thanks thank you all that was such an important session on the intersection between National Security and education and I hope all of us here in this room can the get the message out about this particular topic well we're making poor Bob Gates sing for his supper and he has a double header so I'm going to invite the three people up to the stage who need absolutely no introduction David Sanger who you've already seen a couple of times condalisa rice who of course was Secretary of State and National Security adviser and Bob Gates who of course was Secretary of Defense and the director of Central Intelligence and they are going to stun you with a wide ranging conversation about the world and I have one more Public Service Announcement before they come up there David acius who did such an amazing job with the conversations about the Middle East the man also writes spy novels amazingly I think like 12 of them and he has a book talk that's happening downstairs right after we end this last session so I hope those of you who want to grab a drink and be there can be there now without further Ado Cony Bob and David thank you [Applause] well thank you very much and uh I'm really delighted to uh be here with um two of the most Stellar National Security practitioners I have covered in 30 years in Washington uh I probably at various moments I'll just do a general apology I'm sure I've written a few things here and there I got the odd phone call you know uhhuh always harder from Kandi because it was always more in sadness than in anger I just I just wanted her to yell at me you know no the worst thing you could hear from the press secretary is Sanger just called and he says is it true that but it's so much easier when you're out of office right so so um uh I thought what I'd try to do is focus our conversation a bit to try to sum up uh much of what we have been hearing here over the past um two days about some of the biggest challenges that we're facing and um and try to just see if we can ask uh secretary Gates and secretary rice to put this in some historic um context for us both longer run of US history but also just their time and experience in government so um secretary rice let me start with you you've been um writing and thinking a lot about the analogies to this era um you're not a fan of the Cold War analogies I say as somebody who just put new cold Wars in a title so um but but you have interesting thoughts about why the interwar period uh between World War I and World War II might have some lessons for us so let's start off there sure well despite my advancing age I was actually not around in the period that I think is most like now which is the inner War period um there's no Perfect Analogy uh and we all love to analogize because I think there's a level of comfort when things are uh really chaotic uh have we been there before and uh one of the reasons I think people are attracted to the cold war is in effect we want it and so it's the kind of analogy that appeals but I would say that there are a couple of things about uh the pre- uh War period that are really troubling for me one one uh element is that we are seeing a territorial conflict between the great Powers again uh where uh with China over the South China Sea the East China Sea the Philippines Vietnam uh and of course Taiwan and uh that brings our forces into very close proximity with one another when we think about the Cold War we and the Soviets later on the Russians learned uh how to avoid war and we even had formalized agreements to do it we really don't have that with China uh with Russia of course Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine challenges uh Article 5 of the NATO treaty in ways that we have not seen again territorial conquest and so that's the first element a second element is the kind of weakness of the international order uh and I'll I'll speak to the one that uh I think is in fact most important which is on the economic side the kind of vision of one great big integrated International economy is starting to uh to fail you're seeing decoupling you're seeing reshoring of Supply chains you're seeing uh during Co my PPE my vaccines my travel restrictions and so again a kind of weakening of the international order and then the third uh has a kind of domestic flavor if you will and that's the rise of populism again uh people who felt that they were left out by globalization and uh are now finding their voice uh in people who say uh yes you were wronged by uh those Elites and I often say uh The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse I call them populism nativism isolationism and protectionism and they tend to ride together and again this is something that we saw in the inner War period now I believe we have every reason to believe we can avoid the the problem this time around but even in something like technology we are seeing kind of Zero Sum game in how we think about the technological arms race so I think the cold war is not a particularly good analogy I hope that the inner War period turns out not to be a good analogy either um let me um let me turn it's really interesting because I I think the core of your argument is we're actually in something much more dangerous than we were and and less predictable as you say the Cold War got into a into a run and and later on I want to turn to the question that uh that Walter Isaacson brought up a few hours ago and uh that we've all been debating a little bit which is the Russia China Nexus but that takes me secretary gates to a a piece a really terrific piece you wrote in foreign affairs that appeared at the I think the end of last year and let me just read back to you uh a paragraph that I think you opened the piece with because it jumped out at me at the time you were you wrote it the US now confronts um uh a group of security threats that are greater than any that have been in decades perhaps ever never before is it faced four Allied and agonists at the same time Russia China North Korea and Iran whose Collective nuclear Arsenal could in a few years be nearly double the size of our own and then you went on to say that what had made this particularly difficult was that our own political uh divisions have meant that we haven't really been addressing this in any particular way or even discussing it much with the American people well I think that I mean I I stand by what I wrote the title of the piece by the way was the dysfunctional superpower and and I agree with uh ki's description of the um inter inter War period I I also am disinclined to call it a new Cold War II because I think it's more complicated and more difficult China in many ways is a much more formidable competitor than the Soviet Union ever was and and and has a more Global appeal than than the Soviet Union ever did and I think the the backdrop is our inability to as we Face these threats and and the an earlier panel was talking about nuclear deterrence well we all of a sudden we are going to face um several n first of all this is the first time since the early 1950s we we have faced heavily armed aggressive adversaries in both Asia and in Europe and and they are all and they are heavily armed with nuclear weapons they will have twice the nuclear weapons we have perhaps by 2030 and we haven't even begun thinking about what the implications of that are for nuclear strategy nuclear deterence we're we're talking about modernizing all of our strategic nuclear systems um they're behind schedule obviously but nobody's talking about are we going to use them differently are we going to have a different theory of the case in terms of how we how we deal with that but the real Challenge and really the thrust of the piece was that in the face of these threats we have been unable to come together uh to develop a strategy a view of the way we the a common view of the of what we think the world looks like what our strategy ought to be and and how do we go about implementing that strategy one of the I think one of the critical elements of success in the Cold War was we basically maintained the same strategy toward the Soviets through nine successive presidents both Republicans and Democrats and we're all over the place right now and we've been all over the place for quite a while and so we have become unpredictable to ourselves as well as to our friends allies and adversaries and and we can't get anything consequential done everybody talks about the need to rebuild our military-industrial complex the the need to rebuild these capabilities but but members of the Congress who out of one side of their mouth talk about that then talk about budget restrictions and how and and the fact that that the defense budget will probably stay flat well then what kind of revolutionary changes do you need to be making inside the defense department but more importantly the one of the ways that we were successful in the Cold War was that despite it taking place against the backdrop of the biggest arms race in the history of the world we actually never did go to war with the Russians and so the competition ended up being a compet comptition of non-military instruments of power diplomacy economics technology strategic Communications uh ideology and so on and we are doing nothing in those Arenas um the budgets of of those domestic of those agencies in our country have been uh have been cut back but what's more there's really not much interest and people they're not being made a part of whatever National strategy we have it's all all the talk is about the military the irony is people talked about the pivot to Asia the only real pivot to Asia so far has been military so I I think this is this is kind of the complexity first of all why I agree with ki's u statement but also why I am as worried as I am about the threats that we face and the challenges we Face partly because of the magnitude of the those challenges but partly because of our seeming inability to come together in an agreement on how we deal with that over time so that may be in part because we have not declared as a government uh the challenge the way the two of you have have placed us out and I would I would argue that that's been the case for the Biden Administration and that it was the case for the Trump Administration before it um last week in an effort to try to um at least get clarity on whether or not the government was trying to do something uh on this uh at the press conference that the president held I asked him whether there was a strategy for the United States to get in between the relationship between Russia and China much as Nixon and Kissinger attempted to do with the opening to China and we got a little bit of a wind up of an answer but when when I finally pulled him back to it he said yes we do have a strategy and I'm not prepared to talk to you about it uh which I guess I could understand at least for the covert part of it but you would think much of what you just described from the C from the Cold War were quite public open economic and and uh Communications elements if you were um advising the next president about uh what the elements of a strategy would be to get in the way of the Russia China relationship ship and thus the North Korea Iran one that is supporting it what elements would you think would be the most important what would that look like well the first thing I would say is don't underestimate them but don't overestimate them either uh harmonizing their interests is not very easy uh it cannot be uh warming the hearts uh of a an incredibly ethnocentric xenophobic Kremlin to see China taking the Silk Road in Central Asia again uh it cannot warm the hearts of of uh the Russians to think that the Indians are going to be pulled away because of course China is their real problem and on and on and on and so don't overestimate them either now the other thing is of course they don't have a strategy meeting every Monday and say what are we going to do here they do have a common purpose which is to end the American as they would say it American International order and push the United States out of International Leadership so how do you uh how do you uh counter that well George Kennan had some wonderful words about this at the onset of the Cold War he said we need to deny them the course of external expansion the easy course of external expansion until they have to turn to deal with their own internal contradictions so the first thing is deny them the course of easy expansion that means rebuild military deterrence in a way that Taiwan is not an easy Mark that you can't go past Ukraine uh to the rest of the uh the rest of NATO uh challenge the Iranians uh uh with the ks force and the like so uh military is a part of this but to Bob's point you also have to try to exploit their internal contradictions and we did that very well with the Soviet Union Voice of America was by the way not a propaganda organ all it did was tell the truth and because Russians and Soviet citizens knew that they weren't getting the truth it was enormously powerful one of the most uh interesting moments was when the Chinese government was sending out U bulletins about air quality and at the American Embassy we put up an air quality Monitor and it was quite clear they were lying and so there are simple things that you can do to expose the contradictions and I think one final thing and this is a little bit controversial these days look I I really do believe that these are deeply unpopular regimes uh xiin ping is getting more unpopular every day when you have to use women's day to browbeat women into the idea that they ought to have more babies because China is uh because that's the Patriotic thing to do or when you're Vladimir Putin and you're sending your youth to camps in North Korea really or you're the Iranians and you're uh now putting up some quote moderate because you're really afraid that your own people might Revolt these are inherently weak regimes and so using our instruments of strategic Communications but again keeping open to to these populations I'm a university Professor I want to see as many Chinese students in my classes as possible I even want to stay open to Russian students if I can do it I'd like to see Iranian citizens able to come to the United States because ultimately with all of our problems this is still the place that people would like to live and so these regimes are afraid of their own people we need to continue to work to separate them from their own people but denying them that external expansion means getting serious about the military threat while you work on what our good friend uh Joe NY would have called Soft power great secretary Gates just picking up on that if I had to go back and pick one moment where we could have begun pushing back on Putin because he much more than the Chinese sort of announced what he was going to do I would say it was that day in 20 2007 when you were at the Munich security conference in Putin gave this very fiery speech and said there were parts of uh of Mother Russia that needed to be restored and you stood up and said something to the effect of you'd been through one cold war and you weren't really eager to get into a second one but the message wasn't really received in Europe even here s years later of course he took Crimea seven years after that tried for the rest of Ukraine why do you think we've had such a hard time waking up to where he was headed well I think first of all um there's been an evolution and and the Putin of 2014 was a different person than the Putin of 2004 yep and the 2000 and of 2000 I think I think where this actually where the turn for Putin actually began was with the color re Revolutions in 20034 in Ukraine kyrgystan and Georgia because he thought we were coming for him next that that the CIA that the US was behind these uprisings um and and that and that's when he started putting limits on NOS operating in in Russia and U you know the National Endowment for democracy journalist and starting killing journalists and opposition people and so on I I think that the one clearcut piece of aggression that I me Ki and I were in office when he invaded Georgia and and we pushed back pretty hard but there were limits to what we could do just because of the Strategic location but it seems to me that that the one place where we could have could have and should have pushed back much harder was when he invaded Crimea in 2014 because we had actually been signatories to an agreement in 1994 guaranteeing the territorial Integrity of Ukraine along with the U the UK and Russia if they'd only give up their 1800 nuclear weapons and they did and so we had a pledge from 1994 and in 2014 you know we we would not have reacted milit arily but there were a lot of thing we could have done sanctions and a variety of other measures then to show this was unacceptable behavior and he basically got away with it so secretary r as I read the Republican platform uh that just got adopted when you cut through the capital letters and and much of the other elements of it there was almost no mention of Ukraine as a a place to push back uh and if secretary Gates believes that we should have done more in uh at the time of Crimea um it then raises the question would we end up doing less with the current party that both of you uh were members of you may not recognize all elements of it somebody one of the earlier panels here today noted that China appeared repeatedly in um uh in the JD Vance's speech last night and Ukraine not at all um so has the Republican Party abandoned what George W bush laid out in the in the second inaugural address uh at this point do you think this is just temporary or is this something I think we're in a a different place as a country and I think that those of us who had a particular view uh let me call it a Reagan like view of uh America's role in the world uh I still think it's the best thing do I think it's sustainable uh no and I'll tell you I'll tell you why and it's why we have to start to think um what of the internationalist vision do we need to preserve in order to play the role that we always have which is uh providing a as I called it a balance of power that favors Freedom so what do we have to do um I understand that a lot of people want to focus now just on China but the point that you made about Putin and shishin ping and uh the North Koreans and the Iranians we have to keep driving home that the that credibility is not divisible so what you do in Ukraine is actually going to matter to shishan Ping and I think that's an argument that will carry for even those who perhaps don't want to do uh what we're currently even doing for Ukraine that's the first thing the second is we have to realize that some of these engagements are going to be hard to sustain over a long period of time I don't know if any American president I don't care what his name is or her name is uh whatever that person is can sustain 60 bill billion dollar packages to Ukraine every 6 months and so what now can we do with Ukraine to get to a place where Ukraine has a defensible uh a a reason to believe that they are secure independent and potentially prosperous what does that look like and for a lot of reasons we've been unwilling to talk about that we really can't until the ukrainians are ready to talk about that but what does that mean for territory at some point the War uh which Vladimir Putin stabilized himself he threw mass at it Bob made this point all the time 500,000 Russians have died in this war and he's willing to sacrifice 500,000 more if he has to Ukraine can't do that and so what is the intermediate game here that gets Ukraine to uh secure that is going to be the hard discussion about what is America's willingness to give security guarantees and there I am concern concerned about some of the elements in the party and I think there you're going to have to make the case that uh this you can't just say we're going to stop China and not do something about Ukraine I want to make one other brief point the panel you just had those of us who were internationalists and uh believed in globalization and the integration of China and let's let Capital flow freely and let's let uh Jobs go to the places where it's most efficient uh that was a great macro idea but it had horrible micro effects and uh there are you know unemployed coal miners and unemployed steel workers and kids who can't get a decent education uh who really do Wonder uh why are we doing what we're doing internationally until we do something about the situation here at home until that uh we're confident as Americans again in our ability to access the American dream it's going to be really hard to sell to the American people that we need to maintain our internationalist roles so I feel the connection between domestic policy education good jobs more intensely than I've ever felt it it's interesting because that's DAV could I just could I just pile on on one point on Ukraine on what Ki said and that is how we think about this and and one way to a different way to think about it is what were Vladimir Putin's goals when he invaded it was to conquer the entirety of Ukraine replace the government in keev with a pro-russian government and guarantee that Ukraine would never join NATO or the EU where is he the fact is he has failed in that objective he has in fact seized 20% of the country but you have a pro-western government in power in ke you have the C uh the ukrainians probably with our assistance able to stabilize the Eastern front and and you have ended up he has ended up with a dramatically stronger NATO than he had two and a half years ago countries that are actually beginning to spend real money on defense the addition of Sweden which hadn't joined an alliance in 200 years Finland and so on so yeah we he the ukrainians have not been able to push the Russians back to the Russian border but they have defeated what Putin set out to do well this was a point that President Biden made at the in the opening dinner for uh uh for NATO last week um but let me ask you a little bit about what the what that could look like because what we're dancing around here is at some point we're going to have to have a negotiation that ends this war and uh you made the good point secretary rice that nobody wants to get out ahead of the ukrainians on this but the ukrainians can't raise it because it's politically you know the end of of uh president zalinsky if he starts talking about giving up territory um does an analogy to Korea here work you know if you could have told the South Koreans in 1953 sure there is land that you are giving up here or that you may not have great claim to but in 70 years you'll be one of the you know top dozen economies econom the world you making semiconductors that um the Americans can't make you'd have to stop and explain in 1953 what those semiconductors are right um and that your people would not only be free but you know tourists around the world spending money freely I think they would have taken that deal over the land um how do you get the ukrainians to that point or should we get the ukrainians to that point well ultimately Ukraine has to get it's it's a Democratic Society and uh nobody's going to dictate those terms to Ukraine and I would never say dictate those terms but I would say that we can start talking about the narrative that Bob just outlined and I would add something that recently he mentioned to me you know when the mosa went down as the flagship of the Black Sea Fleet uh something big had happened and the Russians cannot cannot successfully completely blockade the Black Sea which Russians are as used to call a Russian Lake that's a pretty big deal and so uh we just need to start to talk about Putin's aims and what has failed and what Ukraine's future could look like and start to make that future possible I think for instance if you start to think about the rebuilding of ke of har of leave uh you're talking about the center of a new UK Ukrainian economy that will be based on knowledge-based economy that's where a lot of uh coders and software Engineers are they're still working we know companies that still have Ukrainian software Engineers that even in conditions of War are delivering so why aren't we supporting that let's support the Ukrainian defense industry which really is showing signs of being able to do things to sustain itself over time and not just being dependent on the packages we need to start talking about what those American Security guarantees are going to look like because if you add Germany the FG to your analogy they didn't have territorial Integrity for 45 years but both the F FRG and South Korea had something they had an American Security guarantee and so understanding how this package looks for the future we can start talking about those elements we can start trying to deliver on those elements and maybe that then starts to uh get Ukraine to a PO point that you begin to wonder uh at what price and at what cost uh do you wish to not continue this war but with what aims and that's the way that I think I would put it what with what aims now uh what are your aims now in uh in this War I am acutely aware of the fact that we are the last thing between this group and the cocktail hour which is a dangerous thing which is probably a good thing given what we've had to say yeah so I just want to conclude with with one question to each you the same question you which is if over the past 30 years we sort of missed this turn of the Russians and the Chinese coming together of them turning to come up with an alternative system to our own what do you think we might be missing now that a few years from now when We Gather the Aspen security Forum we're going to say we really wish we were paying more attention to spent a lot of time on AI this time I think I should just say first one of my is win the technological arms race right win the frontier arms race in technology and you know why because whatever problems we're going to discuss about Ai and synthetic biology and the dangers they're in we've got to run hard and fast you know why because if we will have investigating investigative reporting we will have Congressional hearings we will have uh whistleblowers about the Chinese will not and so these technologies have got the the democracies have to win the race but David let me just you know me I have to question the premise of the question I would be disappointed if you didn't um I'm I'm I'm not so sure that we quote missed it I think with China in particular we made a bet we made a bet that a country that had a fundamentally different political system could be integrated into an international economy of largely Democratic capitalist States the G7 was all countries that were Democratic and capitalist and we said okay we're we're going to take that bet cuz 1.4 million a billion people uned is not a good idea and for a while the BET worked it worked till xan ping came it worked until xan ping and uh I don't usually do the great man Theory you know one guy mattered that much but you know we used to say you cannot have economic liberalization and political control and Gan ping says yeah you're right I'll take political control and so I think it's not that we missed it I think that we tried for something that I think was the right policy and in the final analysis it hasn't took B and you could say the same about Russia and you could say the same about Russia B I would say that actually it was a good bet because what happened in 2013 our bet was that a richer China would be a Freer China and guess what from the late 1990s till 2013 that was the D China was headed more private entrepreneurs more openness a more open debate the internet getting information all of a sudden disast natural disasters or governmental disasters got reported and people knew about them and so on the irony is it was Xi Jinping who agreed with us that a richer China would be uh a Freer China and that's what he set out to reverse in 2013 and that's what he spent the last decade doing all the steps he has taken inside China economically and politically have been to reverse things that were happening before he became uh the big man in China so my final comment would be sort of looking ahead and it goes back to something Ki said earlier if there's one big thing I think we're not paying enough attention to as part of a Strate y it is her point about the fragility um the brittleness of public support in China Russia Iran and North Korea but the first three in particular and and we have and maybe I've got my old CIA hat on here we have neglected the kind of strategic Communications programs we had all through the Cold War directed the East Europeans and the Russians about what was really going on in their societies and as Ki said even in our covert programs the benefit we had was all we did was tell the truth and they knew it was the truth because they witnessed it every day we're not doing things like that in these three countries in particular Russia China and Iran and we they accuse us of doing it all the time so if they're going to accuse us of of of doing it anyway why not and and I think part of our strategy is getting under the skin of these guys and also getting the word to their people about what's really going on in their countries because we will end up confirming what most of them already know and I think that's a big arrow in our quiver going forward they're trying to do it here so I'm not getting the argument why we shouldn't be pressing back well you have reminded me why um covering you two was such a fascinating intellectual exercise as as well as a daunting one uh and you've reminded all of us here about how to go up 30,000 fet from what we've been discussing each along the day here for the past two days and I think prepared us really well to hear from uh secretary blinkin and Jake Sullivan tomorrow uh about what they've learned in the past three years of dealing with all of this so I thank you both and I thank all of you for the [Applause] evening I'm going use the uh