 Welcome to the latest long-distance Lowy Institute event. I'm Lydia Khalil, a research fellow at the West Asia Program at the Lowy Institute, and today I'm joined by Dr. Megan O'Sullivan. Megan O'Sullivan is a professor of practice of international affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School. She's also chair of the North American Group of the Trilateral Commission. Dr. O'Sullivan served as a special assistant to the president and a deputy national security advisor for Iraq and Afghanistan under President George W. Bush. She's been awarded the Distinguished Public Service Medal, the Defense Department's highest honor for civilians, and was awarded the State Department's superior honor award many times. She's also the author of three books, including her most recent, Windfall, How the New Energy Abundance Upends Global Politics and Strengthens America's Power. Megan, welcome, and thank you so much for joining us. Thank you, Lydia. It's a pleasure to be here with you and the Lowy Institute. Well, since we're going to be delving into the legacy of the September 11th attacks on U.S. foreign policy, and given that these attacks define the careers of a generation of policymakers, I thought I'd first begin by asking you, what was your experience of the day? What were your reflections? What were you doing in September 2001? Sure. Before I answer that question, I feel like there's something remiss in your introduction, which is you didn't tell our audience that you and I actually know one another from long ago, because we met in Baghdad, working in Baghdad back in 2003. I very much have those times in mind seeing you, and I'm looking forward to talking about some of that and some of the consequences surrounding that. But let me get to the question you asked about the actual day of September 11th. I was in Washington, D.C. I had not yet done into government. I was at the Brookings Institution where I was a young postdoctoral fellow and I was actually working on completing a manuscript, a book about state sponsors of terrorism when September 11th happened. I remember seeing it, watching it from the auditorium at the Brookings Institution, and I've been into that auditorium maybe a hundred times since then, but I never fails to evoke that moment very sharply for me. It was as you said, like many people of my generation, it was a very consequential day in so many respects. For me, it really solidified my commitment to government. Up until that point, I had largely been in a kind of academic policy think tank world, writing books and articles on American foreign policy. But September 11th really crystallized for me the importance of not just having good ideas but turning those ideas into action. I had a family member who died in the World Trade Center that day, and my commitment to trying to serve in government really was sharpened at that moment, and it really influenced my course going forward as well as so many of the much, much larger things we're going to talk about today. Absolutely. Those attacks also prompted the Bush administration at the time to push for a congressional resolution authorizing the use of force against those responsible for the 9-11 attacks. This resolution would then be used to justify invading Afghanistan as the Taliban were harboring al-Qaeda. Can you envision a scenario, especially at that time given the urgency and the emotion where the United States would not have retaliated militarily after those attacks? Perhaps people say, you know, if there was a different administration or what other policy options that were potentially discarded. I guess what I'm really asking is was this really a war of necessity? I would say that yes, it was a military force was not inevitable but almost inevitable. If you think back to that time and you look back on what policymakers were deliberating at the time, you will remember that actually the Bush administration put forward an ultimatum to the Taliban, which was the entity that was in charge of Afghanistan at the time. The ultimatum was basically to hand over the senior members of al-Qaeda to the United States. It was the Taliban's refusal to do that, that really launched the military component of the campaign. I think for those who might sit back and say, well, there were other policy tools that might have been invoked. Often the United States or its allies have used sanctions and circumstances where they want to extract something from a regime that it doesn't have a good relationship with. I think it's really important to remember, and it's often hard to recreate or to evoke that sense of fear and nervousness that existed at the time, and people in the administration very much feared that the 9-11 attack was the first of potentially many attacks, and so there wasn't a sense that there was time to let other policy tools work. I think military force was warranted, and I think it was absolutely the right decision at the time. I think the controversy around Afghanistan and the legitimate debates really come from the action after that initial foray, which of course was done with the support of NATO that invoked Article 5 for the first time in its history after 9-11. Here we are 20 years later with the US war in Afghanistan coming to its end. The Taliban is once again in control. President Biden was adamant really about withdrawing US troops from Afghanistan, and he argued that many US voters had demanded it, and especially the developments of the past weeks with the collapse of the constitutional Afghan government dissipating with President Ghani fleeing, the rapid military losses on the ground reinforced that ending US military's involvement in Afghanistan was the right decision. Yet you argue differently. You wrote recently in a Washington Post op-ed that it was the wrong decision to pull US troops out of Afghanistan. Walk us through your argument. Sure. First, let me just address this question that American voters the public demanded this. I would say this had not been a really salient issue in the American public debate. I can't really remember a single exchange or, you know, voters demanding that the next president take action to withdraw from Afghanistan. I think this was an issue that was, of course, important to Americans, but not on the forefront of their minds. And when you have the overwhelming majority of Americans answering the question, do you want US forces out of Afghanistan? They said yes. And, you know, I would say yes to that question, too. But the real question is, you know, under what circumstances at what cost, you know, what kinds of consequences are you willing to see as a result? And I think many Americans in the last few weeks were shocked by what they saw and were not prepared for the possibility of something in the way that they have. And, you know, I hate to say this, but I imagine that there will be scenarios in coming weeks that Americans will also say, well, you know, I wanted US troops out of Afghanistan, but not necessarily at the risk of a massive humanitarian crisis, which may unfold in the coming weeks in Afghanistan due to the paucity of food and other things. Or, you know, hopefully not, but if we have the reemergence of terrorist threats from Afghanistan in future months or years, I think Americans will consider that to have been a pretty significant caveat on their desire to see US forces out. But, you know, to get to the argument that I was making or really to respond to the Biden administration's claim that, you know, it was time to take US forces out because US forces weren't there to bring about democracy. They didn't see any prospect of a peace agreement between the Taliban or the Afghan government. And as a result, they saw no reason why the US should continue to keep troops there indefinitely. And I'd say this is really a misframing of the argument and that it's really misleading to tie American true presence to the idea of a peace agreement or even the foundations of a democracy. As Australians know, as well as Americans, because Australians obviously were there with us in Afghanistan for all this time, that, you know, the real basic reason why coalition forces were in Afghanistan has not so much to do with the fabric of a democratic system, but it really has to do with providing a semblance of security in Afghanistan. And I think that, you know, we can say undoubtedly after 20 years that al-Qaeda was seriously degraded in Afghanistan, but it wasn't eliminated and the threat that terrorist groups could pose in Afghanistan was tempered by the existence of coalition forces in a backup capacity to Afghan forces. And so what I argued to the administration and in a public forum like the Washington Post is that our presence had changed so dramatically over these 20 years. We went from a peak of 140,000 US and coalition forces at the height of the surge in 2000, around 2010 down to, you know, only 3,000 US forces and maybe two and a half times that in coalition forces. And that relatively small military footprint was actually commensurate with our interest. It wasn't enough to ensure that the Afghan government would be victorious over the Taliban, but it was enough to provide a semblance of stability that really staved off the worst case scenario, which is, of course, terrorist groups reconstituting in Afghanistan. And that was a part of a congressional study group here in the United States that met over the course of most of 2020. And we heard very clearly from military and intelligence analysts that it was their assessment that if US and coalition forces left precipitously that those terrorist groups would be able to reconstitute and to provide, and the quote was, a sufficient threat to the US homeland in 18 to 36 months. So for me, you know, I really felt like our presence had changed enough, had become so minimal compared to what it had been in the past, that it was now commensurate with a lower level of US and coalition interests, but not zero. But I think this was a very hard argument to ask the administration to make to Americans because it would have amounted to saying, let me talk to you about this forever war idea. That's not what it looks like. And let me talk to you about a potentially much longer US presence in Afghanistan, one that isn't really, it doesn't lead to any kind of unequivocal victory, but one that has the virtue of staving off a worst case scenario that nobody wants to see. So that's actually a great segue into my next question because I was going to ask you about this forever war framing. You know, you've also argued and you've put in a pretty articulate rationale for the maintenance of a limited amount of US troop presence in Afghanistan because the US troop withdrawal doesn't necessarily mark the end of the forever wars of this September 11th era that it's merely ushered in a new phase. So are we to take it that the legacy of September 11th is just going to keep going? Is there ever an end where we could see a clear US disengagement from conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan? Or should we have expected kind of the maintenance of that minimal military presence that you've spoken about? Sure, I mean, I think first to your point about this isn't the end of the forever wars. The first thing I would say is because US military troops leave a theater, as you know, Lydia, that doesn't mean that peace breaks out and it doesn't mean that US interests are no longer involved there. And so I think that that's something that was very true when we look at Iraq at the end of 2011 when all US troops came out of Iraq under President Obama. This didn't mark the end of conflict in Iraq. It just led to a new phase where you had actually an increased tempo of conflict just not involving US troops. But of course, it's still involved US interests so much so that the United States actually had to reengage militarily in Iraq a few years later when ISIS took over more than a third of the country. And again, as I alluded to in my previous answer, I think that we run the risk of not the same thing happening in Afghanistan but certainly discovering that even though we've left the theater and there are those who will claim this forever war is over, the reality is that interests be it massive flows of immigration, be it a significant humanitarian crisis, be it the reconstitution of terrorist groups will necessitate continued US involvement in some ways. So I think in that respect, this claiming the forever war is over is not accurate. But to get to your larger question about are these forever wars ever going to be over? And my answer would be, let me develop this a little bit, but my answer was that we really had more or less ended the forever war in the sense of America in endless combat in these venues. It had found what I thought should have been a sustainable model going forward. And that was where US forces were no longer the dominant forces on the frontline in Iraq or Afghanistan, but you had a very small American footprint in both of these countries that was supportive of a much larger indigenous effort. And that this in my mind was not a forever war. I mean, nobody calls South Korea a forever war because we have 25,000 troops there and we don't have a peace agreement there. It's a different kind of setup. And in my mind, the parallel isn't perfect, but I do think we needed to think about that we might need to have a small presence that was a non-combat operation in support of a larger indigenous force that was actually taking care of security and fighting the tough additional security force in doing they taken 70,000 casualties over the previous years. And I think what we learned from the last few weeks is not that those forces were a charade. I think that some of the commentary that's out there in the public, but I think what we learned, and this is not a surprise to those of us who have worked on these areas, we learned that those forces continued to need a coalition backbone to function. And that's not surprising again because of the way those forces were built. They were built to rely upon the intelligence, the reconnaissance, the evacuation, the maintenance supports of both contractors and coalition forces, even though they're a very small number. And when you withdrew those things and you combine that with the reality that the Afghan national security forces hadn't been paid for the most part in more than eight months. And the fact that the force that was to be backing up the Afghan national security forces actually cut a deal with the Taliban, the enemy that these forces were fighting to withdraw completely. You can see how there was a lot of demoralization and then a collapse of the forces when it no longer seemed feasible to keep fighting in the absence of coalition support in the face of the Taliban. So again, I think that this runs and maybe we'll get to this later, but we run the risk of really learning the wrong lessons here. When we couch everything in a forever war and we don't talk about different phases of this war, phases that were incredibly costly, incredibly painful for the United States and its coalition partners when we were on the front lines, where we were the ones fighting and contrast that with a different model where we had a small footprint in support of a much larger indigenous force that was doing the fighting. These are two things that have been conflated. So let's bring it back to Iraq, the other conflict of September 11th that you alluded to earlier in your remarks. It's one that's now widely considered to be assessed as a strategic mistake. As you mentioned, both you and I were involved as governance advisors, assisting the Iraqi interim government on behalf of the US administration after Saddam Hussein was deposed. And I don't know about you, but one of the things that I struggle with is, do you agree that it was a strategic mistake that the US should never have invaded Iraq on the pretenses outlined by the Bush administration or at all? Or were there decisions that could have been made or policy options not taken in the execution of the US involvement in Iraq that would have led to different outcomes in Iraq? Right. No, I think this is a question that all of us who were involved in Iraq over that time and subsequent to that time struggle with. And let me share with you how I think about it. Although, of course, I'm still wrestling with a lot of these questions on a regular basis as well. First, I'd like to separate the decision to go to war in Iraq into two pieces. One, I think is, if we look at the decision to go to war and we think about the moment that the Bush administration President Bush found himself in and we think about the information that he and others believe to be true and we think about the post 9-11 environment. I think there it is not unreasonable to think that he or another president was right in making that decision based on the information that was available at the time. I'm certainly somebody having discussed this with President Bush personally on numerous occasions. I do not believe that they were making up reasons to invade Iraq. I believe they firmly believed the information that they had at the time and that led to that decision. That's a different question than the question I think you're asking, which is the question about, now that we know what we do know, now that we know we have the benefit of hindsight, we know the enormous costs that resulted from the invasion of Iraq, now that we know the cost to coalition, lives, treasure to the reputation of the United States, now that we know that WMD was not present and actually Saddam Hussein was just trying to keep the mirage of having WMD in order to maintain a balance of power with Iran, now that we know these things, I think it's unquestionable that it was a strategic mistake to invade Iraq, given those realities. So I think that's how I think about the decision to go in and if decision makers at the time knew everything they knew that we know today, I don't think there's any way that that decision would have been made. And I think even if it had been known that there was not WMD in Iraq at the time, I think that all of the other arguments for the invasion of Iraq would have been insufficient to get America to where it actually did execute the war. That said, I don't think that is mutually exclusive with your other issue, which is like, what was the implementation? Was there something wrong with the way that the United States and its coalition partners went about trying to not just remove Saddam from power, but trying to rebuild Iraq in a way that it could be a source of stability in the region, rather than otherwise. And there I think there's enough fault to go around as well. I think there were, it was inevitably going to be a very hard task to take on rebuilding Iraq, I think was going to be much more difficult than even people who thought it was going to be difficult discovered. But there were certainly things that we did that I think unfortunately and inadvertently made it much harder than it had to be. I mean, there's a long list of these things, but probably you and I would agree that one of them is debathification, a policy of lustration that in my mind, there needed to be some sort of policy along those lines, but the way this was executed and implemented, I think really created additional and unnecessary challenges going forward. There's also the issue of just not providing enough US or other troops to provide security in the interim so that the Iraqi forces could build up and strengthen power. And that I think led and contributed to the rise of sectarian violence in Iraq. So, I mean, there were many implementation things that given that we did invade Iraq and unseat Saddam, then we might have done things very differently. I'm sure like you, or like me, probably not a lot of time goes by where you don't wish you had the opportunity to do something differently in that theater. Well, you mentioned that the US, of course, having invaded is a prime actor in the conflict in Iraq and in Afghanistan, but obviously it's not the only actor. And I'm really interested to hear about your experiences wrangling with the various Iraqi interests, for example, because I think there's an impression out there that what policy the United States wants to implement will happen, but there's a great variety of other interests there. So could you tell us a bit about your experience negotiating with Iraqi actors and factions at the time? Sure, there's so many examples to draw from. And I smiled, whether or not I was on camera or off, I don't know, but certainly our experience is anything from what the United States decides it should happen is what actually happens. And I think that there over time, there has been more humility in the execution of the policy and it's in a greater recognition about that the US isn't in a position to forget about dictate. I don't think we ever tried to dictate, but we really did try to move things in a certain direction. And we often tried to move, not often, I would say we always tried to move things where we had Iraqi partners. It was never that we were the sole voice in the room trying to move Iraq in one direction or another, but it's a very fractured country and there are many, many different interests at play and there was nothing that I can remember that are Iraqis across a political or ethnic or sectarian spectrum agreed on. And so I think that was part of the challenge working in Iraq in the post-Sodam era. In terms of examples, one that I think might surprise some of our viewers do with Iraq and becoming a democracy. I think there's the impression that the US in particular kind of hoisted democracy on the Iraqis kind of compelled the Iraqis to opt for a democratic system, sort of push them in that direction. Certainly it was my experience and I'd be interested I don't know if I'm allowed to ask you questions but if it was yours as well, I felt more pull from the Iraqis on elections and democracy than push. And of course, elections and democracy are not the same thing, but if anything in those early years, the coalition in the United States was actually continuously saying, let's not rush to elections and Iraqis were saying, we want elections, we want elections because for them, they wanted a government that was accountable after years of living under Saddam, they wanted a government that had to answer to people. And secondly, people wanted to know who had the mantle to lead and they felt that elections was the best way of demonstrating that they actually had popular support. So again, democracy and elections are not the same thing, but I really found that there was a real desire on the part of Iraqis to move in the direction of a representative kind of polity and one where there was accountability among leaders. So I think again, there was constant negotiations but that was an area where there was some commonality at the beginning. Yeah, I'd say that would be my recollection as well and I remember well, particularly Ayatollah Sistani pushing for elections in Iraq and he was a very strong legitimate force that we had to listen to and to contend with in Iraq. And that might be getting in the weeds, I think a bit in Iraq policy of interest to some of our viewers, but I'm hoping we could take it back to Washington. So those are really interesting observations around wrangling policy in that post-conflict setting in Iraq. What was it like in Washington because not only did you serve in Iraq, but then you came back and worked as an advisor for President Bush. How was it like trying to push for your policy recommendations there? What was President Bush like as a decision maker? Sure, first just to situate us in time, I was in the Bush administration, I was initially at the State Department working there and then I went to Iraq and spent, well, I ended up spending a total of two years in Iraq off and on and then went to the White House. So I got to the White House towards the end of President Bush's first term. And so really interacted with him on a regular and sustained basis, really in his second term. And I would say that he really had evolved as a decision maker in some pretty significant ways. I'll talk a little bit about how I viewed him as a decision maker, but first I want to dissuade anyone from thinking that the primary job of a White House staffer is to push one's own policy. You asked like how successful or not successful was I at doing that? And really the core function of the national security staff at the White House is to try to, we call it manage the interagency, which is essentially to try to bring together the very disparate, often disparate interest in views of different agencies who may have equities in a problem, try to hammer out potential solutions, try to get agreement about the way ahead among the different actors. And if there isn't agreement to then present those options to the president or the national security advisor, whoever the appropriate principal is, and try to fairly represent all of them. So I would say I did do some policy advocacy, but that was really only when President Bush would ask me directly, well, Megan, what do you think? And he did that a fair amount as time went on, but I certainly tried to do both jobs, to be an advisor to the president, tell him what I think when he asked me, but also to fairly represent my colleagues in the room. So going back to President Bush as a decision maker, again, this is sort of the second term in that the place where I interacted with him the most was over the fairly long period of 2006 and 2007, or where I saw him act most as a decision maker was around the time that we were going through a very intense strategic review around our policy in Iraq. For those of you who remember Iraq in 2006, it was an incredibly difficult time. The country was effectively in a sectarian civil war with itself, very high casualties among Iraqi civilians, but also among coalition figures and American troops. And there was really a sense that America was failing and the war had been lost. We undertook a very extensive strategy review that went on for months and months in the US government and ultimately led in January, 2007, to now know as the surge. And here I would say, interacting with President Bush pretty much on a daily basis over this period of time, I really have a lot of admiration for how he tackled this problem. I mean, he was actually very respectful of process. I think a lot of the caricatures about him just don't prove true at all when I think about this period. He was someone who was really interested in learning the lessons that we had learned from our previous years in Iraq. He was really interested in listening to his advisors and his advisors were arguing very different things. So to me, I think back to a few meetings where one of his closest advisors was arguing something that had been argued multiple times throughout the process and he said, look, thank you, I've heard you, I've listened to your argument, but now I've decided to move us in a different direction and I hope you will be with me. And that to me was sort of almost a model of what you want to see at the highest echelons of government. You want to see senior people making passionate and well-recent arguments to the president or whoever the principal is and then the president making a clear decision and asking people to get behind him. And again, I think on this example of the surge, there never was one day where the president decided to do the surge. It was a whole series of decisions that ultimately led us to the place where this was the sensible policy. And in that respect, I really found that President Bush had a lot of qualities which are very difficult and rare in a policymaker. One of them was that he was really uncomfortable with uncertainty and with leaving things unresolved. So often there's a push, we need a solution, we need it now. And he left this question of what we should do open long enough for there to be debate, deliberation and analysis so that we actually got to an answer which I felt good about at the time. And I think proved to be the right answer in retrospect. So if I could take it to the present day with the withdrawal of Afghanistan, you've also argued, if I understand correctly that you believe that US allies in particular or we'll look at this withdrawal as a failure. And I'm wondering what you think that failure what implications that failure might have on US managing its alliances, its alliance relationships but also equally for managing its adversaries and adversarial relationships. I think one of the arguments that was articulated most frequently in relationship to this withdrawal was that withdrawing from Afghanistan was going to give America more bandwidth, more resources to deal with China. And I think that was one of the strong policy arguments that this was going to be that America needed to end this war so it could focus its attention on China. And I certainly agree that China is the biggest challenge to the United States and the US Chinese relationship is one that demands a lot of attention and resources and political focus, all of those things. But I actually don't agree with that rationale for a few reasons that have to do with alliances. I mean, there are a whole set of reasons that I think are misleading. The idea that somehow withdrawing 3000 troops from Afghanistan is going to provide an extra balance of power shifting resource in the Far East, I think is misplaced and arguments about cost I think are also misplaced because continuing to support the Afghan government or the Afghan security forces or to protect our counterterrorism interests from an overwatch position, all of those things either will be or would have been quite expensive as well. But the most important argument I think that you're saying has to do with the impact of this withdrawal on our alliances and our relationships with others adversaries as well as partners. And of course, I'm conscious that most of your audience is from Australia. And so I wanna tread carefully because your audience and you can tell me better than I can tell you what the effect is on our alliances. But I have to say, I've been really struck by the fact that the Biden administration came in and one of its number one priorities was to really reinvigorate its alliances. And basically we heard the language very strong and clear that America is back, that America is ready to resume positions of leadership after four years with an administration that showed great reluctance to do that. And I think the world was interested and ready to see what kind of commitment was able to be marshaled at a global level. And I feel like the withdrawal from Afghanistan is goes against that rhetoric in a very sharp way. I think it's hard to look at that and not call into question America's reliability to first and foremost the Afghans that we worked with for 20 years and that we asked to make a commitment to us and asked with us to work on a certain kind of future for Afghanistan, but also for our allies who were an extremely important part of that engagement. And we can see, I'm just pointing to public statements that a lot of NATO allies have made it quite clear that they did not feel they had been properly consistent, that they certainly objected to the decision, but they had no choice but to follow on withdrawing their own forces once America decided to do that. And I think we'll see that not only in rhetoric, but I think we'll also see it in actions. I mean, already just in the last couple of weeks, there are increasing calls in Europe for shoring up Europe's own defense capabilities apart from NATO, apart from the United States. And I think in other countries that maybe we have less overt alliances, there are countries that are kind of taking stock of their position and wondering if they should adjust their behavior. For one example, you think about many countries in the Gulf who have really relied on the United States as being behind them when it comes to any potential confrontation with Iran. I think some of those countries may be questioning how much they should be relying on the United States, then they should be actually trying to find a way to accommodate Iran a little bit better than they have in the past. Similarly, if you were Taiwanese, I imagine this hasn't been a great month for you because you might have put a lot of hope in knowing or thinking that the United States was squarely in your camp. If a confrontation unfolded with China, I think there are a lot of questions that people would be right to have at this point. So I think the implications and the consequences of this withdrawal are going to go well beyond the images that we've seen over the last couple of weeks. I'd like to be wrong and I'd love for you to tell me that that is not how Australians are feeling. And I'd certainly welcome hearing that, but I'm not sure that that is the conversation. Well, we're coming up to the 70th anniversary of the Anzis Alliance here in Australia, and I have to say it's certainly a live issue in a matter of great debate. Not that the rhetoric around alliances and shoring up these alliances from the Biden administration notwithstanding, there is a certain weariness within the American population it seems. A need to focus inward. And I'm wondering if you think that this is going to be a new phase of isolationism for the United States? Well, it's a tough month to argue against that thesis, right? It's a tough month to say that no, actually we're on the cusp of a new phase of really global leadership on the part of the United States. I think the reality is that if you look at the history of American foreign policy, that the tendency towards isolationism has waxed and waned over America's entire history. And that it's fair to say, we're in a period now, not so much where I think the average American questions alliances or things of that nature or their value. In fact, if you do look at polling, you can see that the overwhelming majority of Americans actually think alliances are important and that they believe in the value of those relationships. But I do think there's increasingly a sense, sort of twofold of, and I'm gonna not tell you anything that's not obvious, but increasingly a sense that Americans need to labor at home here and fix some fundamental problems here, whether it's infrastructure or the fabric of our own politics before we're going to be in a good position to lead abroad. And I think that that transcends party affiliation. I think you have Republicans and Democrats feeling that way. And I think we're seeing that coming into the conversation a lot more regularly than we had in previous years. And I guess I would even point to something that the Biden administration has talked a lot about and has begun to define a little bit more clearly. And this is the notion of a US foreign policy for the American middle class. And I think a lot of people have asked like, well, what exactly does that mean? And I think time will tell a little bit more, but it does seem to mean that actually when we look at relationships abroad, how do they influence middle America? And a lot of this may have to do with trade policy, with economics, are there economic benefits? At the end of the day, I feel pretty confident that in a world that's as globalized as the world we live in today, it'll be very hard for America to just kind of shrink back into a fully isolationist stance. I think at the end of the day, America's wellbeing is intimately tied to the global economy and also to kind of the global institutions and structures. But I do think it is going to be a patch where there's gonna be a pretty strong pull to look at America's challenges and its needs before trying to fix those overseas. I've never seen it as an either or, but it's an increasingly hard argument to make to the average American. Well, especially since one of the legacies of the Trump administration has been the erosion of democratic norms at home. But that brings me to kind of an exploration of another part of the legacy of September 11th, which is not just the kind of military interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan and the various counterterrorism missions, but it's the Bush administration's freedom agenda. And I'm wondering how you would write the effectiveness of the Bush administration's championing of democracy abroad. And what if anything, we've learned about the global democracy in this 20 year period? It's a very big question. I think, well, a couple of ways to respond. You know, the first thing I would say that there was a very clear rationale for the Bush administration really caring more and more about what's happening inside of countries rather than just in their external behavior. And I think this is really a legacy of 9-11, going back to the original purpose of our having this chat was that after 9-11, there was an awakening in the United States among senior administration officials that essentially we couldn't ignore what happened inside societies, what happened inside societies actually had direct security implications for the United States. So if there was disenfranchisement, dissatisfaction, disillusionment among a population in Saudi Arabia, radicalization of them, that obviously had a direct impact on the security of Americans. So that was like, I think that the beginning of or the roots of this interest in trying to help promote more democratic accountability overseas. But I would say let me take on directly since there's so many facets of this, let me take on directly what I think is the most prominent criticism of the Bush administration kind of freedom agendas. I think people frequently saw it as democratization at the barrel of the gun. That was the phrase that you hear all the time that it's basically like tying together military intervention with democratic promotion. And I think that was somewhat inevitable, that criticism somewhat inevitable because obviously the two largest efforts to promote a democratic system tied to the military invasions of Iraq and Afghanistan. So these two things I think were bound to get conflated from the start. But a couple of things I would say to anybody about, first ever saw, and I don't believe that there was any kind of ideology connecting these. I think the militarization of the democratic agenda really had to do with the fact that there was insufficient capacity in the American system to do the things that America wanted to do. So that we ended up having our military involved in things that you would never want or imagine a military would be involved in. You would want civilians to take on those roads. You want civilians to be talking to Iraqis and Afghans and others about building more accountable political structures, but you actually had our military engaged in the conversations because there was a lack of capacity on the part of the United States to do these things. And I think that continues to be a legacy that we asked our military to do so many things that was really widely outside of its mission. Secondly, I'd go back to what we were saying earlier that I think a lot of the desire for democracy that we saw in many of these places was not being imposed by the United States but actually was coming from people in those countries. Maybe not the same understanding of what democracy meant, but I think it's overstated this idea that the Bush administration wasn't on democracy on people, I still think, and maybe this is my own colored glasses, but I still think in most cases, given the choice people would prefer to live in a democratic than in another kind of system. And then lastly, just my own reflection about this is I became an advocate for democracy in Iraq and Afghanistan or someone who was willing to live in Iraq to try to help Iraqis build a democracy, not because I had some ideological fixation that democracy was the most superior system, although I do believe that to be the case, but I thought that democracy was important because in such a divided society, such a fractured society, I didn't see any way of stability taking root unless there was a political system that was able to balance the competing interest of a wide variety of groups. I thought either there's going to be a Saddam or some authoritarian here or there was a democracy, but there wasn't a lot of room for other things and certainly the United States wasn't interested in going to Iraq and installing a dictator. So the alternative was a democracy that protected the rights of minorities and did its best to balance the multiple interests of a very large number of competing groups. So we've discussed how geostrategic competition with China is the likely next foreign policy challenge for the United States and its allies, but I'm wondering what else is or could be on the horizon? So many things. I mean, I think that's the geopolitical geostrategic issue that has the most attention here in the United States and rightly so. I would say if we're thinking for immediate sort of looking in the next year or so, one of the things that I think is going to pose a wide number of challenges to the international system is going to be potential crises in emerging markets. We were talking before we came on board about the pandemic and certainly we have major uneven distribution of vaccine around the world. We have countries that have assumed very large debt burdens, countries where you have millions of people who have been thrown into much more severe levels of poverty over the last 18 months. And so I think that emerging markets in the developing world, I think they are places where I'm nervous about what lies in the future. And I think there could be a lot of challenges of emerging out of those areas. The other thing which is, actually something that I think about today, it's something a reality today, and I think that we'll see increasingly over the coming years or decade is this whole issue of climate change. And what I mean by that, I mean, we're obviously very, very aware and certainly in Australia with fires and other natural disasters, we're aware of some of the geopolitical implications of climate change itself. Refugees maybe being the one that people seem to focus on the most. And I think those will change our geopolitical landscape. But I also think that we really are looking at a world where efforts to address climate or to try to address climate are going to have their own geopolitical impacts. And so what I mean by that is that over the next 10, 15 or 20 years, a whole variety of actors are going to play different roles in trying to advance the energy transition or trying to stall the energy transition or try to accommodate oneself to the energy transition. And we're all doing this with incomplete information about the future, incomplete information about what other actors are going to do. And I think that it's going to really upend a lot of these traditional relationships. It's going to make some actors more important, other actors less important. I think we're underestimating the geopolitical tumult that is going to come from our efforts to address climate change, not just the actual geopolitical tumult that will result as a result of climate change. So a final question for you, Megan. What lessons of the September 11th era in U.S. foreign policy do you think the U.S. should take into the future? And two part or if I can, what lessons do you think the U.S. will take into the future? Yes, well, you're right to draw the distinction between should and will. I guess there's a large number here. I'll just end with a couple of things. I mean, first I think is this whole question of terrorism. Certainly I think terrorism is going to continue to be with us going back to what we said something earlier in the conversation. Terrorism hasn't been vanquished. It's going to be part of the international landscape. There's still parts of the world where terrorist groups are doing well, are thriving. There could be new places. All of that I think is going to be a reality for policymakers. But I also think that we have come to appreciate it can't be the defining issue of this era. It can't be the defining issue of American foreign policy as it was for so many years. So I think we've come to a better understanding of what is required to address it. Certainly in the United States, we've built up an enormous military, law enforcement, intelligence infrastructure to try to deal not just with terrorism and its manifestations abroad, but also Homeland Security. And I think the challenge there for the United States is how can we make sure that that infrastructure is agile enough to adapt to the changing face of terrorism? Certainly you and your listeners will be aware that recently there have been organizations in the United States that have said, the biggest terrorist threat posed to the United States nowadays is actually not global terrorism, but is domestic terrorism. And there's a lot of truth to that. And so the US is now trying to figure out how it can address domestic terrorism without taking its eye off of international terrorism. In terms of another lesson, I think going back to what I was saying about the forever wars, I was hoping America had been further along in learning this lesson. But to me, an important lesson is how exactly are we going to support and build capacity in countries all around the world without occupying those countries? You often hear that there are dozens of countries around the world that may be potentially compromised, their governments compromised by non-state actors. In every case, the United States and its coalition partners can't go in there and do what it did in Iraq and Afghanistan. We've learned that is not desirable. We've learned that there are so many consequences to that approach. And what we need to have is an alternative approach where we can effectively help countries build capacity and doing that in a way that is sustainable and doesn't require a massive US and coalition footprint. And I thought we had really gone quite a distance in mapping out what that looks like, although I think recent events in Afghanistan make me question it. The last thing I would say just has to do with nation building, it's kind of related to what I was just talking about. But I fear that in the United States, one of the big takeaways of the last 20 years is that the United States doesn't know how to nation build and shouldn't nation build. And I think this is because at the risk of being unpopular everywhere, I think the idea of nation building has gotten a bad rap in the sense that I think people have come to see it as something that's an optional add-on, that's something that was a luxury, when in fact it's really something that was required to ensure that countries like Afghanistan no longer had ungoverned territory. It was a natural follow-up from removing the Taliban. You had to build capacity if you wanted to ensure that there was sufficient stability there that the history didn't repeat itself. I think that people have equated nation building too much with ideological democracy promotion. And there's very little appetite among Americans and certainly among American politicians for what is called nation building. And that's unfortunate because as I suggested, the need to help other countries build capacity, which is not the same thing as helping them realize democratic norms or values or institutions, but just to build capacity to govern, to maintain control over their territory, that need is going to persist for quite a long time. And I hope that the United States and its partners can find a way to learn from the last 20 years, not about whether we should nation build or not, but about what is effective nation building? What are the circumstances under which we can help countries build capacity? What is the sequencing necessary? What are the partnerships we need to build to be effective in building the state capacity? I hope we can delve into that in a way that goes a lot deeper than just dismissing nation building forever wars, a lot of the phrases that had become very common in American political parlance these days. Well, Dr. Megan O'Sullivan, thank you so much for joining me today. We're very grateful for your time. I've learned a lot from your past reflections, your current assessments and your strategic outlook. Thank you, Lydia. It's really been a pleasure to see you and to speak with your viewers. And I'd like to thank Australia for its great partnership with the United States and other coalition members over all these years. And as part of our examination of the September 11th era and the 20th anniversary of the September 11th attacks, I'd encourage you all to go to the Lowy Institute website where you can see the latest Lowy Institute interactive. Did September 11th change our world? It's edited by myself and features essays from a number of notable thinkers, such as Michael Cox, Young Sun, Andrew Bakovic and others. Thank you again, Megan, and thank you, ladies and gentlemen, for joining me today for another Long Distance Lowy Institute event.