 Good morning. On behalf of the U.S. Institute of Peace, I'm delighted to welcome everyone here today. My name is Keith Mines, Director for Latin America at the Institute, and I'll be moderating this extraordinary panel. USIP was founded in 1984 as a nonpartisan, independent, national institute dedicated to using tools of analysis on the ground programming and convening at all levels to seek peaceful resolution of conflict and to help nations and regions coming out of conflict to stay at peace. We have several hundred programs in dozens of countries with field offices in 16, supporting peace builders and initiatives. We're here today for a somewhat unique event. When Rupus the Phillips III that passed away in December at the age of 92, many of us lost a good friend who our colleague Max Boot described as a gentle, decent man who served his country with humility and devotion and fearless truth-telling. But we also lost someone who right up to the end of his life had been active in the search for building a more peaceful world. I first met Rufus some 12 years ago when we were both struggling with the question of the architecture for the U.S. to better conduct what were then being called stabilization operations, the quest to strengthen fragile states or bring failed states back to life. We bonded over a shared sense that we could do better at how we were fielding civilians in conflict zones. But I quickly realized that Rufus was not just interested in how to more effectively deploy individuals, but to what end they were being deployed in the first place. And I would see that his extensive experience going all the way back to the 1950s. He was in his 80s at the time I met him, provided a living link to some principles that have been lost along the way and that we were struggling with as we endeavor to strengthen states and build peace. Rufus was born in Middletown, Ohio in 1929 and after graduation from Yale and Virginia Law entered the military where he served under the legendary Colonel Edward Lansdale in Vietnam in 1955. He served several tours there which Richard Holbrook said he was probably the best informed American on events in the country and perhaps the American most trusted and listened to by the Vietnamese. His approach to the conflict centered on helping to provide the South Vietnamese people with a government that could win popular support by its actions and by its ethos. Not just through massive funding projects and military operations, his approach was politely dismissed by those in power. It was a war after all and wars are won by crushing the enemy. Rufus left Vietnam and pursued a career in business but returned to what he had learned during the war after 9-11 when he saw another generation of American policymakers struggling to find the right formula for assisting fragile states. He wrote a book about his Vietnam experience in 2007 keyed to Afghanistan and Iraq, Why Vietnam Matters, an eyewitness account of lessons not learned. This book then caused the New Yorkers George Packer to comment in his article Why Rufus Phillips Matters, the outcome of the Afghan struggle is ultimately going to be determined not by our unilateral actions or geopolitical moves but by whom the Afghan people wind up supporting even reluctantly Vietnam Lesson 1. Rufus worked literally right up to the weeks he passed away on a second book Stabilizing Fragile States, Why It Matters, and What to Do About It, which is forthcoming from the University of Kansas Press and supported by the Association for Diplomatic Studies and Training, ADSD, and DACOR, and is part of their Diplomats and Diplomacy series of books. We will put it in the chat, a discount code from the publisher for pre-ordering the book for those that are interested. I want to recognize also that various of Rufus's family members are here with us today, in addition to leaving a legacy of public service, he and his late wife Barbara were blessed with an extraordinary family. Children, Rufus, he Phillips IV, and Phillips Shell, Edward Dean Phillips, and Patricia Phillips, and his sister Lucretia Whitehouse. I'm joined today by an extraordinary panel, all of whom were influenced by Rufus's work, an example of public service. HR McMaster, the Fuad and Michelle Ajami Senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, former National Security Advisor, author of two books, most recently Battlegrounds, The Fight to Defend a Free World. Max Boot, the Gene J. Kirkpatrick Senior Fellow for National Security Studies at the Council on Foreign Relations, noted historian and commentator and author of several books, most recently The Road Not Taken, Edward Lansdale and the American Tragedy in Vietnam. Roger Meyerson, David L. Pearson Distinguished Service Professor of Global Conflict Studies at the University of Chicago. His publications include two books, and in 2007 he was awarded the Nobel Memorial Prize in Economic Sciences and recognition of his contributions to mechanism design theory, and we're pleased that he has turned his attention to state building, where he's now made another contribution. As a final introductory comment, our discussion today takes place against the backdrop of renewed interest in state fragility with the launch in early April by the Biden administration of this strategy to prevent conflict and promote stability. The next step in support to Congress's Global Fragility Act, which USIP and others are actively supporting. So I wanted to start, if I could, with a very brief round of personal reflections from each of our panelists on your memories of Rufus and your interactions with him. Just a few minutes of peace, if we could start, maybe with Max? Well, thank you very much. It's really an honor to be here with such distinguished panelists and discussing one of my favorite people in the world and keeping his memory alive. I mean, Rufus was truly an extraordinary individual. I think one of the kindest and gentlest souls I ever knew. He was in many ways the personification in my mind of the good American kind of running counter to every negative stereotype about Americans you could possibly imagine. He was somebody who treated people with empathy and respect and really believed in the ideals of the Constitution and the Declaration of Independence and really tried to promote those abroad, but not in a heavy-handed, overbearing, imperialistic kind of way, but in a gentle, loving, friendly, and brotherly kind of way. I got to know Rufus around 2010, and just hearing him talk about his experience in Vietnam and his time with the legendary Ed Lansdale got me interested in Lansdale and led to my writing the book that you mentioned, which is a biography of Lansdale and grappling with his role in the Philippines and in Vietnam in the 50s and 60s. Rufus was tremendously helpful in all of that. I mean, he spent countless hours with me going over the details of what he had learned, but one of the things that really, there are so many things that I found so extraordinary about Rufus, but among them, as you mentioned, was the fact that he remained engaged in the current debate and the current discourse right through his final days on this earth, and he was incredibly, sprightly, had full of ideas thinking about what we can do in places like Afghanistan, just as he had once thought about what we can do in places like Vietnam. And my conclusion from getting to spend time with Rufus, and of course his wonderful wife, Barbara, who sadly, be deceased him, was that he was really the embodiment of what this country can and should be in world affairs, and that if we had more people like Rufus Phillips, we would probably be in a much stronger position strategically because we would be able to actually exert much more influence in all these countries that we find so frustrating and problematic because his approach is very hard to replicate, but it really involves getting to know the local people and becoming friends with them and gently trying to work with them to bring the resources of the US government to bear to help them solve their problems, and that's unfortunately not the way we did things in the 16th, and it's still not the way we do things in most places, but I really think that Rufus' life is kind of a model for what we should think about and the kind of virtues we should try to inculcate in our diplomats, intelligence, personnel, military officers, and others. Thanks, Max. Excellent. Roger, do you want to go next? I'm an economic theorist, so I wouldn't have been on a trajectory to meet Rufus Phillips, except that when the United States forces entered Iraq in 2003, and our country, President, promised to reconstruct Iraq as a sovereign democratic state, the theoretical question of how do you get organized and how do you do a mission like that democratic state building or stabilization assistance? How is that done? It engages us with questions that are absolutely fundamental to social science, and that's why I got interested in what was, for me, academic pursuit, but was for Rufus Phillips a lifelong advocate. I really only got to know him at a reception in Washington, DC, where H.R. McMaster was the speaker, but two years ago, when he was 90 years old, Rufus Phillips participated in a conference on stabilization assistance that I organized. It was a Zoom conference. Two days of intensive meetings, and when the meetings were done, people gradually dropped off, and I as host stayed on, and the last person to drop off was the oldest participant, Rufus Phillips III, and I had, I think, 20 to 30 minutes of just the two of us chatting online, and it was great. We corresponded, then admired the work that he was doing in the book, the book that he has finished, which we are celebrating today. Let me say, you know, in thinking from 2003 until I met him a couple of years ago, I wasn't influenced by him. I didn't really know very much about him. I was reading other things and other people and studying and thinking, and I was gradually developing a theory of how we would tell the Foreign Service professionals among us how a theorist would advise to structure an intervention. What I want to testify to right now about my relationship with Rufus Phillips is when I finally read his Vietnam book, I learned he did it in 1962 exactly the way my theory set. I had come up with this idea that based on, as a pure academic theorist, that this was the right way to do it. And I would say the only difference between what I had been theorizing and what Rufus Phillips Office of Rural Affairs in 1962 was is that in my theory, the people at the top policy makers would have known that the head of this network for decentralized political engagement throughout, in this case, South Vietnam, the target nation, which were trying to support a new political system, they would have known that the head of that agency was the most important person to guide them on all strategic policymaking with regard to the mission. And in fact, as we can talk about later, when Rufus Phillips, in fact, came home to Washington, D.C., not because he was called to testify at the White House, but because his father was ill for family reasons. But he did go, because he's from Virginia, he did go to the White House. He was often told not to speak unless spoken to, and the United States did not. And President Kennedy asked him to speak once, that was good, but his words couldn't prevail against more authoritative speakers in Washington. And the United States intervention in South Vietnam went in a different direction, and the rest is history, isn't it? Roger, thanks. Thanks. Major. Thank you, USIP, for convening us to honor Rufus and to share our reminiscences about a fine man and someone for whom we all had tremendous respect. And I'd like just to begin to pick up on a couple of comments by Max and Roger. I think the most important word that Max said in that beautiful tribute to Rufus was the word empathy. I think that's what Rufus had, empathy, the ability to view complex challenges and opportunities and competitions from the perspective of others. And then Roger, as a theorist, I mean, I'm reminded of the old joke that historians often tell about political scientists, no offense to any political scientists here, is that okay, you know, political scientists will say to a historian, all right, okay, that works in practice, but does it work in theory? But you know, Rufus was a, he was, he developed his own theory, right, his own theory of how we can prevail in complex competitions, but how we can work together with others to build a better future for generations to come. And what he understood is that ultimately, these competitions were political. They had social and cultural and other dimensions to these competitions. But ultimately, to build this better world, we had to achieve a political outcome consistent with our mutual interests. In this case, you know, maybe the United States and the South Vietnamese people or the United States and the Afghan people or the Iraqi people. And so I just, I really appreciated Max and Roger's comments and reminiscences about, about this fine, fine person. So you asked Keith, when we first met, we met in 2008. I was given one of these kind of crazy missions that we get as a, as a colonel, which was to, to develop a strategy for the greater Middle East, for the Sancom region. And of course, this is during a period of presidential transition, transition and a period in which many Americans were raising questions about the degree to which we should sustain our efforts in both places in Afghanistan and in Iraq. And, and, and Rufus and I hit it off from the beginning. I mean, 40 years earlier, right, 40 years earlier, he had had an experience, I think that was quite similar to mine in that, in that, in the policies, you know, developed in Washington were based on fantasy. They were based on the reality in places like Vietnam or Afghanistan or, or in Iraq. And, and of course, you know, being in the midst of a protracted counterinsurgency wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, we had a connection with each other. And, and, and, and then he shared with me, you know, the insights that he, that he had in his, in his first, in his first book, his book on Vietnam, in which, you know, he, you know, there were striking similarities in how our leaders had misconceived the nature of the wars that we had both observed. And, and you know what, what, what struck me about Rufus immediately are his insights, his, his wisdom, but how, how all of his insights and his wisdom were tempered by humility and empathy. And, you know, he understood the essential elements of success and the degree to which we had agency and could influence a positive outcome. But also he understood the limits of our agency and influence. And, and today, I think especially we should all be inspired, you know, by Rufus, you know, because I'll say after the traumas we've been through, Keith, I think that we have swung from maybe a period of over optimism in the 90s and early 2000s to I think a period of pessimism and even resignation. And, and I think what we're left with today oftentimes is we slap, you know, adjectives like institutional and structural in front of every problem we face. That leaves I think Americans these days with a toxic combination of, of resignation and anger. And what Rufus was, was somebody who could bring people together to have meaningful, respectful discussions about the challenges and opportunities we face, and then also help all of us understand better how we can work together, right, how we can work together to overcome those obstacles, to take advantage of those opportunities and build a better future. So I think maybe today this, this session will be a success if we all resolve to live well, to cherish the freedoms that we enjoy, and to be more like Rufus Phillips as, as citizens. So thanks again, keep the opportunity to be with all of you. I look forward to the rest of the discussion here. Great, thanks. Thanks. That's super. Yeah, I would just say in my experience, the one thing that I can't, that I think was unique immediately about Rufus was not being satisfied with, with where things work with believing that we could do better. And I think that was, you know, he got, he dove right into the resignation and the despair that was swirling around in the mid 2000s and, and just didn't accept it. He said, there, there, you know, there are answers to these things, we can do better. I was quite inspired by that. And it, you know, it kind of helped me to up my game a bit as well. So let's go into some of the substance of his book and of the, what it was that he, he was presenting. So Max, let me start with you. Your encounters with Rufus led you to write a book on, as you mentioned on his mentor at Lansdale. Phillips refers in his first book to what Lansdale described as the X factor, the human political side of the war. He says the official American view of the war missed the single most influential component of South Vietnamese political cause worth fighting for. While the enemy, the vehicle, framed every action as furthering its political cause against colonialism and feudalism and for unification. We underestimated the motivating power of Vietnamese nationalism. While this conflict was at its heart a political one, a war of ideas and of the spirit. Could you share a little bit about how Rufus and Lansdale intersect, what they believed about strengthening failed and fragile states that was different than the conventional approach. And if you have insights as to why this hasn't been heated, would it have made a difference if it was? Well, the X factor that was actually, that came from a briefing that at Lansdale gave to Secretary of Defense Robert McNamara around 1962, where McNamara, as you know, former CEO of the Ford Motor Company, Harvard Business School, Wiskitt, et cetera, loved to, to play with numbers. And he was trying to reduce the conflict in Vietnam, basically to a matter of arithmetic. And he called in Ed Lansdale, who was one of the foremost Pentagon experts on Vietnam at that point, having basically helped to create the status out Vietnam from 1954 to 1956. And said to him, you know, Ed, I need some help with some factors here. Can you help me, you know, come up with figures for, you know, all these various things. And Ed Lansdale said to him, well, I can do that, Mr. Secretary, but you need to keep in mind the X factor. And so, you know, McNamara writes down on his graph paper X factor and says, okay, what's the equation for that? And Ed, you know, sorely disappoints McNamara by saying there's no way to compute it. It just, it can't be reduced to numbers. It really comes down to the feelings of the population about how they would like to be governed and who they trust to be their leaders. And that's ultimately what will determine success or failure in this war, or in other counterinsurgency environments. And it really can't be quantified. You just, you have to do it by feel. You have to understand the sentiments of the population. And so instead of heeding that wisdom, McNamara decided that Lansdale was an idiot, who he was after all, a UCLA dropout did not have all the wonderful higher education that McNamara had, did not have McNamara's, you know, mathematical gifts. And so just decided that Lansdale didn't know what he was talking about. And of course, the way that McNamara and Westmoreland and the rest of the US military and the government ran the Vietnam War was really, as a kind of a matter of arithmetic, the notion that if you expend more firepower, if you stack up more dead Vietcong, you will win. And in fact, you know, Westmoreland and McNamara were in pursuit of this mythical crossover point where they would be killing the Vietcong faster than they could be replaced. And Lansdale and Rufus Phillips both said, you're never going to achieve that because, you know, the question is, do the Vietnamese communists have the support of the population or not? And Lansdale and Phillips both believed it was essential to create a more representative government in South Vietnam that could win the support of the people. And they both thought that one of the great tragic mistakes that was made was the Kennedy administration giving the okay to this military coup that overthrew Ngo Dinh's yam and unleashed chaos in South Vietnam. But Lansdale and, you know, Phillips, both of whom who knew Xi'an very well and realized that he had problems and issues, but also understood that he was one of the few South Vietnamese leaders who was not tainted by corruption or colonialism. And he was the best bet in a far better bet than all these military men who followed him. But, you know, they were completely ignored. And so, you know, I think that's kind of a micro, I mean, there's a lot more one can say, but I think that's kind of a microcosm of why we lost to Vietnam War because we thought that we could defeat a political idea with firepower and it did not work out that way. And I feel like, you know, we've seen similar experiences in places like Afghanistan where we tried very hard, but we just did not place enough emphasis, I think, and maybe it was beyond our capability to do this, but to create a government that could actually win the support of the government. And so you saw once you removed U.S. support, the government in Afghanistan collapsed very rapidly. And that's basically what happened in the case of South Vietnam as well, that there was not a self-sustaining government. On the other hand, we see today in Ukraine that the tables are turned and, you know, all of our military aid is going for a very good purpose because the people of Ukraine are united 100% behind the Zelensky government, and they have a cause that they believe and they are fighting for their freedom, for their homes, for their independence from Russian domination. And so, I think, you know, fundamentally, I think what Lance and Phillips would have said is that we needed to work harder in places like Vietnam and Afghanistan to give the people a cause that they could support instead of simply focusing on what we were against. They weren't focusing enough on what we were for. Super. Thanks. HR, I wanted to go through some of the same ground with you and then go a little further into two other aspects. One is the U.S. policymaking process and how, you know, why is this so, why is it so hard to get the good ideas where they need to be and support it? And even maybe a little reflection without being partisan on the, because it's really not a partisan issue on the domestic politics and some of this. But I noticed that, I mean, in your book, you were on to this, I think even before you met Rufus, because I'm thinking about the publication of your book, because your first book on Vietnam, you said on the tragedy of decision-making Vietnam, you said, Mac the Mayor viewed the war as another business management problem, exactly what Max just shared, that would ultimately succumb to his reason judgment and others' rational calculations. He and his associates thought they could predict with great precision what amount of force applied to Vietnam could achieve the results they desired, and they believed they could control that force with great precision from halfway around the world. They forged they had oblivious of the human and psychological complexities of the war. So you reached fundamentally the same conclusion. Again, I think independent of each other. But as you did, you channel that, and I was glad Max mentioned Ukraine, because it is interesting that, you know, eight months ago we say we're never doing nation building again, and then here we are in the middle of a effectively a nation that was built up at least to the point where it can stand up against not only our greatest adversary, but the greatest adversary of freedom in the world today, stand up and on behalf of frankly all of us. So really quite an interesting distinction between the catastrophe of Afghanistan in the summer and now standing up, Ukraine standing standing fast in the spring. But any comments on again a little bit, if you have some thoughts about how this is, you've worked the policy process at every level, literally. So how do you see this in terms of the policy and how decisions are made? Is it at the whims of who happens to be there? How has this done better? Thanks, Keith. You know, I think both political parties, leadership from both political parties across multiple administrations have displayed an extraordinary degree of strategic incompetence. And it's incompetence that I think can only be corrected through again, Rufus Phillips' empathy, his ability to view these complex challenges and war through the perspective of others, including enemies and adversaries and rivals. And this is what Rufus understood, whereas many Americans like Robert McNamara thought mainly about change, change in the character of warfare or change that he could impose with his new management techniques and the integration of new technologies. What Rufus understood, I think, were continuities in the nature of war. The historian Karl Becker observed that memory of past and anticipation of future should walk hand in hand in a happy way. And what Rufus could do is balance this sense of continuity and change. And he was particularly sensitive to the political dimension of war, which is a continuity in the nature of war, as well as war's human dimension, as well as war's uncertainty because of the interaction between opposites, opposite sides in war. And then, of course, war is a contest of wills. And I think that Rufus' approach in his excellent book that he published, or that he delivered prior to his death, Fixing Fragile States Matters, his analysis is very consistent with what Thucydides said about war 2,500 years ago, that what drives conflict, what drives war is a combination of fear, honor, and interest. And Rufus' experience, his research and his analysis led him to the conclusion that ultimately, all efforts in war have to be oriented on achieving that political outcome. But his message in the book is critical, as it should be in connection with Vietnam, Afghanistan, Iraq, and so forth. But it's also hopeful because what he shows in his analysis and the Columbia example, other examples, is that the United States can be effective in strengthening the political outcomes, overcoming challenges to security if they're partnered with a government whose interests are aligned with ours, but mainly has legitimacy with its own people, and security forces as Max alluded to who were motivated by fear, honor, and interest to fight against an insurgency and for those who are undermining security. So I think that what you're getting to, Keith, is really the main cause of our strategic incompetence described in this last book as strategic narcissism, the tendency to define the world only in relation to us and assume that what we do or decide to do or not do is decisive toward achieving a favorable outcome. Rufus understood, hey, the others have agency. Others have authorship over the future, including our partners, those who we're working with, but also our enemies, adversaries, and rivals. Super. Thanks. And in the U.S. bureaucracy, where would change reside? Well, I think it's in the bureaucracy. It's in universities, it's in institutions like yours. I mean, fundamentally, I think this is an issue of education. I mean, who studies military and diplomatic history anymore? I mean, not very many people. Many of our students as undergraduates and even at graduates are subjected to what I would call the curriculum of self-loathing in our universities in which we teach our young people that all the problems of the world prior to 1945 were due to colonialism, all the problems of the world after 1945 were due to capitalist imperialism. And this combination of new left interpretation of history as well as various critical theories and post-modernist theories, I think are robbing us of our ability to think in time, to understand the complex causality of events, to trace the outcomes back to their causes, to reason by historical analogy. These are all competencies that are in really short supply these days. So it's an educational problem, but within the U.S. government, I think it has to begin with a national security, policymaking, and decision-making process that corrects many of the deficiencies that we've seen between Afghanistan, Iraq, and Vietnam. And that's not taking enough time to think about the nature of the challenge we're facing, to apply design thinking, to frame these challenges to our security in a way that can foster common understanding. And then I would think, and you alluded to this earlier, Keith, is to try to insulate the decision-making process from partisan political considerations. Now those who are going to be partisan, they're going to have a say in the process, but the process should not be constrained in terms of the development of options and the analysis by partisan political considerations. I think the third critical aspect of restoring strategic competence is to always provide multiple options to the president, the person who was elected. And it's in the comparison of those courses of action, those options, that you can draw out the relative costs and consequences and take into consideration longer-term considerations. And so I think these are the important aspects of this. I think there has to be an effective national security decision-making, policymaking process that does this for a president, but it all begins, I think, with what the historian Zachary Short, according to this term, and I've been using it and barring it from him, is strategic empathy, a quality that Rufus Phillips certainly had. And it's, I think, a key source of his wisdom. Tremendous. Thanks. Thanks. Roger, I wanted to turn now to the same themes, but in a kind of a different direction. I know Rufus and you shared a rare focus on the local issues and state stabilization. And like him, you've written extensively about the need to get development and political officers out into the field to help build support for a new political arrangement from the ground up. And we'll put a couple of your papers in the chat so people can pick those up. You wrote in a recent paper about decentralized political engagement, that studying Rufus' approach, you said, we can learn how to avoid the common problem of foreign support promoting excessive centralization in the recipient government, which has been an issue in many stabilization assistance missions. Foreign interveners have often forgotten that autonomous local governments play an important role in most successful democratic states. One of the things about Rufus' book that I would just highlight is the whole second half of the book is about how to structure the U.S. government such that it is more capable of doing things in these what he calls competitive environments, but the local levels. And so he's quite seized with the fact that we can't just work at the capital and call it a day, that we need to be not only conscious of what's going on further afield, but also have our people active there. So, Roger, I just want to give you a few minutes to talk a little bit about where your work in Rufus' intersect. Where I emphasize that I met Rufus Phillips only a few years ago because my thinking evolved independently of his, and I say that to confirm that he had it right. And I think, maybe I can say I have it right because I agree with Rufus. I think in his book, the new book, Stabilizing Fragile States, that he is emphatic that we do need a standby capability for these kinds of missions, whether it's the United States government capability or maybe some alliance like a NATO capability or some other international organization or an ally who provides the capability, but capability is needed. We've seen again and again that the United States has invested in military capabilities to prevail on any battlefield. And repeatedly in living memory, we've seen those military victories seem to go wasted and be fruitless because of a failure to do the political follow-through and investing in the capability to do the political follow-through is something that Rufus recognized and that's what this new book is about. He lays out a way of doing it. He wants to see it. Let me back up and say the decentralization because a couple of things have been said already. HR's point about empathy. Everybody, I can give you quotes going back 100 years that emphasize absolutely the kind of people we want to go to be our local stabilization officers to do the work of post-conflict political reconstruction in the field. The field officers need empathy first and foremost. That's the kind of people you want. But as I say, the return of Rufus Phillips from Vietnam to the United States in the summer of 1963 is just evidence that somebody with a serious standby or standby regular organization that has a recognized importance in the United States government organization is absolutely needed if the message is going to be remembered and the advocate for the political focus, the decentralized political focus has to be there with a recognized bureaucratic position or else it's going to be the same thing again and again. The phrase strategic narcissism was used and I like that. But I want to suggest Americans are people too. And to me, the most important argument I could make might be a lot of people say our state building missions have gone wrong because we Americans thought that we overestimated how much people around the world were like us in valuing democracy. I think actually democracy is a pretty good sell almost anywhere. I think the evidence proves it. But I think the real mistake is we failed repeatedly because we underestimated how much people in other countries are like Americans in valuing their local politics and caring about that some part of their local government should be handled by people who are locally accountable and not just appointed out of the national capital by the national heads of state even if they were elected with lots of votes. We don't want them appointing the people who run our local police department and our local schools in America. And people have similar feelings in other countries. Local politics matters to everyone. It especially matters to people who are in failed or fragile states where they haven't been able to rely on a national government for protection and for essential public services. Local trusted local leadership matters and political intervention when the goal is political change if our policy is not being driven by a deep engagement with the local political concerns that we have but only by consultation would be national leaders in the capital. We're going to miss what the real issue is and it will look like we're trying to set up a centralized political machine that could oppress the people who are trusted. Let me just say one other statement because Max talked about the X factor and the truth is as I said I admit I'm a quantitative theorist so I never obviously I never knew Robert McNamara but I feel akin to him and I've read those reports of those conversations that Rufus Phillips and Edward Lansdale had with McNamara and McNamara was wrong. Rufus Phillips and Edward Lansdale were absolutely right about the X factor but I do want to quantify it and I would suggest more than anything else that extra caring a willingness to sacrifice oneself to take real personal risks and to do military to do service in defense of the state is something that is more is significantly easier to motivate if you think that service to the state can give you prestige with your in your neighborhood in your community and that doesn't happen unless the community leaders people the leaders of the people trust in the communities where we live have some stake in the state or feel connected to the state when the state is coming out of the capital and has nothing to do with with with with village leadership then then there's no incentive to to to take risk for the state it's not going to it's not associated with honor in your community with prestige in your community and let me just say one on Ukraine I simply want to remind people many may not know that after since 2014 since when when since Russia started nibbling at the eastern and southern parts of Ukraine the Ukrainian government in Kiev got serious about local decentralization reforms that they had not been they've been kicking down the road and you'll hear in reports of local mayors regularly when you hear about the battlefield they'll be quoting the local mayor many of those mayors didn't exist there was a major chromata or community reform uh that took a was over the last seven years and there's real evidence that that much of of Ukrainian there are many reasons why Ukrainians don't want to be ruled from the Kremlin from history and you can you can see that but but one of them has to do with the fact that the Ukrainian state has reached out in the last seven years in a way that they weren't before and that has I think been a significant factor and let me stop thanks Roger excellent I legit way I should I should simply close on that there is no better model that the only thing I would add to the to to Rufus Phillips's plea for the United States government to get serious but institutionalizing um a capability for post-conflict political reconstruction along with our other military capabilities capitals we hope to maybe never use again but but but need to have if necessary the one thing I would add is the doctrine should say there is no better model of how it should be organized than the way Rufus Phillips organized the office of rural affairs in 1962 decentralizing authority over American assistance to provincial officers with some regional coordinators and and and a director of the in the national capital who's also talking to to to national leaders then you have an organization which is functioning in the province is trying to support his organization which was its fundamental mission was developing these democratically elected village councils and village mayors and hamlet councils that that's what they were they're promoting local government and promoting a devolution of power by the state to those local governments and now you have a group which of us officers in the field who are in the real who are who are engaged with the political problems of every part of the country and they should be given the resources and they should be consulted on the strategic decisions of the mission and and and there's nothing that no better model than the office of rural affairs in 1962 thanks Roger well we're astoundingly right on time we have about 15 minutes for Q&A I'm getting some questions already so I just let you know the question chat thing is open if you'd like to put a question in there we've kind of stacked the deck here we're all kind of pro rufus phillips so if there's critics out there we're happy to consider something we might be getting wrong here let me start with one that came in this is actually from rufus his brother in law Sven Kramer he said rufus phillips often said that the advice and assistance work he proposed for the us was not to be a subset of military policy but a neglected yet vital politically culturally sensitive part of an overall US security foreign policy strategy and the point being that that the military can't just be the only it can't be the dominant factor that the the overall strategy has to include this this other key component in that larger historical context he was very much aware that major ideological challenges like jihadism communism etc exploited vulnerabilities and intensified internal security and stabilization challenges his policy focus was not on toppling a regime or demanding immediate democracy the kind of overreach that ended with abandonment in vietnam or afghanistan but building on it on a and a building on it effectively and in partnership over over time so he asked where could his approach best be applied in the world today among the vulnerable nations of latin america africa or the middle east or where is it most lacking and another question came in that's in the same same vein let me just repeat this so we've got this together from muhammad monsour musa he just said how can the legacy of rufus phillips be implemented in modern-day conflict management so let me if i could just use one example that he that rufus uses and that was and it goes to another question about the the mix between military and civilian instruments of power but it was he he was quite seized with the mission of of ambassador um bulletin in in kasa the kasamansi region in west africa where he he is with a small team of diplomats just using a few modest tools was able to negotiate a a peaceful solution to a long-standing conflict so again in rufus's mind as as max points out and in his earlier book actually it's not all about just the heavy hand of the military it's often about the the softer side used more effectively but let me just throw that that out max or hr anyone uh where in the world would this be uh would this be ripe for um for for application it will max i'll just i'll make a short comment up front and and you i and max writes about this in in in his books as well on and his book on on its insurances you know i the key a critical test of strategic competence is whether you can integrate all elements of national power and efforts of like-minded partners oriented on a well-defined and commonly understood political objective and we've we have demonstrated our inability to do that in fact how about just meeting the lower standard of making sure that what you're doing militarily doesn't cut against what you're trying to achieve politically and diplomatically think about what we did in afghanistan where we handed the taliban here's the schedule for our withdrawal and now we'd like to negotiate an outcome favorable to us after we told you that we're leaving on this timeline how about as you're as you're trying to negotiate a political outcome with your enemy you no longer target that enemy or even acknowledge that that that that your enemy and instead what you do is you invite your enemy to stay in five star hotels and travel the world fundraising and i mean it's just it is an astounding degree of incompetence uh you know based on the standard of of keith what you're saying is what you're doing militarily we're trying to achieve politically what you're doing economically what you're doing from you know from a decentralized approach to uh to development and and re-establishing you know governance and and and and economic activity i mean they should all be integrated and we've demonstrated i think our inability to do so thanks let me just pick up on let me just pick up on a point that uh spen kramer made in addition to being rufus his brother in law spen was also uh worked on the nsc in the 1980s under the reagan administration um and i you know he alluded in his question to you know uh if i can find understand it correctly to you know really developing governments that can win popular legitimacy as opposed to governments that necessarily win elections uh maybe that's a little bit more my own spin than his question but that's that's i guess that's the prerogative of the the person answering the question i'll take it in the direction i want to take it and i think that is that is a that is a valid point because i think you know there's a tendency in to the extent that u.s policy makers recognize that legitimacy is a problem in in in in countries where we're trying to provide security assistance legitimacy usually translates into holding elections and i think what rufus understood is that there was a lot more legitimacy than winning a popular vote and i think we saw you know the problems with that in iraq for example where they kept holding election after election but the resulting governments were not all that legitimate anyway even though they ostensibly won an election because there was massive corruption and the actual government formation was was done in backroom deals it wasn't this didn't necessarily reflect the will of the people and then fundamentally the government was not able to govern it was not able to provide basic services it was not able to stamp out massive corruption i mean this is i think essentially what what hindered our our military efforts so greatly in both afghanistan and iraq and you know i think what rufus understood was that the government had to be relatively effective you had to limit corruption you had to to the point that roger made it had to be in tune with local desires they couldn't just be imposing top-down solutions from bagged out or cobble on local provinces that actually had to have local leaders who represented the local people and i think you know this is all a reflection of what rufus saw in in vietnam where you had the exact same problem where uh you know even uh you know uh at lindsay on lufus phillips they both although they were supporters of no dinskian they were also critically clubsy um who for centralizing too much power inside gone and not pushing enough power out to the provinces and and for trying to run a quasi authoritarian state but they were also able to make these fine judgments where they understood that you know imperfect as yam was he was still going to be more legitimate and more effective than these military rulers who came after him who replaced all of the i mean one of the tragic things that happened after zm's death was wasn't just the removal of the senior leadership inside gone it was the removal of all the provincial governors all the district governors so the entire leadership i mean you know imagine what happens in the united states if you change not only the u.s administration but you get rid of every governor every mayor in every town around the country i mean imagine what kind of chaos would result from that and that's exactly what happened in vietnam making it essentially ungovernable and so throughout the 60s as this tragedy continued uh rufus and headlansdale both tried to make the case say we have to build up a government that has the support of the people in vietnam and basically the johnson administration the next administration couldn't care less their view was we'll deal with wind van too who who emerged as the military dictator of south vietnam and we don't really care if he has legitimacy because he has firepower he has troops he can he can put you know warheads on foreheads and that's really all that we care about and you know i think what lansdale and philips realized was that that was creating a hollow state that would collapse very quickly if it did not have massive american military support and that's exactly i think what we've seen in more recently in in afghanistan and to some extent less extent in iraq and that's why you know i think rufus's book his first book was called lessons not learned and i think you know we're seeing the tragedy of not learning those lessons over time super thanks roger the question talked about you know problems political and economic problems all over the world i i want to separate i want to separate that from from the question of rufus was philips was asking us telling telling us that this is final legacy that the united states needs to get ready for the next time this mission happens hopefully it doesn't happen soon hopefully maybe it never happened hopefully we never use our military forces either but we need we know we need them to be ready as a deterrent and in the in the in the case when because when they are needed you have to have them um the political i've argued that when the goal of of an intervention is to promote political change then the interveners need to be engaged with local political concerns throughout the country that's not necessarily true in normal assistance that when i would i i don't want to suggest that state building capabilities of the united states of america need to be turned on countries all over the world the normal international the norm in international relations is that nations respect each other's political autonomy you don't get involved in sub-national politics and you don't try to you you you work with with the national leaders uh in in any any relations with their country uh because they are the elected or chose politically chosen national leaders of each country have a sovereignty that needs to be respected by foreigners it's only when we need to promote international political change that it's necessary for the for the united states to get involved and when we do our interlocutors at the national level are not going to say gee we want we want we want to be forced to share power with with local community leaders in the provinces and in the villages no they like centralizing power the president of the country to the typically and then we it's then that we need to reach down a low a lower level otherwise our intervention itself is set is tending to centralize uh uh political power in the in the host country and making it more fragile um we know you know even the united states a democratic presidential election doesn't necessarily yield a leader who is overwhelmingly trusted in every part of the country our system works because we also have serious autonomous sub-national governments at the state and local level and if if there are large regions where each of the the last several presidents has been largely distrusted by a large you know bulk of the population uh those people at least had municipal and state executives that they trusted and and and exactly the same dynamic has played out again and again as we intervened following the normal international appropriately international relations of whatever we do in your country we're only going to do it according to the direction and regulation of the national government that principle can't work once we are it's are involved in making the government itself in supporting the the very existence of the government then we have to have different rules what we need is a capability that's ready for that transition to a different kind of decentralized political engagement when it's necessary but hopefully it will be rarely necessary we don't want to be doing that all over some south america africa asia uh no but we want to be ready to do it when we need to thanks roger uh we have a hard stop in just a few minutes so i i think we're actually not going to have time to go through the next round of questions but i just wanted to comment on some of them so we have let me start at the bottom yohannes uh all allen feldt said uh why describe despite subscribing to the gospel of local ownership with the afghan compact we kept micromanaging developing development and nato allies running their own departmental show i would just comment on that because i was in a prt in like 2012 to 13 and it goes to a number of the comments that have been made about the the question between the center and the provinces it was a very tricky issue through everything we've done i will say there's a number of very good people in the u.s. government and the bureau of conflict stabilization operations that have been working on this and that have been actually deploying people out to the field in different places where we i think we have gotten it right at different times but it's something that that is a very um it's a consistent issue that's hard to get right but it's one that i'm glad we identified rufus was all over it it's something that we have to keep revisiting finding the right model applying that every case is going to be a little bit different uh james mollington i mentioned him earlier i've been realized he was on the call good to see you and i wish we could actually hear from you but we're not set set up for that but he says thanks for the thanks to the belated implementation and much of the landstale phillips model um south vietnam the south vietnam essentially won the insurgency which is historically accurate of course um don't we need to install both political and military strength so a very good point that in the midst of the x factor and all the things we've been discussing there is still a core security issue that has to be dealt with and and create creatively and and and and with military force and mcdonald god bless rufus and his phenomenal legacy wanted to get the perspective of the panel on one of the biggest hindrances the u.s. government organizing a more strategically empathetic stabilization policy i think left the table that but that's a great question i think for all of us to consider to think about and particularly those in government to think about how to infuse that i think hr had it right earlier where he just implored us all to to take those those principles and max as well take the principles that rufus lives so well so i guess my answer to that would be all of us should should read rufus's book uh look at his legacy and then see how we can best best apply it and then colfax phillips um how can rufus phillips strategies be applied in communities of fragile states where local authorities may have weak institutions lack needed capacity skills and may be corrupt to which i would i think just offer that it again it's a it's a long game and i think that was the other thing rufus recognized one of patients um local solutions and and and just really being ready to flex with the new days the new days challenges but very good questions and i'm afraid we're going to have to to table those for next time thanks everyone for joining us it's been terrific to have the the three of you to to to celebrate rufus's legacy and and to try to to get some of these principles out for a wider audience and appreciate all of you that have joined us and we hope to continue the discussion in the future thanks you very much he thanks everybody thank you very much thanks for hosting max thanks roger take care you guys