Held by the council on Foreign Relations, this is an hour. Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to todays council on Foreign Relations meeting with senator chris murphy. Ill be presiding over our conversation. In addition to the Council Members in washington, i want to welcome those of you around the country who are watching on cspan this afternoon. Obviously todays meeting is on the record. Our speaker is senator murphy. He was elected to the senate in 2012 after representing connecticuts fifth Congressional District for two terms in the u. S. House of representative. The senator services on the appropriations committee, health committee, and most appropriate services on the senate Foreign Relations committee where he is the Ranking Member on the europe and Regional Cooperation subcommittee. He has been outspoken on syria and russia so i guess that means well have plenty to talk about. Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome senator chris murphy. Thank you very much. I look forward to our conversation. Thank you to my friends at the council for having me here today and for your guidance throughout my time at the senate and house of representatives. The speed and precision of thursday nights military attack on an air base in syria, it was as impressive as it was predictable. The destroyers, the uss porter and uss ross, 4 billion worth of steel and weaponry, they quickly moved into position to strike planners and Intelligence Officers scores of them were busy assigning targets. In eastern syria, 500 u. S. Troops amassed to help plan and orchestrate the upcoming assault on the city of raqqa at a cost of about 1 million per troop per year were ordered to retreat to safety in order to avoid potential retaliation. When the missile strike was ordered 60 missiles were launched. 9 within one week of the chemical attack a Major Military attack was executed with precision. It was america at its most impressive. No military in the world has more capacity than ours and none is more lethal or efficient or nimble. When the u. S. Military is given a task, resources are never an issue, time is just a minor obstacle. No one was surprised that the attack went down as planned. Friday morning no one was surprised when the attack did nothing to change the reality of the civil war inside syria that has killed 400,000. No one was surprised that a political solution still seemed a billion miles away. No one was surprised no matter how badly damaged that airfield was, syria is still as big a National Security night for for the United States or our allies. Why . Neither the root of the crisis in syria nor the way out is rooted in problems that the military alone can solve. The way in and the way out, its political. Its cultural, its social, its economic. So its no secret why syria feels just as hopeless after thursday as it did before. When a problem is diagnosed as military, the department of defense never has to worry about having enough money or capacity or support from congress, but when a problem like syria is diagnosed as political or economic or social, no one can even imagine a real solution because the agencies that do that work, the state department, they are set up to fail. They are only given the crumbs and never resourced to win. Just enough to keep the doors open. This happens over and over and over again across the landscape of u. S. National security problems. Some of our major adversaries are building up their militaries, but the crisis popping up have little to do with kinetic power. Russias military gets revamped. Moscow has figured how to use its oil and gas and information propaganda in order to bully neighboring countries. China is building an aircraft carrier, but it has more friends now than ever before because of its willingness to spread catch capital all over the world with no strings attached. North korea may be trying to build the capacity to fire a missile on the United States. Those are just the state actors. As political instability grows all over the world, a Record Number of displaced persons, states break down and extremist groups step into the vacuum. The continued break down is catastrophic news for the United States. More ungovernable space means more room for the enemies of the u. S. To grow whether they be terrorist organizations or untreatable viruses. The nonmilitary challenges to the world order and to american security, they mount by the day. Frankly, they define the new threats that lay at our doorstep and yet we scratch our heads and wonder why under both obama and president bush with nearly unlimited resources our enemies seemed only to multiply and strengthen. The answer to me is simple. A strong American Military is still vital to guard against conventional security threats, but the emerging threats do noble stability cannot be checked with military power alone. We face a new world today. Terrorist groups are increasingly immune to American Military. The world has changed. Tools our enemies use have transformed and we have stayed the same. We Pay Lip Service to meet these new threats, but its largely just that, lip service. Military and intelligence spending still outpaces diplomacy and Development Spending 201. We have more people working at Grocery Stores today than diplomats at the state department. Thats insanity. Or how about this. In the global competition for foreign investment, china is lapping us. Our budget for Public Diplomacy is 650 million and their budget is 10 billion. How about foreign aid . We wonder why its not effective anymore. In 1950 when we were rebuilding europe we were spending 2 of our gdp. Today that name is. 1 . Thats a 94 diminution. Maybe its because saudi arabia is pumping ten times the amount into the economy and their priorities takes precedence. Here is the argument i want to make today. Its time we thought about our noncon etic forces. We need to give the department of defense everything it needs to succeed. We should do that. Its a dangerous world out there and peace is achieved in part through military strength. I want my country to have the capacity to do what it did on thursday night. What im saying is we should look at the state Department Like we look at the department of defense. If its reasonable to ask for 50 billion more in military funding then it should be reasonable to propose 50 billion more in nonmilitary funding. Im showing the path forward to right size americas National Security budget for the real threats that face our country. Im outlining the way we can rebuild our countrys National Security tool kit so the president s have the option to succeed globally if they choose to. Heres how it would work. First we need to recognize that success of the marshal plan wasnt an accident. Spending money on building stability is a great National Security investment and its never been in greater need than it is today. We cant compete with china or russia or isis if america exits the Economic DevelopmentPlaying Field and we cannot continue to play the role of Global Fire Department responding to crisis after theyve developed. We need a 21 century plan that recognizes the best action against extremism in at risk regions and the best pathway to open new markets to American Goods is economic empowerment. So the plan sets forward specific proposals to do this. First lets take the handcuffs off u. S. Development financing. This doesnt come at any expense to the taxpayer. Why is mark the global power of power markets allowing china to run circles around us. Its time to consolidate the global alphabet soup into the u. S. International powerhouse bank and take off all of the restrictions that are there to compete with countries like china. Then lets really ramp up the challenge corporation. Its a model that works, but the money isnt enough to demand real reform and theres a line of countries that want in. We should partner the in. A reinvigorated mcc where you can make a huge statement. We should partner where money is fronted to coincide with the implementation of reform. Its a development, a, coming from the United States reaches countries where it really matte matters. Finally, recognize that our adversaries are using energy as a weapon. We should fight back. Begin Financing Energy independence for countries. Put money up to do it and have a robust policy of moving u. S. Lng to allies. Making Ukraine Energy independent is a better long Term Investment than anything we could do with their military. A second set of proposals envisions an america that can respond to crisis before they necessitate the deployment of cruz missiles. There is nothing soft about the work that our diplomats do to protect security. Our diplomats are hardened defenders of u. S. Security all over the globe. They dont cost 1 million per year to deploy. This report focuses on powering up some of the most important missions. A renewed focus on empowering extremists, its already underway but it needs more help. Rapidly spreading corruption, its under mining the rule of law and u. S. Interests all over the world. New Foreign Service officers who are dedicated to promoting Good Governance can turn the tide. It helps sell america. It deserves to get back to kennedy levels of performance. The third set of proposals would put into place the necessary funding so the United States can finally lead on Global Crisis management and prevention. Eventually the slope of every International Crisis flows to the United States. Developing crisis whether they be military conflicts or famines they threaten us. Civil wars in the middle east drive extremist improvement. Public safety crisis in Central America drive undocumented migration to america. Disease epidemics in africa can be at our shores in hours. If the United States doesnt step up to address the crises and prevent them, no one will. We will end up paying the price for this abdication of leadership. While this proposal cause for immediate increases there are two major reforms included here. The major consolidation of the existing Flexible Funding accounts to respond to developing political or military or social crisis. These funding streams as they exist now theyre underfunded. We didnt have the authority to move money from one account to another. To stand up the capacities that were needed to keep terrorist recruitment in kenya at bay. Our new Global Crisis prevention account will give the president the ability to deploy nonmilitary stabilization assets into an area before it falls into governance chaos. We dont have the resources to do this now. A new prefunded Global Health account that would allow the president to stop a pandemic in its infant stage rather than having to wait for congress to appropriate billions to turn it back once it reaches adolescen s adolescents. Estimates are that the billions spend on ebola could have been millions if the Obama Administration had the money to spend a year earlier. Now, as you read through this report or its a big report. At least the executive summery, i hope that youll think i havent gone mad because i understand what im doing here. Im arguing unapologetically for a doubling of the Foreign Affairs budget over the course of the next five years. At a political moment in time when our president is calling for the same budget to be cut by 30 this year alone. I understand today this is not a realistic proposal, but its a marker for where we should be and a marker for the coming debate so that the terms dont start such that flat funding is on one side and a devastating 30 cut is on the other. For the majority of smart thinkers on Global Security that know that our Foreign Affairs budget is badly under funded today, we need to be on offense. President trumps medieval view of the world that the u. S. Can defend itself with a bigger army and a bigger moat, its wrong and its dangerous. Syria is just as big a mess today as it was on thursday. Maybe a bigger mess. The world is a mess too. The clean up cant happen if the u. S. Continues to spend money the way we are today, ignoring the blizzard of crisis that cannot be solved if we continue to equip the department of defense with everything they need and the department of state with the crumbs that are left over. I am glad that we have those aircraft carriers, but the best investment in u. S. National security isnt another piece of military machinery. Its making unstable places stable. The world has changed. The tools of our rivals have transfigured. The battlefield is different than it was decades ago and the way we fund the fight has to keep up. Thank you very much for having me today. I look forward to the conversation. Thank you very much, senator. You have given us quite a bit to think about. Full disclosure, i grew up in connecticut, but you wouldnt want that to affect the quality of the questions in any way. Well get to syria and the strike in just a moment, but i want to follow up on your proposal that youre releasing now. I looked at it over the weekend and the cost of your proposal add up to 131 billion over the next five years adding 131 billion to the existing federal budget, before you count the president s 30 cuts to the state department and foreign aid budget. First, i want to follow on something you said. Donald trump won the election. Is this the time to be suggesting that theres any chance in the realistic future of adding 131 billion to the state department and foreign aid budget . . I try to set this in the context of the debate that were having. President trump has called for a massive plus up in National Security funding. His proposal is at the department of defense, but he is signaling a willingness to talk about increasing the resources that were using to protect this country. And what im trying to lay forward in this proposal is that if we are going to talk about that massive increase, then its misspent if its only happening in the build up of ships and aircraft carriers and tankers. I understand this is Cross Cultural today, but remember President Trump as a candidate. As a candidate his Foreign Policy signals were all over the place, but he did seem to preview that he understood the danger of u. S. Military intervention inside the middle east without a political component to that plan. He was much more of a skeptic about military intervention than an enthusiast. If thats the president that we have, the strike last night notwithstanding, why wouldnt he want tools that would allow him and his administration to learn the lessons. He seems to set up this sort of dichotomy between hard power which is good and soft power which is bad. Part of the pitch im trying to make here is that theres nothing soft about what the state department does and what they can do. These are hardened warriors. I think if we try to reframe this debate and go on the offense maybe theres some people in that administration who do know the disaster of american Foreign Policy in the middle east over the last 15 years who are looking for some new ways of thinking. So the president has proposed some 54 billion in increased defense spending paid for by cuts in domestic spending including the state department. Do you support any increase in defense funding at this point . Absolutely. I try to make that point that i really do believe in peace through strength. There are a lot of bad things that have not happened in this world because people knew if they crossed lines the u. S. Military would be there. I do support increased military spending. I certainly dont support it at the expense of the state department or domestic account. Im laying out an aggressive proposal, but we should be talking about increases in state Department Funding with military increases. Do you want to put a number on it . He proposes 54 billion. If you were in charge of the world, what would you recommend . I think i can easily find ive recommended over five years increasing the numbers play out in different ways, but im recommending about 50 billion in increased Foreign Affairs spending after five years. So i can argue for 50 billion this year split evenly between military accounts and nonmilitary accounts. I think we can put that to good use quickly. Polls show that the American Public has absolutely no idea how much is spent on foreign aid. The average american believes that some 31 of the u. S. Federal budget goes to foreign aid while the actual number is less than 1 . Why is the public so uninformed . Where is this coming from . Its been a convenient talking point for folks who dont have a stake in this game. There have been very high profile uses of this money over seas. A component of that story was the amount of money that we were spending to build up those countries. Its interesting because the next question in those polls is how much do you think the government should be spending and the americans dont think 1 is right number. They think the right number is closer to 10 . If you actually drill down, americans are much more willing to spend additional dollars if they know the actual size of the account. If you told them that you see the 94 diminution of the halcion days and you make the arg kbumt consistently, you can refrain the debate. Whats happened to the folks on your side, the people who want to spend more money and think that we need to spend more money on an account such as the ones you described in your talk earlier, that your side has so woefully failed to communicate this reality that the public is so completely uninformed about what the government spends, what it doesnt spend and as you suggested what they should spend. Listen, this is a disease that infects my party all the time. We get on the wrong side of the debate and we stop fighting it and it becomes a downward cycle. That happened on health care the minute we felt like we were losing that debate we stopped engaging in it. The same thing happened with respect to foreign aid. Of course its a very attractive argument the idea that you should spend money here rather than over there. But weve decided to make a massive commitment to National Security. Its just a matter of where those dollars are best spent. When you walk through the American Public in five minutes to talk about the way that our enemies are building up these nonmilitary sets of tools, it frankly is not that long a journey to get to the point where they understand this. Democrats lost a lot of our Foreign Policy big thinkers in the senate in a short period of time so the folks that were really good at making this argument in the senate, joe biden and my predecessor, joe lieberman, they all left. We need to rebuild a bench of Foreign Policy leaders in the senate, but we have to have the courage to know if we make this argument, spend a little bit of time explaining why its necessary to spend money outside of the military people will follow us there. I want to get to syria before we have a chance to take questions from the other folks that are here. I want be to pin you down on what happened last week. On the one hand he were very complimentary of the capabilities of the u. S. Capabilities and what the strikes were intended to do and yet you remain very critical of the president s overall policy. Just focused on what happened last thursday night, do you believe the president did the right thing in sending those cruz missiles . I dont. First and foremost because hes not constitutionally authorized to do it. Thats not a cop out. Some people say, whats the strategic calculus, not the legal calculus. They are wrapped together. The reason that congress is supposed to weigh in on these things is we are supposed to be allowed to have the full scope of review when it comes to military activities overseas. The congress hasnt weighed in on any of whats happening in syria today, not just the missile strikes, but the 500 plus troops sitting in raqqa waiting to retake that city and getting involved in complicated ways in the fights that play out around. Second, so long as we have a policy of trapping those children inside syria and not allowing them to leave, either by stopping refugee flows into the United States or gutting resettlement accounts, it is an inhumane policy to bomb a country setting off escalation and have no process to help people get out. Would you have voted to give him the authority had he gone to Congress Asking for authority before he sent the missiles . Congress would have been a able to have a conversation about what the policy in syria is. It wouldnt happen over the weekend. Congress would have debated a couple of weeks. Which is one time that president s sometimes take action before they go to congress. Thats not an excuse. Just because it takes time to get authorization, remember, we give the executive permission to take immediate action if an imminent threat is made to the United States. Not give authorization for the massive build up of Ground Troops that eventually could sit in syria for years. That debate could have happened and it didnt. Would you have supported the resolution you just described . I think if there was a resolution before congress to limit the potential for the expansion of a u. S. Led ground war in syria combined with an authorization to strike, i think thats something that i would have been interested in potentially supporting. So take a bigger view of syria. If you were in charge of the world starting where the president started when he was inaugurated or starting right now, what would you do . Its a mess. We know its a mess. What would you do now . I need to step back for a second. America is the only country in the world that believes we can solve problems on the other side of the world in places that we fundamentally dont understand. We have this left over hubris as a nation. Even after the iraq and afghanistan wars are still with us. Restraint sometimes is a smart policy. I know this is totally unsatisfactory to the folks that work in the field of Foreign Affairs, but what we have done over the last four or five years in syria is make the situation worse. We have given these rebels just enough support to keep the fight going, but never enough to win. We have prolonged the carnage inside that country. You need to decide if youre in or youre out militarily. I would argue we should be out. We should be focused on defeating isis, but we should not be engaged in the ultimate fight over the Syrian Regime and we should have a humanitarian policy to let anybody out of that country that wants out. And be a player in the political process. Use the leverage we have on countries like russia and iran and the saudis to come to the table, but not believe we are going to drive the political solution and not bleed military support into the country to keep the fight going though its never enough to get it done. What would i do . I would pull the support for the rebels. I would up my game when it came to political pressure on the iranians and the russians and use whatever is at our disposal to pressure them to step up the fight, and i would dramatically expand our humanitarian assistance. Doesnt that leave syria to assad and what he currently controls and russia to basically run over the rest of the country because without our military assistance, including our air strikes, theres nothing left for the rebels to do . They cant stand up to the syrian and the russian military. Well it begs the question, would you take syria in 2010 as a trade for syria today . Assad is a terrible guy. You have to start with today. What youre saying is that a syria where assad is in charge for any period of time and the russians have syrias equities is an unsatisfactory outcome. I understand given what assad has done, it is impossible to imagine a u. S. Policy that allows him to stay, even for a heartbeat. But we continue to pretend there is a political settlement in which russia and iran abandoned him so we continue to sort of feed the civil war under the belief that some day a set of circumstances will magically occur in which russia and iran push out assad. They agree to willingly leave and there is a pluralistic american oriented government installed in damascus. That is not happening. If assad needs to be a transition, if we need to guarantee some continued stake in syrias affairs for russia and iran, i dont think thats an unjustifiable price to pay for the carnage thats happening inside that country. That suggests that if we leave it to russia and to assad that the carnage would somehow end or be abated. It very much likely would continue in one form or another for a while, just without our help. Right. The question is had we not sort of propped up the rebels with training, with weapons, had we not worked with our partners to do that, where would syria be today . It may be that the civil war wouldnt be continuing. Maybe assad would still be in power, but it might be a less violent place than it is today. Im not saying i dont spend every moment of my day thinking about this problem so i think a lot about it. Im not telling you im sure thats the right outcome, but the middle ground that we are in today where we are propping up this civil war and waiting for the moment in which all of the things that we want align themselves, to me seems a fantasy. Ill give our Council Members here an opportunity to join our conversation with questions. Please raise your hand and then please wait for the microphone, speak directly into it and state your name and your affiliation and keep your question to a question. My definition of a question, Something Like 15 to 20 seconds. After that it definitely becomes a statement. Lets start right here, sir. Thank you, senator murphy, headed to moscow. How would you define success with his mission there . How is that, sam . Thats a short one. Im pleased that the stunning change of rhetoric that has happened with respect to u. S. russia relations in the last 48 hours. Its sort of hard to understand why we all of a sudden decided to take this antagonistic stand when the president or his team wasnt willing to do that. I think theres a way to read what happened in syria last week through the lens of softness on russia. Russia has complicity in these chemical weapons attacks and you have to ask themselves did they think they could get away with it because the United States has signalled more most of this administration there was no price to be paid by the russians if they be45ihaved in irresponse manners throughout the world. That has passed. Whats next is this meeting with lavrov. Whats next . I have low expectations for this meeting. Success to me is tillerson coming out of it and talking the same way he did going in, and then coming to us in congress and talking about sanctions and then tightening the noose on russia. I think i have very low expectations for the meeting. If i read between the lines, i thought i heard you saying theres at least a bit of a positive development. This is a very Different Administration when it comes to the way that they talk about russia and i think thats a positive development. We have legislation ready to go in congress that they could work with us. Again, all of this is dizzying to our allies and adversaries. The fact that we still dont have a syria policy. We had two different ones on the tv talk shows yesterday. Theres nothing wrong with tv talk shows. Especially where they make news the way they did yesterday. I think its good that weve changed but im not excited for an administration that seems to have this kind of sort of Rapid Transformation in their policy and rhetoric thats not great news for global stability. Right here, maam. Microphone is right there. Thank you for coming today. Francis cook. As one of probably ambassadors to your room is thank you. Watching the congress from this end of town has not been very eddie phiing in the last couple of weeks. Do you think that theres enough people in the congress who would support what youre proposing today so we can hope for this in the coming years . It certainly wont come from the administration but the congress controls the budget. No, i dont think there are enough, but there but there is bipartisan support for a proposal like this. As you know, Lindsey Graham has been traveling the world making an argument for a new marshall plan. He understands theres no theres no bigger hawk out there than Lindsey Graham. There are new voices in the senate who are really good on this stuff as well. Anybody that has listened to senator todd young, he is a strong voice when it comes to these accounts. Just a few extra advocates in the senate can make a difference. I think what were going to victories in the shortterm is parody between state department increases, but in the long term we have a handful of people that understand the value to counter what our adversaries and rivals are doing. Questions. Yes, sir, right here in the middle. Board members of the arms control association. Senator, President Trump apparently decided very quickly without consulting congress, without consulting our allies and without engaging the International Community on this attack, doesnt this make an argument for the legislation that would at least require the president before he launches the First Nuclear strike to consult with congress . Im not as familiar with that piece of legislation as i should so ill get familiar with it. I would say that notification to congress and consultation with congress was woefully lacking here. There were a handful of discussions that happened, but there was no broad notification. In fact, i know the Top Democrats were being told as the strikes were being launched. It appears that many of his lieutenants had International Conversations after the fact. It doesnt seem President Trump had many direct conversations. Much of the work seems to have been outsourced. He was busy this weekend, but he did seem to leave a lot of the International Conversations to others. As you know, International Support for the strike has been fairly robust and so i dont think you can fault him for not building an International Coalition if in the end most of our International Players were supportive of the strike. It maybe would be better if he was doing a little bit of that ahead of time or personally. In your plan would you support a marshal plan for a country like tunisia who is making a change to democracy but is also struggling . Tunisia is almost the poster child for what im talking about. Tunisia is a country, obviously, that is an outlier. It comes out of the arab spring but has foreign fighters out of tunisia still alarmingly high given the fact that is, you know, a government that made that transition better than others, a country crying out for Economic Investment and has an inclusive political structure thats able to take it. And yet we have to fight every single year just to keep a tiny flow of Economic Development funds flowing into tunisia. Dont assume that tunisia stays stable, and the amount of money that we may have to spend five or ten years from now on managing a crisis is well, its just a mountain compared to the peanuts that might be necessary to build some real political stability there. Right here in front. Tom mcnar, georgetown. Abrupt change in subject. Can you tell me where the budget control act plays in your plan and where you think it will be next fall and if its still there what are you cutting . The Budget Constraints would have to be removed in order for this kind of plan to be put into place. So, again, im imagining this in a world where we finally have decided that the insanity of sequestration should no longer apply, but the amount of money were talking about is big. Im not going to suggest that 50 billion isnt a large number, but thats the amount of money that you save if you decide to directly negotiate the price of prescription drugs with Drug Companies through medicare, right . There are single policy changes that can get you 50 billion. That is a minor adjustment in tax rates for the upper income earners. The policy changes are not catastrophically large if you chose to make them to come up with this money. Part of what im arguing is that the administration and the folks that propose these supplementals should be thinking about supplemental requests in these nonmilitary accounts. When the president makes many of these proposals often theyre unpaid for because theyre to treat emergencies. When they do that they should including nonmilitary accounts as well. Shawn murphy from George Washingt washington university. Im wondering if part of your argument could be supported by observing that a large amount of what the department of defense does is in fact not hard power, that is, a lot of what they do are things like working on the ground in afghanistan or iraq or building tents in west africa. Address ebola, disaster relief. Theres hardware behind it, but ive been struck at how much diplomacy our american men and women in the service do and if you conceive of that as part of a soft power side of things, all youre talking about is augmenting that with other experts who have Language Skills and experience and so on to make the whole package Work Together extremely well. I think its a wonderful point. I think youve seen this sort of slow, quiet shift since 2003 in which the military has outsourced sort of traditional military work to the covert agencies and the state department has outsourced diplomacy to the military and the one group left without much to do these days is the state department because much of their work has been shipped off to somebody else and theyre underfunded to do what they need to do today. I think thats part of the argument. As rosa brooks points out about all things becoming military part of the reason we channel so much traditional diplomacy through the military is because theyre flexible. They can stand up capacities really fast in the way that the state department frankly cannot. The state departments funding is so compartmentalized to move money from one country to another, its country account specific and capability account specific that when you decide you want to do Something Like dramatically expand land in a corner of afghanistan, the department of defense can come to you and tell you how they can do it much faster than the state department can do it. Thats why a big part of my proposal is built around giving more flexibility within the state department, consolidating accounts so you can move money around. To my Democrat Friends that will be a scary discretionary power to give this executive, but, again, i think every president is destined to fail unless we give them the flexibility in the nonmilitary accounts that we give them in the military accounts. To pick up on that in a moment. We are in a city now that is controlled by a Republican Senate and house. You have ticked through a number of things that you believe that foreign aid and the state department should focus on and the money we need to spend on that. At the end of the day whats it really matter if you and the president and other like minded members of Congress Work together on accomplishing what you want to accomplish but the Defense Department rather than the department of state . I think thats a great question. So i think in the end the military, even given all of the new capacities they have given, are still trained and driven to do one thing primarily, which is that strike on thursday night, right . They have transformed the way that military education occurs, but there is no way to create the capacity in basic training to mirror the capacity you get in Foreign Service school. It would involve a revolution of the state department and the way in which people are trained into it in order for them to do it. I think in a real environment given the way the world works today, you may want to have a conversation about one super structure which sees the full gamut of security challenges and is able to move the pieces around underneath it. Maybe sort of the 19th century idea of an army and a Foreign Office doesnt work any longer. Ill give you an example. Jim jones and others put together a proposal that sort starts to tease getting to that point. They suggested why dont we start by consolidating the state department commands and the military commands. Thats one of our problems is you have the state department carved up in a way that doesnt overlap with the way that the u. S. Military command structure is set up. They have a wonderful proposal out there that talks about consolidating the commands and have one person at the top of each regional command overseeing both the military response and the nonmilitary response. That might be a start. Question right here in the middle. Hello. Church of the brethren. Much of our work is around the ongoing concerns of boko haram. The working group has raised concerns around the accountability of the military and the need to increase humanitarian assistance. One of the pieces of that is you mentioned flexibility. The need for flexibility to work with smaller ngos or on the ground organizations in a place that is very difficult to get to for large organizations. I dont know nigeria as well as others, but it strikes me as a place in which our current tool kit has simply not worked in part because we are supplying we try to hang over nigerias head is support for the military. We have this big slush fund in the department of defense which allows them to move Foreign Military aid around very fluidly, nigerias always in that pot. We try to use that money to force the political change inside nigeria that we know is necessary in order to build long term stability. But again, back to this question of who should be doing that, right . The department of defense, which is not in the business of creating political stability, probably isnt the best agency to be using funding as leverage for political change. The state department is in that business. Thats what they do. They should be the people that have the big bucket of money that is used as pressure to leverage political change. But because we have a 10 billion slush fund in the department of defense, but not in the department of state, its the generals sitting there saying wed love to give you money, but you have to make big commitments on political reform. Im not an expert on those, but its important that you do that. The state department is better to do that. They just dont have the capability. Why cant you use the same 10 billion slush fund and bring over friends of ambassador cook from the state department and get the advice and accomplish the same thing or something similar, meaning we dont want to wait for three years and nine months or people on your side dont want to wait for three years and nine months to do something while we know who is going to be in the white house. Isnt there something that you can do to work within the Current Power structure in washington to accomplish what youre trying to accomplish, t youre trying to accomplish which are admirable, understanding that its highly unlikely that theres going to be significant funding increases at the state department, in fact, at this point, president s budget says theres going to be significant funding decreases. Ted thats probably what you want to do, over the next 12 months you probably want to make sure that you have more professional diplomats sitting at the table helping to negotiate military tunding increases. But, listen, im just not willing to support the way things are done today. I understand what im prospoegz a radical departure in the way that things financed. But ive found in this town everything is impossible until its no longer impossible. You know, the things you never thought could come true sometimes do come true and so why not put out a different waive doing things. And think about it with respect to nigeria as an example. So today were stuck spending military dollars and using it as a means to push political reform. If we had the money im talking about tep years ago we would have been building the kind of political reform that may never have allowed extremism to run out of control as it is today. I dont know thats how it would have played out but when i said that at the beginning of the speech, we cant even envision real particular Economic Solutions for places like nigeria because we only have the resources to envision military solutions. Question over here in the red jacket. Yes. Hi, this is jessica from de loit and im going to maybe take your question to the next level. What were talking about here is backing out from a 30 reduction in state to get to potentially zero to actually get to a plusup position and youre going to need to do that with secretary tillerson. In addition to thinking about getting more power back from dod back into state to reestablish their, you know, across the world. What is the plan for you and your brethren on the committee to work with them to actually have them sort of splip u flip their narrative to get back to being a narrative for this. You guys are so practical. Im trying to lift you guys up into the clouds here but youre not coming. So, i think, obviously this is our trade every day so were thinking about how to plot for the tackics tactics of this. I have not lost hope in secretary tillerson, but i am not expecting him to be a daily advocate for plussing up the accounts in his department with the we had a private lunch with him two or three weeks ago and he did not use that occasion to express a high level of confidence in the work that his department does. And so its going to be left to the state departments friends in the in the senate and the house to try to make those arguments, and we have them. I mean, we have really good we might not have ultimately republican support for the massive increases that im talking about, but we are lots of republicans who know how devastating a 30s cut would be. So im not losing sleep at night think that theres going to be a budget that ends up with a 30 cut or even a 10 cut for the department of state. I think at the very least we can maintain flat funding. I think theres a pretty good chance that we can get republican and democrat support for some targeted plus ups in certain accounts within those subcommittees. Im interested in that private lunch hearing more about it just among our friends here. Listen, you can no, you can imagine the conversation. Listen, secretary tillerson was good to have the Foreign Relations committee, republicans and democrats over to the state department for a private meeting two weeks ago. You can imagine the subjects we talked about, many of them were off the record. But i didnt walk away from that lunch thinking that this was a that these 30 or 40 cuts were deeply antithetical to his way of thinking. He sounded like someone who is going to defend those cuts rather than push back against them. And youve seen different members of the Administration Deal differently with these cuts. There are some that have come to congress if n their confirmation hearings saying i dont support them, im going to argue for more money formy department and there are other secretaries who dont want to raise any public riff over it. It suggests to me that tillerson is going to be of the latter category, not the former. Yes, right here in front of me. Thanks. Elisa with human rights first. This is another practical question down in the weeds that deals with the relationship between the pentagon and state. Last month the u. S. Embassy in afghanistan stopped dlfrg afghan whos served in American Force theres people who are fearing for their lives from the taliban because of their service with us. There just arent anymore special immigrant vooisas to be had and now the senators, a number of senators from both sides have proposed legislation that would increase i think 2,500 the number of special immigrant visas to help save these folks who helped save us. What do you think about that and how do we solve that problem . Well, its a moral impair rative and its a National Security imperative. I hope in my political lifetime were not going to have another deployment like we saw in iraq and afghanistan. But its probably likely that we will and when we are in another country with big numbers we are going to need the local population to work with us in a variety of ways, the least of which probably being simple translation services. As the word gets out that if you work with the United States we are going to leave to you die, we are not going to rescue you, why will anybody else work with us and cooperate with us overseas. Its a moral stain but its ultimately a practical liability. And there are more of these folks in need than you can imagine. I mean, just small increases doesnt begin to fill the need because the threats come not just to the individual, but to their entire family. I literally was on the road going from pancake breakfast to pancake breakfast and stopped in to get something to drink at a Convenience Store and the clerk at the store i forget what town it was, branford, connecticut, owned two radio stations in could be bull that he had let the u. S. Military use and because of it he was run out of afghanistan but his family was still there. And, you know, to his Great Fortune a u. S. Senator comes in to buy a diet mountain dew and we started having this conversation about how many are left behind. Again, this is a tough one because youve got the support in congress, but when you Start Talking about fiddling with immigration policy that may be one of their bright lines which would be absolutely tragic. Right here, yes, maam. Hi, senator. Im formally from usisd. My question takes us back up into the clouds a bit. Fouryear plan as you propoeszed it to gain traction it seems that it would need to be ancered in a nund fundamental rethink of our National Security strategy. Would you agree and if so what would the key tenants of that be . Well, youre clearly right. I mean, i hope i articulated that in my remarks. What im suggesting is that the tools that our add sayries are using are not primarily military in nature and yet ours continue to be. And so youve got to build up a basket of tools that the american president has that matches those overseas. We are so proud of the fact that we have the biggest, baddest military in the world and right, we wear it as a badge of honor that all of the other countries, the next ten bill biggest mill tears combined dont equal ours. But thats the only capacity in which we are the world leader. And why is that acceptable . Why is it acceptable that we are not the world leader on information flows . Why are we not the world leader on economic assistance . Why are we not the world leader on Energy Assistance . Why are we so proud to be the world leader when it comes to military power but we accept being in second or third or fourth place on all of these other capacities which increasingly suggest is the ones that are going to really matter. Second, i just think youve got to be thinking every day about stability, in a world in which it only takes a little bit of space for a handful of really bad people to plot a highly deadly attack against the United States, you got to be making up every day thinking about how to reduce ungovernable space. And big military hardware doesnt do that. In fact it often exacerbates the ungovern lk space. So youve got to be thinking abouting that question and developing the kmaft. Youre never going to eliminate it but dramatically reducing it makes it much more likely that anybodys going to get a foothold on territory that would allow them to get strikes on us. Thank you all for your time today. Thank you for watching at home. Good afternoon. Thank you. [ applause ] [ indiscernible conversations ]. Sunday night on after words, Congressman Ken Buck of colorado also a member of the Freedom Caucus discusses his bik book drain the swamp how washington corruption is worse than you think. When you arrive in d. C. And you have the surroundings that ive described earlier you get very comfortable in that situation and you dont want to give up those comforts. And the way to continue to earn those comforts is to spend more money and grow government and not solve problems but to create programs and take credit for those programs whether theyre efficient or effective to take credit for those programs. And so many of the members of congress are here, its the best job theyve ever had, its the highest paying job theyve ever had, and its a job that they dont want to give up. And so their reelection is more important than the actual problem solving that needs to good on in d. C. Watch after words sunt night at 9 00 p. M. Eastern on cspan2s book tv. Cspan, where history unfolds daily. In 1979, cspan was created as a Public Service by americas Cable Television companies. And is brought to you today by ur