editor robert kurson on his new book "rocket men." >> i never realized what a major role the wives played. it was impossible to disregard it. that's mostly what they wanted to talk about. all three of them believe without their wives they could not have pulled this off. apollo 8 looked to many people like near certain death to go on this thing. it was all rushed. these men needed wives at home who were absolutely supportive and did not reveal to their husbands just how terrified they really were. >> q & a, sunday night at 8:00 p.m. eastern on c-span. former cia director michael hayden spoke with author a.c.

grayling about the influences on war and democracy. they talked about new throatseao democracies and the decision by the european uni-- u.k. to leav the european union in brexit. dedicated public servant and retired as a four star general officer and the highest ranking us air force intelligence officer ever. he continues his public service in a number of fashions. he is, as mentioned earlier, serving to help educate the young people who are entering or have already entered the national security and intelligence work space, offering pragmatic and practical

advice as to how that work should and can be done. but he's also prominent in public speaking about the country and on cnn, serves as one of their senior national security experts. and then lastly is the author of two books now, the first book was "playing to the edge" which was a memoir of sorts that looked largely at the intelligence community in the era of terror. and his new book coming out on the 1st of may is "the assault on intelligence." you can order it on amazon today. with that, i'd like to welcome general hayden up to the podium. [ applause ] >> i appreciate larry's

infomercial. you may have to pay more for postage if you do order it through amazon. [ laughter ] . >> thank you for the opportunity. i cannot do the biography of a.c. grayling justice in the entire time we have remaining for tonight's event. i will not try to do that. i will try to hit a couple of core points to explain why it is we thought we wanted him to come and be spart of the sch-- part the schar school/hayden center. anthony was born in zimbabwe in what has been described as a british colonial enclave. he worked to become an icon of

british education. he's a historian, a philosopher, a 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 his perspective on british public affairs, a member of the u.n. human rights council as well. in 2011, started a new institution, the new college of the humanities in london to continue his life's work. a bertrand russell award winner in 2016. 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 welsh countryside. i was there to push that other book that larry referred to. 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. one that struck my eye was this discussion that was going to go on in the big tent for this very medieval fair like activity, in the big tent, 1400, 1600 seats available for a discussion, an intellectual history discussion of europe and the 17th century. we went and i was absolutely struck. number one, just the -- the word entertainment value is coming to mind, but that's not what i mean. the intellectual engagement value of the discussion that

drew the whole audience in. i began to put into place things coming out of that discussion, the era of enlightenment, the direction of impericism. i was trying to write about the press, the academy, intelligence in a post-truth world. i dug out my old brochure from the welsh village and hunted anthony down and had some wonderful conversations with him on some of the topics that we will cover tonight. i hope in some way i've repaid the debt but i'm sure it's not in equal measure as i think you

h jud will judge after this evening's event. we'll talk about democracy and war and other broad issues. i get a chance to continue the conversation between us and then you're up. so again to formulate in your own mind the kinds of questions you might want the professor to answer during our time together. with that, a good friend, doctor professor a.c. grayling. [ applause ] >> thank you very much indeed to general hayden for this lovely invitation. i will confess to you that today is my birthday. i couldn't have had a better birthday present than this. [ applause ] >> thank you. why did i tell you that? the point about leaving your

21st birthday behind is you really ought to be forgetting subsequent birthdays. [ laughter ] >> my themes are democracy and war. because we haven't organized breakfast for you tomorrow morning, i'm going to have to be brief. i've really got to just touch heads of points on these two great topics. the way i'm going to bring them together is as follows. i read a book recently on war, a philosopher's inquiry into the question, why is war a feature of human history and human societies? what is the wellspring of these drug drug -- destructive events? the two great questions that appear to press and each of the questions need to be dug into to get the real texture of them, are, is it human nature that

somehow or other constitutes a prompt for these very violent confrontations between groups or people or within a society and between nations? or is it something in the way that we arrange our affairs? in the question and answer or discussion session i will give you some more reasons if you want them as to why i reached the conclusion in this book that i agree with people who say that war is an artifact of the way we arrange our political and international affairs, that 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 confessed to just such a sentiment. even though that might be the case, that is not the same thing as war. oddly, war is a matter of

violence and destruction at the tip of the spear of military activity. most of what happens in preparation for war and arranging the logistics, manufacturing armaments and uniforms, training soldiers, making plans requires calm and cool heads and rationality. organization, the which is really a very key feature of wash and which distinguishes war as such from more local and temporary flare-ups between people at a football match or a saloon bar, that distinction 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 is not a feature of human nature. if it were a feature of human nature, there would be far less post-traumatic stress disorder

experienced by people who have seen the most horrific things in the field of conflict. my reason for couple this point with the question of democracy is that, as you know, it is common place that democracies don't make war on one another. democracies do make war. they make war on other people, maybe on non-democracies. but they tend not on the whole to 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. we look around the world and we see a number of figures on the world stage who in their practice, mr. xi jinping is one, mr. erdogan of turkey is another, the leaders of poland and hungary in particular, but here's a troubling consideration, since 1945 the

majority of countries in the world have pretended to become democracies. this is because they've looked at the great examples of democrats, the united states of america and the western european countries, the wealthy, the influential countries, that countries which also have a certain amount of military punch, and other countries have wanted to emulate them by adopting that model. but now there's an entirely different set of models on offer, in particular, of course, the chinese model, where there is no democracy and civil liberties hardly exist. you have a form of state capitalism, the result of which is a massively growing economy, a very powerful economy, ruled by a regime which in effect promises to people who are in business or productive industries the thing that business people really like, which is stability and

predictability. a point about democracy is it doesn't provide quite the same measure of predictability as stability. if there's a change at the next election, there might be a different tax regime or restrictions on environmental, so the business is not quite as plane sailing as a businessman in china, as long as as you behave yourself. that model would be a very attractive one, as you can imagine, to a president of a developing country who thinks to himself or herself, 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 in our sphere. for that reason, we might wonder to ourselves, isn't it worthwhile to try to defend and promote the values of a democratic order, not merely

because of the rather key point that i will reoccur to, that it does harvest the consent of the people who live in a 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 discussion, criticism, argument, people putting forward ideas and other people knocking them down, being hunted down by the press yapping at your heels all the time to make sure that you behave yourself. whereas by contrast the sound of tyranny is silence. there's no discussion there. there's no opportunity for criticism or dissent. if any kind of opposition exists, it does so underground. it's very easy in those sorts of circumstances for civil liberties to go by the board. civil liberties matter. think of it, we all know that

privacy, which of course we've given up because we have embraced with such enthusiasm social media, we've stripped ourselves naked to the view of any private or public agency that cares to have a look at us. i mention public agency with a certain diffidence in the circumstances. [ laughter ] >> a very good friend came to see me in london. he lives in new york. he mentioned that he put on his google calendar the fact that he had an outpatient procedure in manhattan. he was bombarded with advertisements from local crematoriums. this wonderful thing, the access that we have to cyberspace and these electronic communications, have stripped away our privacy.

perhaps among our civil liberties, what shreds of privacy remain we still value. above all, we value freedom of expression. not that that is an absolute value. we all know the trope, you know, that it is really a crime against humanity to shout "fire" in a crowded theater. we all know that. so on a case-by-case basis, you could 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 the name. you can't have cultural and artistic endeavor. you can't have a legal process where people can accuse and defend themselves. you can't have a political process where people can put

forward ideas and others can challenge them. civil liberties hugely matter and they are intimately annexed to the idea of democracy. democracy and civil liberties grew up hand in hand from the enlightenment of the 18th century and they depend on one another. in those places where democracy is under pressure, turkey or hungary for exampling, the d dimunition of civil liberties -- what i would like to do is remind you of something that you all know, because you were all reading plato in book last night. so you remember what he said about democracy.

it was plato that gave democracy an extremely bad name. he thought that democracy was a form of mob rule. he thought this because he thought the people were uninformed, short-termist, self-interested and lacked any conversation for people who weren't themselves or their close kin, who would have so many conflicting desires and interests that tit would end in anarchy, there would be disorder in society. he thought as so many did that one or another form of more authoritarian top down

governance of preferable. the view is still held by plenty of people even today. famously winston churchill, everybody knows he's said that democracy is the least bad of bad systems. he also said the strongest argument against democracy is just a few minutes conversation with any voter. [ laughter ] >> that would immediately bring to the fore these selfsame considerations that plato had advanced. m melkin famously said to believe in democracy is to have a pious hope that checkive wisdom wil i will -- collective wisdom will emerge from ignorance. in the year 1647 in the middle of the 17th century in ta lull n

the civil war in england when charles i at suffered some defeats and put under house arrest. he was put under house arrest and the new model army of cromwell met at a village outside london. there were a series of debates known to history as the putney debates in which the soldiers presented a set of demands. the soldierins had risked their lives for a new contusionstitut order in which they would have more say. they wanted to have universal male suffrage. they wanted the rule of law to be guaranteed. they wanted to diminish the power of the house of records

because the great aristocrats held so much power. these are now things we would think are commonplaces of democratic order, but then they were regarded as revolutionary. the a-- saying at the very, ver least, people, men who are going to have some say in choosing the gom government and the laws under which they live, must have a vested interest in the nation's welfare. they must own property. if you don't have property, you can't have a vote. you give the vote to people who don't have property, what are they going to do with it? they're going to use it to take the property away from the people who have property. a man named colonel thomas

rainbrandt stood up and said, it seems to me that the poorest he in england has as much right to say as the richest he in england about a choice about the laws under which he will live. he captures a point about democracy which is entirely missed by plato and churchill, that merely in virtue of being a citizen of a state, you have a right, an entitlement, to have some say in how your life is going to be managed in that society, just in virtue of that fact, quite independently of how much property or education you have up until about a half century ago in england if you were a graduate of oxford or cambridge, you had an extra vote because you were smart. you had two votes and everybody else only had one. rather amazing.

the oxonians among us would like to bring that back [ laughter ] >> now comes 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 of people who recognized this point about the right a person has to have his or her view taken into account, the consent of the people being in jefferson's famous phrase, a really point justifying condition for government. 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 plate toe had identified, not so much about ignorance and short-termism and so on, but the

fact that there would be differences of opinion in the demos and there would be these confrontations. how do you get from the consent of the people to the other thing that we all have a right to? and the other thing we have a right to is good enough 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, montesquieu, 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. the 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 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 western liberal democracies, i use the term liberal not in your pejorative 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. [ laughter ] >> i think 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 to notify 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

follows. 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, however idealistic they may be, when they get there they find that to get up the greasy pole, you have to be reasonably firmly attached to the rear end of the person above you 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 take a leaf out of the poets' 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-rate 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. it's about how you bring together lots and lots of minorities. 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 coercive 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 hegemony 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 inefficiency. 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. [ applause ] >> 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 in june of 2016. we were staying in a country home with other contributors to the fair. breakfast, dinner, a conversation, universally brexit. 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. 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? [ laughter ] >> help is on the way. >> how does that sound? oh, that sounds perfectly -- thank you. evidently i have some. so that's good. 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. that is this, of the people who were given the vote in the referendum -- and i use that phrase advisedly because three very significant groups were denied a vote in the referendum, people who had a major material 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 orders 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. for a major constitutional change in the kind that the present government has embarked on. so i could elaborate on this even further. but i really want to register the fact that when those politicians who were in favor of brexit in the uk say the people have chosen or the country has spoken and so on, it is 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 50 on the vote. most people under 50 were very much in favor of remaining in the eu. the older demographic seemed to have nostalgic views. and nearly two years since the

referendum, quite a significant group of them have died. we can say that that 37% today would be even less. >> let mu ask you your views on some things happening if my homeland. you andvy talked personally about the question of truth and what does truth mean. i'll mention president trump a lot. frankly, my comments on the president to be reflections of broader trends in american society. not something that's sui generis with the president. the president admits to truthful hyperbole. the "washington post" counts that as 2400 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 in person pennsylvania, which is largely trump country.

journalists 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. 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 to the specifics of a truth, but to a greater truth. or that he is saying things that rhyme with the greater truth they believe in. what are we -- 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.

this is one of the central issues about time. i'll give you an answer in two parts, the first part may seem a bit sneaky of me. i want to finish your point about brexit. but it relates to this. which is your driver to heathrow. would it veterhave picked up a f things we might regard as not entirely true about the state of britain or about, about europe. that a great deal of opinion and polemic assertion, which was very often deliberately false had been leveled at, at the country really, 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 purpose vote or a vote against this rather

austerity wedded government that had caused quite a lot of harm to the economy, people in the lower and middle incomes of the economy. they wanted to believe it there was something that they felt would be a solution to the difficulty they felt and the dilemma. we've had this conversation about the great problem of inequality and injustice in society. we know in the last quarter of a century or more, people all round the developed economies on middle and lower incomes have seen their living standards stagnate. they've seen wealthy people get miles wealthier than ever before. the sense of inequality and injustice associated with it has been dramatically increased. and therefore, when demagogues come around and they say to people, we understand you have a problem. you feel left behind, you feel left out, you feel that you're being unfairly treated. weaned know what the solution is here's where the problem comes from. it comes from the eu and then there might be lots of stories why the eu is bad or having a bad effect. or it comes from the fact that

there are too many mexicans crossing the border or we've outsourced too much of our production to the far east. i know the answer and i i'm going to provide the answer to you. and that is powerful because simple and direct message, which seems to speak directly to the concerns that people have. 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, the vote, the support of people who are feeling that they're in a bad situation, then it is deliberately misuse of that rhetoric. so what's happening? it's, it's a product of the fact that in recent years, and this

is something which 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. everybody can publish their view on twitter or facebook. because it is their own view, it doesn't matter what the details are, what the facts are, what the truth might be. 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. >> i'm going to quote you to you, all right? you write in your crisis in democracy -- that describing a populist leader, 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 with what my former colleagues in the intelligence community describe as the morning briefing. >> well that's -- it's so true, what mr. alexander nicks said, he's the man who until very really was the ceo of cambridge analytica, you may have heard of that unts constitution. he said what persuades people is emotions, not reason. emotion, not fact. we've known this for a very long time. >> david hume, you remember david hume points out that what motivates people to action is how they feel about things, not what logic itself tells them. he cites the case of borro and

zest. he the donkey positioned between two equally delicious bales of hay. since he had no reason to eat one over the other, he died of sta starvation. he said what you need to do is get people to feel a certain way. 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 -- and i quote a couple to you. one lady said she had voted to leave because this was too much football on television. and another lady said that she had voted leave because she wanted the old light bulbs back. that is, we've got a thing where we have energy-saving light bulbs. >> i understand that one. >> she didn't like the gloom, turn the switch on and you can't see anything for a bit. she blamed the eu for that quite rightly, because it was in the

eu directory. now when you analyze those sorts of remarks. they just seem arbitrary and random. when you analyze them, you understand that that person had an attitude or a feeling about the eu. and not a separate reason. not a worked-out account of the eu budget and the making of the eu law. but an attitude, attitude 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. so 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 voting one way or another. we have to remember, terribly significant point, that at any yes/no, either/or kind of vote,

clinton/trump, yes/no, you've got two blocs of voters who have pretty well made up their minds hout they're going to cast their vote. they're probably going to tune out the campaign because they're not that interested, really. it's the people who are in between, the people who are persuadable. the people who can still be influenced, if can you get enough of them to move, you can swing the vote the way that 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 of brexit and of trump, it's the argument in my book, is that that happened in both of those cases. >> let me ask you a little bit 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. it most observers commented that it seemed to abandon the idea of america as an idea. america as a creedo nation and mir more as a nation. blood and soil. number one, do you instinctively view america as a credo nation, as opposed to a nation of shared view it as a credo nation, what's the creed. >> i think the creed is ones that would do pretty well everywhere. i speak as somebody who would be described, i suppose in american terms as a sort of a registered

democrat. slightly on the left. this is washington, so you know about democrats and republicans, we've got a view about social justice, about making things possible for everybody, being inclusive. about valuing things like autonomy as individuals, our liberty. but also recognizing that society is, a theater of compromise and cooperation. that we do better together. by pooling resources. and that a civilized mature kind society is one that looks to those who are disadvantaged or who find the strug until a very, very complex society too difficult for them. that kind of outlook is one which i think would very well described as credal. in the american creed, there's the idea that every american

citizen has a chance. you can all become millionaires, you can all become president. what's interesting is i speak as an outsider, an observer. i report something that an american friend told me. that this idea of having this possibility as an american, of reaching the horizon, getting to the top of the hill, this possibility has seemed to have failed recently. people feel that they're in the queue, but the queue is not moving. what's worse, is not just that the queue isn't moving, but that some people are jumping the queue. when 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 it are women, gays, and mexicans. and that makes you very angry. because they're getting an advantage, but you feel that they shouldn't be getting because you should be ahead of them in the queue. that's a very toxic attitude. a deeply resentful one. can you see how very easily

somebody might travel right across the voting spectrum. somebody who voted for obama now voted for trump. why? what's happened? it's this attitude, this feeling or emotion which is driving them across that terrain. >> the speech after it was the president in front of the united nations. president trump mentioned one form or another, of the word "sovereignty." 22 times in one speech in front of the u.n. what does this suggest to you? >> well it's interesting, that. because 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. you remember the queen victoria back in the 19th century thought that democrats were dangerous and vile people.

well 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 statesman about democracy as something which is very worthwhile. in exactly the same way that a year of sovereignty. one of these feel-good terms, one of these emotional terms that demagogues can reach for very, very easily. what does it mean in a globalized world where everybody is interdependent. where it's very difficult even for a mighty state like the united states, to act unilaterally. where our interdependencies are such that all the positives naturally carry with them the negatives about the degree of latitude. the effort to try to produce a world legal order, humanitarian law, international law and

international criminal court, all of these and the united nations and the security council, all efforts to try to moderate or master what is in fact the international anarchy. >> based on sovereign -- >> based on would-be sovereign entities. when they try to act on a sovereign basis very soon finds that it is caught in the spider webs of interdependency. so the idea of sovereignty is a functionally, it's rather impractical and rather empty idea. i should mention to you also that it is an idea which is just because of its very protean nature is a marvelous resource for hypocrites. in the following way. supposing somebody said we would like to take back our borders and not be ruled by a foreign capital. let's suppose that's a scottish person talking about their

relationship to the rest of the uk. well your most gung-ho brexiteers are going to say that's a lot of nonsense, you can't possibly leave the united kingdom. that's terrible, you want to stay in the strength that we get in unity, combining together, pooling our resources, that's what we need today. you say to that person, in that case, we shouldn't leave the eu. aren't we stronger together? cooperating? >> oh, no, no, we must take back control of our borders. hypocrisy is all that it is. it's a very handy tool. >> i'll ask one more question, more of a personal nature as a 39-year air force officer. you 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, you will see now more recently i published a book on why war happens in society. i have an interest in, somebody who is a representative at the human rights council at the u.n. i have an interest in conflict and the problems in the international order. that earlier book was predicated on the following and i mentioned something of this to you. when i was a very little boy, 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 seven, my mother's permission. i was so -- i was passionately interested in the air war, that interest blossomed away from the battle of britain and to the whole aspect of the air war in

the second world war. i noticed almost every book about the air war was almost always rather muted or half and half about the bombing campaigns. >> it occurred to mow that the allied nations and especially the western allies, the uk and the u.s. and it's other allies had a duty. and the duty was to beat the nazis. and to beat japanese militarist aggression. 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. if we are going to scrutinize ourselves. do in ordered behavior in the hope of learning some lessons from them, we need to look at all the different ways we behaved. 1949, in the fourth geneva convention, a clause was drafted for that convention. outlawing indiscriminate

attacks, aerial bombardment on civilian populations. 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 tell you the united kingdom is a signatory to it, but the united states has not yet signed it. it was a protocol against indiscriminate attacks on civilians. it is now international law. so, so it seemed to be that one should look at that look at the logic behind 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 bomb club, but other people, these were people who had been to what we call public schools in the uk. had read their greek and latin. who knew that uclides, knew that

he said his account of the peloponesian war, the corruption of war. he pointed out in the early years of that war, the city on the island of lesbos broke its treaty obligations to athens and the athenians decided to punish them by burning the city to the ground. overnight they thought that's too extreme, we shouldn't do that they repented. instead what they did was arrested the leaders and executed them. 12 years later, the little island of nilos did the same. it refused to break its treaty with sparta and join athens. athens generals went to this little island and said the strong do what they can, and the weak bear what they must. if you don't agree with us, that's the end of you. the milians didn't agree with

them, so the athenians killed them all. euclides said this is evidence of how things can go badly wrong in the time of war as the war goes on and begins to corrode our sense. the royal air force bomber command did not begin bombing civilian populations until the third year of war. 1942. in the 1939, the raf was told not to carry live munitions over the coast of europe. instead they carried leaflets telling the germans to surrender. they didn't carry munitions. until the third year of the war and when they did start carrying munitions, because bomb something so inaccurate. they bombed by night and the bombed the cities indiscriminately. i should tell you one thing, that the bomber commander, lots of experimentation on kinds of munitions. on the raid on hamburg, a raid code named operation gomorrah,

quite probably, 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. the more than 30,000 civilian who is died that night in the firestorm did so because all the oxygen was taken out of the 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 attack. a kind of phosphorus munition which set people alight and they jumped into the canals to put out the flames, as soon as they got out of the water, the flames reignited. so it was the most terrible attack. when you think that there was knowledge of it during the war, a committee in england. called the committee against night bombing.

and they said the bishop of chichester said what their message was, which was we are fighting barbarians, why are we lee hafing like them? and this was a really telling question in the middle of the war so i wanted to do this, i wanted to praise and honor the terribly brave men who had conducted this longest 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 usa. >> the united states army air force conducted itself in the european theatered a americaably. they bombed by day, they did tried to do precision bombing. they aimed at economic and military targets, they tried to avoid civilian populations and it wasn't until curtis lee may took the 21st bomb group to

japan, in the pacific. >> with that we should open it to questions. larry? >> give the gentlemen 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 fine graduate students will be roaming the room with microphones. if you would like to ask a question, get their attention and they'll pass the microphone to you. please hold your question until you have the microphone. we 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 that we would love to you attend. everybody to attend. and there will be an opportunity to ask questions more personally at that time. s;j raise your hand. >> final caution, please form your questions 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. >> hello. >> great. >> in one of his books historian uval hirari poses that 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 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, intelligence, but also prevent what he has is this dystopian view of coming to fruition and make sure we ensure

enfranchisement and empowerment for this group that he thinks will become useless in the future? >> one thing, sorry, was there a problem there? one thing that it's tremendously important to bear in mind when we think about the future that the great application of artificial intelligence will bring about and also genetic engineering of human beings and new generations of human beings. is that anything that can be done in the way either of the use of ai or the use of genetic manipulation of human genome. anything that can be done, will be done. however horde we try to stop it however much we try to limit it. there are people, very rich people or somebody or other will make use of these things. and these things will happen. so it behooves us to try to be, as -- prepared and proactive as

we can be about how we can manage the outcome. the point you raised is a very good one. ai, as you know there's a distinction between artificial intelligence system which is 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 recently. tragically. and those dedicated ai systems do pose the risk from the point of view of the jobs that they would take away. we look at automation in industry and we see that happening already. we think back to the fact that 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 have to happen with temporary pain. but new things are discovered. the point is often made, 70% of

the u.s. population in 1870s was in agriculture. by the 1950s, it was about 3%. the whole movement of that population had gone into other commercial and industrial activities. and relatively painless. but relatively painlessly. people forget, however, that there were 25 million horses in the united states of america in the 1870s and by the 1950s there were nine million of them. the question is, are we men or are we horses? what is ai going to do for us? is it going to make us redundant or will we find new things to do? that's a good question. a more serious question is whether artificial general intelligence, 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. and what would such a vastly more intelligent system think to itself if it asked itself the question -- what is the most disruptive, destructive element in the world today? what's the biggest nuisance in the world today? well the answer is us, isn't it? that would be the end of us. unless we could somehow build into an agi system, some kind of restraight. some ethical restraint or a meeps of switching it off. i think there are genuine risks out there. there are huge, huge promises that ai might bring to us, they might open up horsen horizons can't begin to imagine. when you consider is that we've solved many problems that 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. we have to try to be optimistic about it. so far as genetic research is concerned and manipulation of the genome to produce 6'5" blonde, 150 iq super athletes, that's going to happen. and perhaps it may be a good thing. because after all we're in charge of our own evolution and maybe it's sort of inevitable that in 300 years time people will look back on us, sort of -- bad teeth and you know, bad manners and what have you and think -- well, thank heavens we discovered the genome. >> a question over here? >> 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 conflict and major combat operations and we often debates

the limit of the operational military force since 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 engaging in an armed conflict? >> it would seem to me that the, 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 consent. harvested in one way or another. as it might be by maybe another election in the united kingdom, what might happen would be a general election. but the idea that they should be a, a real sentiment in the nation, based on understanding of the consequences, and what's at stake. seems to be a sinequonon.

the unfortunate fact of history is when kings and governments decided to go to war, they decided to harvest that consent by means of gingoism and how wonderful it is to die for your country and demonization of the enemy, the "othering" of the enemy. and those sorts of techniques are not democratic techniques, they're the techniques of propaganda. so at the very, 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 in congress for offensive activity. now that of course means that you can distinguish between offense and defense. sometimes to defend yourself you have to be offensive. and so it raises another of semantical issues. somehow or other, taking the country with you, without it

being a case of propaganda, appealing to emotion doing it, would be the ideal. as you know, nothing is ideal. >> several summers ago my government expected your government to support action against the syrian government with regard to crossing a chemical red line and party was called back from summer recess and voted no. who you do you view that dynamic as to what happened? >> well, let me give you a slightly different example. in order to illustrate the answer. the answer i'm going to give is that that might have been an unhelpful thing in the short-term. in the long-term it was a good thing. let me give you a different example. when osama bin laden was killed in that operation, killing osama bin laden as disposing of his body in a way that was undiscoverable. i think he was dropped into the gulf or something like that it

was in the short term the right thing to do. to arrest him, put him on trial and have him in guantanamo, it would have made him a 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 of the rule of law, and of respecting the laws of war, would have been, would have been good for the argument that we would all like to make. that that is how the world as a whole shod comport itself. so the short-term view and long-term view are in conflict with each other and oftentimes in times of emergency and calibrating the degree of danger that an act would produce, the short-term view tends to prevail. >> time for a couple more questions. 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 with all be interested in informed parties which would include governments, but ngos and players in the whole cyberuniverse. to discuss this incredibly important question. because there are two, there are two issues that have somehow got to be reconciled. the one is until a few years ago, what people most valued about the internet or cyberspace was the fact of its democracy, the fact that it was open that it provided a huge number of opportunities. that meme could get information if they weren't blocked as they are in places like china and elsewhere. from getting that information, and that this is wonderful it could transform the world in

very positive ways. but then we see the inevitable happen which is people get to know how to game the system and how to make use of it in covert and untransparent ways to influence and to manipulate and to get great swamp of untruth out there. into cyberspace so 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 gate keepers who only allowed certain voices to be heard, still giving opportunities for people to express themselves? but at the same time. i've said and general hayden has quoted me on this, that the internet is the biggest wash room war in history. on which everybody can scribble their graffiti and their nonsense, their lies, their vituperation and part of the task that educators have and i

have as an educator is to try to help my students acquire that critical acumen that makes them good at evaluating reliable information from unreliable information. and i love to tell the story, because i tell it at every opportunity, about a very distinguished french colleague of mine, a philosopher, a rather magnificent individual. he has a great sense of style and he wears plunging decolletage. magnificent hairy chest. i once said to him, bernard where 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 bodul. only to discover that there was

no such character, made up by some joker on the internet. and my friend had not checked it out and if he had realized that botul's theory is botulism. and you have to be really good at spotting something fishy, is at the very least something we need to equip people with. 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 something open and free, a great international global conversation from which we could all benefit. how do we balance those two things? maybe one of the great challenges that our world faces now. >> one from the back over here.

over here to the right. i think we've got one right over here and could you position one more over here? and then we'll call it an evening. >> who's got the mike. >> i would like to thank you one of the good ways of knowing that you're learning something 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. and hagel said veterans in the senate had a very marked effect in the way we engage in political dialogue. so he kind of wanted to you 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 hominids, one thing that jefferson said that i would not want to agree with. in the 18th and 19th century. there were a number of people, can you quote from jefferson to rusken, who extolled the great virtues of war. very paradoxically, because they used to say war is what strengthens the people and the flower of manhood is honed by the experience of war. well how can that be? all the good guys go off and fight and die in the war and all the bad, weak, feeble, one-eyed guys stay home and reproduce themselves. how can that be an evolutionary advantage? so this idea, this poetic nonsense about you know,

refreshing creative liberty without blood, 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 they didn't learn that at the expense of tens of thousands of other people who suffered as they did. it's an interesting fact that the consequence of the experience of combat. when you read actual accounts of how people behaved in situations of battle, a very, very interesting. i did an examination of some of the literature on this and i was struck by the power of certain stories, anecdotes, 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 brain gun from his gunner. and returned the fire. and the brain gunner was

extremely angry said give that back to me. stop shooting, you don't have to clean the damn thing afterwards. it was obvious he never had any intention of shooting anybody with it 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 at the men i and so they would point their rifles in the right direction. this appoints out how ineffective con script armies can be. what that says is something about the horror, the way that people who are appalled by the prospect of killing other people or seeing blood and kbuts and all the horrors of combat. you have at the moment because of the highly effective body armor that troops infantry troops have, and the excellent front line surgery and medical

evacuation, that front-line troops have today, many people who would have died in former conflicts, but who are alive today with terrible injuries or terrible experiences. the tsunami of post traumatic stress disorder. which tells us this is not great for human beings, it's not a great experience. the majority of people who go into it. people who are great leaders, like general hayden, people who have seen conflict who have commanded men in situations with difficulty. are precisely the people who are able to rise above that experience and to turn it into wisdom. which is the point you're making about those, those statesmen after the war. but for the great majority of people. there's nothing nice about war. >> one last question over here? >> i'm a little bit camera shy. my question is about your, your comment on china, recently a

month ago, xi jinping become his term limit is eliminated. he inserted into the constitution. what do you think the direction china is going? and should, should the west be worried about it? because china have a lot of influence both on self-power and militarily now a days, yeah, that's my question, thank you. >> i have to confess to you 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 ambitions, to get taiwan back to keep control of those islands in the south china sea.

which it sees as so important to its trade routes and import of oil. but also to influence the way that things happen in the pacific region and in the rest of asia. so the, 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 interest as perceived by the 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 officers 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 come, not that far off from being near where the united states is. but with somebody who is obviously calculating very clever, playing the long game. we all know the famous remark that cho enlai said when asked what he thought about the french revolution. he said it's too soon to say. 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 that china is doing, is one that people ought to be thinking about. we will reconvene in the

cocktail hour after where can you ask further questions. now, please join me in thanking our speaker.

attorney jeff sessions testifies at a senate hearing on the justice department's budget. senators asked him about immigration, presidential pardons and special counsel