AMERICAN ENTERPRISE INSTITUTE

THE CASE FOR AMERICAN LEADERSHIP IN GLOBAL AFFAIRS

PANEL I: WHY AMERICAN LEADERSHIP STILL MATTERS

PANELISTS: RUDY DE LEON, CENTER FOR AMERICAN PROGRESS; JAMES DENTON, WORLD AFFAIRS JOURNAL; THOMAS G. MAHNKEN, JOHNS HOPKINS SCHOOL OF ADVANCED INTERNATIONAL STUDIES; JOSHUA P. MELTZER, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION; STEPHEN RICKARD, OPEN SOCIETY FOUNDATIONS; NEENA SHENAI, MEDTRONIC

MODERATORS: FORMER SENATOR JOSEPH LIEBERMAN (D-CT), (PROJECT COCHAIR); FORMER SENATOR JIM TALENT (R-MO), AEI

PANEL II: AMERICAN INTERNATIONALISM AND THE NEXT PRESIDENCY

PANELISTS: ELLIOTT ABRAMS, COUNCIL ON FOREIGN RELATIONS; ROBERT KAGAN, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION; MICHAEL O’HANLON, BROOKINGS INSTITUTION;

MODERATOR: DANIELLE PLETKA, AEI

9:30 AM – 11:40 AM THURSDAY, DECEMBER 3, 2015

EVENT PAGE: http://www.aei.org/events/the-case-for-american-leadership-in- global-affairs/

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY WWW.DCTMR.COM

FORMER SENATOR JOE LIEBERMAN (D-CT): Good morning, everybody, and thanks very much for being here to join us as we I suppose celebrate, or certainly release, the issuance of the report of the American Internationalism Project of the American Enterprise Institute.

Let me just say a few brief introductory words and then – and I think we’d like to really deal with this in a discussion with everybody up here – and I think this group really reflects the great strength of this enterprise, which was its diversity.

So in some sense this project began in discussions that my colleague and friend from the Senate, Jon Kyl and I had as we ended our service in the end of 2012 and began to think about the future. And the discussions – we began to talk about we shared – we had worked together on a lot of foreign policy/national security matters in this Senate and across – in a bipartisan way across party lines.

And we noted and shared our concern about an increase in both of our political parties in what might be called isolationism – it’s a bit hard, but it certainly wasn’t internationalism. It was a pulling inward, a sort of willingness to accept American engagement in the world but not leadership in the world, and that both caused but also clearly reflected changes in public opinion.

In 2013 there was a public opinion poll done by the folks at Pew, at the Pew Trust, where more than a majority said that – which is to say a majority, more than half said that – they responded affirmatively to the notion that America has – let me see. I want to get the quote directly for you: “America should mind its own business internationally,” pretty strong statement. And, of course, that reflected what we all know, which is the preceding two wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, which at that point were unpopular, of course, and a Great Recession we had.

And I think Jon and I both worried about what direction – in both of our parties that would take in terms of the actual implementation of our foreign policy. I can tell you, as a Democrat who was – who became a Democrat during the time of President Kennedy, the robust internationalism – we used to say muscular internationalism – of the Kennedy administration, the Kennedy Democrats, was a far cry from where I worried my party was going. I mean, we understand we were in the Cold War then, but the rhetoric of the inaugural address really summoned a lot of us to public service – the idea that we would pay any price, bear any burden, support any friend, oppose any foe to guarantee the survival and sustenance of liberty.

And so Jon and I talked about what we might do about this and, of course, Dani Pletka arrived. I don’t know if Dani’s here now, but it sort of coincided with our talks. And we thought it would be worth trying to do something about this through what came to be known as the American Internationalism Project.

We had two you might say requirements and/or goals also that Senator Kyl and I set. The first was really the most important. And in some ways, it’s what I personally celebrate the most as we complete the process and issue the report today.

We wanted this committee, the group working on this, to be as diverse politically and ideologically as it possibly could be, Democrat, Republican, independent – people thought I’d been all three at different times actually, but I’m still a Democrat – but liberal, conservative, moderate, et cetera, et cetera.

And because – what Kyl and I were worried about was that this great consensus in foreign policy which followed the Second World War and which was deeply and broadly bipartisan, nonpartisan, began with Senator Vandenberg, the Republican chair of the Foreign Relations Committee in the Senate saying that partisanship should end at the nation’s shores, began a partnership with Truman that went on for administrations following, that that was crumbling and we wanted to try to restore it.

The second was that we not just have this be another report, but that after we come to some conclusions, if we could, then we would stick together to try to market it both to people in government and to people outside.

So I’m going to ask these folks to introduce themselves in a minute, but we were wonderfully successful at drawing in a group of people across political and ideological lines.

And the great news is that we did reach a consensus in response to raising the question that the people who are skeptical or negative about internationalism and America’s international leadership raise: Is it worth the cost? Do we need it to be a global leader to guarantee our own security, prosperity and freedom here at home? Can we do it all alone? Can we afford it, et cetera, et cetera?

And I think what you’ll find in this report is an articulation of a really broad consensus that we hope can spread. I mean, it’s clearly true that in some sense, reality since 2013 has made the case for America’s global leadership.

In some sense, the answer to the question of what happens when America is not fully engaged as a global leader is seen in the events of around the world today – Putin moving into Ukraine, Crimea, now moving into Syria; China asserting itself more aggressively particularly in the oceans around itself; and, of course, the main challenge we face both from states like Iran and from non-state actors like the Islamic State and – which of course claims it’s a state – and al Qaeda, prove how vacuums are filled if we pull back, and are filled, more likely than not, not by our allies and kindred spirits but by those who don’t share our values or our interests.

I think the other thing that really comes home – and I hope that my colleagues up here will in more detail make this point – that there is an American self-interested argument to make for America’s global leadership. In other words, we are not just saying this is the right thing to do for the world – though it is. But we’re saying that our security, our prosperity and our freedom is advanced, all are advanced by America’s leadership in the world.

So for me, it’s been a wonderful process to be part of and particularly because of the opportunity to work with this really remarkable and diverse group of colleagues.

Also, before I forget, I want to thank Dani Pletka, Phil Lohaus, and all the others at the American Enterprise Institute for supporting us in the way that they have to get this work done.

I think maybe what I’ll do now is to begin with Neena and ask you to introduce yourselves briefly. And then, at the end, Jon Kyl is very frustrated and so am I that on this date, which we settled a long time ago, he had an unavoidable conflict. He’s flying and all that but in his private life that made it impossible for him to be here.

So we’re really glad to have a member of the steering committee who I believe is still a Republican so –

FORMER SENATOR JIM TALENT (R-MO): I’m the understudy and just as in broad way. You don’t get your money back. (Laughter.)

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Right. But his voice, as you can hear, is really beautiful and it’s going to be kind of musical, not quite up to the standards of Hamilton, but, you know, not bad. I don’t know that Jim and I are prepared to do rap here this morning. (Laughter.)

SEN. TALENT: I know with a high level of confidence that I’m not.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: All right. So we’ll start with Neena. We’ll ask everybody to introduce themselves, then to Jim, and Jim, why don’t you ask the first question of the panelists. Neena.

NEENA SHENAI: Thank you so much, Senator Lieberman. And I want to thank you and Senator Kyl for your leadership on this project. I think that the report that has come out of the project and just all of the conversations and the relationships that have been built as a result of this project will be invaluable to furthering the cause of American engagement internationally. So thank you very much.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Thank you. Tell everybody a little bit about your background.

MS. SHENAI: Sure.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: You made a transition during the course of this project.

MS. SHENAI: I did. I recently joined Medtronic, the world’s largest medical device company as the company’s head trade lawyer, so it’s just been about a month now. I had spent about five years before that on Capitol Hill working for both Chairman Dave Camp and Paul Ryan on the Ways and Means Committee on the trade staff.

And I want to, on behalf of Josh and myself, thank our working group actually. We had Rob Atkinson from the Information Technology Innovation Foundation, David Bailey from Element VI Consulting, Robert Howse from the New York University Law School, John Veroneau from Covington & Burling, as well as Scott Winship from the Manhattan Institute. And we had some fantastic conversations, really dynamic conversations on the prosperity piece of this project. And I look forward to discussing with my colleagues.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Good.

JOSHUA MELTZER: Great. Thanks. My name is Joshua Meltzer. I’m a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution and an adjunct professor at the John Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies, where I work in international trade and economic issues.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Thank you.

THOMAS MAHNKEN: Tom Mahnken, senior research professor at Johns Hopkins SAIS and was pleased to co-chair the Security Working Group with Rudy.

RUDY DE LEON: Well, thank you, Tom. And thank you, Senator Lieberman and Jim Talent and John Kyl for being part of this process which is about American engagement in the world, but it’s also about how we engage each other here in Washington, D.C., and how we cross the aisle and talk about creating consensus.

So I’m Rudy de Leon from the Center for American Progress, formerly at the Pentagon and Capitol Hill before that. I also mentioned to Senator Lieberman I’d be remiss if I just didn’t acknowledge for a second the passing of Sandy Berger yesterday, who was a great practitioner as the national security adviser to President Clinton, someone who also had the ability to cross the aisle and to create that vital consensus in terms of how we as a country speak as one and move as one.

I thought Tom and I, in the national security discussion, with some of our other panelists in the back of the room, Bruce and Tom, who I identify in the report as contributors, we were able to talk about issues in ways that we – and look at the constructive side. When we get into the Q&A, I’ll point out a few points in the report, but our national security is a vital piece of American engagement in the world. The men and women of the armed forces of the United States will never let us down.

But the diplomats and the economists, the people that help create stability in regions where they are failing, they play a very important role, too, and I think it’s to Senator Lieberman and Senator Kyl’s credit that this was very much part of our discussion as well, all the tools of American engagement, all the tools of American security. Thank you.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Thank you, Rudy.

Steve.

STEPHEN RICKARD: So I’m Steve Rickard. I’m with the Open Society Foundations. I’m Washington director there. I’ve worked in the Senate for Senator Moynihan and at the State Department and the Clinton administration. Among other things, I’m a recovering attorney.

But I also want to echo a lot of the comments that have been made. I want to thank Senator Lieberman, Senator Kyl, Senator Talent, and the American Enterprise Institute for pulling together this remarkable project. It was a great privilege and pleasure to be able to co-chair the Principles of Freedom Working Group with my co-chair who will introduce – Jim Denton – who will introduce himself in a second. But we also had a remarkable group of people, very diverse, very bipartisan.

I think it’s a bit of a pity that we’ve kind of reached the point where you have to have a whole project and issue a report to remind people that Republicans and Democrats agree about much more than they disagree about and that everybody who’s a part of trying to reach government policy in Washington wants America and Americans to be safe, wants our economy to grow and to benefit workers and to produce prosperity for all of us, and that we want the United States to be playing a positive role and to be a force for good in the world.

But, in fact, that is the case, that is something that people has very, very wide agreement in Washington but it has become a little bit of a secret, not a dirty little secret but a hopeful big secret but a secret nonetheless. And I think this project, very, very important to kind of make the point that people agree about this much more than they disagree.

And I’m grateful to the co-chairs and to AEI for bringing this together. It’s been a privilege and a pleasure to be a part of it.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Thanks, Steve.

JAMES DENTON: Thank you, Steve. Thank you, Senator. I’m Jim Denton, the editor of World Affairs magazine. And Steve just stole the two words I was going to use to begin and that is to say that it has been a privilege and a pleasure really to work with everyone here on the stage as well as the very, very good people at AEI who had the foresight and the wisdom, along with Senators Kyl and Lieberman to actually bring together the group to discuss some very important issues which we’ll be talking about now.

And it’s my hope that the discussion will actually echo through the campaigns and through the leadership of the policy community, opinion community here in town so we can raise the level of this discussion and move on with the business of making our country safer and more prosperous along with the rest of certainly our allies and ideally the rest of the world.

SEN. TALENT: OK. I will toss out the first question. I’ll make it pretty open ended, Joe, so a group this learned could probably spend the rest of the time discussing just this question but I’ll throw it out anyway.

So I look at this report as an opportunity which you all took advantage to introduce strategic clarity into the discussion of foreign policy here so strategy is identification of ends at the highest level and matching of a means to it. So I’m going to ask you an ends question and a means question.

What should be the ends of American foreign policy? What are the vital national interests of the United States that our foreign policy is designed to protect, or the national objectives? What package of interests or priorities constitutes American national security in your view?

And second, what are the alternatives to America’s vigorous leadership in the world? And are they viable?

And I’ll give you a comment that you can play off of or not but Rudy’s old boss and my friend and leader on both of the national defense panels, Bill Perry, was talking about this in one of our deliberations. And he said, well, I guess the alternative is to do what we did really until World War II, which is just sort of lie back and wait until problems or risks or dangers got to the point where they’re absolutely intolerable and then build up and beat the crap out of them.

So is that the alternative to American leadership and is that viable in the modern world, building up, waiting, building up and beating the crap out of whatever it is we really don’t like? Tom?

MR. MAHNKEN: I’ll take a stab at least at the first part of it because I actually think there’s been remarkable continuity in the ends of American national security policy for the better part of the century across administrations and across real shifts in the international environment, and that includes defending American lives and territory.

And we for decades, we have done that from a forward position. We’ve tried to protect America as far from our own shores as we can. It’s been helping our allies to defend themselves and working to defend our allies. It’s been maintaining free access to the global commons which has benefited not only us and maybe even – in some ways, not even primarily us but really built a global economy that’s lifted millions out of poverty and created great wealth, and then acting in the common good – not always, not always consistently but quite frequently – humanitarian assistance, disaster relief.

And I think that’s a set of ends that’s had a broad consensus behind it for a long time. And I don’t know that there’s been an erosion of support for those ends. I think it’s been maybe a lack of appreciation of just the benefits that we get from pursuing those ends.

The alternative, I mean, I think you put a very stark alternative there. And it’s one – we’ve pursued that alternative in the past of sitting back and waiting for threats to develop. Well, we have ultimately prevailed but at very high price and one would argue an unnecessarily high price.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: A higher price, would you say, than if we had been engaged earlier as leaders?

MR. MAHNKEN: Undoubtedly. Absolutely. Absolutely.

SEN. TALENT: Which is a point that the report makes, that the people who were critical – and this is a debate we should have. Nobody is saying we shouldn’t have this debate, people critical to American leadership often do not – because of the undoubted costs often do not confront the costs of the alternative.

MR. MAHNKEN: Yeah.

MR. DE LEON: Well, but just to build on that. And not only has it been American engagement since the end of World War II, which was remarkably different, but we could talk with Bill Perry and Steve Hadley, and, you know, they would talk about the peaceful economic rise of Asia really being based on American engagement in the region after the war to see all the parties that had historically had differences focusing on their economic rise. And that’s why in the current era, American engagement in the region, from the security to the economic, to the trade is also very, very, very vital.

But, you know, the report makes a couple of very important points. And I’d just like to just read three or four sentences from the executive summary. One, it says, in the security realm not only does U.S. engagement deter aggression, but in the event of conflict it also enables the U.S. to meet threats far from its shores quickly and in time to prevent losses that would be costly to regain.

But to go on a little bit further, U.S. engagement abroad, however, constitutes far more than just military action. As I said earlier, the men and women of the armed forces of the United States will never let us down. They will never let the American people down.

But military force is but one tool of international engagement and should never be the first option. Too often, we tend to overlook America’s crucial hand in waging peace, dampening rivalries and helping to resolve conflict. We also tend to underappreciate the importance of some of the bedrock tools of international engagement including American diplomacy and foreign assistance.

So it’s looking at how we use all of the tools of American power. And, you know, we’re 30 years after the end of the Cold War and we’re, I think, still adjusting to the new realm, which is considerably different from the old. And, you know, the rise of various ethnic and regional tensions, how you build coalitions, how you use the security component and the economic component, all of these things are critical.

We used to talk of our large alliances like NATO or our treaty with Japan or the Republic of Korea. Now we’re talking about our partnerships with smaller countries, where we are helping them learn to absorb and use intelligence capabilities, put that into the chain of command so that we can deal with the regional threats of terrorism in small applications so we don’t have to wait and then respond in big applications.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: So let me ask a different question. As you can see, we’re divided into three working groups: security, prosperity, and freedom.

To me, one of the most interesting conclusions that we all made coming out of the process was the extent to which there is interrelationship between a foreign policy that pursues those three natural, almost inevitable goals, but one that I thought really needs to be argued more with the American people or both – two, and I’ll raise them and see if you’ll answer.

One is the extent to which our international security presence has been a cause of the prosperity that we have enjoyed here, broadly speaking, in the years since the end of the Second World War but that we also have enabled elsewhere in the world; in other words, that our military has really – and one of the reasons – and then the second is to come back to the – or used to be called not so long ago the freedom agenda.

And how does that – how does that – I want to ask Steve and Jim, which is quite different from security and prosperity but nonetheless at the very heart of who we are as a people, how does the – how should the value of freedom play a part in our foreign policy? Maybe the prosperity – that was a good title you had. It was affirmative. You’re for prosperity, prosperity and security because I want to talk about the interrelationship between security and prosperity.

MS. SHENAI: Sure. Well, we did discuss this definitely in our report, the extent to which the American security umbrella has been critical to securing the global commons, whether it’s sea routes, whether it’s just overall security in Europe, security in Asia and promoting and allowing a framework of rule-based, non-discriminatory trade and economic relations to flourish.

So without basic security, this sort of a framework, which I think has – to answer Senator Talent’s question about sort of the goal of U.S. foreign policy in this space has really been perpetuated. And –

SEN. LIEBERMAN: To the benefit of the American people.

MS. SHENAI: Absolutely. Absolutely. So it’s a two-pronged approach, absolutely. So it’s the understanding that American engagement internationally by opening up markets with our trading partners, with ensuring liquidity in the international capital markets, with furthering U.S. foreign policy interests through things like sanctions or even tax policy are critical to this entire framework of U.S. foreign policy.

MR. MELTZER: Yeah. Let me just – I guess I’ll just add to that in terms of the implications this has had for other countries in the region.

If you look – obviously, if you go back to World War II and, you know, the decimation of economies in Europe and Japan and in parts of Asia, and at the same time a U.S. commitment to international economic order which is premised on an open rules- based trading investment system which was clearly of significant benefit to the United States but very much of benefit to countries in the region. If you think of Germany and Japan who grew, you know, out of that state through largely, you know, an export-driven model and the other countries in Asia, you know, who significantly benefited from these types of rules-based system which the U.S. has continued to develop and underpin.

I think one of the things that comes out in our report, and this is I think being one of the real benefits, Senator, of pulling together a bipartisan group has been that we see around town, if you talk about trade debates or international economic debates, they’re vibrant, there’s a lot of disagreement there. And we reflect a lot of that in our report. And we recognize the diversity of views all coming from, you know, legitimate perspectives.

But one of the things we did manage to come together on was that whether or not you thought that there was not enough engagement on a particular issue, maybe it was enforcement of trade obligations or whether you thought that the U.S. should be more to push China to do A, B, C, all of these required U.S. leadership. It was not a question of taking a step back. It was a question about further engagement, whether you’re coming at it from whichever angle in order to achieve particular economic policy outcomes.

MS. SHENAI: And I would just add to that that in terms of globalization, you know, the globalization march is continuing. And whether or not the United States is actually involved, this trajectory will continue. And U.S. engagement is crucial to ensuring that we have a free, fair, and market-based system going forward.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: That’s an important point. And, actually, as we look back over the last 70 years, post-World War II, we see the extraordinary economic growth that’s occurred in Europe and Asia, which has benefited us.

But now, I think based on – it’s a different world today, but based on some of the same kind of American presence, rules-based trade, we see some quite significant changes growth occurring in Africa, for instance. Fair to say?

MS. SHENAI: Yes. Yes. Absolutely. I think the rules-based system has become the set of baseline norms for the world, the sort of the gold standard of how growth should occur. And we see that in the World Trade Organization. We see countries like China. We see countries that have not had market economies or still don’t have market economies but are working to have market economies accept rules-based systems, litigate issues at the World Trade Organization or are trading partners in the context of our free trade agreements commit to higher standards, whether it’s in the regulatory space or the labor space or the environment space, just simply to have a relationship with the United States, which is good for American consumers, good for American workers, good for American business.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: With your permission, Tom, I really am going to bring Steve and Jim into this.

So in a world that is as unsettled as ours is today, where security concerns are so dominant, what is – what’s the relevance of our foundational values of freedom and opportunity as part of our foreign policy?

MR. RICKARD: Well, Senator, I think it’s a great question and the prior question about how do the different topics relate to each other. And I think there’s a real tendency to say, well, you know, prosperity and security, those are things that we do for us.

Now, on this promoting freedom thing, that’s, we’re being good people and we’re trying to – you know, and it’s going to cost us, but, really, we have to do it because it’s the right thing to do. And, you know, there are a lot of problems with that.

One is, you know, it creates this sense that they’re in tension with each other, and when the going gets tough, maybe we have to compromise on our values in order to pursue our security or our prosperity. And I think one of the leading conclusions of the report is that that is absolutely not the case, that promoting values and freedom in the world is not in tension with promoting our security; it’s not in tension with promoting our prosperity.

Quite the opposite, that countries that respect rule of law, have open, sound governance that is responsive to their people are better trading partners, they’re better to invest in, investments are more secure, they are better partners, that we can go to countries, say like Nigeria and we can try to work with their military to make them more capable and fighting the threat, the very real threat from Boko Haram, but if the Nigerian military itself is corrupt and brutal and if you get your position in the Nigerian military because of bribes and payoffs and who you know as opposed to competence, and, you know, supporting the government, then in the end, that’s at best a short-term stop gap solution. Long-term solutions require us partnering with people, helping them become professional, rights respecting both on the economic side and on the security side.

Was it a good thing to do to help the people in Germany, in Japan, in Western Europe, in South Korea, in Indonesia move in the direction of democracy? Absolutely. Are we a safer, more prosperous country because those countries are democratic rights respecting, rule of law countries? Absolutely.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: We are a freer country because of that?

MR. RICKARD: Well, I think we’re truer to ourselves and what is at core values that the country was founded on, and I do think that we’re – if we – when we give into the notion that we have to compromise our values to be safer, then we do become a less free country, and it’s a false dichotomy.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Jim.

MR. DENTON: Well, with respect to American leadership and the exercise thereof, I just want to – referring back to Rudy’s, the toolbox that he mentioned that is at America’s disposal, part of that toolbox really is our values and the image that they represent to the rest of the world. And it is – I think our values and our allegiance to them and the consistent application of those values by the country through its foreign policy empower us and give us the credibility to lead.

And so I would just want to reinforce the need to be true to those values and not to forget that they have been part of our – you know, they’ve been part of our government or our system of government from the beginning, and the reinforcement thereof is a very important thing.

SEN. TALENT: To follow up, maybe – and I think at some point we’re supposed to go to the audience.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Yeah. We’ve got some time.

SEN. TALENT: We’ve got a little time? OK. Well, a follow up to that, maybe to get a little bit concrete with this, let’s take the South China Sea, where, as an example of what you all have been talking about, the United States’ position with regard to the territorial disputes there is not that we’re in support of any particular resolution of those disputes but rather that we are in favor of – our position is that those disputes have to be resolved according to the norms of international law and international behavior, which is a classic example of standing up for vital national interests. And we are in a competition with China in that respect.

So what is the import for the American people say in that part of the world if the values of a norm-based international order go by the wayside and these countries simply start to compete, you know, 18th century type of thing, what does that mean for the American people, for the economy, for the potential for peace in the region?

I mean, you all want – you don’t have to get in the details but talk about what the alternative would be if we’re not able to stand up for their vital interests there?

MR. RICKARD: I’d just very briefly say, you know, Dwight Eisenhower once said something I think very important, which is, you know, if we believe in a rule-based international system, then every once in a while, we have to accept that we’re going to be on the losing side and we’re going to have to accept that because, on balance, we benefit so much from this system of rules.

And there is no country in the world that benefits from having a world order that’s based on international agreements, most of which we help – you know, play the leading role in drafting, and when we cut corners on those rules, then it undercuts our position, you know, on things like the South China Sea.

For the specifics on that particular case, I defer to my colleagues in terms of the importance of navigation of the seas for our prosperity. I certainly think it’s important but we’ve got more better experts on it.

MR. MELTZER: Well, the only thing I’d like to add to that I think, which is that, you know, I absolutely, wholeheartedly agree that the rules-based system has been absolutely essential for U.S. prosperity and clearly security is clearly a core U.S. value, it’s a rule-based society. And the U.S., I think, has invested enormous amounts of energy, diplomatic and political capital in terms of creating an international order. You see that in the trade space in spades but you see that across the security realm and the values realm as well.

And, in a sense, the United Nations Convention of the Law of the Sea, which is the rules-based systems which would be guiding these disputes is one example I think where lack of engagement on this issue by Congress, you know, which has failed to ratify this treaty has actually harmed U.S. interests, right, because the U.S. would be actually in a much stronger position if it had actually ratified that treaty to be then going to China and saying, this is a treaty which you’ve signed, we signed, we’ve ratified and that you’re not complying with any longer.

So I think it’s a good example of where, you know, a lack of leadership and engagement has actually got real sort of security implications for the United States.

MR. MAHNKEN: I would point out, too, and this gets – loops back to the issue of costs and benefits. I mean, if we take South China Sea as an example, in the security sphere, what we’re actually talking about in terms of U.S. presence and the need to maintain U.S. presence is actually not tremendously costly. It’s not – and this – you know, this nation has exerted much more on other things.

So, you know, what is required – you know, what is required of us to demonstrate our presence, to demonstrate a commitment to freedom of navigation and the free flow of goods and information is not all that – is not all that great. And the benefits both in terms of a rule-based international order both in terms of the international economic benefits of predictable flows of trade I think are considerable.

MR. DE LEON: I think Senator Talent, by using the example of the South China Sea, has really brought us to the core of American leadership and the roles that only the U.S. can play that are very unique.

First, I need to concede. I got one of those letters this week from the Office of Personnel Management. We regret to inform you that your personal information, and, you know, 40 years of security clearance files has been hijacked or whatever the term is.

But rules are important. We’re pressing back on cyber but on the South China Sea, three illustrations.

One, we had one of our Navy P-8s doing an exercise over what we consider international areas. Someone had the wisdom to have a CNN reporter on that flight so that when the Chinese issued a warning that you’re flying into restricted airspace, the whole world heard it. Second, Pacific Command has just in the last month conducted a display of international engagement by navigating these international waters.

And back to the law of the sea, which would be good for us to be a part of, but the tradition is that sovereignty comes from the land, not from the water. And so reclamation isn’t the right term because there weren’t islands at these places to begin with. They’re coral reefs. They have cement poured on top of them. So, you know, I think by challenging the right to declare artificial locations as part of sovereignty is an important international principal and only the Americans could do that.

SEN. TALENT: And if the norm-based system breaks down, what we could expect to see is increasing conflict among the different claimants, which we’ve already seen between Vietnam and China, for example, which could escalate, this being the point that American leadership on behalf of this system preserves stability, a set of rules, and the American people benefit from that. It’s not just –

MR. DE LEON: They absolutely benefit from access to international areas without fear – and this is why Asia has risen.

SEN. TALENT: And the low level of conflict.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Yeah. So, obviously, another tragic example of – two things. One is what happens when the U.S. and our allies in Europe don’t get engaged and how much harder it is when we finally get drawn is clearly Syria.

I think there was a feeling at the outset of the uprising in 2011 against Assad that it was a mess, it was far away from us. And so we and our European allies and to some significant degree the nations around the region stood back.

And look where we are now. Obviously this also was our values. I mean, this Assad is obviously a dictator, a tyrant. The first wave of opposition to him I think was quite sincere and all about freedom and opportunity. They were not Islamist extremists by any means. I spent some time in Turkey and Lebanon meeting with them in 2011. But there was no support given to them. Actually, all the kind of things they were asking for then are finally being considered now – no fly zone and no drive zone, more weapons to do what they want to do.

But really the main point I want to make is something else we concluded in the report, at some level, we don’t really have a choice anymore about whether – well, whether the U.S. should be engaged in the world. We’re engaged in the world. I mean, I don’t mean it just because we’re the superpower. The world is engaged with us and it’s going to come home to us. We can’t put a bubble around ourselves.

So the question is, do we want to try in a – in a wise and preventive way to shape events hopefully consistent with our values of freedom and opportunity or are we going to wait and be forced to come in later.

And, I mean, this is clearly a case, just to say the obvious. Now, we’ve had fester there – a quarter million people have been killed, millions have been displaced, the Islamic state has taken advantage of what was the collapse of the government, created the beginning of a caliphate.

And from that location basically, I would argue has inspired and/or in some cases directed attacks which have brutally affected the security of people in places like France. And they’re obviously attempting to do it here in the United States as well.

Of course, the other as visible effect or our reluctance to get involved early and the error of our conclusion that it’s over there, you know, far away from us, look at the massive refugee flows that are now pouring into Europe and have engendered quite a difficult controversial debate here in the United States.

So bottom line, I think what we concludes in some sense looking back at history and on a policy level, and really we concluded across the breadth of our membership has been painfully evidenced in what’s happened in Syria in our time. Just to show that I’m still a senator so I just make statements and don’t ask questions. (Laughter.) Or ex- senator – you know, I get – not get over the habits.

MR. RICKARD: Well, senator, if I could just say on this, you know, one of the interesting things about our working group discussions I think is – and it was a consistent theme – was people like a simple narrative. People refer a simple narrative.

And there are, you know, two simple narratives here. You know, one is the United States is a negative factor in the world and arrogant and really ought to mind its own business, to quote the Pew line. And, you know, there’s war weariness and some other things, and the history of the last 15 years. That view, you know, has grown in popularity in some quarters.

And then there’s another simple narrative that the United States is, you know, a force for good in the world and, you know, has to engage in this and that the critics are wrong, and, et cetera.

And I think our working group at least said, you know, we need to avoid falling for either of those simple narratives. The fact is that a place like Syria doesn’t have any really good choices. It’s hard to know what is the right thing to do. We’ve made some mistakes. There have been acts of hubris in the past that backfired and where we were counterproductive, and we should acknowledge that and that the American people want us to be better at engagement, not, you know, if we’re going to engage and that that’s important.

But that surrendering to the notion that, therefore, we have no idea what we should do and we should just stay out of it and that that’s a viable option is equally wrong. And that’s – that cognitive dissonance is sometimes difficult to live with.

But the report says quite clearly, we should never be afraid of acknowledging that we make mistakes. We should be open to criticism. We should be self-critical but that we shouldn’t then conclude that we should, therefore, just stay out of it and mind our business.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Thanks for that, Steve. So did you want to add something?

MR. DENTON: Just to say that the other narrative is something which is sort of a reality which was echoed certainly in our group but I think throughout the larger group, including in this conversation, and that is when there is a vacuum, it is going to be filled.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Right.

MR. DENTON: And as we have seem rather demonstrably in the recent two or three years – actually, when we first convened this group, it was not so clear, but I don’t know if it’s happily or not but events have taken place, whether it’s Putin in Crimea or Ukraine or probing defenses of NATO or whether it is Mr. Xi claiming, you know, exotic territorial claims in the South or East China Sea or whether it is Iran engaging in Africa and in its own region.

You know, where the United States, you know, abandons or disengages, other forces will fill that void. And that’s I think something that –

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Well said. I mean, one of the – to me, one of the most interesting and helpful parts of our process, as I said I guess at the beginning, was that we asked ourselves the questions that we thought those who are skeptical about American global leadership or opposed to it would ask.

And one of them was, is the world tired of American leadership? And I’d invite others to comment on this, but – and, again, this is not scientific but I think we all felt from our own discussions with people around the world also just watching events in the world, our allies in Central and Eastern Europe, our allies in China’s neighborhood, our allies in the Middle East. You could go on and on, in Africa. Quite the opposite – maybe because we haven’t been as robust in our international leadership, my sense – our sense of it is, and please correct me if you will want to is that really the world wants more American leadership.

MR. MELTZER: Let me – let me jump in here, Senator, because in case the audience hasn’t realized, I’m Australian by birth.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: I thought you were – I thought you were a New Yorker.

MR. MELTZER: And so, you know, I bring a perspective from that region. And I think it’s absolutely the case, you know, whether we’re talking about Australia, any of United States allies in the region, formal allies of informal allies, Singapore, Japan, Korea and the like watch anxiously the level of American engagement in the region and spend a lot of time and energy trying to make the case I think to the United States of the importance of ongoing U.S. engagement.

And this is not just across the military realm. From the prosperity working group perspective, the sort of trade and economic engagement of the U.S. is seen as being absolutely essential there.

And this is true not just in terms of, you know, shoring up and underpinning the type of rules-based, open, non-discriminatory trade system which everyone benefits from. But I think also this is the case that, you know, USTR – I think it’s been making in terms of the Trans-Pacific Partnership recently, which is also that these are very important vehicles for projecting U.S. values into the region.

At a broad level, the rules-based is very consistent with heavy, stable institutions of democracy but if you go into some of the detail, you know, a lot of what the U.S. looks for in the region now is key commitments around the way governments work, the way judicial systems work, which are very consistent with the way things work in the United States, that the values of the United States places that have these institutions should work.

So you see, for instance, a country like Vietnam, which, you know, you look at the arc of history from fighting a war, become a communist nation, to now essentially through this trade agreement making deep reform commitments to allow labor unions to open up, its government to add the stakeholders and transparency, and, essentially norms of governance which are a lot more consistent with what the United States would like to see in Vietnam and globally.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Here, here. Well said. Thank you. Let’s open it up for about 15 or 20 minutes to any questions you might have for any one of you. Anybody?

Fred Downey. I call on with great pride my long-time national security adviser in the Senate and a veteran of the U.S. Army.

Q: I hope the question is up to that –

SEN. LIEBERMAN: It sure will be.

Q: I want to go back to the simple narratives for a second. It seems to me that American leadership depends on American leaders. And it’s not just the general public that seems fixed in the simple narratives but those who – many of those who are and who aspire to be American leaders.

How do we get beyond the simple narratives in the key leaders and their advisers to the point where we can actually do a good calculus between cost and benefit in engagement?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Neena and then Steve.

MS. SHENAI: Well, the simple narrative issue is actually one that we did deal with in our working group because, as many of us know, the issues of trade and investment tend to be real hot button issues politically. And they tend to be boiled down to questions of whether trade agreements are just methods of shipping jobs overseas. You know, that’s sort of the simple narrative here.

And I think the answer to your question is really education beyond the kind of top line talking points. A lot of these issues are much more difficult to explain in the paragraph under the talking points than the top line talking points.

And what we discussed in our working group on the trade side is that there aren’t – you know, it’s not starkly those who are against or for trade. There are – they’re sort of that middle, that sort of – what we would consider sort of a frustrated free trader, you know, somebody who is – who wants to have more engagement with the world, who wants to – and understands the benefits of economic engagement but also concerned about whether our trading partners are willing to play by the rules that are set or whether the American economy is actually benefiting from the system as is.

And I think American engagement needs to – and some things that we do talk about in the paper, sort of evolve with the times. We just can’t expect that sort of setting out a set of rules, a simple set of top line rules is going to be sufficient to be able to provide those benefits.

You know, in the trade space, we have – you know, the World Trade Organization, for example, we’ve seen a great deal of stagnation in what was the Doha round, which was started in 2001. And the outgrowth of that however has been several sort of sectoral agreements at the World Trade Organization and the liberalization of services, environmental goods, information technology products, sort of a – so to speak, coalitions of the willing to be able to sort of move the ball forward with those who are willing to have those conversations with the eventual hope of broadening those frameworks out more broadly.

The same thing with the Trans-Pacific Partnership – you know, it’s one of these agreements that I think is out there to – and hopefully, you know, a good agreement is ultimately concluded and passed by Congress.

But the framework in Asia of U.S. values, U.S. economic principles that gets spread through these agreements with countries that are willing to have those conversations can ultimately serve as a model for the region.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Somebody else want to add? And I think a part of what we were searching here after we reached the consensus we did, Fred, is a vocabulary or a way to describe why we felt the way we did about the importance of American global leadership to the American people and to our country more broadly. I think we’ve done a pretty good job at that. It could always be better.

And, for instance, it is very – the trade issue is very complicated. The report is bottom line very pro-trade and makes the case that trade agreements have clearly netted out positively for the American economy. I think the number we used a couple of times is 40 million jobs in the U.S. are dependent on trade.

But it’s not – you know, every agreement becomes a new subject to negotiate and then none of them are perfect. But, on balance, they really not only help – they’ve helped us. That’s the main point.

SEN. TALENT: Joe, can I say quick, as a practical – one thing I think would be good to do would be for orientation for new members and senators, take this report, which is a bipartisan report, the ones Rudy and I were on with national defense panels.

There’s all these bipartisan groups who are producing this stuff, congeal it down to messaging points and briefing points on the strategic questions, and get the leaders in both parties to agree to that messaging and agree to make it a mandatory orientation.

Obviously, new members and senators, they can accept it or reject it, you know. But this is what we’re going to brief you on. And I think the NGA ought to do it for governors as well. This is what – there’s a – on the fundamentals of American foreign and security policy, just at least to get them thinking about that and getting them oriented.

The ignorance, as Joe knows, on the Hill in particular, as you know, it’s abysmal. And in fairness to them, it’s really because our system does such a poor job, compared to other systems, of preparing people and even the basics to exercise these – make these decisions.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: So the second condition that Jon Kyl and I set, or goal was that beyond wanting this to be a very broad group of members was that we just not go through the process to prove that we could do it and reestablish a non-partisan, non- ideological or at least non-parochial ideological statement but that we then go out and try to sell it.

So that’s the next phase. And I know we want to talk to members of Congress and new members is a great idea. We’ve begun to explore how to make this available to the presidential candidates.

I mean, what Jim said is true, which is that, unfortunately, there are only a limited number of members of Congress who are really focused on these international issues except when they become a crisis, as they are now, and suddenly terrorism is listed as a number one issue of concern by the American people. So that’s the next challenge ahead of us to try to market this.

Maury Emity (ph).

Q: What is the rationale given the state of global affairs for leading from behind?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Did everybody hear the question? What’s the – we’re going to answer this in a totally nonpartisan fashion. What’s the rationale for leading from behind? Well, maybe I’m not the best one to respond because I don’t agree with it. Does anybody –

SEN. TALENT: You know, I’m going to say this to you. And I think you touched on this before with regard to Syria.

In a particular case, you might very well make the argument that a more passive approach – it just depends on what’s happening on the ground – might be better. And Syria is very, very difficult and has been from the beginning. I mean, Iraq was easy compared to making judgments there.

So we’re not – when we talk about leadership, we’re not necessarily saying that leading means always being at the forefront of any efforts that are going on everywhere in the world. It means understanding that as a general rule, we need to be anticipating and managing events rather than allowing them to manage us.

But I can’t – I mean, I – you know, it’s generally better to be trying to do something to manage than not manage, but I could see instances where you feel like there’s not enough clarity on the ground to be able to make a decision. As a general rule of policy though, it’s a mistake. And I think that’s the point of the report really.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: I’ll try to go back to my law school education, which was supposed to prepare me to make any argument on any side of an issue, to say that I presume the argument for leading from behind was that we, the United States, was too extended and we were getting to be stretched, we couldn’t afford it, and really we’re getting to be increasingly unsuccessful in what we were doing. And people were relying on us too much and not assuming their fair share, our allies, their fair share of the responsibility.

But not having done that, I would say that the leading from behind is a bad phraseology. I don’t know. And I think actually the administration disavowed it. It came from some unknown person somewhere.

I think if you wanted to give it the best rendering, it would be that they were for a kind of cooperative leadership because there’s – you don’t lead from behind. I mean, I think what we found in the crisis areas in the world today, the Middle East, Syria, Iraq, in regard to Russia with Crimea, Ukraine and China, that very little will happen unless the United States is prepared to lead.

Now, generally speaking, my opinion, if we are prepared to lead, others will join us in the leadership. I mean, if we had been prepared to lead earlier on, and still – it’s actually beginning to happen now in Syria, others, including those – significant that the House of Commons changed the vote on – the earlier vote on being involved in air strikes in Syria, that others will follow, including in Europe and in that case in the Arab world.

But I don’t think there’s any such thing as leading from behind. And the end result will be, as we’ve said here, that we will inevitably be drawn in. There may be some conflict to the world that is so remote from us that we could let them go, you know.

Somebody’s famous comment about the Iran-Iraq war was that, from an American point of view, it should go on forever. That was a bit cynical. I don’t agree with it because there’s consequences around the neighborhood that affect – the neighborhood of Iran and Iraq that clearly, as the war went on, and if it had gone on forever would have had a significant effect on our interests, economically, strategically, and in terms of our values. Rudy.

MR. DE LEON: Just quickly. You know, first, here we are, we’re debating a phrase that was used in a New Yorker article, so that may be a low-level person.

So, you know, I think one of the more interesting things Professor Mahnken and I did is we convened the graduate students from SAIS, from Georgetown, from GW, and a few from American. An optimist in my view is a kid who is getting a senior degree, graduate degree in Middle Eastern studies and taking student loans. That’s an optimist. They were across the political spectrum.

But what they said was, you know, in terms of the use of American power, but especially the military power, we need to be more practical. We can’t do everything and we need to pick our – our choices and we need to lead in ways that match our policy goals and our capabilities.

And, you know, from the world, as you know, Maury, that I came from, our capabilities are measured in terms of pilots and aviators and soldiers, and their skills and the sacrifices that their families make.

And so it’s easy to get in, it’s hard to get out, and when we go in, we have to go in very capably. So being a little slower on the front end may help us in terms of realizing our objectives on the longer side.

SEN. TALENT: As a tactical principle, it may be right, but I think what the report’s saying is that as a strategic principle it’s wrong, and I agree with it. I don’t think the administration ever said this is the approach to our foreign policy on a strategic level.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: We have time for one more question. Yes.

Q: Lea (ph) from Voice of America. When we talk about the U.S. global leadership, I think a key issue we have to confront is how does the U.S. deal with a rising and a more assertive China. And I wonder if the report talks about the strategies to deal with that. I mean, the South China Sea, we all mentioned that today, it’s a case in point.

If China’s intent challenging the American leadership in the Asia-Pacific region, is the U.S. prepared to go to war or risk going to war with China in order to maintain U.S. leadership?

MR. MAHNKEN: I guess the first thing I would say is it’s – you know, it’s not just about the United States, although you talk about – you know, the central principle here is that American leadership and American international engagement is key.

I think it would be a mistake to put it down to the United States versus China. I think it’s the United States, U.S. allies, a lot of other countries in the region, and ultimately it is about a rules-based order.

And I think of the bet that multiple administrations have made across the years is that China will eventually buy into at least major elements of that rule-based order and indeed has in some elements on the economic side, a little bit less on the – you know, on the human rights and values side. That’s been a bet. Now, the question is whether – you know, whether that bet is going to pay off over time.

But, you know, I think we’ve been trying to make that rules-based order as appealing as possible and to give China the incentives for – you know, for becoming a part of that order.

I think, you know, an interesting thing though as we talk about these simple narratives of, you know, U.S. engagement, U.S. pullback – I think one of the things that – when you think about really across the spectrum, and you include the folks who are – if you want to call them neo-isolationists or offshore balancers or whatever, even they, I mean, will say when it comes to military power that great power confrontation, that is something that we really should pay attention to and we really should prepare for, again, maybe not as seriously and be as proactive as internationalists but even they will say that – you know, that a rising China is a security concern that we need to – we need to think about.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: So I’m going to exercise what I used to call senatorial privilege and allow you to ask the last question. And introduce yourself because we’re very glad to – we’re honored to have you here.

Q: Flemming Rose, foreign editor of the Danish newspaper, Jyllands-Posten.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Published some of the cartoons that –

Q: Caused some controversy. Yeah.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Yeah. Well said. That’s well said.

Q: Well, my question is about the freedom agenda. What can the United States do to be more consistent in promoting its values? Because looking from the other side, Putin, other people will say, well, it’s a very selective approach by the United States when it comes to prompting freedom. Look at Saudi Arabia, ruled by an ideology that is very similar to the ideology of the Islamic State. You now have a confrontation between Turkey and Russia and, on balance, you can say that maybe Turkey is a little more free than Russia, but not much.

So how can the United States be most consistent in order to promote freedom and be more trustworthy on this issue?

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Steve or Jim, you want to respond?

MR. DENTON: Well, it’s tricky, needless to say, when our values appear to be or in fact are in conflict with our policies. And that is going to happen inevitably as we live in a complicated world. And often we’re going to be choosing between lesser evils and short-term and long-term goals and what can we overlook in terms of deficit of values in a partner in the short term in order to achieve a longer term goal.

And it’s a matter of articulation which I don’t think we should really hide behind. Clearly, we need to – in my view. I don’t speak for anybody else up here, but in my view, clearly we need to align ourselves to some degree with Saudi Arabia for energy and strategic reasons within the region. To abandon them, to let the regime collapse would cause infinitely more chaos than – with respect to the cost-benefit analysis than it would be to, you know, require for them to adopt a set of values which would be consistent with our own, for example.

So it’s tricky. And I don’t really – and every president, every government in the democratic world has to deal with this and navigate it. But it is an issue I think of leadership and being candid and, you know, explaining what the policies are and they they’re there, and to some degree at least implicitly eliminating why we would sacrifice values for a policy.

SEN. TALENT: It’s rich coming from Putin, too. It’s not an argument.

MR. DENTON: It makes a ripe target.

SEN. TALENT: It’s an argument in favor of less American influence but more. You know, people used to say the same thing about our relationship with South Korea and Taiwan and Spain when Franco ran it. Can’t say that anymore, well, gee, because those countries are now democracies in part because of the ongoing sustained influence of the United States in those countries over time that leads them in that direction, not to mention what, you know, Eastern Europe, which would not be democracies if Putin had had his way.

So, I mean, yeah, it’s true. And we have these difficult judgments to make. Don’t always make them right. But over time, the influence of the United States has been in the direction of freedom really all over the world. And it’s both because we want freedom for other people, because, and we’ve said this here, it’s much better for us to be dealing with countries that are more open to our values or leadership. While our people prosper, our people are more safe.

So I don’t think anybody here is saying we’ve always made these calls right. In fact, I’m certain we all have instances where we point out, we said, boy, that was – that just stunk, what we did there. But over time and – I mean, I feel that way, a couple of times, but over time, the influence has been benign. And it’s important to do it because it validates our leadership also. I mean, it’s important to stand up for us in that respect because it’s a reason why we should be exercising this influence.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Steve, do you want to have a last word?

MR. RICKARD: Yeah. I’d like the United States to be more consistent on these things. As an American citizen who believes in the United States and its role in the world. It’s intensely painful when I think the United States compromises its values. I don’t think it’s in our best interest. It’s certainly painful.

But I really think that it’s a huge mistake to – and some people call it moral equivalence or whatever but to say that because the United States makes mistakes and has made wrong judgments that we have no right to comment on anybody else and we should mind our own business and who are we.

You know, read the Saudi Arabian section in the annual country reports on human rights practices that the State Department publishes which cause huge conflict with the Saudi government every single year. There is not another country on earth that would do that, that would criticize such a close ally in very blunt terms about the conditions in Saudi Arabia. Is that arrogant of the United States to do that? Maybe in some sense.

But at the same time, this is a country that’s open to criticism, criticizes itself and if – you know, if Vladimir Putin, you know, who heads a government which just declared my organization non grata because we’re trying to promote openness and tolerance and have been hugely supportive of the Russian people for several decades wants to allow an organization like the American Enterprise Institute to exist in Russia, then, you know, maybe I’d be more open to hearing, you know, criticisms of American mistakes.

SEN. LIEBERMAN: Thank you. Thanks very much. I mean, just in one sentence. I always – it’s an imperfect world so our foreign policy is imperfect but it’s clear that we always do better as a nation and not just in terms of our feeling about ourselves but in terms of practical effect if our foreign policy reflects our values as expressed particularly in the Declaration of Independence, which is an explicitly – an explicit universal declaration of human rights or a declaration of universal human rights.

So as I go back to Kennedy again, whose inaugural influenced me, the rights of man come not from the state but from the hand of God. I look forward to seeing that in the Democratic platform this year.

So I thank everybody here. You can see how much – I hope you’ve enjoyed this. Thanks. This is – this is why I really had a great time at the meetings we held. And in some sense, the – well, I’ve overstating the case but the diversity and breadth of the membership of the steering committee and the working groups is as significant as what we said, I think. I’m proud of what we said. I hope it contributes to the debate.

But in a time of awful partisanship, including on foreign policy, as most recently witnessed on the Iran nuclear agreement vote, we were able to come together really across a very wider spectrum and present this consensus for a strong continuing American global leadership.

Now, the statesmen are going to exit the stage and the politicians are going to come on. You know, Elliott Abrams, people like that, the political people. But it’s going to be an interesting discussion I think and I think maybe a twist on it but of the relevance of what we’ve had to say here to the presidential debate and campaign going on. So stay tuned. As they say on cable news, don’t go anywhere.

Thank you very much. (Applause.)

(Break.)

DANIELLE PLETKA: Thank you all for being here. And I feel like we’re sort of the panel on Fox News after the debate and we’re here to discuss how everybody did. But we’re not going to do that. Let me just quickly introduce three members of the steering committee of this project.

Michael O’Hanlon – I’m not going to tell a lot of everybody’s background. Michael O’Hanlon, who’s from the Brooking Institution; Bob Kagan also from the Brookings Institution, which is overrepresented on this panel; Elliott Abrams, from the Council on Foreign Relations; and I’m Dani Pletka. I’m with AEI.

What we really hope to do was just take a little bit of time at the end of the discussion to talk about the issues of internationalism and sort of look forward a little bit toward the next year as the presidential election, what the opportunities are for us.

And I want to actually – I want to hearken back to a conversation that I had with you, Bob, right at the beginning of this project when we were talking about polling, right? And we had the late great Andy Kohut come in and talk to us actually about American public opinion.

And what he said, and then I posed to you, was that there are always peaks and troughs in American public opinion, that Americans become extremely engaged and gung-go throughout the 1940s, for example, for World War II, and then the end comes and they’re extremely jaundiced, question whether we should be engaged in the world, spending money, and that this has been a real tradition – it was a trend really in the 20th century.

And the question I asked you at the time was – we were in a trough at the start of 2012. Are we coming out of that trough? Is there change or is this somehow different? Andy, I should say, as a spoiler, said he thought this was a little different.

ROBERT KAGAN: What did I say?

MR. PLETKA: I’m going to test you and see you if you’re consistent. You said you thought it was the same as always.

MR. KAGAN: No. I don’t think I could have said that. I worry that it’s different. I think it might be the same as always. And there’s certainly signs suggesting that we are coming out of it, at least in a sort of way we talk about the world since.

And presumably – well, I was going to say that probably both presidential candidates are going to be internationalists of one kind or another. But since I don’t know what some of the candidates on the Republican Party even are, certainly the Democratic Party nominee will be – and I suppose it’s possible that the Republican nominee won’t be, but in the general mood of the Republican Party is more internationalist and more, you know, sort of more concerned about national security.

But then, the test will come because I don’t know other than being concerned about terrorism how – and that may be enough to carry it but how deep American public feelings go about American engagement.

I do think we spent a quarter of a century after the Cold War living off the strategic fumes of the Cold War in terms of presidents who were basically Cold War children themselves, leading the country in a certain direction.

But really with the absence – you know, it’s a cliché but with the absence of communism and one single threat to sort of shape all your policies around, sometimes not even accurately but nevertheless, that was always the story, I worry that Americans forgot why we got into this whole business in the first place. I don’t think anybody teaches them why. I don’t think their leaders teach them why. I don’t think people remember what happened before World War II and that’s why after World War II we decided we needed to put together a world order and sustain it.

And so in the absence of that education, I sometimes wonder whether American people know why do we have a Navy, you know? What does it do exactly? Now, it could be that everything will be fine with good leadership. What I worry about is that the leader will find himself in the position that Franklin Roosevelt found himself in like – I think he said in 1937, it’s sometimes very scary to move forward and look behind you and find that there’s nobody there.

So it’s a question. I think it’s still a question. I’m not confident that the American people are in an upward swing. But I think, you know, it’s possible that they are.

MS. PLETKA: So, Michael, let’s talk for a second about the defense issue, because, of course – so those of you who know me know I always hearken back to one particular story, one particular phrase.

It was right – not long after 9/11, and I saw the then vice president of the United States, Dick Cheney, on one of the Sunday shows talking. And he gave an interesting answer to a question about why it was that the Europeans were not fighting on mass alongside us. And he said, because they can’t. And of course, when you can’t, you start to look at the world very differently.

And setting aside, you know – setting aside that particular period, the question is, more broadly, can we? Will we be able to bite off the challenges that face us? And if we can’t, aren’t we just going to continue to define them down?

MICHAEL O’HANLON: Thanks, Dani. And it’s nice to be on this panel and part of the project. Let me answer in two ways. One, with regard to allies, because you mentioned the Europeans, and then, secondly, with regard to the defense budget. And just in a very simple way.

And I think a lot of people here are familiar with the rough size of the U.S. defense budget. By one measure, it’s still very big. It’s almost – well, it is slightly over now $600 billion a year as recently codified in the budget deal. The Congress and the president just agreed to.

On the other hand, it’s only about 3.2 percent of our gross domestic product, something like that, going into 2016 full fiscal year that we’re now entering. And that is extraordinarily modest by any kind of recent historical standard or by macro-economic standards.

We did an event this summer with Ben Bernanke at Brookings, which was a lot of fun for me, as you can imagine, on defense and the economy. And Ben and people like Alice Rivlin, when we do events with them and discussions I’m sure that you have here as well, economists are not going to say that 3.2 percent of GDP is too much for the health of the broader economy. Obviously, if you can’t make your politics work and you run too big of a deficit because you can’t decide how to pay for these kinds of government programs, that could be a problem onto itself, but the size of defense spending is not, you know, a big drain on the economy.

And the debate that I see emerging – others may disagree, but the full range of debate we’re going to have in this presidential year I think the maximum that anybody is going to propose is something in the vicinity of 4 percent of GDP, and even that is not likely to happen even if there is a more hawkish Republican who wins and the Congress stays in Republican hands. So, in other words, we’re going to be between 3 and 3.5 percent of GDP in all likelihood as our defense level. That is totally bearable.

Now, of course, I haven’t explained how to pay for it or how to, you know, reconcile the disputes and political philosophy between the two parties that lead to difficulties in financing such thing but, nonetheless, at a macroeconomic level, it’s not a burden.

In terms of our allies, the main point I would make – and I’ll be curious how others react as well and how they think – is we have the – you know, the best and the worst of any kind of an alliance system you could ever ask for.

But I will put the emphasis on the best because what we have now in the absence of a single threat is still 60 to 65 countries around the world that are either formal allies or strong security partners. That group of nations along with us represents roughly two- thirds of world GDP and two-thirds of world military spending. This is an extraordinary accomplishment in the history of mankind, probably unprecedented, but I’ll let Bob and others comment as to whether they see any previous precedent, where you see that much global capacity unified around one single leader.

And the reason we are, the reason that group stays unified is because – precisely because every single issue is a one-off in terms of how we manage it. We don’t coerce allies. We do try to sometimes berate them or cajole them. We don’t coerce allies into always participating with us in military operations that they think are either wrong- headed or in a part of the world they don’t have a major interest. And so it’s a little bit of a – you know, case by case, a la carte coalition-building each time we do a major operation.

But that’s part of the strength of this system as well. It’s part of why it survives ugly debates like we all had over the Iraq War. So there are fundamental disagreements but here we are, 12 years later, George Bush isn’t in power anymore; Gerhard Schroder isn’t in power anymore in Germany. A lot of other previous people who had disagreements have left office. And, moreover, we sort of agreed to disagree in many ways about that war with many allies. And the way we do our foreign policymaking, the way we manage our alliances allows that to happen.

So it’s both the greatest strength and the greatest weakness but, on balance, it’s a strength because it means that even now, 25 years after the Cold War, even if the allies can’t do as much as we would like and even if most of them choose not to do very much at all even when they could in a given crisis, we’ve still got South Korea and Japan working with us in Northeast Asia. We’ve still got Middle Eastern allies working with us and keeping an eye on Iran. Even if they’re not formal allies, they’re strong partners. We’ve still got the Europeans deploying 40,000 troops at the peak of the Afghanistan mission even if they all weren’t always happy about doing it and were not equally effective in their operations.

So to me, when I put it all together, the alliance system is something I’d much rather have than not have and it reflects the strength of American leadership.

MS. PLETKA: OK. That’s the glass half-full.

MR. O’HANLON: Yes.

MS. PLETKA: The problem is that what you talked about in terms of defense budget is a little bit more than what we’re spending now and not off kilter historically, but now we’re spending 50 percent of it on internal entitlements, right, health care, pensions, retirement, headquarter costs, things like that – not on fighting.

And even a Congress in Republican hands, war hawkish, one would think, couldn’t really come together to agree how to put more money in and how to do it by sleight of hand through, you know, overseas contingency operations that was not fully backed by their own caucus, let alone by the Democrats.

So the question for me is, do we have enough – will we actually have the resources to meet the challenges that are out there setting aside the question of our will?

MR. KAGAN: I’m sorry. I mean, this is point one. This is item one on what makes me nervous about going forward, whether we’ve come out of the trough because we can have an argument. Mike knows better than I do, but I feel like if we had the worst crisis in the world tomorrow and we had to do something in Syria that required ground troops and maybe 100,000 ground troops, let’s say because it was such a big deal, I don’t think we have the – we barely have the capacity to do that now. And certainly not to sustain it and the damage that would be done. We are all well below where we need to be. And that is not even including what happens in the South China Sea, if we have two things happening at once.

And, as you say, we’ve been unable to address that problem. So the next president’s going to have to dig us out of a hole so that we can begin to return to this leadership posture that we would like to be in. At its base, it rests on the military capability that we are now chipping away at gradually.

When the Congress won’t do what it tells me the American don’t care about it. So in that sense, we haven’t really turned the corner and I’m not confident that we are going to turn the corner in time.

And as you rightly say, if you have less, you do less, then you come up with reasons why you should do less, and then – and that’s how you get sort of out of business.

MR. O’HANLON: I’m sure Elliott’s waiting patiently to get in. let me make one quick point because I want to quote Mackenzie Eaglen since Brookings is over – let me quote an AEI scholar and Mackenzie makes the wonderful point that backs you up, Dani, that we have – we often say we have a sacred bond with our troops. We owe them good pay, we owe them good health care. Obviously for those who are wounded, we owe them veteran’s care throughout their lives and support for their families.

But we also have a second sacred contract with them, which is to make sure that the when they go into battle, they win, and the enemy loses and dies. And she puts it better. It sounds better coming from her than from me, but it’s a very eloquent pitch. And we do have work to do to make that second sacred contract be better understood and appreciated at the same time the first one is remembered and continually enforced.

But I’ll just say one thing, that Bob’s right to express worries. But we have not reached a cliff, I don’t believe. We are still spending more than $100 billion a year on procurement of new military weaponry. We still have the size army that Clinton and Bush did before the buildups of the Iraq and Afghanistan experiences. A lot of people want to cut it too much, but we haven’t hit disaster zone yet.

The Army’s underprepared for major operations because it spent 15 years doing counterinsurgency, but its overall size and readiness is at strain, at risk. We should have that debate but we haven’t already forgone our leadership capacity, I don’t believe.

ELLIOTT ABRAMS: Too much pessimism, which I will now counteract and destroy. I really think –

MS. PLETKA: It sounds very optimistic.

MR. ABRAMS: No. I really think the answer here is presidential leadership. And I remember very well, and there are some people who remember it very well also. We heard all of this stuff in the late ’70s under Jimmy Carter. In fact, it went further.

The nation was ungovernable. You could not have a president provide presidential leadership anymore. The system had broken down. No one could possibly – it was all nonsense because all you needed was presidential leadership, and that turned it around. You needed someone who could explain to the American people why we needed to do what we needed to do.

For example, spend more on the military. Now, I do worry that we’re going to get a president who will not provide that leadership. But if the leadership is there, first I believe Congress will be there. Second, I believe the American people will be there.

I don’t – I don’t think there’s been a massive change. The American people, you know, are not looking abroad for dragons to slay – never, never. But there is always a response to, first of all, terrorism, and we saw the public opinion polls move when Americans were beheaded by ISIS. There’s always a response and I think we also see this.

To the notion that our country is being run down, that our leadership is disappearing, that we are not respected the way we used to be, there’s always a response to that. And that’s an inchoate response because we have an inchoate foreign policy, in my view, or because we have a foreign policy that tries to argue that that is a good thing, that the problem with the world was too much American power and now we’re fixing that. I don’t think it’s reasonable to expect that Congress will right these wrongs. I don’t think Congress ever has.

On the world scene, leadership comes from the White House. And if – I believe if the leadership is there, it will be possible to change much of this. Overnight? No, because, you know, we – it took a long time to do the Reagan or maybe more fairly the 1980 Carter and then Reagan military buildup and we have lived off it for a long time and we need to do it again. But I don’t see in the reactions so far of the American people a reason to believe what I know it’s right to fear.

And when I talk to – I want to say when I talk to people who are at risk, you know, Australians and South Koreans and Israelis and Saudis and Jordanians and Czechs and Poles, sure, their worry is – it’s not Obama who’s only got another year to go. It’s whether the problem is Obama or the American people. And that is the right question to ask but I believe the problem is Obama.

MS. PLETKA: So here’s an interesting question. So you had a consensus come together in this project and you’ve had really an amazing array of people of very different political ideas, all of whom come together and basically say, no, no. We need to lead in the world. We need to have – you know, we need to be pro free trade. We need to stand up for the values of human rights and standards that we’ve always stood for. And we need to have a military that can in fact defend – not just defend our country, but do more. And so everybody came together to say that.

Now, part of the challenge here is – you know, part of the Washington challenge is you start to sound like old people. It’s kids these days. They don’t understand. You know, you say it’s the education system. You know, as Elliott was speaking, I thought to myself, so all of those people who are putting up those lists of demands on campus, are they going to be down with this? Are they going to grow out of that?

And so I guess I ask myself a little bit whether that that is the sort of American people component of the problem? But I also want to – and I want to stay with you, Elliott, because I want to ask a special regional question as well.

Part of the challenge of the Cold War and of Reagan’s leadership was – and, of course, one of the reasons why we wanted to do this, we wanted to stop harkening back to Reagan’s leadership. We wanted to find a new way to talk about some of these issues that didn’t reference so many dead people, actual quote from the events. But the challenge of the Cold War was a much more black and white challenge than that one we faced right now in the Middle East.

MR. ABRAMS: I would say this. Remember the Bill Buckley, a famous William F. Buckley line, that he’d rather be governed by the first 1,000 names in the Boston telephone directory than by the faculty of Harvard College. Boy, is that still true. And Yale. I mean –

MR. O’HANLON: Abrams would be in the first 1,000. (Laughter.)

MR. ABRAMS: That’s true but it’s not enough. It’s not enough. You know, we do polls at the Council on Foreign Relations of the membership of the council. And on a lot of these issues, the result is a lot worse that Gallup gives you. You’re seeing – go back to Reagan.

I think that we have created an illusion – and I hear it mostly, of course, from friends on the left – that in those days, we were all united against the communist menace. No, we weren’t. Are you kidding me? This is a completely illusionary unity. And many people in the – I mean, Joe was on the Hill and in Connecticut politics. Come on, there was no unity at all. And many of the leaders of the Democratic Party in particular, but many – let’s broaden it to say American elites were quite wrong on all these issues.

The question really is not I would say – are these dopes at all of these colleges, will they grow out of it. Many of them will grow out of it as many of their parents grew out of it.

MS. PLETKA: As we did.

MR. ABRAMS: But many won’t, and it doesn’t matter because, thank God, they’re not the only people voting. So I’m not – I mean, I am worried about the quality of elite education in the United States and I think it’s something we should all worry about.

But I do think that you see the reactions. I mean, let’s go to the worst possible – in a way, the worst thing that could happen in the next year other than Donald Trump being elected.

No, quite seriously, a terrorist attack on the United States, which after Paris I think we all believe is possible. How do you think the American people are going to react it? How do people always react? Think of 1973, when there was an immediate fear, it’s going to – I’m talking about the oil embargo. Now everyone will turn against the Jews. I mean, we always have these fears. But the public reaction, when there is leadership, is almost always terrific.

MR. KAGAN: Just to go back in a more depressing direction. The only thing I would – there’s a couple of things I would note.

One is that the American people that you’re describing are the American people post-1941. There have been another American people. They’re still the same Americans, roughly speaking. They were the Americans of the ’20s and ’30s.

And the interesting thing about those Americans is that the worse things got in the world, the more horrible things got in the world, the less Americans wanted to have anything to do with it because why should they? And, also, as they were basically reducing their military capacity, their ability to do anything about it declined. I mean, the American people, our American people watched Hitler conquer France and we were not at that moment convinced that there was anything that we should do about it.

So maybe those American people are gone forever. But I think it’s in the character. It’s there. It’s possible.

And what was different during the Cold War is I believe that although you – of course it was complicated and everything, but communism in the Soviet Union put a floor under the troughs and made that all the troughs in the Cold War were short and shallow, even after Vietnam. The trough after World War I was deep and 20 years long.

So my question has been: are we still in a short and shallow trough period or are we in a long and deep – are we moving toward a long deep? And what concerns me is that, again, terrorism doesn’t quite do it. As we saw after – even after 9/11, yeah, it led to a burst of we’ve got to go get somebody. It did not lead to and we, therefore, need to be reengaged in the whole world and everything. And look what’s happened when – you know, when two wars didn’t end exactly the way we wanted them to end. We’ve completely wanted to absent ourselves.

And the only other data point I would add to this, if everybody is so upset and is so interested in foreign policy now, how is it that in Republican primaries, you know, consistently 40 to 50 percent of voters have been – or polled – those polled have been going for two people who couldn’t possibly be thought of as foreign policy leaders?

Now, maybe we’re all going to get lucky and the one or two people we could possibly imagine in the Republican Party heading in this direction will actually wind up with the nomination, but what does it say about even now, in this – what we consider to be a hawkish Republican Party that they’re still putting their faith in Donald Trump and Ben Carson?

MS. PLETKA: OK. So this is a good opportunity for us to talk actually about people not just about the many deficiencies of the Republican field, but, I mean, it’s been interesting to me on the Democratic side as well to watch as Mrs. Clinton, who I’ve frankly always thought of as a pretty tough foreign policy figure, actually abandon a lot of the – for example, the free trade but also, you know, a variety of other things. She was really a stalwart when it came to what was necessary to be down in Syria and it was the administration that really didn’t go her way. And now –

MR. ABRAMS: It was the president.

MS. PLETKA: The president. Well, he gets – yeah. It is his administration.

MR. ABRAMS: No. But I mean, the secretary of defense was with her, the head of the CIA was with her.

MS. PLETKA: But I’m not sure she’s with herself anymore. And that’s less a criticism of – yeah. That actually was kind of good, wasn’t it? That’s not a criticism of any of these people.

I think what Bob has tapped into is that – is this bigger issue, which is that these – the candidates are in fact responding to the American people. It is not that they are irresponsible or jerks or everything else. It is actually that they see which way – they think they see which way the wind is blowing.

So one of the things, when we came together to do this project, we talked – I’ll just put it on myself since it’s not a nice thing to say, we talked about an unholy alliance of the libertarian right, the libertarian isolationist right and the sort of, you know, isolationist far left. And we talked about this alliance being something that was really representing the threat to free trade, to the budget, to the American role in the world.

Even though I think that because of Ukraine, because of what’s going on in the Middle East, because of the beheadings, we seem more engaged, at the core, I don’t think that engagement has happened. You don’t see it on Capitol Hill. I mean, Mike, do you see it on the hill that that alliance is dead?

MR. O’HANLON: Well, I’m going to speak about Hillary, if you don’t mind instead, because that’s where you had me going and I’m not sure I have a lot to say about Capitol Hill. Maybe others can chime in there.

I think Hillary’s recent opposition to TPP reflects what for me is the number one worry I have about our ability as a country to sustain our long-term role in the world which is the economic foundations of a shared sense of forward progress. You know, it’s been described in many different ways – the middle-class income stagnation of the last generation.

And both parties are not impressing me in their solutions because both are falling back in primary season on blaming the other. If you just let the Republicans run this show or just let the Democrats, we’ll be OK. No, this is a generation-long problem now of middle income, middle-class income. And there’s no easy answer, obviously. And I would like to see the fundamentals of that addressed much more in the debate.

I think Secretary Clinton’s opposition to TPP, which I do not support her opposition. I’m in favor of TPP, but I think it reflect that reality. I think her Middle East policy is getting stronger. Even as her main competition in the primaries is Bernie Sanders, she’s nonetheless given a strong speech on Syria.

So I worry less about sort of the hard power. I worry more not just with her but with the country as a whole about how we’re going to sustain internationalism if we can’t get the middle class to believe that globalization is good for their pocket book. And we know that it’s – that there are benefits to globalization for the average American consumer from lower prices from imported goods, but that’s not the same as having a good paying job. And so, to me, that’s the issue you’ve really hit on that’s important to think about in this project and others.

MR. ABRAMS: I’m struck – just want to go back to the Republicans. There actually is in the race an articulate and principled isolationist, Rand Paul. And he’s nowhere. He makes these arguments. I think he makes them well. He is coherent and consistent, and he has, what? Two percent. And I think that’s because the voters are not isolationists.

Think of Trump. Now Trump, in my view, Trump is incoherent. If Trump were to say everything he is saying now and were to add, and, by the way, this country – he does say some of this – this country gets no respect and we need to start pushing people around and tell them who America is and we’re not – do you think he’d be getting fewer votes? I don’t. I think he is getting these votes, you know, because of this sort of – the tone of attack, the bullying, the unpleasantness and the assault on, you know, all the terrible people in Washington.

I don’t think it is a form of isolationism. And I think that there was a point for eight years ago where I actually wondered if the Rand Paul wing of the party would grow in strength but it hasn’t, I think.

MR. KAGAN: That’s true. And if we’d been sitting here three years ago, we would have said this is – Rand Paul is a serious problem and genuine isolationism is a serious problem. I don’t think we’re dealing with genuine isolationism.

But whether voters in the Republican Party or at the nation at large are really willing to sort of – in the absence of a Reagan do the – yes, we have to completely reverse course. We have to increase substantially – it’s really time that we turned around and moved in the other direction, that I don’t get that sense.

And I think that you can easily support Trump who in one minutes says Jeb Bush and Iraq and you shouldn’t – Iraq, Iraq, Iraq, which is doing all kinds of dog whistles to everybody across the spectrum political Republican, Democrat, Iraq is bad, play that card while at the same time saying, we’re going to win, win, win, win, you’re going to get bored of how much we win. To me, all that is just – that is not obviously appealing to anybody who’s out there thinking, don’t we need to fundamentally change course?

Now, the person who speaks most often about that, I’m afraid, the person who I think is most consistent – I’m not saying this because I support him in particular but – has been Jeb Bush. He’s the one who said 4 percent of defense spending, I don’t think, you know, most of the other candidates have gotten into that, Bush has been pretty consistently spouting. And he is also at 4 percent.

Ted Cruz who is on the rise now, he’s shot in all directions, right? And so I’m not getting a sense even among our candidates.

The only one who’s sort of – it’s really Rubio and Bush who are the only ones who are sort of consistent, even Rubio kind of buckled back in 2012 on Syria because he was worried about Rand Paul. But let’s say he’s in a good place now. You know, that represents in my view – that’s – they’ve got 22 percent of the polling right now.

So I don’t want to say at the end of the day it’s all going to be fine but I’m not getting a signal out of this primary season that says the American people are really ready to turn in the other direction.

MS. PLETKA: And when we think – and I’m going to turn to the audience for Q&A in just a moment, – I guess what sticks with me is that I agree with all of you who think that the fundamental instincts of the American people actually transcend generational, you know, issues. And that, you know, when called to a grand task, the American people have always been ready to answer. And I believe that’s still true and I’ve spent time, a lot of time on university campuses, and I believe it’s true even there.

But let’s think about the next president. Forget, you know, Obama did right, did wrong, whatever that is, for the next president, we have got an unprecedented array of challenges.

And the one thing we know is that the next president, no matter who it is, is going to say, all right. I’m going to go and put a safe zone into Syria, and I’m going to bomb the crap out of Assad and ISIS, and I’m going to start bombing in Yemen, and I’m going to – and I’m going to negotiate a new free trade agreement and I’m going to challenge the Chinese in the South China Sea, and, by the way, Mr. Putin, you need to get the hell out of Crimea. Yeah. No one is going to do that. And so it does beg the question whether the complexity of the challenges that are facing us are in themselves a limiting factor for our engagement globally.

MR. O’HANLON: Well, I think that I wouldn’t want any president to say all the things you just said, which is part of the challenge.

MS. PLETKA: Don’t vote for me then.

MR. O’HANLON: I haven’t been able to figure out yet who either one is going to choose for VP. I think you might be the mystery candidate.

But I think that actually – this gets to Bob’s earlier point at the very beginning that there is no single threat. And even though we have a general sense, many of us, on this working group – and thank you, again, for AEI’s role in making it all happen and Senator Lieberman and Senator Kyl, but even though we have a general sense of greater internationalism, we didn’t try to come out and say on each one of those issues there should be a specific hawkish military-led response. And I think it would be a mistake to do that.

So I’m looking for nuance. And that’s part of the challenge, you know, because we’re in a world that requires it.

MR. ABRAMS: You know, just one quick thing. I think myself that one of the really best things that happened in a long time in foreign affairs was the Turkish shoot down of a Russian plane. A NATO country shot down a Russian plane. And guess what happened? Nothing. I have been worried –

MR. KAGAN: They were urged to apologize for it by their allies.

MR. ABRAMS: Right. Well, I have been worried that so abysmally poor has been our response to Putin that he would in fact take a shot at NATO, that is that in the Baltics and that if you went for Estonia and something, you know, our choices would be very poor at that point and I’m not sure we would make the right choice.

So how do we get Putin not – well, for once, somebody said, stop, and shot down a plane. I don’t think you have to do all of those things even if you – if the agenda is to make progress on all those, everything is related to everything else. And if a new president were to show that he or she had a new policy and you pushed back hard on one of those, then I think it gives everybody else pause.

MS. PLETKA: That’s a little bit like the IAEA report yesterday, right, which is 2003. That was when the Iranians suddenly have pause about their nuclear program. No question.

Folks, I’ve been having all the fun asking all the questions. How about you? If you have a question, raise your hand. I will send someone. If not, I’m going to keep talking.

There you go. There’s a gentleman in the back. Please identify yourself. I can’t see you behind.

Q: Steve Lucket (ph). I work and study here in the city. Thank you very much for the panelists. Dr. O’Hanlon and Kagan, you guys are awesome so thanks as always for your contribution.

Ms. Pletka mentioned Tim’s interview with Vice President Cheney in late 2001. And one of the more salient pieces to come from that session was the vice president’s mention of the dark side. Could the panel examine the degree to which using the dark side – light footprints, back ops teams – is essentially an article of faith or should be for every presidential candidate and how it’s endured over the past 14 years?

And a second briefer question is whether it would be criticisms of U.S. aid or non-aid to Israeli defense, second-hand gear for the Syrian rebels or leading from behind. How do you all define American prestige today? Thanks.

MR. O’HANLON: Well, I’ll start with the first question. And I think covert instruments of American foreign policy, which I think is what you were getting at in your first question, are important and have to be put in their right place, of course.

And so if we look at Afghanistan 2001, they were a big part of why the Northern Alliance overthrew the Taliban and it was an incredible accomplishment. They’ve been very effective in a lot of drone operations, where we didn’t have other choices. They’ve been very effective in creating these very effective terrorist databases which have prevented a lot of people from getting into the United States. And we’ve had relatively few terrorist attacks since 2001. And that’s partly a reflection of the good work of our intelligence community.

But, of course, as you well know, there are limits to this as well. We couldn’t expect the intelligence community to figure out how to put, you know, sand in the Iranian nuclear gears indefinitely. They figured out one or two ways to do it, perhaps, but it didn’t work out over the long term, you know, as a sustainable policy in and of itself.

And in Syria, whatever limited work we were letting our covert operators do with moderate opposition forces was nowhere near up to the challenge there. And we’ve had to now recognize very belatedly and insufficiently so far we have to go well beyond the covert means.

So I’m generally a supporter of a lot of what our covert operations have been about. But I think sometimes we’ve over-relied on them.

MS. PLETKA: Thank you. I want to – I’m going to ask another question. That’s what happens when you get the mic.

One thing we haven’t talked about and I missed a little of our previous panel so I don’t know whether we emphasized it enough but, you know, I have a national security perspective on a lot of these things. Nonetheless, we don’t – we don’t talk enough about aid. We don’t talk enough about development.

One of the things that the report came out very strongly on was the fact that the United States really actually does need to reinvest in soft power. I hate that expression. Maybe it came from Brookings, maybe it didn’t. It has become meaningless because it is –

MR. ABRAMS (?): Joe Nye I think. Harvard. It’s Harvard. It’s always Harvard.

MS. PLETKA: No wonder. No wonder I hated it because it is meant to be basically an explicit repudiation of so-called hard power. Nonetheless, if we think about – you know, there was no dissent whatsoever, you know, hawks, doves, about the imperative of the United States doing more on that side, and yet, when you look at what we’re doing – there’s a great article of talking about U.S. ideological efforts against ISIS I think in the New York Times and the Post today saying, you know, we’re failing. And anyone who follows them on Twitter knows, yeah, we’re really failing. Think again, turn away, Bob. You’re going to disagree with me?

MR. KAGAN: I don’t know what it would mean to succeed ideologically with them. I mean, I think beating the crap out of them on the ground would have a very big effect on the soft power battle in the Twitter-verse (sp).

MS. PLETKA: OK. I mean, I agree with you, of course, but it does seem to me that we don’t spend enough time talking about this and that we’re not seeing enough positive ideas out of it. And as we talk about how this plays into the political campaign, we don’t hear anybody talking about this, not even Bernie Sanders. Isn’t that right? What’s going on?

MR. ABRAMS: It’s not sexy. It’s not something that – I mean, certainly no candidate for president is going to say, let me tell you what I’m running on, doubling the AID budget.

I do want to mention one piece of this, the, if you will, the ideological war part of it: broadcasting. And we are really so bad at this. And we have been so bad at it really since the Cold War.

You know, the broadcasting management, broadcasting board of governors and all of that has been in disarray for a very long time, certainly for 20 years, I’d say. It’s very odd because we are – the private sector is very good at this and it has invented much of it. As a government, we can’t get it done.

I mean, if you look at the numbers of, for example, what do Iranians listen to for news? And you know, they listen to BBC if they can, or they listen to the Israeli Farsi language station. They don’t listen much to our stations.

I don’t – I don’t have a plan for how to improve this, but it’s striking to me because one of the people who was interested in this as a senator is Joe Biden. And I assumed that since vice presidents basically have nothing to do that he would take this and say, let me, let me fix this. He’s paid no attention to it either.

So it was really broken during the George W. Bush years. It remains broken. And we are not really hopeless I think at getting the messages out.

MS. PLETKA: But isn’t this the nexus between what we’ve been talking about and what you, Mike, brought out, which is that, fundamentally, you are never going to – you are going to lose your ability to persuade people of the values of globalization, of the values of leading internationally if you can’t get them to understand that they have a stake in it?

This, you know, whether it’s the economic programs, whether it’s teaching about market economics, whether it’s teaching about – you know, it’s the – any of these sorts of things, whether it’s trade, these are intrinsic to advancing that internationalist view, but you’re right. They’re not sexy and they’ve gotten very, very short shrift even in a Democratic administration. We don’t talk about human rights. We don’t talk about – you know, nobody does. Is there a way to turn that around? Not an optimistic answer.

MR. KAGAN: There’s a way to turn it around but you’d have to go back to having, you know, a more ideological foreign policy, where you were saying that we’re for democracy, and then you’d have to start implementing it, and then you’d have to get into all these hard issues like – it doesn’t do anything to talk about it if you’re not actually trying to do it.

But, you know, on the aid budget, I have to say, the aid budget has – one of the – the biggest attacks made on U.S. aid has come from the conservative side. I mean, the conservatives – and for all I know, they’re probably right but the biggest sort of suggestion that all our aid money is wasted has come from – this building actually I would say, has played a major role in that. Now, again, probably a lot of that money was wasted and just – just like money in the Pentagon is wasted but that’s been one problem.

And also we’re in, you know, a relatively stringent time and all our aid money goes to Israel and Egypt, right? I mean, what was it? What percentage of our aid money? It’s absurd. You can’t – so something’s got to give here.

I actually think aid, during the Cold War and never more so than when Elliott was assistant secretary for Latin America, aid was a crucial tool, and it wasn’t just because it was always working. It was part of the tools. I mean, it was big time bribe money, you know, but it got countries – in the larger political, in the larger political sense.

MR. ABRAMS: Right. Right.

MR. KAGAN: I mean, it was a way of influencing governments in the direction we wanted to influence them, including on democratization. Now, we have so de-linked aid from the idea that we’re giving aid to countries that are trying to – that are going – undergoing reform, for instance, in Egypt, which we give them aid regardless – you know, even when they are cracking down. You know, you’d have to begin to implement all that as well. I actually think that’s more important than the talking we do.

We have to remember something. And this is why I tend to downplay soft power. By and large, countries are not moving in a certain direction because they look at America and they say, oh, what a wonderful country; let’s be like that. That’s not the way people operate, in my view.

Everybody wants to know, what are you doing for me today? Are you protecting me or are you letting me fall to my enemy? Are you providing something that helps me or not? There have been many times through history where America has been very influential even at times when it was very unattractive. And there have been times when it’s been very attractive.

I think to the rest of the world, Obama’s the most attractive president we’ve ever had. They love Barack Obama. And yet, in answer to your question, American prestige is way down because we’re not able to do – we’re not doing anything for anybody.

And I think we got back to providing security, providing aid, doing all – providing, as they say, those public goods that people rely on the United States for, our prestige goes up. And it’s less about how we talk or what we look like.

MS. PLETKA: But it is about knowing what you stand for.

MR. O’HANLON: A couple of quick things on this. First of all, something I hate to do but come to the defense of Harvard slightly. Joe Nye was, of course, the guy who said soft power is an important part of our toolkit but he was also the guy as assistant secretary who put that floor under forces in East Asia and said security is like oxygen. Don’t forget, the minute you don’t have it, you won’t feel very good.

But also, speaking of charity and development, Mark Zuckerberg, I mean, this is an amazing development in philanthropy and in our role in the world. It’s not all about government aid program. We should do more. I’m agreeing with you. But I’m agreeing with you indirect – through a – (inaudible) – argument, where I’m basically saying because of the Gates and Zuckerbergs and Buffetts of the world, because of the fact that Elliott and others have now helped the continents they worked on largely graduate from the need for aid, we have managed to make this problem – still immense but more tractable.

And there are more specific things I think we’re now doing with aid which offers up the opportunity for a president to say, listen, it doesn’t always fail. And it fails – it succeeds sometimes for the reasons Bob alluded to but it also succeeds on its town terms. And we’ve got a lot of countries from East Asia that Senator Talent mentioned earlier, to Latin America, to a number of African countries even that are now growing quite well and that are doing things that had never been done before on their continents.

And so this is making the aid problem still immense and enormous and difficult and crucial but more manageable and something we should talk about because it’s partly a success story that we should now want to build on.

MS. PLETKA: But I think a lot of this – and this is going to be our last word – a lot of this harkens back to what you just said fundamentally which is that you have to stand for something.

One of the things that I most like in the report and so grateful to all of the people who did all the hard work is go in there and just – don’t read it if you don’t want to, but go and look how many times the words values, moral leadership, markets, all of those things are key components.

MR. ABRAMS: I think when you say that, and listening to Michael’s last comment of aids in Africa, what President Bush did was a rather fantastic program, and it was very expensive, and it was billions of dollars.

MS. PLETKA: PEPFAR.

MR. ABRAMS: PEPFAR. It was billions of dollars. And he said – he had two insights I think on this. One, that you could appeal to Americans’ idealism but you could appeal to it only if you could also appeal to their pragmatism, and you could actually say, yes, it’s going to cost billions of dollars, but I will absolutely guarantee it’s going to save millions of lives. And it’s sold. And he got it through Congress, he got the money, the program was put into effect, and it saved countless lives.

I mean, it’s created enormous problems for President Obama because he hasn’t been able to figure out an equally effective program in Africa. And many people in Africa, including heads of state, remember PEPFAR as a kind of Marshall Plan in the sense of, you know, an unsordid act.

We can still do that, but I come back to the question, you can do it but that didn’t come from Congress and it didn’t come from the American people. It came from a president. And that can happen again, but it starts at the top I think.

MS. PLETKA: So believe in something, leadership. OK.

MR. KAGAN: Sounds good.

MS. PLETKA: Not bad messages to end on. I’d like to thank – I know Senator Kyl isn’t here. It’s so sad that he couldn’t be here, but Senator Lieberman is here and all of our participants in the project.

When we started, we said we’re not going to write a report. Everybody writes a report. We’re better than a report. We’ll just change the world. And, damn it. Now, we didn’t change the world. We wrote a report. But it really is – it is outstanding in its breadth and its vision. And it does give everybody a new way to talk about issues without quoting from Churchill or Roosevelt or Kennedy or anybody else who’s dead. It is – we’re all alive at this moment.

And so I want to thank all of them for doing such a wonderful job and all of you for joining us, and you three for a really great conversation. We should do this again. Thank you. (Applause.)

(END)