a quaker since then i've been very active in the course of peace in lectures and through demonstrations demonstrations particularly against the drone command center in  been very outspoken in print and on t v about the failure of our foreign policy and we could not have a better informed speaker today than the current he is george george washington university and he's currently the professor of government and public policy at the college of william and mary and it's very good of you to make the trip today from virginia to enlighten the school and to supporters in the cause of peace so please give a big welcome and i've as i was telling richard earlier really been struck by the colossal apathy amongst the american people that on counter everywhere i go whether it's michigan texas iowa california or whatever and the ignorance and so when i come into an audience like this and have it pretty much dispelled it's very very encouraging especially from a local assemblymen and senators and others who seem to be so well informed i noted that you had dr andrew bass of it as a speaker recently we had andy downing women marry for our forum on the all volunteer force last month and andrew  proud to say i knew he would do it blew our audience away with his more strategic and general appreciation of where the empire are is headed and needless to say there were a lot of people who left their puzzling and perplexed as to how we got to that point or are at that point but i think andrew is right when he says the empire is and anyone who thinks we are in in par is simply historically naive we are an empire here we can argue about the kind of car we are whether it's commercial democratic human rights all those things that we like to think about it as being is really irrelevant if what you say is that the empire are is in trouble deep trouble in november of two thousand and fifteen i had the opportunity and as an academic i'll tell you why this opportunity was so incredible later to go into the roosevelt room and confront the president general paul eaton and myself and a couple of folks that organization veterans four hundred thousand strong so surely they were the reason we were really there to thank us for the help that we had given the administration over the course of the previous two years to keep the congress not to positively do things with regard to the iran nuclear agreement except by indirection to keep the congress from the railing the agreement that's what was going to happen that indeed might be what's going to happen already anyway but the president wanted to thank us for our work in helping him in that regard the president started  his remarks to us which were supposed to last about fifteen minutes with the following sentence and the remarks lasted for forty five blew me off my chair because i teach this as an academic and i never thought i would hear a sitting american president admit to this certainly not to people like us the raid in the roosevelt room for basically a publicity stunt he said there is a bias in this town toward war now when i recovered my equilibrium and began to think why is he saying this to us is he speaking to john kerry who was sitting immediately to his left and was then you may recall advocating for troops on the ground in syria is he speaking to himself is he speaking to all and i  concluded within the first two or three minutes that i think he was speaking to all of us from the look on john kerry's face what he was saying was not all that acceptable to the secretary of state either but he went on to say at least superficially after seven years in the office but i know fundamentally because for fourteen years i've taught it studied it had over four hundred students do case studies on it on two campuses and that was preceded by teaching it for six years in the war colleges of the armed forces of the united states and that is that we are a nation today d'tre whose reason for existence is to make war and if sixteen years in a row of war is not enough to prove that to the average american citizen i do not know what is and with no end in sight i might point out so how did we get here it's a long story started in one nine hundred forty seven with harry truman the end of the cold war the end of the biggest war we'd ever follow world war two in the beginning of the cold war and entirely different state building effort that some very bright people whom i would compare historically to those people in philadelphia who wrote our constitution in that hot summer in terms of brilliance and concern for the country and what they did was they tried to craft a state building effort that would at the same time it protected us from what they thought was an existential threat known as the soviet union and a poisonous ideology called communism at the same time they protected the very things that had gotten this to the pinnacle power in the first place our freedom our liberty and our democracy and by and large they failed and they fail for a number of reasons certainly not because they were intent on doing what they were doing whether they were ferdman every stop james forrest all harry truman or a host of other very brilliant men they were mostly minute that time they didn't fail because they didn't want to succeed they failed because what they put together an evitable e grew to be an empire of war an empire of war that is now so desperately searching for an equivalent to what it had during the forty plus years of the call war that it is making russia into an enemy once again it found terrorism which it discovered on the nine eleven and nurse mightily for the past few years in adequate to the task in the long run and so now we are desperately searching for another opponent china looms large in that search but russia looks like it used to and so is a very comfortable place to go now what are the influences that president obama at least touched on but that as i indicated didn't seem to have the intellectual grasp even though he'd been there in the ivory tower for seven years and had been confronted with these influences what are the institutional other influences that are doing this to us well the first one is the one that dwight eisenhower warned us about when he left office in one nine hundred sixty in the famous speech that most americans could at least talk a little bit about where he named the military industrial complex complex but he gave a much more poignant speech in hundred fifty three which no one seems to remember in that speech he detailed what it was going to take for the next seven or eight years of his presidency in order to get everybody on board the cold war effort and that meant not just the people but also the armed forces and the beginnings of the national security state and what he said was this is no way of life at all not a need true since it is humanity hanging from a cross of on this is a five star general the hero of world war two the architect arguably of much of what we did in the european theater of operations and he is saying that we're building a cross of our own upon which we're going to hang ourselves most americans don't understand we did not even have any military contractors as it were from hundred seventy six until nineteen forty it was world war two that made us go massively to private industry to build weapons and we have been on a bang ever since we are the greatest arms merchant the world has ever seen and if you think that when i was sitting there is chief of staff of the state department and i had two hundred shares of lockheed martin and when i did my final disclosure of financial disclosure form i didn't take those away and sell them immediately and you think that that wouldn't have had an influence on me maybe you might be right but think about people who have thousands of shares of the number one defense contractor in the world think about people who have shares and right beyond and see those fifty nine cruise missiles headed for syria think about people who understand right now that your air force is running out of p and has just told industry that it has to gear up for millions and millions of dollars perhaps billions of dollars more of production of cruise missiles and so forth and you begin to understand that this is a massive influence on the propensity of this country to wage war these people also spend millions of dollars on our senators and our representatives and influencing their views what's the second reason the second reason is the fact that the congress of the united states in the most massive act of cowardice in the history of democracies has abdicated the war power to the presidency wholesale  richard nixon was actually rather dumb to veto the war powers resolution because what the war powers resolution did was say to the executive branch here you go we know you're going to go to war anyway just report to us when you do in oh by the way for we don't like it after a few days we might drop the purse knowing that vietnam had proven you're not going to drop the purse maybe ten years into it and one hundred thousand casualties and fifty nine thousand dead you might dry up the purse but you're going to take the money away from troops in the for you'll not when they're in danger you're going to continue that money coming so what that public law now did was say to the president wage war whenever you want to and all this business of passing passing authorizations for the use of military force a minced to the india a every year and so forth is nonsense the congress has no intent whatsoever of resurrecting its constitutional war power it wants the president to do it it's the best of all possible worlds for the congress if it goes well it can cheer in whole parades in washington as it did after the polls first gulf war if it goes badly they can jus here and they can say the president is wrong and so forth and so on this is a wonderful world for the congress so we have no legislative check anymore on the war powers what's the third reason referred to already in here today it's called the all volunteer force it's called drones it's call high technology it's call no skin in the game for three hundred million americans it's call mr president do what you want to whenever you want to do it because we really don't care last year last year we spent one point two trillion dollars on national security don't let them food you into telling you that it's six hundred billion for the defense budget it's one point two trillion for the national security budget that's nuclear weapons in the department of energy that's the intelligence budget that is in defense department eighty five percent of that intelligence budget now over one hundred billion dollars that's one hundred billion for eight hundred installations around the world that your military purchases on that's the one fifty account at state minuscule but nonetheless part of it and that's the veterans administration account and now growing hugely because of the four and a half million veterans we've created and it's homeland security isn't it homeland security it's all part of the national security budget and i'm just encouraged that you've got this program going with regard to nuclear weapons because frankly i think they're the most dangerous instrument in the world today and i think what we're doing with russia right now is going god forbid to perhaps prove that you may not know but the last couple of years the major exercises by the russians don because they fear nato and they fear in particular are what they think is an advantage  guided munitions their exercises have featured and now it's been incorporated in their doctrine use of small yield nuclear weapons to blunt nato when it uses its advantage we had a conversation last year at the center for naval analyses with some of their leadership do you really think we asked that this won't be escalate tory you know we don't look at it is being asked to tory we look at that as being offsetting your advantage in conventional munitions well let us assure you that it is and we will nuke you back and that's being frank ting candid about it this is very dangerous what we're doing resurrecting russia when russia still position possesses a for middle of a of nuclear weapons is simply stupid and yet it seems to be what we doing the one the one thing that this republican agreed wholeheartedly with donald trump and that's saying something because i don't agree with much with regard to was his opening or attempt to open to russia if we don't talk to moscow soon and moscow doesn't talk to us and we don't come to some kind of modus vivendi with regard to a number of issues in the world not least of all ukraine syria afghanistan where russia is now playing with our forces over there the way we played with theirs with the m after nine hundred seventy nine yes they are doing that any of your military commanders who are over there will tell you that if we don't start dealing with them if we don't start talking we're going to be in another cold war and i predict it's going to be hotter than the former one and it might feature nuclear weapons this is probably outside of climate change and that's a long term existential threat the most existential threat we confront not isis not china but russia because of the nuclear weapons we could talk all day long about china china doesn't want to war china wants to bury its economically remember khrushchev those o well that's what china is aimed at and they don't want to war that last thing they want war is a war they simply want to bury a signal honestly and by the way if you look at the figure slightly and the projections they darn well might do it this is the most phenomenal increase in economic strength in the shortest period of time especially considering such a massive population and territory in the history of the world before china korea distinction the only country so far as we know in modern history that went from being a debtor nation to being a creditor nation in less than a generation or china has made the korean miracle and  sent the taiwan miracle look pale in comparison when you put it against one point three billion people and what they've been able to achieve and really if you look at it closely in terms of real measurements of the economic strength like for example purchasing power parity china's already the number one economy in the world so yes there are other threats out there but china is not about to use nuclear weapons and we're not i hope about to use nuclear weapons against them but in europe it's a different situation i call your attention back to berlin the real crisis is my students have pointed out in case study after case study in that time period was not cuba cuba it was riveting it was thirteen days it was telegenic it was submarines in aircraft carriers and so forth and it was  overflights and all this but cuba was never strategic to either side either side could have ultimately backed down as khrushchev ultimately did and we know now from the archives that both sides really back down berlin was different berlin was fundamentally strategic the g d r was hemorrhaging people so fast that moscow knew if it didn't stop that hemorrhaging it would lose east germany we acquiesced and watched in helped actually the building of the wall we helped build the berlin wall and we did that because we knew it war constructed if that war put up we were probably going to confront a nuclear war in the heart of europe because we knew the russians would never give up the g and would go to nuclear weapons to preserve it and we knew that we would never give up west berlin and thus germany and we would use nuclear weapons much more serious crisis that took place over a long hot summer and so doesn't get the attention that cuba did but that's what we're looking at again in europe we're looking at the possibility of creating a situation in europe where the division is so strong the fear is so strong the politics of fear is so strong and so manipulable that we wind up with russia as the number one enemy that we have to fight and what are we doing with regard to our allies who might join us if we did have to do that fight well lately it looks as if we're trying to do putin's job for him and destroy the nato alliance and drive our allies away from us that's not all trump's fault however this is been happening ever since my president george w bush it's been happening ever since he essentially told the german chancellor that time for her to go f himself and colin powell had to sca fischer who was then the german foreign minister aside and say you let's go you and i have to keep the transatlantic relationship together this is serious we have to keep it together but part of this is the warp in move of just every day relations it's the wharf and woof of every leader in europe now being not born during the war or before the war but being born after the war and not seeing the war is the seminal experience that prevented previous leaders like me to ron and cole and even margaret thatcher saw it as instead they see it as a different world altogether and they see and that world a renegade a renegade superpower a superpower that can no longer be trusted to a superpower that's no longer as angle of merkel said reliable why is prime minister abi in japan trying desperately to grow japan up into a normal nation why is he trying to sell arms on the world market why is he trying to grow the japanese arms industry why is he trying to make tanks and airplanes and ships and sell them to the rest of the world and participate in global military operations because he doesn't trust us anymore that's one reason and how would you pan do with regard to nuclear weapons i'll tell you how they would do in eighteen months maybe twelve some experts say japan could be a full up nuclear country with missiles ships airplanes everything they have one of the most sophisticated nuclear technology industrial bases in the world would they do that could they do that it would probably take some really leadership where we ever seen that in the japanese history before this is not a positive development in east asia north korea north korea the mo the only thing that president  this point that resonated in my heart was i'll go to pyongyang and i'll talk to kim jong il get over there mr president you know this is not something you want to play with i've done the war games of exercise fifty twenty seven fifty twenty eight fifty twenty nine and whatever else they've got now can't be much different from that and i will tell you right now you can't even get to two hundred thousand americans out before one hundred thousand casualties occur we're talking about caution dale we're talking about a brother we're talking about dude type artillery concentrations that in four hours are going to fall on so thirty thousand rounds in the first hour and your air force in the korean air force are not going to get up fast enough to destroy those cannons and to destroy their ability to deliver even more rounds and so what you're going to have is fifteen million people burning in seoul yes we'll win we in the south koreans will win but it be a pyrrhic victory because we will have lost one of the most modern highly developed polytech freedom loving city on the face of the earth so so this is not something we want to contemplate either and then the last thing we're talking about right now of course is what i started with abrogating the agreement with iran which i have people in my political party right now who are trying desperately to discover where iran has cheated so that they can and blame it on iran and you've got a recipe for real problems for the empire and you've got a leadership that so far has impressed me with three danes it's amateur ship it's stupidity and it's ignorance so the empire isn't having trouble the empire is in deep trouble and the only thing in my view and i've said this is i as i indicated earlier all across the country i don't say it with the eloquence of dr bass of it but i certainly say it with the passion the only thing that's going to save this republic at this particular juncture is you and people like you all across this country getting smart again and starting to do things that cause the people in washington to sit up and listen and change their minds and make different decisions and if it takes throwing every single one of those five hundred thirty five people in the senate and the house out on their asses then that's what we should do i fear however that the time with regard to the current set of circumstances is not on our side so anything you can think of to do like what you're already doing that speeds that up a little bit accelerates it and amplifies what needs to be done is you know it's icing on the cake because we're in trouble we really seriously are in trouble my daughter looked at me the other day when we had a conversation like this she's a former second lieutenant in the army secret service agent for eight years and now a housewife with two of my grandchildren she looked at me and she said dad i know what you've been saying is probably right at least in its broad construct i know that we're in trouble but don't ever count us out i said i don't but why do you say that and she says because at the end of the day we will use nuclear weapons and she compared this would be viewed netanyahu and is are and frankly that's not a bad metaphor or a bad comparison israel will to israel will use one of its two hundred nuclear weapons or more if it feels like it's in an existential situation and that's interpretable but be beat and what she was saying to me what my daughter was saying to me was that we will too at the end of the day if it looks like the empire are is fading too fast if it looks like power's going out of our hands too rapidly if it looks like we might be suffering badly we will use military power to enforce our will that is a sad state of affairs and here's my daughter telling me about that and i think she's right we do not want to get to that point we do not want to get to the point where the culmination of the national security state which is the use of the military for every objective it can contemplate is reality because frankly the armed forces are a very poor too for most objective in the world ok thank you excellent question i think the most dangerous example of what you just asked about this is our nuclear program we in the military did a very very excellent analysis which came up with three hundred to one thousand nuclear weapons i know we want to get rid of all of them but that's maybe the way in the future as being adequate to our needs the government bought this that is to say the bush administration george w bush bought this and it sort of a tiered through i think most of the obama administration until the complex began to speak and the complex said wait a minute new mexico washington state tennessee and other places and all the nuclear industry in general doesn't like what we're talking about so we best come up with an idea that keeps some of this stuff alive and well in the that was a discussion about how to compromise between those who wanted to do what was strategically correct and supported by the analyses and those who wanted to support the complex in this case the nuclear complex the compromise is over a trillion dollars over the next ten to twelve years to quote modernize  securitize and make more sure now what that means is new weapons and new jobs in the industry gets money and so over john it means making sure the weapons we already have if we retain them work and that the new ones are safe and thirdly it means what we call surety which is kind of like if i go to war and i have to take this weapon into this strategic situation is it going to fit that sort of thing and we're going to spend a trillion dollars in order to do that three hundred billion in the first tranche over the first several years which i understand has already been voted so that's the number one program that americans ought to be asking serious questions about why do we need to do this let me give an example when we were a young beyond korea looking at their plutonium producing reactor was sick hacker and some other  the hand of the delegation from north korea actually turned to see not a member of the state department but hired by those because he's a nuclear physicist and they and he has since he said in english he said what do i do with my people and sig was your people i have thirteen hundred people here thirteen hundred people working in the young beyond nuclear complex for which he was saying i can't find a job there h trained there holly educated there well paid on a north korean scale and i want have a job for him if i close this reactor down paint that across the u s nuclear complex and you have the same lobby power the same influence the same kind of phenomena and it's going to be hard but we need to start action to look at that program seriously that immediately george w bush violated it so badly he went to tbilisi georgia and pronounced georgia a future member of nato right after that putin moved and we were talking about ukraine we tried to conduct a coup in kiev and ukraine and only partially succeeded and now we're backing former and semites and nazis in ukraine if i were putin and i were looking at the world i would have done the same thing so you can let's tell the leader of russia no matter how author or tarion he may be let's tell him we understand we made some mistakes we understand that larry summers and anatoly chubais increased harvard's endowment by about sixteen billion dollars by pillaging moscow and the fire sales that they suggested you do at the end of the cold war sayings like that the russians know that they have a memory for that no one's ever told the american people we did that of course but we did we have to talk and we have to make some money of colpus and we have to deal with the situation as it is today and then deal with syria which is a horrible civil war that's killing thousands of people and russia iran and us  essential and turkey essential to sorting that out and getting a political solution so it's much more complex of course but it's hugely our fall and we need to own up to that and start acting accordingly well the one positive thing that i was looking at when he first started this business was that he was willing to talk to putin and then on the congress has made that almost verboten for him so even if he's guilty of something  i'm i take your point and i would i would quote a man as i did with richard earlier as unlikely to be quoted in this event as dahl and so in two thousand and late two thousand and we were winning the struggle with afghanistan and generally in what was then called the global war on terror how we were winning if every time we killed two of them we created ten more that's what we've been doing that's what we've been doing by and large those who are attacking us or i would do to since i would also state although that's a different situation with regard to your particular france and england and belgium but i would say that generally it's fair to say that these people are not attacking us because of our democracy or our freedom or even our commercial my they're attacking us because we want what we do to them you know all over stone was at a reception with me last night he was getting an award and then in his remarks brief remarks after getting the award he has just done a series sixteen hours with let me put it and he's done it down to four hours for a documentary that is going to give some insight into  thinking i think that americans are going to watch it there are watch it they don't watch oliver stone's movies basically they don't have cars crashing into each other people shooting each other naked with nine millimeters and stuff like that so they don't watches movies but oliver said i cannot believe the world has not punished us for vietnam we killed two and a half million the enemies we dropped more dumb armed bombs on vietnam then we dropped on germany in world war two all of us got a point the world does not just lie asleep while we do our job the world takes notice and now we have killed three hundred thousand iraqis even by the d o d s estimate probably fifty to sixty thousand and afghanistan another ten or twelve in pakistan another two or three in somalia the ledger grows and if you do that ok i'm a superpower i am the million dialogue i'm the athenian general and i'm on milos and the people of milos are asking me why are you going to kill all the women all the children and most of the men and the athenian general two cities records says back to the million because we can't that's your leadership in this country today because we can't you need to take your country back first of all you're right about the russians doing what they're doing and to a certain extent the chinese too and not just in the south china sea i wouldn't be at all surprised to see a chinese equivalent of a carrier battle group or strike group steam into the gulf of mexico in the next ten years nor would i be surprised to see a russian strike group probably led by a cruiser cruise in the gulf of mexico or off the coast of virginia twelve miles out that's to show us that we're not the only ones are going to it's not necessarily a provocation so much as it is hate in your eyes washington and the only thing we can attribute that to really is our own actions we can that we're doing freedom of navigation and we're keeping the waters free for the world's navies and commercial craft and so forth and that's probably partly true but it's also true that we haven't ratified the un convention on the law of the sea which is one of the dumbest things probably we haven't done in the last twenty years and we tried to bring it up when we were in the state department joe biden agreed he was in charge of the senate foreign relations committee at the time and guess who objected pentagon was all for the whole government inner agency was for it everyone was for but the big mining and oil and gas interest in america stepped in and said no because that treaty might make what's on the bottom of the ocean outside the two hundred mile economic zone but on to the global commons and we want to ripen pillage it we don't want them have anything to do with it and so we haven't done that that's the most incredibly powerful instrument we have with regard to the cloud chinese claims to the dash nine line and yet we haven't signed it so how serious are we about what we say is integral to our interests in the south china sea as opposed to what's china and then let's get to the base of it existence as communism was to mouse it doan to us the south china sea is freedom of navigation and commercial enterprise guess who's going to go to war with that if they have to go to war so her point was if you're going to deal with south china sea you need lots of allies like the philippines indonesia vietnam brunei and so forth and you need to deal with it through all the instruments you've created since world war two including the international court for arbitration of the hague including you and so forth so you don't need to do it with bullets she's right she's absolutely right and yet we are approaching it from that point of view so much as we are the point of view of we have the same interest do when it's absolutely crystal clear that we don't with regard to russia as i've said it's it's sticking his finger and i every week can and can you blame him point every time they poll his status in russia and he's running about eighty to eighty two percent what american leaders are doing that what american institution is doing that even the military is only seventy one percent congress was it eight percent last time i looked every time he sticks his finger in the eye of washington no matter how insignificant it gets reported back in moscow and his poll ratings go up so he's doing domestic politics on the united states the way to get him to stop that is to stop giving him the incentive to do it this is no joke know good question you and your fundamental question boils down to have we deemphasized diplomacy to the extent that we've killed it yes simple answer yes i actually think that mr tillers went to the state department at least in part with the mandate from bannan miller tromp someone and that mandate was disassemble the state department that means disassembling diplomacy well probably president trumpet say no because i'm going to replace american diplomacy with american negotiating power because that's the way he thinks i think so your question is answered with a simple yes because that's what i think the current secretary of state's directions are to dismantle diplomacy as an ineffective instrument and an instrument that has got in america into more trouble than good which is a gross mistake and misinterpretation but that's really the tendency of the national security state which since richard nixon spurs term has been trying to negate the state department with some exceptions like jim baker henry kissinger to a certain extent where the personal power of the secretary of state restored some power to diplomacy every president since nixon has been trying to destroy the state department it's pinko commie dogs over there is any of you listen to nixon's tapes you know it's pinko commie dogs over in the state bar the state department you may not have thought about this the state department has no domestic constituency at all zero the foreign service in fact in polls that are discrete and carefully done is judged much the way the executive branch judges it by the american people as useless as an appendage of the past as something that maybe when john quincy adams was in the court of st catharines and was telling his president about napoleon's movement before napoleon knew what he was going to do because adams was such a tremendous diplomat probably the greatest one we've ever had that's gone now you do everything through the white house and the state department is an impediment to that that's been the thank you you're absolutely right no skin in the game no skin of the game i'm four year old i'm a go of peace being the overall condition but until that comes i want to ready armed forces but i want to ready armed forces people by americans from all across the economic intelligence shows what dollar multipliers are and those analyses time after time again show that for example a dollar into education is forward it turns into for a dollar an infrastructure turns into about two seventy five a dollar and the arms in the military is a dollar in the arms in the military even though it does pay those people who are immediately paid for making the missiles and bombs and so forth it is not replicable it does not create we found that out in the at the end of the co or palin not when we were trying to close bases and we had all we went to these places like the presidio in california where people said mayors and governors and senators and represented oh you're going to ruin  if you close martha raye you're going to oh you ruined and five years later they were sending those postcards an e mail saying man greatest thing ever happened more the economy's booming in newport rhode island you closed his pier and everything going to hell overnight you know newport now won't let any navy ships back again into it is not a well spent dollar