Transcripts For CSPAN2 Daniel 20240705 : vimarsana.com

Away 100,000 dollars in total prizes with a grand prize of 5,000 and every teacher who has teachers participate in this years competition has an opportunity to share a portion of additional 50,000. The competition deadline i friday, january 19th, 2024. For information visit our website at student cam. Org. Good evening, everybody, thank you all so much for coming out tonight. Im one of the coowners of politics and prose along with my husband brad graham who is right there and on behalf of our great staff we welcome you all to tonights event. Ive been looking forward to and so glad youre here in part because its a great book, which is always fun to talk about and in part, a great person who wrote it. My former colleague and dear friend, dan baer and im really excited to have a clans to talk about this book, its, i think, a very important book in this moment and i really urge you all to read it. Dont be afraid even though dan is super scary smart and very experienced in the questions about the world. He has made this book so clear and so compelling and so easy to read and yet, the historical context, that really helps articulate this kind of road map for where this country can go in this sort of depraved moment we find ourselves in. Dan, welcome. Thank you. Let me say for those of you who dont know, carnegie policy Research Policy research and the europe, in europe ive gotten okay. Oh, i have it right here, i should have just looked. He is a former ambassador. Hes u. S. Ambassador to the organization for security and cooperation in europe in the Obama Administration. Before that he was Deputy Assistant secretary of state in the Obama Administration and has been the director of Public Higher Education for the state of colorado. Hes even been a senate candidate. And i should just its truth advertising, we had a forced partnership many years ago which turned out to be one of the great gifts for me. And more me. No, for me, really. Dan and i were joined together with a task of working on and writing Hillary Clintons testimony in front of the Senate Foreign Relations Committee when shed been nominated to be Barack Obamas secretary of state and we spent about six weeks, i would say, or a month working on it. Very late hours and some comical situations and we got to know each other pretty well. He worked on it down to the last minute the night before and the fact that i brushed my teeth and spat out of the car window on our way to the capitol. The funny think about it, this is way more detail than any of you want, which is kind of amusing. We had to convince the secret service to let me go in my car in the secret Service Passage and follow about to be secretary of state driving through the streets of washington to make it to a 9 00 hearing on capitol hill and the secretary clinton, not yet secretary clintons housekeeper gave us little toothbrushes and toothpaste because we had been up all night and we were pretty pathetic and dan was literally brushing his teeth in the passenger seat of my car as i was trying to keep up with the secret service motorcade. We were bonded for life based on that, but the point is that i just realized in about three seconds how smart this man was and also how good he was. You know, this is just a person of tremendous decency and compassion and humanity that goes along with your big giant brain. So, it was a gift to me and it has been ever since. So lets just start with the first question, which is why did you write this book . I wrote the book partly because i was worried well, partly in response to the conversations i was having, you mentioned that i had a that i ran for senate the fact that im not a u. S. Senator tells you how that ended up, but during that campaign, i got the chance to you can at that to a lot of people around colorado. And i found a lot of people asking a question a different version of the same question, which is is it still worth working for, what were working for, you know, i go out and i volunteer and im worried that nothing ever changes. And i worried that, that that, combined with kind of a narrative that you sometimes heard in washington, or in the establishment that america was on a permanent decline and the chinese were going it eat our lunch, the potentially, really, really dangerous, i didnt believe that either of those things had to be i dont diminish the challenges that we face, but i dont think its the case that we have to accept that we cant make change and i dont think its the case that americas on inexorable trajectory of decline. I think we have to make choices, but i think theres a way forward. And i think one of the most interesting and important points of are your book, which is not a major point, but its there, and it struck me that democracys imperfection actually drives progress. You say this, so we can look at the news today. Has anybody noticed what happened in the house of representatives today or yesterday or at the united nations, or you know, go down the long list, and you say, people have this sense that these problems are insurmountable immutable and youre right, democracy isnt perfect and never has been, but its the imperfections and challenges that go wrong that should propel us. Should propel us forward. When its working right, the magic of democracy is not that its perfect, but things can change without having all the institutions scrapped or having revolution. You can get evolution, without revolution and youre quite right. I think one of the things i say in the introduction about the problems we face is that, if all of the people in this room made a list of the top 10 problems independently right now of the top 10 problems that america faces, 80 of those problems would be overlapping in some way. Maybe articulated in different ways, but we would agree on eight of the 10. Not only that, if we made significant progress on two or three of those eight we would all agree that that was an encouraging move in the right direction. So, it does feel like we have unlimited innumbererable problems and theyre totally insurmountable, but if we start to break it down and if we made significant progress on a few of them. It would create the inertia that leads to the others. You say we were sort of in the state of poly crisis, but instead we have to resign ourselves to that to think about poly progress to make progress on the fronts often overlapping and you make the case how interconnected especially the economic and political challenges are. So you, the title of the book is the four tests. How did you arrive at these four . I just want to say dan points out, i think you point out in the book or ive heard you say this, that the tests are not rigid categories, its not meant for everything fits neatly in this, theyre amal gums and the tests are original. And i love the way youre presenting this constellation of challenges and potential solutions in these four brackets, you know theyre not so rigid, but tell us how came to sort of deal with these four. The honest answer is that i was sitting down doing exactly what i just said, making a list of what i thought, like the biggest problems that america faced or the Biggest Challenges that we face in terms of succeeding in the 21st century were. And when i looked at the list that i had made, those four kind of buckets emerged to me. And so, you know, the four tests are scale, by which i mean dealing with the fact that, you know, americas never going to be relatively as big as we were economically, as powerful as we were politically, 30 to 50 years ago, were never going to be 40 of the Global Economy again, were never going to be as dominant or in the foreseeable future were never going to be as dominant as we were in the wake of the cold war when there was this unusual unipolar unit and totally overwhelming scale. Were very big, by far the richest country on earth and a lot going for us. When people talk about our relative decline be sure to remember our absolute strength so scale is one, investment is one. Those two are more conventional, i think, kind of National Security strategy frames, but the las two are fairness and identity and those go really to the real challenges that we have at home if were going to be strong in the world, we have to address some of those fundamental challenges at home. You know, theres a very beautiful dedication in this book. Maybe you could read it and tell us a little of the back story. So first of all, i loved working at the state department. I loved my colleagues at the state department. I have enormous respect for american diplomates. I had enormous respect for my colleagues from other agencies as well and the book in addition to being dedicate today my three nieces which is perhaps the more conventional dedication, its dedicated to stella, my assistant, a member of the foreign service, specialist corps. And she was born and raised in maldova during the soviet union and ended up marrying an american and becoming an american citizen and joining the state department. When putin invaded ukraine for the first time in 2014, i had arrived at post a few months earlier and there was a weeks long span during the early invasion, osc was the only International Organization to send monitors on the ground in ukraine and i was negotiating that arrangement and then helping, and i had late night secure video conferences with the white house almost every night for weeks and one night i was leaving at like sometime after midnight and stella was always there to make sure everything was working and i said to her, you know, im really sorry youve been working late the last few weeks and i appreciate it and sorry for a lot of late nights away from your kids. She said never apologize to me. I am proud to have this job. I am proud to be an american. Im glad to have a job with purpose and i could be picking potatoes in the mud in belarus for a living and dont ever thank me for working hard. I said stella, youve got to put me higher than picking potatoes in belarus. Shes an immigrant to america, and when i found my own confidence tested in recent years and ive thought back to that moment and thats why i dedicated the book to her. The message is a touching story and i think the message, there are things worth fighting for, even when it seems desperate and i think we can all agree it feels pretty desperate right now. Not only are there things worth fighting for, but when you think about it, i mean, i talk to people who say, look, i think its too far gone, i mean, the chances of our success are a million to one, you know, okay. Maybe youre right that the odds are a million to one, maybe im right that its actually much better than that, but either way, what are you going to give up and let our children and grandchildren not have i mean, theres no choice, but to work for it. You say that very clearly, what is the alternative. We can sit here and hem and haw about, well, the u. S. Could have done this or that, what would have the alternative been and lets talk about american hegemony for a moment and you make the point that the standard and the metric used to be american political and economic domination globally defined us as a country and provide a good, secure environment for the citizens of this country, the people of this country and your big premise in this book is no, we dont need to be an hegmon, we dont have to be and we dont need to be. We cant be is i mean, being an hegemon is a good strategy if you can pull it off and i think that its particularly lazy strategistrat in the world or and you get lazy when youre playing poker and every hand is full house you dont have to be that good at poker to keep winning. We have a strong hand, but not every hand is a full house and we have to learn that we, we america, have to learn strategies of International Politics that dont depend on hegemony and we have to depend less on coercion and dominance we are going to leave this book tv program for a brief moment to go live to the senate for what we expect is going to be a short session and lawmakers are expected to return on monday to work on funding measures. Live coverage. Senate on cspan2. Doitsz the presiding officer the senate will come to order. The parliamentarian will read a communication to the senate. The parliamentarian washington, d. C. , january 5, 2024. To the senate under the provisions of rule 1, paragraph 3, of the standing rules of the senate, i hereby appoint the honorable thomas r. Carper, a senator from the state of delaware, to perform the duties of the chair. Signed patty murray, president pro tempore. The presiding officer under