To welcome chris murphy from connecticut to join us in a series of dialog that we have been having here over the last few years, with a range of policy makers and an important contributor to the American Foreign policy debate, from many different points of view. This is partly out of houstons commitment to really intellectual engagement over serious questions. It also reflects my own view that if you look at the history of American Foreign policy often it works when you have many voices with many points of view, and out of that you have consensus exchanges, directions that no single American School of thought may have come up with on its own. If you think about it, thats the way our constitution works. Franklin wasnt all that pleased with it. The constitution was better than any of them to write what it was in their own head, so in that spirit i, hope we will have interesting conversation today. What i plan to do is to begin by exploring with senator murphys a series of ideas related to a very interesting article he has recently published in the atlantic magazine and accident may overlap, places where there is some tension between the ideas and ideas that you may hear around here, and in some places where i just want to press him a little bit further and find out a bit more clearly what he thinks. Beyond that, hes very graciously agreed to accept questions from the audience. We will do that in the form of asking you to write a question down, our staff for then called it them and try to put them together. Our goal its to make sure that the audience time is used in the most efficient way possible, reflecting the questions that seems to have the lightest interest among you. So with no further ado, well get started and its wonderful to be here and to be with you, senator. Thank you for being with me as well, im looking forward to it. As i read your article, and looked at some other things that you have been talking about over the years, one thing that really struck me was that you seemed to share a sense of concern, both about a new authoritarianism and maybe about china and russias role in promoting this that has begun in both parties and both on the left and the right to have more salient and American Foreign policy conversations. How do you see this new authoritarianism as a challenge to the United States or to our values and security . Thank you very much, again for having, me i really look forward to the conversation and i had maybe refer back to your opening remarks and which you referenced the founding of our nation. I believe this is an experiment, i believe that the whole concept of democracy is it means by which to run a country as a natural in the sense that we dont really run anything else thats important to us in our lives through democratic vote, whether be our family or our workplace, we tend to think of other governance structure that makes more sense for other things than are critical to us. So we have to have a sense of that fragility and understand where the threats to our experiments come. In so far as Vladimir Putin has made his model of governance more attractive to those around his periphery, as made people from erdogan to start to think about slow sly ways to transition democracies to something that looks more like autocracy, or chinas ability now to export the tools of autocratic rule, many of them technological tools to others who may want to pick them up, i think we have to see these threats as very very real. We also must accept that the more democracies there are, the safe for american interests probably our, its a little bit harder for democracies to go to war with each other, dragging the land seats, and harder for terrorists to organize in a democracy. We should be in the business of protecting ourselves from tools and models that may ultimately find refuge on american soil, but we should also just recognize that the advancement of democratic interests also tend to avoid the United States having to be embroiled in controversy and conflict overseas. My point in the atlantic pieces that, well, you are certainly going to get a democratic president who is going to be skeptical about largescale military operations overseas. I dont want my party, and i dont want my parties Foreign Policy platform in 2020 to be about a retreat from a global state, i want to be involved and the conversation about how to see the threats, how different they are then what they might have been 50 years ago but still have a strategy torrent to confront them outside of the conference of the United States. This struck me as one of the real points of difference in american politics as a whole, and maybe points of similarity that are bit more bipartisan, and people understand is that in the public at large, theres a certain sense that maybe there is less recent for the United States to be globally engaged but on the other hand, many people on the road of Foreign Policy look specifically at china and russia, and worried that there may be more dangers to american interests and security that and the very recent past. Youre getting this debate in both parties and very strong and lively debate over whether america is safer by pulling back or by staying engaged and making deeper engagements. How do you think about that . We have no choice but to be deeply engaged. Its tried to say it but the world doesnt stop at our borders any longer. Our economic interests are global, the ability for information to flow across borders and four other nations to use fairly lowcost mechanisms to mess with us in the United States outside of the projects in a military force its more menacing than ever before. I think if we are serious about protecting america then we have to be globally engaged. That doesnt mean that your endgame here is to defeat your adversary or your contestants abroad. Ultimately, i do think that if we can project and portray strength to go to russia and china then it may be that theres a better chance that they will decide to amend their political or economic behaviors to a standard that is much more in line with american interests but we simply dont have the capacity to meet them where they are today, and this is what i read about. Whether it fits china midwifeing transformative technologies or the way that russia is using corruption bribery and information propaganda to try to influence its neighborhood, today we simply arent having any meaningful conversation in congress about how to create capacities and our Foreign Policy tool kit that would be able to countenance what they are doing, never mind actually best them in the sense theyre operating without significant support from the United States. This point at something a lot of observers talk about, which is that it Congress Seems to have, of the three branches of government, congress is the one that seems to have the hardest time shaping policy and thats regardless of party but with the relative weakness of congress, both the executive and judicial branches have become much more important to the country. You have a lot of people who think that a Congressional Election is important because it may support the Supreme Court and how does congress recapture its momentum in Foreign Policy is it the Senate ForeignRelations Committee or does they need institutional resources . The first thing is to get serious about our most sacred Foreign Policy realm and thats the declaration of war something we dont do anymore and its understandable why we dont do it, is not the same as it was 75 years ago, there arent armies marching against each other, and peace treaties that wrap up the end of hostilities. War is messy, and your enemy is shadowy and undefined. That doesnt mean theres a responsibility to set the parameters of war making. The first thing congress can do is get that in that game. That means we need to think a little bit more creatively about how we write these authorizations. We probably have to sunset them and revisit them every few years to make sure we are getting definitions right, but the biggest grant of authority is in our ability to authorize war. The point i make is that so much of what ails American Foreign policy today is a lack of capability. We say russia acts a symmetrically because we dont have anything to meet what they are doing so use our Energy Resources to bully neighbors or run are 24 hours, two countries around the world. Congress could create new capacities but if we gave them the executive it would be better than we have today. We did a few years ago when rob portman and i were a piece of legislation establishing a new counter propaganda operation interpreter . Its relatively meager and scope, 60 Million Dollars but for the first time the state department had to think about what they would do if they really wanted to be president infighting the information wars in and around the russia and they stood up capacities to do that. Congress could do that, right . We have legislation now pending a one billion dollar fund which could actually get our goverment in the business of spending money to help countries become energy independent, and places like russia, rather than just giving advice on how to do it. Congress could actually create that nuke to look at that ive been talking about for years. How much money are we talking . We dont bat an eyelash when we plus up the department of defense by 50 to 70 billion dollars a year. That amount of money represents the entirety of the non defense non entail Foreign Policy budget, so i put a plan on the table to double the size of the state department, which sounds revolutionary until you realize that is what we give the department of defense on a oneyear basis and increased funding, and i would argue that theyre having a little bit of a hard time figuring out how to spend all the money that we are giving them effectively today. So i put it on the, table i have another document which is a detailed plan by which you would, over the course of five years, a double the size of the state department and the u. S. Id and i do its mine leslie but to create this kind of capacities that would meet these new threats. I think this issue of the Institutional Reforms needed to adapt america and Foreign Policy capabilities to the 24 century is a very solid concept. It is about adapting to these new realities and really answering what the department of defense has been good at is being adaptable, it could move into places very quickly. If you wanted to give advice to farmers in afghanistan, did find a way to tell you that they can do it, generally not doing effectively but they can say yes. The state department is not saying yes, there in the business of saying no,. Theres money thats criminally siloed that cannot be moved so you have to create not just additional money and authority, you have to carry additional flexibility outside of the department of defense. My critique on syria is that 2000 marines or soldiers really werent going to do the trick and a place that needed diplomats and political help to try to figure out how to create a governance structure that the era, of the kurds and the turks could all live with so you have to create the ability for diplomats to get to places that they did not need to get to before. Its about flexibility, new capabilities, and new funding. One thing on the state Department Capability of notice is that, over the years ive done a lot of visits and lectures, a lot of embassies and consulates and some very interesting places, ive noticed that where we need the diplomats most, they only stay for about one year, and in the dangerous hotspots, american diplomats are usually station for just one year rather than the normal threeyear tour and because people are getting on leave and they dont all come out at the same time the such turned its hard to function. How can you fix that . Of course theres a way to fix that. Its not easy to go to a place that is incredibly difficult, but nobody signed up for these jobs understanding its going to be easy. The structure of our assignments with the state department frankly have not changed in the decades and when it was a bipolar world in which you have to understand the basics of how you argued against soviet expansion, you are dealing with all sorts of contestants that were vying for space, maybe short term deployments made more sense, but today, by the time you learn the afghanistan piece, you are ten months into a one year turnaround time. Once again, very quietly the department of defense has started to think about how to deal with that. The young soldiers go into these places and come out in a year. Special operatives go in they have expertise in parts of the world and they stick around, a lot of the radar screen for a long enough that they dont have contacts and an ability to understand the nuances of places. The state Department Must catch up. I think youre right. Every u. S. President since bill clinton has tried to build a constructive relationship with Vladimir Putin. Weve had a resets, weve looked into his eyes, weve done all kinds of things but we seem to end up with the same relationship, hostile relationship. Is that just, said he wont say yes and we must take no for an answer, or is there a way to rethink u. S. And russia relations . At some point you must learn the lessons that are in front of you and there is a psychology to russia that its not lend itself to cooperation with the major power that helps to organize the rest of the world. I think you have to understand that about the very foundations of russian psyche, we have to also understand the vladimir britain has done nothing to suggest that is interested in anything other than using the United States as a political fulcrum to be able to control his own population. That being, said i dont mean to keep beating a dead horse but we simply put him in a position to win when we continue to drive our spending towards aircraft carriers and drones. Instead of figuring out that really would make him most nervous is to have countries around his edges who dont need his oil and his gas, and today all we are left to do is bully countries into not building russian pipelines and set of going with hard dollars to help them build any suite of Domestic Energy sources, whether they be nuclear or solar or wind or interconnections to other places, we spend four billion dollars every year on the european insurance initiative, and i dont think thats money badly spent but clearly, putin would worry more if we spend four billion dollars trying to weave countries around him off of his revenue making products rather than on brigades deployed in nato countries that is not likely going to invade with his conventional army anytime soon,. Theyre saying it poland had gone into fracking, would be better off, if russian money went into trying to prevent that . Fracking is not terribly popular in europe these days but i think we should be, if you think about how you would spend a new 600 700 billion dollars a year to make our country safer and to give those who wish us ill a little bit harder time, i dont think you choose to spend zero on making other countries independent of the main Revenue Source of money or primary adversaries. Another point where there is some interesting left right consensus is on the question of money laundering, dark money and i was struck with the initiative here and i was struck with how much importance you gave that issue. It is the most oldfashioned means of trying to protect your influence, is to just buy it and to use oldfashioned intimidation and bribery to try to win people to your side. In a world in which it is very easy to cloud the truth, and create a narrative in which no one believes any narratives, that provides cover for this kind of oldfashioned corruption. Yet we are very badly resourced to meet that threat overseas. If you go into these embassies you are going to find a handful of political officers who are charged with doing a whole ton of things, one of which is running and tech ruptured programs. So why not recognize that this is a real life, daily tool of all sorts of countries, not just the russians and create a classification of Foreign Policy officers dedicated only to corruption, spend more money on funding Anti Corruption projects. Some of the stuff that weve done where we spend direct dollars like our effort to professionalize the Municipal Police forces have been very successful, but we spend that money not often 5 million, 10 million there if, you really spend money and put officers all across the world to highlight and fight corruption, you do a much better job than what we are currently doing today, which is largely just complaining about it. The other side of this is how easy it is for corrupt dictators overseas to move money into the west, including into the United States. Corruption everywhere is bad but we are looking at the chinese case where the money is not freelance rich people just trying to get their money safe, as it is often connected to state power and moved around for political purposes, how do we address this problem . We become pretty adept at tracking terrorist financing and finding it where it exists, closing down the shelters that harbor it, you can certainly choose to use those same tools to track the illicit gains of all of darks and government officials but it is a little bit harder because these are often countries in which we still need to maintain a relationship with that executive who is either putting the money into his own accounts or handing it out to others who are putting it into their accounts you dont have any legitimate interests with those organizations that you are trying to protect. Again, i dont think weve really put in the word at trying to put a middle ground