so we feel really good about our prediction. it was an order of magnitude more accurate than what it would have been if we used the earlier predicted wins. -- predicted winsds. we have taken this algorithm and provided early tesh provided an early version of surface -- and provided an early version of this service. how it might benefit those today that count on better understanding of aerospace. peter: microsoft is also a commercial company out to make a profit. where is the business model? mike: we believe strongly in basic research. our mission is really just to try things without a business model. we are taking technologies,

taking techniques, we are applying these in ways that are novel and may turn into a business, but we don't always know in the beginning. right now we are doing is using this as a showcase of what can't done with cloud-based machinery technology when you combine them with services that other people can leverage to build new businesses on top. peter: mike's account ski of microsoft, inc.'s for your time. -- mike is a kautsky -- mik e zyskowski, thanks for your time. >> c-span, brought to you as a public service by your local cable or satellite provider. [captioning performed by the national captioning institute, which is responsible for its caption content and accuracy. visit ncicap.org] >> on newsmakers, lillian castro on the obama administration's housing to pop -- housing policy , and recovery from the mortgage crisis.

newsmakers, sunday at 10 a.m. and 6 p.m. eastern on c-span. >> i am not one of those who believes in the psychiatric examination of people. i believe most of these historians should be on the crepe gush on the couch themselves. i don't judge people other they have a firm handshake or i contact. i try to listen to what they say. you don't learn anything when you are talking. >> he was self-conscious but not self-aware. endless ironies here. nixon did have a psychiatrist. he was an internist. and he was careful not to have

nixon think he was analyzing him. nixon went to him because he had psychosomatic illnesses. he was given some mild there. even though he went to one, he hated psychiatrists. he was afraid of looking at himself in a realistic way. richard nixon was one of the great crutch carriers of all time. this hurt him because he was lashing out at enemies. , focusing on personal so's -- personal stories associated with our 37th president. on c-span's q&a. >> next, chris murphy talks

about u.s. foreign policy and efforts to broaden the debate beyond military action. he spoke of the woodrow wilson international center for scholars. this is about an hour. >> we are pleased to have senator murphy with us today. i am the vice president of the woodrow wilson center term that center. it is a trusted base for nonpartisan dialogue on issues. it is also a place that does a great deal of research on science and technology and population environment and leadership in many other areas. this is actual -- this is actually a unusual number.

senator bob corker was here a couple of weeks ago at our board meeting. chairman royce was here. i will introduce the senator second. aaron david miller is our moderator today. he is the vice president for new initiatives here at the wilson center. he helped to form late u.s. policy in the middle east and the arab-israeli peace process. he has its -- he has received honor awards and is the honor -- is the author of a number of folks. a fabulous book that i would recommend you go and get, the end of greatness. why america doesn't want another great president. senator chris murphy our main

speaker today, is a junior united states senator elected in 2012. murphy serves on several committees, including appropriations, health education, labor pensions and the committee on foreign relations. prior to his election to the u.s. senate, murphy served connecticut's fifth congressional district for three terms in the u.s. house of representatives and also served in local politics in connecticut as well. it gives me great honor to welcome to the podium senator murphy. thank you. [applause] senator murphy: well, thank you very much, andrew, for that kind introduction. thank you to the wilson center for hosting me here today. i'm really looking forward to a conversation with aaron david miller in absentia. let me think my great friend jane harmon for all the fantastic work she's doing here. in connecticut, we are very proud about our largely unpublicized connection to the history and legacy of president wilson. very few people know this, but he actually started his academic

career teaching at wesleyan university and many credit his positive experience with his teaching job there as an inspiration to keep him in the profession. he spent, as did his first wife, many of their summers in old lime, connection. she was part of the old artists colony and he made most of his decisions sitting at florence griswold's kitchen table in old lime. so we love the connections that we have to the wilson legacy and to this center and it's really wonderful for me to be with you here today. i remember this particular day that i'm going to talk about like it was yesterday. it was the spring of 2011.

i was in a small, small village called parmacon in harat province, afghanistan. it was my third and really my most memorable trip to afghanistan. president obama's afghanistan surge was under way. and icef command had sent us to this tiny little village to see general petraeus' counterinsurgency strategy in action. we went out to parmacan where we met with 100 army commandos which was led by a young man from a town of goshen, connection. they were wildly impressive. there was no doubt that they had brought a modicum of piece and stability to a parcel of harat province that had been under the thumb of the taliban just months

ago. after a briefing in their ramshackle headquarters, they led us on a heavily guarded walk through the town, along with a collection of village elders. it was a stunningly beautiful walk. rocky, dirt roads surrounded by acres and acres of the most beautiful flowers that i had ever seen. irrigation canals maintained with u.s. dollars protected by our newly arriving soldiers. a half dozen workers were busy harvesting whatever crop these flowers provided a canopy for. i finally asked one of our hosts, one of our elders what that crop was. poppy, of course, he said plainly. what do you do with it once you harvest it? he said we sell it. we sell it to the taliban, who comes and buys it for a pretty good price. that's what he said within ear shot of u.s. soldiers who no doubt knew all about this arrangement.

an arrangement for which they were sent to provide cover and protection. now, i can't say that i was stunned because by this time i had heard it all during my trips to afghanistan and iraq, but this was as clear cut an indictment of our presence in those theaters as you could imagine. 100 troops in far western afghanistan. they were buying us temporary space, and we could credibly claim that we had purged the taliban from control of that town. but the taliban were lying in wait. they still surrounded the village. worse, they were marching into town to collect the revenue that would fuel their return once we left. we were achieving our military objective, no doubt. but we had done nothing meaningful to change the underlying long-term susceptibility of parmacan to extremist influence and control. they still had no way to feed their families other than producing poppy, which was being sold to the very guys that we were sent there to eliminate. local governance was either irrelevant, corrupt or nonexistent. all signs pointed to the

disturbing but to me increasingly unsurprising reality that our military success was practically meaningless there if we didn't have a viable strategy to change the economic and political reality on the ground for these people. now, in iraq, this contradiction played out with even more devastating results in the aftermath of the late bush administration surge. waves of u.s. troops and even bigger waves of u.s. cash provided a security blanket over parts of iraq, while political and economic progress went in the opposite direction. the u.s. handed out bags of cash to sunni tribal leaders, a short-sighted, impractical strategy for the long term while

prime minister al maliki waged a war against the sunnis, to the point that when our troops left, they were happy to align themselves with anyone who was willing to fight the central government in baghdad. now, today i'm confident that the vast majority of our high level military planners and diplomats fully understand this failing of our u.s. military intervention over the past decade. plus just last week army chief of staff, a battle hardened veteran of iraq said this when he was asked about calls to deploy troops back to the middle east to fight isis. he said, quote, my worry is could i put 150,000 soldiers on the ground and defeat isis? yes. but then what? it would go right back to where we are. a year later it would be right back to where we are today. before we even consider anything like that, we need to solve the political problem. and of course secretary bob gates remarked upon leaving the defense department that any future president that contemplated sending combat troops back to the middle east should have their head examined. and yet there are these creeping signs that we're on the verge in many ways of repeating the very mistakes that we should have learned. the architects of the iraq war are back, unapologetic and in charge of republican candidates' foreign policy.

the intraparty fight between john mccain and the interventionalists and rand paul and the isolationists is over with a convincing neoconservative victory. republican senators right now are calling for thousands of american troops to march back into iraq and maybe into syria too. and recently, these senators are making an interesting claim, one that we wouldn't have thought possible a year or so ago. they're saying that the american public is on their side. interestingly, they have a few polls to back them up. there is numbers on both sides but a few recent surveys suggest that americans are scared to death by isis and they want washington to do something about it, something dramatic

something that answers the ferocity of isis with the kind of powerful shock and awe response that only america can muster. so mccain and graham are right that some polls are showing that americans support putting combat troops into the fight against isis. these polls also have something else in common. they ask respondents a battery of questions about how concerned they are about isis and how they feel about how president obama is handling the problem. but then when it comes to possible responses, they ask only one question. do you support combat troops or not? there is no other option, there is no other alternative. send troops or effectively do nothing. given how scared people are of the real perceived threat that isis poses, they choose to do the only something that they're presented with. but polling and simple organic voter touch and feel tells us that america is still very weary about war. witness the unexpectedly ferocious backlash against the president's plan to bomb syria in 2013. and no matter what the neoconservatives and republican presidential candidates say, the lessons of places like parmacan and mosul haven't gone away. that's why i believe now more

than ever that americans want an alternative vision for how america can protect itself from threats like al qaeda and isis and the taliban that are something more than simple military intervention. americans will responsible to a new forward-looking, progressive strategy that meets these new threats with new tools, rather than simply relying on interventions that were designed for a time when armies marched against each other and grand peace treaties ended conflicts. and to be political for just a moment in a place that i know is not supposed to be political this is a moment for progressive democrats to seize the opportunity to lead. i'd argue the congressional democrats, especially over the last few years, have been absent from a serious interesting debate over the future course of american foreign policy. yet we weigh in on the weighty issues that demand our temporal attention, but it's only president obama and the republicans that are attempting to offer a broad vision for the rules of how we engage in a world full of very new, very scary threats. now maybe our vision silence has been understandable since we've frankly been able to lean on a president who we broadly agree with. we read the president's may 2014 west point speech and in it there's really little to argue with.

but we only have his cover for the next 18 months. now, i support secretary clinton and i support her foreign policy ideas, but in a 50-50 country, we can't simply hold our tongues and hope that she wins. we have to show some leadership and show it now so that the american people have a choice when evaluating how to respond to these new enemies that we face. so this is the context in which we decided to produce a set of eight pretty common sense principles that we think should guide american foreign policy and congress' foreign policy ajeblda as we reorient our policies to meet these new challenges. first we argue that america's nonkinetic tool set is dangerously underresourced. we seem to have forgotten the lessons of post-world war ii in which we were spending 3% of gdp on foreign aid in an attempt to rebuild stability in war-torn areas. we learned the lessons from after world war i and we invested gigantic sums of money in rebuilding our friends and our enemies to use economic

development and political inclusiveness to stomp out instability that could undo the post-war balance of power. today foreign aid is 4% of what it was in 1950 as a share of our economy. a 96% realtime reduction. so we believe that a new marshal plan for at-risk regions like the middle east or portions of russia or china's periphery can get us the stability and win us the allies that were produced by a large nonmilitary investment in the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s. now, we don't need to spent 3% of gdp on foreign aid on this but you can't justify spending 15 times more money on military and military aid than we do on us aid and peacekeeping combined. secondly we believe in working multilaterally to increase your effectiveness, working through international bodies like the u.n. and nato make us stronger, not weaker.

just as importantly, multi lateral support can be a check on american hub russ. if no other ally is willing to join us in a military endeavor why shouldn't it cause us to question the wisdom of that intervention in the first place? yes, there are instances where america is under immediate threat and we can't wait for partners to sign up. but as a rule with limited exceptions, our actions are more effective within coalition. third, we believe in a far more thoughtful and restrained approach to military intervention. significant military action has got to have clear goals, exit strategies, a plan to pay for it and it's got to be authorized by congress as the framers of our constitution intended. if you measure calls to dramatically increase troop levels in iraq to fight isis i'd argue that none of these tests can be met. fourth, we believe that military action is only worthwhile when there is a political strategy to

clean up the mess once the fighting ends. this is our caution. the u.s. military is the most powerful in the world but even it has limits. if there isn't a political answer on the ground to remove the impetus for terrorist organizations, then military gains are only going to be temporary and rarely worth the price in lives and treasure. fifth, we believe that covert actions like mass surveillance and large scale cia lethal operations have to be constrained. the dramatic expansion of our intelligence operations after 9/11 needs greater oversight and

restraint. the usa freedom act is a step in the right direction but more has to be done, like taking large scale military operations like drones away from the cia for good. sixth, we believe that strength at home leads to strength abroad. americans simply won't support more foreign aid spending if we aren't rebuilding our own roads and schools. if we aren't addressing their own economic limitations. that makes sense in part because america leads by example. countries follow our lead because they look up to our track record, to our standard of living. as it slips, so does our ability to lead. seventh, we need to watch the gulf between what we say on human rights and what we do about it. how can we tell other countries to get serious about how they treat people if we are mealy-mouthed on torture. if we hold people at guantanamo bay with no hope of trial. if we listen in on our allies and own citizens. our ability to affect international change on human rights is dependent on our ability to walk the walk at home. finally, we believe that climate change has to be at the center of every international relationship we have. future generations are going to judge us by whether we elevated this discussion in every forum possible given the catastrophe that will be wrought if we don't act. plus the effects of climate change like increased drought in syria and mali are already here. now, i think it's important to say that i'm not suggesting that there's anything earth shattering or ground breaking in these principles, but at least

they would stand in contrast to the enviably simple world view of our neoconservative competition. they argue for ending sequester only for the defense budget. we'd say that the other elements of the national security budget are just if not more important than military funding. they believe that participating in international -- that participating in international organizations demonstrates weakness. we think it's the key to strength in this new multi polar world. they think that terrorism exists in a military vacuum. we believe that it exists in a political and economic vacuum and that our policies should respond accordingly. they think that there's a choice between protecting civil liberties and national security. we believe that they're co-dependent. and these differences play out in realtime as applied to current crises. a progressive foreign policy applied to the fight against isis would start with an honest assessment of our goals. for instance, it sounds really good to say that the american objective is to defeat isis. but should it be?

frankly our policy should be to eliminate the ability of isis to attack the united states. and whether isis is going to be wiped from the face of the middle east is really a question for our partners in the region. and if our goal is to end the threat of isis in the united states, then ground troops makes no sense. but it would argue for the massive plus up of assistance. it would argue for a robust military partnership with our regional partners so long as that partnership is broad and deep. it wouldn't ever rule out going after high value targets that present a threat to the united states and it would call for us to learn from the successes of those bags of cash that we handed out in anbar province in mountains. on the night of our delegation's visit to parmacan we were briefed by admiral mccraven at special operations command.

as we walked in the briefing room, he showed us a pyramid of pictures of the most wanted terrorists in the region. at the top of that pyramid was the photo of osama bin laden. what we didn't know was that before and after our briefing mcraven was putting the finishing touches on the bin laden raid. the night after we left, blackhawk helicopters set off to take him down. despite what we saw, the bin laden raid was a reminder of the seemingly infinite capacity of our armed forces, our men and women in uniform. when you watch them work, it is easy to understand why our influence in the world has been viewed through the prism of the u.s. military for so long. they are damn good at what they do. but today as president obama has warned us, we can't view every problem as a nail simply because we have the most effective hammer in the world. the tactic of terrorism is impossible to fight an army. disease epidemics can't be cowed by an air force. today we are reading reports of attacks on the parliament building in kabul.

it's crushing to hear. after over a decade of american intervention in afghanistan. but last week a report noticed almost by no one noted that the taliban in fierce fighting had taken back four villages in harat province, afghanistan, in the district right next to parmacan. the new threats that we face don't look like the old ones. that's why we need new rules for engagement and new allies in this endeavor. thank you to the wilson center for having me and i look forward to the discussion. [applause] >> senator, let me again welcome you to the wilson center. i didn't know about the connecticut connection but it's an important one. wilson was our only ph.d.

president and our only one buried in washington, d.c. let me thank you also for a thoughtful and thought-provoking discussion. there's a lot to unpack here. i have a few questions for you and then we'll go to audience questions, but i want to make several points. not necessarily directed at your presentation, although there are some relationships. it's more a personal cree de cour. first i think the challenge for this republic is not to identify progressive or conservative foreign policy, the challenge essentially is to try to find a policy that obviously is designed to protect the national interests but also a policy that in essence should work. the dividing line for that policy, and i worked for republicans and democrats and i voted for republicans and democrats shouldn't be between left and right, liberal or conservative or republican and democrat. it should be between policies that are smart on one hand or

alternatively policies that are dumb on the other. and if you want america to be on the smart side, it seems to me we need to focus on substance and effectiveness, not politics. on reality. that is the world the way it actually is before we get around to conceptualize and conceive how we want it to be rather than ideology. on tactics for sure but also on sound strategies. and understand that while american leadership is critical, it also has limitations too. second, from my own personal experience, doctrines and principles can be extremely effective, particularly in articulating clearly and with a measure of honesty a general approach so that congress understands our policy and more important so the american people understand our policy. the problem with doctrines and

principles, of course, is that they're limited in how they apply to a blueprint to navigate in what has become an anomalous hypocritical, cruel and unforgiving world. think about it just for a minute. we participated in military action in libya but not in syria. we supported an arab spring in egypt but not in saudi arabia. we claim to stand for democracy and human rights, particularly in the wake of the arab spring and yet our most stable partners right now aren't democrats, they're authoritarians in the gulf and in egypt, and we're negotiating even now as we speak a punitive nuclear deal with iran and yet at the same time for whatever the reasons, we can't, won't or are unable to take a tougher view on iranian repression at home or their efforts to advance their interests in the region. so the question is how do you reconcile these anomalies and in fact do you need principles, but do you also have to recognize that a principleless foreign policy for a great power may well be more suited to the complicated world in which we

live in. finally, if you ask me what the greatest challenge was for our foreign policy, it would be finding a better balance between the risk readiness of previous administrations, perhaps one in particular, and the risk aversion perhaps of the current administration. that is to say we've abandoned the middle ground. we insist on looking at the world as all in or not in. and the question is, is there a more effective balance between risk readiness and risk aversion, perhaps borrowing on some of your principles, that might in fact serve and suit our interests. one final point, we have an

extraordinary advantage over the rest of the world. it's basically our location. we have nonpredatory neighbors to our north and south and fish to our east and west. but one historian called brilliantly our liquid assets. these oceans literally create the framework within which we see the world. our privileged security position explains our naivete. we somehow believe we have abandoned the notion of what it's like to be a small power. it explains our pragmatism. we believe every problem in the world can somehow be fixed. it explains our arrogance, because we don't have to listen. great powers have tremendous margin for absorbing mistakes and even very costly errors. we need to take account of that and understand that our view of the world is not necessarily the one that will be held by those whose security positions aren't as fortuitous as ours.

so with that in mind, let me ask you a question or two and then we'll go -- we have plenty of time, we'll go to audience questions. i'll start with something you didn't refer to, which is congress' role in foreign the founders in their infinite wisdom created a system in which powers and separated. if i asked you whether or not you thought congress' role in foreign policy was an effective and great one what would you respond to that? >> i hope this is a call of action to congress. it's underlaid by my belief that we have largely been out to lunch. and what i agree is our constitutional obligation to set a foreign policy moving forward.

the constitution gives us specific powers to decide how much money gets spent on a variety of activities. we haven't past a state department authorization bill through the united states congress in over a decade. it tells us that we are the only branch of the federal government to declare war and we simply have chosen not to do that when it comes to the current conflict unless you believe that the 911 is the authorization to take on isis. so i think that senators menendez carter and corker have done a credible job of puts the foreign relations committee in the senate back as a well driven element -- i mean, the willingness to take hard votes on intervention in syria or our process in evaluating the iran agreement. that's important. but it's insufficient i would argue. these other pieces are left undone.

let me -- i really love your comments. but let me take the opportunity to just maybe give a little bit of flavor as to how the guy who gave that speech might respond to a couple of things that you said. i completely understand the caution on doctrine and principles. and i think it's important that we have tried not to presuppose outcomes. what i mean by that is nowhere in here does it say that the united states should always pursue democracy or nowhere does it say that the united states should only pursue our immediate security interests by supporting people that we might ideologically disagree with. what it does say is before you intervene militarily you have to have some political plan for what happens in the aftermath. and as for this question of risk, i think that's a wonderful challenge as well. i think it's important to talk

about what kind of risks we're debating. and we normally think about that as a military risk. the president has not been willing to exercise the degree of military risk that others might want. but there are all kinds of other risks because there isn't the conversation space with which to debate it. for instance, eastern europe it would be risky but incredibly important to make a major u.s. investment in energy independence pen dense -- for our allies to try to change the way gas moves in and around that region. but we can't have that conversation because there's nowhere in the budget where that's allowable but we can have a conversation about a military risk increased intervention in syria because it's a common acceptance that with the president we would fund it. but there's not an acceptance

that no one will back him up. i just want to frame the conversation in military terms and not military terms. host: with respect to risk you do transition in the authorization of use force. you've got the two longest wars in american history which is a stunning fact 5.1% of a million people which gives the president tremendous discretion to use military power and force without controls without constraints in response to the perception that america is under threat. that would imply a greater role on the part of congress in an effort to create some sort of sound basis as to when and under

what circumstances force can be appear plied. maybe congress can cread a consensus that would be meaningful. if you want to change the nature of the discussion, there is a piece of this which does imply a much greater level of congressional involvement and frankly unity in response to safeguarding and protecting the american people. this is a risk of our administration. can you imagine a risk ready administration under these circumstances? you implied it in some of your comments. so congress' role would be even more important. iran, now you don't know what's in this deal. neither do i. but based on what your -- you're sensing do you think you'd be in a position to support the administration's case for a

comprehensive agreement on the nuclear issue with iran? christopher: absolutely. i agree with you that we don't know ha the details look like and there's evidence that there wasn't as much agreement in the framework as we might have all suspected or maybe there's evidence that a political conversation has to play out in a certain way in and around tehran and we have to accept the reality of that before we get a signature. but to me this speaks to the principles that we're talking about here which is finding alternatives to military action that while not being perfect be much better than a thoughtless military intervention without a real political planning process afterwards. that's what i think is amazingly absent from this conversation about this debate. you know, one of my colleagues goes out on the floor of the senate saying taking it out would be a two-day endeavor

without any follow-up conversations. it can't happen in a vacuum. it has to happen in a comparative analysis. i do think it's an exceptional framework. would i like for the agreement to be longer than 10 years? absolutely but elements of it are. and i do buy the arguments that if you're able to give a win to the moderates that there is a better chance than if you rejected this agreement that ultimately you're able to work with that coalition on other underlying festering issues as well. and as the congressional intervention i would say that the way the president conducts these operation matters as to how congress -- how willing congress is to react. in theory if he said he wasn't going to act without congressional authorization and so a debate was forced in the united states senate foreign relations committee when it came to the indictment he proceeded

in a different way. what would happen if he had said i need to act and i'm not going to do it until the congress gives me the power to do it? i would argue that we would have come together. that we would have figured out a path forward. the division on this is significant but not irreconcilable. but we are forced to do it because there is no consequence. no practical consequence for our inaction. it's incumbent upon the president to follow the constitutional balance and alignment of responsibilities as well and i would argue that he should have come to us for authorization on this war before proceeding. >> one final question, you referenced the marshall plan. how would you respond to the area of the world in which the extraordinary program that what

came after it was a parallel universe to what we see today? we occupied japan from 1951 through 1952. not one. we're talking about a marshall plan for a region of the world that is broken, angry, dysfunctional. how do you reconcile -- in other words, doesn't the marshall plan become to some degree a difficult as a prospect as an open ended military intervention? without the political infrastructure that creates the instability, the institutions. how do you actually do that? christopher: so good question. it's a fair critique and it's a very imperfect and precise analogy. i make it to wake folks up to show how little we are spending.

it's amazing that they think that 28% is going to aid when only 1% is going to it. it's important to remind our country how much money we used to spend. i reference to the surge, these bags that were being handed out. i can't lay out the precise manner in which you develop long-term economic stable that hands down the reasons that people join terrorist organizations. part of the reason that we get the stability there is because we answered people's economic concerns. and i would argue the political stability follows from economic stability. that it's kind of hard to understand, to hope a politically stable government when you have over 50% of young people out of work. if you start with economic stability and with partners, by the way i'm not suggestioning that america be the only one but nobody else is going to spend

billions if we don't commit to spending billions if you even attempt to put answers to problems in iraq or lebanon or yemen then political stability at least has a shot. it doesn't without that endeavor. i would just argue that people would say it's crazy. how you can say we're not trying that right now? they look at how much money we spend. that's why i talk about the marshall plan. we are espning a fraction of what we spent on an all be it different endeavor decades ago. host: thank you so much. two questions. please identify before you speak. we have mics. yes, down here in the fourth row -- fourth, fifth. we'll hit you next. promise. >> my name is alex fenos i used to teach at the foreign service

institute. you talk about aid. i would like your views on title eight programs our education about the abroad. those funds have been slashed. how do you sebringing them back? christopher: so last fall i took a trip to balkans in another form i think we should be talking about what's happening there. we sort of take for granted the level of stability there but there are you know very few conflicts over the last years that didn't eminent. and there's some military instability. i was in serbia which is a country that russia has a lot of interest in. it's very relevant to us because it's a tran sent point for energy through and around the region. i happened to be there when vladimir putin was march has

army in an enormous show of force. our great ambassador there was begging me for $20,000 for an exchange program that he had had cut from his budget. and just the incongressruety of putin marching billions of dollars and it seemed to suggest how wrong footed or priorities have come. and te spoke how important it was. as you went around the region you saw all of these graduates of the title eight funding exchange programs enormously influential powers friendly to the united states and to our allies. it was a small amount of money that paid off. as i would argue for how we spend money on these projects how to allocate a new marshall plan part of it would certainly be on that type of program. >> ok. let's. yes. right here.

wait for the mic. here it comes. here it comes. >> yeah. can you elaborate on how your nonkinetic approach would deal with isis given the 1400 year disagreement between the shiah and the sunni and at this particular time we know that the sunnis are the backbone of isis. how would you handle that situation? christopher: i go back to a couple of things. first i have to be honest with what our objectives are here. i don't think we could have a realistic objective that could be settling that dispute. nor do i argue that we could have a realistic objective on our own that would use the terminology defeat isil.

i that our objective has to be degrading them to the point where thra -- they're no longer a threat. that might be different which is to somehow find a way for usaid to mediate between the two sides. i would go back even further. no one can guarantee that this sort of cascading proxy war wouldn't have occurred not with standing the iraq war. but you can make a pretty good argument that if it didn't create the mess that we're living with today then it at least exacerbated it or expedited it. you know clearly the case i'm laying out today would have never allowed us to go into iraq into the first place because we simply didn't understand the political ramifications of that decision. many of them were tightly knit inside iraq. but many of them also have

spilled out to other places around the region. so some of this is -- some of what i'm offering is totally unsatisfactory looking forward. it's just a caution to not do something again like iraq without understanding the hell that it often brings to regions like that. host: ok, how about over here to the left? yes. >> hi, yes, my name is salley and i'm from six consulting. my question is two-fold here. the first one is that the press has stated that senate foreign relations committee met discussed senator cain and aumf. and i just wanted to ask you if that -- do you believe that has legs? and the second question is what are you doing to insure that the 2001 aums sunset is part of those discussions? thank you. christopher: well, there are two

issues, 3 a on that final thing that anybody can argue in 2003 should hang around. we can't get rid of the 2003 aumf. it is our mission to fight al-qaeda authorized current activities of the u.s. government. what we can do with sunset is to have that discussion. i would like to be the based on any amuf. it's important to have an amuf to limit fighting isis. that's a great imperative. i'm so appreciative of the word senator cain has done particular but also senator flake to try to bring the two parties together around an authorization. i -- i have worrys that the limitations in their authorization will not prove to be limitations at all. i believe that we should put a box around the deployment of combat troops

to the middle east. i'm worried that their language does not do that. i would be more comfortable with loser language on troop limitations or geographic limitations or language connected forces if there was a sunset if we were forced to come back and debate the whole thing in three years. that's not included in that authorization either. so i think it's an important starting point. but to me, it allows for a little bit too much leeway for the next administration to take strategic steps that i completely disagree with in the region. there's an important debate happening whether congress should be involved at all in the strategy of warfare or rather if our job is only to name the enemy and then get out of the way. i would argue that there's a long history of congressional intervention on foreign affairs that suggest that we have the

responsibility to also include some discussion of strategy in our authorizations. host: your time now. >> thank you, senator for being here and provoking us. you just used the term "boxs around the middle east" which gets back to what is in our national interest a term that aaron used earlier and you hinted at? and why are we so focused op the middle east? what happened to east asia? what happened to south asia? what happened to latin america? africa? the different parts of europe? what are american priorities to you and how do you plan to deal with them because we're totally obsessed with the middle east and is it or isn't it our

interest? christopher: our interests are multi-fold. they start with preventing the united states from attack. what we know is that terrorist groups isis are setting up shop in a variety of places around the globe. we simply again don't have the resources to meet that challenge. i look at africa as the example. we can't do planning for how groups like al-shabab moves. american foreign policy easily predicted the move of that organization in parts of kenya and taken steps ahead of time to try to warrant that momentum. we just didn't have the resources to do that. again, part of this challenge is plusing up the resources we have available to think outside of the box of the -- of the middle east. we do have an interest in

preventing slaughter and genocide. and so i accept that as part and parcel of america's interest in the world. i just argue that in proposing an intervention you make damn sure that it's going to make the carnage better rather than worse. and i argued two summers ago that in syria dropping bombs in the middle of a stew of a civil unrest would have made it worse for the people on the ground not better. there would begin to be your set of interests. we are right. we are hyperfocused on the middle east. there are good reasons for that, not so good reasons for that and part of this project is to try to hopefully awaken people's interest and attention to other parts of the world as well. host: yes, right here in the middle. thank you.

>> my name is steven short. senator, would you please speak about the importance of trade with relation to american foreign policy specifically fast track authority? christopher: so there's no doubt thton coined it there's an important element of economic state craft that all the work in which i'm talking about here, many of us would argue about the terms upon which you're engaging in that discussion. so i voted against fast track. this is a little bit off topic and i'll tell you my opposition to it. i totally understand the rational of increasing the wheels of the legislative process makes a trade deal easier to pass. but why on earth do we elevate trade for fast track elevation and nothing else that's important? an energy -- a bill increasing american energy independence would make this country a lot more secure. but we subjected that debate to

the traditional set of rules and nobody talks about a fast track for energy reform or immigration reform. and you can argue that our demographics is one of our primary strengths in and around the world but no one's talking about a fast track immigration for the world. i just think it's weird that we're talking about trade and not anything else. i hope there's a deal that i can support because i believe that trade is enter dwined with american foreign powers. it's just got to be on the right terms. host: way in the back. i mean as far as you can go. >> i hope i'm not the only one interested in the china question. tomorrow the u.s.-china strategic and economic dialogue is going to begin. what do you expect are the most pressing issues that should be discussed? does congress play a role in it?

thank you. christopher: congress arguably has been awol on u.s.-china policy. there hasn't been a lot of significant or, you know, really relevant discussion in the united states congress about what to do with china moving forward. you know a lot of us believe that there are places where we can get tougher that for those that worry that increased sanctions against currency policy or cyber attacks would erupt a trade war. we suggest that we're fighting a trade war. one country fighting it. but you know, i, again, look internally when i think about how we deal with china. it's hard for us to say that disputes in the east and south china sea should be resolved through diplomatic means when the united states won't sign the treaty of the seas. it's hard for us to make that argument credably when we're not willing to be at the table.

if we expect china to be really be a participant in the 2015 continent change negotiations how do we do that when the majority of the senate and the house argue that climate change isn't happening and present that scientists are wrong. i think that there are tangible things that congress can weigh in on the u.s.-china agreement. and the obama administration is a part of that. you have to look inward in order to look outward. i think we've got to do a lot of that in order to strengthen our hand when we sit across the table from china. and on cyber security it's the same problem. there's no way to defend what they're doing stealing our secrets an invading people's privacy. but they claim that we do it too. we don't. but when we are tapping into the cell phones of foreign leaders without much credible

explanation it just robs us of the moral authority to get them to change in the way they do things. host: we have time for a question. one more question. yes, in the back. uh-huh. >> thank you. my name is david nikorazi, i respect the georgia news agency. you made several statements on nato and underline the necessity of offering plans to the states neighboring russia? how do you see russia's neighborhood in a new foreign policy of the united states? christopher: so again back to the idea that, you know we rolled out. again, none of these are breakthrough ideas but it's investing in the international organization. you know i think we threaten nato's future legitimacy as we slowly close the door on the closed-open door policy.

there are country who are willing to join, ready to join. i think georgia obviously has some particular and important problems that have to be worked out. but montenegro is absolutely ready to join. and when we refuse to enlarge, we start to diminish the importance of the organization to begin with. just a word about ukraine before we end because it's intertwined on this question on american responses to crises. i mean i am just stunned at how our conversation in congress begins and ends with farming the ukrainian military. that is 80% of the oxygen that we expend. now i think that's a really important question. and i've come around on it. i opposed it at first. but as long as we're doing it in coordination with the majority of our allies which is nothing that you can prepose today that it's worthwhile.

but the reality is is that right now the most important debate playing out is how ukraine structures its debt to the point of $15 billion of relief. america has a lot to say about that. in part because it's american companies. american pension funds that agree to forgive portions of that debt. but nowhere in congress is there a realistic conversation about either putting the pressure on those companies or investing in real economic assistance that would help ukraine. we're willing to spend potentially billions of dollars to hand arms to the ukraine apparently for free. but we're arguing over guaranteeing loans in a manner like how you would pay back the bucket of water before you deliver it to them to put out the fire. i just think that we should be much more generous with that country but we're not having that debate because again, there's an obsession with the

military power of the united states. -- to the point of in the ukrainian debate almost ignoring all of the other levers an resources that we have at our disposal. and i don't argue for reducing america's advantage. i just think there are other conversations and tools that need to be plused up if we want to be safe and we want to take the right kinds of risk that are demanded by these times. host: we've come to the owned the hour and there are many more questions that suggests a degree of interest and i think your talk has sparked some interest and a good conversation. so please join me in thanking senator murphy for coming. and we'll come back. christopher: i will. thank you. [applause]

[captioning performed by national captioning institute] [captions copyright national cable satellite corp. 2015] >> tonight on c-span a special issue spotlight program on iran. with the june 30th deadline for nuclear negotiations approaching, we'll show you events from the c-span archive focusing on iran's government, culture and relationship with the u.s. we begin with a look at the 1953 coup in iran that was orchestrated by the c.i.a. then humon mag and a critical look at iran's human rights record. our final program features jerel green explaining the complexities of the iranian government and culture.