people to revisit some of the fundamental propositions of u.s. foreign policy. so my modest case today is that we, one approach is to continue to count on this disconnect between the public and the elites. after all, it has existed for a long time. it is not a new phenomenon, and frankly, it hasn't mattered because there is continuity among the elites in the republican and democratic party, so if it doesn't have an outlet it doesn't manifest itself in elections. i sauna a little bit in reading brian and jim's articles. we'll see if it plays out that way in a minute. so the one approach is to expect it to continue. i think that's a reasonable approach the other approach which i hope we don't resort to is to obfuscate. and there's a couple different ways this manifests itself. jim talks about during the cold war, this presumption that we had these allies that were vital to national security interests

led us to make truly outrageous claims about these people's commitments to liberty and human rights and democracy and again, it was a bipartisan conceit. and he quotes both george h.w. bush and bill clinton about how vitally important these peel are. so i'd urge people to make a case honestly for american high homo homogeny. arthur vanderburg advised dean atchison to scare the hell out of the american people. and he said he would paint a picture clearer than the truth. so this is a long history of american foreign policy of speaking to the american people

in a way that doesn't expect them to respond well enough or urgently enough unless things are painted to them clearer than the truth. so let me lay out three aspects in which if we conduct this debate honestly, we'll bring the american people into this discussion. first of all is this argument about allies. what exactly are our relationships with our allies, what do they purport to do? what are they actually doing? are their interests synonymous with ours. and therefore our interests are served by that. can we make this case, without resorting to threat inflation, couple examples. terrorism is not an existential threat to the american republic. russia is not on the cusp of recreating the soviet union. fareed sakar yeah says if this

is 1938 -- and another is tied to u.s. continue the economic leadership around the world. and there has been a longstanding belief, just really an assertion that there are clear economic benefits renowned for the american people for spending as much as we do on our military. but i think there's some really good research that calls that into question, and i think that's on shaky ground. so i'll just leave those three on the table, and i'm sure we'll have a lot of time to discuss in the back and forth after. thank you. >> in addition to chris's article out there about hillary, isis and the interventionist bias, he's written a terrific book called "the power problem" how american military dominance makes us less safe, prosperous

and prfree. let me move now to kim holmes. i went back and checked 30 years on and off, he has been there. he and i were on a panel together in the early days of the bush administration. i said how come you're not in government. well, right after that, they made him assistant secretary of state international organization. what do you think, kim, in terms of what you've heard so far. ? first of all, larry, thanks for having me over and delighted to be here on this panel with our distinction wished panelists. i think that i was thinking back in the days, even in the reagan years and the first bush administration, there was a lot more interaction between people who called themselves liberals and conservatives back in those days than there are today. and we spend a lot of times, each in our own bubbles, and i would admit that i do that as well, and i suspect that you all

do that as well. but i had the feeling that there's sort of a yearning that we want to move beyond that and see more what we have in common than what divides us, and i'll say a bit about that at the end, even though i do disagree with some of the fundamental points here. so i'll start on the disagreements and try to end on something that's a bit more positive. the year after barack obama took office i wrote an op ed called "the new liberal realism." and it was the observation that you're seeing here. there was a new alliance forming in the wake of the controversies of the iraq war between groups that normally ideologically didn't have much to do with each other, at least not as much as they did with president obama's foreign policy. and i think at the time what was really driving president obama was less realism as it was championly understood as a doctrine and the way the kissinger people talked about

which you mentioned, but more in the reaction to the perception that he and others had that the iraq war was a disaster, that we were overextended. it was time to really just try the opposite, you know, whatever he did we'll try to do the opposite. and it ended up being very much along the lines of whether you intervened or don't intervene with military forces, and that became the driving controversy. and i think we are still in that. in some ways we see that here today, but i also think that there are some fault lines in that alliance. and i think it has something to do with the fact that many of the objectives and many of the policies that president obama tried to do, which were in line with this view of the world have been tried. it's not as if he's not been president for over six years. they have been tried, and they're not working very well.

and the president tried to reset relations with russia, which was, he thought was based upon the fact that george w. bush had been too harsh against the russians. he, forgetting the fact that frankly, the reason why we had in 2008 bad relations with russia is because of russia's intervention in georgia. prior to that, president bush had looked in putin's eye and said we could do business with this man. but after georgia he was disappointed, and there was a pulling back, and yet i think president obama overinterpreted that and therefore made it all about the sort of symbolism about the iraq war and interventionism and being too much of a cowboy and then applied that to the policies of russia. and frankly, it didn't work. we now have a situation where russia is a lot more aggressive in the near and broad and inside its country than it was before. and in some ways we did farm out our foreign policy to the european union regarding the

ukraine, and they became quite interested in trying to get ukraine closer to the european uni union. it wasn't a nato issue, it was a european issue. so we did lead from behind and let the europeans take the lead, and it didn't work very well. i would say the same thing over libya. i didn't support the intervention in libya. i didn't see our national interests involved in that particular intervention. i think the president did it primarily because the british and french talked him into doing it for hupt and commercial and economic reasons to do it. and now libya is in chaos. it's not just what happened in benghazi. there also is no order there. and so our intervention there was not followed up on, and it turned out to be a disaster, in my opinion. on this whole question of the indispensable nation. you know, a lot of times, those of us who work for foreign policy, we write about it.

we grab these words, and the politicians grab them, and three are used in a certain way. in some ways we overinterpret them and they become almost like buzzwords depending on who's using them they mean certain things. so sometimes the indispensable nation is used interchangeably request gchomogeny. i'm pretty pragmatic when it comes to whether america is dispensable or not. what other nation can perform the tasks that we perform in the world except us? we do things that even our allies cannot do, and it's not just military power, it's also economic interests, it's also other things we do at the united nations and elsewhere. so to that extent just as a matter of fact we are

indispensable, technically to our allies, but that gets overinterpreted to mean that what we really mean is an overaggressive foreign policy where we're going to be hedge mondayic and so forth. following the iraq war is a case example of this. i was at the state department. i worked in the u.n. when this came up. and i do remember that yes, germany and france had their own particular reasons to not want to support the iraq war, but i also remember going to moscow at the time and talking to the russian foreign minister at the time which at the time was more supportive of what we were doing in the german and french war. i don't see germany and france as an acid test as to whether we have a coalition. we have 37 allied countries in iraq that provided 150,000 troops, ground troops, which is

not something anywhere near close to isis in iraq. i don't think that should be dismissed out of hand. the last point i'll make is it's not just the issue on russia. i think the president pulled out of iraq faster than his military advisers wanted him to. and as a result now, he's been forced back in under dramatically worse circumstances i think than if we had stayed. he had a very tightly focused counter terrorism strategy. as i show in my articles, the threat of terrorism is greater and worse today than it was six years ago. many of our allies are complaining, because they don't have the certainty of knowing what u.s. policy is. that is also a component of leadership, being straight and consistent, not just going out and bossing them around and telling them what to do but also playing the traditional role of

consulting with them and doing only what the united states can do in that leadership role, in conjunction with her allies to get things done. i don't believe that it's either -- i don't believe it's a case of simply bossing our allies around. and we define leadership by going out and telling them what to do, and if they don't do it we don't have anything to do with them anymore. i think it's much more subtle than that. and we have to figure out where we have a common interest with particular allies and realizing, by the way, that the allies will change. each one of them will have their own individual interests, not just france and germany with respect to iraq, but other countries, particularly in eastern and central europe who do very much still want the connection with the united states strategically and with nato because they fear russia. so it is true, given the end of the cold war we're not as indispensable in that strategic sense as we used to be. i'll concede that point, but that doesn't mean that we are not indispensable at all to

them, particularly these new countries that depend on us. the last thing i would say, andon't mean to suggest, jim, that you're suggesting this. i think your analysis is much more subtle, but i do hear it from other people, is that we have to be aware of any "ism" because you start trying to create a doctrine almost always created by intellectuals, and it becomes something by which we can discuss among ourselves, the obama doctrine and the like. but at the end of the day, there's going to be so many things outlying the principles of the doctrine that they're not going to give you a lot of guidance, and i think that's true whether you're a conservative realist or a liberal one. >> thank you very much, kim. in addition to his article out there, he's writ and terrific new book called rebound, getting america back to great. so anyway, our last speaker is

brian katulis who's been a bulwark of the national security program here over the last decade. he knows more about the middle east than anybody i've ever met. he's lived there, worked there, speaks arabic, and so he's got his article against disengagement. so brian? >> i want to thank all of you for your articles and coming here because i hope this discussion, and i hope we bring you all into this, comes at an important time. we're at a period of transformation about how we think about national security policy and politics. i think we've seen the politics quite clear. if you look carefully on the votes on the hill, it's not just what happened with the budget and the domestic scene, but there are things like the syria war vote, which i mentioned in my article, the one they had on the non-strike vend and the commity, it split within both

parties, and i think in part, we talk to the hill quite a lot, and both sides. we're in this transformative moment, and i thought i'd mention two quick comments. i have a lot that i agree with. the first point i would say is that i struggled a little bit with the realism and realistic term as somebody who's studied international relation theory at princeton under dick allman. i agree with your main point that obama himself is a pr pragmati pragmatist. i don't think it's balance of power theory or liberal internaggism. if you read henry kissinger's new book, i'm not always a big fan. but he talks about this delicate balance in between the two. and i think the main thing that has driven much of president

obama's foreign policy, which i do think has been transformative has been what is the limiting factor. how do we limit our own engagement on things, because i think we needed to learn from the previous decade. and i think for reasons why he brought the combat naz phase of iraq war and the afghan war which is coming to an end, what more can we do to extend that. it's pragmatic, a realistic assessment of after 15 years, what have we achieved. and i would use pragmatism as one reaction as opposed to realism. i don't think obama himself looks at state actors as the fundamental actor in itself which is the hallmark of realism. the second, which i think you definitely get right and i think we analysts and the political leadership in our country need to get more in synch with where the country's at is i think

obama prag matically recognized that there is a rise of the rest, from the beginning, even before he was president. when he was running for president, you remember his campaign events overseas, including germany, i was talking to a u.s. diplomat about this. it was an appeal to say okay. this period of perceived unilateralism is now over. we want to get others to pull your weight. i have no problem with the phrasiology personally of leading from behind. there are other ways you can describe it. politically i was puzzled as to why it was so pilloried. but i think it's a trend that if our next president doesn't recognize, we'll be in real big trouble, because others, as jim notes in his article, germany has a much more closer interest in dealing with ukraine. i think maybe sometimes you overstate the case of how much our actions or our sanctions and

what key do distract them from that. i think they understand that they have an interest. and just coming back from jordan and the middle east, i think there is a recognition that they have an interest in this anti-isil coalition, which i think we'll talk about. and finding the right fit, what do we mean by u.s. leadership because countries like jordan and israel do look to the west. not that we're going to do the shock and awe which we tried in the previous decade. the thing that i mentioned this already, the third point i'd say is that the thing that i don't think is terribly different in the obama administration, because i think the bush administration experienced this as well, this tension between how do we work with international institutions and liberal internationalism and where doey use our force directly. one of the things you mentioned in the article, jim, is the

first two years of the obama vags was more realist. if you look at things like the afghanistan surge and the smart power sort of campaign. if you look at the israeli palestinian effort, one would say that didn't produce the results they hoped. there was a strand of idealism, but it goes back to every administration faces that. i think we as a country, it's hard for us to simply sort of check these high ideals or we want to, there's that instinct there, and it's hard, i think, for many americans to just leave that at the door. but i think the one thing that has changed, which wasn't maybe so much in your article, but hopefully we'll talk about, is how the world has changed fund amountly. i think obama has adapted to it somewhat and certainly your criticism of the indispensable power framework is spot on. but it's not only the rise of

the other countries like india and china which is quite obvious. that's nothing new over the last few decades, it's the diffusion of power. i think it complicates things in ways in how we talk about diplomacy and foreign policy. whether it's the arab uprising or the arab spring and we see things every place. it leads to my last two sets of comments. those changes are, i think, fund amountly different. the way technology is bringing different value systems directly in odds with one another. the way it allows smaller groups that i believe are not an existential threat, i agree with you. it gets into our politics and consciousness in ways, it makes it very hard to put it in the space that i think obama's tried to do and make it very easy to say, look, they're all coming to get us.

and that, again, i think they have values that are essentially different from ours. and that's where i would close, and that's what my article was trying to do. i wouldn't say the obama vags was necessarily disengaged. i think it set the right balance on most issues. in some ways, though, i think some of the values issues, and its reticence to talk about this, and this is where we may disagree, but having been in the middle east and europe last week while the torture report was released, you see that people still look to america in some ways, and you see that that is a form of power that has been damaged by some of our past mistakes, and you see that people look at our politics in many ways and look at it as an ideal, but unfortunately, you see, also, they see the same dysfunction that we all see, that we often make these unforced errors that hurt ourselves. so i'll close maybe with a little bit of optimism. i think looking at sort of where america is today, especially

when i was in europe last week and in the middle east, it's less pessimistic coming back here, i think, when you look at sort of how people look to our country, still, as an economic engine, especially hin this yea and the fact that we're producing more energy. not that we're fully back to where we were. i don't think we ever will be. we need to prag matically recognize that. and i think the real trick will be, how do we actually adapt to these new trends that i talked about in terms of people being able to have more of a say in their own politics, in their own country's power, which makes for a much more sort of dynamic environment than east versus west or cold war politics. i think a much more forces this administration and the next administration to react much more quickly than i think it's capable of doing right now. >> thank you. all right. we've got about 15 minutes before i turn it over to you folks who have been very patient. let he begin by asking jim.

do you want to respond to any of the comments made by your colleagues? >> just very quickly, on obama's first two years, which i described as realistic, as an effort at realism. i do mean the old style realism. and i mean that when, when obama took office, he cited gol croft as a model and then the green movement in iran, which he decided to keep hands off on. so i do think that was realism. and you mentioned israel and the palestinians. that's interesting, because that goes back to a debate around the time of the iraq war and before, where the neoconservatives felt, having been most of them or all of them through the gulf war that a display of military power as they saw it in the gulf war opened the way for some

negotiations. that was their belief. it cowed arafat, arafat was scared, or he was marginalized, and that therefore that would work within the iraq war. >> you mean gaddafi? >> no, arafat. >> oh, okay. >> and the other side, this is the 2002 iraq war skol croft had been arguing you can't get anywhere in the middle east without an agreement between israel and the palestinians first, so that's where that -- and obama takes off as very much on the skol croft side of that. then obama gets swept up in the arab spring and my heart was with him. it did not work out well. he really, he really believed in sort of the idealist view that democracy was going to sweep the middle east. just one other response to kim. on europe, i mean, i'm not quite

sure. the eu is the economic agency. i'm not sure how the united states would have, when you say obama would have, i mean, delegated to the europeans, it is the eu that would expand into ukraine, and i'm not sure, and nato -- >> but it wasn't nato expansion issue, which is what i was saying, which is what the russians also worry about. >> but i'm not sure if you're saying we should have pushed nato expansion when the germans and others would not have bought it. >> i'm just using it as an example where we do sit back and let them take the lead and it doesn't always work out well. >> chris, let he ask yme ask yo question. in your article, you talk about the tension between particularly republicans who want to save the world, think you can do it, but at home, they don't want the government to do anything. how does that get resolved? ? nothin . >> nothing, but less than

democrat. i think there is a tension between a skepticism of the efficacy of government that conservatives and libertarians share. and a strange enthusiasm and confidence that government can do lots of great things overseas. i guess the pittiest way to say this is folks like me have some doubts about the u.s. postal service's ability to deliver the mail, yet somehow we believe the united states can deliver democracy in a foreign country where we don't speak the langua language. another thing that i was struck by in reading kim's series of articles is this notion about state failure and the need to rebuild failed states. and they hasten to add, this isn't nation building. well, then what it is it? if we're going to fix failed states or make them stronger,

that's nation building, and i think many conservatives and libertarians have skepticism how this can work. how you call it the fatal conceit. so i do think there is a tension there between kind of a confidence in the u.s. government's ability to do great things abroad, even as they retain their skepticism about them doing great things here at home. >> let me ask you. how do we balance between our values and our interests. we talked a little bit about the arab spring. should we have stayed with mubarak because he was kind of our guy? or should we have sided with those who wanted to at least in the beginning move toward democracy? >> well, i hate to say it, but there is no simple answer. there's no doctrine, there's no philosophy that can guide us because you have to look at it on a case by case basis. because each one of our situations, each one of our allies are going to have particular interests that we're

going to have to weigh against whatever values we're promoting. so i do see a realistic fusion of values and interests. but my point that i make in the article and elsewhere is that you have to have both. not only because the american people will not support a purely realistic sort of, you know, imperial germany type of policy, because they do believe that america has ideals that they want to live up to. and if they're going to make the sacrifice in treasure and in lives of their military people fighting in wars, they want to make sure that they feel like they're doing the right thing. now the question is how do you translate into who you support and who you don't support in the middle east. and frankly, our whole middle east policy has never, never been based mainly on values. it's not only the strategic interests we have in our access to oil, but now with the rise of isis and the, all the other

conflicts that we had there, we have, still have to have a preeminence of strategic interest. i often see that since i served in the bush administration. after the iraq war you recall in the second bush term he came out with the freedom agenda which all my liberal friends hated with a passion because they saw it as the ideology cal motivation for the iraq war, when in point and fact it had nothing to do with the intervention of the iraq war. it came later and it was their way of rationalizing what happened after the fact to give it an idealistic purpose. ? what your liberal friends also said? i don't think they really -- >> to this day, when you talk about neoconservative, it's like selling democracy at the point of a spear and that sort of thing. that's what i mean. and the fact is that we will never be able to sell a leadership role, however you may

define it, to the american people unless there are some values. and frankly, our, our alliances are always, are based on values as well. they're liberal democracies for the most part. i'm not talking about the middle east. i'm talking about europe and asia. and we are allies. and that is not insignificant. so if it's in defining what your structure is, it's not something that's taken over by events or a diffusion of power and the like. the real question i have is that i kind of agree with much of the analysis that you were making. but the question is, what do you do about it? what is your responsive to diffusion of power? does that mean you cut your defense budget and pull back on the military capabilities because you don't think you have a need to use it? what does that mean about your trade policy in asia? do you let the chinese take the lead? because we no longer have the kind of interests that we had

there before? if we let our allies in europe and the middle east sort of take the lead, that means that they're going to be asserting their own national interests in some cases, and i think this is what happened in libya in which we feel obligated to support them, much like tony blair felt obligated to support george w. bush because he didn't want to do the intervention either. but we follow their parochial interests and call it leadership, which is the problem i have. >> the responsibility to protect, do you think that should and good guiding principle? should not? president clinton said his biggest regret was not doing anything about rwanda, should we have? >> it should be part of the debate, but what can you actually do realistically and practically? what can be done? and that's one thing that strikes me. if you haven't read this week's

new yorker there was a story about samantha power in there. i think in essence, it's because we could in libya. there seemed to be a pathway towards success and something could be done where our actions would actually lead to fewer lives being lost as opposed to more. and i think it's a serious analytical debate today and it's a reason why the obama administration is stuck, paralyzed. on the one hand he said assad must go, and there's a strand inside his own head and his administration that says we can't overlook sort of the stacks of tens of thousands of bodies and what he's done to his own people and work with him. and then there's also this strand of, if you want to call it realist, realism who say we want to end the conflict, we've got to work with him or his inner circle. so i think that ideal is always

out there, sadly, it's only been applied where we could. and i think that practical consideration is a big thing. if i could just real quickly respond to something kim just said because i think in the case of egypt and your question, it's almost in some ways the wrong question, whether obama decided mubarak should go or not. in essence,a agnd i lived in egt for year, the egyptian people with their uprising decided he should go. we why somewhat of a bistander in that. our statements mattered in that. but what strikes me is you look at the counter revolution and the thing that pushed morsi out of power. with great popular support, and to a large extent, i think the u.s. has been on the sidelines and letting things sort of play out. i think my worry, moving forward, in a place like egypt or in some of these other tough cases in the middle east is if

you don't still have that struggling of how do you blend our realistic interests in having an egyptian ally that we can work with security systems and the values, the more that ordinary egyptians are being thrown in jail by the tens of thousands, i don't think it will work in this day and age, tha t do. i think the rubber hits the road and to the most, for the most part, the obama administration has been, has taken a step back. it's gone dusk, if not dark on these issues. >> go ahead. >> what about iran for example? how do you apply that to iran and the internal development of iran? >> well, i think i would do more if i were in the obama administration, highlighting the human rights abuses. and i think there's bits and pieces of this.

i wouldn't scuttle the attempts at diplomacy, and unfortunately i think some in the conservative, i wouldn't say the conservative, some camps. there is bipartisan support or opposition to diplomacy, but i would continue to have this on the agenda, whether in u.n. bodies, the basic human rights in highlighting it. and i think president obama has done it ep sodically from time to time. but i wouldn't turn away from our values in an accept, and that's where we may have some disagreement, but, again, i don't think we should invade countries and impose sort of democracy on our own, but i think it would be great to have the president and more senior officials talking about this, because in a sense, it connects with the next generation, talking about what i was trying to say in terms of the changes that i think are likely to come in iran. >> i'd like to get to the audience, and then you can make these points as we go. when i call on you, if you would stand up, wait for the microphone, and then tell us who you are and if you are with an

organization. sir? >> i'm brooks jaeger. i'm retired. i served in the clinton administration with bruce b ocho bobbitt. i guess reflecting on being 65 for just a second, i don't find that the debate between the realists and the idealists is very helpful. what i think i've seen over, since the kennedy administration, is the failure of two kinds of interventionism. first, liberal intervention which has failed misserably in vietnam, then the disas fer in chile, then disaster in iran, all of which have led to further

disasters for us by the way. and it seems to me that i'd like to hear more reflection from the panel. i loved everyone's comments and particularly chris prebles, which surprises me because i'm a yellow dog democrat from texas. >> welcome. >> please, to the point. >> what is the real problem that we're facing? what is the real challenge? is the real challenge the evolution of democracy in places like china? is the real challenge a resurgent china that economically threatens our position in asia? what's the land scape that we're trying to play when we're saying we need to be more realistic? >> thank you, sir. anybody want to comment? >> just to, maybe this is stating the obvious. but the landscape to me is divided between a world in which

there are conten shus powers, russia and china, specifically, and then a broad series of transnational threats. and the problem is that those two, you know, in a way, russia and china are similar problems. we could all make up, we could all come up with lots of differences. and the transnational threats are similar problems, and we have to cope with both. and the most obvious in military terms, of course, those are vastly different military problems, and we can't give up what we need to do militarily with major powers and transnational threats, and we have a hard time dealing with both. particularly the transnational threats. >> chris? >> i like the way you framed

that, the failure of two types of interventionism, liberal and conservative. i think that for me, there is an interventionist bias, not just on foreign policy issues, but a range of issues. but i think the burden of proof should be on those who are calling for intervention because interventions have lots of unintended consequences and in the foreign policy rell. because i tend to believe the united states is extraordinarily safe and secure. we have a security that is envied. so therefore, there's a higher bar for me, for intervengs abroad. that doesn't mean never, but it means rare. and the next question is, and this gets to the question about indispensable nation, nus we, the united states, be the intervener? do we presume that if intervention by an outside power is required, must we be

involved? now the answer is no. not as a normative question but as a practical question. there have been a number of interventions since the end of the cold war that haven't involved the united states at all. the problem is that because we have hesheltered our allies foro many years they've allowed their military power to atrophy. we shouldn't be surprised that they don't have the military power to carry out a very small mission in libya, which is, after all, truly in their back yard. and the last point is, we just have to be honest with one another in this company and then with the american people that the purpose of u.s. foreign policy has been to discourage other countries from developing their own capabilities. we talk about it all the time. and we believe, most people do, think that it was a good idea. and i said yes, i continued to believe it's a good idea too, but i don't think it's a good idea forever. somewhere along the heine i

would like countries with the capabilities including our allies to do something that didn't require the united states. >> a couldn't? >> that last point i couldn't agree with more. call it burden sharing. the fact is we do want our allies to do more. but that doesn't mean we necessarily have to do less. that shouldn't be the region. that's a bargain that often doesn't work. if we say we want to do less in the world, we want you to do more, you carry more of the burden. they almost come back and say okay. we'll do less like you are, particularly the case with the europeans. but to answer your question, what worries me the most is there is all of this diffusion of power. there's all this uncertainty in the world. all these different kinds of threats that jim talked about. some are related. some are not related. there's the rising china and russia, a terrorism threat. we all know what at the are. but it's a very confusing landscape. and the thing that concerns me the most is that because of our

internal political and dwlauj cal debates, mainly because of the bitterness that occurred in the deebt over the iraq war is that we're going to be making serious mistakes in adjusting to this new world because we have a tendency in this country to overlearn or learn the wrong lessons when we make a mistake. so vietnam, 1970s, we pulled back, and then we have the chaos of the 1970s, not only in iran but the soviet invasion of afghanistan. then we learn from that lesson in racialen that we need to be very strong and we draw the conclusion that the soviet union collapsed because we were strong. then we do the gulf war, and it's like a cakewalk. it was very easy. so we draw the conclusion from that, therefore, that we can use military power in ways that we never would have perceived of before in the middle east, and so we do the iraq war. and then the iraq war tends out to be the way we don't want it to be and what do we do?

we do the exact opposite, disengage, pull out, and we make the mistake of equating engaging military with nationalism. i am as pragmatic as you might be to use military force in this environment because the utility of it is not demonstrated. but i don't draw the conclusion from that that we should be retrenching our power across the board, that we should be cutting our military capabilities and engaging diplomatically, that we should be showing up at meetings and reassuring our allies in europe and the middle east that we understand their interests. this is just old-fashioned diplomacy. it's not interventionism per se. and i do think that one thing that we should learn from the iraq war is that we have to be damn careful about using military force in places like the middle east. okay we learned that lesson, but

let's not overlearn it and draw the opposite conclusion and therefore we need to pull back and do little or nothing. >> should we have gotten involved in syria earlier? >> not with military force. no. i think the same problem the apply there that applied to libya. it was a situation where i could not see the use of force turning out very well. and i think the problem was that actually -- you're talking about responsibility to protect. that was set up at a model for libya, as a humanitarian operation that could not be applied to syria because there why strategic things overriding humanity or human rights. it was also about commercial interests. >> i'd put more of a stress on the transnational threats that jim talked about. if we're talking about the future of u.s. foreign policy and the issues that you're focused on in terms of climate change. this is a great example of where the obama administration, we

foreign policy wonks are separated. i try to look at all of it. he tried initially on a grand international scheme. and now they're being pragmatic, trying to build pragmatic coalitions, building building blocks and being smart about it. and that's another thing about progressives which define against some conservatives, not all. that we accept change, there is a thing called climate change and we should try to harness it and deal with it as opposed to go back to a decade or two. and i think that's a key part of it, and the transnational threats, defining the context is a really hard thing, i think, for anyone to do. it's why the obama administration has delayed in releasing its new national security policy because we've had this fraction, diffusion of power in the world. >> yes, sir? yeah. this young man here. >> thank you very much.

my name's jeff tyson, i'm a reporting fell low with dyvex. i wonder if you could touch on foreign policy and usid. i've heard that somebody like hillary clinton might be inclined to elevate usaid a part of the state department. i wonder what your thoughts are. >> if you were in the state department? >> will, the problem with aid, from the get go is that there's a forming in the 1960s about what economic philosophy was supposed to be about. it was very, very much motivated at the time about using government aid to nation build and do other things like that. but that's pretty much an outdated economic philosophy these days. and a.i.d. has struggled for an identity. they mix a lot of their concerns

about humanitarian policies and health policies and the like. and sometimes it gets combined, depending on who the president is, with a values like democracy and liberal values and the like. but it hardly ever gets straightened out, mainly because of the way it was born. i don't think a.i.d. should be part of the, certainly not a cabinet position. but i do think that it does make sense that you have an economic development policy that is more in synch with what our strategic goals are and that you have a more serious discussion about what that is, but you cannot do that because of the way a.i.d. is actually constructed. it's always going to have an separate agenda. it has its own people at the embassies that have their own independence from what the ambassador wants. it's been this way for many years. but i don't want to put it inside the state department so it just becomes simply an agency lobbying that point of view

inside the state bureaucracy, but to have a break down even an elimination of a.i.d. where you have a strategy iic synching ofe policies with what the rest of the government is doing. >> any other quick comments? yes, sir. >> i'm aaron. i'm a post cap -- >> we know who you are. >> i'm a graduate student at american university. and i'm writing my thesis as millennial foreign policy. as cold wars retire and we make these steps, i consider myself a millennial. born in 1990. so how will the u.s. foreign policy system kind of work with our style of who we are and how we see the world. and perhaps what key issues,

what kind of motivate us and drive our foreign policy outlook? >> i don't know, but i would urge you#)dpñ not assume that y all are going to have the same point of view in the same way that generation x'ers don't have the same point of view and the way that cold warriors and baby boomers don't have the same point of view. it's the starting point of my book, two people who are quite close in age, and grew up in a similar time period, but madeleine albright and colin w powell could not have been more different. i think there will be reactions to u.s. interventions in iraq and afghanistan that will cause some millennials to be very wary

of military intervention. there will be others who look at the experience in iraq and afghanistan and who will say this teaches us that we need to do it right. we need to do it better. we need to have a larger nation building core. so i think that it's interesting to kind of ponder this, but i'd be very surprised if there's a unit airy foreign policy. >> i was starting with the new obama administration to look for the generational outlook. and i would mention two things. one of them i think turned out to be far less significant than the obama people thought at the beginning and the other more. the first is, in this new administration coming in, there were certain millennial buzzwords.

the world is interconnected. the world is interconnected, over and over and over again, except i could never quite find out in general how that changed the considerations of foreign policy. it did one good thing, which is there was an emphasis on new forms of communications, whether it was in iran or china or anywhere else, the idea of promoting openness on the internet, which was one of the tangible things hillary clinton did, was, i thought, important. but in general, yes, the world is interconnected but we have a lot of the sail foreign policy problems as we did. the one that turned out to be more important as you say that actually in the millennial outlook, the old problems of the cold war are seen as something in the past. and the new problems of, quote, rising powers, txwz think i was saying beforehand that ben rhoads told me in the first year or two of the administration,

what are, i keep reading about rising powers, rising powers. i was just at the copen hagen summit where obama managed to run into serious problems with the chinese and the indians and so on. and he said it didn't look like rising powers to me. they were real powers, and that's what we have to deal with. and so that part is different. i think there, you know, although there are lots of of french or british, germans, diplomats who worry about this, there is less, less of a focus on europe, this is a relative statement, than there was during the cold war. >> mitzi? >> i'm mitzi worth with the naval post graduate kcschool. and i can't thank you enough at listening to this. first of all, i think there's a problem with linguistic terms.

a problem with the term realism, and then there are others that think realistic, and it doesn't seem to be realistic, and it's not, they're used, but most people don't understand what you're talking about. >> that's why we have this. >> well, no, no. but i wish somebody would basically make a definition that we could all start using. secondly, i'm struck by the issue of governance. we somehow don't think about governance. we waltzed into iraq and assumed when we got rid of the army they'd figure out how to run themselves. governance is really hard, and nobody talks about it. >> okay. thank you. >> no, i have two more comments. ? we have a lot of other people here. >> in september, i fell out of my chair when they said our real issues are understanding and relationships. >> let me get a try at that.

i think you're right about the use and misuse of the term realism. it's very, to me, when you're being realistic, you're basically telling the truth and trying to hook at what the objective facts are and understanding the world as it is and not as it should be. that's what realism means to me. the term i prefer is actually prudence in terms of what the guidance for u.s. foreign policy should be, which should be simply careful and assess what we're doing and not get carried away if some type of dlauj cal crusade, whether it's frankly engaging too much or too little. i think, to be prudent, you should look at the facts as they are and try to come up with a policy to match that reality. but getting back to the question about the millennials. i agree with chris that you're probably not going to be any different than any other

generation, whether it's minor any other. you're going to have differences of opinions, the interests that you have that you'll bring to the table. but at the end of the day, just like the rest of us, you'll be shaped by events and have to respond to events just like president obama's having to respond to what's happening in iraq right now. much of foreign policy is you don't have much control over. the world is as it is. you've got an in box, and you have to react to t in the long run, coming up with the capabilities and training and understanding of what you do when you have these unexpected, either attacks or change of events. that's what much of our deebt is all about. it's one of the reasons why chris and i disagree on military capabilities. he probably sees it mainly, if i'm wrong, correct me, as an instrument that can be misused, whereas, i see it as a matter of deterrence. that if you don't have it, people will perceive you as

weak, and therefore, you will be challenged, and you may have to actually respond with a weaker capability than you would have if you had a stronger one. that's capability and deterrence. that's a deebt worth having. >> i do believe in having a strong military. the difference is that the capabilities that you need for a strong military to defend and deter attacks against yourself is quite different perhaps than the military than you need to diefd and deter attacks against others who are sheltering under your security umbrella. the reason we do as we do is not primarily to defend terror attacks in the united states, it's primarily to deterz:háñ at against others. can i answer -- >> go ahead. >> to mitzi's point, i think

that in defense of "ism" for just a moment. realism means something, which in the basic context means that there are anarchy in the world system and that states' behavior is grounded in security concerns. if you believe in that "ism ", or it forms your policy-making, it will guide how you respond. if you believe that peace or war comes from different political systems, you believe in a democratic peace, that informs your foreign policy. if you believe that peace comes from economic interdependence, that informs were your foreign policy. they're not neat little boxes and nobody i've ever met is purely a realist. no, even john, you ask him, does that mean you don't trade with the chinese? no. no. not really. because if you actually believed in that, then you wouldn't be trading with the chinese, because you might have the effect of making them stronger,

right? they are becoming wealthier. so in defense of "ism" and what these terms mean, it can help us sort out how different people, presidents, will approach foreign policy problems and in terms of their hierarchy, where do they place a priority on different things. >> two real quick points. one on the millennial point. for your generation, we've already seen it with our generation, multiple avenues for americans to engage with the world, not just the u.s. government, but you see things like the gatesinitiative and ot. we've seen many go in and become frustrated. for all the smart power talks. kocondoleezza rice tried to refm the state department. i think it's a big challenge. i think those agencies need to

reform, but also i think you're going to see more and more people going into other avenues of u.s. engagement in the world. real quick on governance, spot on. i went into iraq in the summer of 2003. i was against the war, but i believed it was important for us to try to, you know, take a sad song and make it bet ir. [ laughterk6dñ ] >> and governance is a nice label, but the main thing i want to say is it touches upon power politics and politics and these trends that i was talking about, diffusion of power, if we stuck around with tens of thousands of troops, there is this notion that we would have held it du tape. and i think the real fault in the obama administration wasn't leaving with its military force, it was the inattention to the secretary tear yanism that actually has contributed to the spike in sunni jihadism. not managing those politics, which is the point i was trying to make in terms of diffusion of power.

we don't manage these things, but keeping an eye to it. to understand that other actors have efficacy, and they themselves will write their own destiny. we can shape on the margins. that's where obama gets it right. he's often portrayed as too standoffish.