DB1.

Grand Strategy in the Age of Trump

Like to welcome you to this session of Hudson Institute conversation about strategy, national strategy. I expect we'll be doing some more of these, particularly since we've had such a, such a good response to this one. We have today. Some of this is this actually a very special day for Hudson Institute and even for American foreign policy as a whole. And that we have in one room today. One of the great legends of American foreign policy, General Scowcroft, who is also the holder of the Jimmy Doolittle Award, the highest award the Hudson Institute in its power to, to offer. It's now known as the Herman Kahn award, I should say. And fortunately, that change happened before prime minister ABE of Japan received the award. I see some of us in the audience are old enough to know what that might mean. In addition, we have to General Scowcroft, we have two of, I think, the finest minds in the rising generation of scholars and analysts of American foreign policy professors.

How brands and Charles II, del, both of whom have written very important books on the future, on American foreign policy, history and strategy. And in between, sandwiched between these eminences, we have Professor Elliot Cohen who again is, needs no introduction, is one of the most powerful, significant voices in American foreign policy and perhaps needed now more than ever in a, in a very critical time. We're going to have a great discussion and I'd like to invite Professor Cohen to open it with sort of introduction to his recent book, which commits the terrible heresy of saying that hard power may still be important in the future. Who could believe such a thing? Great. Well, thank you. It's, it's a great pleasure to be here. It's an honor to have General Scowcroft and the audience has been a really an inspiration to several generations of people who both study and practice foreign policy and a lot of other old friends. And I am delighted if somewhat apprehensive, to have my colleagues sitting here to my left, how brands and Charlie, I don't, of course, my genial host, Walter Russell Mead. So the book is called The Big Stick, limits of soft power and the necessity of military force. The title at least has the virtue of being unambiguous. The title, of course comes from Roosevelt, Teddy Roosevelt's famous dictum, speak softly and carry a big stick. I'd like to remind people when he used that expression. It was a speech he gave when he was vice president at a Minnesota State Fair.

The title of the speech was national duties. And let me just read a sentence from it. He said we can be certain of one thing, whether we wish it or not. We cannot avoid hereafter having duties to do in the face of other nations. All that we can settle, whether we shall perform those duties well or ill. And one of the reasons why Theodore Roosevelt was so interesting is I do believe he is the first of our presence presidents at a global conception of the American role and as always, since colonial times been plugged into the international system, the idea that wasn't as absurd. But he really did have a much bigger conception of the American role in the world, which is one of the reasons why painted the United States Navy's battle fleet white and send it around the world to let them know that we've just shown up.

Two weeks after he gave that speech. President McKinley was shot, or rather x was four days. He was shot. And then two weeks later, Roosevelt became president. Since that time, the American global role has cost something like 626 thousand dead. About twice as many wounded, trillions of dollars in expense. And of course, we have a military establishment and intelligence establishment that is literally an order of magnitude larger than anything that Theodore Roosevelt even imagined. And in some ways the question underneath this all was, well, why was it worth it? Is it worth it today? I wrote the book for three reasons. First, it seemed to me that could be apart to participate in a belated debate, that there should have been a debate about the American role in the world triggered by the end of the Cold War. After all, the basic consensus about the need to confront the Soviet Union in a global way, which involved a global military. The kind we had never really had before. Sacrifices which we hadn't made in peace time before. That debate did not happen. And it didn't happen, I think because first of the 990s, predominance of hegemony, whatever you want to call it, look cheap. After all. Other people paid for the first Gulf War.

Casualties were extremely low. That pattern basically repeated in the 1990s in Yugoslavia. So the issue didn't really arise in the early 2000s. Of course we have 9, 11 and everything that flowed from that. And I think that absorbed a lot of the energy that would've otherwise gone into a first principles kind of debate. And so now a quarter of a century later we are having that debate. I would argue not under the most favorable circumstances, but, but there it is. And thinking that that was going to be upon us, I wanted to write the book. Secondly, it seemed to me that frequently and the kind of public discourse about military power, there is a kind of a false dichotomy between military options and diplomatic options. As if these are really two completely different ways of thinking about foreign policy. In point of fact, military power works together with diplomacy in the service of foreign policy. And related to that is, it, it seemed to me over time the community of people interested in defense policy is really drifted pretty far apart from the people who think about foreign policy. There are different kinds of communities concerned about different kinds of things. They publish in different places. I wanted to bring those two back together because that's what we have military power. And the, the, the third thing is that seem to me, George W Bush did not expect to become a wartime president in a different way, neither did Barack Obama. And in yet a different way, neither really as Donald Trump. Yet they've all been wartime commander-in-chief. And I believe there's need to sort of think through what does that mean? What, what sorts of considerations should go into the actual use of military power. So that's what the book is about. Just very briefly. It is built around basically a chapters that starts with the question why the United States. And I tried to address as seriously as I can and as respectfully as I can, the various arguments that have been advanced for why the United States should not play a global role that involves the use of force either that basically we're in a, Despite what it looks like we're entering a much more peaceful period. That's the Steven Pinker argument. Or that the United States is simply in competent to play this role. That's an argument that my my friend Andy base of it she has made. And there are others. Second chapter deals with 15 years of war. What is it that we should learn from our experiences of the war with various Islamist movements in Afghanistan, in Iraq. That was a hard chapter to write it, among other things, involved taking a hard look at Iraq War, which I favored, in which I conclude in a measured way I should be very clear, was a mistake. But it does seem to be very important for us to look back as hard as we can on those, the lessons of those 15 years. There's then a chapter on the American hand. What is the sense of a poker hand? Was the United States bring to the challenge of global leadership and not just militarily, but also in terms of other resources. And then four chapters which really built around what I consider to be the great strategic challenges that we face. China. What I loosely called the jihadi challenged, because it's not just Al-Qaida. The problem of dangerous states, that is to say States eager to append at least regional balances of power. So that would be Russia, Iran, North Korea. And then fourthly, the challenge of ungoverned space or the great comments. And when I say add ungoverned space and the great comments, I include things like cyberspace and an outer space. And then the last chapter is called the logic of hard power. And it has a number of things in it. But among them is my attempt to go after Caspar Weinberger is famous six principles for using military power, which he expressed in a speech at the 980 forth Press Club. And I try to show that that really isn't going to work in that I offer my own alternatives. There's a lot more in the book, but I think we want to get to the general discussion. I'll just conclude by saying that I've, now that the Obama administration is over. I've found myself reflecting a lot on it. Then I was quite critical of the Obama administration and I remain critical of it. But I certainly give President Obama credit for being sincere in both wishing and expecting to completely finish off the Iraq war, which he unopposed to begin with, and the Afghan war and actually pretty much terminate the conflict with Al-Qaeda, aside from some mopping up here and there. And more generally to retrench from the use of force. I think those were his objectives and he thought he could do them. And I believe he was entirely sincere. And yet, when we look back on the Obama administration, what do we have? He launched the third Iraq war because that's what we're engaged in. Now. He doubled down and Afghanistan, that is not over. He presided over the largest campaign of assassination, or if you prefer, targeted killing than has ever been waged by a state in which still is clearly not. We killed Osama bin Laden. We didn't even kill off Al-Qa'ida, let alone other movements engaged in a war in Libya in ways that many of us would have expected. Way that created more, more turmoil Or reintroduced as substantial American military forces into Europe. Confronting possible Russian aggression there. And order the United States Navy to begin sailing pretty close to a bunch of man-made Chinese islands in the South China Sea. And I think it's worth reflecting on that fact. Not because it is necessarily implies a criticism of the Obama administration though it may, but rather it tells you something about the logic of the world that he found himself in and that we find and find ourselves in. And so I'll just conclude by saying I agree with Theodore Roosevelt. Duties are going to be out there. We will end up performing them. And the choice is really as Theodore Roosevelt put it, are we going to do the, well? Are we going to do them poorly or we're going to do them with a minimum of bloodshed and expense. Are we going to do them belatedly? Nestle and bluntly? Well, thank you for that. Lan it's a brilliant discussion of a very rich book. I had to happiness to, to read in order to review it in the Wall Street Journal. And it's difficult to do justice to everything that is in that book in a, in a short space, but did a pretty good job Just now. Let me just say at this moment, we do have a couple of chairs down front. If there are people standing in the back who would like to take a seat. I see 123 maybe four seats on this side. If you want to stand up, that's fine, but they're there. Okay. Well, let's before we dig into a particular area of controversy between Elliott and some of our other panelists. What Charlie, what were your what was your kind of risk? What do you think was the single most valuable thing you saw in Eliot's book? Well, the thing that Elliot hasn't discussed and you didn't give justice to is you can learn a lot about how someone thinks by what they're reading. What is on Eliot's night shelf. And if you read this book, you'll know that he reads John Updike, Graham Greene, Tom Wolf, and more restroom. And for those of you who don't know the final, this is the inspiration for George RR Martin's Game of Thrones, but it's much bloodier. Now, the thing that struck me most before a couple of comments on the book was if there was anything, even though Elliot was very even-handed right now on his assessment or his presentation of an assessment of the Obama administration, clearly ticked you off more than anything else. Was the removal of the Churchill bust from the office of the book is framed by Churchill speeches at the beginning and at the end. But it's actually not really a useful framing of the book because it's really more link Konya by that sense. Famously in 858, when Abraham Lincoln is debating Stephen Douglas and he makes a seeming misstep, an error is political advisors have their hair on fire. And Lincoln comes down, he says, I'm after much larger game. And I think it's really important when you approach this book, even with the title that's laid out. This is not or it's a misreading of the book. Has I think Eliot just laid out to understand this as simply an argument for the use of and thinking through under what conditions military force should be used as only just laid out. This is a much larger argument about the role that the United States should play in the world. A much deeper and engage roll and situates itself right in the middle. What disrupting be an enormous debate right now. So a couple of I, if I'm a three thoughts at this kind of engendered and then three questions, either for Eliot or that we can kinda shove aside later. So the first thought is, I imagine for most people watching this presidential campaign, watching this presidency, thus far, what Donald Trump said as a candidate, if you have no historical consciousness, if you have no historical memory, is not crazy. It's just vulgar. Think about this for a second, right? Because if you were to explain to someone who doesn't understand well and viscerally through lived experience. The history of the 20th century. Why is it that the United States is forward positioned around the world? Why is it that we have an extensive system of alliances? Why is it that we have open markets, open commerce with our allies, at times of which have not been fully than official to us in a straight up and up line. Although really good historical answers for this. But again, if you erase that memory or if it begins to recede into the haze of memory, it makes much less sense. And so one thing that I've noticed now having been a transplant in Washington, the most overused phrase in the world is one variant or another of liberal international order. The rules-based order, the Washington led to order, the post-World order, which I think is very low purchasing ability once you get outside of Washington, both where it comes from, what it means, what happens when it goes away. And so one of the things that really struck me from this book is this book is absolutely an argument for, that is how to employ it, particularly with the use of hard power. What the book is not though, or at least it's a contribution, is how you build a domestic, domestic political consensus to utilize that book is obviously a contribution in that line. But how is it that you can build in a very different setting, a enduring bipartisan consensus to use American power in the world. I should say that the parallel, as Ellie talked about the 1980s, there are great parallels. When you think about the 1930s to write there was multiple, there were multiple pressure groups arguing for sustained American engagement in the world, particularly as the international environment darkened. The punchline, of course, is that none of them really have any impact until Pearl Harbor, right? When the politics catch up with the policy. Second thought of the book is that I really like this. Eliot uses the term strategic pixie dust and strategic silliness. And there are actually two different concepts as I understood them in the book. So one is, I think there's pretty good argument. You talked about that we fast-forward through the argument that maybe we should have had about first principle questions in the 1990s. But we can also say that our strategic muscle memory has atrophied there. Things that we don't think very hard about, that we used to think hard about all the time and let me kind of, let me call up three that I think the book really highlighted in important ways. One, deterrence. And you can say du turns a lot, but understanding both intentions and capabilities and signaling the willingness to use force and having the right force in place matters enormously. And just saying that we're going to deter an adversary or a competitor without those two elements in place cannot happen. Second one, spheres of influence. So concept that we talked about a lot, but I think is maybe less understood in political discourse now than it was about what happens and why it is such a threat to American, not to global order, but to American security and prosperity when you begin to have spheres of interests in regional hedge months. The third one, and you take this unrolling the first chapter when you're talking about strategic fallacies, I think this is really a realist argument and certain degree is this idea that there is a natural balance of power that exists in the world. That if that natural balance is upset, organically, states will understand that someone has disturbed this. They will band together and there might be some violence, but eventually we will get back to stasis on this idea that there's no such thing as natural orders, right? And without leadership, without determination, allies will probably not naturally do things. Third, that I would just add that I pulled from the book is I know that a long time ago he taught up in Newport at the Naval War College. I'm about to go back to teaching up there. And my favorite case study that I teach there. I don't know if you taught this whenever there is. As I tell the officers, it's the only case study without a major war. It's great. But in between the wars in the inter-war period, the punchline, as I tell them before they even start reading, is what makes sense in 999, from London's point of view, will make sense in the 1920s and even has to happen, makes less and less sense in the 1930s. And of course, if you're looking at, assessing and reassessing the international environment that you're in as competitors grow their power. This only this reevaluation and this entire book is really an exercise in assessment. That assessment of our strengths, other strengths. How do you get to a fundamental reassessment without there being a really big bang. Write really big strategic surprise that realigns us is that is, I think the critical question that we have. Three questions I'd throw out for you that you can take up or not. First is in the book, you said and I'm not sure which parts of the book or drafted at what point, Elliot. But this sentence this paragraph, I take it to happen during the GOP primary, that Trump presents a coherent, if not majoritarian viewpoint that combines isolationism and belligerents. And I'd be really curious to hear your thoughts about how coherent that is and its implications. I don't mean that tongue-in-cheek. That's a serious question. Second one, we're doing a net assessment of American strengths. The American hand, Elliot drawing ON clause of it says, look when we count American strengths, there are things that we can count, but there are lot of things that you can't count that are intangible. And part of this is America's sense of social cohesion. Our belief in our government, our style of government. The fact that we have an open door to innovate of immigrants. And my question is an obvious one, but do you still believe that? And is it still a strength and what will get us to it being a strength again? Final question I just throw out is, oh, it says that in some ways the United States is the most unpredictable of powers, right? Because we believe things. We don't just play real politic and that unsettles the world. So the question is, if the United States, like I think you can say that being more unpredictable in certain situations is a good thing, right? Tactically, it can be a very good thing. But for a president who has said that he wants to be less predictable as a style. You can only communicate with one player at a time. So what might be actually very good tactically and unwanted, it might be very good vis-a-vis certain competitors also communicated to our allies and partners. And I guess this is not a critique. This is not intended as a critique of the White House, but rather, if we go back and forth as you lay out between strength and weakness, between being engaged and pulling back somewhat up and down even over the past 70 years that we're drawing from, is that likely to change? And what does unpredictability when we become the most unpredictable factor and world politics. How does that change things? Alright? Alright, How? So my comments actually track fairly closely with Charlie's. And the book raised three or four issues for me. All of them clustered around this question of, do we have enough today? Because I think that's one of the motivating questions of the book. If hard power is critically important to American statecraft, American security and international order, do we actually have enough today? And so there were four things I suppose that, that occurred to me in this context. And so the first is this odd duality of the American position the day. Because in Eliot's chapter on what he calls the American hand, I think he does a wonderful job of outlining the extensive US military lead, particularly in global power projection capabilities which won't be matched for decades. Even if then all of the economic and social factors that underpin American strength. And the fact that over the long-term, the United States actually probably has an edge over most any of the competitors you can think of. Uh, and so in a global overall net assessment sense, I think you would say that you might be fairly optimistic about where the United States it's heading. But the duality is that when you look at the picture in regional settings, which is really where the rubber hits the road. Geopolitically, these days, the situation is much dire and in fact, it's, it's getting considerably worse in many cases. So in East Asia, the military balance in the Taiwan Strait looks fundamentally different today than it did 20 years ago. And I think there are real questions about whether the United States could actually effectively defend Taiwan in a crisis if you project out another five to ten years, I think there are real questions about how much the United States could do in a number of contingencies in East Asia. If you look at Eastern Europe, the United States and nato are only beginning to grapple with what it would actually take to defend the Baltic states in a crisis. And so on the one hand, you have a country that has immense global leads. On the other hand, you have a country that is going to have increasing difficulty, I think, sustaining its regional commitments over time. And that gets to a second, which is this question of strategic solvency. The question of whether the United States actually today has sufficient military power to make good on its international commitments. And the reason this has become a pressing issue is that over the past number of years, we've seen two trends heading in opposite directions. On the one hand, the international environment has become considerably more threatening, both with respect to the sort of threats that we're used to in the post-Cold War era. So jihadist terrorism, ungoverned spaces, that sort of thing. But also with respect to great power competition, which is back and multiple regions. But at the same time, the level of US military power in an absolute sense has been declining. Fairly rapidly. In fact, in percentage terms, we have just had the steepest descent disinvestment and defense that we have had since the end of the Korean War. And so there was a question about, at what point do these trends become irreconcilable? At what point do we become unable to actually make good on the commitments we have? And this ties back into the first, I think that point is actually much closer, much closer to that point today than we might like to think. And that gets to a third which I think ties in with something that Charlie mentioned, which is that the United States has gone through these cycles of ambition and retrenchment numerous times before, during the post-war period and even before that. And at some point something always happens that sort of snaps us out of the funk that we've been in after the prior conflict and wakes us up to the fact that there are still responsibilities we have to take care of in the world and that there was a bare minimum of military power that is needed to that. But the problem is the thing, the things that wake us up usually tend to be disasters. Whether that is the outbreak of World War Two and then Pearl Harbor, whether that's the outbreak of the Korean War, 950, the Soviet invasion of Afghanistan in 1979. And so the question for the United States has always been, I think continues to be today. Can we get back onto a better trajectory without the disaster happening? Or do we have to wait for the next disaster in order for that to happen? And then that brings me to the fourth question. Which an IO Elliot you would, you would fundamentally agree with this. I don't mean this as a critique of the book, but as important as military power is to upholding American foreign policy and international order. It's clearly not enough and that has become increasingly evident today, I think because you can sketch out a scenario where 48 years from now, the United States is actually significantly stronger and a narrow military sense because we have once again open the floodgates on military spending. Or if not open the floodgates at least gotten some, some decent marginal increases. But in this scenario, we might still be weaker in an aggregate sense than we were before, because we will have alienated our allies. We will have isolated ourselves from international public opinion. We will have torn up free trade deals, which constitute an important part of this international order that we are committed to defending. And so will come out worse off than we were before. And so I would just say when I read the book, my reaction when it came to the end was yes, absolutely. Yes to hard power. Yes. The big stick, but yes to all of the other things that are traditionally made, the United States the great superpower as well. Well, I hope after this you guys can see why I think we're in the presence of three of the most luminous and interesting mines in, in American foreign policy today. And how much we, much we should be glad that a new generation of thinkers is coming along that, that as the sort of capacity and balance to, to look at these important trues that many of us were afraid would be lost in a new generation and to articulate them in our current circumstances. But having said all that, Ellie, you want to defend yourself quickly? Well, I was afraid of much worse. Oh, it's coming. I think I'm sure it'll go. First thing. In all sincerity, I completely agree with what you said. It's, you know, we're both at that stage where you begin looking behind you say, Is there anybody back there? And there really is. And that is actually a very important thing. You tell me that you've been teaching Shakespeare? Yes. So what type of person behind you are looking at or we call it, right. I don't wanna go down that route right now. Look, I thought those were very insightful sets of remarks, particularly the complements. Let me just start with your first question, Charlie, I think you and I I didn't make these two passing references to Trump and I and I did use the words isolation and belligerence. I just double-checked. And then way to the, to the given topic that we're supposed to discuss. I think those are instincts, not doctrine, not even a concept. It's just who he is. I think so much of that. There are elements of Trump that are semi consistent, but in this case, I think these are just impulses. So I'm sure we'll go more deeply into the shallows of Trump's foreign policy thinking, but and that's really how I would portray them. You raised a very good issue about American, American strengths. I like a lot of people. I have been somewhat shake and not just by the election, but by some of the things that have followed him. And I do think putting evidence, and I'm sure people here realize I have not been the greatest admirer of Mr. Trump for quite awhile. At the end of the day, I will still bet on those fundamental American strengths. When I look at what the reaction was to that extremely ill advised. Competently executed executive order. The kind of outrage and the pushback, which did not just come from the left, was reassuring. And I think you're, you're, I guess I'm inclined to think that we're more likely to get incoherence in fighting push back some disturbing stuff than dystopia. As per say David from's article in the latest issue of the Atlantic. And the reason why is I think, because of the nature of the United States. And indeed, I even think in the long run we may very well come out stronger for all this. I really do. I think there are a lot of young people who are thinking about politics in ways that they did not think about politics before. We raise it, we are raising first order issues about what does it mean to be an American? About what are the things that underpin our system of government? What is the value of our system of government? What does the rule of law mean? So, I, I actually, I remain a long-term optimist, an unpredictability. I think there's a distinction between the fact that the United States can be unpredictable and a leader choosing to be unpredictable as a technique. Even Nixon, who of course is famous for having a coin that was actually did less of that than people think. His so-called Mat, Man meant there was less. So, this guy is different. I think he is genuinely because of the nature of his temperament. He is genuinely prone to flying off the handle. Nixon, I think much less so. Nixon would have calculated before he did something unpredictable if, if that makes any sense. But but I I I'm in a lot of this does get to my very fundamental judgment that this is a different kind of personality as President than anything we've seen before. So too wet to house questions. And again, I basically take the premises of all of them. When I say the American hand, basically, you can have a really good hand. But first, it depends how you play the hand. And secondly, it depends on everybody else's hand. And I think you're right to say other people's hands are getting better. At the end of the day, I tend to think that, you know, the basic inventiveness of American industry and American military leadership is such that you can actually recover a lot of that regional edge. But I agree with you, it is something to be very concerned about. There is a bit of a danger, I think for those of us in the defense world that we get, we get very focused on the quality of somebody's cruise missiles. And you know, what they can do to kind of keep you out. That's important. But at the end of the day, if you're looking at real military conflict, there are a lot of other things that come into play as well. To the strategic solvency part, I think you're right. One of the things that concerns me is that if we believe the President, he wants a massive infrastructure spending program, he wants very substantial tax cuts, and he wants a military buildup. That I don't understand how that works. And I certainly don't understand how it works without really massive deficit spending, which to the extent that the Republicans are still a Conservative Party, which is open to debate. You know, serious conservatives should, will objective and some clearly well, and there will be an element of the Congress which will say, now we believe in some kind of fiscal responsibility. The easiest thing to go and all that is military spending. They're going to be a lot more votes and bridges and airports and roads. And a lot more support from tax cuts than there will be for buying more of 35's or more submarines. In terms of expansion or retrenchment, unfortunately, I think yes, disaster. So one of the things that I fear most about this administration is they're going to end up getting a bunch of American kids killed unnecessarily and import. It may be a nonviolent disaster. It could be blowing up some important elements of the international trade system. It could be losing an important ally and set that kind of thing. Finally, how to the no, is there a danger the United States could be stronger militarily but weaker in 48 years. Yes, I think that's right in the heart of that, the troubles me most is I think the President radically underestimate the importance of our alliance system. Now if you were to ask me what is other than fundamental nature of the country, what is our most important asset? It is airline system. And what I think most presidents understand is you need to it even when you get annoyed at your allies. As I forget what those churches, or maybe it's actress Field Marshal Slim has said, yeah, the only thing worse than fighting war with allies, fighting war without allies. He really seems not to get that. Now the good news I think is. In a very peculiar way, he's surrounded himself with advisors and Cabinet secretaries. And now in National Security Advisor who do get all that. And what we don't know is whether that cast of characters that he has around him will sort of tamp down some of his worst instincts and reflexes and those of some of his advisers. Or whether it'll just sort of blast through those for sure though with this. So I'll stop water because it waits response to that. We were talking about earlier. You could have an enormous amount of policy energy diffused into just cleaning up the messes made by the President's tweets. I mean, if you think about a general matters, having to go around saying no, we're not actually we're not planning on stealing your oil. No, Actually, we do believe in the North Atlantic Treaty. I mean, there's and it's not just one statement like that. You have to go around and sort of hold people's hands and, you know, try to try to sue them and reassure them and all that sort of stuff. That the difficulty is if this were, I don't know, Jeb Bush administration or Hillary Clinton administration. We would be sitting around in the setting like this time about how incredibly difficult The world is and the enormous and complex challenges of American foreign and defense policy in addressing all that. But instead, we're talking about to what extent are we going to be able to tread water? And that's not really a good place to be in. All right. Well, I by the way, I, in my own mind, I, I sort of have divided the political world into three groups on their attitudes toward Trump. One is the Never Trump BRS or the dampers. They just want him gone. Then there is the neck, then there's the ever Trump pursue. Just think he's terrific and he's attacked by enemies who don't love America. And then what I think of as the pinna for Trump purse. That is what never, well, hardly ever. And I think we've seen an increase in the pennant for Trump or sense since January 20th, but maybe a hardening of lines elsewhere. But I'd like to do now is just throw a small apple of discord into this meeting of the like-minded. Because one of the interesting things in Elliot Cohen, Cohen's book is short but quite striking for those who wish to think about stopping, he says that one of the worst things you can do is use the phrase grand strategy. That, that grand strategy is a strategic mistake out. Both, both professors at Dell and brands have thought a good deal about grand strategy and, and tend to like the idea. So I thought it would be both instructive and illuminating for Elliott to tell us why they're stupid as long as we get to return, right? Right. And then for them to explain why you should just shut up. So if we could go into this phase and then we'll talk about something amiable like President Trump's foreign policy, but that's really nice if you're Walter. Thank you. Stuck with the two considerably younger and more agile adversaries here. All right, I can take a swipe at the idea of grand strategy, despite the fact that these gentlemen have written excellent books on the subject for, for number of reasons. And I think of course, the first thing I would say is part of what we may be dealing with here are semantic differences. I think sometimes we may be talking about the same thing. I prefer the word policy and they may prefer the words grand strategy. And as a writer, I'm, maybe it's having read Strunk and White too many times. I believe you know, if you have a choice between two words or one word, go from one word. And if you have an opportunity to get rid of an adjective or an adverb, particularly one like grand, kill it. So stick with policy. Um, and I, and look, the serious point is, does the United States have for macro conceptions of what it wants to do in the world. Of course, you know, you think about nato, you think about maintaining a, some sort of Confederation of European states that are liberal democratic, better out of the Russian or Soviet orbit. Of course, that's, that's the policy of the United States. That the policy United States is we want a Japan that is allied with us. That doesn't feel it has to go nuclear. And that is part of the world order rapture. And I could go on and on. But what troubles me about the idea of grand strategy other than the sort of aesthetic element is, I would say two things. One is that at least as it was originally conceived, beginning with a man named Edward meet IRL. The early phases of World War 2. It's sort of an architectonic concept that the integration of the many different elements of national strength in a very kind of hierarchical way. And I maybe just suffering from having periodically lectured at institutions less August and the Naval War College, which is which I spent four wonderful years had where the officers are really kinda taught that this is the way the world ought to work. You have vital interests of national interests. You turn into a brand strategy and you decompose it in an orderly fashion. I just hopefully that works. I don't think that's possible. And I may have been contaminated here by having served in government as have these gentlemen that I just I just don't see it. I mean, I don't see grand strategies being written and I certainly don't see them being implemented. And that brings me to the second, which is right. So maybe I should, there are three points. Second is, you know, ideas are really important in foreign policy. And as a professor, of course, I love ideas. That's why I do what I do at, but the sad realization I come to is that the ideas are critical, they're absolutely essential, but 95% of foreign policy has to do with implementation and with particular circumstances and adjusting to particular circumstances. And things could go either way. So if you take like something like the Iraq war, if it had been done in a different way, I don't think we'd be having the discussions that we're having. And I, I think I Partners, I, I fear that the obsession with grand strategy will take people away from often what matters a lot more, which is how is this actually gets done? And the third thing does, does go to the issue of unpredictability. You know, I, I am very much taken by Charley's reference to Britain in the 20s and 30s. Where strategic concepts and policy concepts that did make perfect sense in the early 20s, say the commandment to Singapore, bunch of the cases that I teach my own students makes 0 sense by the time you get to the late 30s. And I do think we're in a much more, potentially much more chaotic, unpredictable world than we've been for quite a long time. I really do think we're we're in the rapids. And that puts a premium on, not on for big concepts of how the river flows as opposed to paddling like crazy and avoiding the rocks. All right. I think this one, you want to go first year. I think to some degree this is simply a semantic difference, although the semantics are important mainly for fundraising purposes. If you think of grand strategy is some sort of plan or blueprint that allows you to seamlessly navigate international affairs than, than its quite right. The grand strategy never has existed and never will exist. If you think of it as just a set of guiding principles and priorities that provide a little bit of structure and how you deal with a messy world and actually give some coherence even to your responses to the unanticipated than I think grand strategy does exist. And there are countless historical examples of that. We could talk a little bit about sort of perhaps the Obama administration's grand strategy or the Trump administration's worldview or whatever you have it. But I would also to simply say that I think having that sort of worldview, that sort of coherence is actually essential to making decisions about the subject of this book about the use of military force. I think without a framework like this, you really can't make intelligent decisions about what capabilities to buy, how to allocate, allocate finite resources again, across competing priorities. What circumstances are important enough to use for us and so on and so forth. And so you can call it policy is Elliott prefer is you can call it strategy, you can call it grand strategy. But if you don't have some overarching intellectual framework guiding how you deal with the world, how you make specific policy choices you're at, you're driving in the dark. And where I think I would disagree on substantive Instead of semantic grounds. I would actually say that I think it's more important today to have this sort of overarching and intellectual framework precisely because we are dealing with broader number of threats, there is greater uncertainty about what the United States can and can't accomplish. The world is getting messier. And so I think the penalty for not doing that sort of intellectual legwork is actually higher. If you look at the Obama administration, for instance, I don't, I don't think people are going to be studying the 2010 or 2015 national security strategies as great grand strategic documents 20 or 30 years from now. But I think you absolutely can look at sort of the sum total of the Obama administration's both stated views on foreign policy and then it's actual policies. And you can discern some broad overarching ideas and patterns. The idea that we want to maintain the rules-based order or the liberal order, American primacy, or whatever you wanna call it. But we want to do it more cheaply when it comes to the use of military force that we want to place a greater degree of emphasis on diplomacy, particularly with American rivals and adversaries. And then we want to re-weight American policy geographically. I think these are base, this is basically the code that helps you unlock Obama's foreign policy. And if you understand that these are the basic ideas that the administration had, it explains not everything that the administration did over eight years, but probably 80 percent of what the administration did on a range of specific issues. So there may be sort of more. Enlightened this discussion because we may simply be quarrelling about what you call a certain conception of what the United States ought to do in the world. But, but I do think there is a value to grand strategy, particularly in a time like this. Just a couple of thoughts. Having taught strategy for a while, having written on strategy and then getting to experience strategy such as it is here, I decided that would be a useful exercise to keep a running list of how I heard strategy describe to me in Washington. So this probably plays to Eliot's point. So I heard strategy alternatively referred to as listing objectives. Saying what you want those objectives to be without thinking how your adversary might respond to them. Not thinking through resourcing, doing something. Because not doing something is never an option. Or, and this was my favorite one saying something new. Because you are being sharp and remember all this, yes. But there were three thoughts that hook in. I think with what I was saying that at the very basic, you'd talk about an intellectual architecture that helps to guide choices and allocate resources, Right? But I would say that grand strategy, as I understand it, as I explained, as I write about it, is that it's very basic, a two-step process, right? It's conception and execution. Aliens is entirely right. It has no validity and no utility. If you hope that when you come up with this bright shining, beautiful idea, it will tell you what to do in any given circumstance That's unhelpful and it's not realistic in any way, shape, or form. However, if fits both as how described it, a conception of what those primary interests and objectives are, and murdering and a prioritizing of what threats those are, the threaded in those interests. A analysis of how you will use limited resources to mitigate those threats to your objectives. And then implementing, implementing, implementing those at the new one. Trading your strategic. Or just, you know, I'm reminded very much said that to the bright shining ideas part. After a furious battle that I had had at state. A paper version number 300 that I had written of the same thing was finally not killed and was launched within the building. And then outside of the building, a friend said, congratulations, you've won. And I said, What do you mean I've won? I've written a paper. And he said, Well, that's what winning is. In this context. I said, Ooh, that's getting the boulder up to the top. Don't we have to roll it down? Now, half of what we're talking about is execution is follow up, is, if this is our general set of principles, what does it mean to make sure that the bureaucracy is working, is allocating its resources as such. Then the final point I would make is re-evaluation is part and parcel of this grand strategy or policy whenever we're calling it right now. Idea that never do your objectives or your resources sit in stasis. The world shifts all the time. What we are capable of doing both shifts and we surprise yourself how it might shift. So just as you might see an increase in how much we're spending discretionary really within the military budget that might change and probably pretty soon. You can also see a scaling up or scaling back of what it is that we do in the world wisely or unwisely. But part of policy, part of grand strategy is a constant re-evaluation. And I think this has a lot of utility on scaling up what our objectives are and ought to be. Can you? Yeah, If I can just kinda help us push into things where we can. Rather than haggling about what, what grand strategy actually means, maybe push some of the substantive discussion. So I was gonna mention 2 first, 2 readings that have influenced me. And I'm sure you guys have read them too. And I'd be curious to know your take on one which is a staple of graduate student, graduate education when I was going through that was Charles Lindbergh poems, The Science of Muddling Through. And this goes back, I think, to the late 40s, early 50s. And what Linda said is look, there's a difference between root and branch decision-making. Said he had done a bunch of interviewers of administrators who were all completely impatient with the academic literature on public administration because it said the, the academics, I'll assume that you know, you lay out your objectives, you play out alternative courses of action. And that's not the way the real world works. Real-world works by making lots of incremental decisions. And I, I think that's quite powerful. Apply to foreign policy, to the actual practice of foreign and defense policy is, I think, mainly branch kind of decision-making. Now, there are great moments in history where all of a sudden you've got to make some root kinds of assumptions that Anyways happened during World War Two, not after World War two, as people think during World War Two, when we see ourselves constructing a brand new world order. But for the most part, the business of government ends up being making these marginal choices. The other work which I'm sure he can correct me on the title, Nathan ligases. I think it was the Bolshevik operational code. But the operational code of the Politburo, I think, but there may have been two of them, but I think one of them was the Bolshevik. I'll bet I'll take, I'll take that as a friendly amendment. The Bolshevik operational code that it's from the set of assumptions about how the world works that a coherent group of people have. And I think that's actually pretty valuable way of thinking about many of these same issues. Part of what's going on now and way this goes to your original point. Charlie, is people on the four of us up here share the same basic operational code. Really quite similar conceptions of how the world works. And again, it's significant that you have two people, certainly Obama administration, London, George W Bush. There's really no difference. We have, we certainly have a president who doesn't share our operational code. And I think that's useful way of thinking about it. That to you other questions I wanted to raise one is, if you said you believe in grand strategy, at what level do you expect it? You expect that Obama grand strategy, a Trump grand strategy at George W Bush grand strategy, or is it more? And I think this is probably the way I would think about it. This is, so the basic continuities of American foreign policy until you get it disruptive. Moment. When people would argue, say, let's forget the United States. The Brits were always determined you're not going to let somebody else dominate the continent. Okay, and that really there, yes, there are different variations, whether their wigs and Tories and so on, but it's a, it's a constant. I'm not sure that it's helpful to talk about grand strategy is if each administration gets to craft one, I don't think it works that way. I think there are these deep underlying continuities which are important. The last thing, the second question I would say, it seems to me the important question to ask is not just what our objectives, how do we know? What do you want to do? It's what I call, when I give my students this lecture, theory of victory. What is our theory of victory? Why do we think what we're going to do will actually work? Why do we think that the kinds of inputs we're providing yield the kinds of outputs that we want. And that is always seemed to me that in thinking sort of big policy thoughts, that to a surprising degree that often gets left behind. There's always a kind of leap of faith that the inputs that we're putting out there will yield the objectives that we want as opposed to a really kind of careful reasoning through. Well, why exactly do we think that by doing X, we can get outcome wife. Step one, put 500 thousand troops in South Korea. Step 2, question, question, question I, step three, profit, right, is the right. This has been terrific. And our panelists, as I expected, are, have a lot to say. But if we're going to give the audience any chance at all to intervene, this is the time, uh, please wait for someone to come to you with a microphone and please identify yourself. When you speak. The questions should be short and they should be questions, which is a sentence that would be punctuated by a question mark if it were written? Yes, sir. Right here, place to begin. Good afternoon. I'm Richard Sawyer, work at the National Foreign Trade Council, which should tell you everything you need to know about what I fear. With that said. I'd like you within the field with in terms of the operational code that everyone has shared up to this point, could you comment on two things? One, in a 10-year timeframe, climate events, and to population growth in the places least able to accommodate it. Okay. Who wants to take down? It's clearly that's chap I was going to say that. That's how is a world renowned expert on that? I have to say, honestly, I don't really feel omni competent, so I'm not sure I can I can address that. I suppose my, my basic feeling is humanity has shown itself to be amazingly adaptive and resilient when things move incrementally. And there'll be various adaptations that go along. What we have to worry about is disruptive events and where they're really kind of quantum changes out there. And I don't feel, but I know enough. I mean by, by almost by definition those are unpredictable. Say if you take climate change and pressure on population, that's clearly an issue. I somehow think will somehow adjust to that. Although in some parts of the world, particularly the Middle East, That's kinda just make things uglier and uglier. And there'll be a lot of, a lot of human suffering. It's when something really big happens. I think. I will just say, I mean, I don't feel particularly competent in these areas as well, but I'll concede half of a point to Elliot here by saying that these are perfect examples of issues that make grand strategy or policy very hard to do because you look 2030, a 100 years down the road and it's quite clear. Seems quite clear that these are very big issues that are kinda come lack us over the head at some point. And so you would expect that a good grand strategy would look down the road and say, okay, grand strategy is all about the long-term. What do we do in order to get our arms around these problems looking for it. But the issue is that in the near term, the costs of dealing with these problems, particularly climate change, tend to be more severe than the cost of not dealing with them. And so the tendency is to simply model is to keep kicking the can down at them down the road. And one area where I think give the Obama administration a great deal of credit for actually trying to get ahead of the curve on some of these issues with mixed success. But, but actually taking some action to deal with threats that they could be quite severe over the long-term. But I think the mixed success itself demonstrates how hard it is to deal with these things. If I could just make one other comment about it because I think it deals with the operational code issue that's been raised a couple times. Think you're fundamentally right and pointing out that there are a series of baseline assumptions that we all share and that the US foreign policy community as a whole broadly shares about the way the world works. And this is everything from the idea that the spread of democracy is a good thing that is likely to continue to. American military primacy can be sustained indefinitely. And right now, the, the world is testing all of these assumptions more fundamentally than at any time since the end of the Cold War. And just before the election, a colleague and I did a paper that teed up a number of these assumptions and sort of looked at the extent to which they're all being challenged. The one uber assumption that we did not think to question was the idea that the international order that the United States a sustained over the past 70 years is a good thing. Because it did not occur to us that we might have a president who might think differently about that. But I would say that is now the fundamental grand strategic assumption that is up for debate in a way that it has not been in many, many years. I just add one peripheral point to this on the demographics issue, which actually isn't your question, but it is a question that you addressed and raise that in the American hand. And I'm not gonna summarize it because everyone needs to buy the book. But in Chapter 3, the American hand, one of the long-term strengths that Elliott talks about is if you actually do a comparative analysis of where demographic trends are going for the United States vis-a-vis our major competitors with immigration helping to drive that for us. The point that I would quibble in the book that I think is an additional, maybe, maybe it's a semantic or a definitional difference is grand strategy, of course, takes a long-term view that looks at trends, but is rooted in a belief, at least the way that I have always thought about it, that individuals matter and matter enormously. And the courses and the decisions and the choices that they make or don't make have enormous implications at the political level. And I think in the book, you had said that grand strategy is rooted in the belief that leaders don't matter. Oh, I don't know that I said that. I don't think I mean, if if I if I said it, I don't believe maybe I'd just drop the word on purpose that I don't think I said that. I think a lot of what passes for so-called international relations realism assumes that leaders don't matter. And I think a lot of the, the kind of broad arguments for American retrenchment effectively are saying it doesn't really make a difference what an individual leader decides to do. And I think that is, for example, is very true. Pinker. I think it is very hard for an individual leader to really fundamentally alter the assumptions on which say, American foreign policy acts. In a way, we've got a test case because it's clear Trump has no commitment whatsoever to the sorts of stuff we believe it. And yet, one way or another, he finds himself surrounded by people who do share that commitment. My madness basically leaves this thick tillers and believes IT. Hr McMaster believes it. John kelly, to the extent that he's an important player in this, probably believe that Mike Pence, I think, believes it. So it's an IT really interesting test case about how much Room there is even for the American president who was a very powerful system gives an enormous amount of power. How much room does he really have to change? Fundamental assumption. So we're living in, in many respects, a very interesting political science field experiment. I'm going to insist now that we give the audience a little bit of a channel right here. Yes. Thanks, I'm Peter shortly retired State Department Foreign Service. And my question is American public opinion and knew any grand strategy that the Trump administration proposes or a future administration is going to need popular support to be effective. But we're so split, were so polarized. We're so divided. We don't even agree on the facts anymore. How is this administration going to get public support for whatever it's admin, its grand strategy might be. Let me just say a couple of things on that. First, if you look at the Pew or the Gallup polling, the basic consensus on the American role in the world has not changed all that much when they fluctuate up and down, depending on various things. But it's still basically there. Of course, you can never measure the intensity with people with which people hold these views. So that would be 0.1.2. I would actually fall both the administration that I served in the president I served and President Obama for not realizing that a very important part of their job had to be selling or explaining making the case for the American role in the world to the American people. It's a mistake to think of. Public opinion is something you simply react to as to something as opposed to someone who tried to shake. Third thing I would say, the biggest challenge that this administration will have with respect to public opinion, I believe, will be that a time will come when the president has to speak from the Oval Office. And the American people have to give them the benefit of the doubt that he knows what he's doing. He sees things. I don't say, you know, he's making the best possible decision for what's good for the United States. This president will have to expect that a majority of the American people will not believe him simply because he's the guy Sagan. And that's, that is a real problem. And that's why I think whatever the tactical advantage is of denouncing the press, an alternative facts and all that sort of stuff. And I understand their tactical advantages there. But the larger problem will be when he really needs people like me to give them the benefit of the doubt and just average people to give him the benefit of the doubt. And I know I won't and I betcha, a majority of the American people, one. All right. Let's see over sir. I'm Ken the Tsugi, a Mikado, Trump supporter, off with their heads. Actually Elliott, I think in your last response, you I think clarified your own, expressed confusion about Trump's foreign policy and why does he surrounded himself with all these military type? Sue would be terrific in a war fighting situation. And yet he says he's an isolationist. Well, I don't think he's an isolationism. Isolationist. I think what he wants is a foreign policy based on the consent of the governed, our basic constitutional principle. And he never articulated in that way, but his practice, these rallies, for example, our way of generating consent for policies that were never argued for by either Bush or Obama. I guess my view of guilt my colleagues on this, but I'm always very suspicious of people who tried to tell me what did the deeper thinking that's going on inside Donald Trump's head, I go by what he says and I go by the opinions that he changes. But more importantly, I go by the things that he said and I think it's very hard to listen to the things that he says and to think that he believes and the kinds of things that we believe in. And that he believes, say in our alliance structure, something that's innately valuable as opposed to a bunch of bad deals. So I would maybe title asked two questions together and I'm just 11 response here. I mean, I think that Donald Trump absolutely believes that he is trying to instantiate a foreign policy that's based on the consent of the governed, but a significant part of the foreign policy is based on lies. It's based on a lie that trade is primarily responsible for the hollowing out of manufacturing. Any economists can tell you that's not true. Based on a lie that American alliances or a 0, some propositions in which we pay all the costs and our allies reap all the benefits. Anyone who study this can tell you it's not true. There are absolutely problems with the way that American foreign policy works today, with the way the international system works today, it's absolutely fair to say that we should try to redistribute the way that burdens are shared. But that has to start from an honest analysis of the problem. And I have not seen that from this administration with respect to the question over here about US public opinion, I think there are there are a couple of cautions I would take in. Reading too much into the current state of public opinion. So one is that yes, polarization is, by any statistical measure, historically more severe today than it has been in decades. But it's a mistake to think that polarization is not something that we've had to deal with before and that we haven't been able to come up with very constructive foreign policies at times of polarization, we often forget that the era of bipartisanship in American foreign policy lasted all the way from about 940, 940, nine. And after that was a time of severe partisanship and polarization. And yet we look back on this period as a golden age in American foreign policy. And so that's useful just from perspective with respect to the state of public opinion today, I think there are two ways of reading the 2016 election and the current state of American public opinion. One is that the American people have fundamentally gotten tired of bearing the burdens of American globalism. And the major piece of support for this assertion is the fact that Donald Trump is president. Because at every previous juncture in which a major party candidate has advocated significantly breaking with aspects of American globalism, he has been turned back at the polls, whether that was Pat Buchanan or McGovern or Robert Taft. So something new is happening today. At the same time, the dynamics the Elliott talked about, are there. The opinion polls do not show dramatic swings and what American people, the American people think about the world. The candidate who got the most popular votes in this election espouses a view of American foreign policy that shares, I think, all of the assumptions that we've been talking about. And so something clearly is happening with respect to American public opinion, but I don't think we know quite what it is or how severe the changes quite yet. Just add one thing. What you can each do is now add one thing as long as it's for no longer than a minute because we are coming to the end. So make it quick. Look. I am not a Twitter wizard or anything. I'm not even on it. So you should throw out this comment before even digest it. However, I think there's something traditionally if you look at where presidents have the ability to govern, in fact, build up if a legislative momentum behind them. It's when they can grow and build their legislative majorities. And what I have seen on both parties don't we're talked about the president is a absolutely going out to rally the base. That is a steady base. It seems to not want to grow it beyond that base. I can say the same thing for the other party. I tend to think that the best moment of Hillary Clinton's run happen when she said Bill Clinton out to the Rust Belt. If you remember this in April, May. And he did what Bill Clinton does. And he stood up there for like two hours instead, if I'm First Lady, do nothing but come out to the rest out whether or not he would've is something else. But this idea that my wife says all the time that when I listen to the news, I feel bad. When I go on Facebook, I feel horrible, right? Because we hear the same things by people that we agree with. And there is, and this is why I think this book that I always run is so valuable because that first chapter really is honest. I mean, I took it as very honest intellectual endeavor that they're strong or not. So strong arguments, deeply held, deeply reasoned about why America should not do what it has done. Let's take those on as opposed to just say to ourselves, we agree with what we agree with. All right, We've got Elliot, you want to give one final closing quick remark and then we will break and we can all get back to our lives. I think with regard to the Trump administration, the illuminating moment will not be when he publishes a foreign policy white paper on either the grand strategy of, of Donald Trump or the foreign policy of the administration. Because I think it'll be incoherence. The moment will be when there's a crisis, when there's a serious, really serious crime. I don't mean a ray that goes awry. I mean something big, which is likely to happen given what the world is and how he reacts to it, other people around him react to it. And I think actually a lot will flow from that domestic politics and foreign policy. All right, well, listen, thanks to the panel, thanks to the audience spending great event. Thanks guys.

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