Transcripts For CSPAN2 Book Discussion On National Insecurity 20141214

Im trying to put together some more writing of my own. Booktv continues do. David rothkopf discusses the tribes and those of American Leadership in the world following 9 11. Its about one hour 10. Good evening ladies and gentlemen. It is a real pleasure to welcome you here tonight. Its a pleasure for several reasons. Im David Rothkopf and im a visiting scholar at the carnegie endowment, and for me its a pleasure because im here with friends but also because it symbolizes finally finishing this book. I was not really sure it was done until we came to the day that we were getting it out, selling it, so thats a step forward. But it is a special pleasure because to kick it off weve got it is gushing with three Public Servants who are among the most distinguished in their field, people who i have enormous respect for personally, and after having studied them, both in terms of what theyve accomplished but also in terms of the content of the character. They are great guys and they think they will offer to you wonderful perspective. On the far left is general Brent Scowcroft who has served as National Security advisor twice, both in the Ford Administration and didnt the administration of george h. W. Bush. Beside him is so big is brzezinski was National Security advisor in the procession of jimmy carter, and beside him is josh bolten who serve in a number of positions including most recent as the white house chief of staff for george w. Bush. But all of them are more than that. All of them have been people have thought about the issues we are here to discuss the day, throughout their lives, before there in these jobs, after they were in these jobs. And they set themselves apart by people who think about these issues of the world and issues of running the United States government, as a matter of professional objectives, of professional purpose but they have worldviews and that they are developed on a daily basis. And so what were going to do today is were going to talk for probably 40 minutes or so in a kind of question and answer format. Ive been instructed to tell those of you are live tweeting this event, im tempted to say please dont, but its unavoidable in these circumstances to use the hashtag national insecurity, and that at the conclusion of the 40 minutes we will have about 20 minutes for questions and answers, perhaps a little bit longer, if there are more from you. And then we will head downstairs where theres actually a reception. If anybody would like a book signed, i think i can arrange that with the author. [laughter] we will have a good time and celebrate a little bit. Now, he feels awkward for me to take a few minutes into the talking when im on a stage with people like this, but they have given their consent to allow me to speak for just a few minutes about the book. I am not going to go into great depth. I just want to say i wrote a book, several books ago called running the world, the insights to the inside story of the National Security council and the architects of american power. It was done as the voices of the people who serve in the job, and it was great im grateful to report a very successful book, and the publisher came back and said, why dont we do a followup . It doesnt have to be exactly a sequel. Its not directly following the structure of the book, but lets look at the. From the second term of the Bush Administration through to know. Because there are such strong contrast between the way that the Bush Administration has approached the world and the Obama Administration has approached the world, and the evolution of the role of the white house and the role of the National Security council has changed so much during the period, and has been so central to so many issues, that it would be worthwhile to take a look at it in a book. And i embraced the idea for several reasons. One was i liked writing the last book because i get to go out and talk to all of these people. In the course of this book i spoke to 150 people, including folks like these, including 40 from outside the United States, about half and half from each administration. And that for me is the greatest joy of this because i want to say something, and its really sort of the core of my framing remarks, which is contrary to the conventional wisdom of washington, okay, its contrary to conventional wisdom that is offered up in the media. Of the people ive spoken to and other people ive met in washington since i came to 21 years ago, those who devote themselves to public service, and the National Security arena and the Foreign Policy arena, in the military arena, are good people, regardless of whether they are republican or democrat. The partisanship that has rendered washington dysfunctional and frozen on a variety of issues is a huge distraction when it comes to many of these issues. And while im not saying that there are no people who serve in these areas who are partisan, im saying its important to us as citizens and as observers to strip that away, to recognize that all of these people, talented people, people with lots of options in life, come here to serve the government and the best way they know how, and they make mistakes and they get trapped in groupthink, and they get pushed by the politics of it, but if we strip away the politics and we strip away these filters we look at, we are going to have a better chance of understanding how to make this system work at the best possible way. Via the point i want to make is that this period that we are in is a period that is different from any other period in recent history. The subtitle of the book is American Leadership in an age of fear. And what they mean by that is that i think that is history looks back, we are going to say that the decade or decade and a half following 9 11, and a number of other incidents that were dominant in the period, including the financial crisis, other kinds of brushes with terror and other bad actors in the world, that this period was a period in which we are back on our heels, that americans double vulnerable in a way that they had perhaps not felt vulnerable in many years, perhaps since the darkest years of the cold war, perhaps for some since world war ii. Part of this was a visceral reaction, a visceral reaction to nine 9 11. The fact that everybody in the United States saw these events take place live in front of their eyes. That has never happened before, a period like this. In world war ii there was pearl harbor, that people saw grainy images in a Movie Theater a couple weeks later or they read about in the paper, and their response was the way you respond to things you become intellectual, through the mind first. When you look at 9 11 and you saw people falling from the towers, you saw the destruction, it was visceral your and america reacted for a decade through its got. And the consequence of that was wild swings but at least in my estimation. We overreacted in the first instance, and the signature event of that overreaction was a war in iraq. And then following 2008 and following the general sense among the American Public that we had gone wrong to some degree, we elected someone who said he was going to take a opposite path, and he did. Instead of overreacting to a lot of events, i think we overreacted to the overreaction. Under reacted. And certain issues were allowed to grow and fester, and the signature event of the period may also in a tragic irony be a war in iraq. And so these things booking and this period, and they also suggest as we swing from one extreme to the other and we see the system in some dysfunction, that this may not be a period that historians look back on as a golden age in american Foreign Policy. You know, i think that your general reaction to it demonstrates that that is likely to be the fact. And this is not surprising. Every time somebody gets elected president of the United States, we think this is going to be George Washington or Thomas Jefferson or abraham lincoln. And most of the time its rutherford b. Hayes. [laughter] [laughter] most of the time we get a president who is somewhere in the middle who is a mixed bag, good at some things, bad and other things. But the beauty of the system, the reason the National Security Council System was developed in 1947 was that the people around Franklin Roosevelt said, we cant go on with this guy managing the way that he managed during the second world war. He was playing one hand against the other but he wasnt communicating. If we were to face another war with the soviets, we couldnt do that. We need a system that gets the best opinions, gets the best intelligence, processes it, filters it to the president in the form of choices, and then is able to implement that. And uses the whole of the United States government in a constructive way. I think as we look back to the period of the past 10, 15 years, we find moments when it wasnt doing that. Where small groups were making decisions by the groupthink where they were speaking intelligence and misinterpreting it or overreacting and they let us in the wrong direction, where small groups perhaps today isolating the president even from parts of his own cabinet, from the full resources of the United States government, and causing problems in that respect. There were also, however, moments industry with the system worked pretty well. And i think for some reason we have blinders on to it. I, for full disclosure purposes, served in the Clinton Administration, a democratic administration. Thats where i come from in all of this and i try to be objective. But in the past 15 years, the time that the United States National Security establishment works the best with the last couple of years of the Bush Administration when george w. Bush recognize that things werent going well and he said, weve got to change the team. Weve got to change the strategy. Weve got to change our focus. And what came out of all of that was not only the surge, not only the light footprint technique that the Obama Administration embraced, not only a new military team that came into the thing, but other things, pepfar in africa, doubling down on the millennium challenge, the India Nuclear deal, better relations with emerging markets. Repairing relations with the allies. And then in the second big crisis of the Bush Administration, the financial crisis, there was a remarkable response, which even at the time was controversial but if we look back and how the u. S. Responded versus how the europeans respond, how other parts of the world responded, we acted quickly, decisively. We make it in the blood, and george bush and barack obama i chilled in a kind of Remarkable Partnership in handing off in the midst of this crisis and managing it in a way that wouldnt have been possible if the team in the Bush Administration and the team in the Obama Administration had not been willing to do that. So those are the kind of things were looking at. Obviously, there other things that are in the air. Youre the book by leon panetta, the book by bob gates, theres a lot of books right now about how this administration has worked, and we can talk about those things, too. I hope we have a good, open discussion. I wanted to give it a bit of a sense of over the Public National insecurity is about. The goal of the book is to look for. The goal of the book is to say what can we take away from that . Among the things we can take away our that the system, when it works right, produces not perfect results but the best possible results. What sets this. Apart in your mind in terms of the function of this apparatus . Well, thank you. Thank you for that introduction, a specially saying im on the far left. I like that. Of course from your perspective, i am on the far right. I think it is useful to go back when we are talking about different nics, to go back to the beginning inmate team 47. What did they think they were fixing in 1847 . It was that jessica president was going was going off in all directions. There was no function of government that put together National Security. The basic elements of National Security from the state department, Defense Department, intelligence, wherein the government. But they were all separate. There is no buddy who brought them all together. So the original law was designed to bring together so that the president could look at National Security. Not at defense over here come the state over here, intelligence here. That is how it started off. No, in the beginning, it didnt work very well because president s either didnt like it or in the case of eisenhower, it turns partly into a military staff system. But that is what really to me, that is what basically the nsc is supposed to do. It scares the president by bringing together all of the different perspectives that together make up National Security. Said he doesnt have to do it himself without help. On top of that though, we have to remember that each president we have this difference. A different kind of personality. They like sometimes to get their information in different ways. For example, the first president i served under richard nixon, didnt like comedians. He would rather have all of the papers and all of the views and then he would go back to his room where his private office and study them so you can make a decision. His successor was just the opposite. He was not an expert in Foreign Policy. But he liked to hear the issues, examined and explicated by his staff talking to each other. So what was the way he ingested information. Hell do it the way he wants to do it, even though thats not the most effect way and let the system has to do is to be able to adjust sufficiently so that he gets what he needs, which is a coordinated, consolidated input to look at. And it is different for every president. What were some of the issues now and the change in the nature of the International System has been tougher. Let me ask a similar question as to the back. Used in a comment this kind of a preparatory to lay the groundwork, if you look at the past 10 or 15 years come 15 years, d. C. Assistant growing to meet the stats or do you see one that is fastening back and forth and searching for function, though perhaps not writing it that often. I think a great deal depends, first of all, in addition to obviously the capacity of the president , Leadership Qualities and so forth. A great duo defense on the Historical Context. There is a great difference when it comes to policy making. When you are principal rivals are let say, limited on one power or if there are no principal rivals because you are dominant in the United States has gone through these phases at different stages. So that makes a lot of difference. Beyond that, it makes a lot of difference whether the issues to confront in the context of these two terribly important words, National Security are issues that involved complexity, difficult to need defining it, difficulty deciding what the real choices our or whether you are so invulnerable that you can decide on your out what needs to be done and you can impose your will on the outside world. The fact of the matter is that the United States has gone through the space is in waltham were different styles of president ial leadership, by and large the Historical Context defined pretty much the pattern of behavior. In recent years, we have translated very to radically from wife polarity to american hegemony, which lasted roughly 15 years at most, to the decline of the hegemony to the rise of complexity and complexity is a new time in which we can run not only the residues of historical plaques, but something i attach a lot of importance to in my own analysis of what is happening is what i call the phenomenon of Global Political awakening. We have tasted that a little bit in a few words to each since world war ii of which we only 11 and the best achieve this stalemate and perhaps less than that. In the past, it was very easy to fight against weaker opponents because they were politically underdeveloped. That is how colonialism became imperialism and so far. We recently confront populations in different degrees of intensity are prepared to defend themselves and that makes the cost for us to difficult. Who wouldve thought in 1940 1945 and a country in which rebellion and violence predominates, it would take a decade for the United States to achieve its minimal objective. So that affects that style of leadership. Beyond that, complexity and forces us to deal with many more issues and that has a bureaucratic effect. Kennedy, kennedys National Security adviser had this staff probably a little larger than the number of deputies to the National Security adviser. Brent and i, kissinger, i dont know about your staff, but we have staff in terms of 40, 50 take a few Senior Officers who were responsible for different issues in parts of the world. Today, this staff writ large is a little over 300 people. That creates a bureaucracy which the National Security adviser finds it difficult to run. I used an make sure that my 40 people would be in touch with us every day. So when i would go home, while in the window, i would leave the daily report which everyone would write, indicating what they did, they talk to, what problems they confront, raising issues they think are important and perhaps the president ial significance. I would write my notes on there so that the next morning they would have back. And then i would deposit the whole book in the secretarys Office Without my nose so that competing officers who sometimes compete over territory at access would know what these others were saying, but they would be informed. So the response is to be a bunch more ad hoc, must more sudden and we understand my family did the comparable stages by decades backwards. Look at the rise of islamic fanaticism. To what extent do they contribute to its rise . Are we going to be bought down more and more . Those are some of the problems we face. One final point. A great deal depends on the president ial character. You mentioned president nixon studying his brief. I had a briefing i had to give to president reagan because one of the chiefs of staff with it competent prefer and would be easy old gto with reagan. He had good instinct. That makes a lot of difference. President obama i have the sense is extremely wellinformed. But i also have the feeling when he meets with this toplevel advisers, he tends to lay out his vision in some detail and at some length. That is already automatically predetermines the flow of the subsequent discussion with his subordinates. So all of these factors that could contribute to the process, which today is probably sluggish and responses unless the response is required the necessities of survival, which tends to be dispersed, which tends to be uncertain and which avoids clearcut decisions promptly taken, which in fact is very often, very much needed tiered great, thank you. I want to give you a sense of where we are going to go. I will ask josh a questionnaire to go back to each of these guys for a question. Then i will go to all of you for questions. If you want to think about that, think of good questions in brief questions so we can get enough fame. If you listen to zbigniew talk about the character presents, one of the things that struck anyone is doing this book is that the first term of the Bush Administration was marked by a shock to the system, a reaction to the shock. Some incompatibility and the members of the team. Some groups saying about some ideas. She typed a little bit about the first two or three years just reacting. There was no real time to sort of develop a strategy of this kind of thing. Certainly, their attentions within it. So by the time he took over as chief of staff, there was a sense that things were in trouble. And then the first couple of years of the second term, i sensed there was an internal debate even within the president in which he finally came around and said any to make some changes. This issue of character is so important. Can you talk a little bit about how the evolution took place in your mind wakes i can. At first i want to say congratulations on billy another very readable book. At least the first third. You sound surprised. [laughter] available on amazon. For the bargain price of money is vulgar. [laughter] but it is a very good study indicates precisely to a lot of the points that both brent and zbigniew i have so effectively and the one you just raised about the character both of your referred to as critical of the president s personal style. I think evolution is the right word when it comes to president george w. Bushs stale. He came in with a lot of it attaches, governors not familiar with the apparatus the way of many candidates for president s come to the office. But he also came into office with his dads administration having some of the most abled, most effective National Security decisionmaking apparatus in our modern history. So he had an opportunity to watch that. So he did not come into office naive. But his administration was struck with really the greatest National Security shock in our lifetime. Certainly in the postwar era. And as condi said, we were not prepared to deal with an attack on the homeland. We were in an area that is being described as the end of history when president bush came in. He came into office, intending to be the education president. Not intended to be the National Security president. He was figuring and hoping that whole area would be relatively calm as it had been in the administration that you served in. 9 11 changed all of that. The world had been changing for some time and the problems have been festering. But they exploded with 9 11 and it was a cascading series of explosions that occurred over the course of the Bush Administration. So when you say evolution, that is the right word because the first couple of years were characterized by having to make a very Rapid Response without an apparatus in place that was wellequipped to do with those issues, to try to build the apparatus on the fly, rebuilt our military strength and refocus it on the challenges of the day, which even the smartest people had not fully anticipated. And then learn how to do that as time goes on. Now, one of the interesting things in your boat, at least the first half of that is that you focus on the processes and structures to manage what zbieg correctly described as an increasingly and sometimes mind numbingly complex set of interwoven problems. And all of that is true, but at the core of that, to address these kinds of situations, you need a leader that is able to rise above the blur of information and problems that are showing up, who has clear principles upon which hes making decisions, is able to communicate those to the people whom he has delegated responsibility. And then when he sees things going wrong, to change direction. That is the period in which i served. I became chief of staff i served throughout the Bush Administration, but the first two years as deputy chief of staff for policy. The next serious the budget year, the most despised figure in all of washington except when it comes time to dole out the money to the cabinet. And only the last three were chief of staff eared so i came in the beginning as chief of staff in the beginning of 2006 and i saw a president who is struggling with a very difficult situation in iraq and one night he was able to eventually elevate himself out of the blur of the noise than the happy talk and say no, this is not going well. I need to redirect as much as i love the people in uniform who have been beating their heads against this brick wall now for several years with flagging success, we need to change direction, even if their are many, if not most of the people of the military administration to disagree. So that is the president is to operate. I think going back to the issue of structure, the structure we have in place and remains in place is wellsuited. We have a white house centric National Security structure, which i think even you will agree as bright, the president needs all of those inputs. And he needs all of his actors coordinated and needs a focal point for his own toplevel decisionmaking. So i think the National Security Council Structure was wellequipped to make the pin is that the president wanted to make when it was time to change course in iraq, even when the Defense Department might not want to, and the Intelligence Community says not a good idea. Let me ask all three of you the same question before we open it up. If we keep the answers fairly brief will have more time for the question. But its a tough question. That is luscious look at the last year or two. In the course of that period, thereve been a number of things that have taken place that has been very challenging for everybody in the National Security apparatus. Weather was operating in egypt, whether with the problems in theory a were the president last august looked like he was going to make a move him he then decided he wasnt going to make a move. Later this year he realized he had to. The nsa scandal that took place in all of this and how we dealt with our allies during that scandal. The move of putin into crimea and ukraine and whether we responded to that quickly enough. Or has been a lot of criticism in the current campaign. You hear it from both parties. The criticisms are that it is to white house centric. Its a white house centric process, but not using the rest of the cabinet well. And its reactive, that its riskaverse and so forth. Weve all heard it. One of the things demonstrated in the history of the bush. Was that changes are possible. This happens all the time. As he said, and the system is designed to change. If you are prescribing for president obama for the next couple of years, what kind of changes that need to be made in order to handle the challenges we face, what would you prescribe . I will start with brent. Well, i think the one thing that is fundamentally different is the world is changing and that cause for a different response. I first served when the cold war was ending. The cold war was a great discipline for it because the strategy was giving. It was containment. That tactics we argued about. But it was containment. Now, what is the strategy . It is not clear. Another thing has happened and that is the world is changing. We call it globalization. A look at the information part. Parts of the worlds population and then never in history were involved in any kind of government or votes or anything are now engaged. Everybody knows basically what is happening and they react to it. Take egypt, for example. It used to be very hard to get people to turn out into rare square. It was dangerous business. Now all you need is a cell phone to will be a demonstration at 10 00 tomorrow morning and you get a million people. It is a different sort of their world. I think what has happened, 9 11, is that there was a quick interpretation that this new world whispering in an attack on the United States and what we have to 9 11 was the first attack in first attack america went to be floods of attacks that we have to do a lot of things to prepare for it. It didnt happen. They do not have been because we were prepared for it until the fifth . Is that not the nature of the attack anyway . Those are the kinds of things, which affects the way the system reacts. And also, whether or not it is the right way or not. I guess what i would say is the first thing you need to do is fundamentally reduce somewhat the size because when youve got 350 people, youve got a management issue. The nsc should not be managing. It is a path processing system. You cannot have 350 people sitting down, making the policy. So the first thing you have to do is triage. What do you need to have in this small group . And what can be pushed back to the system to solve . That is what the National Security needs the National Security advisor needs to do. What has to go through the nsc and how and what does not have to. It would be nice if everything did of course. The president is only one man. Okay, zbieg, same question. I agree with much of what you said. It sounds like we are now in an historical phase in which we are inevitably in a react to vote because the world has become very dispersed, very dynamic and the threats emanate from many sources. So in a sense, we are always forced to play catchup in a way with events. That is one point. The second point id like to make contrary to that one is nonetheless we need something that we very much lack in our sordid decisionmaking process. And that is an organized effort to Strategic Planning. The thing that strikes me the most is that we have in the Defense Department, mentalities which engage in planning, but of course there is focusing warfare. When, how and under what circumstances. We have in the state Department Policy planning, which of course emphasizes diplomacy as the technique and peacemaking as the eventual outcome. We have some degree of planning at the cia in the sense that it tries to anticipate the shape of the world and feedback into the policymaking process. But curiously enough, they dont have in the white house, the center of the government or the decisions finally has to be made. Any organized come to Strategic Planning. I have for a number of years spent trying to advocate the creation of Something Like that. I one stage when i was in that position, i did have Samuel Huntington spent two years and sort of engage the Strategic Planning, trying to anticipate how the world might change in how we may then have to react or respond or whatever. I think Something Like that is needed and that made for some of the discourse on the White House Level into a discourse that is more strategic in its own essence in part because it seems Strategic Planning into his response to a challenge. Beyond that, perhaps it leads to anticipation of searching events and therefore to action by us. Right now, we are mostly playing catchup in different parts of the world and others are setting the pace for us in part because they are not world powers. They are regional powers. I think some comprehensive incident, to the National Security adviser and of course cooperative with the other planning agencies of the government would make sense. My final point, i would try to draw into that on an informal basis to simply evening discussions, perhaps led by the president because it seems to me Strategic Planning and policy planning cannot be divorced from congress. I think i was enhanced, the probability the Foreign Policy can be bipartisan. If we dont have bipartisanship in Foreign Policy, Foreign Policy is vulnerable if one party is not totally preeminent and the system will more often than not produce something but the few traders here or there, and paralyze the system. By objective moderators come i do want to point out one thing here. One of those central points to zbieg is making there isnt better off with someone like Samuel Huntington, the Founding Editor of Foreign Policy magazine and when you listen to the editor exactly. When you listen to the editor of Foreign Policy magazine, things go better. Im sure you wouldnt dispute that. I would take the opportunity to hold up the boat. Book. These are excellent points here. I like brents notion of making the National Security staff smaller. But perhaps even more important than that, to achieve the big objective of Strategic Planning, even if there is no such entity right now the best i is unique and National Security adviser to help you set that is a priority, not the management of the thousand problems going on every day. In a way, brents idea of making the nsc smaller, would help, which is shed the stuff that is an absolutely critical to the presidency into the country and just trust the Defense Department and state department. It probably wont do a whole lot better with the white house 10 intervention. Let them handle those things. Due with the important stuff. These two guys did that. The National Security advisors with whom i worked at that very effectively and steve hadley. For the Obama Administration, i tremble to give advice because having been there, i know how difficult the situation is in people on the outside are always giving advice. It is usually at best useless. [laughter] but i will hazard a couple of things. One is that this comes out well in your boat, david, that i didnt this administration has defined itself and not the Previous Administration. The Previous Administration is not a bad thing to be. So each presidency, each Administration Needs its own focus, its own Strategic Priorities and it cant be a strategic priority to be not like the other guys. I think that has led us into a lot of difficulties and problems. The other is turned on the politics of it. Every administration is very political, including the one i search. Its actually one of the charms of our system. It works pretty well, but its not supposed to bleed into the National Security. The Obama Administration National Security round. I will give you one example of a contrast where i think the Obama Administration is suffered by comparison. That is that president bush would never allow the folks who were his political advisers even to come to National Security council, much less speak of that done. He would have a conversation with local people. Thats always. He would decide first was in the National Security interest in the United States and then talk to the political people in say can we get support for this . How do we do this . Decide what is right and the National Security interests. People on both sides of the aisle. The National Security council is which i am nonpartisan. Folks are trying hard to support each other. God sends the wrong signal when sometimes the misimpression that important National Security is made with a heavy political calculus. Good place to open this after conversation. There are people with microphone someplace in the room. If you can bring one over to this person who is. I ask you to identify yourself and ask a question. If you give a speech, i will move to the next person. My name is stephen shore. Everyone agrees that strategy is cool. But is that strategy ultimately a dog with shifting winds of Public Opinion . It is a follow on from a previous instructor. No. Folks, that is the prototype. [laughter] to this gentleman here. And then will conduct you paid mike nelson at georgetown university. For a chance or of the Clinton Administration on technology and economic issues. Many were international, so i spent a lot of time. I was very glad in your boat to see you mentioned the need for more work on science and tech issues about the influence National Security. Id like to know if you have any specific suggestions on how technology, economic and Security Issues can be brought together more because we dont see that very well. It is any other country doing that better than we do quite when they say one thing and then turn it to you folks. I talked to a lot of people on the science and tech side. They can be very loyal people. But they are very frustrated by the fact that they were not i spoke to one person at the undersecretary level who saw the cybersecurity today it was released from the white house. Better part nation is one thing. But at a more important level, we have a government of lawyers. We have a cover made to people who dont necessarily get trained to understand these issues. The Chinese Government has a government full of engineers. I am not saying that we need to switch over and over they swept the white house full of geeks. What i do think we need is people who recognize the centrality of everything we do at changing information paradigms, of changing impacts of biotech and biosciences and the way societies work and how long people live in what cost was. And frankly, we need more capability at the center. There is an office assigned technology possibility. You need a president s science adviser who is an active adviser wow, these are some of the questions that need to be dealt with, but we frankly dont know how to do it. There are difficult problems. You know, i actually set up a small group called longrange planning. It didnt work. It really didnt work and i didnt have time to figure out how to make a more useful. But thats one of the problems. How do you deal with these things . Take the cyberissue. The whole country, how do you do with . There are various ways to do with it. Everywhere has advantages, everywhere has disadvantages. Figurine outcome you are you are either lucky or unlucky. Nobody has figured out the magic way to run a country, and democracy. And that is part of what we are dealing with. That is so we have to do and we have been doing it ever since 1947 in the nsc system. We need to continue to evolve here. Lets get a question right here. Hello. My name is samir emmanuelle. I was really intrigued by your reasoning Samuel Huntingtons name because i have been reviewing Samuel Huntingtons work more recently. I think that what you raise this i attend a lot of forums and what i see lacking was this kind of conceptual and critical kind of discussion that would go along in the 60s, 70s and 80s. Perhaps it can be cared darius and the intellectual renaissance. I am wondering why there isnt a Samuel Huntington. You are the closest thing to it. So what has changed . She was pointing at zbieg, not you. That is why im moving away. Back to my question. In a way, strategizing our policymaking is an intermediate point between braille expertise and the novel problems in which brand referred to, cyberand science and public ignorance. Its an intermediate point because our public is uniquely uninformed about the world. It has no understanding of World History and how history changes people as people discover their own history and redefine it. Has no understanding of events that transpired that harbor prejudices and resentment and translate them into political reality. Have no understanding of geography. We dont teach geography in our schools. And now the other extreme of our experts, people who are innovative, creative, thoughtful and deep, but who communicate in a fashion that itself could change. What is in between is the political process that tries to find some sort of middleoftheroad and translate certain necessities into something that will be appealing and compelling to the masses thereby sometimes dramatizing and oversimplifies in the phenomenon. That is the role of a sense of the president and his staff around him. To perform that will come you have to be sensitive simultaneously to the new frontiers of knowledge and their complexities than once a limit of understanding them. And the layton president says of the society that feels for the first time in history to be frightened by the possibility of outside attack in a variety of ways in a red society that is increasing susceptible to panic. Just think of it. It became attractive to someone abroad to spread in our society. Its not impossible to do that. So we have a situation in which an offense policy decisions decisions are strategizing despite the complex, process of compromises in which there is no clearcut solution. The problem is how to repent and do within that narrow middle group. For example, if every president truly interested in Foreign Affairs . On the other hand, is there a risk that the president will become so absorbed in Foreign Affairs . Qaeda to strike a compromise within himself. But im trying to say its easy for me to be sitting here and talking about strategizing without taking into account how complex and difficult that is and how difficult it is to translate that idea into something im going and results in the state department and Defense Department, but also the domestic agencies working in some concerted fashion. Not to Mention Congress ,com,com ma which essentially thrives on negativism and intervention. Not the fact that its also increasingly susceptible to corrupt practices in fund raising. This is a resentment of mine. I was looking at the last elections and i made the mistake of making a donation early in july. Ever since then, my email has been swarmed by hundreds and hundreds of increasingly threatening demands or pitiful appeals. By highest dignitary survivors of our country. So we are dealing here with a difficult complex policy in terms of a solution by the fact its an animals quest, which will never reduce some of that is ideal. I will take one more question. I will encourage somebody in the far back. The woman back there. Give her the microphone in the far back row. Let me say one thing before you begin your question. There are other things that contribute to this strategy void. Part of it is the culture of washington right now. You know, you cant get confirmed as an official in a highly politicized congress if you have expressed views that are outside the box. So people tend not to do it. If you look at barnett publications, speeches, think tanks and a lot of things produced a record that sold because people are afraid to strain outside the line of someday having a come up in a confirmation hearing and being voted out. But there is also a kind of peewee football quality to the debate in washington. One of the things that make great staff. It was we looked at the top 10 think tanks in washington, which had responsibility for doing this for 10 years. We looked at studies and events and so forth on. What you see is a few areas of the world, you know which they are, getting the vast majority of this discussion. A number of areas of the world, also very important, not getting any discussion. The area that has the fewest number by far, by orders of magnitude of events and discussions around it could probably be categorized by science and technology. In other words, there were discussions in advance on these other kinds of issues. And ive been affiliated with carnegie now for the better part of 17, 18 years. Theres a lot of good work going on with carnegie in brookings next door and so forth. But were not covering the waterfront intellectually. We are not being bold enough intellectually. Creativity is being dampened with an assist and because of the pernicious nature of the political debate within washington. That is also dangerous and contributes to this as well. Zbieg has to go at 6 00 in the 6 00. So please join me and thinking zbieg. [applause] and lets have one last question from the back and then we will wrap it up. So go ahead. The question. Quick answer. This is actually a question based on [inaudible] we cant hear you. Just hold it right up to your mouth. Errico. This is based on something that mr. Brzezinski race, a discussion very prevalent in this town right now, which is decline in american power, that we have moved into gas, an era of uncertainty. The conflicts between superpower nations are more complex than the role of nonstate actors is increasingly complex. So i guess the big question that is floating down in this town that is that supposed to the panel is where does the United States leadership go in this new, presumably new period of history . Turned to reach of year. Question is where is u. S. Leadership go with . Is irreversibly shrinking . How do we need Going Forward in this kind of multipolar environment . Well, that is why we have president s. You know, there is no ready answer. We talk about strategizing. The strategy is the means to reach the ad. We dont know what the end is right now. Is the United States that but in its world responsibility . What are they . And why are they . And what is the cause. We are living in a world, which is transforming from the fairly neat world relatively speaking of the cold war period is subject to new technology use, which are changing everything, the internet, for example was started as a way for scientists to communicate with each other. Wanted it to be opened. Now one of the dangers is that it is a good. People are using it for various errands. This is not we are not discussing a problem which can be solved because you react to one sword to planning process and another one opens up with the world changes. We need to keep trying, but we need first of all to avoid disaster. That is becoming an increasingly difficult problem because the world is increasingly a world we have not seen before and we have to initiate our responses. That takes the condition, which doesnt exist in this country right now, which is a unified system in which the problems were big enough. Lets look at them together of the legislative ranch dont look at anything together right now. Josh, i endorse especially the first part, which is this is why we have president s. This is when president ial leadership comes in. The world is indeed an increasingly complicated and difficult to manage place. Substantially more so it even today than it was five years ago when i left my service. So i have a great deal of sympathy and empathy for the people in the white house tried to manage now. But that doesnt mean we need less president ial leadership. We need more of. If i can expand on the answer to this gentlemans question, which i hope you didnt find discourteous. I was trying to keep within david structure. Fine, blame it on me. Prepresident ial leadership is crucial. Zbieg correctly pointed out you need to cultivate the people in congress, but you need to cultivate them so they are supporting when you beat them, not so that you can just use the responsibility for making decisions and the National Security area. I believe president obama failed that test on the way he has handled this serious situation and i think that is something the president urgently needs to reverse in the last two years of his term, which is exercised strong president ial American Leadership both domestically and in the world. You may be less popular if you do it, people ultimately be much more successful. Thank you. You know, the final point on this as we can talk about National Security and policies than we can talk about the politics of it all. But it ended the day, it comes down to the people. It comes down to who is in the jobs of the most important job in person in our system is the president. Even within the National Security act of 1947, the structure of the nsc and how it works is largely up to the prerogative of the president. Howard is used, who is empowered, who was then, was out of the room. What the process is going to be, whether the process is going to be respect it. That is all a consequence of the president. Five out of six of the president of the United States have come with almost no Foreign Policy experience. We dont Value Management experience in washington. The common misconception in washington is that if you can articulate an idea, you can get something done. That is just not true. The United States government is the largest, most complex organization on planet earth. If you dont have people capable of managing, who understand the core idea of management is empowering the people who work for you as opposed to gaining your powers of none or telling them what to do are using them to advance your particular goal, you are going to waste that system. So you need a president that knows where to go in a president that knows how to manage. You need a president who knows how to work with these people and other leaders and you need a president who is going to be open to other ideas into the idea of evolution and that he may actually be wrong sometimes time or in a more enlightened future, that she may actually be wrong. [applause] at some point. So i think we have had a great discussion here, but this discussion continues downstairs. It laid out a really nice cop to reception to which you are all invited. But before you go downstairs, would you please take a moment and joining these wonderful guys thank you none. [applause]