 If you look at some of the outcomes of that early post-Cold War period, for example, the reunification of Germany within a year of the fall of the Berlin Wall, that's a pretty remarkable achievement, which brought together not just allies like America and Germany, but also longtime adversaries like Gorbachev, Soviet Union. It required a sense of strategic purpose in American diplomacy, a willingness to take risks when opportunities emerged, a sense of strategic empathy, which is not to be confused with sympathy, but I think Bush and Baker and Scowcroft understood very well the predicament that Gorbachev was in, so you didn't see them dancing on the Berlin Wall or spiking the football at the end of the Cold War, and you saw a sense of strategic discipline too. There was a big debate a decade or so later as Russia slipped into, I served first in our embassy in Moscow in the early-mid-1990s, and I've always thought, if you want to understand the smoldering aggressiveness of Vladimir Putin's Russia, it helps to have understood or at least experienced the curious mix of hope and humiliation and the chaos and disorder of Boris Yeltsin's Russia as well. That's what Putin, in a way, has tapped into over the last 20 years. Putin is himself a combustible combination in my experience of grievance and ambition and insecurity all wrapped together. I vividly remember my first meeting with Putin when I was the newly arrived American ambassador in Moscow. This was August 2005, and so the meeting takes place in the Kremlin, which is a place that's built on a scale that's meant to intimidate visitors, especially newly-arrived American ambassadors. So you walk through these huge ornate halls down long corridors. You come to the end of one huge hall, and they're these two-story bronze doors. You're kept waiting there for a few minutes just to let all this sink in. The door cracks open a little bit and out comes President Vladimir Putin. Now, Putin, despite his bare-chested persona, is not that intimidating in the flesh. He's about five, six, even with lifts in his shoes. But he carries himself with great self-assurance, so he comes walking through the door, looking you straight in the eye, which is his want. And before I got a word out of my mouth, it says in Russian, you Americans need to listen more. You can't have everything your own way anymore. We can have effective relations, but not just on your terms. In my experience, that was vintage Vladimir Putin. It was not subtle. It was almost defiantly charmless. But there was a message there, which was, you know, in Putin's mind, the minds of lots of people in the political elite, you know, the United States had taken advantage of Russia's moment of historical weakness in the 1990s. Here's Vladimir Putin, 2005, he's surfing on $120 a barrel oil. His message was, we're not going to be taken advantage of anymore, we're going to push back. One of that is an excuse or a justification for his aggression in later years, whether it's in Ukraine in 2014 or any place else. But you have to understand that combustible combination of attitudes, I think, as well. And, you know, Putin's going to be a formidable player over the next few years. I mean, Russia in many respects is a declining power, you know, if you've measured in terms of economic stagnation and demographic realities. But as he often demonstrates, declining powers can be at least as disruptive as rising ones. And it's a mistake to underestimate Putin's Russia for all of their self-inflicted problems. I remember President Obama, for whom I have huge regard, was asked in a press conference a few years ago when I was still in government what he thought of Putin's Russia. And he said, well, Russia is just a regional power. And my reaction in watching that was, well, it's pretty goddamn big region, you know, across 11 time zones and sitting on one seventh of the Earth's surface. So, you know, I'm afraid the reality is my last comment is that as we look out over the next few years of at least dealing with Vladimir Putin's Russia, we're likely to be operating within a pretty narrow band from the sharply competitive to the nastily adversarial. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't work hard to preserve a safety net in that relationship, which is why I think it's crucially important for cold-blooded unsanimental reasons for both Russia and the United States to extend the new START agreement, which regulates and reduces strategic nuclear arsenals in both Russia and the United States. It expires in a little more than a year, the beginning of 2021. And we ought to be engaged in trying to extend that. Now, it's all quite fascinating. I mean, it would seem that unipolar moment for US diplomacy that emerged, you know, after the fall of the Iron Curtain was rather short-lived. A large portion of your book and certainly your career focused on a period post-911 that you described as the inversion between force and diplomacy that really began, you know, with post-911, with the Second Iraq War and continues to this day. How did that militarization of US foreign policy happen? And how do you think we should write the balance between civilians and the military in our national security? It's a really good question. I mean, I think the starting point for me, it's, you know, fashionable in some ways convenient to assert that Donald Trump invented the demolition of American diplomacy or its drift. And, you know, I'll get to that in a minute. But the reality, I think, is that ever since the end of the Cold War, you know, for the United States in some ways for understandable reasons, it was easy to take for granted the significance of professional American diplomacy during the so-called unipolar moment when we didn't really have a global peer, when it appeared as if we could get our own way on most issues without a lot of investment in diplomacy. It was easy to give diplomacy in the State Department short shrift, despite a lot of very significant diplomatic achievements during that era. The reality is from 1985 until the year 2000, you know, we cut the budget for diplomacy and development in the United States by about 50%. We went for four years in the late 1990s in the Second Clinton administration, not taking in new American diplomats. And, you know, that had structural consequences later on. Then, as you said, Osreia came 9-11, a deep shock to our system in the United States, and an almost natural tendency to put even more emphasis on the military, on the intelligence community as tools of American national security policy. And I think too often to see, you know, diplomacy in the State Department is a kind of under-resourced afterthought. As a recovering diplomat, you'd expect me to say that. I do think when you look at the question of, you know, what it's going to take now looking ahead to renew diplomacy, and a moment when I really do believe it matters more than ever, given the landscape I was tried to sketch before, you first have to recognize that if in the Trump era, you know, the President didn't invent the drift in American diplomacy, I think he certainly accelerated it and made it infinitely worse for all sorts of tangible and intangible reasons that I can describe. I mean, the intangible one is, you know, as a record number of senior vacancies in the State Department. And even today, three years, almost three years into an administration, when the President was asked more than a year ago whether he was concerned about that record number of vacancies, he said, not really because I'm the only one who matters. You know, that's, in my view, that's diplomacy as an exercise in narcissism, not the diplomacy I learned from, you know, Jim Baker many years ago as well. But in terms of renewing diplomacy, setting aside, you know, the persona of President Trump, no matter who's in the White House, I mean, it's going to take at least three things, it seems to me. First is a political leadership that recognizes that in this era, we do need to rebalance the tools of American national security and put relatively greater emphasis on diplomacy and on development. You're never going to get very foreign diplomacy unless it's backed up by military and economic leverage. I'm not naive about that. But I do think it's important to, you know, put relatively greater priority on diplomacy and development. You have a reality today where the White House's last proposed budget for diplomacy and development, the State Department and AID, was about $40 billion and $750 billion for the Pentagon. That's 19 times greater. That's an imbalance that, you know, is always going to exist to some extent but doesn't have to be quite so stark. Second, even if you have that political leadership with that kind of vision, you know, the State Department has to be honest with itself. I mean, while individual foreign service officers or career civil servants can be incredibly resourceful and entrepreneurial and courageous, the State Department as an institution is rarely accused of being too agile or too full of initiative. So there are things that, you know, you have to do within to de-layer the institution to help us get out of our own ways sometimes and to be less passive aggressive and, you know, more full of initiative. And then third and not least, I think, is the challenge of that President Trump has tapped into, you know, in this country, which is a real disconnect between people like me in the Washington establishment, what was referred to in the last administration as the blob, and lots of American citizens who, when we preach the virtues of disciplined American leadership in the world, don't need to be convinced so much about the value of American engagement in the world to, you know, help promote our prosperity, our security, our environmental health, but are a lot more skeptical about the discipline part. Because they've seen too many instances, whether it was Iraq in 2003, the global financial crisis, where we were pretty undisciplined in matching ends to means. So it's not going to be easy to repair that disconnect, but I think, you know, any American leadership, any White House, is any leadership in the State Department, is going to have to be honest about, you know, the significance of that disconnect and then try to reduce it over time. No, absolutely. You talked about the underfunding of American diplomacy and development, and I think it's worth noting that you served as U.S. Ambassador to Jordan during an absolutely consequential leadership transition that saw an untested and unexpected leader take the reins. And 20 years later, King Abdullah is almost the last leader standing from that era in a region that in your own words is still convulsing from the disruption of the Arab Spring. You also mentioned in the book how the Arab human development reports and the stark conclusions on the deficits of human dignity in the region influenced your diplomatic and your assistance approach, not only to Jordan, but to the region at large. Looking back, what lessons can we draw from the Arab Spring, which one of our panelists described today as the Arab nightmare in its final outcome? And is there a wider implication for our field's approach to so-called fragile states? Well, I think there's some powerful lessons there, and as Nancy knows very well as well in a variety of efforts to look at the phenomenon of fragility around the world, not just in the Middle East. I think it's crucially important to understand and learn those lessons as well. If you reread the Arab human development reports, which were written now more than 15 years ago, they seem strikingly relevant today because the deficits in knowledge or education in women's rights and political opportunities and economic opportunity are just as relevant today as they were then. And I think one of the lessons of the Arab Spring, having lived through it, stumbled through it in some cases as an American policymaker, is that the sense of indignity, which at its core drove the Arab revolts now eight years ago, is still very much bubbling beneath the surface. And leaderships in societies that don't address that sense of indignity, that absence of political and economic opportunity, are going to become brittle over time, and you're going to see a re-erruption in many of those societies. And so from the point of view of not just of American policy, but now anyone who has an interest in helping to foster some semblance of stability and security or order, in that really complicated and often dysfunctional part of the world, is to realize that as tempting as it is to get caught up in the headlines and the immediate and sometimes awful challenges of different conflicts in that region or different kinds of scandals, that you have to keep focused on the deeper drivers of dysfunction and disorder across the Middle East. And as a matter of American foreign policy, it's always a mistake in my experience to think that we can pretend that they don't exist or to overemphasize the understandable imperatives of counter-terrorism cooperation or working with different longtime partners in the region, because I think that's not an investment in healthy relationships. I mean, I think to be practical about it, if you look at the U.S.-Saudi relationship today, I think it is not enough of a two-way street. In the sense that I'm afraid today, while I would be the first to admit that we don't have a pristine record of managing the partnership between the United States and Saudi Arabia over administrations of both parties that I worked in, I think today we're way too indulgent of the excesses of a leadership that is right in terms of its vision of economic and social modernization, vision 2030, what Mohammed bin Salman, the very self-confident crown prince of Saudi Arabia, has promoted. And the United States ought to be strongly and broadly supportive of that effort at social and economic modernization. We also ought to be straightforward about, you know, having the back of Saudi Arabia in the face of legitimate external threats. But when that leadership overreaches as it's been doing for the last few years in the horrible humanitarian as well as strategic catastrophe that Yemen is today, or overreaches internally in, you know, a year ago today, the murder of Jamal Khashoggi, a very tempered critic of the Saudi regime in a Saudi diplomatic facility in Istanbul, it doesn't pay for the United States to check its values at the door. It doesn't pay, you know, not to be honest about those issues. And that's what I mean about a two-way street relationship. And I think across the Arab world, that's just one example, complicated as it is, you know, to have those kind of conversations, both privately and publicly, I think it's essential. And that's one of the lessons, I think, of, you know, the Arab Spring and the Arab revolts. They're going to recur unless leaderships and societies pay more attention to that sense of indignity. I'm not trying to suggest that the United States has, you know, enormous influence over the outcomes in many of those societies. They're going to be driven by leaders and citizens in those societies. There are limits to our agency, and humility is always a good starting point for Americans looking at the Middle East, official Americans. But we do have some influence, and it's important for us to at least try to help focus on the right issues. Thank you. Turning more to some of the issues that animate our network, we've been talking a lot about the evidence case for peace-building. And, you know, there's a wide body of research that has shown that most peace agreements fail, defined as a resumption of violence. But at the same time, peace agreements are 35% more likely to last at least 15 years when women take part. And they are 64% less likely to fail when civil society, including women's participation, is integrated. So has this borne out in your own career, and how do you think we can make peace processes more inclusive? I mean, it's certainly true, and it's, of course, much easier said than done to think about how you make peace processes more inclusive. You know, one of the realities is that, you know, peace processes don't end with a signature on an agreement. That in some ways is just the beginning of the process. You know, you have to invest, you know, that piece, oftentimes a very fragile kind of agreement in a broader commitment on the part of societies, you know, well beyond the leaders who happen to sign that piece of paper. Some of them are inevitably brittle. I mean, even agreements that we've made with long-time adversaries, I remember I led a different set of back-channel talks with Moammar Gaddafi's Libya many years ago, 15 years ago right after 9-11, which ultimately produced, you know, the Libyans and Gaddafi getting out of the business of terrorism in a way that we could verify, taking responsibility for the horrific terrorist attack on Pan Am 103, which more than 30 years ago killed 270 innocent people paying compensation for that, ultimately giving up a rudimentary nuclear program. I should add a Gaddafi story to this, too, because he was surely the most peculiar foreign leader I ever dealt with. I remember in the course of these back-channel talks I would schlep over to Libya quietly and meet Gaddafi, whose preferred time for meetings was 3 o'clock in the morning, not my prime time as a diplomat. He also had, you know, he would meet in the middle of the desert, I remember on one occasion we were meeting in this old army tent, with a single light bulb coming down from the ceiling, and it wasn't ostentatiously furnished. It was like white plastic lawn furniture in the tent. There's Gaddafi sitting there. The meeting goes on for four hours, I think, middle of the night. He had this really disconcerting habit of pausing in mid-conversation and staring up at the ceiling, presumably to collect his thoughts. But, you know, here I'm trained as a diplomat to carry on conversations. But the thing that made those three or four minutes while he paused worthwhile was on this occasion he was wearing what you could only describe as a yellow pajama top with photographs of dead African dictators on it. So I would spend the three or four minutes trying to guess how many of those dictators I could identify, and over four hours I got pretty good at it. And the other Gaddafi story, I'm sorry, to divert or digress, but about 10 years ago this week at the UN General Assembly, which is just wrapping up in New York, so Gaddafi comes, a rare appearance. Leaders are supposed to limit themselves to about 10 minutes in their speeches. Gaddafi spoke for 90 minutes. He didn't have a prepared text. He had scraps of paper that kept falling off the podium, and so he had reached down to get them. But what I remember most vividly about that experience is the UN at the time had this really good Arabic language interpreter. So I had the earphones on listening to his Arabic-English interpretation. 75 minutes into the 90-minute monologue, you hear him say in Arabic, I can't take this anymore. He throws off his headphones and leaves the booth. So if you didn't speak Arabic, you had no idea what Gaddafi was talking about the last 15 minutes, but you didn't miss anything. So that was, I'm sorry to digress, but that was an example. The agreement that we reached with Gaddafi on the nuclear issue as well as terrorism was a particularly brittle one because it really was only anchored in the leadership of that country, bubbling beneath that leadership was a deep sense of indignity, which eventually produced a revolution in early 2011, a bloody civil war, the collapse not just of the Gaddafi regime, but at least in the short term of a lot of the diplomatic work that we had done. So it pays to try to anchor agreements, whether it's about conflicts or whether it's with a particular adversary, in wider popular support if you can, but it's oftentimes a matter of years of effort after an agreement is signed as opposed to what it takes to actually get to that agreement. Well, not wanting to follow in Moammar Gaddafi's footsteps, I'm not going to monopolize the floor here. So we have some time left for Q&A. We'd love to start a conversation with this incredible audience. Maybe we'll take three and then allow Ambassador Byrds to respond. Yes, in the front row. We're bringing one. I'm Netra Halpern with Peace Films. Regarding the over militarization of the United States foreign policy, war is big money. And as President Eisenhower very clearly pointed out, do you think that the influence of the military industrial complex is egging the U.S. on to more wars? We had one in the back on the end of the rope. My name is David Steele. I'm a faculty member at Brandeis University. My question relates to when I worked for USIP in Iraq in 2008. And I was part of a provincial reconstruction team as a USIP representative during my so-called deployment there. And my question has to do with what in your estimation happened with the whole concept of 3D security? It seems like you've supported the basic elements of it, defense, diplomacy, development, and yet now it's really considered pretty much a debunked theory. It hasn't worked. I have my own ideas about that, but I'd like to hear what yours are. What did work in it? And what do you think didn't work? And is there anything that could be done to revitalize that? Both good questions. Yeah, why don't we take these two and then we'll go to the next. My retention is less than it once was. And the military industrial complex, it's a really good question and I think Eisenhower in many respects was right 60 years ago about the importance of the United States being careful about that as well. Now, as I said before, I'm the last person to suggest that the United States doesn't need a very strong and effective military. It oftentimes is the essential backbone of effective diplomacy as well. But we have gotten in a bad habit of making it our tool of first resort as opposed to our tool of last resort in part because we've invested so much in the military and under invested in diplomatic and development tools that it's tempting to make use of that very effective instrument. It's not the fault of the US military or its leadership. It's a failure on the part of civilian leaders, I think, to understand the need for an effective balance amongst the tools that we have. I think the US military and the Pentagon are going to go through over the next five or 10 years or ought to go through at least an enormous period of reevaluation too because military strategy is about to be transformed and the process of being transformed by artificial intelligence, cyber weapons. So a lot of the most expensive military investments we've made over recent decades in aircraft carriers, inexpensive fighter aircraft, are going to be called into question when you can take relatively cheap swarms of autonomous weapons or armed drones and have an enormous military impact and make a lot of those systems quite vulnerable as well. That's not so much a function of cost. It's a function of changing the way in which American military and civilian leaders think about defense. So you're right, I think we need to be careful about exactly what Eisenhower warned about all those years ago and I don't think we've been nearly as careful as we should be but we also have to be mindful about the need for military strategy and doctrine to undergo some pretty significant transformations over the next few years. And that relates to the issue of can we recover, if we ever had it, an effective balance amongst diplomacy, development and defense. As I was trying to suggest earlier, I think we've oftentimes had a hard time finding that balance long before the Trump era. I think where we went wrong, again to be honest, was sometimes in overreach. I mean, I think if you think of development in particular, there were instances you saw it and served through it in Iraq. We ran into some of the same difficulties in Afghanistan where, you know, and this is a kind of ideological fever that sometimes we're afflicted with as Americans. It's the kind of crusading impulse to remake societies in our own image. I'm all for encouraging more open political and economic systems. The essential building block is good governance, but we have to recognize the limits of our own agency in doing that. So, you know, I didn't serve in Iraq as you did, but I certainly traveled back and forth a lot. And one of the problems looked at parochially from the point of view of the State Department is in the immediate aftermath of the war, you know, there was this expectation that the State Department was going to step into the role sort of like the old British colonial service, you know, that we were going to rebuild institutions. And, you know, the truth is I always thought that was almost asking the wrong question. We had an important stake in helping Iraqis to rebuild those institutions, but we tended to take on too much, I think, and that then caused people to question, you know, the utility of development and diplomacy. So finding that right balance is always the big challenge. I think it's possible to do, I think it's more important than ever on the landscape I was sketching before, which is much more crowded, competitive, and contested than the world I knew, you know, going back to the immediate end of the Cold War, the world many of us knew then. It's possible to find that balance, but it's going to take, I think, a political leadership that's willing to question, you know, some of the, you know, over-investment sometimes in the defense establishment to make the case for investing more in diplomacy and development and then in the worlds of diplomacy and development to be honest about our own shortcomings and ways in which we can demonstrate to the people who are asking for more money that we recognize, you know, our weaknesses that need to be addressed and we're capable of addressing them. So why don't we do another round of two? We'll do questions as I do. I know you were waiting up front, and then Jane. Hi. Hello. My name is Emilia Micky. Hi. And I'm the founder and CEO of Dennis Micky Foundation. Nice to meet you. Thank you. It's a non-profit in Cameroon. So my question is related to U.S. diplomacy in conflict situations but at the level of maybe countries that are very difficult to handle. In my country as an example, we have an ongoing crisis and the U.S. has tried a lot to come in to help us resolve the anglophone crisis. They've made recommendations but we have a very stubborn government. We have an ongoing national dialogue going on and it's basically kind of like a film show because the necessary steps needed for a national dialogue of that magnitude is not being taken into consideration. There is no inclusivity. Civil society's voices are not heard. Women are not represented. The youths are not represented. So as it states, because most of what the U.S. has done is provide feedbacks like recommendations, advocacy, and at one point they went as far as doing an economic withdrawal of their support to the military. But this has not still made any major change in the situation and we have a lot of people dying, a lot of people internally displaced. So practically what other steps can be done to solve the problem because it's really disheartening to see that a lot of people live in bushes. Most of us don't stay in our homes as we used to. I personally have to sleep with my eyes open or when you speak out you're scared that it might kidnap your family or even you. So what practical steps have been used? Thank you. It's a good question. I mean I think in the broadest sense you need a practical focus on the part of the United States and Africa not just the issues of conflict as you were describing but also on the huge challenges of food, water, health, insecurity, the impact of climate change. And I think again I would be the last person to suggest that we have a pristine record over recent decades, administrations of both parties of paying the kind of sustained attention that matters to the United States about what's happening in Africa. But I think over the last two or three years we've been particularly absent on a lot of those issues. I think if you want to look at an example of a place where the United States made a real difference, you go back to the George W. Bush Administration and the PEPFAR initiative that, you know, by devoting significant American resources, supporting, you know, effective committed leaders as well as civil society activists really did make a big difference in helping to bring most of Africa and most of the world to the brink at least of an AIDS-free generation, which helps create an atmosphere in which it's easier to address some of those other problems as well. If you have that practical focus and, you know, a higher priority attached in American foreign policy to Africa, which I think is essential, I mean, by the middle of this century the reality is the population of the continent is going to double to two billion people from one billion people. And so all those unresolved insecurities are going to be magnified unless leaders and people who take them seriously and curiously are supported. So, you know, you need the kind of relationships with leaderships which are honest and two-way streets where we can push in directions where leaderships aren't inclined to go. You need connections to civil society activists to help promote an inclusive approach to those kind of challenges. You need enough in the way of not just security assistance but development assistance where you can help ease some of the worst kinds of problems that are only going to make insecurity greater. You need to be honest and blunt about poor governance, you know, which is, as you know better than I do, at the core of a lot of those problems. None of those things are easy to do, but they do require to reinforce my first point a focus and a priority attached in American foreign policy to Africa and to its future. Thank you. Now, Jane Zimmerman, I know you've had your hand up for a bit. Thank you. And yes, Jane Zimmerman from Davidson College, the Dean Rusk International Studies Program. Nice to see you. Nice to see you too. And I wanted to commend the back channel, folks. It's not only a great book, it's a great audio book. So I recommend planning a long car drive to listening to it because you'll be doing a lot of... A really long car drive here. A lot of undistracted thinking. And I think one of the great things that came out of it was your recommendation for renewal of American diplomacy or diplomacy through partnership. And yet, at the same time, many of our traditional partners are in disarray, whether it's the Europeans and our NATO allies, even when we look to Asia, Africa, India, Brazil, very problematic. So as we start trying to imagine a future and a renewal of American diplomacy, how should we be looking at trying to build relationships not only with our traditional partners, but new partners? It's a really good question. I was in London a couple of weeks ago, and I must admit that London is the one capital today that makes Washington look like a fine-tuned machine because we're having nervous political breakdowns on both sides of the Atlantic today. And I think part of the problem, I think, is as a friend and a partner, to be honest, sometimes, rather than the cheerlead for Brexit, which is what we've been doing, at least as an administration recently, is to be honest about the importance of European countries kind of recovering their sense of balance. Now, the power of our example today is not all that compelling. But I do think, you know, for all the talk, just thinking of the Transatlantic Alliance, for all the talk of a pivot to Asia and the rising significance of Asia and the U.S.-China relationship as the single most consequential one, geopolitically, in the world today, that's all true. But I think in a very real way, it makes the Transatlantic Partnership more or not less important because if you think about the rise of China, you think about climate, you think about the revolution in technology, the need to begin to develop workable rules for the road to deal with those phenomena, you think about insecurities in Africa and the Middle East. You know, all of those are going to have enormous effect, not just on Europe, but on the United States, too, as well as on Canada. I shouldn't leave the Canadians out, it's a rare feat in American diplomacy to piss off the Canadians, which is what we've also managed to do in recent years. But I think it's going to require both in terms of our, you know, longtime partners and allies in Europe and in Asia, an adjustment. You know, I don't believe that you can simply, even if you have a different administration in Washington, you can just flick a switch and restore an era in which, you know, American leadership was oftentimes kind of patronizing in the transatlantic partnership. There's going to have to be a given take. I do think some European states are going to need to spend more on their defense and security. But I also think the United States is going to do something that's kind of an unnatural act for us, which is listen a little bit more, because, you know, Europeans aren't necessarily going to follow our lead perfectly on issues related to China's technology, because of their entanglement with Russian energy resources and Russia economically. They're going to have a little, some of them will have a little bit different view of how to manage that challenge from Putin's Russia. So I think it's an enormously important relationship, but the terms of engagement are going to need to shift a little bit on both sides. And that's equally true with regard to our major allies and partners in Asia from Japan all the way across to India. I think we have time for a few more questions. Bob Berg, I've been the front row. Thank you. Bob Berg, Alliance for Peace Building Board. Hi. Nice of you to be here. Thank you. I'm interested in, and many of us are, in how you institutionalize forces for working on peace within governments and societies. In the State Department, we had the virtue of the CSO Bureau and the Bureau that was so well led. And it seems to work nicely when it has really great leadership, but you build institutions for all seasons as it were. In Ethiopia now, they've decided to split off the function of peace, in a sense, from the foreign ministry to have a ministry of peace. And there's some talk about that in Europe now as well. So I'm wondering whether you have ideas of how institutionally peace building and peace functions can be given strengthened abilities and capacities in governments, abroad and here. It's a good question. I mean, I'll address it, I guess, mostly in terms of American institutions. You know, I guess I'm enough of a conventional thinker to be a little bit skeptical of trying to create new institutions or new, you know, bureaucracies or agencies of the U.S. government. I mean, I think the challenges really take existing institutions at state and the bureaus, as you mentioned, that already exist, as well as bureaus and parts of the Agency for International Development and invest in them and modernize them. I think that in the end is going to make us more effective overseas. We oftentimes kind of distract ourselves when we create new bureaucracies as well. You know, one of the things that in the State Department at least we've never been very good at is thinking in systematic ways. The way the U.S. military actually does in looking at case studies and doctrine. You know, we tend to be very informal and think we'll sort of make it up as we go along. And, you know, the reality is you can learn a lot from instances in which, you know, American-led or American efforts at peace-building worked and where they didn't. And you can learn lessons from both of those. And, you know, we ought to be a little bit more systematic in learning from those cases, whether it's big negotiations like the Iran nuclear negotiations or more practical efforts at helping to resolve, you know, unresolved regional conflicts in Africa as well. So that's one thing that I think we could do more of. And that would also, I think, you know, make us a lot more effective from administration to administration because you have that kind of body of learning that can sustain a professional cadre of people in the State Department and AID, you know, who are steeped in those experiences and have a lot of practical experience themselves too. Great. I think we have time for a few more questions. Shall we go to the back row? Left, left quarter. Hi, thank you. Natalie McCauley from the Public International Law and Policy Group. Nice to see you. You too. I'm wondering about how the United Nations fits into the kind of partnerships that you're speaking about between the U.S. and our allies in civil society. If you can talk about how it was when you were in the field and how things have changed now and where you think we can go. Yeah, I mean, I've had huge admiration over my career for people working in different U.N. agencies. I've seen, you know, how much good they can do in some very complicated and oftentimes very dangerous situations. My wife actually works for the U.N., works for OCHA, you know, dealing with humanitarian assistance coordination. So I have huge respect. I also have a, you know, healthy skepticism about the dysfunction of the U.N. system sometimes. You know, I talked about the dysfunction in the State Department sometimes and the U.N. system, you know, oftentimes gets in its own way sometimes. It's not a function always of the people working there. It's oftentimes a function of permanent members of the Security Council or big contributors who, you know, can't get along or can't be effective in, you know, in how they try to make use of the agency and the various U.N. agencies. It's a function of the patronage system and, you know, who gets jobs and whether people can be moved around in jobs. But to strip all that away, you know, the world needs an effective United Nations and all the agencies connected to it. And I think, you know, with a certain amount of modernization and reform, you know, it still plays a hugely important role. And you see that certainly in the humanitarian area and refugees, especially with a record number of people either displaced or moving, you know, from their home countries around the world. It's essential that you have, you know, a United Nations system that can help address and coordinate, you know, responses to those sorts of challenges. But I, as to answer your question, I had nothing but respect, you know, sort of individual U.N. career employees that I worked with overseas. You know, they, oftentimes with, you know, relatively limited resources showed enormous resourcefulness and resilience and courage in dealing with very complicated situations, oftentimes not with the security that, you know, is imperfect for American diplomats, but as, you know, it usually, you know, reflects an investment of more resources than in the U.N. system, too. So I recognize the need for reform, but I think the issue is how to reform, modernize, strengthen the U.N. system as opposed to John Bolton's solution, which was to, you know, blow up 10 floors of the U.N. building in New York. I don't think that makes sense. Great. I think we have two questions here. We'll go first with the back row, dark suit, red tie, and then next, two rows forward. Hi. Bo Wilcox from the International Center for Religion and Diplomacy. One thing I'm just wondering about is what kind of work can the Trump administration do to better relations with allies or other foreign bodies when it comes to its focus on religious freedom? And what could future administrations do as well to build upon the work the Trump administration is doing as well? Thank you. Yeah, I mean, I think, you know, both parties has often done a lot of good in trying to promote religious freedom in societies around the world, not just in democratic systems, where that oftentimes at least comes more naturally, but in authoritarian systems where human rights abuses are much more the norm. So, you know, I think it's an important part of what the United States stands for in this administration as well as in others to stand up for fundamental human rights, including religious freedoms as well. I do think that the power of our example oftentimes gets us further than the power of our preaching in terms of, you know, our commitment to human rights in the world. And I think the power of our example has suffered a little bit in recent years. But I do think it's important for us to be seen to supporting, you know, those kind of values and that kind of openness in the world, even if there are limits to our ability to actually influence the choices that get made. As I said before, it doesn't pay to check our values at the door or to be mute in instances where you see real persecution, whether it's in religious terms or broader human rights abuses. And that's true, I think, whether it's this administration or any other U.S. administration. Great. I think we have a question in the middle. This gentleman, the gray jacket. Hi. Thank you. Bruce Staten from the School for International Training. Hi. Your take on the rise of populism and whether you see that as a symptom or a cause of the current drift and maybe specifically when you first started your talk, you mentioned this moment in time where enlightened self-interest came together and established what I'm assuming a liberal institutional approach to peace-building around the world. I'm wondering what populists would say about that. And I imagine from both the left and the right, they would disagree with you and say... I've noticed that. They were left behind. So is it that it wasn't explained to them? Is it that they were left behind in some sense? How do you understand this movement? Well, both. I mean, it's a really good question. Yeah, I have generally avoided over the last year so the term liberal international order, because most people, they travel around the country doing book stuff, look at me like I have three heads, because it's not very liberal. It's not very orderly. Otherwise, there's nothing wrong with the picture. You're right. I mean, I think part of the reason for the rise of whatever you want to call a populist nationalism in lots of different parts of the world, in the U.S. and Europe and other parts of the world, has to do with a sense of grievance that people have about dysfunctional governance that, you know, a political system, a democratic system didn't produce the kinds of things that they wanted. With the ebbing of the era of globalization, euphoria, you know, it's pretty obvious that all of us underestimated the extent to which some people would be left behind. It didn't lift all boats in the way that in 1989, at least, we all, I think, kind of blithely assumed would be the case. And so that was a failure of imagination, maybe. But it had very real political consequences, too. And here, I'm not just talking about the Donald Trump phenomenon. I think there are a lot of people who felt that sense of grievance, felt that sense of being left behind, not just economically but culturally and in lots of different ways. And that's a very real concern. And it contributes to the disconnect I was talking about before between American citizens across both political parties and the Washington establishment, because there's the sense whether it was, you know, in terms of the global financial crisis or, you know, different conflicts we got ourselves into overseas that we weren't very disciplined in our thinking. We weren't mindful enough of, you know, the very real challenges that lots of Americans were facing. So what's the answer to that? You know, I think first it's honest leadership that, you know, is straight with people about the reality that, you know, with globalization, euphoria is over with and we need a more nuanced approach to that. Globalization and the interconnections that come with the revolution and technology isn't going to go away. So automation is going to be a reality in the American economy and it's going to mean significant adjustments in how traditional manufacturing, you know, industries are able to compete. We're going to require a different set of skills for, you know, a lot of American workers. It's going to require investment in educational systems and research and development, you know, across the United States that we're going to need to be able to compete more effectively. Because I think, I still think, as I said before, you know, I'm generally an optimist. I mean, I think the United States has a lot of assets to bring to bear. But part of that is going to be dealing with that phenomenon of populist nationalism here and in other societies is going to be diagnosing the problem and the very real grievances that many people at least have. Addressing them in practical terms and being honest that, you know, you're not going to see overnight transformations but if you're serious over a decade but investment in education and research and, you know, looking at clean energy technologies and the range of opportunities that will exist in the future that there's no reason that we can't compete very effectively and begin to repair some of that sense of grievance over time and it's going to take some time too. That's the only prescription I can think of for a healthy democracy and we're, you know, not an especially healthy democracy today. Well, I think that's a really important note for us to think about for our next two days of discussion. I would like to take this moment to thank Ambassador Burns for being so generous with your time and your insights and for spending this hour plus with us all today. Thank you. And now I'd like to hand the floor to our Director for Learning and Evaluation, Jessica Baumgartner-Zuzik who has some exciting news to announce and