The United States: At Home and Abroad — 2025 College and University Educators Workshop
About College and University Educators Workshops
In this session of “The United States: At Home and Abroad,” Liana Fix addresses European and transatlantic relations and security, Shannon K. O'Neil speaks on U.S. trade policy and the global economy, and Jacob Ware discusses U.S. national security and counterterrorism. The conversation is moderated by Michael Froman.
The goal of the workshop is to find new ways for college and university educators to encourage their students to learn about international relations and the role of the United States in the world. It provides an opportunity for educators to explore the wide array of CFR and Foreign Affairs teaching and research resources available to the academic community, participate in substantive briefings with subject experts as well as in group discussions, and share best practices and educational tools for bringing global issues into the classroom.
The United States: At Home and Abroad
Liana Fix, Shannon K. O'Neil, Jacob Ware
Transcript
FASKIANOS: I am Irina Faskianos, the vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR, and it’s a great joy to welcome you all here for the annual College and University Educators Workshop. I hope you enjoyed the reception and meeting with our departments about resources that CFR offers.
The purpose of this workshop and our Outreach initiative is to serve as a resource for all of you and the important work that you’re doing training the next generation of leaders in whatever field they may be in, and help them better understand the world and the foreign policy challenges facing the United States, and there are many.
So we are delighted to have all of you here with us in person. We have people from forty-three states and Washington, DC, so it’s very exciting. People came very from far and wide. We have an excellent lineup of panels over the next day covering topics from global flashpoints, the new tech era, and at the end of this we will do a feedback session because we really want to hear how you’re using CFR resources and what more we can do to help you in the work that you’re doing.
As a reminder, this workshop is on the record. It will be livestreamed and posted to CFR.org after the fact. We will only be taking questions in the room so we will not be taking any questions virtually.
Please silence your mobile devices—this is very important—and when you’re called upon, stand up and state your name and your educational affiliation and maybe your state, too.
So now I will turn the floor over to our opening panel on The United States: At Home and Abroad. Our distinguished president, Michael Froman, will be moderating the session and he will introduce our wonderful panel of CFR fellows.
So with that, over to you, Mike. Thanks so much.
FROMAN: Well, thanks very much, Irina. Great to see all of you. I’m Mike Froman. I’m president of the Council, and I’m delighted to kick off this year’s College and University Educators Workshop.
We’re delighted to have a full house here tonight, about a hundred educators from forty-four states and the District of Columbia. I’m not sure what’s wrong with the other six states but, yeah, we’re going to continue to try and get full representation year after year, and you all represent community, private, public colleges and universities. It’s great to have all of you here even in this rainy evening.
This evening’s discussion is titled The United States: At Home and Abroad. We were going to cancel it because there’s really nothing going on in the world. (Laughter.)
So I thought just we’d sit here in silence for a while. But, thankfully, some things are going on and we thought we pull together some of our experts.
We’ve got three very distinguished members of our Studies department, which is our think tank within the Council. As you all know, the Council is a think tank. It’s a publisher, it’s an educational organization, and it’s a membership organization. The think tank is run by Shannon O’Neil, our director of studies, who’s got a great background in Latin America, in trade, in supply chains, and then more generally U.S. foreign policy.
Liana Fix, who’s our fellow for Europe at the Council, she is a historian, a political scientist, expert in Germany and European foreign and security policy, transatlantic relations, Russia, Eastern Europe, European-China policy.
Anything you’re not an expert in, Liana?
FIX: Trade. (Laughter.)
FROMAN: Trade. That’s why we have Shannon.
And last but not least is Jacob Ware—you have the full bios there—who’s a research fellow here at the Council where he studies domestic and international terrorism and counterterrorism.
The way this evening is going to work we’re going to talk for about a half hour or so and then we’re going to open it up to questions, and we know you have a full day tomorrow with various panels and sessions touching on some of the touch points but we thought we’d just get started on some of these issues tonight.
Maybe let’s start with—let me start with Liana. Right now there’s a lot of conversation about the role of the U.S. in the world, and I would say our European friends are particularly verklempt. They’re sort of really kind of tied in knots trying to figure out what the U.S. is doing both on the economic and on the security front.
What’s your assessment of the current state of transatlantic relations and how you see this being managed, going forward?
FIX: Mmm hmm. Thanks so much, Mike. It’s wonderful to be here with you all tonight and to discuss nothing that’s going on in the world, especially not in Europe.
So just to start us off where Europeans are and how Europeans feel these days about—let me quote the now infamous Signal chat and the vice president who said in that Signal chat, “I just hate bailing out Europe again,” and I think that’s a good starting point to give you an answer to that question, Mike.
Why is there the strong feeling that the transatlantic relationship, which has been so strong after 1945, now consists, from the view of Washington, at least—consists of bailing out Europeans. Why do we have to bail out Europeans all the time? How justified is that?
And I would say, perhaps, a little bit controversially that there is actually a point to make. There is a point to make that the transatlantic relationship for a long time has been disbalanced, so for the whole period of the Cold War time, one can argue.
Well, this was a Cold War. We needed a strong U.S. following Europe. But the Cold War period is over for already over thirty-five years. So in that period after 1990 it took Europeans really—Europe benefited from the peace dividend after the end of the Cold War and it took a lot of attempts and a lot of persuasion from previous U.S. governments to move Europe into a position where they would take on more of their security.
So I would say some disruption in the transatlantic relationship is actually not too bad, because if you would ask officials from former U.S. administrations what they see now that Europe is investing the money, the loans that they are putting forward for their own defense investments, previous administrations would say, well, we tried that and it didn’t work.
Now it works with a little bit of disruption. But there is a point where too much disruption can turn into the other side and can be a break moment for the transatlantic relationship and I just want to draw all your attention to the NATO summit in the Hague at the end of June because I am concerned that this will be one of those moments where a little bit of helpful disruption can turn into too much disruption when it’s not anymore about incentivizing Europeans to spend more but when it becomes about, well, why don’t we just abandon Europe to themselves, which in a situation where Russia continues to be a threat would, obviously, be a very difficult situation to sustain and to survive before, especially the smaller European countries.
So I think at the moment we are still in a phase where I would say there can be mutual benefits coming out of that. But there is, especially with the NATO summit, a real tipping point that can happen with the relationship.
FROMAN: I mean, Europe is under pressure from Putin, on one side, from the East, in terms of a real security threat supported by China, Iran, North Korea—North Korean troops actually fighting in Russia against Ukrainians—and then now is under pressure from the West, from the United States, to say do more for your own defense. Get your act together economically. We’re going to slap tariffs on you as well.
We’re going to get to trade here a little bit later. But, you know, is this—the dual pressure, is this enough to force Europe to get its act together because of economic reform, and not just defense spending of how much they spend but what they spend it on? You know, can they get their defense industrial base organized the way it should be organized, going forward?
FIX: Yeah. So there is always this argument about the—Europe in general, that Europe works in crises, right? The bigger the crises, the more Europe works together after an initial moment of shock.
That is partly true, and actually there is some academic literature that I’m discussing with my students in my class at Georgetown where there are also examples where that has not been true in the past. So I would not wholly rely on this idea—fully rely on this idea that just a crisis can help the Europeans to move forward.
And the money is really not the problem here, right? I mean, Europe can—it’s a wealthy continent. They can organize money. We have seen that Germany has unleashed defense spending through debt financing. We have seen that the European Commission is more flexible.
But what worries me is the greater picture of a Europe where we have some bigger powers that are all similarly strong in terms of the power balance in Europe, and in the past we had the United States as a hegemon which kept everyone together and forced them to work together, not to let old rivalries reemerge, and now we will come into a new situation where the UK, France, and Germany suddenly all have to work together and to have some kind of cooperative leadership format without one of those three wanting to go along and to say, well, we are the leader now.
The French want to be the leader of the European Union. Do the Germans want the French to be the leader? Hell, no, right? (Laughter.)
FROMAN: They have a few hundred years of disagreements that—
FIX: And I’m not speaking for myself here as a German. But you see what I mean, right? I mean, you see all these kinds of rivalries which many believe have been bureaucratized with the European Union and the thousand committees we have in the European Union but which still are there. The war power politics still exists in Europe. And so beyond the money I think it’s really the question of how can powers in Europe work together without the United States as a hegemon.
FROMAN: Could you see Europe breaking apart further? I mean, you have Brexit already but could you see Europe breaking apart?
FIX: So going back further in history, I could see a situation where we returned to a kind of European system as we had under Bismarck so the late nineteenth century where basically different European countries—
FROMAN: Do we have any history professors here? (Laughter.)
FIX: Correct me if I’m talking nonsense here but where sort of different European countries were having different reassurance agreements, coalition agreements, treaties with each other. It was basically, like, a really confusing network.
I still remember studying this, right, where you have, like, different drawings of this one is allied with this one but if this one is allied with the other one it leads to this very complicated system that we had under Bismarck’s times could return where everyone just makes—tries to make a deal with each other instead of having a collective effort of European security and defense.
And I believe that that’s the more—that’s the less safe—the less safe version for Europe, not only because it has led back then to the First World War but because a system of alliances is much better than just a network of security guarantees.
FROMAN: Jacob, let’s pivot to another issue.
You have been studying terrorism and counterterrorism around the world for some time. You know, post-9/11 our entire security apparatus reorganized itself to focus, largely, on terrorism—the war on terror, counterterrorism—and that sort of over the years receded into the—in the background.
There’s a little known magazine called Foreign Affairs. I mean, some of you may have heard about it. I think there’s probably some examples outside. Just last year Graham Allison at Harvard, Mike Morell, who used to be director of the CIA, wrote a piece in that magazine called “The Terrorism Warning Lights Are Blinking Red Again.” Are we paying insufficient attention to the potential for terrorism around the world and what’s the risk here at the homeland?
WARE: Well, thank you so much, Dr. Froman, for having me. Thanks for being here, everybody.
The short answer is yes, we are paying insufficient attention but I think it’s important to contextualize that answer as well. The way I see it right now we have really five hotspots of terrorism, five hotspots in the counterterrorism space.
First, of course, is the Middle East, broadly conceptualized. I mean, in Yemen we now have been launching military strikes for almost a month. A lot of that was overlooked because of the Signal debacle.
Syria is led by a foreign terrorist organization now. We have collaborated with them against our shared enemy which, of course, is the Islamic State. So we’re sharing intelligence with a group that is until recently designated as a—still is designated until recently was wholly a foreign terrorist organization.
Gaza, of course, is another important zone where a ceasefire has ended, and the Israeli government appears to be going down the road of wholly connected counterterrorism, which hasn’t worked typically in the history of counterterrorism and counterinsurgency.
The second hotspot is Afghanistan, where al-Qaida is reemerging under the protection of their longtime protectors, the Taliban. But really the main concern is over an ISIS affiliate there called ISIS Khorasan Province, which appears to be trying to revive the old external operations model where they plan attacks in country and then send them out. Saw that in Russia. Saw that in Iran last year. In fact, there was an election day plot here in the U.S. that was interdicted as well with an Afghan national.
The third hotspot, probably the most important one, frankly, is Africa. Africa is now the epicenter of global terrorism. According to a recent report the Sahel, which is a region that’s kind of underneath the Sahara, is now facing and now, I think, in 2024 saw 47 percent of terrorism deaths globally, most of those in three countries—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger. Meanwhile, al-Shabaab in the east is making gains in Somalia.
Most of my time here at CFR is spent looking at the fourth hotspot, which is the domestic front. We have seen a rise in far-right terrorism. That’s really mostly White supremacist terrorism over the past kind of fifteen years. Probably is the predominant threat to the homeland. But we’re also seeing rising militancy from the far left as well, and you’ve seen that, of course, in the very publicized Tesla attacks around the country.
The fifth front that I want to point out and we can discuss it very briefly is Mexico, and the reason why I say that is because the Trump administration, of course, has designated several cartels as foreign terrorist organizations and is now engaging in what they’re calling counterterrorism operations with El Salvador regarding deportations, which is quite a kind of sea change from what we’re used to and might be blurring the lines of what we typically understand to be terrorism threats, which is obviously political violence.
Across the board I think that’s why that great team of writers that you mentioned—Michael Morell and Graham Allison, an academic and a practitioner—warned that the warning lights are blinking red and, of course, they struck on New Year’s Day here in the United States with a homegrown violent extremist inspired by Salafi jihadist ideology.
Real quick, the reason why I think it’s important to conceptualize is, you know, most years the United States faces somewhere in the dozens of terrorism fatalities. At a certain point, as we shift towards China and Russia and climate and pandemics and all the other national security issues that we’re facing, we’re probably going to have to have some kind of soul searching conversation about what an acceptable number of losses from terrorism is, and I don’t know what that number is but we’re going to have to come to a consensus.
FROMAN: Have we learned whatever lessons there were to be drawn from our history of counterterrorism after 9/11 to, one, improve our intelligence capability, our ability to intercede and prevent these attacks from happening and to sort of take action where necessary domestically and internationally?
WARE: Sure. Yes, I think, to an extent. Can I point to another Foreign Affairs article which I think is excellent?
FROMAN: Sure. I think advertising as many Foreign Affairs articles as possible is welcome. (Laughter.)
WARE: Published by two great scholars down in DC, Hal Brands and Michael O’Hanlon, in August 2021. It was called “America Failed Its Way to Counterterrorism Success.”
Their basic argument was there had been twenty years in the war on terror and we’d overreached and then we under reached and we were looking for that kind of Goldilocks option and we found it in Syria where the Obama administration and the Trump administration identified a credible partner. That was the Syrian Democratic Forces, the Syrian Kurds in the north of the country. Provided them with intelligence, weapons, air power, but ultimately let them fight.
This is known in kind of military parlance as, like, by, with, and through or leading from behind. Let them fight. Let them take the casualties because they’re invested in the fight and it’s existential for them in a way that is not for us. That was, arguably, the main counterterrorism success of what you might call the war on terror years.
In my opinion, actually the Biden administration used that strategy as well in Ukraine. Obviously, not the air power side but weapons, intelligence, rhetorical support, but let the credible partner fight the fight for themselves, and it worked tremendously well, at least in the initial few years.
That would, obviously, clash with what the Trump administration is attempting to do now in Yemen, which is seemingly to bomb the country into submission. It certainly clashes with what Israel is attempting to do in Gaza which, again, is to bomb the country into submission. That has not been a strategy that has worked at any point in the war on terror years or, frankly, at any point in the history of counterterrorism/counterinsurgency.
FROMAN: Let me follow up on that because you mentioned Yemen, the Houthis, who, you know, sound like a ragtag group but they’re anything but. I mean, they’re really a pretty sophisticated military force. They make their own missiles. They buy advanced avionics from Iran and are able to really attack with shipping, Israel, elsewhere through their capabilities. If bombing them isn’t the right answer what is the right answer?
WARE: If I knew the answer to that question—(laughter)—
FROMAN: Because we’ve sort of failed to deter them.
WARE: Yes.
FROMAN: They’ve continued to manage to survive. There is a long history, of course, within Yemen of a civil war and their role in that but, clearly, we don’t want them to maintain their threat to shipping in the Red Sea or to their neighbors.
WARE: A couple of things. I mean, first of all, Yemen is effectively a failed state. It features a very confused and confusing mix of actors that are backed by various state powers. They are warring with each other. They are collaborating with each other.
It’s a mess but it’s somewhat similar, I think, to a situation like the Taliban in Afghanistan or certainly Hayat Tahrir al-Sham in Syria where a militant group or a terrorist organization, however you define it, has ingratiated themselves into the local population and is providing, you know, government—is the de facto government whether they are in power or not.
Yemen is the site of an absolutely catastrophic humanitarian disaster and bombing that country is going to make that situation worse. At some point you have to engage on the ground, economically, socially, and commit to it in the long term to try to counter the ability of a group like the Houthis to effectively keep Yemeni people hostage from freedom and from their ability to live successful, healthy lives.
It’s a very similar situation, I believe, to Hamas in the Gaza Strip where you have a terrorist organization that is keeping people that that has an interest in having civilians die in kind of—from Western bombs because they understand that is the only way that they can maintain their power.
Of course, the civilians are the ones who pay the price for that. So at a certain point you have to try to reach those people rather than happily let them be in the crosshairs.
FROMAN: Shannon, I’ve saved you for last in part to demonstrate that you don’t have to have a foreign accent to work here at the Council. (Laughter.)
FIX: We have an accent?
FROMAN: But also because there’s no more—
O’NEIL: Ohio doesn’t have an accent?
FROMAN: Yeah, a different kind of accent.
It’s 6:20 or so, so I haven’t looked at the news in probably forty-five minutes. What’s going on with the global economy—(laughter)—and what—how do you interpret the most recent moves on trade and tariffs and the potential implications for the global economic system?
O’NEIL: So the great thing about being up here with both of them but particularly Jacob is it’s been a heck of a week but I’m feeling better about what I look at than what he looks at. (Laughter.)
You know, we’ll all get our stuff. It’s just going to cost more in the grocery store.
FROMAN: It’s going to cost more, yeah.
O’NEIL: But to be serious about this, I do think what we have seen over these last two weeks is, you know, perhaps the—sort of the biggest fundamental paradigm shift in thinking about and in the direction of the global economy that we’ve had for decades. And even with the walk back at least or the delay of reciprocal tariffs, you know, the fact that the United States has put a 10 percent universal tariff on most every country in the world, they’ve put sectoral tariffs on, you know, autos, on steel, on aluminum and they’ve put, you know, exponential—over 100 percent tariffs on one of its biggest trading partners, China, the fact that this is just such a widespread and maximalist view I think is a fundamental break with the way we think about the global economy and at least the aspirations where for fifty, sixty years the rhetoric, if not the reality, was more opening and more trade and coming in and expanding.
And the way it plays not just in the global economy, it plays into global diplomacy, global political relationships, and other types of relations that we have beyond just the basics of trade, and I do think it is creating an incredible amount, whatever happens and whatever’s happened while we’ve been sitting up here. Even if we saw sort of the pullback of many of these tariffs, you know, you can’t put this toothpaste back in the tube, right?
This is just a fundamental change in the way businesses will think about investing and the way, you know, people think about hiring and placing of, you know, the kinds of manufacturing they do and the way they think about sourcing.
You know, we’ve heard a lot, rightly so, over the last number of years about global supply chains, international supply chains, companies are going to think about, you know, what geographies they touch upon, how they source from various things, how they—you know, their cost structures work. And other companies but other nations are going to step in and rejigger what they do and I think in many ways, you know, if we continue on the path we’re on try to leave the United States out, right?
Yes, they’ll serve the U.S. economy. It’s the biggest economy in the world. Yes, they’ll want to sell into, you know, U.S.—very prolific U.S. consumers. But for the other eight plus billion people who live out there how do you do things that don’t touch on the U.S., at least for some types of industries and sectors, so you don’t get caught up in these kinds of trade wars.
FROMAN: You’re one of the leading experts on Mexico, among other things. We’ve got this integrated North American economy that developed over several decades—NAFTA, USMCA, et cetera.
What does it mean for Mexico and Canada that thought they were part of a supply chain with autos or other products that they could rely on with the United States?
O’NEIL: Yeah. Well, the one silver lining of this last couple of weeks is Mexico and Canada got a bit more of a pass than any other nation. So what you saw—yes, you saw 10 percent universal tariffs. Yes, you saw reciprocal tariffs much higher on lots of different countries. But for goods that are coming in through USMCA, which is the free trade agreement between the three countries in North America, if they’re USMCA-compliant they have zero tariffs.
So you did get a pass for many industries. Not for autos, because that one was that Trump wants specifically to put on sectoral tariffs on autos though, again, there’s a little bit of a walk back there for our neighbors, which is that if the cars that are coming in from Mexico or Canada, any parts of those cars that were made in the United States.
So, you know, there’s a lot of cars that are assembled in Mexico but the engine, for instance, is made here in New York, right? There’s factories here that send the engines down there. The value that engine would get to be sort of, you know, deleted or minused out before you actually put the tariff on the others. So there’s sort of some benefit for keeping this integration.
And, interestingly, over the last five years one of the biggest industries that’s grown in Mexico has been electronics. And they—you know, more laptops that come into the United States today are made in Mexico than in China over this last year, and so that too is another industry that is mostly USMCA-compliant and so would come in.
But overall there’s also a question now about USMCA itself. It survived this first round of tariffs but it’s up for review and renegotiation over this next year and a real question about whether it survives that review.
You know, the Trump administration will come with specific asks. They’re going to care about things like corn that we sell into Mexico. They’re going to care about energy and they’re going to care about how Mexico and Canada face China and sort of China in the supply chains that are there, and what other kinds of things that the Trump administration wants.
You know, they want security, back to sort of Jacob’s point on many of the cartels being designated now not just, you know, transnational criminal organizations but terrorist organizations. That changes a little bit of the calculus for businesses that are operating there.
So there’s a lot of uncertainty. Though, I would say, you know, as you look around the countries around the world and thinking about Europe, you know, Mexico and Canada, there’s a little bit of a sigh of relief that everything wasn’t thrown out in the last couple of weeks.
FROMAN: You know, President Trump’s desire to reindustrialize America, bring more manufacturing to the U.S., has merits, has—conceivably has merits and, by the way, is not unique to President Trump. President Biden was also very focused on increasing manufacturing in the United States.
What are the prospects—when you talk to companies—we have a lot of corporate members here at the Council and you consult with a lot of companies. What are you hearing and what do you think the prospects are that they ultimately decided, in part because of the uncertainty, that the only certain thing if they want to avoid tariffs is to produce in the United States, and they open up factories and they hire more American workers and they do exactly what President Trump said they’re going to do?
O’NEIL: So I’d say two things on that. One is there’s so much uncertainty about what the rules are you’re not going to make that investment until you have a better sense of what the rules are and right now you don’t know. And, certain industries can move quickly and certain industries cannot move quickly.
So if you’re building a car you have already commissioned and contracted with your suppliers through, you know, 2028, 2029. So you’re not going to be able to move because you already have to pay those suppliers. You’ve already done—they do a lot of your research in development. You’re sort of the tier one, tier two system the way the cars are made.
So you’re not moving until that time and, you know, presumably after that time there will be a new president in the United States. It may not—you know, it may be this party, it may be that party, but it’s going to be a different party.
So you don’t know if you’re, you know, whether or not moving and investing billions of dollars and finding new suppliers if you’re actually—the rules are going to be the same and your cost structure that you’re thinking of today is going to be there.
Now, some supply chains and some products you can move more quickly, right? In apparel, you know, you’re making, you know, shirts in China. You can move to another country probably within six months, right, depending on where it is. You have shorter contracts and the like.
So some things you could move more quickly if you sort of—but still, again, you need certainty. So if you’re thinking of moving out of China because today it’s 125 percent tariff you say, OK, well, maybe I’m going to go to Vietnam. But Vietnam up until yesterday had 46 percent tariffs so that wouldn’t be the place to go. Maybe that’ll come back in ninety days, but maybe it won’t.
So there’s—one, there’s just this uncertainty. It’s very hard to decide even if you want to invest. And then, if you’re thinking of coming back here to the United States, you know, especially for, you know, like, athleisure that we all wear, we don’t make that kind of synthetic thread here, so we’re—so that’s unavailable. You’re going to have to import that from somewhere, and that’s going to be tariffed, and where are you going to import from. You know, we don’t make some of those things nor do we have some of the skills there. So there’s that sort of a challenge, right? How do you set up the sort of land and the labor and the permits and all the things that happen here?
But I would say, just stepping back, the bigger challenge there for lots of these companies is if you’re going to produce in the United States, one, you’re going to need to bring in inputs and that’s going to raise your cost. You can sell here. You know, you’ve put up tariff walls and, I mean, I’ve studied Latin America for many years. Latin America did this in spades through the 1970s and 1980s. They called it import substitution industrialization so you—
FROMAN: How did that work out?
O’NEIL: You know, the few bright spots are, like, Embraer, you know, the jet company that came out of Brazil, but most of the companies you’ve never heard of because they didn’t make it, right. And it cost consumers a lot more and it cost innovation because you were producing just for the Mexican market or just for the Peruvian market or the Argentine, and the like.
And, you know, the U.S. market is a big market, but if you raise the costs here you are going to only provide for the—you know, for U.S. consumers and you’re not going to be able to export to the rest of the world because your products are just going to be too expensive. Even without retaliatory tariffs they’re just going to be more expensive because of inputs that cost more because of tariffs and/or the production here that costs more.
And right now you’re going to have a lot of companies that are sort of caught in between. I’ll just give you one example so you can sort of think through how this works is, you know, so BMW—the biggest BMW plant in the world is here in the United States in Spartanburg, South Carolina.
They make cars for—you know, mostly SUVs and some coupes for the U.S. market but half of their cars go to other markets. So, you know, they don’t make SUVs in Europe for Europe. They send them from the United States, and SUVs for lots of other places.
Now, if we see retaliatory tariffs then they won’t be able to send those cars out. But they also won’t be bringing in sort of the lower, you know, 3 Series, I think it is, that they import because the margins on that are lower and they’re not going to make them in the United States.
So as U.S. consumers if you want to buy a BMW you’ll be able to buy BMWs because they make them here, but you’re only going to be able to buy SUVs and the expensive ones. You’re not going to be able to buy sort of the others.
So we’re going to get fewer options here and they’re going to be more expensive cars, which means you buy fewer of them. You take more time, which means demand is slower, which means that factory slows down, which means jobs are lost or furloughed, which means an overall sort of shrinking of the economy.
So, yes, BMW will keep making BMWs here for the United States market but they’re going to be fewer than before, both in just number but also quality. So these are sort of the dynamics I think we’re going to see. So, yes, will there be—will we see some manufacturing come back? Yes, but it’s going to be much more selective and lower.
And, like, the last thing I would say is there’s a different way to do this, right, and a different way to do it is really decide what you care about, what we really want to be made here in the United States, right?
Do we want socks to be made here? Maybe not. Do we want, you know, high-tech semiconductors? Do we want, you know—well, your socks maybe, right?
FROMAN: They’re strategic. Strategic socks. (Laughter.)
O’NEIL: Think about the industries that we really want to have here in the United States and we think will be a huge value added to, you know, the U.S. economy, and targeted tariffs and/or subsidies, sort of a package that then brings the beginning of that back to an industry that then can compete globally. That, I think, is a better model than just widespread tariffs on everything, then try to bring everything back.
FROMAN: I think one of the things your comments point out is that during—one of the issues around globalization was that the benefits of globalization were felt by everybody but were sort of invisible. You as a consumer went to stores and were able to get a wide variety of products at relatively low prices.
The costs of globalization were felt by relatively few but they were very visible and very acute—a steel factory closing down, an auto factory moving to Mexico, and that’s what we saw.
President Trump has an interesting challenge ahead because he’s flipped this now on its head, which is that the costs of his actions are going to be felt by everybody and are going to be quite visible, and if his theory is right the benefits are going to be felt by relatively few workers in relatively few sectors several years from now and so—and he’s been quite honest about this.
He says—he’s been saying to the American people this—we’re going through a transition. There’s going to be some pain, you know, but at the end of the day we’re going to have a golden era for America and I think what he’s trying to do is get the American public to be OK with, you’re going to suffer for four or five years but at the end of the day we’re going to have more manufacturing here.
As a political—I’m not a politician but it strikes me that is an interesting challenge to manage if everyone’s feeling pain for years and the benefits are felt or seen several years from now.
We’re going to open it up for questions in a minute but I want to make sure we end on not the most dour of notes and so I’m going to ask each of you to identify at least one bright spot in the world. (Laughter.)
What makes you—you wake up in the morning, you say, oh, thank goodness for—Jacob?
WARE: I’m going to need another minute. (Laughter.)
FROMAN: Oh, man, he’s checking.
Liana?
FIX: So thank goodness for Germany, my country, which is not a very obvious plug here, but it is one of the few good news stories. There’s a new government in Germany. As I said before, Germany has finally opened the tap on defense spending. And I say this not because it’s just relevant for Germany, but because it is relevant for the entirety of Europe, right?
I mean, I talked about political will, how these countries can work together, about defense spending. But the other part is you have now a Europe where you have twenty-seven different armies with a very weird constellation of tanks. I mean, what we sent to Ukraine is called the petting zoo of weaponries that Ukraine gets, right? (Laughter.)
So if there’s one bright spot that I do look forward and I think it’s good for Europe is that we will have some growth engine despite tariffs, despite the China challenge, for Europe coming from domestic defense industry and that—if that is really scaled both from Germany’s side but also working together with the other European partners, if we finally have bridges so that a tank can make its way from Germany to Poland without making the bridge collapse and so once—if finally all these structures in Europe are invested in infrastructure, defense infrastructure and so on, I think it will be a positive development there.
FROMAN: Jacob, back to you.
WARE: Yes, I think I’m ready. I think one of the major challenges that we’ve faced in the counterterrorism space but this is an intersectional issue is social media and the role that it plays.
Again, it’s an extremism problem but it’s also a child sexual abuse material problem. It’s a body disorder problem. It’s a disinformation problem, and that’s intersectional into, you know, climate change and pandemic prevention and great power competition.
Here in the United States, obviously, we are seeing kind of tech leaders emerging into major roles but you are seeing a pretty significant pushback, I think, in other countries that are kind of realizing that these companies and these technologies are not necessarily forces for good in every case, especially when it comes to young people.
Many of you will have probably watched the Netflix show Adolescence, which is kind of a phenomenon right now. That’s pointing to that issue of people waking up the effect that these technologies are having in their lives.
And just from the conversations that, you know, I’ve had over the past couple of years around town I do think—around DC, I do think there’s some energy to start pushing back on that now and, perhaps, frankly, Elon Musk is appearing, in some regards, to have overreached in terms of his political ambitions. I do think as he recedes there’s going to start to be energy to try to curtail some of these major, major forces in our society.
FROMAN: Shannon?
O’NEIL: So let me—the glass half full is, you know, the sort of global economy—the United States isn’t being the most constructive actor. But I guess I’d look at the last sort of five or ten years.
There are a lot of other countries out there actually signing free trade agreements, finding ways to work together, binding their economies together in different ways, and we have seen, you know, incredible increases in productivity and use of technology and like that, you know, is providing greater prosperity for lots of people around the world.
So I think there are sort of good news and bad news stories. Some of the stuff of those last couple of weeks I think, you know, questions a bit of that. But this overlying trend is we actually are seeing a lot of growth and the United States economy has been one of the sort of fastest growing, productive, robust economies there and so I think there’s a sort of a lot to work with there.
And then the other, just to mirror a bit because where I was going to start before is, you know, it has not been a great number of years for global democracies, right? We see sort of Freedom House and others talking about sort of the receding of democracy but hasn’t been a great number of years for autocracies either, right?
There have been real challenges for a lot of these places. And so it’s not just one side that’s having challenges. It’s also, you know, sort of—you know, it’s not just democracies. It’s also the autocracies, whether that’s Russia or China or North Korea or Iran or other places.
And so, you know, as I look around at some of the more recent elections, you know, we’ve seen some countries sort of move to the center. So that pragmatic center, try to come back together.
Now, it remains to be seen if they can pull it together but they’re getting the chance, right, and I think we’ve seen that in a number of different countries, this sort of a center coming together and that—and in countries that are wealthy like Germany but also in countries that are middle income countries that are not—have, you know, sort of the prosperity of a European or U.S.
So I guess what I would say is sort of the small silver lining is, like, I don’t think democracy is over. I don’t think it’s given up the ghost and I think a lot of what you’re seeing is even in the face of real economic and other challenges lots of—millions, hundreds of millions of people around the world voting for it and trying to hold on to it and that’s a good—
FROMAN: Excellent.
Let’s open it up to questions. Just a few reminders. This is on the record and being live streamed. Be careful what you say. (Laughter.) When you get called upon please stand, wait for the mic. State your name and academic affiliation and try and make it a relatively brief question.
Yes, here. Mic right behind you.
Q: Thank you. Diana Bolsinger from the University of Texas at El Paso.
For decades we have heard from intelligence officers and managers that most of the U.S. counterterrorist achievements have been as a result of partnership with a foreign liaison. My question, especially for Jacob and also Liana but I welcome anybody else who has insights, is we know intelligence liaison rests on trust.
Can that trust survive the changes that are taking place in our international relationships, and if not what are the prospects for future U.S. counterterrorism?
WARE: Sure. I have two thoughts just quickly. One is there is a hollowing out of U.S. intelligence agencies, especially in counterterrorism. The good news, I guess, is that has been going on for years, actually, and so we haven’t been buffeted that badly.
I remember when the Afghan withdrawal was happening a lot of us in the counterterrorism space were extremely concerned about just the lost partnerships, the lost human intelligence, the lost projection of power. If there is going to be a significant kind of result of that, it hasn’t happened yet in the U.S. That’s the good news. But I do fear that a lot of these processes, a lot of this hollowing out, a lot of this kind of assault on talent, is going to take some years to come to fruition. So we’re going to have to wait and see.
The other thing that I will note, and I think it’s a really important point because your questions were largely about foreign intelligences, El Paso where you’re from, of course, is the site of the deadliest domestic terrorist incident in the U.S. since Oklahoma City, which is coming up next week of the anniversary—the white supremacist shooting in August 2019 that killed twenty-three people.
The predominant terrorism threat to the United States today is internal regardless of kind of the ideologies that you look at. I remember on New Year’s Day, right, there was a rumor at some point that went around that that individual had crossed the border at Eagle Pass. That wasn’t true, right? He was a convert to Islam, a U.S. Army veteran from Texas. And so we can worry about the foreign side and the intelligence partnerships. But the high likelihood in my view, my assessment, is the next terrorist attacks that come, whether they are probably most likely white supremacists but whether they are Salafi jihadists or far left or a single issue or a male supremacist, they’re going to be internal. They’re going to be homegrown threats. They’re going to be Americans attacking Americans, and that’s a different set of solutions.
The bad news then is, you know, the FBI is counterterrorism. Domestic counterterrorism units are being pushed aside as well and much of the prevention or countering violent extremism work that kind of comes through Department of Homeland Security is also being cut.
So that domestic counterterrorism capability is being taken away and that is a worry, especially for places like El Paso that have this very high profile target set, frankly.
Thank you.
FROMAN: This gentleman here in the middle.
Q: Sokol Celo, Suffolk University in Boston, Massachusetts.
My question is mostly for Shannon. Most of what we are seeing right now in terms of trade and tariffs is predicated on bringing manufacturing jobs back to the United States. Well, when I talk to my students about this topic in general I conduct, like, an informal survey.
I ask them to guess what percentage of all the jobs in United States is accounted for by manufacturing. I get the very wild range from 5 percent to 70 percent. Well, the right answer is less than 8 percent. So we are talking about less than 8 percent, first.
Second, manufacturing—there are two ways how to look at it. One is the number of jobs but the other is the output of the manufacturing, and I was reading the other day that whereas in historical scale the number of jobs has gone down the output has actually gone up, and the introduction of new technologies including artificial intelligence if anything is going to increase the output even further, which means we are going to need less people.
So given this, too, why is the argument of manufacturing jobs so prominent and working in many cases?
O’NEIL: That’s a great addendum, right? We have more manufacturing in terms of output than we did, you know, back in the golden years that we’re sort of harkening back to but we do have fewer jobs, right? It’s gone from, you know, 15, 20 percent to 8 percent as you say. And if and when factories come back they are not going to come back with jobs.
In fact, I was recently in Tokyo and talking to an industrial company there and they were thinking about putting a—they make switches. They’re going to make a switch factory. Was it going to be in Mexico or was it going to be in the United States? And they were thinking about the—you know, if there are going to be tariffs. At the time it was still if there are going to be tariffs. And how would that be in, you know, certain tariffs.
But they did say if they put it in the U.S. it’d be very capital intensive and it’ll be totally automated and there would be very few jobs and that, I think, is just repeated over and over again.
I mean, why—I will also say that when you look at the scale of pay and the like that actually high-end services, you know, often pay more. Export-oriented jobs pay more, that aren’t always in manufacturing because we lead in services. So there are other jobs. It’s not just that these are the best paying jobs today in the U.S. economy.
But, you know, I will defer. As, you know, Mike said, I am not a politician either. You know, I think there is sort of this glorified, you know, sort of union job of the 1970s or 1980s where you didn’t have to have a college education but you could have a—you know, a well-paid job. There’s lots of reasons why no matter what you do with tariffs that will never happen again here in the United States.
But those were also jobs that sometimes didn’t let lots of other kinds of people in there, and as you look at the, you know, what jobs in the United States pay well, they are—as you all know, they are tied to higher education, some sort of higher levels of education and probably increasingly ability to be educated throughout your life and sort of change the skill sets that you have throughout your life.
And so that seems to me a better path than just focusing on, you know, steel or aluminum or other types of industries.
FROMAN: Yeah. I think Shannon has laid out that argument very well. I think if President Trump were sitting here you’d probably hear something more along the lines that no country can be great without a strong manufacturing sector.
Manufacturing drives innovation. It has spillover effects into other parts of the economy. Look at our great history around autos, around aviation, around electronics, et cetera, and that we need some critical mass of manufacturing.
And economists can—and others can argue about whether we have that critical mass now or whether it—you know, whether we’re missing it. We need to build it—to build it further. I think you would also hear that—Shannon’s absolutely right. I mean, the highest paying jobs are knowledge-related jobs, jobs that educated people get that are, largely, in the services sector.
But it’s created this barbell of high-paid jobs of well-educated service workers on one end and quite low-paid jobs of not educated, less educated service workers at the other end, and I think there’s a great deal of concern that those aren’t the kind of jobs that lead to people achieving the American dream.
It may be nostalgia for the 1950s notion of what a job in a factory could lead to but it is that kind of vision of we want people to be able to make things, innovate things, invent things, and be able to support the American dream when they go home and, you know, you’re not going to be doing that if you’re just a health aide worker. That’ll be the critique that you’ll hear from that side of the argument.
The economists have very different views on that, and as we’ve seen even great countries that are seen as great manufacturing successes like Germany the percentage of work occurs in Germany that are in manufacturing isn’t that much higher than the percentage in the United States, and it’s gone down almost in parallel over the last thirty or forty years as automation has kicked in.
Right here in the front. That was just an editorial comment from your moderator. Sorry.
Q: Good evening. My name is Jessica De Alba. I’m from the University of Maine but originally from Mexico.
So I almost had a conniption when you mentioned, Jacob, Mexico is the fifth hotspot for terrorism. That concerns me a lot. So why would the United States be interested in keeping Mexico as a partner as we have been for the past, I don’t know, more than twenty years if Mexico is just really going down the drain?
It’s just becoming a very authoritarian country, destroying its democracy—I’m not as optimistic as you, Shannon, I’m sorry—and losing in this situation. So I know Canada does not really see Mexico as a partner.
O’NEIL: Yeah, I’m happy to say—no, look, I have my worries about Mexico for sure, right, and lots of the changes and sort of the checks and balances of, you know, the judicial branch. There’s a lot of changes that have happened that are making it less democratic and less open to those spaces.
I mean, why does the United States care? I mean, you know, for good or bad we’re together, right? The United States cares because we have an almost 2,000-mile border and yes, there’s lots of goods that come across and part of the U.S. economic competitiveness is tied. That’s the good part of it.
But the downside is so does the challenges that Mexico has, you know, and whether that is, you know, criminal organizations that make lots of their money here in the United States from moving of, you know, drugs or contraband or people or other things, right, there’s those sorts of ties.
You know, there’s sort of those things. What happens in Mexico won’t stay in Mexico. So the U.S. has to have—U.S. always has an interest in that sense.
In terms of this switch in the designation from a transnational criminal organization to a terrorist organization, you know, I think there were a lot of—there were some who felt like that was important to sort of raise the profile.
You know, I will say, having looked at the sort of drug issue and criminal issue in Mexico for many years, it was very hard at times. For instance, you know, one of the best ways to go after drug cartels is to follow the money, right?
And so all of that money gets in and out of the U.S. financial system if you can follow it. It’s easier to dismantle than finding, you know, individuals here and there. But it was always very hard.
Within the Treasury there’s an investigatory department called FinCEN. It was always very hard to get, you know, those investigators to go after drug cartels even though one could argue that, you know, almost a hundred thousand Americans die every year from synthetic drug overdoses, much of it fentanyl, much of it coming in from Mexico.
So you could say but, you know, you go to the people who are there or the National Security Council and you say, well, which of these investigators do you want us to take off of al-Qaida, right, or other terrorist groups, right? Even though, you know, knock on wood, they have not killed a hundred thousand Americans this last year, which fentanyl and other drugs have.
So I think designating them a terrorist organization—the charitable interpretation is it’s an ability to bring to bear more of the U.S. resources to dismantle these organizations so that they do not threaten U.S. lives and by extension, hopefully, Mexican lives, right? I think that’s the argument.
Now, there’s a lot of sort of side consequences or unintended consequences that are very real and I would imagine, you know, our friend from El Paso thinks about this a lot, right? If you are a U.S. corporation and you have a plant—you are GM or Ford or any other and you have a plant and you’re, you know, in land that’s in a border state or any state, frankly, do you know that your landlord is not affiliated with one of the cartels/now terrorist organizations?
Are you providing material aid to a terrorist because you’re paying your bills? Do you know that the cleaning service that comes in is not affiliated or owned by one of these organizations? You don’t actually know that.
Do you know the, you know, the company that does logistics for you is not somehow affiliated? You don’t know a lot of that in some of these areas where these are diversified conglomerates, right, even though they’re illegal organizations.
So I think there’s a lot of ramifications we have not thought through. I mean, even here in the United States if you or one of your students or your children, you know, take fentanyl and you pay someone for it, have you just materially aided and abetted a terrorist because you’ve given money to them? These are—you know, these are kind of legal issues that are out there that were not out there when they weren’t designated terrorist organizations.
WARE: And in the Islamic State case, just really quickly, material support of a foreign terrorist organization was defined super, super broadly. So travel, money, yourself, propaganda—all of those things. At one point, there was a hot chocolate case of somebody who’d sent hot chocolate to a child in Syria. That’s probably the biggest impact here.
Now, I would not have advocated for designating these cartels as foreign terrorist organizations because I don’t see them as necessarily political. They’re more economic or public health, perhaps, in my view. But we have kind of opened up a can of worms here that is going to play out, and we’ll see how that goes.
FROMAN: Let’s go to the back and then I’ll come back up here.
Q: Hello. Thank you all. Brian Alexander with Washington and Lee University and the W&L Washington Term.
Thinking of something that Shannon mentioned in terms of not being able to put the toothpaste back in the bottle and thinking how a lot of us who are sort of comfortable with globalization and U.S. leadership on economic, military, and diplomatic fronts or at least comfortable with working within those frameworks to solve the problems thereof and to look to the development of the world within that framework, if the toothpaste can’t be put back in the tube based on the actions of the Trump administration, who are the winners? Who—are we looking at a global realignment?
Who comes out ahead in this situation so that if in 2028, for instance, we have a president who is sort of mired in 1990s beliefs about the economy and democracy, what is that person looking at?
And I know we can’t predict what’s going to happen five minutes from now but I’m asking you maybe to give us some insights because I think the challenge is, like, what—I mean, do we just embrace this new world order that seems to be disrupting everything we know, or can we start to think, well, what are we going to be looking at when, perhaps, different minds are calling some of the shots?
Thank you.
O’NEIL: Well, I’ll say a few things and you probably have some thoughts on this, too.
So, you know, I guess what I would say, and leaving aside some of the personalities and the particular policies that we’ve seen and that, as you rightly mentioned, change quickly, yeah, I think one thing we’re seeing is that lots of the big, global kind of rules-based order institutions that we have depended on—you know, the WTO, the UN, the WHO, the World Bank, the IMF, name your institution—you know, many of these just don’t function well in a situation of rising great power competition, right?
And when some of them were formed in the Cold War, yes, you had great powers but they were really separate. Their economies were very separate, right? You had a bloc—the Soviet bloc and you had the sort of a Western bloc and that was separate.
But now we are back in a state of great power competition and many powers, perhaps, but at least, you know, two to three and they are intertwined. And so I think some of the breakdown and the challenges we’re talking about are not just, you know, personalities and predilections but are really this just stress for these institutions that were never designed to manage conflicts within.
And so that is—so that’s just a way, you know, so how do we get to who wins on the other side. I think it really depends on, you know, which of these visions of the worlds or paradigms that are put out there sort of comes out on the other side.
And there’s one that I can imagine, which is maybe the next, you know, three years as things shake out but maybe the—you know, the next sort of president of the United States and, like, where you do have a divide between sort of a more, you know, China and Russia and other based sort of, you know, economies and organizations and more Western where you sort of have an agglomeration of, you know, whether it’s Europe and the United States and many—lots of emerging economies and there are more ties you start seeing, you know, at least on the commercial side sort of a bit more of separate kind of production, you know, facilities of supply chains and the like that provide for these different markets, so there’s sort of a balance. You get a little bit of a divide back in there. I mean, I think another one that actually I was writing about earlier this week is that you get a little bit of the U.S. plus one. So people kind of come to the U.S., they produce for the U.S., they’re tied there, but the rest of the world kind of forms back around. And you’re starting to see that a little bit with at least the trading architecture between all of the free trade agreements that are either under negotiation, or signed, or already working, where they’re kind of without the United States. Like, a little bit of that.
But I would say, when you get past the economics—some of that shuffling is happening—when you get past the economic, you know, at least right now, you know, the U.S. is still the biggest defense power. The U.S. is still the biggest diplomatic the power. I do think the U.S. still plays a role. The U.S. is still a place, even with the challenges we have right now, that people around the world want to come to. So I think there’s a role for the U.S. to step back in. I don’t think all is—if this is not your—you know, the way your politics works today, or you have a different view of things, it’s not like this is sort of the end of history, right—to go back to that—(laughs)—you know? I think there is space for the back and forth.
And frankly, you look at U.S. history, we have gone through, you know, lots of ways between isolationism and more openness and not. And so, you know, we may also be going through this. But I do—as I started off, you know, I think there’s a fundamental break from some of these paradigms and rules that we have had for a long time, and something else will evolve afterward.
FROMAN: The gentleman here.
Q: Hi, everyone. My name is Drissa Kone, from HJ International Graduate School, twenty blocks away from here.
So my question is for Jacob. You mentioned about the Sahel region, which is basically a critical area right now. And those three countries—Mali, Burkina Faso, and Niger—they have a narrative—and this is supported by, actually, a lot of social media people from there—that the terrorist group there actually came from Libya when Libya collapsed, actually, and then moved there. And then they actually are being supported, funded, and trained by NATO. That’s the narrative. And that’s why they actually kick out the French and all the international, you know, organizations there, so that they can actually fight better terrorism. What is your thought on this? (Laughs.) One of my students asked me this question, I couldn’t answer, so. (Laughter.)
WARE: So you decided to put me on the spot. I don’t know. It’s a really good question. Gosh, I have not heard that—you said NATO’s funding those organizations? Yeah. I have not heard that particular angle. I know that, you know, a lot of those movements in that region are, you’re quite right, made up of foreigners. It’s actually the same with the case of the ISIS Khorasan Group. It was the same with HTS in Syria. These are international groups that have kind of embedded themselves in the local population. My understanding, you know, of the region, of the violence there, is more so that there are governance issues. I think, you know, those three countries, or those three countries and the neighboring countries, have had something, like, six coups in the past three years. That is not a recipe for combating violence.
The other thing I will say is, in this particular conflict and in others—feel free to throw something at me if I get the econ wrong here—but in counterterrorism we’re dealing with both the supply and a demand problem. And we’ve lost the supply fight in a lot of different regions. We’ve lost the ability to deter organizations from taking hold of institutions. We need to think about demand as well. Why are young people in that region turning towards these organizations rather than a different option? That appears to be the case in a lot of conflicts, whether it’s Gaza, whether it’s, you know, the Taliban. We have failed to break that link all around the world. So I would point to that.
Last thing I’ll say, we have great fellows here working on these questions. Ebenezer Obadare, our senior fellow for Africa studies, is from the region as well. He’s great. And I’d pointed to Josh Kurlantzick’s work on this topic as well, who’s studying coups and military governance. And he has looked at this question as well. So I hope that’s helpful to your student. Thank you.
FROMAN: Am I missing anybody in the back here? Yes, gentleman there.
Q: My name is Kwaku Obosu-Mensah. I’m from Lorain County Community College, which is in Elyria, about twenty-five miles west of Cleveland, Ohio.
OK, this about European peace. We all know that the conflict, if I should call it this way, is between Western European countries and Russia. We also know that people who belong to the same team normally cooperate with each other. So has the European Union ever considered inviting Russia to join the Union?
FIX: (Laughs.)
FROMAN: Go ahead.
FIX: It’s a—it’s actually a very good question. They have considered something—it’s not an explicit invitation to the European Union—but the European Union, especially in the 2000s, has realized that, with the dissolution of the Soviet bloc, there’s suddenly many more countries in Central and Eastern Europe on its borders. And it has sort of expanded in multiple waves of EU integration, you know, integrating Poland, integrating Hungary, and so on. And they’ve built something which was called, in 2008, the Eastern Partnership. Because the European Union thought, OK, we can’t expand forever, right, further east. But we can create closer relationships with countries that are beyond our expansive reach right now—Ukraine, with Belarus. And we can try to negotiate, actually, free trade agreements with those countries. And that’s what the European Union offered to Ukraine, to Belarus, to Moldova, and then also to the South Caucasus countries of Azerbaijan, Armenia, and Georgia.
And they also offered that to Russia. So they also told Russia, well, look, why can’t we have—don’t you want to be part of this Eastern Partnership? Why can’t we have this kind of special relationship? It has not worked at that time. And the reason is the same reason why the NATO-Russia relationship has also not worked, because Russia has never perceived itself as being part of an eastern region. It always wanted to be seen as at least an equal player. And there is this famous quote from the moment when George W. Bush and Vladimir Putin met. And Vladimir Putin asked, well, when can Russia join NATO? And George W. Bush said, well, there is a line, right? (Laughs.) There’s a queue of countries that want to join NATO.
And this is what was at that point, from the Russian side, unacceptable. They don’t want to be pooled with other countries. They don’t want to stand in line. As a great power, they have perceived them, at that time, as a power that is first in line, that makes first these privileged relationships. We had some other attempts of EU-Russia cooperation back then—modernization partnerships, and so on and so on—but very quickly Russia has turned the corner towards a more and more authoritarian system where all these kinds of cooperation have become very difficult. And I would say, the main country suffering from that failure of EU-Russia, NATO-Russia, West and Russia cooperation, after the 1990s, are the countries in between. And that’s in particular Ukraine, obviously, but also Georgia and Moldova, to some extent. Because they have been caught in between this. There’s little else to say about that.
FROMAN: I’ll take these last two questions here, and this gentleman had question. Let’s take them together, and then we’ll give the panel the last word.
Q: Hi. I’m Tom Dolan from UCF in Orlando.
So, Mike, I have a Europe question. So sometimes when I’ve looked at things by, like, people like Kris Lane that kind of endorse the U.S. pulling out of Europe I’ve kind of responded this feels almost like a recipe for Polish nuclear weapons. (Laughter.) And a couple weeks ago, Polish Prime Minister Tusk basically said maybe Poland should be interested in these things. Do you think there’s a realistic chance of that happening? And if a, shall we say, nuclear pierogi does come to exist—(laughter)—could that actually be stabilizing, since, you know, I think many people regard them as being able to credibly threaten to use them, at least in a deterrent sense?
FIX: That’s a great question.
FROMAN: Oh, let’s take one more. And we’ll give everyone the last word.
Q: Hi. My name is Brian Frehner. I’m from University of Missouri-Kansas City.
Like many Americans, my head is kind of spinning from all the recent changes, but I’ve sensed a tenor in each of the speakers, really, that in many ways perhaps some of the current changes may be good to kind of break free from common American assumptions, whether it’s foreign policy, trade, et cetera. And I’m just wondering how much of this—you know, the fact that the tariff on China continues to linger at 125 percent, you know, I’m wondering is the elephant in the room not that this is all about China? And that America’s security in all of these different areas is fundamentally linked to returning this situation on its head? Is that really not what ultimately the elephant in the room is?
FROMAN: All right. Yeah. Why don’t you answer the Europe one.
FIX: (Laughs.) Yeah. I’m happy to start with the Polish nuclear question.
FROMAN: The Polish pierogi, the nuclear pierogi.
FIX: The nuclear pierogi, I love it. (Laughter.) Actually, the Polish prime minister talked about nuclear capabilities in a very broad sense. And what he actually meant is that Poland, for a long time, wanted to get the nuclear weapons from Germany and the bomber stationed in Germany to Poland. So that has been a long-term demand. They always wanted to have that. Is there a situation—that would be the first choice that Poland would take. They want the bilateral nuclear reassurance thing that Germany has with the United States. Would they, at some point, take the step and develop their own nuclear weapons? In the line of countries that would go for that, I would place them probably below Japan, South Korea, and other countries who have an even more existential threat. But I would not fully exclude it.
What makes it more challenging, and actually the administration is quite open to this idea of friendly nuclear proliferation. I’m not sure if they really have thought this through fully, because the problem with European nuclear proliferation is that you will never have enough nukes to establish the kind of strategic stability deterrence effect that you had between the United States and Russia during the Cold War. It just doesn’t work with the proximity. It just doesn’t work with the amount of nuclear weapons. And you create a situation where suddenly each other European country is asking themselves—so would Germany accept France, UK, and Poland having nuclear weapons, without having their own nuclear weapons? Would other countries still be comfortable with Germany having nuclear weapons?
So the European theater, I believe the disadvantage is bigger than the advantage of having small-scale nuclear weapon deposits there. And I think you—I think countries will try to explore alternatives, sharing, French, UK sharing. But going for the full nuclear path would probably really only be an option if the U.S. very suddenly withdraws, not only conventional troops but also the nuclear umbrella, from Europe, which I do think is unlikely.
FROMAN: Shannon, is it all about China?
O’NEIL: Well, you know, it’s interesting the way you put it. And we have said, right, there is something about—you know, President Trump’s approach has gotten, you know, other countries, particularly allies, to do things that they had not done before, right? Liana talked about stepping up defense spending. We have lots of countries who are saying they’re going to, you know, unilaterally lower their tariffs, vis-à-vis whether it’s India or Vietnam or others that we haven’t been able to get them to do. So there are benefits to that. But I do think there’s something to your framing of is it all about China. And if it is all about China, you know, the challenges of China are both on the economic front that, you know, we have sort of the system of supposedly open trade, and they haven’t been playing by those rules. And so they have gained advantage. And how do you counter that?
Do you throw out all the rules and do something different? Maybe that’s a way. But I would say, I think we would find more advantage, as a U.S. economy, if we work with—if we do that new system, or address China together rather than alone. And to me, you know, a 10 percent universal tariff on every country around the world suggests that we’re not going to do it with others. We’re going to make—we’re either going to make a deal or not with China, right? There’s something happening there. But it’s not as if we’re bringing the Europeans in, or countries—you know, emerging markets or others into that. And they’re having similar challenges, right? You know, the overcapacity issue of China sending out, you know, a net trillion surplus worth of goods is—sure, there’s challenges to the U.S. economy, there’s challenges to European, but there are challenges to, you know, India, Brazil, all of Southeast Asia, Africa. Anybody else who has aspirations for an industrial base is going to have challenges there as well.
So I think, you know, yes, it is a big challenge on the global side. And then as you think about on the sort of more, you know, muscular side, you know, defense, diplomacy, and the like, lots of countries face challenges with China too, right? Ask all of their neighbors, you know, around the South China Sea. Ask those who, you know, have been subjected to some coercion in other places, where they want them to go along on UN votes or other things. And so I think there is a space here for the United States to join with others to push back successfully on some of those. But that’s much harder to do if you’ve isolated yourself.
FROMAN: In another recent Foreign Affairs article—(laughter)—I wrote—(laughter)—that we spent years trying to get China to become more like us. That was sort of the whole proposition of bringing them into the international system. And we lectured them about not being protectionist, not restricting foreign investment, and not subsidizing industries. And I’d say they sort of gave us the Heisman, and we made only modest progress. And as a result, we’re now protectionist, we’re now restricting foreign investment, and we’re now subsidizing industry. So rather than China becoming more like us, we have become more like China.
And I think the question is, can we compete as well, if not better, than China on their rules of the road, rather than the rules of the road that we set up after the Second World War, that Shannon just referred to, and the open rules-based system? And it goes to the previous question about where is this all heading? What kind of paradigm are we heading towards? I think that’s one of the fundamental questions to be addressed.
These are three of eighty fellows we have across the Council on Foreign Relations that cover literally every region, every functional—virtually, every functional area. You’re going to be seeing some of them tomorrow. And we hope you’ll view the Council as a resource, not only the written products out there but this incredible group of experts that cover that waterfront. We’re here in part to help support educators, to make sure that we’re providing the kind of materials and kind of input for you to help your students understand what it means to be an even better informed global citizen. So please join me in thanking this group. (Applause.)
You have dinner now. And I’m told to remind folks that tomorrow morning breakfast begins at 7:45, and then there’ll be a session—the first session is at 8:30 on some very important set of subjects. (Laughter.) Please be here on time and enjoy your evening.
O’NEIL: Thank you. (Applause.)
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