[applause] thank you all for coming. Thanks to cspan and its important audience as well, my new book, the rise and fall of peace on earth, revolves around a particular question. The question is, what are the prospects for peace . That is a timely question at any point and i will give my answer in the course of my remarks but it does presuppose, another question not often asked but one that is also relevant to the book. That question is, what do we mean by peace . How do you define peace . The obvious definition is, peace is the absence of war. Thats always welcome but its not very rigorous. After all, the world hasnt spent its entire existence in a continual war. War isnt continual if its episodic. So i propose a somewhat regulation or deep peace. As the absence not only of war but of the eminent threat of war. Emergent preparations for war. Its the absence of Foreign Policy conducted under the cloud of war. That is an unusual circumstance. Indeed by my reckoning as i see in the book we really only had one period of deep peace as defined in that way. That period is the 25 years following the end of the cold war. The 25 years after the opening of the berlin wall. Those 25 years were reminiscent of a no parking sign i once saw. Maybe some of you have seen it as well. It said, dont even think of parking here. In those 25 years the major countries in the world really worked thinking, or at least not taking seriously and urgently, about going to war. To be sure, there was plenty of bloodshed and death during those 25 years but most of it was the consequence in the balkans in central africa, in syria, of civil war or militia, mistreating civilians. But the conflicts that we saw, the death and dying we saw were not the result of clashes between and among powerful armies using the most advanced weaponry and its wars like that that are by far the greatest creators of death and destruction. We didnt have those and what i see in retrospect as the golden 25 years and we didnt really have any serious prospect of such a conflict. Why was that . Why were these 2. 5 decades so peaceful . In my view it was not at all accidental. We had a deep peace because of the unusually robust presence of threepiece promoting features of the International System. The first of these was the benign hegemony of the United States. America was the big kid on the block and even if those countries that were particularly happy about this didnt dare challenge us in a serious way. The second major piece promoting feature was economic interdependence. This was one of the great ages of globalization. We know that countries that trade with and invest in one another on a large scale are very reluctant to go to war for no other reason that the war cost them a lot of money. The third great piece promoting feature of the International Politics between 1989 and 2014 was democracy. This was a great age of democracy the first time in Human History when democracy was the most prominent form of government around the world. By democracy i mean two things. Democracy is i believe a hybrid form of government, it involves popular sovereignty use, free fair and regular elections. But it also necessarily involves liberty and liberty comes in three varieties. Economic liberty thats private property, religious liberty, freedom of worship. And political liberty, the rights and incorporated in the first 10 amendments to the constitution of the United States. Democracy promotes peace in a variety of ways. Democracy gives people some control over their leaders who are sometimes bellicose and then gives them at least the possibility of exercising some restraint. Moreover, democracy is, i would say, is permanently a system of government in which disputes and disputes and conflicts are inevitable in any society, are resolved peacefully. The peaceful resolution of conflict within countries when carried over to relations between and among them leads to peaceful foreign policies. It has to be said that these features individually and together do not by themselves guarantee peace. The reason is that, nothing can guarantee peace. There is no iron ball of International Politics like the laws of physics. Think of these three features of the International System as modular building blocks. One put one on top of the other they created in these 25 years a very large, we dont have to call it a wall, lets call it a barrier keeping out war. This was a golden age of peace. An age unlike any other but it is now at an end. We no longer live in a world in which war is unthinkable. The prospect of war, not the certainty of war, not the imminence of war but the possibility of war has returned in three crucial parts of the world. In europe, in east asia, and the middle east. It has returned because three important countries, one in each of the region, has embarked on policies designed to give it dominance in the region using force. In europe, russia invaded and occupied ukraine. In east asia, china has claimed virtually all the western pacific contrary to International Law has built artificial islands in the western pacific and has installed military facilities on them. And in the middle east iran has used paramilitary groups to expand its influence throughout the region and has pursued nuclear weapons. The heart of the rise and fall of peace on earth is three chapters that describe and explain how and why peace came and disappeared from each of these three regions. Its a complicated story in each case. But all three cases have all one thing in common. In each region for each of these countries that have disturbed the peace, the aggressive foreignpolicy that ended the piece at a domestic cause. Each of the three governments is a dictatorship. So each of them depends for the continuation of its rule, ultimately on coercion and repression. For a variety of reasons, each one wants as much public support as possible and each conducted these aggressive foreign policies as a way of trying to unmask increasing public support in its own country. The reason is that the most reliable source in public support suddenly look very dicey. This was especially true for russia and china. Both of these dictatorships gained such support as they have enjoyed due economic progress through presiding over Economic Growth. In the second decade of this century the prospects for Economic Growth in each of these countries suddenly gives. In russia prosperity depends almost entirely on the export of energy. When Vladimir Putin was first president of russia, the price of oil skyrocketed to 125 a barrel. Money poured in, he distributed some of it to the russian people while keeping a lot for himself and his cronies and he earned considerable popularity. But when he came back to the presidency, the price had fallen by half and showed no signs of increasing substantially. That meant that he had a political problem and he turned to an aggressive foreignpolicy to try to solve it. In the chinese case the Chinese Communist party presided over a remarkable unprecedented period of Economic Growth. Three full decades of annual doubledigit growth in the party was able to do so by relying on a threepart formula. That formula included the Massive Movement of Chinese People from the countryside to the city enormous investment in infrastructure and everincreasing exports. But again in the chinese case but the second century that for looking threadbare and indeed over the last couple years and so far as we can tell from chinese statistics, the chinese growth rate has been cut in half. China has been growing only about five or six percent per year. Thats a very good performance for your trip virtually any country. But its not what the Chinese People have become accustomed to. The chinese regime has a problem comparable to the one Vladimir Putin faces. The third disturber of the piece, iran is a somewhat different case because the clerics that seized power in 1979 and governed ever since for the last four decades never presided over a good economic performance. It never produced Economic Growth. But that has made them all the more unpopular and given them an even greater need for some other source of popularity. The dictatorships conducted their aggressive foreign policies toward your neighbors with an eye toward generating popularity but they justified these policies to their target audience of people that they governed on the grounds that such policies were actually defensive. As mechanisms were restoring their countries to the rightful positions as a dominant power in the respective region. That is to say, each dictatorship, and did piece, has a strategy of preserving its own role. That is where we are today. Well, this analysis or this narrative raises an obvious question, how if it all can we restore peace. In the rise and fall of peace on earth does answer, although i fear is not entirely satisfactory. Of the three piece promoting features of International Politics it created what i see in retrospect of the golden quarter century of peace, by far the most potent in my judgment is democracy. There are many studies by political scientist that find that democracies in the modern era have a powerful tendency not to go to work at least not with one another. And therefore the way to restore peace is for russia, china and iran to become fullfledged democracies. Incorporating both the protection of liberty. But, as you will recognize, that is far more easily said than done. Indeed, one of the lessons that weve learned over the last several decades, while countries to become democracies all the time, they really cannot be made to be democracies from the outside. Democracy which requires customs and experience and values and institutions, cannot be imported and cannot be delivered like a pizza. It takes time to develop and has to be ultimately the creation of the people of the country themselves. So democracy in russia, china and iran depends ultimately on the people of russia, china and iran. So the central message of the rise and fall of peace on earth is both optimistic and pessimistic. There is good news and bad news. The good news is, we have a formula for peace. The da bad news is, we dont hoo implement. And that leads to one final question. Given that we cannot make the disturbance of the peace, democracies and thereby restore democracy, can we, the United States and other government democracies do at least the increase of chances that these desirable outcomes will come to pass. What can we do to nudge these countries in the desirable direction. In my view, there are three initiatives, three policies if you like, that the United States and other democracies can and should undertake to try to push the world in desirable directions. First, we can and should adopt a refurbished version of the cold war policy of containment. During the cold war, the United States and the democratic allies opposed the political designs and resisted the military initiatives of the soviet union. In the 21st century, there is a very powerful case for the United States or its friends and allies in these regions to carry out a similar policy toward russia, china and iran. Two points are worth noting about 21st century containment. First it is certainly not going to be a carbon copy of 20th century containment because the world has changed in important ways. Second, at the heart of any policy of containment must be the establishment and maintenance of coalitions of likeminded countries in all three regions. That is to say, in this era, alleys remain very important for american Foreign Policy. So that is the first thing that we can do to push the world back toward peace. Second, the United States and its friends and allies can and should, take whatever modest steps that are feasible to weaken the dictatorship of russia, china and iran. We cannot topple them but as during the cold war, we can take steps to make them less powerful than they would otherwise have been. Third, and not least important, we americans and citizens of other democracies need to do whatever is necessary to ensure that United States and other countries remain powerful examples of the benefits of democracy in a book that i wrote a few use ago, called democracies good name, i argued that democracy spreads largely by force of example. And we do the best that and thereby restore peace to the world. That is up to the people of russia, china and iran. But these three things are what i believe, the United States and other democracies can and should do to create the circumstances in which peace, having risen and fallen can rise again. Thank you. [applause] the floor is open for questions. Please, when you raise your hand and i recognize you, wait until someone brings you the microphone so not only the people in the room but the cspan audience can hear as well. The floor is open. Professor, i wonder, obviously during this time of peace, america was the flag bearer of capitalism. I wonder how socialism factors into your equation in this new era in the world . Of course, it all depends on what you mean by socialism. I dont think we are going to see a return to fullfledged communism who call itself socialism. Which involved the government control, all the memes of production and distribution, running the economy to Central Planning. That simply is not coming back. Its too difficult and flopped too badly in the soviet union and including china which opted for more free market style of economy. What we will have instead, what we do half is social democracy, we have basically a market economy but we also have a social safety net. It provides old age, preventions, medical care, sometimes childcare, and the central debate in the democracy certainly since 1945, if not since 1919, has been around the question of how generous a social safety net we ought to have. The europeans have for various reasons as you are european expert know well, opted for a relatively more generalist social safety net than we have. But there is always a debate about how generous it should be, that debate has always taken place in the United States for variety of reasons, coming to the floor, when people in odd corners of the american political system claim themselves socialists, they dont mean that they want the soviet style command economy, what they mean, they want a more generous social safety net which gives people more and more generously the memes that they need to have the kind of life that we believe they ought to have. That debate will probably get more intense in the years ahead but it never ended and it never will end. It seems that there is a qualitative and quantitative difference between china and iran and russia that ran in russia economically are somewhat run at the core, much more heavily dependent on natural resortresources to sustain thems although they could create a headache in the media region that they are located, their ability to become a global threat or trigger will broader conflict certainly iran and even in the case of russia is much less than china because its not rotten at the core and while it has its issues, it strikes me their ability to close a true global threat, starting in east asia and the china sea but extending for bond not, a different nature than russian, i wonder if you can comment on that . It is certainly true that china is qualitatively different from russia and iran in very important ways in qualitatively different from every other country in the world except for the United States. It is different in the sense that only china has the prospect of becoming a global power. And i think its also the case that as one can judge, the chinese regime has greater legitimacy and popularity then mr. Prudence wicked russian regime or Islamic Republic government or the clergy. But, at the moment china is not showing signs of trying to become a global power, at least on security terms. Its economic tentacles do wheat far and wide in the bolton Road Initiative is a very ambitious economic ambition. But in security terms, china is refocused on east asia and western pacific. At this point in that particular way, it is i believe comparable to russia and iran. It certainly is much more powerful, going to be more powerful, far more important in the Global Economy than russia or iran can hope to be. But in the security challenge that it poses at this point, i think it is fair to compare it to russia and iran. You talked about containment as one of the ways to go about having peace in the containment argument was, you need a good allies, i wonder if you can assess the state of the United States allies in each of the three areas . That is a very important question, i should say that i have an article in the march april Foreign Affairs on a new container which goes in to precisely the point you race in some depth. But let me give you a brief overview of the three regions. First of all has to be said that an alliance is in some way a contradiction term because their interest in common and also different interest in leading an alliance of the United States have to do in the three regions and no one else can do it, it really is an exercise in herding cats. It is frustrating and circumstances. In europe there is a solid framework for an alliance in the north atlantic treaty organization. The problem there, the familiar problem of free riding, the fact that europeans dont pay their fair share. The husband a problem since the beginning of nato. Every president since harry truman has complained that the europeans are not paying enough. None of them have done it quite President Trump house but the sentiment is not original within