 Well, good morning to everyone. Thank you for joining us today. I think we have a really exceptional group here to talk about what is clearly a salient topic for everyone in the United States. And that is whether the United States can rebuild a national security consensus. There are really three propositions that underpin the discussion that we're going to have here today. The first is the proposition that the United States is that some kind of crossroads in its foreign policy. That proposition is that the nation is fiscally challenged, we're politically polarized, we're frustrated by more than 10 years of conflict, and we're confronting in the geopolitical sense a relative rise of other actors and, thus, a relative decline of the United States. Secretary Hagel, just this morning, for those who were able to listen, laid out a really dawning set of international challenges that combine with this domestic context to put us at this crossroads. Securing US interests in this landscape, domestic and international landscape, is going to be difficult. We'll have to successfully navigate a lot of challenges. So the second proposition of the panel is that we don't today know exactly how we want to do that as a nation. There is no clear consensus on the basic parameters of US foreign policy. The Pew Foundation, among others, have done some recent polling in this area. In 2012, they indicated through their polling that there's a general agreement on the desirability among respondents of the US having an active role in the world. Yet a consensus about what exactly it means to have an active role in the world is much less clear. And in fact, about the same proportion, about 83% of respondents also recommended that the United States put more focus on the troubles at home, problems at home. So the prospect of US military intervention in Syria and the prospect of how the US would respond to the use of chemical weapons really, I think, recently highlighted this sense of fragility about our national security consensus, where it wasn't clear for a bit there exactly where the American public stood, where different parts of the Washington establishment stood, indeed, where our allies stood. So the third proposition of this panel is that a consensus matters. When the nation is deeply fragmented, we're prone to strategic drift, and we've seen that before, certainly during the Vietnam War era. A shared vision of US national security allows us to be agile and it allows us to be purposeful. The contrast might be where the United States was at the end of World War II, where a consensus was formed and was very useful to the United States. The US foreign policy consensus is also important to our allies and our partners, who look for us to be predictable, to understand where we want to go in the world. And it, of course, would help deter those who would otherwise question the US and its motives. To discuss these three propositions and the state, the general state of the US national security consensus, I'm joined today by three really fantastic panelists. First, to my immediate left, Dr. Mitchell Reist is the President of Washington College in Chester Town, Maryland. He previously served as the Dean of International Relations and a Professor of Law at the College of William and Mary. His government service includes time working as the Special Assistant to the National Security Advisor and as a consultant to the State Department, among others. He is an accomplished and a writer, an author, and a frequent commentator on international security and arms control issues. Thank you for being here today, Dr. Reist. Ms. Julianne Smith is to his left. Julianne served until this summer as the Deputy National Security Advisor to Vice President Biden. In this position, she played a key role in helping to shape US foreign national security policy across the breadth of timely issues that are likely to arise today. She has also served in the Defense Department as the Principal Director for European and NATO Policy. And prior to joining the Obama Administration, Julie directed the CSIS Europe Program and the Initiative for a Renewed Transatlantic Relationship, Partnership, excuse me. And finally, all the way on the end there is David Ignatius, and he will be known, I'm sure, to many of you here in the audience. Mr. Ignatius writes twice a week foreign affairs column for the Washington Post. He also contributes to the Post partisan blog for the Washington Post, and he has written eight spy novels. He has previously served as Executive Editor of the International Herald Tribune and as a reporter for the Wall Street Journal. Thank you for being here today. So let me start with a question to each of you in turn, starting with Dr. Reese. And that is to think a little bit about these three propositions that I've put forward. What is the state of our consensus? Do we have a domestic consensus about the role of the United States in the world, or do we even need one? So let me start with you, Dr. Reese. Well, first of all, thank you for inviting me here today and let me congratulate CSIS on this beautiful new home for itself, which I understand is fully paid for. So as a college president, that's really important. I actually think that there are a number of issues around which the American people do agree that there is a consensus around certain foreign policy issues that sometimes get overlooked. At the end of September, a bipartisan polling group up in New York undertook a poll of the American people and it asked them about certain threats and perceptions of the world. And some of the results are perhaps not surprising, but it's important to remember. The American people gave high marks to Iran, China, and North Korea as threats to the United States. Nine out of 10 Americans thought the world would be much more dangerous if Iran would get nuclear weapons. Four to five Americans believed that we should focus on protecting national interests here at home, as was said, versus expanding democracy abroad. That's quite a change from previous administrations, I think. 78% of Americans said that they did not trust Mr. Putin and a majority said that the world is less safe today than it was five years ago, about 57%. So there are some things around which the American people agree. The challenge, and frankly the challenge that the leadership in Washington has not risen to is to try to shape some of these independent issues around a foreign policy strategy, whether it be towards our allies, to our adversaries, and then being able to articulate it and being able to sell it to the American people. And I think that there are some real shortcomings, both in the articulation and in the messaging. Obviously, if you don't have a foreign policy strategy, you can't articulate it, but I think that there's problems twofold that the articulation and the messaging. Consequently, the American people don't understand or not as well informed as they need to be about some of the threats we face around the world. Very good. Well, thank you for the invitation to be here. It's nice to be back at CSIS, back in the new building, and see so many familiar friends and faces. On the consensus question, whether or not there's a consensus in the United States right now on foreign policy, I have a similar answer to what Mitchell just outlined. It's a little bit of a yes and no answer. In some ways, we do have a consensus, particularly on the use of military force. I think in the run up to the vote on Syria, we could see the American public's hesitation and caution against getting engaged in another military intervention. I think we could see fairly high levels of support for the way in which the US got involved in Libya, and that is to say the US took a supporting role. It was only in the lead in the first few days of that operation, and I think most Americans were quite comfortable with that, handing the baton over to someone else to really take the lead. And I think this idea that the United States, particularly on the military side, doesn't always need to be at the front, is one that is increasingly of great appeal to a lot of Americans. We're fatigued from over 10 plus years of being in Iraq and Afghanistan. Our military's fatigued. We've seen the results of a long-term commitment there. There's some skepticism about the ability to rebuild an entire country like Afghanistan and the limits. We've seen the limits of US military power. But on the flip side of things, I think there are a lot of open-ended questions that don't necessarily lead us to a consensus. On technology in particular, it feels like we're in the wild west. There are all sorts of different views across the American landscape, whether you're talking about academia or think tanks or government, about the best way to utilize technology, whether you're talking about cyber or space or now Intel, this whole frontier feels so new to us. And it's triggering a lot of deep-rooted questions about the way in which we utilize these new tools. And from there, there are just, there are also open-ended questions about regions, lots of questions about the rebalancing to Asia, what's the grand strategy, as you noted, for the Middle East? What's the relationship we have now with our partners in Europe? Where do we go from here in a resource-constrained environment? So plenty of open-ended questions. But I think on that military piece, I do see some consensus there on that side of things. Very good. David, that's quite a change, if you will, from sort of the sense of the US being the global leader out in front. Where do you see the issue of consensus and the US role in the world from the American public's perspective? First, I wanna say it's great to be in what I wanna call the house that John built. This is a magnificent new headquarters for a great institution, and I know friends of CSIS are really happy to be here and see how wonderful it is. I think I basically agree with Julie that to the extent there's a consensus in the country, we are a country after Iraq and Afghanistan that is weary of war, yes, especially our militaries, but has been fighting hard and does not wanna be used in missions about which it thinks there's not adequate clarity. We're weary of involvement in projects that aren't well explained. I saw that consensus most clearly in its first phase during the 2012 presidential campaign. I don't think it should be a surprise to anybody that became so obvious in the debate about using military force in Syria. If you remember the campaign, early in the campaign Mitt Romney had a very tough, I'd say almost interventionist, traditionally interventionist kind of rhetoric talking about staying the course in Afghanistan, talking in very tough terms about Iran and willingness to use military power against Iran, really stress on that as opposed to negotiations. By the last debate of the campaign, which was the foreign policy debate, what was striking to me as an observer was that the two candidates' positions on major issues had become almost identical. There really wasn't a lot of space between where Mitt Romney was and where President Obama was in that last debate and I think that tells you that Mitt Romney is a candidate who was listening to his advisors and reading where the country was saw that you had to be careful with a country that was that concern. If you have a consensus about what you're not gonna do, that's a pretty frail consensus and I think that we've seen how problematic that is over the last few months. I mean, you say there's a consensus, but when you have a situation where the Secretary of State twice in one week basically says that we are gonna use military power in Syria to enforce global norms against use of chemical weapons and then you have the President decide that no, he's not gonna use military force because he first wants to go to Congress. That tells you that even within the administration, let alone a broader context, there is not yet a clear consensus. So the lesson of that I think among other things is don't get out ahead of the President. If the President isn't really on board with the policy, the Secretary of State has to be careful about enunciating it quite as strongly as he did. So we'll talk more about these issues. I'd love, Kat, to just say a little bit about what I think is happening on the ground now in Syria based on recent reporting, but I'd say there's a negative consensus. Well, let's not do that, but there isn't a positive consensus that will help policy makers figure out where they do wanna go. Well, let's pick up on a couple themes here. Turning to Mitchell, the example of Syria combined with your point about Americans being concerned, united, at least a large majority, united on views on Iran and North Korea, among other issues. Where, then, do you think a positive agenda could be built with Syria, not even in our tail lights, but certainly the salient experience of the U.S. intervention issue, having passed through this consensus issue, where do you think we go on areas like Iran and North Korea where there's more of a sense that the U.S. might have a positive agenda? In a previous life, I was an attorney and there was a saying that tough cases make bad law and I'm not sure that you want to extrapolate any universal field theories from the Syria case. I think that we had more options two years ago to do certain things there. I think that we had more options a year ago. As I see it now, I think one of the main lessons is one of triage, more concerned for our allies in the region, maintaining King Abdullah and Jordan in particular. These may be more doable than really changing the battlefield in Syria itself. I think David can speak with greater authority than I can. If you look at Syria within a broader context of interventions over the last couple of decades, where have we intervened around the world, in particular in the Middle East and where have those interventions been successful? And the reality is there aren't any home runs in this thing. Some of them have been messy, some of them have deteriorated to the status quo ante. I think if there's one lesson to take from the interventions that have been successful is that there has to be a consensus going in that you're going to stick around not just for a few years but for decades. And we see this in the Balkans where the Europeans have stood up a force that has been there now for a long, long time. And again, each one of these is sui generis but it does seem that there is a question of stamina. And you have to be able to understand that going in. Are we willing to do what it's necessary in Syria for the next few decades to stabilize the situation? And I think the consensus is the American people aren't behind that. And it begs the question of whether they could be persuaded with stronger leadership from the White House. But right now that's not forthcoming. And so I think that we're not going to see that type of intervention in Syria. Saving those we can maybe the best we can do under the circumstance. And I think if that's maybe David's negative consensus it's hard to see a positive consensus when we're talking about military intervention right now. So Julie, going to your point, I think you were the first to raise this idea that there is a consensus around not wanting to be out in front. What does this mean then for places like Iran? What's the takeaway for US policy toward Iran on use of force? Well, it's varied. I mean we have the very particularly in Congress we have very hawkish voices that have pushed for us to continue to rattle that option and keep it on the table and march towards that potential outcome should we not find that the negotiations are producing the desired outcome that we all imagine. But now that we've encountered this new window that has come with the new leadership inside Iran it's been fascinating to watch this debate. You still have some folks that want us to continue down that path and stand firm and not take anything off the table. Others are now not necessarily going down that path but pushing sanctions and another round of sanctions in Congress and then the administration is trying to say look everything remains on the table but we've gotta give this a chance. Personally I think this is the biggest opening and window we've had in a long time and that it would be just tragic if we didn't give this a go. I'm not wearing rose colored glasses. I'm not gonna assume that this is gonna produce the intended outcome and result in us truly halting their nuclear ambitions but we've gotta give it a chance and I think by taking this maximalist approach as some have done kind of it's all or nothing they have to meet this huge list of criteria or we've gotta walk away. It's really potentially shutting the door to this last window of negotiations and then marching us towards an intervention that as we noted most Americans wouldn't support I'm guessing and wouldn't want us necessarily to go down that path. So it's been extremely complicated particularly managing this on the hill where you've got lots of different voices, a tremendous array of views. We can't neglect the fact that our friends in Israel have strong views on this as well and are clearly working with friends here in town to contribute to the debate. It's a Rubik's Cube that's gonna be a tremendous challenge to sort out in the days and weeks ahead but I completely support the administration's position. If we don't seize on this window it may be the last window we have and let's think about the consequences of closing that window. So Dave it's sometimes you can have a grand strategy that everyone buys into and sometimes you can infer a strategy and particularly foreign leaders I'm sure spend time trying to infer what our strategy is. Based on how we have reacted most recently in Syria based on the sense of where the US is going in terms of its internal political turmoil if you will. What is your sense of what particularly Middle East leaders think the US strategy holds for them in the future? Well that particular subset would probably answer disaster. I mean I rarely seen leaders across the Arab world so worried about where the US is heading so feeling ignored and so vulnerable. I think Secretary Kerry's visit to Egypt and Saudi Arabia helped at that. I think to some extent this is a self inflicted wound a part of effective policy making especially in times of transition like this is to communicate all the time with both allies and adversaries and that wasn't done adequately around Syria and they're now scrambling to make up the lost ground and Secretary Kerry on this as I must say on many other things has been a good representative for the United States. Just to briefly respond to your implicit question what should people think our grand strategy is? The right place to start is to read carefully the President's speech to the UN General Assembly. It was written to be a basic strategic framing document for the rest of his presidency very self-consciously as that. And he said explicitly there are four things that were prepared to go to war over. Interestingly each of them really speaks to Saudi security interests which the Saudis I think kind of missed but those four things are the free flow of energy from the Gulf and around the world. That's interesting at a time when we have less need for foreign oil we're still saying that's something we're gonna go to war for. The second is to protect our allies and basic alliances. The third is to fight terrorist networks that threaten the United States and our friends and allies basic CT mission. And the fourth is to deal with WMD proliferation which puts special focus on Iran and the Iranian nuclear program. So that's an agenda that you'd think if people read carefully they would have said that that's pretty much a Saudi Gulf wish list of what US policy should be because the policies are so divergent on Syria and again we can come back to that. There was great unhappiness. Nothing is forever anywhere in the Middle East and so I think the Kerry trip just the body language, the tone is quite different from what it was a couple weeks ago. I'm leaving this afternoon for Egypt so talk to me in two weeks and I'll tell you what I really think. Can I David, can I just sort of engage a little bit on that? So one of the notable things that wasn't part of those four principles was support for human rights and democracy protection. Completely since the Cairo speech it has been absent without leave in this administration and clearly they don't have any plans for the future. Just put that aside for a second but I think that's worth noting. The second thing is if the president gives a speech at the UN and it still does not address the concern that the leaders in the Middle East have it speaks to the president's credibility. It speaks to America's resoluteness. It speaks to our ability to support our allies and friends around the world and here's where I think the Syria issue really did great damage. Greater than whatever the specific policy decision was it sort of lifted the veil on some strategic confusion at the very highest levels in the United States and if you are a small country in a dangerous neighborhood that has to be worrisome because but for the United States it's a very, very difficult world for you and it means that you are either going to have to independently come to your own defense, proliferate in the case of Saudi Arabia or perhaps some others or you're gonna start hedging your bets and bandwagging with the Iranians and we've already seen a little bit of both behavior over the past few years but I think this is really where the problem is the administration not only doesn't have a strategy but there's a lack of credibility and again if you wanna get to the repivot to Asia it's not that this is a bad idea I think that as a member of the veteran of the Bush administration I think that we can claim that we had some role to play in this also it's the lack of resources to adequately fund what that pivot means and the people in Asia aren't stupid they understand the budget difficulties that we have they can understand when Secretary of Defense Panetta says that the budget cuts are gonna be devastating and then they take place and then there's a sequester on top of that so again it has to do with where we are at this particular time and the administration's inability to articulate a clear policy and then have people believe it and so I think it's more than just beyond the details of the policy or the strategy itself Julie, the administration versus the, how much of this is about leadership? How much of it is about underlying conditions? Where do you think this falls out? Well I think Mitchell's right I mean the mood just around the globe is gloomy towards the United States and I think it depends on what region you're talking about some of it is rooted in our actual policies and I think for the Middle East you can point to Syria but I think in other corners of the world particularly if you look at Europe and Asia the gloomy mood right now is stemming a lot from our dysfunction at home and I think I've recently been on both in Asia and Europe over the last six or seven weeks and I was struck, I mean I happened to be there during the shutdown which was unfortunate but the real deep rooted questions and suspicions about the future of US leadership about diminishing resources to dedicate to US foreign policy the extent to which we're gonna be able to be there to support allies and this is a common thread now that is really picked up in most capitals around the globe questions about the lack of bipartisanship the role of Congress, whether or not we can continue to have this debate over the debt ceiling that goes on and on and on and sees no end so yes part of it is rooted in policy I think a lot of it's rooted in our domestic dysfunction here in Washington. David any thoughts on the domestic state of affairs? Well it's a mess and it's a demonstration for the world that the country that calls itself exceptional and wants to be a global leader has this political system that's verging on breakdown and that is a national security crisis of the first order and it just must be addressed. People need to take this much more seriously and I hope all of the political groups especially the business groups that can address why things are breaking down will do so. Just to address Mitchell's good point about democracy promotion being left off the list of the things the United States will go to war for I think the president was reading the country pretty accurately in saying we're gonna be more careful about that and I think if there's anything that we've all learned it's that America with what were good intentions in Iraq and Afghanistan the efficacy of our military power to produce outcomes that we desire and that I would say as an observer our good outcomes for the people is limited and the world has watched that and the world has seen as Americans have seen the limits of our power to be blunt the world thinks that we've been defeated. They think that we failed in Iraq and we are failing in Afghanistan and I think Syria is added, layered on that there's another example of American failure of American fecklessness, inability to achieve the outcomes that we seek. When this all began back in 2003 one of my close Arab friends said to me I said, what do you think about this? He said, when Rome is strong the provinces are robust meaning if you make it work we're all for it and in the end as we've all seen we didn't make it work. Just briefly to share a vignette I spoke this morning with one of my closest sources in the Free Syrian Army and we were talking about a man with whom I traveled a year ago to the outskirts of Aleppo. I went into Aleppo but his headquarters were to the northeast of the city his name is Colonel Abdul Jabbar Akhadi and he was a principal U.S. contact in the period when we were trying to train, assist in a limited way armed the Syrian rebels. As you may have seen in the Washington Post yesterday he just quit and he quit because he felt that he had been abandoned and that he and his people were at risk from the more extreme militias and so he was basically running for cover. The man we have celebrated as the great moderate hope general Salim Idris is in a just doesn't know what to do feeling that he has been abandoned by the people who told him principally the Americans that we would stand with him as he told his friends, neighbors, country people to fight in this fight against the Assad regime. So I think you can't do this. You can't draw people into a fight, tell them you're gonna be with them and then walk away without real consequences and frankly we're just beginning to see the consequences. The al-Qaeda is putting down deep roots in northeast Syria and as your Iraqis would tell you last week when they were visiting that they are matched by increasingly deep roots in western Iraq. Some very serious actions gonna have to be taken to get them out of there. They're at the gates of Europe. There have been thousands now of foreign fighters streaming through Syria. So I just note this, not to be gloomy but I just wanna give you a snapshot of what this feels like for real people who've been involved in this fight at our encouragement. I'm gonna come back to Syria. I'm not actually leaving Syria but I'm gonna leave that direct point and ask about the institutions that the United States led, international institutions led in building after World War II and Syria certainly is relevant here, the UN, NATO, economic institutions. Mitchell, what's your view of how strong these institutions are? Whether they can be agile enough to adapt to the new circumstances we've discussed or whether new institutions are needed for a new U.S. consensus? Wow. That's just the UN, you know, the UN in Syria. You know, I suppose there could be a debate about how useful it's been. You know, when I was in the government, people would come to me with lots of really interesting ideas about forming a new international organization or coalition. And I have to say, if you're in the government, this is not really welcome news because sort of staffing and supporting all these institutions already consume so much time and it's unclear that a new alignment is really gonna make a difference. And so the question I think really is how can you make these institutions more effective? And relevant. Are they relevant? And well, I think clearly they are. The problem is, and Julian touched on it, with technology and with the diffusion of power throughout the world now, I think it's just more difficult to build the consensus in the first place and then empower somebody to actually do something. I think Moise's name just wrote a very interesting book which talks about this trend. So again, a lot of it comes back to what is Washington's favorite parlor game which is talking about leadership, either too much of it or a lack of it. Do we have a clear idea of what we want? And it's not clear to me that we do. We know what we don't want. I think that's pretty clear. The American people wanna rebuild the economy. They want Washington to work. I was just in the Middle East recently and I told my audience that most Americans see the Middle East as a hostile, complicated and confusing place that no matter what the United States does, we're gonna be blamed for it. If we intervene, we're gonna be blamed. If we don't intervene, we're gonna be blamed. And therefore, we're just gonna let people get on with it themselves. And I think that that is the national mood. But it doesn't make it easy to come up with a clear plan for the way ahead. If I can just say that a few years ago, the bumper sticker in Washington was smart power. And I have to say I never understood the boomlet behind smart power because at its best, it is a means to a larger foreign policy goal. At its worst, it is a slogan. We need some serious thinking about what it is we want. And perhaps to pick up the previous point, it doesn't have to be a global policy. I think the regions are so significantly different that an Asia policy that's coherent would be welcome. A Middle East policy, a European or an alliance policy, that may be the best you can do. I mean, I am kind of a guy who thinks strategy is important and planning is important. How you link them all together, you go and you come up with our values. I think that's one way to do it. But the world is so different. It's going at different speeds that I think you have to be a little differentiated in your approach, but you have to have an approach. And I just don't see this administration having any clue as to what it really wants to accomplish in foreign policy or being able to assign the resources to be able to accomplish those goals. So Julie, let me ask you, obviously welcome to comment on Mitchell's points, but also ask you the institution question, because I do think it's important. What are the viability of these institutions to help the US or help common interests, given that the US isn't looking to be out in front on use of force issues, at least, except where our direct interests are concerned? Well, the collection or the alphabet soup of international organizations that we helped create and continue to play a leadership role, and they're all important. And I'm not gonna stand here and tell anyone that we should abandon any of these institutions or lose faith in them, but they're dated. They're rusty, they're creaky, they're struggling to adapt to an entirely different set of players, a very transformative moment in foreign policy, we're at large, and they're particularly challenged with the resource constraints that all of us are facing. NATO, just to cite one example, is extremely useful. 60 plus years of experience working together in all sorts of places, undertaking missions together, working on interoperability, the legitimacy it provides to missions abroad, but it's all under attack by the fact that we're now seeing severe cuts to defense budgets among all the member states, large, small, medium. And so that's an open-ended question, but I wouldn't suggest that, again, we walk away, but they're gonna take a lot of work in the years ahead to make them more functional, more effective, and figure out ways to do more with less. The one point I would add, and I'd hate to suggest that we form anything new, particularly having been in the administration, remembering these conversations and rolling your eyes and thinking, oh my gosh, what is this gonna mean for us in terms of management? But I'm not exactly sure that the set of institutions that we have right now can cope with challenges like cyber, like space. I'm wondering right now if the US wants to come out of this low point and boost our leadership and build public trust, build our national trust, to me it seems like we need to immediately start to take a leadership role, let's just take cyber on establishing international norms, working with our partners to get codes of conduct settled, to try and find ways in which we can tackle this problem together, whether you're talking about denial of service all the way up to a malicious small wear attack. So in the case of cyber, I'm not sure it's a NATO issue, I'm not sure it's an EU-US issue, I'm not sure that spans the globe, it's not a UN issue. So the question then is do we need some sort of new institution or forum or setting where we can then lead the way, help set standards, the international norms that we need, in a framework and in an environment where like-minded partners and allies can come together to get the work done. Great, I'm gonna, starting with David, go around and ask a question and then we're gonna turn it over, we've left a good amount of time and we've certainly given you a broad array of issues to ask questions on. But starting with David, based on this conversation today based on all the thinking you've done on this issue, what are really some pillars that constitute the beginning of a consensus on foreign policy and maybe you wanna start with the president's speech, do you think, with respect to the Middle East, do you think those are pillars that can be agreed upon and built upon and are there others that you would add? Well, I think that Mitch said it well, national power has to rest on solid foundations. Presidents get in trouble when they embark on ventures for which there isn't adequate public support and then patience wears out, the country gets tired and these efforts run into trouble. So, you know, we are gonna be in a period where properly we're gonna be careful, we have a world in great turmoil, what's just very difficult to predict where it's gonna end up in any event, it's gonna take a while for it to get where it's gonna end up. So I think, you know, a prudent, careful policy and that's something that people identify with President Obama, lots to be said for that. You know, when you're in, when I taught at Harvard, I spoke about the fog of policies, like the fog of war, you don't know where you are, you don't know where other people are and when you're in the fog, you don't know where the shoals are, lots to be said for running the engine a little slower. Don't just slam it ahead because, you know, you've got to trust. So I think we're in a period like that. I think the, you know, you talk about cyber and malicious malware attacks, but we're in a post-Snowden world. First thing we have to worry about is how we credibly speak to a world that thinks that we, that the NSA is the enemy and that's gonna take a while. It's a very delicate process for our policy makers, to take real leadership and farsighted communication with our closest allies to build, again, to build a foundation going forward. I would say just one more thing, which is that in this period where we're not gonna see for a long while the US send expeditionary armies abroad, I really think we are in a post-Iraq, post-Afghanistan world. How are we gonna project national power? And when I look at the government, I see a bunch of agencies that are sort of about that, but not organized for coherent application of power. And I think that's like the biggest thing that I wish people at the CSISs of Washington would think about. Just to conclude with one example, you got the USIP, wonderful boutique, it doesn't want to do this. You've got USAID, it's a wonderful aid contractor sometimes, but it's not gonna do this. You have a conflict and stabilization bureau at the State Department, which is shrinking last I knew and it doesn't even dominate the State Department, let alone the inter-agency process. You want a CIA that would love to get out of a lot of the covert action business, thank you very much, and go back to collecting foreign intelligence. So who is, how are we gonna project power? The only people I hear with a really coherent strategy about this are special forces, who came out of this decade with their reputation, not diminished, I would say, but if anything enhanced. They have a network, 80 countries around the world, we've trained their special forces, their personal relationships, contacts, ways to move quickly and quietly to deal with problems. And so I think some creative thinking in that space would be very useful. Very good. Mitchell, I just wanna say before you speak that smart power is, I think, a CSIS branded product. I'm sorry. Which we are deep enough. Careful, careful. But I take your point very much on the sloganeering, it's done well for us, but I take your point. Whatever it takes to get a foundation grant. So in addition to smart power being a pillar of the new American foreign policy consensus, what would you add? Well, I think I wanna sort of build on David's remarks. If you look at what I think is strategic confusion in the White House, if you add a national mood that's inward looking, if you add a complicated, confusing, fast moving world, a lack of resources, what it suggests is that not much is gonna happen over the next few years. In terms of an activist American foreign policy, especially if the president is gonna shy away from doing the inexpensive thing, which is talking about American values. For whatever reason, that doesn't appear to be in the cards. So what does that mean? I think it means that the world's gonna continue to be a dangerous place. That our adversaries will take heart. That our friends will retreat from us if they can, hedge their bets or seek self-help through acquiring more weapons, perhaps starting towards nuclear weapons. But there's one sort of wild card here, which is that according to most estimates in the public domain at least, sometime in 2014, the administration is gonna have to make a decision on Iran, assuming that the negotiations don't go as successfully as we all hope they will. And so that's gonna be a very interesting moment as to whether the administration in fact is going to go against every other trend that's out there in order to use military force because the president has said in Iran with nuclear weapons is unacceptable. There are so many dangers no matter what he decides, in this case, and it's a decision you don't wanna wish on any president ever. And you wanna try and create more options for him, but this may be something that is coming down the pipe. So I see that over the next couple of years we will be slowing down the engine a little bit, but it doesn't mean that the rest of the world is gonna be standing still. It means that bad things are gonna continue to happen around the world, and the United States is not gonna be there to prevent them and to support our allies in ways that we've done in the past. I just, I wanna come back to this values point. We've talked a little bit about the public's view towards promoting values, but I wanted to highlight a conversation that's been going on inside the administration in different fits and starts we've had of this, but at some points it was quite intense. Ever since September of last year, and I mentioned September of last year because that was the month that all three legs of the proverbial foreign policy stool, diplomacy, defense and development all took a very tragic turn and experienced a tragic turn of events. Of course, we're all familiar with what happened in Benghazi, the loss of four Americans on the diplomatic side. On the development side, September of last year was also the month that you'll remember Russia decided to kick AID out of the country. And September of last year was also the time in which we lost eight, well six, Harriers in Afghanistan, the worst loss of military hardware since the Vietnam War. So we had this moment inside the administration where every major agency, state, DOD, aid, they were suddenly faced with this question about the risks and rewards of promoting US values and policies abroad. And it triggered a lot of very tough debates for the administration and it will continue to do so for any administration. Do you keep the embassy in Peshwar open despite the risk to US personnel? How does AID promote democracy and good governments in places where their host government is hostile to their mission? And how does the US military continue to ensure that its precious military hardware is protected even in the face of highly sophisticated attacks? And so this has triggered an interesting internal debate that mirrors in some ways the public debate we're seeing on the values piece, but just to be clear, policymakers inside these agencies are also having to grapple again with this risk reward piece of it and how to best promote our policies and values while keeping our personnel and our hardware and our values close at heart and protected and secure at all times. So it's been a really interesting set of issues to see from the inside of the administration, but again it mirrors some of what's going on on the outside. I think we've probably done a pretty good job of describing the problem. I think the takeaway, the interesting in the Q&A, the takeaway here is it's not really clear what the major pillars are for a US foreign policy consensus. So I certainly invite the questioners to raise some issues there. We have mics coming around and when I call on you, I ask that you give me your name and an affiliation if you have one. So we can start right here in the front. Here we go. Thanks. Chris Nelson and I write a report almost every day as Mitchell will tell you on Asia. And while this has been a fascinating discussion, I'm feeling kind of left out. You can rebalance it. Yes, I'm a pivot and man myself. For the purposes of the discussion, if we've been sitting here in 1975, we'd be talking about the last helicopter off the embassy and we'd be going, oh my God, it would be another sort of Syria discussion. And yet look where we are. But what has astonished me is we seem to have this consensus, there is no American foreign policy, there's no success, Bob doesn't always do environment. China relations, you can argue about this or that, but there's a joint agreement to try to manage them as rational adults, right? We are certainly moving to refurbish every alliance we have in Asia, some more successfully than others. We've got a hell of a problem between Korea and Japan, but maybe we need to get involved. Iran, we've got a tough decision. As Mitchell has written and talked for years, we've still got this North Korea conundrum. I think we need to play Asia more into this. We need to recognize what successes we are having in Asia. Last time I checked, there's more trade, there's more people, there's more, everything going on. It ain't all just about Syria, as horrible and sad and depressing as it is. Are we gonna be talking about Syria 20 years from now? The way we're dealing now with Vietnam, right? I don't think so. So maybe if you have a few minutes, let's remember Asia still there and US-China relations are being managed fairly successfully, thank you. So is US policy on Asia, is that a source for potential consensus? Thoughts on the panel? Sure, Chris, let's go back to 1975. When we did start, we retreated from Vietnam, bad things started happening in the region. Taiwan started getting nuclear weapons, Korea started looking at it, even the Japanese did. And again, that's certainly possible today. You write on this every day, so you know better than most, is that there's been an uneven record over the last five years with Asia. There was this hyper-excitement at the beginning, it was gonna be our strategic partner. Well, that was soon disabused. Secretary Clinton went to Beijing, first trip she said she wasn't gonna raise human rights at all. The question is, are our relations with our Asian allies better today than they were five years ago? And arguably, are they better with China? I'm not sure, are they better with India? I think clearly not. Are they better with the Japanese? Again, not sure, Korea maybe. Inter-aligned squabbling, squabbling's not the right word. This is a very serious differences between South Korea and Japan now, or eroding the alliance. So if you look at our position in Asia, you look at where we were, you look at where we are now and where we hope to be in the future, do we have the right model in terms of rebalancing to Asia? I would argue yes we do, in part because I think that it started under the Bush administration. But are we applying the resources to make that a reality? We're doing a few things. Trade is a separate issue, but this administration was very late to the trade game, as you wrote almost daily, especially in the first term, didn't wanna talk about it. So again, it's not clear where the great successes are in Asia. I suppose Burma maybe won. But again, if you look at the great powers in the world, I can make a case that the United States does not have better relations today with the great powers than we did five years ago. We did not have better relations today with our key allies than we did five years ago. And so I think that this is a part of a larger strategic drift by this administration and Asia is a piece of that. I think I dissent from that critique. I've said some very critical things about the administration's foreign policy, but I think the desire to rebalance toward Asia, although the word pivot, I think everybody would agree now was mischosen, whoever picked it or said it. The policy was basically right. I don't know as much about this region as many I'm sure in the room, but when the US manages to have pretty good relations with China, Japan and South Korea, but that's pretty good policy process. The way in which the US has handled the transition in China to Xi Jinping and a new younger Central Committee, the way the US kept its mouth shut about the Bosch-Ilai affair and let the Chinese work through what was a very difficult period for them, I think was mature policy making. I think we'd see more texture to the rebalancing idea if we didn't have the sequester preventing the rebalancing of our military assets so that they were more available for the Pacific, but when I walked through that with people in the Navy Department, that's a pretty coherent Navy and Air Force idea here, so I think Syria is gonna matter now and last for a while, but that doesn't overshadow the good policy making in Asia. I think I'll bet you Vice President Biden will play more of a role going forward in the China relationship. He certainly helped Xi Jinping's transition process and so that's a stabilizer in my mind. So truly help us be prospective on Asia. It seems to me it has huge trade potential. It's use of force with the important caveat on Korea. Use of force at a high level for the US is unlikely in the region. Seems like a place where we could have some amount of a bipartisan consensus on where to go. Do you agree with that assessment and what do you think that looks like? I would hope so. I mean, unfortunately, it doesn't get a lot of attention in foreign policy circles right now. I feel like the Middle East continues to take the oxygen out of the room, both in debates up on the hill and across the think tanks here in Washington, although there are obviously people dedicated full time to Asia and every think tank around the city, but I think this, first of all, I'd like to chip away at a couple of myths. I mean, because the President had to cancel his trip because of the shutdown, there's a narrative that's floating around and a lot of folks have the sense that somehow the administration is gonna be abandoning the rebalancing policy. I don't think there's any truth to that whatsoever. I think you'll see the President return to the region in short order. I know folks are already trying to work out a way in which they can get him across the Pacific. He's dedicated to it. This policy comes from the top. It did from day one. This is not driven bottom up. It's his idea, his agenda, his legacy, but I'd also say it's not a short term policy. I hope that the next team that comes into the White House will continue to pursue this. Much as you pointed out, the Bush administration had a very aggressive and ambitious Asia policy. The Obama administration has now taken that and tried to deepen and widen it. It's a multifaceted approach. It appeals to everyone. There's naturally a defense component, but as Secretary Hagel pointed out this morning, it's not driven by defense policy. It has a strong diplomatic piece. It has a strong economic piece, and yes, we're still waiting for the results in some of these regions and some of these issues that you mentioned, Mitchell, but I think we have seen some really significant changes. I just cite one. In the China relationship, we've been in this cyclical habit with the Chinese of we engage and then we hit a crisis and we turn the lights out and then we engage again and we hit another crisis, we turn the lights out. We've tried very hard to get past that, and I think the administration has succeeded in keeping the channels of dialogue open at all times, regardless of what was happening, regardless of how tense things may have been over Chen or any of the other incidents that we've seen in recent years. And that to me is a baby step, an important sign about the maturing nature of the relationship. And again, I'm clear eyed about the challenges, particularly with India. I think you have a good point there. And there'll be many more challenges ahead in working with the Chinese, but I like the regional approach. I think again, the multifaceted piece, the longterm view is just about right. And I hope we will see bipartisan support for that moving forward. Okay, right here. Thanks, I feel good. Good morning. My name is Christy Kow from now, the executive director of the Code of Support Foundation, which is a nonprofit that strives to bridge a civilian military divide. The panelists mentioned earlier on the war weariness that this country is feeling. And I would certainly say as a military family member for 11 years, marrying my husband just before the war started, I can attest to that. While I think most Americans appreciate the all volunteer force and what they've done over the past decade or so, we're less than 1% of the population. Can you talk about how the civilian military divide affects, if it does, and how it might affect our ability to actually come to a national consensus about national security? Thanks. This is an issue very dear to my heart. I'd like to- You should. I will start with David. I'm very interested from your perspective as somebody who talks to people inside the administration, outside the administration, in the military, in the public, what's your sense of the state of civil military affairs and how it affects where we're going for policy? Well, I think our volunteer military has undertaken every challenge that the country asked of it over this last decade plus, and performed very professionally, but you can see the problems with having an all volunteer force that sometimes seems like a separate part of the country. The country, when you go to war, the country needs to be all in, and if the country isn't all in, you're gonna end up with problems, and I can understand why military families would feel for all the applause when people walk through the airports in uniform that there is a separation. Many of my friends in the military worry about that, that separation and divergence. And that's one reason why, I think first, the most skeptical comments I hear about future use of U.S. military power, the wait a minute comments come from people in uniform. In general, Dempsey is an obvious example, but there are many, many senior, extremely experienced officers, multiple, multiple tours who would say the same thing. And I think in the context of our subject today, what thoughtful people should think about in this period or what are the other components of national power that draw in not just a volunteer military, but the nation as a whole. What are other ways in which people can serve, be active, the tremendous dynamism of our culture, our economy, just it's still like a overwhelming force of the world. How should we think about that? How does that fit with ideas about strategy and keeping a country secure and maintaining good relations with other countries that, let's face it, resent us a little bit. I just say one quick thing. David's absolutely right on all fronts, but I'd bring it back inside the government as well. I just encountered personal anecdotes. Too many civilians working on foreign policy in our government of all political stripes from FSOs to political appointees that just do not have the necessary exposure to the military, to the Pentagon, to the culture, to understanding the technology, to the acronyms, to looking at all of it. And it affects how we do business as a unit, as the US government on a day-to-day basis. And anything we can do to encourage more interaction and exposure there would be helpful. There's just too many folks you see, both at the White House and state at AID, that don't, quote, cross the river even. So inside the microcosm of the US government, we have a problem, but as you pointed out, there's a bigger problem here across the United States. Let me just, the only thing I'll add, this is a whole topic unto itself. Panel surely will do at one point, but I do think it's important to think right now about the budget environment and sequester and the way that's being interpreted by many in the military as sort of a direct disrespect of what it takes to do what they do and what it will mean in terms of breaking what is considered by many to be social compacts in terms of how the military will have to draw down to meet sequester. So it's a big challenge, I think, particularly in the coming five years or so as we have huge costs that extend well beyond the conflicts we've been in to take care of our military and their families at the same time that we have this incredible pressure to bring down the budget and very little flexibility in how we do that. So yeah, right over here, please. Dan Haldesberger, Aira Atashi, at the German Embassy. Thanks for having me here and invited. I want to be, to come back to the topic, can national security consensus built and I want to ask you where do you see the motives at the moment to achieve this aim which is very important across the aisle within the society because at the moment it seems to me the nation is almost obsessed with two topics, who is the next presidential candidate and second how to go forward with the affordable care rate and this is a really important topic, how to achieve this national security consensus which is to my observation not at the platform which is cannot be observed, where do you see the motives to achieve that particularly politically and I would like to make one remark to the question before, me as a foreign military representative here, I just want to address how I observe to what positive extent the military personnel here, even I, are acknowledged at least by the society. This is exceptional and I want to thank you, the United States for that, thank you. Thank you very much. So Mitch, do you want to speak about that? You know there's an old joke that asks how many psychiatrists does it take to change a light bulb and the answer is only one but the light bulb really has to want to change and so the question is does the political culture in Washington really want to change right now and it's not clear to me that by itself if left to its own devices that it will, it seems in fact that it's only getting worse. So to ask your question what would it take to actually change the status quo here to arrest this trend and perhaps to try to forge a greater consensus and I wrote down a couple of things, one is that you could have another tragic event like 9-Eleven or a direct threat to the United States. One of the reasons why the American people I think feel that we can turn inward now, we should turn inward is because we don't feel any existential threat to our physical security and I think if that were to change, that would change the political dynamic very quickly. Now we hope that it doesn't, there's some other reasons. If some of the more polarizing extreme representatives are defeated by the voters, if the voters decide we just don't want this anymore, that's possible. If the more polarizing representatives are denied funds by the donors, this is what David mentioned earlier, the money stream dries up and we've already seen a little bit of that in the last couple of weeks where some of the private groups have pulled back from some of the Tea Party folks. One of my favorites is if you overturn gerrymandered districts, safe seats, you only have to talk to people who believe what you believe, it's like a self-licking ice cream cone. So you never have to reach across the aisle, you don't even have the vocabulary for talking to people who may have different views, you don't have to broaden your appeal to reach out to independents or people who believe differently than you do. So I think those are all possibilities. I think maybe with a little bit more time, if we can take some of the current contentious issues off the table, if Obamacare gets worked out one way or the other, off the table, because right now that is a hugely polarizing issue. And again, domestic issues are making foreign policy consensus more difficult. Immigration is another one. Budget and tax reform is a third. Believe it or not, maybe having a new president, may forge a consensus come 2016. Don't know. But again, right now the problem is the domestic issues are bleeding over into the foreign policy issues and making it just much more difficult to achieve any type of consensus on these important things. Any other thoughts? Thank you, I'm Robbie Harris, a former naval person, excuse me. I think all three panel members refer to a nation that is weary of war. And I'd like to call on the lady's question earlier about the military civilian divide. Everybody talks about the weariness of war, but also folks talk about the military going to war but the nation went to the mall. And also drawing on the lady's question, only a very small percentage of this nation has been directly affected by either of the wars. The military has become insular over the past 20 to 30 years. The military tends to recruit from its own. It has indeed become insular. So I guess my question to the three panel members is help me, if you can, help me understand this nation that is weary of war when so few have been affected by the war. That's from many of you? I think you're absolutely right. It's a very small percentage that have been tangibly affected. But it's a visible wound that we've all suffered and it's familiar to us as a nation. I think it's beyond seeing how it's directly impacted the troops. It's how it's affected us as a nation. Perceptions about U.S. leadership. Skepticism about the utility of military force. Concerns about what we're committing to when we get involved. It's been a broader and frankly, fairly sophisticated debate out there beyond Washington. So you're right. There are very few families that have a son or daughter who have served. Perhaps very few families that have direct experience in seeing the impact on troops returning home or knowing someone who's had a loss. But all that said, I've been pretty impressed with the level of sophistication about the broader use of force in the American toolkit. So I don't know. I think it's been a debate that's worth having and I worry a little bit that it tips the scales too much in one direction but it's been a very useful debate I think for the country to have. Yeah, I think we have to be very clear and over vocabulary. You're absolutely right. Only a small percentage have really made sacrifices including the ultimate sacrifice. So I think war weariness is not the precise term. I think what's happened is that the American people have suffered a loss of confidence and not particularly confidence in the military but confidence in the decision making that's sending our military overseas. That's really where I think this war, it comes under that heading of war weariness but that's not really what it is. Is that we're not sure anymore that it's worth the sacrifice that these men and women are making on our behalf. That's the weariness. It really comes down to a lack of our having confidence that not only we're doing our thing but we even know what the right thing is in these very complicated situations. And so I think that that, I believe that's a more accurate way to portray the mood. Let me just raise two things that haven't come up explicitly before that are in addition to these points and ask David about them. The first is certainly the economic effects that Americans have experienced of which the war efforts have contributed and the second really is the role of media. And we haven't talked at all about sort of the future, how the future of foreign policy has to account for the incredible flow of information that people receive today. Do you have any thoughts on those or other issues related to this? Well, just briefly, I think I would have said on this question of the nation's weariness. If you like to listen to country music as I do, you hear a kind of general sense that the elites, there's a wonderful song called Fly Over States. I urge you to go listen to. That the elites have been doing great while average men and women has been getting pounded economically, sent off these wars that don't make any sense to fight for people who aren't grateful and don't like us anyway. And so I think there's this feeling, as Mitchell said, that the elites have kind of let the country down. And that's part of this anger that's reflected in I think a very counterproductive way through the Tea Party. But it's out there. This sense our economy collapsed and those people on Wall Street still seem to be driving awful big cars. On the question of the media's role, I have to be honest and say that the news media increasingly are what I would call a partisan accelerator. You take a small squabble and boy, we'll turn it into a nuclear war if you give us a chance. And I'm not speaking here of the Washington Post or the New York Times because I think we're derided these days as the mainstream media. Unfortunately, the part of the news business that's really thriving is the part that tells you what you think is right. The people you think are bad are bad and here's evidence. And the people you think are heroes are great. And that's true on the left. Increasingly, the blogs on MSNBC and certainly true on the right with Fox News and they're partisan accelerators and that is part of our problem. And I have to tell you, it's very hard struggling to do traditional coverage of things in a way that is trying to be balanced which our editors do try to do, believe it or not. We fear that there's less of an audience for that. Very good. We have time for two questions. Let me go right here. Peter Sharfman, Major Corporation. I'd like to return back to the original question and suggest that the broad consensus is about much bigger things or the lack of broad consensus than was our policy towards Syria in the last three weeks a droid or a maledroit. And have we been communicating properly in the last three months with Saudi Arabia? We had four pillars, I think, of consensus on foreign policy, apart from the basic one that the homeland has to be defended no matter what it takes. We would support our friends if we had allies overseas that relied upon us, that shared our values, we would do what it takes to protect them against external threats. That's been a pillar for decades and remains a cornerstone of our declaratory foreign policy. A second pillar of our foreign policy was to try to promote a world order in which international trade could flourish and in which innovation and invention economically could flourish. That's been a pillar for decades. A third one was to prevent or if not prevent slow proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Remains a pillar of our existing declaratory policy. The fourth one was to try to promote political, economic, and social change overseas in directions that we thought would make the people overseas better off. And that's where the consensus has obviously collapsed. But the question I would ask is how strong or how fragile is the consensus on the other three pillars? Okay, I'm gonna group this with another question and that'll be the last right behind you. Yes, Eric Thompson, I'm State Department. And Mr. Ignatius, you mentioned earlier about you referenced the Maliki government and also that Al Qaeda was taking over part of a large part of Iraq right now. How much would you say that is a fallout from Mr. Maliki's own policies there in the country and what are its implications? It's a good question. I'll repeat what I wrote last week after his visit where he came asking for counterterrorism assistance. I noted the irony, this must be the only person in the world who's asking for more American surveillance. And it's easy to understand why because he does have a growing Al Qaeda province problem in the western areas of Iraq. But as you suggest, it's in significant part his own doing. He has been a sectarian leader. He has not given Sunnis in Iraq a feeling that they have a share of the pie. He let the Sons of Iraq movement that General Tras built that was, you know, had basically thrashed Al Qaeda thanks to the tribal leaders, let it go, didn't pay them. A whole series of things. So my own feeling is it's in our interest to work with Iraq and other security, prospective security partners to go after Al Qaeda. But that shouldn't be a free ask. You know, these are special American technologies. And in a world that thinks it doesn't want, I mean, if you want to work with us on problems of mutual security, there's certain expectations that we should bring to the table. And I hope those were made clear to Prime Minister Maliki. Not to say that we should say absolutely not, we refuse, but we should say what you implied. These problems are partly of your making. And if you want to get them under control, you have to govern differently. Julie and Mitchell, thoughts on the pillars for foreign policy? Yeah, it's not the list. I think we could, you know, show up in a capital city, you know, some city across America and ask folks on the street, do these sound about right to you? And I think you'd get the nods, but it's the two questions that come afterwards. How are you gonna do this? And at what cost in an era of austerity? So are you gonna commit U.S. troops to this? Are there gonna be U.S. dollars involved? Are we the only one carrying the load? Is there someone else working with us? Is there a legitimacy piece to this? Do we have the blessing of international institution? Lots of other questions will come with it. So the list itself, I think, stands more or less. And again, you'd get the thumbs up. But particularly on proliferation, well, how are you gonna go about it? That's where you're gonna get the debate. I think that's gonna have to be our last word. I wanna have you all join me in thanking our excellent panelists today. Thank all of you. Thank you.