Robert Saladini: Well, welcome, and good afternoon to everyone. My name is Robert Saladini, and I'm Program Officer here at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress. And it's a great pleasure to welcome you to this talk by Derek Chollet and James Goldgeier who, they are speaking about their book, America Between the Wars: From 11/9 to 9/11: The Misunderstood Years Between the Fall of the Berlin Wall and the Start of the War on Terror. Before we begin today, I'd like to invite you all to visit our Web site, which you can find by visiting your favorite search engine. Just look for Kluge Center. Here you may sign up for e-mail alerts about the programs, fellowships and other opportunities that we offer, both here on Capitol Hill and online. In describing the horrible events of 9/11, President Bush once stated that all this was brought upon us in a single day, and night fell on a different world. None of us could disagree with the emotion expressed by the President about 9/11, but as our speakers today suggest, this paradigm shift in our way of thinking or our worldview had been a process for some time, perhaps as early as 1989, on 11/9, the day when the Berlin Wall fell. The world really did change in ways that were incomprehensible at the time. The mirror image of 11/9 and 9/11 wasn't lost on our authors as reflected in the title of their book, and it shouldn't be lost on us. America Between the Wars is the first book that examines this 12 year period as a distinct and decisive era in American history, a book which Henry Kissinger believes offers illuminating insights into the forces that have shaped today's world, and that Richard Holbrooke, former U.S. Ambassador to the U.N. calls, "An indispensable history to the decade preceding 9/11." Again, we're delighted to have both of the authors with us today. Derek Chollet is an analyst and commentator on American foreign policy and politics at the Center for New American Security. He was Assistant to Secretary of State James Baker and Chief National Security Advisor to Democratic North Carolina Senator John Edwards. During the Clinton administration, he served in the State Department in several capacities, including Chief Speech Writer for Richard Holbrooke and as Special Advisor to Strobe Talbott, then Deputy Secretary of State. He is also author of The Road to the Dayton Accords: A Study of American State Craft. James Goldgeier, an expert on Europe, Russia and NATO is a Professor of Political Science at George Washington University and a Senior Fellow at the Counsel on Foreign Relations. He has had appointments at Stanford and Cornell University, the National Security Counsel, the Brookings Institution, the Woodrow Wilson Center, and he was the fifth person to hold the Henry Alfred Kissinger Chair in International Affairs and Foreign Policy here at the John W. Kluge Center at the Library of Congress, and we're especially glad to have him here. And it really is a pleasure to have both of you here today, and I hope you join me in welcoming them both. Thank you. James Goldgeier: Thank you. Well, it's a real pleasure for us to be here, especially since a good deal of the research that went into this book got done here at the Kluge Center, such a wonderful place here. And I had emailed my research assistants who helped me when I was doing my share of this project, and unfortunately, they've all graduated college and moved on, so they were not able to attend. But it's a real treat to be here, just as it was a treat to have been at the Kluge Center. And also, I should also thank, if anyone's here from the Manuscript Division, the Manuscript Division was incredibly helpful for this project with some of the papers that were there that we were able to utilize. Well, as Robert mentioned in his introduction, our goal is to take you back, not to 9/11, but to 11/9, this mirror image, and as powerfully tragic an event 9/11 was, a day, of course, we'll never forget, nor should we, it has distorted how we look back at American history because of this notion that everything changed, and nothing was the same after 9/11. And as we argue in this book, it's important to go back to 11/9, November 9, 1989, and the fall of the Berlin wall, and look at the forces that were unleashed after the collapse of communism and the end of the Cold War because if those forces that were unleashed, they were already there on September 11, 2001. We just -- we woke up to them on September 11, 2001, and so we need to look back and try to understood what happened during those years. You know, what we've had with both 11/9 and 9/11 is an effort at sort of making us think that the years in between didn't matter. We had the famous notion in 1989 that history ended, and then we that had notion again after September 11 that it started up again. And so that's the kind of frame that's out there. And as Robert suggested in his introduction, there is probably no more powerful effort to frame it than by George W. Bush. And in his second inaugural address he suggested that first there came the shipwreck of communism, and then came years of repose, years of sabbatical, and then the day of fire. Now, as someone who spent part of his sabbatical here at the Kluge Center, I'm partial to phrases like "years of sabbatical," but, unfortunately, in this case, it's just plain wrong. And what it does is, it suggests to you, "Well, I don't really need to go back and pay attention to that period. I simply need to know what took place since September 11." So why is 11/9 so important? Well, first of all, it meant the end of having one simple premise to organize American foreign policy around, one simple concept which people could understand the conduct of American foreign policy. During the Cold War, we had containment, and this was a notion that was developed, first articulated by a famous diplomat, George Kennan, who had been stationed in Moscow and then came back to direct the policy planning staff at the State Department. And Kennan came up with this idea that in the face of Soviet communism and the threat of Soviet expansionism that America's goal, America's purpose should be to contain that possible expansion until such time as, because of the bankruptcy of the ideology Soviet foreign policy inevitably mellowed or perhaps the Soviet union itself even broke apart, which, of course, is what happened forty years after he first articulated this idea. And everything we did in foreign policy during the Cold War was seen through the lens of the this U.S.-Soviet rivalry, even issues that were not directly related to the U.S.-Soviet rivalry, trade, for example, with Western Europe or Japan was seen as part of the battle with the Soviet Union. And then you have the collapse of communism and a government that had been completely oriented toward this rivalry now had to find a new purpose after the end of the Cold War. There were innumerable individuals in Washington, D.C., both inside and outside the government, who drew from the lesson of the Cold War that what America needed after 1989 was the next George Kennan. And there were lots of people who tried to be the next George Kennan and come up with that single simple phrase that could replace containment. One of the things that was, I think, most interesting to us during the course of our research was what we found was that even Bill Clinton was constantly complaining to his aides that they hadn't come up with this new bumper sticker for American foreign policy, because he felt that he needed something like that in order to explain to the American people what the United States was all about in this new world in which the United States was the lone superpower after the end of the Cold War. In 1994, the Clinton team even brought George Kennan down from Princeton where he had been in residence for decades as a scholar after his time in government. He was 90 years old, and they brought him to dinner to ask him, "How do we do this? How do we come up with the next phrase to guide America?" And George Kennan's response was, "Forget the bumper sticker. Try for a thoughtful paragraph or two." And this was exceptionally good advice because the problem was, after 11/9, you had a world of increasing complexity, one what wasn't defined by one simple thing. You had a world of globalization. In fact, the globalization that had been underway that was part of the reason why we got 11/9 to begin with. It was breaking down barriers. You had a world in which you had failed states, civil wars, ethnic conflicts. A world in which all of a sudden the rise of Asia was the next big thing. A world in which you were starting to see the pernicious effects of climate change. A world in which you were already becoming well aware of terrorism and the possible proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. Terrorism didn't start on 9/11. There was the first bombing of the World Trade Center in 1993. There was domestic terrorism at Oklahoma City and the Atlanta Olympics, the bombing of the embassies in Tanzania and Kenya in 1998. We had the bombing of the USS Cole in 2000. These are things, certainly at the highest levels of the U.S. government that people were focused on and trying to deal with throughout the period that we describe in the book. And those sets of issues make for a world that's simply not conducive to boiling everything down to this simple phrase, this simple bumper sticker. In 2000, during the presidential campaign, the George W. Bush team made the failure of Clinton team to come up with this new phrase one of the central critiques that they had. They basically said, "The Clinton group, they're too ad hoc. They don't have a single strategy. They don't really know what they're doing in world affairs." And after 9/11, the Bush team came up with one, the War on Terror. This was going to be the clear strategy that could guide America. But of course it was an illusion, this notion that that would be the one simple thing that could guide America. It was even too simplistic a phrase to guide America in dealing with terrorism, as we've learned, which certainly requires some sort of military response. But it's more than just a war. When we spoke with former Secretary of State Colin Powell for this book, he suggested to us the problem with the War on Terror, as he said to us, quote, "The War on Terror is a bad phrase. This is not the Soviets coming back. Let's not hyperventilate." Now, as we suggest in the book, certainly any administration, the new administration coming in in 2009 should have principles and goals. It should have something to say about climate change, about nuclear proliferation, about the rise of China, and so on. But it is going to have to accept the complexity of the 21st century. It will to a large extent be ad hoc, but this doesn't mean that it can't be strategic. [Skip in audio] -- ideas. It's about politics. And we spend a great deal of time discussing the politics of the period that we are writing about, and for that I'll turn things over to Derek. Derek Chollet: Well, thanks, Jim. And I also want to thank the Library of Congress and the Kluge Center for their support of this book. As Jim has mentioned, the era that began with 11/9 and the fall of the Wall was not just a transformational one for doctrine. It was also a transformational one for politics. And our book is -- a lot of our book is about the politics of foreign policy and how the events of these years between 11/9 and 9/11 actually continue to shape the politics of foreign policy today. And what we try to do is explore the interaction between the foreign policy debates that experts and government officials were having and the political debates as they were unfolding in campaigns and in Congress and elsewhere. And it's our contention that, really, one cannot understand the political decisions and arguments about American foreign policy today or the choices that we're facing in the future without understanding the politics and the events of these modern, interwar years. Now, it's interesting, looking back, both conservatives and liberals used the end of the Cold War to try to remake themselves in some way and draw lessons for what foreign policy should look like. Now, for conservatives, 11/9, the fall of the Wall and the end of the Cold War actually created sort of a moment of crisis and disorientation. Anti-communism had been the glue that held modern conservatism together. And without it, conservatives fought bitterly about America's role in the world. And they, in fact, many conservatives during the '90s questioned the role that foreign policy should play in conservatism at all. And we saw conservatives break down, we argue, and say in roughly four camps. The first would be kind of the internationalist perspective. Maybe best characterized by George H. W. Bush, the 41st President, who saw with the end of the Cold War that actually there was an opportunity for the United Nations to work. And the post-World War II system that had never really been able to function properly because of the U.S-Soviet standoff, end of the Cold War, now actually the U.N. could work. George H. W. Bush had been an Ambassador to the U.N. in the early '70s and one of his favorite stops in his career, and he saw that an event in August of 1990, just some nine months after the fall of the Wall, Saddam Hussein's invasion of Kuwait could be the sort of first test for this new U.N. system. And, of course, what he called it was the New World Order. Now, in fact, it wasn't a new World Order he was talking about. He was talking about making the old order finally work. But he took a lot of confidence, I think, the first Bush administration did, in how this new world could possibly work by using that first Gulf War as an example of the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the other great powers of the world standing together in the United Nations to right wrongs and reverse aggression. Now, there was a reaction in the conservative camp that was the opposite of this, and I think that was -- these are probably most characterized by Pat Buchanan who, at the time, emerged as a major political figure within the Republican Party and the conservative movement and who, in fact, opposed George Bush in the 1992 Republican primaries with some success. Now he represented a more sort of hard nationalism, nativist strain within conservatism, and he was consciously wiretapping into a tradition of conservatism that had been alive in the 1950s, but it had been buried in the latter part of the Cold War, represented by Ohio Senator Robert Taft. And Buchanan had sort of revived this "America First" slogan in the sense that with the Cold War over, America could come home. And in fact, when we interviewed Pat Buchanan for this book, he mentioned to us that he was using the "Come Home America" slogan in 1992, and George McGovern, the Democratic Presidential candidate in 1972, whose slogan was also "Come Home America" wrote him a note and said, "You know, Pat, I'm glad to see someone is making use of my slogan." And he wrote a note back to him saying, "You know, we couldn't come home in 1972, but we can in 1992." There was a third strain of conservatives, conservatism during this time, and these emerge, really, in the mid to late '90s, mainly here on Capitol Hill, and these are what we call in the book the contract Republicans. They were those Republicans who were swept into office in the 1994 midterm election that were driven by a lot of anti-Clintonism. They just -- it was sort of a knee-jerk opposition to almost anything Bill Clinton did as President. But they were very suspicious of international institutions like the United Nations, relatively hawkish. And as I said, they pretty much opposed anything Clinton did. And when we interviewed Newt Gingrich, who was seen as kind of the lead revolutionary of the contract Republican class, Newt Gingrich, who is actually an interesting figure in this book because he is fairly internationalist. He was actually somewhat out of step with his fellow Congressional Republicans on international affairs. He was willing to engage with the world and, in some cases, cooperate with the Clinton administration. So he admitted to us that the opposition of many of the Capitol Hill Republicans during these years to Clinton was fairly irrational on foreign policy. And in the fourth group, to go along with the Bush '41 conservatives, the Buchanan conservatives, and the contract Republicans, were the neoconservatives, a group of conservative thinkers and activists who've been much discussed in the recent years. But it's interesting. In the wake of the Cold War, many of the most prominent neoconservatives believed they had won and that there was -- sort of, neo-conservatism had possibly lost its rationale, and they could close up shop. And many of the organizations and political organs that they had created to sort of guide neo-conservatism during the Cold War actually closed down. And in many ways, the story in our book and the story of the 1990s is the story of their reemergence. And many of the ideas that were discussed during those years that maybe didn't get many people paying much attention to them, we saw sort of explode into the open in the days and months after 9/11. Now, for democrats, the end of the Cold War brought another set of lessons. Of course, you know, after Democrats got over their initial fears that the Republicans and George H. W. Bush were going to be unstoppable after the Gulf War -- you remember George H. W. Bush's approval ratings were in the high, 90 percent and higher -- some Democrats, particularly those around Bill Clinton, who was running for President in 1992, gained some confidence that, actually, with the Cold War over and the bitter divisions that had always divided the Democratic Party over communism in the wake of Vietnam, they could be smoothed over, that Democrats and liberals could be unified around a new set of foreign policy issues. And Clinton, in fact, sort of developed these in the 1992 campaign as part of his critique of George H. W. Bush. And among those were the importance of promoting democracy around the world and believing that the United States needed to have a values-based foreign policy. And Bill Clinton, in the '92 campaign, criticized the Bush administration for not doing enough to promote democracy, and, in fact, many neoconservatives who had, of course, supported Republican Presidents in Presidential elections, previously came over and supported Bill Clinton in the 1992 election because of this critique against Bush and the rift within the Republican Party. The second idea that Clinton championed as a candidate and then, of course, as President, was the idea that the global economy needed to take a place of higher prominence within our discussion on foreign policy and that it was sort of the international dimension to his campaign slogan made famous in the 1992 campaign that "It's the economy, stupid." Now, of course, where this manifested most prominently during Clinton's presidency was on the issue of trade. And, of course, Clinton championed several major trade deals, including the NAFTA agreement in 1993. But I think Clinton became, in sort of his evangelism of globalization, was very much something that shaped liberalism and Democratic politics in the '90s, and I think the experience of that, the response to that is something I think many liberals and Democrats are grappling with today. And the third area of, I think, Democrats' and liberals' response to the end of the Cold War is something that frankly I think many Democrats are trying to live down today, which is the sense, there is a perception early on among many of the Clinton team that foreign policy perhaps mattered less and that a higher place of prominence could be placed on domestic issues and that the President himself could be less involved in foreign policy issues and relegate more of that to his senior aides and staff. Now, it is important -- this was actually a view that many conservatives held at the time. I mean, in the book, we recount an anecdote in December of 1993, Dick Cheney who was the former Defense Secretary to George H. W. Bush, someone who, after the first Bush administration had ended, left office as Defense Secretary with a lot of admirers in Washington and around the country. Someone who many people believed, many Republicans, many independents believed was well positioned to run a successful campaign for President in 1996. Well, Dick Cheney gave a speech at the American enterprise institute, a think tank here in Washington, on their 50th anniversary dinner, and it was a room full of a couple thousand conservative luminaries and supporters, and Cheney, in his speech, ran through what had become sort of the usual litany of criticism against the Clinton administration at the time and their early missteps on issues like Bosnia, and Somalia, and Haiti, and Rwanda. But what was most interesting, we found, about his message was what he said to his fellow conservatives. And again this is in December of '93. He tells his fellow conservatives that conservatism needs to engage foreign policy more, that Republicans had been complicit in making the 1992 election about domestic issues and that now more than ever Republicans and conservatives needed to demand a foreign policy President. Well, Cheney took this message on the road in 1994 in the midterm elections. He did a lot of political events for Republican candidates for Congress. And he pondered whether or not he was going to translate that into a run for President in '96. Well, ultimately, he decided not to. He thought that his message that a strong foreign policy President was needed, didn't really get much traction, so he, in early 1995 he announced he was leaving Washington and said he was going to be leaving forever and going to Texas where he was going to head Halliburton. And for us, what's interesting is that sort of image of where Cheney was at that time and where he thought conservatives were at that time is an interesting kind of window into the politics of the moment. And, as I said, Clinton had, in his early years in office had some pretty huge missteps on his handling of foreign policy. Of course, the "Blackhawk Down" incident in Somalia in October of '93, the Rwanda genocide and the inaction to stop that in '94. And it seems to us, in thinking back of this period and the politics of this period and how that evolved, that these early missteps very much cemented a view of the Clinton administration and Democrats on foreign policy, generally, that I think in many ways they are still grappling with, that somehow they were not up to the job, that they were sort of incompetent and that a steadier hand needed to be at the wheel. And I think this was a view that colored conservatives' perception of Democrats on foreign affairs and the criticism of the Clinton administration throughout the '90s. And frankly, it approached their -- it influenced their approach to governing in 2001 and beyond during the George W. Bush years. But when Clinton left office, there is something of a Clinton consensus on foreign policy among Democrats. That consensus was built around the idea that promoting democracy was important. It was built around the idea that globalization was something that was fundamental to global politics and that we needed to deal with in a serious way, and also, importantly, on the use of force. And, you know, many forget that Clinton did use force very successfully in Kosovo, in the Balkans, as well as in Iraq several times during his Presidency. And the Clinton that we know today, the Bill Clinton that we know today as sort of this global statesman was very different than the Clinton who had entered office in '93 in terms of his confidence and his ability on foreign policy issues. Now, I think some of the Clinton consensus, to be fair, has broken down a bit in the last 7 years under Bush where I think a lot of liberals are finding themselves questioning some of what the Clinton administration was championing at the end of 2001, and they're questioning about how much of this, in the future, Democrats should stick to, whether it's on global trade, or whether it's on the use of force or on promoting Democracy. And conservatives, too, are sort of facing their own crossroads. As Jim mentioned, they came into office believing that this narrative of Clinton and the Democrats, generally, that they sort of were not serious enough about strategy, that they were not engaged enough in doctrine, and that what we needed was sort of a clear -- eyed framework to guide America in the world. And that, of course, was the War on Terror. I think there was also a sense that among conservatives, among themselves and, I think, among the press and in the wider public, that conservatives and Republicans were somehow better at foreign policy than the Democrats. That they just -- they knew that they were doing. They had more confidence. They had more experience. I think in many ways that was colored by the by the fact that they were in office when the Cold War ended, and I think they made a lot of good decisions in the latter days of the Cold War, but I think that very much colored the political debate of the '90s and the debates that we recount in this book in that there was a sense that the Republicans never took Democrats seriously on foreign policy and that they were somehow the sort of default stewards of national security. Well, I think right now they're facing a crossroads and many doubts. It's not just about their ideas where conservatives themselves are questioning the wisdom of promoting Democracy and, of course, the War on Terror as a frame, but I think there is also a sense that somehow they have lost their edge on national security, that they are no longer the A team when it comes to guiding America through this very troubling world. And in some ways you could argue that conservatives are facing a "best and a brightest" moment. "The best and the brightest," the famous moniker that David Halberstan put on liberals in the Vietnam generation and how that entire generation of liberal thinkers, the sort of Kennedy generation, had been in many ways damaged, both politically and in the eyes of a lot of foreign policy intellectuals, by the events of Vietnam. I think it's clear that when we think about foreign policy moving forward as it unfolds in this campaign this year and as it would unfold whether or not John McCain wins the presidency or not, conservatives are also going to be facing their own sort of crisis about their own competence in foreign policy based on the very difficult events of the last seven years. Let me just close with one line, final point, and that's what I think is going to be very important in how a lot of this turns out, and it's something that we talk a lot about in this book, and it's the question of Iraq. What we try to do in this book is put a wider lens on the problem of Iraq. And it's quite remarkable, actually, when you think about it, that since the end of the Cold War in 1989, the one country that has probably occupied most of our attention relative to anywhere else, is this country, Iraq. And to us, the correct way to look at it is the Iraq war and the struggle with Iraq is not something that is a post-9/11 event or even a 2003 to the present event. It's something where, actually, our struggle began in August of 1990, that day that Saddam invaded Kuwait. And George Bush's effort to kick him out of Kuwait and then also showed the U.N. working. Iraq and the struggle with Iraq that we had from that day through the '90s, the Clinton administration, and to the day, very much illustrates some of the struggles that we face in this world in making our institutions work and understanding some of the new threats that are out there like the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction. This January we're approaching what we call in the book the third Iraq handoff. The first one was between George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton. The second was between Bill Clinton and George W. Bush. Again, these were -- we were engaged in a struggle with Iraq during these years. The third will come this January. And when George W. Bush turns over to his successor a situation that is admittedly exponentially worse than any of his prior, his two successors inherited. But I think it's important to sort of think about this in the broader context of history. And that's what our book tries to do, not just on Iraq, but many other problems. So thanks a lot, and we're ready to take your questions. I think there is a mic right there if you, there you go. Male Speaker: I was just wondering -- James Goldgeier: Is the mic on? Derek Chollet: Yeah. Male Speaker: If President Clinton had not won the election in '92 or '96, how do you imagine that Republican foreign policy would have been different from Clinton's foreign policy? James Goldgeier: It is something that, in fact, certainly we asked for examples of Jack Kemp who was Bob Dole's Vice Presidential running mate in 1996. As we say in the book, Kemp said, "Wouldn't have been that different. Our policy wouldn't have been that different." I think it's also -- one of the things that's very important in the book is -- there is a document that we uncovered during the course of our research that had been produced by the State Department under then Secretary of State Lawrence Eagleburger that was a memo to incoming Secretary of State Warren Christopher, a transition memo in January of 1993. You know, there's been a lot of discussion about that period about something called The Defense Planning Guidance, which was produced in 1992 and leaked to The New York Times written about in books such as Jim Mann's Rise of the Vulcans or George Packer's The Assassin's Gate. And this was a document, sort of book that was done by Dick Cheney's Pentagon, Zal Khalilzad, Paul Wolfowitz, Scooter Libby, and so on, about how to preserve American hegemony and how to prevent other rivals from emerging and you know, basically how to keep America on top. And really a document focused on how, through fear and intimidation, the United States could maintain its status as the lone superpower after the Cold War. And so there have been a lot of people who think, "Well, based on that document, if Bush had won re-election in 1992, it would have been a very different policy than the policy that Clinton pursued after 1993." But first of all, there was tremendous negative reaction elsewhere in the government to the document the Pentagon produced. In our interview with him, Brent Scowcroft called it kooky. And if you look at this Eagleburger document, which is a 22-page document that basically lays out a very nuanced view of the world, the kinds of problems that we've become so familiar with, you know, how important the global economy was going to be, the problem of failed states, transnational security issues, how the United States needed to be a leader, but needed to work through institutions and reassure other countries as we worked together to deal with common problems. And this was a document that became a must-read in the Clinton administration. You know, there are a lot of documents produced during transitions. There will be a bunch that are produced in December of this year and January, early January of next year, and a lot don't get read. But this one was read, and this one was taken very seriously. And so you can see, you can see that kind of continuity, and in fact, there are others who, such as Richard Armitage, who became Deputy Secretary of State in 2001, who argue for the continuity between Clinton and George W. Bush and say there was a lot of continuity there until, in his words, "Until after September 11, some of the more ideological members of the administration," as Armitage said to us, "came out of their box." So it's one of the things that we talk a lot about is the continuities. But it was great, you know, because we did ask Kemp, "Well, you know, you had all these critiques. What would you have done differently?" There were one or two things here and there, but all in all he basically said, "We would have basically done the same thing." Derek Chollet: If I could just add to that, one thing this book tries to say is in telling the story of the debates within conservatism and liberalism on foreign policy from 1989 basically to the present, is that many of the things that we're talking about today, so, for example, there has been much written about the different camps within John McCain's groups of advisors, you know, the realists setting off against the neoconservatives and the nationalists. What our argument would be in reading and sort of thinking about this history is that, actually. That's a continuation of divisions that really started to form at the end of the Cold War. And that, you know, 9/11 and the War on Terror, the years after 9/11, created, I would argue, an illusion that conservatives were really unified on foreign policy and national security, that as Iraq and other problems had become more troubling and as the Republican Brand, so to speak, politically, at least, has been a little diminished, these fights are sort of re-opening. But they're not new fights, and I think that's the point. They are fights that have their roots back into the response at the end of the Cold War and the collapse of communism, which, again, took away that sort of unifying factor that had kept modern conservatism together for several decades. Female speaker: Thank you for your talk. I'm curious what your feeling is after all the research you've done and with the knowledge you have as to whether the U.S. has backed itself into situation where real cooperation among nations is jeopardized in terms of, for many, many, years or whether that kind of cooperation that we talk about as an ideal is really possible at this juncture and how would that happen again. Derek Chollet: That's a good question. I'll start with an answer in that, again, one of the stories of this period that I think is a theme that touches many issues throughout our book is how the United States acts in the world and does so with a sense of legitimacy that others believe in our power, right? I mean, this was an era in which we were by far the most powerful country in the world. We still are today. How we use that power that others believe it's legitimate and that they will actually support us, right? As I mentioned earlier, George H. W. Bush hoped the U.N. could be the way we would do that, that institutions would be the, that could be the mechanism through which we would be able to cooperate with the world. But as we saw through the '90s, the U.N. is a flawed institution. I think it's imperfect. Even the U.N.'s greatest defenders would admit that. But yet it doesn't mean that we can completely disregard it, right? The Clinton administration struggled quite a bit with trying to use international institutions to wield U.S. power, and in some cases, like the Kosovo war in 1999, they were unable to get U.N. authorization to do it so they used another international organization: NATO. Now, the Bush administration came in, the second Bush administration, George W. Bush administration came in office with the view that maybe the Democrats, the Clinton team and frankly, even the George H. W. Bush administration had cared too much about international institutions, had probably cared too much about the necessity of getting others to work with us, and I think particularly the early years of the George W. Bush presidency were characterized by a view that, look, if people want to come with us, that's fine, but if not, we don't really need them anyway, right? Now, it's interesting, I think, as history has piled up, as events have turned out in Iraq and the general problems in Afghanistan and other sort of global problems that the U.S. can't solve alone have become more apparent, you see even the George W. Bush administration moving back into a more cooperative realm. I mean, the way that they're handling, say, for example, North Korea and Iran are with other countries, with allies. So it may be that we're seeing an opportunity here that actually there is more of a swing back into the place of cooperation and using institutions. James Goldgeier: I would just add to that, and also it gets back to the previous question about sort of differences because I think one big difference from Clinton from his predecessors and also his successors was, as Derek had mentioned earlier, the place that he put the global economy, American economic policy in American foreign policy. He really raised that. And by doing so, by making global economics more important, that helped to create this notion of the need, that there was this interdependence, and we had no choice but to cooperate, and that this manifested itself in a couple of important ways. One was just the role of economic institutions in American foreign policy in raising those institutions. The Treasury Department became much more important during the '90s than it had been previously, and that idea has been since, where so much of the focus, almost all of the focus has been on national security. And so you had things like the bailout of Mexico in 1995, which I'm sure many of you have forgotten, but we went into, did quite a bit of research on and looked into this. This was very unpopular, hugely unpopular. Eighty percent of the American people thought we should not bail out Mexico during it's economic crisis. And Bill Clinton did bail out Mexico, and it turned out to be a huge success. In 1997, 1998, financial crisis in Asia, the Clinton administration was slow, but eventually it did quite a bit to help prevent that crisis from engulfing ever more countries than it might have otherwise. I mean, these are things that help lend a notion of the United States as willing to work with other countries to help stabilize the global economy, which is such an important part of foreign policy, and hopefully we can bring that back. Male Speaker: On the notion of difference that you were talking about, what differences do you actually see between the Clinton and George W. Bush administration on the issues of democracy promotion and free trade? I mean, is there a fundamental difference, soft of, in the thinking, or is it just a change in the actual means in which it's pursued? And in this regard, what I'm really talking about is the continuities of the discourses between Democratic Peace Theory, the way that modernization thesis is understood and the way that, actually, neo-liberalism is actually fairly dominant within both administrations. James Goldgeier: Yeah, so Democratic Peace Theory, which makes the case that mature democracies don't go to war with one another leads you to a policy prescription of, well, we should make more democracies if we can because then we'll have less war. And this was something that certainly Clinton's first National Security Advisor, Anthony Lake brought in with him in 1993. And Anthony Lake gave a big speech in 1993, democratic enlargement, this issue of promoting democracy. And this was something that was certainly major theme in the Clinton years and Madeleine Albright, when she became Secretary of State developed a project that she called the Community of Democracies in order to try to build democracy, but certainly based on our interview with her, she is extremely upset at what she considers the bad name that George W. Bush had given democracy promotion. Because in her view, there is a lot you can do to promote democracy without going to war. And now some people have in mind this notion that, especially Democrats think, "Well, you know, this freedom agenda, it's a George W. Bush idea. It's all about toppling other regimes with military force and building democracy." And that's something that somebody like Madeleine Albright is very upset about. The trade stuff, you know, Bill Clinton was very much a pro-free trade Democrat. He was really trying to push the Democratic Party in the direction of being supportive of free trade. As we know from this campaign, one of his major, what was then considered one of his major achievements was the passage of the NAFTA agreement between Canada, the United States and Mexico, something that got pilloried in this campaign by both Senator Obama and his wife as something that would need to be renegotiated. And I'll let Derek talk a little bit more about what he sees as sort of protectionist sentiment within the Democratic Party, but certainly from Clinton to George W. Bush, very much this, both administrations very much free trade, World Trade Organization is very important, and something that has broken down politically. Derek Chollet: Well, actually, I want to start on the Democracy promotion argument. What's interesting, and I think again, another lesson that we try to detail in this book is that the way the Cold War ended very much influenced the ideas about the potential of promoting democracy around the world. And I think there was this sense, and we actually have seen it implemented tragically in the last few years, that humans' sort of natural condition is to want to be free. Actually, I believe that. But that the way that you would do it, therefore, is you sort of knock out the bad guys up top, and people will rise up, and it will be relatively peaceful and manageable, and I think that's what we saw happen in eastern Europe. I mean, that's a caricature of how it happened, of course. But we saw that happen in Eastern Europe, and many of those who were in the U.S. government during the 1989 to 1992 period, when a lot of that happened, were the ones who then returned into government into 2001 and beyond. And I think we saw, a lot of rhetoric, particularly in the 2003-2004 period about the potential for democracy in the Middle east were ideas that where imported, and we argue, misimported from the lessons from the end of the Cold War. And so, I think it was obviously overconfident and hubristic to believe that it was that simple. But to me and to Jim, that explains some of the policies and sort of lack of attention we saw to, for example, the post-war effort in Iraq, and the idea that we would just be greeted as liberators and whatnot. They were taking the lessons from the end of the Cold War and the fall of the Wall to the Middle East, and you just take out the bad leader and you topple a statue, and it's all going to be fine. On trade, look, trade was never easy politically for Bill Clinton. It was a huge political risk for him, in the 1992 campaign, in support of NAFTA. Getting NAFTA passed in Congress in 1993, and then subsequent trade deals he did throughout the period, whether it was on China or getting the GAT agreement passed, he had to do basically with majority Republican support and then be able to pick off just enough Democrats in the Congress to get enough votes. So it was never politically easy. And of course, we recount in this book the 1999 Seattle WTO summit, and the impact that this anti-globalization backlash had on the Clinton administration and how liberals and Democrats were never quite fully comfortable with what Clinton was talking about on globalization. Well, I think, that the Bush years, in the George W. Bush years, it's been easier for many on the left to oppose it because it's not just opposing the idea of globalization or the idea of free trade, and it's also opposing George W. Bush. Now, there is no doubt, as Bill Clinton and Hillary Clinton and others are the first to admit, the promise and the hopes for trade deals like NAFTA never really turned as well as many had argued back in the early '90s. So the mechanics and the details do need to be reassessed. But I think moving forward, and if we contemplate if Barack Obama were to win the Presidency this November and take office in January, the Democratic trade agenda, the big D, the Democratic trade agenda is an open question about where that goes. Barack Obama has been very clear that he believes that globalization is a fact. It's not something that should be reversed, nor should we even try to reverse it. And that we need open trade, but I think the details of that need to be worked out, and obviously the politics of it are going to remain tricky within the Democratic Party around the country as we sort of observe the effects of the changing global economy more and more. Yes, sir? Wait for the -- Male Speaker: How do you deal in this book with the policy, or I would say the lack of policy, towards the former Soviet Union throughout this period? I mean, you have the astonishing fact that the most tumultuous, strategically important, politically important change in the second half of the 20th century was absolutely totally unforeseen by the largest mobilization of intellectual talent in the history of the human race in the United States, and by extension, the western world. This was totally, completely unforeseen, and, in my view, has never been properly understood what made it happen. How, according to the language of the day, the correlation of forces and the rational actors and all that is supposed to resolve and make change the biggest academic study of the Soviet Union ever made, the ink wasn't dry on the study until it was full of self-congratulatory language, long tributes to foundations that had supported it, and in the introduction it said, "We are so -- it's a wonderful study." We have people from ever nation all points of view and only one thing we all agreed on. There would be no fundamental changes in the Soviet system for the next 50 years. So that's point one. The complete failure to understand and, in my view, or to anticipate or even allow for the possibility of this enormous change and then the total failure to form any policy afterwards in dealing with it, where whether it be -- I mean, the basic policy was to befriend whoever was the leader and have, there is nothing underneath it that's a bipartisan statement, by and large, of what the absence of policy has been. So I don't know if you would agree with my rather categorical skepticism and concern about it, but I would further argue that if you want to talk about missed opportunity, the most strategically important opportunity to really see some form of significant progress as far as democratization was also missed during this period. Now, what were all these people that you talked to, how do they -- do they talk about any of this or do they just assume, if there's any establishment view, and the establishment view as almost always been wrong about that part of the world, do they basically assume that the Russians -- initially, as things got complicated other there, not only was there no policy developed, but there was this sort of falling back on the inertial, what I call the genetic flaw theory, that the Russians were really absolutists, sort of on parole for good behavior or for not causing too much trouble? And the -- there's never been a period in which newspaper reporting of what's actually going on in the country has been so woefully inadequate. So I just wonder how you deal with, maybe you don't agree that there was an absolute structural dysfunctionality [spelled phonetically] across all kinds of ideological lines, which you very beautifully delineate within the American mode of thinking about this, despite fascinating individual initiatives by a lot of people doing little things, quite apart from and with almost no support from the federal government. James Goldgeier: Well, thanks very much for your question. It also gives me an opportunity to thank Jim Billington for his tremendous leadership of the Library and support of the Kluge center, and I would refer you to his brilliant books on Russia as well. I think we should distinguish between the George H. W. Bush administration and then the Clinton administration. I mean, each had its set of problems in dealing with Russia, but they were different kinds of problems. And, of course, the big transition occurred during the George H. W. Bush administration, the failure to anticipate and, I think, even more damaging, even though they had only one year left, 1992, the real failure to make the most of what was then a very quickly closing window of opportunity to help support reform in Russia because things start to take a turn for the worse pretty quickly, and the United States really had been standing by. And, you know, some of the people we talked to, for example, Dennis Ross who had been instrumental at the State Department and working for Jim Baker as Director of Policy Planning Staff expressed his frustration with the failure to create policy. Ross's explanation was that there was just tremendous intellectual fatigue after getting through the Gulf War in 1991. And so you have the big issue of what to do about the Soviet Union and that the there just wasn't the intellectual energy to come up with a major plan for this. I think there was also a lot of skepticism about what Russia was capable of doing. I also have always found there is a, Yeltsin's first, Boris Yeltsin, Russian President, his first meeting with George H. W. Bush in Washington after independence, he had, of course, come previously and hadn't made a very good impression on either President Bush or National Security Advisor Scowcroft. He came to Camp David in early 1992, and in advance of the Camp David meetings, he had asked for a joint statement that would declare that the United States and Russia were now allies. After all, from Yeltsin's perspective, you know, we in the West tend to say, "We did it. We won the Cold War. All that happened was because of us." From Yeltsin's perspective, he had done it. He was the President of Russia who had helped bring down the Soviet Union, and he wanted a joint statement that the United States and Russia were now allies in 1992. And the answer back was, "We're not ready for that. There are still too many problems to be resolved." The Clinton problem was, as you outlined, which was the focus on Boris Yeltsin, the individual, this notion that he is reform. The biggest danger in Russia is that it will slide back to communism or it will go to the fascists, and so the whole first term was basically spent with a group who really wanted to help Russia. I mean, Bill Clinton, Strobe Talbot, Bill Perry at the Pentagon, these were people who really did genuinely want to help Russia, but they became focused on what can we do to help Boris Yeltsin stay in office. He became identified with reform, and I think that that led to a distortion of how to go about supporting Russia. It was a very difficult time. I would say in defense of them that it was a huge intellectual challenge. What do you do to try to help a country of that size during a transition? And I think that it wasn't just a challenge for those inside the administration but also for people like me, political scientists outside the administration, economists. There was a tremendous amount of uncertainty about what to do, and there weren't a lot of clear guides about how to deal with it. But no question that there were tremendous missed opportunities during the decade, although, as we put it, we have a chapter in which we look at sort of the Clinton efforts to bring together Europe, NATO enlargement, the Balkans, and Russia, and for a moment there in the 1990s, it did look like we were on track. Derek Chollet: The only thing I would add to that is obviously the politics of foreign policy towards Russia became very contentious during these years, and the critique that many conservatives had of the Clinton administration was that they were too focused on personalities and too willing to look the other way at corruption and whatnot while Russia became even more brittle underneath. And, of course, it's been much remarked that what's transpired since 2001 and President Bush's close relationship with Vladimir Putin and sort of how that has gone. But the other thing that struck us, and this is one of the actual facts that came out through the interviews that sort of supported the point that we were trying to make about the fact that conservatives, in many ways, sort of didn't, as a matter of history, didn't pay much attention to what the Clinton administration was trying to do on issues like Russia, which is that when the Bush administration came into office in 2001, they had believed that not only had Clinton spent too much time focusing on these kind of flawed leaders, but that he actually hadn't done things like finally bury the ABM treaty, the Anti-Ballistic Missile Treaty, which had, obviously, was a product of the Cold War, but that they saw this as a perpetuation of the Cold War. And they thought, "Oh, we should just get rid of the ABM treaty because we're friends with Russia, and we don't need the treaty to manage the arms between us because we're friends, and we're allies." And, of course, the Clinton administration worked very hard on the ABM treaty with the Russians in trying to find a way that we, the United States, could pursue a limited missile defense system in a way that would not alienate or agitate the Russians too much. And the George W. Bush comes in office and makes one of its highest priorities to dismantle the ABM treaty, which of course, angered the Russians a great deal, which, you know, we were struck. It was almost as though they had never paid much attention to what the Clinton administration was trying to do on things like the ABM treaty. And then, of course, when they tried to do what they thought was right, and they believed in their minds they were really just ending, doing what the end of the Cold War allowed them to do. It actually created quite a bit of trouble that we had with Russia in 2001 and 2002. Male speaker: [Inaudible]. Derek Chollet: Absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Male speaker: One quick final -- I don't want to monopolize the conversation, but I think the, I had in mind, I'm sure all you say is part of picture, but I had in mind a kind of structural fault in American thinking which also emerges from your analysis which I would say is not just belief in the power of economics, but a kind of economic determinism at a time when they were looking to us for some guidance and some help. And by the way, Ronald Reagan never said we won the Cold War. This was -- a lot of his acolytes rush in with these kind of claims. They really were not very intimately involved. But where we had the assumption, never consciously, I think, that the fact that they were having instant market reforms would solve all problems. And this fit in with the Russian idea for, you know, that what was wrong was not economic determinism but the wrong mechanism for economic determinism. So that it really facilitated, because they then tried to rule through unreformed political structures, they led to instant crisis. Whereas, if they had had a constitutional convention, if they had adopted the first draft of the Constitution that was an American draft rather than the second, the final draft that they accepted which was a French version with a very powerful, central administration and few of the checks, really operative checks that the American model would have given them and did give them. The first draft of that was written in the Congressional Research Service at the Library of Congress by the head of the Commission the summer of 1990, and he said to me, "Well," he said, "Well, you know," before he went back to sell it, which he initially had done, and then it got overruled. "We didn't do anything, we didn't do anything to promote the essential things that put the United States together," not that they could have been exactly replicated, but we bought into this fashionable economic determinism which is also operative now, with regard to China, and that is to say, economic growth and the fact that there are a couple hundred million people involved in the world economy means that sooner or later they're going to develop a kind of non-authoritarian form of government. That may be the case, but it seems to me, that was already operative in Russia. Everybody felt comfortable in forgetting about it because they were changing the economy. It was going to be privatized. Somehow it would all work out. Do you think that's a fair statement or not? James Goldgeier: Well, I think that there are structural problems, and I would argue that they are both structural problems in the U.S. government, and they also reflect a problem, again, outside the government and academia between economics and political science. You know, economics, you have these very well developed theories about how you build markets, and you had the Washington consensus in the 1990s about what everybody needed to do to build markets, and within the U.S. government you have these major agencies and lots of people who are able to implement these policies. So you have the Treasury Department and others who in the '90s, people like Larry Summers, who were great economic theoretical economists who were now in power to be able to put their policies into practice. And so you have this on the economic side, and you don't have this on the politics side, on the democracy side. It gets back to the democracy question. First off, you don't have any major agencies in the U.S. government staffed by people with lots of knowledge about how to go about doing this. And outside, in academia and political science, you don't have a lot of contribution. You have studies of democracy, but in terms of theories about how do you go about helping other countries build the institutions to develop democracy? Compared to what there is in economics, and they're too overconfident in the economic side, but still they've got theories, and they've got structures in the government, it's this total mismatch, and I think that helps partly to explain it. That you have people in place who have theories and are in a position to do something, and they're on the economic side, and they go ahead and foist the economic policies on, and you don't have this same thing in the area of building political institutions. A lot of the work gets done by non-governmental organizations, Male speaker: From the title of your book, America Between the Wars, I draw the implication that you would subscribe to the theory of one commentator after the defeat of Bush 41, November of 1992, that it happened because the United States finally had the post-war election that the United Kingdom had in July of 1945 between Churchill and Atley. Would you agree with that or not? Derek Chollet: That's a good question. I think no doubt, for the politics of the time, the end of the Cold War mattered a lot, right? Bill Clinton told his advisors privately during the 1992 campaign, "You know, if the Cold War had never ended, I probably would have no chance of being elected." Because remember, George H. W. Bush, in 1992, tried to make an issue of Bill Clinton's relative inexperience on foreign policy issues, and I think many of those criticisms were not as -- didn't have as much impact because of the end of the Cold War, and there was a sense, there was a mood in the country at the time that foreign policy mattered less and that the stakes were lower in many ways. So I think there is no doubt when it comes to the politics of the time, the end of the Cold War, I mean, it was a postwar election, and it was a, that fact framed very much the problems that George H. W. Bush had within his own party when he had to deal with the rise of Pat Buchanan and his movement during the Republican primaries in 1992. It also had an impact on Bill Clinton and his candidacy. And what's interesting, I think, what often gets lost in the memories of 1992 and the fact that Clinton probably didn't pay as much attention to foreign policy as, certainly, he later did, and probably that he should have, is that Democrats and many of those around Clinton in 1992 and many thinkers outside the campaign on the liberal side had very bold ideas about America's role in the world at the time, and they believed very much in democracy promotion and in promoting this idea of the global economy changing the way it is and changing the way we do things here at home to better enable us to compete in a global economy. That was something that Clinton was talking about quite a bit during the 1992 campaign. So they saw the end of the Cold War as an opportunity, not just politically, but as a matter of substance in sort of how they should govern America as we headed into the 21st century. Yes, to the right. Microphone. Male Speaker: Hi. I'm interested in why you think the concept of enlargement didn't stick in the early years of the Clinton administration. Derek Chollet: Good question. James Goldgeier: Yeah. I think there are two reasons. One, sort of how they went about it, and one, the events that occurred and sort of how they went about it. So Tony Lake gives this big speech in 1993 on Democratic enlargement, and what he had intended was that all the foreign policy principles would be giving speeches around the same time on this theme, and then Bill Clinton would go to the United Nations later that month, and in his General Assembly remarks he would also highlight this theme. And so you'd have this big push that enlargement is, you know, this new policy of the United States. The problem was the other principles didn't really buy into it. Warren Christopher wasn't that interested. He gave a speech on the Middle East, and Madeleine Albright decided, well, her notion was assertive multilateralism, so she gave a speech on assertive multilateralism, and Bill Clinton was much more interested in the globalization stuff, so he mentioned the Democracy, but that was part of it. They didn't do -- in fact, when we talked to people involved in the development of enlargement as an idea, they were saying, "Gee, you know, look at how good the George W. Bush team released in the first term was, in terms of getting the message out." Everybody's on message. They get everybody outside to write about it. You have all the pundits writing about it. You create this big stir. Well, you know, Tony Lake went and gave a speech, and there was a lot of critique about how it fell flat. William Safire, in his "On Language" column in the Sunday Times Magazine said it sort of conjures up notions of this prostate, you know, enlargement. He didn't really like, maybe that's just where he was at the time, but he didn't really like the language being used. And they just didn't really sort of put it together. There were also problems of the events that were taking place at the time. Derek Chollet: Yeah. I mean, I think one of the big problems was as the Clinton administration was trying to come up with that big idea, right, when they were trying to be the next George Kennan and come up with the theme that would sort of tie it all together and make this world that was seemingly chaotic and in which we seemed to be adrift in be more understandable. As that was happening, events were marching along and causing huge problems. So, after all this effort and energy goes into articulating this new theme for American foreign policy, just in a matter of a few weeks the "Blackhawk Down" incident occurs in Somalia. And whatever support they had been able to muster, even with this sort of relatively weak effort in trying to sort of put forth this new image, completely collapsed. What's interesting, as you saw in these, particularly in the early Clinton years, there was almost an obsession with coming up with this theme. And in some ways it struck us. It was almost as though they were seeking a replacement to making some of the hard decisions on what was happening day in and day out. As though, if you could come up with that one kind of containment-like bumper sticker, that it would all get a lot easier. And what's interesting is the Clinton administration evolves. And we think it evolves in a healthy, mature way, which, that over time they become less obsessed with coming up with the doctrine, and in fact, they start to rebuff attempts that those in the press or other politicians had for them to articulate a new doctrine, and they became more worried about just solving problems. And in fact, the most prominent example of this is during the Kosovo War. Kosovo was an unusual war. It was a war in which the NATO alliance went to war for the first time to help end the repression of a minority group in a small province in the country of Serbia. And many around the world, in the United States, Europe and elsewhere, were clamoring for the administration to articulate this within a broader doctrine of American foreign policy. The doctrine of humanitarian intervention is what they call it. Well, the Clinton administration actually actively resisted being sort of labeled, labeling the war this way. And in part they resisted because they didn't want to sort of tie themselves to any further action. They wanted to basically allow maneuverability so if a similar situation popped up somewhere else in the world, by doctrine, the rules of the doctrine they had to intervene. And they, in fact, came to refer to even the word doctrine in the administration as the D word. Now, it's interesting, if you sort of think back to the last four or five years, again, as was mentioned earlier, the Bush administration, the George W. Bush administration comes into office in 2001, believing that this failure to articulate a doctrine was in fact a sign of weakness. So the events of 9/11 occur, and George W. Bush says it's a War on Terror. Well, what we're seeing now is the War on Terror as a sort of frame to look at America's role in the world as sort of falling apart and has lost so much support that they're coming back to a policy that doesn't look as driven by doctrine as maybe their words would say. It's looking closer to an ad hoc foreign policy, what they had very much criticized the Clinton administration for, in which your solution for solving North Korea is different from your solution for solving Iran, and there is no one-size-fits-all answer for anything. And it may very well be, as we think about the next President, the election that's before us and what an Obama doctrine or a McCain doctrine might look like -- and there's no doubt that we're going to see a lot of articles written and pundits on TV talking about the different doctrines the candidates have -- that in many ways, as George Kennan, I think, advised the Clinton team in 1994, the best doctrine is maybe not to have one. And just to be more interested in solving problems. Robert Saladini: Jim and Derek, thank you very much for being with us today. James Goldgeier: Thanks for having us. Thank you very much. [applause] [music] [end of transcript]