>> next richard haass argues that for the u.s. to retain its primacy in the 21st century it must reduce its involvement in foreign interventions both military and humanitarhumanitar ian and focus instead on restoring its own economic health. this is a little over an hour. >> i am very honored to be here with my friend richard haas and i am here for a couple of reasons. the first is that richard and i go really far back. i don't want to tell you how far back that we met when we were 21 years old and you can do the

math. i have been richard's friend and followed his thinking agreeing with some and disagreeidisagreei ng with some of the years but he has been my friend. i'm here because i was very excited about this book "foreign policy begins at home" from the very moment i heard the title and from the first comer station i had with richard about it. richard and i were colleagues together at the brookings institution and the first question i'm going to ask of you is given this title why don't you merge it with the brookings institution? i think a lot of americans will resonate to it. i read the book richard and i wondered if this is your manifesto to run for president? i can ask you that question too

and if it's at all a quizzical we can know that he is running for president. >> i am president. [laughter] >> i was going to get to that. [applause] >> i just want to read a couple of lines from the book which i think summarizes. americans will not enjoy the standard of living or quality of life they aspire to have home amid chaos abroad and the united states will not be in a position to limit chaos abroad unless it rebuilds the foundations of its strength at home. and then later on he said the object of much be advantage of the opportunity we have now with the strategic respite to restore the foundations of american power including the economy, the school's infrastructure and i

think that we should be grateful that richard has joined the debate in this way. as you know richard the present of the council on foreign relations is working almost every administrator and in our lifetime. he is the author and editor of, or editor of 12 books and i will start by asking you why not merge with brookings but i really wanted to ask you what pushed you in this direction? there are those that say it's an isolationisolationist book. i have read it and it's not an isolationist book. defending yourself against that charge, how did you come to this? >> let me save the beginning it's not a book that i would imagine i would read. here i am lucky enough to be president of the council on foreign relations and i spent decades toiling in what you might call the foreign-policy security venue.

like many in this room i grow up during the cold war and yet i got to this point. what did it was really two things. if i had to sum it up in a sense because the united states has overreached abroad and we have underperformed at home and i'm worried as a result. i think we overreached abroad over the last few decades first in iraq and then secondly in afghanistan when we tried to remake that country. and as i watched some of the debates going on about syria i'm concerned we seem to have lost that, we haven't seemed to learn that lesson indeed as recently as today in the new york times people are saying it's time already to get over iraq. i don't want to get over iraq. i want to learn the lessons of iraq and apply those lessons so i'm worried that the united states has seriously over reached and it has allowed its foreign-policy with this emphasis in particular on the middle east and particularly remaking the middle east.

that is not i believe either's possible or strategically wise and the other thing we have to do in asia and is part of the world and in north america but the second half of the m. argument i'm also worried about what we are doing and not doing here at home and i can't believe any observer of the american clinical scene would believe differently. if one looks at what we haven't done dealing with the deficit in half one looks the fact that we are growing at half of previous -- if anyone has landed at laguardia or kennedy airport i rest my case on infrastructure. i know a lot of kids line up in the world to get into harvard and yale princeton or stanford. i haven't noticed long lines of children around the world trying to come into the united states to attend their elementary schools or public schools. so there are some real challenges here at home and i'm worried that our politics are

simply not up to sorting them out. so i wrote the book essentially to make the case for what we need to do abroad in what we need to do at home and stop doing abroad and stop doing at home but also to help people sorted out. it's a complicated world. this is a far more complicated world and the world i referred to a second ago, the cold war and what i tried to do was write something blueprint is too strong of a word but i guide essentially for policymakers for sorting out the challenges of the 21st century. see what it means by the way 10 years ago we were fifth in the world in infrastructure and now we are 24th in the world which goes to richard's point. let's go straight to the middle east. when i read those parts of the book where you talked about the need to readjust like the word pivot which you can explain, i was thinking we may no longer be

as interested as we used to be in the middle east but the middle east always seems interested in us and a lot of this administration clearly wants to make the move toward asia and is trying tonight that move and get issues of the middle east keep coming back. how do we actually managed to make that move given all the problems you describe so well in the book? >> the analogy that comes to mind for those of you who like to stay up at night watching films as michael in godfather three. he basically says every time i try to leave they keep pulling me back. that wasn't just him with the mafia. that is us with the middle east. we want to balance north asia or the parts of the world and suddenly we wake up in the headlines or libya, syria and iraq what have you but foreign-policy like bald public policy is about priorities.

from the business literature at sometimes about not letting the urgent crowd out the important. what we have to do is look at not simply the middle east as a coach a one square on the chessboard but we have to look at the entire country. we have to look at the middle east compared to everything else we may want to do in other parts of the world are here at home but also we have to know something about the middle east. one of the things we also learn from vietnam from iraq and afghanistan is we can sit around inside the beltway and debate the generation of foreign-policy but at some point it comes up against local reality, geographic historical cultural political and economic. there are real realities in the middle east and we may say we want syria in the next six months or year to be a peaceful and thriving democracy where everybody is reading the federalist papers in arabic translation. fine, i wish you well. ain't going to happen as a result we have to address the foreign-policy accordingly or to

put another way we have this meeting a decade ago or 15 years ago and we had a show of hands. inconceivable, inconceivable that we would have predicted that u.s. foreign policy in this post-cold war era would involve going to war first in iraq and in afghanistan. essentially this was going to be where the united states was going to use its discretionary power? this was how we were going to use the beast dividend? we were trying to remake this part of the world lacks it's what we did but it seems to me to be totally inconsistent with any notion of strategy. >> this suspect you're the book but you were in the administration that led to the war in iraq. why was it so difficult to stop the war in iraq and stop the direction? there were a lot of people colin powell and richard armitage that all had grave doubts about what we were doing before we did it. what led us and why could that

not be stopped? >> is something written a lot about in a previous book but the three people you mentioned all happen to be in one building, the state department. the last i checked there were several other buildings involved in the making of foreign-policy beginning with the white house and after 9/11 there were those around the president and the president signed on to this as well that he wanted to do something that would send that message to the world that we were not a pitiful helpless giant. there was also the view that was marked by some which i thought was preposterous that iraq was ripe for democracy and would be easily instituted and establish a model as the rest of the region would and be able to. so essentially you had the people come into the oval office or the executive's office and

say i can accomplish great things. at very low cost. people usually say where do they sign up and then to be fair that was also the belief proven wrong subsequently that the iraqis did have weapons. we thought they did have weapons of mass destruction. it was in the aftermath of 9/11 were people's tolerance was low. i argued against it at the time but i don't think if you well there was a totally foolish, i think the advice was wrong but i think there were arguments for doing it again based on the assumption that the iraqis did have weapons of mass destruction. absent that they know, i don't think it was a close call. if we were going to do it we didn't go about it right because at that time the cia warned in people such as myself warned that to do this right we should have planning again given local realities. a lot of what has happened after

united states when it was predictable and that was what was so frustrating. whatever you thought about the war with iraq or if ganis tanner any of these places, but that aside. we couldn't have known and prepared for what was going to entail given what we were walking and there's just no excuse for not getting it right. again there is no substitute at times for local knowledge. we forget that at our peril. one of the things that concerns me about the debate about syria is the lack of local knowledge that is being brought to bear. >> one of the things i liked about the book is it's very much not a decline this book. in fact its whole purpose is to fight the possibility of decline. lost in the emotional laden territory between we are number one and we have lost it is a country that matters far more than any other. you know that our gdp is

16 trillion, a fourth of the global economic output compared to 7 trillion for china and 6 trillion for japan and our gdp is nine times that of china. can you talk about the decline and the alternatives and how that book fits into that debate? >> it's funny you sometimes define yourself in terms of what you are not that i feel forced to in some ways because his predictable that i'm charge is an isolationist on one hand and is a decline is on the other. neither it is at all true. the whole argument in the book by the ways that we need to do more at home not to turn our back on the world but show over time we are in a better position to shape the world and by the way if we don't shape that no one else will. the alternative to the u.s.-led world is not a world that is wonderful. there is no invisible hand out there. adam smith doesn't run the world. so it will be chaotic. it's not going to be a china led

world are in india led world or in japan led world. if we are not willing and able to do it, it's not an argument for unilateralism but an argument for american leadership. again we are only going to be in a position to exert that leadership if we fix ourselves here at home. that is why the book is not isolationist and again we can't do, a gated community. what happens out there is going to affect our quality of life and art fiscal security and economic wealth, like it or not. we are not declining in absolute terms. we are growing. we might be growing slowly at 1.5, 1.75 rate but we are growing and other parts of the world have real challenges even though in some cases relatively they are doing better than us. that is to be expected because they are starting at a much lower rate but what worries me is -- so it's not a question of whether we are declining but not

doing as well as we should. again the problems we talked about before crumbling infrastructure to schools that aren't beginning to prepare people. we are living in a global world. we know we don't have the resources set aside to deal with the baby boomers as they retire and as their health care needs mount. we all know that so what is it going to take to deal with these obligations? what is it going to take to double the rate of growth in the american economy? that is the debate we need to have so it's not this abstract debate about whether we are and declined. we are not. let's put that aside. there were a question is are we on a trajectory that we need to be on in order to have the kind of society and economy we want here at home and be in a position to shape the kind of world we want to shape in the 21st century is the answer is no so let's not have a silly debate about decline in the silly debate about where

isolationist. the serious debate is how do we live up to our potential? >> for the record i want to know you never did ask the question i asked about running for president of the united states. i am catholic so i particularly enjoy the issue of the importance of doctrine and i found that part of the book particularly interesting because you talk about the utility of having the usefulness of having a doctrine and you sort of tossed out several possibilities and reject them. one is democracy promotion, saving lives taking on terrorists -- immigration and you wind up with another doctrine that tries to pull in some of those. can you first of all talked about your doctrine? >> let me first make the case for a doctrine. the reason is you want some kind of a framework because when you're sitting in this job or simply as a citizen stuff is coming at you fast and furious. in retrospect when you have congressional investigations,

it's obvious what you should have paid attention to but normally when you have an inbox things don't come in with blinking red lights as they pay attention to me, i am what matters most. when it doctrine does is it helps you sort. it gives you some first-order direction or guidance about what matters most or what to do or not to do. and to try to conduct policies as a policymaker or to try to simply be an informed citizen where you wake up every day without a doctrine it's a little bit like groundhog day. it's tough. there is no way to determine priorities. doctrines matter and there are different things you can choose and also some ideas out there. mine is this idea of restoration. what it does is baker we see say in the foreign-policy world we want to put emphasis -- less emphasis on the middle east and more in asia. it's also the tools we have to

bring to bear tend to have the greatest amount of utility. it also focuses more north american that is where the energy is and that is where the economic growth for the world is going to come from. i think when it comes to our tools we have to look at all of them and not just focus on the military. and then also we ought not to be looking for things to do a broad. we have to be very wary of war is a choice in particular and we ought to be basically preserving our resources to fix what needs fixing here at home, it can which will position us in the long run so we can do in -- more in the world if we so choose. any 21st century equivalent to germany or the soviet union in the 20th century. right now the united states has this respite. i would like to keep it that way and if it emerges i want to build to cope with it.

the only way we can discourage the emergence of a real rifle or deal with one if it happens is by being stronger at home. again that argues for restoring the balance of american national security somewhat away from foreign-policy and more on what we have to do here at home. >> one of the things that was fun about reading the book is sure short portrait of different countries in different parts of the world. i was on the one hand a little bit -- reading your section on europe and the democracies of europe and i was reading the section on china. not because i don't want china to succeed as a nation but because you talk very clearly about the problems they face and those who make the decline is argument and want to say dominate you are quite clear about the problems that china faces. >> the good news about europe is

that it's not going to be nearly as exciting in the 21st century as it was in the 20th century. [laughter] good news. when i had the middle east account the white house my goal was to make the middle east boring and they clearly failed miserably. europe has become boring and we have to try to keep it that way. it's not going to be the locale of the great flashes of the 21st century. and that's a wonderful thing. the dark side of this is europe is not going to be the partner for the united states moving forward that it was over the last four decades. the atlantic year of american foreign policy is largely coming to an end. i don't say this to celebrate it, just simply pointed out. europe is now the capacity given the low rates of economic growth even if it gets out of the eurozone crisis europe is not growing. bob gates when he was secretary

of defense often talk publicly about the change in the political culture of europe. europe is just not going to be willing and able to be the partner that we have come to know. the good news is in some cases we will have other partners and so forth but if i am an anti-european argument is a life observation. in terms of china i'm struck at how much of the debate particularly in the city of washington is about china's inevitable emergence is a great power rival. i'm not so sure china emerges as a great power. just because its it's gdp grows considerably never forget you have to look at the -- 4 times hours and that is a real sponge. china faces massive domestic rovlin's from environmental degradation on an enormous scale to a political system that is not nearly as dynamic as the economy. an economy that is not nearly as dynamic as it was. was. high will china fare against the

backdrop of six or 7% growth as opposed to 10 or 11% growth? i worry that china particularly the emergence of nationalism. the chinese think i think is exaggerated. people who simply extend in a linear fashion chinese trajectory for the last three decades through the next three decades are ignoring lots of realities in addition to the low-hanging fruit has already been taken. it's going to make much harder for china to do well going ahead. plus i don't think the second half of the prediction. i don't see china's necessarily a declared rifle on every issue. in order to be the goal of american diplomacy that is not. it's a very different century in the united states finding limited ways to cooperate in the ability to say with north korea and iran and syria. look at the range of outcomes depending on what china does in dealing with economic issues or climate change issues or just about any issue you can think of. china will become more significant by shaping how china

uses its growing strength against the backdrop also of growing chinese internal challenges is a big diplomatic and foreign-policy challenge for the united states. >> one area where i suspect a lot of people on both sides will sort of have some differences with u.s. where you talk about both democracy and humanitarian intervention. and i think you write about those things that make clear your favor of spreading democracy but you talk about the danger of democracy promotion as a central goal. you have an interesting sort of switch of doctrine if you will with the ideas he manocherian intervention being enshrined as the responsibility to protect the star wars character are two p. and you propose to be changed to their responsibilities to respond. can you talk about all of that?

>> democracy per martian is a worthy thing and there's a whole literature that democracies treat their own citizens better as well as their neighbors better. the problem is democracies are hard to bring about. democracies can be quite dangerous. they can be quite vulnerable to being hijacked by nationalism. also it's very hard for outsiders to say if they want to bring about a mature democracy how to do it. so we could be facing a prolonged era of incomplete or immature democracies in much of the world which could be very vulnerable to nationalism and very intolerant to minorities within their borders and very aggressive towards their neighbors. indeed i think we are seeing a lot of that in the greater middle east today. i just raise questions about what it is we can accomplish and i would also say on a pragmatic level leave the united states

need to be prepared to deal with nondemocracies. we have to deal with nondemocratic china on lots of challenges. to simply set aside and say look until you democratize we are not going to work with you. of course now they don't have that luxury even stabilizing the arms race with the soviet union. the soviet union was an authoritarian system. it has to be about priorities and i would say promoting stability in the world as a priority ought to be fairly high. on the question of humanitarian intervention, the world has seven or eight years ago signed up to this idea of the responsibility. as soon as the world did though there was a collective buyer's remorse. ever since then the world hasn't acted on it even as many countries are against it now because they said hold it great

if we open up the borders if you will of a certain country we are setting a precedent that this will be used against -- so when you see the russians or the chinese or the indians are others getting very nervous about this concept. they are nervous about any compromise of our sovereignty. many governments are worried about the press. if you believe there's a collective responsibility to protect that means where is the collective responsibility to protect its? i haven't noticed one country volunteering for the international military that would be required. tom wrote a spot on column saying if you were serious about serious forget about no-fly zones and forget about all the stuff people are talking about. seal off the country and put in hundreds of thousands of people and basically people can start forming a line of her there. but they're not going to. that is too high for price to pay for two uncertain of an outcome.

so we set this global dander that we are not appear to live with. rather than raising expectations was to say we are going to have a responsibility to respond. we are going to look at each situation for what it is and determine what might be the most appropriate response what it is we are willing and able to come up with in the way of resources rather than holding out on the image of international relations that simply doesn't exist. >> do you know this book is full of aphorisms? there is one that captures something important. the united states does not need the world's permission to add but often needs the world support but there is one aphorisms that every reviewer and i would love for you to defend it because i think it's sensible -- they are going to find it themselves. i will give you a chance to respond preemptively. here and elsewhere are foreign-policy inconsistency can

be a virtue. explain yourself on that. >> some of the things we were just talking about. it's hard to say in a certain situation we are only going to put the promotion of dockers a first for the saving of innocent lives first or we are never going to tolerate certain outcomes. we have to be very careful about this and again you never want to conduct national security of foreign-pforeign-p olicy in a vacuum. you have to look at the local realities what it is you can accomplish at what price and they have to ask yourself what it is the opportunity cost? if i do what i think it will take to succeed in this instance what what i need for my interest around the world? what will it mean for the challenges and commitments i have here at home? i did not have unlimited resources. policymakers did not have unlimited time and in the political system doesn't have unlimited bandwidth so what is it that we all want to choose? that leads to inconsistency and that to me is the beginning of a

mature public policy. >> thank you. i'm going to ask a couple more questions and then i want to open this up to the audience. just something i think a lot of people would be interested in is you are very specifically criticized the idea of a war on terror. you know if that al qaeda did great harm on the cheap meaning it was not at all a powerful group the day before or the day after 9/11. you talk about wide the war on terror is actually a bad frame for fighting terrorism. >> it's not a helpful frame for a number of reasons. one is the weapons turn out to be box cutters available in most hardware stores. they don't wear uniforms. it's not like terrorists wave their hands and say here we are. there is no battlefield and there is no gettysburg on the war on terror. every shopping mall and every

finish line in america suddenly as part of this struggle. there is not going to be a battleship missouri celebration. it's just not going to happen. this is now part of the infrastructure. terrorism is part of the framework of our lives. disease is part of the framework of our lives and what we do is we go after deceased and try to protect ourselves and we try to build resilience into our system like the health care system. you end up having a layered approach. you try to keep it at a manageable layer. you don't don't want terrace to essentially succeed in disrupting your lives any more than is absolutely necessary. >> now my last question is about a whole series of subjects that

i don't think you ever expect to write about. you talk about the proposals on energy education infrastructure economic and political reform. and for the record i have disagreements with you about unions and how to approach the deficit, a about -- >> that council on foreign relations will not be merging with brookings. >> i also was surprised and pleasantly surprised that by some very interesting things. you and doors filibuster reform and endorse suggests compulsory voting is something that could work in something i thought my friend tom and i were among the only people who were for it did you talk about popular election of the united states. would like to ask you what was it like to think about a whole

series of questions that you probably had not thought about since you were an undergraduate? >> my critics will show this as a whole set of questions i hadn't thought about for a long time. >> from here forward everything should be praise from this book. >> what led me to think about that was what led me to challenges facing this country particularly domestically. so many of them had less to do with the substance of the challenge and a politics which precluded are coming together. so you scratch an economic problem or schools problem or an infrastructure problem or an immigration problem and very quickly you don't need to be archaeology, very quickly uka to the political functioning or lack thereof of our system. it seems to me experts could spend all their time trafficking and ideas about this is what we have to do whether it's on gun control or immigration reform are reformer would have you but unless you figure out how to get the political marketplace to

respond more to the general interest in the special interest you're not going to get very far. what i try to do is think about reforms that could make the system more responsive to majorities without that intense impassioned minorities. the problem doing that as they say is the very forces that lead the political system to the place isn't and will resist kind -- resist this kind of change. any conceivable reform has winners and losers and shockingly enough the losers are going to resist it so i ended up making it makes sense to traffic in ideas to put out these thoughts. i do think it's going to require, one or two ways things turn out better. one is the way of fear which is only after crisis. after chair will crisis essentially business as usual is no longer sustainable. the problem with that is we will pay an enormous collective price

for the crisis so this is not the way and if this should want this to happen. the alternative is there is something of a new majority or plurality of the sorts of reforms that we need. i think it could come about and it sounds a bit tacky but from leadership that was willing to in some ways combine what i would say is the best of fdr the fireside chats that educate and create a context for policy reform and lyndon johnson was some good retail politics to try to bring it about. is it a long shot? sure. is it possible? definitely. and no have i given up and americans can be counted on to do the right thing but only after they have tried everything else. the real question for me is whether we get to this in time before the crisis if you will forces us to undertake reform on far worse terms and that is something we should as a policy want to avoid.

i don't have a crystal ball but i really think that is a question. it would simply say i don't think we have forever when you look at projections for example of things like entitlement obligations five or 10 years out. my hunch is that is roughly the time and i think we bought a few years for some of the budget tory reforms of the last couple of years. the energy transformation is also bought a somewhat sometime hopefully an immigration form will be welcome so we are doing some of the right things but there are deep overhangs if you will that we have got to deal with. i don't believe we have an unlimited window. >> let me open it up to the audience. we have a mic going around. >> n91 the u.s.-led intervention for everybody was on board and the u.s. cannot making money.

>> can you lean closer to the my? >> the u.s. was not -- by the europeans. why is that? >> the question was about why was there so much international support for the united states in 1990 and 1991, desert shield and desert storm and obviously the contrast with the 2003 iraq war. the reason is that 1990, 91 iraq war was based upon the one threat of international law and principle that most of the world signs up to which is the idea of sovereignty and the idea that the territory should not be acquired by physical force. when saddam hussein did that the world rallied around that principle, rallied around the united states taking the lead. you have this unprecedented coalition and i think also the fact that the u.s. for again

kept the world focused on this principle. in 2003 it was very different and a very different approach that was to transform another society undertaking a preventive military action. for such things there is virtually no international support and much more questionable international legal underpinnings so it comes as no surprise that the second iraq war if you will enjoy it much less international support. it just showed the phrase international community is bandied about all the time but it's actually an inaccurate term. in some areas there is a degree of international community but in most areas the pressure is little. >> back there please. wait for the mic if you would. >> mark with -- and that council. richard you started out by saying that we ought not to be tilting at windmills and looking for interventions in places like iraq and afghanistan but to say

that we shouldn't pursue intervention to shape never seems doesn't necessarily mean that we shouldn't focus on the middle east and southwest asia. so, the arab spring has happened. don't we have to engage that process and if we don't is it not living in a gated community? >> fair enough. interventions are sometime short for military interventions just to be clear. and yes, let me make clear that not acting is a policy just is not acting. with the case of egypt sure if the united states should engage and the most important dimensions are political and economic and egypt is one third to one quarter of the arab world. we have a stake in its outcome. we ought to make clear here is the kind of outcomes we want. here's the economic incentives we are willing to put on the table if you move in those directions.

is your sovereign decision whether to work in those directions and qualify for that support. it's our sovereign right to make that the conditioncondition s we guess we have implants. our influence however is less than or interest. we can't dig paid those outcomes so i think we engage if you will diplomatically and economically and simply make clear to the egyptians that their choices will have consequences for their relationship with us. with syria we have a different set of tools. there i would say we are obviously massive economic refugee flows and all sorts of supported i would be willing to favor on a selective basis legal support for syrian opposition is who met certain criteria that we would put forward. then i also think there's got to be limits. again coming back to the point, inconsistency is unavoidable. this is not argument for a hands off policy. ibson argument for discriminating form policy

tailoring foreign policy for each situation based not just on our just better realistic assessment of what we can achieve at a certain cost given local realities and what is said we have to keep in mind given the full range of interest we have foreign policy and domestic policy? i want us to be involved but just in a fairly discriminating way. >> at one point in the book you talk about two distinctions and we need to make a desirable and the final and the others between the feasible and the impossible. i think that goes to the point. way back there on the left side and then the lady on the right side. >> chris brogan. millennial challenge corporation. i was pleased to see you touch the topic of entitlements and both i think we need to think about this in the context of social security medicaid and

medicare but also tax expenditures. and so i think the utility of your contribution is to add national security and foreign-policy dimension to those issues which have largely been seen in economic competitiveness and demographic context. my question to you is whether you see, how you see the national security foreign-policy dimensions of the entitlement challenge and the challenge affecting the incentives and calculations of voters and representatives on capitol hill and their leadership both in congress and in the white house. >> if i could piggyback on that i was surprised when he talked about the possibility of modest defense cuts. you are not averse to cutting the defense budget for now. >> the last one first. far more important than how much we spend on defense within

limits is how we spend it. the question of i can give you a better defense for $475 billion than some would give for 500 billion depending on how that money is allocated. so often the debate about defense spending is almost symbolic and if you are in favor of the full request you are prodefense in a hardliner and few will are in favor of an 8% cut or something that makes you anti-defense. look at health care. we average twice the spending on health care and yet our outcomes aren't any better. clearly how much we are spending on health care is not the key. we spend an awful lot on education or k-12 yet the outcomes don't compare very well with a lot of the world so how much we are spending on k-12 education again is not necessarily the decisive point. so why is defense different?

there are just as many choices with defense. let's be smart about it. obviously at some point if the country esther koning and enough there is no ways -- draconian enough there is no way to do it better. what i think congress ought to do is once it's decided give defense leadership would much more discretion in making the choices under the ceiling. that to me would be a far more sense -- and economic determination more broadly on how much you can afford but then don't micromanage the process. which gets me to the other point, the first question. what i have tried to do is introduce a national security filter or lands to a lot of these decisions that are too often seen in a silo. whether it is education or something like tax policy and all that, my argument is simply we are not going to be able to be strong for long unless we put

this economy on a sustainable trajectory that would reduce our vulnerability to potential cutoffs are flows of dollars or what have you. that's more than anything is going to mean in the long run fixing our entitlement. there are sensible things that can be done on social security and even more and medicare which is the bulk of it. tax expenditures are areas where we may want to put some ceiling on what kind of limits on deductions that people tend to take or means testing and certain aspects of our policy again make sense. what i'm trying to say is that we don't have the luxury of seeing these things somehow divorce from her national security. i want to have a more integrated debate in this country. too often too many people on the hill have basically said i'm all in favor of america's national security but when they turn to economic issues are quote unquote social issues they have in approach and thinking about what the consequences are for national security. what i want to do is

increasingly integrate how we spend. people can think more systematically about the trade-offs. >> way in the back there. >> hi. i'm catherine and reporter for world politics review. i was wondering intersection looking at restoration in a new country how you selected the areas of focus you decided to focus on? first of all how you selected the subject and secondly are there any of their areas you didn't include in the book apps because they didn't get no work on their own but where you would suggest the u.s. plays its focus in terms of solving domestic problems? >> i just chose the areas i chose infrastructure, immigration, schools, the budget and so forth, tax policy because i thought they were the most important. and when i read a lot of literature as e. j. suggested that i have not been reading for a while, one of the four me

interesting parts was to explore more fully the debates outside the traditional foreign-policy and national security landscape and it increasingly became clear that these were the principle drivers. if you would make a list of what was driving things, this is where i came out. i think ultimately you can have an almost unlimited list if you look at the budget. you could look at every category of things we are spending on. you could look at all sorts of political arrangements. i chose the ones i did based upon what i thought explained where we were. i'm not saying i'm necessarily right. whenever an author writes a book you never expect to have -- but i would love for that debate to happen. i would love to have more people look at more aspects of our society and our economy and basically say hey we have got to do this differently because here are the connections.

here are their implications for the u.s. national security. that would be it. one thing i write in the book is k-12 education ,-com,-com ma we don't have in this country a good capacity to think about lifelong education just to give you a one minute conversation about it. most of the education in this country is front loaded with a high school or college or even graduate school, no matter how you slice and dice it unless your kid is on the 15 year plan you are going to be done with your formal education somewhere near early to mid-20s. given life expectancy and jobs and the rest that probably means you have four or five decades of leased network after that. the idea that this initial thank intellectual gas is going to get you through the next 40 or 50 years is inconceivable. technology is changing fast and

globalization is too dynamic so what are we as a society going to do to put into place mechanisms for true lifelong learning? lots of stuff is happening on line and maybe that is part of the answer. it might be in certain economic arrangements, tax benefits for different types of supports so people at the age of 45 can retrain. otherwise i worry about a society where people are suddenly, they are trained and they do several jobs is suddenly in their mid-40s they are no longer if you will their skill set is no longer adequate. we can't afford as a society long-term unemployment which is part of the problem we are facing now so what do we do about it? that to me is a useful debate that we really haven't had. >> moving right up the line, the gentleman in the aisle and then yes. >> paul, department of state.

dr. haass you mentioned that having a doctrine is very important as we approach foreign-policy and national security policy and later you commented that inconsistency can be a virtue. on the face of it seems contrary -- contradicting. >> inconsistency is a doctrine i suppose. [laughter] >> answer is the following. a doctrine gives you a framework. it gives you a first-order way of thinking through things. it may be in particular cases you have got to make exceptions. it makes you aware of that but to give chu a going imposition and in my going in position for example i would say we would want to do less in middle east, more in asia and more domestically. then i, up against syria and it informs me to say okay i will want to put a limit on what it is we can do there for all these reasons based upon my doctrine, my knowledge of experts tell me

is the reality of syria that reinforces that approach. that doctrine is not a straight jacket. we had a doctrine of detainment during the cold war and it doesn't provide a 26-point step answer to every challenge. the doctrine is a 36000 feet intellectual approach. that is useful and it's a very good way for approaching something and a good way to explain things and when you have to make exceptions, when the local realities point ports if you will inconsistency than that it's okay. then you know you have got to deal with that. whether it's in your public explanation or you have to account for it as a potential cost. >> if you guys can stay up front. >> there is a young lady just in front of them. >> i am not retired from the state department. richard, first of all i was sorry to hear you use the term

weapons of mass destruction. couldn't we retire that from the vocabulary because it embraces everything from nuclear to chemical and you know better than anyone what abusive use was made of that in the run-up to the iraq war. my question is, you said it may take a crisis to get us to get our act together. we have just been through a very serious economic crisis. why is it that so little has changed? why was this not a learning moment? was it the leadership on the part of the administration? was that the political gridlock? >> it's a good point. on the questions of mass destruction i take your point. indeed i was criticized. it's inconsistency among my critics. i was recently criticized this week for trying to do what you just suggested, for suggesting

that not all quote unquote weapons of mass destruction and chemical weapons ought to be considered something different and i got chastised for that. let's put that aside. you are right, we have a crisis. most recently 2008 and that wasn't enough which is interesting. it's one of the reasons that those who say it's going to take a crisis to shake things up, medium-size crises don't seem to do it. would that suggest to me is the crisis might have to be a truly draconian proportion which reinforces my argument that it's the worst possible way to undertake it. we seem to have a considerable ability to avoid taking tough decisions or we go back to business as usual. we had the situation in newtown connecticut. we had a terrible incident in 90% of the american people wanted action on gun control and we can't even give it a piece of

legislation with a fairly basic background check pass. that was a recent example of a crisis that so far at least does not led to political action. the ability to translate from crisis to action particularly legislative action is obviously not one to one. which again suggest to me that it may take extremely severe outcomes which is exactly what we don't want to wait for so it makes the case for leadership before the crisis in forces our hand under truly awful circumstances. >> the young lady there that richard called on, yeah. >> rebecca chamberlain. i'm a current international affairs fellow with the chamber. i like what you are saying and it reminds me very much of a paper i wrote on a notable paper when i was at the wilson paper

and it resonated very much with what you're saying about national security at home so i'm just wondering how you see your poke intersecting with it or whether it's different? >> alas i do not know mr. y. >> by the way this title was used before 50 years ago. >> right. i would hope this idea is one that resonates. i'm not familiar with what you just alluded to. there has been something. there is an intellectual marketplace and people have been putting out the ideas for what we should and shouldn't be doing abroad and at home. i would welcome the competition of what people are putting out alternative ideas. as a former president once said in a very different context, bring it on. i think it's a healthy debate

for the american body politic. >> the. >> layout, that wasn't ideal however. [laughter] >> could point. good point. we won't use that line again. >> priscilla also retired from foreign service. i agree with much of what what you are saying if not everything, richard and when i think about the solutions you are suggesting i keep coming back to our congress. i haven't read your book yet so i don't know what you say about them but i'm just so distraught about the state of our political system particularly in the congress, the way it has chosen, the fact that people have to spend all their time raising money thinking about the country's problems. is there anyway to fix that? >> i read about congressional

congressional dysfunctionality which is part of a larger -- i look i think there are problems with how money operates in american politics. i think it's toxic. people spend way too much time doing it. my hunch is that situation is going to get worse, not better. i think narrowcasting of the media has made it more difficult. everybody now confined his own cable or internet site so we have a proliferaprolifera tion of many constituencies and it makes it much harder to build community. political parties have gotten much weaker, much less significant so there is that. i think we have an open primary. that way people can just appeal to one side or the other. nonpolitical commissions rather than state legislatures and that way you don't get formed just around one or another set of demographics. but i think these approaches have their limits. i just don't think out there.

i mean i'm not a political scientist. dj -- e. jsm probably several people in this room are but i don't think political scientist can devise a mechanical quote unquote solution to what ails us politically. i think that is going to do depend more on restructuring politics more grandly, about appealing one or the other of the major parties more towards the center and towards those different ideas without trying to animate the political center or just may take an extraordinary individual. it may simply take an individual who can articulate a set of goals that enjoys broad support and he or she then gets elected and is able to have a working majority. at the end of the day we are not going to be a parliamentary system. we are not going to have the advantage of the will of political efficiency. that was the idea here. when the founders built the

system the idea was to make it somewhat inefficient. we have succeeded on steroids so the question is how do we preserve what is integral to the american system which is checks and balances on the rest but without this degree? at what point does an efficiency become dysfunctional? we have clearly tipped over and out but pulling back from map the answers are not so much mechanical as they are if you will more in the realm of politics. >> thank you. i think there are no mechanical solutions to this problem. the gentleman here. i think we are about out of time and there was one other -- we are supposed and that 7:30 and there was a gentleman back there. if we could bring into questions at once i think that would be good. you can evade the hard one. [laughter] >> i'm robert kirstein and i'm returning to the priorities you suggest for attention. i'm intrigued by the emphasis you have given to north america. i have the impression that north

america was doing pretty well especially since nafta. >> i will turn to that and there's a second question somewhere. >> the gentleman back there, thank you sir. >> andrew with dhs. i am interested in how optimistic you are given the state of the body politic, the burst i have seen it in 29 years in washington. how lost i miss -- optimistic you are that any of this has a chance to succeed. >> this gives you the opportunity to give a ringing lecture on hope. and therefore. [laughter] ..