 Good afternoon everyone. I'm Stephen Flanagan, Senior Vice President and Henry Kissinger Chair here at CSIS and it's a pleasure to welcome you all for this discussion of this important book before us here, The Future of Power by Joseph Nye, the author seated next to me on the left. First of all, the obligatory admonition please. We'd ask you to, we are recording this for posterity on the CSIS website. Please turn off all electronics so we don't interfere with the cordless mic system up here. It's a pleasure to have both Professor Nye and two members of the Center's extended family with us here this afternoon to talk about this book which is already gaining a considerable amount of attention, particularly in the midst of all the discussion of American decline and dealing with the rise of the rest of India, China and Brazil and all those who want to say in global governance, but also I think it's very relevant as you look, as you've had a chance to look at it, to consideration on the limits of the power of the United States and other countries in recent days in dealing with the events unfolding in Egypt. Back at the CSIS board dinner in November, our President John Hammer, who regrets he couldn't be with us today, offered to host this event. We thought it would be interesting to have two of our prominent affiliates of the Center, former senior officials, one with diplomatic and security background and the other with an economic and trade background to comment on this book. And so we fortunately have a very wise and distinguished group and extended family here at CSIS and so we're delighted that both ambassadors Hill and Hilsen and Pickering were able to join us today. Now none of our speakers really need much of an introduction but I will do one briefly. You do have full bios in your handouts but as you know, first of all, our author today, Professor Joseph S. Nye, is a university distinguished service professor and former dean of the Kennedy School of Government at Harvard, where of course he has taught for since 1964. He served in a number of positions in government as assistant secretary of defense for international security affairs, as chairman of the National Intelligence Council, deputy under secretary of state. He's the author of at least a dozen books and editor of many many more including the 2000 author of the also the 2004 novel The Power Game. Another one that's he's on this power theme as you can see that was said in Washington and a little more dramatic than this book but this book is really quite a capstone work as you'll see those of you who've had a chance to to read it and know of Professor Nye's other other work in this area as one of the leading theorists and analysts of the nature of power and world politics. Next, we're going to Ambassador Carla Hills, who is chairman and CEO of Hills & Company. She also, in terms of our own governance here, she serves as a CSIS counselor and trustee and co-chair of our advisory board. Ambassador Hill has had, Hills has had a distinguished career in business and government, having served as both as US trade representative in the administration of President George H.W. Bush and as secretary of housing and urban development and assistant attorney general during the Ford administration. She remains very active in a number of non-profit boards and is also chair of the National Committee on US-China Relations and of the Inter-American Dialogue. And last but not least, certainly Ambassador Thomas Pickering, vice chair of Hills & Company. This was this was a coincidence, not a plan. We didn't we didn't mean to keep this completely in the family or in the in the same company, but but he is also we're quite happy to say also a distinguished advisor to the center. One of the country's most respected diplomats, he's served as under secretary of state for political affairs and as US ambassador to the Russian Federation, India, Israel, El Salvador, Nigeria and Jordan. He also was of course US representative to the United Nations and ambassador where he led the effort to build a coalition during the during the the Gulf War during and after the Gulf War, frankly. And he's also held a number of other senior diplomatic posts, of course, in the State Department and overseas. And after retiring from the State Department, Ambassador Pickering joined the Boeing company as senior vice president for international affairs. And he too remains very active on a number of of non-profit boards. So we've asked Professor night to open with a brief overview of some of the key findings of his book. I'll then turn to to Ambassador Hills and Ambassador Pickering for some comments. We may have a little bit of cross talk among the panel briefly, but I know there be a lot of questions and this desire for dialogue with the audience. And so we'll try to get to that directly. We have about what we can go to about 515 and then immediately after there will be books will be available for purchase and signing with Professor Nye in the back of the room. So with that, let me turn the floor over to Professor Joseph S. Nye and welcome back to CSIS. Well, thank you very much, Steve. Oh, thank this. I just need to turn it on. Like technical problems. Sorry. Thanks, Steve. And I want to thank CSIS for hosting this. And I will try to keep my remarks relatively brief. Basically, the questions that comments from my two friends and panelists co panelists and the questions will be the most interesting part. So I'll try to summarize in a very short time or space, some broad arguments. The book summarizes work that I've been doing for about 20 years on how to think about power. But it tries to extend it and push it forward into the 21st century. So it gets into chapter on cyber power and and other things about American decline and so forth. Basically, the argument is that there are two large shifts going on in power in the 21st century. One is what I call power transition, which is largely from West to East. And the other is power diffusion, which is from all governments and states, whether Eastern or Western, to non state actors. And I think those are going to color the context of American foreign policy for the next few decades. Now, power transition is sometimes called the rise of Asia, but it's really the return of Asia. If you look at the world in 1800, you find that Asia is more than half the world's population, more than half the world's product. By 1900, that's down to just 20%. And what we're seeing in the 21st century is a return to what you might call the more normal proportions. It starts with Japan goes to Korea. Now it's China, India will be coming along. And this is a major transition. The world has seen transitions like this in the past. The question is how we're going to manage this. But the other aspect of power shift in this century is power diffusion from states to non state actors. And that is something we don't know much about. We haven't experienced that before. And one way of thinking about it is technology is putting information into the hands of people in ways that it's never done before. Yes, there have been information revolutions in the past, just think back to Gutenberg and the Protestant Reformation, but never as fast or as broad based as this. One way to think about this is that, yes, you could have instantaneous communication around the world in 1970, for example, but you have to be pretty rich or power or have big budget to be able to do it. Now anybody can do it if you have the price of entry into an internet cafe. The price of computing power declined 1000 fold in the last quarter of the 20th century. If the price of an automobile had declined as rapidly, you could buy a car today for $5. And what that means is the barriers to entry have virtually vanished. It's not that governments are no longer the most important actors on the stage, just the stage is much more crowded. And on that kind of a crowded stage, you're going to have to have a much different view of how power is distributed. And the chapter on cyber in the book basically illustrates this of what does it mean to have cyber power in an information age? Who has it? Who doesn't? We can talk about domination, for example, and see American naval domination is still, I think, assured for a couple of decades or so. It doesn't make sense to talk about American domination of cyberspace. It's a different type of game. There are too many actors and we don't even know who all of them are. So there's a different way that we need to think about power and the distribution of power, if we're going to design policies for the 21st century. Now, part of the problem we have is that the narratives we use, the way we talk to ourselves about power are somewhat old fashioned. For example, AGP Taylor, the great British historian who wrote about power in the 19th century in Europe, had a wonderful phrase, he said, the mark of a great power was the ability to prevail in war. But that remains important, but it's not the whole story. And I think, as somebody has said, it's not just whose army wins in an information age, it's whose story wins. And that ability to think about narrative and story as well as military power is a crucial part of what it will mean to wheel power in this entry. I call this hard and soft power, but it's the combination of smart power that's going to be crucial for effective strategy. It's always interested me to see Chinese pick this up. Hu Jintao told the 17th Party Congress in 2007 that China needed to increase in its soft power. That's a smart strategy. If you're a country whose hard power is growing economically and militarily, and you know, you're going to frighten your neighbors and therefore create coalitions against you. But if you can develop your soft power at the same time, you're less likely to develop those coalitions. And so I think who, when he described this, was on the right track, the problem is the Chinese have a great difficulty in implementing it. All these investments in the Beijing Olympics and other such things are terrific. And then they go and throw you show bow in jail and undercut the billions of dollars they're spending on Confucius Institutes and World Broadcast by Shindwan and so forth. So I think one of the things we need to do is to think more clearly about what power looks like. How do you use it? How do you combine hard and soft power effectively? Now, I'm when we when we get into questions, I'm sure we'll get into a lot of Egypt and Middle East today. So I'm not going to talk about that now. But I think the major point is that Egypt is a great example of power diffusion. The more power there are more people with information, the power information conveys than ever before. So let me take a little time, though, on the other aspect, which is power transition. And particularly this view that the Chinese are about to replace the Americans. The United States is in decline and China is the next hegemon. Gideon Rockman has a piece on the front page of front cover of foreign policy saying American decline this time it's real. The argument in my book is no, it ain't true that what you're seeing is in fact that the rise of the rest, the Americans will not have the same preeminence as a share of world product that it had in the past. Very hard for me, though, to think that the Americans aren't going to remain the largest power for the next 20 or 30 years. It's true that if you look at Goldman Sachs, they'll tell you that China is going to equal the US and GDP by 2027. The economist says it might even be sooner than that. That's plausible in the following sense. If you have 1.3 billion people and you're growing at 10% a year sooner or later, that could be an economy as large or larger than the US. The problem, though, with that kind of projection, is not only that it's linear and doesn't accept the fact that sometime history has accidents and bumps along the path, but it also is taking one measure of power, economic power, and one measure of economic power, which is GDP, and assuming that that's the measure of all power. In fact, if you think about it, GDP per capita is a much better measure of power. It's a better measure of the sophistication of an economy. And if you look at when China equals the US in total GDP, let's call it 2025, but it doesn't matter what number you pick. It's not equal to the American economy overall. In per capita income, China's not likely to equal the US in per capita income until well into the century, probably 2040, 2050 or so. So even on the economic measure, people are, I think, misinterpreting this rise of China as a decline of the US or overtaking the US. But it also is interesting that when people look at this rise of Chinese power, that they focus on this one dimension, and they neglect military and economic power. And the book has a chapter on military, economic, and soft power and how those are affected by the Information Age. In military power, I really can't see China equaling the US for another 20 or so years. There are, I'll say, problems in some areas, but equal no. On soft power, I've already mentioned that China has a lot of trouble developing soft power equivalent to American soft power as long as they have the type of political system they have. I was once giving a lecture in Beijing University and was asked, how can we increase our soft power? And I said, lighten up. But unfortunately, that's not the way the system works. And it's interesting, if you look at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs polls, it shows the American system well ahead on soft power, even in Asia than China is, despite the major Chinese investments. Now, you could say, so what? Why worry about this? About whether people are correctly or incorrectly perceiving American decline? It matters because if the Chinese think that they're rising too rapidly and therefore deserve to be conciliated, they're going to suffer from a hubris and a more certainness, which will be very difficult for Americans to make compromises with them. Because every time we try to reach a compromise, and there are areas where we do need to work with the Chinese on financial stability, on climate change, on pandemics and so forth, if we compromise, then if the Chinese read that as weakness, then essentially becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. On the other hand, the dangers that the Americans become too fearful of China, that all of a sudden we say, oh, we can't do anything with the Chinese because they're about to overtake us. I think the, you know, there is this famous saying of Thucydides about the cause of the Peloponnesian War was the rise in the power of Athens and the fear it created in Sparta, and that World War I was the rise in the power of Germany and the fear it created in Britain. And there's some people who say that will be the story of the 21st century, that the rise in the power of China and the fear it creates in the United States will lead to a great conflict. It's bad history. It's bad history for a couple of reasons. One is Germany had passed Britain in economic production by 1900. I just tried to argue with you, China is not about to pass the United States for another couple of decades in per capita income. It's also bad history in the sense that it implies that we can't manage this. This is something we can manage. And it's, you know, if you say, how do you manage a policy with a country like China? Well, it's a Goldilocks policy, neither too hot or too cold. It's going to take a lot of careful balancing in terms of getting the right proportions of the right mix. But it's important because if we don't do this, we're going to be in a much more difficult situation than we need to be in terms of Asia. The key I think on this is to realize that power, and I try to argue this in the book, power is not just power over others. It's also power with others. There's some things that we want, whereas others develop their capacities, we benefit as well. This is particularly true in the economic areas, which are non-zero sum. It's true in dealing with climate and other such things. And the reason the Americans, I think, are going to be well placed to deal with this, if we don't lose our head and become more too fearful about decline, is there's no country that's quite as good at borrowing from the whole world, making networks the whole world, and maintaining alliances. I can't see any other country as well placed as we would be to do that. So if we don't succumb to too much fear, if we keep a sense of balance of using hard and soft power in a smart combination, I think the United States will be able to deal with these two great power shifts of the 21st century, the power transition, the power of diffusion. So I have a relatively ostentatistic view of the future in this book. Thank you, Joe, for writing the book. I think that you have provided a wonderful framework for understanding how globalization and the development of the internet has dramatically affected the concept and the use of power as we look forward in the 21st century. You mentioned the shifts that come from globalization, and it's surely true the west to east movement. No group of countries has benefited more than Asia. You mentioned China, lifting millions of people out of poverty, but it's not just China. We have Indonesia and India and a host of countries throughout the ASEAN region that are very, very different today as a result of participating in global markets. And then the capacity of non-state actors for good and for evil. I mean, you have corporations with supply chains that encircle the globe, entrepreneurs that can have contacts across state lines, and you can have NGOs with members in multiple states, and you can have shadowy figures that are trying to do you in. So the picture is very, very different today, and I think that your reference to yesteryear's focus on military power as the measurement for the stature of a state is probably obsolete and you say that better than any. You know, I think of you as being sort of a master chess player, and you are writing a manual that for three dimensional chess that deals with power. And on top of your pyramid is the power to compel change. And right below that is the power to shape an agenda. And at the lower level is the power to influence preferences. And I was asked to just focus a little bit on the economic sphere. And in the top level, I think we would all agree that sanctions would be in the compelling change. Sanctions with the muscle to make them effective is one thing. And I enjoyed your chapter on that. It's true that sanctions don't always work, and many have said that they mainly fail. But as Joe Nye reminds, as pointed to Libya and South Africa, they don't always fail. And that's his top on the pyramid of hard power. The second level of his pyramid in the economic sphere is the power to shape the agenda. And that does require working with a number of players. In the old days we had the G3, then the G5, then the G7, and then we invited Russia, and G8, and then we invited others. And we today are now at the G20. And I would venture to say that with respect to trade and the opening of markets, most governments see that as a positive outcome, particularly with markets with which they are dominant, in which they are dominant. But that doesn't mean that these governments won't try to manipulate the markets, which they do through legislation. Think of by America, regulation. Think of standards that are geared to giving preference to the home team in China. Or just think of old-fashioned tariffs that have not been brought down, that try to favor the domestic. And the way we try to moderate this manipulation of the market is through international agreements, such as we have with the World Trade Organization. And again, most governments would rather engage in a rule that moderates the manipulation of others than to be left in the law of the jungle, even though it constrains their opportunities for manipulation. But the diffusion of power and the fact that there are that stage, as you put it, is very crowded, makes the negotiation of new rules very much more difficult. You know, 20 years ago we had the organization called the Quad, made up of the United States, Europe, Japan and Canada. We met once a year and the rules that we were willing to subscribe to, that was the deal. And that was because we were the largest economies and the largest participants in global trade. So our smaller trading partners had to go along to get along. And today the emerging economies are account for fastest growth, and the fastest growth not only in GDP, but the fastest growth in trade. And so increasingly, they're insisting on a voice in shaping that agenda of what the trade rules will be. And it will be necessary, as the professor says, to work with them, not try to think of exerting power over them, because it just won't work. And then we get to the third level of the Master Chest player's pyramid. And that is influencing preferences. And I think that our three pending pre-trade agreements offer a good example. You know, the president has his bully pulpit. The Congress can hold hearings. NGOs can put on programs, think tanks can do the same. Entrepreneurs can strike up acquaintances across border, and they can influence public opinion. They can put their slant on it. To date, most supporters of those three trade agreements have not been, I would say, vociferous. They, it's not been vociferous with respect to the benefits of the flow to producers and their workers, nor have they been vociferous in terms of the disadvantage that occurs to our producers and our workers as the governments with which we have negotiated but not past trade agreements have moved on and are entering trade agreements with others. Korea has one with the ASEAN 10. They have one with India. They have one with the European community. And it dislodges the American producer and the team that supports him. Similarly in Colombia. It was our fastest growing agricultural export market in South America growing above 30% per year in the decade leading up to the crisis. When we did not endorse the agreement or pass the agreement here and Colombia moved on with agreements with Canada, with Mercasur, which included Brazil and Argentina, our exports have plummeted and they're down very severely from what they were in earlier times. And so to date, I think the fact that we haven't sold the benefits has caused our government to tread very slowly and very lightly in the trade arena because the influence that has been created against the agreements has seemed much more vivid than the influence in favor of supporting the agreements. So the future of power is one we all should think about. Think about how we could exercise it in combination with organizations with which we are connected businesses and the like because I think that your comment that you made that we no longer have power over others, but rather we will have power if we're willing to work with others. So I congratulate you heartily on a very well written book that needs to have been written. Thank you, Steve, very much for inviting me and thank you, Joe and Carla for giving me the honor of joining you here. Just a little word about relationships. You've seen that Carla and I work for Carla, her firm. I was at one and the same time Joe's landlord and his student. There's a little story in the late 70s. Joe was here working in the State Department, rented my house purely by hazard. I had no net out there for Joe. I returned threw him out under the diplomatic clause. He went across the street to Ron Spire's house and proposed that we carpool, which we did. And Joe taught me everything I know about nuclear reactors, nonproliferation and modern science and foreign policy, among other things, 20 minutes a day for a whole year for free. So I come as an enthusiastic continuing student of Joseph Nye. And I think this book is superb. You'll see it is the culmination of Joe's long term work on looking at power and particularly smart power. I had the honor to join in this building, the Smart Power Commission, that he and Rich Armitage ran. And all of that, in my view, brings us to an understanding and indeed, a sense of the focus that this particular analysis and very cogent series of examples in the book, I think summarizes, in many ways, great directions for the future in our country and in the world at large. Joe has done a great job in encapsulating, in a very few minutes, what is an enthralling and I think tremendously interesting read. If any computer dunce like me can understand 75% of Joe's wonderful chapter on cyber, then I commend it to all of you as a hard but very useful and valuable read. I think that I join in believing that particularly with respect to military power, it has serious limitations. And in the recent past, we have tended to believe that in fact, military power is the great answer to the difficulties of diplomacy and we have seen indeed that military power unfortunately created tremendous new workload for diplomacy around the world and we're only now beginning to recover from that. I also want to join certainly in agreeing with Joe in his assessment of both the uncertainties and indeed some of the problematic factors connected with the now putative indeed almost iconic American decline. On the one hand, in the second, the meteoric rise of China, I think you make the point, Joe, that large numbers of Americans answering a poll already believe that China has surpassed us economically so that there is a factual distortion in the modern world that obviously needs some correction, but there is a reality distortion too that I think needs to be fixed and certainly you make it clear in your book that that is a very, very significant and indeed serious preoccupation for all of us. I think that it is important for us to look at the points that Joe makes about some of the major players in the international community, certainly China, Russia, India, the European Union, Japan and Brazil. My sense is that a great deal of our future diplomacy and a large share of our future security will be wound up with these players, that we will be in the realm with all of them in one way or another in that ad mixture which has, as Joe points out, synergistic proportions of military and soft power, of hard and soft power in the confection what I would call the dynamic cocktail Joe of smart power. And in many ways the book I think gives you a very strong sense of how this fits together and how in a constructive and valuable way it can be used. It's useful I think for us to take a look at the example of how and in what way we can deal with these major potential partners and rivals, as I like to call them, the six states and organizations that Joe has focused on. I think there are two or three things that I might add to what Joe has very constructively said about this. I think it is very useful for us to look hard, using smart power and how we can base our relationships with these countries in the win-win column as opposed to the zero-sum column. And in many ways there are out there, as Carl I think pointed out, particularly in the economic arena with China, serious possibilities in that regard, certainly in the military strategy and the military and strategic arena with Russia there has been. One only has to look and in fact at the impetus which New START has given to the reset with Russia, which has now led on to the WTO and there are serious expectations that it may well lead on to cooperation and ballistic missile defense and then many other things that are important aspects of this. I also think that the capacity to set the agenda toward win-win means that we have a better capacity jointly and even multilaterally to contain the negatives because each side has a serious interest in obviously exploiting with the other the win-win possibility. They're very simple, but I think not necessarily totally irrelevant theory of how to move the process ahead. In a more organizational sense with these countries, we have over the years morphed into a pattern of arrangements which in fact is designed both to exploit and further develop smart power. This is the Presidential Commission. In some cases castigated in domestic political questions because it hadn't happened to have been in the past identified with an individual personality but in many ways it keeps popping back up. Certainly in the Bush administration the strategic economic dialogue with China is a very important example in my view of a new set of relationships certainly elevated to the presidential level involving serious cabinet participation. An agenda that revolves heavily around critical projects and something in which there is if I could put it this way serious adult supervision on both sides when it works well in assuring that there is continued progress and further development. So you have both a new organizational structure and arrangement coming out of the past as well as a new kind of focus to exploit in fact the smart power approach to these kinds of activities. There are many other things that I think one can talk about. I was struck by the chapter on cyber by the question which I posed to Joe before we came into the room are we ready yet for international agreements in the area of cyber? Is this a little bit like disarmament where we began believing in fact that particularly with commanding authority in a particular area we should not enter into agreements with other states about control. So are we moving in to the period where in fact we can each do each other such serious damage that it may well be useful to think about whether there are sets of arrangements and Joe without stealing all of your thunder has certainly told me was certainly in the area of criminal activity this makes some sense. But I put that out there as one of the many things that this book stirs up in the mind that might well be useful to look at. I will end by only saying there is in my view a very large agenda for diplomacy that in many ways as an ex-diplomat I would not be here defending that position if I didn't believe otherwise but certainly I'm a victim here and a product of my own experience. But let me tell you that shortly a group of us will put forward a report. It's a report that will I think conclude that in Afghanistan we need to think seriously about whether there is a political answer or a political outcome to the question of the conflict. My own view is that all conflicts have political outcomes. If you don't seek yourself to control that outcome that outcome will be dictated to you by circumstances and others. I think in addition we have a serious lack of diplomacy in Iraq in dealing with the outstanding issues and I only mentioned two or three. What's the nature of the future federation? How are we going to assure for Iraq's majority rule and minority rights? How and in what way is all that oil income going to be fairly divided without leading the country back in to ethnic and indeed religious conflict? All of those questions are out there. And then if in fact that isn't boring you, we now have a stalled Middle East peace process. It's now become Egyptianized. In my view the last week has said the things are not going to get much easier. They may get harder. Any new Egyptian confection of governance may be less attached to the history of the peace treaty and more inclined to be pro-Palestinian in their lean in the direction for the future. Israel is not going to greet that with enthusiasm and indeed may dig a hole that it's in now deeper as a result. But the burden on us will increase because this is an area where we have very important strategic interests which in my view is a mistake in the well known phrase to say peace has to mean more to Egyptians and Palestinians than it does to us. It means turning over. A strategic issue of great interest to us to the vicissitudes of the folks on the ground and not taking the kind of role and in place indeed place we ought to. And it's certainly time in my view in the diplomatic scenario there to borrow a leaf from Joe's book and put forward in what I think can be a helpful step, a kind of framework of principles that we believe must govern any peace settlement to inform the parties both what we will support and what we will not support in moving that process ahead. There has to be a way of breaking free from the last eight years logjam. We could go on from anymore. I see my friend Jim Locker in the room. For a long time our government has not moved in its structure and indeed many of its ways of doing business to accord itself with the new arrangements for power much less to say to deal with the future of power. Whole of government answers are critically important. Ideas about turf and departmental responsibilities need in many ways to be blended with the kind of cooperative efforts that have made for the best answers from the United States in the past and Ken in the future. Joe thank you for the book. I commend it to all of you. I get no commission on any that you buy but I think it's your unique background. Nothing but in many senses you're here because you're interested in Joe and the book and I highly commend it to you as an informative, interesting, stimulating and in many ways very rewarding read. Thank you. Thank you very much. Thank you very much. Well before we have about half an hour for discussion but before turning over the floor for questions I do want to, Ambassador Pickering raised a question that I did want to pose to Professor Nye and that is that whole question of why has smart power proven so hard in practice to implement? And you touch on it in the last chapter of the book a bit and I don't want to preempt Jim Larkin others who may want to ask some related question but clearly I remember here even in this room in the Alpha Alpha luncheon four years ago and then Secretary Gates embraced more or less smart power as your commission was still unfolding. He tried to apply it and I think at the later stage of the Bush administration of 1943 you could argue was trying to apply it. This administration came in clearly embracing a better balance of the toolkit but yet we've seen that it's proven pretty hard to do in practice and this is a rather macro question but what do you think some of the big impediments are Joe and sort of putting smart power into practice? Well one is inertia basically our bureaucracy is structured in a certain way that it's very hard to turn the super tanker even with all Jim Larkin's efforts it's hard to turn. So you have a situation where the Defense Department is a giant and the rest of the government is pigmies and it's hard to change that even when you have an enlightened secretary of defense like Bob Gates who says we need to invest more in our soft power but beyond and below that is American political culture. It's very hard in American politics to get up and say you should invest more in soft power. Isn't it ironic that Huqin Tao can say that in China but a congressional friend of mine told me that she agreed with a hundred percent but anytime you got up on a platform in the U.S. and said we need to do more on soft power you're not going to get the votes and if you don't get the votes the Congress isn't going to provide the bucks. So those are the two main reasons I think. Basically I mean that's part of the reason for the book. We got to get in our minds as a people a much more sophisticated understanding what power is. Okay we'll open the floor I'd ask you just to wait for a microphone and David Abshire I see your hand first and there is a microphone coming to you. Thank you. Joe I'm in all you write on leadership and you write on soft power and I think we need some smart leadership. You and I are involved. Thanks. Foundation for International Understanding. As we look at the the inversion of people to people which is not new. The Marshall plan was new. The NATO originally before it became a military alliance didn't mention this over the years. The breakthrough at Helsinki is what emerged from the third and and the Reagan in the Westminster speech. And we tried to get our foundation very nice understanding in the presence of a normal trying and the whole world of not for profits is something not understood. I was with a science advisor. The White House they understand this. I I chaired a small foundation compared to this. We give only the science and education. We have today. Eight organizations that we're supporting in Pakistan. We're not the biggest supporters all of them have come in with much larger grants. Reaching the people of Pakistan from seeds for peace to to to to the systems engineer at that's in the schools of Pakistan and teaching new ways of education. And that world. All of they could all triple their efforts. They're agile they're close to the people. They're the opposite of top down their bottom up. But Trey has said when he landed with a hundred first we can't change minds. And seventeen percent of the people of Pakistan favor us. It's our take Clinton has left. Half a billion dollars it's top down. And I think it's amazing that this president who was elected by this social network you know I spent a day at the interactive studios of Disney. And people coming together science and education. Now that that needs to be unlocked that what's needed there can be reprogrammed. But that's new. On cyber it seems to me then all these areas we need reform measures that's why your next book has got to be. Reformist T. R. Roosevelt. But we need to re-institute something analogous to the joint economics. The joint atomic energy committee. In the cyber world to get together all of these different groups to bring it together in a concerted strategy. But I think seriously you've written a wonderful book on leadership. We need smarter leadership. And at these big historic breakthroughs. That thought institutionally how we do it. To make strides. Rather than simply trying to re-divert money. From part of the budget to another part of the budget to get more of the State Department. To really move into these new ways of people to people that we see reflected. In the streets of Egypt today. Thank you David. Yeah David you and I agree very much on this in fact. I teach a course on leadership in foreign policy at the Kennedy School. And I look over past presidents. Ironically the president who stands out best on all this is Dwight Eisenhower. The more I study different presidents the more I realize even before all these terms are embedded Eisenhower had an intuitive understanding of it. Yes there's a couple of questions here in the front row. The gentleman here. Professor and I am Aziz Hanifa the editor of a newspaper called India Broad. Reference to your recent article Asia in the balance you start off talking about the fact that the heads of the five permanent members all visited New Delhi. And except for China which has been a little circumspect everybody else have endorsed India's bid for its candidacy in the UN Security Council. Then you go on to talk about the very sexy issue of China and India and how you know people are writing thesis about who is whether it's authoritarian China or democratic India but you end with the fact that India is not going to be an ally but perhaps more of a counterweight in terms of China which seems to be closer to sort of the New York conservative argument. While Indian officials and administration officials always bristle when this argument is brought forward and the strategic partnership between India and the U.S. has become almost a cliché. Could you speak to that? Am I getting you wrong in terms of the fact that your argument seems to be more closer to sort of the New York conservative counterweight to China argument? I think my argument is a little different from that. Basically I was in Delhi last month and met with the prime minister and the foreign minister and others. I think India and the U.S. are fated to be closer together. I think it's going to largely reflect the rise of China but what Manmohan Singh made very clear and others is they don't want this to be phrased as an alliance. Bill Emmett wrote a very interesting book called The Rivals a few years ago. He said we talk about the rise of Asia as though Asia is one thing. If you look more carefully you'll notice that you have Japan, you have India, you have Vietnam and the oceans and so forth and each of those countries is concerned about the rise of Chinese hard power and the extent to which China begins to throw its weight around the more it pushes those countries into closer relations with the U.S. For many internal domestic political reasons it's inconvenient for Indians to call this alliance. So unlike our relationship with Japan which clearly is an alliance I don't think we're going to see an alliance with India in that same sense. But I think we are going to see a closer alignment between India and the United States. And then that's going to be reinforced by the fact that we have a lot of close interests. Our economic interests with India are growing. The Indian diaspora is an enormously successful part of American economic and political life and you know there's the sole cliche but it's nonetheless true that we are both democracies and that matters. So I think it won't be an alliance but I think India and the U.S. are fated to become closer. Yes sir, gentlemen. Professor Nye. My name is Rob Dubois. You've seen my emails every few months on Powerful Peace the blog about applying smart power from the Navy SEAL. One of your biggest fans and what I have run into with my bottom up discussion about applying smart power bringing it as my work in 30 plus countries is done on the ground in Oman and wherever. We have the potential to make personal contacts, reach out to our local commands and then through to the local establishments and up through to connect with the international smart power coming down. But my small wars council colleagues often poo poo the idea of smart power. They're among the detractors of smart power saying we've had DOS and DOD for decades. We've been doing the balancing of soft and hard power for decades. My answer to them is yeah, but it's not working. I've been out there and I'm seeing us not connect well with I'm seeing there still be the ugly American stigma in most countries around the world because certain individuals doing certain things. What would you answer to them and saying of course the construct is there. There's there's soft and hard powered in our institution. How do I answer them about this and say how it could be done better? Well it's interesting because a lot of people in the military get this and a lot of people in the and DOD get it starting with the secretary. And if you look at counter insurgency doctrine as expressed by Petraeus is very much a smart power doctrine of combining hard and soft. It's when you try to implement this bureaucratically that it gets so darn hard. And part of this goes back to what I said earlier that the allocation of resources is something that's that we inherit from the past and there is a tremendous different disproportion of the allocation of resources. I don't want to quote the person who told me this but there was a fund that was set up to do some of this sort of work and that it was going to be it was it was a fund that was in defense and the secretary defense said we should shift this to state and indeed it was shifted to state and once it got out of the DOD budget into the state budget Congress cut it in half. That's the source of the problem. Yes there was a question back here. Yes sir. I need to bring up the word WikiLeaks but I'm going to bring it up. When you can have someone disseminate that much information or they call open diplomacy it changes the power situation all together but in a way that we don't know how to deal with yet. What's your suggestion on dealing with some of that? Well I'm glad you brought it up because WikiLeaks is a good example of this diffusion of power that I've been talking about in the book. I think we make a great mistake by focusing on Julian Assange. We're building him up as something that he isn't. If it weren't for if Assange had never been born this problem would have arisen sooner or later anyway. What it means is instead of focusing on the symptom which Assange is we ought to focus on the cause which is we're going to have to learn to classify less and to deal with systems for maintaining the classified information we have in a much more intelligent way. The idea that we would subtly in the aftermath of 9-11 say sharing means putting state cables into ciphernet and then not having a way to restrict access within that so that a private bag dead didn't have access to some of these cables totally irrelevant to his job and that we didn't monitor that. This is sheer incompetence. If this was a bank as soon as the alleged perpetrator downloaded certain things his screen would have gone blank and there would have been a sergeant coming in and asking why are you looking at this. We can do this. We just we haven't and instead of that we're talking about prosecuting Julian Assange and getting us into all problems related to freedom of the press which shoots ourself in the foot we've got to face the fact that we have to change our own behavior on handling information. But that's a it's a longer story but that's case you didn't know I have strong views on it. Yes this is another question then Walt Holcomb in the back. Could you wait for a mic I'm sorry. May not need it but. Congratulations on your book. I'm sure it'll be a great read and everybody should buy a copy because you get a commission. If you had twenty billion dollars more to spend on soft power which is approximately the Goldman Sachs bonus pool. I think the I mean it's nice to have a question from your old boss. The I think that you could put a lot more into. Inter societal exchanges know there's I think the most effective form. Of this is is direct contact among people David Apshire has long advocated this there is there was a talk about setting up a corporation for public diplomacy instead of having it just done with a bureaucracy. We ought to be having more Americans having more contact with people in other countries and we could provide the funding for that I think we do some of this but I think we could do a lot more I would put some of it in that know there's our great strength is our civil society and we ought to be having an increase in the contacts of our civil society with others this is something that China can't do. I also would like to put some more money into the public diplomacy which we have which is not adequately funded. And I would put some of it into trying to deal with some of the issues that Jim Locker has talked about having joint expeditionary diplomacy if you want to call it that. So there are a variety of things of that sort some of the things that we need to do don't have necessarily large price tags on them. I mean some of the most important things in fact maybe done at relatively low levels of cost but a large portion of the money was suddenly allocated to the Wall. I would try to fund this. I know David what does it now is incorporation for public diplomacy or foundation foundation foundation foundation. Yeah yeah National. Let me just pick up on Walt's question to I agree with Joe I wanted to add a little granularity. Joe in 79 I participated in negotiating with the Chinese on their access to the United States institutions. And over the years people tell me there's been a hundred thousand Chinese who've come here and studied a lot of them in science right technology engineering and math but beyond that we've managed I think probably less than 10% of that the other direction. I think that that much if that's what you meant by China's restriction and failure to do it then I totally agree. I think that in the area of public diplomacy the notion that that is totally 100% output of information about the U.S. on the airwaves on the television and perhaps through the net maybe should shift a little bit. My own view is that U.S. centers overseas for years have garnered a great deal of enthusiastic attention. Even more English language training. And it's even more valuable because so much of what's going on internationally depends upon that. I think traditional libraries and new access arrangements to all kinds of data through putting centers in foreign universities that in a sense have computer access made it available to folks. George Soros invested 100 million dollars in putting the Internet in Russia. We piggybacked in 20 places by putting those kinds of corners in Russian universities in very remote places. All of this is very imaginative. I think very much in keeping with what's going on new. I totally agree. I think those are the areas. And for reasons I don't understand because the Congress itself appreciates the power of information more than anybody else. We seem to get a goose egg every time we look at that particular issue and turn around and deal with it. Well, we have at least a couple of NGOs here. We'll be happy to have that redistribution of resources. Yes, in the context. Natalie Liu here with Voice of America. Professor Ngai, you mentioned President Hu Jintao of China has seemed to be quite receptive to the idea of self-power. But is a hard regime inherently capable of projecting self-power? There might be a related question here from Doug Paul. No, not on this? Okay, well, I will embroider it. Did China just blow 10 years of self-power out the window in the last few months with its behavior on some of the territorial questions in the last few months? I think so. I mean, I think Hu Jintao on the top Chinese leadership is smart enough to know that self-power is a useful part of their overall strategy for the reasons I gave earlier. But they're trapped by their own authoritarian system in terms of how they do it. Notice in my answer to Walt Slocum a minute ago, I said our greatest strength is our civil society. And if we're going to put funds into something, don't necessarily make it government directly. Have government help create a foundation so that we have more contacts of civil society. China can't do that because it won't let it civil society go free. That's what I meant earlier when I told people you want to be more successful, lighten up. Look at India and Indian soft power. Bollywood makes more films in Hollywood. China doesn't lack talented actors and actresses and film directors, but they don't lack sensors either. And the fact that Chinese films are censored so much means that they can't get that broad mass appeal. So I think China is, I think, you know, the locking up of Liu Xiaobo and this overreaction to the Nobel Prize committee, I think was China shooting itself in the foot. But even if they hadn't done that, they still are not going to be able to compete in soft power until they begin to change their political system. Yes, there's a question here from Doug Paul. Doug Paul from the Carnegie Endowment. Joe, I wanted to ask you to address the question you raised at the start, your reviews on what's happening in the Middle East and how it relates to your book. Well, I think the change in the Middle East, which caught, I caught me, but I'm not an expert, but a lot of people who are experts by surprise, is really quite fascinating because it indicates that when you have this enormous spread of information and diffusion of information, you're empowering people who previously weren't empowered. I was at the Munich Security Conference this weekend and one of the things, one of the comments that struck me as most telling was by a German expert on the Middle East who said that this was the most remarkable thing in his 35 years of study of the Middle East. He said the conventional wisdom is you had the dictators, you had the Islamists, and there was nothing in between. All of a sudden we realized that over the last 20 years or so that in between had been filling in through this enormous new surplus of information. And then when you could get a catalyst to suddenly trigger it off and get the capacity through Twitter and Facebook and text messaging for people to coordinate and to realize I'm not powerless here in my house keeping my head down, there are others who believe like me and we can all act together and we act together, they can't shoot us all at the same time, it had an enormous impact. So this is the case I think the information revolution had a huge effect and it had the effect first of preparing the ground. I mean that more people had more information then they had the effect of simplifying the coordination problems that go with collective action. So I would argue that Egypt, Tunisia and so forth are very much illustrations of this diffusion of power that comes with this extraordinary reduction in the costs of information and if you want the widespread information. We have time for a few more questions. Well could I just see it just as anyone else, I thought I saw another hand out there but go ahead sir I'm sorry, could you just tell us who you are by the way? You grind staff, I retired last year National Geographic but the military ties between the Egyptian military and the US military I think sort of helped the military be the common effect there in Egypt and it was extraordinary could you comment on that and maybe Ambassador Pickering? Well I think that military to military ties are an extraordinary source of American soft power. We sometimes think of military power and this is something I go into the book is there are different aspects of military we sometimes think it's kinetic or shooting that's military power. Let me tell you that giving a guarantee to another country of its security as the US does to Japan is a source of soft power and training and military to military training programs is another enormous source of soft power for the United States. The fact that we have these ties with militaries in this case the Egyptian military means there are people to pick up the phone to, people you can influence, people who can trust you and so I think I've you know ever since I worked for Walt and the Pentagon and looked at this I was always struck going back to this question of amount of money we spend very little on this and yet you know I met several millions of international military education training it's the best investment you could possibly get I don't know it's probably half of a fighter plane or something but it's a terrific return on the investment. Let me just add to that because I totally agree with what Joe has said I think in Egypt the long history of training in the United States the long history of joint exercises in some ways has also I think created a sense of comradeship and relationship and ability to talk back and forth. The interesting comparison is probably Pakistan where for other good reasons there were essentially non-proliferation reasons but for a very long period of time up until we cut it off most of the leadership of Pakistan had been trained in the United States and then for a very long period of time that went away and the recovery is a very hard and very difficult recovery particularly if they've enjoyed training in other places China perhaps or just stayed domestically and absorbed only what was going on inside Pakistan particularly with the growth of the Madrasa movement and with what I would call a serious inward turning in Pakistan's own strategies about its own future which have heavily affected military outlook so that comparison is I think a very vital one to show you that this is just not a plus it has minus aspects when it disappears from the scene and I couldn't agree more the notion that because it wears a uniform it's just hard power is a serious mistake I think hard power and economics that doesn't wear a uniform and so you have to look at I think Joe's book is extremely good at giving you the sense of that thank you very much well thank you all I'm sorry sir we do have a minute just for a quick question Daniel Morrow from SAIS I am Italian that's why I have a question for you if you look at the South Mediterranean you see that the autocrats are almost all around in power starting from Gaddafi apparently no one is taking care about we get oil since 40 years when Gaddafi is in power without one day of cutting off also when Gaddafi was bombing Italy he didn't cut oil I see a contradiction and this is my question between us Americans and Europeans asking for more democracy on the other side of the Mediterranean mainly Turkey included and then when they open up the societies we are not very able to deal with the change inside the Islamic societies so how do you see the possibility to deal with this problem well I think we've seen this in the last week or so as the administration has tried to react to these events foreign policy is not just the human rights policy or democracy policy foreign policy is the effort to get as much of as many goals as you can in some balanced form a president has to deal with another government if we have interests and we have governments to affect those interests but if you deal only with governments in this case the interest in oil but it could be also the peace process or it could be terrorism and neglect society you're going for stability in the short run against stability in the long run so you have to think of the narrative that you're creating at the same time and have that narrative relates to the other society so you have to do a very difficult straddle you have to deal with governments because that's essential for policies and stability now but you also have to address societies because that relates to those narratives that you're conveying to other societies relates if you want to not just our values but also stability in the future and getting that balancing act right it's not easy that's a good echo to I think for this event let me just thank first of all my two colleagues Tom Milia and T.J. Cipalletti for helping organize this thank Professor Nye for taking time to be with us I would invite those of you who can't stay to join him there will be a books for sale and signing in the back of the room and last but not least to thank our two commentators, Ambassador Hills and Ambassador Pickering, thank you for your insights and thank you all for a number of good questions actually done