(gentle music) - [Narrator] And now, Crosscut Festival Main Stage, featuring a selection of curated sessions from this year's Crosscut Festival.

Thank you for joining us for The End of American Exceptionalism with Robert Gates, moderated by Mary Kay Magistad.

We would like to thank our keynote Track Sponsor BECU.

We would also like to thank our Session Sponsors, Becky and Mike Hughes.

Finally, thank you to our Founding Sponsor, the Kerry and Linda Killinger Foundation.

(gentle music) - Hello and welcome to the Crosscut Festival.

I'm Mary Kay Magistad, a former China and East Asia correspondent for NPR and for PRI's The World, and most recently creator and host of the Global Reporting Centre podcast On China's New Silk Road.

It's about how China's global ambition and its Belt and Road Initiative are seen and are having impact around the world.

Our guest today has a deeply informed perspective on that and much more, including whether American exceptionalism is over and what that might mean for America's place in the world.

Robert Gates was a U.S. Secretary of Defense under two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama, and he was CIA director in the early nineties under President George H.W.

Bush.

His most recent book is "Exercise of Power: American Failures, Successes, "and a New Path Forward in the Post-Cold War World."

Secretary Gates, thanks for being here.

- My pleasure.

- We'll get to China in a moment, but let's start closer to home.

What does American exceptionalism mean to you?

- I think that American exceptionalism, and I think it was a phrase coined actually by Madeleine Albright if I'm not mistaken back in the early nineties.

I think the gist of it is that America has a unique place in the world, and is an exemplar of a free market economy, and an example to the rest of the world.

We have seen two different threads in American history of how that is put into practice.

John Quincy Adams and others thought that we should be the city on the hill, the model for the rest of the world, and that others should, we should try and set an example that others would emulate.

The other side of that debate, if you will, was Woodrow Wilson who believed that we ought to be aggressively out in the world, trying to, as he put it, make the world safe for democracy, to actively be engaged in the rest of the world in promoting our values and in promoting democracy.

I think that the one part of American exceptionalism that, in my view, remains relevant, even in light of today's problems is that we still have a unique convening power.

There is really no other country in the world that is trusted by most of the other countries in the world in terms of protecting what we would call the global spaces, the freedom of navigation, the internet, if you will, and other such domains.

And our ability to get countries to come together to try to work on problems and to try and solve global problems in a way President Biden's convening of the Global Summit on climate change just a few days ago is an example of that.

No one trusts the Russians to bring together a large number of other countries.

No one trusts China to do that.

And as suspicious of some countries, as some countries are of the United States, the reality is we still have a, I think, a unique convening power in the world, in terms of trying to deal with global problems.

- So then what part of American exceptionalism is over, if in fact you think any of it is or should be?

- I don't think it's over, but I think it's challenged.

And I think that in a way the public comments that we have seen out of Xi Jinping of China and the Chinese foreign minister in Anchorage at the meeting are an example of the pushback that this country is giving, is getting, that our economic model is no longer one that others ought to follow in the wake of the economic crisis in 2008, 2009, where we actually had to seek Chinese help to get out of that mess, but where it was created, a global economic crisis was created in this country.

I think that our paralysis politically, and, you know, we've always had polarization in this country politically, but what is new is paralysis and our inability to tackle anything big and get it done, whether it's education, or the infrastructure, or immigration, and so on.

And our domestic divisions, not to mention the race issues that we have, the race problems that we have and so on, and so the Chinese and others are saying, you're not an example either politically or economically than anyone else in the world ought to follow, and you're in no position to lecture the rest of the world in those arenas, because of all the problems that you have.

And I think that those are real challenges that we have.

The question in terms of our, whether our being in the indispensable nation is over, I think depends on how we come back economically, and also whether we can get past our political paralysis to tackle some of the real problems that we face here at home.

- But how much of the challenge is in adjusting to a new situation is, are things that we can change at home, as opposed to a change in the global environment and global realities as different countries have become stronger economies, have changed their own expectations and their expectations of what role America should play?

You know, perhaps moving toward a more multipolar world would be the preference of many such countries, rather than having America continue to be the premier power?

- Well, I think a multipolar world is a given.

That's just the reality, and we certainly are not going to be regarded under any circumstances as the model to follow for Xi Jinping or Vladimir Putin.

But in terms of the rest of the world, I think that we still have that convening power, and they look to us for leadership in terms of trying to deal with global problems in a way they do not look to Russia or China.

But it does begin here at, but getting to a better place does begin here at home and addressing our domestic problems and moving forward from where we are now politically I think is critical.

And I think that's why, you know, in many of the problems we're trying to address include reinvestment in our own country and research and development and basic research, education, and so on.

We have a lot of catching up to do here at home.

- So I have to push back ever so gently, because China, certainly when I've lived in China, and I attended, you know, the Summit for African Leaders to come, dozens of them, in 2006, and those sorts of summits, those sorts of meetings, continue.

There have been summits for the Belt and Road Initiative, two of them, that have brought in dozens of leaders.

So with developing countries, China has developed a convening power and has some street cred on the ground because of the investments that its been making through its Belt and Road Initiative.

It's a mixed record for sure, but there, as over the last four years sort of American opinion toward, or world opinion toward the United States has taken a bit of a beating, according to the Pew Global Surveys of Attitudes.

Attitudes toward China, until the last couple of years, last two or three years, have been reasonably positive in some of those places where China's investing-- - Well, I think you've actually framed-- - What kind of challenge do you think this poses for the United States?

- I think you've actually framed it pretty well, and that is the power of the checkbook.

The convening power of the checkbook is always powerful, and I think that Belt and Road is a challenge that we have, that we have to figure out how to deal with.

And one of the things that we have going for us in that is that there are a lot of challenges associated with Belt and Road.

The debt-trap problem that a lot of developing countries are seeing, where they're getting sucked into, they are agreeing to projects that saddle them with a huge amount of debt to the Chinese.

The Chinese require, in virtually all of those contracts, that they'd be with a Chinese construction company, they employ Chinese workers, they are not environmentally sustainable.

And so, and many of those projects may end up being white elephants.

Now, I think that we've begun to figure out again how to compete with this.

One of the problems that we've had is that after the end of the Cold War, and I write about this in the book, we dismantled all of the institutions that provide us with the non-military means of power, so we abolished Congress, abolished the United States Information Agency in 1998.

When I left government in 1993, when I retired as CIA director, the Agency for International Development had 15,000 employees, dedicated people working in developing countries and often in very hospitable circumstances.

When I returned to government 13 years later as Secretary of Defense AID had 3,000 people, and they were managing, mainly managing contractors.

So China, ironically, has developed some of these non-military instruments of power that we've let wither.

And until we reform those capabilities and fund them properly, we're not gonna be able to compete with things like Belt and Road.

So I think that China does present a challenge in this.

We have made some progress through the Overseas Private Investment Corporation, was replaced in the Trump Administration by development infrastructure, a new development infrastructure organization that doubled the capitalization of OPEC to $60 billion.

And there's just been a recent move to increase that to a 100 billion.

But what I say in the book is that we really need to figure out how to do a public-private partnership here and how can the American government incentivize U.S. companies to invest in projects in developing countries that actually benefit those countries and not just the elite, but benefit the people in terms of jobs, in terms of of production capabilities and so on.

And I think we have that capacity, we just haven't done it yet, but, you know, as I say, I think China's convening power primarily is there is both positive and negative.

On the positive side, it's the checkbook diplomacy represented by Belt and Road.

It's also the fact that they use their economic power to disadvantage countries that cross them.

So the Koreans, South Koreans, have paid a penalty for allowing the U.S. to put an air defense system in there.

The people that sold us the land, a department store chain, has been shut down in China.

When the Philippines challenged the Chinese, the Chinese stopped importing Philippine fruit.

When the Nobel Committee awarded the Nobel Peace Prize to a Chinese dissident, the Chinese stopped buying Norwegian salmon.

So they have this negative convening power, in terms of pressuring countries very crudely to adapt their policies to please China.

So I don't think that China, people do not willingly look to China for leadership in addressing global problems.

They look to China for the benefit of the Belt and Road.

They look to China for perhaps other benefits, but I think that it's a very different kind of convening power, a very different kind of power than the United States has had in the past.

- Let me ask you as a student of history, literally, you have your degrees, your bachelors, your masters, and your PhD in history.

As you look at the, you know, the idea of American exceptionalism, the idea that America is different from other countries, that perhaps we, you know, when the Cold War ended, and we emerged as the premier power that that was just it, we wouldn't have to do the work anymore, and thus got rid of the U.S. Information Agency and so forth.

I mean, what does history tell us about the rise and fall of powers, and what speeds that kind of a process?

I mean, what are we not doing right now that we need to be doing, taking into account all the other things that are changing in the world, but to continue play a meaningful leadership role in the world?

You've talked about investment, but what what besides that, what about, I mean, you've talked about several different instruments of non-military instruments of power that we've let wither, like what do you think is at the top of the list for what should be happening now that isn't?

- Well, I think there are a number of things, and first of all, I would say that that many of the problems that we have dealt with over the past 20 years internationally, and I would say, well, have derived from what I would refer to as either hubris or triumphalism after the end of the Cold War.

And the belief that, well, the fact that we had won the Cold War, the Soviet Union collapsed, and we were sort of sitting on top of the world in a position of power unparalleled perhaps, since globally, since the Roman Empire.

And I think we felt we could change the world and make it more in our image that as Francis Fukuyama wrote, you know, it was the end of history.

The debate between authoritarianism and democracy and market economies was all over, and I think we've seen that's totally wrong, and history is still with us very much.

But what we didn't really appreciate was that although the Cold War took place against the greatest arms race in the history of the world, it was actually a, there was actually a military standoff.

And in the entirety of the Cold War, there were probably only fewer than a hundred American combat deaths directly attributable to the Soviet Union.

And where the Cold War was actually fought out was through surrogates and guerrilla wars and things like that, but especially in the non-military arenas.

So technology, science, education, strategic communications, our alliances, all of these things were instruments of power that were used in an integrated way to combat the Soviet Union around the world.

And to strength, to exacerbate their weaknesses.

There were, we had a variety of economic tools that we used, both positive and negative, against the Soviet Union, and against people, and with respect to people in the Soviet orbit.

So I would say that it's not just one thing that we have to redevelop if you will, but a variety, and it starts with diplomacy.

The State Department has been starved of resources for many years, and it has been weakened in many respects, but the answer is not just a throw more money at the State Department, it needs to be reformed.

It needs to shed its bureaucratic character and culture.

It needs to be more entrepreneurial.

It needs to give more opportunities to younger people and not be such a stifling bureaucracy.

Some of the most critical people, most critical of the State Department are some of our senior diplomats.

We need to reinvigorate our foreign assistance programs.

And President Bush did that along the lines of the Millennium Challenge Corporation, which talked about accountability and making sure that there was local buy-in to projects, and so on.

We need strategic communications.

In the early 2000s, Hu Jintao invested $7 billion to create a Chinese global strategic communications capability.

We dismantled USIA, as I indicated earlier.

So there are, we've allowed, particularly under the Trump Administration, we took one of our greatest assets, nonmilitary assets, our alliances, and put that in jeopardy.

And it will take a long time, I think, to get the level of confidence back among our allies that we are a reliable partner.

So there's a variety of things that we need to do in the non-military arena that need investment, and the truth of the matter is compared to the costs of our military, these non-military assets or these non-military instruments of power are relatively inexpensive.

When Condi Rice was Secretary of State, she and I would banter back and forth about the fact that if you took all the foreign service officers in the American Foreign Services there are, it would not be enough people to crew a single aircraft carrier.

And so we just, we need to understand that these non-military instruments, first of all, were critically important in our success in the Cold War, but they are absolutely essential in the contest that we're in with China.

Because China, unlike the Soviet Union, is a multidimensional power.

The Soviet Union, basically, was a military power that had oil and gas.

China's a far more economically sophisticated, economically successful, economically integrated into the rest of the world country than the Soviet Union ever dreamed of being.

And so, if we're going to actually be able to compete effectively with China, both directly and around the world, we're gonna have to reshape, and reform, and reinvest in these non-military instruments of power.

- China is challenging the U.S., or would like to compete with the U.S., not just economically and politically and in terms of the non-military instruments of power, but potentially also militarily.

Some of China's Belt and Road Initiative investments, many of them, are in ports and strategic locations or along coastlines, including near and around the South China Sea, but also in Pakistan's Port of Gwadar, and Sri Lanka's Hambanthota, and in Djibouti, where China has its first overseas military base.

How concerned are you about the possibility of U.S., the United States and China clashing militarily, and where do you think it might happen if it does?

- I think that the, I think both countries really understand how disastrous a military confrontation between the two of them would be.

And my worry, my greatest worry, is that a conflict would occur through miscalculation or an incident that spirals out of control.

And of course, the most likely arena for that is in the South China Sea, where our military forces and their military forces are bumping up against each other almost on a daily basis, and where both sides are being pretty forward-leaning in the deployment of their, particularly their naval assets, but also air forces.

The Chinese have created a blue-water navy.

They have, you've mentioned places where they actually are probably going to have, where they either probably will or already have a naval facility, particularly in Djibouti.

But they're also looking for a naval facility, a navy base on the west coast of Africa, which would give them access to the Atlantic ocean.

So all of a sudden, we're not talking about the Pacific, and the South China Sea, and the Indian Ocean, we're talking about the Atlantic.

And so, I think this is very worrisome, and they're cranking out ships at an unbelievable rate.

Xi Jinping just commissioned three new warships all at once, just a few days ago, so I think this is a worry.

They're not a global military power at this point.

Maybe they will be, they certainly have devoted a lot of investment to their navy and to their air force and their missile capabilities, but I think where they are particularly, a challenge for the United States, is in the South China Sea, is in the Pacific, particularly west of the first line of islands west of Japan and Taiwan and the Philippines and so on, and there they outnumber us significantly.

They have about 370 navy ships there, and we have something on the order of 70 or 75.

Now, we have allies who have ships, and so that number isn't as one-sided as it sounds, because the Japanese, the Australians, the Philippines, and others have navies as well.

But it is clearly the area where they have dramatically improved their military capabilities.

I think that the risk of a conflict clearly, right now, is greatest with respect to Taiwan.

But I think that at least for the near term, and maybe the medium term, the risk of it direct Chinese assault or invasion of Taiwan is actually pretty low.

There are a lot of alternative means of putting pressure on Taiwan available to the Chinese that are short of war and short of the potential for a confrontation and and even a major war with the United States over Taiwan.

I worry, for example, about what I would call a nibbling strategy, where the Chinese might see one or two Taiwanese islands that are actually quite close to the coast of China, and therefore militarily, not particularly a big challenge.

And I doubt that the Taiwanese or the U.S. would go to war to retake those islands, but Xi Jinping would've made a point.

I think there are also a variety of economic and other kinds of tools that the Chinese can bring to bear against Taiwan, but the South China Sea is the place where the risk of an inadvertent confrontation could escalate.

And we don't have any of the agreements with the Chinese that we negotiated with the Soviets, in terms of maintaining control of inadvertent incidents that could escalate.

With the Soviets, we had the Incidents at Sea Agreement, which provided a set of procedures that you would follow and that both countries would follow if there were a clash or a confrontation between our ships or submarines, and we don't have anything like that with the Chinese.

We don't have a hotline with the Chinese, so that's a worry for me.

So the military piece of it-- - Okay.

- Is significant.

- I wish we had a lot more time because there's so much I could ask you and would love to ask you, but sadly, this is all the time we have.

I'd just like to thank you for your insights and for giving us so much to think about related to America's place in the world and to our relationship with China.

Thank you so much.

- My pleasure.

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