 A UCD graduate, he's been in Washington for the last 16 years, he has a doctorate from Georgetown, he's worked with various think tanks and various academic institutions in the United States, he has published quite extensively on foreign policy, most recently he produced a book on the strategic challenges facing the United States which he published back in May, he is head of Europe basically in Brookings which is one of the most respected think tanks in Washington which provides support, advice and thinking across the whole political spectrum though. It's a great pleasure for me to ask him to address us on the subject of the contest for the 21st century and the future of American power in the era of Trump and Putin. These issues would always be relevant but they're ever more relevant now with the uncertainty in foreign policy generally, perhaps the greatest level of uncertainty for the last 25 years and to have somebody come from Washington who is aware of our interests and our experience here and to talk on the issue is a particular pleasure. So Tom, I'll give you the floor. What I'd like to do is to talk briefly about the book I have which is all measures short of war, the contest for the 21st century and future of American power and it's really a book about what the international order, the state that is in today, how the post cold war order has sort of come to an end and what comes next. I'm not the first person to say that the international order is in trouble, for many years people have predicted that some thought it would end with a bang, others with a whimper, no one I think predicted it would end with a tweet but that's sort of where we find ourselves in 2017. So I'll come back to Trump at the end because I think it's what he is doing in foreign policy I think is unique and is quite significant and figuring that out I think it's going to be a task that we all have for the next three and a half years but I'd like to set him aside a little bit at the beginning just to talk about some of the broader context because the book is essentially sort of about what's happened over the last seven or eight years and how that's a fundamental change from the post-cold war order because I think what we when we look at the international order and that's really just a you know political science speak I guess for the way the world's been organized over the last 70 years or so you know we think of it in terms of you know the European Union, the UN, the NATO, America's alliances with countries in Asia, an open global economy, imperfect progression, a progression nonetheless on democracy, human rights and values throughout the world, bringing billions of people out of poverty that some of those things were in place after World War II but that order really went global at the end of the Cold War and there was an expectation that over time as countries sort of participated in globalization and traded with each other and worked together on common problems that they would converge on the same type of international order that they would all become responsible stakeholders of sort in upholding those values and those institutions and the status quo even if they were sort of reformed around the edges and they wouldn't necessarily all become democratic, no one really expected Russia or China to turn into democracies overnight but that wouldn't mean that they didn't have a shared interest in combating terrorism or limiting nuclear preparation or working on climate change or maintaining a healthy global economy and the US Deputy Secretary of State in 2007 I think gave a speech on responsible stakeholders and that was sort of really captured the the zeitgeist to the moment which was that China and Russia over time would potentially become democratic but also would work with the West on these common problems. One of the features of that period which is quite unusual is that it meant that the great powers weren't really in competition with each other and you know competition is sort of the norm in international history there's really never been a period even in the concept of Europe in the 19th century where the great powers essentially cooperated with each other and didn't sort of prepare for conflict or didn't actively combat each other and so this 20-year period for you know from 1989 through really to the financial crisis is something of an anomaly it's something that's quite unusual and I think it had sort of several sort of underlying causes one and that many sort of experts offer is that the gap between the US and everyone else was so large that it didn't really make sense for them to balance against the United States or to push back and because it was simply too too big a bridge to cross and but that wasn't enough you know because even if things were bad enough Russia and China could have teamed up with Europe in a way to push back against the United States and they didn't do that because what the US was offering what the West and what Europe was offering generally was seen to work for most countries in the world that they had shared interest in prosperity they just shared interest in an open and global economy and so that I think was two of the main reasons the third reason was that countries face the same challenges that especially after 9-11 people believe that those challenges and were ones of countries face together and those are far more important than the things that traditionally divided countries that territorial disputes geopolitical differences those are largely a thing of the past and that that was sort of driving this notion of convergence to me the big sort of story of the last seven or eight years from the time of the financial crisis has been the unraveling of this sort of expectation of convergence and instead of convergence we've seen real divergence in the international system Russia and China I think both believed that the international order ultimately was threatening their vital interests that there was a threat in terms of the future the future of Putin's regime in Russia that that was threatened by the expansion of the EU by the expansion of NATO that the prospect of color revolutions in in Ukraine and elsewhere could ultimately spread to Moscow China actually sort of believe the same thing although we often don't recognize it as much that the US was sort of instigating color revolutions and democratic change in places like Hong Kong and but also within China itself and so they were sort of fearful of that and they wanted an enhanced sphere of influence in the region they didn't see why they couldn't have a greater sphere of influence in exchange for cooperation Putin believed that by working with the US and Afghanistan that the US should give him more leeway in Eastern Europe and but of course the international order isn't really structured like that it's structured more along the lines of expansion of democratic institutions and so as Russia and China became more powerful I think they began to push back for the first time and they began to actively oppose the US in ways that they hadn't before if you think back to the Iraq War of 2003 Russia objected then but it didn't send troops to Iraq it didn't arm Saddam Hussein it didn't intervene in the conflict all things that is done in Syria and now one may think that that's you know that that's sort of a reasonable thing for them to believe and that that is sort of a legitimate thing or illegitimate but it really doesn't matter so much as the fact that that was how they thought about it and they began to I think for the first time seek change especially in the regions in the Middle East partly is the result of the Iraq War and also because of the failure of the Arab awakening those two things in combination really ended prospects of positive reform in the region that we saw an unraveling and that occurred and conflicts and that arose especially in Syria and that made the prospects of reform in the region very very unlikely on the global economy the failure of the of the international financial system in 2008 2009 giving rise to the greatest crisis since the 1930s really changed the nature of the value proposition of globalization for billions of people around the world it was no longer sort of a one-way bet to prosperity but really offered crises and an outsourcing and long-term stagnation that led people looking for alternatives so all of these things that sort of people believed about the international order heading in the right direction in the 90s and 2000s that that sort of came undone it from about 2008 2009 for a variety of different reasons and so the question I really try to look at is what comes next you know what happens now if this sort of past is is behind us that the sort of hope expressed by you know the center left and the center right throughout the 19th 2000s and that we were all sort of on the same track that that has come to an end what does the era of sort of divergence look like and the the major argument I make in the book is that one of the there are many things going on and climate change will continue to be very significant and there'll be problems of terrorism and nuclear preparation but the biggest sort of new development is actually sort of an old development which is the return of major power competition between Russia and China and potentially others and Western powers and that we're likely to see and the return of history of sorts but in an age of globalization when we're all interconnected and interdependent and that sort of era of competition will be fundamentally different and then anything and that we've experienced before and so I try to lay out in the book what that will look like and I make a few sort of points just in terms of the overall character and one is that as we sort of think about it won't necessarily be global it will tend to be regional right if you think about the international order we often think of the UN or the IMF and but actually a healthy international order normally relies on healthy regional orders you know it's the fact that Europe sort of works and was reconstructed in the late 40s and 50s and that East Asia sort of works and was and was reconstructed in the 50s and 60s and that that is sort of the foundation of a functioning international system and if that falls apart then all of the global cooperation that we see through international institutions like the UN will be detrimentally affected and so what happens in terms of Russia and its behavior in Ukraine or Eastern Europe or China and the South China Sea that that's just not a minor regional issue that's actually a core issue to the future of the global order and so as we look at sort of these tensions and problems they will tend to occur in the neighborhoods which these great powers are but that's not actually a cause for comfort right that doesn't mean that these things don't matter so much it means that these are just the latest flashpoints of the kind that we've seen in the past in previous sort of troubled eras so that's sort of the first point in terms of the what I think the return of geopolitical competition will look like at the second is that as we sort of think about all of this that there are really two worlds on offer there are two sort of different models and I think we'll have to choose from as we choose our foreign policies and the first is a world that sort of looks like the world that we've had in the past you know a version of that liberal international order that we sort of got used to in the 90s and 2000s it may be reformed India may have a greater role Brazil may have a greater role but it will be basically similar to what we've had before that's the first the second is a more nationalistic model based around spheres of influence where Russia is dominant in Eastern Europe China's preeminent in East Asia it's much more mercantilist it's much more closed authoritarianism tends to be on the front foot democracy sort of in retreat in many parts of the world and that's not sort of an apocalyptic scenario but I think it is quite a realistic one and I think it's a fundamental change from what we sort of experienced before and as we think about Russia and China both of which are very very different and are behaving in very different ways I think that choice is actually there in both both of those countries I think desire that and I think in a way Trump actually also desires sort of a more spheres of influence system he and I'll come back to at the end has been an ideological opponent of sort of a liberal international order for his entire life and so I think when you look at what he wants it's actually more aligned in some way with the Putin and Xi Jinping vision of the world than it is with a traditional and a traditional model the third point in terms of how we think about this is that when you look at what countries will do and how they'll sort of act in the world they don't want a major conflict with each other you know Putin doesn't want to fight the United States and China doesn't want to fight the US or Europe you Russia doesn't want to fight the EU or NATO and the US I think doesn't want to fight either of them either but they are going to compete and this is where the title of the book comes in with all measures short of that to try to achieve their objectives and the US you know has sort of done that in the end you know in the Obama administration by using financial sanctions by sort of exploiting Russia's vulnerability and the financial system for strategic objectives to punish Russia after Ukraine Russia has used those weapons in the cyber attacks on the US to sort of achieve its objectives China's done something very similar we've seen China in the South China Sea use its civilian vessels and other sort of land reclamation technologies to try to establish its sphere of influence there this sort of competition I think will continue with all of these tools with all of these weapons that are quite new that we're not actually all that familiar with and we're not very used to and so I think that sort of war is still possible it could occur by accident or inadvertently but I think the main sort of thrust of it will be sort of competition on these other sort of tools these measures short of war that George Kennan wrote about in the 1940s in terms of the competition with the Soviet Union and FDR spoke about before in the 1930s the four point is that with these measures short of war that these measures basically take advantage of the fact that we've integrated like crazy for the last 20 years economically because it made economic sense but we now now find that we're mutually vulnerable like we're vulnerable in ways we didn't anticipate because we have integrated you know the West sort of cyber and information systems are integrated with those of China and Russia by and large their open systems the Russian financial system is or was until very recently dependent on the Western financial system and the same there's a more mutual co-dependence and with China so there's an integration there and that means that we are actually vulnerable and so I think as this sort of unfolds you will begin to see some de-globalization as countries try to delink from the international system because they want to try to reduce their vulnerability so it's no accident that Putin has actually tried to de-globalize Russia and take Russia off the grid make it more self-reliant not because he thinks that's a better pathway to prosperity but because he wants to reduce the ability of the United States and of Europe to impose costs on him for his behavior and that's probably not it's not a not a foolish thing for him to do given the circumstances actually so he's trying to reduce his exposure Europe is trying to reduce its energy dependence on Russia partly for the same reason we see in Eastern Europe they're trying to come up with alternatives to reliance on Russian markets because they want to be less vulnerable to it and the US I think there'll be a big debate on cyber in the next couple of years for similar reasons so we may see some de-globalization there so those are just some sort of initial thoughts and what that how that general how that general competition will play out and but I think the main thing is that as we look at it it will it will it will really erupt in in Europe and Asia and so in the book I have a chapter on both and try to talk about how I think that will unfold in both regions I'll just say a brief word about both of those and they're very different I think in Europe and none of these occur in a vacuum in Europe and I was in sort of talking about it over the last few days some people have said you're very pessimistic about Europe I'm actually I think a little bit more optimistic this year since the book came out because of some of the developments that have occurred but if you look at Europe over the last five years or maybe seven years there's been five interlocking crises any one of which would have been a major deal in the 90s or 2000s but have all occurred at the same time there's been the Euro crisis which we're all very familiar with here obviously the Russia Ukraine crisis the refugee crisis in the Syrians of a war being the third Brexit being the fourth and then Trump and the transatlantic one being the fifth and they've all occurred at the same time and there's sort of a negative synergy between them and sometimes one reinforces the other you know Putin deliberately fueled the refugee crisis to weaken the EU to take advantage of and the vulnerabilities in the European Union for strategic purposes and so they sort of reinforce each other that I think has presented a real opportunity to Putin who sees sort of the existence of the EU and of NATO as an existential threat to Russia and would like to replace that with a more traditional great power system where Russia has a veto over major security decisions and even economic decisions in Eastern Europe or maybe more broadly in Europe and to reduce the role of the US and he doesn't have many options because he doesn't have Russia is overall a declining power but he has hard power he is the ability in the will to use it he's quite innovative and strategically resourceful and so he's pushing at pressure points where the Western sort of will is quite weak to try to assert his advantage and East Asia I think is fundamentally different because China is not a declining power it's a rising power and also it has a interest in the open global economy it doesn't want to see the global economy collapse it doesn't want to see and that weakened because that would pose real problems and for for for Beijing and but it is trying to revise the order regionally and it's using those tools particularly in the maritime space to try to accomplish that to gradually climatize the region to Chinese leadership it's facing a lot of push back from Japan Vietnam and others as it tries to do that but its long-term goal I think is to essentially share power with the US and East Asia which means a much greater sphere of influence in its region now one might think well what's so wrong with that but the countries of the region have a big problem with them are pushing back because they because they see that as a threat to their interest so those are I think are the two sort of major challenges as as we look at sort of you know US global as strategy you notice I haven't mentioned at the Middle East which I treat a little differently in the book because I don't think it's sort of on a par with these things I don't think that Iran is on a par with Russia and with China I think what's happened in the Middle East is essentially a regional coal war as that status quo is collapsed and that there's this contestation for the domestic governance systems of these countries that are divided between sunny and sheer groups and that we've seen this regional coal war between a sunny-led coalition with the UAE and Saudi on the one hand and others and then Iran and on the other and that that's been remarkably destabilizing and it's led to this general unraveling and I think the main sort of risk as we look at it isn't that the US would lose influence or Europe would lose influence in the Middle East it's really about whether or not there'll be contagion from the region that will affect Europe or affect Asia and so we may see with the refugee crisis that that actually got to a point where it nearly collapsed the European Union because of the pressure it put on governments in the in the EU and so as we think about the EU it's more about a problem to be managed than a prize to be won so the final part of the book is about what to do about all of this because you know you sort of have to outline a three-point solution that involves buying your book to to to and any of this but I do try to I do try to sort of dive into the different sort of choices and I look at ways in which the US could be restrained and then once in which it could be more assertive and on the on the restraint side I try to look at how the US may facilitate you know a sphere of influence order and whether that will be a good thing and whether or not there's a way for the US to do less in the world and I think that in very very different ways and they're fundamentally different presidents but Obama and Trump both sort of fall into this category I mean Obama was a supporter is a supporter of the liberal international order he saw the US as having an important role to play but he also wanted to do less in the world he wanted to do less in the Middle East he believed that Europe should sort of take care of its own backyard and should basically manage the problems and there he was resentful in a way of Britain France and Germany for not sort of stepping up to the mark some of the language there with with Trump and I think that has a viability to it there was some of the things President Obama did have some promise and but the problem is that over the long run it runs the risk of essentially sort of facilitating the emergence of the spheres of influence order because it reduces that US role in Europe and it sort of says that you can distinguish between core and peripheral interests and given the nature of the international order since 45 where the US has sort of had an outsized role for international stability and that's hard to sustain over the long run as I think he acknowledged actually in some of the Atlantic interviews and that he did at the end and so I think he was giving voice to a feeling that the US should just be a normal power and to sort of return to some sort of normality but whether that's possible given the type of international order we have I think it's a very big question so I'll come back to Trump in a minute but the strategy I try to advocate for in the book is what I call responsible competition which is sort of to recognize that the world is a more competitive place and the Russia and China are pushing back and that they do have a very different vision of international order but that the role of the US of its allies of the EU of Japan and others is essentially to try to compete responsibly with them to work where possible but to push back where necessary to try to preserve in international order based on on certain norms and values and institutions of the kind that we've had but I do think that recognizing that the nature of the foreign policy challenge has changed and that the need to sort of compete responsibly is now sort of required if we are to try to uphold what we've had in the past and that that is that that's I think the basis of US foreign policy should be just to finish on a few words about about Trump because I maybe this might be repeating a little bit what I said and what I said at the department in the IEA event last year but I do think that Trump is unique in every way in terms of how he looks at the world. He has basically opposed the America's global leadership role his entire life since at least his mid 30s in the early 1980s. He's had a very sort of a different idea about how the world and should be organized. Most people think he's sort of making this up as he goes along but I think there are some impulses there as far back as 1986 he talked about sort of his opposition to US alliances, his opposition to trade deals. He first visited Russia in 1986 actually and has always had a soft spot for Russian authoritarianism and he's repeatedly over 30 years never really contradicted himself in any of those core issues so there are many things that he makes up many things that he doesn't know very much about as we know and but there are a few things I think that he has been pretty consistent on and he has quite a nationalistic and narrow sense of US interests in the world and the role that it should play and it's much more coercive and assertive and so I think what we've seen in his administration so far is sort of a fundamental contradiction between two things. One thing is that view and his sort of predisposition for that approach and the other is the fact that most of the rest of his cabinet have been coalescing to try to push back against that to preserve a more mainstream approach to US foreign policy and really seeing that play out on issue by issue and I worry that over time he will sort of figure out a way to assert his authority over the system and to sort of push it more in his direction but I do think that the international order and all of the things that we sort of take for granted in the world are much more sort of threatened today by whole configuration of forces particularly by his sort of approach to foreign policy than it has been at any time really since the Cold War and possibly well before. I do think that as we as we as we look at sort of key crisis points I might just say one or two words about a couple of those on North Korea and I think he wants to have a different approach but he's sort of very much boxed in and that's really where you see this tension between the mainstream forces and him play out because Secretary Mattis I think would not count in as a foolish military action in in North Korea and what he would resign I think before doing that and so you see him sort of box him but that doesn't mean that the impulse isn't there on Iran and there are there I think headed for a confrontation with Tehran he sort of gave a blank slate to Qatar and to the UAE and a blank slate to Saudi Arabia and the UAE on Qatar and party manipulated in his visit and there on Europe I think he remains dedicated to a partnership of Putin but he's been prevented from doing that by a lot of the pressure on Russia in the US which is continuing to unfold so all of these things I think are very much in motion but the thing I worry about the most is not actually what he does proactively because I think he's lost the capacity to impose his will on US foreign policy because of the divisions within his administration it's more what he will refuse to do so will he just refuse to do certain things like refuse to endorse Article 5 of NATO you know pull out of the Paris climate change agreement or take other steps where he just essentially refuses to bear the mantle of leadership that the US has had in the past and then the destabilizing effect that that could have and so that I think is the main challenge but certainly I think it we're in for interesting times ahead I finished the book just before the election and then out to furiously rewrite the intro and conclusion afterwards but the one thing I did learn when I went back because I was wondering how much I essentially got wrong and it was that the the overall thrust of the book is really about why the world is becoming more nationalistic and competitive and I had sort of assumed that the US would be pushing back against that I didn't maybe fully appreciate the extent to which the US would be consumed by those forces itself and so in some ways you know what Trump has done I think is to sort of show that that sort of deterioration is actually more severe even than than I or others may have thought at the time and the big challenge I think is how to repair that and is it possible for countries especially for democracies and to uphold it and I think we're seeing those efforts and this is a finish on this is the reason I'm optimistic I think about Europe at the moment because we see what Macron's election which is with the election in Holland and with Merkel possibly going to win again in September and even if Schulz wins I think it's very much in this mainstream as well as a dedication to try to uphold that and whether or not they can pull that off I think that's a big task and but I think there's some possibility of it so I'd like to thank you as a thank Barry and thank the Institute here