- So thanks, everybody, for being here.
My name is Ryan Goodman.
I am one of the faculty co-directors
of the Reiss Center on Law
and Security at NYU law school
and a co-editor and chief of the
online forum Just Security.
On behalf of both the Reiss
Center and Just Security
I wanted to welcome you all here.
My purpose and function is
just to welcome you all here.
So I'll keep my introductory
remarks very brief
because we have our two star attractions
for which you all came.
Harold Koh, former State
Department legal advisor
and Sterling Professor
of law at Yale Law School
and Jeffrey Toobin, Chief
Legal Analyst for CNN
and staff writer at the New Yorker.
And I feel very confident and safe to say
that these are two of
the most powerful legal
and analytic minds in the nation
who have the ability to shed great clarity
on our nation's predicaments
and pathways forward.
So we are greatly fortunate
to have them both here
and in conversation with one another
to discuss Harold Koh's
new and important book,
The Trump Administration
and International Law.
It couldn't be a more perfect moment
to have this kind of conversation
but in some ways I think every single week
that passes is a more perfect moment
to have this conversation.
The political stage is now set
and now that we have the
results of the midterm elections
so we know what the
political board looks like
a little bit better.
The quote unquote Trump Doctrine
I think is even more clear
and has been crystallized in
part from last week's statement
by the President on the
United States and Saudi Arabia
certainly crystallizing
a part of his outlook
or perspective on
international institutions
and international law.
And then, just today's headlines alone
shed light on the importance
of this conversation
with the Ukraine situation
heating up with Russia,
a UN security council
emergency meeting this morning,
an extraordinary cabinet
member from the White House
allowing for use of force
by the nation's military
on the southern border
and the Bob Mueller
report seemingly imminent
or at least certain developments underway.
So in that sense I think of it
as a perfect moment, unfortunately.
I hope and expect the
conversation will illuminate
both the descriptive
parts of Harold's book
and the normative parts of Harold's book.
So just the way in which I
think of it myself is that
the descriptive parts include a diagnosis
of our current situation,
how did we get here,
towards an increase in anti-globalization,
a retreat from international
law and a fear of migrants.
Also in terms of the descriptive
is a description of the
counter resistance to this moment.
What is what Harold's describes
as in his entire career
and that is in the book, the
Transnational Legal Process,
how we might define as
a descriptive matter,
its successes and its failures.
And then finally, the
normative part of the book
which is a prescription of the way forward
to the benefit of all Americans
and to global order.
But that's not up to me,
the conversation is in more capable hands.
There'll be, at the end,
about a 15 or 20 minute period
where we'll be able to have
questions from the audience
but I just want to turn
the floor over to Jeff
and please join me in
welcoming both of our speakers.
(audience applauds)
- Hello everyone, thank you for coming
and thank you for this fancy environment,
I'm usually in a little bit
of a lower brow audience.
This is, you know it's a
great opportunity for me
to read Harold's book and to talk here
because you know I am often
in the daily news cycle
which moves so quickly
that the subjects change
before you can get into
subjects in any depth
which Harold certainly does in this book.
And so in my effort to show
that I am a person of substance
as well as just like a television guy,
someone who gets into depth.
Harold tell me about
the jacket of your book.
(audience laughs)
- Thank you Jeff.
Before I answer that difficult question
I just wanna single out
three pioneers who are here.
First, Jeff himself, I
think back in the day
there was no CNN or a legal commentator
and now we have someone
we can always count on
to give an instant and
correct legal analysis
under all circumstances.
Then, my dear friend, Ryan Goodman
who both pioneered the
idea of I think a center on
law and security here but
also the Just Security blog.
At the time we were told
that it wasn't necessary
to have one and now it's indispensable.
And then the greatest pioneer John Sexton,
my old friend now of 40 years who I think
really is responsible
for everything we see
and that's an extraordinary credit to him.
When I was asked recently by a judge,
what is the thesis of your
book in three words or less
I said, he is not winning.
And that concludes my presentation
I think you're entitled to
your CLE credit right now.
But what actually happened
was as Jeff was saying
there's a constant flurry of activity.
You cannot follow what
happened this morning
because of what happened this afternoon.
We have entire crises that
are created entirely by
tweet storms up like North Korea,
there was no problem with North Korea.
We weren't solving the problem
and suddenly we had threats
and suddenly we're on
the brink or appear to be
on the brink of nuclear war.
And then when it turned out
that we weren't getting very far
or we had a series of
unsuccessful summits,
we suddenly have these reduced tweets
and people think that these
things are now under control.
And I got a mock-up of the book cover
and it was gigantic
picture of Donald Trump,
huge, his whole face.
And I was looking at
it and I said you know,
I really don't wanna look at
this for the rest of my life.
I think he's gonna be gone quite soon.
I think when gone he will
be viewed as a major error,
a cautionary lesson, can we
get something that's more like
The Wizard of Oz, a
little man projected on TV
with a group of people laughing at him
and that's what they gave us.
So anyway, that's the explanation.
- Well Harold let's start talking about
what Trump stands for in
terms of international.
And you write in the
early part of the book
that it's the "systematic
disengagement from nearly all
"institutions of global governments."
What do you mean by that?
- Well Trump, I think,
misunderstands the world.
He thinks the world is deals
and what we all understand is
the world is relationships.
And what they're learning on
the other side of the Atlantic
in Brexit is how disastrous it is
to think of the world as deals.
The thesis of my academic
work all along has been
that domestic and international are
dramatically intertwined.
So trying to cut these
ties in one fell swoop
is like trying to pull
all of the red threads
out of the tapestry and expecting that
nothing's gonna go wrong.
Now we see this on the
other side of the Atlantic,
you know, in Dover, there's
only one day of food on hand.
Everything is coming over
on the boat at night.
You know between Dublin and Belfast
there's one electric grid.
Is that really gonna be
cut off on March 29th
if they do a hard Brexit?
You know, I just walked by a
Pret A Manger on my way here,
you know something like 80%
of Pret A Manger's staff
will be eliminated or unable
to stay in the country
if their visas are all revoked.
Oxford and Cambridge will lose
30% of their student body.
These are huge because
of the deep intertwining
of our domestic-international law.
That's exactly what's going on here
yet Trump insists on viewing
the world as zero sum.
As opposed to thinking globalization
is an inevitable thing
that must be managed,
he thinks he can just
terminate these deals.
And that I think means that
he's blaming other people,
he wants these allies to get lost.
He's said all of these
multilateral institutions are a disaster
but what ends up happening consistently is
he does what I call a
resign without leaving.
He threatens to leave, creates a tumult,
somebody tells him that's
really gonna be a disaster,
he figures out a way to
pretend he's actually left
while we're still there
and all we've done is
make ourselves a lame duck
that has no influence in organization
in which we used to be prominent.
- The key phrase in the book
and I know in your
career, Ryan mentioned it,
is transnational legal process.
What is that?
That's not a term that
I think everyone knows.
- I mean I think people understand
the notion of a legal process.
But I think what we learned in law school,
Harvard Law School which
is where Jeff and I went,
is that the legal process
is bigger than courts.
There are many players
in the legal process.
And that they do two kinds of things.
From the outside they create interactions
that force interpretations of law
that are then internalized.
So a good example would be,
suing somebody under
the Geneva Conventions
forces them to obey the
rules against torture
as a matter of U.S. law which
has been made enforceable.
The same is going on on
the border, by the way
with regard to immigration.
The other way is inside bureaucracies.
Inside the U.S. bureaucracy,
not a single person
has taken an oath to serve Donald Trump.
They've all taken an oath
to serve the Constitution
and laws of the United States of America.
So he might order them
to do something illegal
but that doesn't mean
they're gonna follow it.
In fact, if they do follow it,
they could be held
accountable in other ways.
What I wanna argue here
is that there's something
much bigger than Donald Trump
which is this transnational legal process.
He might be trying to disengage
and he's a powerful actor in the process,
arguably the most powerful actor.
But he's getting resistance
from the outside,
he's getting resistance from the inside,
and therefore, the guardrails
of law are basically holding.
There's a lot of sound and fury
but if you actually totaled up
what's happened in the last two years,
there's been much less real accomplishment
and much more of a rattling of the cages.
- Is transnational legal
process immutable or...
It obviously changes over
time, doesn't it or does it?
- Well you know...
- Is it the same as it was
fifty years ago or--
- Well a lot of these
things are reparable.
So you take for example,
you know we didn't pay
our UN dues for many years
and we were in the rears.
Then we did and then we got current.
This happens all the time.
You know, we may say
we're not participating
in the Paris Climate Agreement
but we haven't withdrawn.
The date that Trump picked,
which is the first date
you could withdraw,
it doesn't actually
execute until the day after
the next presidential election.
So, depending on what happens
and you know, if he gets sued,
which I am confident that
he will, we're still in.
And then the next president could step up
and repair that damage.
- When you write about
transnational legal process
you talk about patterns of obedience,
that's a phrase that you use.
We've all learned to throw
our cans in the recycling
no one has to tell us to do that.
But doesn't that change over time?
I mean isn't that something that,
for example the president can change
what the patterns of obedience are?
- Well, first of all they
have to be disciplined.
He is not.
Second they have to be
in place for a long time,
we're at two years.
I'm pretty confident
we can last four years.
Eight years is another story
and we can say more about why.
The main reason would
be that the bureaucracy
I think would turn over.
You know, in the government
where I worked for 10 years,
young people are ready
to serve but not Trump.
Because they have a better way to spend
the first couple of years
of their legal career.
The people who are at the
end of their career service
will retire early because
they've already done their time.
But if you're 25 years in,
you're gonna wait it out.
Now if Trump is reelected
and you've done four years,
trying to do damage
control you might decide
well I can't do another four years.
And that's where the long-term
ungluing could happen.
- Now, it's funny you actually sound
a little like Donald Trump
or his allies in saying
that there are these
people in the bureaucracy
who are fighting him.
So in a way you think
that's right, don't you?
- I don't know if it's right,
it's a fact of life.
I mean when I was in
the Obama Administration
they fought me. (laughs)
These are people who are committed to a
certain bureaucratic past and
it doesn't change that much
so they don't go all the way left,
when left government is put in.
They don't go all the way right
when a right government comes in.
You know a classic example would be
during the travel ban litigation,
suddenly a document was
leaked from Homeland Security
that said that the travel
ban had nothing to do with
promoting national security.
You know where do these leaks come from?
Or we now know that the CIA concluded that
Jamal Khashoggi was killed by MBS.
You know, how did that happen?
Because they have ways of
getting out the truth.
Over the objection, to
journalists like you.
I mean I think we call them sources.
- With luck.
I don't know how many people
out here are boxing fans,
especially of the Muhammad Ali era.
But you talk about the
rope-a-dope which was when
Muhammad Ali, towards
the end of his career,
would let his opponent sort
of punch themselves out
and then when they were exhausted,
you know, finish the fight.
You suggest that as a
bureaucratic response to Trump.
How does that work, what does that mean?
- Well it suggests a number of things.
You know, as you recall this is in Zaire
Ali was at the late stage
of his career, as you say.
His opponent was young
and strong and wild.
And so, he retreated to the ropes
and let himself be pummeled.
And he counter punched and he taunted him
and he covered up until the eighth round
when finally Foreman was so exhausted
that he came off the
ropes and knocked him out.
Now there are three messages from that.
Number one, there is a way
in which someone who's full of
initiatives can be worn down.
Everything that's going on at the border,
which looks like a series of events
is actually of series of ways
in which Trump is trying to
reassert the essentially the same policy,
this zero tolerance policy.
Every time he does it, it gets blocked.
You know, he started trying
to do family separations.
That got blocked by the
Flores 20 day provision.
Then he said no birthright citizenship.
Turns out that that's legally required.
Then he said you can't apply for asylum
except at a port of entry.
Turned out that violates a statute.
And as a result, each time he's doing it,
there's an obstacle.
The second thing is that
in the seventh round,
if you were to ask somebody who's winning
they would've said Foreman.
In fact, Ali was about to prevail.
You saw it, Foreman started to lose it.
And I don't have to tell you
what you see in the paper
every day now to know whether
we're at a point where,
every day we read some account by
Bob Woodward or others showing
just how fragile this is.
Or you read the account,
the defensive Khashoggi with
eight exclamation points.
I mean that's not the work of a guy
who's got it all together
or much less has a strong
intellectual frame.
And then finally, most worrying was,
as we all know, Ali came unglued.
He took so much battering,
there's only so much
battering you can take.
And all the more reason why
we're in kind of a moment of
reckoning now that the last
two years of the first term.
Ryan mentioned you know the
House comes in in January,
suddenly there'll be an avenue
by which a lot of the
oversight can be done.
What we're really looking for here
is the splintering of the coalition.
We have, for the first time
in our country in a long time,
a coalition government
like they had in the UK
between the Trumpites and
the traditional republicans.
And now the traditional
republicans are pretty much gone.
You know people like
Boehner, Ryan, McCain,
but in the last few weeks we suddenly see
there's Mitt Romney, the new McCain.
Nikki Haley is gone, you
know maybe she wants to run.
What we may be seeing now is that
they may have gotten all
they're gonna get out of Trump
at which point the question is,
do they need somebody else to run for
reelection in 2020 who
doesn't alienate everybody?
It would be hard to find
a candidate who did.
- Who alienates fewer
people than Donald Trump?
- Yeah.
- Yeah I suppose
you could find one or two people.
- Yeah and then you also have,
even if it goes eight years,
there's no one who's gonna
succeed to the mantel of Trump.
There's nobody who has
his kind of visibility.
So they have to find another approach.
There's not an intellectual
movement going on here.
So I think the question is
and everybody's asking this question,
how is the counter
resistance prepared to deploy
to start pushing back on
some of these initiatives?
- Well let's talk about a
couple of specific areas
and start with the one you mentioned
which is immigration.
And your hypothesis and
you began to outline it
which is that Trump has
really not succeeded
in doing much of anything on immigration.
You know, we're heading
into another budget crunch
where there may be money for the wall
or there may not be.
Where do you think Trump has succeeded,
if at all, on immigration
and where has he failed?
- I don't think he's succeeded anywhere.
His fundamental strategy is shock and awe.
Promoting self-deportation
and to create the impression
of a zero tolerance
policy rather than what he
pejoratively calls catch and release.
So everything is directed toward that.
The travel ban he devoted
huge energy to it.
The litigation still
precedes the wall no funding.
Legal immigration build,
no action on that.
He withdrew from the
global compact on migration
and we can go back in.
Family separation, complete disaster,
they've backed off of that.
Birthright citizenship
was thrown out there
for the election, they're off that.
The caravan, you don't hear
much about that anymore.
The troops at the border that's becoming a
public relations disaster of its own.
Now revoking of the right to asylum
except at ports of entry,
that's already been blocked on a TRO.
So now he wants to shut
down the government.
Great.
You know by the way, I
don't think people like it
when you shut down the government.
So we learned that in '94 with Gingrich.
So I think if he shuts down
the government on that basis
it's yet more capital spent on something
that doesn't help him.
- Obviously immigration is an issue
that transcends just the United States.
Do you see Trump as a symptom of
what's going on around the world
or someone who has encouraged
what's going on around the world
in terms of the hostility to migration
and immigrants generally?
- Yeah I mean look, there's
a lot of writing about the
new authoritarians, you know
the changes in globalization
and technology, the impression
that democratization
had led to impoverishment
of the middle class.
Lost jobs that who's to blame are aliens
and that therefore the
solution is to go nationalist.
And that playback had been
followed all over the world.
You know, Hungary, Brazil, Poland,
you know the Philippines,
China, Russia, Turkey.
And all the global
authoritarians are basically
doing the same playbook.
They de-legitimate
legislators and the media
and courts and then
they demonize migrants.
And then they basically try
to change the Constitution
to give themselves greater deference
and say that you know they're
the real voice of the people.
Now, you know it's interesting because
largely I think because of the
strength of our civic society,
our guardrails have held better
than a lot of these other places.
But you know, those of you
who have been following
the travails of Central
European University in Budapest
you know they're about to move to Vienna.
You know and these are some of the places
that were the hallmarks of
democracy after the fall in 1989.
So, and all of this
again goes back to Syria.
You know there's really
the Syrian refugee crisis.
So Hillary Clinton just took
a lot of criticism for this
but you know, it was something
where there should have been
a stronger effort to
manage it on the front end.
You know Turkey and
Jordan are virtually broke
as a result of the refugee outflows.
You know, Merkel arguably
is no longer in power
because of the long-term residual effects.
It's arguably what lead to Brexit
and arguably what led to Trump.
- Let's move to serious,
for a fairly cohesive administration,
the Obama administration,
it seems to me as an
outsider that the one issue
where there was just tremendous
internal disagreement
and it wasn't really even
camouflaged much was Syria.
And you were part of the first Obama term,
you were legal advisor to Hillary Clinton.
Talk a little about how
the decisions were made
in that period about what
to do or not do in Syria
and what you think the implications
of those decisions were.
- Well I really go back to 2010
when Arab Spring or Arab Awakening began.
We were up in the State
Department video room watching
demonstrations across Tigris
Square, Tunisia, Libya
and Hillary Clinton said,
looking at all the people,
those people don't wanna be in Al Qaeda.
They want control of their own lives.
You know, they don't want MBS controlling
whether or not women get to drive.
And so the real question was,
could we capitalize on this moment
in the way that we tried
to do after the collapse
of the Berlin Wall.
And the one effort to do so, Libya,
led to a backlash there
was then, you know,
Obama had very little
leverage on Congress.
There was no support for stabilizing
or putting more of an effort in.
I'm very much influenced
by my experience with
Dick Holbrooke, the late Dick Holbrooke,
who believed that it was possible to
stabilize a society through
diplomacy backed by force
that gets you to a Dayton.
He very much wanted a Syrian Dayton
and he very much wanted
a Dayton for Afghanistan.
In fact, that was his mission.
Steve Coll, the Pulitzer Prize
winning author writes about
Holbrooke's nascent attempts
to negotiate with the Taliban,
which we haven't done until just now,
we started years late.
And in Syria, you know,
when you have somebody like
Kofi Annan says I can't do it
or now Staffan De Mistura
because of the failure to engage.
You know Obama's failure there
was to say Assad must go.
And actually there was no way-
- Why was that a failure?
- Because you actually
should make Assad go
before you say Assad must go.
If you say Assad must go
and then he doesn't go
then it doesn't look serious.
And if you say there's a red line
and you don't follow the red line
it also doesn't look serious.
And then we were in the absurd
situation of distinguishing
between use of chemical weapons,
which is the basis for
bombing, at least for Trump,
and dropping barrel bombs
on people from helicopters,
which is a conventional
way of killing people.
Now it's interesting,
the times that the U.S.
actually threatened some
sort of military action,
which is 2013, that's what
began the process with the
Organization for the
Prevention of Chemical Weapons
and led to a major removal of
big caches of chemical weapons.
But as people like, you
know, Dexter Filkins
or Robert Worth have reported,
you know, Assad maintained enough
that he could use it at places like Idlib.
Now it's almost over, I mean, they won.
And they've destroyed this country.
- But you believe there
was a meaningful chance
to use force in Syria that
might've turned things another way.
I mean just, you know again from an
outsider journalistic perspective,
you know we have this horrible
quagmire in Afghanistan,
we have this disaster in Iraq.
You can understand, politically,
why the President might feel the
commitment of military
power to another country
in the Middle East might not have a
tidy or effective ending.
- Yeah, what you didn't mention Jeff
but I think what's
critical is that Bob Gates,
who was after all a republican
Secretary of Defense
said something like
the President has to
have his head examined
if he gets into more than
one Middle Eastern war.
So this was a war that people
weren't prepared to fight
and particularly after Libya,
they weren't prepared to do it.
So it's interesting you have
the Secretaries of State,
Hillary Clinton, John Kerry,
and the ambassadors to UN,
like Samantha Power,
pushing citizen rights,
pushing for a more aggressive action.
But the Defense Department
didn't wanna do it.
And if you don't wanna
attack the root causes
then you have to deal with the symptom
which turns out to be refugee outflows.
And you know, once they started coming in,
you know the Turks then
justify all of these things
as a result of their need to deal
with these refugee outflows.
A final point which is
just worth making is
we really oughta more
explicitly draw the connection
between global warming, climate change,
and reliance on fossil fuels.
You know, why do we let
these crown princes who...
We're in an extraordinary time here,
the North Koreans
assassinated the older brother
of Kim Jong-un in Malaysia
Airport with nerve agents.
And then not a few months later
the Russians assassinated
a guy in Salisbury, England
sitting on a park bench outside of a pub.
And then, MBS according to the CIA,
sends what 15 or 18 guys to kill a
Washington Post journalist with
two million followers on Twitter
and claiming it's an
accident or a rouge encounter
even though they brought a bone saw to it.
And then don't forget that,
that was followed by 12
pipe bombs being placed
and mailed to former
presidential candidates
and future presidential
candidates of the United States.
I mean, this is really brazen,
outrageous behavior of the kind
that we haven't witnessed in a long time.
And then to read Trump's
statement on this,
which is essentially saying,
because this guy controls oil
and because I have turned
away from climate change,
which as you saw in the report
that they tried to bury over the weekend
is gonna cause a gigantic drop in our GDP,
we have to just shut
up and give him cover.
I mean that's an astonishing
state of affairs.
- Well since we're on the subject of MBS,
I mean that's not all the President says,
he doesn't just say it's
'cause of oil he says,
because they're buying
so much military hardware
and the number of billion
dollars fluctuates
in depending on which statement he makes
but he always says, you know,
our relationship with Saudi
Arabia is about American jobs.
- Well there's a word for
that which is leverage.
We have huge leverage
and the whole idea of
engagement is you use
that leverage to achieve
certain kinds of outcomes.
You know Tom Friedman put
it well in his recent column
where he said you know, is my
problem that he's such a fool
or that he's a chump and can't
get anything for his deals.
I mean let's take for example
the meeting with Kim Jong-un.
You know I went to North Korea with
Albright in 2000 for five days.
We would never bring out the
President of United States
to meet some tin pot
dictator in North Korea.
You specify all the conditions
and when he has met all the conditions
you might give him a private meeting.
- But-
- But not a photo opportunity.
- But that's if they
don't fall in love first.
That's a separate rule, I think.
- Well the point is that
diplomacy correctly done,
works it way up to the top.
You never lead with it,
you don't bring out
Hamlet in the first act.
And know we have this pathetic
spectacle of you know,
Trump wandering around the
UN looking for Kim Jong-un.
And here's one of the
most shocking things,
you know, Kim Jong-un played it just right
in that first he comes
in, he executes his uncle,
consolidates his power,
then he decides I'm gonna be
in a big poker game with Trump and others
so I might as well put chips on the table.
So he escalates.
Builds more weapons.
Then the mountain that
he's testing them in breaks
and then he goes, well
I guess I'll deescalate
and get more points for that.
Now, you know, people who
have been watching this know
you're not gonna give him any points.
Now, the other thing he does is, you know,
we did this with the Chinese,
they arrest everybody in the room
and then when the Westerners
appeal, they release them.
I mean you don't give
them any credit for that
except that Trump is so clueless he said,
oh this is great because I arrived
they released all these people.
And here's the most interesting thing,
you know there should be
two things on the table
on day one, before you even
have a single conversation.
One is, I want some real
political prisoners released,
one's who have been held for a long time.
That's what we did with the Chinese
over the course of
several administrations.
This is left and right,
Democrats and Republicans.
And then secondly, does
anybody think that the
North Koreans if they want
to destabilize United States
are gonna use an intercontinental
ballistic missile?
They're gonna use cyber war.
After all, you know
after that terrible movie
with James Franco which
I nevertheless saw.
You know, they took down Sony.
So the first thing that Trump should say
or somebody should say on Trump's behalf,
if you wanna meet with Trump
and have anything close
to a photo opportunity,
disable your offensive capacity
against our cyber grid.
- Could we determine if
they had actually done that?
Do we have the capability to do that?
- Well relying not on information
that I know from any
classified source, yes.
- Okay.
- I mean by the way Jeff,
why do you think all these missiles
went down into the ocean?
I mean, we're talkin' Korean's here.
I mean, they know what they're doing.
The missiles that went down in the ocean
were taken out by cyber commands.
I'm confident of that fact.
And what they've actually done is
they've adjusted some of their control
so that they're more impervious
to our cyber commands.
That's when the breakthrough
has occurred on the ICBN's.
- Before we leave, I wanna
just go back to Syria
because of your faith in
international institutions
and the transnational legal process.
One of the arguments against
military intervention
in Syria was that the UN
had not authorized it.
And you write in the book
about the never, never rule,
about that there are certain people
who believe in international
institutions who think
that unless the UN
authorizes military action,
it should never ever be engaged in.
And you don't share that view,
so talk a little bit about that.
- Well looking out over this audience
a fair number of the people here were,
you know, of age during the Cold War.
And the Russians vetoed everything.
In fact the UN strategy during that period
roughly until 1987 was getting
around the Russian veto.
You know how did we come
up with the strategy
for the Cuban Missile Crisis?
You know it was a quarantine
but it was actually a blockade.
Blockades violate the UN charter.
But the legal advisor,
Abraham Chayes of Harvard
and others adopted a different approach.
So, I think people who came of
age as international lawyers
between 1987 and roughly 2010
and also a lot of Europeans
are much more absolutist about this
because they think that the Russians
are capable of being
talked to about this issue.
On Syria, after the 12th consecutive veto,
I think you have to say,
what's in the broader purpose of the UN?
After all, if it's really true
that you cannot prevent genocide
then any member, permanent five member
can commit genocide
against their own citizens
and veto everything.
And it's consistent with the UN charter
for us to accept that.
Now I'm not an advocate of
using force for it's own sake.
What I'm an advocate of is,
you have to have something
that gets people to the table.
That's what happened in Bosnia
and you remember the Owen
Commission, all of these things.
What finally got them to the
table was the combination
of the Croatians starting to win
on the ground Operation Flash and Storm
and the use of force by
NATO against Milosevic.
- This is an example of
the Holbrooke Doctrine
you were talking about.
- Yeah.
- The diplomacy backed up by force.
- Yeah look what happened.
At Dayton we have you know,
a partition of the country,
it's been a cold peace but
it's held for 20 plus years.
And Kosovo's a part of it now
and now they're all negotiating.
You know, the other thing, too
that Holbrooke did that
was very much apart of this
was he didn't sacrifice accountability.
You know, he wouldn't deal with Karadzic
he had to go to the War Crimes Tribunal.
And that's where he
died and Milosevic, too.
And so, the idea that Assad
was gonna be dealt with
if they had had that kind of
multilateral negotiation process in 2010,
you know it's eight years later,
it's too late at this point.
It's very hard to know.
It's interesting though,
the Russians are even now conceding that
there is a Astana process
that they would allow
and as you know, the United
States is bombing inside Syria.
They're just bombing against IS,
the Islamic State.
So it's a crazy situation.
You know I quote
non-interventionists position
as being put forward by legal academics
is to my mind a pro-slaughter position.
I mean, who's kidding who?
Everybody's intervening there.
And you know based on what?
The Kellogg-Briand Pact?
I think on this one the legal academics
gave an argument to the people
who didn't wanna do anything
by saying that's legally off the table.
And you know, lawyers
shouldn't make up arguments
that people who don't wanna act can use
and use for political ends
and that's what they did.
- Let's talk a little
bit about Afghanistan
because when I was reading
your book I was reminded of
Bob Woodward's book, which I read recently
and perhaps others have read.
And I wouldn't say it's a
very sympathetic portrayal
of Donald Trump but it is
sympathetic in one respect
where a constant or something
that comes up frequently is
the troop commitments in Afghanistan.
And Trump keeps saying, as
he did during the campaign,
what are we doing there?
Why are we there 17 years later?
What are we accomplishing?
And you know, I'm sitting
there reading there thinking,
yeah what are we accomplishing?
And are we gonna be there
for another 17 years?
Where does that fit in to the
Trump successes or failures
and if you could just
talk a little bit about
what's happened and what's
going to happen in Afghanistan.
- Well let's not forget
that the George W. Bush Administration,
which has now been cleansed
by some of the most recent experience,
headed us down this road.
I give there an imaginary speech.
If you had said, we're gonna
go after Osama Bin Laden
and wipe out the Islamic
State on September 18, 2001
and you say here's what
we're not gonna do.
We're not going to invade Iraq.
We're not gonna torture anybody.
We're not gonna open Guantanamo.
We're not gonna use military commissions.
We're not gonna open black site.
But if we have to go after Bin Laden
with targeted killer air drones, we will,
and we'll do it multilaterally.
I think that woulda gotten a lotta support
and it would have been over fast.
So the mistake number one
was Cheney going to Iraq.
- Iraq or Afghanistan?
- Instead of focusing on Al-Qaeda,
to start a war on a different front.
Now Obama, to his great credit tried,
and I was there during the time,
tried to disengage from
both Iraq and Afghanistan.
And Obama also tried to
legalize the conflict
by putting it within certain frames,
setting forth drone
rules, banning torture,
barring black sites, et cetera.
There are a couple of ironies.
One of things I mention in the book is
I think Trump has a great
opportunity to close Guantanamo.
He may have the best opportunity.
It's classic Nixon, China thing.
There are only 41 people there.
He's already had an opportunity
to send someone there
and he didn't do it, because he said,
he was told by Rudy Giuliani and others,
you can't get a conviction
out of a military commission.
If so, why doesn't he get
some credit for closing it.
- You have a lot of
confidence he's gonna do that?
- Well it's a talking point for them.
I mean, by the way as you
know, military commissions,
when you try to invent an
entirely new legal system,
it's gonna get challenged
at every single stage.
And they've been amazingly unsuccessful
in terms of getting
any actual prosecution.
We're now facing the real
prospect that Guantanamo,
people will die of old age on Guantanamo.
And I first went to Guantanamo in 1991,
for Haitian refugees.
And people constantly
believe that Guantanamo
is a solution to their problem,
when in fact it just is the
source of more problems.
Now negotiating with the Taliban
I think is a critical thing
because I think Al-Qaeda is virtually,
the original Al-Qaeda,
the ones who did 9/11 are virtually gone.
So the real question is,
getting on top of the war power.
And, you know, you cannot
simply have a process
by which the war against Al-Qaeda
has mutated into the war
against the Islamic State,
has mutated into the war against every
self-proclaimed IS radical.
Because if that happens,
then we have a forever war,
and Congress authorized it back in 2001.
So that's where people like
Schiff or Merkley or others,
or Tim Kaine, this is
a subject of many blogs
on Just Security,
sun-setting these provisions
and saying that the authority stops.
You know the war that
was authorized in 2001
was against the people
who attacked us in 2001.
And that oughta be the focus there.
Now the Taliban, you
might end up having to
engage in something
that's already happening.
You know the Kurds have already split off.
The question is how to
not to have a return
to the conditions that existed
under the Taliban before.
Hillary Clinton specified these conditions
as a condition of
negotiating with the Taliban
at the Regis Society in 2011
and those continue to
be the right focuses,
which is obeying certain
human rights principles,
agree to obey the
Constitution of Afghanistan
and then agreeing to set up government.
And a lot of the interesting features,
I know of (laughs), you know Bowe Bergdahl
was released as a Taliban
prisoner for six Taliban leaders.
They were among the people
who were supposed to negotiate for this.
And I was in the meetings
(laughs) in the Situation Room,
where I'll never forget this,
where somebody would say, we
can't release Bowe Bergdahl
for six people.
One because it's six to one.
We can't release for six to one.
And over the weekend the
Israelis traded a guy
for 125,000 people, 125,000 to one.
So I said, well how do
you like those numbers?
That really showed you know (laughs)
if they can do it,
if it's helpful to us
as solving this problem
as a diplomatic matter.
So the smart power solution,
means using enough force
to get to the diplomatic table,
then creating a legal framework
that has an enduring quality
and then to enforce
those legal boundaries.
That's what Dayton did.
And we needed a Syrian Dayton,
we needed an Afghan Dayton.
- But I mean, just to push you on that,
I mean haven't all those
thousands of troops amounted to
enough of a push?
I mean wouldn't there have
been enough of a push by now
to get these negotiations?
I mean like, how do you
know when it's enough?
I mean I know it hasn't happened yet.
But you can see why people think,
isn't 17 years long enough?
- Well all the surges are
supposed to depress the Taliban,
so they think we're not
gonna fight anymore.
And you know, the intel
on this is pretty strong.
The Taliban just has to keep
replenishing itself to keep fighting.
They would like to figure
out a way out of this.
You know, the original Al-Qaeda
is a very different posture.
Their approach is to leave Afghanistan.
And that's what's happened is
they've gone to other places
and have mutated.
The key though is to not
treat homegrown activity
as somehow connected to
this external activity.
You know the Islamic State
now sends out through social media
warnings that say things
like, come or kill,
which means come to Syria and fight,
which people don't wanna do,
because they don't wanna get killed,
or in your hometown do something,
which means getting in a truck
and driving down and killing a
bunch of people on the street
or going to the Pulse
Nightclub or getting a gun.
A lotta these people are...
Or doing things in the
Boston Marathon, et cetera.
And these people are not part of the group
that attacked us on September 11th.
This is what Obama used
to say, which got derided,
he'd say they're kind of a JV.
Another way to put it is like you know
there are Beatles imitators
and there are the Beatles.
- I don't think that would
have gone over well either.
- (laughs) But it's true.
I mean the people who were the originals
are different from the imitators.
And the people obviously
imitate the people
who are gonna be the most successful.
And Al-Qaeda is most
successful in attacking
civilian targets in major
metropolitan centers,
so people are gonna imitate them.
But that doesn't mean that they are them
and that doesn't mean that's the group
that we declared war on
or that we have a continuing
legal authority to attack.
- Just going back to a
section of your book,
the Iran deal which we...
You don't say it, I mean in
my journalistic shorthand,
I think we've pulled out of the Iran deal.
You say not exactly.
- We're still in.
Even under Trump's scenario,
we don't leave before the
end of 2018, early 2019.
All the leverage is gone.
Remember the key with the Iran deal
was the release of all
these frozen assets.
They were released immediately.
We have no leverage.
In fact, the Europeans lead by Macron
now wanna have a new deal.
The only difference is,
we're not part of it.
And here's the biggest catch...
Trump started in Korea by saying he was
going to get rid of strategic
patience, or Pence said this.
What's that, strategic impatience?
Is that the policy?
I mean we have no defined policy
and first it meant threatening
to end North Korea,
which means killing 25 million civilians.
My family, parts of my
family came from North Korea.
I don't take lightly the
statement that we end a country.
But guess where we are now?
We're trying to get a deal and ineptly.
And all of the people who were turfed out,
they're looking for diplomats
that will come back in
and negotiate the deal
and the deal they want
is the Iran nuclear deal,
except for Korea.
And that's the irony of it.
- Elaborate on that.
What do you mean they want the
Iran deal except for Korea?
- Well right now Trump has
ineptly tried to pursue
two negotiating streams.
Him and Kim Jong-un talking
about denuclearization
and Moon Jae-in, the
South Korean President,
and Kim Jong-un talking about peace.
You always do this in a
multilateral framework.
That's why we had six-party talks,
so that the North Koreans can trade off.
And you put a lot of issues on the table.
And you bring in professional diplomats
who work with these guys every single day
and now exactly what
they're talking about.
And that's what the P5+1 got
to on the Iran nuclear deal,
which Trump calls it, he
obviously hasn't read it
to know anything about,
it eliminated 98% of the
enriched uranium in Iran
in one year
and pushed the breakout
time to nearly a year.
So even the Israelis end up saying,
we can't do better than that.
Our alternative is to use nuclear weapons.
You know, you have people like Bob Corker
and others who say, we're not
gonna do better than that.
Jim Mattis says you can't
do better than that.
So, you know, Trump having
railed about the deal,
says basically I'm gonna
reimpose the sanctions.
And the question is, will
the Iranians respond by
breaking the deal themselves?
What they've done instead is they've sued
the United States at the
International Court of Justice.
And so in fact, the Iranians
just got provisional measures
against the United States at the
International Court of Justice.
And here's an interesting thing.
All of the lawyers who
worked the Iran nuclear deal
are now being sent to
the Korean negotiations,
so they can stick mechanisms
and other kinds of things
that were originally used
in the Iran nuclear deal
into idea packages for North Korea.
Because if you're gonna have
a negotiating settlement
with the North Koreans,
it has to look like what we got in Iran.
And it also means, you probably shouldn't
break the Iran deal prematurely,
because that's the only
thing holding it together.
The danger is that our
hardliners, Trump and others,
could embolden the Iranian hardliners
so that they break the deal,
the Revolutionary Guard and others.
And then that creates a big problem.
- Just in general, you're
a lot more sanguine
than I think a lotta people
that I've listened to are.
Let's just talk about Iran, on its own.
Isn't there commercial
pressure on European companies
not to do business with Iran?
Isn't that having an effect on Iran?
I mean you see to think our withdrawal
has had essentially no practical impact,
but at least according
to the administration,
it has had some practical
impact on trade with Iran.
- Jeff these are bets on
opening closed societies
and changing the way
they think about things.
We tried from 1959 until
two or three years ago
to put sanctions on Cuba unilaterally.
It didn't work.
So the alternative is
actually try to engage them.
The theory of the Iran nuclear deal
was essentially to lift the sanctions,
get rid of the Boogie
Man of the great Satan
and open Iran up so it changes,
because people of Iran are so smart
and so engaged with the outside world
that they won't go back.
Same idea in Afghanistan.
Part of the process in Afghanistan
was getting cell phones
into the hands of people
or getting education for Afghan women,
who were deprived of their
education under the Taliban.
- Can I just stop you right there?
I mean something that I thought was
completely shocking to me,
'cause all I ever hear about Afghanistan
is like suicide bombings.
On page 109 of your book,
you talk about all the good things
that have happened in
Afghanistan in the last 20 years
including cell phones.
If it was news to me, I
suspect it would be news
to a lot of people here.
- Yeah, I mean, opening
up of these societies
is to give people control
of their own lives.
You don't bomb your way into democracy.
The way you do it is
give people the capacity
to influence their own.
You know, John Sexton is here.
I'll never forget this.
I went to NYU Shanghai.
You know Shanghai is
one of the most polluted
cities in the world.
There are all these websites controlled
by the Chinese government,
the Great Firewall,
that all lie about the degree pollution.
The U.S. Embassy website
has accurate measures
of particulate matter.
And there's a 15 year old kid there,
whose hero is John Sexton,
who was gonna take me
on a tour of Shanghai
and he checks his website.
He's holding this mask and
then he suddenly goes, ah.
He had learned his English
by watching Friends on TV,
so perfect English,
and he says, U.S. Embassy
website says crazy bad,
so you better put on the mask.
So in other words, there
are ways in which people
empowered individuals,
connected to these networks
are able to circumvent
these governmental controls
to find out the truth.
And that's happening in Iran,
that's happening in Afghanistan.
Here is the great sadness
to me about North Korea.
It's not in the book but,
in 2000 I went to North
Korea with Secretary Albright
and then we flew back to Seoul
where we met Kim Dae-jung,
the Nobel Prize winner
and he says to me
or he said to both of us, I have an idea,
which is we're gonna have the World Cup
semi-final is supposed to be played
in either Tokyo or Seoul.
And he goes, I would like there to be
a United Korean team and
we'll play the game Pyongyang.
George W. Bush gets elected,
he breaks off the talks,
be breaks the six-party
talks, over the objection
of Brent Scowcroft, his father's
National Security Advisor,
and over the objection of his own father.
So we have a policy of threats
rather than a policy of negotiation.
On 2002, nobody else maybe noticed this,
but that game was played in Tokyo.
It was the Republic of Korea, South Korea,
against the reunited Germany.
That game should have
been played in Pyongyang.
You know this would have been...
CNN would have been there.
You would have been there.
I would have been there. (laughs)
Ping pong diplomacy is nothing,
it would have blown the place apart.
It would have opened it
up beyond our imagination.
The North Koreans would have been
rooting for the South Koreans
and saying, how come
we're not a united team,
playing the reunited Germany.
And I think the public
consciousness of this event
would have shattered the
way in which North Korea
think about what they're doing.
You know, I've never seen
more discouraged Koreans
than I saw in North Korea.
There is to see low energy Koreans,
that's kind of a shocking thing. (laughs)
Especially in this part of New York.
Everywhere you go, there's
a 24 hour grocery store
run by highly motivated Koreans.
- With kids in medical school.
- Yeah, yeah.
- Before we open it up to questions,
let's talk a little bit about
what's the appropriate posture
going forward for people
who are disappointed in
the Trump Administration?
Start with Congress.
I mean what do you
thing Congress could do,
you know the House of
Representatives could do now
that Democrats are in charge?
- Well I'm glad you
asked me that question,
because I've written an article
that just came out into
the Yale Law Journal.
Is it really true that the President
could withdraw us from
all treaties tomorrow?
Could Trump by tweet withdraw
us from the UN Charter,
NATO, the IMF, the World Bank?
There's a case called
Goldwater versus Carter,
which has been dramatically
over read for this purpose.
But one thing Congress can do right away,
and they've done it with
the No NATO Withdrawal Act
is indicate that if you're gonna do that,
your action is in Youngstown Category III,
the lowest level of
Congressional approval.
They can start to sunset all
these war making authorities.
They can start by demanding transparency,
particularly with regards to emoluments.
One of the crazy thing
about the emoluments clause
is that...
People think the emoluments
clause is about personal greed.
It's about establishing
an official channel of communication.
If you had a choice, if you're MBS,
of going to the embassy
in Riyadh or Jeddah
and dealing with our Ambassador
or sending someone to sit
in the Trump International
Hotel lobby to meet with
Kushner or somebody else,
which was is gonna get you what you want?
And the second approach is entirely
outside the scope of oversight,
outside the scope of every piece
of Congressional legislation
from the post-Vietnam era.
And then take for example,
the transgender ban.
As you notice,
it's a sign of the desperation
of the Administration
that they're now going
to the Supreme Court
on all these Hail Mary passes.
They did so on the Children's Trust Case,
with regards to climate change.
They're doing it now with
regards to the transgender ban.
And if I take anything from
John Roberts recent statement,
is the Supreme Court's gonna
try to hold to regular order.
- Right, just to fill people in,
if they're not familiar,
what the Solicitor General has been saying
in a couple of these cases,
is these district court
decisions are so terrible,
we want you, the Supreme Court,
to skip the Court of Appeals,
skip the Circuit Courts
and deal with these cases right away.
That's what you're referring to.
- Yeah, I think what motivated
Robert's statement is,
if he allows Trump to
denigrate the Ninth Circuit,
then he has to be willing to issue stays
of District Court opinions
coming out of the Ninth Circuit.
And I think they're not ready to do that.
And so I think they're saying, look,
there are no Trump
judges, no Obama judges,
we're not gonna grant
this extraordinary review.
And the longer that these
cases stay in the lower courts,
Trump will lose.
In the travel ban litigation,
Trump lost 50 times
in the lower court.
It didn't even get to the
Supreme Court 'til two years in.
You know the Supreme Court
only hears 80 cases a year now.
So in fact the Supreme
Court's ability to monitor,
also you should take a look at the way
in which the two judges in
the family separation case
managed those cases.
They didn't issue appealable orders.
All they did was say show up here Monday
with a list of whose been
united with their family or not.
And it's through this kind
of constant supervision,
you know Jack Weinstein
style judicial oversight
that they end up,
finally the government has essentially
thrown in the towel on
this whole approach.
That's why they switched
to the asylum approach.
And now Trump is also trying to switch
to this other approach with Mexico.
Who know what that's gonna go through?
But my guess is,
each of these things
gets a lot of attention
and then they have to
switch to something else,
'cause it's not working.
- Okay, that's...
Anything else for Congress?
So emoluments, sunsetting the AMUs,
the authorization of the
use of military force.
Anything else Congress,
how about investigations?
What cries out to you for investigations?
I mean there's a wide variety of things.
- Well the Senate intel
side has been working hard
and now that Devin Nunes...
I mean this is an
appalling state of affairs,
is no longer in the majority,
then the House Intel Committee
can join in and do genuine
oversight of these issues.
We still have the...
Do you know if the Russians hacked
the election that we just had?
I don't know.
- Wait 'til I read my book about it,
then I'll find out.
(audience laughs).
- I mean, you know,
our electoral systems are broken.
Plus we know have a situation
where the President regularly denigrates
unanimous findings of the
intelligence agencies,
which is fairly shocking.
I think the most fundamental
thing they can do
is just continually restore
and reaffirm faith in
our basic institutions.
Take the Jim Acosta case,
which is obviously from your network.
Trump wants to do those things
he thinks he can do unilaterally.
So revoke security clearances,
revoke press passes,
pardon people like Arpaio.
If he thinks he can
withdraw from treaties.
As we saw in the Woodward book,
they'll put a whole bunch
of things on his desk,
and other people have to steal them off
for him to do that.
- That's not in the
Constitution or anything is it?
That like stealing stuff
off the President's desk?
(audience laughs)
- Well my point is that,
I wrote a book called the
National Security Constitution.
The original title was A Power Shared.
Most of these powers are
actually shared powers
and under the Supreme
Court's recent case law,
most of this stuff is
justiciable, the Matosky case.
So it's not gonna be the case
that all these things can
be done with no consequence.
So I think all of these are ways
to send a signal to Trump,
you're not operating in
the zone of exclusive
or a plundery authority.
And obviously there are
all these things about
obstructing the investigation.
Mueller I think has been
doing a brilliant job
and his team is doing a brilliant job.
The most interesting
thing is how they went
very broad into foreign activity.
All of the initially indictments
were about foreign activity.
Now they're just trying
to connect them to that.
What worried me about
the security clearances
and the revocation, was what
they were really aiming at was
revoking security clearances
not just of Bruce Ohr,
but of all the people who are working
to support Mueller's investigation.
Because that's a way of
cutting off their access
to what's going on in Russia,
or the people that they're
trying to indict there.
But it doesn't seem to be, knock wood,
that doesn't seem to be the case.
And I think Mueller's got what he's got.
And he's got so many people flipped now.
He's gotta be getting very
high level information.
And they don't leak.
They don't leak.
- Alas they do not, yes.
(audience laughs).
Why don't we open it up for questions.
This gentleman over here.
Can you pull a microphone
so people can hear you?
There you go.
- Check, okay thanks.
- [Male Audience Member]
Thank you Jeffrey.
Professor Koh, based
on the four factor test
that you developed in 2011 for determining
what constitutes hostilities
for purposes of the
War Power's Resolution,
do you think that U.S. Military support
for the Saudi led coalition war in Yemen,
primarily in the form of midair refueling
and the provision of intelligence,
provision of target intelligence,
constitutes hostilities?
And if so, do you think that
the Obama Administration
was in violation of the
War Power Resolution
at any point since it began
this military support in 2015?
- This is Saudi involvement in Yemen?
- Correct.
- Okay.
- Well to be honest, I
don't have enough facts
about how many armed
forces are in Saudi Arabia
or Yemen supporting the activities
of the Saudi government.
What we said in the Libya case
was that when you have
an extremely low level
of military activity,
and it was low level.
It was high for the first 10 days,
to establish a no fly
zone and then it dropped.
So on day 60,
remember the craziness of
our war power jurisprudence.
There's a Constitutional test
for initiation for warfare,
which is, is it war that
Congress must declare?
And very few things rise to
the level of being a war.
I mean they're major,
premeditated large scale invasions
like World War II or something like that.
The continuation test starts at 60 days
after the trigger begins.
And that's very much fact dependent.
And you know Libya, when we did that,
I got a lotta criticism.
Almost nobody, in fact to this nobody
has seriously engaged
on the facts of Libya.
Because the fact of the matter was,
we established a no-fly zone in 10 days
and then turned it over to
NATO to lead that coalition.
The only thing that changed around day 50
was that the Allies asked us
to start using drones again,
for the simple reason that,
we had destroyed Libyan
Command and Control,
but the missiles were still there.
So the Libyans repaired their missiles
with laptops that were
on mobile platforms.
So it was the NATO allies
who asked the United States,
if we have a targeted laptop
moving around on mobile platform,
will you be willing to use
a drone to take it out.
Now some people in the government argued
the inclusion of drones in the package,
makes it hostilities.
I have no idea where they got that.
I mean that's...
That's not in the War Powers Resolution.
It's not in the legislative history
of the War Powers Resolution.
I think the most interesting thing to say
about the War Powers Resolution now is,
it has largely succeeded
in ending the crisis
for which it has created.
Creeping Vietnam.
But what it's largely
done is driven activity
into unregulated areas.
So less than 60 days,
drones or unmanned activity,
cyber conflict, special ops,
and those things are not
regulated, therefore.
Congress hadn't gotten
around to regulating them.
So that's one of the things
I think could be the focus.
Charles Black said in 1973
or something like that,
what kind of War Powers Resolution
never opines on the
most important question,
which is when can you put
troops in in the first place?
That was the craziness
of the original War Powers Resolution.
It's a deadline, it's a gimmick.
It's a deadline that's
supposed to promote dialog.
And then the deadline doesn't work.
The legislative veto
provision is unconstitutional,
so it's not able to
achieve its intended goal.
Now there have been any number of efforts
to rethink the War Powers Resolution.
Probably the most comprehensive one
was done by the Miller Center
at the University of Virginia.
It was jointly sponsored by
Warren Christopher and Jim Baker.
It was completely bipartisan effort.
I think it's worth digging that out.
This goes back to Jeff's point.
Congress could have hearings.
I mean that would be an
amazing thing, wouldn't it,
to go to a hearing an hear people?
You know the War Powers Resolution
or all of the framework
legislation post Vietnam
were months and months of hearings,
in which all interested
parties appeared and testified.
In the period that we've
just lived through,
everything is done on the authorization
or appropriations backed
at the very last minute.
They're stuck in and there's no hearings,
there's no oversight, no nothing.
That's not legislative process.
I mean yeah, the Congress's behavior
is so unbelievably appalling.
You wonder why people
wanna be in Congress.
Or if they get there, what exactly it is
that they're doing.
Running for re-election
is what they're doing.
- Yes sir.
- [Male] Could you comment a bit on
what seems to be going on
between the U.S. and China,
because Congress was able
to enact changes to the
statute applying to
the committee on foreign
investments in U.S..
There's been some kind of
sensible pushback there.
But the absence of a
coherent Trump Doctrine,
seems to be inching us towards
some rather difficult situations there.
- Well this is the Chinese moment.
They're occupying the field.
They are the most important
voice on climate change now,
because they helped to
get the Paris deal done
and the U.S. abandoned that area.
One thing I should have
said to Jeff earlier is that
the Chinese and the North Koreans,
their experts remain their experts.
When I went to North Korea in 2000,
there were the five people I met there
who were their U.S. experts.
And when Trump landed in Singapore
and got off the plane, they were there.
For the last 18 years, all they've done
is studying everything
about the United States
and their counterparts, et cetera.
You know, the people in
China who are the experts
on the United States,
they're focused like a laser
on U.S. strategy and how to counteract it.
Yang Ji Che, Chen Xi Chen, all these guys.
And we have people who
are rotating in and out.
Our career diplomatic
core is being depleted.
The people who know stuff
are working for the last administration.
And then we have a leader who
thinks he knows everything.
And so it's a good example, (laughs)
as you recall, Trump
started the Administration
by saying he was gonna deal with Taiwan.
And then he had a few
initial conversations
and then the Chinese basically
whipped him into shape,
and said you want us to
take care of North Korea,
then you better read the words.
And Trump read the words.
It was an abject collapse,
just as he did with Saudi
Arabia, an abject collapse.
So what's happening,
and I say this toward the end of the book,
where we're moving from what
has been a Kantian system,
imperfect, but a system of
law governed international society
to an Orwellian spheres
of power and influence,
where alliances are made and broken.
So yesterday he's Rocket
Man and today I love him.
And we overlook their
human rights violations
so that we can get a
good deal on their oil,
that kind of thing.
And meanwhile Xi Jinping
has become president for life.
So I think that
their capacities, the
Chinese capacity to focus is
frightening and always has been.
When we, in 1999 when I
ran the U.S. delegation
to the Human Rights Commission,
we were running a resolution against China
and we thought we were up by
two votes on the day before
and we lost.
And the reason we lost
was that my co-sponsor,
another country, wasn't in the hall
when I arrived in Geneva the next day.
And I called the guy on his cell phone
and I said what happened.
And he said, the Chinese.
And I said, what happened.
He said last night in our
capital they gave a bridge.
For how much?
$200 million.
He said, I didn't wanna
embarrass you by showing up
but I had no authority
under that circumstance.
So they get paid at home.
- Yes, the woman in the, right, yep.
- [Woman] Yeah, I know you
started to say something about it
but I would like to know what
gives you hope in this chaos?
- Well I close the book
with a joke from Mel Brooks.
(Jeffrey laughs)
Mel Brooks is a famous Korean comedian.
(audience laughs)
He used to play a guy called
the 2,000 year old man.
And they say to him,
before God, was there someone else?
And he said, yeah, there
was a guy named Phil.
What happened to Phil?
We'd say oh Phil, don't
beat us and don't hurt us.
And then one day lightening
came out of the sky
and killed him dead.
And we said, there's something
bigger than Phil. (laughs)
But you know, there's something
a lot bigger than Trump.
The institutions of our civic society
and our alliances are
much stronger than Trump
and then encircle Trump.
Or to give you a different analogy,
this is a great book for
you to get for Christmas
or whatever, The Hidden Life of Trees.
You know these trees are these network.
