Im the executive director of the American Academy of political and social science. Its my pleasure to welcome all of you to our seventh annual Daniel Patrick monaghan lecture. Briefly, were really pleased to see such a full house as always. Were happy to be joined by folks worked with senator monaghan. Mora is pat monaghans daughter and a tremendous supporter of our organization and this initiative from the beginning. Id also like to thank sage publications. Sage in the publishing world is probably the preeminent Publishing House concerned with the social sciences. They also publish the title called the annals of the American Academy. Theyre also the principal cosponsor of this lecture, having given us generous funding to support this enterprise so thank you to them. Also a quick thank you to the willard staff and to my staff at the American Academy. Theyve just been terrific in getting all this started. We are going to have a brief time for question and answer after ambassador powerstalk. Two points about that. One, it is going to be brief. Well only have probably time for several questions. Id ask you to keep your questions succinct, to do your level best to not make them mini lectures of your own or position statements but actual questions. And second, please wait for a microphone to come to you. Were very pleased to know that cspan is going to be covering this today and we also have our own inhouse tech staff. Wait to be heard before you speak. That would be terrific. With that, i welcome ken pruitt to the stage. Ken is the carnegie professor of Public Affairs at Columbia University. Hes also a former director of the United States census. More to the point of todays proceedings, ken has been a past president or a director in some sor of most every organization thats been influential in this doesnt country. So ken, if you please. applause thanks and welcome. And i will say just a few words about the academy itself. The earliest generation of the social scientist who didnt come along until about the 1880s. They did help our universities get established for the social sciences. But they were peripheral of course. They were really immature as scientists. And the idea that they should have their own academy was an idea that came out of the university of pennsylvania and launched it and launched it with the journal. So it became the earliest journal in the social sciences that had the responsibility that tom just mentioned of doing more than just reporting our research but also reporting our research in such a way that it would, quote, unquote, make a difference. Its been very successful since. We dont make a lot of noise about ourselves except about 12 years ago the idea was why dont we do at least one thing publicly every year for whomever. Youll see later we elect fellows. That became the monaghan award and Everybody Knows that this was an unusual man. I have a quote that somebody asked me to read, so im going to do it. The nations best thinker among politicians and best politician among thinkers. And thats true. He went back and forth without any hesitancy. Always carried a deep commitment to getting the story right. We started about 12 years ago with this award and the event. Alice was our first nominee. She passed away this last year so we do recognize that and she was a great i think i saw becky blank walk in, maybe. Yes. Whos also a monaghan awardee. Did i miss anyone whos here today right now . Haskins is here. Sorry. Yep. My immediate task is to get somebody else up here who can speak more whats the right word eloquently than i can about our speaker, about ambassador. I would say the 12th year of doing this and for about half of those years we were looking for somebody out of the international world. We wanted to recognize pats of course ambassadorship to the u. N. It was hard. The competition is very strong for these events. We simply never came up with somebody who was in the International Sector who we felt was senior enough and so forth to merit the award. So youve done us a big favor. Ive been under lots of pressure pressure. Avril haines will introduce her. She went out and got a law degree at georgetown and is now at Columbia University. Thats just an accident. Not quite, but where shes extremely active in a number of initiatives that the Columbia University is engaged in and so forth. I wont go into those things. I want to say a word or two about shes our National Security assistant under obama. Make sure i get it right. Deputy director of the cia, Legal Advisor of the National Security council, was a real player. Shes a very modest person and you would not know that was true of her, but she was a major player in the last goround and remains that and remains very active. So avril, would you please take over . applause thank you so much. Thank you, ken. Honestly, im incredibly grateful for the opportunity to briefly introduce samantha this afternoon for her lecture as the winner of the Daniel Patrick monaghan prize. And in part because its a real gift to have an opportunity to force sam in a ballroom full of people to hear what i think of her, because she would never stand for the smoke im about to blow if we were alone together. But also in large part because i really believe this prize uniquely suits her. There are the obvious parallels between monaghan and samantha. They both have irish roots. Samantha was born in ireland and is a proud immigrant. And theyre both authors. Sam, i have to say insanely won a Pulitzer Prize for her book in her 20s after spending a year as a war reporter in the balkans. And they were both harvard professors and she still is and both served as the u. S. Ambassador to the united nations. Moreover, like monaghan, samantha is an ideas person. Shes someone whos intellectually insatiable on a range of topics and believes that the biggest problems causing human suffering in the world today can and should be solved. And they are both incredibly charismatic as people. That really isnt what i was thinking of when i thought of her as being so wellsuited for this particular prize and giving this lecture. Samantha exemplifies a leader who champions the use of informed judgment to advance the public good and shes someone who has consistently thought, as i know ken has and the American Academy of political and social science has, to further communication between the academy and the policy world, between scientific thought and practical thought. And i have no doubt that youll see that today in her lecture. The importance she placed on evidence based policy making and the value of social science and Academic Research and rigor was obvious in her approach to decision making, of her memorandum she wrote for the president in her interventions and meetings and who she selected to have on her staff when she worked at the white house or when she was ambassador to the united nations. She is an intellectual who wants to face the really challenging questions, relishes doing so no matter how complex those dilemmas are. But she combines that drive with an equally, if not more powerful drive to be effective and to produce and to produce impact, and in my experience, that is truly a rare combination. The first time i met sam, and she wont remember this by the way, she was chairing a meeting in the white house on the ottawa convention, and sometimes known as the mind ban treaty and i was a lawyer at the state department and the scene was striking. Here was this incredibly tall, redheaded woman who was a well known human rights advocate chairing the discussion of armed controls treaty in a room full of military officers. And i think that people made fair assumptions about how she would run the meeting, but it is not the impression she left with that day. She had done her homework as she always did, but she made clear that she was not there to advocate for the treaty even though her position was clear, she wanted to understand their perspective and she had studied the report and work hard to unearth the data on the issues, and what she had were penetrating questions that made clear she was listening and wanted to understand what they thought about this, and not accept peoples views on faith, and she wanted to be sure that whatever the issue was on this issue would be rigorous. Moreover, characteristically, she assumed that everybody had noble intentions is and trying to achieve the objectives they felt to be critical cli imly important to the United States, and not only that, but focusing the objectiesy s objectytives and examining the means, and examining it in a way that no one else had. As a colleague, you cant help but see that samantha is fierce, and brilliant and selfreflection sometimes to a fault, and occasionally stubborn and kind and emempathetic, but tough as nails when it comes to pursuing a better ethical society, but something that promotes a leader today and science and social policy is her focus on the human consequences of governmental action. If you read her book, you will site reflected in spades. She is constantly asking herself, particularly as ambassador to the u. N. And she talks about whether and how we are effectively integrating a concern for human consequence into the thought process and into the National Security. And honestly, this may sound obvious but for someone who has worked in government for many years, it is not. If you recognize it as critically critically, important it is no easy to do. When you are looking at the lenses that simplify and ignore the consequences of the statetostate interactions and on the human beings they touch, and i think that in part it makes it easier to sit in the sit room to make the hard decisions to do that, but it is also true that it is challenging to find ways on the time lines that you are making decisions, and in the institutional structures that we have to actually tap into outside sources that give you a sense of what those human consequences are in the moment that is so critical. Yet, today, with the increasing mobile interconnected world that we live in, and the state actors are powerful, and if not more powerful and frequently less accountable for the states of the decisionmaking that actually brings together and breaks down the barriers of those between sort of governmental actors and the communities that they are working with across the borders is more and more critical. And the human consequences that we need to take into account are not the potential harms that people may suffer as a consequence of the Government Action on the particular portions of the population, but it is also frankly the opportunities that we can reveal and promote, but also how authoritarian societies can affect the societies, the people who are living in those societies. I think that in short samanthas approach to thinking about these issues is not only intellectually more sustainable and pragmatic, but it is something that we need today and something that the democratic societies have a comparative advantage on, and im so proud and honored to introduce Samantha Power for this prize. I appreciate that the society has done this. It is remarkable. So thank you very much. applause thank you so much. I am so, so grateful to be here. Thanks for the American Academy of political and social science, to ken pruitt for serving as president and for leading this incredibly important academy, and im looking forward to our discussion after. To tom who hounded me all summer to get a topic for this lecture and never did. So it is going to be a big surprise for everyone here. And to jessica for organizing this which is no easy feat. Of real i have to say more than a word of afrel who i saw working in government the freshest eyes. No tab boos, and no dumb questions and talk about rare. It finds out that one thing that constrains rigorous policy and debate is the sense that certain questions are off limits or a feeling that things should be done a certain way. While the position of the National Security adviser is famously, i suppose, the most stressful position there is in the National Security establishment, the secret, the best kept secret and one of the best kept secrets in washington is that the deputy National Security adviser job is more stressful, because you are mikey in the old cereal commercial, because everything that is hard comes to you. And so she ran the most fairest and most intensively determined and inclusive National Security process i ever saw. Then of course made her way to the cia where she brought her background in International Humanitarian law and her regard for human consequences into that institution, and not only i think changed many dimensions of how things were done in the intelligence community, but won the fierce loyalty of intelligence professionals just as she has everywhere she has worked in the government. And the main thing that i would say about afrel is the unfailing way as a person, decency as a friend and as a person that she wants to see in the american policy. So i am so honored to be introducing her. And thank you, mora, and she is there, and i could not be more honored to be receiving this award in your dads honor, and i could not be more pleased and proud as an american and as a person who also lives in the broader world that there is an award named for your dad and we come together to think about your dad and his legacy, and again, i am incredibly proud to be here. Afrel drew a few alleged parallels between me and senator moynahan, and i dont flatter myself to believe that i necessarily belong in his league despite again how pleased i am to be associated with him. And so there are as afrel noted a few parallels that i do acknowledge, so both Daniel Patrick moynahan and i do take pride in our irishness, and part of it is that we, and im going to speak about him in the present tense, because he is still such a large force in our world today, but we carry wit an expectation, and irish expectation that good things may not last, and you all remember that after president john f. Kennedy was shot, moynahan famously saying that i dont think that there is any point in being irish if you dont know that the world is going to break your heart eventually and then he paused and added, i guess that we thought that we had a little bit more time. And that is very moving and poignant, and i spend my days with that same sense of worry about the world, and especially these day, but i am hoping that we have a lot more time and not a little bit more time. We both had the experiences of afrel noting toggling between academia, and stints in Public Service though he in a larger range of roles in disciplines and academia than i, serving in the white house though, and sensing a skepticism of the insights that i might have drawn in the social science or the behavioral science or the Political Science, i often wished that i could mobilize a retort as lively as moynahan could when he was being challenged, and of course, the incident that quick, comes most quickly to mind in context is in 1976 when he was challenging the new york incumbent senator james buckley, and this is moynahans First Political race and when senator buckley pointedly referred to in one of the debatesdebate s professor moynihan from harvard and then he proclaimed the mudslinging has begun. No dirtier mud than to be called professor in a political debate. We both believe in the essential role for ideas in the shaping of the Public Policy, and also in the power of words. Never to diminish the power of words. Finally, i feel one other great overlap, but this one is with moras mother, and senator moynihans spouse, the senators wife of 48 years, elizabeth moynahan, and she often said that she married her husband, because he was the funniest man that she ever met, and i wanted to say that i feel the same way about my husband, Cass Sunstein who is here today. You know about his book, but you dont know about his humor necessarily. Some of those books have a little bit of humor in them. So when one attempts to take the measure of moynihan, senator, ambassador, veteran, author of 18 book, nine of which he wrote while he was serving in the u. S. Senate, and president ial counselor, cabinet member, sociologist, professor and public intellectual, what may be most striking of all in our era of intense polarization is his fierce independence of mind and spirit which persisted throughout his decades of public life. How inconceivable would it be today for someone to do what moynihan did . To get appointed to cabinet or subcabinet positions in four consecutive president ial administrations kennedy, johnson, nixon and ford. A former teaching assistant of his at harvard bill crystal said that he is never in anybodys camp. And so with being recognized with this honor of a lifetime really, i would like to address a problem that greatly concerned moynahan when he served as u. S. Ambassador to the u. N. Under president ford, and that challenge and concern of his was the future of democracy. So today, i would like to examine first the contemporary state of democracy and the relative appeal throughout the world and discuss the rise of china and the implications for the future of democracy and thirdly, i will argue that facing a future in which these two very different models, the democratic model and the chinese model will coexist on this earth. Id like to look at what we can and should do to enhance democracys prospects. So first on the state of democracy. Back in the fall of 1975 with the american byicentennial approaching, moynihan after leaving his ambassador role in india and taking up the role in the u. N. Spelled out the pessimism about the democratic model in the world in an article for the public interest. He wrote liberal democracy on the american model increasingly tends to the english monarchy and a ho