The title itself, the violence inside us. You take the readers for both the biology and history of violence and so id like to ask you why begin air, why did you choose to begin here . Guest thank you so much for doing this and im blessed to be joining you to talk about this book. I start with this question what kind of violence is inside us because for me, it was the first real question is why i began the mission of my political career. While the book is mostly a history of american violence and how we overcome that history, it also involves my own political story since the shooting in connecticut in 2012. I had been pretty prestigious as a lawmaker before hand but never had an emotional connection like now and it was after sandy hook i realized this was about to become my political calling that i startebuti started asking que. The question i ask myself wasnt that different. A young man with no prior history of violence and no motive walking into an Elementary School and shooting and gun down 20 firstgraders. How on earth can a human being do that, how does the brain work in a way that convinces your self but that is a logical next step . I wanted to start the book the air and talk about how this compels us to violence because we never conceive of mass murder. Almost every single one of us have had a momenhas had a momens where we contemplated violence or undertook an act of violence. Maybe it was the kid on a schoolyard. Maybe it was in a fight with the relative. I think its just important for us to understand throughout history our species has been more prone to violence than almost any other animal species. And its long been a way in which humans organize themselves and maintain violence over others and they put themselves in a position to procreate. So to me, that discussion is part of how somebody like adam lanza understands and the way broken brains operate as important but also just understanding the way that they normal brain operates and how violence is central to the human story going back out. Host its a great point and i think that an understanding violence, to properly understand it, you do need to have this grounding and i think its hard to appreciate the struggle with it if you dont understand to some extent it hasnt been the exception that its been the norm throughout the course of history. I found a compelling. Lets talk about violence in the United States in particular. Most people know the United States is something of an outlier having much higher pay rate of murder and other nations. Why is that . Guest the book spends a lot of time trying to explore why america is a more violent race. We will talk about suicide and accidental shooting as well, but we are clearly an outlier when it comes to the homicide rate. The book talks about the fact that that has not always been the case in the United States. In fact, for much of americas early history, we were not a global outlier. It wasnt until the middle 18 hundreds in which americas homicide rate started to diverge from the rest of the world and it never came back to the ground. We have been a global outlier now for 150 years. And there are two things that explain why those numbers started to separate. The first is the expansion of the cotton gin, we brought more slaves to compel to more violence as a mechanism to order society. And in america very early on with a normal mechanism to organize our economy and health of the nation and it was also used in high numbers for the same reason, for similar reasons and violence just became normalized. The second thing that happens is we have the first waves of new immigrants to the United States and. To expand at a rate of violence and then two things, there thea third thing that happened in the middle 18 hundreds and that is a reinvention of the handgun that can be used without reloading every time and can be concealed in your pocket. The United States didnt have any history of the regulations of those guns started quickly spreading throughout the United States. They were romanticized by the people who were selling them and sort of these three things, the expansion, the greater the ability to conceal and the normalization of violence that came out of americas expansion of the slave population all started to move in a dramatic upward direction that america never recovered from. Host so youre not saying that guns are the only reason that the United States has higher rates than average. You are saying that the reason our rates of gun violence and violence in general are so much higher is because of these two things. So to be clear it is your position and th in the book thae United States would be more violent than the average country even without that. Guest desisting to be a surprising concession to some listening to me talk about guns over and over again on the nightly news programs. I think i knew some of this going into the research of the book, but it would certainly reinforce for me throughout my study yes, the premise of the book is america was always going to be a more violent place. So, the question is when a have this sort of smoldering fire existing in this new country, what should you do . The last thing you do with his throw gasoline on the fire and the gasoline in this case was the explosion of the firearms ownership and any kind of regulation to make sure they only fall into the hands of folks that are responsible. My argument in this book is that in fact they have an elevated responsibility in the United States of america to control violent because our history of slavery, our history of a sort of racist tax system that was reinforced by violence and our role would the melting pot of ethnicities that hands the history to the increased rate of violence puts us in a position where violence wa was already gg to be sufficient careful about taking further steps to clean those already elevated. Host i wanted to ask about another surprising confession you made in the book. I found it interesting that you say the three Supreme Court decisions the district of columbia versus heller was in fact rightly decided. And so to the audience that is the 2008 case where the court recognized the individuals right to bear arms but wasnt necessarily connected with any militia or military service. I would like to hear more about that. Why was it rightly decided, and what should that mean for advocates of gun control moving forward clacks guest the first gun control law in the state of connecticut and i tell this story in the book was awol propelling individuals attending Church Services and town meetings in the state of connecticut must be armed. So, thats probably surprising to folks as well as prohibiting the. But in fact in the early days of connecticut history when frankly there was a conflict, it was a requirement that people actually openly carry weapons. And i think that it speaks to two things. One, it speaks to the rivalry to be a common law right that individuals should be able to carry weapons. Now the Second Amendment that is sort of horribly convoluted, impossible to understand and can be argued to only relates to militia but i think that if you read the full constitutional history youll found they thought people had the basic right to own the weapons but that also tells you is that the right was heavily regulated. But there were far more during the early days of the republic people were prohibited from where you were required to register their weapons. They certainly thought legislators could have heavily tradition the rights of certain individuals and i just think that is a smart place for the movement to land. We have no secret agenda. We have been engaged in making sure. I think that is a safe place and happens to be what the constitution demands. Host at one point the nra was one of the most powerful if not the most powerful. What you say that that is true today and why or why not . Guest it is not true today. Because we have spent the last seven years building up a movement around eradicating violence that they become more and more powerful and now have overtaken the nra. Weve also done a very good job of exposing the nra. One of the things i talk about in this book is how they have changed over the years. If. Then this guy comes along who i tell the story of in the book and host could you tell a little bit about that because i dont think people know that part. Guest he comes out of the texas border country. His whole family has worked for and around u. S. Border protections. As a young man he has a runin with some young mexican youth he thinks committed a crime against his family and in that confrontation he ends up shooting one of the boys did. On a technicality he ends up not going to jail but it stays on his record is such that he actually changes his name. He moves one vowel in his name so he can sort of paper over his past. He eventually joins the nra and kind of objects to the idea that the nra sort of goes along with some of the early gun laws of the 1960s especially coming out of the nnn in the 1970s he and a group of radicals eventually take over the nra. The amount that they packed in the annual convention and all vote to stop the nra gun control and advocate of responsible gun owners. Hed take the nra and plasterers it to the rest of the developing rightwing movement in this country and he seized this opportunity not to just stand for the last regulation of guns but also link arms with the antigayrights, the anticivil rights movement. And he sort of invests in them as the leader of broad rightwing political infrastructure in this country that has no compromise on gun law and its a fascinating story how an organization that was pretty sleepy politically up until the 70s all of a sudden becomes the epicenter of this sort of rightwing antiregulation movement. And thats what the nra is in 2013. When i first encountered it in our attempt to get the bill passed host where do you see it in three years, five years continuous clacks guest the second part plays out in the last 20 years. What happens is a the nra starts to rely more and more on the gun industry for donations and they find themselves in an interesting position again. The gun industry is worth of cuts a deal with a changing commercial sector around firearms purchases. Back in 1980 half of households bought a gun so you could make a lot of money just selling one gun to households. Today, less than a third of households own a gun and its going down. The gun industry now has to sell a lot of expensive weapons to a smaller number of people and the gun industry goes along for the gun industry sort of helps create this mythology of the government to get your guns so you better load up and create a private arsenal before they ban all those weapons for the gun industry starts to be against background checks because thats the way they are going to catalog the guns and come after them. They oppose restrictions. All of a sudden they get out of step with their members. They are way out of step with the members and the broad middle of the American Public and the reason if thats become atrophied has become increasingly because theyve done a great job and in particular these kids have taken control of the antigun violence that could have done a great job of exposing that. The gun lobby is fighting for studies in its own members dont believe in and of it as a consequence of the gun industry becoming more reliant on the industry and industry changing. Host i found it fascinating how the sort of interest of the nra aligns with the interest of the gun industry which align aligned with the ins of conservatives and the republican party. It reminds me of this classic sort of challenge that you hear about politics in the United States which is that a wellfunded, well supported specialinterest can often overcome. So i want to ask you how do we overcome that in the area of gun control and how they feel with this more generally in washington . Guest part of it as having the confidence that we are right. Another story that i tell in the book is the story of 1994 elections that has been sort of mythologized democrats lost control of the congress in 94. That is just fundamentally not true. The assault weapons ban was wildly popular. Ronald reagan was one of its primary cheerleaders. There were all sorts of things the administration did that were unpopular. The assault weapons ban wasnt one of them. The nra does a wonderful job in 95 and 96 with the help of people like bill clinton to create this story but it was an assault Weapon Damage caused democrats to lose and so thats sort of created a new reality in which for 20 plus years democrats just stayed away from the issue of gun. It was never a political loser. But since we started to revolt which was always told people to support restrictions on assault weapons. That brings me to another story that i tell them about. A woman lost her son through a horrific episode of gun violence and she decides to run for a congressional seat that had been held by republicans and she decides she is not going to hold back. Shes going to run on universal background checks and that he thinks that shes crazy and begs her not to run and she wins because guess what, people like bans on military style back to the weapons and background checks. Part of how we will win his faith that we are right and by going out and running more candidates like this. Thats why we won control of the house in 2018 and we will win control of the senate in 2020, because we are just unapologetically running on these issues in the way that we did back when i first ran for congress. Host im going to move from politics to policies for a moment. In the book, sorry, tobacco, a colleague of mine once said that the United States doesnt have one gun violence problem, it has several. And by my count, we have at least four separate gun violence challenges. We have domestic gun violence, gun suicide and mass shooting. Would you agree with these categories and if so how are the challenges similar and how are they different clacks guest i would agree with those categories. You see in my book i work through each of them one at a time. There is a chapter on urban gun violence and a chapter on Mass Shootings and one for suicide and Domestic Violence. What unites them, what we know is there is easier access to a weapon you are more likely to shoot your wife, commits suicide, commit murder in a city or urban center and more likely to be a massive shooter so we have to accept that if we were smarter and have less guns in this country and less powerful weapons in this country, all of those numbers would come down to. And i sort of go through methodically be evidence that suggests that. Connecticut has four times less gun homicides than florida us and that isnt coincidental that the fact that our gun laws are much stronger. But then you mentioned the difference. Lets take the difference of gun homicide and suicide. It happens in this country primarily or most often to africanamerican males. Gun suicides in this country is primarily an epidemic of white males and its important for us to sort of explore how we get to both places. Gun homicides in this country sort of tend to track a handful of neighborhoods with huge rates of poverty and high levels of illegalillegal gun usage whereas suicide tended to be a little bit more of a rural phenomenon. And in a book i argue it is probably connected to the sort of loss of economic power white males have experienced over the last 50 years. The recent suicide trend shows it isnt just about depression or traumatic pain but its a loss of connection to your community. And thats loss of connection for white males, picture and Economic Security that a substantial. So thats why you se see more suicide. Frankly the results of black people in this country having been subjugated for years. They dont actually feel a sudden loss of connection or loss of economic power because theyve never had that economic power. [inaudible] but because they have these tremendously elevated rates of poverty and a sort of cycle of marginality produced by the racial criminal Justice System and other factors. Certain things connect them into certain factors explain them, explain why they are different. Host in your book you discuss open violence, Domestic Violence, suicide all in one chapter but then Mass Shootings has a chapter of its own. In 2018 Mass Shootings killed 80 people had obviously each one of those deaths was a horrible tragedy. But at the same time during that year there were over 60,000 other homicides in the u. S. , according to the fbi. The majority of which were due to urban violence. Why do you focus so much on Mass Shootings . Guest thats a great question. And theres a book devoted to the proportional amount of to people that diethe people that n usage based on the numbers 80 of the book woul with beyond sue because the vast majority of gun deaths are. What i think im trying to do here is be true to the entry point for Many Americans to this debate. The fact of the matter is whether we like it or not, the Mass Shootings do command the nations attention when they happen. And they are the reason why all of a sudden today we have a movement on this clause for the better and my hope is that the antigun Violence Movement can be merged in some way, shape or form into the black light is not a movement because as we discuss in the book, you cant make Real Progress on gun homicide rate in this country especially in the cities without social and economic work. But i do have this chapter devoted to Mass Shootings because the reality is that right now thats a lot of the reason people answer to this movement, thats the reason it started and by the organization started with command the attention on tv and thats what drives the site of topics. It was in the wake of sandy hook and el paso. While i dont like the fact this country only cares about gun violence in a mass shooting happens, and i told the story in the book about getting just, you know, getting yelled at and bikers Public Meeting wednesday his africanamerican moms and dads stand up and say where have you been this has been happening in my neighborhood for decades and now you care about gun violence. Where have you been. I feel that i understand right now people want to know why the Mass Shootings were happening and its par thats part of whys movement had grown and i get more attention in my book. Host i think its hard to argue that the politics or anything other than what you said and frankly the vast majority of the public is in a sense valuing life lives more than black lives however i do wonder whether the future of the movement is not based in elevating one type over another but instead, creating a sort of coherence so that constituencies that care about violence in the inner cities and that care about suicide and of course Mass Shootings all come together. Increasing vi one or if we cant elevate one or the other but it has to be all of us at the same time. What do you say . Guest i think that is 100 right, and that is the message that has been sent. That is what they are telling at the north end of hartford. They said listen, we grieve more for the families in sandy hook then anybody else because we know where the pain is. The plight of their lives matter and our kids lives dont. In the opening pages of the book i told a story of a young man who died in hartford two months before sandy hook and i open the book with his story because i think its important for people to understand my awakening to this issue comes through sandy hook and his wife, shane olivers life matters just as much as any of those children that died in sandy hook. But this story occupied no space in the headlines. His story never got told by the national news. Every single one of those kids had theihave their story told. And in the end this book i hope is an attempt to acknowledge a lot of people come to this issue through Mass Shootings that this epidemic in connecticut weve done that. We were able to pass very strong gun laws in 2013 after sandy hook because they joined forces. They literally marched together through the states and we ended up with our gun laws being changed for the better and yes i think the future here is in these movements and or understanding of the issues. Host absolutely and then witindependent of correspondenco different policies. One of the issues with urban violence is that it shows it isnt as responsive in the legislation as other forms of violence yet it is more responsive to the concrete sort of programs that focus to deterrence and something that you mentioned in the book. One of the things thats important is we have to remember that this is about dollars as well as legislation. Your work highlights the importance of this and thats why i try to make clear to the one thing that tracks exposure to violence more than anything else in this country is income, poverty. And frankly that is true across several buckets weve done about gun violence. Youve are more likely to be the victim of suicide and Domestic Violence and to be the victim of gun homicide. Iif he were a lower income and o much of the solution is coming to this conclusion that economic desperation whether its focus to deterrence effort which is a way to say listen, we are going to identify the atrisk populations for violence and we are going to put resources into those populations and focus resources on the populations to give them pathways to success and its a sort of targeted way to solve the economic problems. And i have a story from the baltimore and walking through the streets of baltimore as a part of my research for the buck and a guy comes up to me and says hes been shot multiple times and hes talking about why theres more violence happening in the streets and he says it hardens your heart and becomes one of the headlines in the section of the book and he said listen, you do things when youre hungry and literally cant put food on the table that you wouldnt do otherwise and to him, and at the data backs this up, that explains many of these elevated rates of violence in the poorest sections of the country. Host i think that obviously poverty and a lack of opportunity, but i also think given the evidence we have seen identify the people and places that are the highest risk and then directly work with those populations. Guest i do talk about these focused programs and i just want to make sure that we do not use that as a substitute for broad economic reform because then its important to recognize in my opinion the diminishing of the Economic Standing leads to the suicide epidemic and so i believe these focused investments in the atrisk populations in a way to provide a temporary fix. A more permanent fix is to recognize that we just have an economic crisis that is putting people in desperate situations across the country and that is in part wha by bd what i believs the story of violence so i want to make sure they do both of the targeted interventions and have the broad conversation as well. Host absolutely. You cant divorce the broad social justice issues from the immediate violence issues but i think its important that when we talk about violence that is disproportionately were randomly impacted, we offer direct concrete solution. When we have violence that disproportionately impacts black americans, we are offering indirect root cause things that will make a difference in generations from now. Look, we absolutely, both communities from all communiti communities. I want to turn to the moment we are in today. Its impossible to ignore the conflict in the country right now and you are wellpositioned to speak to this. How do we navigate our way through the Current Crisis . Just in violencdistant violencen leftwing protesters, counter protesters literally fighting in the streets on both sides. How do we stop this and if you were president how would you get us out and lowered if you were e joe biden . Guest i rewrote the introduction to the book. It has a june 2020 date on it. I wanted to make people understand even though i wrote this book a year ago you can read this book through the prism of today. Much of what we are seeing today has long historical roots in this country. Vigilante justice has been around in america for a long time and there are connections between the rise of fox clan in the late 18 hundreds and early 19 hundreds and American Cities today for justice for these protesters. There is a Straight Line between the those zoning laws put in place in the jim crow era to the experience today in which black people and white people dont live with each other. So a black mans experience cant be understood by a white Police Officer who has their neon merrimac. So this book i hope is a way for people to understand how we got to this moment today and how if you dont understand that passed then you can fix this country for the future. Now listen, just getting rid of donald trump will be a big step forward, because the president has decided that his reelection hinges on the chaos being turned up. So as we take this, hes talking about going not to help, but to turn up the heat to try to prompt more riots so he can claim that this is a law and order it election even though the divisive rhetoric contributed to the separation. So that is a big step forward. But your question is what should the new Administration Due . Again i think the new administration should recognize the economic crisis that exists is a big part of the reason why this violence is occurring and the next administration should move quickly on reforms. I think the next administration should think boldly about policing reform. Really ask yourself the question does every Law Enforcement officer need a firearm, does every Emergency Response called require police, can we reorients the way that we enforce the law such that there are not as many potential explosions of violence and then back up and think to ourselves hell do we create a common understanding of our lives . Right now you are less likely to go to school as a white kid with a black kid and yo then you wern years ago or 20 years ago. Our schools are becoming rapidly more segregated. And so lets start thinking about how we go to school and permanent housing and live together so that we can have our shared experiences in which i dont have to buy a book to understand what a black persons life is like. I have a neighbor that is African American or Asian American or latino. All of that has to be part. Host let me press you a little bit further. If yo you were president right w seeing this chaos in portland, seattle, other cities what would you do right now, what would be the speech he would give in to the actions they would take . Guest i think its a little hard to create that hypothetical because the moment is created in part by a president that has been nothing of this, so its a little hard to see what would you do. I would argue that we might not be in this moment if we had a president obama who would have early on taking the steps to heal and those would have involved telegraphing that we are going to take the black lives Matter Movement seriously not just in words. People right now see the words used by politicians but they wont actions. They want to policing reform bill passed. They want the nations gun laws contained. They want the investment in public housing. And if i were president , i would be championing those legislative efforts. I would be using healing rhetoric. That doesnt immediately erase the pain that provides a tangible signal that we are going to change as a nation and right now the president is doing the exact opposite. Hes actually saying hes going to fight housing segregation even further. Hes going to fight any and all Police Accountability measures and go to these protests as a mechanism to. Thats the response that makes this worse, not better. Host thank you and thank you for letting me press you on that. You call your book a template for action. What are three policy actions related to gun violence that if you had the votes and the budget you were t would take right now . Guest first and foremost, universal background checks. No matter how the background check is its only as strong as the weakest states because guns are used for homicides in my state more often than not come from states with loose background checks. I think youll see big ammunition. Theres a National Requirement so that would be the first thing i would do. Second, i would pick up on where we were discussing. I did have a National Investment and say every single community, we are going to identify the communities at risk of violence and we are going to make an investment in those communities and give these kids a pathway, a vision of their future that involves sort of putting down violence is a mechanism. Host probably given a moment thathemoment that they ad double down on policing reform. It is true that one of the things, and maybe you agree, one of the things that i believe sparks violence in communities of color is the lack of legitimacy in Law Enforcement. When youre in a city of los ths angeles and only 35 of homicides occur victims of color being followed, then you start to think about whether you need to take justice in your own hands. A mother in baltimore who lost her son and had no success getting a police to take it seriously that her sons friends would regularly come to her and say let me go out there and deal with it and she said no im not going to put another family through this, but thats whats going on when police are not focused on solving crimes committed against people of color but instead are focused on rounding up people of color and putting them in jail. So, policing reform not just getting fleeced out of communities of color but making them effective is another part of the solution so thats what i would say. Host thank you. Lets unpack this a little bit. Right now we have some reformers calling for significant changes to policing and we have some reformers calling for the funding or abolishing the police. And at the same time, we have significant spikes of homicide in the nations cities on the order of 20 to 30 and many American Cities. Research by myself and other criminologists have documented this pretty well. And this is violence that isnt happening between police and protesters. Its happening in communities come in poor communities of color between and among young men without a lot of hope and without a lot of opportunity for often involved in this type of violence. Some people believe, i think many people believe they have a role to play in responding to that. How do we find our way out of this, it feels like the Politics Today make it sort of impossible to find a reasonable middle ground. Guest guest i dont think its impossible to find that reasonable middle ground. I spent time over the last couple of months sitting down with the organizers in connecticut who have been holding these Defund Police released to try to understand what they mean by that and if they acknowledge that of course there has to be a mechanism by which to enforce law, with their belief is is tha that the curret structure is so broken that it cant just be reformed. You have to rebuild lawenforcement from the ground up. Its important to understand the defund policthat Defund Police s not suggesting there should be no enforcement of the law but they are saying that the existing structure is so broken its beyond repairable and you have to rebuild it again. Now whether or not we are going to do that, i think we should be bold in the way that we think about how the laws are enforced in this country. Thats why i do suggest you are thinking beautiful bouquet that is the Domestic Violence call really . Does it need every time a Police Officer with a weapon . Beneath Police Officers in school today . We want our schools to be safe but does that require a Police Officer with a weapon to be in the schools who can arrest kids for bringing minor drug offenses were breaches of peace when they get in an argument with an assistant principal . So, i do think that while i dont support eliminating the police but i do think we should have some pretty comprehensive conversations about how we enforce our laws. Host absolutely. I want to wrap up with a final question. In your book, you issue a call to action and basically tell the reader if you are moved by this book, just do something. That is to appear phrased what you say in one of the final chapters. What are a few things, two or three things the average person can do right now to save lives and fights back . Guest i talk a lot in my book about how i feel having been a late convert to this movement. The young man that i spoke about that occupies the first trip or if this book was 20yearsold when he was killed by another 20yearold on the 20th day of october, 2012 and 20th victim of gun violence at that in the city. He got killed over a fight over a girl. He was going to do the transaction with a customer. Keep us in the car flipping business and was going to collect the last payment on a car and the group that was surrounding this customer started mouthing off about his girlfriend and he fought back on behalf of the girl. He threw a punch, the kid went back to his car, got an illegal gun, fired, he ran away and he died later that day at the hospital. Shane grew up like 2 miles away from me from where i grew up. My life growing up in a peaceful suburb had nothing to do with his life growing up. I told the story of his life growing up. He was constantly dealing with a threat of violence. He had to become a good fighter even with one arm that didnt work to protect himself and he ended up dead at the age of 20. I decided to structure my life in a way that inouye spent huge amounts of my time working to try to make up for lost time. Thats why i ran for another term in the senate to pass laws like the one we talk about to make sure that there are not more shane olivers. But you dont have to run for the senate. All you have to do is go online and sign up to become a member of one of these antigun Violence Movements in your state for. All you have to do is run for local office. The right to be a member of the board of education and make sure that your school is investing in the kind of programming that with kids out of poverty to make sure that they dont get back into the cycles of criminality. All you have to do is Pay Attention to the businesses. There are campaigns right now against organizations and retail establishments refuse to keep guns out of their stores. You can be part of that movement. Thats worked tremendously well over the last few years. You can make a donation to the candidate running for office. 5. It will make a difference. Believe me. So theres all sorts of small things you can do and what weve lacked is and people who believe in the things necessary to change the trajectory of gun violence. 90 believe in universal background checks. What we lack is the Political Movement that is Strong Enough to get the changes made. And we are so close to being Strong Enough. In the 2020 election it probably will be the decisive election winning especially on the nations gun la laws in 2021. Host the most important thing we can all do too and this is to vote in the next election. Its a bit trickier this time than it was last time around so everybody has to make a plan to vote. Make sure you know where your polling place is. But this here when democracy is on the ballot, the future of the trajectory is on the ballot, everybodys got to get out there and cast their vote. Host thank you for adhering and writing the book and for your advocacy and leadership on this issue. Is there anything i missed that you would like to share . Guest im grateful to be part of a movement that has grown as quickly and robustly and i always told the crowd so that they could the movement that you read about hit roadblock after roadblock. Its confident the righteousness of your cause and it ultimately proved successful. I hope this motivates more people to become more active but also gives them the fact necessary to. Host thank you again, senator. This program is available on a podcast. All programs can be viewed on the website at booktv. Org during a Virtual Events hosted by the Commonwealth Club of california, former defense secretary robert gates took a critical that the book did a good use of power around the world since the end of world war ii. Here is a portion. How the United States had gone from the position of supreme power probably unrivaled since the roman empire in every dimension of power in 1993 to a country today said that the challenges everywhere. I thought about how did that happen, how did we get here so i began looking at th the major fw and policy challenges that we have had since 1993 and thinking about what they had done and what we had not done that could attribute to that decline. But i camwhat i came up with waf nonmilitary instruments of power that they had played such an Important Role in our success in the cold war against the soviet union and it had largely been neglected and withered after the end of the cold war at the time that we continue to fund our military, we basically dismantled all of the nonmilitary instruments of power from diplomacy to economic leverage to Strategic Communications and four. We can go into that later. And as i looked at the look at s that these challenges can sali somalia and others right up to the relationship with russia and china it occurred to me that we had failed in many respects to figure out how to compete with the beast hovers outsidthese poe military realm and the realities of the 15 challenges that i write about for all practical purposes, i considered 13 to be failures and thats why in the title the word failure comes first. There were a couple of successes and some lessons to be learned from those as well that we had a lot of problems during the 27 year period and i would conclude by saying the war in iraq and afghanistan both began with very quick military victory is. Anvictory. And the problems identified whether it was iraq or afghanistan or somalia or haiti or others is once we had achieved military victory, we then changed our mission and we then decided to try to move to bring democracy to