 To my knowledge, this is the first time we ran out of books. We've had many book events before, but never did we run out of books for the author to sign. And Joe, it's a wonderful sign that admiration people have for you, so I just want to say thank you. Let me just say a few words of introduction. By the way, what we're going to do, if you wanted a book, but you weren't able to get it, we're going to send out to everybody a link where you can then just order one. So we'll be able to get this taken care of for you. I just want to say a sincere thanks to all of you coming. I've had the privilege of talking with Joe about this book. I mean, of course, he's kind of intimidating for a guy that's written so many books, and I'm still thinking about one. I haven't gotten that down yet. And a man who has probably done more to shape strategic thinking in the last 30 years in America, I mean, no one exceeds Joe for that. And he's given us a new gift tonight, and that's this latest piece that he is, where he's exploring the foundations of national power and is the American century over. I think it's something that we all think a lot about. We talk to each other about it, and Joe in his very typical and thoughtful way has explored the idea with discipline, and it's really good, and it's exciting. We're delighted to have him here. Let me just say that my name is John Hamry, the president here at CSIS. I am the, when we have public events like this, we always give a little safety announcement. I am the responsible safety officer tonight, so if anything happens, you're gonna follow my directions, okay? We have our exits are right here. We've got three exits to go out. We're gonna go out that way. The emergency stairs is over in that corner. We're going to rendezvous across the street at the Beacon Hotel, and I'll pay for drinks. Okay, so we got a good idea, but follow me, all right? So if I were to spend any time trying to introduce Joe Nye, it would be a diminishment of the evening, because he is his own personality. You all know it, that's why you are here. So I won't spend any further time introducing Joe, but we are going to be listening to a remarkable man with some very interesting ideas. Would you please, with your warm applause, welcome Dr. Joe Nye. Thank you, John. Well, it's nice to be back at CSIS. It's an organization I deeply admire, only exceeded by my admiration for John Hamry, who I work for as one of his trustees, but also on the Defense Policy Board. So I appreciate your being our host, John. Let me say a few things about the argument of the book, but I don't want to go on for too long, partly because professors talk too long anyway, but because the most fun of these events is to have a degree of back and forth and questions and so forth. So if I'm too verbose, John, stop me. But I think the question of whether the American century is over one that has intrigued a lot of people, both here and in China, and there is a conventional wisdom that China is going to surpass the United States and the American century. In fact, if you look at a book by Martin Jock, a British author, the title tells it all. It says, when China rules the world, or my Harvard colleague, Neil Ferguson, says the 21st century is the Chinese century. And a little bit earlier this year, well no, it's about a year ago, I should say. The Financial Times had a headline which said that this was the year in which China had passed the United States. I thought these ideas were wrong, and part of that's what's in the book, to try to understand what the world will look like in 2041, which is 100 years after Henry Ruse made his famous proclamation of the American century. So if you look at this, you can ask, well, why bother? I mean, who cares who's number one? Some people take this position. But the danger is if you don't understand power relations, if you make mistakes, you think you're stronger or weaker than you are, you can get policy wrong. And there's a long tradition in thinking about international relations. It says that when a rising power creates fear in an established power, that's the source of great conflict. This, of course, was the famous explanation that Thucydides gave for the Peloponnesian War, which was the event in which the ancient Greek city-state system tore itself apart and ceased to be the center of the ancient world in the Mediterranean. And Thucydides said it was caused by the rise in the power of Athens and the fear that created in Sparta. And many people said last year as we were celebrating the 100th anniversary of World War I, that World War I, in which the European-state system tore itself apart and ceased to be center of the global balance of power, was caused by the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain. Much too simple a view of the causes of World War I. But it does indicate that when countries make mistakes about power relations or don't understand them, it can have major consequences. And there is a view expressed by some, such as John Mirsheimer, a very distinguished political scientist at the University of Chicago, that says that China cannot rise peacefully, that China and the United States are likely to have a conflict. If so, that's very bad news for our century. It would be extraordinarily disruptive. And so the question of whether it's right that China is about to pass the United States and end the American century, is more important than just a matter of national pride. Now, let me start by looking at this question of whether the United States is in decline. One of the problems with the word decline is that we don't know what's the yardstick or what's the measure. People talk about it all the time. But if you look at a human organism, such as me, I can assure you I'm in decline. We rarely last more than a hundred years. But if you look at a social artifact, which is what a country is, we don't know what a life cycle looks like. There was a famous British statement of the 18th century, Horace Walpole, who after Britain lost its North American colony, said, woe to us, we are now reduced to a miserable little island like Sardinia. And he said this just on the eve of Britain's second century, which is fueled by the Industrial Revolution. So when people say, well, the United States, it's over, so forth, how do you know? I mean, what is the life cycle of a country? And what would you know when you thought about decline? Just to give you an example, how even very impressive, thoughtful people can get it wrong, Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon often cited as the most thoughtful the statesman we've had in terms of understanding the big picture, in 1968 to 70 or so, they thought the United States was in decline and that the world was becoming multipolar. They talked about multipolarity all the time. Of course, by the end of the 20th century, the world was unipolar, not multipolar. Now, what happened? How did they get it wrong? Well, for one thing, the United States began and ended the 20th century with about a quarter of the world's economy. In between, after World War II, we went up to nearly half the world's economy because World War II strengthened the United States and weakened everybody else. So from the period from 1945 to 1970, indeed the US share of world product went from nearly 50% back down to 25%. And so in that sense, as Kissinger and Nixon looked at it, it was indeed decline. However, they extrapolated that curve as though it were gonna continue. And in fact, it didn't. What it did is it flattened out and stayed at 25%. And in that sense, their view that we were in decline didn't predict the way the century was gonna end. So even very astute observers can make mistakes on this, which is a reminder that I too may be mistaken of what I'm saying, but it helps to be self-aware as you make your mistakes. I'm just warning that. Now, the other problem with decline, of course, is that it's a confusing term in the sense that it can be referred to absolute decline or relative decline. And they're not the same. For example, ancient Rome was absolute decline. Rome didn't succumb to the rise of another empire. It succumbed to hordes of barbarians. And the reason it succumbed to the barbarians is because it had no productivity in its economy and because it had internacing warfare. They were actually killing each other for power. We may be gridlocked for power, but we don't kill each other unless you watch House of Cards. Now, in that sense, the argument that people make that the United States is in absolute decline has to be measured against the facts. And if you look at the facts, demographically, we're the one rich country which will hold its position as the third largest country by the middle of this century. All the others, Europe, Russia, Japan, so forth, will be diminished in their demographic footprint. In energy, which everybody said a few years ago, we were becoming hopelessly dependent on imported energy. The IEA now, the International Energy Agency now, says that North America may be having no oil imports in the 20s. If you look at research and development and new technologies, if you look at the technologies, they're gonna be most important in this century. Let's think of biotechnology, nanotechnology, and information technology 3.0. The US is generally in the forefront on all of these. If you look at the universities that underlie technologies, you look at the rankings that are done by, let's say, Shanghai Jiao Tong University, just so it's not a biased American view. Of the top 20 universities in the world, 15 are American, none are Chinese. And if you look at the nature of the culture in which this is embedded, an entrepreneurial culture with rich capital markets which can take ideas and spread them into commercialization quickly, it's hard to beat the United States on this. So these comparisons of the United States with ancient Rome, as though we're in absolute decline, I don't think make any sense. What's a little more interesting is the idea of relative decline. And in that sense, we ended the 20th century with about a quarter of the world economy. And the IMF, the International Monetary Fund, now projects that the United States will probably be somewhere like 18% of the world economy by the 2020s. Projections like this are somewhat inaccurate. But if that's true, it would indicate some degree of relative decline. You could also though reframe that by saying it's the rise of the rest. It's the rise of China, India, Brazil, Indonesia and so forth. And part of that has been an objective of American policy. So whether it's relative decline or the rise of the rest, it's still gonna leave the United States as the largest of the major actors. And if you think about the role of the largest state in terms of leading in the production of public goods, the United States will still be crucial for that. So this is a prelude, this clarification of what absolute and relative decline mean. This is a prelude to the question of will China pass the United States and thereby end the American century. If you try to judge that, it's worth noticing that very often when people make these projections, they make the projections based just on extrapolating the growth rates of GDP, gross domestic product. And that's not a very good way to calculate it because we're not at all clear that Chinese growth rates are gonna stay that high. In fact, they're probably going to diminish. But the point is that even if you do take these projections, you have to ask if you're talking about passing the United States in power, you have to ask about all three dimensions of power. And power involves both economic power and military power, which I'd love together is hard power, and soft power, the ability to attract others and get what you want through attraction and persuasion. And let's look at each of those in turn, but let me spend most time on economic power because that's the one that gets the attention of the headline writers, such as the people who put this on the front page of the Financial Times a year ago. Well, the problem with the Financial Times headline is it was done in something called purchasing power parity, which is a good measure of welfare, but not of power. You don't import oil or jet engines in purchasing power parity. You import it in exchange rate for dollars. And even so, at some point, if China with 1.3 billion people growing at some rate above 7% or around 7% doesn't stumble, and if the United States with 350 million people and growing at about 2.5% doesn't stumble, you would expect the lines to cross, but at some point, probably in the 20s, China will have a larger overall economy in the US measured by exchange rates. Now, not everybody agrees with that. For example, Charles Wolfe, an economist at RAND, has recently come out with an estimate in which he sees Chinese growth rates is lower, US growth rates is higher, and he says China won't pass the United States until 2050. I don't know. I mean, these are disputable estimates. You plug in your estimates about growth rates and you'll get the answer you want. But the point is that even if China has a larger economy than the United States, let's say in the mid-20s, in gross domestic product, size of the market is only one measure of power. It's an important measure of economic power. If I have a big market and I'm trading with you and I deny you access to the market, as the Chinese did to the Norwegians over salmon, over Leo Xiaobo, then obviously that's power. But it's not the only measure of power or economic power. You also wanna know about the sophistication of an economy. And that is better measured by per capita income. And per capita income, the Chinese are only 20% of the United States. So even when they pass us overall in terms of total size of the economy, there won't be anything near us in per capita income. Now you say, well, what does that mean, sophistication of an economy? Well, one illustration of it is to think of the thing that most of us carry in our pockets, this thing, and to say, what do we pay for this? Well, it costs us probably about $700 here that I fold. And then you say, where's it made? Well, made in China. And then you say, all right, how much of the $750 does China get? Well, the components are probably from Malaysia and Taiwan and elsewhere. The royalties for design are American. Marketing is American. Turns out China gets only a few percent. So we import a product, and the trade statistics show this is $750 imports from China. In fact, in value added, it's really mining Chinese labor to put together components and design and ideas that are from elsewhere. So it's not surprising that Chinese sometimes complain that they're very good at producing jobs, J-O-B-S, but not Steve jobs. Someday they will, and they're working on it now. There's some brilliant Chinese entrepreneurs, Jack Ma's a case of point. But as of yet, their economy is not as sophisticated as ours. Another example of this would be money. People say, look, China has $4 trillion in reserves. This means that China is gonna dominate world currency markets. Well, not if the money is not convertible, and not if there aren't deep and rich and liquid capital markets, and not if you have to worry about political interference in those markets. So if you say, do you want to hold Chinese Yuan, or do you want to hold dollars? China has been making a major push to clear more trade in Renmenbi Yuan, but it's only about seven or 8%, whereas the dollar is over 80%. And the difference is that people feel that there is a sophisticated financial market behind, and a rule of law, I should add, behind the dollar, which there's not yet behind the Renmenbi. Someday there will be. But the argument that this economy is equal to the other economy, if you don't think about sophistication of the economy, you're making a mistake. I could go on with that, but I would simply note that to take us back to an earlier point, that this projection of China having a larger market than the US by the 2020s depends upon a high rate of Chinese economic growth. And there is a question there, which is if you take previous countries that have had high rates of economic growth, remember Japan had 10% economic growth at one point. If you take those countries overall and you ask how long does it take to return to modest rates of economic growth, Larry Summers and Lant Pritchett have done an estimate in which they look at this experience of other high growth countries. And their estimate is that China would grow at about 3.9%, just on the statistics, not any particular things about China in the next decade. Some people think that's too low, others think it's too high. But what's interesting is that the projections that we have of the Chinese officially now say 7% is the new normal. I don't think so, it's gonna I think be lower than that. In addition to that problem, you have the problem that China faces in terms of demography. Because of the one child policy, China's workforce, labor force is peaking and you're having more people in the next decade who will be either very old or very young and the number of workers to support them goes down. And that leads the Chinese to say that they fear they may grow old before they grow rich. Yet another problem that they face is that they need to change the growth model. The export-led growth, which has been very successful for them so far, has to be replaced by a more domestic consumption-oriented growth. And they have to get away from imitating technology, whether it's stolen or purchased, and begin to develop the capacity to develop their own technologies. And they are making progress on this, but still have a long way to go. If they're not able to do that, then they'll run into what's sometimes called the middle income trap, where essentially they do very well up to a point. But to get beyond that point, they have to develop this indigenous capacity for innovation. And Xi Jinping talks about this. He says that we have to make sure we don't fall into the middle income trap. It's easier to talk about it than it is to implement the policies to do something about it. And then finally, China has a problem, as we make these projections ahead, of how is it gonna handle the difficulties or issues related to political participation? We know that when economies and societies reach a per capita income of around $10,000 per capita, that there are increased demands for political participation. If you're India, you're poorer, but you also inherited from the British a constitution which gives you a design to solve this problem. China hasn't figured out how you solve this problem. And I'm sure they'd like to have good answers, but they really haven't. And I don't think Xi Jinping or anybody knows the answer to this. So as we project ahead, there are not only statistical points I mentioned and the questions of how you evaluate, but there are also a lot of unknowns in the future of the Chinese economy. So when people say that China will pass the US in economic power, I say maybe, I doubt it. If you turn then to military power, there you find that the US military expenditure is four times Chinese military expenditure. And if you take accumulated capital goods, what we've purchased in the past, the ratio is more like 10 to one in the American favor. Now China is investing, it's increasing its military budget in double digits for over a decade. And this means that it is increasing its capabilities. They're probably going to show up primarily and first in regional capabilities rather than global capabilities. So the job that the US Navy has to protect allies and to have a presence in the South China Sea and the East China Sea is becoming more difficult, not impossible, but more difficult as the Chinese capability grows. But is China going to be a military power to rival the US globally? Not very likely. Another way of thinking of this is that China is going to be importing more of its oil from the Middle East as the US imports less. And it's going to worry about sea lines and the increases in Chinese military investment may help with protecting sea lanes through the Straits of Malacca. I doubt they're going to be relevant in a significant way to the Straits of Hormuz. I suspect that will still be a need for American position there. So military capacity will increase. It'll give us more pressure, but I don't think you're going to see a China which equals or rivals the US as a global military power in the quarter century, which is the time horizon that I'm looking at. And then finally, let me turn to soft power, which is the ability to get what you want through attraction and persuasion rather than coercion or payment. China has been making major efforts to increase its soft power. In 2007, Hu Jintao told the 17th Party Congress of the Chinese Communist Party that China needed to increase its soft power. If you step back and think about that, that's a very smart strategy. If you're a country whose hard power, military and economic, is growing mightily, the first thing that's going to happen is you're going to scare your neighbors into coalitions to protect themselves against you. But if you can combine that growth in your hard power with an increase in your soft power or attractiveness, you're less likely to frighten people and the coalitions are less likely to be as effective as they otherwise would be. So Hu Jintao's decision or his device to the party in Xi Jinping has repeated it to invest in soft power has led to expenditure billions of dollars to create things like Confucius Institutes or things like the turning C seats, Chinese Central Television into a sort of Al Jazeera global station and Xinhua doing the same thing. And I think that's interesting, but the Chinese are not getting that good a return on their investment. Chinese polls show polls taken by the BBC or Pew and so forth, reputable polling sources, show that Chinese soft power or attractiveness goes up in Africa, somewhat in Latin America, but not in Asia and not in Europe or North America. And you say, well, why is this? Well, I think there are two reasons that determine that and which China would have to overcome if it really wants to equal the United States in soft power. One is China has to unleash its civil society. A lot of American soft power or European soft power comes not from government broadcasting, it comes from essentially foundations, universities, Hollywood, cultural industries and so forth. China with Communist Party control is very low to give the freedom to these aspects of civil society which unleashes their full creativity. And the other problem that China has is if you look at nationalism and disputes with neighbors, China has in particularly in the coastal areas but also with India on the Himalayan borders has disputes and because of rising nationalism in China which is helping to legitimize the Communist Party and may become more important as economic growth rates slow, it's very hard from the compromise. So it's one thing to put up a Confucius Institute in Manila to attract people to the true glories of traditional Chinese culture, but it's hard for Philippine consumers of this culture to feel warm toward China if China is chasing Philippine fishing boats out of Scarborough Shoal at the same time. And we saw the same thing in Vietnam when the oil rig was parked within the area that Vietnam considers its exclusive economic zone which led to anti-Chinese riots. So you say, well, why doesn't China see this? Why doesn't it accommodate this and smooth it over? And my Chinese friends tell me that because at home there's a quite fierce competition about who is more nationalistic than whom. And so if you become somebody who says, let's do this peacefully, you're gonna lose your bureaucratic competition at home. So until China is able to unleash its civil society and find ways to manage these disputes without the nationalistic overlay they have now, then I think that China is going to lag behind in soft power as well. So I would say that in all three dimensions of power, economic power as measured by sophistication as well as size, military power looked at globally as well as regionally, and soft power considering both the civil society and territorial nationalism disputes, I don't think China is going to pass the United States in overall power. I once had a lunch with Lee Kuan Yew a few years ago. He and I sat on a European company board at the same time and having lunch with him was one of the real treats of going to these board meetings. And I asked him, what did he think? Was China gonna pass the United States in this century or not? And he said, no, he said, I think they're gonna give you a real run for your money. But he said, I don't think you're going to pass you. I said, well, why? He said, well, China can draw upon the talents of 1.3 billion people. He said, but the US can draw upon the talents of seven billion people. And what's more, it can reconvine them with a diversity which leads to much more creativity than you can ever get with ethnic Han nationalism. This, of course, by an ethnic Han. And I think there's something in that. So long as the United States keeps its openness and doesn't succumb to fear or hubris, I think that Lee Kuan Yew is probably right. So to conclude this, let me say that if I go back to this opening question, is it the Chinese century, will it end the American century? Is it going to produce a result like Germany in Britain did 100 years ago? No, I don't think so. One thing that's worth noticing is that Germany had already passed Britain in industrial production by 1900. So Germany was really on the heels of passing Britain. And the British felt that. If my analysis is correct, then China's not about to pass us. And if that's correct, then we have time to manage this relationship. So we don't have to succumb to fear and overreaction. And my great worry is that when people talk about decline, talk about the century over, they generate fear and anxieties which create the wrong types of policies. We can manage the problems of China. And China creates a number of problems. But it also creates opportunities and things where we can benefit from working with China. International financial stability, managing climate change, managing the rise and control of pandemics, handling transnational terrorism. All these are areas where we in China can find common cause at the same time that we may be disputing territorial limits in the South China Sea or the East China Sea. So we're gonna have to learn to have both cooperation and competition with China at the same time. But if we come too much to fear, because we fear that we're in decline, or if the Chinese believe this, we could get policies that could mess up what otherwise is a relation which can be managed. So that's part of what I was trying to get at by writing this book, which summarizes some thinking that I've been doing about America's role in the world for a much longer time than the mere 130 or 40 pages of the book say. But I think the message about how do we think of America's role in the world, and particularly how do we relate to the country that's most likely to challenge or seem challenging to us, I think it's a message that policy makers need to take seriously. So thank you all for your attention. Why don't you sit there, Joe? Okay. Joe, thank you very much. This was a splendid recounting of your book. And I know there are gonna be many questions from the audience, but I'm just going to get things started, if I may. And let me just begin by asking a question. How much does this, our tortured domestic politics shape international perceptions of America's power? Well, it's a good question. And I think too much is the short answer. I mean, we often damage ourselves by making us look weaker or dumber than we are. Now that's hard, but if you take this Asian International Investment Bank, Brolio, where we decided that people shouldn't join this Chinese bank, people, there were a number of headlines in Asia saying, this was a sign of American decline. They said, no, it's just a sign of American stupidity. We've done stupid things for centuries. I mean, what we should have said is, let this bank go forward, but make sure that it's a transparent international institution. So if the British and the Germans and others join it, there's much more likelihood that it'll be held to certain accounting standards, that there'll be less Chinese corruption in it. And the idea that we would have spent political capital to try to stop it was just dumb. So now, and behind that was the fact that when we agreed in 2010 to increase quotas for China and other emerging markets in the IMF, the Congress didn't pass it. Four years that we've been sitting on this, which again is dumb. It doesn't cost us much of anything, but it becomes wrapped up with issues of sovereignty and control and so forth. Or take the law of the Sea Treaty, which you can have as many Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff and former Secretaries of State and Defense come and testify that this is in our interest, and we go out and preach in East Asia that China should obey the law of the Sea Treaty and then they say, excuse me, have you ratified that? No. Why? Because the majority of the American people don't want it? No. Does the majority of the Senate not want it? No. A few senators decide that it's an affront to our sovereignty. So we do a lot of really dumb things in our domestic political disputes and institutions, which I think does diminish our power below what it otherwise would be. Joe, let me just dig down then, because it seems we do have a challenge when we're a representative of democracy, it's bottom up. It's hard to get a sense of national conviction and purpose if we don't have an enemy that seems to focus us. But it's pretty pathetic to think that we need enemies to get our poop in a group as a nation. Well, I think that's right. And I do worry that we're gonna create an enemy in China because we feel we need one. I don't, I mean, if my analysis is correct, we don't need a Chinese enemy. China will cause us problems, but so do other countries. But we need, China is not like Nazi Germany or not like Stalin's Russia. It's not an existential threat to us. And it's not about to pass us. In that case, we can be more relaxed and don't have to put them in that enemy's role. But as you said, if we don't have them, who's gonna do it? The Chinese will say quite openly that managed democracy is more efficient than a popular democracy. How do you think this is going to play out? Well, I think that's a great phrase for the Chinese to use until you realize how rampant the corruption is there and how if I'm correct that they're gonna have a problem with managing this demand for participation as per capital income reaches $10,000. I think that slogan isn't gonna sound so good. I mean, for all our problems, the United States still has the capacity for change. And even for the problems of gridlock, and people say that we're worse than ever, well, not necessarily. Member Thomas Jefferson opposed George Washington's treaty with England, the J-Tree, and worked with the Congress to try to defund it. So we've been doing this for a long time. But more to the point, even if you say, well, there's a trend, a downward trend since the 1970s or 80s, it's worth remembering that Obama's first Congress passed healthcare, whether you like it or don't like it, but they passed it, and passed a stimulus bill and changed the position of gays in the military. There are a lot of major changes. This is not a stagnant society. In the meantime, healthcare costs have declined, the economy's recovered, unemployment's at 5.5%. And a lot of the strength of this country is not just in Washington, it's around the country. So if you ask me, would I rather play the political hand of Washington for all its faults or the political hand of Beijing, I'd much rather have the Washington political hand. Joe, we're coming up on sometime this spring or summer to move on TPP, the trade from Trans-Pacific Partnership, big, big regional free trade agreement, I think, with principles underlying it is the goal. The narrative that's being used in Washington by the administration is that if this is about who choose who sets the rules, does China set the rules for trade or do we set the rules? Now, that might be the way we should talk about it in the United States, but that must sound pretty weird overseas, do you have a thought on this? Well, I think the Chinese often will bring that up. They say, is your rebalancing toward Asia containment? We say no. They say, then why is TPP aimed against us? I think the answer to that is, the proper answer to that is that we should be willing to have Chinese participation. I think the administration has said so when China is able to live to those standards. So if you think of it as open-ended trade agreements, open-ended in the sense that they're not permanently exclusive, excluding others, then it's more understandable. Let me just step back one last question and I'm gonna turn to all of you. This is more of a, it's not really from your book, Joe, but you're the kind of intellect that would give us all perspective and insight on it. One of the great problems about being the world's only superpower and having to deal with regional superpowers is that we have to integrate four and five and six crises simultaneously, whereas our regional competitors worry about one or two. Do we have the attention span as a nation to be a global superpower? I think it's hard. I mean, if you look at the Bush administration, friends of mine who were in the Bush administration say that it wasn't a deliberate neglect of Asia, it's just that every time you went to the situation room the agenda was something to do with Afghanistan or Iraq. It just ate up the time of top-level people and you can increase the bureaucracy, but a top-level decision-maker has only 24 hours in this day. And Obama and his team came in talking about a rebalancing toward Asia, which is a better word than pivot, which is always not a very good word because it means turning away from other things. But if you looked at John Kerry's address book, not his address book, his travelogue, you wouldn't ask whether this is a rebalancing toward Asia. I mean, he's obviously been absorbed by the Middle East. It may be the right decision, but if you ask, can we do both at the same time, it's very hard with it at the top-level time, the top-level decision-makers. Forgive me, one last question. And I know you haven't had a chance to study this yet, Joe, but it looks like there was a surprisingly detailed agreement with Iran. I think it's all too fresh for us to really know what we think yet about it, but do you have an initial impression? Well, again, I would like to see what it meant. I mean, I just have what I've received on my iPhone this afternoon, but I think if you say the major options were to try to reach an agreement which would keep Iran a year away from nuclear weapons with a detailed inspection regime and so forth, versus just continuing the sanctions, but during the sanctions, the Iranians keep building centrifuges, versus the Bolton option of bomb Iran, which buys you maybe one year, three years, but then they go back and do the same thing again. I think of those three abstract options, number one is the best, but I think we do want to, before making a final decision, I'd like to see what they decided on some of the details. Joe, thank you. Let me open up the floor here. Let me, let me, let me just start with you in that kind of a dusty pink sweater. Would you please, the microphone's coming over to you, right there. One question I have is that in China, there are hundreds of different languages and dialects, whereas in the United States, almost everybody speaks English. Does that make any difference to how well China can do in the future, having so many different languages and dialects? Well, I think dialects do provide a problem of sorts in China, but they've been pretty able to overcome that. I don't think that's a major problem. I think more of a problem is how they're gonna deal the minorities in Xinjiang and Tibet, which is more than just a linguistic problem. It's how will they be integrated. So I wouldn't focus as much on the language part of it as the minorities part. Shirm cats? I don't have that off the top of my head. Doug Paul probably knows. Yeah. Why don't we bring the microphone over to you? Thank you very much, Professor Nye. I'd like to bring you back to John Hammary's first question about the domestic political situation. It's my good fortune to have read the book, page 91 of the book, you talk about the fact that... You've done your homework. You mentioned that often political partisan gridlock in Washington is accompanied by innovation in states. I wonder how you think about that now, particularly as we look at sort of the cultural wars that seem to be moving from Washington to the states. There seems to be as much gridlock or more in the states. Leave California aside, that's a special case. Well, there are culture war problems and they do go across the states. Louis Brandeis, Justice Brandeis said the states are the laboratories of this democracy that you can try things there. So if you take... If you say culture wars, yeah, that spreads. It's like a fever or something. But if you take a question like, how do you get more accurate or more representative congressional districts, which right now, because of the terrible way in which we reapportion districts every 10 years, you have so many safe seats that a Republican has to make sure he has no competition to the right and a Democrat must make sure she has no competition to the left. And the net effect of that is that the parties are further apart than the American public is. Well, there are two states which actually are doing something about that. One is California with nonpartisan primaries. In other words, Iowa with a truly independent redistricting commission. So that's an example of these laws of RFRA and being reproduced in the states. Actually, I think it's less important than these efforts to rethink how you do the way we elect our representatives because that is what I think is creating the sum of the extreme partisanship. Just one follow-up, one follow-up, if I may. Well, I may turn it down, you can go ahead and try. All right, soft power. You gave a talk in 2004 at CSIS about your new book then, Soft Power. And presumably you still grade papers now and then. I wonder, would you share your thought process in talking about how the Obama administration has used the tools of soft power in foreign policy? Well, I think Obama has tried and it's worked in some areas and not others. If you look at Obama's speech in Cairo in June of 2009, that was a major effort to attract Arab people by soft power. I don't think it's worked very well because it turns out that what you do is more important than what you say. So in that sense, I think I give them credit for trying in some areas they've done better than others. This gentleman that was right next to Sherm, I promised him so later. Thank you. This month, it's 70 years since my father was freed from Bohembald, my father Polish soldier, by the Americans. And a year ago, looking at the swimming pool instructions where I live, I saw 27 different type of instructions, which among others forced us to go out of the pool every half hour to do a little chemical test on the quality of water. And I told my wife, this is not the United States that would have freed my father. There's been some risk aversion that has been intrusive getting into the system more and more. Do you have any comment on that? Well, over regulation I think is a problem. And there have been efforts both, I mean, if you look at the early days of the Obama administration, my colleague from Harvard, Cass Sunstein, was given the specific job of going through regulations and trying to see what ones you could get rid of. And they did get rid of a number. So we should be constantly thinking of ways in which you can reduce regulations which are not functional. But doing that cost-benefit analysis to make sure that you're throwing out the bathwater and not the babies, that's a hard job. Jan Lodl. Thanks, John. Let me say to the last question, if you moved to Virginia, we don't have those regulations out there, so pools are okay. Joe, I'd like to turn to the hardest of hard power, nuclear, you talked about the Iranians a little bit, but what about the Chinese and the Americans and the Russians? You know, if the Spartans and the Athenians were nuclear powers, maybe it would have come out different. How does that play? Does that kind of ensure that we never have the kind of a big war that would be the worst case outcome for China and America, or does it add a risk in there? And of course, the Russians still maintain the biggest nuclear arsenal, so that adds another question in there. I'll leave it at that. Well, I think there still is nuclear risk, and it takes constant attention as you've spent much of your career doing. But there is also another effect that, I once called the crystal ball effect, which in 1914, if you've given the Kaiser, the Tsar and the Emperor, a little crystal ball and said, here's a picture of 1918. And look inside it, you'll see your empire is dismembered, you'll see that you've lost your throne, and you've lost tens of millions of your people. Do you still want to go to war? I suspect they would have said not. And nuclear weapons provide that crystal ball. Now, it doesn't mean people can't drop a crystal ball and shatter it, it doesn't mean people can't miscalculate, doesn't mean that North Koreans will look into a crystal ball the same way we look into it, and so forth. But I think there is something in this crystal ball effect which makes people more prudent about war. Doesn't mean it's impossible. And that's why we have to be continual alert and aware of it. But the nuclear factor is gonna be with us for some time. Joe, can I give you a very awkward question? Does global zero make sense? Well, I'll tell you, I don't, I mean, Sam Nunn is a great friend of mine, and I admire him. Or if it makes sense, it's what I call aspirational rather than instrumental policy goal. But in the near term of the kind of period I was talking about a quarter century, I don't think so. I think in fairness to Nonan Kissinger, Schultz, and Perry, they outlined step by step. They did not embrace global zero, but a bit that campaign. The gentleman over here in the yellow tie, Daria right here, first table. He's been very persistent. Thanks so much, Spencer Boyer from the National Intelligence Council. Thanks so much for your comments and for your service to the NIC. I wondered if you could talk just a little bit about global talent and how you see that affecting American power in the coming decades. Often people will point to the United States, Canada, perhaps a couple of other countries as being countries that do attract very strong global talent, not just because of our economic and educational strength, but because there's a perception that we're welcoming cultures for the most part that immigrants can assimilate into and that their children will have good opportunities as well. Other countries such as Germany, many in Europe are trying to do more to create that perception. I was wondering, first of all, do you agree with that? And secondly, do you think that others are making up ground on United States in terms of being that attractive power? Thanks. I, the point of my quoting Lee Kuan Yew was that this is one of the great strengths of the United States that we can take talented people from all over the world. And when we try to stop that, we hurt ourselves. I mean, we are a nation of immigrants, as Franklin Roosevelt once told the daughters of the American Revolution to their chagrin. The point is that our strength, every generation complains about the next generation coming in, you know, in the 19th century, you had the Know Nothing Party, which didn't want the Irish Catholics. And within a century, we had an Irish Catholic president. And, you know, this capacity to assimilate, to give people opportunities to use talent is, I think, one of our great strengths. And I think, I mean, Australia does it, Canada does it, and so forth, but of the large developed countries in Europe or Russia and so forth, they don't have that capacity. So this is in Japan, I put the same problem. Daria, we're gonna take one last question right here. This gentleman, yeah, stand up. She's got the microphone right behind you. Nope, snuck up. Hi, Tom O'Donnell, I work in Energy and International Affairs, and now I'm teaching in Berlin. As you're going through your analysis of China, very systematically, the aspects to look at, you could also apply these issues to the United States. You know, one of the elements of empire a few years ago, people would have talked about it perhaps this way. What struck me is, could you talk briefly about applying the same categories and analysis to the European, or to Europe? If anything, now there is a place that's had the Industrial Revolution, had these transformations and so forth, but is obviously lacking in certain depths in certain ways. Could that be the rival to the United States in the future? In principle, it could. The European economy, when Europe acts as an entity, which is sometimes, is equal to the United States. But the problem is, it often has trouble acting as an entity on a lot of issues, and it also has a severe demographic problem over the long term, and it also has a severe energy problem in terms of how it manages the energy resources it has. And so, all those things, I think, would make me rank the Europeans as less likely to be a global competitor. With that said, we have a strong interest in Europe doing well, so there's no other part of the world with whom we share more values in Europe. So we should be rooting for Europe to overcome this current period of doldrums because we need them as a partner. Well, I've had the pleasure of knowing Joe for 25 years, and it's always been so refreshing to have a colleague who speaks in such calm and rational terms. He always convinces me, I must say. And I just wish our public debate had this level of civility in common sense. Would you, with your applause, please thank Joe. For the peace.