Carolyn Brown: -- Center here at the Library,
and it gives me great pleasure to welcome you here this afternoon
for a lecture by Dr. Charles Kupchan, who is the current holder
of the Kissinger Chair in Foreign Policy
and International Relations here at the Library of Congress.
The Kissinger Chair is part of a program that was endowed
by the friends and admirers of Henry Kissinger,
and has essentially two parts.
There is a Kissinger Lecture, which is an annual lecture given
by a statesman; tends to alternate between an American statesman
and a foreign citizen, sometimes former Prime Ministers or some such.
And then the other substantial, major part is the Kissinger Chair,
who spends many months here at the Library conducting research.
And as is our habit, the Kissinger Chair, at the end of his tenure,
gives a public lecture, and this is that lecture.
Our speaker this afternoon, Charles Kupchan, is a professor
of International Affairs at Georgetown University,
and a senior Fellow at the Council on Foreign Relations.
During the first term of the Clinton administration, he was Director
for European Affairs on the National Security Council,
having previously done some work at the State Department.
And prior to that, he was
at Princeton University as assistant professor.
So, Charlie has gone from academia into government, back into academia.
And I don't know whether we'll look up some years down the line
and see you back at the head
of some other administration's foreign affairs,
or maybe academia will seem more pleasing.
Dr. Kupchan has a number of books to his credit.
I'm going to start with the most recent ones and go backwards.
The End of the American Era: US Foreign Policy and the Geopolitics
of the 21st Century, Atlantic Security: Contending Visions,
Nationalism and Nationalities in the New Europe,
and The Vulnerability of Empire.
And of course he's written numerous articles,
and you'll sometimes see him turn up on the op-ed pages of the newspaper.
Today's lecture should be of particular interest.
He'll be talking about "Dead Center: The Collapse of Bipartisanship
and Its Implications for US Foreign Policy."
Dr. Kupchan notes there has been a dramatic shift in US foreign policy,
with today's more assertive unilateralismism marking a sharp
break with the multilateral traditions of the Cold War.
Dr. Kupchan will examine why bipartisanship
and political centrism have eroded, and assess the likely impact
on the foreign policies of the next President.
Any of us who have been following the newspapers know
that we have been seeing this over the last --
I guess it was very clearly over the last two weeks
in the various debates about the Iraq war;
we've had this almost incredible split in bifurcation.
So we're looking forward to having some light shed on an issue
where mostly what we see is the heat.
So, please welcome Charlie Kupchan.
[applause] Dr. Charles Kupchan: Thanks very much, Carolyn,
for the very kind and warm welcome, and let me take this opportunity
to thank you and the Kluge Center, Library of Congress,
and your colleagues, from Robert to Mary Lou to Joanne and others,
for what was really a very productive and wonderful stay
at the Kluge Center, which unfortunately is coming to an end,
as my teaching responsibilities have turned back on.
Let me also mention, by way of introduction --
and this is up on the monitor --
that the remarks I'm going to make this afternoon draw
on an article called "Dead Center:
The Demise of Liberal Internationalism
in the United States" that's coming out in the next issue
of International Security, and that article was co-authored
with a friend of mine named Peter Trubowitz, who is at the University
of Texas at Austin, and I want to make sure that he gets credit
for participating, but also that if you disagree with what I'm
about to say, that you direct most of your ire to him.
Carolyn's introduction was a perfect segue for me in that my point
of departure, for the comments I want to make, is,
let's look at what just happened over the last week or two,
with the report of General Petraeus and Ambassador Crocker,
following through to yesterday's defeat of the Democratic bill
that would have put some constraints on the amount of time
that US troops are spending in Iraq.   I think it's safe to say
that we have essentially witnessed probably the last chance
for a bipartisan compromise on Iraq,
and that's because the Bush administration, whether you agree
with their assessment of the situation in Iraq or not,
has laid out a plan that succeeded in peeling away those Republicans
that might have defected to the Democrats to stay firm,
and not to support either a deadline for withdrawal or attaching funding
for the troops to some change in strategy.
And that's why I think it was Joe Lieberman, Senator Lieberman
who said yesterday, it's probably the end of Congressional efforts
to intervene, to try to take control or have influence on the Iraq war.
This outcome is not particularly surprising to those of us who live
in the United States, and especially in Washington,
and I assume many of us do.
And that's because if you watch TV or read the papers,
go out to dinner parties, you will sense that we live
in a very polarized country.
You will sense that the country is more polarized,
more politically charged than at any time in recent memory.
And if you were to sense that, you would be right,
right because studies of Congress, voting patterns in Congress show
that this legislature is more fractious
than any since the 19th century.
And if you looked at public opinion polls, you would find that the gap
between Republicans and Democrats on most issues of foreign policy,
as well as domestic policy, is huge and growing,
with most Democrats basically saying, "This war is a disaster
and we should get out," and almost all Republicans saying,
"We're doing better, let's stay the course."
Now, it's not particularly unusual that there is a gap
between Republicans and Democrats on domestic policy.
There always has been.
What is unusual and worrisome is that that gap seems to have moved
into the realm of foreign affairs.
And from the administration of Franklin Roosevelt
through the administration, at least the first term of Bill Clinton,
politics really did stop at water's edge.
Yes, there were some disagreements about how to manage the Cold War,
about Gulf War I, about whether to bomb Serbia during the war
over Kosovo, but for the most part, Congressmen
and Senators alike put foreign policy into a separate
and somewhat insulated category.   That is no longer true.
In fact, I think it's safe to say that today,
polarization over foreign policy is even greater
than polarization over domestic policy.
A poll last month revealed that 93 percent
of Democratic voters oppose the war in Iraq.
That same poll showed that only 14 percent
of Republicans oppose the war.
That's about as polarized as you can get
without there being no difference, or --
you know, no one occupying the extreme positions.
So what I'd like to do in the next 20 minutes
or so is use these observations about the widening gap
over foreign policy as my point of departure, and now work back
in history to the 1940s, to make the argument
that what we're witnessing is not a passing phenomenon related
to the war in Iraq or the Bush administration,
as is often portrayed, but a much deeper structural shift
in the nature of American politics and the nature
of American engagement in the world,
because I think what we're seeing today is the disappearance,
the erosion, the collapse of the bipartisan moderate center
on foreign policy that was the political foundation
of American engagement in the world from World War II through the 1990s.
The thrust or the implication of that assessment is
that this erosion, the hollowing out of the political center,
the "dead center" as we put it in our title,
is not likely to be repaired when Bush leaves office,
and that we are entering what will be a new era in the formation
of American politics, in which the domestic foundations
of America's engagement in the world will have to be rebuilt anew.
And what I'm going to argue is that the 1990s were, in many respects,
the mirror image of the 1940s.
In the 1940s, geopolitic concerns -- Nazi Germany, imperial Japan
and the Soviet Union -- helped build a bipartisan consensus,
and that consensus was furthered by a set of domestic changes
that I'll come to in a minute;
in particular a new North-South alliance
and an ideological moderation bred
of rising prosperity in the post-war boom.
The 1990s, in contrast, witnessed just the reverse.
American primacy that decreased the incentives for multilateralism,
and domestic changes that undid the important alliances between North
and South, then emerged in the '40s.
Instead, we're seeing the return of regional divides,
the hollowing out of the moderate political center
as globalization creates a widening gap between the haves and have-nots,
and a polarization that is spreading
from the elites to the broader public.
Let me now organize my remarks into two sections.
First, I want to talk about the rise
of what I will call liberal internationalism
in the bipartisan center, and then I'll talk a little bit
about the demise.
So to begin, what was liberal internationalism?
How do we define it?   How do we give it substance?
I think the simplest way to get at it is that it was a double compact.
It was a substantive compact between power and partnership,
that the United States would project its power abroad,
which was radically new after decades of isolationism,
but it would do so in a consensual and multilateral fashion; power,
but power wedded to international partnership.
And it was a political compact in that centrist and moderate Democrats
and centrist and moderate Republicans really,
for the first time in American history,
came together to forge an alliance,
a coalition behind this substantive compact.
And it was that compact that in many respects enabled them to agree
to put partisan politics outside, to leave it at the front door
when it came to the formation of American foreign policy.
And I can't stress enough how unusual
and rare this combination was.
For those of us who lived through the Cold War in the 1990s,
this doesn't sound like it's very new.
Partnership, power, yeah,
that's what we have been doing for the last 50 years.
But prior to World War II, the US tended to either favor power,
as Teddy Roosevelt did when he tried to flirt with formal empire,
and then the Congress said, "We don't want
to colonize the Philippines," or we went for partnership,
as Woodrow Wilson did when he wanted to disarm and to form the League
of Nations, and the Senate said, "We don't like that idea, either."
And then from the '20s to the '30s, we had a stale mate politically;
neither power, nor partnership, but isolationism.
And then Roosevelt was the first person to come along and say,
"We need to pull both the unilateralists and the isolationists
to the center, we need to build an American grand strategy
that is based upon power and partnership and bipartisanship."
And bipartisanship was crucial to the formation
of this centrist coalition and this new brand
of grand strategy for three main reasons.
One is that, as I mentioned, this was a radically new course
for America, and it therefore entailed political risks.
It wasn't very appealing to voters that Americans would be sent abroad,
either in World War II or after the war, to take up posts,
permanent posts, if you will, in Germany
and in other parts of Europe and Asia.
So, too, was the idea of the League of Nations in its new form,
the United Nations, something
that most Americans had much interest in doing.
Keep in mind that the Senate categorically rejected the League
of Nations because they had nothing to do
with compromising American sovereignty by putting the US
in some kind of framework
where others might have some say on what we do.
So for both of these reasons; sending American soldiers abroad
to die, giving other nations some say on our politics,
liberal internationalism was very risky.
And therefore, you needed to have Republicans and Democrats alike say,
"We're going to hold our fire on this, because it's important
to build a bipartisan consensus,
and we're not going to go after each other."
The second is that liberal internationalism,
because it was both liberal and internationalist,
required Congressional approval.
To get the US into the UN, you don't just need a majority,
you need two-thirds of the Senate.
The Democrats are finding that out very clearly now,
when they're trying to deal with Iraq, because you also need
that vote to override a Presidential veto.
And so Congress, even though the Constitution doesn't give it a huge
amount of power in foreign affairs, does give it the ability
to block power in partnership by keeping it
out of international institutions,
and by constraining the defense spending that is needed
to maintain the military forces needed to be sent abroad.
And finally, bipartisanship was key because it meant
that this new strategy had legs, had staying power.
It gave liberal internationalism continuity and constancy.
It meant that it lasted beyond the presidency of Franklin Roosevelt.
And again, this was new, because we were flip flopping all
over the place on our foreign policy before Roosevelt came into office,
because there was no bipartisan consensus
on America's role in the world.
So, what happened in the '40s that made this possible, and is it,
in fact, the case that we see bipartisanship
on the rise during this period?   Could we have figure one, please?
Peter and I have gone through, with the help of Nicole Mellow,
one of his colleagues, and attempted to look at bipartisan voting
in Congress going back to 1898 and up until 1968,
when bipartisanship began
to collapse during the fight over the Vietnam War.
And in fact, we find that beginning in World War II there is a rapid
and stark increase in bipartisan voting that remains through the war,
drops down briefly between the end of World War II and the onset
of the Cold War, another downward blip over the Korean War,
but as you can see, reaches remarkably high
and relatively sustained levels from the 1940s right until the beginnings
of the divide over the Vietnam War.
This happened in part because Roosevelt was determined
to avoid the mistakes of Wilson.   Wilson was intensely partisan.
He wanted to crush the Republicans by pushing the League of Nations
and Article Ten, the commitment to collective security
through the Senate, and he failed to do so.
Roosevelt carefully studied Wilson's mistakes.
He co-opted the Republicans by reaching out to Wendell Wilkie,
the person he defeated in the 1940 election, to sell internationalism.
He appointed Republicans to prominent posts
in the Democratic administration to make them stakeholders
in liberal internationalism.
But there were also other conditions that helped him do this;
one was the presence of a competitor outside, and a competitor
that required the United States to find partners.
We couldn't win World War II or the Cold War on our own.
American power was not enough.   We needed allies.
We needed allies to create a Democratic space
in northeast Asia and in western Europe.
We needed allies for American bases, for our ground troops,
for our ships, for our aircraft.   And therefore, the nature
of the geopolitical threat necessitated this combination
of American power, but American power wedded
to institutions and allies.
And furthermore, that threat induced political discipline.
It helped Democrats and Republicans alike say, "We may differ,
but we need to hang together because this is a matter
of the utmost importance."
At home there were also conditions ripe for the onset
of bipartisanship, and I'll touch on three of them.
One is that for the first time in American history, Roosevelt was able
to cobble together a North-South alliance in support
of a consistent foreign policy.
And the North and the South had disagreed on major issues
of foreign policy from the get go, from the founding fathers right
through the period of Roosevelt.
In general the North was protectionist
because it was an industrializing part of the country,
and it didn't want to have to be able to compete with European goods.
And the South was very pro-free trade because it was an exporter
of tobacco, cotton and other agricultural products.
The North was generally more pro-military than the South,
in part for reasons of its federalist inclinations;
more comfortable with a country that emerged
with a strong political center.
The South, very libertarian, wanted arms to remain the providence
of American citizens and American states, not the federal government.
That begins to change in the '40s, because in part,
the northeast became the new industrial workshop of the world,
and therefore backed free trade.
So the North and the South agreed on free trade.
And the South began to support military spending because a lot
of bases and military industries opened in the South.
And so they said, "Hey, military spending isn't
such a bad idea after all."
And the other change that's important is that Democrats moved
to the northeast, mainly because that's where the jobs were.
And it meant that rather than the northeast being a lockbox
for the Republicans, you began to have a country
where you had Republicans and Democrats residing
in both the North and the South.
Therefore, the regional delegations that were sent
to Congress were heterogeneous; a nice, healthy mix of people
of different political persuasions.
And it's interesting that the most conservative part of the country,
the South, was in the Democratic Party, the more liberal party,
and the most liberal part of the country, the North,
was in the Republican Party.
These are what used to be called the Rockefeller Republicans,
the mainstay of the moderate caucus within the Republican Party.
As I'll come to in a minute, they're gone.
The second change -- and could we have figure two, please --
was that there was a rapid increase in the moderate center in Congress.
And we've measured this by looking at members of the House
and the Senate that vote more toward the ideological mean of the House
as a whole, of the Senate as a whole,
rather than the ideological mean of their party; as you can see,
increases quite strikingly, beginning in the '20s
up into the '40s and the '50s.
And this largely was a product of the post-war boom, and the degree
to which Americans were experiencing a prosperity
that they had not known, probably at any point in the country's history.
And this led people like Daniel Bell, the sociologist at Harvard,
to pronounce the end of ideology.
Another way to put it, it's not the end of ideology,
but the ideological positions that were bred by the haves
and the have-nots began to converge toward the ideological center.
And then finally, we find a similar moderation in the public.
Can we turn to figure three, please?
And that is that the public generally agreed on foreign policy.
Even during the Vietnam War, when you began to see polarization
between hawks and doves,
that polarization did not fall along party lines.
So the Vietnam War made Americans, in general, less comfortable
with the use of force and more interested in diplomacy,
but it wasn't as if Republicans went this way
and Democrats went that way.
The public moved in general as a block, not as a partisan block.
And it was the rise of this moderate center
that helped Roosevelt cobble together, as I mentioned,
for the first time, a bipartisan coalition behind
liberal internationalism.
Let me now turn to the other half of the story.
What has happened to this bipartisan center?
What has happened to Democratic and Republican support
for liberal internationalism?
Why has America become so disenchanted
with international institutions and engagement in the exact framework
of cooperation that it offered to the world after World War II?
The quick and easy answer is because George W. Bush and the people
around him didn't want to continue that policy.
But as I want to argue, Bush and the people around him were
as much a symptom as a cause of the deeper erosion
of the moderate center in American political life.
Let me turn to figure four, please.
As you'll see, bipartisanship on foreign policy began to plummet
in the Vietnam War, and it never returned to pre-Vietnam levels,
in part because the war left scars,
in part because Ronald Reagan was a polarizing president.
But it did climb back in a pretty important way in the 1980s,
as the Cold War heated up again.
And then it really begins to fall off after the Cold War ends.
That's when Republicans and Democrats take their gloves off
and stop trying to keep foreign policy as a preserve
of bipartisan cooperation.
Bipartisanship reached a post-war low in the '94 era,
after the Republicans took control of Congress.
It then rose to some extent in the late 1990s --
largely due to some Democratic gains in the South, but primarily due
to an economic boom -- and then peaked, a post-Cold War peak
with September 11th, but then dropped off rapidly.
And bipartisanship from 2003, 2004 onward has gone back to the '93,
94 levels, and indeed below, as we've seen in the votes in Congress
over the last few weeks and months.   Well, what's happened?
Is this just a passing phenomenon related to the Bush administration,
or is there something more deep, more structural that's taking place?
What I want to argue is that the same forces, the geopolitical
and domestic forces that were at work in the '40s and '50s
and that created this bipartisan center, this compact between power
and partnership and between Republicans
and Democrats has come undone, and the geopolitical and domestic forces
that brought it together have started to work in reverse.
And they have undermined that center that took life in American politics
under Roosevelt's watch, and it was then extended by Truman,
by Eisenhower, by Republicans
and Democrats alike that followed Roosevelt.
On the geopolitical level, the big shift obviously is the disappearance
of the Soviet Union., and the move
from a bipolar world to a unipolar world.
And that created a sense in this country
that we just didn't need partners in the same way that we did before.
We were spending more on defense than the rest
of the great powers combined.   Who needs allies?
Moreover, there was no clear check on American power,
and therefore the incentives
for multilateral partnership dissipated quickly,
as did the incentive for stopping partisan politics
at the water's edge.
The stakes were simply no longer as high as they used to be.
And many people think about the collapse of bipartisanship starting
with Bush, but keep in mind what it was
like in the second half of the 1990s.
Keep in mind that Bill Clinton was a liberal internationalist,
but the Congress that he faced certainly was not.
He wanted the ICC and the Kyoto Protocol.
He knew he couldn't get it through Congress.
He sent the comprehensive test ban treaty to the Hill.
They voted it down, despite his willingness to retract it.
He kept sending ambassadorial nominees
to be confirmed by the Senate.   They wouldn't even consider them.
So the catfight had already begun well before 9/11,
9/11, you might say, should have restored a sense of unity,
a sense of bipartisan cooperation, but it hasn't done so.
And I think it's curious why that has not been the fact.
Maybe we could talk a little bit about that in the Q and A.
But I think that part of the problem is
that terrorism doesn't play the same way that the Soviet Union did.
It is sporadic and elusive; we don't know who to fight.
We don't know who to go after.
It requires bureaucratic coordination so that the FBI,
the CIA, the Treasury are talking to each other,
but it doesn't require mobilization.
We are not being asked to go volunteer.
We are not being told to go build airplanes
on the factory production lines.
We're told to go about our life as usual.
The battle against terrorism requires multilateralism,
but only in a narrow sense; law enforcement,
freezing assets, sharing intelligence.
But when it comes to military, the use of force,
we don't need several divisions parked in western Germany
in alliance with our NATO partners.
Most military operations against terrorism
that are successful are covert, are surprise, usually carried
out by one country, maybe with help from another.
When Israel gets hit with a terror attack,
the United States is not flying air cover when it retaliates.
When the French have fought terrorism
or the British have fought terrorism,
they generally do it alone.   It's the nature of the beast.
Internally, similarly profound changes have been taking place,
in many respects undoing the emergence of the center
that occurred in the '40s.   Yes, part of it is Bush.
He has embraced a governing style quite different
from Franklin Roosevelt.   Roosevelt made the creation
of a bipartisan center one of the top priorities.
Bush, in many respects, had exactly the opposite goal.
He was told by his advisors to engage in wedge politics and to play
to the party base, and he has done so.
But that cannot explain this deeper erosion of the moderate center.
And for that I think we need to look, number one,
at the return of regional divides, undoing the North-South alliance.
Not creating a new North/South divergence,
but creating a new separation in America's regions;
the blue/red divide, if you will.   And the biggest change here is
that the Republicans now have a virtual lock on the South.
And therefore, they occupy what politic analysts call "the big L,"
those states running from the mountain west,
south to the southwest and east into the southeast.
The Democrats, meanwhile, tend to occupy the northeast
and the Pacific west; some of the states in the Midwest
in the Democratic column, although they tend to be swing states.
But what this means is that there is a return to an America
in which geographic divides
and political divides again run in parallel.
The most conservative part of the country is now part
of the most conservative party.
That means that the Democrats do not have to tack to the center anymore,
because they don't have a large conservative Southern presence.
As I mentioned earlier, the Rockefeller Republicans used
to pull the Republican Party to the center.
They were a powerful block within that party.
They're gone.   Finished. There aren't any.
Or maybe you could count them on one hand.
To the degree that there was a moderate caucus
within the Republican Party, it was eliminated in the 2006 midterms,
when most moderate voters voted for the Democratic candidate
because of the war in Iraq.
And we therefore see the two parties moving in opposite directions.
It's hard to find Republican representatives from New England.
It's hard to find Democratic representatives from the South
and mountain West, although we're getting some flux there.
But what that means is that regional delegations are now
pretty homogenous.   What that means is we're returning
to the geographic political polarization reminiscent
of pre-World War II America.
And we're seeing military spending also play a role in that divide;
the northeast has lost its interest in high defense budgets,
in part because military bases
and military industrial complexes have left the northeast,
and tend to be in the South and in the Sun Belt.
So, too -- could I ask for figure five, please --
have we seen the precipitous erosion of the moderate block in Congress.
Again, using the same statistical methodology,
we've measured how many people occupy the ideological center
in today's Congress.   And the answer is, not very many.
And we attribute this to a number of different factors.
I would say probably the most prominent among them is
globalization, and the degree to which it has created a growing gap
between the haves and the have-nots in American society.
That's why the Democratic Party seems
to be backing away from free trade.
Didn't get a lot of attention in the press,
but certainly it was a very important event a couple
of months ago, when Bush lost fast-track negotiating authority
for free trade agreements.
A second change, I think, is the erosion or the passing
out of a generation, the World War II generation;
people who fought in World War II.
In the 1970s, 75 percent of Congress had served in the military.
Today that number is below 30 percent.
Ninety percent of Congress has been elected after 1988;
they will not have been in office during the heyday
of bipartisanship during the Cold War.
And I think this is part of the reason that we're seeing erosion
of the bipartisan spirit.
The Lee Hamiltons, that generation is tending to retire from Congress,
and they are not being replaced by a younger generation
that has the same experience of scientific
and bipartisan cooperation.
Other factors that are likely playing a role are redistricting,
which give incumbents very little incentive
to take moderate positions, because they don't need to;
because their districts tend to have voters only
of their own political persuasions.
And I think it's safe to say that the media has clearly played a role
in the polarization of American politics, becoming more
and more combative as they all struggle
to increase time and advertising dollars.
Finally, figure six, please.
This polarization among the elites has moved into the public.
And as I mentioned earlier, Democrats and Republicans are
at opposite ends of the spectrum when it comes to the Iraq war,
and not just the Iraq war.   This key compact between power
and partnership no longer enjoys bipartisan public support.
In the 2004 election, we found that most of the supporters
of George W. Bush, 70-plus percent believed
that military force is the best way to fight terrorism.
Kerry supporters, Democrats, believed in equal numbers
that diplomacy is the best way to fight terrorism,
and that excessive military force only worsens the problem.
So you see the two parties moving to opposite extremes
on this key question of whether we should be using power or diplomacy.
And I think, somewhat worriedly,
we are seeing higher temptations toward isolationism
than at any time since World War II.
Amid the impassioned political debates of the post-Vietnam era,
only 36 percent of Americans believe
that the US should mind its own business
and focus on the home front.   That number is today 52 percent.
And it is particularly pronounced among 28 to 24-year-olds,
with 72 percent of that age bracket arguing
that the United States should end playing a leading role
Let me end by gazing briefly into the future,
simply to say that if we are right that the erosion
of the political center is not a passing phenomenon associated
with the Iraq war or the Bush administration, but a deeper trend
in American politics, then we are headed into uncharted waters.
And I would say that perhaps the main challenge facing the next
President of the United States will be to restore political solvency
to a grand strategy that no longer enjoys bipartisan political support,
as we are seeing almost every day in Congress
and from the Presidential candidates.
As Walter Lippmann wrote in the 1940s, when he worried
that there would be no bipartisan center as soon
as World War II ended, "When a people is divided within itself
about the conduct of its foreign relations, it is unable to agree
on the determination of its true interest.
It is unable to prepare adequately for war or to safeguard its peace.
The spectacle of this great nation which does not know its own mind is
as humiliating as it is dangerous."
Lippmann's words were not particularly prophetic
for the Cold War era; I worry that they may be all too prophetic
for where we are heading after the next election.
And in ending with a few thoughts on how to bring American politics back
to a political equilibrium, I would simply end
with the following thought: I think that if there is going
to be the restoration of political solvency,
it will come from an American grand strategy that entails less power
and less partnership; that the US is today overextended --
clearly in Iraq, but beyond Iraq.
That will mean more reliance on other countries
and international organizations for help,
it will mean using the military to fight against terrorists
that are terrorists and identifiable as such, but using democratization
and pluralism, not war, for the broader challenge
of bringing stability to the Middle East.
It will mean more pragmatic partnerships rather
than formalistic alliances, because it seems to me we are not going
to be in an America in which the Senate passes
with two-thirds gusto the building of a whole new set
of international institutions.
And I think politicians are going to have to be very shrewd in trying
to put together working coalitions behind key foreign policy issues;
environmentalists on the left and evangelicals
on the right behind fighting climate change.
Immigrant groups on the left with big industry that want low wage jobs
on the right, on immigration reform.
Democrats committed to international institutions in principle allying
with Republicans who see them as a way of shedding burdens to try
to rebuild support for multilateralism.
But the final thought I'll leave you with is that this kind
of more judicious and selective engagement in the world seems to me
to be the type of grand strategy calibrated to the problems
that I see our country facing ahead.
And those problems are the collapse of bipartisanship;
the rise of a party system that is again polarized on geographic
and ideological lines, and a likely inward response to the Iraq war,
not unlike that which occurred after the Vietnam War.
I think a correction is coming in this country.
I think it's inevitable.
And it seems to me that as I mentioned,
the key challenge facing the next American President will be
to find a grand strategy, yes,
that meets the country's geopolitical needs,
but I think far more importantly,
that restores the political solvency needed
to sustain a coherent national strategy.
Thank you.
[applause] I would welcome your comments, questions, participation.
Let me mention that there are some copies of the paper,
some advance copies floating around.
Robert, who is standing there, has some, so if you'd like a copy,
please take one on the way out.
Sir? Male Speaker: [Inaudible] future, that things might change.
What I'd like to ask you is whether you think a bit more focus
on the threat -- that is, what we're up against with terrorism right now,
if we consider that a priority for now.
And I'd like to go back a little further than your analysis.
I live in Williamsburg as a retiree.
My first post was in the Middle East before Africa, so I follow that part
of the world, particularly Saudi Arabia.
But back in the late 1700s, early 1800s, before we had a government,
if you don't count the articles of Confederation,
our sailors were being picked up in the Mediterranean.
This was by the nations
in the [unintelligible], not the Middle East now.
We were paying one-quarter, I believe, of our federal budget
in tribute to the Barbary pirates.   The country was very divided,
even in the same administrations, including Jefferson's.
There was great division.
And a lot of people just said, "Pay them.
We don't want to fight them."
And we didn't have a Navy to fight them with.
And a little bit analogous to the last few years,
our allies that we have now in Germany and France didn't exist.
The Europeans, including the British, were quite content
to let our people be oppressed or imprisoned.
So I wonder if going back that far, when the country was very divided --
and in fact, I think the Middle East helped us get a constitution,
because some people in the Federalist Papers and that area,
they became very excited about this
and didn't want our people taken up any more.
And we came together, and we created a constitution.
We created a strong US Navy.
And pretty much alone, we went over there and fought back.
And then things changed for us.
Do you think this might be a path -- back to my original proposal --
a better analysis of the threat?
I don't think a lot of people understand we're at war.
This is a very nebulous thing, this war against terrorists.
And I think if we understand the threat better,
maybe we'll get the change that I think you want,
and we'll pull together and defeat this next problem.
Dr. Charles Kupchan: I think that's a very perceptive interpretation
of the problem, because we don't have a good public dialogue
about the nature of the threat,
nor do we have a constructive public dialogue about the best way
to get that discussion going.
Because of this polarization, we tend to have the extremes, right,
with the Democrats saying, "Shut Guantanamo"
and the Republicans saying, "Expand Guantanamo,"
and one party saying the war is going swimmingly, and the light is
at the end of the tunnel, and the other saying it's a disaster.
And so I think that we desperately need to kind of clean
up the strategic discourse and try to get our arms around the problem.
But, you know, it is, I think,
intrinsically a very difficult problem, more difficult
than if we had a state adversary.   We know where the state is.
We can find it.   We can contain it.
We can bomb it, if we have to.
Even the Barbary pirates, we knew who they were.
They had ships.   We could go after them.
We could form alliances with areas that were threatened by them.
And we can do some of that with the problem of terrorism.
But it's also a deeper sociological challenge.
So I don't want to say that there is a silver bullet.
This is a generational problem.
I think the key, though, is for us Americans
to keep our heads screwed on.   The British, they had attacks.
The Spanish, they've had attacks.
They seem to take it with more equanimity.
Yes, September 11th was horrific and shocking, but let's be smart
about how we deal with this.
And I would also welcome your general invitation to think
about the future by going back further in the past.
If you were to say to me, you know,
"What period in American history might be most informative
about where we're headed?"
I don't think it would be the Cold War.
I think it would be pre-World War II America, maybe the inter-war period
where we have allies, but it's more contingent.
Maybe a world in which America isn't present everywhere
in the same way it is today; in which China, Russia,
India become more capable players.
And we have to get used to the fact that others need
and want seats at the table.
So I would join you in saying let's look further back
in American history, to see where we may be headed.
Please? Male Speaker: Could I pose a very basic question, primitive,
almost, that we are facing a threat of terrorism, violence,
the violence related to terrorism,
and that's the immediate threat that's seen.
I think it's minor compared to the uneasiness the leadership
of this country feels, or any thinking people feel
about the bigger problem of being overwhelmed,
economically, in the world.
We're at the pinnacle in terms of power, economic power.
Military power, obviously we have that,
and that has proven to be inadequate.
It does not make us safe, it does not allow us
to do what we want to do in the world.
I mean, it's pretty clear that we have to have some kind
of more comprehensive approach to power, and given the fact that we're
at 300 million, which we pride ourselves,
the growth of our population -- we're 300 million, that's a lot --
but that's only one-third, one-fourth of China's population?
India's population?   One-fourth?
That we are only 300 million, and could it be that the thing
that could bring us together is the recognition of the fact
that we're only 300 million in a world which is much bigger,
and moving technologically and scientifically at a pace
which will match ours; that taking care
of that 300 million is the first and most important thing we should do;
making certain that internally, everybody feels
that there is a nation mobilization, that we need everybody
of the 300 million to survive and prosper and continue
to lead the world, and we're going to take care of everybody.
And the divisions that are really taking place that are most dangerous
in terms of the -- Wall Street does not care about the workers
on the bottom, and they will outsource to workers in India.
Some of those kinds of things are the things that we need to deal
with if we want to come together on basic policy,
whether it's foreign policy or domestic policy.
There is a need for a unity based on the understanding
that we need all 300 million, and if you throw in the immigrants,
12 million to 300 million, we need all 312 million, you know,
in order to really survive and prosper and carry on the building
of the American constitutional democracy as the model in the world
that it should be, and maintain our leadership role.
Dr. Charles Kupchan: I think one of the remarkable characteristics
of the United States, and why even though this talk --
I would not call this particularly uplifting and optimistic --
why I think we may well get it right and get past this problem,
is this is a remarkably resilient and innovative country.
And unlike most other industrialized countries, we're still growing.
And we're still growing mainly
because we open our doors to immigrants.
And, you know, the European Union, for example,
which tends to be growing about one percentage point lower
than the United States, historically, people say, well,
"The economies, they're sclerotic, they don't know how
to pull it together, the wages are too high, taxes are too high."
The main contributor to the difference in growth is immigration.
We just keep bringing people in.   We integrate them, and it works.
And so there, you know, I think there is hope.
But at the same time, I think
that the US is not addressing just those social issues,
socioeconomic issues that you're talking about.
And it seems to me that as I mentioned, the gap is getting worse
with hedge fund managers and others getting enormous incomes,
and then the average American dealing with wages
that are either stagnant or have, in fact, dropped in real terms
over the last few decades.
And even though corporate profits are rising rapidly,
historically American workers are benefiting
from those corporate profits at the smallest rate in American history.
And so I would agree with you that these issues are getting conflated;
that the war isn't going well, we're not sure that America is trusted
and admired any more, and there is a sense of dislocation at home.
And it's very difficult to disentangle those two sources
of our national polarization, because I think
that they are so closely intertwined.
Carolyn, did you have a question?
Why don't you wait for a second for the microphone.
Carolyn Brown: I find myself wondering
if we haven't been also hurt by our own language,
and I wonder what you think about the characterization
of the terrorist threat in terms of the war on terrorism,
and wondering if the language that's used in England and France and Spain
and other parts of Europe, who you said managed to deal --
I don't remember your exact words.
Treated less dramatically -- Dr. Charles Kupchan:
More equanimity or something.
Carolyn Brown: With more equanimity, right.
If some of it isn't the language we have chosen,
which then exacerbates our anxiety and reactivity.
Dr. Charles Kupchan: I think that there's no question
that the language and that the appropriation of language
for political purposes has not served the country well,
in the sense that calling it a war on terrorism, I think, confuses
and misleads more than it does mobilize.
In fact, it does create almost this schizophrenia in the American mind,
because we are constantly told that we're at war, but sort of we're not,
and I think that's kind of the confusion.
At least for the average American we're not.
And, you know, we don't have conscription.
A lot of this war is sort of being put on a credit card,
and so in that sense it's so distant from our lives.
But it's also, I think, part of the reason that there is a disconnect
with our allies and our -- I wouldn't call them enemies,
but countries with which we don't have a long history.
They think that the US is thinking about it in the wrong terms.
And I think that the government, US government has tried to move
in a better direction in terms of the language that it uses.
It has tried to get away from the war analogy.
And I think also that the administration has done a pretty
good job of trying to make sure that it doesn't portray what it's doing
as a clash with Islam, or to do things that end up alienating
and threatening the Muslim community here in the United States.
And that's actually quite different than in Europe,
where despite the rhetoric,
the actions that have taken place have led to growing disaffection
and suspicion mutually between Europe's dominant population
and its Muslim immigrants.
So at least from that perspective, the US has handled this pretty well.
Male Speaker: Thanks for your presentation.
I mostly enjoyed it, and I look forward to reading your article.
While listening to your presentation, I was, however,
wondering -- you jumped from Vietnam basically to the 1990s,
and it seems to me you left the 1970s
and the early '80s outside the picture.
I was wondering whether some of those changes you have seen
that produced the end of bipartisanship can be traced back
to the 1970s, end of prosperity, political realignment,
rise of the Sun belt, and several challenges, both domestically
and internationally to American primacy,
leadership and so forth and so on.
If that is the case -- I'm a historian of the 1970s,
and I believe this to be the case -- if that is the case, well,
the period of bipartisan consensus seems to me quite limited in time;
it goes from 1940, '45, to 1965, '70,
and it seems to me it has rested upon very exceptional
and unique circumstances, most of all,
the existence of a very strong threat,
unique threat to American security,
and in many ways the American identity.
And if you take a long term picture, foreign policy in the history
of this country has always catalyzed and often exacerbated partisanship
from the Jay Treaty to war with Mexico, and so forth and so on.
So I was wondering what your response
to this kind of objection would be?
Dr. Charles Kupchan: I think there is no question --
and maybe we could put up figure number 654 for a second,
if you would -- two more back --
that the story does begin in the '70s.
That's when the consensus cracks, as you can see here.
The Vietnam War is going on,
and you begin to see a secular downward trend, and then it sort
of spikes down in the early '80s, even below domestic policy.
But then it starts going up again.
And as I mentioned in the lecture, it never goes up back to the levels
that it attained pre-Vietnam era,
but it reaches a reasonably steady state in which it is still higher
than the debates over domestic policy
through the end of the Cold War.
And so it's a murky picture, I would agree with you on that.
But I think the evidence would suggest
that with the threat perception that reemerged in the 1980s
with the Reagan presidency, that you get a reasonable amount
of restoration, and that it doesn't collapse in a secular way
until the Cold War comes to an end.
And, you know, Peter and I went back and forth and back and forth
as we were working on this paper, which is really doing more work?
Is it the threat, and as long
as there is a threat there will be bipartisanship,
or is it the domestic?
And, you know, I'll give you my hunch,
is that the domestic is 60 percent and the threat is 40 percent,
because we've had times in American history
when there had been a clear threat, such as the 1930s.
But we didn't build a bipartisan consensus
because the domestic landscape wasn't ready.
Similarly, I think you could argue
that 9/11 should have created a threat environment
in which we returned
to the bipartisan center, but it didn't work.
And that's why I think that at the end of the day, domestic conditions,
regional divisions, the erosion
of ideological moderation are doing somewhat more of the explaining here
Male Speaker: [Inaudible] that the deterioration
of the middle class increased polarization.
Would you address the effect of globalization on the concept
that you indicated, that we're facing a potential period
of isolation?
It would seem that globalization would push against that.
Dr. Charles Kupchan: You know,
I think that the globalization cuts both ways, if you will.
It has two faces, or at least two faces.
I think we tend to think about it in too glib a fashion.
And in particular -- I don't want to sort of go after individuals,
but you know, Tom Friedman is, to some extent,
the prophet of globalization.
The world is flat and we're all in this game together.
And on the one hand, that's true.
And the United States is more integrated
into the global economy today than ever before,
as are many other countries.
But the effect of that globalization depends on what's running
through these big wide digital pipes,
and when there is good stuff running through them: "Hey, this is fun.
Let's do this some more."
But as we saw in the late 1990s, globalization, when things go south,
can hurt much more than it helps.   And so I'm someone who thinks
that globalization is more geopolitically neutral,
and that at bad times we will try to cordon ourselves off,
and at good times we will open ourselves up.
And I also think that we are witnessing, to some extent,
a backlash against globalization.
That's why you're hearing more protectionism,
especially from the large swing states in the Midwest,
which have experienced the greatest job losses
because of outsourcing and deindustrialization.
I'm starting to sound like Lou Dobbs here, which worries me a little bit.
But you know, I think if there is to be a turning inward,
in my mind it is more in a geopolitical sense
than it is in an economic sense.
It's very difficult for me to think of the United States kind of pulling
in its tentacles economically.
It's much easier for me to think about it pulling
in its tentacles geopolitically.
And, you know, it may not be politically correct to say this,
but, you know, terrorism doesn't always invite going out
and chasing the bad guys.
Terrorism, at times, gets people to pull in their horns.
It got the British out of Palestine, and Aidan arguably
out of Malaysia as well, eventually.   The French left Algeria.
So it seems to me that at some point we may say
to ourselves, "You know what?
Maybe we're better off coming home than chasing bandits
through the alleys of Baghdad and the mountains of Afghanistan."
I don't necessarily think that's going to happen,
but it's completely conceivable to me that our politics are going
to head in that direction.
Please. Male Speaker: You mentioned that the media is one
of the largest factors in creating this wedge.
And I think that's really important, and I just wanted to see --
I don't know, has there ever been a historical precedent
for the role the media is playing right now?
And if so, are there lessons to be learned from that?
And if not, are we kind of going
into an unclear path with the media as well?
Dr. Charles Kupchan: There are some citations in the paper
to scholarly studies of the impact of the media
on political polarization, and so I would send you to those studies
to get some statistical analysis.
But speaking more impressionistically,
I think that the digital age and the explosion of information
on the Internet, on television, newsletters, is good and bad.
On the one hand, it means that we do have an enormous amount of access
to information and news in short order.
On the other hand, it means that we tend to narrow our views.
And let's say in the '50s and '60s, Americans tended to get their news
from Walter Cronkite, and it tended to be kind of centrist
and not particularly political.
Now you tend to go to the Web site that you like, or you go to Fox news
if you're tilting to the right, or MSNBC if you're tilting to the left.
And so there is an extent to which the digital age is,
even though giving us lots of information, creating a world
in which that information is narrower.
I think also that -- and this is a somewhat different point,
and it's again very preliminary, because we don't have good evidence
on this -- that the digital era is one of the reasons
that we are seeing the return of regional divides.
And the logic would be the following:
that in the industrial era, Americans had to move for jobs,
because jobs were usually located at a port, near a mine, at a riverhead.
And that created this demographic mixing that led
to the North-South alliance; that meant that suddenly you had lots
of African Americans and Democrats living in the northeast.
To some extent we are witnessing the reversal of that,
because in the digital era you can live where you want to live,
not where you have to live.
And so, conservative Americans who aren't so comfortable living in,
I don't know, the northeast, are moving to South Carolina.
Our inner cities are now tending to be populated by lower income,
many of them immigrants, because the upper income levels,
more of them white, are moving to more affluent suburbs.
And all they need is an Internet connection; you don't need to live
in the inner city anymore.
So my hunch is -- and again, this is preliminary -- that on this level,
too, on the demographic level, we're seeing this red/blue divide,
in part because the separation of workplace from where you want
to live makes it easier for people to move to areas of the country
where they feel more comfortable.
And that makes us more homogenous locally, more divided nationally.
Male Speaker: You seem to look back with a little wistfulness
that what pulled us together and allowed for a center --
at least one of your points was we had a common threat of Hitler
or Stalin, and Osama bin Laden does not play like Hitler and Stalin.
A further point that you made was that we can't really, therefore,
retain any lessons from the Cold War period.
Though there is a kind of lesson that Ian Shapiro has suggested,
and others have thought about, that Kennan's proposal
of containment was better than the policy of either appeasement
or supremacy in relationship to the Soviets.
And one could argue the same thing with regard
to our relationship to terrorism.
But containment requires self-containment,
and it requires thinking through how we define ourselves as a nation,
and that seems to me is what's crucial in thinking
about this problem of a consensus.
Are we first over others; the supremacy approach,
first apart from others; the isolationist approach,
or first among others; that is,
are we to move towards being a republic or an empire?
And it seems dealing with that question of national identity
and the understanding of our national role may be a way
of finding a way in which America can recover a center.
Now, if there is a need for a threat, never you mind.
The problems connected with huge inequities in wealth
and distribution of wealth across the world may produce the kinds
of problems which will require nations
to work together to deal with.
The housebreaking of corporations, international corporations, again,
is something that may require partnership amongst the nations.
But that would be to think of ourselves
as a republic seeking partnerships, and not simply answering the threat
of a supreme evil by the solution of empire.
Dr. Charles Kupchan:
A very thought-provoking question and comment.
I don't want to sound wistful for the Soviet Union.
I think that we're all better off not living in a world
in which there is a clear, state-based threat,
and nuclear annihilation following from it.
But it is also the case, just empirically speaking,
that that did help us pull it together politically.
I would share your hope that we could find a way
to pull it together politically in the absence
of that particular existence of another, or in the existence
of the threat of terrorism, which likely will be
with us for quite a while.
And I think that you hinted at what's required to do that,
and that is change the narrative, deal with the question
of American national identity.
Stop talking about threats and start talking about opportunity.
And occasionally that happens;
you'll see a candidate go out and talk about that.
But usually they get pushed back to talk about Pakistan and al-Qaeda,
because that travels a little bit more politically.
But there is no question that we, as a nation, have a lot of sorting
out to do, and perhaps ought to have a national dialogue about --
you know, I think one of the things that we are not,
and we know we're not, is an empire.
And one of the reasons that I think Iraq has not gone well is
because we're not an empire, either constitutionally or spiritually.
And therefore, when we tried --
whatever the initial motivation for the war was --
to sort of run it in an imperial fashion,
we didn't do a very good job.
But what it means to be a republic now, how to recover that sense
of self, in particular how to recast American national identity
in a country in which a fourth of this nation will soon be
of Hispanic background, a third of the nation by the second half
of the century, will require us to be flexible and innovative.
And one of the things I think I would add as a final thought --
and this I think is particularly true for the Europeans
on this general question of immigration --
I think we hear too much, "They need to be like us.
They need to assimilate," as opposed to, "Well,
they will also change us."   We will become something new,
as new waves of immigrants come into the country.
And maybe that kind of narrative about pluralism, about change,
about a new identity, about openness to the world rather
than being closed to the world will help us stimulate the debate needed
to get us past what appears to be a deeply rooted,
rather acrimonious moment of American polarization.