constitution is missing a bill of rights. washington took the oath of office. two states, new york and virginia, were agitating for a new constitutional convention. in the words of jim james madison and george washington, they were terrified that this process. they believe it would be infiltrated by enemies of the new government, and that our union would be fractured, never to come together again. >> you can watch this and other programs online at booktv.org. david unger talks about the rest of the national security state since world war ii and argues that every president since then has failed to curb its expansion come even though it it has cost trillions of dollars and hasn't made us safer. this discussion from politics and prose bookstore lasts about an hour.

>> good evening, i am bradley graham, co-owner of politics and prose bookstore with my wife melissa. over half of the entire staff i would like to welcome you to the store. those of you who are regular customers know that how much we appreciate gathering like this. tonight's event is just one of nearly 500 author talks that we host in the store each year. part of what we consider our central mission, which is not just selling books, but promoting the discussion of literature and ideas. in that same spirit, we have been expanding our in course offerings in recent months, and we continue to support dozens of book clubs. if you are new to the store and want to find out more about what we do, you can sign up later at the information desk back in the center of the store, to receive our weekly e-mail newsletter.

it contains the calendar of events, listings of our classes and programs, staff favorites, and other useful information. or you can go to our website at www.politics -- pros bookstore.com. you can even download e-books from our website. it we are delighted to have as our guest am a david unger. david is someone who makes a living by expressing opinion. the editorial opinion of "the new york times." he has been on the editorial board of the times for more than 30 years. and if you have ever read a times editorial about the military, foreign policy, or international finance. there is a good chance that david had a hand in it. he has brought a historian straining to journalism, having

earned a phd in history from the university of texas at austin, and his provocative new book, "the emergency state: america's pursuit of absolute security at all costs", offers a broad historical perspective that survey is seven years of u.s. security policy to argue that the united states has gone terribly awry trying to make itself save. david's basic point is that the institutions we have built and policies we have established to ensure our national security were originally designed to fight not cmac germany and waged a cold war against the soviet union. they weren't conceived to protect us against today's international terrorism and other 21st century threats david argues that since the time of roosevelt and truman, we have slipped into what he calls a

permanent self renewing state of emergency. marked by excessive secret agencies and a kind of imperial presidency, and our constitution had never intended that. the results have been an increasingly complicated, costly and ineffectual security system that has damaged our democracy, undermine the our economic strength, and ironically, david argues, left us more vulnerable. david doesn't just describe, he also prescribes. the final part of his book contains a blueprint for the future. as you might imagine from his searing critique, the solution for revitalizing american democracy would require radical changes in our approach to national security. some of the things he recommends even have a kind of back to the future quality. like requiring that the wars that we fight be declared by congress and not by the white

house. or that we become much more selective about what government information gets classified. david writes with a lot of passion and his book, even if you don't accept all his premises, it will definitely make you think and i encourage you all to read it. david plans to speak for about 20 to 30 minutes, and then he will take questions. and then he will stick around to sign copies of his book. if you have a question, just step up to the microphone right here in the center. that is because we do record our events. and of course, tonight we have the c-span cameras here. now, please send us your cell phone and join me in welcoming david unger. [applause] [applause] [applause]

>> thank you, bradley, and thank you all for coming out in this balmy february evening to this great washington institution. i am really glad to be here. the most important part of the evening will be your questions and my responses. since the book just came out, and although bradley gave you an excellent summary, i think i will tell you more about what's in it since you haven't had a chance to read it. first of all, the title. what is "the emergency state"? it always translates to state of emergency, and it's not quite the same thing. the emergency state it is a set of procedures, practices, institutions that we have developed -- constitutional shortcuts we have developed over the last 70 years to cite world war ii and to fight the war on terror. without the intent of building a parallel to our constitution, but we have.

undeclared wars, budgets of agencies that can't be reported to the congress, like the cia, congress can't exercise its power of the purse, we can't have democratic debate on policies that were not allowed to know about them come even president obama can tell us exactly what happened with the drone strike. he is not allowed to tell us. we didn't create the emergency state all at once. it has been growing. it certainly didn't start under george w. bush, but i think the experience of the bush and cheney administration made us see any clear way where we have been going. as i did the research for this book, my feeling was that the bush administration invested little that was new. it built on old practices. it turned renditions into extraordinary renditions. it undeclared war with a vengeance. but nothing really that we can talk about in the

question-and-answer. but this book isn't just about the sorry tales of the recent past. it is about things we can do to get ourselves on track. the ideas i offered in the book. the purpose of the 10 ideas, i am not qualified to give a blueprint for returning america to the constitution. none of us is. the constitution was deliberated over four months by the educated elites of the day, with popular input. it went to ratification and we need that kind of process. what i am trying to do here is start a discussion. i am being deliberately provocative with some of the proposals, but the analysis is straight. it is vetted as calverley as if it was going into a new york times editorial or we never like to have to run embarrassing corrections because we overstated a point. what kind of changes? changes in the way we decide on war and peace. the changes in the way we

recruit our military forces and in the way congress passes and deliberate military budgets. changes in the way we deal with the world as a whole, changes in the way we reached trade agreements. because the "the emergency state" isn't just about foreign policy. it is about how our american democracy shapes or ought to shape our place in the new global economy. it is not hiding from that economy. it is facing it the way that our constitutional democracy can and should. with all the assets available to us in our system. it is not just about what rate a gin we decide to do, it is about how we decide. not enclosed executive hearings. it is about making our constitutional democracy work again. that is the main point. the concept of the title, "the emergency state", is that on the one side we have the coherent thought through plan of our

democracy, the separation of powers, checks and balances. all of them may have an antiquarian feel in the 21st century, but they were done for a reason. they were done from the expense of the founding generation, with the journey of british colonial rule, with the date of earlier republics, italian renaissance republics which have failed and succumb to their military leaders. they particularly understood that the greatest danger to the survival of the republicans democracy was unchecked war powers in the executive. they knew from the sorry experience of the articles of confederation that they needed a stronger national constitution. they were determined to build one with the executive authority , so they could not go toward unchecked. why were they afraid of war? war, for one, it is a source of taxes. a government which wages constant war is going to result

in a sour populace, it would change the relationship between the government. it worries about the necessary secrecy of war and secrecy to a government as was meant to be open. they are particularly concerned about the war power. finally, as authors will tell you, authors of any kind of book, the tall concept is a narrative frame. the author's choice of organizing a mass of data out there that can make better sense of it. that is the only way of organizing it. it is the way i chose to organize it. most of the material in the book, there are some primary source research there, there is some reporting that i've done in the course of my time in my crew are, and original documents i look back at. most of what this book is based on is the very rich, secondary source literature we have. the good histories and analyses of recent history. what i have done without, is i have gone back into all that

data that we all know, do you all know, that i know, and looked at patterns. patterns that come out of it when you ask the questions of 2012. that is the way to good history works. or else the history of the revolution would've been written in finnish in 1830 and there would be no reason to go back. 1860, there would be other questions. theodore roosevelt, the depression era, our era has asked a new set of questions of our shared american history in order to make it better. in order to modify it for the needs of today. i tried to be clear, but i try not to oversimplify. reality is complex and multifaceted. a dozen different directions. there are no pure heroes or villains in this book. we have to honor the complexity, but we don't have to surrender fatalistically answered in 10

say that it's so complex i can't make sense. we can make sense of it. if we don't try to make sense of it, we walk away from our democracy. our democracy counts on are trying. the average citizen tries to inform themselves. if the government doesn't give you an information, we must demand that the government give you that information. we have a democracy, not an athenian assembly. the way a representative democracy works is that we have to demand of our representatives to tell us what is going on to be accountable for their decisions. not just the campaign donors, but to the voters that have a say of putting them back in office or not. there was always some good rationale that presidents in the last 70 years could find for going outside the constitution and taking emergency state

measures. emergency state measures like we have mentioned -- undeclared wars, presidential wars. fdr had an isolationist congress. as the executive, he sincerely and accurately saw the need to keep britain from going down for the nazi on -- onslaught. he chose not to visit congress and the public which had been in the shadows within isolationism. he thought he could handle it all in his presidential powers. he went a little bit astray. but the threat was real. but the motives were sincere and good. roosevelt did this in wartime, and this was common in wartime. abraham lincoln playing with habeas corpus in the civil war, but normally when america strays in wartime, the war ends, peace

is declared, the party that led the war is thrown out. amends are made. but a peacetime emergency state is different. a peacetime emergency state, when does it end? when does the emergency and? will be entered into in the truman years was a peacetime emergency state. they weren't terribly calm years, but we weren't at war. the last declared war was the second world war. already, the constitution is a bit unfinished or, it in that we are doing the kind of emergency actions which are constitutionally and otherwise justified by a presidential war, but we are doing it in peacetime and indefinitely. and we are building this layer of emergency state. ad hoc emergency stay. truman and eisenhower would talk often about the nation of soviet

communism, just as we we recently have heard about islamic fundamentalism. we then heard, this is a unique threat. america has to act like the enemy to fight the enemy. it can't afford to follow the constitutional democratic rules. we have an unscrupulous animated government or whatever. it was challenges to what was the right and turn right way to respond to it. after eisenhower, with the development of ballistic missiles in the 1950s, where either side could annihilate each other on 20 minutes warning, as we saw in the cuban missile crisis, well, how can the congress declare war within a 20 minute missile launch? there is an argument for adjusting the rules to use the power the president has always had under the constitution to respond to an actual or imminent attack against the country, to give him a little space to

respond on a different clock. but we didn't choose that route. we choose the route from cutting ourselves off definitely. in emergencies past, when world war ii ended, we had a peacetime emergency state. the cold war nuclear confrontation ended. we didn't inherit a safe world, but we didn't have 18,000 warheads pointed at us either after 1989 and after 1991. yet, the constitutional shortcuts remain in place. even more, worrying that they changed the race, i missed the public debate about did it happen? i was working for a daily newspaper. we talked about a lot of things during the early '90s. okay, now we can go back to our constitutional democracy because we are not living under terror. we didn't have the debate. there is no reason, i would argue, that the undeclared wars that we fought since world war ii, korea, vietnam, iraq, first

persian gulf war is, could not have been declared wars is the constitution calls for. there is no time pressure, no need for surprise, we all read about it in the newspapers, but there were wages of presidential war. not national war. not considered foreign policy of a democracy. for the past 60 years, our wars have been only as popular as the president to wage them and only stay popular as long as those presidents stay popular. from june of 1950 until the chinese came across, it wasn't a cakewalk any more, vietnam was enormously popular until 1968, maybe a little earlier. then it became aware that nobody owned, and they were going to change the policy that they inherited from other presidents. and so on. they became orphaned wars.

whether it is a conscription army or a volunteer army, you put your life on the line to kill and die for your country in a war which has no constitutional authority, nothing congress site onto, and we all have this image -- i lived there live there and i don't think it happened the way it it was said -- nevertheless, people came back to not the kind of welcome they deserve for the sacrifices that they made. the risks they made in good faith for the country, because we had these very irregular kind of wars, or at at least that is one main reason. soldiers still died today in afghanistan. but the country doesn't care much about how it ends. as long as it ends. why is it that we have come to think as of world war ii is the good work? could it be because it was our last properly declared war? a national war?

not a presidential war? this is worth thinking about in an era where because the nature of her dentures are not coming up at us by surprise from another high-tech superpower, we can deliberate and we can debate about wars. we can go back to the constitutional way that worked and let us on our previous wars, not like our current wars. the new way to wars has not been good for anyone. i argue in the book it is not making us more secure. most of the things we have done since 9/11 was a real attack on this country, but it didn't -- it wasn't responded to in a way that made us more secure. it was responded to in a way that made chehalis terrorism in more popular cause in parts of the war. it divided us internally. it has made us less democratic.

we can go back to the constitution. it still works it is the emergency state that doesn't work. i have been harping on war powers because it is the obvious example. but the emergency state is a much bigger package than that. there have been books as long as i've been in the business about the imperial presidency, the invisible government, the unitary executive come in the national security state. "the emergency state" reaches more probably. it reaches to a much bigger problem. a problem that was put together for reasons of national security, that created structures that have shortchanged our democracy and other areas as well. economic areas, federal budget areas, text areas. the way we put together our military budget. i worked for "the new york times" on analyzing the military budget each year. as much as i would like to say to you that this current budget of about 525 billion regular

based line budget and 80 billion contingently funded iraq and afghanistan -- how we could put that in half and he just escaped -- we can't cut that in half. once you build it, you have contracts out of there and you pay a price for terminating this context. we built it up recklessly. we have to build it down temporally. but what is the result of building recklessly? what is the result of the last decade, it including obama as well as bush, of increases and higher defense budgets and during the height of the cold war under reagan -- the height of the confrontation. i would say it isn't part of actually what is being debated in this presidential campaign. military spending, accounts for roughly 50 cents of every dollar of discretionary federal spending. last year, it was equivalent to

one third of total federal texas. we spent 2.2 trillion last year, our taxes were 2.1 trillion. that is why we have a 1 trillion-dollar deficit of the 2.1 trillion, that came in as taxes, 700 billion went out on the military. what does the public see for the taxes paid? visits the highway bridges that don't fall down? visits the a world-class health care system? visits the shorter lines at the social security office? no. it sees the world's most powerful military, and the world's biggest budget deficit. this is poisoning our system and our political debate. there is a place for the government to improve the quality of life for america, when the map is just described.

this is not the only thing that we give our tax dollars, but it is the most visible thing, and it is subtracted from the kind of thing that i'm talking about. i live in europe. europe is not a happy place at the moment. you have all read about the euro crisis. at least their tax dollars are not disappearing before they turn into services. they are not getting what they paid for. it is because of a corrupt or overlarge bureaucracy. but that can be addressed and performed in the democratic system. we have gotten ourselves into a very deep hole with our military spending. if we voted for change we could believe in, i know it can't be done overnight, but this is 2012 and we can do it now. "the emergency state" has been waging without having to tell us for half a century. i'm not saying they have kept it a sinister secret, but i've been a member of the council of foreign relations for 23 years. i got all the meetings. i read all the literature.

it is unstated that the underlying strategic purpose of american foreign policy is expanding the space of markets. it is globalizing the economy. it is promoting not just globalization and free trade, but a very specific brand of globalization and free trade. stealing a line from my colleague, tom friedman, project flat world. right? americans have designed to make the world flat, and then one day, in the mid- 1980s, wall street, for its own reasons, tilted that flat world and all those high-paying equity bubble factory jobs slid off somewhere. not here. you heard echoes of this in the state of the union. it president obama believes it, he's right, that tax incentives and regulatory incentives can bring manufacturing back, then it must have been prior tax and regulatory policy that facilitated their departure.

but governments can act in ways that we build our lost industrial base. other than a service retail financial sector economy. which we have learned the hard way, they're just not enough jobs for our country of 300 million people, and they are not great jobs. if you read things in "the new york times" about apple's production in china, what comes out made the late steve jobs feel that he had to do it in china, it was not low wages. we are talking about sophisticated technological equipment in which labor costs are a fairly small fraction. it is the fact that if he wants a new iphone model in six months, he only has the workforce and infrastructure built up around china. that is why they -- when they have floods in thailand, things doubled in cost. it was the strength of the

location. with the midwest and the industrial belt, when coal and iron went with our railroads and erie canal and st. lawrence the way, this is the stuff of industrial peril. and we have been living under the illusion over the past 20 or 30 years that old jobs and products are equivalent. they are not. you wake up one day in china says sorry, we don't want to do it that way. we have the power not to. and then one is our want of power that we have over invested in military toys and underinvested in economic policy. we will get back to this subject. i don't want to get overly simplistic here. the world economy is a complicated place. but the narrative i have given you is not wrong either. military power has spread. i'm going to use a jargon word that i wouldn't use in "the new york times." a neoliberal.

why am i using that particular word? it is the particular form of globalization. we have chosen to press on the world and confused with the globalization word, but we have chosen a particular form of globalization. neoliberal globalization as i just use it, is a war of choice. it is a policy choice. it is a war of choice waged against the 99%. paid for by the 99%. and waged in their name, our name, but without their informed consent. what do i mean by neoliberal globalization? briefly, a globalization divorced from a capitalism divorce from democracy. essentially. the very opposite of what we embarked on after world war ii. the first model, which brought 30 years of upward mobility,

rising incomes, prosperity, at least to a part of the world we used to call trilateral, japan, europe and north america. it was a fact that it was only part of the world, but its success can depend on the fact that it was only part of the world. the trick is to do the same trick for the whole world now that we did then. why did the bretton woods model not produce geo- globalization? why does it produce listening income disparities? one reason is that it was shaped largely by two men. john maynard keynes of the british treasury, and harry dexter white of the new deal of the u.s. treasury. they were the two chief architects of bretton woods. john maynard keynes was a keynesian. he deliberately made room in the

monetary situation he created, the wto derived -- he left rome and understood that one thing that was crucially important was to leave space for governments to temporarily impose capital control. why did he need this? living in britain in the late 1940s, having the experience of britain in the war period. being the inventor of stimulus policies, he knew that in a completely flat financial world with no capital controls, the country that tried to stimulus as a way out of recession would be subjected to be self-defeating. in order to allow i can see in world, heat, over the objections of economic purists, insisted upon not permanent capital control, the ability of governments in times of recession to invoke capital control. it sounds very technical and

economist talk, but it is the crucial link which allowed governments, democratically elected governments from the trilateral world, for 30 years to dampen recessions and converge and come by the keynesian fiscal policies. neoliberal globalization leaves no room for that as we see right now. as we see in the rapid pointless debate, as we see in the obama stimulus policies are enough or not enough. in a flat world, in a neoliberal globalized world, the u.s. government still had the capacity to create as much demand as it wanted, it just can't call into being -- they can be sure that the production is called into being by that demand. it is going to be in the united states. we could well be stimulating chinese and german industry, while they freeride and don't have budget deficits and look

down their noses at us. it is a crucial point. it is not the only crucial point, it is one. the other thing that neoliberal globalization is that it is characterized by free movement of labor -- lack of free movement of labor. what it means is for integration. we called the agreements which constituted free-trade agreements, not quite, we don't need 600 pages to write a free-trade agreement. you just need there shall be no tariffs and non-tariff barriers and both countries agree and there no exceptions. it depends on the type you use. 600 pages, which remember, on the fast track, congress decided to see or debate. just up or down. what about the other 599 pages? using provocative language to say an undisputed fact. any other pages is padded protectionism for that narrow

interest groups with the right campaign bundlers and lobbyists on campaign hell -- capitol hill that congress isn't allowed to delivery. example, intellectual property rules. here i am standing, and author, a writer, trying to sell my book for money. talking about intellectual capital rules. no, i am not saying the internet should be free. i am saying that all of the stuff that microsoft and apple and hollywood get britain into trade agreements, in the name of intellectual property, are a protectionist measure for all of us. that form of protection is not western. the form of protectionism that slows down dismissals in detroit and cleveland -- it is a sin against the market. what else? agriculture. not exactly a free-trade center in the united states. i love the family farm as much as everyone else, i love to drive around the countryside and

see farms and everything else. i don't think cost has to be huge payouts to produce a specific crop, sugar in the mississippi delta -- agribusiness running away with a lot of money, and distorting rule trade and agriculture so that countries across the third world, which have comparative in agriculture can, can take advantage of that, to delay capital to move up the food chain. that is protectionism. why, as a fellow author writes in his new book, why is it that american retirees cannot use medicare for medical services a broad? right? we have medicare, you can live abroad come you can get your check abroad, but you have to come to the united states to get medical treatment. what does that have to do with protectionism? everything. everything. imagine if an american retiree who had earned medicare could

use it for a heart operation from the doctors that are here, over there, or in thailand. why can't they? it would make it easier for the retiree, but more important, how often have we heard about unaffordable entitlements? why don't we reduce the cost of them? when we have to take them back to be a protected ama that is not subjected to price competition? why is it right in an auto worker or a computer programmer has to face the music of globalized wage competition and a doctor does not? it doesn't make sense. and it distorts our policy, and it distorts our budget. and we never debate it. we have protectionism for it the well hillview -- starting at

about the 60s or 70s, it became excessive is a fact in this town you could not get a trade agreement negotiated with a foreign power if the president had to come back and then deal with explaining it to congress. instead, we got into the habit -- this is an emergency state have it -- the constitution says clearly that the sole power to regulate international commons wants to congress. another congress is expected and pilloried if it doesn't, to grant a hand up to the president, blanket authority, fast-track authority, to negotiate a deal, come back and get an up or down vote from congress. just like the president wants appointees for 90 days. well, appointees -- there's a better case in trade agreement. in a globalized world, trade agreement has tremendous consequences. the 600 page ones have more consequences than the one page ones would. so we go off into a world where

trade specialists and trade lawyers -- my best friends are trade lawyers -- they created world where all of these questions at best, go to secretive arbitration panels, the wto and elsewhere, and they decide just which of the democratic laws that congress passes might be preempted by this trade agreement that the president signed that congress didn't debate. and which is still allowed to apply. right? and be a business case that was brought to some people as attention was the marine mammals protection act. wto practice, not a law that can't be changed, nothing that can be negotiated, the practice says that when a commodity -- a can the can of tuna, enters the international marketplace, it is a can of tuna. it doesn't matter if it was made in mexico for the united states. that's good. it doesn't matter if it was made by people forced to work at

gunpoint and it doesn't matter if it was made by factory who is pouring arsenic into rivers in a country that is trying to keep the rivers clean. that's pretty bad, right? that means the worst condition producer has a competitive advantage. and even the well-meaning american producer has got to meet that or die in the marketplace. that is not a good thing. we have to look little more carefully at how we shape our trade laws. why can't these positions be made in the light of day quite to why can't united states follow the constitution? i quote in the constitution, congress has the exclusive power to regulate commerce with foreign nations? do we follow that? i don't think so. a little bit more. a couple of minutes. okay. read the book, it is all there.

i am bipartisan in my views. we have had 13 presidents since 1940. seven of one party, six of the other. none of them come off very well. there were recognizable differences in parties at the beginning of the period. the republicans were a little bit more conservative, constraint on foreign wars, that evaporates when you get into the period of nixon and reagan and they are all peddling the same forms of emergency state without knowing it. one preview, when you look at the book, i offer a new way of seeing it should nixon. every book has to have a hero or an antihero. and it turns out that richard

nixon comes off as a kind of antihero in this book. a tragic antihero, of a certain sort. because, i mean, when richard nixon was elected in 1968 with 43% of the vote or whatever -- the country is in a mess. you know? johnson has been waging this war in vietnam, which he knows is unwinnable, but he's afraid to go to the people, and she is afraid that who lost china, and two lost whatever. he can't figure out a way to get out of it, but he knows it's hurting america at home and the great society. he is trapped in the logic of emergency state. he doesn't know how to get out of it. he is trapped in the logic that began with harry truman in the truman doctrine, saying that the whole world faces a choice between two systems. all right? and the whole world did face a choice between two systems. if you make that the defining element of your foreign policy forever forward, from

1947 to 1968, you are one to see that there only two powers. if the united states admitted it was hurting itself in vietnam, and withdrew, it goes down on our side end up on the moscow side. in other words, the problem that every politician faced in 1968 was how to liquidate the disaster of vietnam without accessing strategic defeat in the cold war which would've hurt in other areas. well, along comes richard nixon because he is richard nixon. and he figures it out. first of all, it was always the democrats they got saddled with losing china, never the republicans, because richard nixon compared to satellite program at that. he had freedom of action there. he realized what was going on, the clock was running out on him domestically, the draft, all volunteer army. right? richard nixon is too smart to think that a war that 500,000

americans were sent into because the vietnamese were losing it, would suddenly be successful if you put the vietnamese backed. but he was buying time. he was buying political space. at what he did with that, how much -- how early he came up with it, it was a trap. he played the china card. suddenly, you can do it. you can step back in vietnam and not have a worldwide prestige victory handed to the soviet union. it is not the whole of richard nixon. it is not all the things he did. it isn't the plumbers, it's not the paranoia, it's not that expletive deleted. when you look at history from the vantage point of our own time, if you look at this as a fact of "the emergency state", to see how richard nixon fits into the picture, and then like a tragic antihero, he is done in by his paranoia and secret government and trying to plug

the leak of the pentagon papers. a new way of looking at the 1970s, the 1970s the emergency state -- the 1970s, for those of you old enough to have any memory of the 1970s, it was a painful time. whether we are talking about the last final days of richard nixon, the saturday night live lampooned the presidency of gerald ford, the hostages of jimmy carter -- even the music wasn't very good by then. but, from the vantage point of 2012, things have gotten so bad that they were almost starting to get good. people were so convinced that a succession of presidents was leading them down the wrong path, but they put heat on their elected representatives. suddenly, the need of people in

both parties to get reelected in this atmosphere meet congress awake from its long rip van winkle sleep. they passed the war powers act. they started having scrutiny over the cia, and put a whole structure in place. and it was really hard. it was hard to get into the american state, it was hard to construct a better monetary and trade system and come to grips with changing economic reality in the world. and then we stopped. we might've stopped because it was hard in the fires were burning our feet and we got tired. were we might've stopped because ronald reagan came along and told us we didn't have to do that. it was morning in america again, and everything would be fine, and just to shoot right to the end. ronald reagan -- and i am in the middle of reassessing ronald reagan, okay? when i see restart led and bruce stein and larry corbett and other members of the

administration, i realized let's not make a cartoon out of the reagan administration. there are many things from which we can learn. unfortunately, what the successor candidate for president under ronald reagan was don't make jimmy carter's mistakes and say that our energy diction is a problem. just keep smiling and say we can do everything, and there you go down. and they all have, haven't they? clever man. we are living in an electrical democracy of the reagan presidential template. .. ..

it almost sounds like you're over with ron paul and the only solution. >> ron paul says a lot of smart things. ron paul is a consistent constitutionalize. he was in the police into the bedroom on various issues. i deemed to be honest here. i wasn't planning to vote for ron paul or speak at his rally, that if i want america to start debating these issues, i have to be happy that ron paul has raised them and gotten the response he's gotten from young

people. i think he has to be allowed to debate. i think it's healthy for him, whatever he's doing now in the romney santorum maneuver. >> sorry. i have a question. what about thinking of the international security, the violent of a public good and in international public good and what the u.s. has decided to do is pay for a public good, which is usually costly. during the 70s we try to expand it under jimmy carter to human rights, which is another public good. i feel it may be raking in people since then have decided, we can't afford everything. luscious focus on one of the most tangible and our cms cost

and you're suggesting even giving a pain for the public good now. so i was wondering what your thought is i'm not. >> well, i think to govern is to choose and you can't do everything. you can't afford to do everything. i think the public peace is definitely a public good. it's a collective public good. it is something the united states should aspire not to unilaterally deliver to people whether they asked for it or not, but to operate in the international arena as a sort of imperfectly did to mobilize international forces for collect it -- it is their tradition after all. we slipped into saying in the beginning of afghanistan, rumsfeld was very explicit. there is nato offering to help. we don't watch you. we want our forces. we trust our forces. you go in the quiet areas. i have an article coming out in

the world policy journal and a few weeks, which takes on this very question, which is to say i'm not an isolationist. i think that they unfortunately named the vote nationalism is not the only kind of internationalism and order order and there can be better internationalism. it could be internationalist and worthy about it to take something seca millennium goals, which affects billions of lives, billions of children and are cheaper than the wars we wage. they are somewhat more standup posture on global warming from the world's biggest disproportionate m.ed. i think that, you know, we can't do everything. no power in history has succeeded in doing everything. united states never tried to do everything before the emergency stay. it always understood the debates were about worker interests.? for you to become collect this?

was better done by the u.n. in the league of nations? the unilateral self-appointed to do everything keeps us from doing anything well and keeps us from multiplying our force diatribe in our natural allies to our side, by behaving in a more collegial and collective action line. i'm not pretending it's pretty out there and they don't have national interest in the jealousies in the hegemon is always the targeted enemy and the rest of it. i'm just saying we could do better than we are in the first step is to choose, to set priorities, to say here we are, the richest nation the world. not the richest people, but the richest nation in the world history, the most formidable military power with global reach. how do we want to use our lives, our power and treasure to make

this a better world for us to live in, for others to live in and to complete and perfect our democracy, which is a work in progress. >> i was wondering, about the emergency teams, i saw once on this alternative newspaper that somebody was saying that some building collapsed that was still standing and then people were saying that there weren't dynamites to build the cause. i was also wondering, when there's a paranormal show called coast-to-coast in these top hits, but t. necessarily believe everything people might say about -- about september 11,

2001 about the government -- you see the perils of emergency and everything they say about conspiracy? >> you know, trust but verify ronald reagan said. as a journalist, i am willing to listen to things i want to see evidence behind it. i have lived too long to see except it versions of thing survives speared camelot for examples. we learned later that camelot was and what thought it was. i have not seen evidence that takes me feel that there was some alternate reality 9/11 that was radically different. but was staring us in the face is that our government told us on 9/11, that really catastrophic intelligence intelligence failure is coming in and catastrophic policy response failures going out. that's the area of may special

expertise. that is what i focus on. how can we make sure our government is less likely to fill us in the future because things like that can happen in the future. what do we learn about how people slip through the cracks on 9/11? what can we learn that was wrong about the way we went to war in iraq and afghanistan? let's learn and prepare for the future. i don't rule out anything, but is no reason to believe it unless i have evidence to believe it and so far i don't. journalism is an imperfect field, but you know, one rule of thumb that kid says to every working days if there's a relatively simple and straightforward explanation that doesn't have a lot of holes in it. don't go looking for more complicated ones. they may be a mistake, but it's how we get through everything. >> i wonder if you have a sense that time is running out on us and our failure to deal with

their problems. >> in some sense it is. the >> i'm an optimist. people say gloomy you. what i'm saying here is american can't do two shall democracy still works, that the good sense of the american people is still there. we should listen to it more often. and yes it's true we've got more people on a less sustainable planet than ever before in global temperatures are rising and we don't aim to be had in the right direction for a lot of things. but it honestly live, as long as we're somehow that sell this stuff can talk about it here, there is reason for hope. i don't think it's too late. i've not written a gloomy and inevitable decline of the west we had our day vaux. a book calling for revitalization of the energy in this spirit that i know in this country from living here and been part of it and having seen

a better moment. >> professor unger, former psych student. right now and i let the other day that china lives or money to africa and the imf does and despised him access to resources which feels their economy and a lot of their economy and state run. some people call it a new form of authoritarian capitalism or state capitalism. i wanted your opinion on how that baby for the next era of the emergency state will we see a combination of the military minded emergency and also an economic emergency, were like stalin and wanting, the chinese way of business isn't exactly plain that the rules. >> i think what i'll have to give a lot more thought to china than we usually did. find resources, i don't know the current economy didn't do that.

we have a heart tattoo world war i and world war ii with the japanese oil embargo by the sense that countries had to lock data at the expense of other countries. they couldn't trust the market to make it ever available to them. like erin thinks well, you say we could get our enriched uranium locally, but she put the sanctions on which a developer in capacity, which is not to say the behavior is innocent or good for dangerous come of it a safe interact live, which is that if the scramble for resources is competitive, if the chinese oil company is not allowed to buy chevron, if downloads are not sold for national security reasons, who can be surprised when china goes and makes its own rules where you can. what worries me most is not that. i think enough resources for

all. in china itself. what bothers me about china and africa is that all of the imperfect efforts that non-chinese donor nations have created to create some kind of performance guidelines, anticorruption and transparency guidelines come the millennium development goal by flames, putting money ideas is rendered worthless if china feels, let's grab a pariah. i share and since then as a pariah. they need us. they can't say no. look at them no strings attached. no one else can attach their strength of our lives. that's a collective good too and we've got to find a better day to do with it. ant task disc would make a a different way. two minutes they say.

>> it's great to see you again. my question is follow-up on the last one. do you feel or fear the wrath of china will use to perpetuate the emergency state here? >> it would be hard to watch the january january 6 national defense strategy rolled out and not feel that way. >> that was the first part. the second part speaks to both the things you talk about. >> it does. to get more specific. essentially one way of watching what obama and panetta and dempsey said is no more rocks, were not going to make that mistake again. we're going to wind this down to get a dividend and spent a large fraction of the dividend building up another part of

hypothetical and encourage the chinese to respond the same way. what scares me that someone is analyzed for 20, 25 years is a lot of the things we buy that are most wasteful for the worse we actually fight only makes sense with a high-tech enemy, the soviet union, it nuclear attacks, et cetera, no sense for people live up the land and operate out of caves or anything like that and are useless. and we lose those words despite overinvestment. these are the process centers of military industry. we know they haven't lied what congress and the president has been handymen in the way of cutting a chilly enough for the ten-year budget.