to address these problems, but at the same time, although no one nation alone can solve the problems without leadership, it will be impossible to galvanize the response we need to meet the changes of our time, the changes that that not only focuses on issues like terrorism and nonproliferation, but also the new challenges like gliement change and disease and piracy, all that require an increased level of common activity, and this is something that i think we need to focus our efforts on. how do we generate the capacity in the international system to be able to meet these challenges? in our own efforts we've identified three core elements of a strategy going forward on mobilizing that sense of common or collective action. first beginning with our traditional alliances and partners. from this hemisphere where we

deepen our ties with canada and mexico. i came back from a trip from mexico and despite their problems and our common effort to deal with those problems in drug trafficking, our increased and deanenned -- deanened ties give us a chance to deal with the problems together. in our partnership with europe though we hear less about, it's precisely because they are in such good form and we have deep bonds of interest and values that allow us to work together not only on challenges in our area in the transat lin tick -- transatlantic area, but beyond on the economic global crisis on issues like the iranian nuclear program where the united states and europe cooperate together on the serious challenge. we will see this on display next month when nato holds its summit

to reaffirm the centrality of our alliance for the 21st century with a new strategic concept and a new way forward to allow us to deal with the challenges of the 21st century both through nato and the useu. also with our traditional allies in east asia, and i'll come back to that. that's the core of the strategy, but it is just a stepping off point because as we all recognize and you know very well that in addition to the traditional allies, there are new powers arising around the world that offer great opportunities for the united states to develop new relationships and new partnerships to meet these common challenges, and we have to develop the kinds of relationships with these emerging powers that will allow us to make sure that their role in the system is one that strengthens our capacity rather than weakens the ability to meet what we believe a largely shared

challenges. these, of course, are the emerging powers from i india and china to russia's new role to brazil, south africa, and so many others, and beyond these and the nation states are critical to the core of our international system, we need to go beyond these relationships with traditional allies and emerging powers to develop international structures for cooperation, the multilateral cooperation to bring people together to deal with the common challenges both on the regional and global level by silentenning the global institutions and the world bank and imf and others increase our capacity to deal with the challenges of our time. as i said, no nowhere is the set of challenges more obvious than east asia with a mix of the three elements very much in play. traditional allies, emerging

power, and new efforts to develop multilateral cooperation. as we gather here today, years as secretary of state. she visited even a brief stop i. in a very short period of time, the president is on his way to india beginning a tripe to esiaa, korea, and japan that reflects his commitment to building ties to this region. just as a final footnote, i am too am leaving on monday to represent the apec in japan this week. we are focused on this not to say the other countries aren't, but there's no doubt that the forces at work in our

world today makes east asia critical to our own long term security and prosperity. the economic dinism, the increased focus on capacity to meet challenges like nonproliferation and terrorism, disease, and climate change, make asia a critical set of challenges for us, and opportunities, i think, are enormous there if we both sustain our engagement and show leadership in working with the countries of the region to meet that, and again, here you can go through the three core elements of our strategy. first, the traditional allies. our relationship with japan is a remarkable one, and we have seen and reflect back on what happened in the 60 years of our alliance or further back from the end of world war ii and the transformation in japan to a modern democratic open society which is partnering with the united states on economic, political, social,

transnational, and security issues. we're working very hard to make sure that alliance lee mains -- remains relevant into the 21st century and our common efforts to redefine the ways on which we work together on the security front, on global institutions. i'm confident that relationship will be vibrant and a cornerstone of our engagement in asia. we have seen in recent years a tremendous deepening of our relationship with the republic of korea. another great story. if you think about what the situation was in south korea in 1960 and the level of poverty and lack of political opportunity in that system, and now there's a country that's not only a vibrant democracy now having joined the ranks of the g-20, hosting the summit, but also playing a role in the region and globally. they are hosting the second nuclear summit and partnering with us in afghanistan. it's playing a critical role in

the issues around the world, and we are really enormously appreciative of the leadership that the president and his administration in demonstrating that korea has moving from a country of consumer of security and now providing security to others. in australia, another part of our sustained alliance partnership, we are celebrating the anniversary of that alliance, and there's no more reliable partner for the united states and no country we appreciate more for its own contributions for security in its region and globally, and again in afghanistan and around the world. we work together in a relationship of confidence and of shared values and interests which is really unparalleled. we have important new partners in the region, the in connection withed importance and attention we play in southeast asia that includes two of our treaty

allies, thailand and the philippines that remain strong partners of the united states but also long term friends and friends we are building stronger relationships like indonesia, malaysia, and singapore. they are on display in the secretary's trip and the president's trip as well. of course, beyond these allies and traditional partner relationships, we have the two most significantly emerges countries in the world in this region, india and china. i think it's really significant to take an opportunity to reflect on the role that india's playing both in the region and globally today and the importance that we attach to building this bilateral relationship between the united states and india. the -- as many of you know, the first state visit that the president hosted was president singh, and over time that relationship has only grown closer.

india is dmon stlaiting they are ready to play an important role on the economic and political stage, a country that is experiencing sustained 8% economic growth where u.s. exports to india has quadrupled in goods and services. india is the second largest increasing investment in the united states now of our global partners, and again, a critical international partner now with us in the g-20, but also our relationship spans a whole range of activities in the economic, political, security, and human dimension. i've said in the past that we are entering what i call the third stage of our renewed relationship with india that began with president clinton's visit to india in 2000 that took an important step forward and

president bush's decision to move forward on nuclear cooperation with india, but now we're in the third stage that puts us into or bit in which we broaden that relationship to go beyond specific issues to a comprehensive partnership reflected in the u.s.-india strategic dialogue, and the many issues on display during the president's visit on education, technology, and agriculture, not only to help build a second green revolution in india, but also for us to work together to help meet the agriculture and food needs of other countries, particularly in africa, and of course, the e enormously strong people, the people relationship that we have with india, and it's significant that this is the first stop of the president's trip in east asia because india is not only a central player in its own region of south asia, but it is very much an east asia country as well participating with us in

the summit and increasingly engaged with its partners in east asia with the recent meetings illustrate. it's not a coincidental that we have seen an increase in our security engagement with india. it's now true that for india, the united states is a country that it has the most military exercises with. we've deepened our security partnership in many ways, and it's something that contributes broadly to the security of the region as a whole, so we welcome india's increasing role in the region and see it as a partner there. now, of course, the second and obviously equally important part of our challenge in dealing with new systemic powers is our engagement with china. as you all know in this past year, china surpassed japan as the second world's largest economy and passed germany as

the largest exporter and china has an important role to play, and if it plays a constructive role, has an important contribution to make which is why this past may we sent one of the largest delegations ever to participate in the second strategic and economic dialogue co-chaired on our side by secretaries clinton and geithner. secretary clinton has said, and i'm quoting her, in the 21st century it's not of anyone's interest to see each other the add adversaries. if you look back our engagement has led to important achievements including the participation in the nuclear summit here in washington and china's support for u.n. sanctions against north korea and iran, and while the path getting there was not an easy one, china signed on the copenhagen climate treaty to provide a platform for us to address the urgent question of

global climate change. we recognize in seeking this relationship of increased cooperation and pursuit of common interests with china, we recognize there will be areas of disagreement especially as china's economic growth is increased by military capacity. it's important that we find increased avenues of dialogue to address the challenges. it's what the academics call a security dilemma. there's an inherent risk and the only way to address that challenge is through dialogue, and in particular the importance of strengthening military tie between the united states and china. we welcome the fact china welcomed secretary gates to come to china to put that on a stronger footing because it's critical to our future. it's important to recognize

military to military ties are not one side or the other, but allows both sides to prevent miscalculation and allow ways to understand our common objectives and achievements particularly on issues like the south china sea as well as the need to address issues beyond the military dimension and increased importance of our ability to talk through perspectives and differences on human rights and the rule of law. i was happy to be able to welcome the chinese delegation for our human rights dialogue here to washington a few months past, and it's important to continue to be able to address our differences candidly whether it's about the condition of political disdense or the border question of openness and the opportunities for the freedom of expression and religion in china's society. these are big challenges. how do we sustain our traditional relationships with our allies and build them to make them 21st century?

our relationships, and dealing with the new emerging powers. in east asia, the nation state remains the core of the center of activity and the way in which we need to build up our efforts to meet these challenges, but that alone, i think, is going to be insufficient which is why we focused on the third element of our strategy which is building new institutions and structures of multilateral cooperation to enhance cooperation, to allow us to work more effectively together, and east asia presents a real challenge in that respect because historically east asia lags behind in other parts of the world in building the kinds of institutions. there's been reluctance to move towards formal institutions to tackle the hard problems of our times. i think we've seen over the past decade a realization that we need to work hard to complement

the bilateral relationships, and if you look over the last year or two you can see through our decision to join the treaty of cooperation, to secretary clinton's participation in forms and since she became secretary, secretary gates' recent participation in the ministers meeting, and now most recently secretary's clinton where she participated for the first time in the east asia summit is a prelude to our expectation that the president will join next year in this important new emerging institution as well as our continued commitment to apec this year in japan where i participate and the president joins the leaders a few days after, and the anticipation as we move from the japanese chair of apec next year which we will host it in hawaii and an opportunity to illustrate apec can be an institute to sustain

and deepen economic cooperation, increase trade and investment, and particularly the ability to deal with new challenges like dealing with regulatory standard and promoting green technologies and trading investment in green technologies. these all represent important opportunities for us to deal with common challenges, but we also see it in flexible and innovative tools like the mekong initiative to address the environmental and economic challenges in the mekong river valley and our north korea problem and others are all examples of trying to find new strategies in multilateral cooperation in east asia. how this comes out remains uncertain, but the one thing we know is the pros pelgts for a peaceful east asia that benefits all the people in asia and across the pacific depends on

our engagement there, and that's why we have a high priority on it and look forwards to develops relations with all the countries in the region. i think the engagement doesn't guarantee success, but in absence of that, we'd had little chance of achieving the goals of our country and the partners in the region. thank you for listening to me today, and i look forward to your comments and questions. [applause] do we have mics? yes, go ahead, please. >> [inaudible] is it on now? i'm dianne jacobson from jacksonville, florida. thank you for your comments. the theme has been that our nation can't be strong if our economy is not strong, and this morning we attended a breakfast on information technology, and

at that breakfast, we basically heard that while united states is very good at negotiating trade agreements, we might not be so good at enforcing those agreements, the result of which is that china and korea and vietnam and a variety of other countries, number one insist that we build manufacturing facilities in order to have access to their markets which is not exactly free trade, and that more importantly that our technology is either being reversed engineered or outright stolen, and we don't seem to have a mechanism to enforce that because we bring suets in their courts, and of course we lose because it's not a level playing field. my question is number one is that true from your perspective, and if it is true, what do we do about it because it dramatically affects our economic security and national security. >> i don't want to -- sorry, there we go. i don't want to underestimate

the challenges of enforcing trade agreements, but i wouldn't share that basic assessment. i think on the contrary that what we are seeing is one, an increased emphasis on role space trade, and a recognition by many countries who in the past have perhaps been scofling in the trade system that it's in their long term interest as they begin to move up the value chain that they need to understand it's in their interest to protect intellectual property and reserve their own commitments. we're determined to vigorously enforce our trade laws and the commitments that our partners made in the wto noticed in a number of years filed cases in china and we enforce that it's a priority for the president. he's made the expansion of u.s.

exports a priority for us, and we recognize we are confident that we can compete with the playing field is level and rules are observed, and we will take every advantage of the rights that we have both under bilath rail agreements and multilateral agreements. we also engage in the rule spaced enforcement on sustained engagement with our partner countries about why their own laws and own commitment and enforcement is critical to their own future. i believe we will see progress in that area, and we see this in the dialogue with others. we have to individual leapt, but -- vigilant, but in the long run there's increased recognition that countries cannot stay in their own economic growth through piracy or means that makes other countries less willing to deal with them. we are alert and devoted to the problems with devoted resources to it. i think this is something that is not a long term losing

proposition for us. i think we have the better argument when it comes to this, and i believe through our engagement, we will continue to make progress. >> from the denver world affairs counsel -- not on -- i got a green light. i'll shout. our mayor this summer hosted the -- our state is very interested in new relationships with latin america, and i noticed you didn't speak to latin america in your talk. could you address that part of the world and the other left behind continent, africa. >> i got to say it's -- every time you give a speech if you take one thing to talk about, you get accused for not talking about the other. i apologize. [laughter] i just came back from latin america. i'm not apologetic in the sense that i think we have a deep engagement with them.

i actually, though i didn't participate in the meeting that you described, i was in aspen for a meeting right afterwards with a number of heads of state in latin america including the president who is an old friend and heard about the meeting that you described. this is enormously important region for the united states. i wanted again if you think about i mentioned the first trip of the secretary's was to asia, but the first meeting with any heads of state was just before president obama inauguration, and we had sustained level of engagement with mexico and the president participated in the summit of americas and the president twice participated in oas meetings. we've had extensive travel todd region and a number of key leaders from the region in the united states. they just met with the newly elected president in columbia in new york just after the general assembly.

the president had a chance to talk with the newly elected president of bring zill a few -- brazil a few days ago. we see a number of opportunities and a real transformative environment in latin america, and what is significant about that is we believe there's an opportunity in this region not only to work together on common challenges, but to learn from each other that the, that it's not just a question of the united states telling others what to do, but to know we're dealing with common problems and how to create social economic activity and social inclusion throughout the hemisphere and our pathways to prosperity is sharing economic opportunity and how we learn from programs like brazil's program or the opportunity's program in mexico to create jobs and economic opportunity for those who are less well off. how we work together on the problem of criminal organizations and drugs and

creating opportunities to deal with the energy challenges in the hemisphere and in the area of green east asia renewable -- renewable energy to charted a new path in that dimension. what is encouraging about is is there's a tremendous con convergence of interest in the hemisphere. you don't see too much about it because we don't have clashes. we have a few differences with the leaders in the region, but there's not a deep debate in the region about the centrality of democracy, about the need to have our economies be open and grow. we have opportunities to build and stengthen those partnerships both on the bilateral and regional level, but i am very optimistic from my own engagement in a sense we have strong partners, that we're working to the to deal with bilateral and regional problems and also working to the on a global stage. in fact countries like mexico

and brazil and argentina participate in global institutions like the g20 and the fact that mexico is hosting the next round of the conference of parties on climate parties in cancun and columbia joining the security counsel is are proof that we have deep engagements with the hemisphere. we understand the importance and something that is resonant with the people of this country to understand the need to have strong political, social, economic, and people-to-people relations throughout this hemisphere. okay. great. >> thank you, i'm -- [inaudible] first of all, thank you for a very impressive overview. i'm always amazed of people at your level keeps these things strawght. [laughter] in the course of yesterday, we had a reminder from a speaker that strategy is a question of making choices, and in the course of yesterday there was areas of choice either expressed

or heavily implied. the first was a question in breamer put to tony blair in talking about global economic government in concert with countries of different values namely china, and which of our values would we have to compromise, adapt, or otherwise manage in order to have peaceful ordererly economic government, and i think that the flipside what economic interests are we willing to put at risk for the sake of our values? second area has to do with security. we heard a lot of new areas that are becoming security concerns. we heard one expression that said, hey, some of this we have to absorb. there's a question there again of priorities and choices. which areas are areas we would devote resources to and which would we have to absorb? i asked these two questions in light of two perspectives. i was a foreign service officer for a number of years, and to be

perfectly honest, i wonder at our government's institutional ability to analyze questions of that nature which means then because of that and i suspect too, and i'm quoting somebody, but the question was u.s. strategy is a list of desirable objectives without priorities expressed and with no accounting for costs. i know in your position especially that the u.s. strategy pro-- pronouncements spread the good news, but is it time to take on some very difficult public expressions. thank you. >> thank you, sir. those are important questions and one i take seriously. you may know i served at structural policy planning in the cline toll administration's first term. and you see the pictures of ken and henry owen and other

distinguished thinkers of our time, you are challenged to answer the questions you raised. ..

ing from the first day of in administration signing order and stopping torture and closing gitmo those were statements we made about our values. as we speak my colleague and others are at geneva human rights council undergoing period dick review. we're talking about our own record in front much others. if we want to be credible dealing with human rights violations in burma, china, north korea and elsewhere that we have to be prepared to have others criticize us

and give answers back in terms of what we think. if you look at sustained basis, nobody believes by pounding the table that you will get countries to change their ways on important issues of freedom of expression, freedom of religion and the like. we have to stay at it. we have to have a sustained view. we have to support those who are fighting for those. we have to provide assistance in smart ways those willing to pursue it. i don't believe these are profoundly deep tradeoffs from a strategy point of view. the resources of course that is a tradeoff. we have obligations as first question observed we have an obligation to make sure our economy is strong. we will have to do our part in the national security community to deal with our challenges of our budget deficit and the like which means we can't do everything we want to do. one of the reasons we've undertaken this quadrennial development and diplomacy review is to be smarter about our own ability to make these long-term strategic decisions. the pentagon is pretty good at these things. their qdr, the quad dreen

y'all defense review. eric: is long term look out at capabilities and tradeoffs that need to be main not just for today's fight but 10 and 20 years time. similarly we need the capacity in the state department to do that kind of planning and make those choices. i'm confident after we complete this, the secretary announcing the outcome of this in a month or two time, that you will see a very, a clear, attempt to address this question of tradeoffs, priorities and what are the things we most need to be able to do to meet the challenges of the 21st century. i'm sorry i have to go. thank you all for your attention and thank you for the work that you're doing. [applause] >> we return live to the world affairs coins sieve america. coming back from lunch. we expect to hear shortly from the keynote speaker, former ambassador to iraq. ryan crocker.

>> i wanted also to join maria thanking ryan and general odierno to their service to the united states of america. to sit here with them is a great honor for me. you also notice the retired state department has now got the pentagon surrounded here. we'll try to go from there. general odierno has a meeting with the secretary of defense a little bit later this afternoon. so we've got a hard stop about the 1:15. so the three of us thought that we would sort of dispense with opening statements and move to just some questions and then we want to leave plenty of time for all of you to have the benefit of asking questions of them. and so i thought that with your permission, i would be interested in following the ideas that maria had put out and talking a little bit about the future of iraq. i think it is also important at this stage to consider how the future of iraq connects to the larger questions of strategy that we were talking about this morning about the fight against extremism and

terrorism and the very important subset here. pakistan and since we've heard about it so much the fact we have a former ambassador to pakistan here is an important thing. we ought to talk a little bit about that. and third, as marie yaw said for me one of the most interesting things about having these two people sit here that they were, as she said the vanguard how military and civilian people worked together and what they did and also in the future. i would like to take a little bit of time to see what lessons they take from the work in united states and iraq and the work they did together. we'll move as quickly as we can to your questions because i think that is a very important part of this event. i want to stick then with the issue that's in your book, the future of u.s.-iraq relations. i think that is fundamentally a question of the future of iraq. so i wanted to, general, if i could start with you, sort of take on this question. here we all are. we have invested this time and energy and effort and

treasure and blood. what happens next in iraq and what's it look like? >> i think i would like to start out by saying it is important to understand how important iraq is, i believe, to the future and what is key place it is in the middle east and the roll it can play in my mind, of, bringing increased security, not only inside the middle east but to the united states. iraq, as everyone knows, is in a very strategic location inside of the middle east. it's a mixture of many difficult groups of people, sunni, shia, kurds. it has iran on the right, to the east it has many sunni-arab states, to the south and to the west and it has this large kurdish population in the northern part of iraq. and so, this represents so many peoples within the middle east, just iraq itself, becomes an extremely

important place for our future. then you put on top of that the fact that they have moved, started to move towards a democratic process. they're interested in having open, economic and environment inside the country and once this starts to take hold it could be a great representation for the middle east. and in my mind it could then create an atmosphere of more stability. and an example for other nations. so as we look to the future of iraq i would say, let me first talk from a security perspective. there is still violence in iraq today but it is a much different violence than it was just three years ago. three years ago we had a widespread insurgency throughout the country that was spread from the north to the south, from the east to the west. today basically you have

three groups, i would say three different categories of security issues within iraq. one is, you still have a very small group that's involved in what i would consider to be an insurgency where they're just trying to disrupt iraq. they want to see the government fail. they would like to see someone else take power in iraq. but that group now is extremely small. secondly, you have al qaeda in iraq who i consider is now conducting terrorist operations. they know longer can conduct broad spectrum counterinsurgency operations. they are conducting terrorist attacks although much less than they used to but still conducting terrorist attacks against the people of iraq. why are they doing that? there are many theories on this. i believe of course they do knot want the democratic process to fail, they do not want the state of iraq to become stable. they would much rather see it be fragile or failing so they can take advantage of that in order to move forward the idea of creating

a base for terrorism. i believe they failed in their attempt to do this but they won't stop. so, the important piece is that we've now created, we can talk about this later, but we've now created a security force in my mind that is capable of dealing with this for the most part. we can talk more about that later with questions. so i then, my position is, iraq is now about political, about politics and about economic issues and we still have a ways to go to resolve some of the political issues involved and we still have some ways to go to continue to improve their economic issues. i think that is what is important as we look to the future. i think i will maybe leave it to ryan. >> well, first, i would just like to say what a pleasure it is to be here today. pleasure to be with my friend and comrade, ray odierno.

this is the first time we've been together since we were in iraq and i have to say you clean up very nice [laughing] >> they were disappointed in my dress uniform. i don't own one so. >> the second thing i would like to do is move to my prepared statement. [laughter] which actually has to do, not with me but with you. i'm delighted to be at this annual gathering. i have worked with world affairs councils around the country for many years and have enormous regard for the organizations. i've always worked with the national organization that we represent today, the world affairs councils of america, and there are some great councils around this country but speaking from the policy side, as great as those parts are, the sum

that the world affairs councils of america represent is far greater. i had the opportunity and in conjunction with general odierno to reach back to the national level to ask for a leadership mission to come to iraq during the transition between bush and obama. a number of you who participated in that mission are here today. it made a difference. i think there are other leadership missions that need to take place. i would like to see a leadership mission to afghanistan. i would like to see a leadership mission to iran. i would like to see another leadership mission to iraq. we have turned the page. i'd like to see you get out there and make an assessment before we decide we're closing the book. and that from a policy perspective that only really works if there is a national organization. so i commend you, marc grossman, laurie murray, all

the people who worked to put this together today. [applause] iraq going forward, i would agree with virtual everything general odierno said. i see the glass as distinctly more half full than half empty. he picked through a number of very positive points. let me tell you what my worry list is. for all of the progress that iraq has seen over the past three years in particular, the challenges in front remain immense. sectarian tension between shia and sunnis has subsided. ethnic tensions between kurds and arabs though have increased. those tensions lie on a rickety foundation of

unresolved institutional and constitutional issues, states rights issues. the authorities of a regional government in kurdistan versus a federal government in baghdad versus provincial government elsewhere. general odierno and his forces literally done heroic work in conjunction with both the regional government and the federal government to keep the peace along the green line but this is a holding action. the hard decisions still lie in front of iraqis. general odierno has painted the picture of what iraq could be. an enormous strategic asset for the region and the world. iraq for the last half century has really defined itself in the opposite manner, an adversary, a problem, an enemy. we now have the opportunity to see a different set of relationships move forward. we have an architecture for

that. the agreements that are negotiated during my time as ambassador, both the security agreement and more importantly the strategic framework agreement that defines our relationships in all aspects. but there has to be content to these agreements. so, in addition to all of the unresolved issues it iraq, here's my biggest worry. that in america as we look at other issues overseas like afghanistan and pakistan that take our attention, as we look at our domestic issues, particularly our economy, that we are not thinking about turning the page as president obama said. we're thinking about closing the book in iraq. that iraq is over, time to move on. good-bye, good luck. if our thinking and if our

resources as a new congress moves into office does go along these lines, i think the chances for long-term strategic success built on the great work that general odierno and his troops and a lot of brave civilians already put into this will diminish sharply. american interests will pay, iraqi people will pay european more. >> may i ask, both of those are interesting and good answers but they're from more or less an american perspective. put yourself in the shoes of iraqis at this point. if there were two iraqis or three iraqis sitting here today, some of whom had national responsibility or some of like these people here citizens interested in the future of their country what would they say? ryan, i'll ask you first. >> polling is a particularly imperfect business and particularly developing

societies like iraq but i was struck by two polls. a "cbs poll" here found 70% of americans were done with iraq. time now at len remission, just time to get out. been too long, cost too much, too many other things to do. a poll conducted the same week in iraq had the same percentage, 70% of iraqis but it was 70% of iraqis who thought it would be a terrible mistake for them if the u.s. decided to cut, and head home. ray of course has more recent experience but what i encountered talking to iraqis in government and in the markets was a range of views on america. some tiny percentage who were really grateful for everything we had done from day one.

a vast middle range with varying degrees of emotion who said, boy, have you guys screwed this up to greater or lesser degrees but almost all of them at the end of the day saying, stay here until it is fixed bus because if you leave it will get even worse. partly anecdotal, partly based on some surveying, partly based on the nearly unanimous votes in favor of the strategic framework agreement that binds us together as allies, iraqis in many cases may not like us but i think in most cases feel that our role going forward is essential for their security and stability but ray has much more recent views. >> i don't disagree at all with what ryan said. we have to be careful confusing the last thing ryan said, liking versus needing. it is very difficult i found over the years, i had

trouble actually myself coming to grips with this, it is hard for a country to like somebody who invited them, who overthrew their government and stayed for a very long time. the fact of the problems they had with saddam hussein and they wanted him overthrown you have foreign people within your own country and foreign military within your own country it is sometimes hard to like because they want to see themselves take control of their own country. they understand where they think they can go, the vision that they have, i believe the iraqis believe they should be, they have ducational systems andle the educated to beble to do that. i think they believe they have the natural resources to do that. but they need significant help because those resources and the infrastructure associated with it has been so ignored, really since probably 1980. you can make the argument that most people don't

realize iraq has been at war since 1980. 80-88. "desert storm" in '91. then you had saying shungs with the overthrow of saddam hussein in 2003. whe underestimated the impact that sanctions had on the people of iraq. i'm not so sure they had an effect on saddam hussein and the government. for example, if you went around and talked, doctors weren't able to update based on what e english, medical technology and instructions almost given in english, they weren't able to have access to that. oil infrastructure hadn't been updated in 20 to 30 years. electrical infrastructure had not been updated. i caught the term, i called it societal devastation. one of the things we did we underestimated the societal devastation when we got into iraq. that is partly why it has

taken so darn long there because we didn't understand what would come out of that. part of that was an insurgency. part of that was other people trying to take control. the iraqis believe the united states if they really wanted to could fix this problem. and they think we have chosen not to fix it. and we've explained to them tile and time again we have done everything we can to help them to fix their problem. and so what we're trying to do now, they are now taking more control. they are now are a sovereign nation based on the agreement that was negotiated back and signed back in december of 2008. and so what we're now trying to do is build their capabilities so they can move forward. so the people of iraq believe they need our help to do that because there is still a mistrust between elements inside of iraq. they don't, they have not built up trust between each other yet. and we kind of act as an honest broker, somebody who is there, to help them work through their issues, not to

solve their problems for them but be there and create the environment for them to solve their own problems. and i think that's the role we have to play moving forward in my mind. >> thank you very much. i would like to stay with iraq for a moment but yet turn a little bit to the questions of diplomacy and civilians and military people working together. one of the things that seems to me is that you two pioneered a way of working together. and, when you think about the president obama's national security strategy and focus on the whole of government, and you think about the lessons that we learned in the bush administration about the whole of government, and here i would say, this isn't just the state department working with the military, but it is the civilian side of government, the power of the civilian side of the united states government working with the military. i would be interested as you think going forward here, in the african command now, military, civilian at the top, very tight work together, in southcom, very much, working civilians and

military working together, what lessons did you draw and what lessons would you give to those who are, come now and say i have this responsibility, it is a whole of government responsibility, how do i do it? >> let me go officers. i would just say that, first off as i go talk to my military audience in the leadership schools and everything else, first thing i would say to everyone, there will never be a conflict again where it is a pure military solution. i just don't see that happening any time, anywhere. and the reap is because the complexity of the world we live in today and the environment we live in, whether it be the information management, the information age whether it be what people now expect pause they have instantaneous access to information they know, they know how to, they ask for how people can help them to solve their problems and the

military can't do that by itself. so no matter where we go, we're going to have to have a civilian component that either goes in with us or very close behind us to solve the problems that we have to solve. and i think the lesson learned here is, we just don't simply have the expertise to do that. what we can do, we can do some things when the environment does not allow civilian agencies to operate because of the level of violence. so we can do some minor things but our whole way of moving forward is to set up an environment within the civilian leadership can come in and take over those things where they have the expertise and they have the ability to reach out to bring the expertise in to help us to solve these problems. so what are the lessons learned that i have come out of this with, even because the counterinsurgency strategy i would say brigade commander level or battalion commander level is unit of effort. in military you talk about

unit of command. you want unit of command. unit of command is easy. everyone workings for them and you tell them what to do and they supposedly do it, supposedly. unit of effort is very different. unit of effort means, we have this diagram i used to draw, in one place up in northern iraq you had border, border police. we had the department of homeland security working there. we had other governmental and security and intel agencies working there. we had the state department working there. we ad usaid working there. we had nongovernmental organizations. we had the united nations. we had foreign military units working in there. then i had a brigade commander responsible for this, i was responsible and i say i want you to build unit of effort. what you have to do, you have to build relationships. you have to understand what they're trying to achieve. then how you can assist each other in moving forward to this broad goal you're requiring trying to achieve.

what we use to do is ignore many of these organizations. we didn't pay any attention to them t caused us problems. made it much more difficult than we had to. it is about gaining unit of effort and realizing that from a four-star level general down to the lieutenant colonel level. frankly i found the lieutenant colonel did a hell of a lot better job than four-star generals did because they did it for survival. what i realized we have to teach this and we have to be the examples. we have to lay this out and show we have a strong team and we understand this piece of unit of effort. that's what i think we worked with, the state department starting with ryan. when he was over there. and then attempting to carry that forward. and it is very important. but again it is just not the state department. it is all these other places the u.n. plays a major role in iraq and we want them to play even a bigger role. so you have to at least meet, talk with them, build

relationships understand what they're trying to achieve. try to build a synergy between what they're doing and what you're doing. so that is probably the number one lesson learned. >> thank you very much. ryan. >> just two brief comments. purely military and purely diplomatic problems cease to be with the gap ceased to be important. it is now one big, messy, political military world. certainly in iraq and certainly in afghanistan. so you have to have that unit of effort. and it starts at the top with both dave petraeus and ray odierno. it was, you know the old american revolution mantra, we had better hang together or most assuredly we will hang separately. any chance of success was going to come out of that unit of effort and everything we did we basically did together.

we had joint strategic assessment teams. joint campaign plans. joint campaign plan implementation task force. joint working groups. more joint task forces. with general odierno, members of his staff were members of my staff. my closest, most tightly held morning meetings always had a representative of general odierno in the office. there simply could not be any daylight between us and if you can get that going at the four-star level you can push it down, not without pain, wailing, gnashing and sometimes bloodshed but you can do it. so the first part of the answer is, you just get 'er done on the spot. the harder problem and one that in my view we still have not mastered, is institutionalizing this. there is no manual for whole

government organization and approach. the state department came up years ago with an office called the coordinator for reconstruction and stabilization that is supposed to coordinate the civilian effort worldwide. it is still a shell. and what i found i had to do as ambassador was go through the speed dial to various cabinet-level secretaries saying, mr. attorney general, i really badly need 20 five assistant u.s. attorneys and i need them a week from friday, okay? there isn't a mechanism to compel that whole government approach. it is left to field commanders, i think military and civilian, and i hope that as we move ahead as a government we find ways to better impose and coordinate that and just to pick up on ray's last point, it isn't just whole of government.

it's, it is whole of international effort. one of the things we successfully did in iraq was bring the united nations into coordinated operations where they worked off of our provincial reconstruction team bases. we housed them. we secured them. you moved them. they could not have done this on their own and they made a crucial difference as we moved into the elections. so it is an internationalization of the whole of government's effort right now that is being carried out more by the force of will of individuals in the field than it is by any effective standard operating procedure. >> add to that one more piece. when we used to have, and ryan and i would meet three, four times a week in the mornings or at least talk on the phone or something but that sounds like it is a minor thing but you don't understand how much goes on, how much was going on every single day inside of iraq and ryan would be working

significant amount of political issues. i would be working significant amount of military security issues and they overlap. and if it wasn't for us sitting down and talking through and letting each other know what is going on we would have disconnects. we would end up working against each other potentially. and so it is absolutely key for the senior leaders to sit down and then, when we did the surge we embedded state department teams with our brigades. we found all of a sudden we gained the sinner ingy that they were working together because they were sharing everything they were doing together. a and so it sounds sometimes, monday we had a meeting. a meeting talking about very serious issues every single day can make a huge difference and there's no way i could have known everything he was doing and he could know everything we were doing every day. so it was important we sat down and discussed that. . .

>> we want to do all these things together which you. and, of course, we have 40 people for every one of theirs or 50, or 100. i don't know. [inaudible] >> okay. [laughter] so what we had to do as ryan said is i started embedding people inside the embassy and they work for the ambassador. to build their capacity and use their expertise. and it served me better. because then we learned what was

going on. went a better idea how we could support and it brought the synergy together. so it's about leadership. and i'm not, you know, this is always about leadership. if the leaders are not willing to do this it will not happen. if leaders are willing to do it, it will happen. especially now as ryan said, it's not codified. but we certainly know it must be because we know in afghanistan, they are doing the same thing. we did in iraq. and even in pakistan where we have some military forces they're doing some humanitarian things. all round the world they have to be very tightly needed with the ambassadors. if you don't do that, you will never have unity of effort. >> thank you very much. >> i invite you now to pose questions. we have a few minutes before this panel is, i would be very, very grateful for questions and comments. >> joyce davis with the world affairs council at harrisburg. i think everyone in this room pretty much is the mother with

the middle east. and we've watched how, in many countries, the people will experiment at least with islamic governments. so the question that am asking you is if indeed the u.s. is closing the books, clearly stepping away, to allow the iraqi people to determine their fate, and considering what we know about the influence of iran amongst the majority of she is in the country, can you envision, you know, the possibility of an islamic state emerging after the united states leaves? and what do you see as factors that would contribute or not contribute to that? and how do you think the american people will feel, having basically created another islamic state? >> well, my first theory on the middle east is its competition. you just asked one incredibly

complex question. there is little likelihood of an islamic state emerging in iraq because iraq muslims are divided between sunnis and shia. they would not be able to agree at all on a common theocratic approach to government, as happened in the case of iran. another dimension of this is the relationship between iran and iraq. the vast majority of iranians, of course, are shia. a substantial majority of iraqis are shia. yet those two countries had a vicious eight-year war to defend their histories, their borders, their nationalities, their ethnic cities against the other. the common bond did nothing to

ameliorate probably the most vicious ground campaigns we've seen since the trench warfare of world war i. but that does not mean iran's is not a problem with iraq. i will come back to my earlier comment here the iranians. when i got there in the beginning of '07, they were sponsoring militias that were hugely destructive. because of the surge, general odierno had a key role in implementing, we started a virtuous circle where sunnis turned against al qaeda, shia noticed that instead of sunnis fighting shia, they were fighting the common enemy. they reassessed their ties to iranian backed militia. the iraqi government turned against those militias and defeated them. so a bad couple of years for

iran, but do you know the iranians are saying now? they are saying, hey, your american friends are going home soon, and guess what? we are still going to be here. we're always going to be here, because we've always been here. and that is why i urge that, as a government, congress and a people, we turn the page to increasing iraqi responsibility to an increasing civilian support role but we not close the book. because believe me, there are others out there. not just the iranians, also al qaeda, the syrians who also have a very bitter history with iraq, who are all set to march through the remaining chapter without us. and it will not be a pretty sight. >> i have to delineate between what iran wants, what is going on. i think iran obviously wants to have significant influence over

iraq. they would probably like to see an islamic state and status in iraq at some time. you know, there's also think we haven't talked about, ryan probably knows more about that idea, but but there's also this religious quarrel between iran and iraq, the head of shia islam. so that plays a role in all this. but what iran wants, what iraqis want are very different things. iraqis do not want iran to come in and have lots of influence inside of iraq. every poll, and as i've watched iraqis vote over the last several years, they want to have iraqis in charge and they would like to see this democratic process. because their participation has been tremendous. so what i worry about is that they lose confidence in the

democratic process, especially as we continue to go through this long stalemate of forming a government. and i worry more about that, but that can lead to, not that i believe iran will have this wave of influence. i think iraqis will allow that to happen. are their factions that will? yes. iraqis as a whole will not allow that to happen. i want to we emphasize what ryan has said. that is why it is important -- i always worry about in 2011, just a little over a year from now, when our u.s. forces leave, that we lose interest in iraq. to me, that's the issue of the future. is we cannot lose interest. and it goes back to the strategic framework agreement which talks of political economic relationships, cultural exchanges, educational exchanges, medical exchanges. these all played a key piece for us sustain a relationship that

also allowed the iraqis to continue to build a more stable government which allows them to stand up against countries like iran and some of us who want come in and try to dominate and have too much influence inside of iraq. so in my mind, the next three to five years are the most critical. and it has to do with how we react to that. they will be be a lot of discussion about how much money we spent on iraq, because they are an oil nation and they should spend our money. i don't think anyone disagrees with that, but we know that they will not reap the benefits of their oil probably until 2013 or 14. because they have to rebuild the infrastructure to get it out of the ground. so until that time we have to be there to assist them through political and economic issues, and to me, that's the way for us to stop. although i would argue i think that would be, i don't think that will ever happen, but i never say never.

>> we have a short question and to short answers. >> what i would like to do is pressed further on this whole issue of capacity building. many of the current capacity building efforts are pretty much get on a time line until the u.s. military begins to go home. in part because, as i understand it, there is this habit of ensuring that nobody goes out, outside the green zone without a lot of military escort. at some point that's not going to be possible, and yet the capacity build is going to have to be longer-term. so how do we square that, not in the level of raw strategy but insurance of the operational piece of this, sustained this capacity when we may not be able to provide military support that we presently do? >> i think first off, you know, the plan is to fashion is a misnomer to think and what is in the green zone. there are people all around the country inside of iraq.

there will be two conflicts established. there will be other outpost, state department outpost. i will call them an outpost for now, in other parts of the country, where they will continue to support capacity building within iraq. they work with military escorts. some work with some civilian contractor escorts. over time, what we advised them to do and they are now starting to do, start to let the iraqis provide escort. i have enough confidence in iraq military they will be able to do that, with some u.s. oversight for that. and so they have to start moving in that direction which will allow us been to do this capacity building. i also, it's kind of related, the one thing where i have changed in my view overtime as i've seen iraq progress, is i believe there's a time limit, large military presence becomes

counterproductive. and i think we are close to that time. we are starting to become counterproductive because as iraqis see the iraqi security forces continue to improve, they don't understand why you need 50,000 u.s. forces on the ground. so that's why the plan is to slowly go down to zero as they increase their capacity. and that's why today we just have trainers and advisers. iraqis have been doing security in iraq now since the beginning of 2010. so it's been about 10 months where they have really been in charge of everything, and we have slowly drawn down our force. they've done pretty well. we have not seen security get worse. we haven't seen it get worse. we have to continue that. >> i will sneak in one last question. >> i really like the unity of effort that you talk about, and i was just wondering if you could so to speak to that

pervasive and top american military command, or are you fairly unique? >> i would just say, we have learned this. i mean, the last major conflict of iraq in 2003 was desert storm. we were in and out. we went in, military do the job, we left, everything was great. it went well. this obvious he was much more complex, and we realize that's the only way you can succeed, and we realize that now in afghanistan. and so i think within the military, we clearly understand this now. but my worry is what ryan just said, it's not codified. i worry that we will lose, over time, what we have learned here. and we will repeat mistakes of the past. so is my responsibility and others to ensure that we don't do that. >> in my foreign service career, i have had a long and very productive relationship with my

military counterpart. i would just give you a couple of examples that i was ambassador to kuwait in the mid 1990s when saddam hussein looked like he was going to invade again, a swift response from the administration in 1994 precluded that. but then the commander, central command, and i spent the next three years working together to set in place security agreements and security architecture in kuwait, airbases, robust exercises, and so forth. to guarantee that it could never happen again. civil military cooperation was, in kuwait, was the number one item on my part for the. in pakistan in 2005, the great kashmir earthquake killed 80,000 pakistanis in two minutes. led to the largest and longest

airborne humanitarian relief mission by the united states since the berlin airlift. and that was a completely coordinated civil military operation. i chaired meetings three times a week, seven days a week for five months out of my office bringing everybody together for a total unity of effort approach. it can be done. it is being done around the world. because again, if you're smart enough to get to where three of us have gotten, and lucky enough, you have learned how important that sort of thing is. but it still needs to be codified. >> i've got to just -- you also have a book. the good news about this though is we have a lot of young officers both in the state department and the military who have experienced this at the lowest levels, and they understand the importance of a. so i think that will bode well for us in the future.

>> quickly. with the increase in the number of women in the state department, and now in the military, you have the opportunity to get a lot of right wing thinking into that. will right brain thinking get into iraq? and when and how? >> ray, what do you think? >> well, you know, it's a great point. [laughter] >> i'm serious here. the forest service state department has worked very hard to get a foreign service that looks like america, particularly in gender balance. and i'm kind of pleased that

three of my last four bosses as secretary of state have been women. we have an award now. this is going to set incredibly boastful, and it is, in may 2009, secretary clinton created something called the ryan crocker award for outstanding achievement in expeditionary diplomacy. that means basically go to really, really awful places. and if you come back alive -- [laughter] -- we will present something to you. it's been given twice. it was given last year to a potential reconstruction team leader in eastern afghanistan, spent 18 months out their, lost to a for people to ied attacks, spoke fluent, negotiate agreements, tribes in the military, them between tribes,

she left three teenage kids at home to go do that. and the second award was just presented the day before. do and patterson of our outgoing matters -- ambassador to pakistan. for those of you who have dug out there who really want to see combat, don't send them to rate. send them to us. [laughter] [applause] >> if all of you i think would join you and thank you to panelist for the service to the united states, and also for this panel today. thank you very much. [applause] [inaudible

conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> i think we would all agree that general odierno and ambassador ryan crocker have definitely helped those fulfill the mission of our conference, and the mission of our organization. the reason why we're all here for the past two or three days is so that as the leadership of our council around the country can come in and engage on a critical national security issues with the critical players in national security, and we've had that experience for the past then have a we have certain hat just over lunch. we hope that you take what you're learning here, you take a back to your communities and help educate the american public on global issues, which is our mission as the world affairs

councils of america. and i just want to reiterate, we've got a great afternoon coming up. we have about a 15 minute break now, and thank you all for being here. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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the world affairs councils of america hosting its national conference here in washington, d.c., today. we heard earlier, deputy secretary of state james steinberg who opened the conference with a speech about u.s. foreign policy priorities. and coming up in the next panel we'll hear about briefing rooms to blogs, foreign policy in the new information era. in our latest news, house speaker nancy pelosi is going to be running for minority leader as the hill newspaper reports her decision is splitting some democrats. one congressman from north carolina may challenge her bid. president obama is offering 10 day trip to asia. you attendees with leaders in india, indonesia, south korea and japan. on monday he will be in new delhi to address the indian parliament before heading to jakarta that the present plant something in seoul for veterans day next thursday when he will give a speech to a u.s. troops stationed there he will return to washington on sunday

november 14. before the president left washington, he addresses the latest jobs numbers from the white house. >> [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] >> and again we will be taking you now to some remarks from the president that were given early or today about the latest jobs numbers. >> good morning, everybody. we are in the middle of a tough fight to get our economy growing faster, so that businesses across our country can open and expand, so that people can find good jobs, and so that we can repair the terrible damage that was done by the worst recession in our lifetimes. today we received some encouraging news your based on today's jobs report, we've now seen private sector job growth for 10 straight months. that means that since january,

the private sector has added 1.1 million jobs. let me repeat, over the course of the last several months, we've seen over a million jobs added to the american economy. in october, the private sector has added 159,000 jobs. and we learned that businesses added more than 100,000 jobs in both august and september as well. so we have now seen for months of private sector job growth above 100,000, which is the first time we've seen this kind of increase in over four years. now, that's not good enough. the unemployment rate is still unacceptably high and we've got a lot of work to do. this recession caused a great deal of hardship and put millions of people out of work. so in order to repair this damage, in order to create the jobs to meet the large need, we need to accelerate our economic

growth so that we are producing jobs at a faster pace. because the fact is an encouraging a jobs report doesn't make a difference if you're still one of the millions of people who are looking for work. and i will be satisfied until everybody who is looking for a job can find one. so we've got to keep fighting for every job, for every new business, for every opportunity to get this economy moving. and just as we pass a small business jobs bill based on ideas from both parties and the private sector, i am open to any idea, any proposal, in the way we can get the economy growing faster so that people who need work can find it faster. this includes tax breaks for

small businesses, like he from taxes on new equipment, so that they've got an incident to expand and hire, as well as tax cuts to make it cheaper for entrepreneurs to start companies. this includes building new infrastructure, from high speed trains to high speed internet, so that our economy can run faster and smarter. it includes promoting research and innovation, and creating incentives in growth sectors like the clean energy economy. and it certainly includes giving tax breaks low for middle-class families and extending unemployment benefits to help those hardest hit by the downturn while generating more demand in the economy. it's also absolutely clear that one of the key to creating jobs is to open markets to american goods made by american workers. our prosperity depends not just on consuming things, but also in being the maker of thanks. in fact, for every $1 billion we increase in exports, thousands of jobs are supported here at home. and that's what i set a goal of doubling america's exports over the next five years. and that's what on the trip that i'm about today, i'm going to be

talking about opening up additional markets in places like india, so that american businesses can sell more products abroad in order to create more jobs here at home. and this is a reminder as well that the most important competition we face in this new century will not be between democrats and republicans. it's the competition with countries around the world to lead the global economy. and our success or failure in this race will depend on whether we can come together as a nation. our future depends on putting politics aside to solve problems. to worry about the next generation instead of the next election. we can't spend the next two years mired in gridlock. other countries, like china, aren't standing still. so we can't stand still either. >> we've got to move forward. i'm confident that if we can do that, if we can work together, in this country will not only recover, but it will prosper. and i'm looking very much forward to helping to price the

markets open, help american businesses, put people back to work here at home during the course of this trip. thank you very much. [inaudible] >> changes need to occur in congress. begin to run for congress, and to make the changes that are necessary. >> whether it was john been on a c-span new members round table in 1990 or coverage sense, you can learn more about the presumptive speaker of the house in his own words in a 800 appearances on line at the c-span video library. it's washington your way. ]?]??

>> we will be going back sure to the conference of the world affairs councils of america assess participants comeback from a break. a quick news update in the meantime. house speaker nancy pelosi is considering a run for minority leader as the hill newspaper reports her decision is putting democrats with more liberal members of the party mobilizing support. centrist democrats say she should step aside after the party's losses in tuesday's elections. >> back now to the world affairs

councils of america. they will be starting up again shortly and they will be looking at briefing rooms to blogs, foreign policy in a new information era. you're watching c-span2. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

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>> as we do wait for the world affairs council of america to come back for a break, this week's midterm elections had given control of the u.s. house to the republicans, and oregon representative greg walden has been chosen to lead the transition effort. he's putting together a 22 member team composed of newly elected members, some longtime incumbents, and others with previous transition experience. the purpose of the team is to look at ways the house can operate more efficiently which may include rules changes that would apply to the entire house of representatives as well as an internal republican conference rules. for more about this effort you can go to the gop leader.gov/new majority.

>> will be joseph lockhart. he is a founding partner -- >> we are waiting for this group to come back together. it's the world affairs councils of america. and we'll be talking about new media and foreign policy, how the two intersect. you're watching live coverage here on c-span2. >> bob boorstin is the director of corporate and policy communications for google. he helps design and implement the county strategy on a wide range of domestic and international policy issues. he has more than 25 years of experience and political communications, national security, public opinion research and journalism. susan glasser is the editor-in-chief of foreign policy, a longtime foreign

correspondent and editor for the "washington post." she became foreign policy's executive director editor in 2008. and was named in her current position in the spring of 2010. helle dale is a senior fellow for public diplomacy at the heritage foundation. her work focuses on the u.s. government institutions and programs for strategic outreach to the public of or in countries as well as more traditional diplomacy, critical elements, and american global leadership and an id is against extremism. ladies and gentlemen, i present to you the next panel. [applause] >> can you hear me out there? can you hear me now? perfect. so i should waste a few words first. i'm good at that having been a spokesman. i think really what we going to talk about here today is this

idea of a connected world, the information revolution, digital world, all of that, and how, if any, how much impact, if any, does it have on foreign policy. and i think i'm going to try to do some of the practical things at the front end because once we get into the broader issues, i think we will stay there. and then look at both the promise and the peril of the connected world when it comes to foreign policy, particularly in the communication aspect of it. but, duncan, i thought i would start with you since your are represented here. it was only 12 years ago that, when i was working in government we were at the white house, and we had the camp david peace talks. and with a singular things about that, the negotiating session, was that they were held at camp david out in maryland. and i think everybody thought

that we were doing it to sort of bring the spirit of the previous camp david talks with president carter, but, in fact, it wasn't as well known. the real reason we did them out there was that we could shut down everybody's cell phones. [laughter] and when i asked dennis, the lead negotiator, why was that so important and he said to me, because the last time we had talks with these parties, we would spend the first three hours of every day arguing over what had been in the newspaper. now, that's only 12 years ago. how do you guys do it now with this explosion of communication and with the idea that anybody with a laptop, a smart phone, can become an agent of foreign policy. >> really glad to be here. can you hear me now?

good. you pointed out what is probably our biggest challenge of all. when i first joined, we had a place at the table. in fact, a place at the center of the table talking to me. and setting the agenda and setting the narrative about what america was doing. we don't have that centerstage anymore. we are just one boy's in a whole of voices to talk about u.s. policy, what america is doing, and what our names are overseas. there's an opportunity here that we can reach a much broader audience that we reach before, but we also can get drowned out very easily. and the news does get made by people around the world, and we have to, we ask a sometimes find ourselves and train with somebody puts on a small blog that then gets think that by the press and taken forward.

one of the ways we do this is, we ourselves are finding ourselves going out and acting like normal citizens do. blogging, we blog, we go out. so for instance, i will give you a quick example. dinner, the press is there, cameras are will come it goes out as a and b. roll footage to television. we also had a group larger, a blogger from our staff within talked about that debt and what the secretary said in arabic and in the blogosphere's of those areas. not their own blogs. they went to other peoples blogs and talk about it. and that so we have to do. it's very difficult. it's a lot more retail than wholesale sometimes. and it is stretching as in many, many ways every year something comes up.

i remember a twitter that was dismissed by many of my colleagues used to years ago as an inconsequential way of communicating. we now tweet in six languages and english. next to facebook of course is a big now and we don't know what the next great thing is, but we have to be very innovative to be there. and being in the government, as you know, and being in state department where everything is a highly controlled policy, carefully delay needed, we don't have to turn around and do the opposite of that which is risk-taking and very lives and not guidance oriented. so we have a challenge. >> that seems, your very last thing, it's interesting which is this risk-taking, this reform. you're asking people who have been trained over a lifetime to approach their job one way, and

then almost overnight change how they approach. what's the cultural change been like? >> it actually requires a major cultural change, and we find it's not an age-related thing. people just have to have the attitude that says, we have to get protection to people saying, you're not going to get in trouble for going out and walking that line that is very difficult to do. it is helped by the fact that people that are doing these new communication technologies are excited by the technology, and by this exciting experience. on the other hand, it's very, very potentially dangerous. if you are out there blogging about the middle east peace process, and not clearing what you blog, you can't, because you're having a discussion back and forth, you are on dangerous ground, and there's no question. you have to kind of absurd and know it, but it's a hard one. we are struggling with it.

we are giving protection to people. we have actually come up with paradigms and what we should be doing, and we made it part of their performance ratings that they should be doing these. [inaudible] >> the same dynamic with a phone service is going on with the media when i came to this town about 30 years ago. does a very hierarchical structure of the "new york times," the "washington post," and if you work there you had a lot of influence. even within that structure there was an even further get a grip which was a foreign policy reports, the people who had gone and covered wars and covered big diplomatic events. you have kind of scene, how do you adjust to taking, in particular, for you and for your colleagues, going into a world where now it's much flatter, it's much more horizontal rather

than vertical, and, you know, people, you know, you have is politics forever, but people don't always know what they're talking about. and it's just not the policymakers. >> now, i think that's a good way of putting it. i think it does connect us to the challenges that you see inside government, and in the media. you know, our friends at politico historic sort of almost a paradigm way of this new washington all the time 24 hours a day, they have a saying we want to end the hour. and i think the challenge their that's true, i can probably -- it's certainly true in trying to take something like smart coverage about international affairs, what does that mean on foreign policy.com? and when you think about that, you think, gee, you can win the hour and you can lose the day. you can win the hour and you can lose the week. picture metaphor. and i think the challenge is

that we can't opt out of the hours, but we have to come everyone of us ends up becoming sort of a strategies of our own, charting our own course through this new media landscape. we all have the tools, therefore we must all make our own status and see how we deal with the tools. because in the end, i can ask we take both sides of this because in some ways i am sympathetic to both parts of it. there's a reason passionate recent debate about what the u.s. government proper role should be, the nature of instruments like google, is a force for good in the world? it is a really, really great tool. there's a huge reaching debate. that's how we think about these things, and the reason they are relevant is because how we think about them is how we end up using them. right? and, you know, the debate in the blogosphere for example, of the state department use of twitter

and other media, and that's happened inside the state department as well. it's a really interesting example. are we revolutionizing and re-creating a whole new way? for political organizing to take place in authoritarian society? did twitter contribute to the green revolution or was a fundamentally irrelevant in a way that we here in the west express it because of all the people in english twitter and. these are big debates that happening right now and i think they're very important. and, of course, not only am i followed them, but you take that and think how we supposed to produce meaningful at the tate of journalism around this? how are we supposed to present in real time version what's happening in the world. and also, the bigger picture, step back high-altitude version. on our website, we relaunched it almost two years ago now as a

daily web magazine. we went from having one blog and we have 15 days bloggers. we have to i think we publish five or six edited articles. in addition to that we have multiple contributors, we have daily briefs, different subjects. so where is all that information coming from? i was in russia last summer, and my husband and i had been there in the old media world as correspondence from the "washington post." and i went back, and we were reporting a story, but we were also, it was when obama made his trip to moscow. and i thought, well, i have some very interesting conversations, what should i do for our website. i am primary editor. by the time i got back and look at my hotel after running around moscow, my bloggers had already written like three or four things, and they're pretty good at it pretty much covered most of the things i would have said. and here i had traveled thousands of miles to moscow. you know, spent all this time

going to events and talking to people who wanted to spend time with me. it was a real lesson for me about, like, you know, we're definitely in uncharted territory. >> i do want to record to know that you remember, you read her bio, she was editor of the "washington post" coverage of president clinton's impeachment. >> and we are still friends spent this is the first time i've had a chance to publicly question her and i took a pass. just so, you know. [laughter] that we are not done yet. bob, for me wears two hats year because he is both one of the best thinkers in my party on foreign policy and national security, but also networks for google, which is leading technology company, which obviously has an impact. you know, bob, you know as well as i do that at this fight used to often break out as we diplomats between using the word great answers, and you take three or four days to sit

beside. he goes to the culture how do they keep, how can they keep up? and from with your technology hat on, judy technology companies, are they, our youth so a winner of the impact of your hardware and software, the impact it's having on the process? and then is that a business plus decision? >> well, first, thank you for having us all here today. i really appreciate it. thank you to the people in the audience who actually care about these issues. it's hard to find you out there. sometimes. let me say, let me where the technology hat just for a minute here, and say that i am not of the belief that either technology has changed foreign policy or that davis had completely or had no impact at all. you will read a lot of stuff out

there these days that basically says there's been a revolution in foreign policy because technology. people said the same thing about cassette tapes and its role in the iranian revolution. people said the same thing about george soros and the use of a fax machine in eastern europe. all of these things definitely had a role. i'm not saying they didn't. but i was grateful that technology today is playing is a role of scale and scope. you can do things a lot faster and you can build things a lot faster, movements and ideas, thanks to technology. i don't think that fundamentally it changes the way that people think. if they did, perhaps we would have fewer ethnic troubles and things like that. but we don't. then again the internet is a very young. the one impact that i think it's

early has that would be important for this audience to focus on, it's that it has magnified the role of the diaz perez around the world. when it comes to revolutions, be it in iran, which is kind of a would be revolution, or elsewhere, there is no question that the ability to raise money and the ability to interfere, the ability to become involved in your home nations affairs, has been radically increased by the impact of the internet. and that's something that i assume that most of you deal with in your chapters at home, the questions and who's involved. so that's something that i think is a definite change in look at. are we at google aware of this? yes, we have to be every day. i mean, just this week there have been stories about you two being asked by representative in

congress and a member of the british government to take down videos from a known terrorist. we always review videos that are flagged for us, but imagine, imagine the new questions, that technology raises. and go back to scale. people say, well, why don't you simply look at everything you before it's uploaded? i'm not joking when i say that. people actually say that. and just to give you one statistic year, every minute they are 24 hours of video uploaded to youtube. every minute they are 24 hours of video uploaded to youtube. so doing that would take a few billion people i think to keep up. [laughter] we are doing really well, and it is an unemployment problem, but we can't quite get there.

but just to give you an idea of the scale of what we're doing with here. so we have a flag system where somebody says to us, we think this is a bad figure, please take it down, and we respond as quick as we can. we can get into discussions about these kinds of problems. and just this morning i opened up my intro news service for google, and it said that google maps had created international incident on the border between nicaragua and costa rica. because some nicaraguan commander read the border incorrectly and set up a camp across the border in costa rica territory. [laughter] we were blamed for the bombing in mumbai, because there were google earth images on some computers that were found in pakistan. so are we unaware of this? you betcha. this is something that we deal with every day.

and it's cutting right on the edge of something new and different, and it makes for a very, very interesting job. i mean, that it put that way. >> so given all of that, from your perspective outside the government, does the government, do you think the government, you know, over the last, sake decade, understand this change? and is understands how to take advantage of it? >> well, i think duncan macinnes said the government, those that understand the serious challenge. i would also say that u.s. government is not necessarily the most nimble player in the complexity and sophistication. no insult the u.s. government but it is might be somewhat old fashion machine in a world of a very new media landscape. but i think actually there's two

sides to this question which is worth some discussion here. one is how does it affect the presentation of you enforce -- u.s. foreign policy, which information, sorry, i.t. is involved in the stat state department, how do we convey that to the rest of the world. and that's the technological challenge. the challenge of choosing which needed is the correct me for which part of the world. it does it's certain not to that every part of the world is has decided enacted as we are. it very much depends as we're talking to what you want to talk to them on broadway radio or on a website on the internet. so that presents a challenge, but it's also a challenge for u.s. policy itself, the substance of our policy. what do we support in the world in foreign policy in terms of the freedom of information? . .

>> when we look back to some of the revolutions of the past, the fall of the soviet union, information has all been key. how strong does the u.s. government want to stand behind the very io dee lis tick --

view around the world. i think so segment the subject is little bit because it becomes vast and complex when you look at the totality of it. >> can i just add one word there? >> yeah. >> it is this notion of not forgetting other media i think is incredibly important. one of the things that happens with i would say all the people i work with a generation younger than me is they forget about things like newspapers and radio and television. i have to wave a newspaper in front of them every day to remind them it exists. >> i can't read a newspaper on screen because i don't like the way it looks. >> don't tell google news people that. [laughter] radio remains for me an absolutely key media in which to

communicate in the vast majority of the world where they don't have access to electricity much less the internet. i just put that on the table as a cautionary note in proceeding with this discussion about technology. >> well, just to bring this part to a close, and for me to underlie just how different it is, i remember when i moved, when i got the job at the white house, i had to go what was called to nfc school, a foreign policy school and learn a lot of things and it was an interactive process other than a few areas, the areas with taiwan and the middle east peace and you'll say this and nothing more and say it how we tell you. i remember and this gives me nightmares of doing this now in this environment is we had a

very nice older gentleman who represented several greek news organizations, and he used to come to the briefing every day and had a question about cyprus. i liked to call on him and he'd get the first question. because it was so important to get even the nuance of every word and just say it the right way, i worked out a deal with him where he told me before the briefing what his question was and some very smart person at the embassy wrote out the answer. i'm telling you that worked for a year and a half. [laughter] you'd be shocked why it stopped working. it's not like ethics overcame either of us. [laughter] it was because one day he had two questions. [laughter] and i hadn't noticed that i couldn't understand a word he said. his accent was thick. he asked me a question and i

didn't understand and he asked it again and i was stumped and i turned to pg crowley and i said, was that question one or question two? it was question two, and i gave the right answer. [laughter] i can't imagine -- [laughter] i can't imagine in the blogging world how someone as simple as me could survive -- [laughter] let's go to something more serious now. bob said a lot has been written on the subject by important people. i want to quote something that was in foreign policy or foreign affairs, i'm sorry. let me just take a minute and read it. democratic governments will most likely be tempted to further their national interest through the same combination of defense, diplomacy and development on which they relied on in the cold

war and decades after. they have to reflect the rise of the changing natures in states and this has to go beyond government to government contact to embrace civic society and private and public sector. the software created by companies in flee market are useful to citizens abroad than state-sponsored assistance or diplomacy. it goes on at some length. are we at the point now where the state department shares power with nongovernment organizations, with activists? has the rise of the internet given new tools to our government, or has it diminished their power and their control of the dialogue? i ask anyone. >> both things are true; right? on some level and that's in a sense that bob made the point it hasn't changed human nature. these are powerful new tools used by people, so it might be

amped up in scale and magnitude, but it's people who write blogs and twitter and people who had protests and revolutions before there was blogs and twitter. i think we all understand that, but i think to me that's one of the really interesting things is watching the intellectual combat unfold on this specific point of ideas, companies, and these new too tools that emerged reinventing political activism and political freedom and the controversies. there's a huge debate, and i think it's a very important one. i can argue both sides of it, but i think it's important for this group to think about we in america tend to have a very strong belief in almost a utopian belief in internet freedom is something that how can you not be free of it? how can it not be the policy of

the united states state department to support internet freedom or something that is in- inevitable next stage. does it mean the united states government is politicizing the internet that originated in the bowls of the defense world that is built and maintained by the incredible innovation of independent entrepreneurs. in a weird way we are converging this conversation. part is how do we improve our basis and messaging for the internet, and then another part of the conversation is should we be supporting, you know, democratic activists and internal revolutionaries by working with google and twitter to make sure their services are available in countries that want to block them. those are really not necessarily clear-cut conversations.

>> let me make it even more complicated by posing the ime is it -- by posing the question is it always necessary for this? how would the american public take it if they knew we helped issue in an islamic government in iraq? well, internet freedom brings about fundamental government, is that something in our interest? that makes it even more complicated. >> there's two points i'd like to make that a useful here i think. one is for many of us that are communicators in the state department, the new media is the best of the world and worst at the same time. it's the best because it's just not an expansion of the one-way broadcast media, but it was actually interactive. it is what is called the last three feet, the most important

part of diplomacy, face-to-face talking. if you are sitting in front of your screen and someone else in moscow is talking with you, it's interactive and because it is interactive, it allows for a different conversation than you have with a press release. press releases are easy and dialogue is hard. that's one. the second thing i'll point out is the internet has a dark side which is control, and many governments around the world use the internet to control their people, and we believe very strongly in opening the internet. we've tried to figure out ways to make things other technology ways to open the internet and have people get around the blockages. you have to worry when you do that because of this spy versus spy thing and if you do that and

the iranians feel they are safe to use the government, and then the government can collect that information, we're worse off. there's no technology that says you can use the internet and the government will not find out you used it. >> that's correct. >> they stop people at the airport in tehran asking for their facebook account. >> everyone you communicated with on facebook. >> yeah. >> it's a double-edge sword. we believe firmly that just like in the cold war, access to information is important to totalitarian regime. >> in this article written by eric smith, he says the free market democracies are best suited to take advantage of this new structure. what do you think? is that true? i could make an argument that a

world terrorist organization can use this, a type of connectedness and communication to create havoc more than a non-nimbo u.s. country could. >> do we know the answer to that? >> no, not yet of course, but we've seen examples in china and iran and elsewhere where repressive regimes are good at doing this. in iran there's one internet service provider. if you have one just owned by the government, it's easier to track people on their cell phones which they do with alarming -- [no audio] i would say first that before the internet, we saw this change happening of a evolution of power, and i think, you know, a

really good example are the gates foundation and the u.n. foundation. really interesting how powerful they are on the ground in reality all over the world and in certain areas gates is more powerful than the u.n. foundation now as it's become more funded, but there you had rich people with an influence, and the internet is giving more people influence, people without resources more and more influence. now, we don't know how much influence they will ultimately have. a second thing i remind people of is that internet and freedom of which i'm responsible for for google which is hilarious. [laughter] it's not an intiew wit inand of itself. it's a tactic. it's like saying --

no, no, it's something you were doing in order to conquer territory. internet freedom is something that will lead somewhere in reality, and that's another point i'd like to make is what happens online doesn't happen offline. i mean, this is a very important offline game that we used to call reality in this world. [laughter] it doesn't really happen that way, and i think that there are a lot of people out there in my world and in the world of silicone valley and those who are internet heads who just don't get this point that it must be transferred. of course, the last thing i'll say is that it goes back to your point. sometimes the u.s. influence does a lot more harm than good. when people know that the u.s. is giving money for a certain thing in the middle east or in other areas of the world, that's not necessarily a helpful

thing. we can do a lot more quietly or through the private sector or through individuals than attaching the made in the usa stamp to a particular policy. i'll just mention recently that the state department gave money as part of an interpret freedom grant to a group that is a fallen gone front. now that's -- >> how much money? >> it wasn't much money, but you give of give them -- you can give them a dollar, and the chinese government will still go crazy. i have no love of the chinese government, but it seems to me it would be a really strange way to deal with a government that we're trying to at least have a relationship with to stick a hot poker in your thigh by giving money to the group that it's most offended by when there are other ways to do it.

[laughter] >> right. that debate is so fascinating and interesting and which technology and as far as i understand it they tried to create a technology to allow chinese internet users and to have the fire walls that are keeping them from accessing websites that they want to go to. i personally have that big of problem offending a chinese government, and they take a long time to make the decision to give $1.5 million or something like that to this particular group to work on technology, but there's a whole cluster of very interesting debates and vj technological i'm not capable of judging there, but just feel the importance of it getting right.

i think by looking at the last sea of information, a new media of new venues, things that come at you so fast, it looks all confusing, but we're still all human beings, and human human beings tend to have ways of behaving in ways that is much older than the technology we are talking about here. i believe people start sorting what it is they're receiving, and in the age of the internet, i believe most people find they have a couple websites they go to and a couple sources they trust, maybe, a couple blogs, you can't deal with everything, so you deal with whatever your mind can cope with, and you tend as human beings to drift towards what you already believe in as the kind of affirmation. you subscribe to the newspaper that shares your editorial views. you watch the news channel that makes you feel good at the end of the day, and i think in terms

of the internet, that is happening. in fact, i think you are probably getting more se agree gaited in the ways they receive information than when they picked up newspapers and read from the front to the end. there's news in there they had not particularly been looking for. there is that kind of sense of identity and identification which ultimately could work in favor of the u.s. government, and others who are seeking to predict one particular message because people around the world looking for that message and believe in it are like likely to look for your website and those websites that value the views that the united states stands for. i don't think it's an undifferentiated sea of opinions and information out there. i think we tend to sort it. the question is at this point in

time to have the 30,000 vision to see the patterns in the chaos. >> let me ask susan on traditional foreign policy international relations deploam sigh, we had sorters. they had been elite journalists and academics. their power in my view is beginning to dwindle based on the changes, and it's unclear whether people have the ability on their own in this environment today to be making informed decisions. where are the sorters going to come from? >> i think, you know, you're right on the mark. those comments fragment our experience of the news and how and why, and that's happening on a global scale. -- that's not necessarily the bad news it seems. we're also experiencing at the same time is a powerful hunger for a recognition of overtime

quality and differentiation are coming back into for important reasons, and i think there's an enormous hunger and appetite not only to sort and organize the world's information, but also to find our way as quickly and effectively as possible to the proven providers who also have a level of authority. does that mean we're going back to the old day and you can talk to ten people and be explained what's going on in cyprus? absolutely not. i would say the conversation has been opened up in some very useful and constructive ways. you know, in the old days, foreign policy, foreign affairs, you know, there was a very self-conscious appointed group less than the number of people who could fit in this ballroom, all men, all with the same education and the same world view coming from the same narrow strip of, you know, this country

and having spent a little time in os ford, and they thought they could run the world from this particular location, and the media was organized and structured to provide information exclassively to them in the terms they would find it. that's not helpful in the globalized world, and that's a system that's dead. good riddance. i'm not one of these people who think we lost something. i mean, you know, this is the other side of our, you know, from the downside of the internet freedom discussion. the positive side is right there in front of us, and i think anybody who is created, you know, journalism today about international affairs, this is a golden age for it. we vice president figured it out -- we have not figured it out out, but we have access to information more than we ever had. we have access to the world's smartest people, to the people on the ground, the people inside the room. yes, we're figuring out what

that model is in terms of what the business model is for it. you know, there's a bunch of web sites and i'm foolish on the idea that opening up the conversation first of all in the long run is something that is very effective, and also when you hear the conventional wisdom that this means the death of the foreign reporting and death of standards and drowning in a sea of nonevaluated blog postings and wire service stories, that's not where this is heading. i really don't think it is. >> we're going to go to questions from the audience, but let me ask you each a question and answer it in 10 words or less, and i know that's difficult. think of it this way, while you are answering, eight hours of video will be uploaded to youtube. [laughter] is this trend we've been talking

about inetbly a good thing for society? 10 words. [laughter] >> i would love to think so, but i have reservations. >> well, i just said it's the golden age for journalism, and i do think that's true. it's a tactic. it would be like giving a man a printing press or the fax machine. it is what it is, and there's a lot of great things. >> but ultimately is it going to lead us to bigger freedom, more information, good or bad, or we don't know yet? >> i think it's mostly a good thing. i think we all share that view that it is mostly good, but it definitely has pitfalls. it has shaded areas.

it is requiring more studies before we see all the good things. >> i'll take shelter in more than 10 words in history. there was a series of conversations with john wyden, his tore call conversations and they talked about revolutions, french, american, chinese, # what they meant. they talked about the french revolution and turned and said, what you think the impact of the french revolution has been? joan says, it is too early to tell. [laughter] >> with that, questions? >> two quick questions. what do you think about saudi arabia, uae, china, and others forcing them to open up its block transmissions to local

security agents? second quick question. what's going to happen when english is no longer the soul language of the internet and there's a chinese network or an arabic network? >> i can't answer the first question, but the second one, the internet is moving into a multiple language. we are finding more and more languages being used throughout the internet, so we have -- we've upped our own game to produce more material in languages. it's happening. people want to speak in their own language, and they do now increasingly. >> on google, the translator increased a lot, and we are looking at new content we

haven't grasped yet. >> i think to the saudi arabia issue of forces people to give up their internet information, facebook, websites or their friends, i think those governments honestly, they are working hard and they are effective, but they are fighting a losing battle. it's like throwing speers at the sea. i think in the long run, this runs against those seeking greater control. >> you know, as to misquote joe, it's too early to tell, they may eventually lose this, but are they losing it now? if you're an iranian who did something brave and paid with their life or with the lives of their family, can we really say

that there's an inevidentability about this, and how does a technology company wrestle with, you know, dealing with the regimes in which, you know, and the countries they deal with? you know, the u.s. government says things that some companies think are wrong and offensive, but they follow the law. >> yeah, it's not -- it's known as a type rope walk. there is no simple answer in how you deal with each regime. each one is different. each one has a different impact on its people. each one has different laws, national laws that if you're going to operate in that nation, you have to follow. i could get into a long recitation about the difference between how we dealt with thailand and turkey when they shut down youtube or any number of questions like that, but the only certainty here is uncertainty, and the one thing i

can guarantee is that this debate between security and free expression is going to broaden into a debate to security, free expression, and economic growth because when a company like rim cannot operate in certain countries, people are going to begin to say how can i do business in that country if my corporate correspondence is not secret? if i'm opening up everything i have to the government, and then i think you'll see the beginnings of some reconsiderations of some of these governments that care as much about economic growth as they do about surveillance. that's my hope anyway. >> yes, thank you, panelists very much. indeed. i'd like to ask if you think

internet freedom at this time is going to bring about the end of political correctness, and a second question, if you don't mind me asking, is what was the reaction in your community to the wikileaks, and the reaction of many of the countries in the western world who would have liked perhaps to have had the opportunity not to have had them posted? thank you. >> any one? >> well, wikileaks is a good case probably on both sides of the claim. on the one hand, there's a long tradition of the government keep secret many things which are actually important and value l for policy conversation, and now it's a long established principle since the release of the pentagon papers, and these

were not close to the level of the pentagon papers, this was, you know, the raw material, literally the electronic copy of the digital wars fought in this era. it was very on the ground stuff opposed to something that would give us a strategic picture. obviously, an enormous concern to the security issues raised for people on the ground in iraq and afghanistan working with the americans, and this is the classic nonstate actor of our new era. it's true after it blew over the initial release of wikileaks, there was concern of afghanistans, you have a whole -- first of all there was an investigation, and it didn't get as much coverage as the initial

round of coverage, but armed services committee did an investigation to find there was not the kind of enormous security breaches and terrible consequences that were perhaps feared or were talked about to people who opposed the initial wikileaks. you know, it's not a federal question; right? you know, we don't have a good answer it it -- for it. >> it's easier as a former government official. i think the government has an enate right to protect the people who are protecting our freedoms. having said that, the way we keep secrets is, should outrage people. we have used the clearance process now to not keep secrets that are essential to our security, but are essential to our political security, and it's been going on for a long time. it's been done by democrats,

republicans, and it's a real challenge for the government and a real challenge on government strengths to say here is embarsing information or information that politically undercuts our case, but you have a right to know it, so i think both sides have, you know, moral standing here, but a government in this day and age has a lot of trouble being heard on this given the way they've used it. again, this is not a partisan comment. we keep too many secrets mostly for the wrong reasons. >> well, quickly on that. after the most recent wikileaks, i was struck by a piece that we ran by, a woman who had been in baghdad, and remembers the bombing and this was is whole new stage of almost a civil war in iraq, and, you know,

secretary rumsfeld, senior military leadership went out of their way to say we're not seeing any signs of major disruption or uptake in bodies. i'm at the mafnght, and -- market, and everything is fine here in baghdad. i don't know what the reporters are talking about. it's a devastating portrait of the political purpose and the political record. of course they knew what was going on. thousands and thousands of people were dying in iraq in a wave of spasm of violence, and both military and civilians went out of their way not to deplore that violence. that's a pretty good case for releasing information. >> yeah, i think we have time for one more question. >> i hope you have time for my one question. >> i was just going to make a remark to the wikileaks case and

political correctness. i certainly think that the publication of the documents are maybe not as damaging in terms of security is deeply responsible and deplorable, but i also think that when you go back and comb through them, you do find some very interesting information at a very ground level, and we have been paying attention to a number of incidents of massive weapons of destruction found in small amounts of u.s. troops and they come upon them in different situations throughout the deployment. all of those bits of information there deserve being combed through for various stories that have not been sufficiently told up to this point. as far as political correctness is concerned, i don't have to -- so much of the internet is so

wide open that if you make a few remarks on your facebook page that are not political correct or somewhat out of line, whatever context you're in, your friends, your employers, and everybody else can see what you are saying, so off the cuff remarks of not a nice nature are likely to be uncovered and displayed when you don't want them to be. >> i'm sorry, but i think this whole conversation is at least two years out of date. i don't know why we're talking about the internet. the web is dead. we had eric smith on foreign relations in new york last week, and he told us a billion people have smart phones already, and they the rate of purchasing of smart phones you can predict within three or four years, the majority of all telephones in use in the world will be phone --

smart phones. text messages resulted to immediate mass action. quick example. sars epidemic in beijing, someone put out a message that said the virus is carried out by pets dogs and cats. millions of people killed their pets instantly. my question is, you haven't begun to see what a deliberate misinformation campaign can look like. you have not come close, and we have people who believe there was yellow cake uranium. we have people who believe the iraqi army killed babies in kuwait and that's why we needed to go to war. how can you counter, how can government counter a calculated misinformation campaign against a specific set of policy interests that is executed by

sms text messages or any other senator phone capacity in a layered, planned fashion that leads to a mass belief that a nontruth is a actual acting truth? >> i'm from the counsel on foreign relations in new york. >> well, could you repeat the question? [laughter] sorry, i couldn't resist. let me take the first part of it which is just for the sake of argument. you know, there are billions of smart phones. you know, i talk about the internet, i talk about the digital revolution in terms of the internet, but this is all of these different tools. it's one of the reasons why i pose several different ways here, and was skeptical of the

inevidentability of this being a positive thing for society because there are a lot of dark forces out there. you know, i have to, you know, you pose the question of what would happen if we saw a dlibility misinformation campaign, and what will government do? in my opinion, we've already seen it, and it happened, and it's been well documented. it was well-documented before election day in 2004, and voters made their choice based on the two choices they had and decided they were okay, so we need to not only worry about forces of evil depending on your perspective, but also when government deals with disinformation because they have as many or more levers on new technology as they did on old technology. it's, i think as we've talked about here, the field is -- the playing field has been

leveled, and there are plenty of new tools, but it is the great unanswered question as we go forward of, you know, does truth and justice win out? i'm not sure it does. >> on misinformation, -- [inaudible] >> can you turn the mic on? [inaudible conversations] [laughter] >> here, use mine. >> am i on? am i on? no? now i can talk, maybe? >> keep going. >> keep going, okay.

>> okay, no? >> we must be out of time. [laughter] >> hello? hello? good? >> one of these is working. i'm not sure which one. >> the digital media -- [inaudible] >> still can't hear you. [inaudible] >> hello? good. okay. the digital world is a place that is a fertile ground for disinformation and misinformation, and often it's misinformation, and in areas of the world where conspiracy theories are more convincing than normal news for less reasons, pakistan being a prime example of a place where misinformation and conspiracy

theories of the most outrageous types and levels exist, the embassy there answers them every day, dozens and dozens and dozens of them, they still persist, and they persist for a reason. they are not even coordinated. it's not like a cam campaign. they exist because they fill a need that the people have that's not something by standards of normal media. it might have to do with their view of themselves in the world or whatever, but certainly we had this in iraq. we had a lot of misinformation on why we're there from senior iraqi officials to others, and even people have been told the same countervailing views on the same subject both, we're there for the oil, but we're really

there to destroy iraq. we're in iran because we are there because we want iran to take over. it's odd. it's a hard thing to deal with. we deal with it because by actually trying to answer them back, but it's a lot of people out in the world there talking. >> i just have to say one thing. i'm not sure that the questionnaire was really listening to the discussion if you felt that smart phones were not part of the discussion. we were talking about all devices that can access the internet, and always that you communicate that you communicate via the internet, sms or whatever way you choose to communicate. in the future as you are saying, everybody is going to carry something this big that is going to be their personal computer, and it's going to be limited by bandwidth in the developing world for a long time which is

why they're going to rely on sms, and while their access is different from the access of people in this room, but i sense a lot of hostility in that last question, and i just want to make sure that we're all on the same place here in terms of understanding what technology we're talking about. again, it's not an answer, it's a new tactic and a new way to organize, but it's no answer or an answer in and of itself. >> i'm going to use an old technology, a microphone, to exercise my power to say thank you all for this conversation. [applause] >> thank you, joe, for the excellent moderation of a great panel that took us thoughtfully and thoroughly through a complex

issue, and i hope you were all blogging and tweeting during it to your counsel members, and we'll take a break now for coffee and come back in for a panel on the election. [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] the world affairs counsel of america taking a break between some panels. the next group is looking at elections and u.s. foreign policy. a quick news update. democratic leaders in the house are getting ready to run for new leadership positions. majority whip james of south carolina is making a bid for minority whip and as the "wall street journal" reports, house speaker nancy pelosi is running for minority leader. her decision comes with democratic support and others stepping aside from the recent elections. meanwhile, president obama is starting a ten day trip to asia

attending meetings with leaders in india, indonesia, south korea, and japan. he'll be in new delhi before aheading to jakara. he'll in be seoul on thursday giving a speech to u.s. troops there and be wac in washington on november 14th. we'll take a look at this morning's washington journal with viewer phone calls and e-mails. >> host: first of all there was a poll done just before the election by abc news and yahoo together, and you can see 75% believe that america -- before that number was higher at 88%. 29% of americans recently said the america used to be but is no longer. we'd like to hear from you and your thoughts on this. we were brought to this topic by

michael kinsley and his topic in "politico". the theory that americans are better than everybody else is endorsed by a theory of u.s. voters and u.s. politicians. there is less and less evidence to support it. he talks about some of the evidence, but here's his concern about us thinking this way as a nation. he writes the conceits that we're the greatest country ever play be self-embassylating. if people believe it's true, they won't do what it takes to make it true. the brits cherish the myth of being people who smile through adversity just accepted cuts in government spending that no american politician would consider imposing. when the british voted for change, they got it. he acknowledges every time i strike his note, i get called an

elitist. we'll talk about this later on, but we wanted your thoughts. let's hear from the campaign first. this is marco rubio talking about america's place in the world. >> what this race is about is the great country, a future that americans know is there for the taking, but it requires actions on our part. americans believe with all their heart the vast majority of them and the vast majority of floridians that the united states of america is simply the single greatest nation in all of human history. >> host: let's get your thoughts on this beginning with a call from the democratic line in indiana. >> caller: good morning, i think america is the greatest country on earth. i'm 72 going on 73, and i looked to my children in main street for that goodness. i have five children, two of my

sons work in the big steel mills up here in butler and columbia city. i have a daughter that works for a company here. i have a daughter-in-law who works for a german company. they work hard every day. they pay their taxes, and they obey the law. i have a daughter in florida, a son in florida studying to be ray nurse. a daughter married to a landscaper. they are all working hard and trying to be freed americans. >> host: well, francis, people work hard in other countries. what about those qualities make them part of a country that is the greatest on earth? >> caller: americas has wonderful ideals for what we stand for, and i'm telling you someone is in control now that is changing our whole situation as far as what our ideals used to be, hard work, paying your

taxes, why does $40 trillion lie in the hands of just 5%? that's not right. >> host: thanks for your call. dean up next on the republican line from kentucky. >> caller: good morning. we were at one time the greatest country in the world, but now we have such evil leadership in washington that our value system is going down the tubes, no longer is the well of the people being recognized. we got judges that are legislating from the bench against the will of the people. if we ever get back to our core values, we will once again be the greatest country in the world. >> host: is there another country taking the place? >> caller: i would say israel is the latest country in my opinion in the world today. >> host: why is that? >> caller: they recognize god as being the true leader, and we have ignored god and kicking him out of everything in our society.

we're starting to open our doors to islam which is one of the most evil religions in the world. we need to get back to our core values. god first, us second. >> host: dean in kentucky. some statistic which we'll mix in throughout this session this morning. first, the united states is first in gdp. we are $14.2 trillion in gdp followed by china, japan, and india. next is a call from union city, new jersey, arthur, and independent. you're on. good morning. >> caller: good morning. just basically, it's like it seems there's no real answer. you feel everyone yelling at each other, but my parents, my father was in world war ii bragged we're a great generation, and we got to where we are now, but opposed of course we're great, but we need

to focus on balance and stepping back on like what's going on. i think we're a little spoiled, myself included. we need to focus on who we are instead of yelling at each other, again, i don't have any answers, but i just appreciate c-span, and we need to keep the conversation. >> host: do you think it's a concept worth discussing as a nation ?k >> what's that? >> is it one that we ought to reflect upon? >> caller: i'm not smart enough to answer that. it's kind of like not -- we get into so many different issues that are so like not tangible that -- i don't know. it's hard. like everybody has the same things to become a nation that produces things again, but again, i have no answers, but it just seems that there's so much money, and everybody says the same thing about war regardless,

you know, the amount of money that's spent like, like could we just, like with half the money we spend each month on war, paint all the houses white or energy roofs and change the lightbulbs and like just to do something like for us here that is tangible. it's so exeansive to be in the whole world. >> host: here is nick, democrat, talking about america as the great education country. >> god bless our veterans, thank you for your service and our american troops. those are our american heros puts themselves in harm's way so we can live in the free country and enjoy the many freedoms we enjoy. >> host: back to statistics. when you look at the gdp per capita, liechtenstein takes

first and united states is second place, japan is 14, and china with its population down at 86, and india at 123. walter, a republican, you're on the air. >> caller: thank you. i think that the foundation of america is the greatest foundation, the declaration saying we have inalienable rights given to us by our creator. i think those fundamental platforms are building blocks of our country are second to none. i think one the callers from kentucky made a great point. we have the platform, but only once you live up to the instructions of the owners manual, do you remain great. we had a decline in the country from killing millions of babies say it's a choice, political

view, moral views being declined in what we accept is lowering our abilities to be the best, but i've never seen anybody hop in boats and row a thousand miles to go to ethiopia. i think it basically is going back to restoring our basic values and common sense and our pride and action speak louder than words, and until we do that, we'll hypocrites. we're the best hypocrites on the block. we talk about china, but no one says i can't wait to move to china and live in a hut and have a rice field. we're not living up to our potential by the constitution and declaration of independence. >> host: thanks. we'll mix in tweets here. let's do this one from mike freeman who writes we are so great, but our sense of community has taken us down. do we need to bring up stats on

wealth? next from virnlings, june, independent, no, democrat, sorry. go ahead. >> caller: good morning. thank you for having my call. you don't know how great america is until you come from somewhere else. i'm from africa. this is where you can go to living in mud to living in a ten bedroom house. the fact of monnestty, you are able to do anything in america. i'm thankful for this country and grateful. so many people do not appreciate the greatness of this country. >> host: well, june, what is it that makes america great and this society that allows someone to get ahead? >> caller: the most important thing is the free system we have from poserty to middle class to wealth. there is no room for growth in

most countries. if you are born in poverty, you die in poverty. 234 america if you work hard, come from poverty, you can move to the middle class, and you can move to the top. that system alone is a very, -- it's a system that works, and we are very grateful to be in this country and be in that system. if you work hard and do what you can do with honesty, you are able to at least live a successful life. >> host: how many years have you been in the states? >> caller: 26 years. >> thank you for calling. from virginia, south of washington, d.c., next up is new york, an independent. you're on. >> caller: good morning. i think what's happened in this last election proves that our country is not as great as it should be.

i think what is happening, we are the spies all over the world, and you can't be a great country when every country in the world despices us, despise our system. we are such hypocrites. we are -- i'll give you an example. any time our political are elected to office on how much they can demonize the president of the united states with lies and threats and twisting they

have been encouraged by the leader. >> host: thanks for your call. you can hear her feedback in the back. if you call, hit the mute button so we can hear you otherwise it's hard when you hear yourself on a delay in the background. we had never satisfied with what we have and we need a spiritual revival starting with gratitude. back to the campaign trail and this is rand paul speaking of america's place in the world. >> america is exceptional because we embraced freedom, because we have it in our documents, and because we have lived and fought for the principles of freedom. >> host: back to telephone calls. next is a call from rapid river, michigan, pete, a republican. you're on, pete. >> caller: good morning. >> host: good morning. >> caller: i think it's undeniable that the united states is the greatest country ever historically.

i hope you challenge on who he think would have -- and we leave this part of the washington journal today to go wac to the world affairs counsel of america. meeting here in washington and the next group looks at recent elections and role on foreign policy. >> then again it had everything to do with american foreign policy and america's role in the world. we have an outstanding panel for you this afternoon with people that you've read and you've seen, you've read them in blogs and in newspapers or websites and on niewrm -- numerous tv programs. i commend you as well, the introductions that are in your booklets are in more detail. our moderator is doyle mcmahonus. he's been a correspondence in

the middle east. he's covered six presidential elections, and he's only 25. [laughter] you can read his biweekly column in the l.a. times and see him on washington week among other programs. also we jerl sybe, editor of the journal and you can read his biweekly column in the "wall street journal" and you're likely to see him on fox business news, on abc, and on cnn. also pleased to have with us christina freeland, global editor at large for the thomas corpg, and i want to reck z 23450euz and give a thanks for their support of this conference and lending to us not only her this afternoon, but paul yesterday as acting participants

in this conference. i'll pause here and ask you in joining me to thank them for their support in this program. [applause] .. >> you can read his weekly

columns with the "national journal" and elsewhere. you can also see them on msnbc, hardball, and jerry mitchell report, "morning joe," "meet the press" and this week with george stephanopoulos. this is an credible panel. we thank them for being with us, and i'm going to shut up and turn the floor over to doyle mcmanus. thank you all. >> thank you. thank you all for being here with us today. it's a humbling and challenging experience to talk about foreign policy, or american politics, in front of a group of people who are active in the world affairs councils, because we know that you are among the most erudite and engaged people, civilians in the country. so that's my way of saying, please hold us to a low standard. [laughter] we have here a panel with my own

exception, very distinguished journalists, all of whom have worked at one time or another as foreign correspondents in places like london and iran, moscow and kiev, and kabul. but his current distinction, and the reason we're in front of you today, is we brave to cleveland, las vegas and the suburbs of philadelphia. here's what we're going to try to do today. i'm going to ask each of our panelists to do a very quick, three to five minute sketch of some high points on his or her topic. other panelists will be able to weigh in and disagree on that. we will try to keep that to happen our or so at the top of our session. but we do want to get as quickly as possible to your questions and comments so that we can engage with you that way. so we will first ask ron to talk about what happened in this

election, jerry to talk about what it means for the white house and congress. i will say a few words about foreign policy per se, chrystia will talk about the economic and trade agendas and the impact there. so, ron, what just happened? >> thank you. and thank you for elevating me to experience although i only have about four minutes in japan was. so not quite in the same class as the others. what i do is cover american politics. to understand this election let's just first take one step back and say that two years ago this time barack obama won the most decisive victory for democratic presidential candidate since 1964. first democrat since johnson and second since world war ii to get 60.1, 51% of the vote, three for 65 electoral college. for had not voted democratic more than once. 1964. that was where we begin this

cycle. and by the way, democrats began the cycle with larger majorities in the house and the senate than the republicans a cheat at any point during the 12 years under control from 94 until 2006. what we experienced was about as close as we can get in the u.s. to a parliamentary election, i believe. the congress is functioning more and more like a parliamentary institution. the levels of partyline voting, republicans going with republicans, democrats but with democrats, the political scientists who have tracked this over the long term tell us it was the highest since reconstruction. and we saw on vote after vote essentially one governing party opposing its agenda and opposition party resisting that agenda. it's not entirely surprising wind up with a parliamentary election. particularly in the house. president obama or the campaign

or stayed away leaned heavily on the results. and national exit poll 85% of voters said they approved of the president, though democratic. 86% of those who disapproved voted republican. very similar to the patterns in 94 and 2006, which also were both parliamentary elections, white voters who disapproved of president obama voted nine to one republican. and as you can't take that brought thing and see how it plays out within the actual context, there are 125 house democrats on election day in dishes were obama carried out a 60% of the two years ago. that have been lost. there are another 48 house democrats district were he carried between 55 and 60% of the vote to get ago. only six of them lost with six still to be candidatecandidates out of the 173 house democrats district were obama was 55% or above, two years ago, only six at this point have lost.

very different picture of when you get a little down in his situation. there were 35 democrats in districts that he won, but he won with less than 55% of the vote. 21 of them have already lost with two more to be counted. the number that may be the most familiar, is that there are 48 house democrats and districts that voted for john mccain, 36 of them have lost. three quarters of them were defeated. these tended to be blue-collar downscale district. but bottom line, district were obama was over 55%, only six of 173 loss. under 55%, 57 of 83. more than two-thirds of them were defeated. in the senator was a little more capacity for candidates to achieve separation. in nevada and in west virginia, harry reid and joe mentioned one despite low approval rating for the president. but even there the relationship is pretty strong. apart from nevada and west

virginia, democrats lost all of the kansas senate race in the where obama was at 46% are below. arkansas, florida, indiana, kentucky, new hampshire, iowa, new hampshire. when he was 47 or above, california, colorado, connecticut, delaware and washington they would. the only exception in the pattern were illinois, interestingly, and pennsylvania are the only two states where obama was a 47 or above, democrats lost in that. and the reason they lost, very particular in both cases. overall what we saw in this election was not necessarily a collapse of obama's coalition, but and corrosion of it and the gimme nation of their turnout. and then a really sharp movement away from the democrats among the first who were kind of cool. voters who were cool towards him and '08 became ice cold in 2010. i will try to be quickly. the heart of the coalition,

modern democratic coalition that elected obama our young people, minorities, and college educated white voters, particularly women. democrats slipped among those groups in 2010 but they didn't collapse. they still won two-thirds of hispanic and hispanic say, michael bennet and especially harry reid we're sharon angle backfired on her. the african-american voters state pretty strong at 90%. young people, 57% are college educated white women wavered. i will come back to that. still in the high '40s. their turnout was down. the rest of the white electorate so, by that i mean blue collar white men and women, and college educated white men, all of which tended to be pretty skeptical of government moved sharply to the point where the exit poll, republicans won 60% of all white voters. in the history of the exit poll for congressional races which goes back to 1982, no party had a gut to 60%.

not even in 1994 among white voters. only twice before had any party got that high i, 1974 and 1964 for the democrats. the erosion was greatest among the blue-collar voters who had been skeptical of him since the beginning, and have been hit hard by the recession and also tend to be dubious that government is going to do anything to make their lives better. democrats only one in 4% of those voters. the white-collar voters were a little more diverse. women were better than men, and the most interesting pattern, i will close on this point, was we saw a really stark distinction in the white upper middle upper-middle-class whites behaved on the coast and in the heartland. you know, the biggest thing that's happened in my mind over the last 20 years is made of democrats more competitive. was a minority population, and

the upper-middle-class white electric, particularly along the coast has switched from the predominant republican to predominate democratic. in this election by and large in the coastal states democrats still did pretty well with those voters. california, connecticut. colorado which functions as a coastal state basically plays with the upper-middle-class is somewhat more -- in the middle of the country there was a difference in the blue collar and white collar. they voted almost as heavily republican. as a result, when you consider the demography is less able to democrats, they are few, older, whiter, they are voting republican, you have to wipe out in the middle. other than vermont, iowa and new mexico after this election, there is no state that doesn't touch and ocean in which democrats had a majority, congressional representation. just those three. so the only kind of sober line here for democrats is that this

comes, this continues and i will close on this point, it continues a very the volatility. this third consecutive election were at least 20 seats move back and forth between the parties, the last time it happened was 1948-1952. obama lost unify democrats and unified control of government, obvious in 2009. they lost it. neither party has been able to sustain control of the white house, the house and senate for more than four years since 1968. and obviously independent voters who moved sharply to the democrats and '06 basically stay there in lesser numbers, move back to republican. neither party has been able to achieve a legions, lasting allegiance. party because neither party has been able to solve the core problems which will be the subject of excellent books and. [laughter] >> that i believe is a silver lining here is that for

democrats will be there is a message for republicans, don't unpack everything. that's what i would say. [laughter] >> to question. one is, reminding, you mentioned democrats only win in maritime states except for vermont. as i recall you had an earlier version of that will some cycles ago which was democrats cannot win in a state where cattle outnumber people. >> that's true of. [laughter] i have said, i said, and this is due again, i said in 2000 that george bush won every county in america with a cap in it. except in vermont we have the cows that work for ben & jerry's. [laughter] and that is where we ended up here again. this map, you kind of look at the congressional district map, it's kind of a throwback to the '90s when we talked about the democrats as being a bicoastal party and his tremendous difficult in between except for portions of the upper midwest.

and we are kind of back there. i mean, this was a wipeout of really enormous proportions to the senate of the country. if vista was a parliamentary system, like 94 and '06, this would have been a vote of no confidence. >> ruthlessly summarized what you just said, two things happen to democrats. one was the shift of white voters and the other was turnout didn't happen. turnout was foreseeable in the midterm elections. this is a giveaway of asking what does this tell us about 2012? if democratic turnout among young voters and nonwhite voters had somehow been equal in this election to its levels and '08, what would we be looking at? >> good question. so, both youth and minority falloff in midterm election. it fell off more than usual, particularly the minority turnout. youth turnout has averaged 12% admit terms, 18% of presidential

since 92. it was 11 this time. so it went down for the. the bigger fall was in a minority share of the vote went down from 26% in '08 to only 22%. that will go back out. i become it will not like of up to twice six, it will probably go to about 20%. judging by -- and needs to grow at the rate as the last 20 years minority will be about 20, 29% of the vote in 2012 which means mathematically if obama holds at the same rate the democrats are doing he could lose 60% of the white vote and get elected which is the least national popular vote. is probably his that, you know, where the coalition wasn't able to democrats, with the exception of pennsylvania and illinois, mostly because they ran better with suburban white voters than republicans have, and which into nice case probably should have. sestak should have won that case. he was woefully underperformed in the philadelphia suburbs even though he was from there.

he didn't collapse in pennsylvania. leaving aside those two states, where there are enough of those people, they kind of held on. colorado, washington, connecticut, california. the problem is in the middle of the country that coalition by itself, even if it shows up, is not enough to win with. you have to be at least, you don't have to when most white voters. you can i get -- lee fisher, the candidate in ohio, 129% of white voters. the question for obama is how much of this is program and how much is recoverable. i think there's more recovery in the upper-middle-class then there is and again, we can do for for second here, i think he won 40% of working-class whites in 2008 which is not a good number, but he will be very hard-pressed to get that. i would be amazed if he gets back to that again. so i think there is a path to

victory, but it may require i think it would be very hard for them to win the kind of metal bending states that he won last time. and i think it may be for example, in arizona, a diverse state, may have to kind of look, ouch together the absent the economic recovery spent any burning questions? >> okay, gerry. >> i will say this before i talk. i am from kansas and i'm now trying to figure out what the distinction is between the political preference of the wheat growing state and court growing state, and those farm dry land versus irrigation. next week. you know, i think ron is a very good job of describing an extraordinarily volatile not you, but great in american

political life that we are living there. and that's what i think we saw further proof of. and it was the result of the bad economy. but also kind of a national mood. and i thought as we went through the year, and as we did, the wall street show, nbc news poll which helped organize, there were two numbers that i saw through the year that illustrated the mood is what anything i could think of. the first one we asked several times during the campaign whether, if people come if voters were offered an option to check one box on the ballot that's what everybody in congress, one vote, would they do it or not, all three times as 50% of the people said they would do so. pretty astonishing. towards the end we asked a different question. we said if you had a choice in the vote for the representative of your district and house of representatives, between some in 10 years express in congress and somebody had no experience whatsoever, who would you vote for? 50% of the people said i would vote for the person with no

experience whatsoever. that is the mood to produce the result that ron described. now, often infrequent and i think perhaps somewhat in correctly that was described as the motivator. i think i was all. someone from ohio talk to me, it was more of a mood of fear. this was for the country has lost its way. fear that the country was slipping. fear that the country was losing control of its own destiny. and the economy was a big part of that obviously. so that is what i think produce the election results. then the question that we'll ask ourselves, and i will address briefly here is what does that due to the chin and washington, and a congress that will now arrive for a lame-duck session next month and a more portly, to start over again in january. and i think the overall effectiveness of those will have been to narrow the agenda in washington, down to a few course

subject to the economy which means job creation, spending, debt and deficit. i could republicans will be looking at this and saying that's what the agenda is. you also say repeal of health care bill is part of our mandate. they don't actually i believe believe that. they believe the people who stepped in your want that to happen by and large. but they also recognize it's not going to happen. so i think the house will cast some votes to repeal the obama health care, lock stock and bill. those votes will die in the senate or big bill somehow be coalition in the senate. then they'll go back and try to spin part of health care bill and stop parts of it. but i think that's an important thing publicly for public is but the core issue for republicans is spending tax levels and the debt. that's really i think the overall and first effect to

reduce the agenda in washington. which is not going to be pretty by the way because really, those questions get what i think is the core issue facing ethical system which is what is the role of the government in the 21st century, what is the role in american slides in first century? i think that really was what the 2008 election was about. now have another election and they said maybe it's more over in this direction. i think the country kind of revolves in a general way the question of what is the role that we want government to play in the 21st century, i think you will have a loss wins back and forth. enable the next two years will have a lot a debate about issues surrounding that question in washington. so i think you'll have a lot of discussion about which government program can go, which government programs can be cut in half, which defense programs are we went to single out, are we went to attack, i don't even have a lot resolution.

republicans like to say that they're prepared to get $100 million of spending right now, which is fine. my question in response to that is what you find find the other $900 billion in spending that you have to do? so even $100 billion of spending cuts, it gets to the low-hanging fruit, not the high hanging fruit. there will be an exercise in december in which the commission to present obama appointed that is bicameral will it produce or not produce some kind of report might be -- i think in this environment it might be minimalist in its scope and probably short-lived and its effect on this debate. i think there's a more important political debate coming up early next year in which a lot of these conversations will crystallize. somewhere in the march, april, may time frame there will be a need to get the voting congress to raise the federal debt

ceiling. this is already emerging as sort of the flash point in which the tea party people in particular, and their friends and countries, people who elected by the tea party explosion into the as and, if not actual tea party candidates themselves, are saying essentially that we would draw the line. we are going to extract the price from the administration. the administration is likely to turn and say, well, you can shut down the government if you want, but that didn't work so well the last time. i think a lot of democrats in congress will say, you want to extend the debt ceiling? five, you go for. we're not going to. when you get our you get to make those decisions. i think it's going to be a moment in which some of these questions on how much they are you going to cut, are you going to be pushed to the front of the line because republicans will try to say this is the price for

raising the debt ceiling. you agree to this package. and i think democrats will say not what we read in the election. so i think that's the core of the debate. it raises the question about other issues, what happens to them along the way, especially importance to this pre. so let me take off a couple of those and then we can move on. you going to talk about free trade i know. i think free trade things like the south korean free trade agreement probably get a little easier in a new congress versus the old congress that although it will be interesting to see with the tea party caucused is about free trade. they are not free trade by instinct, and some of, somewhat isolationist. we will see whether that is an overall director you also have new republicans like rob portman, senator from ohio, ran on a difficult environment in industrial state, a platform of explosives think free trade isn't good for my state. it's good for industry in the

u.s. he won by 17 points. he won easily. and by the way, his running mate ran for governor also was attacked for being a free trader. so we'll see about free trade. immigration reform i think less likely and this congress. again, the tea party influence somewhat nationalistic is not for immigration reform. both parties have a clinical need to do with immigration but they don't have the environment or the those to handle it very well. the price of political immigration bill that has something that somebody can call amnesty and so i think i gets more difficult. i defy anyone here maybe you know, i can never be at i saw this year in which a candidate something pro or con about ratifying the s.t.a.r.t. treaty. [laughter] maybe i missed it. maybe in vermont, but --

[laughter] >> i assume because it slipped under the radar screen, it may be easier to get it done in a lame-duck congress. but i could be wrong about that. it's one of those things republicans probably don't want to thank, take a stand on. the easiest thing may be to just move on. i'm just guessing there because i've got today, i haven't heard any discussion about it. there has been a loud discussion that i think, discussion alive consequences which is the demonization of china. pad after ad after ad this year that china is the enemy, china is destroying our economy. china is the problem. it's overstated in campaign ads, as everything is overstated in campaign ads. what are the consequences, i'm not sure exactly. i don't think figuring out irrational approach in the next 10 to 20 years. finally, energy.

i did an interview with mitch mcconnell yesterday and i asked him twice and i guess twice is a little slow, make sure heard it right. i so what can you agree with president obama on? both times he said, there's an energy things we can agree on. he said more nuclear power, electric cars that those are things we can agree on. we can't agree on cap-and-trade. that's dead. and by the way, white house people say the same thing. citing energy is one of those areas where there might be some possibility that every wants to show they are responsible adult and maybe something can happen. but that's kind of a. that's it for the next two years. i think much about we've had and much what ron describes set up the morning well. >> gerry, let me ask you one question about the numbers in the house. back in september, congresswoman michele bachman from minnesota announced that she was setting up something called the tea party caucused. there was nervous laughter and

no one was quite sure whether anyone -- over time, over a short amount of time something like 10 100 members of the house conference joint that. if you look at the house republican conference in january, is the tea party, half of that conference? is a dumb part of that conference? >> i don't think it's have to caucused. less than that. i think -- by the way, the remaining moderate democrats, about 2 23 or 24 of those, wille enormous. and more importantly, it influences on, there's a group of senators, 20 democrats, 2012, they come from states like nebraska, west virginia, montana, colorado, florida. if you want to define us, you're a democrat running for reelection for your senate seat

in 2012 and you want to defy the tea party, good luck with it. so i think there's a tea party influence that transcends numbers. but i would guess the tea party caucused as it stands is whether doubt is probably 150 when the dust settles next january. >> which side do you think, if either, has more incentive to try to find agreement? or did both mostly, they both mostly feel they're better off shopping differences and heading into 2012? icon if you like videos in washington happened not so much because of the specifics of the policy, but both sides made fundamental calculation. they need to reach agreement. does either side have a tablet is? >> visitor i think the interesting historical anomaly in which the house changed hands but the senate didn't. that's very unusual by the way. it's important to get the senate changed hands, i think it would be much more portable republicans to some agreement that under the current circumstances in which they can shoot free throws in the house, they can pass whatever they want, they know it will die in

the senate or the veto pen a president obama, and they don't have to take the blame for it. . . you are making it very bad, and ineffectual parliamentary system, if you actually control the legislature you can do whatever you want.

>> as opposed to not being able to do anything at all. >> exactly. i recently participated in a conversation between paul martin the former committee and prime minister and minister of finance and bob rubin and paul martin was to balance the canadian budget. and he did that, having on the back of a conference meant which was introducing a gsp value-added tax, but and it was obviously really difficult. you guys are now where of the national problems you have when balancing the budget way you cut etc. etc. anyway quite recently paul and bob are were talking about this, and reminiscing on what it was like, and apparently the day after the crucial vote in parliament to balance the budget paul martin was minister of finance and bob said to him,

well, you know how did it go? how many months of mack negotiated a taken paul said you don't understand. we control the party. it took a morning he said. this is our budget and they voted for it. so i said you guys still have a long ways to go. which is not a bad read into what i want to talk about which was the implications for economic part of foreign-policy of these midterms, and actually i think that jerry's point about start not appearing in the campaign is an important one, that really foreign-policy right now insofar as it is figured in people's thinking about their politics in the u.s. is really about the economy. so i would just like to pick out for egg issues that i think are going to be of concern to americans and also to the rest of the world. the first one jerry alluded to already which is china and trade but i would claim it and maybe a

slightly more compensated way. which is global financial imbalances. i think this is the really big question and if nuclear arms negotiations word may be the dominant issue of the 1970s in the 1980s, the big framework for the international discussion, i think the big framework for the international discussion for this decade is going to be figuring out global financial imbalances and that includes figuring out what should the rate exchange rate b., the right framework for figuring out the right exchange rate but it also includes something a lot more competition and which has never really been a subject of international relations between states, which is what should be a country's level of savings and what should be a countries level of consumption? we are already saying this with geithner, with treasury going out and saying particular to the

chinese into the germans, we think you aren't consuming enough and you are saving too much. this is actually quite remarkable that in foreign relations we would be talking not about how many guns people have pointed at us and not about control of the islands and not even about international emission standards, things that are about the collective international state. we are now and what i think are the most important discussions between countries, talking about what is your savings rate. to the chinese we are saying what is your national health care system? you guys have to improve your national health care system. kind of rich coming from americans i would say. in order that your people don't have to save so much money. so this is i think the really important, really come for gated issue and i think really really difficult, because we have no idea how much tolerance national populations, not just americans

but germans, chinese, are going to have for the global discourse starting to have some airing on the sort of intensely personal and intensely domestic issues. the second sort of big issue that i think these elections will have a bearing on in the global discussion is u.s. inflation. in some ways you know we are here talking about the midterms but i think you could argue that the most important political events this week was ben bernanke and the huge quantitative program that he announced. and that is sort of fascinating, because from what ron and jerry have described, i come away with the conclusion that there is going to be gridlock especially cherries vinyl i thought fine analysis of the motives of the tea parties so really the elected politicians aren't going

to do anything. meanwhile we have the unelected head of the central bank announcing a quantitative program which is almost as big as-- was. it is huge. and it is hard not to conclude, particularly if you are a foreign observer of u.s. policy, that there is this kind of unspoken consensus that one politically less painful and actually economically not so bad way to start unwinding this problem of a huge foreign debt, is to print some money. it is kind of nice if you are issuing debt in your own currency. actually, you have the printing press and you can just pay the money back by printing it and giving it to the chinese. and that is a little bit what we are starting to see happen, and just as much as you have in u.s. politics this humanization of china and you know undervalued

chinese currency, is the culprit for u.s. economic woes. i think you are already starting to see and i think we will see much more a dynamic outside of the united states of other country starting to accuse america of being an unfair economic player particularly as you see a lot more quantitative easing and people say come on, you guys are just playing unfairly. the third , which will exacerbate that second if it does happen is what happens with the u.s. economic recovery. and you know, oddly enough, the biggest concern the rest of the world has about the united states, i would say the biggest foreign-policy issue the rest of the world has about the united states is will the u.s. economy recover? everyone is hoping and praying as intensely as americans are actually that it does because

this great burst of global prosperity we had for the past two or three decades has been to a very considerable degree in-- by the consumer who is and consuming that much any more. the final point on sort of big foreign-policy issues. i think, and this is something i think it's already evident in u.s. politics, but will be more so globally. it is one important thing that we are seeing, it is we have been talking inevitably since there has been an election about partisan divides. i think a really important split we are starting to see is the different, maybe a tale of two cities when it comes to globalization and technology revolution. you are actually seeing some part of america, some of the big multinational corporations, but also some of the really smart entrepreneurial businesspeople,

maybe particularly in technology and finance but also some manufacturers for whom the global economy, the technology revolution absolutely fantastic. you know this is a time when he can build a company and you can build a branch almost overnight and the global economy offers huge success. also, it means actually that your state is much less tied to the state of the country overall. that old line about what is good for general motors is good for america, it is less and less true and for me a really important data point was the ibm third-quarter results that were about 10 days ago. where ibm reported that, in economies in in the first three-quarters of this year, their profit has gone up 29%. that is kind of amazing in a crummy world economy. and what was i thought even more interesting was part of what is driving it is this huge shift in

just less than a decade of ibm printing and american countries to be a global one. in 2003 they have 7000 employees in india. now they have 75,000, and over that same. now, that same seven years they have reduced their u.s. workforce by 30,000, so it is now around 110,000. not that much more than their indian workforce. and this is ibm. you know this is a pretty big, pretty old u.s. corporation. so that split meanwhile, i think a lot of these heartland voters who ron was talking about are having a very different experience of the impact between impacts of globalization and the technology revolution and they think these conflicting results of what is going on are going to be driving kind of, driving conflict within both parties

actually. because i think both parties have a little bit of support from people on both sides. and then my final point on one thing we should be watching. this is maybe a little bit out of my, maybe a little bit venturing outside the reservation but especially to jerry's point about there is going to be a big national debate in america that decides government. i think there is one country that americans should be watching very closely which is britain. britain had that debate before the elections and they made an incredibly radical choice. i asked an economist when it would be, when we would start to see if that was working or not. a guy called michael spence, nobel prize winner and he said of going about 15 years. incredibly-- incredibly useful for policymaking today. i think it be sooner and it could really be bad or really good, and i view hope-- do hope that americans you know maybe it is not going to be in campaign

ads but i hope washington will be watching that quite closely because it is a real-time experiment in what happens when you cut up the sides of the deficit that the size of the government really sharply. >> say one more word about the british experiment. if you were to try to translate the british experiment into an american program what would it look like? >> well, what they have done is just under 20% cats in government services, apart from health care and education, and that means about-- that means about half a million jobs lost. that is a lot for the british economy. british population is about 50 million. >> it also means big defense cuts. >> yeah, absolutely. at defense has not showed it at all. the only areas that they have been concerned about is health and education which had cuts,

much smaller ones but i think the really, you know, the big-- this is the question which is by throwing that any people out of work so quickly in a weak world economy, are they going to tip britain into a much deeper recession, or the toy argument which is everyone will suddenly feel confident that the british budget is back on track and private sector will bloom. >> we will see if they are all keynesians are not surely. >> i think it will be-- but somebody is trying it out so the rest of us are lucky that we are not reddish i think. whether it works or not, and you know. >> will you send us an update? >> i think other people will be watching too. >> thank you very much. that is terrific. now, even though we said at the beginning of the session and even repeated that the election wasn't about foreign policy, and i know that hurts me and almost

everyone in the room to think about that because those of us who spend a lot of our time thinking about world affairs and foreign policy in a strange way would like every election to be about foreign policy, i think we should be careful what we wish for. but, clearly this election will have an effect on foreign-polico worth remembering that the 2012 presidential election will be partly about foreign policy in this election will lead us into that to let me say just a few words about where we have been on foreign-policy and where i think we will see the immediate effects and where that will put us in 2012. oddly enough, although it has gone almost unnoticed, the first 18 months of the obama administration were in a sense a period of relative bipartisanship and american foreign-policy. it wasn't the sharpest point of disagreement between the two parties, far from it. yes, there were republican

critiques of the obama administration, especially the decision to set a target date for beginning a drawdown in afghanistan. but, compared to everything else that was going on, president obama got a pretty free hand for his policy of engagement on iran for example which if you remember in 2008 campaign, he was derided by republican conservatives as hopelessly naïve to think you could negotiate with the leaders of iran, north korea and who was the third in the axis of evil at the time? thank you, venezuela. that is right, castro may have been part of it. the president got a pretty free hand even on pressuring netanyahu on settlement in israel although that immediately ran into trouble, didn't work. it was bungled and but essentially, and the president

has gotten a pretty wide praise for the way he has handled the drawdown in iraq. now in an era of, in an earlier era we would have thought that this was the normal tradition of american bipartisanship and we haven't really seen this kind if-- for a while. why was that the case? in large part it was because barack obama moved pretty smartly toward the center in foreign-policy. his withdrawal from iraq, the end of the combat mission in iraq was supposed to happen in 14 months. the deadline got kicked out. in afghanistan, when the military came in and ask for more troops he gave them more troops. when they asked for more troops after that he complained about being asked for more troops and then gave them or troops. we will see what happens if general petraeus comes in and asks metaphorically for a third bite at the apple as july approaches and in that case the request won't be for more troops. it will be for more time.

i think that one will be tougher but, i would argue that one of the effects of this election we just had, and the new calendar that leads to a presidential election in 2012 will be what you might call the repolarization of american foreign-policy. there is now and the next 23 months every incentive for republican critics of the president's foreign-policy, and there are plenty of them out there for plenty of good reasone critiques. reasons that are both substantive and political. i think we are going to see those in two or three areas. one of them will clearly be the most important decision that is already on the calendar and that is the decision in afghanistan. will president obama decide to pull the trigger on the drawdown

that he has promised will begin in july? i think the answer is yes. the answer is yes for substantive reasons. he spent a long time coming to that decision, and as far as we can tell he believes in it on substantive grounds, and then the second is political. the main pressure on obama on afghanistan at this point is not from his right. it is from his left turquoise main danger between now and the election of 2012 is that an antiwar democrats will run in the primaries. it is folly to predict an election narrative two weeks in advance, but it is always the most dangerous thing for any civic resident to have a challenger from the days of his own party. he wants to head that off. the easiest way to head it off is to do what he has already promised to do, but he wants to threat a needle. he wants to withdraw some troops gradually without creating chaos

and without prompting david petraeus to walk. that is not an impossible needle to thread that it is the dilemma he faces. issue number two, iran. a crisis, if it occurs, if iran gets to the point of deploying a weapon, building a weapon or announcing the capability of building a weapon, that i think will instantly be the defining crisis of a rock obama's foreign policy in the next two years and how he handles it will in many ways be his defining moment as certainly as a foreign-policy leader, before the american electorate. it would be folly to try to predict how that might happen except i will note that the administration's own people who are working on this believe that the iranians won't get there in the next two years. they say they are working

assiduously to make sure they don't get there the next two years, and when one of the white house's top people on this was asked, do you really mean that your goal at this point is just to kick the can down the road to years? his response was, in the business of non-proliferation, kicking the can down the road for two years as is a pretty major victory. so i think we can expect the can to continue to rattle down the road. the other unlikely outcome would be that iran might buckle in the face of the economic sanctions that have been ratcheted up and in effect sue for peace. i don't think we need to spend too much time on that, unlikely event. barack obama and the rest of us should be so lucky. last major issue, again in that do we should be so lucky category, is israel. at this point it is very tough to see conditions in israel and the negotiations with the palestinians getting to ripeness

if they did get to ripeness that would actually be a dilemma for president obama. there are risks inherent for any president in investing a lot of time in trying to negotiate a peace agreement in the middle east. not just the obvious risk of putting pressure on israel and irritating israel supporters in the united states. among them the many conservatives who have moved over the last 20 years from the democratic hardy, jewish conservatives from the democratic party and to the republican party which has helped the american party and look good as the democratic party has remained the american party of labor, but there is a somewhat more subtle danger for a president and that is when the country, when the electorate is asking him to spend full time on the economy, negotiating peace in the middle east we already know it takes in the end, in the endgame weeks and weeks of concentrated presidential labor.

every actor in the middle east has gotten used to having quality time from her president. none of them are going to agree to sign a peace treaty of all they get to talk to us as secretary of state or the national security adviser oregon the vice president. although joe biden would be an effective weapon in getting them to sit down and sign a piece of paper. [laughter] in a strange way i think that the terrible dilemma that resident obama may face is that, if middle east peace looks like a possibility, can he spare the time and energy to do it? it is an unlikely choice. again he and we should he so lucky, but that will be one of the problems he could face. in a more immediate sense very quickly we will face some challenges, the administration will face some challenges i should say in the new congress beginning with the s.t.a.r.t. treaty that the jury referred to on energy, trying to reassemble

some kind of international energy, international climate change policy with cap-and-trade taken off the table as a possibility and finally, the administration and the democrats in congress have been painfully trying to move step i step toward new openings in their exchanges with cuba under howard burman who was the chairman of house foreign affairs for the last two years, the new chair of house foreign affairs is of course going to be ileana ros-lehtinen a cuban-american from south florida, who has no interest in relaxing the embargo, so i think that one is off the table. now, this sounds like a dire picture. i will close by saying their docs equate in a political sense, it may turn out to be a good thing for president obama, a more polarized debate and sharper focus on foreign-policy. actually it allows a president who has not done a half bad job, you may disagree or agree with his policies but there have been i would argue no major disasters on his watch and that

comparatively speaking is a pretty good record. that will allow president obama to highlight his stature as a president who can operate in that field, and to bring his putative opponents qualification into question and if he is very lucky and carries out his gradual drawdown in afghanistan and has to withstand reasoned, sensible conservative counter arguments against him, he and his political lieutenants will do their best to cast the republicans as the party that wanted a longer, a baker and a tougher war, and as he knows from 2008 that is not a bad platform to run on in front of the american electorate. and with that i will take a question. >> some questions for a quick that goes directly at that last point. i was struck going around the country and following campaigns

at the ambivalence of many conservative republican candidates about afghanistan. on the one hand particularly some of the tea party candidates there is kind of a clear pullback on the bush vision of the u.s. kind of you know investing what in treasury makes the world and makes us safer democracy. on the other hand the natural republicans trying to paint a government, every serious republican senator candidate opposed the idea of time limits for withdrawal or time limit. so i'm just wondering, if in fact petraeus and the pentagon to resist the drawdown that obama envisions do you think there is a chance the white house gets caught in a squeeze between would-- congressional republicans on one hand and the pentagon on the other basically raising a lot of heirs or. >> i think it is a plan but it is not impossible to thread the needle here. it is not impossible to, because in fact, the pentagon is not a

monolith here. there is not exactly a tea party and the pentagon, but there are generals-- there is a line in bob woodward's book where i think colin powell says to someone in the white house may say to barack obama you know, there is more than one general in your pentagon. you don't have to take the first piece of advice that is there. i think so, that yes, if obama and his crew handled this badly, and it is possible, we don't know but we may have a different secretary of defense-- of defense at the pentagon at the time so there is an x. factor. you could have some kind of split along those lines and that would be dangerous. now i will leave it to you whether and in electoral terms you would rather be on the small were side or the large foresight of that argument, but it is

dangerous. >> i have to ask a question too which is to what extent do you think the economy will dictate the decisions in afghanistan and to what extent does this become really hard to sustain a lot of spending in afghanistan at a time when the u.s. economy is bad? >> that is a terrific question because it has been striking how often, how bluntly and how openly president obama talks about the economic cost of the war, and the opportunity cost of the war, the fact that too many of us in the 2008 campaign, the obama argument, by downsizing the wars in iraq and afghanistan we would have enough money to fund energy and education and health care seemed like kind of a trick talking point and it may have been. but there is no question that the enormous drain on the budget of those wars weighs heavily and i still think in a sense the

most important speech he has done as president in the structure of american foreign policy is his speech back in december at west point when he echoed eisenhower and said, we have to learn to live within our resources. and so, in sort of a concrete immediate sense no they are not going to make the decision based on the dollar cost of different options, but in a much larger sense yes the framework of obama foreign policy is intended to take us from a very expensive neoconservative nation-building democratizing model of foreign policy to a much more economical model. absolutely. >> my name is james nathan and i'm from alabama. i would like to ask christine, are there any impediments to depreciating the dollar? it seems to me, this is the fed 's, this is the fed's approach currently and probably

respectively, so what is to stop, what is to stop the fed and how can the rest of the world-- why would you expect that the rest of the world would do anything but have to accept it? >> well, that is a good point, and it is what is happening. i mean what we have seen as a result is competitive devaluation, so you know the real losers as the u.s. dollar depreciate doesn't have an impact on china because the chinese have linked their currency with the u.s. dollar. but the real losers are the other emerging market economies that are seeing their economies appreciate relative to the dollar so you have seen them starting to try to competitively depreciate their currency too. and i guess the economic, the sort of economist dream scenario is that we achieve this great global pact to rebalance the global economy in china and germany start consuming more and

american start saving more and everybody is happy but the nightmare scenario is america prints lots of money, trying to have a little inflation, depreciate the dollar and everybody else starts trying to do the same thing. and that tends not to work out so well. >> can i just had one thing? there is one other danger is and that is the people could start to build barriers to capital flows, not to trade but to capital flows and which others have talked about doing. people who worry about the great depression like downward spiral, which they attributed to protectionism and not worry about the analog now being capital flows, not trade barriers. >> and i don't want to belabor that point too much, but it is hard to blame the brazilians too much because you know, the big global trade in recent memory was the young. when japan was caught in a similar economic situation to

the u.s., interest rates incredibly low and so the smart thing to do was borrow the yen and moved quickly to another currency and you made lots of money. people are doing that now with the dollar. >> exactly. >> my name is herb from naples, florida. i am sorry. my name is herb ebert from naples florida. as the agenda unfolds over the coming months for what is going to happen in washington, what is your prediction for tax policy? >> tax policy? first of all i don't have one because everybody that i've asked in the last two weeks has a different answer. actually i do have one. because nobody has a very clear answer i think the only option that actually can accumulate the vote in a lame-duck session is one that kicks the can down the road to use your metaphor, that is a one or two and i would think democrats would settle for one, republicans would demand two, extension of all the bush tax cuts which doesn't squeeze

anybody, but everybody will have to live with, and it is not because that is the one that has gathered a consensus. it is because it is the fallback option for everybody and i think that is kind of where we are at. republicans want to extend them all. democrats want to extend three-quarters of them or couple the two. i don't think there is a center of gravity on any of the solutions so i think kicking it down the road for a year or two is the most likely outcome. >> this is one of those great times when you get to-- a couple of weeks ago interviewed the president and asked him about this, and he in that conversation drew a very hard line against extending all of the tax cuts, and said if the republicans want to extend the top 2% of the earners he will have to show us where they make the $700 million. he gives his comments about this idea of maybe just kicking the can down the road. i do not think that would all be

his first thought, second or third preference. i think you would rather stand and fight as al gore would say, about stopping the extension of the top brackets now but they are going to be a lot of shellshocked, crack, 23 democrats up in 2012 in the senate. he feels they don't have the horses with them. >> you now, i think that is a stalemate right now but you kick that issue into the new congress, then maybe gets rolled into a package with some other things. there are trade-offs to be made. if you are democrat you would want to make them in a lame-duck session. i think that might happen in this horse trading that is going to happen over the debt ceiling and overall kinds of other things in congress. the overall lame-duck, you know i think are our feeling and are reporting is the democrats have very little incentives to help republicans resolve almost anything in the lame-duck. is kind of, you know you want to

cut $100 billion, here you go. we will fund the government until january and you take it over and i think they want to kind of make them confront the implications of the campaign agenda. at the chamber of commerce helped a lot of republicans who have a position on interest that the chamber won't want to see go away. but i think next year, not knowing. >> next question. >> my name is gil stevenson and i'm from vermont said thank you for the thoughtful words. my question is about the budget, and specifically mention that cutting 100 billion was the easy part, and my question is, is one of the easy part of function 150 international affairs budget, so it is not so much about anyone foreign policy but about the ability to have a foreign-policy and executed at all, number one and number two, so it is an armed omnibus reconciliation process? >> great question.

>> i would encourage you and i mean this seriously. i would encourage you to go to the defense department web site and read bob gates' speeches over the last several years. he has said quite explicitly and not many people were listening i understand we have to give at the office and here is my plan for doing so and in august he said that, actually in may and again in august he told us building you have to give me $100 billion in defense savings over the next five years so that i can go to omb and say here's 2% of our budget. i'm giving it back to you. you give me an return a 1% increase so that i can keep the forces at the levels they are at now and he is about to set out to try to make that happen. so he is trying to get out in front of a freight train that you correctly identified into it the way he wants to do it and i think rational people would say is a smart way. we will see if he pulls it off but is not going going to be unscathed and i don't know what republicans are going to think about that the bob gates who is none of the above thinks it is inevitable. >> but there is a lot of

enthusiasm upon house republicans and the new house republicans for cutting foreign aid. it is always and enthusiasm on their part. eric cantor who will be the house republican leader, has talked about zeroing out foreign aid to countries and authorities like the palestinian authority that he deems to be not supportive of american foreign-policy. he is even talking at one point about taking the aid program for israel and giving it its own separate category in the budget so it would not be counted as foreign aid, a prospect that horrifies some, the folks at aipac and other supporters of aid to israel, so that will be, that will be a fight. >> keeping in mind the miserable fiscal condition of this country, and energy as well, do you think there is any

likelihood for a major excise tax on fuel for example, $3 a gallon for gasoline? >> no. >> stop there. [laughter] >> you now, part of the challenge going forward is that opposition of new taxes has really become a litmus test for republicans, or the pledge that americans for tax reform conservative group puts out every senator challenged except one under any circumstance. virtually every house challenge i think all that one house challengers signed it and it is, you know it is just hard to see how you get past that in a variety of areas. social security is another one where it is eminently possible to imagine a deal that would involve some benefit reduction, raising their time and date a lot longevity but the political price of getting democrats to sign onto that kind of benefit reduction of some kind of

revenue increase is really hard to see how republicans get their after a cycle in which you have two sitting senators tonight renomination. i think they are going to be pretty leery of going on that kind of thing. >> we have taken your time so we will take questions from anyone who is within 6 feet of a the microphone but no one else. >> okay, if i may. i'm david brooks and i'm from the santa fe council of international relations. this is a political question and not a foreign-policy question. as i understood the gentleman who is analyzing the election said that one analysis that had been observed was that upper-middle-class white worm moving from republican to democrat. >> in the last 20 years. >> and that is in line with what i think, think i have observed anecdotally. to what do you attribute that and do you expect it to continue? >> right, well it has been

common in the democratic improvement among those voters-- by the way we end up being at the best point for democrats with pretty close to a 50/50 split so it is not like they are predominately democratic but they have gone from being predominantly republican to being very competitive and outside of of the south obama carried the majority of white voters with a college education. the answer is partially foreign policy. primarily the flipside of what has boothe blue-collar voters for the republicans over the last 40 years, there was a famous book what is the matter with kansas in which he argued republicans have somehow convince blue-collar voters to vote against their economic interests by getting into focus on cultural-- thomas frank wrote that. by getting into the focus on cultural issues like abortion and gun control and. in fact the reverse has happened. as those issues have become more prominent you have seen more upper-middle-class where many voters are pro-choice and pro-gun control and also

meaningfully on foreign-policy. there is a meaningful difference in attitudes on foreign-policy. by and large, the tilting kind of working-class america is toward unilateral action and peace through strength as the best way to safeguard american interest in the world. in upper-middle-class white-collar america in the polling it tilts much more towards diplomacy and alliance as the best way to save america's interests in the world. i have said often that foreign-policy functions in american politics like a social issue, like abortion really. it divides the country along the same lines as abortion does rather than some of the economic issues so as the whole set of concerns has become more prominent democrats have grown with those voters. the interesting twist to what we are going to see in 2012 is that a lot of the improvement happened under bill clinton who was moderate to liberal, moderate to liberal on foreign-policy issues and moderate to liberal on social issues, but the area of big--

era of big government is over. many suburban upper middle class whites were clinton democrats. the men in particular do tend to be kind of leery of a big rolett front clearly in this election. >> to our panel, please join me in thanking them very much. [applause] thank you. [applause] we will now move quickly into our final plenary session. [inaudible conversations]

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[inaudible conversations] >> okay, we are going to do some quick introductions. we want to maximize the amount of time we have for discussion. this is an important topic. i am joyce davis, the president of the world affairs council of harrisburg, probably one of your newest councils, and we are delighted to be here with you, and to join in this important conference. the topic of this last plenary of the conference is global health, the challenge ahead, and i think we have a distinguished panel that will tackle some very difficult issues. moderating the panel will be rendell wilson, my former colleague at npr and she worked

for more than a decade with npr's science desk. rendell wilson has reported on the global hiv/aids epidemic, other infectious diseases and public health issues. she has traveled throughout africa and india, interviewing people from all walks of life, including heads of state, international health experts, developmental specialists and others. brenda wilson was awarded a kaiser foundation media fellowship in 1999 to study the impact of aids on migrant workers in south africa. she also shared a dupont colombia award for breaking the silence, and mpr series on aids in the black community and she also won an award from the national association of black journalists. on our panel we have dr. anthony fauci who was appointed director

of the institute of allergy and infectious disease in 1984. he oversees an extensive research portfolio of basic and applied research to diagnose and treat infectious diseases such as hiv/aids and other sexually-transmitted infections, influenza, tuberculosis, malaria and illness from potential agents of a terrorism. dr. fauci serves as one of the key advisers to the white house and department of health and human services on global aids issues and on initiatives to bolster medical and public health preparedness against emerging infectious disease. and we have also laurie garrett. she is a senior fellow at the council on foreign relations. ms. garrett is a pulitzer prize winner and author of the council's report on hiv and national security, where are the links? she is presently writing a book

examining the global impact of infectious disease. and finally, we have rear admiral art timothy ziemer, who was appointed in june 2006 to lead the president's malaria initiative. that is a historic $1.2 billion, five-year initiative to control malaria in africa. in 2008, the lantos hyde act authorized an expansion of pmi and in 2009, and was included as a key component of the u.s. government's global health initiative. this pmi strategy is targeted to achieve africa wide impact by having the burden of malaria and 70% of at-risk populations in sub-saharan africa, which is approximately 450 million people thereby, removing malaria as a major public health problem. so would you join me in welcoming our panel and brenda,

please take the moderator. [applause] >> this is going to be interesting coming after the last discussion, because we are just going to sort of link somewhere else in the big question i suppose is going to be on everyone's mind is the ability of the american public to somehow i think beyond their borders, to think of people whom we don't see all the time but who we care about. you know, prior to this administration coming in, we probably had one of the biggest and the greatest i suppose steps taken toward addressing global health that has happened in years, and that was what was considered one of the main legacies of president george bush, which was his proposed funding of treatment of people with hiv.

we know that you know millions of people and we have known for sometime, 33 million people now are infected with hiv and president bush, as a way of sort of counterbalancing our policy in iraq, proposed that we provide up to $15 billion over the five years from 2003 on to the treatment of people with hiv in about 15 countries. from $25 billion later, you have to imagine that at the time that this was proposed, we were talking about hundreds of millions of dollars and going to hiv and aids, not much more than that. now we are up to, you know, to an administration that is proposing $9.6 billion for a series of programs, the main one being hiv and aids under the initiative started by president george bush, which is the

president's emergency plan for aids relief. it now as part of an umbrella group of programs called big global health initiative. president obama has said he is going to start changing the way we do business. it is clear we are coming up against some notion of the finite and the question is, how are we going to-- the question is going to be how are we going to deal with, i suppose problems that we had not begun to define as well when president bush you know propose the president emergency plan for aids relief. so i want to start with dr. anthony fauci who was a part of the group that met in the administration of resident george bush to sort of create the president's emergency plan for aids relief.

what have we learned from that? we are now up to 33 million infected with hiv. what are the lessons that have come out of that, and you know, can we continue i suppose treating people? i think we are now up to about 4 million people in africa and around the world being treated come even though it is understood that may be three times as many need treatment. >> there are several things that were burned by that experience and by the actual implementation of that truly transforming program, and that is that you should not assume the way some people did early on that you cannot deliver rather complicated health care implementation to people in the developing world, namely getting them to get tested and get drugs that you have to take virtually every single day.

so, it was not only a proof of concept but it was actually something that had been implemented very well. the numbers are really extraordinary. the pepfar program is responsible now for about 2.5 million people who are on therapy, close to 1 million babies that were saved by the blocking of mother to child transmission. 10 million people who are under care, including aids orphans so it really is one of the truly landmark programs that the united states government has implemented. that is the really very good news. the sobering news is that, when you deal with such an enormous problem such as this, and aids is a classic prototypical example of that, but as i'm sure you will hear from ken about malaria and tuberculosis and others, is that the solution to the problem is just not treating

people. you have got to treat the people who are infected, but if you look at the totality of people in the lower middle income countries, 30 to 40% of the people who need therapy are getting it, which means that 60 to 70% of those who needed are not. for every one person that we put on therapy, two to three people not only initiating therapy on newly infected people but even sustaining the therapy. get newly infected, so if you just do simple math, the number is economically not feasible. of new infections are we need to try as best as we cae outstripping our capability is really learned is that you have to prevent hiv and action. that is the thing we need to do. we have well proven biologically proven modalities of prevention ranging from distribution to mother to child-- to circumcision to needle exchange to a variety of things. that is the good news. the sobering news about is that only 20% of the people who would benefit from those preventive modalities actually have access to them, so the lessons we have

learned is that when you are dealing with a disease like that, prevention is a major part of what you need to do. and also you have got to get the countries themselves involved in making these types of things part of their own programs. and i think that is what the global health initiative is trying to do, not only by having a larger umbrella of which pepfar is a part, maternal health and child health etc., but making it a part of development where countries have an investment in the health of their citizens as opposed to the united states and others developing countries coming in and continually taking care of them. so, an amazing amount has been accomplished but there has been as you alluded to brenda, some very important lessons that have been learned so i will stop there. >> i will try to make this not just about money, and we will come back to the question of whether by changing the approach, you know,

strengthening health systems in these countries, whether in fact you can do these things more effectively with the resources that you have, the limited resources that you have. but before we go onto that as we noted in the beginning, we started out talking about 300 million or so a decade or so and now we are up to about 25 billion with this administration proposing $48 billion over the next, guess it is actually 63 billion with all of the programs included over the next 60 years. but then you have got a whole bunch of groups. you have got a lot of other folks involved here. you have got the bill bill and melinda gates foundation. we are seeing a lot of actors coming in. the u.s. is the largest contributor but you know, it contributes 40% but then there are all the other folks and then you have got people saying what we really need is not $40 billion which is the total amount of the contribution right now, but we need probably about

twice that amount. you have got lots of different people with their handout for one thing or the of and i don't want to say handout or code that is probably not a fair description. i will put that into some sort of perspective for us. japan, the united kingdom along with bill and melinda gates, what if they asked the ball of the players and what is everybody doing and what do we expect them to do? the u.s. is not doing this alone, let's put it that way. >> one of the things that we all know here in the united states from our own experiences that health costs money. you can have all the goodwill in the world but unless there are cache, the purchase, the necessities for cleaning up water supplies, distributing pills to prevent malaria infection, you can't accomplish very much was just good intentions and albert schweitzer

like deals. the good news is that between 1998 and 2008, the total pile of cash out their for what we grandly called global health increased exponentially. it went from somewhere in the ballpark, demanding on whose numbers you are using, between four and $500 million. that is for everything that we call help, from clean water supplies all the way to pills being handed out, training doctors and all sorts of things. and we are now well into the ballpark of 45 to $50 billion if you include all the range of things that i put in the original number. the biggest driver of that increase without a doubt is in the united states government and if you actually combine private and public giving from the united states for this whole pot of political-- we are by far the biggest donors.

i mean, in the scale of 50 to 70% of the cash that is out there, what we call global health. so, this puts us at a difficult moment in the light of the other other discussions you have heard today. general odierno said you cannot succeed in this new vision of iraq or by implication of what he was saying, where we are going with afghanistan, if you can increase the level of the civilian engagement and what we are dealing with and foreign assistance. that means you need a strong u.s. agency for international development, strong global health initiative, and you know a strong account 150 to put it in budget terms. but we are in a different world now, as are the elections, and we are in a very different world from the one in which tony fauci played a pivotal role in the creation, the conceptualization

of this thing we call pepfar that brenda was describing. i mean that was the post-9/11 world and it was a world in which there was an awakening among christians at a very grassroots level across the united states to the needs to engage as christians in improving the health of the lives of people outside the united states. and so you had literally from grassroots churches a kind of a movement in the united states that supported president bush's very surprising announcement. i mean i think tony was one of a handful that knew what he was going to say when he stood up at the state of the union address and announced by the way i'm going to throw billions of dollars that the hiv/aids epidemic. and now, where we are when we look at the constant nudging u.s. government is giving to the rest of the donor community to step up to the plate and collectively, at least combine

all of them to match what we give, if we could just accomplish that we would have a hell of a pot to fight for global health with. this is where we are now. first of all we have an enormous wealth gap that has occurred, that was already in process of occurring before the 2008 financial crisis. just here in the united states since 2005, the bottom 6% of our population earn 12% of the wealth of our country while the top 10% earned 21%, but according to the 2009 census, that got much worse. the bottom were 3.4% and the top 41.5%. that sort of widening of the gap of wealth and shrinking of the real income of middle-class is not it a uniquely american problem. in fact, the most extraordinary gap widening occurred in the u.k. with a 600% increase in

wealth to the top 1% of the u.k. population over over the same time period. what this has meant is that our own little class is shrinking and is experiencing tremendous financial pressure, and is in a less altruistic and generous mood at this moment. and this is going to make for a real challenge in trying to go forward, pushing in congress, pushing the g20 and various other places for cache dedicated to global health. the food policy, the water policy and any of what i call transnational threats. in addition, we are shy, americans as individual collectively are shy $4.6 trillion for her personal retirement. so what is really going to look bad in five or 10 years as the full baby boom generation marches off into retirement or whatever they march off into.

.. >> that essentially involves countries trying to devalue their personal labor forces more than their guy's labor forces in order to attract investors. this doesn't bode well for middle classes anywhere. and liquidity crisis roughly

somewhere between 5 and 10% of the global wealth locked up. not out there at the moment. i mean in general circulation. so when you put all of this together, what it means is that we have less cash that's that'sh in circulation. we have a shrinking middle class in most of the wealthy countries, the wealth has really shifted to the top 0.1% wealthiest in most large economies in the world. and we're shifts from a g8 world to a g20. here comes the big catch. most of the big g20 countries are still recipients, not donors. china is a major recipient of funds from the global fund to fight aids, tuberculosis, and malaria. brazil is still a recipient country. so when the latest g20 summit

happened two weeks ago, if i got my memory right, two or three. >> november 22. >> thank you very much. no g20. >> g20 before that. sorry. >> they tried to push for a real discussion of the donor role of the g20 besides the original g8, uh-huh. off of the agenda. we're talking about currency wars, trade, and market policy. when you really get locked down into arguments about how do we deal with global health governance and donation to support such things as all of those people, the 4 million plus that we've got on retroviral treatment, but neat to stay on it for the rest of their lives, you cannot stop the pills from flowing. when we look at big picture, the countries all end up being we're

not talking in the same conversation. we're talking about trade policy, about technology transfer, about who controls pharmaceutical patents, and whether or not at the next pandemic, we get vaccines or it all stays in the rich world. so we don't really have a collective conversation where we're talking on the same plane when we say global health among the potential donor states expect the original traditional wealthy nations. and the original traditional wealthy nations are feeling a lot less generous today than they did four years ago. >> this seems like a good place to segue towards you. i noticed on tbs, you had spoken with mr. juarez, you had talking the generosity of the american people. are they willing to be generous if they see the development of poorer countries are, in fact,

effective. and i think an important point that might get missed by some of the g20 countries is the length between prosperity, productivity, and health, and with malaria, your talking about 450 people. many of them children. children die of the owners. you know, the adults, doesn't make for a very vigorous or wealthy work force. against the scenario painted by laurie, do you believe the legacy of president bush will be protected by the new dimensions we see forming in congress at this point? >> that's a good question, brenda. everyone is asking it. we have set tremendous expectations in the world today with the success of the

programs. i refer back to what laura said. there's one the major shifts that have allowed us and collective multilaterals in our country to work. it's the increase in resources. what we're facing now while it's causing a lot of questions, i think we need to remind ourselves that we have been at a place like this before. and so the question is what do we do? and we don't know yet because the dollars and the economics will become a bit clearer here over the next several months. and at that point, we have to look at realities of what congress appropriates and then look at our national commitments and priorities and make appropriated judgments. you referenced the generosity of the american people. laurie mentioned that in a number of her comments. i feel that's a trait that we

have embedded in our dna as citizens of this great country. and if i can get personal for a second, i have come to that conclusion based on a number of things. i grew up in asia. my parents for missionaries. much of their work had to do with medical missions. and in many of the countries today, 50 to 60% of health deliverables is done through ngos, private sector, and missions. along with that investment comes a lot of passion and personal sacrifice. that's going to continue. now that is marginal when you talk about the billions of dollars needed to sustain programs. but it still exists. then there's also the private sector. and the private sector has been extremely committed and involved. let me speak from malaria specifically. it's been an inclusive

community, internationally as well as u.s. where we've seen the pro sports teams, nothing but net, the soccer leagues motivating. we have millions of deaths for nets, but we have advocated the significance of engaging on a chronic, international problem that we call malaria. we've had major contributions, motivated and driven by greg chambers, the u.n. malaria envoy who have mobilized private citizens as well as foundations to come together and work with government. and then there's the donations that are being vis -- solicited through the global fund and then our own program. as we look to the future and the commitment that we have communicated to the most endemic

country, most of them in subsahara africa. i think the challenge for us is as the budget realities become clear, we are going to have to make adjustments. we have made progress over the last four years in many of the countries in malaria. the challenge that we have in malaria are much different than what the hiv and aids community have. we have proven effective interventions, our program, i call it my ppp program, it's not public private partnership of what we have very aggressive and significant ppp. but i call it my prevention, prevention, prevention program. because three of the four interventions are all about preventing people from getting malaria. so there's a significant investment up front as we have seen the incident rate drop as much as 50 and 60% at some

countries. and all caused child mortality dropped by 30% in seven countries based on two data points. there's a lot to be -- so celebrate. so regardless of the amount of money that we get, we're going to have to rally the horses, corral the wagons, and do everything that we can to sustain the progress that we have made with our multilateral partners as well as the national governments. and then work towards sustaining so that when the dollar figure changes, we can continue to scale up, sustain, build capacity, and move forward. >> all right. thank you. >> yeah, sure. >> you know, because you said at one point, we've been here before. and, in fact, there was a time back when john f. kevindy was president of the united states when the u.s. congress voted to try and eradicate malaria.

u.s. american people set out to get rid of malaria. not just in the united states, that we had done. the whole world, and it was at that time, ddt was brand new. there were no resistant insects, and chloroform was brand new. there was no resistant parasite populations. they both worked. we got out there. the campaign went full bore. the country that is had lived with malaria, horrible levels for centuries suddenly went almost malaria free. jakarta went to a state of almost no malaria. then congress said we gave you a deadline, and you haven't finished it yet. so the money is cut off. and boom. malaria soared everywhere, and one the things that sored with it was ddt and chloroform

resistance. the lesson is where we need all of you on our side in this, if i can use that rallying cry. it's that this surge in global health, interest, concern, and funding is still in an infant stage. the money is poured out, but a lot of programs are just, you know, still making mistakes, finding their way, trying to make relationships with host government, whether does the balance and ngos fit in? we can't once things are starting to work, we'll pull the plug because we are looking something else to do with our money. >> dr. schake, the question is how do we do it and, you know,

-- can we do it with less forces, i guess? >> you know, we each -- all three of us have alluded to it in one way or another. a cupful years ago in a journal that i'm not so sure people read regularly, "nature medicine" i wrote an article that was a commentary on the success of the programs that we've had in malaria and hiv/aids, and some extent tuberculosis. the point that i made in the commentary was exactly what laurie, you, and tim have been saying. the catch word is really sustainable. health is there. you don't fix health, you have to keep living it. people keep getting sick and diseases continue to emerge. the answer to your question is how we deal with it is true putting more money in. but putting it in a way that it

becomes sustainable. sustainable within the country that we're dealing with. and make health part of the national strategies of the countries that you are working with. i mean it's no more -- secretary clinton gave a wonderful speech a few weeks ago where she was talking about getting rid of the words aid to and talk about partnerships and development. that's really -- health is part of that. it's a fundamental part of that. you know, we were talking about this panel that was here before that was talking about the political events and foreign policy. well, you know, health is one the most important components of foreign diplomacy. i think this is all big part -- part of the big picture. the way to do it is to take an approach that we're not just going to be doing something on

the short term the way that he said. here congress gives us a five-year appropriation and that's it. it can't be that way. it has to be an almost indefinite commitment. not a commitment of giving, but a commitment of building sustainability. >> i think that's interesting. i referenced president obama's speech to the, you know, the millennium development comment in new york in september. and he specifically said, you know, we should not think of development as charity. which i think we do. we think of it as something that we give. i think it would help if you -- i'd be curious to know from you how -- building health systems. how do you build health systems in places that for so long have depended on assistance. can you make the trade off with the country to get them to do it? >> we can do it, but we have to

have cooperation from the country. we can train people. they have to have an environment in their own country where it is an attraction for them to stay in their country as opposed to training people who then go off to other countries because you trained them. and we can't fix the economic system in the country or the attitude of a country about how much of their total gross national product they are going to put into health. we've got to partner with -- that's what part of the millennium goals are. that's really part of that is to deal with countries who are taking seriously their own contribution to what's going on in their own country. so it's not going to be easy, brenda. it's just not easy. because some of the countries that have the greatest needs have leadership that don't see it that way. and it's presumptuous for us to

think we have go in and have the societies change, but help train people. >> a lot of sort of -- i was sort of reviewing what people were talking about, the three pillars of development. defense, diplomacy, and development, essentially. i think a lot of people think that in the past, we've sort of gotten it wrong. so much of our resources and advance was on -- resources and emphasis was on the military. the people bringing aid and people bringing care were in uniform. they might call it the impression of what the u.s. is doing and why it's doing. how do you link aid to diplomacy in that sense? >> i think that's an important point. i have refer back to what the president himself has said. and we are anticipating his policy decision on global development where he addresses the whole idea of sustainment, innovation, and incentivizing

multisector partners, business and private. secretary clinton has followed up in saying, you know, we've all heard her three d, defense, diplomacy, and development. and it's clear to those of us in the development for business that development is a core component of diplomacy, health diplomacy, we can talk about that all evening. i think the defense department does understand their role and their mission. they have been mobilized successfully over the last number of years to do tremendous work because of their capacity in disaster relief situation. floods, earthquakes, tsunami. i think there's an awareness though, by the defense department that what they do is not long-term development. that has -- that is an industry and a sophistication that they understand needs to come in parallel to the whole of

government approach to effective development. and again, one more thing, underneath the global health initiative, the principals that we see outlined, in addition to focusing on women's health. leveraging the inner agency process, which includes dod. looking for innovation, leveraging resources, but focusing in on what tony said, it has to be owned by the country itself. so that the donors and all of the players look at one basic common plan by which we engage and can leverage what the country requirements are with the other donors. so i'm optimistic that the playing field is coming together in a clearer way even though the finances maybe a little bit fuzzier. >> okay. >> that's a big irony, actually, of the moment that we're in. as i said this whole, you know, global health and development and the linkage between the two and sufficient funding to do something meaningful is a

relatively new phenomenon. it was just at the point where we have had serve the perfect alignment of an administration, a leadership in the house, leadership in the senate, all agreed that there had to be better coherence, there had ab a strategy to foreign assistance, that it had to be linked in some smart way with defense, some smart way with long-term health and development, and now, you know, that leadership on the house side is out. we have to see what the gop leadership would feel about all of this. and kerry-lugar, point bipartisan effort never really got beyond committee level. we don't know where that's going. one the things again that i think we all took away from general odierno's talk which was such an inspiring conversation earlier today, you are not going to win over support for good governance and for working out

differences between tribes, ethnic groups, political interest of various kinds, in iraq or afghanistan if the only american presence is a combat presence. they also used the phrase, hole of government. the hole of government approach in afghanistan, hillary clinton has said over and over again starts recognizing that an afghani woman had several orders of magnitude, greater probability of dying in childbirth than an american women. very few women felt they had to worry they would die in childbirth. if you were in kabul or out in the rural areas, this would be a very real concern every time you got pregnant. what does it mean to u.s. interest and u.s. foreign policy if more and more women in afghanistan recognize that

because of programs brought by the global health initiative from the united states, fewer of them are die dying in childbirth, and more are likely to live to their 5th birthday. what does that kind of engagement mean? i think that goes to do you build a health system and so on? i think it goes to what are we trying to do for foreign policy. why did we for so long think that all of the issues -- i noticed how much of the room has left. this is the soft stuff? right? we already had all of the hard stuff. >> it's a question i'm going to pitch it to the audience after this. but i'd like to ask each of you to, you know, answer the question: why should americans, particularly in the current economic climate -- why should, you know, we continue to grab the very small percentage of

budget to begin with -- >> some people account for all of 150. >> why should americans not let this drop? why should they continue to invest in development? >> well, health care. global health care. >> there are at least two reasons. probably four, but i don't want to go on. >> i'll give you two. one that i used to work on long before people got interested in global health and the globalty of what we do. that's the pure humanity reason. as human beings we should feel a moral responsibility if it is possible to help to take care of the people who are less fortunate. i think as human beings in general and particularly as americans that has been the spirit of america for a very, very long time. maybe for -- ever since the beginning of our nation. that's one reason, the other reason is that we live in a global community. we are all interconnected.

and a healthy world is a world that will be economically viable. we depend on different countries back and forth. we know that. that's an economic discussion that can go on and on and on. also from a security stand point. i would venture if afghanistan were not as poor of a country as it has been from the stand point of health alone, it's one the most unhealthy countries in the world, i'm not so sure we would have had al qaeda being able to just go in there and roam freely if that was a strong healthy nation. so it goes everything from humanitarian to economic to pure security. >> i would go another level, to just add on to what tony said. all of which i, of course, agree with. as soon as folks on gaza and the west bank have children that

contracts maze els, if the odds of a palestinian child living to age 10 are expotentially lower than in afghanistan, you are not going to recognize the differences. span that globally. we had the call a year and a half ago when h1n1 arrived first in the united states and then in mexico. fortunate, it was relatively benign. not anything akin to the 1918 horror of influenza, but everything that we had always warned that would happen in a pandemic, that would aggregate tensions between nations and misunderstanding between nations really did happen. overwhelmingly, the very slow

and eventually available vaccine concentrated in the wealthy country. overwhelmingly, the only effective drug, tamiflu, concentrated in stockpiles in the wealthy countries. and overwhelmingly, every single thing in the tool kit that could address the pandemic was far more available in the rich country than anywhere else in the world. in fact, by the time the vaccine supply reaches africa, the epidemic was over. what that said that the rest of the world, you know, what, why should we partner with you on anything? because when the really big one comes, you are going to walk away from us? you are going to horde everything. you are only going to take care of your own. if we don't think the health and survivals of baby boy in beirut is the sames a baby boy

in los angeles, we are never going to have a conversation. >> health is the right thing to do. as tony said, the programs that the u.s. government are investing in are saving a lot of lives. malaria was invested as a life-saving mechanism. now it's building capacity and sustainment. in addition to health, the united states government is -- one the presidential initiatives is feed the future. in addition to health, nutrition and food to move towards this whole development commitment. i'll jump back to what tony said earlier. the millennium development roles. you hear a lot of chatter. getting back to malaria. we address six, which is reduction in infectious disease. we address the internal health, but healthy communities mean kids in schools. we are touching education. in malawi, a mother making $1 a

day spends 30% of her income on anti-malaria drugs. that's poverty in action. if we can eliminate that from her discretionary income hit, that will help her that day and that moment. that then drives us to millennium development goals, poverty alleviation. while we do excellent work in health, we are saving lives, the united states can show impact, show data, this is a good return on investment. it drives us back to the ultimate goal of poverty alleviation, community development, which is what we are all speaking and hoping for. >> if there are questions, certainly you can start here. yes, all right. >> can you hear me? >> yes. >> i'm patricia from the western

mass council world affairs. i know it's not a very economical -- economic consideration or a militarily important country, but for purely humanitarian reasons. shouldn't we be doing more about haiti which is the country in our own hemisphere. i'm concerned about the recent outbreak of chorla. is there any kind of ongoing help in our own hemisphere for countries especially like haiti who have nothing really to offer to us economically, militarily, but from a humanitarian point of

view? thank you. :