some time and are delighted for you to hear him today please join me in welcoming and a base consists of people who are optimistic and upbeat and i want to preface my remarks by saying i'm basically a pessimist and i hope you won't find what i'm about to say to be too much of a downer it seems to me that we live in a pretty discouraging moment for anyone concerned about the course of us foreign policy and maybe it's a discouraging moment in american history more generally we live in a country where war has become any normal condition and in which perhaps apart from the people in this room that reality is in fact widely accepted on this score maybe others as well but on this score it's difficult to contemplate the upcoming presidential election with anything other than dismay surely hillary clinton is correct in describing donald trump as utterly unfit for office disqualified by both character and temperament but it's not entirely clear that secretary of state clinton is all that much better suited for the presidency i am reminded of her smug gloating comment when she learned that the libyan dictator moammar gadhafi had been tortured and killed we came we saw he died that's precisely the sort of thing the donald trump himself would say opiate no doubt trump would employ the first person singular rather than clinton's imperial we how it came to be that a nation of well over three hundred million people and up with two candidates who are both disliked and  not altogether loathed to by a majority of the electorate how this came to be it seems to me is a judgement on our democracy and not a very favorable one no doubt it is a notable milestone to have the woman running for the presidency as the nominee of one of our two major parties but hillary clinton's candidacy does not mark a milestone on the path toward an enlighten prudent approach to foreign policy back when women first began to appear on the american and european political scene there was an expectation that their presence would have a and of an effect on politics that would serve to nudge the world away from war and violence one of my heroes jane adams represented something different people believed back in those days represented something preferable to let's say her contemporary theodore roosevelt because she was a woman and therefore people then believed lesson kind to the source to the type of bellicosity that t r represented today such notions based on the belief that women are intrinsically different from men with a reduced propensity for violence one of those differences such notions would be dismissed as sexist today after all we have women who fly fighter bombers and attack helicopters who graduate from the army's ranger school who are eligible for enlistment as combat marines and all of these are seen as signs of progress the women who have ascended to senior positions in the american national security apparatus are in fact cut from the same cloth as theodore roosevelt all have demonstrated that eagerness to put u s military power to work that teddy roosevelt pioneered and that has become a hallmark of american state craft since the end of the cold war we should not be surprised by the pronounced militancy of these notable women after all a belief in the eck efficacy of military power and the imperative of military activism has become a precondition for employment in the white house the state department and the pentagon jane adams conviction that war is evil and peace possible would render her unemployable in present day washington indeed her far out views  even from being invited to appear on the sunday talk shows in the present political environment jane adams would be dismissed as a coupe so if secretary clinton becomes president clinton we can surely expect her administration to sustain the trajectory of u s policy to which both democratic and republican presidents alike have  hered for several decades now she will support very high levels of military spending unrelated to any realistic evaluation of threats she will demonstrate as she already has demonstrated a penchant for armed intervention is i'm broke she will endorse the absence of accountability turning a blind eye to where the money goes into the consequences of previous interventions not least of all the one that she promoted in libya hillary clinton will be a strong and forceful and decisive commander in chief she will not be a creative or thoughtful one above all she will be a loyal and conscientious servant of the national security state and it clients and hearing to what president obama himself has disparaged as the washington playbook here it seems to me we get to the heart of the matter presidents come and go each promising big change each treated as a demigod charged with directing the course of history itself in fact the change turns out to me much less than promise without any one take taking much notice of continuity from one administration to the next greatly outweigh discontinuity and here it seems to me president obama himself offers case he came to office you'll remember on a wave of expectations that his would prove to be a transformational presidency but president obama will leave office without having transformed much of anything consider the realm of national security god forgive me i just realized that i am adopting the  the very so consider the arena of national security president obama ran for the presidency promising to end the iraq war remember the stupid war and promising to win the afghanistan war you remember the necessary war and sadly he failed on both comes after a brief time out the iraq war has resumed with a vengeance and we are in it as ref gonna stand his effort to achieve victory the surge of twenty ten came nowhere near to succeeding and subsequent efforts to hand off the war to afghans itself have likewise fallen short so president obama will be queef to his successor the two wars that he himself inherited from george w bush an astonishing reality is treated by the press as no big deal beyond these two specific arenas of conflict president obama has shown no hesitation to employ force elsewhere he wants he assured americans that in his words the tide of war is receiving is receding on the contrary however the tide of war has swept u s forces more deeply into conflicts in places like libya somalia pakistan and yemen troops president obama has recognized that invading and occupying countries with expectations of transforming them is a truly dumb idea so he's tried his hand at different techniques emphasizing missile firing drones and special operations forces to wage what has become a war of attrition against militant islamism this approach has in fact reduced the cost imposed on the united states whether measured in terms of of monetary outlays or casualties suffered by u forces however the this alternative approach has not produced anything like conclusive success it's merely created a smokescreen that conceals a condition of strategic bankruptcy to a greater extent that he then he himself may be willing to acknowledge president obama has adhered to the washington playbook why does this circumstance persist well because it serves the interests of powerful institutions and the aspirations of ambitious individuals who hanker for a seat in the situation room as the commander in chief decides where next to bomb and who next to kill the existence of forces with a bias favoring militarism is hardly new the unlikely pair of c wright mills the radical academic d eisenhower the not so radical career soldier laid it out for us more than a half century ago and the truth is they spoke then remain true today doubt that mills or eisenhower would find our present circumstance all that surprising a nation in gauge in in in in permanent armed conflict where there is no anti war party in a presidential campaign where there is no antiwar candidate and where the word peace itself has largely vanished from our political discourse recall the back during the cold war presidents from harry truman all the way to ronald reagan routinely spoke of peace as the ultimate objective of u s policy now what they meant by peace was not necessarily clear perhaps in retrospect it was just a way of suggesting that the cold war might someday come to an end or perhaps they were engaged in cynical politicking as was certainly the case with president nixon  connection to vietnam regardless the idea of peace and the possibility of peace form part of the american political vocabulary no more hillary clinton and donald trump offer no plan for peace they both say elect me and i'll double down on isis but what can citizens who find this circumstance an acceptable do how can they reconstitute the peace movement that can perhaps exercise  decisive influence on american politics there's obviously no easy answer to that question clearly reciting pieties will not suffice no one pays attention to pieties action is clearly imperative what's needed it seems to me is a sustained effort to confront the american people with what washington's penchant for war has actually produced and at what cost today politicians sadly abetted by the media want to talk about what we should be doing about isis antiwar activists should shine a spotlight on the various and sundry u s military campaigns in the greater middle east prior to our current war with isis campaigns which by any measure have yielded precious little and in several instances not least of all in iraq have actually made matters worse but a month ago i participated in a more a small discussion on the future course of u s foreign policy in a small group there were two former officials from the george w bush administration one had held a senior position in the state department the other had been a staffer on the national security council they're both conveniently now housed in prestigious academic institutions as they wait their summons back to the center of power and they have four words to describe existing problems or defects and u s policy in a foot for words nose to costs no mention of the trillions of dollars that we have expended since nine eleven in our wars in the greater middle east no mention of the thousands of americans who have been killed in those wars too precious little purpose no mention of the tens of thousands of american lives that have been shattered as a consequence of those wars and needless to say no mention nowhere near us of the collateral casualties caused as a result of american interventions those numbering in the many hundreds of thousands so this is where i think peace activists should focus really limitless lee emphasizing in concrete and specific terms all of the cumulative damage but the american penchant for war has produced only then i believe might our fellow citizens awaken to at least the possibility of taking another course thank you very much well we're going to take our marching orders here very seriously for getting those numbers out and collected and taking professor pace of which is direction do you have some questions that you would like to address and if you raise your hand i'll try to number you off and then go in order and questions jeffrey of course we're with jeffrey why don't you ask your question more people are thinking and then look  oh i teach a course called ideas in american foreign policy and the idea to the point to the course was to invite students to read and reflect on  documents that in my judgment shaped the way we as a people have come to think about the world and our role in the world in the very first document in the course lesson the good ship arbella as they prepared to land in massachusetts bay and to found what was going to become the massachusetts bay colony and he in the course of that sermon  recognized that there was a covenant joining those people that community to god and that god had assigned to that community a unique mission that went for our being on the question of whether they were going to be be able to make it through the next one and he charged down with the and i think that that statement which has resonated so in some respects been redefined no longer necessarily see ourselves as god's instrument more likely to serve self as histor instrument but that that charge and expectation continues to animate american politics in exceedingly powerful ways i think it was reinforced powerfully reinforced by the end of the cold war which seemed to render a verdict that said that our way was the only way that was going to succeed and also seemed to render a verdict with regard to the effectiveness of american military power you recall of the notions are utterly false in my judgment but you recall that there was a very common interpretation said that the when the cold war ended the way it did as it did when it did was because the soviets had had were now willing to own up to the fact that the united states had become in a sense militarily supreme and so it was time to call off the competition through one of the ironies of history immediately at the end of the cold war saddam hussein recklessly and foolishly chose to invade and to annex kuwait leading to operation desert storm which again i think misleadingly was interpreted by the american people as a further affirmation with regard to our of our assigned role in global affairs and an affirmation of what m in form by militaristic mindset that survives even to the present moment and again my in my my my suggestion what's missing  an accounting of the effects of american military power a preference for simply talking about what us forces did yesterday and what they need to do tomorrow denies us denies the american people a proper understanding of how defective those notions of our chosen us and those notions of american military supremacy we we are we  blind to the own truths to which we subscribe beginning at the end of the cold war well i don't know that i can identify anybody i mean you know i think that there are some people on the left i have to be politically on a right but there are some people on the left who fancied that senator sanders was going to be that voice but he chose for whatever reason to focus his can y almost exclusively on domestic issues so he never actually said much about what people thought he might say if he chose to to you know go down that path so i don't i don't know of anybody who i would p  it is it i don't know what the constituency would be in this country in running for congress or a seat in the united states senate where you would stand up and behind a podium like this and say i am the antiwar candidate please vote for me you just you wouldn't get the nomination of your party i mean you might get the nomination of the green party and god bless you but you're not going to be able to attract the kind of support that's going to any bring in the money that you need to have in order to mount a credible campaign and be to to win the votes so the you know  the the the bernie sanders the system is rigged to come in and i think to some degree applies to to this entire realm of politics not rigged but but there's a there's a seat a bias in a particular direction that if you're an optimist you think can be reversed and if you are a pessimist you think maybe not so much this is a deal that was based on a desire to satisfy mutual interests it wasn't something that we that  resulted simply from coercion and threats i accept the fact that economic sanctions probably played a role but but in forming this deal is a recognition that iran has interests that deserve to be recognized and and that's a precondition to negotiating any agreement it seems to me that in other some of the sort of  touchy potential flash points in the international order to present moment there's not a lot of evidence in washington of a willingness to acknowledge the interests of the other party let's el i would fully accept endorse and applaud the expansion of nato and the e u eastward but the fact of the matter is that for since the end of the cold war we've basically treated russia with considerable distain and disrespect and putin who is a nasty piece of work is now to some degree paying his back so if if indeed we would like to avoid  the return of some semblance of a cold war with russia by the way i by no means do i think the russian threat is anywhere anywhere near what the threat posed by the soviet union was forty years ago but if we would like to avoid some kind of a revival of a cold war with russia one of the things we're going to have to do is to acknowledge that russia has legitimate security interests that deserve to be recognized you know people victoria n d is not inclined to to acknowledge that yeah what do you think yeah i mean to the problem the problem is of course of course i mean i mean raise your hand if you are not fearful the day after nine eleven ok one person was not all the rest of us you are minorities or the rest of us were were were shocked appalled angry fearful you know string out the adjectives you want because it was a heinous despicable murderous act and we didn't know if there was going to be another shoe to drop maybe you know the problem was the problem is not that we were fearful the problem was the response of the george w bush administration which which immediately declared that the appropriate response to this vicious act of terrorism was to launch a global war against terrorism which was a which was which from day one was a misguided notion but once it was accepted by the vast majority of the american people partly because they were fearful but partly because of this attitude which i described earlier of of confidence in the efficacy of american military power the misplaced confidence but nonetheless the princip responsibility for the iranians course that we followed you know belongs on the shoulders of the people to whom we met and trusted our security and that was the george w bush administration well i don't have a good answer that question and i mean i mean by my book and read it and take it seriously i mean that but but this is this is it is not the case that that there is an absence of center into washington and it doesn't particularly propagate among our fellow citizens but you know it's like it's like asking me i don't know how you raise your hand if you do not have a smartphone ok still it was still it still is still a minority most most of you have smartphones asked me the question what the hell are we going to do with this  addiction that people especially young people have to being constantly on the net so they can constantly access the most trivial sort of information and therefore deny themselves the opportunity actually to become educated knowledgeable connected to more important things the answer is i have no idea i have no i have no idea what to do but other than one thing i'm going to do is never buy a smart me well i don't want to preempt a question i've read parts of it and i've never tried it and i haven't thought about it for a long time but my friend paul miles is here and i'm sure he knows the city's better than i do but go ahead so i began by saying i am a pessimist and and you're asking me how what is the path toward salvation but you know i mean i'm a i'm a catholic fallen and and that therefore redemption will not occur it is not within our capacity to redeem ourselves i'm a i'm not a pacifist i explain i'm really not an activist i don't i don't join organizations i have immense immense respect and regard for people who are activists and who join organizations and who demonstrate and who fight and lobby but my temperament is one that says that at the end of the day we're not going to get there here well i frankly i would not i would not overstate the significance of these artificial islands and the and the chinese activity there are a symptom of a much larger larger and very difficult problem and or question the question is what do the chinese want clearly the emergence of china as a great power is one of the defining features of our time there is nothing that we can do to prevent that from from happening there so they will be not frankly not just china but also india arguably some other sort of medium sized powers are going to be incorporated into the international order and the end the goal has to be to facilitate that process in ways that doesn't lead to catastrophic conflict but it's difficult to even come up with a a strategy to do that absent a clear understanding of china's aspirations i'm not sure the china knows what its aspirations are at this point that there is sufficient not a china expert sufficient change undergoing ongoing within china that may make it unclear even to the party leadership as to what their ultimate purposes are so what do we do i mean i think i think that there are a few things that i can imagine that are more important than persistent and comprehensive dialogue with china with with the government with the party with the military with academics with young people to see consistent effort to fully understand the trajectory on which that country is headed and quite frankly to try to facilitate their understanding of us in ways that may diminish any suspicions they have that we are necessarily hostile i mean at the end of the day we've got to share the planet with those folks and and you know what there's a lot of so so a confrontational strategy a strategy that assumes that we're on a collision course with china strikes me as deeply wrong headed that sa you know there's going to be a lot of joslin and bump and elbows and misunderstandings as this story unfolds probably over the next three decades for decades but i think i think dialogue and another chinese fighters intercepting an american reconnaissance flight along the borders of china i'm not sure of borders what hundred miles out i don't know does it make sense for us to be doing at this point i mean i'm not i mean in terms of the benefit versus the antagonism that we're causing how would we feel if there were chinese reconnaissance flights going up and down between boston and new york and washington and routine basis i'm pretty sure we wouldn't be happy about that so dialogue and effort to avoid unnecessarily provocative behavior and then we keep our fingers crossed and we hope for the best