which is what the big sell was or are they not. we'll wait and see. we don't know the answer to that yet. >> sure. i'll take another one from twitter. and katherine, i'll probably kick it back to you. you sort of referenced this earlier, about a measure of success is how well the common core helps some of our most vulnerable students. students from what we might call special populations, students with special needs, english language learners and others. when you were out in these classes and schools, how did you see them interacting with the common core? >> i didn't hang out with teachers of special populations than those who were trying to serve all their kids. we're talking about a very wide spectrum. not so much on the ell side. i haven't seen as much of that. what i saw was teachers trying to do their very best. and feeling that one of the places that they needed the most support weren't getting it is teaching special populations. the survey data that we've seen,

that's one of the areas in which they had the least support, and they've gotten the least insight. they're struggling with, how do i deal with whose kids' native language is not english. that is a weak zone i've seen in my reporting. not to mention kids with special needs. kids far behind academically. >> absolutely. chris, is this your experience as well? >> yeah. it's my experience with whatever state standards we've had in the past as well. i do think that we have a real challenge as a condition tri about what do we do with kids that are below grade level, our current testing structure tests at grade level. so how do we make sure we're scaffolding so children can advance and we're measuring growth, not just as part of our accountability system. i think these are all things that need to be looked at by states to make sure that special needs students and kids who are behind academically get there. >> i think we have time for one

more question from the crowd. i think we'll go right here to the front. sarah, if you would be so kind. >> thank you. i'm roberta stanley, public school -- >> speak into the microphone. >> roberta stanley. in retrospect, do you think it was a mistake for the state school officers and governors to sign this compact and go it top down instead of in another method? >> state schools and governors have traditionally been responsible for standards in the state. so i don't know that i would -- i don't think it was a mistake. there was a mistake made, and it was that we weren't ferocious in our defense, that this was actually led by the school chief officers. and the governors. >> wasn't that one of the -- [ inaudible ]. >> there's some that are. relevant to that, in state governments, the state chief and

the state governor are in charge much the education in the state. if it had emerged from school districts in states, or something like that, i think that might have been a possibility. but i don't think our strategy was wrong. i think, quite frankly, we just weren't strong enough that the federal government needed to not incentivize us to do this, and that we needed to stay in control of it. i think we can get that back. i think we're just going to have to be firmer on it. >> rick, do you think it's possible for them to get that back. >> we'll see. i mean, i think certainly the direction chris is signaling i think would be very productive and constructive. i've got a proposal that might help. for instance, under race to the top, the obama administration was delighted that congress had $350 million to fund the consortium. one of the criticisms of the move is that it's a waste of money, it's going to undo a

couple years of work. i think it's appropriate that secretary duncan said, gosh, maybe we pushed you guys into something that you weren't excited about. so i'd like to see the secretary and the president find $350 million carved out of administration priorities to award the states which want to drop the common core. you could have a national contest for states that are not excited about the common core. they can submit their pull out of the common core contest. the $350 million will be divvied up among those states. i think something like that would actually go a long way towards, you putting some real symbolic heft behind the notion that the federal government is whatever role it has in playing getting the ball rolling in the last five years, is going to relate to the common core differently going forward. >> i think that's a great note to end on.

if we can give a round of applause for our panel that's here. those of you following at home, you don't have to stop talking. i've seen a lot of people conversing with each other using the hash tag. please continue to do that. a lot of great questions were raised on there. keep chatting about it. thanks for having you. thanks for coming. the c-span cities tour takes book tv and "american history tv" on the road, traveling to u.s. cities to learn about their history and literary life. this week we partnered with charter communications to madison, wisconsin. >> it is a glorious service. this service for the country. the call comes to every citizen.

it is an unending struggle to make and keep government representative. >> bob is probably the most important political figure in wisconsin history. and one of the most important in the history of the 20th century, in the united states. he was a reforming governor. he defined what progressivism is. he was one of the first to use the term progressive to self-identify. he was a united states senator who was recognized by his peers in the 1950s, as one of the five greatest senators in american history. he was an opponent of world war i. stood his ground, advocating for free speech. above all, bob was about the people. in the era after the civil war, america changed radically from a nation of small farmers and

small producers and small manufacturers, and by the late 1870s, 1880s, 1890s, we had concentrations of wealth. we had growing inequality. and we had concern about the influence of money in government. so he spent the later part of the 1890s giving speeches all over wisconsin. if you wanted a speaker for your club, or your group, bob would give the speech. he went to county fairs. he went to every kind of event that you could imagine. and built a reputation for himself. by 1900, he was ready to run for governor, advocating on behalf of the people. and he had two issues. one, the direct primary. no more selecting candidates in convention. two, stop the interest. specifically, the railroad.

>> watch all of our events from madison saturday. and sunday afternoon at 2:00 on "american history tv" on c-span3. congress returns to capitol hill tomorrow. both the house and senate gaveling in at 2:00 eastern time. the house is scheduled to debate ten bills, including updating the presidential records act. the house republican conference holds leadership elections on thursday. and in the senate, votes are expected on judicial nominations and a child care grant program. off the floor republicans and democrats in the senate will hold leadership elections on thursday. watch the house live on c-span and senate live on c-span2. government advocates called for reforms in house and senate investigations by the campaign legal center. public citizen released a report examining house and senate ethics investigations.

it said the process has improved in the house with formation of the office of congressional ethics. but that the senate has failed to take any disciplinary action against ethics violations. this is about 50 minutes. >> are you ready? okay. hello. my name is meredith me gee hee, i'm the policy director of the campaign center. i want to welcome everyone. this is a -- supposed to be, what we hope will be a roundtable discussion, not just panel presentations, about potential reforms to the congressional ethics process. we are pleased to have a very wide range of groups that have been a part of discussing what the reforms would look like. let me just first off give some of the list of the groups who have been participating in the effort to try and really push for reforms in the congressional ethics process.

in addition to the campaign legal center there's the citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington, common cause, democracy 21, judicial watch, thomas man, the league of women voters, norm ornstein, the project on governmental oversight, public citizen, the sunlight foundation, taxpayers for common sense, and james thurber. it's a pretty diverse group from the right, the left, the middle and every place in between. what we want to do today is give some information about a study that public citizen has released, and then be able to have a discussion both among ourselves and nif any of the st or hill folks who are here to talk about congressional ethics, why they are important, what needs to be done, what changes should be discussed. at the panel we will go through and let me just have everyone introduce themselves as the folks up here very quickly. >> i'm jim thurber.

from american university. american university doesn't endorse this. we're a 501-c-3 organization. we cannot lobby. but as an individual, i'm very supportive of this, and have been for many years. >> citizens for responsibility and ethics in washington. >> i'm craig holman, government affairs lobbyist, and i want to note that i'm one of the few lobbyists who calls himself a lobbyist. >> i'm aaron scherb. >> and i'm norm ornstein with the american enterprise institute but also here as an individual. >> i'm going to turn it over to craig who has written a report looking at the office congressional ethics and we'll have him talk about that a little bit and open it up after he's had a chance. >> first, i want to take a minute or so providing some background about what created the office of congressional ethics. this came in the wake of the jack abramoff scandals back in

2006, 2007, when our organizations, all the organizations here worked on drafting and promoting the honest leadership and open government act that set up a whole series of new congressional ethics rules along with ethics rules for lobbyists. and one of the key problems that we all noted of the congressional ethics process is enforcement. enforcement has historically as always until oce, was the responsibility of members of congress oversees members of congress. and both the congressional ethics committee, both in the house and the senate side are run by members of congress and they used to -- the senate still does -- operate largely in secrecy. it has always claimed that they are doing a great job.

they do it all confidentially. even though the public doesn't know what they're doing, that is the basis of their effectiveness. well, that was ridiculous. following in the wake of the jack abramoff scandal, where the house ethics committee did almost nothing at all, we recognized that enforcement is the major problem. so then we started promoting an institution called the office of congressional ethics. this office of congressional ethics is staffed and run by outsiders. they cannot be members of congress and not be registered lobbyists. even though they don't actually have any enforcement authority or subpoena authority, what they do is conduct an investigation and make recommendations to the house ethics committee either to dismiss the case or to proceed with further investigation. the strength of oce lies in the

fact that their reports, once they make a referral to the house ethics committee, their reports become public record. they become public record 45 days after referral, or at the conclusion of a house ethics investigation. but at some point it becomes public record. we have none of that over on the senate side. let me explain quickly the findings on the report. the report is the case for independent ethics agencies, the office of congressional ethics, six years later, and a history of failed senate accountability. what we found is that throughout the history of the ethics committee prior to oce, very, very little disciplinary actions were ever taken. during that decade that we called the decade of inaction from 1997 to 2005, which is a long period, there were only five disciplinary actions ever taken by the house ethics committee. then during the whole jack

abramoff scandal of 2005 to 2008, there were another five disciplinary actions taken. that's it. then suddenly we created oce, and the office of congressional ethics period of 2009 through 2014, we saw literally a four-fold increase in disciplinary actions taken by them. 20 disciplinary actions. so the office of congressional ethics, the fact that it offers transparency in the ethics process, has really exhilarated and enhanced greater activity in the house ethics process, but has not done so overzealously. i want to point out that the oce has taken up 136 cases in preliminary reviews, and of those have only referred about a third of them to the house ethics committee for further investigation. most of the cases get dismissed. but still, you're seeing a healthy work load going to the house ethics committee, and

because it becomes public record, the house ethics committee is actually starting to do its job. now, compare that to the senate. we were pushing for a similar outside office on the senate side, and i remember senator ted stevens, for instance, sitting up there on a committee, saying, there's no problem here. the ethics process in the senate is working beautifully. of course, shortly thereafter he came under a very sharp ethics scandal, of which the senate ethics committee didn't do anything. we take a look at the report. and we've got charts at the end of the report that are very handy. take a look at what the senate ethics committee has done, compare that to oce. first of all, they're receiving fewer complaints than ever. there were like 99 complaints filed with the ethics committee in 2009. in 2013, last year, there were only 26. and we're seeing a steady drop in this. part of the reason is because

almost every single complaint on the senate ethics side gets dismissed. 513 complaints that have been analyzed from 2007 through the end of 2013, all but four have been dismissed. all but four. and the reason -- or much of the reason why that is happening is because the senate ethics committee operates in secret. even though they publish the number of cases they're taking a look at, and they publish the number of dismissals each year, which by the way is almost an identical number every year. that's it. we don't get any kind of record as to what they were looking at, who was being investigated, or what's going on. and without that type of accountability on the senate side, the senate ethics committee is a failure, the same type of failure that we had on the house side prior to oce.

so this report recommends, first of all, that the senate institute a similar type of outside investigative agency similar to oce to make their ethics process begin working, and secondly, you know, try to ensure that oce and whatever the senate may do is a very effective agency. the main thing that oce is missing is subpoena authority. it can only ask people to come in and testify before -- we'd like to see it have real, real cop authority to conduct its investigations. anyway, that's a summary of the reports. i'd like to move on to others. >> thank you. what we have done as an informal group, we've written letters to t the house and senate leadership about their ethics processes. as craig noted, in the house, our first priority is to make the oce a permanent office.

every congress, we kind of wait to have the black or white smoke come out to determine whether or not the ethics -- the office of congressional ethics is going to continue. we'd like to find a way for the house to go through a process that could make this a more permanent situation, and not every time there's a new congress. we've also encouraged the house leadership on a bipartisan basis to support giving subpoena power to the office of congressional ethics. and lastly, to increase the transparency over here on the house ethics side, everything from better access to their pink sheets, to more information about the information that they provide to member offices. on the senate side, as craig noted, our letter talks about creating a similar office of ethics that would be based on a successful oce. we talk about creating timetables for reports. and we specifically talk about not only transparency in the ethics process in the senate,

but a new problem that has cropped up dealing with amorphous sounding groups, looking to fund travel for senators. the senate staff looks at these groups and has no clue really what this group is really all about. they often have no track record. and it's very hard to find information. so i'd like to stop there and turn actually -- i'm going to turn first to norm. norm, if you could talk a little bit both about why you think these issues matter, why should anyone care about ethics in congress, and why you think it's so hard to get even with bipartisan agreement, to get this done. >> sure, meredith. let me say, that i really believe the office of congressional ethics has been a terrific success. give a little credit to speaker boehner and leader pelosi. they chose the initial members and actually picked good people. ranging across the ideological

spectrum, with very good leadership from two former members, david skaggs of colorado, and porter goss of florida. but including a real mix. and virtually every decision that they've made, either to not move forward or to push something on to the ethics committee has been done unanimously. so it's taken it out of a hot-house arena and it works much better with real credibility. more often than not, they will say that a complaint brought doesn't have the merit. and it has much more credibility, for the members themselves who have the complaints brought against them, than it would if it were done by their colleagues. that gets to the root of the problem that meredith was getting at. when congress is given the constitutional responsibility to police its own, but it's in a damned if you do and damned if you don't situation. it's very easy for these things to become politicized and partisanized. we went through a long period with the criminalization of

ethics. but its even just as easy to imagine, and it's, frankly, happened more frequently, and this is what craig was getting at, where in effect an old boy network that cuts across party lines that says, we won't push anything against your members, you won't push anything against ours, and we'll push it all under the rug. so there's a real lack of credibility here. and that lack of credibility hurts congress as a whole in serious ways. that's why many of us have pushed for some kind of independent process, respecting the constitutional responsibility that congress has, which is what resulted in the office of congressional ethics. there have been multiple attempts to do this in the senate which has completely brushed it aside. it hasn't gotten anywhere near the attention that it deserves. you don't take the full authority away from congress. the final decisions have to be made by congress. and it's all filtered through the house ethics committee. but if you don't have an independent accountability

process, then you really don't have an ethics process at all. i would just make one other point. craig talked about the abramoff era. there was another element to this, which is that when the ethics committee in the house pushed and pushed, finally did its job, against tom delay, the speaker then in effect fired three members of the ethics committee who had looked at the evidence, and come out with what was actually pretty mild punishment, letters of admonishment. but the chairman joel hefley and steve lauterrette were dismissed from the committee. that shows you how this process can get caught up in a political hot house. what we want to do is move it out of that hot house. and then one final point, when you don't have any enforcement, the word gets out to the members and the staff, anything goes. there's no reason under those circumstances, or no need that members or staff feel to figure out what is wrong and what

isn't. what is actually over the line in terms of the ethics rules and the responsibilities that they have. and what isn't. and you end up with more violations. as much out of carelessness than anything else. so not only do you need some significant enforcement, you also need a constant process of ethics education. and that's something else that we're calling for. to make sure that members and staff know what the lines are, whether it's travel, or relationships with lobbyists or others, or the kinds of things that you can and cannot do with campaign donors. all of those things need to be not only enforced, but also taught seriously to members and staff. we want to do this to strengthen congress, not to undermine it. >> jim, could you talk a little bit about why this is important? why everybody cares about ethics? >> first of all, i want to put my comments in the context of the fact that i've been teaching

a course on ethics and lobbying for ten years. it gets a laugh from some of my colleagues, but it's very important. and we track through meredith's good work all of the articles that appear, dozens of them sometimes, each week on ethics problems. and they've not gone away. i think the primary problem here, and it's been stated three times, is, we don't have effective enforcement. we didn't have effective enforcement in the 1995 act, we don't have it in the 2007 act, and there's little transparency, a little more transparency with oce, but there's little transparency certainly on the senate side about problems and solutions to those problems. and i think transparency, you've heard this before, is like -- it's like oxygen to fire. in a democracy, you have to have it. it's cleansing. it's not the only thing. and next, especially for you in the media, there needs to be

better access to information from the house ethics committee, the senate ethics committee, if it does something. and ethics training and education is very important. now, what does all of this do? it goes against a very human -- a very strong human norm. i call it the iron law of reciprocity. when you have peers judging peer, and it's in a place where i'll help you if you'll help me, even though it's highly partisan, it's within each party, it's very difficult to push against that. that's what these things do. but it's for the good of the democracy. it's for the public good, and that's why we're pushing it. >> i just want to build a little bit on something that the speaker before me said. as craig said before, transparency is really critical here. what transparency does very specifically is when the oce releases its report at the end

of an investigation, it has two effects. one effect is to act as -- make the house ethics committee accountable, and it also makes staffers and members more accountable, because they know any transgressions will not just disappear into a black hole of the house ethics committee. so for me, what's most important here is transparency in the process. and the advent of oce has made the process on the house side at least more transparent. it's not transparent enough, but it's gotten somewhat better. perhaps in response to that, the house ethics committee itself has gotten a little bit more transparent. on their website now, they post the house ethics committed tee reports, you couldn't get those in the past, there's more to be done on the house side. there are certain documents that are very difficult to obtain, even though they're public documents. documents having to do with even

the basic guidance that the house ethics committee provides that are called pink sheets. some of them are online, but not all of them, particularly historical ones, and those are guidance that members and staff need to have, and the public needs to have so they know what the standards they're held to. on the senate side, as others have said before me, there's much, much less transparency. even the basic rules of what senators are and are not allowed to do are often very difficult to ascertain. so several years ago, my organization found out, other people knew about that there was a sort of senate members manual that guided some of the behaviors of members of the senate. in fact, members of the senate, the rules committee, we asked for access to this, to make it public. that seems absurd that the public wouldn't know what the rules of their senators and staffers are held to. and they didn't provide it to us. it took until several years

later that a newspaper reporter was able to obtain this. the senate has a lot further to go in terms of transparency. >> could you talk about why average americans should care about this? as a grass roots organization? the common cause has been working on this for many years. what do you find when you go and talk to people outside of washington? >> absolutely, yes. thanks, meredith. i think the public knows that the congressional ethics process is broken. congress policing itself is like a pitcher calling his own balls and strikes. and the system is broken. and all of our organizations are here to help try to nudge congress to fix it, and to create an independent ethics -- a fully independent ethics process. and there was a time when the congress' approval ratings are in the single digits, teens at best, i think the public would greatly welcome a fully independent congressional ethics process. when we talked with everyday

americans about this, they're shocked that there aren't stronger rules, and stronger ethics processes in place. and common cause, all these organizations, have helped create the ethics in the house, and that's a welcome transparency. it's not a complete solution, but we're working to strengthen that. so i think the -- creating a senate -- office of ethics in the senate would boost congress' approval rating and would be become among most of the public. >> are there any questions from any of the reporters? >> what's your attention at this point of the oce, that it should be renewed next year. do they have people serving on the oce who are doing a good job, and do you expect them to continue? >> first of all, let me just say, it's very important, as norm did, to talk about the

leadership at oce. and the excellent job that they have done. because it's very difficult in washington to find many examples where you've had bipartisan leaders that have been able to make most of their recommendations in a unanimous way, among both republicans and democrats. so i think they deserve credit. leadership matters in this town. so i think they should be singled out. we have written a letter to the leadership of the house asking that they make a public statement as soon as possible, that oce will be renewed. the only thing that we saw was, there was a press report from miss pelosi's office indicating that they were supportive, but we've heard nothing else from anyone else in the house leadership. so we would welcome a statement by the house leaders on both sides of the aisle, making very clear that they expect oce to resume, and we also are hoping

that there will be an opportunity to engage in this conversation about how to strengthen oce. we are hearing reports that the lack of subpoena power is actually harming their ability to do their job. and we obviously are careful about opening up discussion about oce, because we know that it has means within the house, particularly those who maybe have been the subject of an investigation, but we also think that creating this ability for them to get the information they need, so they can do a fair job, is a critically important aspect. but so far, we've heard -- other than the report that was right after the letter was sent earlier this fall, it's been deafening silence. >> let me just add, you know, a lot of members don't like this. they didn't like it from the beginning. actually, nancy pelosi deserves an enormous amount of credit.

she took plenty of heat, as did mike capuano, who was in charge of the task force, for doing this in the first place. they don't like to lose control over any aspect of their lives. it's actually been made much tougher because of the lack of subpoena power. any member who has an investigation that's begun through oce gets a lawyer. and the lawyer reflexively says, we're going to stone wall, we're not going to give you anything. we hoped when the office was created that they would get at least indirect subpoena power, where they could go to the chair and ranking members of the ethics committee so there would be something there. but when lawyers do this, it causes friction and more trouble and more difficulties. anybody who has a referral from oce to the ethics committee doesn't like it. so it's tough to get this going and to keep it going. but if it ends, there will be an enormous outcry. my guess is that even some of the 7% or 8% who still approve

of congress will turn against it. and, you know, when john mccain says they're down to blood relatives and paid staff, they're going to lose a whole lot of those, too. >> norm, i have not met any of the 7% to 8%. i would like to add one thing, and that is the historical context of the senate. it was senator obama who pushed the idea of an office of senate ethics. it got about one-third of the senate in support of it. as i remember it was about 36 votes. that's in the context of i think over 30 states that have an office of public integrity. they're doing this in the states, but they couldn't do it in the senate. we've got a tough lift here. but it's very important. >> just to give some background in case people are missing where this question is coming from. oce was created as part of house rules. as a result, it has to be renewed each session that the house comes back. and that is a potential weakness, if the house suddenly

chooses not to renew oce. however, with the current leadership, speaker boehner and nancy pelosi, i am now comfortable that oce is not in danger with this leadership. last session, we had a crisis for a while, because the board members on oce were supposed to be term limited out. and new people appointed. and then the board reauthorized. well, neither speaker boehner nor nancy pelosi thought of that, or realized they had to do it. we were getting right next to the next session. and this whole board would have gone defunct. but both speaker boehner and nancy pelosi sat down together, ended the term limits for the board, and renewed the office of congressional ethics. with this house leadership, i'm not worried about oce in danger.

if we do see a change in leadership, i suspect this will become an issue once again. >> the tea party groups in ohio were instrumental in pressuring speaker boehner to reauthorize. the office of congressional ethics. so there's a broad ideological support for this institution, for that ethics body. so we hope that will continue as well. >> i would like to note that among the groups that have been involved in these discussions are judicial watch, and the national taxpayers union. what we really tried to do is create a dialogue that's not based on right or left or republican or democrat, but really ethics standards that apply across the board. i think any of us who have been in washington for any period of time know that ethical problems are not reserved to one party or the other. it's inherent in the nature of politics. and so we have really tried very hard to ensure that the work that we do is nonpartisan, and we think that's an important message. particularly as we get close to the elections.

this is not about one party or another. this is about the integrity of the institution. >> one other note here, which is that the -- for the members of the office of congressional ethics, it's really a thankless task. they don't get paid anything. they have to spend a lot of time on this. they're vilified on a regular basis by the ethics committee itself, where there are real turf battles. it's a tribute to them that they've kept this up and decided to stay on. a couple of them are getting fairly old now. the former member from illinois, bill frenzel from minnesota. so at some point, they're going to be changing. we want to be sure that when those changes occur, the leaders step up to the plate once again and pick people of the same quality and integrity. >> one question on what you just said about the national taxpayers union. i just noticed in your letters,

national taxpayers union didn't support the senate office, or what was this -- >> i would note, i think one of the senate copies, there's only one difference, because one of the groups got originally left off. there's only one difference. i'll make sure you get that. the national taxpayers union, really, the only thing that they raised concern with when they were talking about the senate was travel. and i think that was because there are groups here, myself included, i think public citizen who have been in favor of eliminating privately financed travel. for senators and members of congress. that was not a position that national taxpayers was particularly comfortable taking, so they just said they would rather not go there. >> but they do support the independent agency. >> right. >> okay. >> all right. yeah? >> just procedurally speaking, in order to get the changes, is

it a decision specifically by speaker boehner and pelosi? [ inaudible ]? >> well, they probably would have to take some action in house rules, to take this. i would note that there are different ways you can do subpoena power. you can give subpoena power to third parties as opposed to the members themselves. you can give them full subpoena power to any witness involved in an allegation. but that really would have to come from the leadership and it would have to be contained in the changes in the house rules. but there are also -- while all the house rules are recreated every two years, i would note that we don't have a lot of concern that the standing committees, like agriculture, or, you know, the ways and means are going to disappear anytime soon. that is a concern that remains to some degree with the office of congressional ethics. so part of the effort here is to

try and figure out if there are ways to make sure that the office of congressional ethics is really embedded in the expectation of the standing committees that will occur at each new congress. >> by the way, a little anecdotal story about subpoena power. i think all the reform groups supported having oce back in 2008 when it was being debated, have vested with subpoena authority. however, congress wasn't willing to go that far. so they usurped the subpoena authority. and they have caused somewhat of a division. i know i and meredith were two who were saying, okay, we're not going to oppose creating oce, but this isn't probably going to work. norm insisted we were wrong. fortunately, norm was correct. oce has done its job, as the numbers show. and the reason it's been able to

do it is because of the transparency element that it still has. even without subpoena authority. >> yes, sir? >> under the subpoena authority, two questions for really anyone on the panel. if oce were given subpoena authority, are there any separation of powers implications about this independent agency having direct oversight responsibility and authority on members of congress? and also, is this something where you would envision individual witnesses having a right to not self-incriminate based on the ethics rules in addition to the justice rules? typically a person can refuse to answer on the right to self-incriminate in criminal law, but could they based on an ethical violation? >> i'm actually not certain. i don't think, and i'm speaking tentatively here, but i don't think there would be a

separation of powers concern involving the house investigating its own members and its own staffers. the constitution specifically provides for the house to govern its own membership. so i don't see why you would have a separation of powers necessarily within, or separation separation of powers problem looking to third parties, somebody who is funding travel or someone who isn't in the government. that's the first one. i'm sorry, the second one again? >> just the form of the subpoena power, how it would be envisioned if this type of thing was a person to have the right not to self-incriminate based on what they might say would suggest they committed an ethics violation as opposed to a criminal violation? >> i have to admit i haven't thought that through. i don't know if anyone else has views on that. self-incrimination is under the fifth amendment, so it would be a criminal violation. i don't necessarily see where that would apply in the context

of a subpoena having to do with violations of house ethics rules. obviously some of the house ethics rules are based in statute and based in criminal statute, so there may be some grounds there for making a fifth amendment type defense. i wouldn't see it being applicable in the context of mere violations of house rules that aren't based in criminal law. >> i can address both of those. when we were going through what was a painstaking process of trying to create this panel, we had a working group working with mike cap you ano. tom and i were part of it, public citizen and common cause. we went through each of these issues as capuano then went back to his members. there was enormous across the board resistance to the subpoena power. at one level you can understand, the members were frightened of any outside group having authority over them. and there were questions about having an outside group.

i think it could probably be resolved. but what we really aimed for was an indirect power. run through the ethics committee. which we thought would probably work enough. what we wanted was at least to have a backup where either members or staff would feel reason to communicate with, and offer information and testimony to the panel, instead of, what's now happened in far too many cases. like i said, lawyers just instinctively say we're not going to give them anything. i think in most cases it works against their clients, but there's that. on the second question, this is the same kind of question that emerges whenever any congressional committee has a witness in front of it. namely, if there is a potential criminal violation, then, of course, you can say that you're

invoking the fifth amendment. now, presumably the committee can offer you some immunity. it's not clear that the office could offer immunity, but almost every instance of an ethics violation, or potential ethics violation or allegation that we're talking about does not involve criminal activity. it involves a violation of the ethics rules. and so there's no protection there. and of course, for the most part, if a member or staff tried to do that, it would work against them. it would probably look pretty foolish. >> yes? >> is there any indication of subpoena power is really necessary? like have there been cases where people just don't cooperate, so nothing gets done? >> yes. >> yes. >> yeah, the reports that we have, from the oce, is that this is a growing problem. that they have found that when they go to conduct their

investigations, as norm mentioned, folks are lawyering up and shutting up. so, you know, they want to be able to do a full and thorough investigation, and when people won't talk to you, they won't give you records. basically you can't do that. so it's a problem. >> on the other hand, they've done a lot of reports. they've gotten a lot of information. >> that's it. in the reports i've read -- >> there's a lot of voluntary participation going on. but in many of the cases, especially where they get more extreme, you find that a number of parties involved in the cases are not participating. you know, it puts oce in an awkward position, too. because they've got to issue a report with some sort of recommendation to the ethics committee. and if no one's going to talk to them and explain what happened, that just leaves questions wide open. so sometimes oce will send a referral to the ethics committee

saying, we can't answer these questions. so we recommend that you pursue it. you know, and use your authority. >> they say they have a negative influence. someone doesn't answer, they say, well, we have to assume they have something to hide. [ inaudible ]. >> i think what i understand is it's a growing problem, that it first created the notion of not cooperating, and seemed it was going to leave a bad mark, if you will, by your name. increasingly, they're finding that people are saying, we're just not going to cooperate. so they're left with this inability to come to what they consider a good resolution. they end up forwarding stuff to the ethics committee. and the process kind of begins. where if they had the subpoena power, they could get definitive answers. and therefore, be able to make more definitive conclusions. >> by the way, the same lawyers for those parties that urged the parties not to participate in an

investigation before oce, if oce then sends a report to the ethics committee saying, we can't answer these questions, so we recommend you pursue the investigation, those same lawyers will say, you're using our lack of participation as a negative mark, and, therefore, carrying on the investigation. so, you know, that's part of the awkward situation. if oce had subpoena authority, it could actually do more factual based research. >> off the top of my head i can think of one example. there's an investigation of congressman bill owens and pete roscoeman. if i recall correctly in the oce report, it talked about how lobbyists who were involved in organizing one of the trips, including lobbying a former senator, refused to cooperate and didn't provide documents or information, which made oce's job all the more difficult in trying to understand what was going on. the point is to make oce's

investigation as thorough as possible at the front end so they can reach the best possible conclusion without having to kick it over to the house ethics committee in the first instance. >> what is the reasoning, or oce's reasoning for why people are lawyering up so much more? [ inaudible ]. is it because they expected oce to be able to be a bigger threat -- [ inaudible ]. >> i can only speculate my conclusion would be that they have been surprised, to some degree, as some of us were, that oce has been as effective as it has been, to go ahead and pursue these investigations in fair-handed manner, and has reached bipartisan agreement.

i think there were fairly low expectations for oce when it first came into being. >> except from norm. >> except from norm. i don't know, norm, do you have -- >> i do think, one of the great things that's happened with oce? >> i think one of the things that's happened with oce is when we used to have a situation for a long time when there really were criminalization of party differences, you would have some outside group bring in an ethics complaint, and that would bruise -- she's under investigation, she's under investigation. that really burned a lot of people that had done nothing i don't think. what oce is doing, because it has independent authority to clear people in a relatively expeditious way. but for plenty, they would much

rather delay, stonewall and basically use it again the panel. now one of the reasons they want to do that is we did manage to get and it was just as important as the point that many of our panelists have made -- if the ethics committee doesn't ---for some of the members, they would just as soon have these published reports that they can rely on an ethics committee not take any action, or find information that might be embarrassing. so it works in some ways to improve the process, but without some way to get some information out there, it really does cloud up the process, to some degrees. >> i was one of those who testified before the task force

on this and the original idea and the concept was to create an office that would be in charge of doing investigations, and then you would have the house ethics committee that you would do the ajudicatory process. you do have some duplication, where you have an investigation by oce, then you have another investigation by the house ethics committee. so not only do you have duplication, but i think the whole point here is to be able to provide two things, one, members of the public, confident that allegations are being looked at and resolved fairly, and for the members, to be able to say, look, i got a clean bill of health and therefore i'm fine. and really, you have to have an oce that is strong enough to stay we have look at all the facts. we didn't make a recommendation for it because we felt the facts weren't there.

we're a little bit in between at the moment, because that clean bill of health, sometimes may not come about because they don't have the subpoena power. >> you emphasize in the report that the budget is only 1.5 billi billion. do you have any specific recommendations for the number of board members? >> i think we certainly don't want to see too much of a bigger one, because the larger the number, the more difficult it is to corral the cats and also to really have an effective conversation. one of the issues that the oce recently dealt with was violation of disclosure laws. that took a lot of resources that they really have reported that if they had more resources

perhaps they could have looked at more of these code violations. we're not looking for a huge increase, but we think it's important to have an office that will pursue the facts where the facts lead them and not because we don't have the staff to go there and to investigate. >> i would like to add, whatever an appropriate budget would be is necessary, i want to repeat that the ethics process is broken, it isn't working, it's not doing it's job. if we need to create another semiindependent agency with its own budget to make it work on the senate side, that is really what is necessary. >> any other questions? yes. >> typically when you guys are able to push these kind of bigger changes, there's been some kind of crisis. why now and how do you gauge

your prospects of success in the current environment. >> well, this is a joke that we're waiting for a scandal and this is all ready to go, after that, right? i mean, that's what you're talking about, usually after a scandal, there's reform. >> in both instances, an independent office was rejected roundly and soundly and in a bipartisan way. the senate closes ranks when it comes to something like this, if not on anything else. i think we have to be realistic, this is not likely to happen unless and until there is a scandal of significant proportions that it then becomes clear do a larger audience that the senate has no ethics process and they're forced to move. what we want to do, i think as much as anything else, is to keep some pressure on and now we have a model and we know what

works and what doesn't and what can be improved. so it's ready, when the time comes, they can just plug it in and we'll have a better process. and ideally, it will be what we originally envisioned, which really is an independent office, almost like a prosecutorial authority and a grand jury in a sense to decide whether there's enough there, but then can take it to the ethics committee which acts like a judge and jury. the first judge and jury, before it gets to the whole body, and present the evidence. now they don't do that either. so we would love to see it refined so that it could work better, but the most important thing is to find the opportunity and the traction to make it happen. because without it, you really don't have any credibility here, whatever emerges, you pretty much know that in the senate it's just going to die. >> we all know the low polling numbers in terms of approval of congress, we all flow that

there's this feeling that washington is becoming increasingly irrelevant to the political discourse, that unusual is going to happen in washington. the senate ethics process is broken, knowing that the house ethics process still needs improvement, one of the ways you begin to reconnect with members of the public, is to be viewed as a congress that has high ethical standards this a process that works. when a bill rises in the senate and go into is black hole, never to be heard from again. this is not a time to crawl out from the singleal digits. it's how you connect a representative body with the american people. >> i'm trying to get senate candidates and senators to talk about ethics issues during the

campaign can be healthy so the public can see what the senators propoeding. so hopefully, somebody who actually talks about it will in fact do something about it in the near future. >> we know that right now the committees that write the rules for the respective bodies are in fact meeting. and that is actually happening now, so if we wait until january, this is the period between now and january where the rules for the respective bodies are ready to go on day one. >> any other questions? well, i want to thank all the people -- congress returns to capitol hill tomorrow-both the house and the senate gaveling at 2:00 eastern time. updating the presidential records act.

the house republican conference holds leadership elections. off the floor, republicans and democrats in the senate will hold leadership elections on thursday. you can watch the house live on cspan and the senate live on cspan 2. with lives coverage of the u.s. house on cspan and the senate on cspan 2, here on cspan 3 we complement that coverage by showing you the most relevant hearings and public interest events. the civil war's 150th anniversary, visiting battlefields and key events, examining art in facts and determining what artifacts reveal about america's past. the presidency, looking at the policies and legacies of our

nation's commanders in chief. lectures in history with top college professors devilling into america's past, and our new series, real america, featuring archival films from the 1930s through the '70s. cspan 3 created by the cable tv industry. watch us in hd, like us on facebook and follow us on twitter. tonight on cspan 3, the former ambassador to russia and india and israel. thomas pickering was ambassador to india and russia under the clinton administration. he spoke at george washington university last month about u.s. efforts to promote democracy.

this is about an hour and ten minutes. >> thank you all for coming to this event. we're all very excited to hear from the honorable thomas pickering. the panel -- the conversation is going to be moderated by chris kojim who is a visiting professor of the practice of international affairs after serving as the chairman of the national intelligence council at the elliot school he was previously the director of the mid career mipp program and director of the summer foreign policy program. in government, chris served as a staffer on the house foreign affairs committee, under representative lee h. hamilton as the deputy assistant secretary of state in the bureau of intelligence and research and as deputy director of the 9/11 commission. he was also the president of the 9/11 public discourse project, the commission's follow on public education organization. he served as a senior adviser to

the iraq study group. please welcome professor chris kojim. >> it's a real honor to be here tonight, and this is in the very best traditions of this school. a very erudite, accomplished policymakers into the academy, and so that both can benefit. and i'm deeply dedicated to this continuing interaction between scholarship and practice. so it's a real honor tonight to introduce ambassador thomas pickering. he is a career ambassador. and that is the designation that very few ever receive. only a few in a generation. and ambassador pickering really is a phenomenon. the most accomplished ambassador of his generation. and he joined the foreign

service in 1960 and retired for a second time in 2001. and during that period of time, oh, the assignments he had. it's just stunning for me to contemplate him having served as ambassador of the united states of america seven times. in important countries and positions around the world. he was not limited to any single area of expertise. so he served as ambassador in jordan, from '74 to '78. ambassador in nigeria, '81 to '83. ambassador in el salvador, '83 to '85. israel, '85 to '88. and then he was the ambassador of the united states to the united nations from '89 to '92. in the lead-up to, during and then the aftermath of the gulf war. a hugely important position for the united states, and he

represented our government so very well. followed by his service as ambassador to india, and then during the clinton administration, as ambassador to russia. as the first ambassador to russia. his predecessor, of course, had been ambassador to the soviet union. he also served as the undersecretary for political affairs from 1997 until the last day of 2000. again, a position of exceeding importance in the formulation and implementation of american foreign policy. just on a personal note, i have never seen an individual with more energy and more creativity and more ideas working tirelessly to figure out ways to advance the diplomacy of this great country.

he has served with enormous distinction. i can't tell you how fortunate all of you are, as am i, standing here to have the opportunity to hear from ambassador pickering, and he will speak for approximately half an hour, and then he'll take questions and we'll have a bit of a conversation here. so ambassador pickering. [ applause ] >> thank you. thank you all very much. and chris, thank you for that very elegant, very hyperbolic, wonderful introduction. i'm sure i'm going to have to put that on paper somewhere and keep it. it's a pleasure to be with you, and thank you very much for the invitation to come by tonight. i want to talk about three things.

i want to talk a little bit about the changing world situation in terms of some of the key influences on foreign policy. that are new or different or more challenging. and then i'd like to talk about seven major issues, problem areas, challenges, difficulties, that we face with the opportunity perhaps on two or three of those to talk about some policy directions for the future that i think are interesting and possible and useful and perhaps not yet being fully pursued. then i look forward to your questions and comments, criticisms, ideas, thoughts, whatever. everything but tomatoes.

thank you. the world is perhaps going through the most rapid change in the human environment that we have ever seen. one wonders whether, in fact, with the geometric speed with which things are proceeding there is an end point at some time. one also used to look years ago at the roman empire. and when the barbarians came in, everything froze. we're all related to both romans and barbarians, so we can be proud of the roman achievements, and a little bit sorry that some of our ancestors threw spears. but that is obviously a question that none of us is prepared to answer, seemingly we can move on from strength to strength, and deal with change. the most fascinating change that i think we are all facing, and that you see, know and master well beyond what i have to deal with, is the electronic information related revolutionary changes that we all see. much of this has changed the way in which we do diplomacy. it's changed the way in which we

understand the world. it's changed the way in which the people of the world absorb it, know about it, and understand a bit about it. and i think one of the major contributions, not the only one, to something like the arab spring, or the arab transition as i think we all prefer to call it now, was, in fact, the notion of a rapid movement of information, people taking in ideas and thoughts that they had. the notion that dictatorships and autocracy were not a successful way of treating people in terms of the governments and the need to change that, and the fact that you could mobilize people through electronics in the main and bring them out and use public demonstrations to make a serious change in governmental organization was very, very interesting. in egypt it was fascinating that one of the things that people seemed to have forgotten in the plethora of changes was that

there already were established political forces at work and had been at work in society. some of them a little bit underground. certainly the muslim brotherhood was one. another, perhaps, was the notion that ordinary people ought to be able to gain an opportunity to participate in their own governance in a serious way. there were no leaders of that movement strikingly, and one of the interesting things is that with no leaders you can't win elections. and if elections are the preferred method of choice, then you become absent from the future in an unusual way, even though you have, perhaps, been instrumental in causing it. but these are examples of things that are happening around us and all the time. but the pace of change, i think, the breadth of change in the world, is very much due to this. closer to home, and i think more interesting, if i can sort of swivel around in a different

way, is the fact that over the last decade we found not to the surprise of a lot of people but to the surprise of some in the leadership of the country, that military force is not a very good way of solving diplomatic problems. and that diplomatic problems can be usefully solved at the conference table, often because you have a first-rate military course. and if you begin using military force to try to resolve problems, that don't -- that -- where it doesn't work very well, then you undermine in a serious way the capacity to have, in fact, the value of a first-rate military force behind your diplomacy, and behind your actions, and so if used and abused, if i could put it that way, it tends to be less persuasive. less useful. less important. as an american diplomat i was always grateful that we had a first-rate military force behind us.

i was grateful, too, that we had a first-rate economy. and even with some of the change that came about in 2008, and in 2009, from which we're still recovering, i think that our ability as an economy to perform, and to show leadership, and to deal with issues, great and small, is very significant. i think that there is another set of questions that's very important that we tend, when we add up what is it that's behind our diplomacy that makes us have a great chance to be more successful, is in the political realm, interestingly enough. and interestingly enough, it happens to be, i think, our values and principles. if there was one thing around the world that people admired about this country, was its freedom, its prosperity, its commitment to doing things correctly, its valuing ethical principles and its ability to

act in accordance with them. some of that has gone away. and we've lost some of that. there's nothing written in stone that says we cannot come back to it. and i think we are. i think it's -- we're moving perhaps more slowly than we should be, but it's a significant and important part of what underpins our diplomacy in a changing world. i think that there's several other things that are happening. diplomats normally used to work on a country by country basis. now we work much more significantly multilaterally. we used to be very much consumed by political questions and they were always treated by american diplomats as the top priority and the top of the heap. now that has shifted remarkably. and questions that are both multilateral, and heavily economically based are equally as significant, if not more significant, in the concentration of our effort, and the focus of our diplomacy.

and that's important. i'd like to say two or three other things. i think that, as we come to look at questions, it is important for us to begin to move out of the traditional stovepipes of consideration, particularly if we want to look at questions from a strategic point of view. from a point of view of strategic impact and strategic importance. and i've come to believe that there are now clusters or packages or groupings of issues that need to be taken together, as we consider them a foreign policy importance. one example is obviously the intimate relationship between energy policy, environmental issues and policies, and climate change. they're not uniquely clustered, and all alone. but they form the center focus

of i think one of the important clusters of questions we have to deal with. i'll talk in a minute about seven of these. they vary. some are clusters of issues that we would call worldwide, and functional. and others happen to do with regional areas of the world, where, in fact, regional problems and major country competitions are important to us. but looking at them this way, at least from a strategic perspective, is helpful from two directions. one of those directions is that it helps us avoid the unanticipated consequences that sometimes happen when we make a move on a set of issues and intimately related questions in one way or another affected. so the broader sweep of the cluster gives us an opportunity, at least, to understand those are interrelationships that we need to pay attention to. i think the second question is maybe more technical, more

useful for the diplomat, but it gives us an opportunity when we're negotiating in a set of questions, to understand that if we need a broader scope to get the negotiations moving, to offer either concessions or to seek concessions on a broader basis, looking at questions through the cluster focus is helpful and important in being able to gain those advantages in a negotiating scenario. let me now turn to the questions, and perhaps some of the things that we should do about them. i always am a little bit stymied at this point as to which priority is important. absolutely fascinating. i've been talking about this for a few years. and almost every time i come before an audience to talk about it, the priority has shifted a little bit. so tonight i want to begin with what i call the extended middle east as a cluster of questions. it's self-evident, it's obvious, the importance is perhaps, if anything, been overstressed in the press recently.

but we can look at that. and so, from the straits of gibraltar to the hindu kush, the extent of the middle east is a fertile field to continue to present us with new, interesting, challenging, and sometimes very destructive problems. and, in fact, the middle east fertility in this sense has probably outstripped our capacity in any real way to continue to deal with them. certainly new questions have emerged since the beginning of 2013, or even 2012, with a kind of rapidity that has left us all breathless, left our government masters, if i can call them that, certainly stymied often at

the starting post, as to how to get at them. and looking now at the complications of their interrelationship. no one set of questions, i think, in the middle east has the silver bullet embedded in it, that will solve the others. but it is interesting that as things get worse in one area, they tend to affect others. so that as we fail, and indeed, as the process fails to find a way to deal with the problem between israel and the palestinians, it tends in the main to affect arab attitudes toward the united states that runs across the full gamut of the middle east. and while it wasn't the centerpiece of change in egypt or in yemen or in libya, it is certainly there in the minds of many people who think about that problem. similarly, in an interesting way, and i'll talk about this in a minute, if we are able to break through in the negotiations with iran over a nuclear arrangement, there are opportunities to follow on,

because we in iran share some common interests in afghanistan, in iraq, and maybe eventually even in syria. although that looks like a long shot at this point. but it is interesting to see that interrelationship, and we should keep it in mind. it doesn't mean finally that all of these issues have to be treated in a broader context. we can deal with them in stovepipes. but we should keep our mind on the strategic interrelationships as we go ahead, and understand some of that, rather than to fence ourselves off in a narrow corner and treat with the policy merely as the policy as we are the press, or as our own inventions about the region, tend to catalog it. often people in the region don't see it the same way and we should be cautious about that. i would say that the number one problem at the moment is probably what our arabic speaking friends called daish,

it is arabic for isil or isis or i.s. the islamic state in iraq and in greater syria. and this is a serious problem, and we've addressed it as a serious problem. perhaps in my view we've overmilitarized it. but it has great military connotations. and if anybody wants to undertake a really unpopular cause, just go out here and raise up a banner and say, let's negotiate with isil. you can understand why, in effect, this has a bigger military character. but there are political and economic issues that are important here. and i think they need to be looked at. political questions of what kind of a coalition can we build. and those are important. political questions that have to do with how and in what way in iraq, in which the maliki government spent a good bit of its time either ignoring or tormenting sunni, a new iraqi government can pick up its socks and understand that it has to deal with minority from the

point of view of their rights, as well as obviously the significant value of majority rule, and that happens to be at the moment the shia. but those are significant. and economic questions are very important. where is some of our oil coming from? well right out of isil-land. do we continue to take that oil, and do we continue to feed the money into isis that that oil is being paid to -- paid for to receive. a very interesting question, particularly at a time when oil prices are going down. of course, if it were isil, it couldn't happen to nicer guys but there are still real problems about a resistance to a fundamental terrorist movement that is now heavily funded by the oil enterprise and we need to think about that. so those are significant. on the military side i think it's very interesting. there are now clear indications,

whether we like it or not, that while our aerial attack has been quite successful, both in northern syria, and in northern iraq in supporting the forces opposing isis, it is also now become an isis rallying cry to try to bring more recruits to the flag, more folks to the kalashnikov. and this is something we need to keep our eye on. it is also useful to begin to think about whether isis in its own galloping mistreatment of the sunni population of northern iraq has opened an opportunity for us politically and militarily to begin to deal with the sunni tribal leaders that we worked with in 2005 and 2006. is that door going to open? well the problem with that door is, having opened it once years ago, and then walked away when they had a feeling that somehow we were going to be around to

protect their interests, and left them cold in the hands of a new shia government, are they going to move to our side as rapidly as they did before. are they going to be useful. and then the final piece, who are the ground troops who are going to help us deal with isil if we are limiting ourselves now to air, to training, to intelligence support, and to equipment. i don't know. it's interesting. the shia forces in iraq have shown up until now they can protect baghdad. but can they help retake the region. which is an important objective. general allen who is leading the effort, i believe, is now focused on a two-year plan, that some time by 2017, he hopes to see the kind of results that we would like to see as soon as possible but aren't going to be

possible, in part, because much training is required and much equipment is required, and that's not ready at hand. i always ask the kind of question myself, in looking at this sort of issue, why is it that the afghan taliban, with almost no training, are so effective as military operators, when, in fact, the afghan national security forces, with all of our training, doesn't seem to be nearly up to the grade. why is it that isil, a kind of ragtag bunch, a combination of islamic fundamentalists, ex-baathist officers of the iraqi army and some real banditis, and why are they doing so well? we have to look at that a little bit and see, in fact, whether we have an answer to that particular problem or not. that takes me to syria. i'll only say the following. syria is a real conundrum for us. we declared war on 2 of the 3 major elements in syria. isis, and assad.

assad is happy to fight isis. isis is happy to fight assad. we've picked the moderates who are arguably, perhaps, the most timid of the military forces. maybe the most divided of the military forces, to put our chips on for all the obvious reasons. they're politically the kind of people that we should support. but that raises real difficulties. do we, in fact, go slow on assad while we try to go fast on isil? that seems to be some way in which we're leaning. on the other hand, the turks are very upset by assad. don't want to join us if, in fact, we go slow there. the final political piece is interesting. because, in dealing with isil, we have this unusual combination of people who all find it in their interest to oppose isil, but with whom we have wide

variety of varying differences. iran, russia, saudi arabia, turkey, the gulf states, certainly the sunni gulf states. if we could figure out a way to unify them against their other divisive interests, we would certainly have a better coalition than if we kind of move in with support from our traditional friends. that's a challenge. it's not yet fixed. it's a real problem. in syria, this problem is forcing taking hold, as well. because we have serious differences in our interests in syria, between us and iran and russia, among others, and saudi arabia and turkey. the syrian problem has been going on for three years. 200,000 people have been killed. 9 million people have been displaced in one way or another. a human tragedy of the first dimensions, bordering on genocide in many ways. a situation in which we saw

almost no attention in the papers except when it comes to a problem on the turkish border. we know little about what's going on, in many ways. and some of the more despicable inhuman acts are regular fare, unfortunately. and the principle sufferers are probably women and children. the people who least deserve to suffer for any reason at all. and so this is a huge problem. there's no question at all in my mind that a cease-fire is an imperative. and increased humanitarian assistance. on the other hand, there is no way at this point that we know of to generate the leverage to do that. i think in some ways, perhaps, further consideration of things like a no-fly zone might help to generate the pressure that might bring us closer to the table. but that's an arguable proposition but an important one. i think it is also significant that beyond a cease-fire, if you can get there, then the

challenge is to negotiate a transitional government, with or without some electoral arrangements. and then, obviously, to ease out mr. assad, and put him on his way to whatever hotel or villa arrangements he's chosen. and then see, in fact, whether syria can be held together with all of the terror and turmoil. and that's a huge job. it's a very big challenge, and one that i don't see on the near horizon, as well. so we're looking at two-year time frames or worse. for some of these problems. i spent a lot of time on this, because i think it's important to demonstrate how difficult diplomacy is these days. how intertwined it is with military, political and economic considerations, and how complicated the interrelationship is just between these two issues in the middle east. i won't spend a lot of time on arab palestine. i think that there are several things that are important here. we almost know what the solution

could be. we also know that the parties are not ready to negotiate on both sides, despite their professions of interest in doing so. we also know that the status quo is not defensible. and it is not permanent. and it is pushing the parties, once again, toward violence and conflict. whether we like it or not. the bicycle principle applies. if you're not riding forward, you're falling down. and this is important to keep in mind because too many american administrations have kited their arab/israeli check on the basis of the theory that peace has to mean to the parties than it does to us is the overwhelming judgmental basis for our proceeding. the truth is that if our national security is intimately involved in the middle east, and i believe it is, then it has to mean as much to us as it does to

the parties. the truth also is that the parties have shown themselves almost congenitally now unable to cross enough of the divide to get themselves started, much less to move down the path to negotiations. the tragedy is that i still think majorities in both camps, palestinians and israelis, with any kind of a reasonable leader, would move in the direction of the risks that have to be taken for a two-state solution. and while academics write wonderful papers on the demise of the two-state solution, i don't see anybody who's ready to accept a one-state solution where there is equal vote, equal political rights, equal citizenship, equal civil rights. at the moment, the situation is that the palestinians are under a kind of virtual occupation, and i don't believe that will continue to be the case forever. they won't accept it.

we are a key, perhaps the most important key, even though we have continued to fail. and that's a significant issue. i will mention as well iran, because i followed the negotiations for a long time. let me just say this -- i said that the negotiations if successful could produce real progress in the middle east. i think if they're not successful, watch out, because i don't think the absence of progress there will do anything but lead us on the road to conflict again, a conflict we can ill afford and a conflict which will solve little. and the opportunities are great at the present time. we have some gaps to cross, but it was interesting to read on a back page of the paper today that on the critical question of enrichment, the western side has increased the offer, if i can put it that way, of how many centrifuges the iranians can operate.

so i think we're beginning to see a little movement even before the election day in the united states. but that's one of the questions that obviously is at the moment containing in my view real progress. the other two issues are how rapidly the sanctions come off and what duration the agreement should be. i think they're all bridgeable, but i'm a consummate optimist. nevertheless, i think that the next three weeks will be critically important in where we go. i don't expect to see a full treaty, but i expect to see either 1 of 2 things, and that's what i'm optimistic about. either agreement on the major questions that have to be resolved with the treaty to be drafted later, or a set of arrangements that is close enough to that particular goal to justify a further

continuation of negotiations. and i believe that both of those are better results than nothing at all. i believe that we can get a good agreement, and i believe that it's now in sight. i'll only mention one other area of the middle east -- what to do about afghanistan and pakistan. i happen to believe that there are opportunities there that some of them can come out of the potential for india and pakistan to find a way through some of their deep problems that underlie if not overburden some of pakistan's preoccupation with afghanistan. the new president of afghanistan has gotten himself off to a good start. he's a very intelligent man. he understands some of the difficulties. he's take an real swipe at corruption, something that was not in the lexicon of the former president. it will be interesting to see where that goes. in the meantime, pakistan is still a state that has an army or an army that has a state but not at the moment a democracy in which the army is, in fact, part and parcel of political

decisionmaking made by the civilians. that i think will continue for some time. i'm not sure that the army is ready to move to take back governance in pakistan, but it's always a danger, particularly when the governance gets as weak as the present civilian government is now. well, we spent a lot of time on my number-one priority so, let me go through some of the others so you don't get the idea that the world is simply the middle east. the world is even more complex in other areas. the one i would choose to discuss next is probably the one that i like to call rivals and partners. our relations as a country with china, with russia, with india, with the european union, which is not a state yet, and not in some cases not a state yet, japan, brazil, if you want to add others perhaps continental countries where the real sweep

with strong economies are growing economies with real potential for the future, a potential to be rivals or partners. and our challenge, obviously, is in our foreign policy whether we can work to make one and not the other be the outcome of that relationship. it's not all diplomacy, but diplomacy has a lot to do with it and, in fact, can help in an important way. china is slowing down in its economic advancement. that should please some. it certainly isn't pleasing to the chinese. china is shifting some of its economic focus from export-driven growth to domestic demand-driven growth, and we should be grateful for that. we're concerned about chinese expansionism as we're concerned about russian expansionism. new elements perhaps on the

scene and how and in what way we deal with them. it's critical in my view that with major countries that are part of what now is a multipolar set of directions if i can put it that way from the major countries of the world, that we seek several things, that we seek to find those win-wins which can buttress a relationship and make sure that there are on both sides real investments in that relationship rather than major competition for leadership. and that's significant. much of those relationships relates to personal relationships between leaders. when it sours, things don't go well. when the relationships get defined by negatives as our relationship with russia has been defined, i think unfortunately on both sides from time to time, it takes on a kind

of version and diplomacy of ankle kicking. but then it gets worse. and i can answer questions and talk further about some of those issues, but we have real opportunities with friends and partners. we have opportunities to use diplomacy, to seek a better sense of where countries are going and where they would like to see themselves, what they see as their role in a major world in which we are still looked to for leadership despite some of the declines. another set of questions intimately connected with the rivals and partners question because they all seem to play in it in one way or another is the issue of weapons of mass destruction. they've been around for 60 or 70 years. we have had evidence of use, happily not nuclear use in wartime, since august of 1945, and that's a fire break that we should work hard to keep and

perpetuate. we're concerned about proliferation. we talked a moment ago about iran and how and in what way they can provide a problem for us as they could. even worse, i think in north korea, we have some capacity to contain, but the question of whether we can roll back a north korean program or not is a highly contentious one and a very difficult one. there is potential for serious instability and a potential for obviously as we saw when the world began to wring its hands with the one-month absence of kim jong-un, that raises the specter of difficulty for us. and it won't be easy. i think that beyond that we owe it to four quite serious cold

war warriors. henry kissinger, george schultz, sam nunn and bill perry. none of them wimps. to come out of the closet four years ago and say, you know, we really have to take a serious look at whether we can get rid of these things and if so how. a lot of people were taken up short by that. there was a theory that in the world of the blind, the one-eyed man is king, if somebody develops in their back garage a nuclear weapon and threatens a denuclearized world with it, will that be the end-all and be-all of danger? happily, we see conventional force playing some role in that. happily, we see the potential for some serious interest in moving in that direction. and it will be a challenge, obviously, if we can make any progress there, but we've made progress in other fields as well. a third and important issue -- or a fourth and important issue for us is perhaps also connected with the larger players.

it's 2008 and 2009. the cluster of questions that runs from basically the failure of our home mortgage system to report honestly on what it was that was being marketed as clusters of home mortgages all the way through to a macroeconomic crisis, potential failures of major banks, in some cases the failure, major involvement by the governments in stabilizing the economies and propping them up, a real crisis in europe, certainly great potential for a country like greece more or less to drop out of the world economy for a while, and significant challenges in how and in what way we institutionalize a little better, the operation of the world financial system and the world banking system, how we bring it in in a way that accords with some of the institutional attentions we have paid to trade and the regulation and indeed the international

role played in evening up the trade picture, removing unfair practices and seeking new ways to move. we are now challenging the world with two major trade agreements east and west. they can provide an important and i think very significant addition to multilateral trade arrangements, which have fallen on hard times. they're an important complement to the many bilateral trade agreements we have around the world. we are recovering. the rest of the world is not doing as well, particularly in europe. it's important, obviously, for world stability that we continue to move ahead, and it's important that we not produce once again the kind of behavior in the united states which helped to unhinge a great deal more of the world's economies than we ever anticipated.

the next question that i think is important for us, it's been around for a long time, is countries on the path of development and change. i call it poverty, growth, and development. i look at food, water, and health as major ways of dealing with a cluster of questions. i look at many issues that come out of this set of problems. not all economically determined but in many cases they are. everything from failed and failing states to crime and narcotics to migration, again, to effects on trade. a whole series of intimately related issues that have to do with how and in what way we continue to address the developing world and the issues that are there. it would be surprising tonight

if i were never to mention ebola. it is clearly just an example in effect of how closely we are now linked in the world to even the most disadvantaged states at the farthest removed and how much what happens there affects us in many ways. again, the crisis may have been overdramatized. we won't know until we see it recede. again, it's required a particular determination on the part of people who are well trained and able to protect themselves. it's involved self-sacrifice in an enormous way. i spent two years in nigeria. nigeria, the spread was stopped by a wise doctor with two assistants who found the victim, went out and found all of those people the victim was associated

with, the doctor did that at the expense of his life. it stopped it so far in nigeria, a country that is slightly better provided for than liberia, sierra leone and guinea, but one that not necessarily is so and one that has the largest metropolises in africa, because you don't understand what that might have been. we do need constantly to think about how and in what way we deal with that part of the world, whether it is for reasons of the best sort, or self-interest reasons of the best sort. they're remarkably combined in what we see out there now. and i think that no one has had an entirely successful foreign aid program, and i suppose the opposite is also true -- no foreign aid program has so colossally failed that it hasn't helped somebody. but we do need to think about

it. we have jumped from pillar to post too often in my view, from focus on agriculture to a focus on health, to a focus on education. when the reality is that most countries need all of the help in all of the regions in whatever way they can. we have struggled with the issue of good governance and how important that is to make progress in dealing with that issue and how we cannot produce that. that has to come from the state itself, from their own people and from the leadership. and leadership has been very differential, and we see across the board serious problems. but we have no opportunity to re-create the colonial world. that's gone. and in many ways we have to operate in a situation where we have fully to respect not only leaders but publics while at the same time seek to work with them to persuade them that their

future can be better and that we're in a position to help. i just talked some time ago about energy, the environment, and climate change. i won't say a lot about that. i do think that, as we move ahead, climate change is a hugely befuddling and very challenging problem. it's one of the few problems now whose life span is a great deal longer than ours and therefore those who are comfortable and have reached advanced age but are still in charge of decisionmaking feel less imperative and less imperative about venturing large amounts of money to deal with something that they find very hard to detect. but we are seeing this gradually year by year, increasingly

bringing difficult news to us. the best scientists tell us that indeed it's a real phenomenon an we have now seen a significant disappearance of traditionally iced-over areas. the argument is of course that normal variations in climate are producing this, none of it is man made. those particular challenges are real. i believe in fact now it has gone on so far and so fast that we have to look at the mad-man possibilities and we have to deal with it. and i suppose you can say for those of us who have children and grandchildren and beyond we ought to look at it from their perspective as much as our own, and i hope we do. but it is a very difficult problem. we have done a pretty good job in part because we've learned how to get gas out of shale in moving away from putting excessive amount of carbon in the atmosphere, but we are a

long way from being there, and that challenge will remain. let me wind up now very briefly, as i've already overstayed my time i'm sure much too much, with one other question. our government is not well prepared in my view or organized to deal with the problems of the 21st century, and that was before we saw the standoff at the okay corral, which takes place on a daily basis on capitol hill. i think that it is significant that we need to move in the direction, particularly in the executive branch, of how we can deal with problems worldwide and domestic on a much stronger whole of government basis. we are still too stove piped. we are still, in many ways, too separated in our ability to bring the full concentration of the government across a broad spectrum to deal with issues as they come up. mobilization times are slow.

our military have shown the way in being able to put the four services together to be able to deal with their problems. but their showing the way has now opened the door for the civilian side of the government to move that way. and finally, internationally, our institutions, we have many, maybe too many, they are all spread out. some of them lack what i would call the commitment to deal with the problem. other areas i think lack better institutions. i mentioned banking and finance a while ago. and so there are even if we are able to get our domestic government in shape, significant challenges out there in the world, whether it is at the united nations or at nato or all the other institutions that are out there. i won't dwell at length on that. you've been kind to listen to me for so long. and let me now open the floor to

your questions. [ applause ] >> i will start here by saying we have 'til a little after 8:10. >> we can go to 8:15. >> 8:15. so we have some 20 minutes for questions. really in the interest of getting as much student participation as possible, i will -- i'll forego the first question and let's just go right to the audience. right here. can you wait for the microphone? it's coming to you. >> so at this point in time the united states is probably, like, the largest superpower in the world, but at the same time we're living in an increasingly multipolar world, but there are

a lot of other countries or blocs like the eu that have significant power. how do you perceive ideally the united states playing into all these problems that you've touched on? like, should we be leading the charge on all of them? should we purposely be stepping >> i think it is a great question. i think that there are a couple of ideas here. i think that we consulted more with our friends during the cold war than we have since. that is my experience. we learned a lot. our leadership was very effective, because they played a role, even though they were going to follow us, in supporting the direction in which we chose to go, which was often, in many ways, informed by their ideas. i think partic papory ways of

proceeding, even those estranged from. russia, with all the problems on ukraine s playing a positive role in the iranian negotiations, and seems to be continuing, if anything maybe more positive. why? i don't know yet. i guess they don't want iran with a nuclear weapon either. i mention, with many of the countries and many of the problems, we have common interests. we don't want the world run by islamic fundamentalists. we don't want people with nuclear weapons all over the place. there are things we can do to enstrengthen the international financial system, if we are prepared each to anti-up. and one of the great tricks of leadership is getting everybody to believe that your best idea was really their best idea. i think that is where we should

be in the diplomacy. i think that it notion, final point, that we were a unilateral super power, if you define it as, we could do anything we wanted while we were in that state, without the help of anyone else, i don't think that ever existed. i don't think we operated that way. we may have pralted periph reallily, that it was a mistake, i don't think we disregarded everybody else, and went out hell for leather doing what we wanted. >> please, here. don't turn around. you are the one. you got the do the. dot. >> in your talk, you mentioned some of the challenges, facing global institutions today, specifically, i wanted to know, this has been discussed a lot, whether or not there has to be or should be structural form to

the united nationings security council, and specifically, is it time for the world to consider the elimination of the veto power? >> i am glad you asked that question. i was lunatic enough, without asking washington to give a speech every once in a while to take a look at the veto power, it wasn't working in our interest. happily, nobody heard that, if they did t they were kind enough not to come down on my head. i thought for years, if you chalked up the veto power, and those who exercised it, most of it was for rather silly reasons, china exercised a veto in guatemala case over taiwan. we did in the middle east when we didn't need to.

it was an easy way out. i also think that a proposal which said, take genocide. let's make it a particular case for reform. while they there are disputes about it, we pretty much can define it it is easier to define than tororrism. now, let's say now, i thought there was a time when we could convince the five permanent members, want now. there it was a time to cop vince the five permanent members, unless three of them said they were prepared to vote against a draft, they would all agree to obstain or vote in favor. that would do several things, that would crystallize the negotiations on a draft. it would give us a better chance to get a tougher draft on genocide questions. which in my view is very important. i think you could take out of the mix right away things that

states as a clause in the nuclear test band territory, it is in your vital interesting to go back to testing you have an out. limit that as much as you possibly could. moving it,a way from those kinds of things would be important for us. i think you could extend it to nonproliferation, and maybe state to state aggression over international boundaries, that is a way forward. it may not be the only way forward. the other structural change is to put stateos as permanent members who in fact are now very large, prepared to play a major role in the world scene. i won't say nuclear powers, because if it happens by circumstance that all five permanent members are nuclear powers, i don't want to make that a hurtle someone has to jump through to become a permanent member. it is time to cut down the veto.

it is a perfect opportunity. so that it isn't over-used. i think it would help to transform the security council a great deal, if constructive thought to that t do i think there is a chance in hell that will happen? no. so, regarding the arab spring, how effective do you think it has been, given that egypt had a horrible experience after a year. libya is essentially a failed state, and syria is in the midst of civil war? >> and iraq isn't doing so good. yemen is a mess, everything is okay. >> it seems that the monarchies escaped pretty well. in some ways, i feel they paid

their way, if i could put it that way, made sure their people got advantage, consistent with the kind of autocrattic rule that they have, and beginning to think they have to open up. do i think the arab spring was a haoing success, no. do i think they were endevelopedered by popular opposition, yes, did popular opposition channel itself into the right course in one way or another? could we help it? probably, we couldn't help it much. probably in one way or the other, significant forces were at work in the country, were more significant than the people who opened the door to the square, unfortunately. will it change again? i don't know. i think president cici has to know he is not being judged

against the gamal standard or the mosey standard, he is being judged against, i think slightly more liberal standard than we saw before. will that in fact, engender change? will the military in egypt give up power? we will see something moving on to political parties and political competition in the near feature? i am afraid not. i wish i could see it i don't think it will happen. i think tunissia is a happy example, but even they have problems. >> i am looking to this side for a question, all the way in the back. touching back on russia. and the potential energy crisis with russia and ueu.

there is a rumor the u.s., is thp plausible, more effective than the current sanctions that we have. should we look at something more unilateral outside of the u.n.? >> everybody is wrestling with this issue now. i would say the following. i think that one of the effects that we would feel at home if we begin to export gas and i will talk about why that is hard. is that european gas prices are three times ours. once the marginal british thermal unit of gas begins to go at higher prices, i suspect it will drive up domestic prices. that it will push inflation, that will not give us the advantages that we have now with cheap energy, protected in some ways, by our failure to export.

to export gas we have to build expensive expensive liquefied facilities, at least, to get them underway. one of the things we can do, i suppose, and we are doing, is take less of the world's gas, although, we are heavily relint on canada and mexico, and maybe less of the world's liquids. so, in fact, we push that surplus in the direction of people who need it. my own feel suggest that the most effective sanctions on mr. putin in the long run will be to take advantage of his strategic era, of not using his oil income over the last 15 years to diversify and strengthen russ russia's economy outside of the area of hydrokargon. he i