Assessing the Bush Foreign Policy Transition
Transition to Governing Project

April 18, 2001

Transcript prepared from a tape recording

Moderators:

Norman Ornstein, American Enterprise Institute

Thomas Mann, Brookings Institution

Panelists:

Ivo H. Daalder, Brookings Institution

James M. Lindsay, Brookings Institution

Robert C. "Bud" McFarlane, former national security adviser to President Reagan

Carla Anne Robbins, Wall Street Journal

Proceedings:

MR. ORNSTEIN: [in progress] of the Brookings Institution. We are co-directors of the Transition to Governing Project. You have some information about this, I think on your chairs. This is a project which we and our institutions have been conducting for the last couple of years and we will continue for a while in an attempt to improve the transition to governing, to get a focus on governing, we hope during the campaigns, to reduce the impact of the permanent campaign a bit and to make for a smoother movement from the time of an election, from the time of what's become a 36-day period of limbo, and then a transition itself.

We've done a number of sessions and other projects, and books, including, most recently, Preparing To Be President, the memoirs, or the memos, I should say, of Richard E. Neustadt, and The Permanent Campaign And Its Future.

We are going to have a session on presidential leadership next, coming up in mid May with David Gergen and Fred Greenstein, and there'll be others along the way. Stay tuned.

I'm going to introduce our panel. We were hoping to have, I should note, Paul Wolfowitz, the deputy secretary of defense. He couldn't make it. He sent a little note, saying that he is very sorry--no--make that "very, very sorry" that he couldn't make it, and I sent him back a little note saying that that was fine, I would take that as an abject apology.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Mr. Wolfowitz has been a member of the Board of Academic Advisors, here, at the Council of Academic Advisors, left behind some books, and he's not getting back those books, I should also note, till further notice.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me introduce our panel and then turn things over to Tom.

Starting over at the far end, Ivo Daalder is a senior fellow in Foreign Policy Studies at the Brookings Institution, has written many books, including, most recently, "Force, Order and Global Governance," which is forthcoming, along with "Winning Ugly: NATO's War To Save Kosovo." He served as a professor at the University of Maryland and as director for European Affairs in the National Security Council staff in 1995 and 1996.

Robert "Bud" McFarlane, is the founder, chairman, and chief executive officer of Global Energy Investors. Previously, of course, a long and distinguished career in foreign policy, as a foreign policy adviser to Presidents Ford and Reagan, counselor to the State Department, deputy national security advisor, national security advisor, among many other very important positions.

Jim Lindsay is a senior fellow in foreign policy studies at The Brookings Institution, also a prolific author, including perspectives on global issues and perspectives of world politics, served as a professor at the University of Iowa, and director of Global Issues and Multilateral Affairs at the National Security Council, 1996 to 1997, and also as a foreign affairs fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations.

And Carla Anne Robbins covers foreign policy for the Wall Street Journal as she has for some time, has worked as a foreign correspondent in Central and South America, covered the Gulf crisis from Saudi Arabia, is a political scientist and winner of numerous awards, including the top ones in journalism and foreign policy.

Now let me turn things over to Tom Mann.

MR. MANN: Thank you, Norman.

I'd like to add my welcome on behalf of the Transition to Governing Project, and the Brookings Institution. The idea of this event emerged from a conversation, several months ago, that I had with Ivo and Jim. They were asking me for all of the great studies in literature, on what outgoing presidents should do, and how they should act during the course of a presidential transition, and discovered that all of the writing was directed to the president-elect. So the question became what can we say about "lame duck" diplomacy. What are the appropriate lessons for outgoing presidents to internalize as far as the conduct of foreign policy during what is typically a, really a quite long transition period. This time, of course, it was cut in half. Jim and Ivo went on to write a piece called "Lame Duck Diplomacy" that will be coming out in the Washington Quarterly.

But, at the same time, they have been looking at a series of issues related to the foreign policy transition of new administrations, having to do with the organization of the State Department, the structure of the NSC, operation within the White House.

Now, if we add to that questions of staffing the new foreign policy and national security team, and the initial policy experience in the Bush administration, I think we have a full plate of topics to wrestle with this morning, and that really is our objective.

And our format will follow the format that we had for sessions before the election, anticipating governance and transition, which is more conservational and informal, rather than sort of long statements. So I'd like to begin, if I could, by asking Jim how should outgoing presidents conduct themselves on foreign policy, and to what extent should they really hold back for fear of making commitments for the new president?

MR. LINDSAY: Well, I think you ask sort of the best question and also the toughest question to answer, Tom, because, clearly, "lame duck" diplomacy is something that can get people's hackles up.

If you look at the Clinton transition period, again, in United States politics, unlike many other democracies, it will take a long time to go from one government to another. It lasts about two and a half months. Bill Clinton came under a great deal of criticism from his critics up on Capitol Hill for things that both he was trying to do, and even things he might have been considering doing, and particularly on North Korea missiles.

One of the things that sort of emerges from those criticisms, it's the tendency to attack presidents in a transition period on grounds of principle. You really sort of see three kinds of principled objection being raised, and you saw them against Clinton. One is that "lame duck" diplomacy is wrong because a sitting president should defer to the incoming administration and respect its sensibilities. I noticed that Majority Leader Trent Lott, and Speaker of the House Denny Hastert wrote Bill Clinton a letter on his policy toward North Korea, in which they said--let me sort of quote from the letter.

"We urge that, in the closing days of your administration, you not attempt to bind our nation and the incoming administration to a new policy toward North Korea. Rather, we urge you to respect the prerogatives of the new administration to seek to overcome the disagreements of the past six years."

So we have this one sort of standard, principal complaint--you should defer to the next president. Another complaint that comes up, and you can see echoes in the Lott-Hastert letter, is that it is wrong to tie the hands of your successor, and the third general principle, objection that comes up, is that "lame duck" diplomacy is wrong, because a "lame duck's" motives aren't pure, that they're driven by a desire to establish a legacy. For example, Bill Safire dismissed Clinton's efforts on Middle East peace as a "hubricity stunt" and it was wrong for that reason.

And as Ivo and I argue in the forthcoming piece in the Washington Quarterly, that all of these sort of lofty, principled arguments against "lame duck" diplomacy really don't hold up terribly well to scrutiny. One problem you run into in terms of the first question, for example, of deferring to the successor is that you do have two and a half months from the one election to the inauguration of the new president and the rest of the world will not put itself on hold to meet the needs of the American electoral calendar.

It's even dangerous to suggest that presidents should sort of put themselves in a caretaker role for two and a half months.

Likewise, the argument that it's wrong to tie the hands of incoming administrations. The reality is that politics is all about tying the hands of your [audio out]. It's also about talking closer to the microphone.

And I guess sort of the oddest one, the one you hear the most, is sort of questioning people's motives. It's wrong because not getting it pure of heart. That's sort of "old sport" in Washington, to impugn people's motives. Well, leaving aside the fact whether you can actually really determine what people's motives are, the reality is the American political system has predicated the notion that ambition will drive people.

I refer people back to what James Madison wrote in The Federalist Papers on this subject. "If men are angels, no government would be necessary. Rather, the idea [inaudible] ambition against ambition."

So I think that the problem you run into in diplomacy is that presidents--it's important that presidents, sitting presidents continue to exercise the full powers of their office, but it really requires sort of a real balancing act, and that is--and I think there's some general rules to keep in mind.

One is that they are president and will remain president until noon on January 20th, and they should do whatever they continue to see fit.

I think, number two, it is important for presidents to recognize that there's probably not a wisdom in trying to accomplish or pursue initiatives that they're not going to be able to accomplish before January 20th.

That is, beginning new initiatives, that you are--you know you're not going to be able to carry out, particularly if you know your incoming administration opposes it, aren't worth doing.

Nonetheless, there's a third, and I guess a kind of balancing argument, is that presidents shouldn't be "lame duck", presidents shouldn't be dissuaded by the fact that they may tie their successor's hands, and, indeed, the argument about tying successor's hands is a little bit odd, at least in one sense, because almost anything a president does, at any point in his administration, is going to tie the hands, or potentially tie the hands of a successor, and, indeed, in some cases it's possible that no matter what you do, you will tie the hands of your successor.

I think, for example, of Bill Clinton's decision, last September, not to proceed with deployment of a ballistic missile system. He was criticized by some, applauded by some for making a sensible decision, others by preventing his successor from being able to move forward quickly.

I think there's one other rule, and that is not only behavior of the incumbent president, but the behavior of the incoming president, and I think in that regard, there's a lot to be learned from the way George W. Bush handled the transition. I think, in many ways, it was exemplary, in terms of reminding people that he did not become president till January 20th, noon on January 20th. Until that point Bill Clinton would be president and would exercise those powers.

MR. MANN: Ivo, if those are the principles, how would you evaluate this foreign policy transition period for the outgoing president as well as the incoming?

MR. DAALDER: I think in two ways. Clearly, George W. Bush, as Jim said, handled himself in exactly the way you would want any president who is incoming to the office to handle himself, that is, to make very clear from day one, that there is only one president, that the United States speaks with one voice, and that that voice, until noon, on January 20th, is that of the sitting president.

It is a statement that Bill Clinton also made on November 4th. His first public statement after his acceptance speech the night that he was elected, was very clearly to state that the world should not think that he was now president, that George H.W. Bush was president, and would continue to be president, and that he would support George H.W. Bush at every turn in the conduct of foreign policy. Little did, I might add, Bill Clinton know how much foreign policy would in fact be conducted in the two and a half months transition period between Bush's defeat and Clinton's inauguration.

Just to remind you what happened in that time, and then to put that into comparison to what has happened in the latest transition, George Bush, Sr. sent 30,000 U.S. Marines to Somalia to help feed starving millions. He bombed Iraq. He threatened war against Serbia over Kosovo. He tried to seal the Uruguay Round trade negotiations.

He finalized and signed the START II agreement cutting U.S. and Russian nuclear forces to 70 percent below Cold War levels, and he signed treaties banning the chemical weapons and establishing a free trade zone throughout North America. A respectable list for an entire four years. But to have done that all after having been defeated is in fact remarkable. All of those attempts were publicly supported by Clinton with two small exceptions. They did not support the finalization of the Uruguay trade round, which is one of the reasons it wasn't finalized, and Clinton did call into question the notion that American troops could be out of Somalia by January 21st, as promised at the time by Marlin Fitzwater.

Compare that, for a moment, to what happened in the last administration, where I would argue that one, the kind of foreign policy initiatives that Clinton took were measured, and two, that wrongly, in my view, the Clinton administration was influenced by the transition in not taking steps it otherwise probably would have.

First, on what it did. In the foreign policy transition, there were four major foreign policy issues. There was the Middle East, there was the signing, by midnight , December 31st, 2000, of the treaty on the International Criminal Court. There was the finalization of the U.S. financing deal, and there was the decision not to pursue a missile deal with North Korea.

On the Middle East, he was criticized for spending too much time and too much energy in the hope of getting a final legacy, in fact, the Nobel Peace Prize, which he was accused of doing. I would argue that given the kind of investment that Clinton personally had made in the Middle East peace process during the eight years, and, in particular, in the last year of his presidency, it would have been remarkable, indeed, it would have been wrong, had he not tried to pursue the peace process in the way that he did.

On the ICC decision, he had a decision to make. If the United States was ever interested in influencing the nature of that treaty, it had to be a member, a signatory to that treaty by December 31st, the year 2000, and he decided, for that reason, and that reason only, to do that.

On the U.N. financing deal, that was the implementation of a congressionally-passed law, albeit it in a way that required an amendment to the law, but was widely, in fact, welcomed on Capitol Hill and Richard Holbrooke, who achieved that no small feat, got a standing ovation from the very people, that is, Mr. Helms and others, criticizing Clinton for conducting foreign policy during that same period.

And then there is the question of North Korea, which I think is an interesting one, because there is little doubt in my mind, that it was the transition that influenced the administration in its conduct of its North Korea diplomacy after November 7th, in the following way.

The administration believed--whether that's true or not is a different matter, I happen to think it's true--but they believed, strongly, that they could get a deal with North Korea that would have, one, immediately halted the export of all missiles and missile components, and, second, would have frozen the development, production, testing and deployment of all North Korean missiles over 300 miles, that they could get that deal in return for, one, a presidential visit, second, assistance to the North Koreans to help them launch up to three satellites a year, and third, an in-kind contribution of food and other material assistance to North Korea, as well as having a commitment from North Korea to negotiate the elimination of their missile program, and to negotiate a verification protocol to verify that agreement.

The administration was faced, at the end of October, with this deal that required, first, one more high-level meeting with the North Koreans, and then, second, a presidential visit, because the deal would have to be signed in Pyongyang by Bill Clinton.

Sandy Berger has said, publicly, that the reason the president did not travel to Pyongyang was not because we ran out of time but because we faced a constitutional crisis.

I would just point out that the president did travel to Northern Ireland, he did travel to Vietnam, he did travel to an APEC meeting during this very constitutional crisis, but perhaps a constitutional crisis makes Pyongyang a different kind of visit. I don't know.

The real reason, in my view, reported by Carla, and others, has to do with the belief, by the administration, that in order to pursue this deal you had to inform the incoming administration. That was the courtesy that you ought to give to an incoming administration. If you're going to do something significant in foreign policy, tell your successor. And we didn't know who the successor was until December 11th, 12th, whatever it was, a distant memory, which I try to forget, for various reasons, and the Clinton administration, which of course had already informed the Gore team that this was happening. After all, Leon Fuerth was a member of the National Security Council principals and deputies committee, so he knew what was going on, wasn't about to go and inform the Bush administration that the Bush people, who may in fact not be elected, and therefore, they couldn't inform the Bush, the incoming--what might have been the incoming Bush team until December 12th, at which point they decided it was too late to launch a presidential visit.

The moral of the story here is that you had an administration that, because of a transition, and only because of a transition, was unwilling to act in a way that it believed, rightly or wrongly, served American interests, and the argument that Jim and I make in our article is that is not the way to conduct "lame duck" diplomacy. Don't be a "lame duck" when you think it is important that you act as a president.

MR. ORNSTEIN: We've laid out some markers here, including, mostly, a discussion of the substance of foreign policy during this transition. I hope, during the course of our conversation, we will broaden the focus a bit as well. We want to deconstruct the foreign policy transition, which consists of more than just questions of who's making policy or what kind of policy is being made.

But, also, there are a lot of other delicate issues. For an incoming president, you are trying to form your own team, and formulate your own policy as you begin, even as you're trying to step aside from what the outgoing president is doing, and even as you're trying to track what they're doing so that you can at least have some level of continuity or make the shift less abrupt as you come in.

I would raise a couple of questions here, more generally, that I hope we can deal with during the course of the discussion, and then I'll ask a specific question along the way.

One is this is obviously a peculiar transition, one in which the transition itself was cut in half. Now we've seen some evidence of the discomfort level that can be caused there, and what Ivo was saying about Korea.

But I would ask the more general question: Did that make this much different in the way in which the transition itself occurred? The fact that the Bush administration, coming in, had only half the time that other presidents-elect have had, in putting a team together, and formulating their initial steps, make a difference compared to what we've seen in the past?

The second is how important are the structural considerations? And here I would ask Bud McFarlane a question.

The Reagan administration, when it came in, during its transition, created a very large advisory group, 120 people to make a foreign policy advisory transition, told these people, presumably, that their role--this was of course part of this larger, indeed, humongous transition operation, office buildings throughout Washington for those months--told them that their role was to prepare for a transition, but we know some of those people went out and free-lanced and basically acted as if they were a foreign policy team.

Is this a good way--did you view that as a good way to begin a transition? Is there a good way to set up a structure when you're in this period of uncomfortable limbo? How would you compare the transitions in which you were a part, incoming and outgoing, with this most recent transition?

MR. McFARLANE: I participated in an outgoing transition in '76, '77, and then four years later in an incoming. I think your characterization of the incoming Reagan team was--well, "team" may be a little overdrawn. It was a "cat fight." We had self-appointed experts for Defense, and State, and all of the agencies, that did fancy themselves as kind of the "centers of wisdom" in each of these places, and, to their credit, they'd done quite a lot of work in policy analysis, and were prepared to really put on the shelf the new policy. But of course they ran into the appointment of cabinet officers, and in the case of secretary of state, greeted and thanked the transition team, and dismissed it, and all those papers were never heard of again.

That isn't to say that they were irrelevant, but few actually, of those people, on those teams--and I was on one of them--came into government. It was a team that was, I think, fair to say, largely dominated by extremely conservative people, very competent, conservative people, but all of the work generated during the months of transition, in the policies context, I can't recall any of it being adopted.

The Bush team, on the other hand, hasn't focused so much on the development and presentation of draft policy for the Middle East, or proliferation, or anything else. It is probably marked, however, by the highest level of talent that I can recall, in modern times, coming into it. But I mention "talent" in both the relevant dimensions, and that is depth of knowledge of substance in the regional and functional areas, but also bureaucratic canniness, and how to make the wheels of government turn reasonably well.

I think that experience is standing them well in the planning process, for now you see, from the White House, a number of directives being issues for defining what the policy ought to be in a dozen different areas, but also a pretty good demonstration of crisis management, which is the other task of governance. Steady state planning and crisis management.

So they get very, very high marks, I think, better than any that I've experienced.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me just ask one other larger question here, and I'll ask it of Carla.

One of the things that characterized the Clinton transition coming in, and this Bush transition coming in, is of course a president’s replacing those of another party. During the course of the campaign in 1992 and in 2000, I think it would be fair to say that the rhetoric from the outsider, who then became the president-elect, really was kind of foreign policy defined in black-and-white terms--that's natural in a campaign--and in a lot of ways, what you did wrong, what we'll do right.

Then you get in and realize that there are reasons for continuity in foreign policy and that shades of gray predominate. You could say this, for example, about Clinton's rhetoric on the former Yugoslavia in 1992, and then the realization in 1993, that it wasn't so easy to resolve. You might say it, as we look ahead now, with regard to the Bush policy towards Korea.

Did you see, Carla, in this case, any sign of a realization, as they moved from the rhetoric of the campaign to the reality of the transition, of both a struggle over believing your own rhetoric or some sense of trying to conform to continuity in the past, some sense of tension, internally, over these kinds of issues, and how would you compare that to the Clinton transition?

MS. ROBBINS: Well, I think one of the biggest differences between the Clinton transition and this one, or, certainly, the campaign, is that foreign policy just wasn't all that important in this last election, and while Bush defined himself differently, and was critical on things like Iraq, and allowing the coalition to unravel, and certainly critical for not moving robustly toward missile defense, and hinted that they--at times it seemed to suggest, stronger, that they would get out of the Balkans.

I don't think there were that clearly-drawn substantive policy differences to run into that "brick wall" the way that Clinton did as soon as he came in, whether it was questions about MFN with China, or discovering that you couldn't solve Yugoslavia overnight, that Clinton seemed to imply during the campaign.

I think Clinton felt the need, much more to define himself, and they positioned themselves quite effectively during the '92 campaign because of his lack of foreign policy experience. Well, Bush had a comparable lack of foreign policy experience, and perhaps much less foreign travel than Governor Clinton had.

Because he was Republican and because he was George Bush's son, it seemed to matter less. He didn't have to buy the credentials. So I don't think they define themselves as starkly to run up against it.

That said, a few other things have really struck me. One is on Iraq itself, that they were quite critical of the Clinton administration for allowing this coalition to fall apart for maintaining sanctions, and then once got in, there was this sort of wonderful discovery, that it was hard to maintain the coalition when it came to sanctions.

You know, there was this incredible sort of hyperventilation among some members of the press when Bush did what was really a rather minor bombing in the first, what? five days or something, soon after taking office. There were all these, just fabulous predictions, from people who had advised the president during the campaign, that this was the beginning of a really, really tough, "get tough" policy with Iraq, and then the secretary of state went to the region and discovered it was very hard to keep the coalition together, and came out with basically a policy that I believed that the Clinton administration would have followed had--or the Gore administration would have followed if Gore had been elected, which shows, shall we say, intelligence on their part, perhaps.

I don't think it's necessarily going to be a successful policy, but one can--at least they figured out, pretty fast, once they were in, that the world is a tough place to manage, and that very often things that work on the campaign or sound good on the campaign aren't reality, and they were willing to take the hit even, a public hit and the criticism, some criticism. More to come, I suspect. We've been, blessedly, not had to think about Iraq because they've been struggling with other things.

Two other things that have struck me about them: one is how little--and this is the naivety of someone who's been working here for a decade, and I'm still naive--how little they had really thought about the sort of foreign policy, a lot of the foreign policy issues, including things like North Korea. They were briefed on North Korea. If anything, the body language was pretty good after they were briefed on North Korea.

When Dr. Rice and then-General Powell were briefed, they didn't say to the Clinton people, "Don't do it, don't do it." But they seemed to think that they had a lot of time afterwards to review it, and think about it, and when you had a visit from the South Korean president, all of the information they were giving us was we really haven't made our minds up yet. It's really too early to make our minds up. We haven't thought this through. You don't have enough people in place in the Pentagon, enough people in place in the State Department to have a really serious conversation about what we're going to do.

The problem was, is that the South Koreans were waiting for an answer, and when they didn't get an answer and it was, shall we say, bounded with a little bit of rhetoric, I think the South Koreans, and the world took away a far more negative message than they intended to send. I don't think there is the luxury of the time, and I don't know when you do--as Bud said, I mean, you can come out with all these great policy papers, and once you put a secretary of defense in or a secretary of state in, they may want to do something different.

At the same time, the world is impatiently waiting, and the final thing that we can talk about, this, I'm sure all of us have opinions about this, is that when they were confronted with their first crisis, which is the sort of thing you could never write a paper for, what are you going to do when an American EP-3 collides with a jet fighter off of Hainan island? They handled it pretty well and in a remarkably non-ideological way, and that may be a testimony to the fact that they do have grown-ups running it. We'll see how they handle it now because the ideology is creeping in.

But there is something to be said for all that accumulated knowledge, because it stood them quite well in that one crisis.

MR. MANN: Let me press the North Korea issue partly as a way of linking our initial discussion with this latter one, and invite all of you to jump in on it.

Did the peculiar nature of this transition constrain Bill Clinton in a way that proved harmful to U.S. foreign policy interest around the world? That's number one.

The second, and the fact that the administration wasn't ready to make a decision, and, in effect, set those negotiations off the table. Did that have any harmful effect on our foreign policy? In general, did the differences that seemed, at least on the surface, between Secretary Powell and the White House, were those indicative of a sort of broader feature of this administration?

MR. DAALDER: Let me just start it off with there's no doubt in my mind, that if we had known the identity of the president on November 7 or November 8, that the Clinton team would have immediately briefed the incoming administration on what it was going to do on North Korea and it would have gone ahead.

The judgment, whether that was a good or a bad thing, is a different one, and we don't have to debate the wisdom of the proposed deal here. But there's no doubt that they believed, that is, Clinton believed that it was the peculiarity of the particular transition that prevented them from doing what they otherwise would have done, and what they thought was the right thing to do from a foreign policy perspective.

I would criticize them for taking that stance, but they believed that. So in that sense, it made a big deal.

I am struck, just on North Korea, but more, in general, also--I am struck that while the administration, this administration seems, during the transition, to have paid a lot of attention and spent a lot of time on thinking how it could get its cabinet in place, the fourteen people. It didn't spend a lot of time in how it would get its sub-cabinet in place. It is still, really, remarkable, that--I mean, today, I think we have announced the fifth or sixth Defense Department appointment, was appointed yesterday, J.D. Crouch. The State Department has done a little better, but not that much better.

It has identified most but not all of its under secretaries, and only some, a very few of its assistant secretaries, and that, combined with a statement on just about any foreign policy issue, that "Don't ask us what we think, we're reviewing the policy," is creating a problem in foreign policy and in the way the world looks at the United States, because the world is not standing still, just because the United States is going through a transition, which is basically, now, not two and a half months, but is getting close to eight or nine months.

We start on the day of the election and we really don't get our people confirmed until July or August, and our first policy reviews don't come out until May, June, or July.

So you have this six or seven months in which the country is not supposed to have a foreign policy and, in fact, if you criticize them for that, they're saying, well, you know, we're reviewing our policy, which is what happened on North Korea.

North Korea. I think what you saw was Powell going out and saying what he thought we should do, and the rest of the administration said, "Well, we haven't decided that that's the right thing to do," and therefore, he was pulled back.

In the end, they may in fact arrive exactly at where Powell said they were going to do, and they go through this very convoluted process, made more convoluted and more damaging because it is a long-term process, with results that the South Koreans are now trying to resolve.

I think there is a systemic problem here, that is not specific to the transition and the peculiarities of it, which is that campaigns don't think about governing during a campaign. This is a central theme of your project, and it is remarkable that the Bush and Gore teams were unwilling to think seriously about people, let alone about policy, until December 12th.

MR. McFARLANE: Well, I guess I disagree there. I believe that if the point is that there ought to be foreign policy teams during the campaign, formulating draft policy, that seems kind of unrealistic to me. It is seldom relevant in American campaigns, and for a president who is preoccupied, or a candidate to focus on organizing that, given the competing demands on his or her time, is probably unrealistic, but there's a more fundamental point, why I think it has to wait, and that is because as you prepare to govern and to recognize that the veneer of new faces that come is a veneer, and that you have to rely, to govern, on the thousands of professionals that you are going to inherit, and one of the important outcomes of launching a policy analysis study, right now, and for the next six months, really, is to engage those on whom you're going to have to rely and to give them the sense that, indeed, the legitimacy of participating, so that they are more than props, and don't feel inclined to go out and leak and undermine the policy at least as much as they might otherwise.

That's an important thing. Henry Kissinger understood it, and launched dozens of studies, and while he may have had a foreordained outcome in mind, it did serve a very useful purpose, and if the alternative is that you react instead of proceed on the basis of established policy, it makes for a much less stable set of relationships with allies and adversaries.

But if you have on the books, on the shelf, published and delivered in presidential speeches, after about the first eight weeks of the administration, allies have some sense of predictability and so do adversaries, and that analytical process is invaluable, and it really cannot occur before you actually get to office.

MR. ORNSTEIN: But let me just push you one element of this. Here we are, now, 88 days into the administration and you've got no more than two or three, or four political appointees in any agency, certainly, in any agency in foreign policy.

From your perspective, and years in serving in government, is it dangerous or damaging when you've got two people in the Defense Department who are Senate-confirmable appointees, who are there, in place, as you're trying to make policy, or navigate your way through delicate crises? Or if you have no more than three or four in the State Department, for what might be--actually, with five nominations in the Defense Department now, just formally going forward, it'll be another three or four months, at least, before they get in place. Till September, October. Is that a problem?

MR. McFARLANE: Well, I think it's less of a problem than it sounds like, for a couple of reasons. There are designees that are in office, and while they don't want to breach Senate prerogatives by acting--and they can--they are around the table, and there is a very solid set of candidates that are in the wings, and actually contributing to formation of policy, though they haven't been confirmed yet.

I think in the Defense Department you may be seeing a little bit of a change, a significant change in how the Pentagon will contribute to policy formation, and that is that you have a very strong team, unusually strong team of service secretaries, who are usually irrelevant to the policy process. I think that'll be different in this administration.

Jim Crouch, and all three, are very solid intellects, in terms of defense policy, and that that will make up for those who are not yet confirmed at the undersecretary level, and lower, at OSD, and that you may see a band of brothers and sisters with the two at the top at Defense and the Service secretaries being kind of the nexus of Pentagon process, and in the State Department you undervalue, I think, the Foreign Service that are in place, and that are quite simpatico, I think, with the secretary and Rich Armitage. I don't think it's a big problem.

MR. MANN: Jim and Carla, would you like to "weigh in" on this?

MR. LINDSAY: As you look at it, what is striking me, to go back to the question Norm asked earlier, what role did having this unusual election, which was not settled on November 7th, rather, not until the middle of December--I think that clearly set the Bush team back, but I'm not sure that you can point to the phenomenon you're pointing to, Norm, of not having very many people at sub-cabinet levels, and say it's because of oddness of the way the election was settled.

I mean, they have been remarkably slow in pushing--I read Al Kamen every Monday, get the update as to where we stand on that. But I mean, I understand Bud's point, that you can sort of have people who might be nominated, participating surreptitiously, or as consultants, or what have you.

I think it creates a real problem if you come in and say, look, if you're in a campaign, you can give a lot of time to what our policies are going to be, in part, because the public didn't demand us to think through those policies, and we're doing lots of other things.

What we're going to do is take the first several months, do reviews of our policy, and we're going to politely ask all of our friends and our adversaries to put things on hold while we try to figure out what we can do, and there may be even some wisdom to that, and you should be willing to suffer the shouts from foreign capitals, that you're not ready to deal.

The problem is how do you conduct your review when you don't have the people who are going to run the policy? It seems to me that creates a real problem, and you can say, well, to some extent, the administration relies on holdovers from the previous administration, but, clearly, whoever's holding down, let's say, the under secretary of state for arms control, is probably going to have a bit of a different take on it than John Bolton will be once he's confirmed, and I think that creates very real problems, and so as this sort of--as the transition stretches out, you end up not sort of getting a full line, as Ivo points out, perhaps, till June--I think it creates some real serious problems and actually hurts this process of trying to do a strategic review of what it is you want to accomplish.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Carla?

MS. ROBBINS: Two points. One is that some policies have made, just almost verbally, or implicitly. I think the Balkans is sort of a striking one, is that after concerns that were raised during the transition, when Dr. Rice gave an interview to the New York Times and suggested that the Balkans was not a correct use of American troops, and there would be a new division of labor in NATO, which completely freaked every European [inaudible] out, then they tried to sort of walk it back, but, privately, they didn't really walk it back, publicly, and Secretary Powell went to Brussels and--it was Brussels, wasn't it, Ivo?--but just that said that we got into the Balkans together and we'd get out together.

This is something that the Europeans are just holding on to with bloodied fingernails, and sort of Charlton Heston out there, and they--but I think that a policy was made that day, and I wonder how much of an internal discussion there really was, and how much that evolved from that day of the New York Times interview, and all that. But that is the sort of thing on which precedent is built and it was a terribly important moment, interestingly, got very little attention over here.

The other thing is that--I was struck, when Bud talked about all of these experts who would come up with papers, and then, suddenly, the real people who were making policy were in there, I think we may see that potential for chaos as well, particularly in the Defense Department in the next few months, because they have all of these secret review groups that are going on with lots of former people in, and very few current people in running these, and they're coming in and they're making their cases, and they're bringing more and more people in. But there's no public debate about it, at all, because they're incredibly secretive, and there are some people who see it as sort of a--has the danger of being incredibly "hothouse," all--a health care review under Mrs. Clinton, now Senator Clinton.

But I suspect that this whole notion of defense transformation, which covers the entire--everything from missile defense to the Joint Strike Fighter, to all sorts of other questions here, that you've got all these different groups that are working in parallel, it's not clear how much they're talking to each other, it's not clear how much they're talking to anybody, except for Rumsfeld and Wolfowitz.

When you have the people from the service chiefs who feel, and the services themselves feel incredibly cut out from this, let alone the Hill, which feels incredibly cut out. So I think the potential for that crash that, if they didn't do that review during the transition, they're sort of replicating that, potentially, that problem, right now, and you could see a real crash in the next six weeks, or so, when the information finally comes out about what the recommendations have been and Rumsfeld accepted, and a lot of people, both in the building and on the Hill have absolutely no idea what they're doing or where they're going. No preparation at all.

MR. MANN: I'd like to turn us to Norm's second point, which really went to the structural considerations, and I'm wondering, maybe Ivo, and then Bud, could say something about what we learn, what's possible to learn from initial decisions made on the structure of the NSC staff, what changes have been made, how significant are they? How does the vice president’s national security staff fit into this larger operation, and then, what can we see of what's going on, structurally, at the State Department, Defense Department, and the intelligence community, that gives us some hint as to the structural foreign policy, national security thinking in the new administration?

MR. DAALDER: Let me start, a little bit on the NSC, which is--[start side 1B]--the team that came in, not surprisingly, given where Condi Rice learned her trade, basically wanted to recreate the NSC that Brent Scowcroft ran and Bush won. A small NSC, focused on managing the interagency process, a NSC that did not have a public or a diplomatic profile, and that would be able to perform the "honest broker" role within the administration, as well as being--because that's what she was during the campaign, a close adviser to the president.

A number of steps were taken, that led to that kind of NSC. First, they cut the size of the staff, significantly, though far less significantly than one would think. The staff today, at about 70 professionals, is larger than any other NSC staff, except for the last Clinton term. There's never been a staff that has been as large as the current staff, except for the staff from 1996 to the year 2000. It's staffed largely with holdovers.

It's very interesting. The transition in the NSC took much longer than similar transitions in NSCs, both in Clinton, Bush One, where there was a very significant changeover from day one and day two, you have none of the confirmation, none of the--little of the ethical and paper-filling-out exercises that needs to go on, or it can go on while you're already on board.

So the normal excuses for why there were delays can't be put on the NSC side, but it was remarkable that even, now, you have at least three senior directors in the NSC that are Clinton holdovers.

So that's remarkable. The second thing that is noticeable, that Condi Rice and her team came in and said we are not going to do what Sandy Berger did, and the Clinton administration did, which is we are not going to have a large press operation. We're not going to have a large legislative affairs operation. We're not going to have a communications operation. We're not going to have a speech writing operation. We're not going to do all the kinds of things that the NSC started to do in the late rule, and then really blossomed under Berger, which is to have its own press spokesman, to have its own speech writers, to have its own legislative director, people, all of which normally are in the White House, of which the NSC normally is considered to be a part.

Under Berger, the NSC became a separate, almost agency-like structure. Three months--or not even three months, 12 weeks into this NSC, you now have a legislative director, senior director in the NSC staff. You have a press spokesperson who in fact speaks publicly, and consistently. You have a speech writing shop, and the numbers of people who are in these functions are slowly but surely increasing.

That is, there is something happening in the way the NSC interacts with the media, the Hill, and the outside world, that is not just Clinton/Berger. What it is we can talk about, but there is a sense here, that you can no longer operate an NSC in the dark. Condi Rice is publicly, extraordinarily visible, much more visible than Scowcroft, much more visible than Tony Lake, perhaps even more visible than Berger was when he became, early on, when he was national security adviser, Sunday morning talk-shows, Nightline, Today show--you name it. That's not the role that a national security advisor has traditionally taken, but it is clear that Condi Rice, despite her inclination not to do this, has decided that in fact it is an absolute necessity to be out there in order to perform the functions that the NSC needs to perform.

MR. McFARLANE: I think the intent of the president and Condi Rice to have the NSC be a managerial and coordinative body is a very healthy one, and probably was a precondition of Secretary Powell before his accepting the nomination, and also a sensible precondition.

You don't see the kind of giant intellects of Dick Pipes, or Hal Sonnenfeld, or Hal Saunders [ph], on this NSC, and it's going to be more a managerial body. That said, I believe that it is not inconsistent with that role for the national security advisor to be making, or explaining the policy in public. It's always seemed to me that one of the reasons for our failure in Vietnam was the inability of the government, here, to state its purpose, how our interests are engaged here, how they are threatened, here is our strategy, and to evoke popular support for the policy.

Part of that was uncertainty about what it really was, I suppose, but it also takes talent, and there's more than enough work to go around between secretary of state, defense, and the national security advisor, and I think it's a healthy thing for the security advisor, in coordination, and not in competition with the other cabinet officers, to be out there explaining the policy.

I was spending fully a third of my time at the end of the, my time in government, either with the Congress or with the press, trying to explain what the policy was, and I think it serves the national interest to do so.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me take that several steps further now. Really, there are three things, presumably, that are to be done in a foreign policy transition. One, as we've discussed, is setting your policy directions, or at least beginning that process.

The second is picking the people you will have in place, and as Ivo suggested, the specific people can make an enormous difference in that policy direction, if you pick a John Bolton as opposed to somebody else for arms control, that makes a huge difference.

The third is setting not just the structure of the individual entities, but the overall decision making structure in foreign policy. So let's talk for a minute about this Bush transition.

We know that basically the choice of Colin Powell as secretary of state was made during the campaign for some very good reasons, including campaign reasons. It was still striking, because this is really is the first secretary of state, at least since Kissinger, who started with a base of one's own, and, indeed, different from Kissinger, with a popular base, the most admired person in America.

That is unique, and it raised some questions for me at the time, very similar to the ones raised when Hillary Rodham Clinton was picked to head up a health policy decision-making area. Is it wise for a president to pick anybody for an important position whom he cannot fire?

But having done so, and having picked a strong, and strong-willed secretary of state, the president-elect then went about the process of picking a secretary of defense, and we know something about that process. We know that the initial top candidate was former Senator Dan Coats, put forward and supported extremely enthusiastically by a coalition that included, at the top, the current senate majority leader, the former Senate Majority Leader Bob Dole, with whom Coats is a law partner, virtually every Republican in the Senate. It moved forward, right up to the top, to a point where the president-elect and the vice president-elect had a lengthy interview, over several hours, with former Senator Coats, and then, in what was a difficult move, publicly, basically rejected him, and made it clear that they were rejecting him for a couple of reasons that, commendably, related to the overall philosophy of governing.

That this president wanted, if he was going to have a strong secretary of state, to have an equally strong-willed secretary of defense, so that you wouldn't have that dominance in the State Department and a fear that Coats, a nice man, with extensive experience in the area on the Armed Services Committee, didn't have that strong personal style, and, two, to manage a $300 billion, 3 million person bureaucracy, somebody with some management experience. So went for Rumsfeld.

We know, as Ivo has said, about having created two very strong chief executives, in effect, of these entities, that Bush and these others, and Condi Rice, presumably, herself, wanted a different style National Security Council, one that would serve more of a passive and coordinating role.

But then we saw another "wild card" enter in, which is the role of the vice president. With the national security staff set up at least as extensive as that of the National Security Council, and an initial decision made, later withdrawn, to have the vice president chair the principals' meetings, a role, traditionally, that had been left to the national security advisor, and then when it appeared, I would hypothesize, that this would undercut the national security advisor and the community at large, they drew back from that and gave that role back to Condi Rice.

We have an entity in place, in other words, a foreign policy decision-making entity, with four major figures presumably playing very sizeable roles here, outside of the president himself.

Now what I would throw out to you is was that something that they had thought through? Is that something that can work? How long will it take before all of this "shakes down" and how much is the concept of the role of the vice president, who has been called by, among others, Ken Duberstein, former chief of staff, the "prime minister"--can he play this role as a major foreign policy arbiter, while also chairing the Energy Policy Coordinating Committee and spending much of his time casting tie-breaking votes, or waiting around to cast tie-breaking votes on the Hill? For anybody.

MR. : I think, Norm, when you look at it, one of the things to keep in mind is that there are a variety of different ways to run the White House, and there's no sort of perfect way to run the White House, and a lot of it depends upon the person who sits in the Oval Office, whatever system they're most comfortable with.

Actually, in your question, there's sort of several elements. One is how do you get very strong, forceful, successful personalities to work together, and, clearly, there is history, going back to the first Reagan term, where you can have strong personalities. Think of Al Haig and other members of the administration, where it didn't work terribly well.

But under Bush One, you had strong personalities and they worked together quite well, and I would have to say at least in the first shakedown cruise, with the flap over China, when you might have expected a lot of leaking during the process to try to sabotage each other, this team had worked fairly well, I think as Carla pointed out, and you can say that it's a testament to their maturity and their experience. One might also say it's also because they have very little choice. It's very hard to do the right thing when you have no options.

I think the real question is going to be, for this team, is what happens when you do have options, and you have very different preferences about which way to go, and those preferences are very deeply felt and argued. Will you then be able to keep them all in the room, all on the same page, sheet of music, or are you going to have the temptation that Bud pointed to earlier, where you begin to leak like crazy to sabotage the others?

MR. : Yes.

[Laughter.]

MR. : [inaudible] obviously has [inaudible].

MR. : But I think it's also something important to keep in mind in terms of trying to figure out how this is all going to work, and it gets back to your point, Norm, where you say is it wise for a president to hire somebody he can't fire?

Now I don't know whether or not George Bush can fire Colin Powell. Perhaps he can. But, clearly, what he can do is to ignore him and ignore the advice he gives. At the end of the day, it's the president who decides who he is going to listen to, and I note that, early on, and just as they're about to be inaugurated, there were unnamed Rumsfeld aides, and Wolfowitz allies, chortling in the press, that we're going to crush Condi, she's just not of the same caliber, in terms of intellectually, and bureaucratic experience.

Well, I don't think events have borne that out, and I think whether you believe or don't believe that Condoleezza Rice has the same bureaucratic experience as Don Rumsfeld, who Henry Kissinger tells me is sort of the apotheosis of a hard-nosed bureaucratic player, she has one thing that is absolutely invaluable. She has the president’s ear. He listens to her, he talks to her, and I am told that when the president was informed that the Aries aircraft had collided with a Chinese fighter, that the president was in the midst of having dinner at Camp David, on the weekend, with, among others, Condoleezza Rice.

I think one of the general rules of White House politics is if the president listens to you, regardless of your title, you matter.

MR. McFARLANE: I think two points are germane, and the Defense Department appointment, it may well have been that after they digested the enormous legacy of problems that they were going to face in Defense, got $90 billion in hardware you've ordered you can't pay for, at least in what is in the five-year plan, that Senator Coats, an extremely talented man, didn't have the hands-on understanding of not just that but of the reorientation in national defense strategy, and it's not just NMD. It's conventional force structure, force projection capabilities, and just what do you need to deter and to cope with a very different panoply of threats.

So they needed somebody who had been there, who understood the building and how to manage it, allocate resources, and plan, and Don Rumsfeld's perfect for the job.

The other point I would make is that in earlier administrations, take the Reagan administration, one of the reasons for discord was not least because the cabinet officers involved, almost all of them wanted to be the president, and that's going to make for a very fractious situation.

It's a little-known fact, but it wasn't just Al Haig who aspired to that, and virtually everybody that was at the table did, and so this is not a band of brothers.

[Laughter.]

MR. : I'll make three observations. First, I think--

MR. McFARLANE: None of these people want to be the president--

[Laughter.]

MR. : Well, one liked--

MR. : Rumsfeld did.

MR. McFARLANE: I don't think Don or Cheney, or Colin, any of them, want to be the president.

MR. DAALDER [?]: One of them might want to be anointed. Three points. One, in following up on Jim, we don't actually know how this decision making structure's going to work when there are two different views on the table. We don't. My suspicion is, given what we do know, is that more times than not, you will have a ganging up of three against one, being Rice, Cheney, Rumsfeld versus Powell, and that you will find, more and more, that the president doesn't listen to his very strong and very able and very popular secretary of state, who may, being strong, able, and popular, decide that he no longer wants to be part of this team.

I think that's one possibility. Second, on the question of the vice presidential staff, it's not true that the vice presidential staff is as large as the National Security Council staff, but it is larger than any other vice presidential and national security staff has ever been, much larger and much more senior than Al Gore's.

The problem here is, is if you have two staffs serving the president, because that's what you then create--you create a vice presidential NSC, and then presidential NSC, and they don't see eye to eye, you've got a real problem. That is, you have within the structure, built in, by definition, competition.

It's also extraordinarily strange and shortsighted, because, after all, the National Security Council staff, as Colin Powell would remind many, as would others, serves four people. The president, the vice president, the secretary of state and the secretary of defense.

So why is it that the vice president needs his own National Security Council staff, given that there is already a National Security Council staff?

That said, I do think that the China crisis--was my third issue--demonstrates already that the vice president is so--because he is so important and so prime ministerial, he will not necessarily be there every single time major foreign policy decisions are handled, because he may be on the Hill presenting the 51st vote, as he was during much of the China crisis, or he may be doing the Energy Task Force, or something else.

That leads to an observation on the China decision-making structure. My understanding was, of how the decision, which I think was a test well done, and well overcome--but the way the decisions were made is you had an NSC structure, with the sort of principal deputy mix of Powell and Armitage and Wolfowitz and Rumsfeld, and not the vice president but "Scooter" Libby, his chief of staff, and national security advisor, and presumably somebody from the agency, and Condi Rice, which would meet on a very daily basis.

The president would never meet with them. And then there would be a separate decision making meeting, which would be the president, the vice president, Condi Rice, Karen Hughes and Andy Card. That the "real rubber hits the road" on foreign policy, and presumably on domestic policy, Rice would be replaced by Karl Rove.

But on foreign policy, the "real rubber" is in the Oval Office, and there are no principals there. There are no secretaries of Defense, there are no secretaries of State, there are not directors of central intelligence, or chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. That's what happened under China. Whether that's what will happen in the next crisis, when there's a bigger military dimension, or a bigger intelligence dimension, remains to be seen. But Condi Rice played the role of the conduit between the NSC structure decision making to the president and his trusted advisers, which happen to include the vice president.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me follow up with another sort of interesting element of this dynamic.

We are seeing set up, partly because of a press dialogue, but partly, I think, because of a reality, two entities at deep and regular odds with one another, the State Department, the Defense Department. It's a combination of the traditional mistrust and overlap in responsibilities, and different viewpoints that you have in these agencies, along with the personnel, because in these areas, as we look ahead, where we're likely to see very strongly held different points of view, what you have, more generally, is these two conflicting foreign policy visions that have been a part of the internationalist side of Republicans’ foreign policy philosophy for a long time, what you could call, in shorthand, a kind of muscular Reaganism, on the one hand, and a more pragmatic diplomacy on the other. As we look at the personnel populating these agencies, as we look at not just the strong personalities of Colin Powell and Don Rumsfeld, but of others, Wolfowitz, and Richard Haass, and Rich Armitage as well, what we're seeing is that one philosophy tends to have a dominant set of players in the Defense Department; the other philosophy, a dominant set of players in the State Department.

I would ask you whether you see that as being the major dividing line, the line of conflict down the road, and, secondly, we know that Rich Armitage didn't particularly want to go to the State Department because he has this very close, longstanding, personal friendship with Colin Powell, and didn't really want to serve in the same department with him, for a variety of reasons. But that there was a very conscious decision made to put him in as deputy secretary of state because of his relationships with all the players here, as perhaps the one who could be the buffer and smooth out these ongoing tensions between these two departments.

Is that an accurate characterization? Can he play that role, and how do you see these fault lines?

Carla?

MS. ROBBINS: I just want to answer one part of that because I can't answer the Armitage as buffer thesis.

MR. : Physically, there's no doubt he can--

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: The divide, I think, is, is certain--philosophically, I think it's an accurate description, but what's sort of strange and contrarian about it is that in the past, the sort of muscular, "Let's get involved in the world" philosophy has come out of the State Department versus the "Don't get your rubbers wet" philosophy has come out of the Pentagon, and now you've got the muscular guys at the Pentagon and you have back the way everyone always thought it to be, which is the more pragmatic diplomats back in the land of diplomacy.

So this could be a prescription for not doing anything, ever, because the muscular, Reagan people, while they may be extremely muscular, and certainly Wolfowitz has been a very strong advocate for intervention in Iraq, and concerned about the Balkans, and probably do other things, that they will potentially be balanced out by the chiefs, who don't want to do much and are nervous about military engagements, and all of that.

Then you have, interestingly enough, to complicate it further, you have the former chairman of the joint chiefs over at the State Department, who himself was very much opposed in the past, although Ivo will debate this, I'm sure, on a variety of interventions.

It could be an argument for not doing anything, militarily. I mean, that could be the net effect of it, and there's really no way of predicting it.

One other thing on the question of whether Colin Powell is fireable, which is the one time we've seen them not be consistently on message--and God, they've been on message, she said in a frustrated fashion--

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: --was on the North Korea thing, and he was brought back, slapped back, drawn back, yanked back. He came back into the fold, very quickly, the next day, to the point that he came out of the meeting to tell the press what was happening in the meeting, and it probably ended up getting overstated because of that one 24-hour period of dissonance, and you didn't see any fighting about it afterwards. You didn't see a lot of blame. But I also credit that to early days. It's not just that they only had one choice on these decisions. It's also really, really early days. It's real easy to be on message in the first few months.

MR. MANN: Others of you want to weigh in on the Defense/State?

MR. DAALDER [?]: Just a slightly different observation. We know that there is at least one foreign policy issue in which the president is totally committed, which is missile defense, and if you look at the appointments throughout the administration, there is no doubt that we are going to do missile defense. On the NSC, the key people are Steve Hadley, Bob Joseph, and Franklin Miller. There's no doubt, at all, where any of those three stands.

In the Defense Department, you now have Rumsfeld--the line is Rumsfeld, Wolfowitz, Doug Feith, Steve Cambone [ph], and J.D. Crouch, not known as your average ABM Treaty lovers; put it in those terms.

And at State, the only person who deals with this issue, assuming he will be confirmed, is going to be John Bolton, also not known, necessarily, for a commitment to international negotiations on limiting missile defenses, to put it mildly.

So at least on that issue, and I think whereas Powell, probably, in his private moments will tell you that he doesn't think this is a terribly good idea, because that's what he said when he was chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, you hear in his voice that this is an issue he isn’t going to fight.

So, on this one issue, I think staffing has confirmed to the predilections of the administration. I don't see anywhere, in this administration, any position being filled by somebody who says, "Wait a minute," at any level, on the issue of missile defense.

MS. ROBBINS: I would add two things to that. One is that the State Department will play the role of the interlocutor with the allies on this subject, and there's missile defense and then there's missile defense, and I think that--

MR. : You're going to get missile defense.

MS. ROBBINS: Yeah.

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: You think you're going to get the first one rather than the second one?

MR. : It will play the role, but, for example, the group of people that's going out to do, meet with the allies is an interagency team that includes such people as Bob Joseph and Steve Cambone [ph], again, not known for holding back on missile defense as opposed to missile defense.

MS. ROBBINS: Well, but I think there are two things. When you listen to the president talk about missile defense--and I'm not arguing that it won't be enormous and incredibly disruptive, and won't give me an infinite number of opportunities to write front-page pieces. But that they spend a lot of time worrying and talking about the allies, and I think that that concern, at least the State Department plays a role in it, there will be a role for more than just the Bolton’s of the world. There'll be the people who deal with Europe and the people who deal with Russia, to some extent, and the people who deal with China, who may have something of a voice in it, and they may find some unlikely allies over at the Defense Department among the chiefs and the services, who really don't want to do missile defense, because it's going to come out of their budget, and also about the fact that there are some hard realities settling in over there, which is all this really great "cool" stuff, that everybody thought they could build easily and quickly, can't be built easily and quickly.

So already you're hearing a little bit of a discussion about, well, you know, there's--I suppose the fundamental debate here is, Do you want to do something for the sake of breaking the treaty? Just break the pottery--

MR. : Yes; yes.

MS. ROBBINS: --versus, versus--you do? You want to break the pottery?

MR. : I don't but--

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: Versus the reality, which is, you know, why try to break the pottery, because you can't build the thing that breaks the pottery. So I'm not sure--I think you're right on personnel, but I think there are certain realities that are settling in also.

MR. : Jim, you've got a book, new book on missile defense coming out on this.

MR. LINDSAY: Coming out next week on national missile defense.

MR. : 16.95 for the Brookings--

[Laughter.]

MR. : Is this book going to be fully deployed next week?

[Laughter.]

MR. LINDSAY: I mean, looking sort of at the--

MS. ROBBINS: But not in Alaska.

[Laughter.]

MR. LINDSAY: Looking at the whole national missile defense, I think actually both Ivo and Carla are right. I mean, I think Colin Powell knows this is not an issue on which he's going to carry the day. I mean, I think one thing to keep in mind about Colin Powell is that he is a general, and he is used to sort of surveying the terrain and deciding when to fight your battles, and when not to fight them.

I think one of the reasons he is held in such high esteem is because he has done that, artfully, throughout his entire career. He knows when to pick them and when to fold them.

I think that even though it's tempting to get into this, that a lot of people are spoiling for writing the Rumsfeld versus Powell stories in papers, in part because it's a very sort of conventional story to tell. I think that Powell being a very astute bureaucratic player, is going to try to prevent that opening from occurring.

I think Powell knows what he got himself into. He's a very bright man. He knows that he is not personally close to the president. Never was. His relationship with Vice President Cheney is one that, I guess you could describe as "complicated," or not without issues. So I would imagine that Powell is going to be very adept at trying to stay close to where the administration is, and I think on national missile defense, the administration 's biggest problems are not going to come from Colin Powell getting out there, saying it's a really lousy idea, but as Carla points out from the service chiefs, and uniformed military, will say, well, wait a second, you know, if you do this we've got to give up really "cool" stuff.

You talk to a lot of Army officers, you know, they don't want to build some big national missile defense. They want to buy artillery and tanks, and as far as they can tell, artillery and tanks--

MS. ROBBINS: Theater missile defense to protect--

MR. LINDSAY: Or theater missile defense. So I think on that particular issue, the breakdown could be slightly different than the conventional State/Defense.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let me push you just one step further on this issue, though, Jim. I mean, it seems to me you can't compartmentalize here. That if you decided, all right, this administration's going to move forward with missile defense, it's going to move forward with a space-based, a sea-based, and a land-based, and then a sea-based component, okay, we're going to get out there, and now the State Department has to step in and deal with diplomas with Korea, diplomacy with China, and also has to deal with our allies on a whole range of very important issues.

That in the State Department, as this moves forward, it's going to be everything that we do. We've got this huge mess that has been caused by this decision to move forward with missile defense, and everything that we try to do is going to be immensely complicated by that.

Isn't it the case that this issue, in fact, spills over into virtually everything else?

MR. LINDSAY: Oh, in terms of its policy consequences, yeah, it contaminates everything else, and it can really poison relations. But I mean from a cynical State Department point of view, if the Defense Department goes out, or the president goes out, breaks a lot of pottery, and all of a sudden, now, they need the diplomats, that's pretty good. I mean, if you look at it right now, what the State Department--Colin Powell inherited an organization with two distinct characteristics.

Number one, it is structurally dysfunctional. I invite anybody to go to the State Department web site, call up the organizational flowchart, look at that "dog's breakfast" of agencies and sub-agencies, and what have you.

But it has another, and I think for Colin Powell, a more important overriding characteristic, and that is extraordinarily low morale. It is an organization of people who feel they are unappreciated and not listened to, and, indeed, Colin Powell's done a masterful job, partly because he spent a lifetime training in terms of leading people, of coming in from the get-go and validating those people, and telling them they matter to him, from sort of the little things like his opening remarks referring to them as his colleagues, and as experts that he intends to listen to, to such things as inviting junior Mexico desk officers to come and brief the president before the president went to meet with Vicente Fox, and a variety of--excuse me.

And he also has done his own photocopying, and when the photocopier jammed, he fixed it himself, which is a story that got wide currency in the State Department, which gives you some sense of how low the morale is--

[Laughter.]

MR. LINDSAY: But look at what's happened over with the China episode. All of a sudden, now, we see the Washington Post, among other papers, running a front-page story, I believe, talking about the return of the diplomats. In some sense, they've benefited from it. So I'm not so sure that if they really go out and break the pottery, that all of those foreign service officers who really want to go out and smooth waters, won't feel all the more important, and it's a different issue as to whether or not Powell thinks it's good or bad.

I would imagine his message to his troops will be this is what the commander in chief has offered, and we're going to go out and make if happen.

MS. ROBBINS: But in response, also, Norm, if your fundamental question is if they push this ahead, will the world be a more complicated and dangerous place, I think the answer is yes.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Well, partly what I was asking was doesn't this exacerbate those built-in tensions between the State Department and all these other entities, because it's going to complicate their lives?

MS. ROBBINS: I don't think State's going to throw itself on its sword over something that the president so clearly--

MR. LINDSAY: It gives them something to do. They won't do it.

MR. ORNSTEIN: A lot of photocopying is going to be going on over--

[Laughter.]

MR. : There's a lot of talking points there.

MR. McFARLANE: Not to be a contrarian on this, I think that as visible and emphatic as support for NMD has been, from Rumsfeld and all others that you've mentioned, now in office, and they face this terribly daunting agenda of problems within defense, I think they are tackling, but that job of tackling is going to expose so many massive problems, that NMD becomes one among peers, without limit, and I believe that it's possible that it may lead to a retrenchment on NMD. Yes, there will be an NMD program, but it's going to be a much more boost-phase oriented, phased over a long time, without heavy, up-front costs, because you just can't get there from here, in coping with service needs, unpaid bills, and new threats, and put out a very robust, certainly not space-based NMD.

So I would look for some retrenchment on NMD, and as for this earlier question that you posed, Norm, about the personalities and the probable conflicts, again, I'm contrarian on that. I think maturity really does matter, and that all of the fights that have occurred in the Reagan years, and earlier, involving some of these same people, really did sink in, and the lesson that those squabbles hurt the president and the administration and thereby them, and--so, yeah, surely, there'll be disagreements. Strong-willed people, different points of view. But at the end of the day--and Cheney's going to be key in this--when the decision's made, there's going to be a lot of loyalty, and I think less other kinds of animus flowing out, that we saw in any earlier administrations.

MR. ORNSTEIN: Bud, let me just ask you one last question before we open up to the audience as a whole. One could pursue a thesis here, that Don Rumsfeld, in fact, may be the most revolutionary secretary of defense in modern times, having had all of this experience.

He has come in and, first, the signal of doing to Andy Marshall to head up the larger strategic review, that sense that he's not going to have "business as usual." That this is a man who clearly doesn't have much to lose in his own personal sense.

It's not like he's going to be thinking about going back to the defense industries, or world, so that if he breaks a lot of crockery, internally, it'll cause him any problems. That this may be a secretary of defense who moves towards a more fundamental reorganization of the Pentagon and its power structure than we have seen before.

Do you think that's likely, or possible?

MR. McFARLANE: I do think it's possible. I think it is virtually certain. The reality, that there is no cold war dimension, threat, and while there are severe threats, that the architecture and force structure key to that former threat needs fundamental change. Don Rumsfeld really gets it, and he has studied enough of the other real requirements, to understand, you really can't keep going the way we have.

What does surprise me, however, is that because Don's been around government for a long time, that the chiefs have not been more engaged in what is going on, because when you're going to come up with something profoundly different, you need the chiefs on board, obviously, and getting it to the Hill and then, of course, the Hill is the other dimension in the problem. You've got everybody's defense industry, from Ingalls [ph] to, well, every state in the union, that is not going to be accepting of fundamental change. That's going to lead to a massive clash, and--

MR. : My money's on Congress. No, seriously, I mean, I would point out that it is much easier to promise a revolution than to deliver it, because while everyone can, in theory, agree we ought to fix it, no one agrees on what the fix is, and I think that whereas, to go back to the discussion of Senator Coats, it may be true that Don Rumsfeld might be better at "ginning up" a program, or a revolutionary vision, or a strategy, it's not clear that he has the ability, or will have the ability or the resources to be able to sell that vision on the Hill, at least in part because the more revolutionary his proposal, the more opposition he's going to have in the Defense Department, and it's not just going to be sort of narrow-minded members of Congress saying, well, this is going to affect that defense plan in my district, but it's going to be that member of Congress not only saying that, but saying, "Listen, I just had a conversation with General So and So, or Admiral So and So, and he told me these guys are out of control."

MR. McFARLANE: You know, I think that's overdrawn. I'm trying to think of that kind of "white knight" in uniform, today, that really is going to be an outspoken Tom Moorer [ph], or I don't see it, nor do I see it on the Hill.

I don't see a Sam Nunn, a John Tower, or somebody that can intellectually argue defense strategy and really counter somebody of Don Rumsfeld's intellect. Yeah, there are going to be skirmishes, but I think Rumsfeld can carry the program.

MR. : You don't have to say things in public. You can say lots of things in private.

MR. McFARLANE: Yup.

MR. : [inaudible]. Ten bucks.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Hey, we're talking defense. Ten billion.

MR. : We're talking to Brookings Senior Fellow. Ten bucks.

[Laughter.]

MR. ORNSTEIN: Let's--do we have some questions.

MR. MANN: Yes, please wait for the microphone, and then please identify yourselves.

MR. MANN: My name is Paul Mann. I'm with Aviation Week. Following up on concerns about the allies, and attitudes among lawmakers, to what extent is this Defense Department borrowing trouble for itself in the future because it's neglecting, hasn't got the time to consider, right now, the rapid reaction force that Europe has proposed, which has drawn a great deal of ire on Capitol Hill. The issue continues to simmer.

There's a lot of talk about Fortress Europe and Fortress America again, and some people who argue that these kinds of family crises are common in NATO say this one is different.

MR. : I'm not sure that this one's the breaking point. I can think of other ones, like withdrawing from the ABM Treaty, that would be much worse in terms of breaking the crockery. So far, the administration has publicly made, in all its statements, the right noises with regard--or the noises that are pleasing to your European ears with regard to the rapid reaction force, which, let's be clear, is a force of 60,000 troops to be deployable for up to one year in peacekeeping and crisis management operations, not the kind of thing you are particularly worried about when you have a large military on this side.

What you may be worried about is the structure of decision making and planning being removed out of the alliance, and be separated from the alliance into Europe, and, here, I would argue, as the Clinton administration in the end did, and the State Department does now, you know, let's look at countries like Britain and Germany, and the Netherlands, to fight that battle for us. They don't want to leave NATO.

This is not a European cabal that is coming together to withdraw from NATO. There may be some people in the French Quay D'Orsay who'd like to do that, but, you know, that's okay. I really don't see that this is going to be the "make or break" point. I actually don't hear the Hill talking about the rapid reaction force in the same way that it used to be, even a year ago.

MR. WILSON: I'm sorry. I didn't mean to--if anybody else wanted to say something on that point. I didn't want to cut it off with my question. My name's Patrick Wilson. I work for Representative Mike Pence.

My question is before the Easter, Passover recess, 200 members of Congress sent a letter to the president asking for a fundamental reevaluation of the Mid East peace process, particularly the relationship with Israel and with the Palestinian Authority, and then of course this week, Secretary Powell made a significant statement about this relationship, particularly as it relates to recent Israeli activity in the Gaza Strip, et cetera.

What does that decision making vis-à-vis Powell and the president say about where things stand in policy making at the State Department and the real-life example of this reaction with Rumsfeld, et cetera?

MR. : Okay. I'll bite. I sort of draw back, a little bit broader, if I may, in terms of looking at the whole question of the Middle East peace process. I mean, the administration has, in essence, from the get-go, told everybody who's interested, that it doesn't see itself as playing an active brokering role like the Clinton administration. We're going to do it differently, we're basically going to take a breather, and the parties are willing to talk, and if they want us, they can come and knock on our door, and if we're not too busy, we'll come forward and do some--help them.

One can question that approach on sort of theoretical grounds, as to whether it's realistic to wait for them to figure out what they want to do. If you're going to wait for them, it may be a very long time, but if they can figure out, between themselves, what they want to do, what do they need the United States for?

The bigger danger in it is that it's not clear that that sort of hands-off policy is going to work, in part, because of how, you know, delicate or volatile things are in the Middle East right now. Witness what happened yesterday.

I think the administration discovered that it couldn't put it on hold, it had to come out and make some decisions, or make some announcements, and I think that's always going to be the temptation.

You think of it, the administration came in--I know this drives Carla crazy--but it basically said we're going to set our priorities. We're going to stay on message. We're not going to let events outside sort of set the agenda for us.

The argument was that the Clinton administration is often too reactive, its priorities were determined by other people, and what I think the Bush administration discovered in the first couple of months is that foreign policy is often some--it's not something that you do, but gets done for you, and that other actors have the ability to push issues on to your plate.

MR. McFARLANE: I think one of the reasons for their relative--it's not a difference, detachment, or appearance of detachment, as that while they, on the Israeli political spectrum, wouldn't be--and the Barak wing of policy--they're not all the way over with Ariel Sharon, and so I expect, in the recent sessions with the prime minister, there was not fulsome, all-out support expressed, typical of earlier exchanges.

The level of involvement will depend, very importantly, on the prime minister's level of promotion of [inaudible] Israel's policy. He is not the same man he was 20 years ago, in terms of espousing that point of view, but not far from it, and--

[Start tape two.]

MR. : [in progress] let's say you revisit the 1948 Key West agreement. I would imagine then you will have a real donnybrook, and I think Carla will have lots of opportunities, and her colleagues, at the Wall Street Journal, also have lots of opportunities to write wonderful stories.

But, right now, it's all theory. The "rubber has not met the road," and ask me the question two months from now.

MR. : Let me add two things. I actually think there's--of the seventeen or so panels that are doing the review, not one is looking at roles and missions, they're most functional, which is interesting. I think the other interesting aspect is if you want to be revolutionary about your defense policy, then shouldn't you also at least try to integrate your foreign policy into that revolution?

That is, presumably, your defense policy is, ought to be supportive of a more general foreign policy, with regard to what it is that you're trying to achieve, and as far as I can tell, the discussions between the revolutionaries in the Defense Department and the State Department, let alone anybody in the White House trying to coordinate this, is not of a high level. That is, it isn’t taking place as far as I can tell.

There may be that we will shift our defense resources, the revolution says, to Asia; but are we shifting our foreign policy in a similar manner, away from Europe? I don't know. I don't know whether that decision has been made. It may be made by the Defense Department but I'm not clear that that is a decision that belongs with the Defense Department, or, more importantly, ought to be decided by the Defense Department, without input of others that ought to be concerned about this.

I would just note that the president and his secretary of state are planning to travel to Asia, some time later in the year, whereas Colin Powell in his first two out of his three trips, if you include his trip to Mexico, went to Europe and the Middle East.

And that the president, after visiting his neighbors to the South and to the North, will take his first two trips also to Europe. That is partly because the calendar dictates that. APEC comes after the U.S.-EU summit, and the G-8 happens to be in Europe rather than in Asia. So there are reasons there.

But if you really think that our foreign policy is shifting to Asia, perhaps you would have made a trip a little earlier there, either as secretary of state or secretary of defense. As president.

MR. PERRY: Nick Perry, Center for Defense Information. The panel has more than intimated that the foreign policy process has been quite closed to the public and t o the media. Those of us in Beijing during the EP-3 incident saw our policy go from "We demand" to "Let's negotiate," and we never found out exactly why the shift.

This administration seems to keep its own counsel more than any other. Can we expect this to continue and maybe, more importantly, how will the media react in the long term for not getting access to the process?

MR. : Yeah, Carla.

MR. : This means war.

[Laughter.]

MR. : And how do we react when we don't get to read about it?

MS. ROBBINS: Well, I mean, I think Dan can answer this as--even better--or Andy, or any of the other--there's a lot of media, other media people here. Every administration comes in with the intention not to squabble, with the intention to stay on message, and with the intention to say the president made every single decision, including this decision to use the word "regret," and then it goes away, with time.

There's no question that certain presidents, over time, have had a better, more effective way of weaving their magic and deluding us in the press, and Ronald Reagan certainly did a really fabulous job with that, and the Clinton people seemed much more chaotic from the very start, in part, because they were chaotic people.

[Laughter.]

MS. ROBBINS: This appears to be a more grownup group. But at the end of the day, there are going to be fundamental differences, as there always are--differences because there's money differences, differences because there's philosophy differences, differences because there are huge egos involved. These grownups have very big egos and a lot of experience of running--all those years of running big organizations, and the idea of sort of subjugating their views, I don't think is going to last a particularly long time.

Now beyond the selfishness of the media, I would also like to think that it would be good for the public to know more, and I think that the idea of controlling a ll information or spinning a different view, that everybody suffers, and I think the Gulf War, and Vice President Cheney's role, then Defense Secretary Cheney's role, and that is a very instructive one.

When he was defense secretary, and he controlled our access to the war, we made a deal with them, they said they'd take us to the war if we didn't rush to it ourselves, and then we didn't rush it to ourselves and then they kept us pent up and made sure we didn't see the war. The net effect of this was that the American public came away thinking that wars were electronic games, and that nobody ever got hurt, at least not on our side.

Then that suddenly became the standard for the way we were going to fight wars, and, yes, think that's one of sort of the lessons in which we have a responsibility to the public, but that it sort of feeds back, as well, in the way policy is made, and probably the most chilling thing about this is that when then-Defense Secretary Cheney talked about some of the things he was proudest about, after the war, is he talked about how proud he was of his ability to control the press view of that, and I think it's cost something.

So I think this administration came in believing they can do it, and I've come in swearing they won't be able to.

MR. : But their desire to control media coverage, and influence media coverage describes the administration more broadly. I mean, I think if you look at then-Governor Bush's campaigns in '94 and '98, they would argue the hallmark of it was they had four points they wanted to make, and they made them, relentlessly, and they ignored everything else, and they stayed on message, and I think that that's--

MS. ROBBINS: But it's so much harder to stay on message when the world is changing so quickly, and hitting all the time in the face. I'm not, I don't worry about it, constantly, just probably twelve hours a day.

MR. : But I really think other parts of the administration didn't live through the Gulf War also take lessons away from their history, that says if you want to win, you got to control the agenda, and you don't leak, and you don't these things, and they're going to try very hard to do that.

MR. McFARLANE: I would challenge the view that it is somehow required, or to be presumed that an administration, while it is figuring it out, while it is doing its studies, that it ought to be bouncing these ideas off the readership of the Washington Post. Once you get your policy, yeah, then you have an obligation to engage, do backgrounders, and so forth. But I mean, if it's a complaint, that they are not opening up the analyses of options A, B, and C, right now, I don't buy it.

MR. : Well, I don't think Carla's asking for it for the readers of the Washington Post but for the readers of the Wall Street Journal.

[Laughter.]

MR. : Three years of the news pages of the Wall Street Journal.

[Simultaneous conversation.]

MR. : I happen to be a Wall Street Journal reader.

MR. : [off-mike] [inaudible], the coming of--

MS. ROBBINS: And a Gulf War victim.

MR. : --the coming summit in Quebec prompts the question whether trade issues are more broadly--globalization issues, and the pressures that we all are seeing on the rest of the economy, are being factored into foreign policy and defense issues, and whether a mechanism exists to integrate those two major [inaudible]?

MR. : Let me take that on, because the administration took as one of the lessons from the Clinton administration, that it was not good at integrating economic and foreign policy considerations. They argued that the response to the Asian financial crisis was dictated by the Treasury Department, and that the State Department was not a part of the decision making process, and that that, somehow, was wrong. Put aside the criticism, whether true or false. I would only point out that it was president Clinton who told the treasury secretary to take care of this problem, with the secretary of state in the room.

Nevertheless, that lesson led to a belief that the way you take consideration of economic issues in foreign policy is to integrate the policy formation of international economic questions within the NSC structure, something that hasn't been the case since 1971, when Richard Nixon decided that the integration of international and economic decision making and coordination within the NSC was not a smart idea, because the tendency is for foreign policy to dictate economic policy as opposed to economic policy influencing foreign policy.

Now, in part, realizing that, the administration has addressed this by creating a new deputy's position within the NSC, a deputy for international economics and national security affairs, who reports both to Condoleezza Rice and to Lawrence Lindsey, in the hope that if you dual-hat not just the staff on the international economic side, which was the case in the Clinton administration, but also their leader, you would get more integration, and, in theory, this is a very good idea.

In fact it's an idea that my colleague, Mack Desner [ph] and I proposed back in November.

But the theory is based on an assumption, which is that the National Economic Council, and its staff, and its coordinating responsibilities are as strong, senior, and significant as the National Security Council coordinating mechanism, and, here, one, the NEC staff is virtually nonexistent, and to the extent it exists, it deals with domestic economic and not foreign economic policy, and, secondly, all coordination of international economic policy takes, explicitly, part within the NSC structure, under NSPD-1, the National Security Presidential Decision 1, which lays out the structure of decision making.

It is the Principals' Committee of the NSC that does the coordinating of international economic policy making under the chairmanship of Larry Lindsey, if and when that issue gets decided.

The likelihood of this way of doing business is that you get even more decentralization of decision making on trade and international financial issues, that is, Bob Zoellick isn’t going to come to these kinds of meetings, he's going to do his own thing, and if he gets pulled in, he gets pulled in in the White House and by the chief of staff, which means there is no coordination between the foreign policy and trade policy making.

I note that Condoleezza Rice wanted, one, Bob Zoellick not to have a cabinet title, and, two, to integrate trade policy within the NSC, and she lost.

Second, that on international financial issues, it isn't clear that these highly complicated issues are best handled by having Condoleezza Rice or even the secretary of defense in the room. These are complicated issues, and because they are complicated, they won't have time to spend thinking about them, which means they tend to be done by the Treasury.

But what you will have, most likely, is decentralization of economic decision making rather than centralization of economic decision-making.

MR. : Carla?

MS. ROBBINS: Just two really quick points. One is that I always said President Clinton came in and he only got one thing on foreign policy, which is that he couldn't afford to have Russia go under, and President Bush has come in and he gets one thing on foreign policy [inaudible], which is that he's a free trader, and he really believes in it, and I think that the level of presidential commitment is going to push a lot forward here.

The other thing is that they came in believing also another thing, which is that they were extremely skeptical, they said, publicly, about intervention and bailouts, and things of that sort, and bailing out Wall Street. Governor Bush was a huge supporter of the peso bailout when he was the governor of Texas.

So they're going to have to work that one out. They're going to have to work it out on Turkey, in the very near future. They're struggling with it, but I think the fact of the matter, that as decentralized as it is, the fact that anybody can walk into the Oval Office and talk to the president about this, it should never be underestimated, the importance of it.

MR. ORNSTEIN: We'll take one last question here and then I think we'll wrap up.

MR. SUCHSTAVA [ph]: This is Manov Suchstava from Congressman Pallone's office. Last week, when the China crisis was going on, the External Affairs minister from India, Mr. Jaswansing [ph] was here, and he had a meeting with Secretary Powell, Rumsfeld, and then with Condi Rice, and when he was meeting with Condi Rice, President Bush stopped in, unscheduled, and then invited him into the Oval Office for 40 minutes.

Does this indicate that the policy towards India is becoming sort of a counterweight to increasing the competitive China, or is it something that has--is India on this administration's radar screen at all? Would you care to--

MS. ROBBINS: The president talked about India as a large and important power and ally that had been, he felt had been neglected, in one of his speeches. So at least he put it up there in a speech. I don't know who pushed putting that in that speech.

MR. : But it was an odd passage because it said India is a big powerful country, and, by the way, three of its five richest billionaires do software. Then it segued into a whole other issue. I mean, the broader question is what does this administration want its foreign policy to be? I think that's still in flux, in part, you know, as academics, what you like is sort of a broad vision that sets the grand parameters. I think probably Bud being a practitioner would say it can often be very hard to have broad visions because you're overwhelmed with so many things on a day-to-day basis.

I think that sort of they're, right now, trying to figure out not just where India fits into their foreign policy, but they're going to have battles over China, over Russia, a variety of other things.

So I think a lot of this is still in flux. It will be determined by, or shaped as much by specific events that occur, that they respond to, as it will be to a broad vision of where they want to go.

MR. ORNSTEIN: All right. Well, listen, thanks very much to Ivo and Bud, and Jim, and Carla, and thank you all for coming. We are adjourned.