olitics this is what the American people expect and deserve as I noted Steve and his team set a very high bar which we have been committed to meeting and where possible exceeding the NSC has produced over 100 memos covering everything from the interagency policy process to our plans and protocols to address the many nightmare scenarios that could arise we've made our entire staff available to meet with and brief the incoming team this handoff continues as I speak as part of this transition we've had constructive meetings with General Flynn and my team has met extensively with his the discussions we've had and the suggestions I've made I will keep between us not least because much of it is highly classified but I will say that I am very proud of the professional manner in which we have conducted this transition and our integrity is and must always remain above the fray I'm also extraordinarily proud of the NSC staff we've built and that General Flynn will inherit when I returned to the NSC in 2013 having served there in the 1990s I was struck by how much it expanded in that period and while I continue to believe to retain the flexibility to staff the NSC as they wish we've worked hard to right size and reform the NSC we've reduced the staff by over 15% today's NSC operates with a policy staff smaller than the staffs of USIP and many think tanks as we've streamlined we remain convinced that one of the NSC's greatest strengths is the career national security professionals who comprise nearly 90% of the staff they're the brightest and hardest working staff in government and I am extremely grateful for their service and sacrifice but ultimately the issue is not mainly about the size of the NSC it's about the role of the NSC every president and every staff or herself I'll simply say as others have that departments and agencies are the ones that need to lead in formulating and implementing policy but the NSC staff is uniquely placed to ensure that the president receives a truly integrated perspective that takes into account the president's agenda and the risks, costs so General Flynn inherits a vital job at a challenging time and while it is no secret that this administration has profound disagreements with the next one I intend to make myself available to him just as my predecessors have for me we are all patriots first and foremost threats to our security democracy should be above partisanship as President George H.W. Bush wrote to President Clinton after their own electoral battle and I quote your success is now our country's success I am rooting hard for you said President Bush General Flynn I am rooting hard for you in a few hours I'll accompany President Obama to Chicago for his farewell address and this has me counting my personal blessings my grandfather was a janitor who emigrated from Jamaica in 1912 with my grandmother who was a maid and a seamstress after the President of the United States I'm filled with gratitude for this country and the opportunities it has provided me and so many others when I think about the difference I've been privileged to see the United States and our government make in the lives of Americans and people around the world I'm deeply honored and humbled to have joined in this journey I'll continue to do my part as best I can and in the years ahead I'm confident that patriotic Americans of talent and goodwill will ensure that this great country stays strong secure and prosperous a beacon of hope for all the world thank you very much thank you Ambassador Rice for those remarks I would now invite Lieutenant General Flynn and Ambassador Rice to move to this side of the podium as they have done and to exchange the symbolic handshake representing the handoffer's responsibility from one administration to the other thank you both Lieutenant General Michael Flynn is President-elect Donald Trump's pick to be our 25th National Security Advisor Lieutenant General Flynn who last served in government as Director of the Defense Intelligence Agency after a distinguished 33-year career of military service during that career he held various intelligence posts and served several deployments in Afghanistan and Iraq and he served in these positions with great distinction please welcome Lieutenant General Flynn to the podium and I want to thank Susan again but I would really like everybody to give her another round of applause that was an amazing speech it's an appropriate place Institute of Peace and I want to thank everybody for their very kind welcome not only here last night but really sort of back into government I want to thank the U.S. Institute of Peace for peace and I especially want to thank Nancy Limburg and Steve Hadley and many of the other former National Security Advisors their time and their council over these past two months with the current and former National Security Advisors and the array of current and former National Security Council staffers and others that are in the room here today I mean this really represents the collective wisdom and experience of some of America's greatest national security thinkers practitioners and doers and what I'd like to do is just take a brief pause because I'm in awe of Secretary Albright who's sitting here in front today and I'd like everybody to just give her a big round of applause for her dignity demonstrated just a grace a dignity, an elegance and a commitment to this country that goes beyond our wildest imaginations people outside don't realize the sacrifices that what you see in Dr. Rice Ambassador Rice and what you see in Secretary Albright and I think that that sort of transcends who we are and it is Americans that are our greatest asset and our American people the American people that we have in this country across this country that said the gravity of this moment is a bit overwhelming as I step back into government for what I know is a monumental task ahead transitions are hard enough they're hard enough in anything that we do but transitions and transfers of power and one United States president to the next are historic and this one is no exception to me one of the most significant moments in American history was at the very beginning when President John Adams was not re-elected and had to hand the presidency over to his arch rival Thomas Jefferson it could have been a constitutional crisis but it wasn't why? because we have peaceful we have a peaceful transition of power and that is the tradition that has bound us all ever since as for Adams and Jefferson in their final years they became great friends and their correspondence is one of the best examples of patriotism and bipartisan sense of national purpose among all of our leaders that have ever existed as a model to the world as a model to the world at least in our history the United States has set the standard of peaceful transition of power and it is a model that continues to be the envy of the world we stand today on the threshold of a new era as we continue to navigate the remainder of the 21st century a century that has already presented us with numerous unpleasant surprises and looking ahead this century clearly represents one with even more risk but also with many opportunities I want to personally again thank Ambassador Rice and her entire team for their preparation the transition materials as Ambassador Rice highlighted that they provided to us the initiation of various NSE reform measures that she has already undertaken and the time that she and her team took to help guide us and to help us be as well prepared as we can be prior to inauguration day as I stated these early years of the 21st century have proven to be extraordinarily challenging as old familiar threats and challengers have reasserted themselves and new ones have emerged lending this period of time a feeling of great uncertainty and in certain parts of the world reverberating upheaval given the hyper accelerated nature of the time in which we live and emerging threats and active adversaries that are also moving at warp speed these 21st century challenges are among the toughest we as a nation have faced in decades in many decades this is why we are absolutely committed to leading a national security council with our president elects vision to make America great again that has as its primary mission its primary mission the safety of the American people and the security of our nation that mission is to be supported by an overarching policy of peace through strength as we examine and potentially re-baseline our relationships around the globe we will keep in mind the sacrifices and deep commitments that many of our allies and our partners have made on behalf of our security and our prosperity as well as the security and prosperity of other freedom loving nations around the world in fact alliances are one of the great tools that we have and the strength of those alliances magnify our own strengths one of those strengths one of those strengths is the unapologetic defense of liberty this is the core element of American exceptionalism and why America will exist and will remain a superpower the exceptionalism that defined America from the start became the standard by which every other free people measure themselves and the standard by which we should measure ourselves America might have its ups and downs but the assumption has long been that American power would always be there reliable, strong present and ready we have always been the indispensable nation and we always will be to that end we must consider the elements that make us indispensable and I'll touch on a few this requires extraordinary foresight and vision that is able to transcend political ideologies a matching long-term strategy that lays out a roadmap to keep us on track despite the massive hurdles that we may encounter along that path the right processes to review the assumptions to determine validity and meaning that form our strategy and lastly some means of measuring whether it's working or not and being honest and accountable to ourselves given those elements and even in extremely difficult times we have never we have never lost of America or what it means to be an American and the idea of American exceptionalism faced with some of the darkest days of civil and foreign wars economic depression and many recessions that we've gone through weak leadership at home or hostile threats from abroad the American people always maintain their faith in the uniqueness of our democratic experiment which produced the greatest force of economic growth and innovation and the greatest model for liberty the world has ever known that has not and will not ever change this this is the essence of American leadership whether we like it or not the world needs us and in fact demands it what has changed is the nature and character of America's enemies and the new and dangerous technological environment in which they operate that's why we are committed to having the National Security Council continue to serve as the fulcrum of national security and national security decision making in the most effective way possible on the National Security Council we will serve four primary functions we will advise the president on national security issues we will formulate national security policy in coordination with the interagency process we will monitor how policy is carried out and we will also ensure that the president is properly prepared and staff for the many national security related events that we are likely to encounter and I would add one additional function I want to add that President-elect Trump we need to help him work with our partners in Congress on both sides of the aisle despite the difficulties that we will face serving as the national security advisor is an awesome responsibility and it gets to the very essence of protecting and defending the American people our homeland and our constitution given those responsibilities it is our mission to ensure that the president of the national security community and the American people continue to be well served in order to achieve that we are absolutely committed to continue carrying out those necessary reforms begun by previous administrations all of this will be done in the spirit of working toward common national security goals particularly protecting American values and principles as we confront we recognize that what makes our country exceptional is what we are defending every day and that's freedom and we must never fear we must never fear who we are or shy away from the values and the principles that America represents again we have a lot of serious challenges in front of us make no mistake about that but we will face them we will face these challenges undaunted we have a very high sense of responsibility and purpose lastly finally I will tell you that KT McFarlane and I were very excited we are ready to get started and we are very much looking forward to working with many of you in the room today and around Washington DC and elsewhere throughout this great country thank you so much and God bless America thank you both for your thoughtful remarks and for that symbolic gesture of the important hallmark of the peaceful transfer of power that makes this country so special we are now going to take a break for lunch and you will notice that we do not have any programming scheduled during this time and we would encourage you to mingle to sit with people you have not met before to enjoy our lovely building and each other's company and to facilitate these conversations tables and seatings in a variety of locations all around this building on the third floor in the International Women's Commons above us on the second floor in the Leland Atrium and in all the conference rooms in the area and behind us in the tent which we've had coffee breaks I've been on the board here four years I couldn't find all of these places but not to worry there are staff around to a quiet corner where you can meet and have direct conversations so please enjoy your lunch and we'll see you back here in a little over an hour thanks very much I know there's been a lot of hubbub that's a good sign Delighted to have you back we have a jammed afternoon what we're going to do now is have two short snappy segments that offer practical ideas and new insights on how do you build peace we think of them as TED Talks for Peace Builders and I'm delighted to introduce our first speaker who is a colleague of mine at USIP and our director for Middle East programs he focuses on Iraq Syria and Yemen Sarhang Hamasai was born in Iraq he was displaced twice and became as a refugee to the United States and he became a citizen this summer so he brings to this talk a lot of personal experience and a lot of hard work on how to break the cycles of violent conflict Sarhang Hamasai good afternoon ladies and gentlemen can you hear me fine the microphone working fine it is my distinct honor to be speaking before you today I'll be talking about conflict and peace building from a bottom up by that I mean from the local level connecting with national and international efforts and bottom up is something that USIP's chairman of the board and former national security advisor Mr. Stephen Hadley often talks about how he got to appreciate after his NSA role often policy makers respond view and respond to conflict from the top down from the perspective of national governments from the perspective of international institutions and that would mean responding to immediate results of a conflict through prisms of political cycles and immediate results but leading to often times missing local issues that are important that have long term implications I'll talk a bit about my journey through conflict and becoming a peace builder my primary purpose is to be the voice of those who live through conflict and become and work for peace I was born into conflict actually in a way and as ironic as this may sound I am a product of conflict my parents met in Soleimania province after they came from two separate villages and became neighbors because their villages were destroyed and there was I was born and raised and spent most of my life I was four years old when the Iraq-Iran war broke out in 1980 a war that was devastating and caused hundreds of thousands of lives by the time I turned 12 1988 Saddam Hussein the political the bath party the Iraqi government had developed a reputation for suppressing the Iraqi people with brutal force using violence against civilians some of these acts included using chemical gas against the city of Halabja killing 5,000 people leading the Anfal operation which led to the destruction of 4,500 villages raised to the ground including the villages of my parents again and that was 10 miles from where I lived the Anfal operations also killed 400,000 or more these estimates are not final and those people were taken to the middle and south of the country to be found later in mass graves thousands more were moved to concentration camps the world around me felt burning falling apart it made me ask it made others ask where is the international community from all of this where is humanity from all of this from all of this killing questions that the people of Aleppo Syria the people of Taz in Yemen are asking today before I turned 30 actually Iraq had been in three major conflicts major wars with neighbors and international actors and as many if not more local armed conflicts so the cycles of violence seemed without an end one bleeding to another and these while they have cost me and my family dearly and they have brought life threatening experiences to me whether it was artillery bombardment of the Iranian army to my city whether surviving a car bomb from one of ISIS's predecessors I feel lucky I survived whatever is my journey through conflict is the light version of it others had it worse much worse they lost their lives they lost family loved family members and one of my former colleagues lost 22 members of his family in the gassing of Halabja so many these while these events on these conflicts did not kill me they committed to preventing violent conflicts they shaped who I am today and committed to preventing violent conflict and breaking cycles of violence for others and many like me in the Middle East especially the youth are born into conflict they are drawn into the conflicts of the Middle East they are confronted with tough choices were religious actors armed groups non-religious actors offer a combination of carrots and sticks join us you'll have job you'll have power you'll have a leadership you'll have a future but if you don't you have no future and these choices are at their worst when they are offered by an organization like Daesh Al Qaeda these kind of conflicts are have changed from the times of when the battles were fought in the front lines these fights are in the communities in the streets in the homes not far away front lines but their devastating effects go far reaching in the refugees that you see and the terrorism acts that are inspired and the budgets that are being drained thousands of miles away in the interest of time I will focus on Iraq and Daesh and I'll tell a story from there much of the news that we get from Iraq today is overshadowed by Daesh by ISIS the terrorist organization there and I'll use Daesh the local term that's often used there Daesh suppress the communities and perpetrated barbaric acts against the communities Sunni and minority communities Sunni Arabs, Shia Arabs, Kurds Christians, Shabak Yazidis and others and what is less known for the outside world is how Daesh implicated local tribes local communities and has sown the seeds of division and violence on which they survive in one such act in the province of Salah-e-Din in Iraq they committed what is called the Spiker Massacre and this is important this is the breakdown of what CVE what all that means comes to life Tikrit falls at the fault line between the Sunni-Shia divide in Iraq in that area so the massacre which killed 1700 Shia servicemen mostly young cadets from 20 Shia tribes from 9 provinces of the south that was a wound that was wide and deep and you have to see this in the context of the Iraq war and Iraq violence for 11 years before that and at the heart of it was sectarian violence so for the Shia this was yet another act of the Sunnis an attack against the Shia it widened the schism towards that was between the two communities for the Shia they perceived that Sunnis to be either terrorists or supporters of terrorists and this was yet another example so this act this massacre had the potential to spiral out of control and leash cycles of violence that would have been extreme at the tribal level that would have been extremely difficult for the Iraqi army to control for the counter-dash coalition to respond to and that kind of risk would have made Mosul the liberation of Mosul which we have before us today even far more difficult if not further delayed the Iraqi team our Iraqi partners partners in the network of Iraqi facilitators Sunnis for peace building organizations and individuals we trained in conflict resolution and peace building we were monitoring the aftermath of the massacre we knew what was at stake we knew the danger that we're dealing with we knew that the revenge cycle of violence will get out of control so we designed a dialogue process for the Iraqi facilitators that Iraqi facilitators led and brought together the Sunni tribal sheikhs from Tikrit and Salahuddin the Shia tribal leaders from the south and the representative of Grand Ayatollah Ayid Sistani the Grand Shia cleric and the representative of Prime Minister Abadi's office the National Reconciliation Committee as well as parliamentary members and talk about here's your top down together the dialogues culminated in a peace agreement in which the Sunni tribes disavowed membership of any of the members who have collaborated with Daesh and they have also committed themselves to work with a judicial process to bring perpetrators to justice the Shia tribal sheikhs have disagreed to drop blanket statements and accusations that all Sunnis are responsible for this crime they agreed to not go for tribal revenge they both agreed, both of the Sunni tribes and the Shia tribal leaders agreed not to prevent politicization and this is important this was an effort to reverse the seeds of violence that Daesh left behind this was preventing violent extremism at its core because the massacre had become a recruiting tool for the militias to go and revenge for the Shia and it had also the risk of pushing the Sunni population furthermore in the direction of Daesh this was important that it was prevented the dialogue process did succeed in containing the tensions in preventing violence and preventing further loss of life and it was also very important and came handy when Tikrit was liberated we started this work four months before the city of Tikrit was liberated and when Tikrit was liberated the people did not trust the Iraqi security forces to go home because they had heard reports about how the popular mobilization forces, the Hashdel Shabi have been what's called the Shia militias have been attacking certain populations and the Iraqi security forces the Iraqi government did not know who to trust to allow back to the city they didn't know who was ISIS who was supporter of ISIS so the trust and the relationship we built between the tribal leaders and the Iraqi government interlocutors we work with led to a vetting process that facilitated the return of the initial 400 families to Tikrit about 1200 people was used to facilitate the return of other people and I'm happy to report that today more than 320,000 people 320,000 people have returned to Salah-i-Din and Tikrit and that's a major achievement as someone who was displaced twice and has seen the hardships of displacement I could tell you what that meant for these families to go home so this was also important because when we embarked on this process many people felt that the only response you can have to Daesh and the aftermath of Daesh is a military response civilian organizations like USIP and the Iraqi partners have no role in dealing with a problem like Daesh but the work proved that actually there is and these are the ways that you reverse the long term effects and we knew that we had done that before we knew that there are practical ways that you can respond to conflict and build peace for many the Spiker Massacre may seem like a unique story and there may be unique things about it in terms of the high number of casualties and certain aspects of it but what's not unique is that revenge violence and local conflicts that the aftermath of the fight with Daesh has left behind in every town, in every village in every province that they were and so as an organization from my personal experience from the work of USIP and from the work of Iraqi partners I can tell you yes, recapturing land more than 50% is progress welcome progress but I can tell you that more work needs to be done recapturing land from Daesh is not the end ending Daesh is not the end of violence and the reason I say that because we have more ingredients for violence today and it's as I said it's revenge violence and local conflicts that are left behind as USIP we are working with the Iraqi government the Kurdistan regional government the United Nations the coalition to counter Daesh who all do great work to embark on this problem there are 3 million Iraqi people who need to go home and revenge and local conflict is a barrier that we need to address second revenge violence and local conflict has the potential to give us a process that I usually call D-Daeshification or D-Icification and by the I mean that similar to the debathification process after 2003 the process to go after members of ISIS or perceived members of ISIS oftentimes you'll find civilians there could lead to a wider divide between the Sunnis and the Shia and the Sunni communities themselves this time and this is a development so all this may sound like a difficult task but our work tells us that it is possible that reconciliation is possible and by reconciliation I mean getting people back to their homes and peacefully coexist we are working on this in Anbar we are working on this in Salah-e-Din and we have lines of efforts in Mosul around Mosul and in Nineveh and we hope to expand that and let me conclude by saying that I know there may be a lot of reason to say the conflicts in the Middle East are endless and there is no way to deal with them this is a bleak picture but from my again my personal experience the work of USIP and the work of our Iraqi partners I can tell you that there is a reason for hope and the reason for hope is there are Iraqis in government and also mostly in non-government sector in civil society that are working hard to achieve better governance and to achieve peaceful coexistence in Iraq but they are overshadowed by the news of Daesh and by superpowers and regional actors on the ground one of the people that I would like to celebrate with us is my friend Rayat Khattab who is one of the facilitators that helped us on the Spiker Massacre it is him people like him many like him in Iraq and elsewhere that give me hope because there are people who want to find alternatives to violence they put their life to risk so the investment that the United States and the international community have done have put in the Iraqi civil society has paid dividends already the Spiker story is just one good example one of many the work of USIP is elsewhere and is showing us the good work of other people whether in Libya or in Tunisia or in Myanmar in Afghanistan in Africa it is possible the role of the United States is an indispensable leading role in diplomatic, economic developmental and military terms if we help these people I think we can turn things around happening at the local level where you need to bring communities back and restore social cohesion so it is that bottom of approach and the top down that will enable addressing these conflicts I believe that we collectively can work on this approach and by applying strategic patience to as we respond to these conflicts I think peace is possible and there are practical ways to address even the most violent conflicts like Iraq Syria, Yemen and Afghanistan thank you so much thank you for your attention thank you Sarhan thank you for that note of optimism and for reminding us that peace is indeed possible and I'm delighted now to introduce our next peace talk speaker a renaissance man who is a musician a best-selling author and president of our partner in today's event the American Enterprise Institute and someone who reminds us frequently on the importance of compassion and he also is here today to talk to us about the roots of populism please join me in welcoming Dr. Arthur Brooks thank you so very much what an honor it is to be here congratulations to USIP for this wonderful event this event that has taken its place in the constellation of important traditions as we pass the baton to the next on behalf of all my colleagues at AEI we're really honored to be a co-sponsor of this event and I've been looking forward to give a peace talk I'm not a foreign policy specialist I want to talk about a different kind of peace one that we can all invest in today I want to talk to you today about political peace maybe the most elusive kind of peace around the world of all it would seem today but I'm going to make the case to you in the next 15 minutes that political peace is possible I'm really honored to be in front of leaders like you because I want to make the case that we can in this room we can be agents of greater political peace in our country by following a few rules that all of us in point of fact have learned along the way in our lives as leaders now I want to start by telling you about an experience that I had some years ago before I came to the Enterprise Institute I was a professor at Syracuse University where I was teaching economics and entrepreneurship and I had a pretty ordinary professorial life I was beavering away in relative obscurity teaching my classes and writing my books I had written a lot of books which were very boring and nobody had ever read them and weirdly along the way I wrote a book that became popular I didn't exactly know why it hit the news cycle in just the right way it was a book about charitable giving and I asked the question in this piece of research I mean it was a very empirical book it had a lot of numbers and figures and equations in it but it asked the question who gives more to charity conservatives or liberals that was just right for the news cycle and strangely to me the book started selling hundreds of copies a day and my life changed overnight I had no idea I was not ready for this as a professor I was just working away in my office and suddenly I saw the Amazon numbers going up I said what does this mean and I found out very quickly what that meant it meant I was going to be on TV a lot and I was going to be on the radio a lot a week after the book came out I was on Rush Limbaugh's radio program to the great consternation of my friends in the faculty lounge I assure you it turns out I was on Rush, who knew and I also started to get correspondence by email from people I'd never met before in my life hundreds of thousands of emails and in those days I read all my email and my email was very easy to get because it was on the university website and I remember it was a Wednesday or Thursday afternoon I was working in my office I was working on a data set and an email popped up from a guy in Texas and here's what it said it said, Dear Professor Brooks you are a right wing fraud which I thought was a pretty unpromising way to start an email but I kept reading and the first thing that I noticed was that the email was like 5,000 words long it was going to take me 20 minutes to read this email but gamely I'm going through it and the next thing I noticed is that this guy was refuting every single point in my book chapter inverse things like the columns in table 3.1 are reversed moron stuff like that, right? and I was going through it it was just heaping abuse on me but every single detail in the book and you know what thought kept going through my head as I was reading the email here was the thought he read my book so I decided to tell him that right, I mean I was filled with distress and anger and humiliation but I really wanted to tell him how thankful I was that he'd read my book so I did I wrote back to him, dear so and so I could refute every point and I could rebut with rebuttals I could tell you what I think about you but I really want to tell you what's written on my heart which is how grateful I am because you read every single word of that book for the years to write it and I put my whole heart into it thank you send went back to work 15 minutes later his response pops back up dear professor Brooks next time you're in Dallas if you want to get dinner give me a call and I said power I understood at that moment by accident how to turn that situation around and that was a simulacrum for what leaders can do in the political space to achieve political peace I want to talk more about that in a second but first I want to diagnose the problem we have that we've just experienced in the 2016 election in the United States or the Brexit referendum or what's going on all over the world what are the roots of populism people will tell you it's anger people are angry, that's wrong the reason we have so much political animus is not anger there's always been anger it's contempt contempt according to social psychologists is defined as the utter conviction of the worthlessness of another person that is the perfect way for you to make a permanent enemy is contempt now there's a big body of literature on this there's a social psychologist at the University of Washington his name is John Gottman some of you may have heard of him he's the world's leading expert on marital reconciliation he has a laboratory in which he brings couples together and saves their marriages he's a hero if you believe as I do that marriage and family is the unit of analysis of a healthy society this guy's great he's brought together thousands of couples and saved their marriages he has a trick that he can do he'll bring a couple together arguing over a contentious issue for five seconds with the sound turned off and tell you with 94% accuracy if you will be divorced within five years now you want to know what he's looking at don't you you want to know the secret here it is physical expressions of contempt number one eye rolling I have three teenagers at home lots of eye rolling the problem is when equals show each other contempt it's particularly harmful it's almost like a physical assault when people who work together show each other contempt it destroys workplace harmony when spouses do it when world leaders do it when people in politics do it when people on a debate stage who want to be president of the United States do it for those people and to those people and to their followers and that's what explains the roots of the political contempt the contentious atmosphere the toxic ecosystem that we find ourselves in is mutual expressions of constant contempt do we want to solve the problem if we do then we have to deal with contempt now solving that problem doesn't mean solving it for somebody else you know what it really starts with starts with me because I feel lots of contempt I mean not right now I feel lots of contempt look I'm the president of the American Enterprise Institute and for years I've been seeing policies at the federal level with which I disagree you know I mean I'll dream about some really bad policy cooked up by the federal government and I'll wake up in the morning and open the Washington Post what they really did is worse than my dream for me right I don't feel good about that I feel contempt the way to political reconciliation and peace is for me to cure myself of that contempt how how do we do it how does each one of us as a political leader do it now here's the typical answer that's wrong let's all come together and agree let's all come to the middle we need more centrism we need more people in the political middle we have to take politics out of our decision making why is that wrong that's wrong because that creates an undemocratic unelected atmosphere in which unelected people bureaucrats run everything and that creates more contempt and more anger and more contention from the citizens don't believe it that's the right way to make this work so I go back to my original question how how do we fight contempt I asked that question to the wisest man I have ever met my friend my teacher his whole life I have never met my friend my teacher his holiness to Dalai Lama see when I was working on this and for those of you who don't know about my institution AEI has now a years long relationship with the Dalai Lama where he's come to AEI several times and we've gone to him at his monastery in Dharamsala in the Himalayan foothills and it's a wonderful relationship where we talk about the morality of free enterprise and big world issues and we dilate some of the big controversies of the day and I value the relationship he's become somebody who it's a friendship that I value so very much and when I was going through this problem of contempt that I was seeing in politics it happened to coincide with one of my visits with the Dalai Lama and I asked him this your holiness what do I do when I feel contempt and he said show warm heartedness I thought about it and I thought what else you got because just on its face that sounds kind of like a fortune cookie or not really serious advice it's it sounds kind of pat but then I thought a little bit deeper you know the Dalai Lama the one who was kicked out of his homeland when he was a teenager a brutal Chinese communist aggression at the end of a gun sent into exile with his people sent to live in a country in poverty and anonymity to be gone and forgotten that one, that Dalai Lama and the one over the course of his life who through warm heartedness and kindness and love became the most respected religious leader in the world that Dalai Lama see warm heartedness isn't for sissies warm heartedness is for strong people that's why he told me that that's what I remembered here's what he says I defeat my enemies when I make them my friends warm heartedness makes your enemies your friends you want to know what strong people do the Dalai Lama starts every morning praying for the Chinese leaders not praying that they'll change the attitude toward Tibet praying that they will find what's right for them that's warm heartedness that's what we want that's what we can do that's what lies in the future for us we choose to grab it but I need to be a little bit more practical the time that remains for me just in front of you here today so I want to go a little bit further in how we can do that as leaders and there is a way for us there's something for us to remember such that we can turn the wheel of contempt toward gratitude and that is I mean toward warm heartedness and that is to show gratitude I read a book years ago you've read it too it's the most important book that you've read with a terrible title and that you've forgotten there's a lot in there it's how to win friends and influence people by Dale Carnegie it sounds like a it sounds terrible you know self-improvement it's really tacky it's downscale it's not suitable for people of our intellectual caliber right wrong read it again it's a guide to ethical living it's a guide to happiness I recommend it very strongly to you you read it in high school go back and read it again it'll change your life actually and there's one point in that book it's a beautiful moment Carnegie his research method this is in the 1920s he's going all over the United States to find the most successful people and find their secrets to success and he's in New York and he goes to see the most famous magician of the age see in those days in Broadway they had these lavish vaudeville variety acts they didn't have you know big musicals and there was this guy his name was Howard Thurston he had been performing on Broadway for the last 40 years the most absolutely just world famous guy we've forgotten him today but google him you know that's how you find everything and you'll find Howard the amazing Howard Thurston super famous very rich he went to see Howard Thurston and he wanted to see what does he do that's so special and he watched the act and it was just rabbits out of hats and card tricks and the whole thing but here was the secret Howard Thurston was laughing alongside his audience Howard Thurston looked like it was his very first night he was a boolean he was magical in his outlook and not just in his tricks so later Dale Carnegie went to the dressing room said to Mr. Thurston I'm writing a book about the most successful people in the world and you're the greatest magician of your age what's the secret to making it look like it's the first night even though you've been doing those tricks for 40 years oh simple simple every night before I go out on stage I say in my dressing room I am truly grateful for the people sitting in those seats because they make it possible for me to do something for a living that I love that my friends is the secret why do I bring that kind of gratitude up because who are the people in those seats for you they're people you disagree with in a democratic capitalist society none of us wants to live in a one-party state none of us wants to vanquish people who disagree with us once and for all we don't want that in the United States and in Europe and in democracies around the world we want a vital competition of ideas even though we disagree with others and you know what that means we need people with whom we disagree and we should be grateful to them we should be grateful to live in countries where there's no knock in the night and there's no jack booted thug just because we have differing political views when was the last time that you expressed interior gratitude for that if you do you simply cannot feel contempt toward those with whom you disagree that's the beginning the gratitude toward the system that makes this possible to the people who gave their lives for years to make that possible and the people on the other side of the aisle were going to tell you that they think you're wrong but they're not going to shoot you that's a wonderful thing and it's a beautiful thing for which we should be grateful for which we should be warm hearted and that should wipe out the contempt and be the beginning of the peace now I know this is an unusual talk from the president of a think tank that does pure public policy it's an even weirder talk from an economist but I took the opportunity to do it today because if we think differently as leaders and we act differently and we show these values then a better political future is possible in our countries and it starts with us thank you thank you thank you Arthur thank you for that Arthur and I know I feel the warm hearted gratitude pulsing out of everybody I mean this is exactly the kind of conversations that we want to have with everybody here so thank you for reminding about this Arthur I now would like to tee us up for our next panel which is about unpredictable instability and we heard from Secretary Albright this morning that unpredictability sometimes is really interesting but unpredictability all the time is dangerous and we've also heard a lot about the kinds of challenges that face us around the globe that include crises all around from pandemics to the refugee flows to the new rise of great power so I'm delighted that we have a distinguished panel here today to talk to us about that and I'd like to introduce our moderator Charles Lane a successful columnist for the Washington Post and a regular on Fox News Sunday please join me in welcoming Chuck Lane life is full of surprises it's a revelation to learn that I'm a successful columnist but I appreciate hearing that thank you very much and let's jump right in with our panel and the first thing I'll do is just set the stage for you a little bit I was talking to my two panelists who are Army guys about that old saying no plan survives its first contact with the enemy and I think many in administration quite apart from armies could testify to the truth of that aphorism new presidents tend to come in with a big plan about how they're going to either change the previous foreign policy or change the world and those administrations tend to find out that the world has other plans for them and they're quickly encountered with the need to improvise and come up with a new plan to deal with the new reality so that's going to be our theme for this panel and I honestly think couldn't come up with a better group of four people to address that issue I will introduce them really quickly and then we'll just jump in to preserve the maximum amount of time for your participation for questions from the audience later on so to my extreme left not ideologically but just over there on the left is General Jack Keane who in addition to his very distinguished service in the U.S. Army is now the chairman of the institute for the study of war on his immediate right is Juliet Kiam who's a national security analyst for CNN now the brand new CEO of the World Bank Dr. Kristalina Georgieva who just arrived at the World Bank in Washington just prior to that was in charge of humanitarian issues for the European Commission and then right here on my left again these are not ideological references I'm very comfortable is Dr. James Carrafano he's the vice president for foreign defense policy at the Heritage Foundation has been helping out with the transition of the incoming Trump administration so what I'd like to do in the first part of the panel is starting with General Keane ask each of the panelists to briefly give us their thought on where the surprise might come from now obviously if we could predict it it wouldn't be a surprise but we're going to try the exercise of trying to identify in advance what the black swan might be over the next four years facing the Trump administration General Keane you want to take that? Charles thank you being my colleague up here mentioned this other network I think it was described as CNN I just want to mention that Charles is a contributor on Fox News as I am and we are colleagues and proud to be associated with that particular network listen I want to thank USIP for what you're doing here today I think this is the third time that you have established this platform and it makes a lot of sense to bring back the incumbent administration and those who are taking over and there's obviously a transition experience going on that's divorced from this but you know the public display that I saw some of it on the internet this morning between the principals and both administrations is really quite encouraging we've had such a polarizing experience these last number of years that maybe there's some encouragement that are very foundation what we all have in common together virtually even though we disagree on public policy the fact that we all are very concerned about national security, protection of the American people our basic freedoms, our values we all have that in common and we're willing to sacrifice quite a bit to assure it's accomplished and that was very much on display today as we witnessed the principals from both administrations talking to all of you so well done USIP there's a couple of certainties that's going to face a new administration one is that they will have strategic surprise that's a fact this is United States a global leader and we've had strategic surprise dramatically beginning in World War II all the way to the present and the second thing is despite our best efforts up here to predict what will be the strategic surprise of the Trump administration if history is our guide we will fail miserably because no one has ever been able to predict the strategic surprise accurately of an incoming administration but nonetheless as we all know and those who have served at 1600 Pennsylvania Avenue know that the world has a way of coming to the doorstep of the White House regardless of what their particular domestic agenda is or foreign policy agenda and to certain degree it will move them possibly in a different direction and that's the reality of it you go back and history and it's very pregnant how that impacted administrations post World War II the Korean War no one expected it and the Vietnam War protracted war and then we have the collapse of the Soviet Union we have Saddam Hussein invading Kuwait we have Milosevic fighting four wars in Europe and the Europeans at least for most of that were sort of powerless to do much of anything about it we have 9-11 to be sure in the Bush administration but we also have 15 years of protracted war since 9-11 which I would tell you also is a strategic surprise to most of us we had the Arab Spring another strategic surprise in the Middle East that has fundamentally changed the contours of the Middle East with failed states civil wars radical Islamists only taking advantage of the conditions that exist there so in my judgment they're the main contour of what this administration will I think is facing is the fact that there are two growing powers in the world who want to change the fundamental international world order as we know it and they are willing to take degrees of risk to achieve that because they believe it is in their national interest to do so at the expense of the United States and its allies why because they refuse to accept that world order that international order that the United States had helped design post World War II with the major institutions one of them represented here on the stage the IMF, the United Nations political military alliances throughout the world so that the calamity of World War II 100 million people killed would not be repeated again those nations are certainly Russia and China and one is much more of a near term problem Russia and China considerably longer term problem but will be there and I think this is most obvious to everybody sitting in the room but it is there and we have to deal with it and face it in terms of something I think that may trouble us is the nexus of trans-national actors and cyber technology it is just a matter of time for trans-national actors to acquire the technological means to attack our critical infrastructure and as such reversing that because they are not a nation state we don't have the capability that mutual assured destruction did with nuclear power to modify that behavior in other words they can attack our financial and banking infrastructure they can attack our utility infrastructure they can attack our transportation infrastructure those are critical infrastructures in the United States and you know as well as I do they are not properly defended as we speak today the nuclear infrastructure of the United States is properly defended I'm talking about military nuclear power and also our military networks are properly defended nation states have already tried some of this to be sure and that's going to increase but I think the most troublesome thing because you can't stop the behavior except by attacking back at it is a trans-national actor nexus with that kind of technology that is a potential surprise for us so we don't minimize it remember because we had colleague Sheikh Mohammed in our jail house for so many years we had a lot of information from him that he volunteered to us after the extended interrogation technique was applied but nonetheless he gave it to us and one of the things we found out was the attack on the United States was driven by Usama bin Laden principally because he thought he could collapse our moral and political will by attacking our economic center our military center and our government center he didn't understand the American people to be sure but nonetheless it was a realistic strategic objective at least from their perspective to try and that certainly is something that trans-national actors out there today would certainly want to take on they have never ever given up the idea of using WMD on the United States any means to hurt and kill us and certainly if they can acquire cyber as a means to do it there's been a state going to do it Thank you General Keane Juliet It's a pleasure to be here and thank you for having me so I came out of the Department of Homeland Security as assistant secretary there so I thought I just lay out some of my thoughts I know you're involved with the transition and it's a funny department and so I thought I would lay out sort of where we were I served on the transition for Obama from President Bush and we got briefed on every super squirrely thing that was going on every you know potential enemy and of course and we thought we had it down and then of course the first real crisis ended up being this unknown virus known as H1N1 which was coming in from Mexico there was no known vaccine at the time and that's what is going to happen to the Trump Administration you're sort of thinking about one thing and then something borderless trans-national comes around so I want to talk a little bit about more governance and some of the challenges ahead for a homeland which is very different than I think when we talk about war or other issues because it is still I would say a work in progress although the department is much older and the apparatus is a little bit more refined one of the issues that will certainly come up and there's just going to be no question about it because it's very difficult to sort of undermine or limit the threat that we now face is this sort of call it what you will, lone wolf whack-a-mole terrorism whatever individuals who are more likely than not directed by ISIS maybe inspired by ISIS but what we're seeing in the more recent cases is what you might call sort of ISIS justified people who have a lot of things going on Muslim Americans or converts we don't know what's up with Fort Lauderdale who are looking to ISIS to give them justification so there's sort of three different ranges I worry about the ISIS directed a lot less than the other two and those will happen in the United States but more specifically they're going to happen in a state and then they happen in a city and that is a very different dynamic than a wartime footing because the challenge for homeland security is really a governance challenge in this country it is 50 governors all with their own opinions 250 plus major cities all with their own opinions all with their own attitudes all with their own budgets about how much they are going to prepare and respond to a threat that is very very hard to predict and is showing up in places maybe New York but also Orlando so I think that that will continue to be a challenge and how a new administration keeps governors who are focused on a lot of different things and mayors who are focused on the potential teacher strike how you keep them focused on public safety and security for an apparatus that is dealing with all sorts of other things so that is going to be I think a challenge in terms of the sort of what we would call the intergovernmental aspects for any administration and in the absence of a major event which can unify a country like 9-11 for you know the tragedy that unifies these more individual cases are really sort of local responses in many ways so we have to make sure that local and state public safety entities are ready to respond to the whatever because we can't answer the whatever we don't know what it's going to be the second issue is the department itself I know this is an international audience but there's a lot of people domestically you know we always say it's a new department it's still figuring itself out and it is but it's also either in 4 or 8 years or it's so new and so figuring out what lanes the department is in and what it's good at I think is not both a challenge and an opportunity for the new administration because once again we don't know you know there's I can name a thousand threats that could happen obviously terrorism created a department of homeland security and the apparatus that it helps fund on the state and local level but we have everything from immigration and other things the third issue is going to be and the thing that might very likely challenge and administration is some major natural event and it will challenge the way we live in this country in the ways that the Hurricane Katrina did not we seem to be rebuilding New Orleans as it is or that Hurricane Sandy is just starting to we could debate the causes or whatever I'm not interested in that but some city or state will be impacted in a major way and I think that over the next 4-8 years as an administration and as a as mayors and governors will begin to face whether we don't change the way we live in America the challenge for our homeland security is of course its size and that we promote flow airport security why can't we be more like Israel you put 900,000 people in the air every day as the department does that's a really hard comparison you put tens of millions of people on subway systems that's a really hard comparison we value the flow of people, goods and ideas there's going to be differences about how much flow you want I think the challenge ahead in particular with sort of mega storms or major events do we begin to think differently about how we live as a society in a country to protect communities and to protect in particular the sea coast the Department of Homeland Security owns the Coast Guard also owns FEMA so it is going to be challenged I think sooner rather than later we will have to take a step back and do some of these efforts Dr. Georgie maybe an international perspective you're sort of fresh off an experience where Europe certainly came in for a big surprise a strategic surprise in 2015 well first I would start with a recognition that what is new in the world of crisis is not only that they are but also they do not have good manners they don't wait their turn they overlap with each other and actually what is unpredictable obviously we can't quite see but we can do a much better job in scanning the predictable and being sure that at least the predictable is kind of under control in my view there are three things that we need to watch in 2017 very carefully one since I come from Europe I cannot not say the elections in Europe there are three very critical elections March, April and then in the summer the Netherlands, France, Germany what is going to be happening around the dates of these elections can have an unpredictable impact on the results and actually we have seen in Europe so far a remarkable resilience of democracies I was in Belgium in Brussels on the 23rd of March when the attack in Brussels happened and the reaction we all had was to stand up be counted our way of life is not going to be shaken I went to their equivalent of the Kennedy Center Bazaar to a concert and the hall was packed and many people were there to make a statement but if we continue to have soft target attacks in Europe would that have a risk this is something to watch very carefully secondly I call it the belt of trouble for a lack of a better word but if you take the continent of Africa and you start from Mali then Northern Nigeria then you go to Central African Republic South Sudan Somalia this is kind of your belt and then you have above the belt Libya which I don't talk about but it's there and then if you cross in the Middle East of course Syria you reckon then you go a little further to Afghanistan all this is potentially a source of shock because the cumulative impact of this footprint of conflict by the way and I didn't mention the Congo this deal not holding so we have this to watch you talk about natural events in the United States but we haven't had recently a major drought either in the Horn of Africa or in the Sahel the cycle of drought has shortened the last one when I was Humanitarian Commissioner 2011 is it now just about time to be hit again and my third point would be the economy of the world we have to recognize now I am with colleagues from the World Bank who were supposed to tell me we have a report coming at 4 o'clock so whatever I say is embargoed for now but we are coming with the report that basically says the growth projections for the world not so fantastic obviously we would see this package in US and what would be the impact of this package on growth but we are in a world economy where if there is a big shock in a sizable country and I'm not going to name them but you can all think of what could they may be and then this is all combined in a multiplicity of crisis how are we prepared for it and I guess the short answer is not so well but to finish on a positive side I think there is now a huge recognition in governments and institutions like mine, the World Bank that scanning the horizon for the science of travel being able to have a much more risk management frame of mind this is the new normal this is where we are to be and hopefully we would see every year doing better in this scanning the horizon assessing risks and taking appropriate precautionary action thank you I'm totally not going to answer the question is a depressing setup I want to actually answer a question which I think is more important which is why I think regardless of what the crisis that we know is these guys might actually do okay and I have three points for my optimism the presidential transition law because we've actually never done a presidential transition like this because the law was in place in 2012 but they didn't transition anything so this is the first time we've ever exercised the law and I think fundamentally the law has done a good thing in a sense it enables putting in place a rather substantial infrastructure before the election and that's particularly important for a team that's coming in which is outside of government because we don't have shadow governments like a lot of parliamentary governments or ministers and we don't have people that really understand the day-to-day governance of what's going on and part of what a transition team does is actually pretty unglamorous it's really like doing due diligence on an acquisition it's explaining what you're taking over and so what the law does it really enables the folks who are out running on a campaign to fall in on some training wheels and to begin that process of transition I think much, much more efficiently after 9-11 to do that and I think that's generally successful so the second I think is this administration I think this administration has really tried very, very hard to replicate the kind of effort that President Bush made in transitioning to President Obama and I think they've done a very good-faith job certainly for the agency that I've been working with most closely, Department of Homeland Security Jay Johnson's done a remarkable job the Department of Homeland Security could not have been more helpful and productive in helping people understand what they were assuming command of and I think that's generally true across government I think it's been enormously helpful and when you talk about passing the baton literally there are actually people that are passing the baton and not talking about politics and it's I think been very gratifying for me as an American citizen the third thing is on January 13th they do a left-right crisis management exercise with the incoming and outcoming S1's and somebody has worked in this stuff forever it's true, Mulkey said no plan survives contact with the enemy but Eisenhower's corollary was plans are useless but planning is everything and so the notion is preparing to prepare is in itself maybe the best hedge against uncertainty and they've made a lot of I think it's a lot of progress, one area in particular is in dealing with a cyber security response because literally there was no plan and over the course of eight years they've actually put together a cyber security response structure in the federal government and you could argue it's not perfect but it was better than what we had before which was nothing and so that's one area of great concern that I think they've made good progress and I would really hope that they'll pull the baby out with the bath water so there actually has been good work in terms of putting the structure together on how to deal with uncertainty and hopefully this team will pick that up from the last team and move forward on that so I'm planning on going to sleep on January 20th and sleeping pretty soundly and waking up on the 21st and thinking the world will still be here what time are you going to sleep on that one? probably pretty early well thank you all for those really interesting comments and I think you've already anticipated part of what we were planning to do in our second round of questions which is to talk about the importance of crisis preparation and getting ahead of problems I wanted to maybe get your reflection on something that Dr. Georgieva pointed out which is by implication some of the uncertainty and some of the crisis in the next four years might come from the developed world from what we've always thought of as the more stable areas of the globe I hope it's not too risky to say the biggest shock maybe in world affairs this year was generated by the United States in our very own election certainly not a flood or an epidemic but a big shock to people's expectations and I'd like to ask each of you to reflect on that and ask whether we've reached a point in world affairs where we really can assume any particular area is a sort of a reservoir of stability this instability is maybe something that's been globalized along with everything else who wants to take a crack at that I'm going to start because this brings a very interesting memory 2011 maybe it was I had a visitor in Brussels at that time I was in charge of humanitarian affairs and crisis response and the visitor was Greg Fugati the FEMA administrator somebody who grew up in the ranks from a firefighter to run the FEMA to my to my taste very well so I asked Greg what are your priorities and his answer was two, one think of the unthinkable two prepared the United States to receive international assistance if the unthinkable happens and now what shook me as a European was I never thought I would live long enough to hear somebody from the United States to say I want to prepare the United States to receive international assistance but the point is that we actually are in a world where trouble travels shocks especially those that are caused by the evil of men in a technologically connected world and those caused by nature they absolutely put the soul on equal footing who is to say if you remember we in Europe not that long ago were victims of our own stupidity in the Second World War and then we were the refugees United Nations Agency for Refugees was created for us who is to say that in the world there wouldn't be a situation in which these shocks are to be there but this being said I just want to stress two very important things because they lead to our responsibilities one developed countries may now be more at risk of multiplicity of shocks but we are much better prepared we are much more resilient because we have strong institutions we have strong economies and therefore two we have an obligation to work on resilience and to be aware because if we don't trouble travels it is going to come and bite us in the butt that's a technical term General Keane I think that's almost self evident frankly because we are part of the developed world and as I mentioned the two revisionist powers are trying to change the world order that we help develop we are going to be challenged and that is already in evidence secondly the terrorists, the radicals their target is largely the developed world for similar reasons because the developed world has global impact politically, economically and socially and they believe it's that pollution which has brought them to the radicalized ideology so ultimately we are always going to be their objective and that is going to continue with that part of the problem that we have with the radicalization of people ideologically and religiously motivated to kill their fellow citizens or to kill others this is a generational problem that we have not even come close to dealing with we don't have a single alliance that I'm aware of to combat the problem we haven't tried to develop a comprehensive strategy to deal with it we have people in America that think we can develop a counter ideology strategy to deal with the radicalization of largely Muslims I find that to be quite absurd I think we need to have the people who are involved in that and develop the counter ideological arguments for religious people themselves, political leaders themselves who are part of the nations where these conditions are allowed to fester and people become radicalized but we definitely need if we have a radicalized problem like I think we do and we can describe it now as almost a global jihad why aren't we not approaching the problem globally to deal with the ideology similar to what we've done in the past we did this with post-World War II and we were intimidated by communist ideology every single European country that looked at that saw that as a formidable threat and no country by itself could stand up against the Soviet Union and the Warsaw Pact so we put together what? a political and military alliance and developed a containment strategy that worked and we were motivated by the intimidation of that ideology and what it pretended for all of our freedom-loving people where is that in dealing with this we don't have it and I think that's a sad commentary this is why I'm encouraged about this administration I'm not talking about politics now I'm just talking about leadership American leadership in the world has a role to play and we can play a role here we don't craft the strategy but we can bring people together and say look we gotta get organized here we don't have a problem we do have a generational problem these people gonna keep killing us and we gotta figure out a way to stop it my profession can only do some of this the kinetic solution is just a portion of it and it has a rightful role to play to hold this horrific behavior accountable it has appropriate role to play but I would suggest to you it is a smaller role than what needs to be played to push back the ideology and that's where we got to get to and thoughtful leaders of the world I'm convinced can do this American leaders I think we can help possibly organize that effort and empower it we don't have to come up with the answers they can come up with the answers Juliet? so I just in response to your question about multiple crises and crisis preparation we often talk about resiliency like Geist and everyone talks about we just need to be more resilient if we just did more yoga we would all be fine kind of attitude and I think it's remind me every morning but it doesn't work but I want to remind people resiliency is actually investments in making cities stronger response capabilities stronger having interconnected systems of critical infrastructure built in a way that if the best just assume that the bad thing is going to happen because most of us in this field have to just assume that how do you stop the cascading losses how do you have failsafe systems that stop the bad thing from happening and I think that as we try to stop bad things from happening which obviously prevention and mitigation are key also these real investments in what it means to be to be built resilient doesn't mean that people in Manhattan and New York we just keep rebuilding the same way it floods every time can we build subway systems that are stronger or having to do with terrorism look I came from Boston I oversaw the Boston Marathon security planning up till two years before the Boston Marathon attack we in Boston like to say Boston strong it's our Irish stock that's what got it through it let's just be BS what got it through us is while three people died at the finish line over 300 people who were sent to hospitals did not die and that doesn't happen in crisis management that ratio is too good to be true and those were a lot of bad mistakes part of that was the training and investment in crisis management in engaging a public health apparatus that was ready to surge capacity if something like that would happen that is what strong and resilient is three from dying and the attack that happens but also invest real investments cost money in also trying to minimize the harm in a world in which we have to assume bad things will consistently happen though we wish they wouldn't we're just about ready for our question and answer period so I like that people are going to be handling the mics to prep but I want to give Jim a chance to say a word on that actually I want to go back to your original question because I actually thought it's one of the true threads of bipartisanship that's gone through the last two days and I think should not be lost because what I hear from left and right and conservative and progressive and Republican and Democrat is nobody disputes the notion that the peace and stability of Europe, the Middle East and Asia are all of vital interest in the United States and and you have to get equal attention all three of those not that they all have to be the land of milk and honey or everything and everybody expects that in the Middle East at the same time too the notion of a large regional disruption in any three of those regions is incredibly damaging to us and job one of the next president is whether you want to run the threat of radicalization or cyber or whatever that all three are important, all three are equal importance and you don't get credit for two out of three so I think the notion of an Asian pivot however is inappropriate for the next president and each region demands a different solution set and has to be up with its own turn because I don't think you can make big global trade-offs to say well we'll you take this part of the world and I'll take that part of the world each region is going to have to be dealt with on its own case and obviously they're going to impact one another some degree but they each demand equal attention and I do think that's bipartisan I mean we could argue about the specific sets of what you do but I think there is broad recognition that we all need a roll of our sleeves and we need to care about all three Okay thank you very much I'm going to move a little bit and I have my magic pen out here if you see it pointing at you it means it's your turn to ask a question so I'm pointing at you and when I point the magic pen at you that also triggers your identifying yourself and then asking a succinct question It's one formerly under secretary's date in the Obama administration for economic growth energy and the environment I just like to make two points and raise one set of questions one is arguably over the last decade the most serious crisis facing the industrialized countries has been the financial crisis because it not only had adverse financial circumstances but very strongly adverse political circumstances which we're still dealing with throughout the western world, Europe and the United States in particular which argues for the increased emphasis on maintaining the legitimacy and the credibility and the resilience of international financial and trade institutions the second is that we discussed earlier today a whole series of strategic issues but there was very little discussion of the role that increased trade and trade deals should play and had been anticipated to play TTIP and TPP in bolstering our alliances our alliances in the Pacific with TPP and our alliance in Europe with TTIP now problem is my concern over the future and if this is a bipartisan issue it's not one or the other because we saw on the campaign both candidates and the United States and the United States and the United States would be in a worse position if there was not stronger support for global institutions which were extremely helpful in 2007-2008 if we let those institutions languish if we don't give them support it seems to me the world and the United States are much more vulnerable to a financial crisis than trade war this to me is a big problem what does this administration do and what does the if we don't have TPP if we don't have TTIP what is the alternative to demonstrating to other countries that we are major players on trade that we're reliable partners on trade and international economic issues then it seems to me it weakens our credibility not just in the economic area but on national security and on political issues as well so I'd like to pose these two challenges to our panel how do we strengthen the legitimacy of the international institutions on which we depend and if we don't support TPP or TTIP what do we do to demonstrate our trade credibility and therefore underpin our national security and our foreign policy credibility in Asia and in Europe so that's a lot to chew on a shot at it since it is I'm here from one of the global institutions I feel obliged to come on that question actually I'm very happy to come on that question of course in a world that is more interconnected than shock prone we need stronger buffers we need the capacity of the workers somewhere to very swiftly move resources and make sure that the rest of the world is protected from contagion just going back to the general key is a very good point on the necessity to deal with these threats at source because militarily you can do some but not everything is there anybody in the audience who like me was born on the other side of the iron curtain the Bronx the Bronx a little further a little further that iron curtain in Europe so I see people raising their hands look how did you win the Cold War you won it of course with smart strategy and engagement but basically economically you drove our system at that time central planning to its knees and it went bankrupt and we were free well we need a similar massive investment in areas of instability I think of my institution as the World Bank as the critical investor in areas that otherwise would fall from the hands of bad people and stayed there for a long time as well as to pull these areas from the hands of bad people and bring them back to a more civilized place but global institutions have also an obligation to be oriented towards the future to make the investments that would make a difference in the world of tomorrow and what are these investments well first we do need to assess economically and financially where the risks are and be able to put a price tag on them and actually the World Bank did a study astonishing astonishing number 14 trillion dollars is the cost of conflict and violence to the world economy obviously cutting this cost down on its own is a very good thing to do but then we have to be much more creative and this is my second point in being able to lean forward at the time of crisis anticipate crisis act early lean forward so we prevent the crisis into sucking in world resources and creating instability to do so we must rely much more actively on these global institutions to create the environment for the private sector to step in because what gives me grief at night what makes me not going to sleep just the idea of the demographic boom that is happening exactly in this belt of trouble I was describing Nigeria turning into a one billion people country well for that not to happen or to happen without creating huge instability we need jobs for people well we need first education for boys and girls and then we need jobs for people we need people to stay where they are and believe you me from an European perspective I saw how destabilizing it would be when people are on the move unexpected in big numbers so to sum it up I am talking about my institution the World Bank I do see the World Bank today as necessary as it was after the Second World War to make that investment instability in the world in the way that creates a chance for us to cut down the cost of destruction and of course provide the buffer to the world not only from a security standpoint also from a financial standpoint I would leave the other panelists to venture on the topic of trade so I don't take too long to share in that question I think we have a question here Eileen Shields West Refugees International so one of the most destabilizing forces in the world today is the large number 65 million people who are displaced because of climate conflict or economic migration and my question is what are we well the US is do we perceive that as a threat and that we have a role in mitigating that threat in Europe to deal with it as we know that's not successful or the neighboring countries who have Lebanon and Jordan and Turkey of course so Senator Kerry brought up the idea of a new Marshall plan this morning which would encompass Middle East Africa and Asia is that possible doable is that even in the cards with the new administration I'll take that I don't know enough about the new administration to comment in terms of what they would do and I'm not sure anybody here truly does but I would suggest this first of all thanks for the question we have to go to what is causing that problem and treat it the migration that we show explode in Europe the 11 million people that have displaced in Syria is a real humanitarian crisis I'm frustrated by the fact that it's allowed to linger as long as it has based on our own public policy to be frank about it but these challenges that we have in the Middle East and the political social economic conditions that are essentially driving those challenges we have to help our Middle Eastern friends deal with these problems and we have to be very frank with them about some of these conditions that are there and help them shape the improvements that's necessary the civil wars the Arab Spring has all grown up as a manifestation of those conditions the social disenfranchisement the lack of political participation and the lack of economic opportunity our major drivers to the instability and turmoil that we see there yes for something like the Middle East some fashion of a Marshall plan I would agree with Secretary Kerry on that although I don't agree with some of his other public policies let me just full disclosure here as it comes to Syria some of the other issues in the Middle East but I definitely think we have to look at that entire area holistically and given the millions of people that are under the age of 30 as you know in that region and the economic and social disenfranchisement they feel this problem is going to get worse before it gets better and you can look at the Middle East from an American perspective and ring your hands and say this has gotten worse ever since we tried to do something about it but the source of action is to just pull back and try to contain this problem as best we can and let them solve this themselves this is not our problem to solve culturally very different topography is very different and this is much their problem and that's 1935 Europe all over again thinking that's what that is and that's being tired of World War I and Nazism and that polluting ideology is going to contaminate anybody it'll go away just leave it alone and how horrible a mistake did those leaders who are plagued by the experience of World War I have to suffer as a result of it in terms of their people we cannot afford to not do something about this problem and it's going to take a lot of thoughtfulness and comprehensive strategy and participation with our friends in the region to do it we got to get the Europeans involved in it because they are all touched by this crisis that exists there in terms of the United States we really think of the south north challenge that we're going to have if we don't have it already with minors and undocumented minors trying to come here and then also mass migrations after some catastrophe the Haiti earthquake happened I know we like to feel good about ourselves and say we're going to deploy resources held the Haitians, what really did animate all of the activity was an utter fear of a mass migration out of Haiti that would sort of show up on the shores of Florida that's not a bad thing I think it's important that we protect our borders but that we have to continue to assist these countries that might face mass migration problems not just from an altruistic you know, de-conflict perspective but also because those challenges will find their way here just given how the United States so often serves as a magnet trying to close our borders but you know, the oceans are hard to close a lot of times We have a question here Hello, Sean Callahan with Catholic Relief Services I wanted to ask you a little bit about values and it sounds like a little bit what I'm hearing is a little bit of a bunker mentality of bunker America and protecting ourselves and when I was studying history when I was young one of the things that we were very proud of is we were the new world and the old world was kind of stayed and that new world was young and vibrant and energetic and I was in Kenya a month ago talking to some people and they started describing us as the old world that they were the young countries that they were the vibrant ones that Latin America was young countries as well so those continents and that we were more of a status quo power so my question is I hope that we have migrants coming here to a certain degree is a good thing because we must be doing something right but what is the importance of the values of that optimism and that energy and that we don't close ourselves down but open ourselves out and invest in the continent of Africa and Latin America and other places so that they see feel and have hope in the future and can trust in the United States as opposed to thinking we're a status quo power out to protect ourselves it is very beautifully said that what in the end determines our choices is who we are and one thing I learned when I was commissioner for humanitarian aid going to this devastated places was that Europeans, Americans the people from this old world very good people very very generous willing to put their lives at risk to save the lives of others but somehow talking about being goodness is being good is not it doesn't cut through goodness tends to be quiet evil very loud and you're right that what makes us strong is we do have this core values solidarity sharing the opportunities with others and we have to amplify this voice of goodness but we also have to be mindful that our people in our countries are anxious, they're anxious for reasons and not look with disrespect to this anxiety and look for solutions that are based on these values but they're also good for the for my neighbors and my family for their comfort, for their strength of mind and by the way I just wanted to say that retired general Lin in an interview with Farid Zakaria talked about the Marshall clan who is the forthcoming national security advisor he talked about the necessity to invest very heavily in the countries that are most conflict prone so it resonates very much with the position we have taken on this panel but thank you for bringing that up Ali Barkey from the Woodrow Wilson Center we talked about the strategic surprises and General Keane said never predict those crises what I would like to do is actually give you a concrete example and see how you would respond and Juliet already started mentioning with Haiti but state collapse is clearly one of the things that we are facing and then Venezuela is probably the country that is probably nearest to the United States that will collapse very soon imagine a situation where you have a collapse of the state in Venezuela with civil war government killing lots of people lots of refugees and it's close to the United States close to Mexico, Colombia etc what would you recommend the new administration to do in a case in a situation like that easy if I could add crises in Venezuela what ought to be done to prepare for it right now as well as to cope with it if it didn't when it happens even as you want to try that Jim you know in terms of which was your second question in preparing for the future any new administration most importantly from a national security perspective has got to develop a national security strategy not something that's thrown in the whole box and nobody reads but something that's thoughtfully put together that actually becomes the foundation of the work that you're about to do on behalf of the United States and then you have to have the processes that support all of that and the objectives that you're trying to achieve and some accountability for that this is organizational stuff that is boring and all day life but it really makes a difference and you can see when you look at the NSC and how it operates differently under administrations and how some operate considerably better because these systems are in place and another thing I think the interagency should do is something it's embedded in me because of my years of experience with the military one of the reasons why we're able to deal with different enemies as well as we can is because we prepare so much based on different scenarios that we call it so we do we don't call it crisis management but we do this kind of crisis management against different enemies so that we're prepared to deal with the unexpected as a natural condition of warfare and therefore I believe we likely do it better than anybody in the world however most government entities even those that deal with crisis management don't do that because they use the excuse that day to day business is too much, too consuming and we're never going to be able to get the principles involved and we've got to get past that and only when you can get the attention of the principles can this really work and I would suggest that that is something that possibly General Flynn with his military back when I haven't had this conversation with him could maybe put in play so that you can deal with a crisis like Venezuela or a problem with nuclear weapons in Pakistan we can make a laundry list of things that need to be done and I'll just stop there somebody else going to contribute you had this experience in Europe of being all of a sudden faced with a massive displacement of people and the region in huge trouble I would say do Europe on steroids do what Europe did much faster what Europe did in the end is exactly the right thing massive financial package for the countries in the region that are in trouble where refugees come from or our hosting refugees reinforcement of the border control so we know who is coming and we can give some comfort to the population that we know who is coming and fast assessment of where in the European economy people actually can find jobs be prepared to do that when we have the situation you describe a country that is facing political collapse is what your scenario and of course it is the politics that needs to be fixed but if there is no massive financial assistance then fixing it would be costly over medium term and less likely to be successful and of course domestic politics is domestic politics it would be for the people there to figure it out but if they are left on their own they pay a very high price the rest of us pay a very high price we did it in Europe over period of 18 months for fairness to us I don't know a country or a region that would have a million people coming and this would not be a shock but we have to be much faster we have to be much less wishful thinking in kind of saying I wish it to go away but I think we have enough time for one more question which is good because we have one more question thank you John Norton Moore from the University of Virginia my comment actually relates to an earlier period in which I had the great privilege of being the first chairman of the board of the United States Institute of Peace and I had a wonderful time in talking to Senator Spart Motsanaga my leading Democrat about what he wanted for this great institution and then sitting immediately next to Ronald Reagan the then president of the United States a wonderful Republican about what he wanted from this institution and I believe that Spart Motsanaga and President Ronald Reagan would just be enormously pleased to see the wonderful success of this institution that was literally created by them and that created then all of the wonderful leadership that it currently has had with all the many chairman and others this wonderful little agency is doing extraordinary work that I think needs to be more broadly called to the attention of the world generally not just the American people second general comment is one of the things I think as a concept that needs to be put on the table somewhat more strongly than I've heard it today as we all seek the things I think that we share in common we would like to see greater economic development we would like to see a reduction in conflict and war we would like to see greater human rights we would like to see far greater health and wellness generally for people around the world but we know the thing the aggregate of things that actually correlates with all of those things more strongly than virtually anything else we have found it is democratic governance the rule of law good governance generally and so I would suggest one of the things we need to be talking about is not just a Marshall plan it is the question of how do we actually get out there much more effectively in promoting democracy rule of law and good governance and that we not forget the enormous importance of those things as we think about this for example let's say in realist terms but that we understand realistically the thing that really does correlate are all of these things relating to governance and we see so much of this now a few years ago there was a very very fine proposal to create a democracy rule of law training center for all of Africa that would be funded half by the United States of AID that would be funded half by the European Union I still think that would be one of the single most important things you could do in trying to assist Africa that would then be turned over in a short period to the African Union but I hope that we put on the table in all of our discussions democracy, rule of law good governance I'm a secret closet fan of USIP and a Steve and Nancy thing but I don't want that to get out in public but I want to run up to my comment about why I'm a fan because I think it relates to your comment which is I hate we need an interagency solution I hate those things this notion that we can only solve a problem if everybody fricking gets involved I don't know how many people have been involved in government but when they say a whole of government I really kind of blink I think the answer is governance or development what you need is the right combination of tools at the right time in the right place to get the job done and it's not always a trope of a Marshall plan or something else sometimes it might be a very finesse of instrument and one of the reasons why I love USIP particularly what Nancy and Steve have done is what they have done in some ways in very humble ways is they put together some tools for the toolkit which don't fit in kind of traditional big government programs don't necessarily aren't the thing you would find in an NGO but they live in that little shadow space in between where somehow that's just kind of a nice tool and just the right piece to fit in there so I'm a fan because it adds more tools to the toolkit and I actually don't like this notion of when we have a problem we need to throw up a toolkit and just start throwing tools at because sometimes what the world needs is not an architect needs a craftsman and in a lot of these problems I would actually disagree with maybe a lot of things that we need big and more and everything and in cases there are a lot of cases where what we need is a craftsman with the right set of tools and a lot of times tools are exactly the kind of things that Nancy and Steve and the folks here are doing but I never said that I'm glad you concluded on a construction metaphor real estate development is a very relevant thing these days in America and this conference has come in on time and under budget right at 3.45pm this panel I should say so join me all in giving some appreciation to our panelists in once again thanking our wonderful panelists we will take a very strict 30 minute break but I want to make sure that you come back we've got Senator Graham joining us who promises to be his usual provocative insightful self we'll have a conversation with Senator Graham and then we'll have our wrap up panel of the day looking at what should America's role in the world be with the new Deputy Secretary Assistant Designee KT McFarland Steve Hadley Michelle Flournoy former Deputy Undersecretary of DOD Chief Foreign Policy Advisor for Secretary Hillary Clinton see you back here in about 25 minutes distinct pleasure now to welcome to the podium Senator Graham who really does define needy-no introduction but Senator Graham since 2002 you've been a leading voice in the Senate on all of the issues we've been talking about today see how well that's worked out we're delighted to welcome you here today and have a conversation we've been talking here all day long about foreign policy challenges I know you've just returned from a trip to various parts of the world and some of which we've been talking about and you've also been an important voice on how we need to think about winning the war on terrorism and you held a hearing last spring and into the summer where you said that we're not going to win this war by just killing terrorists and this is a crisis where you pay now or pay later that theme was echoed a bit this morning both by Admiral Struvredes and Secretary John Kerry who talked about the Marshall Plan and how we need to ensure that we're thinking about all of our 3Ds working together so love to hear your thoughts on that anybody here not being confirmed this week raise your hand so we're having like 400 hearings tell Jeff Sessions he's doing great one, thanks to the institute beautiful building, great cause you get some taxpayer dollars good investment Steve Buggster crap out of me all the time about more money so what's the theme of this thing passing the baton I hope that's what we pass as a baton so the first thing I think President Lex got to do is find out in his own mind what is winning the war on terror I mean we know what World War II is like you take Berlin you take Tokyo you shoot down the air force you sink their navy I think it's been hard for Americans to get their heads around what we're doing we're very schizophrenic when we get attacked we want to blow everybody up after about 2 or 3 years we want to leave everybody alone it won't work that way when you get attacked you need to respond but you also need to respond in a fashion to make sure you're not attacked again so I think the big problem he's going to have in his own mind is how do you win the war what does winning look like let me tell you what I think winning looks like people over there can take care of their problems with some of our health but not be dependent upon us their armies and their police forces can protect the populations and the rule of law replaces the rule of gun and young people have something to live for rather than die for that's pretty nebulous but when you think about it defeating radical Islam is the proposition that they're selling a glorious death we've got to sell a hopeful life and if I could find a way to win this war where all of us stayed over here and never had to go over there I would so I would rather fight it in their backyard than ours I'd rather have partners than do it alone and I'd rather hit them they hit us and to win the war the kinetic part of it has limited utility what have I learned after 39 trips to Iraq and Afghanistan it's a long ass way over there and I keep running into the same people all the time we're fighting in Iraq and Afghanistan the 1% have been doing a heck of a job on our behalf so what have I learned that building up their institutions is hard particularly when there's lack of security and I hope President elect Trump soon to be President Trump will understand that if you're not for the 150 account which all of you know right it's good to talk to an audience who knows what the 150 account is we didn't fill up the room it's probably for a reason so I'm going to try to convince him on General Flynn that the 150 account is a great tool in the war on terror and that you want to rebuild up the military replacing sequestrations is a great place to start but if you don't replace sequestration for the FBI the CIA the national security NSA and the 150 account you'll miss the boat on what it takes to win the war so the president elects got to make a decision in his own mind what is our role in winning the war and what does victory look like was talking about the importance of investing precisely in those areas of great instability that have the potential to come back down the road to be a greater problem would you agree with that yeah so the Marshall Plan the reason we made that name up is we couldn't think of another name most people my age understand what the Marshall Plan was all about it was taken to totalitarian states with radicalized populations staying until things got better building up working with the kids that the prior regime tried to radicalize and over the arc of time you got Germany and Japan let me tell you it is pretty hard right now in this environment selling staying power so the 150 account is 1% of the budget my belief is that if we could create a new account for western democracies Gulf Arab states Japan and it would be ironic if Germany led the new Marshall Plan and put together about 100 billion bucks and said to developing nations we're here to help you but there's going to be a new way of doing it Nigeria we got to get Nigeria right so you got a new president they're taking the fight to Boko Ram so what I would envision with this money is a public-private partnership like the Millennium Challenge Corporation what President Bush should be very proud of so it's going to be an international version of that it will be new money not to replace the UN individual state aid programs but a collaborative effort between the private sector and the public sector to take new money and leverage better results in some countries it may be power for us to help you with your power supply you can actually pass laws where people have to pay the power bill so the bottom line is I'm trying to convince the new administration and my Republican colleagues that we're going to pay now or we're going to pay later the first nightmare for radical Islam is for us to get to the country before they do invest in the lives of the young people before they can corrupt their lives and the biggest antidote to tear above all else is giving a poor young girl a chance for an education and a voice for her children that drives these guys nuts and that's what I want to do exactly thank you and help Israel you mentioned that it takes a long time to solve these problems and that's been one of the themes today that's why it helps to take Senator Thurmond's place you have the long view of things and we've been talking about how these are not problems that are solved in four or even eight year increments and it's actually the 70th anniversary today of a speech that Senator Vandenberg gave 70 years ago who made the very famous line that politics stop at the water's edge so in order to transcend these four to eight year increments we really do need this bipartisan support for key foreign policy solutions you've had a long successful career is that still possible is that imperative still still front and center it's okay to disagree about foreign policy too it's okay to have a row of debates but you don't want to undermine each other so let's look at what President Trump's going to have to deal with we're going to take Mosul back from ISIL how many of you think we'll eventually do that raise your hands Ramadi, Fallujah how do you hold them Raqqa's going to fall one day who's the holding force it's my view that the YBG Kurds are not going to hold Raqqa that you're going to need an Arab holding force and if you've been to any of these areas recently you realize that the entire economy has been devastated would he leave a residual force behind this time the first question he's going to have to answer in my mind is is he willing to put American dollars into the pipeline to reconstruct these cities that have been destroyed in the name of liberating them and will he get other people to put money in the same pot because if you don't invest in reconstructing Mosul, Ramadi and Fallujah he's not going to back into the enemy's hands a residual force if the Iraqis requested this time around a residual force which they did last time by the way would he say yes here's my advice if you don't leave some soldiers behind this time you're going to get the same result as last time Syria who's going to hold Raqqa and that part of Syria is this a good deal that the Russians and the Iranians here's my general proposition any deal cooked up by the Russians and the Iranians is probably not a good deal so what did they accomplish they've driven us out of Syria in terms of peacemaking and if Assad stays in power I hope the president elect understands that that will be recruiting tool for radical Islam for decades the biggest winners I think of the Iranian-Turkey deal is Russia, Iran Assad radical Sunni Islamic groups the biggest losers Syrian people us the Arab neighbors and eventually Turkey and maybe Israel why did I say Israel Israel's constantly under attack from two groups the last thing I want to want Ron for your country is to have somebody in power in Damascus that would create a corridor all the way into Lebanon so that the weapons that exist in Syria can flow into Lebanon and one day be used against your country to our friends in Turkey if you think this is a good deal for you you're very short-sighted what is Erdogan's political base what is it it's the rural areas of Turkey the secular urban areas not so much here's what I fear by throwing in with Russia and Iran he's reinforcing the narrative that he's empowered the mortal enemy of Sunni Islam the Iranian Ayatollah and that radical Islam is going to send upon Turkey with a vengeance not because Turkey helped destroy ISIL but because Turkey will be seen by religious conservative people who are not members of ISIL or Al-Qaeda is having done a deal with the devil so this current construct of where Syria is given into three groups Turkey gets a foothold inside of Syria to deal with this Kurdish problem I think it's not going to help the Kurdish problem I think it's make it worse why did Turkey do this I think Turkey believed that we were an unreliable partner because we were training the Kurds as the liberating holding force in the eyes and minds of the average Turkish government official the YPG Kurds and the PKK are ever bit as lethal as ISIL and Al-Qaeda I think we drove them to the Russian-Iranian camp here's what President Trump's got to decide he's publicly said he wants to work with Russia to destroy radical Islam they're not destroying radical Islam they've been destroying the moderate forces that have been trying to liberate the country from Assad if he insists that Assad stay in power if President Trump buys into that construct I think it's going to be a nightmare for the Arab countries surrounding Syria because the war never ends it's going to be a problem for our friends in Israel and I think Turkey's in a world of hurt when he wants to build up the military count man is he willing to invest in the 150 count because if he's not and I think we're missing the whole point of trying to win the war does he want to leave forces in Iraq when everybody's ready to leave will he build up forces in Afghanistan he's going to have a lot of hard decisions will he give more money to Israel I hope so I want to help him and I hope everybody in here will want to help him but the bottom line is when I think he's wrong I've got to have the courage of my convictions even though I'm a Republican to tell my party I think you're wrong Senator Graham you have been a long time supporter of the UN however you've been quite critical recently to the vote on Israel and I'm curious whether you see that there might be other ways to address what was essentially a political vote of member states without undermining the importance of the UN I'm an internationalist in my party I'm a Steve Hadley kind of guy so I I think what President Bush did with Petfar and all the AIDS programs in Africa is going to serve us well for 100 years United Nations the Marshall Plan has to be coordinated with what the UN is already doing I've already met with the new Secretary General before he got the job great guy from Portugal can't say his name don't want to butcher it but how do I sell to the people in South Carolina that I want to take more of your tax dollars partner with international organizations that in their mind have gone crazy the average South Carolinian believes that when it comes to our national security and the problems in the world Israel is not the biggest problem to those who believe that it's about land you really don't remember very well what happened when Israel left Gaza how do you do peace when you have the other side divided into two camps I believe in a two state settlement a two state solution but it requires the ability of both parties to deliver I'm going to suspend funding to the United Nations being an internationalist until they correct the problem with this resolution we've had differences with our friends in Israel about settlements but we've always said among ourselves we're going to keep these differences among ourselves and we're never going to let the peace process here's my problem with the United Nations they selectively chose one issue of many they highlighted in a fashion that I think gives false hope to peace the problem as I see it is not settlements by itself is the fact that Hamas governs about 40% of the Israeli of the Palestinian population and they're not remotely interested in peace and that a boss can't deliver so I'm going to do two things Ted Cruz, my new best friend we're going to introduce a resolution tomorrow suspending all assistance to the United Nations until we get this resolution at a better spot stop funding the Palestinian Authority until they change their laws that reward young Palestinians for killing Israelis and Americans and let me give you an example Taylor Force is a young man whose parents live in South Carolina he graduated from West Point he did a tour of duty in Iraq and Afghanistan he was an Israel as a graduate student studying and Jaffa I believe it was went out to dinner came out of the restaurant got stabbed to death by a Palestinian the Palestinian was killed back to Ramallah he was welcomed as a hero given a state funeral and his parents were given a lump sum of money by the Palestinian Authority what am I supposed to tell people in South Carolina I know Boswell he's got a lot of political problems but I'm not going to continue to fund organizations who tell their young people the best way to get ahead is to kill somebody else so how you doing are there ways that leverage can be used with member states without imperiling especially the critical assistance that the UN provides to a healthy conversation with the Ukraine they voted for this resolution like what are you thinking I went to eastern Ukraine with the president and looking at the Russians killing everybody yep they're doing it how would you like to be in Israel when you get 10,000 rockets it's not that I don't see fault in our friends in Israel there's fault with all of us I just see this to be an absurd proposition by the international community to single out settlements and condemn Israel I just don't see that as being very constructive to the member states who voted for this and depend on us for assistance we're going to have a new conversation here peace will come only when the Palestinians are united and can deliver if that day comes would they have an election and they're long overdue and the Palestinians reject Hamas and they vote for a more moderate view then the burden will be on Israel until that day comes Senator Graham we want to open the room to get some questions and reflections from the audience absolutely so if anybody has anything they'd like to raise with the senator and one of the I'd like to also note that one of the things we've been talking a lot about today have been the critical priorities facing the incoming Trump administration you've noted several but while we see if there are comments or suggestions from the audience love you to be thinking about ranking the top three which we've been asking people to do what those would be rebuild your ability to deter aggression by setting aside sequestration sequestration is Latin for doing really dumb things how we've been able to freeze do this to the discretionary budget and not move the debt needle and call it a success I'll never know we're going to have the smallest army since 1940 the smallest navy since 1915 the air force Congress will have shot down more fighter planes than any enemy could hope to do through sequestration but when we replace it I hope we'll look at what defense really means if defense doesn't mean the 150 account you made a huge mistake Mr. President you watch a lot of TV in case you're watching this if you're not willing to invest in the lives of others you cannot make a safe here I have come to conclude that and if you don't believe me ask any general General Mattis said if you cut the State Department's budget you better buy me more bullets so get funding right the Iranian agreement what keeps me up at night is a nuclear arms race in the Middle East does anybody share that concern how many of you believe the Arabs are going to get a nuclear weapon if they think the Iranians one day will get one just talk to the Arabs the nuclear agreement with the Iranians needs to be renegotiated because at the end of 15 years they don't even have to cheat they can reprocess and enrich we do have more insight into their nuclear program than we did have before with the $150 billion we gave them in sanctions is not building school houses so what I would do as my number two priority is that I would impose sanctions on the Iranian regime for their behavior outside their nuclear program for holding hostage American sailors for toppling four Arab capitals for supporting Hezbollah, Hamas and taking Yemen and tearing it apart we're going to introduce sanctions in a bipartisan fashion to sanction the Iranian regime for their behavior outside the nuclear program if I were President Trump I would seize that moment and use it as leverage to get a better deal the third thing is North Korea North Korea is an interesting place the former leader said he had nine holes in one in his first round of golf that's when he lost me being born in a mountain and all that other stuff I go there we're laughing but North Korea has nuclear weapons and they're trying as I speak to develop the missile technology to hit our shores how many of you really want to be President of the United States so the third thing I would worry about if I were Trump is how do you stop the ICBM program in North Korea and if you don't stop it you're going to own the consequences so I am going to offer General Mattis Thursday a congressional authorization to use force to stop their ICBM program from hitting the homeland if they want it and I think every member of Congress should be on the record as to whether or not they support the proposition of using military force if necessary to stop the North Koreans from building ICBM that could hit America those are the three things I think we should focus on early thank you for that we have a questioner right here is that Randy? Sean Callahan Catholic Relief Services I appreciate the comments you made Senator regarding the 150 account where would you advise the President-elect what would be his first overseas trip why and what would you have him say I'd go to Israel and say I'm your friend then I would go to Jordan and have the King of Jordan host a regional summit and say I'm your friend then I would send a joint message from the Western world and the Arabs to the Iranian people we want to be your friend and I'd send a message to the Ayatollah we've had it with you clear and succinct Priscilla thank you I'm Priscilla Klapp if you were to authorize the use of power on North Korea from the Congress what kind of reaction do you think it might cause would North Korea go after South Korea would they start a fight that's a really good question I advocated leaving troops behind in Iraq I advocated helping the Free Syrian Army four years ago and I got asked what would happen if you did a consequence to helping people who are fighting for their freedom I realized that if you adopt my foreign policy views that there will be consequences I've said out in thought what's the worst thing that can happen the worst thing can happen is that North Korea actually builds a missile that can hit our homeland and I work backward the worst thing can happen in Syria is for Russia and Iran to come out after we told him he had to go the worst thing that can happen for America is when you tell North Korea it's not going to happen and it happens so Trump has tweeted himself into a red line here should he have done it I don't know I wouldn't have done it that way I'm glad I don't email or tweet I would have told the Chinese what my red lines were and you tell North Korea all things, all bets are off that's the way I would have done it but we're now out there for republic to say we're not going to let North Korea build an ICBM here's what I think would happen if they believed Trump was serious about it they would find a way to stand down because let me tell you this as bad as a war with North Korea would be I know who's going to lose it they will as bad as a war with Iran would be but they will and you know what they know that too interesting times isn't it you got a real crazy guy wanting to build a missile to hit your homeland with like a hundred weapons I mean what do you do about it we have one question we'll do two more questions over here and then over there thank you Senator you have advanced in your comments today I'm Tamika Tillerman I direct the Bretton Woods 2 program at New America a pretty simple proposition which is born out by most of our history you can either invest now in addressing these market failures or you can pay later and what we see at this moment is that those market failures that we're encountering around the world are not only expensive for the US government they're also very expensive for the private sector in a way that we maybe haven't fully appreciated previously so I'd be curious to ask your opinion on what if anything can be done at a policy level with the private long-term financial actors that will ultimately end up paying a big price if these problems metastasize to start pursuing investments that can address root causes of some of these challenges around the world while hopefully making a return in the process well Boeing builds 787s in South Carolina I love Boeing they're about to sell a bunch of jets to Ryan I know they got Airbus' competition Tillerson's whole confirmation is going to be about you know the difference between being a CEO at Exxon and being Secretary of State there's one area where I think we can work together with the Russians and the Chinese the Middle East is seeking nuclear power most Arab countries that I've talked to one day would like to have a nuclear program because they'll run out of oil and gas I am okay with the expansion of nuclear power in the Middle East for peaceful purposes so Russia, China and the United States should think about collaborating with our private sectors to basically build nuclear power plants throughout the Middle East as long as we control the fuel cycle I don't mind Iran having a nuclear power plant I just don't want people who deny the Holocaust the ability to enrich and reprocess I don't like the idea that on the day we signed the agreement that we voted in the Senate on the Iranian nuclear agreement, the Ayatollah said God willing in 25 years Israel won't exist so the private sector part of this is what the Marshall plan is all about you have NGOs you have big companies doing business all over the world what if you could take the power of goodness which is the NGO the power of capital which is big business with the power of government and put on the table new assistance that reinforces better governance and reinforces outcomes that are more transparent I know I'm a bit schizophrenic to some of you in this audience please understand that I get it when it comes to the limitations of the use of military force in destroying radical Islam Russia, no one has asked me about Russia how many of you think Russia hacked into the DNC and Podesta me too how many think we should do something about it me too now the president elect talks all around this I hope you'll understand that I'm not suggesting that his victory was brought about by Russian interference you won Mr. President Hillary Clinton lost you won and had nothing to do with the Russian hacking but they did try to interfere and what I hope you'll understand is that in about 10 days he's going to be the leader of the free world and that you have to stop this behavior because it's happening all over the world he says he wants a better relationship with Russia how many of you desire that how can you have a better relationship if they do the same old thing you're never going to have a better relationship until Russia changes its behavior you can't have a better relationship with the country whose leader steals his own people blind and kills folks that oppose it and gobbles up their neighbors and tries to break the backbone of democracy the very foundation of who we are as a people the only way a better relationship with Russia occurs is when they change not us forgiving more their bad behavior so the congress today introduced sanctions that hit them in the energy sector where they're most vulnerable that deal with financial services sectors so if you want to do business in Russia it's going to be harder for you as a private sector company the reason I did that with nine other republicans and democrats is to let Putin know enough is enough and the current sanction regime is not working President Trump is going to have to decide how to deal with Russia I have decided we're going to deal with Russia from the position of strength we're going to rebuild our military we're going to go after him and his cronies for what they did in our election and what they're trying to do throughout the world I just got back from the Baltic states where all NATO members were scared to death I spent New Year's Eve in the Ukraine on the eastern front of the war with Ukrainians who know they're outmanned and outgun but are willing to die I'm a hopeless romantic when it comes to democracy but I'm also very practical we're dealing with Saudi Arabia I think they got room for improvement there are a lot of our allies that we need to push to do better but you have to deal with the world as it is the private sector needs to be more utilized in American foreign policy because you bring to the table the essence of America may be better than any politician our ace in the hole is that average people want to be more like us not less our biggest export movies, entertainment never lose sight of the fact that we have an advantage over all enemies not because our military is so much better than it is it's because most people want what we take for granted Putin one day will fall just like all thugs and bullies fall how much damage between now and then I don't know ISIL will be destroyed one day because most mothers and fathers don't want their daughters turned over to these bastards that just need our help to our friends in Israel hang in there things are going to get better my foreign policy is very simple I believe that what we stand for should be offered to everybody and if they don't want it to a free and fair process I'm okay with that Trump says America first I say freedom first the right of self-determination above all else and if you vote for a dictator too bad if most people could vote they wouldn't accept this and if you want to be peaceful here and you want to preserve our way of life you better be involved over there the only thing I can tell you after 15 years of being at war we're never going to win this war all of us stand over here and the best and the brightest among us are not just our soldiers it's the people in the State Department and these NGOs who go out and represent American values without carrying a gun I'm a pretty hawkish guy but I've had the pleasure of seeing our State Department in action our NGO community in action and I believe we would be very wise to invest in them just as we would be wise to invest in our military thank you for having me thank you Senator Graham thank you Senator Graham thank you for taking time out of such a busy schedule thank you for being a starry-eyed pragmatist and a fierce defender of the 150 account he's got a crazy hearing schedule so we're very very appreciative that he was able to join us our next and final panel we'll build on the conversations that we've had today and take a look at what should America's role in the world be with the number of challenges that we have we have a terrific panel and I'm happy to introduce our moderator Susan Glasser she'll moderate the final discussion introduce our panelists she's a columnist, seasoned journalist and the chief international affairs columnist with our media partner Politico please welcome Susan and our panelists thank you so much for sticking with us I think we're absolutely delighted to have the final position in this extraordinary collection of people gathered on both sides and across the many divides in Washington today to talk about passing the baton and foreign policy from one this is a group that needs almost no introduction so I will be very brief in order to get right to a conversation that I was eager myself to hear what everyone has to say and I know you are too so we'll start right in basically this is a pretty unparalleled group of people w