THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE

CARNEGIE FOREIGN POLICY CONFERENCE

“MANAGING U.S. DOMINANCE”

MODERATOR:

JESSICA MATHEWS, PRESIDENT,

THE CARNEGIE ENDOWMENT FOR INTERNATIONAL PEACE

KEYNOTE SPEAKER:

DEAN ROBERT GALLUCCI GEORGETOWN UNIVERSITY

EDMOND WALSH SCHOOL OF FOREIGN SERVICE

JUNE 20, 2006

Transcript by: Federal News Service

Washington, D.C.

MEREDITH RILEY: Good morning everyone. If I could have your attention

please, we’d like to get started. Welcome to the Carnegie Foreign Policy Conference. My name is Meredith Riley and I am a junior fellow in the Democracy and Rule of Law Project here at the Carnegie Endowment. It is tradition for Carnegie President Jessica Mathews to open events such as this, but there are a number of reasons why she really is the ideal person to inaugurate this conference.

First is that she is one of the staunchest supporters of the incoming foreign policy generation. She has given her full support not only to this conference, but also to the research, and the personal and professional development of all of the junior fellows here at the Endowment. But most importantly, she tirelessly takes a challenging and forward-looking approach to U.S. foreign policy making. Her work has spanned issues and it has spanned industries.

Jessica Mathews began her professional life as a molecular biologist, earning her Ph.D. in the subject in 1973. Subsequent appointments as a Congressional Science Fellow and a staff member for the House Energy and Environment Subcommittee brought her full time into politics.

Her intellect and integrity brought her to the executive branch, where she served as Director of the Office of Global Issues on the staff of the National Security Council and later as Deputy to the Undersecretary of State for Global Affairs.

Outside government, she has contributed cogent commentary and analysis while a member of the Editorial Board of the Washington Post and later as the author of an influential and internationally-read weekly column in the Post.

She has also been a pioneer in the think tank world. Before coming to Carnegie in 1997, she was founding Vice President and Director of Research for the World Resources Institute and then from 1993 to 1997 at the Council on Foreign Relations was a senior fellow and Director of the Council’s Washington Program.

She serves on too many boards and her work has appeared in too many publications for me to mention here, though I will say that her seminal 1997 Foreign Affairs article, "Power Shift," was chosen by the editors as one of the most influential in the journal's 75 year history.

She is a frequent commentator on the environment, globalization, international organizations, Iraq, non-governmental actors, non-proliferation, national security, and U.S. foreign policy in general.

With her unique background in both politics and science, and her path-breaking work across foreign policy sectors, Jessica Mathews truly embodies the innovative thinking we in this room seek to bring to foreign affairs. Ladies and Gentleman, Jessica Tuchman Mathews.

JESSICA MATHEWS: Well, you don’t get introductions like that every day. I

really appreciate it very much. I want to begin by saying a few words to you about our hopes for this conference

and for the conferences I think that will come in years after, and then to share some thoughts with you on the theme of this gathering before introducing our keynote speaker for the morning.

You are, in case you haven’t already discovered it, an extraordinary group. The

junior fellows’ concept for this conference seemed to strike a chord not just in this city but well beyond it, and evoked an enormous response, an enormous number of applicants for today’s meeting. And the organizers, therefore, had the luxury of choosing attendees from among a very large number of applicants. And the result is a group of individuals whom – as I have looked over your backgrounds – with an amazing richness of experience, and across the many sectors – of academia, of journalism, of nonprofits – and from both the legislative and executive branches of government, including civil service, foreign service, and the military.

In my experience, the gaps among sectors are huge and can be hugely detrimental

to the making of good policy. So the making of relationships across sectors is one of the goals of the organizers, and from what I can see of the group here today, it has been successful, and I hope you will take deep advantage of it. The getting-to-know-you part of this meeting, and the insights you will get from listening to each other, may be the bigger part of the value of today’s meeting. And the speakers, including myself, may be quite incidental to it. And it will be interesting to me to see at the end of the day what you all decide to do about perhaps – if anything – about staying in touch and perhaps building some kind of network amongst you.

I do want to tip my hat to the junior fellows, the Carnegie junior fellows, who are

an extraordinary group, and who have done I think a superb job on this event, from its conceptualization to its organization to its execution. And it’s really a great pleasure to be associated with them and to have watched their grappling with this task and their success at it.

They have hoped, and as I think – as you know, that today’s discussion will take a

really long view. They say 50 years. That is hard for me to even understand. But let’s say 40 years roughly – (laughter) – I know it’s roughly your working career, your life, your working life. And the theme that they have chosen I think, therefore, is exactly the right one because I do believe very firmly that in one guise or another, this question of managing U.S. dominance is going to be the leitmotif of these coming decades, and therefore of your whole careers.

What should the U.S. role be in the world? What do we make of American

exceptionalism? What is our appropriate attitude toward international law and international institutions? What are our responsibilities to the rest of the planet regarding, for example, consumption of resources, including the finite resource of the planet’s ability to absorb wastes? What are our responsibilities and the limits to using American power to make the world a better place? These are the questions that are going to dominate your working careers. I think they do dominate it now, but for years and years to come.

The great American historian and the former librarian of Congress, Dan Boorstin,

used to say that trying to understand the present without a knowledge of history is like trying to plant cut flowers. And so I thought that I would use my few minutes with you to try to sketch what I see as at least the recent historical context of how we got to where we are today, which is I think a very troubled moment in American foreign policy, and a very determining one.

I think the story really begins at the end of the Cold War when we became the

world’s single superpower. There are two problems here. One is that managing global dominance without the restraining counterweight of a peer power and without succumbing to imperial overreach is a very, very difficult task, one at which all prior hegemons have failed in one way or another. And second, and this is partly why it is so difficult, is that one global power is much harder for the world to swallow than two.

At the beginning it seemed as though the U.S. might be different from the other

hegemons. If anything, it looked as though the risk was that the U.S. would turn inward rather towards imperial overreach. But as the 1990s unfolded, we began to travel a new unilateralist path. Let me describe it this way: In this period of the ’90s, the U.S. stood apart from the rest of the world, especially from its allies in Europe, in the creation of the International Criminal Court, with respect to the Kyoto Protocol on climate change, with respect to the ban on anti-personnel landmines, biodiversity treaty, the verification mechanism for the biological weapons control treaty. It unilaterally abrogated the ABM Treaty so that it could build a missile defense system. And, shockingly, it rejected the Comprehensive Test Ban, on which it had been leading the global drive for decades. It also turned away from a U.N.-brokered treaty limiting the export of small arms.

Nearly all of these occurred during the Clinton administration. The vote on the

landmine ban was 142 to nothing with 18 abstentions. The vote on the ICC, the International Criminal Court, was 120 to 7, with 21 abstentions. On Kyoto, it was 178 to 1, with only the U.S. opposed. With the exception of India and Israel in a few cases, not a single democracy shared the U.S. position on any of these issues. Instead, we found ourselves in the company of Libya, China, Iran, Iraq, and Cuba.

As this pattern unfolded, it reinforced a view that was already growing on the

political right that international institutions and international law were instruments of the weak that prevented the U.S. from pursuing its national interests. Because in this view

what the U.S. wanted was uniformly good for the world, this meant that these were also instruments that were prevented the world from becoming a better place. Thus, John Bolton, who is today the U.S. ambassador to the U.N., said in 1999, “It’s a big mistake for us to grant any validity to international law, even when it may seem in our short-term interest to do so, because over the long term, the goal of those who think that international law really means anything are those who want to constrict the United States.” I don’t think he has changed his view.

Then came 9/11, and from this unilateralist soil burst one of the periods for

American enthusiasm for empire that have appeared from time to time in our history. A month after the attacks, Max Boot, writing in The Wall Street Journal, called on the U.S. to, quote, “unambiguously embrace its imperial role.” Stanley Kurtz called for, quote, “a new democratic imperialism,” whatever that means. Dinesh D’Souza of the Hoover Institute noted America’s evident moral superiority. From here, it was a short step to calls for the U.S. to transform the world in its image.

Kurtz went on: “Imperialism as the midwife of democratic self-rule is an

undeniable good.” If so, of course, the U.S. needn’t bother with the rules that apply to others. “The organizing principle of empire rests,” wrote another intellectual of the right, Stephen Peter Rosen, “on the existence of an overarching power that creates and enforces the principle of hierarchy but is not itself bound by such rules.” That is not, by the way, a bad definition of empire, but I leave it to you to decide whether it works in today’s world.

The unilateralists’ frustrations with manifestly imperfect international institutions

and agreements turned, in this administration, into open disdain and rejection. “When you look at some of the agreements that the U.S. has rejected,” says Richard Perle, “they were negotiated over a decade or more by people beavering away in Geneva or Vienna without adult supervision” – including our major speaker for this morning. (Scattered laughter.)

“The people who worked on multilateral diplomacy, who do this kind of thing” –

this is Perle again – “are so naïve as to believe that the way to deal with an outlaw country was to get it to sign up to the same rules that would be adhered to by the non-outlaws.” In other words, treaties and international regimes are waste of time; the good guys don’t need them and the bad guys won’t obey them. This was a revolutionary change, and it became the core of the administration’s nonproliferation policy.

The final new element in the picture that really shapes the world in which you are

going to live, at least for the next maybe half-dozen years, and certainly through which you have lived over the last half-dozen, or last five, is the illusion that everything changed on 9/11. It didn’t. It changed for us, but not for the rest of the world, and not nearly as deeply as we believe. The attacks did leave us with a hugely exaggerated sense of threat, and that has led to another of the revolutionary changes of the Bush administration; namely, the explicit embrace of the concept of preventive war.

The new realities of the administration’s national security strategy dictate a new strategic imperative. We will actively confront, when possible, early and at a safe distance, those who threaten us, employing all instruments of our national power. When one reads the national security strategy, it is to be reminded, I think – or at least it reminds me – of Catherine the Great’s similar reaction when she said, “I know of no way to protect my borders other than to enlarge them.” The U.S. has gone on the offensive in every sphere, from the Middle East to outer space.

The important thing, however, is that the concept of preemption and prevention

have become so confused in the public mind and even in experts’ mind as to be I think now almost indistinguishable, but that confuses a terribly important difference. The legitimacy of preemption, the national security strategy acknowledged, is traditionally based on the existence of an imminent threat. But it went on to say, in this age of terrorism we can’t expect to see the usual signs of imminent threat, like mobilization of armies. Importantly, however, the strategy did not go on to offer an alterative standard. It simply argued that we must adapt the concept of imminent threat to the capabilities and objectives of today’s adversaries. And what this amounts to is not preemption but a loose standard for preventive war.

That term hasn’t been used, for two very strong reasons. It is partly because

preventive wars have no legitimacy under international law, and it is also because the concept of preventive war enjoys a very poor standing in American thought and practice. As historian Arthur Schlesinger, Jr. has shown recently, it has been explicitly rejected by presidents, from Abe Lincoln to Eisenhower, Truman, and Kennedy.

In ’57, when the Soviet Union, which had already acquired nuclear weapons, was

acquiring long-range missiles, Eisenhower was strongly urged to undertake a preventive war to prevent that – to, quote, “rollback the Soviet threat.” And certainly Stalin as a man of evil dwarfed Saddam Hussein and the threat certainly dwarfed the one that was exposed on 9/11. Eisenhower was under enormous pressure, but he refused, making the historic choice for containment instead, a policy that required long-term leadership and patience, national patience. The same thing happened when the Chinese were about to become a nuclear power. Kennedy was urged to undertake so-called “surgical strikes” to prevent it by his joint chiefs. He declined for the same reasons.

Now, clearly today’s threats are different, but the question is whether the

strategies for meeting them should be devised unilaterally or on some kind of a multilateral basis. “America’s special responsibility as the most powerful nation in the world is to work toward an international system that strives to translate power into cooperation. Any other attitude will gradually isolate and exhaust us.” It sounds like a pinko liberal; it’s actually Henry Kissinger.

He specifically rejects the notion that one nation alone can define the nature of the

threat and the content of preemption. He somewhat confuses the issue by using that word. And then went on to argue explicitly for an international dialogue to develop multilateral criteria that would render such an attack legitimate and smart, and the criteria

would include such things as the imminence of the threat, the scale of the threat, the means of preemption, et cetera.

9/11 had one other legacy that I think is important for you to think about, and that

is that for the past five years U.S. foreign policy became not just unilateral and uni-polar, but uni-dimensional. It has become very nearly impossible to get sustained and focused attention to any issue beyond the falsely conjoined ones of the war on terrorism and the war in Iraq. We have a one-note foreign policy, in effect.

Just to give you one sense of the costs, last spring the White House announced a

reorganization of the National Security Council, in which five new deputies were created. One was to focus on winning the war on terrorism; one was to focus on winning in Iraq and Afghanistan; one on advancing the president’s freedom agenda, especially in the Middle East; one on public diplomacy; and one on advancing the prosperity agenda. As you all know, how institutions are organized and where responsibilities are divided in Washington reflects very much policy attention all of the way up to the top, and that gives you a sense of where major issues, from relations with Russia, to climate change, to you name it, stand on the agenda today.

So to summarize, we have or should be having national debates on the question of

whether the U.S. should explicitly operate by a different set of rules from all other nations; on the question of whether international cooperation, including the formal creation of rule of law, is not just slow and frustrating, but whether it is harmful, a trap that constrains the good guys while the bad guys do what they wish, or whether it is essential for solving today’s problems; on the role of diplomacy, which is a consequence of the kind of view that I sketched as a useful tool in our toolkit for solving problems; and finally, this crucial question of the embrace not of preemption but of the entirely different concept of preventive war.

All of these things I think shape an enormously unusual moment in foreign policy,

and highly – one for which there are very few precedents for you to go back and learn from, and one of which your careers have been sort of catapulted into the beginning of, and which I think you will see over some decades the kind of working out of this very unusual moment.

I now have the genuine pleasure of introducing to you one of the people I admire

most in this town and like the most, a very good friend and a very distinguished practitioner of American foreign policy. Dean Robert Gallucci is head of the Georgetown University Edmond Walsh School of Foreign Service, where he has been for 10 years – we are not that old, no?

ROBERT GALLUCCI: No. MS. MATHEWS: No – after completing 21 years in government service.

Among the positions that he held at the State Department, he started in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency. He served in the Bureau of Intelligence and Research as the

division chief. He was a member of the secretary’s policy planning staff. He served as an office director in both the Bureau of Near East and South Asian Affairs and the Bureau of Political-Military Affairs, and he rose to become assistant secretary for Political-Military Affairs.

He had extensive experience abroad and in the multilateral context including in

Rome with the Sinai peacekeeping force in the ’80s, and more importantly, more recently, as deputy executive chairman of UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission overseeing the disarmament of Iraq after the ’91 war.

He negotiated what I believe to have been, notwithstanding what has since

happened, one of the major diplomatic achievements, perhaps the greatest diplomatic achievement of the Clinton administration, namely the framework agreement with North Korea, a long and grinding and difficult, very difficult diplomatic effort.

That is only a sketch of his career. You have more detail in your packet. He was

educated at the State University of New York at Stony Brook and has a Master’s and Ph.D. from Brandeis. He has taught extensively, has written extensively, including a book with Dan Poneman and Joel Wit entitled, “Going Critical: The First North Korean Nuclear Crisis,” which received the Douglas Dillon Award for a book of distinction on the practice of diplomacy.

He is wise, he is funny, he is smart, he is dedicated to the effective deployment of

American power. He has been extraordinarily successful in an extraordinarily broad number of efforts. I think you are very lucky to hear from him and I look forward to it.

(Applause.) MR. GALLUCCI: Thank you, Jessica. Listening to your opening remarks, it

makes me think that something I hadn’t reflected upon until just now, that maybe as you get older it gets more appealing to sit and listen than it does to speak. So I would just as soon continue to listen to you as to speak.

And I think that first occurred to me last year when we had a freshmen

convocation at Georgetown. And I don’t remember who the speaker was, but he observed to the freshmen class who had just arrived at Georgetown that they – ought to think about it a moment because he was sure that each one of them would regard their own view of the world and their own view of their place in the world with more confidence at that moment than they would for the rest of their lives. (Laughter.) They would never, in a sense, be smarter than they were at that moment. (Laughter.)

It’s a pleasure to be with you. It’s a great audience, and I’m really happy to share

some thoughts. My task, as I looked at it, was to do an – as I understood it, a sort of tour de raison, which I’m really not up to. Random thoughts I am up to. And as I thought about this – and I have in the past – that the idea of touching on a number of issues that are what I call critical to the national security suggests that I should briefly go over that

career that Jessica mentioned because I don’t think you heard enough detail about my past. (Laughter.)

And when I do this it is truly daunting to me because I think of when I went into

government, my first assignment really in the Arms Control and Disarmament Agency, and then for a period thereafter when I to the State Department, I had one real mission. In Political-Military we are big on missions, and one mission was to make sure that Pakistan never got nuclear weapons. (Laughter.) And soon after that I was promoted and sent off to be the deputy director general of the Sinai peacekeeping force, where for four years, my goal, objective, my mission was to bring a warm peace to Egypt and Israel.

Not long after that, some things intervened, but I was then asked to head up as a

deputy the UNSCOM, the U.N. Special Commission charged with disarming Iraq after the first Gulf War. And of course what we were supposed to do was make sure that the world never again worried about weapons of mass destruction in Iraq. That was the third major mission.

Following that, the secretary of State thought there was a problem with the

Russian-loose-nukes situation, and my job was to make sure we never had to worry about fissile material leaking out of the former Soviet Union.

After that mission, it was North Korea. And as Jessica mentioned, I did lead

negotiations with the North Koreans, but the objective of course in 1994, the mission, was to make sure we never had to worry about the North Korean nuclear weapons program ever again.

Following that it was Bosnia, and it was to bring to the states of former

Yugoslavia a perfectly successful multicultural, multiethnic, religious peace, and a successful state. We can see where that is.

The last task they gave me was to do something about the assistance which we

had detected between Russia and Iran, and that is to make sure that the Russians didn’t help the Iranians in their ballistic missile or in their nuclear weapons programs.

So if you go back over this, this is an unbroken record of diplomatic failure –

(laughter) – that at every turn was rewarded with promotion. (Laughter.) And all I can say is this a great country or what? (Laughter, applause.)

I am going to start here on the first topic. And I’m going to hit some of the issues

that Jessica mentioned, but at I would call a lower level of analysis. And maybe one can extract from it some of the propositions that are either at odds with or quite consistent with what Jessica laid out.

The first is the question of proliferation. And the two cases that are on our agenda

– if you ask the average bear right now what is the proliferation problem, how would you describe it, what is it, I think the average bear would say Iran and North Korea in terms of

the traditional concern about the proliferation of nuclear weapons, Iran and North Korea, whereas when I first went into government, we had 12. We called them, without any political correctness, the dirty dozen. We now have really two that we focus on: Iran and North Korea.

And so my first point to you this morning is going to be a suggestion or a

proposal that you restructure the way you conceptualize the problem of proliferation for these two states and other states that might come along. The proposal is that you not consider the threat to the United States or the international community the acquisition of nuclear weapons by Iran and North Korea.

I’m going to say, yes, it is important that they – if they acquire nuclear weapons –

one, they already have; the other may be on the road to it – it is important for the reasons that are normally adduced. If these missiles – excuse me, if these weapons are mated with ballistic missiles of sufficient range, they can threaten not only our allies but the continental United States. And many of us are doing interviews these days about the coming North Korean ballistic missile test. And, yes, it would be of concern to us if North Korea could reach the United States with a nuclear weapon made into its ballistic missile.

And, yes, the nuclear weapons program could be provocative to other states in the

region. In Northeast Asia one thinks immediately of South Korea and Japan; in the Middle East one might think of Saudi Arabia and Syria and others who might respond by withdrawal from the nuclear non-proliferation treaty perhaps not immediately but over a period of time where they found their security was inadequately addressed by current circumstances, and in the case of Northeast Asia by alliances with the United States. And if it were to lead to a change in one state, it would be more likely that other states would follow. There would be sort of – a domino effect might be anticipated, and that would be of concern as well.

None of this is trivial. It is important. But I am tempted to say as one of my

former professors Ken Waltz would say, deterrence works. Or more precisely, we think we learned over all of those years of dealing with the Soviet Union and even with a hostile China that it had not failed to work, which is really all you can say about deterrence. When deterrence is working, we can’t really be sure it’s working. We don’t know what the independent variable is; we just know what we want not to happen isn’t happening.

When deterrence fails, we can be pretty sure it failed because something bad

happens. Well, we don’t know for sure whether it would work, but we expect it wouldn’t fail. Okay, but the greater threat here is of course – I say of course because I anticipate many of you see where this is going – the greater threat is the accumulation of fissile material by one of these two states or others. It’s a circumstance that may arise before the accumulation of significant quantities of nuclear weapons, and it is more dangerous to us and to the international community because it opens up to a possibility, at least the

possibility, that some of that material will leave that state and find its way to a terrorist group, and we will confront the quintessential threat, the nuclear armed terrorist.

We might ask about why this is the quintessential threat, but I think most of us

would be ready with the answer. The answer is because we are without confidence that the way we have defended ourselves since 1945 would work anymore. Before 1945, we actually had what strategists called defense by denial. We could actually prevent the enemy from approaching our shores. We could do that for 150 years. Since 1814 we have been pretty good at that.

And then of course we confronted the possibility of attacks against which we had

no confidence of defense by denial, attacks that could be nuclear weapons attacks so that one missile would be one city, therefore devastating to us. And of course, we relied therefore on deterrence. And when we looked at the terrorist threat, we asked about unconventional attacks and we should not have confidence – I’ll submit to you without evidence but we could talk about it in discussion – that there should be no reason to have confidence in our ability to prevent an enemy from introducing a weapon, a nuclear weapon into the United States. This is a well-traveled ground, as well some could argue, but the idea that we would have ourselves with impermeable borders is I think ludicrous.

That leads us to the question of deterrence and then of course to our enormous

problems with relying on deterrence of a terrorist threat. How do you know who did it? How do you know where they live? And if you find out who did it and where they live, suppose they don’t care about your retaliation. I mean, anybody who values your death more than their life is not a good candidate for deterrence.

So in that circumstance, we really would like to find a situation – find a way of

getting to a situation where this kind of enemy who presumably not only has the – would have the – capability then to attack the United States, but also the intent. They are a different kind of terrorist than we’re accustomed to thinking about and analyzing through the 1970s and 1980s.

And so we worry about this a great deal. We worry about fissile material

therefore leaking out of countries like Russia and Pakistan. And we worry about transfer, that is to say unauthorized shift of material from countries like Iran and North Korea. Is this plausible that these countries would do this? Should this really be the first thing I talk to you about this morning? Is this the number-one issue as we think about America in the decades ahead? In security terms, I would submit to you – and I’m prepared to argue this – yes, it is; that in both cases if someone says it’s not plausible that North Korea – even Pyongyang, it’s not plausible that Iran – even this current government in Tehran would actually accumulate fissile material and transfer it.

And I would say some of us thought that we had warned the North Koreans

sufficiently not to transfer extended range ballistic missiles to anyone or there would be hell to pay. And of course – (chuckles) – the North Koreans went ahead and the Ghauri missile in Pakistan is the North Korean Nodong and the Shahab-3 in Iran is the North

Korean Nodong with some little Russian modifications. And they did that an other things without regard to possible consequences, about which they had been explicitly warned. They turned out to be empty threats.

With respect to Iran, I think it is arguable that Iran has been the single greatest

source of conventional weaponry to terrorists of any nation state on the planet for some time. And so the question is would they contemplate, seriously contemplate transfer of fissile material? What would be in it for them? Would they get caught?

If they got caught presumably there would be hell to pay if they got caught with a

transfer and certainly if we suffered the loss of an American city. But would they get caught? Are you confident that your intelligence community would catch one of these countries transferring a baseball to al Qaeda operating out of some place in Central Asia or in Africa? I think that would be a stretch even for our extraordinary intelligence community.

What about the idea that if we found that they did it and there was a detonation,

we would figure out where the material came from. I tell you this point because there may be some of you technically witting (?) in this extraordinary audience, and that is of course the issue of attribution. If there is a detonation, could we attribute it, the source of the material to a particular country? And the answer I can say with, in an unclassified basis, absolutely is possibly, but not more than that. That is the true answer whether you’re in a classified basis or an unclassified basis. We might be able to tell you where the material came from depending on a number of things, again, that we can talk about.

So do you want to trust that this will not happen? Do you want to trust the

government in Pyongyang or the government in Tehran? What are the options to deal with this threat? Well, you certainly can warn them right now don’t do it. And I have been told that to some degree that warning has been issued. You can be more explicit about consequence. Another thing to do is to of course negotiate with these governments and try to lock up their fissile material so that that situation does not materialize.

And then we get into the question of do we have a government in the United

States that is interested in solving the problem of a government like the one in Pyongyang or the one in Tehran having nuclear weapons by negotiating with the government as a mechanism of dealing with the threat. And I would submit to you we do not. We certainly have not, and I am suspicious that we do not now have one yet, although I know they are tempted in the Iranian case.

What about containment, which is the nicest thing you could say about our current

policy? You could call it a policy of containment, which is to say doing nothing and sort of hoping for the best but having a pretty strong rhetorical posture, and being very clear about how much disdain you have for the human rights violations and all of the rest that is wrong with the governments in Pyongyang and Tehran.

Or you can contemplate something Jessica talked about, which is preventive war. I will not grace it with the administration term preemption. It would be of course preventive war if we got up one morning and decided that North Korea already had – we would estimate some place between six and 10 nuclear weapons, producing a weapons worth of plutonium every year, probably beginning to run centrifuges or at least possibly some place eventually producing highly enriched uranium, and that we could not put up with this.

And notwithstanding all of the problems there would be about finding the targets,

which we do not have with much precision, if at all, all of the problems we would have with regenerating programs after they had been struck, all of the problems we would have with the crushing of our alliances, with countries which would not be happy about us launching a preventive strike, it might be argued that it was better to do that than to sit around and wait for fissile material to be transferred to a terrorist group.

I tell you that because while there are an awful lot of people who think preventive

war, as Jessica described it, is an atrocity in terms of policy, something we have put aside in the past when we had very good reasons for considering it seriously, here is a piece that has just come out in – every journal is all strung together, but I think it was Survival – about the quote the growing consensus for preventive war. I think that is something of an overstatement.

But I will tell you that if I was absolutely persuaded that negotiation had failed,

there was no sanctions option, and we were looking at essentially the situation we have now, I might be stirred to act in a way which I would normally consider to be barbaric, that would be with a strike at these facilities. That is how serious I think this problem is.

There is a separate problem I wouldn’t like you to forget about because if there

was a detonation in an American city tomorrow morning, and let’s say it wasn’t Washington so we could have hearings about it, and we could both testify – (laughter) – then I would suggest to you that that would be a problem of leakage, not transfer, because the material would have come, we would both say, from either Russia or Pakistan, and it was not, we would say, likely that either Putin or Musharraf authorized the transfer; it had leaked out. And so what do you do about that.

Well, that leads to interesting questions about what kind of threat you can use

against these countries to get them to be more cooperative than they have been in securing their fissile material, which I think is the critical issue. And I have some thoughts about that which we could go into later.

But the broad issue for me here on this first point, which I recognize I am

dragging out, is that our objective should be to limit the production, and the production of, and limit access to, to the maximum extent possible, fissile material all over the globe. I did not like the India deal and so testified. Very uncomfortably I sat next to someone I have incredible respect for, and that would be the former Secretary of Defense Perry who testified in favor of the deal with India.

I don’t like it not because if you do the deal with India what are you going to say

about Iran. That is not hard. I mean, that is the straw man for me. The India deal has a problem, and that it isn’t that you can’t distinguish between India and Iran; India is actually a better citizen than Iran, even though it has nuclear weapons. The problem is how do you distinguish between India and Brazil. We have just established or are on the verge of establishing a new standard for having nuclear weapons, and that is if you’re sort of good, right? If you’re sort of good, it’s okay.

MS. MATHEWS: Today. MR. GALLUCCI: Today, precisely. That is the problem. What about Brazil? What about Argentina? What about

South Korea? I mean, for goodness sake, I mean, what nicer country do you know than South Korea? (Laughter.)

So I ask you here that the India deal is bad for that reason, but it’s also bad

because it shows our enthusiasm for what the Indians tell us they are going to do. They are interested in thermal recycle and breeder reactors. They are interested in using fissile material in their energy sector. We should have no enthusiasm for that. This woman here worked on this policy in the Carter administration and terrorized any number of people with her hostility to an energy policy that was bonkers 30 years ago and is still bonkers.

And so while I am on the subject of bonkers policy – (laughter) – let me note to

you that we are correctly some of us concerned about climate change and what that might mean. I am fairly certainly we don’t know exactly what it might mean in all of its ramifications, but properly concerned about it, and concerned that what we do as societies on this planet impacts the extent of climate change.

Not to miss a beat in an opportunity here, there are many in the nuclear

establishment who see this as the wedge issue on which to promote the regeneration of nuclear energy as a part, a major part of our energy mix. And I am not saying that sounds nutty to me. It might – that might be okay, but we are going to be back at it because I have been at more meetings than I would like about the new nuclear energy, and there is an awful lot about the new nuclear energy that looks a little bit like the old nuclear energy, and we are seeing enthusiasm again for various reactor concepts and fuel cycle concepts that would put fissile material into circulation in the energy sector.

And I tell you that we do not need that because my focus, this first issue, is how

do we keep fissile material over the long term out of the hands of those who would make a simple nuclear weapon and destroy an American city? That to me is absolutely essential. We always talk about the destruction of an American city, those of us who are hooked on this issue.

But let me suggest to you another vision of the future, not one baseball but four. I mean, if you could get four crits – critical masses – out of these countries, what would be the implication not of the detonation of a weapon in an American city and killing some place between one and 500,000 people promptly, but suppose you did three or four.

Suppose you did Washington, New York, Los Angeles, and Chicago? I would

submit to you we would have just changed the international structure, which is a big thing for international political theorists. We would have changed the international structure. A lot of dead people, and that is the first issue, but we are talking about something that seems to me more plausible than what we worried about for decades of the Cold War, and I am concerned that we are not focusing on this issue anything like the way we need to.

I’m just going to now say some things quickly so that I don’t appear to only know

about one thing. (Laughter.) Some very bright people have observed that China has great potential to become a great power, to become the competition for the United States, become the vehicle by which the international system – the structure of the system changes from unipolar again to bipolar. I think all that’s plausible.

The indicators are there, and we can watch them, what the Chinese are doing in their investments, what they’re doing to lock up future energy sources in the Middle East, their diplomacy that parallels this, their military modernizations. You can see the diplomacy even on individual cases, like North Korea, had been very active for a period. And you can see this little squib in the newspaper the other day, which I thought was extremely significant in terms of conflicts we might get to know in a short term, a new patience in Beijing over how to deal with Taiwan. And then of course, as we used to call them, big emerging markets. For us in the United States and for everyone else, China is certainly that. No matter what you’re selling, if you’re selling a billion of them it is good news.

So, at the same time of course we’re looking at enormous uncertainties. I tend to

focus – on the side of the political military – on the military modernization. And when I read about what the Chinese are doing, I find myself not worried but interested in what they’re doing, and want to watch carefully the extent to which the modernization implies a real effort to develop substantial force projection capability. That they would become smaller and lighter and quicker makes sense, but there will be other indicators about whether they wish a military for a different kind of foreign policy.

And when we look at the strategic modernization, it is not surprising that they’re

looking, striving, to achieve deterrence against the United States, which I would submit to you, in classic terms, they do not now have. That’s reasonable, but let’s see how much further they go with their strategic systems. Will they also look for the blue-water Navy? Where are we going to see the Chinese military going, which wouldn’t be a bad indicator about what kind of foreign policy we might expect over the longer term. And will there be continued patience over Taiwan? And I tend to connect the patience over Taiwan to the domestic situation in China. It’s kind of like a Schumpeter connection, that if things

go badly domestically, I wouldn’t be surprised if nationalism isn’t hit upon by those in Beijing as a method of dealing with possible fragmentation, possible centrifugal forces.

There’s an interesting connection between the growth rates in China and stability

in China, and I think all of us will be interested to see, for a variety of reasons, whether China can maintain its current pace of growth. And it will certainly be important for the maintenance of stability with particularly this kind of non-participatory government.

And, you know, many of you I’m sure have much more experience in China than

I do, but when I go there I am just struck by the absence of ideology. It is just – it’s phenomenal that we have essentially an authoritarian, bureaucratic state but no ideology to go with it. Communism seems essentially dead, in people that I’ve talked to in China, and so what keeps this – what’s the glue that keeps this country together? And you worry about what glue may be manufactured.

In terms of U.S. policy, I don’t think we’ve been doing badly on China. I do, by

the way, think we’ve been doing badly in most other areas of foreign policy but not particularly on China. Some have warned, I think the best thing to say, is do not create a self-fulfilling prophecy. Do not demonize China; do not make China a great threat. As I said, I look at the military side and I think watching what happens would be a very wise thing to do.

No talk about foreign policy would be adequate without mentioning Iraq,

Afghanistan, terrorism, and so I’m going to mention them. On Iraq, I would observe, we’re not winning. (Laughter.) It is my view that we cannot walk away, regrettably. It is true that we must build the proper military and police. We must lower our profile, which is a tremendous problem, I think, to our ultimate departure from Iraq.

We must also, I think, lower our standard for success. And we must, as everyone

observes, shift, as soon as possible, responsibility to those Iraqi authorities that we are attempting to stand up. I think we should expect the violence to continue for some period of time. That’s part of what I mean by lowering our standard for success.

I think that – not only for Democrats but for Americans generally, I think we

should be able to admit in one sense that no matter where you were on the invasion of Iraq, that we did not do it well. For me I can say we should not have done it. But whether we should not have done it or not, we did not do it well and we created a situation which we have some responsibility for. And so that’s a brief and non-controversial, for me at least, view of Iraq.

Afghanistan I am quite concerned about. We cannot afford another failed state in

Afghanistan, a return to another failed state situation. My take on this is we are not winning in Afghanistan either. We are not actually walking away; we are going to be part of that NATO force as NATO stands up in Afghanistan, and it is going to be quite a challenge. And again, lower standards of success, but not something we can walk away from.

I have a few other – a few thousand thoughts here, which I think I’m going to

spare you so that you may tell me how I’ve misstated that which I’ve already addressed. I do want to close on one thought though, and that is that I think, along with the substantive points I wanted to share with you, that it would be important for the American people to recognize the impact of ideologically driven foreign policy that’s rooted in nationalism. And I think that’s what we have been treated to.

It has led to the unilateralism that Jessica talked about, which has undercut the

broadest kind of foreign policy that we need. It has taken foreign policy instruments off the table, and that troubles me a great deal. It has made negotiation and compromise things to be discarded. It has led us, I think, to the phrase which I know many of you must embrace – and I’m worried that Jessica would as well – and that is “democracy promotion.” I am very worried about – I think I can live with support for democracy, but promotion sounds a lot like intervention to me.

I would, if I were recommending a foreign policy to the next administration – you

know the phrase “block that metaphor”? Well, I would block that soaring rhetoric. I would be guided by the national interest. If you’re guided by the national interest, you still have room for values. You can still intervene for humanitarian reasons, but you are constrained in that intervention when you do and your objectives are downsized to less than imperial.

Thank you very much. (Applause.) MS. MATHEWS: Okay. So, we have questions – time for Q&A. I think there

are going to be mikes around, so who would like to begin? Yes. Q: Hello? Okay. This question is for Dean Gallucci. Do you think that

ultimately cooperative threat reduction in Russia and the newly independent states is going to work to stop the loose-nukes problem, you know, to stop proliferation of fissile material?

MR. GALLUCCI: Not in a short enough amount of time. In other words, I – let

me first say what, you know, I always have to say. I applaud cooperative threat reduction, the Nunn-Lugar effort. No, it’s terrific; it is great. You might have seen in today’s newspaper that there was a breakthrough that they needed to have so there wasn’t an embarrassment in the meeting that’s coming up with the president, and we’ve gotten by one of the liability issues.

But, you remember when the presidential debates were going on, both candidates

were asked what’s the greatest threat to national security, and they both picked this issue. And then I believe Kerry said that – unlike the president, who said he’s going to address this issue so that the material will be secured in 13 years – you know, I’m going to do it

in four. All I can tell you is that if you really have the concern I have about fissile material leaking out of the former Soviet Union, you don’t want to live with this for four more years even, never mind 13. So, if you really believe this is the number one threat, you want to ask what up, you know. I mean, get some more German shepherds in the meantime, get the fences, get internal security.

I mean, on an unclassified basis, there’s wonderful stuff written about the

vulnerability of fissile material in Russia. There’s a group at Harvard; there’s a group out on the West Coast. And it’s very detailed, and the vulnerabilities are extraordinary. And we and the Russians are tolerating them. We are for not having it the number one issue on our agenda, and the Russians, for good – I mean, that is, quote, “bad” nationalistic reasons, have been hard to deal with on this issue, and we need to jack it up on the agenda.

MS. MATHEWS: Yes? Q: Thank you. I had a question on Iran. And you made the suggestion that the

threat from Iran is the connection between nuclear terrorism. And you made the – you pointed out that the leakage problem would be one of Iran has provided conventional weapons in the past, but making the jump from conventional weapons to nuclear weapons seems to me to be a big one. From the Iranian perspective, the attribution wouldn’t be a problem. If anything were to happen, it would be automatically – you know, from their side it would be automatically be Iran would be blamed. So I was wondering if you could perhaps explain that connection a little bit more.

MR. GALLUCCI: Sure. First, I think – let me be uncharacteristically honest on this point. I don’t think it would be an easy decision for any state, Iran or North Korea, for a leader to decide that the best thing for their country was to sell or transfer fissile material to a terrorist group. This is not an obvious thing that would happen, right?

So the question is, as you try to assess this threat and figure out whether you are doing what Jessica said about exaggerating our vulnerability here – because I argue that there’s this enormous irony that we are – no nation has ever been as powerful as we are – force projection capability, precision, lethality, all those measures – we can’t defend the United States of America against devastation by an enemy that actually doesn’t have a single ship? How can this be?

And so you work your way back, and I get to this thing and I say, okay, how do I feel about this particular government that we have right now in Tehran having significant quantities of highly enriched uranium accumulated, which would happen if the centrifuge program they have in mind – which is not 167 or 1,000 or 2,000 but more like 10,000 centrifuges – actually got going? How would I feel about accumulations in that state of significant quantities and still having the possibility of an ideologically driven foreign policy? Not entirely ideologically driven – I mean there’s a lot of sort of Persian hegemony going on there I think as well. I’m not comfortable with that.

So how might it be plausible? Well, it is interesting – at least interesting – that Iran has actually, as a matter of state policy, supported terrorist groups. That’s a data point. It is not – you’re quite right; there’s an enormous step function from that. You know, it’s not a little slippery slope to go from that to transferring fissile material and taking the risks that would be entailed. And you may be right that if Iran was the third or fourth country – and it would be the fourth probably the way I would count now that could be the source of that highly enriched uranium – that we would be thinking about Iran.

But think about the consequences of what we do: using a nuclear weapon to

respond, as we had threatened through the long years of the Cold War, but not being certain that you were actually responding to the right country? I don’t know; that doesn’t sound like us, even this administration. So I’m not so sure deterrence is in place yet.

MS. MATHEWS: Do you want to pick or do you want me to pick? MR. GALLUCCI: You pick. MS. MATHEWS: In the white shirt in the back. Q: Hi. MR. GALLUCCI: Hi. Good morning. Q: Thank you for coming to address us. I had a question about North Korea

actually. Dr. Mathews described the 1994 accord as perhaps the signature diplomatic achievement of the Clinton administration. I think to some people that might strike them as damning the Clinton administration with very faint praise, although I think many people recognize how tough it was for you to negotiate that deal.

And I guess my question is, is based on your experience negotiating with the

North Koreans, knowing that they really show no respect for paper treaties and a cooperative approach hasn’t promised much except extended negotiations, do you see any prospects for real movement or we only have hope for sort of more paper agreements that may delay their nuclear program by a year or two?

MR. GALLUCCI: I love the phrase “paper agreements.” I have an idea; let’s

have an agreement and not put it on paper. (Laughter.) There’s a great line – some guy arguing against the continuation of the ABM treaty: What do you want to depend upon for your security, a missile or a piece of paper? I love that kind of crap, I mean, because it is the use of rhetoric to frame an issue.

My own view, to go back over the assumptions in the question, is that the North

Koreans took the agreed framework, which was written on a piece of paper, seriously – so seriously that within months, within months, the reprocessing plant was shut down. Work at two reactors, a 50 megawatt and a 200 megawatt, was stopped. Months after

that, American technicians from our laboratories were going over and sealing up the spent fuel that had 30 kilograms of plutonium in it and putting it in dry storage so it couldn’t be reprocessed. And that held for a decade almost. So I don’t think it didn’t mean anything; I thought it meant quite a lot. I would yearn for that period again as opposed to the one we’re in.

Now, did the North Koreans cheat? Yes, they did. They knew very well that they

were not supposed to do a secret deal with Pakistan and get centrifuge technology from Pakistan and equipment. Not withstanding that, they did. Why did they? Maybe because no matter what they sign or what they say, they will always feel a need to have a secret nuclear weapons program. That’s one possibility.

The second is because things weren’t going the way they anticipated them going

in terms of the relationship between Pyongyang and Washington. Why did they have nuclear weapons, one might argue. Why do they need them, one might argue. One might argue that they wanted them and needed them because they worried about the United States ultimately changing their regime and they were looking for some guaranteed security. They were prepared to give up nuclear weapons provided they got a political relationship with the United States that was robust enough to make an invasion unlikely to impossible. They didn’t get that relationship. They started to get it at the end of the Clinton administration when the Perry Process was unfolding, but then a funny thing happened on the way to the forum and there never was the engagement of the North anticipated by the Clinton, soon to be Gore, administration. That didn’t happen.

So, for me I would say I really – if I was buying a car from the North Koreans, I

would take it to my mechanic and have him check it over, compression and everything. I’m not in the trust world with the North Koreans. But I think the deal actually held for a while. I think you can have reasons for looking at the North Koreans trying – well, I would call it, if it was a treaty, a material breach because it isn’t a fissile material production, but at a pretty low level that got stepped up in the summer of 2002, which is why we confronted them in the fall of 2002.

So, I would be careful about what assumptions you make about what you can do

or not do with negotiation with North Korea. My own view is you can do quite a lot. You would now have to have greater transparency then we negotiated back in 1994, and I believe they would understand that. They can actually be quite savvy.

So, yes, I know the president wants to say, but never quite gets it right – but what

he wants to say is fool me once and shame on you, fool me twice shame on me. But he can’t, you know, that doesn’t come out quite that way but that’s what he wants to say. I believe that is a very good thing to teach your kids, when you have them, about how to deal on the playground. But the international system ain’t the playground and that kind of simple bumper sticker-type logic is not adequate in terms of political analysis to guide a foreign policy. It’s not, but that’s what you get. You’re welcome.

MS. MATHEWS: I just want – can I add –

MR. GALLUCCI: Absolutely. MS. MATHEWS: Because I swore I wouldn’t say a word here but one of the

things that if I had – if I were a speaker instead of the introducer this morning and tried to sort of sketch what I think are some more of the big challenges you all face – the working out – one of them has been this sort of evolution over the last decade of the notion that it is a positive or creative or helpful rule of American policy not to talk to our enemies. Basically that’s what diplomacy is for; you don’t really need to have diplomats to talk to your friends.

And it’s become a tool or an approach that’s been over used, over used, over used.

And one place where it has been, I think, most detrimental has been with North Korea. It’s obvious that this administration pursued it for – you could argue almost still is pursuing it in some way or other – but attached to it is also the unwillingness to listen to what other countries view as their – or to see what other countries see as their national interests.

One of the things on North Korea that I argued for years – wondered about – is

why we didn’t do a Nancy Reagan just-say-yes policy to North Korea’s insistence on ending the Korean War. Does any American really want to continue to think that we are at war – that the Korean War continues? They have been saying they want to end the Korean War. They want a formal statement of ending the Korean War, and it relates to their question of where they may feel threatened. I believed for a long time that that was – well, it is worth saving poker chips; it’s also worth sometimes playing them. And I think on that issue is one worth looking back at what a difference that might have made addressing – it’s a paranoid regime but some paranoid regimes have real security concerns.

(Cross talk.) Q: Alexa Courtney with USAID, Office of Democracy and Governance. So I

had two quick questions. One, touching on your last comment about democracy promotion being kind of seen in the vein of rhetorical justification for interventions – and in fact I think I would agree with you on that point but would like to ask you, what do you see, if any, as an appropriate role for foreign assistance to support and encourage political and institutional development in some of these – in fragile countries or kind of closed counties or non-democratic countries, if any?

And then just one second unrelated question, if I may, about what we could have

maybe done differently when the nuclear trading network of Dr. Khan became exposed in Pakistan in terms of handling that differently and encouraging accountability through Pakistan, or damage control that we might be doing that just isn’t in the press right now. Thank you very much.

MR. GALLUCCI: Just briefly, I think there’s nothing wrong and everything right with supporting emerging democracies, and there are dozens of ways in which we do it and should do it. There’s nothing wrong with the United States taking a position that – a rhetorical declaratory policy that we favor democracy in dealing – and democracy is a shorthand for a whole bunch of stuff, not only just elections but respect for civil liberties, human rights. It’s all that stuff – freedom of the press. When we’re dealing with governments that do not manifest this, everything from the other emerging superpower, or at least great power, China, there’s nothing wrong with saying that and having that as a declaratory policy, or even to friends, for example, in these still authoritarian traditional societies and governments in the Middle East.

But the question is how aggressive to be about this and how much of your policy

should be driven by this, and do you in fact even go to the point of intervention? And when you do intervene, for that or other reasons, by justifying it in terms of democracy expansion, that’s where I think you’re creating an interventionist foreign policy for a value that you have at the cost of another value, which is a respect for sovereignty. And that’s still the state system that we have. That’s the best I can do in answer to that question.

With respect to the other question about AQ Khan, the problem I have a – there is

a security issue on the AQ Khan case for me. I will tell you that one of the problems of 9/11 was the tension between what intelligence agencies like to do and what law enforcement agencies like to do. Law enforcement agencies like to arrest people; intelligence agencies like to follow them. And sometimes there’s a tension between intervention to stop something and wanting to find out what’s going on, how extensive this is.

And the short answer to the question is I think that – to the extent this was a

conscious choice – and the Khan network was known to us before the Iranian exile group made the points about what was transferred from Pakistan to Iran. It was watched for a while; maybe it was watched for too long. I don’t know. I don’t know – and indeed I don’t know enough about it to know that, but I do know that your intelligence community was kind of onto this, the Khan network, earlier, as early as the late ‘90s.

So, this is a – why exactly the call was made I don’t know, but I suspect there’s a

bureaucratic explanation here at work. That’s what I was sort of hinting at by the tension between rolling it up and following it.

MS. MATHEWS: Back there. Q: Hi. I’m Alexander Konetzki. I’m a research associate at the New American

Foundation. Secretary Rice appeared before the Senate Foreign Relations Committee in April, and she said then that nothing has taken her aback as much as the degree to which energy, and the all-out search for energy from countries like China and India, is warping diplomacy on the international scale.

And since you’ve been describing diplomacy as the key to ensuring the greater degree of international security in the coming 20 to 30 years, I was wondering if you could talk a little bit about that relationship between this all-out search for energy, which is of course essential for economic growth, and international diplomacy leading towards a greater degree of international security.

MR. GALLUCCI: That’s a great question and I’m not up to it in terms of an

answer. I was listening to Qatar’s energy minister at lunch last week talking about just that competition. Qatar is a target but it is not by any means the only target of countries like India, Japan, China attempting to essentially establish concessions that will be there and guarantee their access in the future. I don’t know what the – I mean, the actual discussion over lunch was whether this was the way we wanted to go; is this the best way to manage this extraordinary reserves? And Qatar talks about having 600 years of gas reserves. I don’t know whether that’s, you know, a little bit of exaggeration, but they certainly have a lot, and there are “scarce” resources – and put scare in quotes here – to be apportioned.

And it seems to me that, you know, diplomacy is – I think you need something

prior to diplomacy because – something in the State Department sometimes you don’t have that you should have before you launch a diplomatic initiative, and that is thought. I mean, before your diplomacy, which is an instrument, you need to conceptualize an issue correctly and you need to figure out what we want to do to deal with it. I don’t think – and I’ve listened to some debates on it at conferences on energy – that the issue has been adequately conceptualized so that it’s clear what you want to accomplish with diplomacy. I don’t think we’re there yet, or at least if we are I don’t know that we are.

MS. MATHEWS: Can I add something there? MR. GALLUCCI: Please. MS. MATHEWS: I came to Washington in 1973 when I started my career. It

was an equally crazy year to the ones that most of you began your careers in. It was the year of the Arab oil embargo, and I’ve worked on energy policy sort of off and on since – had an equally distinguished career of successes as Ambassador Gallucci in his career.

I would say there are two things that distinguish American energy, in quotes,

“policy” over that period. The first is that we have done one really meaningful thing on the national level about energy and that was so-called CAFE standards – automobile energy efficiency – that has really made a difference in terms of usage. It worked until 1986 when the gap between the price signal and the regulatory signal got too wide and Reagan changed the direction of the improvement in standards and it has been flat basically ever since.

The other distinguishing characteristic has been that the country only pays

attention to energy policy when we have a price spike. I would guarantee you that if the price today were $28 a barrel you would not have asked that question and Secretary Rice

would not made that statement, even though the underlying trends and the underlying resource issues are identical. It’s an entirely price-driven and entirely sort of momentarily driven policy. But Bob is right to point out, I mean, there isn’t a policy. The only other achievements that there have been, interestingly enough, have been taken by the states, largely California, but a little bit of the Northeastern states as well.

So if you were trying to look at sort of a 30- or 40-year assessment of American

ability to act on its own interests across the board, I think energy has to be among the top five failures, at least – maybe top three. I mean, it’s just we have been unable as a country to do anything more than pay attention when the price of gasoline goes up. That’s it.

If you look back, most of a good deal of Europe has a countercyclical policy

where when the prices go down, the taxes are raised so that the price signal stays just about flat. This is the obviously intelligent way to do it. Then you can begin over time to direct people in different directions and to build the alternative. The problem we have is that we only approach it – the tax issue and the price signal, which is the right way to do it, when the price is already high, and so the pain is multiplied. It’s a non-existent policy.

We can take two more and I won’t say anything else. The next two. Q: Hi. William Schirano from the Heritage Foundation. I was wondering if you

could put yourself in the shoes of the Iranians for a second. And I wonder, is there a price for the uranium enrichment program and probably the heavy water reactor that they have at Arak? And if there is a price, what do you think that price is given your experience with North Korea situation; granted it’s a bit different but I thought maybe we could have a thought exercise.

MR. GALLUCCI: Fine question. I’ve always thought that the North Korean case

was easier than the uranium case because the North Koreans wanted a deal so desperately. I mean, they’re prepared to launch a ballistic missile to try to get even some talks with us, by one interpretation of motivation here, where the Iranians have intermittently been uninterested and then interested again, depending – they’ve had changes in governments. So you asked the question, right now what is it that would have them give up their enrichment program?

I think the first thing is that one of the great virtues of the initiative is, at least as I

understand it in the press, that we have joined in another six-party talks – we’ve joined the other states, Europe, Russia and China, in making clear to the Iranians is that they don’t have to give up their uranium enrichment program. They just have to give it up for a while, maybe 50 or 100 years, but not, you know, not forever. Their sovereign right to have enrichment is respected; it’s just that you can’t have it now. Maybe when you have a nuclear reactor economy that would justify your own enrichment program – that would be in 50 or 100 years – then okay. So the first thing is in principle you don’t have to step away from that; you can in principle still maintain your right to enrichment. You just can’t have a real plant.

Second, the carrots here look strangely familiar to me. For all the hostility,

indeed the peeing on the agreed framework that went on over the fact it involved providing light water reactors to North Korea, they have found their way into a solution to the uranium problem. And there’s good reason for that, because the point the president wants to make, and he made it in a speech yesterday, is that you can enjoy peaceful nuclear energy.

In the last administration, when I was doing the Russian/Iran connection so

effectively, I was part of the Gore-Chernomyrdin thing, and I was arguing that we should get off this obviously wrong-headed position of telling the Russians they shouldn’t finish Bushehr. Let Bushehr go. It’s a light water reactor. You can have return and spent fuel if you want, or not. It is zirconium clad. It’s high burn up. Grow up; let them have it. Build some more. This is all good news for Iran because if they’re really concerned about energy, because they don’t have enough oil, and they want to join the modern world with nuclear energy, well, they’ll be help for them in that. That’s a good deal.

But then there’s of course a lot else. To invite Iran back into the community of

respected states would be a very big deal. So there’s a lot out there for Iran over the long term. And Iran, remember, is a – we talked about democracy – is a partial democracy, I would say. Some power is apportioned in Iran as a result of a kind of election. It’s kind of hedging this, but this is true and there’s something there. And strategically over the long term, there’s no reason for us to be at odds with Iran. There’s no reason for Israel strategically in that region to be at odds with Iran. And the smarter Israelis are very aware of that, no matter what they say about the existential threat right at this moment.

So, I think there’s a lot of good news in this for Iran if they can see a way to get

there from here. And there is intelligence in this – I mean, smartness in the initiative that has gone forward, a way for them to allow them to do this with some dignity.

MS. MATHEWS: Do we have time for one more or no? (Cross talk.) MS. MATHEWS: Okay, make it really a good question. (Laughter.) MR. GALLUCCI: A good question is a short question, I think. Q: Thank you. I have a question – My name is Dalal Hasan. I’m from the

National Endowment for Democracy. I wanted to go back to basically the debate that you – the questions for debate that you framed, Jessica, and your comments about the things that we should be looking forward to evaluating in the next 40 years of our careers, particularly the trend of U.S. unilateralism. And you pointed out that 9/11 didn’t in fact change the world; it changed the United States.

It changed the world but, I mean, the perceptions of that impact are stronger in the United States than in the rest of the world. And one of the outcomes of that has been that it has been very difficult to have a foreign policy discussion that is long term because unilateralism thrives on perceptions of fears and those fears – that perception of fear has been really sort of aggravated to the American public.

So, my question is, there’s two sort of conversations that happen, one amongst

policy makers but one also between policy makers and the public. And it’s that conversation between policy makers and the public that I think has made it difficult to really articulate clear alternatives to unilateralism. Even if there is a realization that those policies need to be perceived, it’s difficult to articulate them with real public support. So, I would just like to get both of your advice on how we should think about that going forward.

MR. GALLUCCI: Yeah, thanks. When I think about the temptations that exist

for the – you know, in the political setting, in the political scene of the United States of America, the incentive is very much, when we talk about security issues, to embrace a unilateralism, even for those in the Democratic Party who have been critical of the Bush administration’s – I mean, Jessica ticked off a bunch of these items that we think of when we think of the Bush administration’s unilateral policy. But it is hard because all one has to say in the American discourse is to say that when the national interest is at stake – and go one step further, when the national security is at stake, we will not compromise it by bending to the international will. The U.N. won’t prevail. Multilateralism won’t prevail.

I have a lecture I quite enjoy giving about the difficulty of negotiating, on behalf

of the United States of America, any national security issue, because why would that – how could you possibly negotiate – if you don’t know anything about the national security, and you’re an American citizen, what do you know? You don’t compromise the national security. So go off and negotiate, but don’t compromise. What? That was like this administration’s position on North Korea: We’ve got to solve it diplomatically but we will not negotiate. Hey, buy me a car, right?

So, I think there is a huge prejudice in this country against acknowledging

anything but the exceptionalism of the American position in the international system. And you need – if you’re going to – if you believe that’s the right thing and you don’t want to lie as you seek office in this country, you have to think of sophisticated ways of making that argument.

Jessica? MS. MATHEWS: We have trespassed on your coffee break too far and on the

next sessions, which are really fabulous. So, please join me in thanking Bob, and I will try to answer you in the coffee break.

(Applause.)

(END)