7:00 eastern wednesday morning. join the discussion. former cia and nsa director michael hayden spoke with author and floffer a.c. grayling about the influence on war in flocksy. they talked about new threats to democracy and the u.k.'s decision to leave the union phone as brexit. >> what i'd like to do now is introduce general hayden, th intersection doesn't need to take a lot of time. for those one or two of you who has been asleep for the last 10 or 20 years general hayden is the director of the -- a public servant who served in the united states military for over 30 years and retired as a four-star rankings officer. he continues his public service in a number of fashions. he is as mentioned earlier

serving at the shar school helping to educate the young people who are entering or have already entered the national security and intelligence work space offering pragmatic advice as to how that work should and can be done. he's also a prominent in public speaking around the country and on cnn serves as one of the national security experts. and lastly is the author of two books now, the first book if you've not seen it was playing to the edge, which was a memorial of sorts that looked at the intelligence community in the era of terror. the new book coming out on the first of may is "the assault on intelligence. "if you go to amazon you can order it to do and be the first to have it in your mailbox in

may. i'd like to welcome general hay didn hayden up to the podium. >> thank you. i appreciate larry's info measurable. you may have to may more for postage if you order it through amazon. thank you for the opportunity to come and introduce someone we're delighted to have with us here this evening. i cannot do the biography of a.c. grayling any justice so i will not try to do that. i will try to hit a couple of core points to perhaps explain why it was we thought we wanted him to come and be part of the shar school hayden center dialogue this year with regard to truth and a post-truth world. anthony was born in what was then called roe dee sha, sim bam way now. what has been described as a

british colonial enclave. from that beginning worked his way to become an icon of british education. someone whose both philosopher, historian, a philosophy of history and historian of philosophy all in one. an active media commentator, for a long period of time wrote a weekly column on basic core issues for the british public as well as commenting from this perspective on british public affairs. remember the u.n. human rights counsel as well. in 2011 started a new institution, the new column of the e menties in london to continue his life's work. an award winner in 2016. in a year after that in 2016, i

had a chance to experience anthony even though he did not have a chance to experience me. we were both at an event at a small welsh village for a magnificent literary festival that fills up five or six days in the lush countryside. i was there to push that other book that i referred to, but my wife and i were there together and we wanted to take full advantage that we were there to see some of the other really wonderful events. and one that struck my eye was this discussion that was going to go on in the big tent, all right, for this very mid evil affair like activity, in the big tent, 1400, 1600 seats available, for a discussion, an intellectual history discussion of europe 1670. we went and i was absolutely struck by, number one, just the -- not just -- the word

entertainment value is coming to mind put that's not what i mean. the intellectual engagement value of the discussion that drew the whole audience in. and it began to put in to place things coming out of that discussion. the era of enlightenment and evidence based approach to life. years later, actually within the last year, i was trying to write about evidence based institutions, the press, the academy, intelligence in a post-truth world. i dug out my old brochure, found the name and hundred anthony down. and we had some wonderful conversations with him on some of the topics that we will cover -- cover tonight. with that conversation since

then, there's always been beneficiary to me. i hope in some way i paid the debt but it's not in an unequal measure i think you'll judge this evening without sequence events. we'll begin with a.c. grayling talking a bit about democracy and war and other broad issues. i get a chance to come up here and sit in one of the chairs and continue the conversation between us, then europe. so again to formulate in your own mind the kinds of questions you might want the professor to answer during that time together. with that, good friend, doctor, professor, a.c. grayling. >> thank you very much indeed to general hayden and to the shar school and the hayden center for this wonderful invitation. it's lovely to be here. i will confess to you, by the way, that today is my birthday,

and i couldn't find a better birthday present than this. thank you. [ applause ] why did i tell you that, the point about leaving your 21st birthday behind that you really ought to be forgetting subsequent birthdays. my feelings are of war. i've got to really just touch heads of points on these two great topics. and i wanted to -- as follows. i wrote a book recently on war, an inquirying into the question, why is war a future of human history and of human societies. what is the wellspring of these destructive events? which can tear down in a matter of seconds now with -- may take many centuries to build up.

the two great questions that appear to press, and there are each of them which need to be dug into to get the texture of them are, is it human nature that somehow constitutes the prominent for these vinyl confrontations between groups of people or within a society or in between nations, or is it something in the way we arrange our affairs. the only question that answer session of the discussion session i will give you more reasons if you want them, as to why i reached the conclusion in this book that i agree with those people who say that war is an artifact of the way we arrange our political and our international affairs. it is not something which is natural to human beings. even though, we humans can from time to time feel very aggressive and want to punch somebody on the nose, mr. biden

recently admitted to such a sentiment, even though that might be the case that is not the same thing as war. ugly, war is a matter of violence and destruction at the tip of the spear of military activity, based on what happens in preparation for war, logistics, manufacturer armaments and uniform forms, training soldiers, making plans, requires calm and cool heads and rationality. organization, which is really a very key feature of war and which disstings war from such flare ups between people at a football match or in a saloon bar, that disstings is a very important one. we need therefore to pay attention to the arguments that say, war is an outcome of the way we organize ourselves

nationally and internationally and it's not a feature of human nature. if there were a -- there'd be far less -- in the field of conflict. this is a point that we related to later on. my reason for coupling it with the question of democracy, as you know it's a common place, not entirely accurate but almost totally so, democracies don't make war on one another. democracies do make war, and war on other people and maybe on other democracies but they tend to on the whole make war on one another. that's an interesting fact. all the more so because democracy in our world is very much under pressure at the moment. you look around the world and we see a number of figures on the world stage who in their practice, mr. xi ping is one,

some of hungry and particular. here's a trouble lg situation, since 1945, the majority in the countries have pretended to pic democracies. this is because they looked at the greater examples of democracies. the western european countries, the wealthy, influential countries, the countries that has -- and other countries want you to immolate them by adopting their model. of course the chinese model where there is no democracy and civil liberties how they exist, you have a form of state capitalism, the result of application which is massively gruing economy, a very powerful economy, ruled by a regime which

in effect promises to people who are in business or in productivive industries. the thing that business people rial like which is stability and predictability. the point about democracy is it didn't provide quite the same measure of predictable, maybe it does stability but predictable, if there's a clang at the next election there may be a different tax regime or new con strikss on emissions of environmental protections. the business landscape is not quite as plane saving it is if you're a chinese businessman in china, as long as as you behave of course. that model would be a very attractive model as you could manual, to a president of a developing country who thinks to himself or herself, well i don't have to bother about democracy. i could stay in power for the rest of my life and we could be a rich country and influential.

for that reason we might wonder to ours, isn't it worth while to try to defend and promote the values of democratic order. not merely because of what the key point of which i will recur to, it does harvest the consent of the people who live in democracy to the political and governmental order under which they live. that of course is the key point. but, also because of what democracy is in practice between elections. think of this, the sound of democracy is noise, it's a back bell it's discussion, argument, people hunted did you know by the press. there is by contrast the sound of gra constitugratuity is sile. there's no discussion there.

if any kind of opposition exists it does so underground. it's very easy in though sorts of circumstances for civil elizabeths to go by the board. the civil liberties matter. we all know that -- we have embraced with such enthusiasm, social media, strip ourselves naked to the view of any public or private agency that cares to have a look at us. i mention public agency with a certain diffidents and the circumstances. a very good friend came to see me in london a few weeks ago, he lives in new york. he told me he put on his google calendar the fact that he had an outpatient appointment at a hospital in manhattan. for the next three days he was bombarded with advertisements every time he went online for his goal crematorium. this is a statement now that we're all under scrutiny.

this power and useful and wonderful thing. this access that we have, these electronic communications has striped away our privacy. so perhaps our civil liberties and what shred of privacy remains we value. we value our right to continue gait with other people, to discuss as we're doing tonight for example, and above all, we value freedom of expression. not that that is an absolute value, it is really a crime against humanity to shout fire in a crowded filter, we all know that. so, on a case by case basis you can make a case for saying that there are times when perhaps we should be a little constrained about what we say. in general, freedom of expression matters because without it you can't have an education system worth -- >> you can't have an cultural

endeavor. you can't have a legal place where people can accuse and defend themselves and you can't have a political place where people can put forth ideas and people can challenge them. civil liberties are very intimately annexed to the idea of democracy. democracy and civil liberties grew up hand and hand for the enlightment of 18th century and they depend upon one another. in a world where democracy is under pressure, take for example, turkey or hungry, the civil liberties in those places goes hand and hand down ward, down the staircase. just as they went up the staircase together after the great revolution unfortunate society as the beginning of the modern period. this is a point that we can revert to. i would like to remind you of something that of course you all

know because you all reading plato in bed lal night so you very much remember what he said in book age of the republic about democracy. he thought democracy is nothing other than the form of okay roxy which means more brutal. he thought the people of the dee must were uninformed. short-term, lack any consideration for people who went there themselves or -- who would have so many competing and c conflicting desires and interest that the bable of opinions would be a disorder in society and nothing of value would get done. as people did for so many centuries after his time, one or

more forms of top bound gov nance was to be preferred to democracy. this is a point, this view of the dee must a condescending view if you think about it, it's a view that is had by people today. famously winston churchhill will know he's had democracies over bad systems, we know that. he also said the strongest argument against democracy is a few minutes afrgs. that would immediately bring to the floor these considerations that -- had advanced. to believe in democracy is to have a hope that collective wisdom would emerge from individual ignorance. and again, very much to his point. but these aversions, those criticisms from what you might

expect from the people are misguided. in the year 1647, in the civil war in england when charles the first has suffered some defeats and had been captured and put under house arrest in a hamilton called palace. that house arrest couldn't have been too tough for him. he was put under house arrest, a little village outside of london called put any. it was a series of debates known to history as the putny debate. the soldier presented to the gra dees of the army a set of demand. the soldiers have risked their lives for a constitutional order in which they'd be able to pap more. they wanted to have the rule of

law be guaranteed. they wanted to diminish the power of the house of lords because of course the great aristocrats owned so much land and had so much power in the states. these are thing we'd think of our common place in the order. famously art argued back against the -- they were called the ang agitators. at the very very least, people, have some say in choosing the governments and laws in which they live, must have a vested interest in the nation's welfare, they must own property. if you can't have property you can't have a vote. if you give a vote to people who

don't have property they're going to use it to take the property away from people who don't have property. thomas rainbow stood up and said, it seems to me that the poorest hee have has much right to a say as the richest he in england to some choice about the rules under which he believe. and therefore he captures the point about democracy which is entirely missed by plato and lincoln and which you wechurchhy missed. the virtue of being citizen of the state you have a right, an entitlement in having some say in how your life is going to be managed in that society. independently of how many property and education you'll have, don't forget that right up until about half a century, if

you were a graduator and you had an event who was smart and -- who'd like to bring that back. but this idea that it doesn't matter whether your a male, female, poor or not just being a citizen you have that right. now, becomes a very important point which is recognized by a whole litany of genius from the end of the 17th century up into the middle of the 19th century people recognize this point about the rights a person has to have his or her view accounted, taken into account. the consent of the people being jefferson's famous phrase, a really important justifying condition for government. and they were trying to think of a way that they could do that, that they could harvest that consent by getting over the

great problem that was identified. not so much about ignorance, short-term -- and so on. but the fact that there would be differences of opinion and that therefore will be this bable of confro confrontations. the other thing that we have a right to is good enough government. what i government. now, what i mean by the phrase good enough government is because outside the beltway there is nothing in our world perfect. so we know that government is never going to be perfect or even indeed all the time good, but we want it to be good enough so that we can live our lives. i mean, after all, we have our families, our careers. we treasure our civil liberties. we want to be able to apply our energies if we so choose to

creating lives that feel good to live, which are flourishing and have in them achievement and value. and that means that we don't want to have to be looking over our shoulders all the time at how we are being governed and the laws under which we are being governed. we want to be able to express our preferences and choices, and we want that to be translated into, parlayed into good enough government for all the things that we value. john locke, mont skoou, the founding fathers of this great nation here, benjamin constant, alexis detocqueville, jon stewart mill, i'm spanning a time between the 1680s and the 1850s and '60s, they all of them contribute odd to this discussion about how do you do that. and they model that between them they forged was the model of representative democracy, where the adjective representative is a very key term.

the idea is that you can construct institutions and practices to be populated by people who represent the people at large, those practices and those institutions will of themselves because of the way they are designed and structured and run will deliver the good enough government to which the people have a right. and the idea of a representative is not the idea of a delegate or a messenger boy or girl. we don't send representatives to the house of commons in the uk or to the house of representatives here just to be carriers of messages. we send them to do a job of work for us. we expect them to go get information, listen to discussion and argument, get the facts, debate, come to a judgment and then act in the interests of the country.

well, what i've just described there as the task of a representative of course is highly idealized because our representatives more often representing their own individual interests and the party line, much more than they are the interests of the coun y country, at least on every occasion. and the reason why that has happened is as the franchise has been extended more and more, as the vote has been rolled out to more and more people so that by the early decades of the 20th century most of what we think of as the liberal democracies, i use the term liberal not in your fejortive american sense, by the way, but in the correct european sense of a rational sensible person, that in the western liberal democracies the idea of a universal suffrage for all adult members of society who haven't disqualified themselves

is now taken for granted. but as that franchise was extended, so politicians realized that they had to organize more and more. they had to get themselves into parties. and then they had to exert discipline in those parties to ensure that they got the party agenda through. now, all you have to do is reflect for a moment on the very concept of party discipline to see that it contains at the very least the seeds of an anti-democratic aspect. it may not always be so but it can be so. i want to give a vivid example of how the idea, the control, the combine nature if you want to put it that way of party discipline can really seem to act against both democracy and against the national interest, and it relates to a tragedy unfolding on the other side of the atlantic, which goes by the

name of brexit. now, i'm going to be entirely neutral about brexit and just say i think it's a bloody stupid idea. and most people who have any view of the matter and who know something both in the united kingdom itself and in the rest of the european union would agree with that sentiment. in fact, they would think i was expressing myself rather mildly. about a year ago, just a few days over a year ago, the house of commons in london passed a bill, the notification bill, empowering the prime minister of the united kingdom tonight the european union the united kingdom is going to leave the european union. i'd make a quick footnote that this related to a subsection of the lisbon treaty about notification but not about the decision that parliament is meant to take of the matter. but that is another story under litigation at the moment in the

uk, so i will leave it to its own devices. but, this the vote in the house of commons for notifying the eu proceeded pretty well as followed. mp after mp after mp after mp went into the lobby to vote in favor of the bill saying this is a terrible idea, this is a very bad idea, we hadn't be doing it. it is known that the majority of members of the house of commons and an even larger majority of members of the upper house, the house of lords, are what is known as remainers, that is, people who don't want brexit to happen. and yet they have supported the government. both the government governing party, the conservative party, and the opposition party, labor party, have supported these measures. because the leaderships of the two parties have demanded of their mps that they vote according to the leadership's wishes. they've been whipped, as the expression is. i think it's an expression used

here too. they're whipped into the voting lobby for the party line. well, there is an outstanding, or let me use a more pejorative term, an egregious example of how party discipline reflects the interests of the party and the party line and not the interests of the country. this is just one little aspect. it's nevertheless an important one. the way our democracies have developed have this twin track aspect to it. on the one hand the widening of the franchise. on the other hand the fact that that meant that political organization had to get more and more smart so that agendas could be got through. acting, therefore, having the effect of being anti-democratic on too many occasions as a result of the fact that a particular agenda may not actually represent what the interests of the country are.

now, why make this happen? it's because both in this country and in the united kingdom we have a voting system for the house of representatives and house of commons. the first past the post voting system. which itself is a very distorting system of electing representatives. let me give an example. suppose you have a weird-looking gerrymandered constituency somewhere as it might happen in somebody's imagination and that there are 100 voters in that constituency. 100 voters. and suppose 10 people stand, 10 people manage to raise enough money to stand in the election. eight of them get ten votes each. one of them gets nine votes. and the last of them gets 11 votes. the person with 11 votes will go off to the house of representatives or the house of commons. 89 people in that constituency will be unrepresented. now, that is a commonplace, a

commonplace of elections in the united kingdom certainly. almost always there are very, very few cases that governments have been elected on a genuine majority of vote, over 50%. most governments are elected in the region of 40% or less of the popular vote cast. and yet the first past the post system artificially inflates the majority that they have in the parliament and therefore because in the uk we don't have a constitution, happily you do here, but we don't have a constitution in the uk, there it is said that the constitution, the unwritten constitution i should say, is a set of understandings that nobody understands. which of course is very useful to politicians because they can do what they like with it. so you get a situation where an unrepresentative voting system, party discipline, and then a number of other features, i go

into them in the discussion period if you'd like more detail on them, have this effect of making the system very vulnerable. if you have good people, people who are honorable, people who are dedicated, people for whom government is a vocation, who desire to make a contribution to their country. and there are many such people. although as you know anybody who goes into politics are about how idealistic they might be when they get there they find that to get up the greasy poll you have to be reasonably firmly attached to the rear end of the person abouf on the greasy poll, compromise, not telling you the complete truth about something, all the political careers end in failure because you begin by annoying one group of people because you're favoring another and then you annoy yet another group and eventually you've annoyed all groups of people, which is why you fail in the end. really politicians if they want to be remembered with affection

should be taking a page out of the poet k book and die early. but generally speaking politics is a hard game, it's a difficult job for the politicians but it is also one where the very nature of our order even including the responsibilities of the fourth estate to try to keep politicians honest or make them dishonest or make them cover things up and manage the truth. famous remark, be economical with the truth and to reach all sorts of compromises in order to get anything done in the political order, which is what makes us dissatisfied. so if it turns out that there are people in government, people in positions of authority and power, elected people, who are not of the very first rank and who are not dedicated, then the way that the institutions of our representative democracy can be manipulated can act against the interests of the country, and that is happening.

i'd just make one passing remark about the united states. after all, i'm a visitor in your very, very wonderful country. i have the greatest admiration for it. love many things about it. but can't help noticing that the electoral college was set up to ensure that extremely unqualified people would not get into high office. i'd leave that one hanging in the air. then i will say that in the case of the united kingdom our democratic order there has for too long, too long depended upon the individual personal honor of the people who have gone into politics. and as somebody who is very much a fan and a supporter of the great flawed but nevertheless great ideal of the european union, a project which of course has many difficulties and would take a long time no doubt to get

right but has so many good things about it, nevertheless at the same time i think the attitude of the british to the european union has too much been manipulated by misrepresentation of what it is and misunderstanding of its nature, a fault of the political order, i think also of the press in the united kingdom, the tabloid press particularly which has been extremely partisan in its opposition to the eu. but the idea of the eu has in just one respect militated against our politics in the united kingdom in the following sense, that the eu has made politics less ideological over time. the main parties have competed with one another over who best might manage membership of the eu. all of those great debates in the past about socialism and capitalism, all the deep divisions between people who had

passionate reasons for wanting to support one view of the world against another, those have rather faded away. with the result that you don't get that much first-rate people going into politics. there are more interesting things for them to do and to compete with one another about who's going to manage a system. one result of that would be, and this is an entirely personal judgment of mine, that very second-rate or third raitt people, too many of them, get into the system and they operate those institutions and they operate in those institutions in a way rather different from how their predecessors did. one of the great statesmen of the last quarter century are people who lived through the second world war. i often say to people if you want to see what the point of the eu is, spend a few minutes on youtube looking at footage of europe in 1945 and ask yourself isn't this a great idea, a project of peace and unity and the rest. but the statesmen who actually experienced that and saw it with

their own eyes are all gone and the people who now in politics, in our country, in the united kingdom, are people without that kind of experience or insight. and they've found that they can work the levers of these institutions in ways that serve them and their partisan interests and they forget something which is crucial in this balance between the right we have to say and the right we have to good government, and that is that democracy is not majoritiarianism. there's no such thing as a majority in a country. it's just the aggregation of minorities. and the respect for minorities, all those different minorities, their interests, their desires, their needs and harvesting their participation in the process and getting their consent is something it does take great political talent to achieve but it also takes a respect for those institutions which were so carefully and painstakingly

worked out by those great minds that i mentioned, from locke to mill and through your founding fathers here who devised the institutions of your constitution to try to ensure that democracy would deliver that good enough government. so if our democracies are under threat, and i end on this point now, if our democracies are under threat it's very bad news because you put that against the background that democracies don't fight wars with one another, that countries which are authoritarian are altogether too prone to using military power and quertive means even if they're non-military ones to get their way. we look at a world now where for example the people's republic of china, an extremely irredentist country, extending its influence into the south china sea, the spratly islands, exerting a huge

amount of influence in africa, sucking up an enormous amount of energy and resources from the middle east. it's a country which is growing in power and influence. it's a regional hegemon and very soon perhaps will be genuinely speaking a superpower. and it is not a democracy. it offers a model which is in too many ways really an unhealthy model. one of the great things about democracy is unefficiency. and i think we should enjoy the fact that inefficiency, which is a protector of civil liberties and which gives us all a chance to have a say, is something that we should cling to with as much enthusiasm as we can. so let us work to stop the erosion of our democracies first by being alert to it. and perhaps, and it's on this concluding sentence that i will stop, and perhaps one of the most dangerous things that is

happening in our democracies around the world today is the hornet's nest which has been opened by big data analytics, social media, the invasion of privacy, the use of these powerful influencing techniques, covert untransparent techniques of manipulation and influence which have changed the landscape of elections in just the last two years. thank you very much, everybody. >> doctor, thank you. i've got a few questions. maybe drive the conversation forward. remember, everyone, think of questions you want to ask professor grayling. i've got a series of questions about issues in my homeland, but i do have one in yours. i first saw you at hey on y in june of 2016. we were staying in a country home with other contributors to

the fair. breakfast, dinner, a conversation, universally brexist. talked to people at the event. conversation universally brexit. i met no one in any of those encounters that thought brexit was a good idea. until the driver came to the home to take us to heathrow hp and we got in the car and asked him about brexit and he was the first one i met who actually was seriously considering that leaving the union was best for the united kingdom. what was going on? >> well, what you spotted there is -- is this on? no? i'll press that button again. it's gone orange for some reason. is there somebody with some technical expertise? >> help is on the way. >> how does that sound? oh, that sounds perfectly -- thank you. evidently i have some. well, what you spotted there was

that people who are going to be at a literary festival are, let me just put it bluntly, the kind of people who wouldn't want to see brexit happen. and then you met somebody who did want to see it happen. and there was very definitely a democratic class and income distinction between those who wish to leave and those who wish to remain. i think it's important for this discussion about the apparent choice the country made to leave the eu since the politicians say the people have spoken, the people have chosen. we should remember the following very, very significant fact, a fact which feeds into something that has to happen after brexit, which is a re-examination of the political order in the united kingdom. of the people who were given the vote in the referendum, and i use that phrase advisedly because three significant groups of people were denied a vote in the referendum. people who had a major

monetarial interest in its outcome. young people, 16, 17-year-olds, that demographic had been given a vote in the scottish independence referendum of 2014. so there was a good precedent since it was their future that was at stake. they were denied a vote, and there had been discussion about giving them the vote, and it was turned down. citizens of other eu countries who live in the uk because of freedom of movement and so on, who live in the uk, pay their taxes, bring up their children, marry british nationals, they weren't given a vote. and yet they have a big stake in what the outcome would be. finally, our own fellow british citizens who've been living abroad for 15 years or more, were denied a vote. it seems an entirely arbitrary cutoff point and it would seem extraordinary in most constitutional borders that any of your citizens of voting age would be just denied a vote for that arbitrary reason. so those three constituencies

were denied, and therefore the franchise was restricted. now, of that franchise 37% of the total voted to leave. i'll repeat that. 37% of the total electorate voted to leave. by any stretch of the imagination, a thoughtful, mature constitutional order would not regard that as any kind of mandate for a major constitutional change of the kind that the present government has embarked on. i could elaborate on this even further but i really want to register the fact, there have been those politicians who are in favor of brexit say the people have chosen or the country has spoken and so on. it is a nonsense. that 37% of the franchise represents about 26% of the population. there was quite a big difference between people over 60 and people under 350 on the vote.

most people under 50 were very much in favor of remajor in the eu. the older demographic tended to have rather nostalgic views about britain's imperial past. and i have to say it's nearly two years since the referendum. quite a significant tranche of them have since died. so we can say that that 37% today would be even less. >> let me ask your views on some things happening in my homeland. you and i have talked personally about the question of truth and what does truth mean. folks like me can document -- i'm going to mention with the americans in the room, i'll mention president trump a lot. but i frankly view my comments on the president to be reflections of broader views in american society, not something that's sui general rhys with the president. the president admits to truthful hyperbole. the "washington post" counts that as 2,400 lies in the last 13 months. new jersey muslims celebrating

9/11. 9/11 -- families of 9/11 terrorists leaving the country a few days before the attacks. none of which were true. i grew up on western pennsylvania, which is largely trump country. a journalist there, selena zito, is not just from western pennsylvania, she's from my neighborhood. and selena has tracked trump country, rust belt voting very well. selena came up with the famous phrase "people like me took trump literally but not seriously. people who voted for the president took him seriously, but not literally." and when i talk to trump supporters, they don't try to defend everything the president says. but they often say and always suggest or indicate or i can sense that the president is speaking not toot specifics of a truth but to a greater truth. or that he's saying things that rhyme with a greater truth they believe in.

you're a philosopher. what are we to think about what that means about truth? >> it raises i think a very interesting point. and also you're quite right that this is one of the central issues of our time. i've got to give you an answer in two parts. the first part seems a bit sneaky of me. i want to finish a point about brexit but it relates to, this which is your driver to heathrow. would have been -- would have picked up a lot of things that we might regard as not entirely true about the state of britain or about europe that a great deal of opinion and polemic assertion which was very often deliberately false had been leveled at the country really i suppose in order to persuade people to use their vote, even indeed to prompt people to think that the vote would not really

be a vote for leaving but would be a protest vote or a vote against this rather austerity-wedded government that had caused quite a lot of harm to the economy, to the people in lower and middle incomes in the economy. and so they wanted to believe it. it was something that they felt would be a solution to the dilemma and the difficulty they felt. we've had this conversation about the great problem of inequality and injustice in society. we know that in the last quarter of a century or more people all around the developed economies on middle and lower incomes have seen their living standards stagnate. they've seen wealthy people get miles wealthier than they had been before. the sense of inequality and the injustice associated with it has been dramatically increased. therefore, when demagogues come along and they say to people we understand you have a problem, you feel left behind, you feel left out, you feel you're being

unfairly treated and we know where the solution is, hoerz where the problem comes from. it comes from the eu and then there might be lots of stories about why the eu is bad or having a bad effect. or it comes from the fact there are too many mexicans crossing the the border or we've outsourced too much of our production to the far east. i know the answer, and i'm going to provide that answer to you. and that is powerful because simple and direct message which seems to speak directly to the concerns that people have, but if it isn't backed up with evidence, with detail, with facts, with costings, with assessments of how it might actually be done, then it is not worth anything any more than any other assertion is. that's just point number one. but point number two is that it very often happens that the people who use these sorts of claims to capture the loyalty of the vote, the support of people who are feeling that they're that i bad situation, then it is deliberately misuse of that

metric. so what's happening? it's a product of the fact that in recent years, and this is something social media has a part to play in also, that opinion has become something that people might very, very sincerely believe in or feel extremely invested in and they want to assert that opinion and they've been given an opportunity to do so. everyone can now publish their view on twitter or facebook. and because it is their own view it doesn't matter what the details are, what the facts are, what the truth might be. and as a result we are now drowning in a tsunami of opinion, and it's very, very easy for somebody who says but look, here's a fact for people to say yes, that's your fact, it's not mine, that's your truth, i don't accept it. >> that's interesting because i'm going to quote you to you. all right? you write, in your "crisis in

democracy," that describing a populist leader, all right? someone who favors simple slogans instead of attention span. the immediate instead of the long term. the local and obvious instead of the larger picture. and all in the form of attitudes rather than worked-out ideas. that actually matches very closely what my former colleagues in the intelligence community described as the morning briefing. >> it's so true what mr. alexander nix said. he's the man who until recently was the ceo of cambridge analytica. you may have heard of that institution. he said what persuades people is emotions, not reasons. it's emotion, not fact. and vth we've known this for a very long time. the other thing everybody here was reading last night by david hume. and you remember david hume

points out that what motivates people to action is how they feel about things, not what logic itself tells them. besides the case of the donkey who was positioned between two equally succulent bales of hay but since he had no reason to eat one more than the other he died of starvation. david hume says what you need to get people doing things is to feel a certain way or to have a certain attitude. again let me cite the example of brexit. i had a friend who in his wretchedness and misery after the vote tried to soothe himself by collecting stories from elderly leave voters. and i'll quote a couple to you. one lady said she had voted leave because there was too much football on television. and another lady said she had voted leave because she wanted the old light bulbs back. that is, we had got a thing where we had energy-saving

lightbulbs. >> i understand that one. >> she didn't like the gloom, you can't see anything for a little bit, she wanted the old light bull bz back and she blamed the eu for that. quite rightly because it was in the eu directory. when youant analyze those sorts of remarks, they seem arbitrary but when you analyze them you understand that that person had an attitude or a feeling about the eu and not a set of reasons, not a worked out account of the eu budget and the making of eu law and so on. but an attitude. attitudes are things which are very easy to manipulate and to nudge. after all, the nobel prize was won last autumn by an economist who introduced this idea of nudging. little nudges, influence, drip feed of negative news about something would eventually form or help to form attitudes or shape attitudes in ways that will in practice result in vogt

one way rather than another. we have to remember, it's a terribly significant point, that in any yes no, either/or kind of vote, clinton/trump or in/out, yes/no kind of vote like a presidential election, referendum, you've got two blocs of voters who have pretty much made up their minds how they'll cast their vote and they're probably going to tune out of the campaign because they're not interested really. but it's the people in between, the people who haven't made up their minds, the people who are persuadable. the people who can still be influenced. and if you can get enough of them to move you can swing the vote the way you want. all elections and all referendums are actually won on very, very small margins. and this is why this targeting of untruths and half truths and attitude forming, emotionally charged messaging can have such a big impact on outcomes. and in the case both of brexit and of trump it's the argument in my book is that that happened in both those cases.

>> i ask you to do a little diagnosis of our country. so president trump gave a speech in poland last summer. it was a friendly venue, back to some of the comparisons you made earlier. it was a very well-crafted speech. but it was a bit controversial. most observers commented that it seemed to abandon the idea of america as an idea, america as a creedal nation, and america more as a nation, blood and soil. two-part question. number one, do you instinctively view america as a creedal nation as opposed to a nation of shared blood and history? and if it is a creedal nation, is it a universal creed? >> well, i think certainly it is a creedal nation. and i think the kind of ideals that the creed expresses are

ones that do pretty well everywhere. i speak as somebody who would be described i suppose in american terms as a sort of registered democrat, slightly on the left maybe. >> slightly? >> this is washington. you know about democrats and republicans. we've got a view about social justi justice, about make things possible for everybody, inclusive, about valuing things like autonomy as individuals, about liberty, but also recognizing that society is a theater of compromise and cooperation, that we do better by pooling resources and a civilized mature kind society is one that looks to those who are disadvantaged or who find the struggle in a very complex society too difficult for them. that kind of outlook is one

which i think could very well be described as creedal. now, in the american creed the idea is that every american citizen has a chance. you can all become millionaires. you can all become president. you can all have a great opportunity. and what's interesting and i speak as an outside your an observer but i report on something that an american friend told me. this idea of reaching to the horizon, getting to the top of the hill, that this possibility has seemed to have failed recently. people feel they're in the queue but the queue is not moving. and what's worse, it's not just that the queue isn't moving but that some people are jumping the queue. you think about the sort of trump base attitude. it might be that you're stuck in the queue and the people who are jumping are t. are women, fwa gays and mexicans. and that makes you very angry because they're getting an

advantage you feel they shouldn't be getting because you should be ahead of them in the queue. now, that's a very toxic attitude. it's a deeply resentful one. and you can see how very easily someone might travel right across the voting spectrum. someone who voted for obama now voting for trump. why? what's happened? well, it's this attitude, this feeling or emotion which is driving them across that terrain. >> speech after the speech in poland was the president in front of the united nations. i know your view on scottish secession. you opposed it very strongly. but president trump mentioned one form or another of the word sovereignty 22 times in one speech in front of the u.n. what does that suggest to you? >> well, it's interesting that. that's one of those words, it's like the word democracy, actually, which until 101 years ago no major statesman ever

mentioned in positive terms. queen victoria back in the 19th century thought democrats were dangerous and violent people. your very own woodrow wilson in 1917 said he was going to take the united states of america into the first world war to defend democracy. that was the first great statement by a great -- by a statesman about democracy as something worthwhile. and in exactly the same way the idea of sovereignty is another one of these feel-good terms and another one of these emotional terms that demagogues can reach for very, very easily. but what does it mean in the globalized world where everybody's interdependent? where it's very difficult, even for a mighty state like the united states to act unilaterally. where our that all the positiv

naturally carry were them the negatives about the way people have to act and what they have to do. the very effort to introduce a world legal order, humanitarian law, international law, an international criminal court, and the united nations and security council, all efforts to try to moderate or master what is in fact an international anarchy. >> based on sovereign -- >> based on would be sovereign entities. who when they try to act on a sovereign basis, by for example a single country going to war with its neighbors and very soon finds that it is caught in these spider webs of interdependency. so the idea of sovereignty, functionally it's a rather impractical and rather empty idea. but i should mention to you also it is an idea which is just because of its very protean nation is a marvelous resource for hypocrites in the following

way. supposing somebody says we would like to take back control of our borders and our sovereignty and not to be ruled by foreign capital. now, let us suppose that that is a scottish person talking about their relationship to the rest of the uk. your most gung ho brexiter is going to say oh, no, that's not a lot of nonsense, you can't possibly leave the united kipgd m, that's terrible, you ought to stay in. the strength we get in unity, combining together, cooperation, pooling our resources, that's what we need today. so you say to that person. oh, well, in that case we shouldn't leave the eu, rbt we stronger together, cooperating? oh, no, no. we must take back control of our boreders and sovereignty and so on. hip ok ryski is all that it is. it's a very handy term. >> i'm going to take the frichblg of the chair to ask one more question of a little more of a personal nature as a 39-year air force officer. you all need to take that as kind of the two-minute clock to get your questions ready.

seemingly out of the blue and literally i guess, in 2006 you wrote a book called "among the dead cities," which was your view of the strategic bombing campaigns of world war ii. what did you say, and why did you choose this to write about? >> well, now more recently i've published a book on why war happens in society, that i have an interest as somebody who is a representative at the human rights council at the u.n., i have an interest in conflict and the problems of the international order. but that earlier book was predicated on the following. and i mentioned something of this to you. when i was a little boy you my great ambition was to be a spitfire pilot in the battle of britain which would have required time travel, better eyesight and probably since i was only 7 my mother's

permission. but i was so passionately interested in the air war that that interest blossomed away from the battle of britain and into the whole aspect of the air war and the second world war. and i noticed that almost every book about the air war was always rather muted or half and half about the bombing campaign campaigns. it occurred to me the allied nations and the rest of the uk and its aallies had a duty to beat nazis and to beat japanese militarist aggression. so that was the first duty of the allied powers. but we all know that the ends do not justify the means and that if we are going to be very honest with ourselves, it we are going to scrutinize ourselves, do an audit on our behavior in the hoping of learning some lessons from them, we sneed to look at all the different ways we behave. now, in 1949 in the fourth

geneva convention a clause was drafted for that convention outlawing indiscriminate attas, aerial bombardment on civilian populations. and the governments of the united kingdom and the united states refused to have that clause incorporated. that clause was finally incorporated in the first protocol in 1977 when the fourth convention was updated. i have to sell you that the united kingdom is a signatory to it but the united states has not yet signed it. this is a protocol against indiscriminate attacks on civilian populations. by the way, the u.s. does observe it in practice. it is now international law. so it seemed to me that one should look at the logic of it, look at the understanding of it. most of the people who ran the royal air force, not arthur harris who was head of the royal bomber command, but the other

people, these are people who had been to what we call public schools in the uk, had read their greek and latin, who knew their thucidites. they knew he said he had written his account of the peloponnesian war because of the corruption of morality that war causes. he pointed out that in the earlier years of the pell month peloponnesian war the city of micelini on the island of lesbos broke its obligations to athens and they decided to punish it by massacring the population and burning the city to the ground. but overnight they decided that's too extreme. so instead what they did was arrested the leaders and executed them. 12 years later the little island of milos did the same thing. or rather it refused to break its treaty with spartda and to join agentens. and the athenian generals went and they said to the leaders of this little island, they said, the strong do what they can and

the weak bear what they must. if you don't agree with us, that's the ipd of you. they didn't agree with them, so the athenians killed them all. killed all the mep, took all the ohm and children into slavery and they burned their city. and t this. ucidites said this is evidence of how things can go badly wrong in a time of war as the war goes on and begins to corrode our sense. the royal air norse bombing command did not begin bombing civilian populations until the third year of the year. in 1939 when the war was started the r.a.f. was told not to carry live munitions over the coast of continental europe. instead they carried leaflets telling the germans to surrender. now, that's an act of wishful thinking if ever there was one. but they didn't carry munitions until the third year of the war. and when they did start carrying munitions they bombed by night and they bombed cities indiscriminately. i should tell you one thing,

that the bombing command did lots of experimentation on kinds of munitions. on the raid on hamburg, a raid code named operation gomorrah, quite appropriately, five days of bombing of hamburg in 1943. they bombed 30% high explosives to blow off roofs and blow out windows. 70% incendiaries. and it caused the most tremendous firestorm. more than 30,000 civilians who died that night of the fire storm did so because all the oxygen was taken out of their bomb shelters where they were hiding. they just couldn't breathe. and anybody caught in the firestorm was so badly burned that their corpses were the size of dolls. a very early form of napalm was used in the account, a kind of phosphorus munition, which set people alight. and they jumped into the canals to put out the flames. and as soon as they got out of the water the flames reignited. so it was a most terrible

attack. and you when you think there was knowledge of it during the war, there was a committee in england called the committee against night bombing run by a man called porter catchapu and vera britain who had written a wonderful account of the first world war. they said -- the bishop of chichster said what their message was, which is we are fighting barbarians, why are we behaving like them? this was a telling question in the middle of the war. i wanted to do this audit. i wanted to praise and honor the terribly brave men who conducted this campaign of the war but to say that the policy was badly mistaken. >> your prose has gotten great credit for the deep respect with which you write about bomber command and u.s. 8th air force. >> thank you. and i should say the united states army air force conducted itself in the european theater admirably. they bombed by day. they did try to do precision

bombing. they aimed at economic and military targets. they tried to avoid civilian populations. and it wasn't until curtis lemay took the 21st bomb group to japan -- >> in the pacific. with that we should open to questions. larry, you've got some instructions. >> i'll give the general and the professor a moment to take a sip of water and catch their breath. i just wanted to offer a few instructions. a couple of our money graduate students will be roaming the room with microphones. if you'd like to ask a question get their attention, they will pass the microphone to you. please hold your question until you have the microphone. would love it if you stood and introduced yourself when you ask the question. i'd like to note that we are -- we do have c-span here, who is taping the event for broadcast at a later date. so if you are camera shy, we do have a reception following the event we would love you to attend, everybody to attend and there will be an opportunity to ask questions more personally at that time. so with that please raise your

hand. >> one final caution. please form your question in the form of a question. >> go for it. right over here. why don't you go ahead and set up a second one over here. >> thanks very much for this great event tonight. oh. great. in one of his books historian yuval harardi poses the tremendous advances humanity is making in the form of artificial intelligence, automation and other fields is going to lead to what he calls at some point a useless class because we just can't stop this inexorable growth. how do we make sure we're harnessing all the benefits we need from these technologies to keep pace in so many fields whether it's medicine, foreign

policy and intelligence, but also prevent what he has 24 distaupian view from coming to fruition and making sure we enfranchise empowerment for this group that he thinks will become useless in the future? >> one thing -- sorry, was there a problem there? >> no. >> one thing it's tremendously important to bear in mind when we think about the future that greater and greater application, intelligence will bring about. also genetic engineering of human beings and new generations of human beings. anything that can be done in the way of either the use of a.i. or in the use of genetic manipulation of the human genome, anything that can be done will be done. however hard we try to stop it, however much we try to limit it. poor people or very rich people or somebody or other will make

use of these things and these things will happen. and so it behooves us to try to be as prepared and proactive as we can be about managing the outcome. the point you raised is a good one. a.i., for example -- as you know, there's a distinction between artificial intelligence systems which are dedicated to a particular task like brain surgery or teaching mathematics to grade school children or driverless cars, a bit of a bump in the road for one of those just recently, tragically. those dedicated a.i. systems do pose a risk from the point of view of the jobs that they would take away. you look at automation in industry you see that happening already. you think back to the fact people used to say when there are great transitions introduced by technology, in fact the move

of people from one sector to another tends to happen with temporary pain. there are people who are out of work. but the point is often made 70% of the u.s. population in the 1870s was in agriculture. by the 1950s it was 3%. that whole movement of population had gone into other commercial and industrial activities and relatively painlessly. the great depression had nothing to do with it. but relatively painlessly. people forget, however, that there were 25 million horses in the united states of america in the 1870s and by the 197 0z there were 9 million of them. are we men or are we horses? will they make us redundant or will we find a new thing to do? the real question is whether artificial general intelligence,

a.g.i., that is, human-like intelligence but much superior to our human intelligence, because the minute we get a system which is as intelligent as we are, within minutes or hours it's going to make or create vastly more intelligent systems. what would such a vastly more intelligent system think to itself if it asked itself the question what is the most deceptive, destructive element in the world today? what's the biggest nuisance in the world today? the answer is us. unless we coulds somehow build into an a.g.i. system, some kind of restraint, some ethical restraint or a means of switching it off if we're in a position to do so. i think there are genuine risks out there. there are of course also huge, huge promises that a.i. might bring to us. they might open up horizons that we can't at this moment begin to imagine. and when you consider that we've

solved many problems technologies have introduced in the past, we should be hopeful, we should be optimistic about it, because after all, what's the alternative? pessimism? well, just find a high building and jump off if that's your view. so far as genetic research is concerned and manipulation of the genome to produce 6'5", blond, 150 iq super athletes, that's going to happen. and perhaps it may be a good thing because after all we are now in charge of our own evolution and maybe it's sort of inevitable that in 300 years' time people will look back at s us, bad teeth and bad manners and whatever, and think thank heavens we discovered how to manipulate the genome. >> question over here. >> good evening, sir. you mentioned earlier that

democracies garner the support of the governed. in the u.s. we have not officially declared war since world war ii but we've had repeated armed combat, major combat operations. and we often dwabt the limits of the authorization of use of military force from 2001. what do you believe is the right feedback mechanism and the right level of support that the leadership should get from the governed before entering into armed conflict? >> well, at the very simplest and most basic it would seem to me that the government of the day ought to be authorized to take action in defense of the state, of the nation, but that to engage in offensive activity there does need to be greater con sebt. harvested in one way or another as it might be by another election in the united kingdom what might happen would be a general election.

but the idea there should be a real sentiment in the nation based on understanding of the consequences and what's at stake seems to be a sine qua non. the unfortunate fact of history is when kings, emperors, governments have decided to go to war, they've tried to harvest that consent by means of jingoism and appeals to patriotism and how wonderful it is to die for your country and demonization of the enemy. and those sorts of techniques are not themselves democratic techniques. they are techniques of propaganda. he at the very least we would say surely the commander in chief must have the right to authorize defense but that you need something a bit more, maybe an agreement of congress, for offensive activity. now, that of course means that you can offense and defense. sometimes to defend yourselves

you have to be on theive. so it erases a number of smantical issues. but somehow or other staking the country with you without being a case of propaganda doing it or emotion dogging it, would be ide ideal. >> several summers ago my government expected your government to support action against syria for crossing a red line and parliament came back from recess and voted no. how do you personally view that dynamic as to what happened? >> let me give you a slightly different example. that might have ban an unhelpful thing in the short term but in the long term it was a good thing. when osama bin laden was located and was killed in that

operation, killing osama bin laden and disposing of his body in a way that was undiscoverable, i think he was dropped into the gulf or something like that, was in the short term the right thing to do because to arrest him and put him on trial and have him in guantana guantanamo, it would have made him an even bigger martyr and there would have been more trouble ensuing. but in the long term the idea of honoring the concept of due process and the rule of law and respecting the laws of war, would have been good for the argument we would like to make that that is how the world should comport itself. so the short-term view and long-term view are in conflict with one another and very often in times of emergency and when one is calibrating the degree of danger that an action would produce, the short-term view tends to prevail. >> time for a couple more questions. who's got the microphone?

ma'am, right here. >> brad smith of microsoft has called for a geneva convention in cyberspace. who do you think should be involved in that process if you think that the existing infrastructure that we have from a legal perspective is insufficient to deal with the effects that attacks may have on civilian populations. >> i very much back the idea of an international convention. we've all been interested in informed parties that would include governments, ngos and players in the whole cyber universe. to discuss this incredibly important question. because there are two issues that have somehow got to be reconciled. one is that until a few years ago what people most valued about the internet or cyberspace was the fact of its democracy, the fact it was open, the fact it provided a huge number of

opportunities, that people could get information if they weren't blocked as they are in some places like china and elsewhere, that this is wonderful and it could transform the world in wonderful ways. but then we see the inevitable he happen, which is people learn how to game that system, how to play it and how it make use of it in covert and untransparent ways, to influence and to manipulate and get a great swamp of untruth out there into cyberspace. how do we control the latter while preserving the former? what kind of regime for managing the internet without making it just a reprise of the gatekeepers who only allowed certain voices to be heard, still giving opportunities for people to express themselves. at the same time -- i have said that the internet is the biggest

washroom wall in history on which everybody can scribble their graffiti, their nonsense, their lies, their vituperation. and part of the job as educators we have is try to help my students acquire the critical acumen that makes them good at evaluating reliable information from unreliable information. i love to tell the story about a very distinguished french colleague of mine, a philosopher called bernard henri-levy. you may have heard of him. he has a great hairstyle and he wears plunging decolletage. his shirts are open to his belly button. magnificent hairy chest. i once said to him, bernard, why do you wear your shirt open to your belly button? and he said, and i quote, "because i'm hot." he published a book a couple of years ago in which he quoted an

unknown thinker of the french enlightenment called batul, only to discover after the book was printed on the internet there was no such character, it was printed by some joker on the internet. and if you consider batul's theory is botulism you might have -- you may have thought that being able to see things through would -- but that leaves the more general question open, which is how are we going to balance this need to stop this venomous hateful lie-dispensing instrument which is the internet and cyberspace and social media, with the desire to have a great

international global conversation from which we could benefit. how do we balance those two things? maybe one of the great challenges our world faces now. >> take one from the back over here. over here to the right. and then could you position one more over here? and then we'll call it an evening. who's got the sniek here we go. >> hi there. first of all, i'd like to thank you. one of the good ways of knowing that you're learninging? and knowing the truth is the more you know the more questions you have. i have so many questions i have a hard time picking one. that being said, i want to return to kind of our main theme tonight. the influences of war and democracy. a lot of people say that war is inherently antithetical to many of the levers of democracy. yet jefferson said, somewhat infamously, that the tree of liberty has to be refreshed every 80 to 100 years with the blood of tyrants and patriots. sec def hagel said world war ii

veterans had a marked effect on the way we engage in political dialogue. i kind of wanted you to investigate what those influences are and maybe also include the idea of the amount of troops in world war ii is a lot different in terms of demographics than for instance iraq and afghanistan. thank you. >> well, in the case of that remark by jefferson, and even homernods i have to say one thing that jefferson said that i would not really want to agree with. in the 18th and 19th century a number of medium, you can quote all the way from jefferson to ruskin who extolled the great virtues of war. very paradoxically, actually, because they used to say war is what strengthens the people, the flower of manhood is honed by the experience of war. well, how could that be? all the good guys go off and fight in the war and all the bad, weak, feeble, one-eyed guys stay home and reproduce

themselves. so how can that be evolutionary? this idea, this poetic nonsense about refreshing the tree of liberty with our blood, personally i would rather have a great bunch of senators who didn't have to learn that to be great senators by having to go to war. it would be so much better if they didn't learn that at the dpps of tens of thousands of other people who suffered the way they did. it's an interesting fact that the consequence of the experience of combat, when you read accounts of how people behave in situations of battle. a very, very interesting. i an examination of some of the literature on this for the book on war. and i was struck by the power of certain stories you talk about how important stories are. of a canadian lieutenant. he was with his platoon in normandy after the landings and

they came under fire. and he grabbed the gun from his gunner and returned the fire and the burn gunner was extremely angry with him. he said give that tobacco to me, you don't have to clean the damn thing afterwards. it was obvious he had no intention of shooting anybody with it because he would have to dismantle it and clean it. and this officer said he and his sergeant used to have to go up and down the firing line kicking their troops to get them to look up in the grex of the enemy and point their rifles in that direction. and this is an indication of how ineffective conscript armies can be. about 20% of them tend to be fully effective in battle conditions. and what that says is something about the horror, the way people who are appalled by the prospect of killing other people or seeing blood and guts and all the horrors of combat. you have at the moment, because

of the highly effective body armor that infantry troops have, and the excellent front line surgery and medical evacuation troops have today, many people who would have died in former conflicts are alive today with terrible injuries or terrible experiences. a tsunami of post-traumatic stress disorder. this tells us this is not great for human beings. it is be not a great experience the mamth of people who go into it. people who are great leaders like general hayden, who have seen conflict and commanded men in situations of difficulty, are precisely the people who are able to raise above and turn it into wisdom, which is the point you're making about those statements after the war. but for the great majority of people there's nothing nice about war. >> one last question over here.

yes, please. >> i'm a little bit camera shy. my question is about your comment on the china motto. recently xi jinping become -- his term limit is limited and he had it inserted into the constitution. what do you think the direction china is going and should the west be worried about it? because china has a lost influence on soft power and militarily nowadays. that's my question. >> i have to confess that i think people should be a bit concerned, not just the west but also the neighbors of china. i'm sure that the likelihood of china using its now very considerable military muscle is

probably limited to its irredentist traditions, to try to get taiwan back, to get control of the islands in the south china sea which it sees as so important to its trade routes and its import of oil. but also flounce the wto influe things happen in the pacific region and also the rest of asia. the kind of decisions that are made by an authoritarian long-term government are not the kind of decisions that tend to get made in democracies. they tend to be ones that cleave much more closely to the national interests as perceived by those leaders, who would be prepared to use means that would on the whole be unacceptable in a democratic order. and the fact that president xi has made himself president effectively for life is i think

a bad sign because it means now, especially that he has centralized in his own hands all the chief offices of state, it means now that we have somebody who is as powerful in some ways and controlling the kinds of resources in some ways that -- not that far off from being near where the united states is but with somebody who is obviously calcula calculating, very clever, playing the long game. we all know the famous remark that cho enlai made about the french revolution, what he thought of it. it's too early to say. this is related to the chinese attitude of being patient and getting the advantage over the longer term. you can be very sure that xi becoming life president is a step in a move. what that move is, part of the

jigsaw puzzle with the spratlys and everything else china is doing, is one everyone ought to be thinking about. >> we'll reconvene in the cocktail hour afterwards, where you can ask further questions. now please join me in thanking dr. grayling. [ applause ] captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2008 captioning performed by vitac