 Hi, folks. How are you, Mel? There's a seat right up front if you want. There are a couple of seats for those of you in the back. Please join us. I'm Steve Clemens. I'm founder of the American Strategy Program, a senior fellow at New America, and I'm Washington editor at large of The Atlantic magazine. And it is terrific to have all of you here. We are streaming on many, live on many websites. So hello to The Atlantic crowd, Washington Note crowd, New America Foundation crowd, and I want to thank the staff and team at the New America Foundation and Democracy, a journal of ideas for the excellent back work that they did, particularly during the holidays, to make today's event come together. I don't think there's a topic more significant than the one we're discussing today when it comes to the broad question of America's engagement in the world. We're sitting in a year of choice in 2012. We've been watching the GOP debates, occasionally hearing comments from President Obama, and if we were doing this four years ago or eight years ago at various times, and you benchmark the kind of discussion we would have had, every time we jump ahead another four years, I feel as if the consequences around this debate are staggering, and the notion of where America's going to go, what vector, what course it will take in the next four years has a lot to do with whether we'll be doing this yet again, but we'll be looking at the tail end of a debate having seen substantial, I think we have seen substantial American decline in my view, I don't think that's shared by everyone here, but asking about what America's purpose and place in the world is. This series of articles that we're profiling today that have appeared in Democracy, a Journal of Ideas, was pulled together by Michael Tomaski, the editor of this fantastic journal, and today we have some of the authors of this series, Charlie Coption, who's a professor at Georgetown University, a senior fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations, Rosa Brooks, who's a professor at Georgetown Law Center, and a esteemed fellow here at the New America Foundation, a colleague, Congressman Tom Periello, I was here and I just noticed a new title of CEO of the Center for American Progress Action Fund, I hope that's right, so Tom is employed again, that's good, but one of my favorite congressmen or former congressman, and then Bruce Gentelsen, who's a professor at Duke University, and also a very well-known and well-respected author in this field, and advisor, has been an advisor to the Department of State section policy planning, so the essays that have come forward really wrestle with this question of what progressive foreign policy should be. I've entered the debate and I'm going to allow Michael to come over and talk about this, I just sort of felt like, wow, if there was a series of articles I wanted to play in, this was it, so I decided to take on Charlie Coption, and look at these fundamental questions, if you were looking at America's stock of power today, where it is today as opposed to where we would have liked four years ago, what would you do to reinvent America's position? What kinds of things do you do to try to build momentum again, re-engage, what are the requirements of an ascendant America, and that in my view is going to require negotiations that look something like a new global social contract with other key stakeholders in the system, and it's going to require somewhat a lot of humility and reinvention in the United States, because much of the debate, and I hope we get into it here, and we've seen it in the GOP debate, sort of asserts that U.S. power is just there, it's static, it's constant, it's strong, you can assert it, you can sort of invent it, and it will be there, and I think there hasn't really been a discussion that I've been satisfied with in the GOP debate except from John Huntsman, on the real constraints in American power and the real limits today, so without further ado let me invite my colleague Mike Tomaske, editor of Democracy D to take the floor. Thank you, Michael. Thank you, Steve. Thanks. Steve, thanks a million for putting this together. We're very, very grateful to you. Democracy is a small little thing, and we don't have the resources or the muscle to do something like this, and you and New America do. Thanks to everyone who did anything for this, helped publicize it, put out the chairs. We're very grateful. I just want to be very quick and talk a little bit about the journal and a little bit more specifically about what this series of articles is about. I'm sure many of you, we always encounter this at events that many people haven't been introduced to democracy before. So, democracy is a liberal, progressive, quarterly journal that has existed for about six years. I've been with it for two and a half, I believe, something along those lines. Sometime in the middle of 2009, we, watching the ebb and flow of political events, decided that we would launch a series of articles that we called First Principles. This was a point at which, do you remember, rather fierce opposition to Obama and his whole agenda had sprung up quite dramatically. It seemed then that everything was being contested, everything about American politics and ideas was being contested, the role of government, how to build an economy, our civic culture, our role in the world. Everything was being very, very fiercely contested. We decided that we wanted to do a series of articles that would try to restate and reframe progressive First Principles for this new era in a way that would make articles both timeless and useful five or 10 or even 20 years from now, but also very wedded to the moment. So that's what the assignment of these four authors and our fifth author was. The fifth author, incidentally, is out of town, but she wrote also a terrific piece, which I commend to all of you. This was Rachel Klinefeld of the Truman National Security Project. I'm sure many of you know Rachel, and she wrote about what she called the awakening world, how America should react to the greater realization among people in the developing world of their situation, their greater strivings for democracy, for freedom, and she wrote a terrific piece. But these four also wrote terrific pieces. We're going to go in direct order and we're going to go down the row. They each have seven minutes. I want to take a moment just to mention also my colleagues at Democracy, the managing editor, Albert Ventura, associate editor, Jack Mazzerve, obviously edited all these articles with me. It's just the three of us in a small office, and we work pretty hard on editing these articles as our panelists might agree. In many ways, the most important man in the room today is our intern this semester, Michael Fantuza, who's the timekeeper, and the four of you are going to look at him because he brought his little cards, and I'm going to enforce this. You each have seven minutes to summarize your articles, then we'll move forward to discussion. I'll let Steve ask the first question because Steve, as he referenced, wrote something in response to what Charlie wrote, and I want to get that conversation going. I have one question that I want to ask everyone, at least one question. Then we'll open it up to you. There are a lot of you. I'm sure there will be a lot of questions. So, that said, I think I'm done. Charlie Cubshin wrote about the question of progressive grand strategy. Thanks, Mike. I think I'll stand up here just so that when I get the card that says stop, I can pretend not to see it over there in the corner. Let me begin just by thanking Mike, not just for having the good sense to reach out to the five of us, including Rachel, but also for editing a journal that has filled not just a niche in Washington, but I think what was a gaping hole in public debate, and it really has done a remarkable job of getting out a progressive voice on lots of different issues when that voice, I think, didn't have sufficient weight and sufficient volume in public debate. So, kudos to you, Mike. And also to Steve, who I think has cornered the market on putting together interesting groups and getting people to think creatively about a whole host of issues. In the piece that I wrote for this issue, I tried to sort of step back from the details of policy and ask what kind of defining concepts, what tenets would I identify as foundational to a progressive set of first principles on grand strategy moving forward. And the four that I identified were grand strategy starts at home, the need for economic and political solvency. Two, retrenchment, the importance of striking a new balance between America's resources and commitments. Third, the importance of a new bargain between the West and the emerging rest. And then finally, a consolidation of the Atlantic community. Let me take a couple minutes and just flesh out each of those four points. First, I think the most important idea would be, as I said, that grand strategy starts at home. If we do not get our act together economically and politically, our paralysis or weakening at home will be reflected in our weakening abroad. And in the first instance, that means making sure that our economy is up to the task, making sure that we have sufficient economic base and sufficient economic growth to sustain our diplomacy abroad, to sustain what we take to be adequate levels of defense spending, to sustain development assistance. That's kind of a no-brainer. But I would make a secondary argument. And that is that restoring economic solvency is critical to restoring political solvency. That the crisis of governance that we face here in the United States is fundamentally about the downturn in the welfare of America's middle class. A political system that is beholden to special interests. A political and economic system that favors the advantaged few over the many. And historically, when we have seen the rising middle class move to the center of the political spectrum and marry with both Democrats and Republicans, you have bipartisanship on foreign policy. The bipartisanship that was born after World War II was made possible by the rising fortunes of the American economy. I think the onset of partisanship, the split that has emerged, both on domestic and foreign policy issues over the last decade or two, is fundamentally related to our economic problems and to economic inequality in this country. Class is returning as a source of ideological division. And in that sense, a plan for economic renewal, a plan for less economic inequality, a plan for making sure that America's middle class has expectations about the future that are equal to the expectations of the past. This is central to restoring not just the health of the United States economically, but its political health. And historically speaking, when the United States is divided at home, it is weak abroad. When the United States is united at home, it is strong abroad. Second point, I think that we are facing a growing gap between our resources and our commitments, and partly because we are going to have to whack the defense budget to bring our debt down, but also because our commitments abroad have come to outstrip our interests. That's particularly true in Iraq. I think it is also true in Afghanistan. And in the first instance, retrenchment means not just cutting the defense budget, but also cutting our commitments, not in the sense of a retreat, not in the sense of a polished vision, but in the sense of re-equilibrating our interests and our commitments and our resources so that our commitments abroad are more in keeping with our core interests and the resources that we have to sustain them. In the first instance, it does mean keeping ourselves at a distance from Iraq, rapid downsizing in Afghanistan, but also relying more heavily on allies and international regional institutions in other parts of the world. I think the Republicans don't get this. One wing of the party would have a foreign policy that outstrips means no limits on our nature of our commitments, and the other wing of the Republican Party would do far too little, that is to say to deny the country sufficient means to pursue even necessary ends. Third point, I think that the dominant view in Washington is that even if we are going through a period of diminishment in Western primacy, the Western order is stable. That's the view, I think, on both the left and right. And the view that I articulate in the article is that not only are we moving to a world in which we will have to deal with the rise of the rest, but also a world in which there are alternative versions of modernity, that the Chinese, that the Russians, the Indonesians, the Indians, the Brazilians, they are not going to buy into the world that has been created by Americans and Europeans since the onset of globalization in the 19th century. And in that sense, a top priority is sitting down at the table and striking a new bargain with emerging powers. Not just about a new distribution of power, but a new set of rules to anchor a rules-based international system. Final point, and Steve took me to task for this point, I end by saying that we need to consolidate and breathe new life into the Atlantic community. And I made that point not to say that the Pacific pivot is incorrect, not to say that of course we don't need to focus our assets more on the Middle East and more on East Asia, but to say let's not forget the Atlantic community. But to say precisely because we are moving to a world no longer dominated by the West, we need to ensure that the United, ensure that the United States and Europe hang together as a community of liberal values, as a community that attempts to protect and expand the values that the United States holds dear and continues to prize as vital even as we see a world emerge that embraces a much broader and more pluralistic set of norms when it comes to both domestic and international governance. Thank you. We have a couple of big picture pieces that's Cupchin and Gentelson and then a couple of pieces that looked at more specific issue areas. Rosa Brooks wrote about democracy promotion. Thanks very much, Michael and Steve, thanks for putting this on. I should start out by saying that when Michael asked me to do a piece on democracy promotion and whether and why it should be a important aspect of progressive foreign policy, my first reaction was that I was the wrong person to write about democracy promotion because I've always been a skeptic of how we do it, if not of whether we should do it. In the end though, partly by forcing myself to go through the process of thinking about it in a different way than I had before, I decided that perhaps that meant that I was the right person to write about it because I was a skeptic. So let me start out with with the with the skeptical note that I think actually at this point certainly certainly a few years ago many of us brought to the subject of democracy promotion. It was a pretty tarnished idea. Leave aside the Cold War history of democracy promotion, which is a whole story unto itself and not a particularly uplifting one, look simply at the Bush administration's approach to democracy promotion by military force at the freedom agenda of the Bush administration and it's not particularly hard to see why the notion of democracy promotion became something anathema not only in the progressive community but in many other parts of the world as well. It became bound up with the Iraq war, bound up with some of the worst aspects of the post-911 Bush era, our brief thank-goodness embrace of torture, et cetera, it's all of the abuses that you can think of. So nobody liked democracy promotion and in the article I actually talk about a couple of times during the my recent stint at the Defense Department where we accidentally stuck the word democracy into a few speeches and testimony and were roundly slapped back down again. The administration, the Obama administration wanted to put that term behind them. That of course had to change because to everyone's surprise when the Arab Spring came along suddenly it looked like we didn't, wasn't up to us to decide whether democracy and democracy promotion was a good idea. There were a lot of other people who were coming along who had their own views on who weren't actually particularly interested in ours and democracy again became one of the rallying cries for protesters around the world. What that did of course was it forced the Obama administration to backpedal pretty rapidly and say actually oh yes democracy supporting democratic traditions is indeed one of our foreign policy goals. That said we were always still a bit of a beat behind and I think that this is a good time as we go into an election year to think again about how should we feel? Not just about democracy but about democracy promotion. So first principles, can we rescue democracy promotion from all of our mistakes, all of our hypocrisies, all of our false starts and hesitations? And I think the answer is yes, not despite all those hypocrisies, mistakes, hesitations, but in fact because of them. We should embrace democracy and democracy promotion not because democracy is perfect but because democracy is really the only political system that humans have yet managed to come up with that builds in the capacity to self correct. So what's the core idea of democracy? I'm not a political theorist so this is just my version seems to me the core idea remains that everybody counts, everybody gets to participate, no one person or group of people has a monopoly on political wisdom and that carries with it some at least minimalist assumptions about human rights, some minimalist assumptions about free expression, free assembly, the rule of law, some set of institutions to guarantee those things. Here's the problem, if everybody counts, if no one is a monopoly on wisdom, if worthy ideas can come from anyone, pernicious ideas of course can also come from pretty much anyone. And that's why we need democracy, we need democracy because we will get things wrong repeatedly over and over. This is why progressives I think should care about democracy, not out of some sort of triumphalist American exceptionalism but rather out of the deep sense of humility that should come for us from knowing that we ourselves are deeply imperfect, our history of slavery, genocide, Japanese internment during World War II, denial of the vote to a new name, we can all come up with that history. Our progress is still uneven, we still have many problems. Our democracy has produced bad policies with pretty impressive regularity, but our democracy is also what has yet managed to enable us to repudiate those things however slowly, however imperfectly over time. Democracy I think in that sense is a necessary concomitant to a belief in human fallibility, it enshrines that capacity for self correction and that's why we should care about it. So implications of this for progressives, I think it leads us to four precepts for, if we think about democracy promotion, if you think it's a good thing then we should want to promote it, but there ought to be four precepts that should guide us. We should do it with honesty, with humility, with patience and with realism. Honesty that's the bare minimum prerequisite and that means acknowledging mistakes and hypocrisy and acknowledging that we're going to do it again too by the way, that's the nature of the thing. Humility means that we need to recognize what we don't know and what we don't know is a lot. I think even the biggest experts on democracy promotion are often the first to say, we don't really know what set of institutional arrangements, best guarantees democracy, we don't really know exactly the contours of the political rights that are essential to it are and how we should do it. People do this different ways, we're often stumbling around in the dark when we do it and we often do the most harm when we think that we are doing the most good and we're most certain that we are doing the most good. Three, patience. I think we often fall into one of two equal and opposite errors. Either we're absolutely unrealistic and we think we can we, with the help of the international community, will bring democracy to country X in a few years or we get irritated when country X does not appear to be a fully fledged democracy in a few years and we say to ourselves, well, they're just not ready for it, they don't want it, they're not interested and we give up. Doesn't make any sense to me. Our democracy was not created in a decade as a result of a nice package of technical assistance from the World Bank. Our democracy was achieved through not only our own revolution and the bloodshed that went with it and the Civil War and the bloodshed that went with that. We stand on the shoulders of generations of other people who struggled and fought and made mistakes. It was a pretty long hard slog from Athens through the Magna Carta, through the Declaration of the Rights Amendment, you name it, took a long time and indeed I'm told that I'm taking a long time, but I will finish very soon. Unlike democracy, I will be done quickly with this. Why would we imagine that other societies will transform overnight, other societies that don't have that particular history of struggle? I think that technological changes, communications changes, probably have accelerated the rate at which cultures and polities can now change, but it's not going to be overnight by any means and indeed rushing democracy can undermine it very badly. Finally, realistic, we should know from the last 50 years that there are the political will for democracy promotion, rule of law promotion, human rights promotion, all these related things. The political will will be uneven, the resources will be too few and will also be uneven. We will go from feast to famine over and over again. And yet we continue to act whether it's Iraq or Afghanistan or other places around the globe as though political will will be enduring and as though resources will continue to flow and so we develop relatively grandiose projects which then become unsustainable and sometimes actually end up doing more harm than good, which is left fledging democracies strewn with the wreckage of abandoned projects. What is final, finally, what should this mean in practice for how we think about it? I actually think that when we're thinking of those democracy promotion programs abroad that we are going to undertake, we should ask ourselves a pretty simple question which is if this project had to stop, had to be completely abandoned in a year, would it still have done more good than harm? And if the answer to that is no, we probably shouldn't be doing it. We shouldn't, of course, be doing it altogether some of the time. Sometimes diplomacy is a more useful tool, sometimes giving others the tools to do something is more useful tool, is more useful, sometimes trying to encourage the private sector to act is going to be more useful than governmental action. I think that the Obama administration has inched its way towards a pretty good approach to democracy promotion as a result of the Arab Spring. I think we now have a nuanced and sophisticated approach in theory. And I think the big question for all of us as we move forward will be can we, in fact, put this into practice? Thanks. Thanks very much. So Tom, I'll just introduce the next two so I don't take up any more time than I absolutely have to. Tom Periello wrote about humanitarian intervention and Bruce Gentelson we asked to write about something we called the multipolar world. Well thank you very much for including me in this and for asking these questions. I want to start with some context which I think may be clear to those present but I think it's important to be asking these questions in this context because it's unusual and Steve alluded to some of this at the beginning. One is we are entering an election cycle in which it's quite possible that the progressives are going to be on offense about national security and the Republicans may well be on defense. We saw some serious defeats on the national security front in the previous administration and some quite stunning victories in the last few years in this one and that's not always been the case. The second bit of context that's relevant to that is that while progressives may well be on offense about national security progressives are deeply divided about some of these victories and some of the tactics that have been used. And so this is a moment I think in a great panel and process to step out of the political campaign environment which I think we have been reminded in New Hampshire and Iowa is not prone to nuance and substance to ask the question about how we feel about some of these developments of the last few years and again some I would say stunning victories on the national security front but also continuing to deal with both moral and legal questions as well as technological ones. The third bit of context is that we are continuing to evaluate the idea of U.S. foreign policy at a time where arguably it has less and less of a monopoly or dominance over the actual development of events around the world. Something that I think in the context of Arab Spring we have seen. Now this doesn't mean it's not incredibly powerful but we also see a world and this goes to I think what will be said next and part from Bruce what kind of world we're living in. So it's an I just want to say that in that context and I do want to address quickly while I do not want to in any way replace Steve's inimitable role but to address the previous two comments very quickly before getting to my work on humanitarian intervention. On Mr. Coption's piece I just want to echo what a big deal it is to see this relationship between our domestic strength and our foreign policy. I spent much of last year in the Middle East most prominently in Egypt about six different trips there are different periods during the revolution and people there about the revolutionaries and people on the street were so cognizant about this perception of a concentration of wealth in the United States of the fragility of the economic system. Many people have talked about comparisons between the Berlin Wall moment and the Arab Spring moment and how things have gone differently. There are many reasons for that but one is at that time democratic capitalism was associated with prosperity and with strength and I can't tell you how many times when I would be interviewing people on the streets of Cairo or in Upper Egypt and people would say oh well we don't want that we tried that under Mubarak. There was an association of crony capitalism with some of this. Now we're not going to get into how accurate those critiques are here but there is a perception there's a very strong perception or connection between how our economy is doing and some of this influence overseas and I would argue to some of our conservative friends who talk about American exceptionalism that there probably has been no greater blow to American exceptionalism in recent years than the conservative's handling of the debt fight and I was overseas for most of that not only in the Middle East but with many people from Europe and Asia and elsewhere who were working there and it was a stunning example of how a failure and falling apart of functional governance here right up until the end when it really failed to come together there was still some sense that America would work it out that America would figure it out and it did start to change I think people's perception there so it's a very important thing on Rosa's I think she raises a lot of important points about humility and she's been an important mentor of mine and so I always learn something from that experience I do think that what we're seeing particularly in a non-governmental perspective is the idea that this distinction between us and them on the democracy agenda is disappearing that there's much more talk by non-state actors of needing to revive or revitalize democracy in the United States and overseas not as an othering or us them conversation but as a new generation and new century with new technology and new volumes and concentration of wealth looking at what that democracy means so on the article about humanitarian intervention I'm making a very simple point which is when we go through World War II and look at the use of force we saw for those of us who see it in history books an absolutely devastating war that we still see as a noble war because it was the ultimate moral and existential security threat through the use in Vietnam and elsewhere there was increasing skepticism both of that cost of war and also people's legitimization of the use of force so there has been an assumption by many liberals of an extreme hesitancy on the use of force even in the face of mass atrocities with the logic of saying well no matter what if we use it we're going to end up doing more harm than good anyway and I believe we have reached a tipping point where that is no longer a morally defensible position the cost of inaction in the face of atrocities and in the face of certain grave threats is immoral in the context of what we're looking at and there are two major factors I think to look at in the use of force one is what is the cost the human cost in particular of that use of force we have developed technologies not perfect but that have tremendously reduced the costs and casualties of war when employed in certain situations and I think we've seen that dramatically in the cases of Kosovo and of Libya in recent years the second is we've had huge expansions in the ways we can legitimize force if legitimacy is the difference between violence and force before there was pretty much unilateral action or UN Security Council action and from about its inception the Security Council became fairly paralyzed and that is an ultimate barrier of legitimacy is complicated in its own way given that many countries in the global south consider it not to be a particularly representative body anyway what we've seen in recent years with the emergence and expansion of NATO of various regional alliances of the African Union and other areas is the ability to have a different sense of what it means to divide that division between violence and force so when we look at both the technological legitimacy in our application of force and the legal and regional diplomatic developments that have given us more avenues to divide what is a sort of cowboy adventure from a legitimate use of force we really do have a different capacity than we had before and I think progressives have to take that very seriously and I think should be very proud of the intervention in Libya not because it was perfect and not because we're anywhere near done with that development that will be there but because we believe in progress that's core to the idea of being progressive so the idea that we might actually increase our human capacity to reduce suffering over time is something that we should see as a good thing and be willing to incorporate into our sense of foreign policy thank you so let me also thank Steve in New America for the event and Mike in Democracy a journal for this whole approach on first principles I mean I think it's really important we have plenty of a slew of policy analysis out there this issue, that issue but the notion of principles not just in sort of the theoretical sense but in terms of frameworks of how we see things like the role of government in society America's role in the world is really really important for us to be addressing so let me put my comments in the context of foreign policy in the coming presidential election now we all know that the election is going to be predominantly about the economy that's obvious and when you see the polls maybe three to five percent of the people say that they're going to pay attention to foreign policy but you know in a close election three to five percent matters and so it may well be that winning that debate could be decisive not as important as the debate on the economy but I think the notion that foreign policy doesn't matter is wrong if it's not a close election three to five percent may not matter but I think it's prudent to assume that it's going to be a close election and in that context I think that it's going to be much more thematic than issue based you know with the caveat we don't really know what this year is going to bring but at this point in time there's no issue out there like you know 9-11 was in the 2004 election or Iraq was in 2006 2008 or Iranian hostages and Soviet invasion of Afghanistan were back in in 1980 and I think the Republicans are trying to make this thematic along two main themes one is I think Steve said this at the beginning is the declineism theme and what they're trying to get at here is is both you know sort of a bullish notion of American power but also sort of broadly optimistic you know not pessimistic the old sort of Reagan optimism you know Mitt Romney's believed in America and the second one and it's also been mentioned by Tom and others is American exceptionalism and that's trying to get at people's pride you know we're the best you know we're special and you can understand this strategy particularly in the current context it has some appeal amidst all of the uncertainty and anxiety and fear that people have in a profoundly changing world but I think it can be countered indeed trumped in a very progressive way and so let me address that and put some of the arguments I make in the article in that context first in terms of the declineism argument I actually think that the problem is not declineism but it's really those who sort of are making that argument their problem is denialism you know it's sort of a basic fact of life for any of us as individuals or whatever that if you don't have a sense of what are the problems and challenges you face you know you're not really going to be in a position to meet them and figure out strategically and so I think that really comes down to seeing the world as it is not as it was or how we might like it to be so everybody has their metaphor and framework for this mine that I use both in a book that was mentioned that I co-authored with a colleague Steve Weber at Berkeley and in this democracy article is an astronomical one that goes back to my days as an undergraduate at Cornell when there was a professor named Carl Sagan running around trying to teach all of us non-specialists about astronomy and the notion here is that during the Cold War we really saw the world like Ptolemy saw the universe you know Ptolemy had the earth at the center and everything else revolved around it and to a great extent that's how we saw the world in the Cold War the US was at the center we were the wielder of military power economic dynamism democracy you know and the like but it really shifted to a Copernican world and for Copernicus you know everybody had their own orbit and the notion it's even more than multi-polarity but we live in a world today where there's been a diffusion of power of economic power of soft power a pluralization of diplomacy and many other aspects along with sort of a 21st century version of nationalism and non-alignment and we need to understand that other countries in the world are not revolving around us it doesn't mean that we don't have a lot of power but in a Copernican world you want to think about things in different ways and we get I get into sort of four areas of policy in the article one is on leadership and moving from rhetoric to strategy and we're basically faced with three different kinds of scenarios you know one is a situation in which interests are shared by a broad swath of the international community and somebody needs to be the impetus to mobilize for collective action that's Libya to a great extent I think we played a very important role there we didn't do it on our own it wasn't frankly where we were leading from but it was where we were leading towards which was towards results and as Tom said it's not over there but in the context of norms like the responsibility to protect as well as the Arab Spring that was an extremely important situation there are other situations in which other states see their interests as different than ours and there I think we need to have what I call in the article sort of a sweet spot partnership strategy that if you like is the diplomatic analog to coin to counter insurgency where to the extent that that had some success in Iraq it was going into areas like the Sunnis seeing how they saw their interests and figuring out how to work with that we need to work with partners whether it's emerging powers like Brazil and Turkey or China in many situations and figure out where everybody's sweet spot is and figure out partnerships which are not amount of here's our talking points follow us but they're really an effort you know to use diplomacy to forge those partnerships the third kind of situation is where frankly others believe their policy ideas for how to organize the international system are to be blunt better than ours I think frankly some of the ideas about the international financial system less reliance on the monopoly position of the dollar would be better for others and better for us and that really requires acknowledging that not all the best ideas are made in Washington a second area is this whole area of the use of force and here I think Democrats need to shake off the worry about being soft up I think this administration has shown an understanding in many respects about how to effectively use force I haven't been a supporter of the Afghanistan policy but in many other areas and I think we have to we have to take our positions on this strategically based upon what works not worrying in a defensive way that we might look as soft in other words we shouldn't leave it to just the people like Robert Gates to show that it's strategic not soft to have a high bar in another major war two other areas really quick one relates to the Arab Spring and the notion and here I think Rosa's points about democracy promotion for many years we sort of followed this notion as it was said way back he may be an SOB but he's our SOB you can't sustain and we tried to give some nodding in the head towards democracy promotion I think what we learned this year is that's not sustainable political Islam is here to stay we can't make the same mistake with political Islam that we did during the Cold War with various forms of nationalism in the third world and write them all off as part of some monolithic movement we need to differentiate I think the administration is doing better on that with Egypt now than it is for example doing on Bahrain says not values over interest this is the way that values are very much part of the strategic picture and lastly and this is what at Charlie's themes is this notion of the domestic is what I call the article mustering strength from within and this gets to the whole question of American exceptionalism Republicans want to use that as an anesthetic to ease the pain to make us feel good about our past we need to use it as a stimulant to tap people's pride to understand as Charlie said that national success in the 21st century is less about muscle flexing abroad than strength from within in terms of your policies in terms of your economy and other ways and so we need to enter the American exceptionalism debate not with peons to the past but about ways of making this a stimulant we have been great in the past the way we're going to be great in the 21st century is not the same as in the past because it's a very different world what does that mean to this next generation and to us going forward and to really do it in a way that makes people feel that you know we're kind of all in this together and there's something that we want to make ourselves proud again without going sort of the anesthetic route about just sort of sitting around with myths that's not going to help us compete in a 21st century world thanks I want to thank all of you I also know that someone's going to be coming to take this mic after Mike Kamasky does to ask questions in the audience congratulations to all of you I think it's an excellent set of essays and I want to tell those folks that are watching online again that they can access these essays on the Democracy Journal website or on the New America Foundation website or the other places where it's streaming when we titled this event we titled it reformulating American strategy in a turbulent world colon American spring and Michael Kamasky suggested this idea American spring and I put a question mark on the end and I've been struggling with this question of what what what could that mean and when I think about the notion of what how we think about the Arab spring the American spring it's fundamentally asking key questions or disrupting the incumbent order disrupting orthodoxy and as I took that a next step I began to ask well what is the orthodoxy of the time is the orthodoxy one where today a brand of liberal internationalism and neoconservatism have set the pace that America has become and a disruptive engaged democracy promoting interventionist around the world or is the orthodoxy one that we've been seeing it's it's it's a pugnacious American nationalism sort of asserting moving where it wants without real regard to the way gravity works in the world or is orthodoxy along the lines of a Nixonian Kissingerian the substance of foreign policy is still basically realpolitik and and and guarding and and husbanding resources and directing efforts in ways that that move the national interest forward last night thanks to Bill Goodfellow I was a guest today an airing of a movie I highly recommend called In the Land of Blood and Honey that was produced and directed by Angelina Jolie I'm not normally a big fan of Angelina Jolie but it is a it's a stunning movie it's not about U.S. foreign policy but it does remind when you see this film about how cycles of violence and history are so much a part of this story and and and when when you would then ask the next question which I think both Rosa and Tom got into about what is the right policy response and and it's when the problem I have with the moral agenda or the promotion agenda is one where I'm all for America being about better outcomes in the world and better life as long as the stock of American power remains the same or is increased that American like that you can do tomorrow what you're trying to do today and I guess my question to all of you is I'd like I'd like to just quickly get a snapshot of what you see as your own Arabs as your own American spring notion because I sort of see some of you saying we need to revitalize transatlantic relations we need to be better at democracy promotion we humanitarian intervention this to me sounds like all out of the same old playbook to some degree so what's the the most important disruptive thing that you think United States needs to do in its foreign policy portfolio to either re-achieve its status or or to you know to change the game because that I think gets at the question of American spring or not I think that the the contours of American foreign policy moving forward are clear to some extent regardless of who wins the next election and that is that when you combine the domestic constraints that we face with increasing international constraints I think we're headed towards some kind of strategic retrenchment and the question is how well is it handled and what is the implication and you know I think because we're progressives we believe that the that that the progressives Obama are better equipped to handle this than the the opposition for reasons that we've all been talking about but I think Bruce put his finger on it when when he when he sort of said that you know the Republicans are going to go for the same old refrain which I agree is denialism it is not a new form of nationalism but to directly answer your question Steve I would say that that the big unknown is here at home I think that that Obama did the right thing by trying to be a post-partisan president I think he truly believed that if he reached across the aisle he would find willing partners that has not happened and he has now moved toward a very different approach to running for reelection it's an approach that's going to be more combative that is going to try to play to this question of the economy that we've talked about but as I said I think that you know this this kind of period of American history in which we are going through a fundamental change requires domestic consensus I don't know where that's going to come from I'm deeply worried about it I think it is the six million dollar question is this on? yes it's on I agree with with Charlie actually and I want to by way of agreeing with Charlie actually maybe challenge something that you just said a bit Steve about the danger of moralism do we run the risk that it reduces the stock of American power in the world I think when misapplied it certainly can when it's hypocritical it certainly can but equally I think that when the United States is viewed by the world as having failed to step in when good requires it our prestige and our stock of power also goes down and that's let me circle that back to Charlie's point I think that historically when you think of part of what American power in the world has been based on it's been it's been based not just on having a big army it's been based on the idea that we are kind of the land of opportunity the land in which people can choose who they will be and not be forced to be who their ancestors were or who's one politician or another tells them that they must be and that is something that has for many generations brought immigrants to this country it's been the root of a lot of the diversity and creativity and innovation in this country that is still in many places thank goodness something part of what people think about the United States that our stock goes up when we are viewed internationally as the the creators and the guarantors of opportunity of choice of change it goes down when we are viewed as the enemies the destroyers of opportunity and choice and change I think that part of what we are seeing right here in the United States is a a tremendous loss of faith on all across the political spectrum in our own idea of ourselves as a land of opportunity and choice and change rising income inequality economic uncertainty problems with our public education system you name it I think that whether you want to look at the Occupy Wall Street movement or you want to look at the Tea Party the same animus is there a lot of anxiety about are we losing that special something that makes us us and as Charlie said that could go in a number of different directions it could go in a really good direction or it could go in a really bad direction if it goes in a really good direction I think it will be associated with progressive ideas it will be associated with a humble and honest and realistic but real embrace and promotion of democracy and human rights abroad as part of our foreign policy which may at times include the use of force for humanitarian reasons if it goes in the wrong direction it will go in the direction of a denialist head in the sand form of exceptionalism which could either go in the neo-conservative not grand strategy grandiose strategy direction or it could go in the Tea Party isolationist direction I think that that remains to be seen but I do think that for our foreign policy to go in the progressive direction we have to care very deeply about what happens here domestically well I think the most dramatic disruption that could improve our national security would be to end our reliance on oil I think if you look at what it means in terms of the strength of our economy and our interdependence and what it means for relationships in some of the most volatile areas in the world not just the Middle East it is a dramatic blow to our national security that we failed to develop a national energy policy and you know even those who go with the drill baby drill crowd not only are we never going to get to 100 percent that way but it's a global commodity so it actually doesn't change the extent to which the conservative position on energy has done more to strengthen Ahmadinejad than just about anything else and so what what it would mean to really dramatically increase I think our strength is that's an example but I think what Dr. Kupchyn and others are getting at is this fact that we have rarely in our history had such a big gap between the scale of what we need to accomplish and our political capacity to do it I certainly think something like a 10-year rebuild of America's competitive advantage putting out a real competitiveness strategy the administration rolled out some of that this week is vital and there were those of us that certainly wanted a stronger and more visionary stimulus to do that seeing this as both a national security issue and a middle class issue rather than a short-term push to the economy to prevent a depression which itself was a notable act of intervention so I think that's the scale of things that really dramatically improves our security rather than on the margins I think beyond that the irony of the Iraq intervention was that it was supposed to put a chill in dictators around the world to reinforce with shock and awe our capacity to remove unfortunately with how it developed it had exactly the opposite impact I do think Libya and other interventions and the use and I know that the organization I've just joined is going to be doing a lot of thinking on the drone issue this year there's some very difficult questions out there that could be part of this question of how do you do some of this with fewer resources but present a credible and robust threat in addition to hopefully the soft power elements that I think most of us agree on just a couple points Steve I think it's really about being savvy you know in terms of the stock of power it's like being an investor how do you leverage you know limited investments and get the return you want so two examples one I think because I think has been done well the other unless you're up so the whole South China Sea I think one of the best strategies this administration has had goes back to 2010 when secretary Clinton went off to the ASEAN meetings and was pushed not just by Korea and Japan but by Indonesia and Vietnam to basically balance against China you know China too the notion of the Copernican world is that it's not a world where anybody can be a hegemon there's too much nationalism pride national interest identity out there and there's too much diffusion of power in lots of ways so I think you know China which you know really for maybe the better part of two decades had been really I think emerging regional in ways that was surprising to many of the countries there that it wasn't as threatening then they started to overplay their hand if we overplay our hand and turn this into you know what I think a lot of the Republicans want you know sort of a zero you know bilateral confrontation by China with China those Indonesia's in Vietnam so I think we've played that fairly savvy the second example is the whole question of Iran in the Gulf with the Saudis with Bahrain in the context of the Arab Spring and there I'm a little let's positive of what we've been doing you know you know there is no question that that are and we've seen a lot of the last couple weeks but even before that that you know the Iran you know is posing a serious threat in the region in a variety of ways but it's also the case that countries like Saudi Arabia and the Bahrainis are basically saying what dictatorships did to us all over the Cold War which everything that's going on inside this country is about is about Iran you know Bahrain may well become about Iran but only become if we continue to pursue the policies we do which further radicalizes it and takes away the moderate middle so in the notion of pushing the the Bahraini government I think harder for reform it's precisely if you want to keep the fifth fleet there you know you're more likely to have the three to five years from now if you're on the side of reform so I think this bridging and that's not about values over interest that's a strategic sense in a world which we've seen with the explosion of technology where you can't control your message you can't control information that we really can't hedge as much on that we like to hedge say you know well we're and there I think we're going to have to work out a relationship with the Saudis on terms that won't go back to the status co-ante where we have a lot of shared interest and we have some divergent interests and we need to use our leverage and our bargaining and I was you know when they wrote those two op-eds one in the post and one of the times in the spring taking shots at us and we're kind of going you know to Riyadh and sort of trying to make not you know we really need to to not bash them but make sure that they don't think they can leverage us more than we let than we leverage them and so it's really how you use your power not just sort of the quantity of it I'll ask one question and then we'll open it up and my question I think is of all four of you and is in the general category of what can we learn from our own mistakes and I guess I would just be interested in thinking about liberal and progressive foreign policy thinking and making over the last 2030 even 50 years or even you know since the in the in the post war period there have been a lot of twists and turns and a lot of different phases of liberal foreign policy making at which moments different strains and types of thought and action were dominant but what do you think let's say you know since the Vietnam era let's say is a is a liberal foreign policy mistake from which we need to learn as we assess and go forward and think about the new world so I have time to think I would say inferiority complex you know the whole soft on thing that that and I think we so much let the other side set the themes in the context for much of the political foreign policy debate that we had to prove that we that we were tough and an example of that I think and Steve and Charlie have been doing some really good work on this was the whole Afghan policy review you know in 2009 you know read Bob Woodward's book or other accounts when the policy review was done all of the options were about the numbers of troops there wasn't anything about a so-called diplomatic search right and even had people like Henry Kissinger writing that you know ultimately you needed to engage all of the parties in the region and get them to understand that have each pursued their own national interest India, Pakistan, Iran, China that they all risk losing and figure out you know what the diplomatic piece would be and I think in some respects that was still the sense of you know because we were withdrawing from Iraq we couldn't show we couldn't really think about diplomacy in the Afghan we're sort of doing that now but we've lost a couple years and I think the reason was the worry that we would be seen as soft and I think it's time to demonstrate that it's more about savvy than toughness and you know that's why I'm sort of happy to engage with the way the Republicans are setting the agenda I think and not just preaching the faithful I actually think you can reach a lot of average Americans who really believe that this is more about you know to use sports analogies game plans than just sort of you know throwing your power at it so I think it's a good time as a couple people said that we really can win this debate but we have to have a little more confidence in how we see the world and what our own strategies are yeah I would echo that I think that we should be willing to debate this and want this debate because too often we say well we want to pivot back to domestic policy which is our bread and butter and I think that we should say what we really believe on this speak to our deepest convictions and and not back down from that two quick examples I think in terms of things we learned from one that certainly for for my generation is a defining event is Rwanda I think we cannot as human beings as well as as Americans forget that 800,000 plus people were slaughtered and we didn't do anything about it and we had at least some capacity to do that now we've also learned about the overuse of force and intervention so we need to balance that we don't want to overcorrect and then want to jump in everywhere every time that someone is injured although that's not about impulse to want to prevent innocent people from being killed and slaughtered so I think you know we cannot forget that that happened that happened within modern memory the other I think is just that threats are real and I think sometimes that you know we kind of hope some of these problems will go away and by not acting and sometimes with decisive force early these are small wounds that can become infected and become big problems and one of the ways that we have to think about this is how do you prevent yourself how do we prevent our country from getting to the point of impossible decisions you know we are facing one very shortly possibly between a nuclear armed Iran or regional war in Iran what do you do to prevent yourself from getting up to the point that you have two incredibly difficult world scenarios so I think we have to think about not avoiding these things until they get to the last second but doing what I think our side is particularly good at which is preventative diplomacy use of smart power etc to not get to to that point where that extremely difficult decision has to be made I think that we we have not been very good at to use an overused phrase winning hearts and minds in in our own country and and let me talk about both the the minds first and then the hearts I don't think we have a grand strategy I don't think that there has been a democratic progressive grand strategy in the last 20 years and I actually think that's a problem I think that I think this this goes with what Bruce said about about defensiveness I think that we have spent a lot of time responding to criticism saying I am not a crook I am not we are not weak on defense etc and not nearly as much time articulating here's what the vision of the world that we want to get to in 10 years 20 years 30 years 40 years is here's what the world that we want our children to inhabit looks like which then connects back to the to the to the more incremental things here's what we need to do next year and the year after and the year after and all these areas that we just haven't done that we've done a rotten job at it we consistently conflate laundry lists and strategies you know the national security strategies and not a strategy it's a list of aspirations good aspirations but that doesn't help us get anywhere so one I think we do need to do that that hard work of articulating a grand strategy which means a vision of the world and how we get from here to there and two here's the heart's problem I think that I think that progressives and the left have consistently been too technocratic which is weird because that's not the historic tradition that progressives come out of but we need to get better at at metaphors we need to get better at narratives we need to I think and I think that the right unfortunately has been quite good at that has been quite good at coming up with the catchy phrase the catchy image that hits people here it was something that George Bush was good at ironically it was something that Barack Obama was exceptionally good at during the campaign and has proven far less good at as a president than as a campaigner perhaps we'll get some of that back and I think that part of this is a challenge that shouldn't be left to you know us experts at all because we tend to be the very people who have not been so great at this but and we tend to be irrelevant and we tend to be irrelevant oh come on now but but I you know I almost feel like we should have a little contest of you know good metaphors I mean even think you take just here's just an example here's something I don't think is the right metaphor but but just the I'd love to get people thinking in terms of metaphors when we think about the whole issue American decline or you know boo-hoo how do we talk about this and it's certainly true that if you run around saying oh America is in decline you leave yourself wide open to aha you hate America why do you hate America you know I I keep thinking of Gulliver's travels right there's Gulliver and he you know first used in the land of the what do you call him the big people the Bob Bob Dignagians and that's not much fun he's getting beat up all the time it's not fun to be tinier than everybody else then he's in the land he's in Lilliput it also turns out it's not fun to have everybody be smaller than you that's that's no good you have no friends you keep stepping on other people by accident which is actually not a bad metaphor for what we've been doing the last decade you know that what's Gulliver his trajectory well he figures out it's nice to be with people who are your own size and we want to live and we actually I think we want to live in a world in which there are more people our own size more peers and more equals I don't think that's that's probably a little too complicated but I guess what I would solicit from all of you not necessarily today but you know help think about what are the narratives and metaphors that help capture that vision of where we want to go because we need to do a better job at it I would answer your question Mike by perhaps borrowing some language from from Rosa's initial comments and and suggest that progressives liberals but actually Americans as a whole should exercise more humility more patience more modesty more realism in envisaging the country's role in the world and that I think that at times we we tend to view the world too much through our own eyes and we believe that in in going after a progressive agenda that we can actually envisage a world that starts looking a lot like us and I think that view that we can go out and socially engineer other countries had has led us into some of our gravest errors Vietnam Iraq Afghanistan I think that liberals progressives truly believed at the beginning of the Arab Spring that suddenly liberal democracy was going to to flower across the region and now Islamists seem to be taking power in just about every country and and I don't you know that's not us for us to judge but I think it should send a signal to us that we should be modest about the degree to which our version of modernity is being embraced around the world we look at China and we say well China's middle class is growing that means China will soon democratize don't hold your breath right it could be generations before China democratizes it's following its own path based upon its own cultural and geopolitical and and other kinds of dispositions so especially as we're moving into a world in which American power isn't quite as pronounced as it used to be I think modesty humility and realism would serve the country well we're going to open up the floor and then we're going to start with Heather Hurlberg thanks Heather Hurlberg from the National Security Network and I want to actually reframe Rosa's comment as a challenge to the panel because in fact the only thing that's worse than progressives not having ideas about how to talk about national security is a room full of progressives sitting around throwing out metaphors for a culture that we have to look at ourselves and admit many of us tend to be a little bit more out of touch with but what you've all pointed to is that if we were putting our core issues and priorities out there into the national bloodstream more metaphors would emerge which by the way is how conservatives do it you know our friends who are also conservative wonks with PhDs in you know Iranian or Middle Eastern policy did not sit around and come up with any of the slogans that we enjoy so back to Charlie's point about there being no sort of national consensus around where we're going next if the four of you were writing President the one foreign policy speech that President Obama will give during the reelection campaign what are the two or three concepts that you most want to get out there about what the world should be like and if we can have a quick round you can have one concept you don't have to have two so this is still gotta go through the speech writers right but it's it's raw material it's a results orientation right it's not who does it but how you know how do we achieve things that serve our interest nationally and globally and when you ask the question that way you know you really get into notions that you know others may have some better ideas than we do that's not an insult you know it's respect so it's it's a it's what works with a pragmatism that's not value free but what works also relates to how you do democracy so that's my sense is you know is it's a really it's a results orientation working on it I think that I think results oriented is a good frame I think that right now it's going to be partly a question of also saying who's looking at the threats yet to come I think that they're their orientation towards the Pacific is one that doesn't necessarily you know hasn't penetrated the public consciousness but I think as someone pointed out it's not going to be the facts of the policy it's going to be the theme so who's looking out for the next generation of threats and I think as progressives that difference between those who are sort of stuck in the 20th century threats versus those who understand and are addressing the 21st century threats and having a track record to prove it is maybe part of that pivot I know Heather Heather you've had to endure too many rooms of people coming up with really bad metaphors and now you've asked us to do it again I'd say two things one and Tom points to the importance of a clear-eyed assessment of emerging threats I think that twinning that with a equally clear-eyed awareness of emerging opportunities and ability to grasp those opportunities I think that we we talk too much about threats that threats are real we don't talk enough about opportunities that goes back to you know what does it mean to have a vision of what we do want the world to look like there are a lot of good things happening out there which if we stick our head in the sand bad things will happen to us just as much as if we stick our head in the sand in the face of threats so reaching out for opportunity preparing for threats reaching out for opportunities and the other theme I think would be of connections connecting and progressing that the world is interconnected it's a global neighborhood and when we help when we help make our neighborhood better for our neighbors we help ourselves as you can can tell Heather from my general remarks I think that we're going through a sea change of sorts domestically on foreign policy and I think that the republicans may be making a mistake in thinking that Americans want to hear about more and more American power and more and more American commitments and the reason I think Mr. Paul is actually doing reasonably well as he is tapping into something in the American electorate that is important and so I would I would probably focus on how effective Obama has been in going after America's enemies but doing it cheaply and compare the cost of a drone strike whatever you think of a drone strike versus the cost of occupying Iraq for 10 years and I would also focus on what what Obama calls nation building at home and that is domestic investment rebuilding America's middle class and tying our foreign policy particularly the trade promotion agenda to the degree to which that agenda can can feed into and bolster the domestic economy. Thank you. I will go right here and we'll we'll work around the room and we're not going to ask any more questions to all four panelists. Great. I'm Joe Marie Grease-Grabber with New Rules for Global Finance and quickly one of you talked about commitments versus interests I'd like to know what are the core interests of the United States when you talk about US interests what do you have? How are you defining that in your own head? And in terms of the US spring I think the challenge is to debunk corporations are people to retake the political system and let it be owned by people and not by the money. Thanks Joe Marie so core interest let's take a couple more questions let's go in the back I think Stan Cober and yeah in the bar back there Stanley Cober thanks Steve let me read you a sentence from James Madison just one it has grown into an axiom that the executive is the department of power most distinguished by its propensity to war hence it is the practice of all states in proportion as they are free to disarm this propensity of its influence so we've been talking about democracy and war and how we have to be firm but in a democracy which branch of the government should make this decision for war? Okay Congress in war and then there was another gentleman over here I saw right here and then we'll do the left Thank you You're now a student from American University in the last foreign policy magazine there was a question about this exceptionalism and especially the question of the need for reformation of the political system what is your personal opinion if it's necessary to change some institutional arrangements especially to be able to to to to face all these challenges for framing U.S. foreign policy great and core interests branches of government in war and exceptionalism Rosa No? I will let my colleagues figure out our core interests Okay Charlie You know on the on the core interests I think that there's no question that there are two areas where America's hard power remain important for this foreseeable future and that's the Gulf because of the dependence on oil and the Iranian threat and that means keeping a sizable flotilla in that region and northeast Asia where the rise of China is causing a shift in the balance of power that the United States will have to deal with other than those issues there's obviously the threat of terrorism but I think we should have a much more confined and hard-headed view of interests beyond those that I just mentioned and be very careful about doing more Libyans, Afghanistan's and and ventures where we end up being the fixer of last resort those seem to me to be expensive propositions that go well beyond our core interests I think that there are lots of of fixes that that one can take I mean I think that you and your questions said that we need the American people to retake the political system most Americans feel very distant from the government very distant from democratic institutions and I don't think that there is a silver bullet but I do think that Obama is headed in the right direction when he speaks to the broad mass of America of the American public and says we need a system that advantages you and not a system that advantages the special interests and the people who are most advantaged what can you do about that I think that politically speaking there are lots of little little fixes that you can do none of which alone is that important but when they add up they may make a difference such as dealing with campaign finance such as dealing with congressional redistricting such as trying to find perhaps a way of using the internet or other modes to make democracy feel more personal and more responsive I think what could come up with a whole list of things and try to string together a set of reforms that might make a difference I would just say on interests the national security the security of our nation and its people the health and well-being of our citizens and our values and those play out in a number of ways in terms of domestic political reform I think you could take any issue across the board and say we will be hard pressed to address the scale of the problems we face until we massively change the way we finance elections redistricting and I was saying what in the context of Rose's article really try to redefine and re-energize democracy in this country in a new century and I having gone on the inside for two years in congress it is worse than anything you imagine from the outside and I know you imagine terrible things on the congressional war powers question there's obviously a constitutional question there there's also a functional question which is when people have to vote for something they take ownership over that decision in a different kind of way and I think I want to draw in a very quick analogy on this to what President Obama was able to do with the Libya intervention enforcing our allies not just to give rhetorical support but to actually cast votes in favor of justifying this intervention at times when that was starting to look like it might drag on and might be a very different scale of intervention than people had hoped you saw people wanting to run for the exits you saw some of the regional allies who had helped to legitimize it as well as some of those in Europe when you put people on the record for something they take that vote very seriously I can tell you from my own experience with that and so I think whether we're talking about the balance of powers within the US or what it means to actually get allies involved I think there is a really important accountability element of forcing people to go on the record whether it's other countries or within our own on that and you saw it with congress where some of the voices that had been most beating the drum to do the Libya intervention then turned around and voted against that authorization a pretty phenomenal political active of hypocrisy so you know the the interest question is really interesting because it's really hard to go beyond you know Tom's general ones or or Charlie's particular areas I mean let's let's think about a country called Afghanistan which after we got the Soviets out we didn't think was was important anymore and then proved to be extremely important you know in 9-11 if there was to be an H1 N1 virus you know breaking out you know in eastern Africa suddenly so even from even when I've been in you know in the State Department elsewhere in the policy world it's really hard to sort of define them in a in a fixed kind of way which brings us back to this theme about you know how do you reduce the standing vulnerabilities you have at home so energy security environmental sustainability competitive economy those are things that in a classic realist sense or sort of self help you can do for yourself so since you can't totally control what's going to happen out there it's all the more reason to to to focus on the domestic foundations and reduce those vulnerabilities that are largely about what we do for ourselves not what others do to us and it brings us back to the question of how you sort of fix things and this might be a better answer to your question Heather than before I mean I think it's really about sort of how we compete in a global era it's a global era it's not just China there's all sorts of countries out there and we need to effectively compete economically technologically with ideas in a variety of ways that to me actually speaks to the American exceptionalism debate can get people excited you know sort of a sense of what we need to do but when you think about that some of the barriers are our inability to do any kind of you know long term strategy and this has a lot to do with the way Congress operates or you know James Madison Federalist number 10 you know about the power of interest groups so what would Madison think if you read Politico today you know so I think I think we really need we're in a world in which other countries frankly you know if you look at some of Brazil's strategies or even some of China's strategies and areas like alternative technologies not you know in terms of competing in these areas we need to really compete in a global era and there's a whole lot of challenges there that are that are part of our domain to fix or not to fix from what we do for ourselves at home right up here in the front Jordan my name's Lee Yang I'm very happy to hear this panelist about democracy promotion I think that's a very good phrase I've been years in that case try to say promote even fairness I think we usually say about the democracy what we have for freedom that other countries feel jealous about us but I don't think this panel would agree with that I think we had really to promote and then tell that really reality is what we have and what's the weakness we have and I have a presented but the problem we can we need to get to your question that my question will be say can we really have real action to remedy the weakness that we have for instance can we really say do some cost effectiveness or real the particular abuse and waste and corruption and then within maybe three branches and maybe even fourth branches because there's overlaps so your your issue is how do you achieve cost effectiveness in government right cost effectiveness or eliminate those corruptions got it and make us really democracy thank you so how can we make our democracy real democracy Mel Guzner Hi, I'm Merrill Guzner with the Fiscal Times I've written a lot about budget deficits Romney is talking about and the Republicans an 8% increase if you project out over the coming year as opposed to an 8% decline and this is over previous projections and you mentioned Dr. Kupchin that you know the Americans do sort of respond to chest thumping in electoral terms whatever the economic underlying reality is so I guess this is really a framing question to couch the coming military build down in terms of the necessity for one in terms of our economic weakness in home and needing to balance budgets and all of that seems to me to you know be a different counter to that argument what's a better counter that sort of says America would benefit around the world by having a smaller military footprint in the decade ahead Great question how do you turn to it Ben Barber Yeah, Ben Barber from McClatchy newspapers perhaps for Mr. Jendelson given the fact that so many jobs are going abroad and in reality in a completely open labor market you can always find some people in China or India to do our jobs for 10 cents on the dollar or a penny on the dollar how can we ever overcome that So competitiveness right here the lady in white Hello, thank you my name is Guy Ann I'm a reporter with RT and I have a question for Dr. Coption use your loud voice I'm sorry and Dr. Jendelson thank you by the way it was a very interesting panel my question is regarding Iran the sanctions the crippling sanctions against Iran do you think they will help to turn the Iranian people against their government and the other question that also has to do with Iran the execution of this American convicted of espionage in Iran could that possibly become the spark that would cause an all-out confrontation and overall do you have a sense that this powder keg of tension over Iran is waiting for a spark to explode thank you and we'll take one last one from Diane in front and you're going to be really fast okay just in addition to smart power hard power soft power diplomacy also consideration of analyzing the other underlying conflict using tension reduction not using fear and Mr. Jendelson you just mentioned we need to compete in the global market but what about also we need to learn how to cooperate and more so a question about cooperation Iran getting corruption out of government Chinese cheap labor and Meryl Guzner's great question about how do you make decline sound good Charlie well I think that for starters you probably don't talk about decline they you know the republicans will continue to want to tag you with this this thing and I think we need to to develop a language that is about the renewal of America about investing at home about the importance of rebalancing our commitments and interests all as part of a of a dialogue that includes fiscal responsibility and I do think that Obama has a very large window that he can walk through left open to him by the republicans in the sense that I think any reasonable person needs understands that we need a responsible mix of budget cuts tax increases and domestic investment to bring the country back to life economically and I think that the the scaling back of the defense budget has to be a part of that that broader dialogue coming to the question about about cheap labor abroad yeah I think it is a huge part of this conversation in the sense that I think the most important reason that that wages middle-class wages in this country have been stagnant for two decades is because of globalization because precisely as you said it's hard for the American worker to keep pace when jobs are moving abroad and that's depressing wages only a domestic strategy of investment of reeducation is I think going to solve that problem finally on Iran you know I think we're definitely in a in a dangerous zone I hope that the Iranians are not stupid enough to attack an American ship or drive a small boat into the side of an American cruiser because I think that does have the potential to to quickly escalate I don't think that the United States is looking for a fight right now I do think the United States might be willing to use force in the not too distant future depending on what happens and I think that this move to the to the KUM facility is a dangerous one because it is much more difficult to carry out a military strike on that facility than in existing facilities and if they kick out the inspectors which they may do I think it will create a lot of pressure in Israel and in the United States for the potential use of of force do I do I think that these sanctions are going to turn the Iranian people against the Iranian regime I'm not sure it matters and that's because the Iranian regime seems to have demonstrated sufficient ruthlessness to keep down the opposition any last comments Ruth The only one I'll comment on is how do we how do we make a decline sound good and a shrinking military sound good I agree I think you you you don't frame it as decline I actually think on this one that that we could do a lot worse than then use the same script that the the right has been using in terms of talking about you know ordinary family has to balance its budget has to at least over the long term you know has to and we've been going through a period in which ordinary people had to think real hard about are you and when you look at your spending are you spending only on what you need or are you spending on all sorts of things that you don't need that are unnecessary that are irrelevant and this I think is Charlie's point about the scope of our commitments militarily now exceeds the scope of our interests even if you define our interests in a relatively broad sense so it's time to you know put our put our house in order in that sense and say wait a second some of these things are not things that we actually need whereas because we're spending so much on these things we don't actually need we're not spending on things that we do need thank you Tom first of all I think in addition to a normative question about whether we should cut the budget I think it's also important to have the facts which is that there's one reason that the sequestration cuts are out there which is that the Republicans were more interested in protecting millionaires than protecting the military that choice was on the table so the question of what should be done and sort of an intellectual sense here is different from let's be honest about that reality that choice was on the table for serious structural deficit reduction and that was rejected over and over again so I think it's important to understand that on the competitiveness challenge Jeffrey Sacks has a new book out I haven't read it yet I did read a couple of his op-eds around it talking about this point that in the 80s we were convinced that the threat was government when the threat was globalization in terms of our competitiveness strategy there's certainly a lot of history behind his thinking on that not just looking in the U.S. context but abroad and I do think that it's the level of rethink that we have to do if we're going to get serious about competitiveness is to understand it in that context on Iran you know I will leave that to experts but we'll only say that I think this is an incredibly serious situation and I do think the ball right now is in Iran's court I think this administration has given plenty of space for diplomacy and other things to work I think the stakes of what we're talking about now are incredibly serious and I think we're there are moves that need to be made here very soon or I think that that spark is a very real possibility so really quickly on the declineism you know it's the problem is not declineism it's denialism we're about renewal it means recognizing the problem and dealing with it not just lamenting it the notion of American exceptionalism is a stimulant not just as an anesthetic on the jobs question so a little promotion I've been writing a monthly column with a colleague who's a New York City investor on Huffington Post we call the bi-sectoralists which is about how private and public sectors need to work together and our last one we did a couple weeks ago I used the example that we have a cottage up in the Blue Ridge Parkway in the district next to Tom's old district and I get to walk the Blue Ridge Parkway you know and it's a twofer right in the 1930s it created jobs and 80 years later it's the backbone of the Virginia and North Carolina tourism industry you know I think I think smart public sector spending is crucial to how we do this on cooperation and Iran I mean it's a good example so take Turkey as an example you can compete in a global era and still cooperate with others you know I think we've been working much better with Turkey lately than we did back in the whole Iran nuclear issue which I think was as much our fault as it was you know Turkey and Brazils you know we're working with Turkey on Syria we're finding ways to cooperate you know looking listening to others ideas and you know amidst everything else Iran has indicated that they'd like to start talks again in Turkey you know is that a stalling tactic we don't know but I think just writing it off would be wrong it is a very dangerous situation you know we need to respond to deter them as well as pursue cooperation but we also need to avoid that soft on thing we need to think this through strategically and not worry about what others outside are saying about us because it's a classic crisis that has to be dealt with but we don't want it to spin out of control you know we'd like to get it to resolution you know not getting my next mortgage payment that we will but we can't write that off either thank you but as we close you know I want to just throw out a couple of items and I think Mel's questions is so important now as we talk about national security questions and budgets and strategy and you know what is the the progressive game plan if these are coherence if you use as a measure of what Americans felt they needed to spend as a measure of security before 9-11 the defense budget that preceded 9-11 is a pretty good figure so if you look at that and you look at the amount accounting for inflation over time we have spent since 9-11 2.3 trillion dollars above what Americans felt they needed to feel safe in the private sector that equates to about 6.5 million jobs so we are at this point of hard choices when you begin trying to frame and think about what's going on that and I think Bruce's comment about an inferiority complex or insecurity to be so important because the response from the Democratic Party I'm an independent but from Charlie and others but Charlie was not in the group but the large institutional response from the institutions of the Democratic Party was to try and hug the Pentagon more tightly than the Republicans were it was to hug a general day basically set up new institutions that essentially were trying to validate and initiate all sorts of things it built around armor for soldiers but then it went on and on and on but the narrative was not one that you critique the Pentagon and I tried to raise this issue the other day because it's very interesting when you listen to Leon Panetta talk about security it's very interesting because he is a numbers guy when we saw him in Halifax he talked about defense in the age of austerity and essentially if you have declining dollars the sense you get is you're going to have declining security you can't achieve greater security deliverables with less money and I went back and got a lot of hate mail for it but I went back to Donald Rumsfeld he was one of the last secretaries of defense to really shake up the generals and to sort of say we need to change the way we achieve security create efficiencies we use the revolution in military affairs apply information technology create new narratives on how you're going to achieve security why you may or may not be spending more money at the time there were budgetary constraints he denies that but I said we need to go back to that because there was a way that we talked about security and defense and achieving something more even if there were some fundamental institutional or financial constraints it's a really important lesson because the when you talk to the last comment I'll make is the metaphor I use to tell people where America is at and what its hopes can be is it where the general motors of nations very well branded sprawling capacity you always hear from generals we have you know we've got the greatest intelligence network in the world we can project power in the world we've got all of these assets America is still great well general motors was too and and that's the problem can you rewire reframe and reenergize a sprawling from and do it and that's the challenge and I think that's the that's the muck we're trying to do I want to thank Charlie Rosa Tom and Bruce and Michael Tomaske in Democracy a Journal of Ideas for sponsoring today's program thank all of you for watching online and being with us today but a round of applause to all of you thank you very much