The United States, Russia, and the Future World Order

January 26, 2010 Relationship Between the United States and Russia and Its Impact On The World Order ROBERT KAGAN:I'm Bob Kagan here at the Carnegie Endowment. And we've pulled together these people to talk about the United States and Russia, but also about the larger issue of the future of world order. This conversation is going to be stemming to a large part from an article written by John Ikenberry and Daniel Deudney in survival recently which is a very provocative and interesting take on what happened in U.S./Russian relations, but we are going to probably go beyond that and discuss a lot of other things, as well. I'll just quickly introduce people who are here. We have John Ikenberry. I'm not going to go through his endless title, but he teaches at Princeton. Daniel teaches at Johns Hopkins. Stephen Sestanovich teaches at Columbia and is also at the Council on Foreign Relations and we're very grateful that our friend Tom Friedman agreed to come and moderate this panel. I don't think I need to tell anybody who Tom Friedman is. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Teaches at the New York Times. ROBERT KAGAN: Teaches at the New York Times. Do you have tenure? THOMAS FRIEDMAN: None of us do effectively I'm sure. ROBERT KAGAN: Anyway, I am going to now turn it over to Tom. Thanks very much. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Thanks Bob. This is a treat. It brings me back to a moment in time when my colleague David Hoffman and I, he's out there somewhere, where are you David? We were traveling with Secretary of State Baker watching the end of the Cold War, the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of NATO expansion and the birth of Russian democracy and all of the great power issues that both came together at that moment and flowed from it. And that's really what John and Daniel's paper is about. Without further ado we're going to give them a chance to take fifteen minutes or so to present their paper, the substance of it. Then Bob and Steve are going to give their critiques from different perspectives and then I'm going to moderate a bit of discussion up here with the four of them then we're going to open it to the floor. That's the plan so without further ado John and Daniel. JOHN IKENBERRY: Thanks Tom and thanks Bob for organizing this event. I want to start by situating our argument about Russia and the west and the context of a larger debate really that's unfolding today really about the future of the international order of American grand strategy, about the rise of great powers and great power politics. In many ways the big question of our time is really about the fate of the American led post war international order whether it is breaking down, evolving, giving way to a system of competitive great power relations that return to the 19th Century or to the Cold War. And this is a set of questions really. At the grandest level it's a question about whether the hope and vision after the Cold War, the continuing liberal ascendency, its global spread is over. Whether the Cold War ended with a triumph of liberal principles of world order, the dominant legitimating principles of politics and economics and now that's over giving way to something else, fragmentation breakdown. At another level it's about China and Russia. It's about whether these non liberal great powers that are rising in different ways, certainly China represent a challenge to this liberal world order. And if so how deep is the challenge? It's complicated obviously. After all these are both capitalist states that are heavily dependent, whether parasitic or deeply dependant, on the world economy. It's not clear what their alternative vision of world order would be, but there is a challenge. There is a transition, a power transition going on and we don't really know what it entails and how deep, how profound the shift is. Is it about a challenge to U.S. leadership? Or is it a deeper challenge about the principles of liberal order of openness, rule based order that we associate with this post war sixty year period? Or is it about authority and privilege and leadership and institutional reform which is a less deep kind of challenge to the existing system. In this debate there is a variety of views and even on this table are quite prominent views. One view is that we are returning to a divided world order, that we are in a period of U.S. decline and retreat, growing conflict between democratic and authoritarian great powers, differences that are reinforced by historical grievances, some of which we are going to talk about today, mercantilist strategies and struggles over markets and resources. And at a deeper level there is a very real question about whether the liberal American-led project has a monopoly on the future or whether there are actually again to describe different multiple modernities that are in front of us: Liberal autocratic, perhaps theocratic, perhaps others. Our position, Dan and I, which sets up this paper and which is part of what we've been doing individually in our research and writing and in our joint work is that the liberal ascendency or liberal moment is not over even if there are troubles ahead. The liberal order remains the deep framework for world politics and even in the context of rising China and Russia on the edge. This order is a sixty-year-old order built around things that we now take for granted: open trade, multilateral institutions, cooperative security, democratic solidarity, great power restraint, sharing the spoils of modernity, joint leadership. These are all aspects of this system that actually doesn't even have a name because it's not just the American-led system it's a larger complex amalgam. I've argued that this is a system that's easy to join and hard to overturn and both Russia and China in one way or another have to reconcile themselves to it even as they integrate into it and try to evolve it in their own ways. It's been a successful order. Again, the terms are integration, restraint and institutionalized cooperation. This system opened up the world economy after World War II. It integrated Germany and Japan. It solved, in a way, the framework the German problem, the European problem, the Franco German problem. It integrated transitioning states over the last thirty years. Five hundred million have left poverty and found their way into this system and it ended peacefully the Cold War which we are going to turn to in a second. It's more than American power, it's not best summarized as unipolarity but as a system with an expansive logic of openness and rule-based relations that continues in our view to be the kind of system in which all great power politics are going to be taking place. In the background we make an argument about U.S. liberal order building over the last one hundred years. And my basic point here before I turn it over to Dan is simply to say that there have been two strands in the American project that gets us to the end of the Cold War and the settlement of the Cold War. One strand is a realist strand built around great power concert, accommodation and restraint or the watchwords. This evolved beginning with ideas and practices we saw on display in Vienna in the early 19th Century that were lessons that were really not learned at Versailles but were learned after that. FDR, the architecture of the Security Council was all about a framework of great power of cooperation of concert, the integration of Germany and Japan, the basic logic which reappeared in 1989-1991. The second strand is the more distinctively American, Anglo-American strand of liberal progressive agenda bursting onto the scene in 1919 with Woodrow Wilson. The watchwords here are: integration, institution building, cooperative security, free trade, human rights. This is Cannes. This is also Roosevelt, but its Eleanor Roosevelt not Franklin Roosevelt. Both of these strands in waves at these moments of transition after war have been the ideas and practices that have brought us to order building and including order building at the end of the Cold War which Dan is now going to talk about, both the triumph and the troubles that we can look back and see at that period. DANIEL DEUDNEY: I'm going to narrow the debate here to the question of Russia and the question that we have to ask is: who lost Russia? This is obviously a very complex story, but I'm going to be making the case that we did to a significant degree. We, some Americans, some tendencies in American foreign policy are significantly at the root of this great change from the expectations of the end of the Cold War. I'm going to do three things in setting this up. First of all, how is the United States to blame for this? American Foreign policy has all these different strands to it, different voices, shifting and different periods, but we argue that there really are two fundamental sources of this on our side. First of all, is the export to Russia at the period of the breakup of the Soviet Union of a model of capitalism that was essentially indifferent to domestic equity. In short, this is that we exported Reagan and Thatcher neo-liberalism rather than an earlier, we believe, more robust new deal, economic liberalism. And second, the United States has been in a project since the end of the Cold War that has come to the floor, of perpetual primacy. It is this project of national greatness conservatism that is second at the root of the problem. Now let's go back on three points here. First of all about the end of the Cold War itself, second of all about the futures of the settlement and third about the ways in which these dimensions of American policy and grand strategy have undermined the settlement. The end of the Cold War is obviously a very complex story. John and I make the argument in multiple of our writings that there really were two fundamental vectors, two fundamental forces that were very important here. First of all is the character of the west overall, which is American grand strategy, the Europeans, American institutions, international institutions, western culture, that created a set of constraints and opportunities for the Soviet Union. And second it was nuclear weapons. Now these two external factors determined in our view very powerfully shaped the way in which the Soviet Union responded to the underlying problem of economic stagnation. Economic stagnation really starts the train, but how they responded in the way that they did is, we believe, unintelligible without looking at the character of the west and the inducements and so forth that it provides and nuclear weapons. Let's look at the settlement itself. The settlement has sort of two large dimensions, one of which John just summarized that it is first a mixture of accommodation of great power accommodation and liberal order building integration. These two pieces are central to the settlement. The second feature of the settlement is that it was centered to a very significant degree on nuclear weapons and arms control. Now it has become widely recognized that the Cold War ended and ended the way it did on these arms control settlements because Reagan and Gorbachev converged on an understanding of nuclear weapons that was really quite radical relative to that which was held in the national security establishments in either state. Now they were both outliers, they were both radicals they were saying things about joint nuclear vulnerability as providing a fundamental necessity for a transformation of relations in cooperative restructuring of nuclear forces. It was that shared understanding that was at the center of the settlement. Now, note that this is a very unusual settlement for a great power competition. It was completely symmetrical and it was centered on a notion of shared vulnerability not on the greater power of the supposed victor from the conflict. Now, let's look at the breakdown of the settlement. The order and the expectations that we had in the early 1990's. There are really two large stories here. The first story is internal to Russia, the failure of the democratic transition. Now, this is obviously a very complicated story and one can make very strong credible claims that it was doomed to not succeed because of Russian legacies. Time out of mind they have lived in highly despotic hierarchical societies and they were just not going to be able to make the transition. We think, however, that this is significantly incorrect, that the democratic failure in Russia had to do with the economic transition. The key privatization of the vast bulk of the assets of the Soviet State, which as we all know went into the hands of a very small number of individuals. And the vast bulk of the people in Russia in the period when it was democratic to a significant degree were what? They were significantly economically dispossessed. There was a significant diminution of their well being. And so the failure of the equitable transition of the property assets essentially destroyed the key constituency that any democracy has got to be based upon and that is the interest of the vast majority of the people in the country. Now, why did they distribute the wealth in this way? Undoubtedly many reasons, but significantly because the models and the advice that we were pedaling were get it out of the hands of the state and that's the key thing that we need to do. An indifference to the issue of equitable distribution, that is, of course, Reaganite, Thatcherite, neoliberal economic policy. The second underlying problem with the breakdown of the settlement, again on our side, is the continuance encroachment by the United States on traditional Russian great power legitimate interests. Of course, there are two dimensions of this. There is NATO expansion and the nuclear realm. And NATO expansion is something that we as liberals acknowledge was part of the liberal portfolio. The integration of these countries, particularly in Eastern Europe into these western institutions was a very positive and settling dimension. Integration of other states in the NATO is in a sense a key part of an integrationist liberal international order building. We acknowledge that there is a tension between this and Russian great power interest. And there has been a failure of imagination on the liberal side to come up, and this is very relevant today as to where we go next, to come up with an architecture of institutions for security that are significant and that encompass Russia in them. Now, of course, the encroachment of NATO has stimulated the other feature of the Russian failure or the Russian turn away and that's this truculent nationalism. They are now anti-western, they basically see the significant centers of opinion, see the settlement as a ruse as something that the United States pulled a fast one on them. The mutual understandings at the end of the Cold War have essentially been systematically reneged by the west and as NATO gets closer to Russian borders NATO seems to be increasingly, purely an anti-Russian enterprise in their view. Second is, of course, the architecture of arms control. The United States continued not full arms racing but we continued to percolate along drifting towards some sort of primacy while at the same time articulating a rhetoric of perpetual primacy in the great power sphere. This tendency culminated, of course, in the unilateral American withdrawal from the ABM Treaty. Now the ABM Treaty and the problem of ballistic missile defense is a complicated one, but we have to remember that fundamentally this was central to the architecture of mutual restraint of nuclear forces at the end of the Cold War. The United States has in these ways we believe fundamentally been at fault and fundamentally been responsible for these failures. So what do we do? Very briefly, we have to acknowledge first that America as part of the western liberal order has multiple tendencies and some of these tendencies are corrosive of that order. This great power primacy and the export of this type of economics and to certain types of circumstances are essentially subversive of the overall project. Second, we need to come up with an agenda of what to do now. We've got to go back, not just reset, we've got to go back and refurbish the core principals and architectures of the settlement coming up with, as I said a few minutes ago, institutions that are both significant and encompass Russia and we have got to move towards the restoration of some version of the ABM Treaty. Unless we are willing to step up and do this we have to expect the continued erosion of the settlement architecture. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Thank you very much. Steve why don't you start? And then Bob you back him up. STEPHEN SESTANOVICH: Thank you, Tom, and thank you, John and Dan. I want to begin by praising John and Dan's article. It is elegant, stimulating, thoughtful, provocative, imaginative, thoughtful, did I say thoughtful? Genuinely creative. And I really mean this and I recommend it to all of you, but there is a problem. I don't think it is true. Its account of the end of the Cold War and its aftermath, above all the course of Russian-American relations is so at odds with my own understanding of what happened and the differences have important implications as John and Dan suggest for how we think about where we are now. I'd put my core argument this way. I can understand people who don't like the Cold War settlement as it really was or think it's no longer feasible, that it represented a possibility whose time has passed. It's possible that John and Dan are in that camp now and in his own way Bob may be in that camp, too, but it's important to understand that they are scrapping not upholding the principles of twenty years ago. Let me start with how the Cold War ended. The argument that you will encounter in their article, and then again I recommend it, is that the Cold War was settled on the basis of an agreement. More precisely a series of arms control treaties to accept mutual vulnerability in the nuclear age thereby ending the nuclear rivalry that they say overshadowed all other issues in the Cold War, an accommodation in which the great powers agreed to respect each other's critical interest. In this image the Cold War ended in a kind of strategic nuclear tie. Now, I agree that the reduced tensions of the late 80's created a favorable environment for what followed, but this version of what happened leaves out the more significant political content and a geo-political clash that was not resolved on the basis of a tie. To my mind John and Dan's article blurs the approaches of the Reagan and Bush Administrations, but the reality is actually different. George H.W. Bush and his advisors came into office deeply skeptical of a relationship centered on nuclear arms control. They hated that. They thought the good feeling of perestroika would damage American interests, and so they wanted to throw the Soviet Union on the defensive by insisting that the Cold War could not end unless the division of Europe was overcome. The origin of the nice sounding phrase, Europe whole and free was a competitive one. It was a demand for the withdrawal of Soviet power, in particular for German re-unification and other people thought it was too competitive; our allies, Thatcher and [Inaudible] told George Bush you're playing with war. Moreover, the administration explicitly rejected realist ideas that were floating around at the time for recognition of a Soviet sphere in Eastern Europe. Nixon and Kissinger made proposals of this kind and they were dismissed. The U.S. was not going to honor Soviet imperial rights at a time when the empire was collapsing. And Jim Baker was clear about this in his memoirs he said, We saw German reunification as a coming issue and we wanted to get there first. Now I've said the Reagan and Bush approaches were different, but we shouldn't exaggerate. After all, the only treaty that Reagan and Gorbachev had reached was the INF Treaty of 1987, which was important because it followed a very tense confrontation between the West and the Soviet Union at the end of which the Soviet Union was completely humiliated. American policymakers believed that the Soviets had tried to divide American-Europe and that they'd failed. Now, John and Dan I think would say that when those tensions eased after that crisis, agreements were reached that created a positive environment in which it was easier for the Soviet Union to accept the loss of empire. I agree, but I don't think it's the most important thing that happened. Gorbachev and other Politburo members in 1989 accepted what was happening because what they wanted to accomplish at home couldn't happen if they did what was necessary to preserve an East European sphere of influence. For them accepting their neighbors as independent democracies was the only policy consistent with perestroika. Now, why is this important today? It means that the real settlement was about beginning to cooperate on the basis of convergent interests not about agreement between the great powers to respect divergent ones. There was a lot of positive geo political mood music at the end of the Cold War as to save Gorbachev's face, I would say, but the main factor was this. The Soviet Union could not have resisted the end of the Cold War without making itself a total outlier in Europe at a time when it didn't want to be an outlier. Looked at this way, it's Putin whose outlook is at odds with the settlement. For him it's more congenial for his domestic political aims to aspire to have a sphere of influence and more threatening to have to accept neighbors as democracy. That's okay. He's a big guy and he runs a big country, but he has to overthrow the settlement to get there. So my summary here is that the Cold War settlement was not about mutual nuclear vulnerability, if it had been the Cold War would have been settled in 1972. Nor was it about the idea that fundamental interests should not be challenged. Its core was not about nuclear arms control at all and in fact in the pivotal years of 1989 and 1990 that was hardly discussed. Instead its premise was that the conflicting interests that fueled the Cold War had changed. This was important. It's what made a Liberal International Order possible. In fact, once you had regimes whose interests were not at odds, you didn't even really need a settlement. The Cold War more than anything else could simply end because there was already a kind of accommodation. Now, there is an implication of this for today, arms control can be revived and can help create a positive environment, but by itself it doesn't get you back to the heart of the transformation at the end of the Cold War unless you restore agreement about no spheres of influence and about democratic peace. Now, let me turn a little bit to American policy since the Cold War in which John and Dan have identified breaches of the settlement, but if you look at the end of the Cold War as it really happened, that's a much harder case to make. Remember that the Clinton Administration was expected to be excessively attuned to Russian interests to follow a Russia first policy, but in the end it pursued NATO enlargement and it led NATO in humanitarian war in the Balkans and it began the process of undermining the ABM Treaty. How did this happen? Well, John and Dan say that they seem to accept the unquestionable historical point and should say that at the end of the Cold War there was no agreement that there would be no NATO enlargement. They say that's misleading because it was unthinkable. That's not quite right, it was not thought of, but when it was put on the table it was impossible to argue that NATO enlargement was inconsistent with the principles of the settlement. Free choice and end of historical dividing lines, that was an expression of the settlement. So the countries that wanted to get into NATO faced a situation which was hard to conceive of any objections that didn't violate the settlement. I think the phrase empire by invitation has rarely been so appropriate as here. And given this, how did the Clinton Administration approach the problem of relations with Russia? It didn't, as you might think from many accounts and from a kind of prevailing narrative that is definitely strong in Russia, simply ignore the Russia problem or ride rough shot over Russian sensibilities. To the contrary the principle of Clinton Administration was just as John and Dan argue that both Central Europe and Eastern Europe and Russia should be integrated into European institutions. The Clinton Administration wanted to pull everybody along. As a result, the U.S. spent the run up to the first wave of NATO enlargement working out elaborate agreements with Russia to enhance its cooperation with NATO, to create a special forum in NATO for U.S./Russia consultations. In this context the U.S. wanted Russia in the WTO, it wanted it in the G-7, it wanted it in APAC, it wanted to create a new European security organization, the OSCE, which hadn't even existed before. There were many people who were critical of this. They said the U.S. was becoming too slavishly solicitous of Russia. In reality there were limits to what the U.S. was prepared to do to accommodate Russian preferences, but it wanted to explore all kinds of Russian-American cooperation and did, from research on theater missile defense to joint peacekeeping in the Balkans. It was not willing to change or to render the NATO alliance useless or ineffective as a guarantor of European security and full membership for Russian NATO would have done that, but this is a dilemma that needs to be acknowledged rather than simply thinking of American policy as a violation of some agreement that never existed. My own feeling at the time was a great uneasiness about NATO enlargement, because at first the policy didn't have a Russia dimension to it at all, but I believe the Clinton Administration did a lot to make the Russia half of the policy real and, frankly, so did the Bush Administration. Russians tend to forget or be in denial of this because it inconveniently undercuts what John and Dan call their narrative of grievance. It reminds them of how unready they were to take advantage of the full opportunities for cooperation and integration, but we shouldn't forget it because it's where we have to resume the process if we can. Let me stop with that. ROBERT KAGAN: This discussion is like an inside out Oreo. The hard cookies are in the middle and the soft white stuff is on the outside, so I'll go back to where John left off and talk about this in the context of what I consider to be the crisis of liberal internationalism in the present era. One reason I thought that John and Dan's paper was so important is because it is addressing this crisis. There is a problem, things have not turned out the way many of us expected after 1999 and I dare say they didn't turn out the way John and Dan expected after 1989 and it's relevant because the Obama Administration is dealing with this, is grappling with this right now. The Obama Administration ought to be naturally a kind of liberal internationalist administration. Colleagues of John are in influential positions in the administration, when I read speeches by the Secretary of State I feel like I'm reading John Ikenberry so this is highly relevant to where we are right now and at the root of it is the question. And I raise it as a question. I have my own prejudice about the answers but the question is: Can you build a liberal internationalist order when two of the great powers and arguably two of the most formidable great powers are themselves not liberal and, in fact, arguably are decreasingly liberal as time goes on? Now, in my view there is an effort ongoing by liberal internationalists to try to figure out how to do this, but in the process maybe the undermining or rejecting fundamental premises of what liberal internationalism was supposed to be all about. And that's what I want to discuss today. I think we have to dispense with a few low level errors or at least strange interpretations of the paper in Dan's presentation which is that this problem is somehow the result of national greatness conservatism which is the euphemism I suppose for neo-conservatism and also what Dan didn't mention but which is very much part of the paper is the insidious role of ethnic groups in shaping American foreign policy, and I'm talking about NATO enlargement. But if you go back and look at the origins of the falling out between the United States and Russia they all occur in the 1990s. By the time we get around to pulling out of the ABM Treaty, the narrative of grievance is already in place. The narrative of grievance has to do with NATO enlargement and American and European behavior in the Balkans and specifically Kosovo in 1999 which Russia considers part of its own sphere of influence and felt completely shut out, which, by the way, it was, of that settlement of that action. It bears reminding even on the economic front that the Reaganite Thatcherite economic policies were hoisted upon the hapless Russians by Strobe Talbott and Jeff Sachs and those famous Reaganites and Thatcherites who dominated the Clinton Administration. When you look at NATO enlargement itself, and Tom, by the way, who I think may be the only person, certainly the most prominent person, at this table and possibly in this room who actually vigorously oppose NATO enlargement. Tom remembered how the forces were [Inaudible] in those days and I don't think Tom viewed national greatness conservatism as his number one problem. His number one problem was that NATO enlargement was very much part of the Liberal Internationalist project. It was part of the expansion of democracy which was the key, at least as it was understood in those days by Liberal Internationalists, to establishing a genuine Liberal Internationalist order. Now, I thought maybe I'm wrong about this so I went back and because I'm such an eager student of John Ikenberry, I went back to John Ikenberry's writings throughout the 1990's and, in fact, all the way up to 2007 to see if I could find where it was he started ringing the alarm bells about how NATO enlargement was a disaster and was going to bring a clash between the United States and Russia. As it happens I could not find those alarm bells being rung. In fact, what I found to the degree that John talked about Russia at all in this period which was very limited actually, NATO enlargement was seen roughly as part of the Liberal Internationalist product. John, in fact, praises NATO in the first instance, but I would say in one case explicitly but certainly all the time implicitly NATO enlargement as well as a deepening of the international institutions of liberal order as beneficial in showing a policy of restraint by the United States in being willing to deepen its commitments in Europe to a body in which it had only one vote. Again in John's point of view at least during this entire period NATO enlargement is part of that project. So I think we National [Inaudible] will have to share at least some of the blame for destroying U.S. - Russian relations with that vast army of Liberal Internationalists. When John would [Inaudible], not so much. I could find you, since you raised that a combination of hard core realists and neo conservatives together with domestic interest groups representing in particular corporations and ethnic communities with foreign attachments shaped American policy towards Russia. Maybe you meant to put the Clinton Administration, Dick Lugar that famous neo conservative, Chuck Hagel that other famous neo conservative, Braginski that other famous neo conservative, but here at least in this sentence they are, well he falls under the ethnic category, I suppose. A footnote on the ethnic category now that Steve brings it up, there is a tremendous complaint in this paper about the role of domestic politics in shaping American Foreign policy. I don't need to remind John I'm sure of the enormous praise that he bestows on the American system over the ten years prior to this, precisely for having an open political system which other countries are able to influence by means of their lobbyists and you recognize the importance of that in stemming what you then regard as the evil Ronald Reagan's hard line policies with peace groups that arose etc., etc. And here I find it very disturbing that you've taken the kind of Walt Mearsheimer approach to foreign policy which is if you don't like the foreign policy it's those ethnic groups that have screwed it all up. But that is a footnote, because taking that position is also at odds with the Liberal Internationalist project so the point I want to make aside from raising some of these interesting historical footnotes is that in an effort to make Liberal Internationalism work again but in an environment where Russia is behaving like Russia we are having first, as Steve pointed out, to rewrite the history of the Cold War settlement, but more importantly to redefine what Liberal Internationalism means. That is, I think, John's big project he refers to in the paper as what he calls a higher liberalism which to me in the same way that someone described Wilson's policy of the higher realism which really meant liberalism, this higher liberalism really means realism. Because now we're being told that the fundamental principles of order must rest on a balance of power among the great powers, that that is the starting point. That may or may not be true. It is not the position that John has held consistently and eloquently for over a decade which was that Liberal Internationalism at least during most of the period that he wrote about rested on American Hegemony. Okay if the hegemony is fading, I'm not sure it is, that does create a crisis, but to now make the leap that we must in order to preserve Liberal Internationalism accept realist principals about dealing with Russia and China, I think that theoretical contradiction is probably too much to withstand scrutiny or actual behavior and especially, and I'm going to conclude on this point, when you ask what is the recommendation that you are proposing to solve this problem that we're having with Russia and I think the phrase you use is we should not be resetting but rewinding. I wonder what rewinding means since you don't decide to flush it out in the real world. If Russia's traditional non liberal internationalist great power sense is that they need to be not only the dominant power in their near abroad but the dominant power in Eastern Europe as they had been during the Cold War and before the Cold War, does reestablishing what you regard as the settlement mean rewinding back to acceptance of that? Does Russia's traditional great power desires which need to be accommodated allegedly in the pursuit of Liberal Internationalism mean that we have to be a party to the unwinding of the widening of the democratic space that occurred during the 1990s and into 2000? What I fear and what I worry about in this administration in general is that the desire to reset relations with Russia and China is, in fact, undermining the Liberal Internationalist project that no one has been a greater spokesman of than John Ikenberry and that where we're heading is not going to be a pleasant place for liberals, and I mean liberals in the broadest sense. Thanks. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Thank you Bob, thank you. I really don't want to get in the middle of this. It's really interesting and I just make a couple of points that really struck me as missing. Maybe I missed it. I read it on the airplane this morning coming back from Miami, but I really saw no mention of the price of oil. And I think we have to remember a very interesting coincidence that the price of oil cratered in 1991 somewhere between ten and fourteen dollars a barrel. 1991, 1991, 1991. What happened in 1991? Well, the world's second largest oil producer also cratered, called the Soviet Union. I'm a very big believer, give me eighty dollars a barrel and I'll give you a Soviet Union as Saudi Arabia. Give me thirty dollars a barrel and I'll give you a Soviet Union as a Norway. Give me ten dollars a barrel and I'll give you a Soviet Union as the United States of America. So the relationship between the price of oil and the pace of freedom is very much part of the background story here and the coincidence of Yeltsin's position of the NATO expansion in the United States and ten dollar a barrel oil and Putin and an aggrieved Russia empowered by eighty dollar a barrel oil I think is something that's very much a part of the substructure of this story. The second point I'd simply make as Bob eluded, I was an early, loud and in many cases except, for my friend Michael Mandelbaum, lonely opponent of NATO expansion. And I'd just like to get you guys to talk about this. I came at it from two directions. One was: was there any problem in the world of any scale that we could solve without the cooperation of Russia? That was the first question that I asked and it seemed to me on a purely realist ground we traded Russia for the Czech navy. And the Czech's don't have a navy so on purely realist ground it seemed to be a very bad arbitrage to have done. Second, on liberalist grounds I never understood why Russian democrats, Russian liberals, the aspiration of a whole generation of young Russians wanting to be part of a free world had to take second place to Polish, Hungarian, Belgian and Lithuanian liberals after the collapse of the Soviet Union. As Bob alluded to, one of the big reasons for that was because that group of liberals had no domestic voice here in the United States. Except basically corporations, Arm and Hammer and people like that, there was no domestic constituency speaking up for that group of liberals and somehow they became secondhand democrats. So with that I want to say get out of the way and let you guys rebut. JOHN IKENBERRY: Well, let me just start and first of all say thank you for those comments. And Bob, congratulations on all that reading you did. I actually apologize for the suffering I caused and you're correct in the sense that I am -- this paper is a new paper for me and that it's focusing more on dilemmas that liberals face as they think about these grand transitions and the dilemma you have when you deal with non liberal great powers and how you approach them. And one of the arguments here and in our foreign affairs article earlier, Dan and I are making the argument that at some point along the way liberals who are wishing the spread of democracy well, including in areas but China and Russia would be well advised to think about how those tactical moves have strategic implications and long term implications in feeding nationalism inside of the non liberal state and that there is a kind of higher liberalism that is entailed in restraining and playing for the long term, which was actually Woodrow Wilson playing for one hundred years as he famously said. So the longer kind of vision of how you get transitions going and not necessarily at every turn pushing the democracy promotion project in each crevice and in each point even though you are a liberal and you believe and Bob believes this, as well, that ultimately a more peaceful, stable and just world will be one where those values and institutions spread. Now, on the question of what was in the mind of Americans and Russians at the end of the Cold War with the nature of the settlement and to what extent was there a restraint message in this settlement that was communicated by the West to Russia that then becomes part of the grievance as it unraveled, I would just simply stick to my guns here. I spent the last year of the first Bush Administration in the State Department of Policy Planning and I actually got to the policy planning office on the day that Gorbachev was on holiday and the coo that followed and the crisis that ensued. And during that winter the great project of the State Department was to try to figure out some way to get resources and aid to the Soviet Union so that this fledgling Gorbachev moment would not die. So we had the largest group of foreign ministers ever assembled on the eighth floor of the State Department trying to unscrew and un-nail everything that could be sent to the Soviet Union. More importantly than that, really, was the language of grand strategy at that moment in the Bush Administration. It was really a language of restraint. Robert (Inaudible) famous nine assurances, the promise to turn NATO into more of a political organization now. Steve can say this is all a kind of smoke and fog. And that to some extent may be, but it was also a statement about principles and about the future and about how the settlement would not be a settlement where one side lost and one side won, but it would be one where they were jointly putting forward a new set of architectural designs for the system. Remember the famous speeches of the United Nations. Remember the very sincere view on both sides that this was going to lead to a more stable one world system of integration and restraint. Now, on NATO expansion, again, thank you, Bob, for reading my pieces. I didn't write about NATO expansion during that period. I remember being as befuddled by why it was happening as everybody else, council meetings and walking out of meetings with Robert Buoy and others, John Gaddis, not sure what was driving this large design. Now, Bob is suggesting that liberals are implicated in NATO expansion. And yes they are. And in our paper we make that noted. And the whole last section of our paper is really trying to put the spotlight on liberals who want to push and spread but also have to realize that part of the project that they are trying to build is on a foundation built on restraint. I'll come back to that in a second in my wrap up. Importantly, Washington's deviations for the principles of the Cold War settlement were in part the result of the incompleted, inappropriate pursuit of liberal ends. And this is where our argument is that, yes, liberals were implicated and that is clearly the story of the 1990s and, yes, I am conflicted and many liberals are in that it was a story of providing a security framework in which these new democracies could build civil military relations rule of law that could integrate and, of course, the EU awaited them, the EECU. So A, liberals are conflicted. B, liberals were enthusiastic from Madeleine Albright down that this was something that was going to have a positive impact, and it did. But, C, that agenda, what wasn't attached to it was a commented agenda of finding a way to weave Russia into a larger security space. It wasn't that you should stop finding ways to support fledgling democracies in Eastern Europe but rather simultaneously finding a way to lock Russia into a larger security space, precisely what many of us need to be doing with China today. I will just toss the baton to Dan and come back on this issue of restraint which is terribly important. DANIEL DEUDNEY: We have lots of different points here, tremendous interest. I want to go back to some of the points that Steve made about the end of the Cold War settlement in the 1990s and try and put clearly in play where we disagree and why we think we're right. First of all, you give us a characterization of the end of the Cold War which doesn't really have nuclear weapons as central as the one we do. And this is really a question of the history of it. And we thought immediately after the end of the Cold War. We wrote this and we have seen substantial additional historiographic confirmation of it that Reagan and Gorbachev both really got off the reservation in terms of conventional wisdom about nuclear weapons. And this is a purely junctural, very contingent type of feature in all of this. The reality of mutual vulnerability had been around for a long time but their position went beyond the deterrence position. Their position was that the relationship between the United States and Russia, Soviet Union, had to be radically transformed in order for them to deal with what was the largest threat to either of their core national security interests. And this is still central to the relationship and I'll come back to that in a minute. Second on this question of Eastern Europe and why Mikhail Gorbachev accepted change in Eastern Europe. As you say it is clearly the case because this would be contrary to perestroika. We say that in our analysis of this period but we also make the additional argument which is that he was able to do this. He, Gorbachev, the Soviet leadership, were able to accept this transformation in Eastern Europe because they did not see this change as a threat to core Soviet security interests. And we think this is a major change compared to previous Soviet governments added to what was going on in central and Eastern Europe. And this is fundamentally the result of their realizing that the western alliance is not Nazi Germany, that the western alliance is radically different. It's not really core threatening in the same way that these earlier regimes were and the nuclear weapons creates this entirely different dynamic of mutual insecurity. Now, you could end by saying, I think usefully and constructively, "what do we do now? Where do we go with this?" And you say that to get it back on track we have to say no spheres. The Russians are going to have to accept no spheres. And we are going to have to have democratic peace in your language or your domestic regime convergence. We have to get democracy in Russia as a prerequisite. I don't think that this is necessarily the case. Our argument is that we have this goes back to the nuclear point a transcendent, common national security interest with the Russians to regulate and control this capability. And it's notable that the nuclear threat problem in the 80s and so forth was centered on interstate relations. Of course, now in the post 9/11 environment we are all focused on non state actors. And over this period of the 90s into this last decade there has been a major American/Russian cooperative accomplishment that is somewhat below the radar in terms of the grand strategic conversation. And this is, of course, the (Inaudible) program. And this is a response by the United States. This is very novel. They're defeated and what are we afraid of? We're afraid of their weakness. We have to go in and sure them up. We are worried about their incapacity. Very, very different than a traditional type settlement. This is still very, very real. We may not think about nuclear weapons much, but they are still out there and the United States and Russia between them have in a 98 or so percent of the total missile material on the planet and we have a core security interest in working with them and putting aside secondary differences in order to do so because of that mutual threat. Let me say something about this conversation with Bob on the liberal internationalism. As John pointed out there are all of these tensions that there are fundamental recurring dilemmas that liberals have to deal with and that is not all national greatness, conservatism or unipolarity and so forth. It's also the liberal internationalism. We do accept that there has been liberal implication in the cause of this chains, that we pushed and that is part of the liberal agenda. But I want to step back and point out that one of the most fundamental features of the relationship today is, as has always been, the strategic nuclear force arrangement. I have spoken a few minutes ago about Reagan and Gorbachev and a legacy of this radical nuclear run world, this quasiabolitionist orientation. But there is another Reagan legacy that we also have to confront. Reagan gives us a very schizophrenic legacy. At the beginning of his administration it's assertiveness and then we have this nuclear run world, this mutual recognition. The guy flipped from one extreme on a spectrum to the other without ever pausing in the middle in a deterrent standard understanding in a nuclear era. There was another Reagan, of course, and that was the Reagan of the SDI. And this is still very much with us. The dilemma that we face which is really at the core of the ability of the United States and Russia to go significantly further with nuclear weapons disarmament is going to be the ABM issue, the ghost of SDI. We are still in (Inaudible). And the reality is that the United States has for a variety of domestic and grand strategic reasons committed itself to going down this path of substantially developing ballistic missile defense. Now, if we continue doing that, if we do not stop and move to some sort of regulatory mutual restraint at least for the weapons that have to do with the core of the arsenals, then we are going to see the continued deterioration of the settlement and the return to the type of competitive arms racing that we saw before. So our fundamental national security interests remain at the core and they point towards cooperation. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: A quick intervention. JOHN IKENBERRY: I just wanted to, for the record, make it clear that I don't agree with Bob's characterization of my view about great power balance as a necessary component. He argued that somehow after ten years of writing I didn't think about or talk about it now I think you have to move to a balance of power system. No. That's not what I believe. My new book is called Liberal Leviathan. It's really trying to visualize a world where the U.S. remains at the center of the system. It is not a balance of power system but it an order if it is going to work it is going to be one where there are accommodations with Russia and China along the way. As we as liberals bet that there is a pathway to modernity that leads through principles and institutions that we still hold dear, if you want to be a great power in the 21st Century you got to belong to the WTO. I think that's true. And I think that that says something about where the system can go if we allow for forces in these non liberal states to work their way, the lapping tides of capitalism, the effects of integration, all of these master forces that over the long term will continue to see modernization in ways that we want. It's important to make a distinction between great power restraint which has been part of an entire liberal project. And one of my arguments is that liberals don't appreciate the realist foundations of their project, but that doesn't mean that you accept the Kissinger view of international order where Henry argues that international order, successful order is built on two foundations. One is a balance of power and legitimate agreement on principles. I think you need agreement on principles but I'm making bets that you don't need a balance of power but restraint is not the same thing as balance. Restraint is a practice that has evolved through the Westphalian history of great powers and has been part of the accomplishment that entails great powers settling their differences without balance through binding as Germany and France did after World War II and as the U.S. has done with its great power allies, that in ways, perhaps not best described as binding but as accommodation and restraint we can do with Russia and China with higher liberal principles. There you have it. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Bob and then we will open it up to the floor. ROBERT KAGAN: Well, there is a lot that has been said here that one could quibble with and I will resist the full list of quibbles. One thing that does just to be a little concrete since we have been at a kind of high level of abstraction in a lot of this one thing that seems to bug you guys is the issue of the ABM Treaty and ballistic missile defense. And the effort to enshrine it, enshrine mutual vulnerability as a principle of the settlement, I think is going to get in the way of the kind of great power accommodation that you're talking about. Let me explain why. In the 1990s the Clinton Administration was trying to think about how to deal with the problem of Iran and of North Korea developing nuclear weapons and missile systems. And their view of this was we are probably going to need missile defense. They didn't think the right way to deal with this was to accept mutual vulnerability. That was not and will, I predict, will never be the view of American policymakers toward these countries. They are going to try to deal with defense. The Clinton Administration, therefore, went to the Russians and said we are looking at a change in the nuclear relationship. We need to mend the ABM Treaty. We may need to carve out large parts of it and just put it aside because otherwise we are not dealing with uptodate security threats. We are still imprisoned by the Cold War. The Russians said sorry, this threatens us. And my proposition is if all of the elements of great power relationships that defined the Cold War are considered to be ones that have to be carried forward and respected anew because we discovered that they are part of the settlement, we are going to have a harder time dealing with real security threats. The Bush Administration went further than the Clinton Administration did in abrogating, would have in abrogating the ABM Treaty but it didn't go further in the sense of radically different proposition about missile defense which was it had to deal with new security threats. And if every time the United States says we're trying to deal with something new in 21st Century security, the Russian answer or the Chinese answer is we're sorry. That threatens us. Then you're absolutely right. The relations among great powers are going to be contentious, difficult and you are not going to be able to solve problems. The achievement, I think, of the Clinton Administration and the Bush Administration both at different points was to get Russian American relations to a point where issues like this did not seem mutually threatening. And the path back to that kind of relationship is obviously one that needs to be identified. But if we think that we can't go there because of some relationship that was defined in the past, the ABM Treaty of all things, Richard Nixon and Leonid Brezhnev, that should be an obstacle to a new kind of great power relationship because we think we agreed to something of that sort in the 80s and 90s. I think that is really to make the prospect of real great power cooperation and even liberal internationalism much more remote. SPEAKER: I'm going to try and be brief. I mean, I'll try is going to be the key word here. I think the problem is, in my view, that in order to try to ease the way toward a more cooperative relationship with Russia you have overly adopted Russia's version of events. I mean, there are times when I read this paper I thought was listening to (Inaudible) explaining what's happened over the past 10 years. And you don't need to do that, it seems to me. And, in fact, it's damaging to do that. I think a much straighter story is that the reason, by the way, I pointed out that you weren't raising alarm bells in the 1990s about NATO enlargement is because no one is raising nobody really thought other than Tom and some people, but even Tom, I would say by late 1990s was fairly relaxed about the effect that this was having on Russia because the Russians themselves had not yet decided to make this the defining issue of the relationship. They also were very unhappy about Kosovo but that was also not made the defining attribute, quality of the relationship. The Russian governments of the 1990s were all about trying to integrate with the west and they swallowed their pride knowing, by the way, that they have lost the Cold War. I mean, we don't like to use the words win and lose. It's not polite. But they did and they certainly perceived that they lost the Cold War and they understood that there was some of this that they were going to have to put up with. They also didn't perceive, as I think Steve pointed out or somebody has pointed out, the rise of democracies in their midst as threatening because they were democratizing or were trying to democratize. They didn't walk across the border and say oh my God here is a pro western country developing in Poland or here is a pro western country developing in Hungary. They were an aspiring pro western and western country. And what happened was things began to change in Russia. The reasons why they changed, I'm sure some of it was what we did, some of it was what was going to happen anyway. This isn't the first time a country decided that they had been stabbed in the back after losing a war and they had gotten a bad shake and why did they have to put up with it. And what Tom mentions is critically important, the rise in the price of oil gave Russia a sense of power which made what they had given up look like they had given up too much. When you are weak you give up and you have to deal with it. If you're strong you say "why did I give up so much?" So they began to rethink the narrative. And they began to be more assertive. And they began to demand what they had not previously demanded. And it was a lot of circumstances that it wasn't just because there were evil, stupid people in the United States. These things happened. It seems to me Russia followed a perfectly understandable course. Now, what we do about it is the question. I would say, A, let's not rewrite our history to accommodate the fact that they have changed their view of things. And B, let's not give up on the principles that we have held by predominantly for 60 years since the World War II settlement that it is better, in fact, for everyone concerned to support and strengthen international institutions with liberal democracies as best we can and, yes, hope for change in those countries, but not at the sacrifice of countries that want to be part of a democratic order, that are yearning to be part of a democratic order in the here and now so that we can accommodate a new Russian nationalism at the expense of countries around its border. That to me is too much, John, and it's not where you in my personal opinion and you're dying for advice from me. It's not where you should be going. It's not where liberal internationalism should be going. There are ways to cooperate with the Russians if it is true that nuclear weapons are a transcendent national interest of Russia and the United States then we ought to be able to have disagreements with them on 15 other issues and still find agreement with them on that if that's true. During the Cold War we had arms agreements with the Soviet Union at a time when we didn't agree about anything else. So let's not sacrifice everything in the interest on moving ahead on arms control. We ought to be able to do both. And, by the way, if we can't do both that means it isn't a transcendent interest of the Russians. We ought to know that, too. TOM FRIEDMAN: I think that one of the things that I would add to your list of what changes that Putin discovered that this was really good politics. And once he discovered that it was game over because then it became an overriding interest to really pick at this. We got about 20 minutes. And I want to open the floor and just identify who you want to ask a question of. AUDIENCE: Documentary film producer. I'd like to raise the issue of economic reform. (Inaudible) did anybody hear my SPEAKER: We heard it. AUDIENCE: If you agree with this assessment, how will this complicate the application of higher liberal principles to international organization? THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Let's take that. I want to hear the answer. SPEAKER: I'll say a word about that. Russians are very concerned about this. And they are debating the issue. A lot of Russian liberals were secretly hoping that the economic decline or crisis for them was going to be more protracted than it turned out to be. Once things started turning up they found their case that the only way to get out of the crisis was through more reform, weak. But this is important. There is a significant constituency, the leading spokesman for which is the president of Russia that believes that actually they have overdone their ideas of being able to find a separate path of development. They believe that actually the only way that you can really create a successful modern state is to go back to the crazy ideas of 90s reform to complete the development of the rule of law and so forth. That's one of the reasons I think Bob he didn't mention this dimension of it is really right about not giving up entirely on what we thought the whole end of the Cold War was about. It's because there are a lot of people in Russia who are arguing that that still is their future. And ultimately I think that argument will carry the day. SPEAKER: I think no country was more harmed by the return of oil prices which really then aborted the whole Medvedev camp argument for reform than Russia. AUDIENCE: My name is Mike. I'm at Johns Hopkins. I think this has been a great program, really super. Full disclosure at the outset. For most of the period that you folks are talking about I was the Staff Director for European Affairs on the Center for Foreign Relations Committee working for Joe Biden and then I was tasked with NATO enlargement as many of you know. I think it was the right policy. I thought it was then. I think it is now. If I could fill in one or two brief points. I mean, you have all made great points. I find myself, in general, more in agreement with Bob and Steve. It's almost three years to the day, it will be in about two weeks, since Putin made his speech at the Munich security conference in which he basically laid out this narrative of grievance. And it's just and I'm not suggesting in any way that John and Daniel follow that but I think a lot of people bought it. And it is just simply wrong as we have heard today. Let me just give you two more examples of ways that it's wrong that he never talked about. Jaeger (Inaudible) who just died a few weeks ago publicly has said he was the acting Prime Minister of Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union. He said had it not been for American agricultural aid there would have been starvation. This is not the kind of action of a country that wants to undermine another country. More interesting, perhaps, is as late at 1998 we were asked by the Russians to ratify something called the CFE flank document. This was after the first war in Chechnya. So it was eyes open. We knew what was going on. We knew the strategic implications. It was ratified by the U.S. Senate by 100 to 0 vote. Again, we were still looking very much to be and Steve is perfectly right. We set up NATO Russian counsel and the permanent joint counsel and then the Russia counsel. I think what Bob just said at the end hits the nail on the head. There has been a change of attitude in Russia. Just a little anecdote. When NATO enlargement came on to the agenda it was first pushed, of course, from central Europe (Inaudible). Then Senator Biden and all went to the countries that were the highest candidates, Poland, Czech Republic and Hungary and Slovenia. But you know what? We went to Russia first. We went to Moscow in March of 1997. It was right after a mini summit in Helsinki. You may remember. And I remember meeting with the national security council in Russia where we discussed and we said look and incidentally Senator Biden wasn't even committed to it then. It was a fact finding trip. We said what do you think about all of this? Well, they weren't jumping up and down with joy. If I had to characterize it I would say they were against it, but there was absolutely no fear. There was no paranoia. They understood that NATO never had an offensive battle plan. That never was in it. Putin has jumped on this as a domestic tool to further his own agenda, pure and simple. Now, what's really interesting is what really and the organization that really endangers the current group in Moscow is the EU and Lavrov because it would just change the whole system. Lavrov, their foreign minister, made his speech to this effect about 11 months ago. So, I mean, I think there is waking up to that. And then, finally, Tom, honestly, I don't understand what you were saying at the end about liberals in Central and Eastern Europe versus liberals in Russia. I mean, it seems to me that this is not a zero sum game. We treated it that way. (Overlapping comments). SPEAKER: I want to make one point here because you really raised it. I might have raised it, too. Yes, Putin played this cynically. That's not the only question. The question is: why did it play so well all across Russia? Because they perceived that there was a trade off here. You can't succeed with a political line. AUDIENCE: I'll give you one reason. First you dismantle independent television and then you bombard people with propaganda. Of course it's going to have an effect and that's what happened. But one last thing about SPEAKER: Fox TV did it all. I don't think so. AUDIENCE: I didn't say Fox. One last thing about domestic American constituencies and their influence on foreign policy. First of all, that's as American as apple pie. I mean, not only is there anything wrong with it, I see a lot right with it. But secondly it sort of presupposes that there is just kind of a DNA building argument in favor of something because of perceived homeland interests or ancestral interests. When we had our last hearing we had an open mic hearing. Anybody who was not a crazy essentially could come speak. And you know the two biggest the two most impressive speeches, one was by the Polish American Congress headed by the late Yon Novak and the other was by the American Jewish Committee, David Harris. Now, I would submit that if you look at history there was no particular reason that the American Jewish Committee should have been in favor of NATO enlargement other than the fact that they are patriotic Americans who thought it was a good idea. And, I mean, I think it does a disservice to groups to kind of imply that there is sort of a monochromatic tone to what they are saying. SPEAKER: I don't find them monochromatic. I'm all for lobbyism. American as apple pie. That doesn't mean that every lobby is acting in the American interest. AUDIENCE: That's true and incidentally there were people who spoke out including some Russian Americans who spoke out against NATO enlargement. So it is not that there was one anyway, these are just some just to fill in some of the holes. But the narrative, again, I think Bob underscored at the end. We just simply can't accept that as received wisdom. It's not. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: All the way back. AUDIENCE: My name is Tom and I'm from the State Department. And I've got a question about one of the smaller points that you raised, Dan. You mentioned twice that we needed to create institutions that were significant and that would encompass Russia. There are a number of institutions that were set up to take care of one need or another, some of them haven't worked so well and presumably that's what you were thinking about. And, of course, there is a case to be made for setting up institutions if you want to accomplish something and then figuring out what to fill them with or an institution that then compels a certain pattern of behavior that then leads to desirable ends. But I was wondering what kinds of things specifically you might have in mind with that comment. DANIEL DEUDNEY: Well, you've asked a question that I go around and ask and I think our point on this is that the United States and the liberal community and American foreign policy needs to be more imaginative. We need to come up with measures that will be significant and will include Russia and we need to be continuously talking about them, continuously thinking about them not under the assumption that they are necessarily going to be implemented right away but that as part of the menu of conversation, the possibility frontier of the interaction of the two states that this has more of a presence. The reality is that the European Union and its relationship with Russia is another major piece of this and the Russian European relation is really going to be as important as what we do with NATO. So there are really two different tracks of this. AUDIENCE: Jerry Mitchell from The Mitchell Report. One of the other things we haven't heard about this afternoon is a topic on which both Bob Kagan and John Ikenberry have waxed eloquent in years past and that is the concert of democracies. And my question is: Where are you on that point today? Still a good idea? And if so who would be the members and what benefits could we expect from it? And second, if you have changed your mind, what led you to do that? SPEAKER: I didn't bring up that John wrote in 2007 he was still talking about concert of democracy. JOHN IKENBERRY: In the Princeton Project Report AnneMarie Slaughter and I put forward a notion of a concert of democracies. And I think I'm still very much of the view that democracy should be strengthening their institutionalized formed of cooperation and developing stronger ties. I like a senior diplomat's proposal, retired diplomat Jim Hutley's argument about a planning unit that would be built amongst mature, advanced democracies to strengthen their capacity for long term planning and concerting their visions of grand strategy. I don't think I've cooled to the idea of a concert that would be a that would sort of be the primary vehicle for a kind of post UN global system, that is to say to the extent it were to be developed and given responsibility by the United States and the other parties in it for making decisions about use of force, for example, in some sense challenging the security council for that kind of authority, I'm less certain it would be a constructive development. But I just want to say that the 21st Century is going to be a century where we will, if we are to survive, will be developing much more extensive forms of complex forms of cooperation, intrusive, elaborate, monitoring, surveillance. We will be building joint capacities among nations for all sorts of things. And we know something from history and theory and that is democracies are particularly good at working together and developing complex forms of sustained cooperation. So they need to be a vanguard in various ways. But to an extent it would be a league of democracies that would have this more insidious effect and I'm cautious about it. ROBERT KAGAN: I would like to see Russia placed in the context of our overall interests rather than asking: What do we need to do to repair the relationship with Russia? Which I think is the dominant perspective right now. We should ask: What do we need to do to repair our relationship with Russia in the context of our broader interests? I am still wedded to whoever was the originator of this idea, the Bush Administration or Clinton Administration, they were both committed to it which was the idea of Europe Whole and Free. I don't think we do the Russians any favors by pulling back on that agenda. I think we should be playing for the long game which is we don't know where Russia is going. It is not dangerous to Russia in our sense of its true interests to be surrounded by democracies. I fear that we strengthen Putin's nationalist hand by showing that it's working if it gets us to back off in these cases. I personally think Russia is not so strong that you can't erect certain realities in front of it that would then if we stick to our principles it may cause a rethinking of what Russia's true interests are right now. I think Putin is getting a free ride, in a way. He gets to thump this nationalist drum without any real price. I would like to see that happen. I don't want to give up on Russia internally because at the end of the day I think John and I are in complete agreement, that where we want to go is a Russia that is heading back in the direction that it was stalled in 1990s but that means that our policy around Russia should also be about promoting democracy. DANIEL DEUDNEY: I agree with Steve. Of course, it was our original argument that arms control has to be the center of the relationship and this is something that I think we have to acknowledge is not going to go very far unless we are willing to alter where we think we want to go. And this is something that the United States hasn't really confronted yet. And the Obama Administration, let's face it, is not going to be able to get any kind of major arms control agreement with the Russians through the Senate implemented on our side without more of a consensus on our side about what is very important. And so it is here again where we are divided is a significant issue. The second thing that we have to do and this goes back to the argument that we made in the paper and that I summarized in my presentation about the underlying failure of democratization. We are liberals. We want liberal democracy to occur in Russia. And we make the argument that the fundamental reason why it failed had to do with the economic equity issue. And that's not something that we can greatly effect at this time. I think your point about oil prices is a key part of it. And if we reduce our oil dependence and oil prices fall that will help. That's important to do. But even more important is the model in terms of what we, the United States can do, what the Obama Administration can do. We, the United States, need to restore some updated version of the New Deal deal. That is to say that over the last several decades there has been an erosion in this country that democracy has got to work here and be seen as working and solving problems and needing the interests of the vast majority of people if it is to remain a type of model that it did in the past. And I think that Obama is right on track in this way, and I think that the export viability of this model is continued to be damaged by this kind of indifference to economic equity by powerful factions in the United States. JOHN IKENBERRY: I agree with Dan with Steve that the centerpiece should be arms control and the stakes are high and the possibilities for negotiations and ongoing relationship in that area across the various aspects of arms control and nuclear weapons and locking down old weapons. But in some ways the broader argument that I think the Obama Administration should embrace is that the long term prospects of Russia will hinge on the long term prospects of an open liberal international order where the U.S. is a leader and the system itself is healthy. So if internationalism begins at home and as Dan said reimagining the American model, if you will, of political economic, but beyond that of how globalization worked and the role of social justice and equity issues, that kind of rebranding, reimagination of the American model at home has huge implications for the kinds of agreements and building of consensus internationally . That was the story after World War II. It's been called embedded liberalism. It's a social bargain that went with open markets. It wasn't just let's just reduce barriers and get the party going. It was about building social institutions that would safeguard against economic insecurity, this social safety net and so forth. We call it the welfare state. But it's more than that. So the U.S. rebuilding its own model and working with a global system to give the liberal order another few generations of durability and functioning ahead of us. And then, just to wrap up, we may disagree about the sources of Russian grievance and the historical record upon which they are based, but the fact of the matter is that Russia as a post imperial state has this deep resentment and hostility that is to some extent constructed, certainly contingent in its political manifestations on the rise and fall, the boom and bust of the Russian economy, but it is real. And one of the ingredients I think for a stable cooperative relationship with Russia is to rebuild the kind of respect and deal with the kind of psycho drama that is part of this sad story, really. And build a kind of legitimate and respectful reciprocal kind of relationship that we can use to do business for many years to come. And that's part of what we have tried to do in this article. THOMAS FRIEDMAN: Thank you very much. Thanks to all of the panelists. This was a great seminar and I'm glad you all could be here. Thank you.