a lot about her life story, what she built, how careful she had been, does gina think that she's still a middle class? and she said, i don't think there is a middle class in america anymore. if there was, i wouldn't have to go to the food pantry at the end of every month. >> the life of president richard nixon sunday at 3:45 p.m. eastern with author john farrell talking with david marinets. >> he was up to his neck. his loyalist attempted-the years to try to say it was deemed random cover-up, or dean and be halderman p -- they showed right from the start, he was going to play it rough the way that they played it. he was going to be tough, tough, tough. and it was a terrible downfall. >> for more of this weekend's

schedule, go to book tv.org. a panel of academics and public policy analysts recently explored the role the united states should play in today's world order. hosted by the ethics center and bart college's globalization and international affairs program, this is an hour. >> good afternoon, everybody. i'd like to welcome you here to the new york public library for our forum, shades of red and blue. i'm the director of the ethics center. and the globalization and international affairs program. along with our other partners, i'd like to welcome you here to this important discussion on global security. in a moment, i will introduce

the panel and their chair. but before i do so, if i can just mention a couple of things about format. firstly, if you're tweeting, then we've got the world's longest hashtag, shades of red and blue. exercise your thumb there if you happen to be using that. i want to mention a number of our panelists are distinguished authors whose works are are available at a table over there at the end of this session, and you may even be able to prevail upon them to sign a few. one last little thing about context. i learned the other day, it might sound like a bit of trivia, but the first division of the united states marine corps was refounded in of all places in melbourne, in australia, during the second world war. and the battle hymn for the marine corps of this division which was commanded by general mattis, the current secretary of defense, is the australian folks

on the waltz on matilda. they wear on their shoulder patch to this day the southern cross, which is one of the great emblems of australia. so there's an incredible connection between the united states and australia, which actually goes back well beyond that. australia has stood alongside the united states in every single conflict over the last hundred years. i think we may be the only country that's done that. so the issue of global security is one which very much unites us in our approach and our practice. and it's an incredibly important topic to be able to look at from a diverse perspectives, because our common interests are generally at odds here. in terms of the process we're going to have, jim ketterer from bard will be leading the conversation with our panelists. you'll notice at the table here there are two empty chairs. and the reason for this is it's

a very special process that we use in australia quite a bit, in which we're using for the first time here, which is that about halfway through the conversation, jim will open the table to you. in the audience. we believe in these kinds of conversations it's not not just about people talking at you or down to you. if you're in the audience and have a question or comment, you have a seat at the table, too. that is not a permanent seat. it's not as if you just plant yourself and say i'm here for the next 20 minutes or so. i'd ask you to join the conversation on a temporary basis, knowing that you'll be giving way when you do, not to another panelist, but to another member of the audience who may want to have a chance. make it brief. get involved in the conversation, but vacate the chair if you would please. in the last session we saw lots of people had a chance to do that. so that's to come. in a moment, though, we've got a

wonderful panel. professor walter russell mead, elmira bayrasli. i hope i pronounced that correctly. >> very well. >> jim ketterer from bard. and simon longstaff. you probably know half of them. or you can read about them. please join me in welcoming our panel. [ applause ] >> well, thank you, simon. thanks to all of you for being here. thanks to the organizers for putting this timely and important event together. so as we're shifting to foreign policy, it strikes me that foreign policy tends not to be in most american presidential elections something that's front and center in the elections. several of the elections we've seen before 2016, in the debates, foreign policy issues sometimes would barely get a mention. yet we sell on this election

that several key issues came to the fore time and again. how we deal with china, trade deals, the question of russia that is still with us, and more. and the foreign policy establishment in washington and beyond, the community of people who have devoted their careers to doing this, the same community of people that ben rhodes from the obama administration called the blob, they are not always so connected to the electorate necessarily. so attuned to elections. so i think this is probably true across the political spectrum. so given the surprising nature, not only the results of this election, but the way in which it rolled out, what do you think are the kinds of things that the foreign policy community should take away from not only the election and results, but the

nature of the run-up to the election? including in the primaries? tom, we can start with you. >> well, one thing that concerns me about the relationship between the blob, or the foreign policy establishment, and the public, is that in fact we often hear, the american public says, the establishment is not listening to us. i'm concerned now when it comes to foreign policy, that the establishment listens to the public almost too often. what i mean by that, foreign policy in that it does make appearances in our politics is almost entirely an extension of a permanent campaign on both sides. i think -- now, i don't want to idealize this where republicans and democrats quietly shook hands on fighting the soviet union or any of those myths, because that era of bipartisanship i think was remembered more fondly in our memory than it is in reality.

on the other hand, it seems now that the public and foreign policy experts alike seem ip capable of having a discussion about america's interests and america's role in the world without thinking about the impact, the position you're taking, has on your preferred candidate. it's almost like we've become a parliamentary system in some ways, that we're simply not capable of taking a position on foreign affairs, that is not some extension of some candidate or of a campaign. and i worry about this, because what i -- because i think foreign policy, you know, reflecting my own bias here -- i should also say i don't represent the government or navy or anybody else. but i think foreign policy is not only immensely intricate business, it's a dangerous business. a lot of other areas of public policy are a lot more forgiving than foreign policy. i'm concerned that experts are being drawn into this partisan

warfare and losing the ability to speak to each other, even when they differ. because of this notion that everything they say has to be related back to partisan advantage or some political organization, or some person or campaign. and now i think we're living in the worst of all possible worlds, where foreign policy is merely a football to be thrown about on places like twitter, as though these are not real decisions that could kill millions of people. and i find that really startling. and i think the only good thing i can say about it is in a strange way it's creating a new bipartisanship of forcing experts who normally would disagree with each other, into the same trench where they at least agree on things like basic rules of evidence on how to conduct an argument. but that's happening very far away from the public debate which i think now has escalated into almostt -- i don't want to

say irretrievable, but deep, and very deep partisan sides that's drawing experts into it. >> that takeaway is structure, process, but what about substantive issues, specific policy issues, anne-marie? are there things that came to the fore in this campaign, from either party perhaps, that resonated with the electorate in a way that you think is different? are there shifts in the population that we can start to read these tea leaves? >> well, what's most striking to me is the -- there just isn't a line between foreign policy and domestic policy, on the two biggest issues, i think for voters, economics and jobs. well, that was, you know, trade. that was nafta. that was china. that was globalization has taken away our jobs. and then there's a debate about that. but then that looks immediately at specific countries.

and then the other which was security was not what shall we be doing in the middle east, but what is the responsibility of people among us? which we heard about in the last panel. so in both those cases, the people talking about it were -- we as foreign policy experts had views, but that was not where i think the real heat of the debate was. and that is a function of a world in which borders are much more permeable. and both immigration and refugees, but just in general, the inability to wall ourselves off from global traffic. >> but you mentioned trade. we had the interesting situation sdurg the democratic primaries and during the republican primary where you saw that the sanders was proposing a very anti-trade deal platform that eventually hillary clinton came onboard to.

and that this has been one of donald trump's key themes is anti-trade. so in that regard, the people who were supporting sanders and the people who were supporting trump agreed on this issue. and what does that say about what's going on with the electorate? why would that curious situation come to be? >> i think that, you know, i think looking at the sanders supporters, and the donald trump supporters, i think we have to take a step back. i think this anti-globalization, i think this reactionary -- a moment that we have in terms of foreign policy and how things have become so polarized i think is much more less about the policy, and it's a lot more about what is america's place in the world and who are we, what is our identity. and i think that we've gone from a 20th century where america was the, you know, the unequivocal super power in economics and in military, and here in the 21st

century we've seen the rise of china, india, brazil, turkey, a lot of other countries. and what we have seen is the prosperity in those countries, people moving into the middle class, and they're becoming entrepreneurs, and they're moving progress along. and i think americans are stopping and they're saying, what happened to our progress? we were the country that were creating the jobs. we were the innovators. and is that a function of trade. and if that is so, then maybe we should stop that. so i think what we're projecting on to foreign policy, but i don't think we're actually taking a look and taking stock about what -- where is america, and what is our role within the global world order. >> walter, what do you think? >> it's interesting in 1918 we fought in world war i, and immediately there was a big debate over what it oh do

afterwards. and woodrow wilson lost, and took a much lower profile. and the american troops came home. what's often forgotten is after world war ii, we had the same debate and again we demobilized 90% of our forces. we had already pulled out. and then when stalin began to move in eastern europe, we had a big debate and went back in. in 1990, at the end of the cold war, we didn't have this debate. we just simply -- we decided that we would globalize our foreign policy, that we would go from kind of america as the center of the free world to america as the pillar of a truly global order. what's interesting is that in 1992, the voters picked the least globalist of the two presidential candidates, george h.w. bush and bill clinton, who ran on -- didn't like nafta and was going to do less with foreign policy. in 2000, they voted for george

w. bush over al gore. at least the electors did. and again, bush, it's hard to remember now, but wanted a humbler foreign policy, no nation building, less engagement. and then in 2008, they go for barack obama over john mccain. in 2016, they go for trump over clinton. so the voters have actually been very consistent in expressing of the two choices they're given, they pick the one that is the least engaged with this project. >> i mean, that was true at the beginning of world war ii as well, right? >> right. >> franklin roosevelt had to create lend/lease to be able to help the british, because he could see we needed to help the british. it's not uncommon for people whose job it is to look around the world, often on the coast

much. >> true, anne-marie. but the difference is, the foreign policy in those days was actually able to persuade the people. this time i think after 1990, i think the foreign policy community thought that actually it was going to be a lot easier. when harry truman is gearing up for the cold war, they knew it would be hard. they knew people might get killed, would be drafted. and they really needed political support. but in 1990, we thought, hey, in a free trade, we'll make everybody rich. democracy's spreading. in kuwait we had a war and made the world pay for it. so it's going to be easy. so we can do this without really gaining the deep consent of the project. >> you're making two assumptions that i would disagree with. first, in listing all those presidential contests, you're almost talking about them as the foreign policy where somehow is

the deciding issue when in fact most people don't care about foreign policy. >> it sets a pattern. >> but there's not a pattern. the second assumption i disagree with is the voters are somehow consistent. these are the same voters who at the same time will tell a candidate, listen, i want you to keep us out of all this trouble in the world. make sure america is number one. at the same time make sure america is most powerful in the world, keep america number one, america at the top of the heap. in the next breath say, but let's not engage in places we don't know about. >> unfortunately elites didn't make mistakes. >> i didn't say elites don't make mistakes. the electorate for 40 or 50 years have sent -- >> i would actually disagree there. that the way truman persuaded the americans to support the marshal plan and cold war wasn't to say, america is going to replace dprab as the gyroscope of world order and promote a global system.

what he said is, the russians are coming. >> well, yeah. >> because they were. but here's the point, though. here's the point. in 1990, when the russians weren't coming, we doubled down on the great replacing great britain thing, and the russians became somewhat abstract. again, the idea was, it's going to be easy and cheap and you're going to like it. and they don't necessarily like it. >> i worked on capitol hill during the first gulf war. and one of the things that struck me was that it wasn't that bush 41 had to sell the war, it was that bush 41 had to sell restraint. >> yeah. >> it wasn't -- the american people weren't saying, let's just do this -- this was a full-blown why aren't we burning baghdad to the ground problem. >> again, american people like -- this is very jacksonian response. the american people are all for like wars, that are quick and we win.

>> right. >> they're not for like nation-building, and counterinsurgencies. every president who started one of these countersur jensy wars -- >> the american people have a shallow understanding of foreign policy and like it when we win? >> the people are revolting. you're right. they stink on ice. the voters are stupid. >> the place i agree with you -- the place i do agree with you is that i think since the beginning of the 1990s, we don't have a clear picture of what we stand for in the world. it was during the cold war. it wasn't just that we were against russia. russia was the soviet union, and that was communism, and we stood for democracy and we stood for human rights. hypocritically in many cases, and inconsistently in other

places. carter believed in human rights and so did reagan, formed around democracy in the form of human rights. since then, it's not clear that we're the first and the best. it's not clear, you know, donald trump says like as kissinger was, we should just pursue our interests just like everybody else did. i think a lot of americans think, no, we're more than that. we stand for something more than that. it's important that we stand for something more than that. but we haven't -- even the elites don't agree on that, much less saying this is who america is in the world and making that case to the voters. >> i also think one thing we have to actually acknowledge in this day and age is that social media and the fact that we've gone as individuals, and this also includes cnn and the 24/7 news cycle, we've gone as individuals from being observers of information to being participants in it. and i don't think that whether it's the government or the

establishment has not caught up to that reality, and they're still operating on the status quo of the 20th century. and i think you're getting this reaction of whether it's donald trump or bernie sanders or hillary clinton going out there and having this knee-jerk reaction. if you take a look at foreign policy, even under the obama administration, and i'm a self-professed democrat, but i think that the obama administration and the obama foreign policy certainly suffered from the fact that it did not know what to do with this changed role, where no longer does government have a monopoly on collective action. >> but i would say, though, that there's a difference between the kind of participation. so if we're talking about participating through social media, that's one level of participation that's very different, i think, than when truman was trying to sell what we were going to have to do as we were ending world war ii, and beginning the cold war. there had been a large number of

americans who were directly involved in that war. in world war i as well. and in vietnam. the number of people that the united states has sent to this long span of combat that we're now engaged in, is a very small number. multiple tours. and, you know, bringing in the national guard in a way that really i think puts that burden on a small number of people. so, you know, when the participation has shifted from making kind of the sort of the key decisions that any country should have to make about going to war, collectively via social media, that might be problematic. >> even before truman, fdr when he gave fireside chats, he would tell people, get a map so you can follow along with me. literally maps sold out around the country. today to get the average american to look at a map, is under pain of death. >> google maps. >> yeah, google maps.

we were talking earlier, there were a couple of years ago the "washington post," this participation issue, they asked americans what they should do about russian intervention in ukraine. people had very strong feelings about it. directly in proportion to how little they knew about ukraine. the average respondent in this poll when asked to identify where ukraine was, was off by an average response of 1,800 miles. ukraine is the single largest country whose borders are entirely in europe. the average american could not place it on the right continent. >> how might their thinking have been sharpened if there was a real chance that they or somebody in their family would have to go serve in an american expedition in ukraine if that's what they were promoting? >> i think here's maybe where, in my view, the kind of core reason that there's this gap, is that after world war ii, we just didn't build this international order and global system, but there was also a domestic order.

that basically if you didn't screw up, you have a pretty good job for life. that, you know, you graduate from high school, chances were you would get into a factory or something. over time your wages would gradually rise. not for everybody. there was a lot of racial discrimination, and women didn't get an equal shot. nevertheless, in general there was this sense that things were going to get better, and that you had security and stability in your life. what has happened since 1990, particularly, but beginning even before, is there's a revolution in people's ordinary lives. and so there's a feeling of insecurity, you know, at home. and so here you are, off trying to fix an honest process, but here at home, it's a mess. and that, you know -- and they wonder why. why do you care so much about

over there? and also, i will say, while some of our global efforts work pretty well, a number of them actually dumped. so, you know, the revolution in egypt didn't bring human rights. all of those phone calls obama made to erduon -- there's a sense that you don't know what you're doing over there, and you certainly don't know what you're doing over here, why am i going to trust you. >> i wanted to ask a question to everybody then. i come from one of those towns. 40 years ago that was thriving and now depopulating and empty factories and all of the things that we talk about every day. and the great point about the foreign policy there's no longer a division between foreign and domestic politics. i find when you talk to the ordinary voter, or ordinary

citizen, they are unaware of their own -- i can already feel your look -- but when you say to people -- >> we can flee -- >> the standard of living around the folks who say you don't know what you're doing over there, you don't know what you're doing over here, and when you try to make the point about think about the amount of, say, chinese electronics that you are buying, the things that you making that is part of that globalized system of trade and peaceful cooperation that you're surrounding yourself with, i almost want to go out to the folks -- >> like a heroin addict that -- >> and you're blaming the guy who smoked for 40 years because he got lung cancer. >> but i think -- >> no. >> it's more that in all kinds of communities around the country, there's been a collapse of social capital. and again, if you go to an ivy league college and you talk to the kids there, or even a place like walmart, you know, what are you going to do when you

graduate? you'll hear a lot more kids that are interested in fixing the world than in, you know, i'm really going to go move to west virginia, because i feel as an american, it's my duty to help my fellow americans. i think the elites have kind of stopped teaching that kind of patriotism. >> i guess my question was -- >> it's for america, which is great. but there's a sense of where you gain people's trust by doing things that they understand are good, and then there's a likelihood when you ask them to do something they're not quite sure about it, they will trust you and believe you. >> what do foreign policy experts do in this situation where anger -- which i think is fundamentally misdirected at this point, because when people say you don't know what you're doing over there, my argument -- somebody asked the other day 50 years of this kind of policy, what have we gotten? a global system of prosperity --

>> i agree. my response to the donald trump getting elected was to cancel four trips to europe to, you know, essentially elite ideas for a kind of -- i just thought, why am i spending my time talking to people like me in european watering holes rather than actually reading about and traveling in this country? and one of the ways you can look at this election was it was a statement that said, in multiple countries, the people who had been advantaged by globalization, all see each other the same way, talk the same way, we differ a little, but the bigger divide are those folks who are still in those towns left behind. in france, in germany, in britain -- >> pennsylvania. >> pennsylvania, absolutely. i do think that walter's right that even as a foreign policy person, i am far more connected to my counterparts in britain

and japan, or even in beijing than i am to folks in west virginia. >> i couldn't agree more. i just think we need to listen. and again, trust is something that people develop. i think the average american -- you know, franklin roosevelt was not very much like the average american. he was about as privileged as it was possible to be. and he was a cripple, too, which he lied about. and yet people felt that he cared about them. even then he found it very difficult to nudge the country into world war ii. but he built up trust on things they understood, and then they were willing to trust him on things that were a little new and more challenging. and i think elites need to think about -- there's a difference between a member of an elite and being a leader. and i don't think on our side of

this we've done enough about that. >> i don't disagree with you, walter, but i also think we're not thinking about, yes, there's a perception about the voter and whether it's in pittsburgh or in west virginia and how they have been -- they feel left behind. but at the same time, they feel left behind because they see so many people whether it's in india, brazil, mexico -- >> i actually think they're looking at india and mexico and brazil. >> the people in china, brazil and india, they're actually gaining a sense of confidence. >> but i don't think all that many people in western pennsylvania necessarily know that the middle class in turkey feels more confident than it used to. >> they are getting a sense that the world is changed. >> they think the middle class is doing better than they are. >> they're doing better. but then when you talk to these people, they always say, why are jobs going to mexico, why are our jobs going to china and why are those individuals doing better? you're talking about fdr and

truman, but talking about an america where we had not only military power, but we had the soft power where people wanted -- people loved the idea of america. >> the reason they think the jobs are going overseas because they think the wages are lower. they don't actually think that the factory is going to china, meaning that china is richer than us. because if china were richer than us, the jobs would come back here. so what they see -- they're not actually, they don't actually go to china a lot. or read a lot of chinese social media. >> but they are told this. they are fed a lot of these -- especially in this election. >> this is true of the sanders wing as the trump wing, is that selfish american corporations are moving jobs to low-wage havens overseas. they're not hearing selfish american corporations are moving jobs to high-wage corporate companies. now, i think what they're hearing that they don't believe

is, in the 1990s, everybody said, okay, we're going to let china build up, and they'll be doing low wages, slave labor, whatever it is, it's going to make us -- but in the end it will make china democratic as an industrialized to become democratic. so china will be peaceful. i think what people see is not the chinese middle class is happy. what they see is china has gotten really powerful by taking low-wage american jobs and built a big economy and is now becoming a military threat. so that the promise that free trade was worth the sacrifice to american jobs in order to create a more stable world order isn't looking quite so solid. >> but wasn't -- this is part of what i object to in this debate is the notion that they were sold free trade in exchange for a more peaceful world. it seems to me that the very first job i had in politics was working on a plant closing, which was a really painful thing.

it seems to me that what all this boiled down to was, we're going to maintain free trade because it's bringing up a fairly quickly rising standard of living with a lot of cheap stuff that you can afford now that you could never afford -- why does the american government support free trade? not because it's going to make china peaceful, but now that you have an air conditioner that you couldn't afford before. >> but they had an easier time getting an air conditioner in 1975 than they do now. not a smartphone, i'll admit. >> it seems to me when you do listen -- >> disposable income is less. >> i didn't have to cancel a lot of trips to europe. i spent a lot of time talking with folks that -- who worked in factories, very angry folks. but i find when i listened, the answers i get are, demand a square circle. to do the impossible. that they are almost a set of demands that i cannot imagine any policy maker succeeding with. i think this is why successive

administrations of both right and left, democrat and republican, simply cannot satisfy what it is that the american people are demanding, in foreign policy. let me limit this to the foreign policy agenda. . it's contradictory in itself. >> americans are getting -- now they're getting very specific messages that are just absolutely wrong on the facts. and perhaps from both sides, in addressing these issues. these issues have real policy consequences. when we see an executive order that says that the united states government is now going to aggressively address the trade deficit. i suffered through international economics 101, understands very quickly that a trade deficit is not necessarily a bad thing for an economy. it takes leadership to talk about things that while they might intu ti tifl sound right are not right. to follow a policy direction that is based on an absolute

perpetuated falsehood, eventually, you know, leads us to a very difficult place. it doesn't end up addressing the kinds of issues that everybody here is saying we need to listen better and we need to understand those issues. those actually are the very people who suffer first with bad economic policy. so where does this go? >> i do think both the left and the right are saying, we need to rethink what -- for people in both parties for 40 years has been orthodoxy, which is you support free trade. because free trade expands the pie. we all learned our basic theory of comparative advantage. it expands the pie. then you figure out how to redistribute the pie and you retrain or whatever. and i do think what you're seeing on both sides -- i've been thinking about this, too, wait a minute, if it expands the pie but it expands the pie so

unfairly that we say we're going oh retrain, but we don't, retraining doesn't work. we've tried it. then maybe we either have to have much more redistributionist policies, which i'm not sure is politically viable, or maybe we should in fact have a more -- you know, have at least the same amount of protection as many of the nations that we are trading with do. germany has more protection than we do. china certainly does. and it seems to me we should listen and challenge our own orthodoxies there. it never occurred to me you wouldn't support free trade. but it seems to me it's worth going back and asking, why are we -- who is this benefiting? why are we taking this position? from right and left. >> and without looking over our shoulders, as experts, as people who work in foreign policy. and saying, which candidate, or party, and -- >> right.

exactly. >> that's driving a huge part of this. >> that's where you lose trust. >> yes. >> trying to steer to it. >> without a doubt. >> but i think there is something where our elite education does stress theory over history. you know, political science-the history of power. economic theory over economic history. because in fact if you look at history, while protectionism is in theory bad, it's worked pretty well for a lot of countries. like the u.s. in the 19th century. and arguably having protective tariffs against britain actually allowed us to develop a sector to compete with britain. and a lot of other countries that protect, not because they didn't take economics 101, it's because they took history 101. so i think we have -- i think this is an area where elite is bad. that they're too used to theory that have models of ir and they try to think, okay, are we going

to become liberal internationalists, and what's the history in the balkans and -- >> where is bosnia? >> right. i do agree that the elites have lost touch. i definitely agree with that. but i think -- but i also think that we're losing perspective here, because we're looking at this again from a purely american point of view and we're not acknowledging the world has changed. and so you're talking about protectionism. protectionism didn't work too well for the soviets. >> it worked really well for the chinese and it worked well for the germans and japanese and koreans. >> it did not work well for latin america. >> so study why it works in some places and -- >> but then you can't say protectionism does work and it -- >> well, it does sometimes work. >> you said sometimes it works. that's why we actually have to have a -- >> i don't know what we're arguing about now. >> we have to stop reacting to

words that they're magical incan'tations. if you say protectionism and you say free trade, suddenly the protectionists all freak out. >> more empirical and less abstract. >> and to say you say, under what conditions. we could have the same discussion about unemployment. do unemployment benefits make people lazy or help? it depends. some people yes, some people no. sometimes it's a necessary bridge. instead we have these immediate kind of electric voltage moments where the words come up. i think that unfortunately has been reinforced by our partisan debates. i think the foreign policy community needs to transcend that and not get to a consensus perhaps, but at least to agreeing to rules of the road about changing that consensus. >> to be able to sort through these kinds of issues, in what

situations would protectionism, or some level of protectionism, or some targeted industries or whatever, how should we do this, how should we do that. yes, there needs to be more listening to the electorate. but that's not going to answer those questions. >> not on north korea. >> and those kinds of questions i think do require a combination of expertise, but also leadership. and the willingness to be able to explain difficult things to -- >> and to teach. >> right. >> fdr, your point about fdr is a really good point. fdr was not just a leader, he was a teacher. >> so was teddy roosevelt another member of the elite. george washington was the richest man in the colonies. so it's not that elites can't be leaders, but a lot of elites don't know how to lead.

and people sense that. so i think you can be honest to the facts and honest to history, and also honest to people. but you also, i think you do have to put principle ahead of ambition. you have to say even if it means i never serve as the underdeputy assistant of x, i'm still going to tell people what i think and they're going to know that what i say is what i think. [ applause ] >> profile in courage. let's see if anyone would like to join us at the table, if you dare. please come and join us. >> we're really very nice. >> and as simon said, that the -- come and join it for a little while and then be ready to relinquish your seat, please. >> you need to come up. >> do i have to? >> yes, please. >> this is how the panel will listen to the people.

>> we're leading. >> there you go. >> hi. >> thanks for coming. >> welcome. >> yes, please begin. >> i'm grateful you actually mentioned that the conversation had become what to a lot of outsiders, strangers, just by the green card, think of american policy, which is that fdr, a great read, but it was played out right here a moment ago in some respects. and the point is, discussing microcosm of domestic issues, which are multivarious, but without addressing the rest of the world, is atypical of how the rest of the world views american foreign policy. we just saw it happen.

my question is to bring it to global security. and as i'm sure you're all aware, david cullen is the origin of the strategy of desegregation. and what do you see as the next logical step for dismembering radical terrorism and helping ensure peace as it stands for the middle east? >> who would like to start with that? >> should be easy to solve. >> i guess i would start with -- i hear a lot -- i go to some of the same forums anne-marie goes to, and i hear a lot of sort of debate about will it be democracy that ends terrorism in the middle east, empowerment of women, economic development? my own sense is none of those are going to happen in a policy relevant time. if maybe we'll get lucky and they will, but in fact, we actually have to deal with the reality in which the arc of

history isn't going to kind of come in, bend just when we need it to. and so you're facing a very complex movement of a kind of -- you know, it's ideological, religious, cultural resistance, state disaggregation. but i do think we spend too much time inventing imaginary paradises in which this problem will just go away. >> right. >> so i would say, while i don't necessarily have the answer at this point, the first step is we just have to clear a lot of ground. >> i agree with that. i think that we -- i can't believe i agree to you. >> if people listen to me long enough -- >> i think we're approaching -- you know, we try to talk about these issues. number one, we have to take a look at -- we're reacting to terrorism through a very military lens, very national security lens, but we're not

understanding why the terrorism has arisen in the first place. and that has to do with -- i know they talked about this in the last panel, it has to do with people feeling marginalized. going to anne-marie's policy, exceeding into foreign policy. this is whether you're in brussels or paris or san bernardino, we just have to acknowledge that. and approach terrorism as war. the nature of war has changed today. when you're talking about -- russia is no longer -- we're not afraid of russia coming in with their nuclear missiles, their icbms, now they're attacking into our elections. how are we reacting to that? on the one hand you can say, well, no one's dying, but something is profoundly being disturbed in our -- in this country, and in the world order.

>> i actually would not approach this in terms of how we, the united states, or the west, or however you want to use "we" is going to end isis or islamic radical terrorism or whatever the phrase is, we are not. it is to me the equivalent of the fights between the protestants and the catholics for a very long time in europe, where we're not -- the best we can do to protect ourselves to become more resilient, obviously increase our intelligence where there are very specific things where we can take action, we should. but to me, it's crazy to think this is an enemy we're going to defeat the way we defeated, you know, hitler in the second world war. and i look at the british in this most recent attack, and indeed the city after 9/11, and where the view is, okay, you

know, we stop a lot of attacks, once in a while one gets through, but you go to work the next day and tell them, nope, you didn't win. and ultimately you let the larger forces within a religion, within various societies resolve this particular issue. but i don't think we're going to defeat it. >> i just want to give you a warning, a bit brief. i want to make sure we have enough time. >> i agree with anne-marie and i think this notion of somehow -- this is one of the worst myths peddled during this election, they were going to elect the equivalent that we're going to raise the american flag and declare victory. i think the way we tri usm of is to endure and remain true to ourselves. the second biggest -- the biggest danger of the cold war was the holocaust. and that the united states and allies would become too much

like the soviet union in creating a national security state and creating a large intelligence apparatus. i think that we need to spend less time thinking about how to defeat them in some strategic sense, operationally we have to stop them, but we have to keep always looking at ourselves and saying are we being true to our own values. because that is victory. in an enduring way. i would also just say, tom said also that having a sense of really what the threats are, not just the threats that are posed by isis or al qaeda, though they are real, and persistent, but i disagree with you elmira that we mainly have to be worried about the russians and hacking and what they're doing in the cyber world. yes, that's of concern. but the in you clear issue has not gone away. you can make an argument that we live in a far more dangerous time in terms of nuclear

security than we ever have. that's one issue that really did not come up in the elections. it doesn't really make for good, you know, politics to talk about the potential for nuclear annihilation. but i think whether -- states like the -- like russia or the north koreans or other nonstate actors who might use nuclear weapons, it really is chilling and should be chilling to people. i think that's another area where we need leadership to be informed and to be able to speak about it in an informed way, and to honestly address these issues with the american people. and i think that's just not happening at all. >> you've been very patient. >> yes, you have. >> go ahead. >> that seems very interesting. coming back to domestic issues, all the time listening, i've been thinking about the white elephant, you know, that's under the rug. and that is the enormous growth of wealth in the last 20 years in this country.

and my question is, what is the relationship. it's interesting that you don't mention that, it's kind of like on the side, talk about jobs, protectionism, globalization. what is the relationship between our economic policies and the growth, the enormous unbelievable growth of wealth? i mean, it's almost like magical. >> it's not magic. >> oh, i understand that. but i'm just using a -- it's kind of -- you would never believe that, even ten years ago, you would never realize the disparity between our poverty, which is also unbelievable, and the enormous growth of wealth. i was reading in the "times" today that ivanka trump had something like $800 million, she and her husband. one person? so that's my question. >> who would like to start with that? >> i think that -- i mean, the

elites that we have been talking about have -- i think it's connected with what they want and how to achieve to augment that wealth is very much directly tied to, we can create cheaper things in taiwan or in china or in south korea. and we're going to get more profits in. you know, the supply chain has gone global. and they have been pushing for that. and they have been thinking about the consequences of what is happening to somebody in pittsburgh or in west virginia. and just about the -- just the social welfare. when you take a look at silicon valley and you hear constantly all the time about the wealth gap within silicon valley, and how you have people who are within the community sending their kids to private elite schools, then you have the people that are going and taking the nannies and the people who are taking care of their homes, and they're in these public schools that are -- they're

losing money. and there's a significant gap there. and this is something where, you know, where does it come down to? it does come down to the elites, but it also comes down to not only our elected officials in washington, but our local leaders on the ground. and, you know, this is not a discussion about domestic politics, but you can get into a discussion about campaign finance reform, and how much elections are dependent on that. >> i just want to say one thing. you know, blaming rich people for wanting to be richer, but i think -- >> i wish the elephant under my rug was growing a little faster. >> but when i said there are winners from globalization who win over and over and over again. just as a university professor, i remember the day i realized in the late 1990s that of course prior to that that i had taught maybe 100 students in one place, suddenly could be taught online all over the world. and i could reap the benefits of that many times over.

so there's a class of people who have gained extraordinarily. yeah, my elephant's not -- but it got a lot thicker, versus people who are fundamentally losers of globalization. part of what i was saying about the divide in this country and in europe and in other parts of the world, it's that divide between the winners from globalization and the losers. and each country has to then come back and say, wait a minute, we can't -- we cannot continue in a policy with this amount of division. there has to be some redistribution, or different policies so everybody gains. >> i want to replace the word globalization for a minute and say information economy. >> yes. >> fair point. fair point. >> yes. >> really, this is as big as the industrial revolution. >> some of it is unavoidable in a world where the information is the accessed information, the ability to manipulate and use the information is a skill.

some of the problems we're seeing with the income disparities, were not the intended consequences of that, but unavoidable -- >> you know, if we're going to address that, then we'll retrain people. >> nobody's -- >> we're redistributing internally. which is a question for domestic politics. and we can have arguments about tax rates and distribution and things like that. >> the industrial revolution starts in the 1820s in this country. it isn't until after the second world war that we learned how to run an industrial society. my guess is the information revolution is going to be the same. we don't understand what's happening in the way that we did when we had a mature industrial economy. you know, the economy doesn't behave quite the way the central bank thinks it will. so we don't know -- >> we're still figuring it out. >> so we're in a period of kind of fumbling. again this gets to the elite thing, that in fact we -- you know, a generation ago, you

could apply known techniques to existing problems. and more or less success would come. now it's a little bit hairier. >> let's continue on. our listening tour. >> this is a little complex. the idea that only elites can run foreign policy is really a simple thing. an extension of the human relations. you're generous, you're fair with people, they'll probably treat you generous and fair. there are exceptions. there are crazy cults. american capitalism may be a crazy cult. if you drop a bomb on somebody, they're going to hate you. it doesn't have to be islamic terrorism, it's bomb terrorism. and so the u.s. -- most of the electorate sold us a bill of goods that everything about the military's good. you know, military industrial complex, and their view is that any war is a football game. you root for the home team.

it wasn't always like this. the 1920s, the committee investigated the merchants of death. outlaw war -- >> thank goodness that happened. >> this can happen again. >> i'm just saying, if we hadn't had the kellogg pact we might have had another war. >> i'm going to take issue with you here and say the notion that foreign policy isn't that complicated, and that we don't need experts to do it, first of all, very clearly in this current and political environment, we're going to engage in realtime testing of that pie both sis. and i don't think it will end very well. in part, i think the amount of information taken about the world, whether it's 2017 or 1917, i think is like most specialized areas of knowledge beyond the comprehension of one -- any one citizen, which is why we have a republic, not a democracy. why we mediate these decisions through a republic of elected representatives rather than by

pluck site. i also think that ordinary citizens are always surprised in foreign affairs by the problem of unintended consequences. that when you -- that you move one part of the rubik's cube and six other parts of it move. that's a really difficult thing to do. i suppose coming back at this as a foreign policy specialist to say, you know, i think we probably all heard this at some point in our careers, it's a great metaphor that i didn't invent, that americans treat foreign policy like the plumbing. it's invisible, and they don't know how it works but they only care about it when it breaks. >> i think that's right. but i want to agree on two points. one, very much your point, and i heard you make it earlier, that when you kill people's families, they remember. all right? when we, the bombings in germany and japan in world war ii, they bombed us, we bombed them. now it's much more one way, right? the places where we're dropping

these bombs, they may bomb us through terrorism, but they don't have the ability to really strike back. these are often from drones now. it's not even -- there's not even a pilot up there. there you are in a wedding, or whatever else, and boom. your child, your cousin, those humanitarian issues, people getting killed and you look to see, well, who is responsible, and it's the united states, even for many reasons that we might articulate -- >> even when it's defending other people. >> i do understand. but that is not just the sort of extra issue. i do think that is a core issue about who we are in the world and what we stand for and how we make enemies. >> let me just complicate it a little bit. >> this is complicated. >> i quite agree. >> during world war ii there was a big debate over whether we

should have unconditional surrender on germany and japan. roosevelt and the people who were against that, they said to make the world go longer, they would fight harder. roosevelt basically said, good. because the reason we're having world war ii, because in world war i the germans didn't really learn what war was. because it stopped because it was outside of germany. so we're going to destroy that country. we're going to go through there like sherman through georgia, only more. and teach them that war is not an option. so sometimes violence makes things worse. by the way, that worked. >> what did that teach us? that violence works? that we can control violence? >> but we already -- >> the worst bumper sticker in the world is the one that says war is not the answer. i think, it depends what the question was. should we eradicate jewish people from the face of the

planet? maybe war is the answer. >> georgia didn't secede until after sherman. >> i this ewe have to maintain our humanity. even in -- i think this is where foreign policy experts do their job. we have to think about things people would rather not think about. we have to maintain our humanity doing it. >> you also, though, mentioned within your question this overreliance on the military to solve every international problem. and i think we could certainly see lots of evidence to support that claim. i would say, in part, that goes back to the facts that most americans are very distant from the military. very distant from what it actually means, as sort of what the opposite of what walter was saying, that since we are the ones who are engaged in the action, as a country, but most of the people really aren't engaged in it. you know, the military went to war, and america went to the mall.

this makes it easier to see every problem with the military solution. this makes it easier to say, we're going to increase the military budget by some astronomical number and cut state and usaid. i'm sorry to end it there, though. let's have one last question. >> i'm afraid the time got away from everybody. can you be brief? >> very brief. >> i'm not going to pose my question. i'd much rather lead into the last thought that you just mentioned. i think because we use war as a historical point in our history, peace gets too comfortable. so peace, it's very easy to succumb to human paranoia. even when there's no chaos, more likely than not we will let chaos ensue. >> we'll leave it at that. okay. ladies and gentlemen, as i mentioned before, a number of our authors will be selling

books over there, and signing books. there's another session in half an hour. we'll be talking about something equally intriguing, race, religion, ideology, does it divide, does it unite. but before we take that break, would you please join me in thanking our panel. tom nichols. anne-marie slaughter, james ketterer, and elmira bayrasli. and walter russell mead. thank you very much. sunday on q&a, the house of truth, a washington political salon and the foundations of american liberalism. we talked with author brad snider on his book. walter lipman, oliver wendall

holmes junior, and herbert hoover, who met regularly in the early 1900 rs to debate politics and the future of the country. >> i think everybody, lipton, race was a selling issue for them. they cared about the rights of workers, and it took oliver wendell holmes jr. in a 1923 quasz moore v dempsey, which found for the first time the mob dominated criminal trials of southern blacks violated the due process. for the first time the supreme court struck down a state criminal conviction. that was a huge moment in putting fair criminal trials in a liberal agenda and linking the idea of fair criminal trials with race. sunday night at 8:00 eastern on c-span's q&a. sunday night on "after words," republican presidential candidate and ohio governor john

kasich discusses his new book, two paths, america divided or united. he's interviewed by christine whitman. >> you talk in the book, too, about trump won and we should learn something from that. i posited for a long time that they were two sides of the same coin. the frustrated the angry and scared people. they didn't care whether the person they were supporting could actually do what they said they were going to do, all they cared about is they said they were going to do something. do you think congress has learned this lesson? >> i think congress -- >> they were so frustrated -- >> i think congress is so dysfunctional. >> you served. what do we do? >> well, look, you know, you know this. you've worked with the legislature. what we've done is that we've gerrymandered, which we've always done. then we have filled people, you know, people have gone out and sought the information that reinforced their views, and shut out the information that didn't out the information that didn't do that.

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