>> your own personal experience. henry has a trump card we can interrupt you anytime he wants i will start with you, h.r., on this question. >> thank you. it's very important to the present of all of us to ensure that congressman katko fulfill its constitutional role which oftentimes as you know is vital to our democracy because congress represents the american people but it's also caucuses role too often critical in providing sometimes corrected what the unwise policy and for us across emaciation to access the right the point where their staffs do. so the department as you mentioned john, has a primary responsibility for that interaction on the hill but what we've intended to do at the national council is to have conversations with senators and congressmen and staffers about our key policy initiatives and early in the development of what we're calling our integrated strategies. we found that immensely helpful because first of all a lot of the -- requires remedies and all of them require resources. i think our emphasis has been in relation to question on early consultation from the nsc. but continued coordination between the departments, relative departments and the hill and the relevant committees. >> jim and steve, each of you have administrations that at somewhat contentious relations with the congress. how does this issue, they would want to know what you are saying and what you were thinking, but you have an obligation to the president to be as advisor. >> i think the most important thing is for the national security advisor and the nsc is, on matters of national, international security to be, project an image of bipartisanship. and my relationship with president obama, , i asked him r that latitude to resist putting a political stem on big issues until such time as those issues have been developed and obviously it's a political decision. during my time, followed steve, we decided to combine homeland security and nas security into one staff. and that was a big difference in terms of the size of the staff. but i think that bipartisan approach is extremely important. i in my military career, i had the good fortune of spending a few years on capitol hill, as a marine liaison officer and my motto was always do for the majority what you do for the minority, and vice versa. that i found out when i became nationals could advisor that all of a sudden i was a democrat and i didn't know i was. you know, you have to get through that and you can only get through that by working at it and by making sure that you reached out to both sides, and i think that's extraordinarily important on security issues. >> well, of course the nationals could advisor is not confirmed by the senate -- national security adviser. i like i'm sure all my predecessors spent a lot of time consulting informally up on the hill briefing, explaining policies and all the rest. it's an important part of the job. i learned everything i know about being national security adviser for man in the front row, brent scowcroft. and one of the things, worked for him when he is national security adviser the first time, but we served together on the commission more than most important things about the tower commission which was astounds with president reagan in 1986 in wake wake of the iran arms sales was to stave off an effort by the congress to basically take over the national security structure required the national security adviser be confirmed, set the number of people come set the organizational structure and brent led the charge to frustrate the effort because it's not just an issue of privacy. it's an issue of separation of powers. if the president cannot gather around him or her a staff people in which he or she can have great confidence, but the president is not to be able to carry out the constitutionally prescribed roles with the president has a lot of rules and a lot of leadership. so it's a fundamental constitutional principle that needs to be observed. and it is always subject to struggle because in times of war presidents get more power. in times presence into getting cars, congress takes it back. it's very important for the institution of the presidency to preserve that group that is able to support the president and that constitutional. >> henry, nobody had a boss that more difficult relations with the carcass ultimately than richard nixon. how did you balance your obligations to be his advisor but also the accountability to the congress? >> the question of accountability i see two ways. one, how congress can control the main lines of policy if some of it is carried out by the nsc. and some measures that have to be taken in essentially a secret mode, opening to negotiations, the exploration of new avenues. so that's the basic problem. the administration, during the vietnam war, and you cannot say that bipartisanship was at its height. and several of the people who it started us into that road, the peace movement. so passions were great. and president nixon had to combat it, all of -- but, in fact, what we did is, is two things. as a matter of principle we did not, or president nixon did not commit that his staff members could testify before congressional committees. or could be subpoenaed by congressional committees. but we agreed with the senator that we would have private meetings, , that he would invite me and the numbers of the foreign relations committee to drinks in his house, and that i would, periodically and brief them so no formal record was kept of these briefings and it was not a subpoena. so that's, and we invariably briefed the leading members of the various senatorial committees. the problem was that was a philosophical difference, and the country was so deeply divided at that moment that it was very difficult to find a basis for bipartisanship. and how do you end a war that one party has started, the other party -- [inaudible] and the party that got involved had a ship inside that party so that the objective in principle to the policy they themselves had advocated. i don't say that as a criticism. that was, in fact, the situation. but even during the nixon. we thought we made strenuous efforts to involve the congress and other decision-making. what the key issue really comes down and continuing debate, to what degree do the operations of the nsc become so pervasive that they would act like a department? there is a category of decisions which i think most would believe have to be done to some extent secretly, and to commit -- but then when it becomes a day-to-day occurrence that's when it arises, whether they're still congressional control. i i think most of the time the c has stayed on the right side of the line. but one could argue that if the nsc is an institution conducts the continuing negotiation that goes on over several years, that then it is really doing, taking steps that ordinarily are under departmental and congressional control. >> you anticipated the next question i was going to ask. because there is a critique in washington these days at the nationals could be counsel has become operational. it's taking on the activities of the departments rather than being a coordinating and advisory. each one of you probably dealt with that criticism. henry has given us his thoughts. stephen, how do you think about that? i mean -- >> well, one of the things is that part of the bargain about the national security adviser and the nsc being not subject to senate confirmation or testimony and the like is that it needs to be respectful to confine its role so it does not preempt the role of the departments and agencies or cabinet secretaries who are the ones that are confirmed by the senate, and to whom slots and monies appropriated to carry the foreign-policy. it requires a national security adviser to enforce discipline on the staff, and to be self-limiting, and particularly not get too public in terms of what they are doing. we, you know, we learned in the iran arms sale in iran-contra the dangers of having an nsc that runs operations. on the other hand, i would suggest simply this. i think in this he spent lot of time developing ways of building policy options for the president. i think there is a role though for the nsc, not in writing operations, not displacing the departments, but to make sure that once the president makes a decision and sets the policy, that the departments and agencies are implementing that policy effectively. it's not this the substitute fe department of agencies but it is to make sure that they are in plummeting the president decision and hold them accountable. i think that's kind of a new frontier for the nsc and something that a think we need because the greatest policy is no good if it isn't implementing and is it causing effects on the ground to advance the interests of the country. >> i think the biggest cancer in the nsc is when it crosses over from the strategic to operational. and we have to guard against that. it's not easy. technologies a double-edged sword in this case, where technology allows someone in the nsc if he or she wishes to to pick up the telephone and call an operational command on the field in afghanistan. and that's a problem for every administration. that's not just one administration. as as a marine officer i was one receiving end of direction from, direct from the white house as the captain in the operation off of cambodia. well contented intentioned stae you wanted to talk to captain jones and he could do that. but that is, that is the big problem, and it's one of the jobs i think the national security adviser and whoever else can convey is that under no circumstances will you do that. under no circumstances it becaue once you open that door, then you do get into running, micromanaging and running operations and that something that the nsc should guard against absolutely. >> h.r., panic which was spot? >> sure. first let me say it's been a great gift to be able to study the nsc from a historical perspective and then to learn from those who are here and especially general scowcroft tos been just a tremendous role model and mentor for me as well. so much of his work is very relevant to this question on emphasizing the role of the nationals could be counsel, coordinating and integrating the cross department agencies to provide options for the the president and once the president makes decisions and stephen has pointed out, assist with a sensible implementation, execution of those decisions. in recent years for whatever reasons, more and more authorities have been centralized, or centralize within the nationals could be counsel. and it did cross a line between a coordinating and integrating organization into an executing arm of the government. so consistent with president trump's guidance, we have devolved responsibility and authorities act to the departments where it belongs, and emphasized that coordination and integration role. one of the ways we've done it is with the time we saved by not calling up captain jones or his equivalent. what we've done is applied that time to reestablishing our strategic confidence, to think longer-term, and to involve the heads of the departments and agencies, the state department in particular, to play a foundational role in framing problems, in giving situations around the world that affect our national security through the lens of vital interests and then based on that framing, to establish long-term goals. in more specific objectives associated with those goals. then what happens is the principles issue guidance to the departments and agencies which then allowed them to get to work and actually start doing things. if it's already within their authority to meet whatever the principles guidance is. and that would bring those decisions to the president that require his decisions. the approval of that framing and then ultimately we deliver to the president in an integrated strategy, much as we did as many watched us do it on the cuban policy which is probably the most public one. but there are policies on iran, for example, which you will hear more about this week. i could go on and on, but i think what has helped us has helped us address this potential of centralizing too much control in the nsc, making dse to operational comp is to focus more on the development of these integrated strategies. >> hendry, i think when you were a national security adviser, you had a staff that was 40 or 50, i'm not exactly sure, i think it was 42, 45, something like that. we see big staffs in the nsc in recent years. i mean, is this just a simple question? more people are looking for things to do, they take on command. is part of this, h.r., you started with -- can only talk about how big a step is and how influential it is given its job? >> okay. well, if you talk to get sure you can -- you can get away with 40 or 50. if it's me i need more help. we should remember you probably need a few more staffers if you're not henry kissinger. but we have made a a conscious effort to reduce the size of the staff, and to make sure that form follows function. as we default responsibilities back to departments and agencies, as we get out of management of tactical issues, they were able to reduce. we have reduce significantly the numbers of policy people in overall staff. it was over 400 or so at its peak. we're down to about 360 something epic that sounds like a lot. of those 360 to about 160-170 policy people, and the rest is the white house situation room which runs multiple shifts and information technology, those who manage the president travel and visits the foreign leaders. so there's a large administrative component. it's not as big as some of the numbers you hear talked about. what has contribute to the growth over time as well from 50 or so to 167 is the emphasis on homeland security especially after the mass murder attacks on our country on september 11, 2001. a nationals could be counsel has a blended staff that also includes some homeland security council. does it mean we can't get smaller? we can't i think the emphasis is to have the right people with the right expertise and because of the coordination and integration efforts, the right personality a lot of times to lead by charm and bring people together around these important issues. so i think we are at a good place now in terms of the size and effect is especially of extremely talented as all of you know the dedication and talent of the people on the national security council, it's astounding. it just make you proud every day when you interact with your teams. but it did grow for a number of reasons. it is getting smaller again but the numbers can be deceiving in terms of policy. >> we didn't start with a fixed idea of the number of people that should be on the staff. i think one of the problems is what you define as national security policy. and when we started in the nixon administration, we concentrated on a number of key issues like russia and opening to china. four or five key issues, and we let most of the others to the departments. then gradually over time the line between strategy and day-to-day policy got eroded, and so there was felt to be a greater need for white house supervision. there's a reason for this. in the ideal world, the people who lose a debate accept it and march along. in the world that i knew, which i know has improved, the party that gets overruled tends to think it was misunderstood. [laughing] and that, that there is a need to carry out the implementation as close to the original overruled point that you could find. so there's a tendency for the departments to slide over into the preference of their members. this is, of course, maddening to the president who think they settle something and then they gradually slide two, i think this accounts for the fact that -- [inaudible] got -- but that function of, which steve hadley mentioned, to add to policy relations, the need for supervising implementation. because very often the difference between success and failure is -- and if you screw that up, even a great policy decision can fail. so it wasn't the desire to improve, and, of course, i must say from a historically important view, relations between the operators and the receivers were never better than when i had both the jobs. [laughing] >> which actually was not a good system. >> jim, you brought up this question about how technology is changing the nature of the national security council. i think when come henry, i think i remember you telling us when you first open the channel to china, it was a typewritten note that went through mail channels and it took a while for even to know if if it got bigger that e would is sitting with a piece of machinery on their belt that's got more computing power than dod used about 40 years ago. >> the channel to china, on the chinese side was a handwritten note that was delivered and packaged and brought to washington by a pakistani diplomat. and i'll reply was typed -- our reply was typed on paper that had no watermarks on it, and came back the same way. so each exchange took a minimum of nearly three weeks. and the real time was two to three months between these exchanges. >> and so now jim is talking come he's had the experience where it's a battlefield commander can get a phone call from the president, and this is hard to run national security council with that kind of immediacy. how did you deal with it, jim? >> well, if i could just make a comment on the psychology to go back for one more second on the previous because i feel pretty strongly about this. the size of the national security council is not what's important. it's what the national security does, national security council does. if you look at the range of issues that the president has to deal with every single day, just in the seven days since i've been gone, i know h.r. deals with about twice as many issues every day that either steve or i had to do on our watch. so the size of the nationals could counsel has to be adequate to the task. that means you organize yourself on functional directorates and geographical directorates that makes sense. you have to have that kind of knowledge. now, on my watch we combined the homeland security council and the national security council, what i will tell you on my watch the national security council was severely underfunded, severely underfunded. grossly underfunded. and the only way to fight that was to get detainees from agencies. so, and steve and i talked about this, so on my watch the national security council was roughly two-thirds detainees and one-third permanent personnel. and guess what. after the first year, those detainees when back to the agencies. and she had to rebuild them. the national security council has to be organize and the size frank i don't care what the size as long as it does what it needs to do. and secondly, it has to have come in this day and age where big issues are the province of multiple agencies and departments, it's no longer just the defense department element of the state department. its treasury, energy, commerce. it's everything. and they are at the table and if you're going to run an organization that seeks to be the ringmaster, if you will, to make this thing work, you have to have adequate size. and i think you have to have them there on a permanent basis i think the ideal i think detailees are good on a think we had it wrong. we should of had two-thirds permanent personnel for policy and one-third detailees that can be rotated. that's my opinion. on the question, john, that you raised, you know, that's the national security advisor has to figure out what it is the president needs to know. and, frankly, in this day and age with the pace of technology contributing to the immediate knowledge of what's going on in the four corners of the world, you don't, we don't have the organization to keep up with that on a 24/7 asus. jokingly, when i was nationals get relations, you know, we need important national security council. when one half the world is asleep and we need one when half the world is awake. we need to have staff other than just kind of a watch but actually people are working issues so that when the shift comes are actually transitioning with knowledge and you're not spending the whole waking hours other next day trying to catch up with what's going on. because it that's the conundrum you are caught in, , you have no time to think strategically and less you build that into the national security council and you have a senior director who have a staff who does nothing but think about what's coming over the horizon. in fact, in fact, technology isr example of technology being a double edged sword but it does multiply the task of what you tell the president during the pdb dramatically every day. >> you know, dwight eisenhower really did have two indices. he had a military backgrounds we had a j3 and a j5, for people that are not familiar, j3 is responsible for day-to-day operations, fighting the fight. the j5 is responsible for strategic planning, looking downstream. eisenhower actually had two staffs and he spent as much time with each of them as the other. he gave priority to it. i know h.r., you got to know your j5. she putting together a nationals get a strategy. how do you distinguish between strategic long-range planning and the daily fight? >> we do have a strategy team, kevin as well working on the national security strategy overall. but we tried to do that by developing a system that emphasizes strategic planning and then that same team, unlike the eisenhower administration which had a planning board and the operational control board, ocd, the same directors have oversight for implementation. and so what we found is with initial strategies we developed, that we really need principles to become involved about six months into a sustained strategy to assess it and then to recommend adjustments, unless the situation changes fundamentally such as a referendum or anything that really causes us to review the assumptions on which that strategy is based and to make recommendations to the president on how to adjust based on ignorance. what we found is immensely important strategies in place because, otherwise, the tendency is to respond to events without fully understanding how to try to bend or respond to this event in a way that actually advances towards clearly articulated goals and objectives. we have not separated execution or at the mentation, which is departments and agencies but coordinated from the planning effort, but what we have, what we do have are at least two organizations that look long-term all the time. >> could i i ask each of you, steve, this is a huge problem and i don't think any nsc staff had assaulted. i think what h.r. is doing is in the right direction. the old problem if all you do is manage crises are you going to get his more crazy because you're not putting in place policies and strategies to shape the future and avoid the crises. on the other hand,, as jim mentioned, the number of issues that h.r. is dealing with his overwhelming. we tried and peter is here come he can talk about it. we try to have a strategy that was integrated into our step. peter and his people would show up when we're talking about a day-to-day problem to try to give a long-term strategic perspective. really i found the best time i i could do, meet with the team was saturday morning, billy time things got quite a little bit. but there's a terrific resource available, and that is you are pressed to have primed to take a longer view but, of course, we have a robust think tank community here in washington. one of the things that we did was come up with sort of ten things that might go bump in the night and be a problem for us. and peter went quietly to a number think tanks and said if you do a study of long-term implications of acts, i think i know some people in the white house could be interested in reading it. so i think there's actually a real opportunity for using this think tank community as well as intelligence community and policy planning communities to make the intellectual investment and much of what verizon and try to talk about some alternative strategies. it's the partnership that adult think we have taken full advantage of. >> jim? >> i completely agree with that. having the privilege of working in a think tank like csis, i think there's great value to asking the think tank community to take on some of the strategic issues that are coming out that they're not quite mature but they are watching and thinking about. it's a force multiplier and it's something that should be used, i think. >> just at all. i think it's important to have this focus as stephen has mentioned to organize properly forward as well. and so its outreach to think tanks to bring in outside perspectives and what i'm doing is repeating a lot of the advice i got for many of you, as i took the job. but it's also helping the departments and agencies maintained a long-term perspective and to help integrate their long-term planning. what we did to organize is create a deputy national security adviser for strategy, tina powell, who is our main bridge into policy planning at state come into osd policy, and brings those teams together around one regarding national security challenges so that we are ready to frame these problems, get guidance from principles that they are been talked about within their departments. it's not a beating that's held in we say iran are russian discussed. this is something that dean has eluded across departments and agencies already for the framing discussion. >> henry raised a very interesting issue, which i didn't focus on at the time. i'd like to bring us back to it, that is when you talked about the necessity of government to doing things in secret, but we're a democracy where policy is a a public debate. i would like, how do you feel about, obviously the government has to have secret channels where it can initiate diplomacy but it has to be grounded in something we talked talk to the american public about. henry opened the door on this. again, h.r., if you would give us your reaction, jim, steve, and i will come back to henry. >> well, i had a practice that i had no secrets from my nsc principals. there wasn't anything i was doing that condi rice as secretary of state and bob gates, the secretary of defense, didn't know. and it was fine because that's the way the president wanted it. so i think that is an important piece, and we had the kinds of relationships where i was very comfortable doing that. i also wanted them to know what i was thinking, and to get a a sense of the kind of advice i would give to the president so if they had a different view it would have an opportunity to present the other side. i think in terms of the congress and the public, i think one of the things we have to distinguish between is the schematics and general direction policy from sort of operational and execution detail. and i think the public and the congress, once you start with schematics, they have an inexhaustible desire to go all the way down to the detailed, and it's a mistake. i think what we've got to do is make that distinction broad policy, what context, what are objectives, what's our basic principles of our strategy. and then let the professionals do the implementation and execution, where some secrecy is required because your strategy will not succeed if the enemy knows what you going to do before you get there. i think that's a distinction we lost and we need to try to discipline, we need to reintroduce into the system. >> one of the things that technology does allow for very classified communications with friends and allies, and one of the things that i not only enjoyed the most but i thought very productive is engaging other national security advisers on a weekly basis with one to two hour video teleconference on a regular basis. that had a very unifying effect on the big issues, and you could talk pretty high level of confidence. i don't recall anything that was ever discussed on those video teleconferences ever being revealed in public. by then or by us. more countries decided to adopt the national security adviser in their government. the uk didn't have a national security adviser officially designated until 2009-2010. and more countries have since come on i think h.r. has more interlocutors to deal with. but i think you have to be careful to make sure that when the national security adviser is using those channels that there is immediate feedback to the secretary of state, the secretary of defense and other departments. and that's a metric that absolutely you have to live by because otherwise you have fragmentation and the big risk or national security adviser is, you know, if he or she doesn't do that well, you become competitive with another department and that's absolutely something that you cannot tolerate. >> a real dilemma is the more people you can bring in, the more expertise you can bring in and bring to bear on a problem the better because it gives you different perspectives. allow should understand the better tools you can bring to bear to help solve problems, but in recent years in particular the problem of leaks has become a real challenge to national security, and so i think what is very important is everyone that's involved in these policy discussions understands the sacred trust that is placed in them. and they realize speaking to the media about government deliberations is treasonous when it involves national security. and so that, with that confidence established, the more transparency the better i think in terms of common understanding across departments and agencies. and so that's the thing we really have to strike. >> let me make a philosophical point here. in conventional wisdom, it is of course desirable to have transparency, and secrecy is supposed to be bad, and sharing knowledge is supposed to be very good. but if you ask yourself how history is actually made, if you turn into a bureaucratic effort, a lot of people get informed and you may wind up stagnating and being paralyzed. the absence of creative policymaking is to go down a road that is in a lonely fashion. there's a spanish proverb that says traveler, there is no road. the roads are made by walking. and this seems to me to be an aspect of policymaking, and if one becomes too obsessed with clearances, which is one level a way of feeding anybody's ego, and nobody is willing to walk on unfamiliar roads, then you are in great difficulty. of course, a president, a secretary of state, when he pursues sacred avenues will have to pass them over a measurable time in the thinking. but when president bush sent brent scowcroft to china after tiananmen, if that had been made as a public discussion, there would've been endless debate. and after he had been there and worked out some principles, those principles you didn't be discussed and become part of the political process. so the art of conducting the nsc, in my opinion, involves a combination of making sure that there is a needed level of transparency. and so, almost every president had somewhere alone when felt it was necessary to employ emissaries of separate channels. i'm a great admirer of the current security adviser. if you are thinking about the role of the national security council, this is a key moment to reflect on. how to strike that balance between the operations and division. >> i'm going to ask i think the hardest question and henry i'm going to start with you. you know america exists is such a dynamic and once fractured society. we have so many different traditions in our country. it's hard for us to develop a sustained geostrategic strategy. something that carries over from administration to administration to administration. you've talked about how we get excited with our missionary impulses and take on new goals but we lose it in the politics. how do we develop, what are the necessary preconditions for establishing a durable national strategy that would transcend over multiple administrations, henry? >> i think one of the biggest differences may be the biggest difference between the united states and other great countries is that we have never had the experience of a direct national national -- except in the civil war when it was domestic. the greatest part of our history after the first generation we could conduct policies as observers, fixing immediate problems that impinged on us so we tend to think foreign-policy has a series of fixable problems and why you take say the chinese chinese, to them foreign policy is a continuing presence. they don't think they even fixed the problem. they fixed the problem is an admissions ticket to another problem to them and it's one of the problems with how presidents talk to the chinese leaders. so not having had that data but now we are living in a world of permanent danger because of new technologies and the judgment we make need not to be addressed only to the immediate issue but in shaping the future. that's a new experience for americans and we don't have trained personnel in that way that it had to do it for sustained period of time. and so some of the decisions one can make in foreign-policy are very understandable. we have fought of america is being beacon whose internal performance would shape the world, so we tend to think if we can reach a domestic structure of other countries that will come to be. now we have to learn that we have to make progress in stages and we have to learn the nature and considering we had to start over from scratch it's amazing what we have achieved. and there is no other national security adviser in the world today who has spent time with the american national security department so i tend to criticize our feeling strategic moves but it has also gotten us to where we are. now we have the chance to broaden it. that's a big challenge and the nsc adviser now has all of our problems and with that new problem. >> would any of you care to speak? >> i think it's a problem. if you look back and say where have we come close to doing what henry is talking about i think it's probably in managing the cold war and managing their response after 9/11 after the terrorist attack in the united states. someone familiar with both of them i think cold war is an example where we have common policy across a number of different administrations. 9/11 and the response there was more difficult. we had a lot of divisions within the country but i think the formula is the same. to take and race point getting a vision endorsed by the president that seems to fit the times and then taking that strategy and having a national debate and discussion and involving the congress. i think we succeeded in the cold war but the basic strategy have a lot of bipartisan support. after 9/11 we had huge debates about the balance between what we needed to do to safeguard the country and within the law what we needed to do to ensure we stayed a common society and open society that we wanted to be. we had a lot of things in the course of the legislature but we sort of came to a consensus. we are still struggling but there is a lot of continuity in terms of dealing with a policies policies. in our own untidy way it's difficult but we have been able to do it and i think there has been a lot of continuity on china for example. but it is hard and it takes work work. b we are one of the few countries that publishes the national security strategy on a regular basis. i think it's an extraordinarily good thing to do but classified and unclassified and i think departments that the individual departments ought to publish their own strategy to support the national security strategy. it provides for the information for the public in the unclassified sense and it protects you from revealing too much on the classified side so i think that's a very good thing to do and it keeps people focused. >> we are at the end of our tang tang -- time but i want to take a minute or two for general mcmaster. he is currently the custodian of this remarkable institution. there has probably been no other single recitation in america that is as important on a day-to-day basis. the national security council we are now at the 70th anniversary. you are currently the steward. what is your vision and how do you look at the future of this and we'll wrap it up at that. >> as dr. kissinger mentioned the stakes couldn't be higher. their new dangers to national security. clear that the age of free security was over by what we see now is this democratization of discretion and new threats that are emerging new battlegrounds in spaces involving very sophisticated campaigns of subversion, the use of cyber capabilities for example. and so that really requires us to really focus on our strategic competence. recent years i think you could make the argument that we have swung from maybe unrealistic expectations about the degree of agency and control we have over complicated situations to almost defeatism and withdraw from certain contested spaces and battlegrounds. so what the president has directed us to do is to approach the national security challenges and opportunities from a perspective of pragmatic realism to prioritize the safety and security of the american people, to emphasize the connection between security and emerging prosperity in new ways such that we integrate what we are doing from an economic perspective and also from a military and diplomatic perspective in new and different ways. peace through spring two a broader range of factors that can do us harm and despite the oceans on the other side of our continent but then also to advance american influence and recognition as america's partners and allies and like-minded nations that give us our unique strength across the world. so these are ideas that underpin the development of our integrated strategies and certainly will underpin the national security strategy as well. i would just like to say first of all thank you to john at csis for this tremendous opportunity and i would like to thank in particular former national security adviser from whom i have learned so much and benefited from your kind advice and mentorship as i took on this job and found my way from a cold start. so thank you john and thanks to all of you. before i let you say thank you with your applause we have got a bunch of people here who have worked on the staff of the national security council in various positions at various times. could i ask those of you who've worked at the national security council to raise your hand? all right, thank you and thanks to all of you. 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