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Joseph Nye, Lawrence Korb, and Newt Gingrich

Speaker: Newt L. Gingrich, Chief Executive Officer, The Gingrich Group
Speaker: Joseph S. Nye, Dean, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University
Moderator: Lawrence J. Korb, Adjunct Senior Fellow, Council on Foreign Relations, Senior Fellow, Center for American Progress

Thursday, September 25, 2003
Council on Foreign Relations
Washington, D.C.

Council Acting Washington Director Lee Feinstein (LF): ...this week, including the remarks of Secretary-General Kofi Annan. So we're really pleased to be continuing this. Just so that you know, this is part of a road show that the Council's been running, and Larry Korb has been at the center of it. We've been staging these debates around the country on the basis of the Council's Policy Initiative, the CPI. Larry may say more about the CPI, which Larry authored for the Council. And we're very, very pleased that we have two of the leading proponents of the different sides of this debate here tonight to carry it on. I just want to make mention of those who made this event possible, and that's the United Nations Foundation, the Rockefeller Brothers Foundation, and the Open Society Institute, who funded and actually suggested to us that we do a debate on the president's national security strategy. With that, Larry, over to you.

Lawrence Korb (LK): Thank you very much, Lee. Let me join Lee in welcoming you here, particularly our guests, and I'd like to make a special note of the students that we have here from SAIS [the School of Advanced International Studies at Johns Hopkins University], Georgetown, George Washington, and Howard University. I think it's terrific that you're getting involved in this debate at this time in your careers. Now, I'm a senior fellow at the Center for American Progress, which is the new think tank here in town. I just started there this week, but, as Lee mentioned, my last act at the Council was to finish this Council Policy Initiative. And basically, what the Council tries to do in those documents is present the best case for alternatives that we feel should be involved in the debate.

And in this one, we try and get people who closely can argue for one of or all of the alternatives specifically. And I think tonight we're very lucky to have two people here who certainly are up to date on what's going on, have been long involved in this debate. Now, before I introduce them, I've got to take care of the housekeeping things. Please turn off your cell phones. (laughter)

The second thing is that, unlike most Council meetings, this meeting is on the record. Most Council meetings are off the record. This is on the record. Our speakers' remarks will be followed by a question-and-answer session, and we will end promptly at 7:45. And so, as a courtesy to the speakers and to your colleagues here, I would ask you to please stay until the end of the meeting.

Okay, with that, let me turn to the introduction of the speakers and get this debate going here. In many ways, you could say that the speakers don't need any introduction. I think everyone knows who they are, but let me briefly summarize their accomplishments. Speaker Gingrich spent some 20 years in Congress, the last four as Speaker of the House of Representatives. And he probably, more than any other individual, was responsible for the Republicans gaining control of the House of Representatives after more than 40 years in the minority party. Since he has left government, he has not slowed down in the least. He's the CEO of Gingrich Group, a communications and consulting firm that specializes in transformational change. He also serves as a senior fellow at AEI [American Enterprise Institute], a distinguished visiting fellow at the Hoover Institution, the honorary chairman of NanoBusiness Alliance, and an advisory board member of the Museum of the Rockies. He's also a news and political analyst for the Fox News channel and a member of the Defense Policy Board. He's the author of seven books and, in addition to that, he's an educator lecturing both at the National Defense University and the Joint Warfare Fighting Course.

Joe Nye, again, is a person who needs no introduction. He is the Don K. Price Professor of Public Policy and Dean of the Kennedy School at Harvard. He has served in two administrations, both Clinton and Carter. In the Clinton administration, he was in the Pentagon as the assistant secretary for international security affairs, and he was also the chair of the National Intelligence Council (NIC). And he worked in the State Department in the Carter administration. He is the author of many books, the latest of which is “The Paradox of American Power.” And he has something that those of us who spend our life in research and the academy envy, is when you talk about a concept which everybody uses, he's the one who thought it up, and that's "soft power." So everybody knows that.

With that introduction, I'd like to turn first to Speaker Gingrich, and what I'd like each of them to do is to speak about six minutes, give their position, and then we'll have a chance for about a three minute rebuttal on each side. So, Mister Speaker, welcome. We appreciate your coming.

Newt Gingrich (NG): Thank you, Lawrence. I am delighted to be here, and I accepted this evening because I wanted to lay out a formula and not just give Joe a chance to respond, but give the rest of you. My formula is actually pretty straightforward. I want to draw a distinction between the analytical framework of the September 2002 National Security Strategy and the execution of it. I want to vigorously defend the first, and raise questions about the second. So those of you who want to say "gotcha" on things like we have a long time building one mile of paved road in Afghanistan, I'm cheerfully going to say, you're right. And Joe Nye actually gave me the formula when we were on the Hart-Rudman Commission [on national security issues]. We came up to visit him, and he said, you know, the greatest challenge in Washington is that we appoint people for policy purposes, not for implementation purposes. And the result is we have enormous focus on policy debates, and almost no focus on instrumentalities of implementation. And that just, for some reason, locked into everything I'd learned in over 20 years, and I think it is exactly right, and it explains about 80 percent of the challenges the Bush administration faces.

So now, let me go back to part one, which is: are they right about policy? And here I think it's a logic train, and you've got to decide whether or not you buy their logic train. I happen to buy it. One, the world's really dangerous. It may be more dangerous than at the height of the Cold War. It is certainly equally dangerous.

The reason it is dangerous is because weapons of mass murder-and I think that's a better term than weapons of mass destruction because biological weapons actually don't destroy much-weapons of mass murder are going to become more and more potentially available, are usable by smaller and smaller groups, and that poses a national security issue of the highest order. If you believe in thinking about alternative futures or alternative paths, and I've done both, I would suggest to you that the end of Western civilization is more likely to come as a result of a biological weapon than any other single possibility, that an engineered flu is vastly more dangerous than smallpox. And if you look at the cost of the 1918 flu epidemic, which was larger than the entire casualties of the First World War, it has to be very sobering. But if you look at the North American Indian, the Aztec, the Inca, or the Hawaiian experience, it's terrifying.

And anybody who isn't worried doesn't understand it. Now that's compounded by a second problem, which is there are people who legitimately hate us. And let me make this quite clear. If you are a reactionary Islamist of the Wahhabi sect, you should want to eliminate us. That is the natural logic of your position. We insist on women being in videos. We insist on women being in Congress. We insist on women being on television. We believe in a whole series of things. Remember that the term "great Satan," as originally used by [Iran’s Ayatollah Ruhollah] Khomeini, wasn't about evil. It was about being tempted. But the United States is a culture, which tempts people away from the one true way, and, if you're a Wahhabist, they're right. If you believe in the sharia [Islamic law], they're right. And we need to get honest about this. We have a definition of life incompatible with the most reactionary wing of Islam, and it's guaranteed to cause a conflict. This is not to buy the idea of conflict of culture because 90 percent of Islam doesn't believe in that. Ninety percent of Islam actually thinks they're kind of nuts, too. Which is why, if you looked at Afghanistan, there were a lot more people celebrating than crying when the Taliban was driven out.

Third, we have not come to grips with the core challenge of dictatorships of stunning irresponsibility, with weapons of mass murder and mass destruction. And let me just suggest to you, I think it was a week ago or two weeks ago, there was a brilliant article in The New Yorker on the nature of the North Korean regime. And when you read that, I challenge you to suggest either an appeasement or a containment strategy of any rationality is likely to work.

So let's start with point one, which is the world is really dangerous, the threats could come here to kill us at home, and the Bush administration has at least made the first serious effort to [unintelligible] where we're going.

I think, by the way, if you want an analogy, we are where America was in '47-48. We're still having an argument, and we haven't gotten the next telegram from Moscow yet. We're still arguing about the nature. We're a long way from the NSC [National Security Council] of 1968 and writing a response. We're still arguing about the nature of reality. So I would give the Bush administration relatively high marks for understanding it's scary, understanding it could kill us, understanding we need to be on offense, and understanding it's hard. I give them not nearly as high marks-being a Republican I can't go further than that (laughter)-I give them not nearly as high marks for understanding Joe Nye's great point, which is our instrumentalities are dramatically lacking.

I mean almost nobody fully understood that my argument about the State Department at the American Enterprise Institute three months ago was actually an argument about limiting DoD [Department of Defense]. You cannot afford an incompetent State Department if you're going to be the leader of the planet because you will overuse the Defense Department. And if you overuse the Defense Department, it's actually a function of weakness, not strength.

The great instruments of the late ’40s-including the Marshall Plan, Point Four, the pre-Central Intelligence Agency, winning the election in Italy in ’48-there are an amazing number of things we did that weren't military, but they were stunningly effective in retrospect. We are not, today, bureaucratically prepared to exercise non-military power with any level of effectiveness. And this is an enormous problem.

My closing comment, which is actually a critique of the administration, but in favor of their general values: you cannot have a coalition of the willing if you don't constantly cultivate the willing. And we do not, today, have the strategic depth of our planning, the capacity of communications, the strength of diplomacy, to insure that the maximum number of willing are available when you put together a coalition. And, in the long run, this is very dangerous to the United States. So with that brief introduction, I yield.

LK: You kept me from having to say my favorite line that I've been practicing all day, the time for the gentleman from Georgia has expired. But I didn't have to say that. (laughter)

NG: It's the House versus the Senate. (laughter)

Joseph Nye (JN): Well, Newt has demonstrated the central tenet of the new strategy, which is pre-emption. He took away my best line. (laughter) We're going to find that we agree on some of this, Newt, but I'll be careful to make sure we don't over-agree. Basically, I've argued, in Foreign Affairs, the house organ here, in the article I did over in the summer issue about strategy after Iraq.

9/11 was like a flash of lightning on a summer evening, which suddenly illuminates new landscape and then goes dark again and you've got to pick your way through it. And that's where we are now. And what it illuminated were two things that had happened in the latter part of the twentieth century, which profoundly changed world politics. One was globalization and the other was what I call the democratization of technology. And the globalization point is clearly illustrated by Afghanistan where, in the ’90s, if you'd asked most Americans what's Afghanistan like, they'd say conditions are terrible, but it doesn't matter much to us. And what we learned on 9/11 is we've lost the buffer of two oceans, if we'd had it, and that terrible events or terrible conditions in poor, weak states halfway around the world can matter very much to us. And the other thing that it illuminated was this democratization of technology, part of which was the information revolution. Basically, it meant making things cheaper and cheaper and putting them into the hands of more and more non-state actors, so that if you were a terrorist or a malevolent individual in the twentieth century, you would kill tens, maybe thousands if you were lucky, and if you really wanted to kill millions, you had to have the apparatus of a totalitarian government, to be a Stalin or a Hitler. And now it's not at all farfetched to imagine pathological individuals being able to kill on that dimension, that many people, without the apparatus of government. Al Qaeda killed more people on September 11th than the government of Japan did on December 7, 1941. That is a change in world politics.

I call it, in my book, the privatization of war. And that, I think, is where the national security strategy is correct in making, for the Bush administration-what was about a 180 degree turn from where they came in-from the way the president ran as a classical realist with a very narrowly bounded foreign policy, which was going to eschew nation building and foreign policy and social work and all the rest of it. So, in that sense, I think that focusing on this new threat was the correct answer in the national security strategy.

But lest we have too much agreement, let me point out a couple of things I think they got wrong. One is the way they made pre-emption into a doctrine. Pre-emption is a fact of international life. It's not new with this administration. When the Clinton administration planned a possible strike against [North Korea’s] Yongbyon nuclear facilities in '94, that would have been pre-emption. Indeed, as the administration has done, it stretches pre-emption, which means an imminent threat, to prevention, which means dealing with a threat which may not be quite imminent, but is serious and you don't want to wait until it's too late.

I think there are grounds for that, but I think the last thing you want to do is elevate it into a doctrine. And by making this a doctrine, blurring the difference between pre-emption and prevention, and pronouncing it, you get into all the problems that Kofi Annan identified in his speech a day or two ago, which is you open the door for anybody. And I think the price of moving to preventive war is to establish a procedure which legitimizes it. That means that, while an extremist, you may have to act unilaterally. You ought to at least make efforts to act multilaterally to legitimize this.

And I think the administration didn't deal with either of those issues. It blurred pre-emption and prevention, and it didn't talk about institutional constraints which would prevent it from being a terrible precedent for others. I think that's a real flaw in the strategy.

The other serious flaw, I think, was the proclaiming of American dominance as the central focus of our foreign policy. Now, I'm not against American dominance. I actually think it's good for the world. And I also believe that it's a fact of life, that whether one thought it was good or bad wouldn't matter. It's going to be there for another couple of decades. But touting it as the focus of our foreign policy, that we will knock down anybody who tries to get near us, is really violating Teddy Roosevelt's good advice, that if you have a big stick, for God's sake, speak softly.

And for all this new view that the problem in the world today is American power or, as some put it, American empire, we didn't need that trouble. We should have just followed Teddy Roosevelt's advice. So I think those are flaws in the strategy as articulated. As I said, the virtue of the strategy is that it identified a new threat and refocused on it. The flaws are that we let the rhetoric get in front of the strategy's implementation.

Now, on the area of implementation, there, I think, is where the danger is that Newt and I may agree too much. I think that, if I were asked about the strategy, I'd say to simplify it. Good on ends, bad on means. If you look at that, I would say that one problem or puzzle is if you ask how they implemented this, isn't it bizarre that they chose Iraq first rather than North Korea, which, in terms of the way the strategy is written, is a clear and present danger and an imminent threat? And we now know that Iraq, nasty as it was, and there may be good causes to use force to prevent Saddam getting weapons of mass destruction, was nowhere near as imminent a threat as North Korea.

I've always said that I think this means that Iraq was leftover business from the twentieth century, and the real challenges of the twenty-first century that the strategy identifies are still before us in the form of North Korea and Iran. I think the administration has made three large mistakes or there are three large flaws in the way they've implemented the strategy.

One is that they've approached it in a one-dimensional way, and that one dimension has been the focus on military power. Basically, I've argued that power today is distributed like a three-dimensional chess game. On the top board of military issues, the United States is clearly dominant, it's unipolar, hegemony, whatever word you want, and I don't see that changing rapidly. You go to the middle board of this three-dimensional chess game, where you play up and down as well as across; on economic issues the world is already multi-polar. We can't get a trade agreement or antitrust or financial regulations without the agreement of the Europeans and the Japanese and others. Ask [U.S. Trade Representative] Bob Zoellick. And if you go to the bottom board of transnational relations, which are things that cross borders outside the control of government-whether it be the spread of infectious diseases or whether it be transnational terrorism, which is now a dominant threat as the strategy identifies-it makes no sense at all to call that American empire or uni-polarity or anything of the sort. This is chaotically organized, and the only way you deal with these issues is essentially by cooperation with other countries.

By focusing so heavily on the top board-and military power is a necessary, but not sufficient, condition for success-the administration has done one-dimensional thinking when they're playing a three-dimensional game. And if you play three-dimensional chess in one board only, in the long run you're going to lose.

The second flaw I think they faced was devaluing the soft power that Larry mentioned. Soft power is the ability to get what you want through attraction rather than coercion, and it is important. It makes a huge difference. I would submit that we won the Cold War by a combination of military power for the containment, but soft power for transformation of what was happening inside the Soviet Bloc. And the administration has not paid much attention to soft power. Indeed, many of its actions have squandered or stepped on our soft power, as the public opinion polls show. If you look at Andy Kohut's Pew polls, it's quite remarkable, when in 2000, Indonesia, the largest Muslim country, had 75 percent of the public attracted to the U.S. and last year, after the Iraq War, it was down to 15 percent. I mean, that's got to cost you something.

Now, I also think it's important, even though people will say, “Well, it doesn't matter, it can't stop us, we're so strong we can do it,” it does matter in terms of winning the war on terrorism, which is what the new strategy is about. If you look at the war on terrorism, you've got to use force against somebody like bin Laden. You're not going to attract a bin Laden. But Newt is right, this is not a clash of civilizations. It's a civil war inside Islam, and most Muslims actually do want modernization, democracy, human rights, and a better standard of living. And the key question is how do you prevent this radical strand of Islamists from recruiting the middle?

And, let me tell you, you can't do that with military power. You do that with soft power. You've got to attract those people, and that's the lesson of the Cold War. It's not quick, it's not overnight, but you've got to attract them. And that's the secret to success in the long term in the war on terrorism, even if killing bin Laden is the secret in the short term.

And finally, I think the third flaw of the administration's implementation is the devaluation of international institutions. You know, the cliche that the issue determines the coalition, not the coalition determines the issues, sounds great. But what it means is you treat institutions, like NATO or the U.N., as a toolbox. I'll reach in and I'll pick out something when it's useful, and I'll chuck it away when I'm done with it.

Let me tell you, after a while other countries get less willing to put tools in that toolbox. And there's a great danger that these institutions, when we need them, and let me tell you, right now, we find that we do need them on North Korea and on Iran, will be devalued and we'll pay a price for it. The other point is a larger point, which is the key problem for the United States as a preeminent or preponderant power, is to legitimize its power, to effectively make ourselves attractive to others.

And that, I think, is something that institutions help with. Yes, we pay a price. We're tied down. We're restrained to some extent. But, on the other hand, we have the leverage that comes from having an institutional framework. Compare the aftermath of the Gulf War in '91 with the aftermath of the war in '03. Compare Bush 41 with Bush 43. And look at who's paying the price, what percentages are shared by others, and the problems we're getting now or having now to get others to play a part. I think this illustrates why the devaluation of institutions, which we've seen in parts of the administration, has been a serious mistake.

And then finally, there's the point that, if you look at the way we invest, there's a tremendous disproportion between the instruments we use. Our defense budget, if you count the parts of the energy budget that relate to defense, is close to $400 million-billion dollars. (laughter) That's what happens when you're an academic. You think of these little numbers. (laughter) $400 billion. And our public diplomacy is about $1 billion. And during the ’90s, after the Cold War, we cut it by 30 percent and wrapped up the USIA [U.S. Information Agency]. This is a huge mistake. I'm not arguing that you should spend as much on soft power in the form of public diplomacy as you spend on the military, but 400 to 1? I mean, that seems to me a little bit disproportionate in the way we're investing.

The result of this is that we know how to do some things related to hard power extremely well, as the brilliant four-week campaign in Iraq showed. And there are other things we're not doing at all well. But in terms of winning the war on terrorism, we're going to have to change the pattern of our investments and the way we train people and the way we implement the national security strategy.

LK: Thank you, Joe. Mr. Speaker, any response?

NG: Well, I wrote notes because he covered enough topics. (laughter) To keep with your timeframe, I'll go through them quickly. And some I agree with strongly and some I disagree with, so I just want to make observations. First of all, on the distinction between prevention and pre-emption and how you could have handled the U.N., for example, I'm reminded of Will Rogers' comment in 1917, that he had figured out how to defeat the German submarine problem. He said, 'If you heat up the Atlantic, they will have to pop up and surrender.' (laughter) And somebody said, 'How would you heat up the Atlantic?' He said, 'Aha, that's management. I am merely a consultant.' (laughter)

Given [French President Jacques] Chirac's relationship from selling the nuclear reactor at Osirak for the entire period of the Iraqi regime and given the French one-sided oil deal with Iraq, I can imagine no strategy that would ever have gotten Chirac to agree to a war with Iraq. Now, honorable people can disagree, but I don't quite see how you cleverly get a larger coalition if [German Chancellor Gerhard] Schroeder's trying to survive by getting the Greens and the anti-war vote, and Chirac is trying to be Chirac. It would take a repudiation of Chirac's entire career, which strikes me as relatively unlikely, maybe particularly for somebody who is a Gaullist. Second, it's very hard to explain to a Texan the concept of talking softly. (laughter) I will simply leave the Theodore Roosevelt analogy at that level.

But I will suggest to you that the challenge of U.S. dominance, which none of us fully appreciate yet, is that we are like a 12,000 pound elephant in the world's living room, and we wake up in the morning and we shake our head because we think we're still a cute hamster like we were with Jefferson and Adams, and our trunk breaks five pieces of family china. And the entire planet stares in horror, and we have no clue. And if we don't learn that being this big in every sense, economically, culturally, militarily, being this visible requires a dramatic rethinking of the entire American approach, we are going to be in the same problem Rome ended up with in the Italian wars. If we crowd the entire planet, the entire planet will eventually decide that stopping us is the issue.

This is not a Bush problem. This is an American problem. And it's very deep and it's very real and we really underestimate it. Third, if I could pick circa January of 2002, and I got to replace either Saddam or Kim Jong-Il, there is no question in my mind which one I would have picked, and it's Saddam. And the reason is not the immediate threat of Saddam. It is which of the two events has a larger effect on unraveling our opponents? If we succeed-this is an if-if we succeed in creating a relatively open, relatively prosperous, relatively free Iraq, we begin to change the Arab world. If we succeed in North Korea without great violence, at most we achieve East Germany. And we really need to understand the difference in the strategic effect of the two, not the strategic importance.

I think North Korea is terribly dangerous, one of the two most dangerous places on the planet. But I think that, nonetheless, if I were trying to strategically leverage our capacities that Iraq was a better choice because of its long-term impact on many, many other people and what it does in the region. It's a question of where you think the center of gravity of our threats is.

Fourth, I think, and here I think that Joe's exactly right-and I can't figure out how to explain this in a way that the bureaucracies will get it-the center of gravity in the world we want to create is helping those who agree with us, not killing those who disagree with us. The center of gravity among the Palestinian people is organizing and making effective those Palestinians who cherish safety, health, prosperity, and freedom enough that they're prepared to join us in defeating those Palestinians who value killing Israelis over having peace.

Now, we have no model for doing this in the modern world. We have lots of models in the past. I mean the Hukbalahap campaign in the Philippines in 1898, Central America in the 1920s. We're actually quite good at this when we think about it. We have totally mis-focused. This is a bureaucratic problem, not a Bush problem. We've totally mis-defined the problems. The problem in Afghanistan is not defeating the Taliban. The problem in Afghanistan is organizing everybody who wants a decent future. If you organize everybody that wants a decent future, they'll beat the Taliban. If you run around and spend money trying to defeat the Taliban, you may, in fact, lose the war because you lose everybody in the middle who says why am I doing this? These guys will kill me, and you're in Washington. (laughter)

It's really important. Building a village and all the efforts of the U.S. Marine Corps for a century is dramatically more useful than almost everything we've done in the last three or four years. And we just keep skipping-I'm a history teacher-it's a problem of being an ahistorical society. We keep forgetting our own experiences.

Fifth, soft power is exactly right. Now, here's a simple test for all of you. Eighty-nine billion dollars divided into 25 million Iraqis is how much money? [Senator] Bob Byrd [Democrat of West Virginia], given this problem, would win in Iraq. (laughter) If I could take $3,500 in U.S. dollars in cash, per person, and go to families of six and say to them, there are two teams. This is the team that gets $21,000. And there are the other guys, which team are you on? Do you know how fast you could organize Iraq? But we can't do that. We have to pay for a military, an AID bureaucracy, and an auditing process. So we insist on being bureaucratically stupid and then wonder why it doesn't work.

There was one quote that actually made me a radical on this topic. There was an AID official in The Washington Post who said, the Afghans have to get realistic and understand what our bureaucracy is like, and if they're not prepared to wait the length of time it takes to file an application, tough for them. (laughter) And I thought this is a guy who should be fired summarily so everybody else understands the message. Because it is not the Afghans who are going to lose if we lose. And yet the model in this city today is, could you audit the money correctly? The Marines give away water and soccer balls. It works. The current worry of the Congressional staff is who is auditing the water and the soccer balls. Now this is a society bent on suicide. So, for $89 billion, we put half of it into soft power and half of it into the American military who, by the way, I would not have move very far away from air bases. I'd have really good Iraqi forces with lots and lots of high technology equipment, and I'd have B-2s overhead, and I'd have a simple model. When you get in trouble, we kill whoever's bothering you. (laughter) But I wouldn't have us patrolling very many streets very long because it is exactly the wrong model. And for $45 billion in development and $45 billion in military power, you'll get 20 times further than you will get on the current design, although you might not be able to get it through the Congress.

Similarly on soft power, both the General Accounting Office and a report that'll come out next month by a U.S. congressional commission on information will both report that the current model of the State Department trying to communicate with the planet is a disaster. If you have a democracy, which we believe in, and you have television and the Internet, you had better have an American model of communication that is about a hundred times, I mean this literally-not ten times, a hundred times better than anything we're currently doing. And we are nowhere on that front.

Just two last things. I agree totally with the notion that there's a lack of institutional understanding, and that's part of what I meant about the notion. "Coalition of the willing" is a great phrase, but you'd better have institutions that optimize the number of willing. We should because American is not that powerful. I spent five days in February reviewing the plan in the Gulf. Everywhere I went, what people said to me was the Kuwaitis gave us their biggest port, the Kuwaitis gave us all their airfields, the Kuwaitis gave us a third of the country to practice in, the Kuwaitis at their own expense built a pipeline all the way up, the Bahrainis did x, y and z, the Qataris did a, b and c, the Saudis, for all the complaints, and I'm one of the complainants, did a, b-I mean, you go down the list and you suddenly realize, from 1941 to the present, it is America and her allies who have dominated the planet. It is never America. Even in Grenada we were clever enough to ask six countries to join us, and that's right, not wrong. We should never go alone. We should never focus on ourselves. And we should never think the coalition of the willing can only have an American eagle. And that's a different model, and Joe's exactly right about the institutional focus. And I would just say last that I think is explicitly wrong-this may be a great debate-it is explicitly wrong to take the Bush 1 model, which was build a large coalition and let the coalition define success, which is what happened. I was told at Labor Day, sitting in Riyadh in 1990, we are not going to liberate Iraq because a deal's been cut. Nobody in the coalition wants to replace Saddam. So I wasn't at all shocked when we didn't replace Saddam because that was the deal. And we've got to get a lot-and here's where Bush is right in principle and his bureaucracy is not always right in execution-we should be really clear about the deals we want to organize and make sure that that's the people we recruit. And there's some middle ground between Bush 1 and what we just did that is probably the optimal position, but middle grounds are easier in theory and much harder in practice.

LK: Joe, a quick response?

JN: Yeah, at the risk of agreeing too much with Newt and thereby depriving the debate of a debate, let me just pick three points to pick a slight disagreement on. Would it have been possible if we had waited another month, another six months, to have built a broad coalition or was Chirac irreconcilable? I don't know the answer to that. Jeremy Greenstock, who was certainly in the heart of it as the British ambassador [to the United Nations], says the answer is, it's not that we would have gotten Chirac to have voted for it. We might have gotten him to abstain. It's quite possible that instead of allowing the French to isolate us, we could have isolated the French. If so, you might not have gotten the full U.N. resolution even if he had vetoed. You might have gotten a Kosovo-type resolution, where even though people say there's no formal U.N. resolution, there's a knowledge that this was debated in the U.N., there was a general consensus, and Kosovo had legitimacy. We were impatient and we lost that opportunity.

The second point I might disagree a bit with Newt is on this question of American size and our popularity. The big kid on the block is always going to be resented. Admired and resented simultaneously. There's always a love-hate relationship, but we can do something about the ratio of love and hate by the way we design our policies. And, as some people argue, I won't say Newt did this, but some people say, you know, suck it up, you're just going to have to face it as the big kid that you're going to be unpopular. Well, you know, there's something wrong with that argument because we've been as strong as we were today for the last three years, and our popularity has varied, as I mentioned in the Indonesian case, from 75 percent to 15 percent. That's a big change in popularity, and you can't explain change with a constant. So policies can make a huge difference to how much love or hate there is in a love-hate relationship. And I think that's an indictment of the way we've implement the policy.

And the third point, which is an actually very interesting counterfactual, suppose we'd done North Korea instead of Iraq? I guess the reason I would have focused on North Korea was, it's not that North Korea affects only the Korean Peninsula or affects Japan going nuclear, and that affects China, which is a considerable perturbation in the international system. I worry a lot about North Korean exports. I take seriously this problem of rogue states intersecting with terrorists in terms of delivery of weapons of mass destruction. You know, people say, well, once North Korea goes nuclear, we will interdict them. You know, to get a lump of highly inert uranium out of a country does not require a big ship with a lot of shielding. You can put it in your briefcase and get it on an airplane to Beijing. And then to Tehran. And then to wherever. So I would have put North Korea first. But in any case, we didn't. We put Iraq first, and we are betting that there's leverage of Iraq on the Middle East. Having made that bet, we'd better be awfully sure that we follow through on it.

What I worry about, in fact, is that if you look at the coalition inside the administration, there are what I call the neo-conservative Wilsonians, and there are the Jacksonians. The Jacksonian is a much more powerful populist tradition in the United States, which is you use a lot of force, you kick down the door, you beat up the bullies and you come home. The neo-conservatives actually are a much weaker strand in the American foreign policy, and going into Iraq there was a coalition between the neo-conservative, neo-Wilsonians, and the Jacksonians. Now I think it may turn out that that coalition splits, and it wouldn't be far-fetched to imagine a political advisor saying to the president sometime next July, my God, we'd better take Chirac's deal, declare a timetable, have an election no matter what it is, get some sort of government in there, and just make sure it doesn't collapse before the end of November. If that happens, it'll be a political victory in a partisan sense, but a disaster for American foreign policy in terms of the bet that Newt said we should have taken.

NG: Can I ask one question? I can't resist. (laughter)

LK: I'm supposed to ask you guys, but go ahead.

NG: But I think it's a very important point that Joe raised, and it's one that's worth exploring for a second. I knew how to do Iraq. I mean win or lose, I knew basically we could do Iraq. I don't know how to do North Korea. I mean I really find North Korea a really hard problem.

JN: Right.

NG: So if we had decided, if the president called you, brilliantly having understood your position, the president called you in October of last year and said, “You know, Joe, you know [Defense Secretary Donald] Rumsfeld and [Vice President Richard] Cheney and all those nut cases are just wrong. (laughter) I'm not going to do it. I mean they're too aggressive. I'm not” -don't make me go back and tell Don I said he was a nut case. (laughter) “But by God, let's go do Kim Jong-Il. I'm sick of him, and all I want is a good plan so that by summer Kim Jong-Il is gone.” I mean, how do you do North Korea?

JN: Well, you're right. There are no good options. But, if I had looked carefully at the intelligence and said, there is a real problem with Iraq. I'm willing to use force before I allow Saddam to have nuclear weapons, but it's not quite as imminent as we're making it out to be so I can buy a year or two.

NG: Right.

JN: Let me use that year or two to really put the pressure on the North Koreans, which means I've got to get the Chinese in line. Let me now, instead of saying I won't deal with them, let me now say to the Chinese I will go in to six-party talks, I will put a considerable package on the table, but let me tell you, China, that if you don't make up your mind between your two objectives, which is a stable North Korea and a non-nuclear Korean Peninsula, you're going to lose that. And when you lose that, you've got a nuclear Japan, and guess what that's going to do for your neighborhood? And I would have said I will spend-you know bureaucracies can do about one thing at a time. They can't walk and chew gum at the same time, and NSCs in particular. And I would have said spend that year that you have while you wait on the Iraq issue, and really make a major effort to see whether there's a way to get a solution with the Chinese as the major leverage. It may not have worked, but I would have given that a try. I would have put my bet that way first.

LK: According to this, I'm supposed to take 10 minutes to ask questions, but I'm not going to because you've all been very patient and I want to get it out to you. What I would ask is that when I call on you, wait for the microphone because, as you can see, this is being filmed, and we do want to know who you are and get it all on tape. Tell us your name and your affiliation, if you so choose. You must tell us your name, but your affiliation is up to you. Okay, who would like the first question? Yes, sir.

Bob McNally: Thank you. Bob McNally with Tudor Investment. Anticipating perhaps the second other dangerous point on the planet, I was hoping you could both help us understand the operational differences of your approaches in telling us how you would-what strategy you would advise the President to follow if we stipulate that Iran will not adhere and fulfill the IAEA [International Atomic Energy Agency] deadline to prove it doesn't have nuclear weapons by October 31st, stipulation number one, and stipulation number two, the president has assigned you the task of insuring that Iran does not obtain nuclear weapons. Your strategy please?

JN: Okay. I get to go first. (laughter) You go first so I can knock holes in you because you're going to make good holes in what I say. Let me draw an analogy. When I joined the Carter administration, the conventional wisdom was that the NPT [Nuclear Non-Proliferation treaty] was over. It was shot. The French were selling a reprocessing plant to Pakistan; the Germans were selling an enrichment plant to Brazil. Everybody said plutonium is the wave of the future, and it looked like the NPT was over and that we would see, you know, vast expansion in the number of nuclear states. We created the Nuclear Suppliers Group, which said leave the NPT alone; don't try to amend it, but get a side agreement that enrichment and reprocessing are not normal, that countries will not be allowed to import or export it, and that we will all agree to enforce that. That worked. I think we need something analogous to that with Iran now. We need some sort of an agreement, not to open the NPT and amend it. Opening and amending things is a disaster. But where you get a coalition of friends of the IAEA or friends of the U.N. Security Council or something like that who say that, if Iran will allow not merely the more rigorous inspection, which they're hinting they will do, but will allow us to-will prove to us that they've stopped the enrichment at Natantz or anywhere else we choose to look at-we will guarantee them full fuel supply for their Bushehr reactors, but the fuel has to be reprocessed in Russia. That's part of the contract. So essentially, I would see whether we could do an analogy today to what we did with the suppliers' agreement in the 1970s, plugged this big gaping loophole that's in the NPT framework now. If that doesn't work, Newt will give you the answer.

LK: Let me ask you, before I go to the Speaker, would you place Iran above Iraq and after North Korea? Remember, the president had this axis of evil. Where would you place that in terms of the priorities?

JN: My complaint is North Korea.

LK: Okay.

JN: Which I thought was a real clear and present danger. Iran, I think we have a little more time to work with.

LK: Okay, Mr. Speaker, on Iran.

NG: Well, I mean let me say first off I don't disagree with that. I actually would place Iran a good way down. I think the second most dangerous place in the world is Pakistan, and that we don't get it. You already have a substantial number of nuclear weapons. You have a society moving towards Wahhabism and Deobondism. The current leader of Pakistan happens to be favoring us, but there is no reason to believe he controls the Pakistani Intelligence Service on an operational basis, and certainly no reason to believe that he controls the most radical third of the society. And you can tell that by the fact that they can't police the northwest areas. I mean they physically can't do it. It's not possible. It's a society breakup. So I am very worried about Pakistan. I'm not quite as worried about Iran.

[Tape ends]

[Tape resumes]

NG: ...slightly different angle. I'm not assuming every place; you know, there's always Churchill and Hitler and why is everybody else stupid? But I'd approach it much in the way of the core dilemma of liberal democracy in the ’20s and ’30s. Diplomacy and legalism is fabulous if you have a negotiating partner susceptible to diplomacy and legalism. You can work things out. I mean, we wanted large chunks of Canada. We decided after 1815 that it was a rather-you know, we couldn't do it, and you have a series of negotiations in the Nineteenth Century where we and the British get together and decide on the boundaries because, the truth is, the alternative is too expensive. The thing I found most fascinating, both in a recent chapter written by Nick Eberstadt on North Korea and in this New Yorker piece, was that both of them argue a very simple syllogism, which is the reason the North Koreans want nuclear weapons is the North Koreans want nuclear weapons. (laughter) That all the symbolic cultural negotiating is farcified, what if they just want nuclear weapons? And what if they decided that the survival of their dictatorship and, basically it's a theocratic structure, it's a medieval Korean theocratic structure, and the survival of that system requires nuclear weapons? Now, that's fairly non-negotiable. And what if George W. Bush actually means we won't tolerate North Korean nuclear weapons? Now, at that point, you're at an intersection which is really, really dangerous and really difficult.

Now, let's go to the Iranians. So the Iranians look around, this is the Iranian world view. The Americans are now in Pakistan. It's a fact. The Americans are now in Afghanistan. It's a fact. The Americans are in Turkey. It's a fact. The Americans are in Iraq. It's a fact. The Americans are in all the Gulf States. It's a fact. Other than the places where we have training teams, like Georgia, because there are Americans in all the Caucasian areas, Iran is now surrounded by Americans. Why are the Americans surrounding them? Well, if you saw [Israeli Prime Minister Ariel] Sharon visit New Delhi, you know why the Americans are surrounding them. Because there is an Indian-Israeli-American strategy for crushing Pakistan and Iraq.

Now, the question you have to ask-and this, by the way, is how the '67 war occurred-the question you have to ask is, that being true, which none of our analysts, by the way, take as true because our analysts all sit back and have a cup of coffee and say, we know that's not true, but do they know that's not true? (laughter) No. They're all sitting there going this is a perfectly rational strategy. What is the only thing which would stop the Americans? And it was stated by an Indian general in 1991, who looked at the results of the Gulf War and said, if you don't have nuclear weapons, you can't play. So they're going, I'm not going to try to build F-15s or F-22s or AWACS or whatever. I want to stipulate if we fight a high-technology, high-tempo war, the Americans win. So what is it I can do to stop them? And you only really have two things, biological weapons and nuclear weapons. So all I'm doing is self defense. Now, if the Americans want to withdraw from Pakistan, Afghanistan, Central Asia, Iraq, Turkey, the Persian Gulf, maybe I'd consider giving up my weapons, if they'd also take the Israelis with them. (laughter) But if they insist on not doing that, what can I do?

Now, as a historian, I don't think that's irrational. And I think that's why-I have a simple formula. This process of seeking American security is bigger, harder, and longer than anybody understands. It's bigger, harder, and longer than the administration understands. It's bigger, harder, and longer than its critics understand. And it ain't going away. And my solution to Iran is part of a much larger complex problem, and I agree with Joe. I think the next place we ought to pivot, and we ought to pivot two places, in figuring out how to organize a pro-peace Palestinian faction that will defeat Hamas, and understand, that's their goal. We're going to defeat Hamas, live in prosperity, and tolerate the Israelis. Defeat. Not live with, not negotiate, not chat, not meet on Tuesday, not be close friends. Defeat. Because Hamas is clear; not a single Jew. Now for those of you who aren't historians, not a single Jew is a pretty clear phrase. It's what Hitler said, and he meant it. It's what Hamas says, and they mean it. We should honor them. They are serious. We want peace in the area, we'd better be equally serious. And then I'd pivot and I'd take out North Korea. And I'd take out North Korea-and this is the problem you're going to get back to with Iran-not by attacking them, but by explaining clearly to the world community, a regime dedicated to a level of tyranny that shrinks the average size of its population should not be acceptable in the world of the U.N. Now, what is it the U.N. is going to do about a regime whose policies have shrunk the average size of the North Koreans through malnutrition? And I would make it a world problem, and I'd make it a regime problem. Not a nuclear problem. Because if the regime goes away, the nuclear weapons go away. And if the regime stays, you'll never get security.

LK: Okay, Dan?

Dan Schorr: Dan Schorr, National Public Radio. Can I pursue, for another moment, this question of Iraq, the preferred target? That assumes there had to be a target and it's been discussed as though the best one was Iraq. And has Iraq turned out in the way in which people in this administration-who apparently have had something about Iraq back to 1992 when they were already talking about when and how we invade Iraq-but the way Iraq was then sold to this country was it will result in a transformation of the whole situation in the Middle East. It'll make it possible to have peace between Israel, between Israelis and the Palestinians. It will transform everything in the Middle East. What has happened, in fact, is that now the president refers to Iraq as a central front in the war against terrorism because he made it the central front. It didn't become the central front. And now we have people coming in with passports that say Jihad volunteer from all over the Arab world. Is that what we were supposed to win in Iraq?

NG: Well, I think-I assume I'm supposed to go first here. This will give Joe a real opportunity. (laughter) I mean let me pick up each of your points. First of all, did you have to do something? Look, this is a Churchillian administration. This isn't Stanley Baldwin and it's not Neville Chamberlain. I mean he got up and said there's an axis of evil. Okay, he named three. He could have named five or seven. There was some complaint from the Syrians. They thought they deserved to be on it. They didn't understand. (laughter) But he limited it to three, being a frugal, conservative administration trying to set priorities. (laughter) As a Churchillian administration, he can't say there's an axis of evil and, by the way, we're going on vacation. So you've got to do something. Now where do you focus on doing something? Second, you're asking...

LK: Let me stop you there.

NG: Yeah.

LK: You had to because you said it? Or you had to because of the threat? I think that's...

NG: No. He said it because of an intellectual belief.

LK: Okay.

NG: I mean if you read the speech, the speech is not a political sloganeering billboard speech. It's a speech that says weapons of mass destruction are stunningly dangerous. Dictatorships that hate us are stunningly dangerous. And dictatorships that relate to terrorism are doubly dangerous, and here are three of them.

LK: Okay.

NG: Now, I mean I'm just saying, you can disagree with it, but it is a rational, logical, activist presentation. Now, let's take Iraq. And if the modern age of 24-hour television and instant analysis existed, the Boona campaign in 1942 would have destroyed McArthur's career because it was a terrible campaign in New Guinea and it was a horribly executed effort. And it was a total mess. Now, the reaction of the American people was, beating the Japanese will take a little while. Send more troops. And we did, and eventually we won. I mean, if you were to say to me, given two or three years, who's going to win in Iraq, I have zero doubt. We will outlast them, we'll out-organize them, we'll out-resource them. And in the end, we'll win decisively. This is not Vietnam. I mean, to beat Vietnam, you have to have Ho Chi Minh, the North Vietnamese Army, 30 years of organization, and China and Russia. These guys got none of those things. They've got a looting, raping, pillaging group of torturers who resent the fact that this week has been a bad week because they couldn't rape, loot, or torture. And everybody who is against the campaign, you explain to me how you'd look an average Iraqi in the face and say to them, “You'd be better off if we'd left Saddam in power.” And if you doubt that, look at McKiernan's quote of the man who walked up to him and said, with tears in his eyes, I am so glad you're here because the last view I had of my daughter was a two-hour videotape of a 12-year old being gang raped before they killed her and the warning the rest of my family will follow unless I shut up. So I have no apologies, and I suspect Bush has no apologies. This was an evil regime doing evil things, and people who disagree with that ought to look at the regime. Now, is everything perfect? No. But I think North Korea is a much harder problem. I think Iran is a much harder problem.

And so you've got to start out by saying, the challenge of being a statesman, which Bush is trying to be in the best sense, is doing practical things. Did Winston Churchill manage to create a free Poland? No. But he sustained a free France. And for his generation, that was the most he could get. And I think George W. Bush did a tremendous thing for this planet, which neither the U.N. or our German and French allies would have done, which is to take head on an evil regime which, by any legitimate moral standard, was evil. And any of you who want to argue that Saddam wasn't evil, I'll be glad to debate that anywhere in this country, including a Howard Dean rally. (laughter)

LK: Okay, Joe, you have a comment?

JN: I think there's no disagreement that getting rid of Saddam was a good thing. The question is when we did it and how we did it. My view on it was right war, wrong time.

LK: Are you not concerned that since the intelligence didn't pan out the way we thought, having been a former head of the NIC, that we've now set a new standard of behavior and the Indians can go after one of the people on Newt's list, the Pakistanis, and say just what he said?

JN: That's why I said in my criticism of the national security strategy that we were not carefully guarded in the way we expressed the issue of preventive war. And I think that does create this kind of precedent. Indeed, I think that, even going back to what Newt said about the axis of evil, each of those three problems was as he described it. I don't see that you gain much by lumping them together as a single problem. I think, in fact, you make it harder. And I think the problem for the administration is that that was great rhetoric for a domestic audience in the State of the Union address. It was not great rhetoric for solving diplomatic problems internationally.

LK: Okay, I'd like to...

NG: Can I make one comment?

LK: Quickly.

NG: Just I have talked to no officer who has served in the Gulf who did not believe going into the campaign that there were chemical and biologic weapons and who did not practice routinely getting into their chem/bio suit. And this was not a p.r. gimmick. The entire internal system in the United States and Britain believed-and, by the way, Saddam behaved in a way which reinforced that they had these weapons.

LK: I'd like to get a student in here if I can. Any students have any questions? Going once. That gentleman there. Please give him the microphone.

Anthony Barnes: Good evening, my name is Anthony Barnes from Howard University School of Law. My question is, first of all, you gave a tremendous analogy, Mr. Nye, regarding playing one-dimensional chess on a three-dimension board. But given what we know of the United States, don't you think that one of the reasons they did that was because they thought the kind of empire perspective made them believe that they could do that in any dimension at all and actually get away with it?

JN: Well, there's a danger that if you, as people say, that if you're a two-year-old boy with a hammer, everything looks like a nail. (laughter) And as a grandfather, I know exactly what that means. We invest heavily in the military. We've got an absolutely terrific military. And our military, not surprisingly, did an excellent job. But if you ask, how well have we trained the military for duties after a war, how much have we invested in that, look at the Pentagon's plan to cut down on training for peacekeeping until after Iraq. And then compare all that to what we invest in the budget of the State Department. Or, more narrowly, what we invest in public diplomacy. As a society, we are really Jacksonian in that sense. We like to be tough, to be strong, kick down the door, beat up the bad guy and go home. And we are not investing or training very well to play on all three boards at the same time. And, to give you an example, if you say did the war in Iraq help us on terrorism, well, in one sense, it did. Getting rid of Saddam was a good thing, and Saddam did support terrorists, albeit the evidence for connection to al Qaeda is pretty ambiguous, as the president himself has said. But that's just the top board. You also have to ask, as you use military force in a way which is not seen as legitimate, how does that affect the ability of al Qaeda to recruit on that bottom transnational board? And most of the intelligence reports that I've seen publicly discussed say that the capacity of al Qaeda to recruit went up as a result of what we did on the first board. So we improved things on the first board. We made them worse on the bottom board. Playing a three-dimensional game means to think of both or all three boards at the same time.

LK: Okay. Yes, in the back there.

Dan Burton: Dan Burton with Entrust. And I'd like to ask Professor Nye about his phrase, democratization of technology. Because on the one hand, it seems that that under-girds, almost more than anything else, soft power and the ability of America to coerce and attract allies. But yet, in your latest article you use that to really talk about the privatization of war and, therefore, creating this new military threat that we've got to deal with. So it's a salvation and it's a damnation at the same time, and I wonder if you could comment on the tension between those two?

JN: Well, you're exactly right. Technology is a two-edged sword. I mean you have to be utopian to think that it only helps. It can do some great things for you and some bad things for you. What the Internet and the information revolution has done has spread information to a much wider part of the world's population than ever before in history. If information is power, there are more people on the globe with information and, therefore, power than ever before. From a point of view of democratization, that's a good thing. On the other hand, let's pose that one-tenth of one percent of those people are malevolent or pathological. Before they had this capacity technologically, they were much less effective. They could only kill in onesies and twosies. Now the democratization of technology, meaning the price has gone down so that essentially anybody can enter the game, allows them to have destructive capacities that were once reserved solely for governments. It's like globalization. Globalization's got a good side: trade and investment, which increases incomes overall. And a bad side, which is something like transnational terrorism or the spread of infectious diseases. Technology is not a pure good or pure bad, and policy has to try to change the ratio between the good effects and the bad effects.

LK: Okay. Yes, sir? Right here.

Jim Lobe: Jim Lobe, Interpress Service. For both gentlemen, I want to pursue what Mr. Korb suggested, which is the question of credibility and its impact on pre-emption or prevention on the strategy itself. If it's true that the justification for going to war appears to have been invalid, at least the stated reasons for going to war, and it appears invalid both to the foreign public, to other governments and their publics, and also to the American public, what is the impact of that of the strategy itself and its implementability?

NG: Well, let me answer first. If what you just said is right, it's destructive. That is, if people conclude in the end that our reasons for going to war were not only invalid, but we thought at the time they were invalid, then I think it's tremendously destructive. On the other hand, if the lesson that comes out of this is that a dictatorship which pretends to have weapons of mass destruction should expect us to behave as though they have the weapons they pretend to have, it may be, in fact, very chilling for dictators. I mean I'd have to argue that we end up discovering, as we may, that Saddam literally had no weapons of mass destruction, then you have to look back on the eight or nine months prior to the invasion as one of the weirdest, dumbest periods in the history of dictatorship. I mean, this is a guy whose macho instincts meant that he had nothing. Now, if he genuinely had nothing, why wasn't it easy to say to the U.N., “I have nothing? Inspect everything.” But that's not what they said. I mean, no, we have a nuclear physicist four or five weeks ago who said, “I was instructed to lie.” We find these all over the place. Nobody wants to put them together. The New York Times isn't going to put them on page one right now, but the fact is there was a very large denial and deception campaign, and what will be truly a grand irony if, behind the denial and deception, there was nothing. I mean it will make you wonder about the pathologies of the dictatorship.

But I don't think it's bad for America to say to the planet, you need to understand if we are genuinely frightened, we are going to hit you. And we're not going to go to a court of law. And we're not going to convince a jury of 12 people after the trial lawyers ar