Printable Version

Chuck Hagel on America's Role in the World

To listen to this event, download the audio file here.

Event Transcript:

MR. TIM ROEMER: Good afternoon. My name is Tim Roemer and I’m the president of the Center for National Policy and I welcome you to a forum entitled “What Took Place at Dinner in the” – no – (laughter) – a forum entitled “America’s Role in the 21st Century Foreign Policy,” and we couldn’t have a more qualified, a more experienced, a more articulate person, let alone senator, than we have here today in Senator Hagel.

Before I introduce Senator Hagel, I want to tell you a story about his quick wit. He, a few years ago, was a recipient of the Center for National Policy’s Distinguished Public Service Award, and we had Senator Hagel with Senator Kennedy and they were in a forum like this seated in chairs separated by the podium. And the award at that time was a clock that was a historical replication of a beautiful clock in Statuary Hall, so it had a couple of literally moving pieces to it.

And I had the honor of giving Senator Hagel the award and as clumsy as I can be and as uncoordinated sometimes as I can be, I went to hand it to him and part of the clock fell out and hit the floor, and Senator Hagel didn’t miss a beat. Literally, he said, “Hey, Roemer, that’s Kennedy’s clock.” (Laughter.) I don’t know if it meant Senator Kennedy was never on time or if it was a reminder to the senator to be more punctual, but Senator Hagel not only with his eloquence and policy statements, his willingness to speak the Midwest commonsense and talk about new ideas, but his good sense of humor that I’ve known through the years keeps us all on our toes and entertained.

Also before I introduce Senator Hagel, I just want to remind people about a couple of the events coming up that the Center for National Policy is hosting. I mentioned that we had the honor of honoring Senator Hagel a couple of years ago. We have an event coming up in June – June 19th – where we will be honoring in a bipartisan way Speaker Pelosi and Senator Susan Collins of Maine, particularly for their hard work on national security and national security reforms. So we hope you’ll mark your calendars with that and hopefully will attend.

Next week, we have an event that Senator Hagel might even want to attend. We have an event on Iraq, something he’ll speak eloquently too today. We have James Dobbins, former ambassador, somebody who’s worked extensively in Kosovo and Bosnia on the political and the economic side, combining with former General Bill Nash, who will talk about the military obstacles and options and what kind of package might we see put together to try to get to resolving that very difficult situation there.

We have the announcement of the war czar made yesterday. I don’t know if that’s an indication that the interagency process is broken and not working and you have to have somebody else to get State and the National Security Council working together. Maybe that’s a question that we’ll ask Senator Hagel is what he thinks of the creation of this new war czar.

Let me move from the Center for National Policy to the introduction of our distinguished guest and speaker. Back in the Vietnam War, it’s entirely appropriate as we look around this hall to have somebody of his experience here. Here we are in the hall honoring the brave and courageous people who have fought and served and sometimes died for our country – served here, served overseas. This hall where we honor the guard and reserve is certainly probably bringing back memories to Senator Hagel. He served in Vietnam with his brother Tom. They sent home five Purple Hearts to their mother. He’s a man who served with great distinguished honor and bravery and probably saved his brother’s life at one point and his brother saved his life since they were in the same infantry squad.

I think he has learned a lot from that war and he speaks eloquently about war today based on that experience. I think he’s trying to come up with ideas to solve the war and not posture to try particularly to put himself in a position to run for office. The ways that I know Senator Hagel, I know him by sitting in an audience with him watching hours and hours of baseball games that our sons played on the same team. His son Ziller and my son Matthew played on the same team, and you get to know somebody very well when you’re sitting there watching one batter walked after another by 11-year-olds. And it’s not only that Senator Hagel showed up for his son’s Ziller time after time and game after game, but you could see the great pride and love in his eyes as he watched his son perform out there on the field. He showed up and let Ziller know the entire game that he was there to support him. That shows a great deal to me about what kind of dad he is and what kind of family man he is.

I serve on a board with his wife Lilibet, the Meridian International Board, where she makes countless contributions to the community and that the board – we work hard to try to bring strategies forward on hearts and minds and exchanges of people to people, something that Senator Hagel’s wife works so diligently on. His son, his wife, his brother, his career where he’s involved in the United States Senate, efforts on the Banking Committee, the Foreign Relations Committee, and the Intelligence Committee to try to bring some bipartisan commonsense to different problems.

Will Rogers once talked about being on the right track is not good enough. You have to keep moving forward so that you’re not run over. Senator Hagel is not only so often with his commonsense in the Midwest on the right track, he is trying to move this country forward on the Iraq war, trying to find solutions to this problem and trying to find ways – bipartisan ways – that we can get sensible policy to resolve that issue.

So I hope all of you will join with me in commonsense, bipartisan Center for National Policy welcome to Senator Chuck Hagel from the great state of Nebraska.

Welcome, Senator Hagel.

(Applause.)

SENATOR CHUCK HAGEL: Tim, thank you. Tim, I’m always grateful when a Hoosier introduces a corn husker. There are very few things that our two states disagree on, but it seems annually there is some conflict over who produces more popcorn in the country, and if we could just confine our differences to that, we would be in a hell of a lot better shape in this country. But I think we have been the number one producer nonetheless. (Laughter.)

Tim noted that much of the secret to life – he didn’t say it exactly this way, but a measurement of success is not only being on the right track, but he didn’t say exactly this, but being on the track and going in the right direction helps, and he said avoiding being run over is always helpful. But what that always produces is some avoidable and unavoidable collisions, and that’s what this business is about: governing. And those collisions are there for the very reason as to who we are and our form of government and expressing ideals and standards and ideas about influencing the future course of the country and the people in the world we live in today – (it’s the world?).

And so I am particularly grateful that I have an opportunity to exchange some thoughts today with you, but I am very appreciative of what you’re doing in this organization because, as I noted to Tim, Craig, and some others a few minutes ago, at a time when the world is very complicated – it is swirling at a rate almost that’s incalculable, the rate of change over the last 60 years, and that is condensed in smaller and smaller timeframes every year, every five years. Regulation can’t keep up with it. Government can’t keep up with it. The world markets can’t keep up with it. And that also produces challenges that are more complicated and in many ways more dangerous than we have ever seen before.

And if a nation is to remain free and active and engaged and lead and, as Tim noted, not getting run over, then it’s going to require an informed nation. It’s going to require an educated nation. It’s going to require an engaged nation. And forums like this have nothing to do with me. Forums like this help do that and we never have enough of these kinds of forums because they are all about interests that are far greater than individual interests or corporate interests or union interests or any other special interest.

We also are dealing in this town – Tim certainly this and many of you who have worked on the Hill in a number of the elected bodies – at a time when the dynamics of the so-called special interests are wrapped around almost every issue and every facet of every issue. Now, I am not one who has ever called for, nor would I be, to short-circuit guarantees that are enshrined in the Constitution on allowing individuals to lobby it or make their case, make their point. I was a sinful lobbyist once, which I acknowledge freely. Lobbyists are important and interests are important because we need to hear from those interests, but what’s happened in my opinion is that that cycle of influence is now so pervasive in ways that we can’t quite calculate that does inhibit decision-making. And it does conflict with, in many times and many cases, the greater interest of the country.

For example, who is the lobbyist in Washington for the greater interest of America? Now, you all claim you are; I claim I am. But really who does that? How many lawyers and lobbyists do we have on that payroll of the greater interest of America? Well, we don’t have any. And there’s where leadership is critically important, and when you have to go against your party or go against your president or go against some of your constituents – the very constituents that put you in office or the very interests that helped fund your campaign to put you in office. If you think there’s a greater cause or if you feel strongly enough about going in a different direction for the good of the country, that’s our obligation. That’s the responsibility we have.

And I set that up because what we are dealing with in this country and the world today – these mid-21st century challenges and opportunities represent a time in the history of man unequalled by any other time. Now, we can say that in every generation, every century, every decade and it would be right. But just as an example, if you take a few minutes and go back and read Dwight Eisenhower’s farewell address in January, 1961, which I recommend you all read – many of you have – it’s a short speech, five pages long. He packs as much in that five pages as I’ve ever seen packed in a speech and I think it’s one of the best speeches ever given by a president. That speech was famously labeled the Military Industrial Complex speech, which he mentions that at the end, but that’s not what all that speech is about. That speech is about a number of other things other than, and by the way, there is a word left out of that speech that had been in the original draft. Military Industrial Congressional Complex, and they took “Congressional” out because it might be a little too edgy and a little too tough, so he took it out.

But when you read that – through that speech what Eisenhower talked about, he talked about leaders, nations, institutions, individuals, corporations, unions lead through a certain moral authority, through a certain moral force, through an inspirational, enlightened leadership. You don’t lead through just raw power. You can get away with that for a while, but you will never sustain that leadership because people respond to a higher standard, to a higher expectation in a country like America, and I think this country represents the highest expectations.

I think we’re in danger in losing some of that today. I think we are seeing a numbing down, a dumbing down of expectations and standards and we just kind of glide through it. And in many ways in this town, we have blown past the ethical boundaries of behavior. We now play on the legal limit edge. Well, if the question can be answered on the basis “is it legal?” – and there’s a difference between ethics and legality, as you all know, because that – ethics is about a standard of behavior, and we’ve blown past that in this town. The world as it peers in and evaluates this great country called America – and Reagan was right, I believe and I always believed this when he referred to America as the “Shining City on the Hill.” We’ve made our mistakes, we are flawed, we stumble as individuals, as humans do, as leaders do, but we have always, always held to a higher plateau of behavior, of conduct, of standards.

And if we lose that in our generation – and I think we’re dangerously close to that, and you can take any measurement of that within our own society, within – in polls taken about what the rest of the world thinks about America today, our perception – the perception of others about America – that reverse optics is as low as it’s ever been by any standard in countries that have been very strong allies over many years. Take a country like Turkey. Turkey has been probably as indispensable an ally for America as there has been since World War II. (Inaudible) Australia. What better friend does America have than Australia? You look at those survey numbers, whether it’s Pew, whether it’s Gallup it doesn’t make any difference – Zogby in the Middle East – and astoundingly low. I mean, in the single digits some countries what they think of America.

Now, I suspect that we could dismiss that partly by saying, well, great powers are always resented. That’s true. I think a certain amount of that resentment is built in and we are the most dominant power on earth, probably – I wasn’t alive at the height of the Roman Empire, but I suspect there’s not been a time in world history where one nation has so completely dominated the earth like America dominates today, whether you measure that in gross domestic product. The second largest economy in the world isn’t even half of our economy; particularly military power. Every measurement of power, we are in a different universe.

We are seduced by that power in very dangerous ways and therein lies, I think, a great and maybe the most fundamental challenge to our security interests for the future. I said somewhere recently that I felt one of the great challenges for America in the next few years, probably generation, certainly the next set of presidents we have is to reintroduce America to the world. And I say that because if, in fact, what I’m saying has any relevancy at all, and some of what I’m saying is, in fact, fact, then we’re going to have to do something different than what we have been doing or we will not have the moral clarity, authority to lead the world.

At a time when the world is exploding with new possibilities and new powers and new development, China, India, Brazil – every corner of the earth that’s pushing America in every industry, in every field, whether it’s financial services, you could calculate those issues by looking at things such as over the last two years we had more than 30 large international corporations delist from the New York Stock Exchanges. To give you a better example, in 2002, 60 percent of all the international IPOs were listed in (New York?). Last year it was 16.

Either you could take hours and look across the arc of measurements of interests and you see where this is going. We should welcome a great amount of this because it represents standards of living improving. That means a more global standard in behavior, whether it’s China or Russia or Vietnam, the WTO, all imperfect, all problems, of course. But that’s the whole point of international standards. That’s why these great leaders after World War II, like Eisenhower and Truman and Marshall and others, came up with these coalitions of common interests, like, General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade, NATO, the United Nations, World Bank, IMF. Well, it was to standardize some element of global behavior and standardize some dynamic of trade. And the point being it helps standardize, legitimize, and help produce countries that are responsible – responsible governments: rather than sending armies across each other’s borders when there’s a conflict, fight it out on the floor of the WTO. Common interests, common challenges, common responses. That’s what that was about 60 years ago, and it has produced a pretty good world, with all the problems that we’ve had and all the difficulties.

You think of what’s happening in the world in the last 60 years has been truly historic. Let’s start with no World War III. That’s not a bad an accomplishment. I suspect if the great leaders – and Eisenhower talked about this, by the way, in that speech that I referred earlier to about the great power and menace and challenge of atomic weapons, of nuclear capability – how that could in his words in that speech destroy civilization. We will not let that genie out of the bottle. Something’s worked: no World War III. We have improved greatly the standards of living of many people across the world. Not everyone has benefited, of course. You look at the advances in every discipline – science, medicine, transportation, technology – every area there’s been astounding advances.

Now, the trouble spots in the world today are clearly defined, starting with the Middle East. Are there areas of the world that were left behind over the last 60 years. They are the troubled parts of the world because they didn’t benefit from these great advances of mankind: the Middle East, most of Africa, North Korea, some of the countries of Latin America. Go right through every troubled spot. No human recognition of human conditions, dignity, any form of liberty, self governance. Market economies don’t exist in those areas, so we shouldn’t be too shocked that Islamic fundamentalism or other radical ideas incorporate the tactics of terror for their own ends and they prey on those who are in cycles of despair, in cycles of poverty.

And I don’t associate necessarily a direct link between poverty and terrorism: bin Laden has disproved that. But we do know that when man is without dignity, not much else matters. And the human condition always drives every action, every element of mankind. Throughout history it has. You can’t chain people up. Eventually something will break. The Soviet Union is a fairly recent example of that. For 70 years, they dominated a good deal of the earth and it broke – and it broke. Hundreds of years, millennia of history.

So reintroducing America to the world, in my opinion, is going to be one of the great challenges we have to keep a stable, secure, developed world moving, as Tim says, in the right direction – on the right track. The reason I say a reintroduction because the world today, 6.5 billion people, the great majority of those citizens of the globe were not alive during World War II or after World War II. When you look at the 6.5 billion people and you recognize that only two billion are under the age of 25 years old – and in Iran, for example, two-thirds of the people in Iran are under the age of 25 years old. Vietnam, a country of about 80 million people, 60 percent of those people are under the age of 20 years old. Societies that are growing older are the United States – the percentage of the population – are the United States and Europe.

The rest of the world where the great breakthroughs are occurring in development are the young nations, the youth, the nations that have all that youth. So their connection to America is essentially nonexistent because most of the world was alive during World War II or certainly after World War II that has some connection to America’s role. I don’t mean in World War II, but what America had to do and lead with their allies after World War II to rebuild the world. Certainly it was in our self-interest, but it was in the interest of all nations. There is no zero-sum game here, and these great leaders – post-World War II that I’ve mentioned – some of them understood that and they understood that if we were not to revert back to a very bloody 50 years of the first 20th century, then we were going to have to do something dramatically different.

I think we’re going to do something dramatically different over the next few years for America. Reengaging the world. You engage your enemies. Things don’t get better when you don’t talk to people. And in a hair-trigger world with every little margin of error – proliferation of weapons of mass destruction the most easy to identify on this – then you have to recalibrate policies, directives, engagement, reintroduce in who we are engagement that have worked very well for us for 60 years. Foreign students coming to our country to learn. We’ve got an immigration policy today that’s ridiculous. It doesn’t look. It undermines our own self-interests. Many of our regulations and polices undermine our self-interests because we’re not thinking in the light or context of security except build fences on our borders, build up your military, and there’s a military solution.

The security of America does not rest with a military solution, just like General Petraeus has said, or any general that I’ve talked to in Iraq or in the Pentagon, the solution in Iraq cannot only be a military solution. Vietnam was not a military solution. Algeria was not a military solution. It will be a political accommodation. Now, the military has a role in that, but we’re asking our military to do things it can’t do. If we’re going to project military power in the world thinking somehow that that is going to be the most significant weapon we have for the national security of this country, we are dangerously mistaken.

Our nation’s security is going to depend on relationships. That means a seamless network of intelligence gathering and sharing, working with our allies across the world to stop these things before they start to get into any kind of operational, active mode. We can’t produce enough Marines and paratroopers to put it around the world. If you lose the people of a country, you’ve lost. That’s what’s happening in Iraq today. That’s what’s happening in Iraq.

Engagement, relationships, exchanges, reaching out – commerce does that as well as any one thing. Trade does that as well any one thing. Trade can do things that no government program can do, partly because it enhances the standard of living for people. Trade is not a guarantee. It’s an opportunity. That opening up, letting the world see again who we are, what we believe, what our standards are.

Abu Ghraib is a good example of the damage that can be done to a country. We ought to close Guantanamo not because there are not bad people out there wanting to do damage to us, but we ought to be smarter than that. These kind of things represent frameworks and images for America that do not enhance us, they diminish us. Torture the (unintelligible) issues that we’d have debates up here about torture. Is torture a legitimate form to protect our national security? Colin Powell spoke clearly about this. Some of our great leaders of our time has spoken clearly about this.

America has always held itself to a higher standard. If we lose that, then we would have lost the moral authority to lead world and it will do great damage to our country, and my 14-year-old son who Tim talked about, the baseball player, and my 16-year-old daughter will inherit a very dangerous complicated world. The world wants America to lead. They don’t want us to impose. They don’t want us to dictate. There is some form of justice and tolerance that must also be incorporated in our foreign policy that connects directly to our national security. We can’t go around the world say we’re going to make the world safe by invading countries and bringing democracy to countries whether they like or not. If a country wants to move in a democratic direction, we should be there to help, we should be there to assist, we should do everything we can. We can’t impose that. The future of Iraq will be determined by Iraqi people. I don’t know where that’s going to go. We’re in a lot of trouble.

We’re undermining our most valuable interest in the Middle East in the way we’re handling this with our allies there. Even Saudi Arabia, one of our strongest allies – Saudi Arabia is one of our strongest allies, has been since World War II, called America’s involvement in Iraq an illegitimate occupation. Now, that got some attention around here. But that’s the reverse optics that we somehow have missed here that we are going to have to reengage and that, in my opinion, is where we must move before we have any legitimate talk about national security interests. Of course, sovereign nations always have as its highest priority the security of their nations, the security of the country. Of course, that’s not debate. What is debatable? If we do it wisely or smartly or if we do it foolishly, and we’re doing it foolishly. We’re ruining our military with what we’re asking them to do. Putting them in situations they shouldn’t be put in. Iraq’s a good example.

A national intelligence estimates came out two months ago and said what’s going on in Iraq is not an al Qaeda front, it’s not a centerpiece for terrorists. Are they there? Yes, they are there. Were they there before we got there? No. What’s going on in Iraq, our national intelligence agencies say, is a violent, sectarian war, clearly complicated by an (intra-sectarian?) war. Those are not my words. Those are the words of the 16 intelligence agencies of this country. And if that’s what’s going on –and I just came back three weeks ago from my fifth trip over there and it’s worse every time I’m there by any measurement – then we’re going to have to change the focus.

I said on the floor of the Senate yesterday that we’re going to have to change our policies because, as General Petraeus, as Secretary Gates, every one of our journalists has said, General Nixon (ph) in the north last week, we can’t continue to sustain ourselves as an occupation power – essentially the government – in Iraq indefinitely. And as Secretary Gates said, this is not an open-ended commitment. We can’t do that. It is impossible to do.

We can hold for a while. We can try to buy more time now in our fifth year, but at some point there must be a political accommodation around that by Iraqis. They must take responsibility for their future and for their government. I don’t know where that goes, but the fact is we are now dealing with a great number of uncontrollables and very few good options. So I said yesterday we should start to think about not this debate going on in the Senate (inaudible) three votes this morning on it about how does the president get his $100 billion. That money is going to be there. It needs to be there. We’ve been debating conditions. Well, okay, if we want to continue to do that, what are the conditions? Should we have benchmarks and what are those?

What I said yesterday is what I referred to somewhere as the hockey puck dimension of foreign policy. You don’t skate to where the puck is, you skate to where you think the puck will be. And you’d better be skating to this fall. You’d better be skating the way you think things are going to be in Iraq this fall because that’s what we’re coming down to. And I said I think we should start thinking about things like a UN mediator, getting the U.S. face out of and off of the political process in Iraq. You all know by any poll number the Iraqis now believe we’re occupiers. You also know the Iraqi Parliament last week – more than half of the parliament signed a draft bill talking about timelines as to when America leaves Iraq.

That’s where this will go in a sovereign nation – which we say they are a sovereign nation – asking us to leave, to get out by a certain time. Are we not going to? (If we?) hear that, we’ll have no choice. Of course we will. But at the same time, we have interests in the Middle East. We have interests in Iraq. We can’t precipitously just pull out, but if we don’t change course and we do some new things, I think a UN mediator to come in and try to bring some accommodation and work together day in and day out. Obviously, the Iraqis are incapable of doing it. There’ll have to be some credible outside force to help bring that together. It can’t be America. It cannot be America. We can help support it. We can keep some kind of force structure there to do it. We can provide continued money for economic development and other things, but we have to take the American face out of this because we are undermining our own interests and our ability to not only influence, but to have any hope for any kind of lasting – and certainly the immediate future – outcome that at least brings some stability, some core stability to Iraq.

That’s what we’ve got to get to now, and this grandiose talk about democracy flourishing all over Middle East, which was always astounding to me since every one of our allies other than Israel was a kingdom. Jordan’s not a democracy. Saudi Arabia’s not a democracy. I think you could probably argue about Egypt. The Gulf States, Kuwait – those are not democracies. But yet they’re very important and strong allies. So we are a long away from seeing democracies flourish and pop up all over the Middle East. We need just some core stability in Iraq.

The other part of this, as I mentioned earlier in Baker-Hamilton, their 79 recommendations had it just right in my opinion. You use all your instruments of power – diplomatic, economic, military – and use them at the same time. It’s an (arc?) that you use and you can’t use one without the other. And they said firstly, engage Iran, engage Syria. There’ll be no peace in Middle East, certainly in Iraq without Iran’s involvement, without Syria’s involvement. That doesn’t mean that somehow we change our attitude thinking that these are good people. I think the people in Iran are good people. The leadership is what we’re talking about – the leadership in Syria. And we’re going to have to somehow find some way to engage.

Now, the administration, as you know, is scheduled to have our Ambassador Crocker talk with the Iranians here shortly, which I think is exactly what needs to be done. Secretary Rice saw the Syrian foreign minister briefly in Sharm-el-Sheikh a week ago, but there has to be follow-through. There has to be follow-up. And that’s why I think a mediator under the auspices of the United Nations like we had in Afghanistan, like we had in East Timor, like we had in Kosovo, like we had in North Ireland, is partly what we want are going to have to be looking toward.

An imperfect job? Absolutely. But let’s frame this up with the facts of life, ladies and gentlemen. You have chaos now in Iraq. The Middle East is more dangerous, more combustible than it has been since any time before World War II. Where is there stability in the Middle East? Lebanon? The government of Israel? Everywhere you look, we have huge problems and we have – we run the risk of seeing this lap over outside the borders of Iraq into potential of a sectarian war in the Middle East, and that potential is very real unless we change some course on strategy and policy.

Well, all of this can be done and all of these is within our grasp to try to shape this. We can’t control it all. The great powers have always recognized their limitations. Arnold Toynbee may be the greatest historian of history of all times in his magnificent book, The History of Civilizations, he writes about 24 civilizations. And there’s one component of each civilization that is always, I believe, determinate whether they last or not – and 24 have not. Challenge, response. Challenge, response. We have a set of challenges today that we have never had before. These challenges are far more complicated. It will depend on how we respond to those challenges as to the future of my children, your children and grandchildren and the world.

There’s a tremendous amount of burden on the United States. I recognize that and you do too. We didn’t ask for it, but we have it. And I don’t think anyone would trade that. I don’t want my children to grow up in a world where America is not the leader of the world because the next leader may not be near as judicious and benevolent with its power as America has been with our power, even though we’ve made mistakes and we will make more.

But we’ve got to come together to grips with all these larger dynamics and start thinking through what happens this fall and about debating that. What happens next year rather than this nonsense that we’re consumed with here?

And the last point I’d make on this and we’ll open up (inaudible). Tim said something to me when I first got here about presidential politics and what that’s doing to the world and the country and so on. There’s no question that starting a presidential campaign essentially in January of this year, two years before the elections, has affected the ability of the Congress to govern. It has parallelized, locked down our ability to govern. And why is that? It’s not the fault of Hillary or Obama or John McCain or anyone else who’s running for president in the Congress. That is the way it is.

The reality is most likely you’re going to have the four major candidates maybe six, possibly an independent – I don’t know – but certainly four Democrat and Republican presidential and vice presidential candidates. I suspect most of them are going to come from the Congress. My guess is at least two will come from Congress. And do you believe honestly that somehow the two parties and the White House and everybody jockeying for advantage with the debates already started and the presidential campaign started at a very heated clip – and normally you don’t see them until the fall before a campaign, or at least the year before – do you think that is conducive to any kind of nonpartisan consensus to try to get things done? Of course, not. It makes it worse, and that’s what you’re seeing right now. And it’ll only get worse and that’s why it’s even more dangerous.

Here, I’m talking about – some of the things I’m talking about is that we must find some bipartisan consensus on Iraq and on our future, our security, and we can’t wait. We can’t wait for two years for the next president to take office, or a year and a half and that new administration. Too much is going to happen in the world in the next year and a half, not just in Iraq. Too much is going to happen that’s going to affect our security.

So some of us have tried to move in the direction, as Tim said – I use his analogy again at least in the direction we think is the right direction for our country. That means you take your party on, your president on and you do it. But that’s leadership. That’s what we’re here for. We’re supposed to do that. It seems to me that’s an expectation the American people have when they send us here. It doesn’t mean that they’ll all agree with it. I can attest to you they don’t. But as I said once, if you want a safe job, go into another line of business.

This is an important time in the history of this country, probably it’s an important time as we’ve seen in modern history and I think it’s the most important time certainly since World War II. I think it’s that important and that big, and I go back and will end with what I said earlier about your organization – all of you who have an interest in these things. It is important to stay engaged and have these forums, get candidates in and talk about it, and then offer your comments as well.

Well, I’m hopeful about our future. If I wasn’t, then I would get out and turn this over to someone who is hopeful. But in order to be hopeful, you have to be honest and you have to say it straight and you have to let the American people know we’re in trouble. That’s not despair. If you’ve got a health problem, the first thing your doctors will tell you is you better be honest with the fact that you’ve got a problem. How do we fix it? How do we fix it? That’s what politics is about. That’s what governments are about: making a better world. How do you fix it?

Well, you’ve been generous with your time. I appreciate. I’d be glad, Tim, to respond to anything you want to talk about. Thank you.

MR. ROEMER: Please join me in (inaudible). (Applause.) Very nicely done.

Before we open it up to the floor, as president of Center for National Policy, I get the opportunity to ask the first question. And so maybe as the president, you’ll get that opportunity someday if you run. As a think-tank president, it is so great – it’s a dream for a think-tank president and a think-tank to have a 40-minute statement that is comprehensive, that is global in nature and that lays out strategically some answers to some problems and that is not just peppered with sound bites for the media. That is exactly what we try to do in the think-tank world and we’re very grateful for your time and all of the thought that went into that statement, Senator.

So now, I’ll probably ask one that isn’t so thoughtful. If you’re frustrated with the political process, which many people in this country are – more and more people are independent – why not run as an independent or as a Republican or a Democrat? Why not form a third party to try to get your foreign policy ideas forward?

SEN. HAGEL: Well, I think that’s a very active question and it is going to be with us for the next year. And I’m certainly not the only one that might have an interest in moving in a little different direction than where we’ve seen politics moving in the last few years, but I would start with this. I believe we’re living at the most unpredictable, dynamic time in the history of the world. Politics just mirrors and reflects what’s going on in society, in the world. We are products of that. We respond to that. We react to that. And because of that uncertainty and unpredictability, I believe we are seeing and will see over the next year, year and a half, as we lead up to the presidential elections, a very, very fluid, unpredictable political situation in this country.

What do I mean by that? What I mean by that is you look at any poll numbers on any candidates in the two major parties and no one has been breaking out of a pattern. Partly that’s because we’re so early in this, partly because most Americans are sick of it – are sick of all of us. Read the polls: our poll numbers – job approval in the Congress – are in the 20s, just like the latest Newsweek poll on Bush. Neither party is seen as an enhancer or a glittering new dimension to lead this country. Democrats are down in the swamp just like the Republicans are. So all that unpredictability and that swirl and these challenges and there’s nothing like a war that will crystallize that like it is. And you’ve got a situation with the war where the majority of Americans have left the president’s policy. You’ve got a third of the Republican base that has left the president on this, and I think that continues to erode across the board.

So you’ve got, in one sense, a perfect storm brewing here that’s going to blow into next year, where I think anything is possible. And I really do believe that. I think the legitimacy of an independent candidacy is a possibility. Would that be difficult? Of course, it’d be difficult. To get 217 electoral votes, no third party effort or independent – not even a third party, but an independent ticket has ever come even in the realm of getting that done. Does that mean it couldn’t be done? No. Not at all, I don’t think.

But your more specific question for me is: why not? I have said I’ll make a decision on my political future later by the end of the summer. For me, it’s certainly the first, my family. I’m not at all concerned that my family couldn’t go through this presidential run. I – my wife, my children. Now, they would be exceptional people in something like this, I believe. But when you get through your personal inventory of issues as far as your family, then you’ve got to look at the cold, hard reality of where do you think realistically you might have an opportunity to influence the outcome of an election. You can’t get too far ahead of yourself on the influence of the direction of the country because you’re going to have to get elected first.

But then you also look at are there other ways to influence your country? Are there other ways you can contribute other than elected office? You’re a very good example of that. You voluntarily stepped out of Congress, where I think most people believe in Indiana and others that you had essentially an unlimited career ahead of you in politics, but for the reasons you chose, you stepped out. You’re still involved. You’re still engaged. You’re still leading. So I don’t dismiss other ways maybe to help make a better world or change the world, but the reality of all that has to fit me, has to fit with my family, has to fit in the components of an election.

I don’t know, for example, in my party if we get down into later this year if a Republican – I’m a conservative Republican. I’m a conservative Republican not because I say I am, because look at a voting record. If you want to judge anybody, look at their voting record. But I also have strong beliefs in other areas that don’t necessarily coincide with where my party is or the president of my party right now; foreign policies being one of them.

Will I have an opportunity? Would there be a fit for me? Would there be a role for me? Would there be an opening for me in my party? I would have to assess that, as I am. Those are uncontrollables I can’t determine. I can’t fix that. I am who I am. I’ve said what I believe and this is who I am, and I’ve never tried to calculate a vote based on a political career or a political position.

Second, if I do not think I have an opportunity there in my own party, is it in any way viable – a third party or an independent ticket? But all those things would have to – and will be considered before I make a decision and then whether I would want to stay in the Senate. Do I think I would be in a position in a third term in the Senate to have a chance to influence things the way I hope I could? (Inaudible) as I said just get out and do something else. I know that’s not a good answer, but that’s the best answer I can give you. It’s the most honest answer I can give you.

MR. ROEMER: Let’s open it up to the floor.

Q: I was curious, what are you hearing from other Vietnam War veterans specifically about Iraq and the war on terror? I’m talking about (inaudible) we don’t have a national platform (inaudible).

SEN. HAGEL: Well, I think that not unlike most Americans, the views vary on the issue. I’ve never seen any kind of a particularly sophisticated or any other kind of study on 500 Vietnam veterans and what their ideas or attitudes are about the Iraq war, how we’re handling the Iraq war. I’ve never seen anything like that. My answer would be based on the anecdotal information when people talk to me. I would say – and trying to be as honest as I can for both sides here because I just don’t have good information. I can only respond because you asked the question what I’m hearing. Almost every Vietnam veteran that I’ve talked to, whether it’s in Nebraska or anywhere, who seeks me out – but that’s a reason. They seek me out because they know who I am, I suspect. Most Vietnam veterans I don’t think would seek me out because they disagree with me, but, nonetheless, almost all of them share my position on Iraq.

Now, again, they’re going to probably come and be sympathetic to me because I share their view or they share mine. I doubt many of them who think I’m an idiot or think I’m totally wrong are going to spend much time with me.

So I don’t have a good answer as to where the Vietnam veterans are on this. All I can tell you is that the people that I have talked to – almost invariably they have shared my position.

MR. ROEMER: Is there time for maybe one or two more questions? (Inaudible.)

Q: President Bush (inaudible). I’m just wondering what you think about the increasingly bellicose remarks coming out of the Kremlin (inaudible).

SEN. HAGEL: Well, it’s always a concern when you have a power like Russia who ratchets that rhetoric up. I think certainly – the example being Secretary Rice’s trip over there, and the papers this morning were filled with stories about both Putin and Rice – as I said, one of the headlines, have agreed that we need to ratchet that rhetoric down on both sides.

You’ve got some pretty touchy issues here between the U.S. and Russia right now. One is the missile defense systems that we’ve talked about putting on the border of Russia and those Eastern European countries, Poland being one of them. You’ve got some energy issues. The other problem which we need to pay attention to is the decisions that were made by Turkmenistan and Kazakhstan to run up through the north (of their?) countries, their national – nationally-owned natural gas pipelines to connect with the Russian pipelines that feed into Europe. That’s a concern because it gives Russia even more power than it already has to feed natural gas and oil into Europe, meaning the Europeans are very dependent on the Russians.

We’ve got – Iran has been a touchy issue with them. We’ve just got to do a better job in my opinion. I don’t blame us for this, but I think we’ve got to smart. It’s partly what I was talking about a little forward-thinking here and kind of building into a larger, global strategic policy – which I don’t think we have one, quite frankly – integrating into the fabric of that. Deal with Russia. Deal with China. China and Russia are going to be great powers. They are out there now and that isn’t going to change. We’re not going to intimidate them out of that. We’re not going to bludgeon them out of that. We’re not going to go attack them – at least I hope not. So we’ve got to be smart how we handle. There are always going to be differences here. There’re always going to be issues that we have. There are issues with our best allies. Now, we’ve got to be smarter in how we’re dealing with the Russians, it seems to me. Well, there are things in Russia going on that I don’t like either – a lot of things.

But one thing – and I’ll end with – my answer is already too long for this – but one thing I would end on and I think it’s important: we’ve got to understand – this country, America – that when you (frame up?) a nation or a government of a nation – first, let’s remember where we came from. A hundred years ago, half the people in this room could not even vote in America. Some in this room until the mid-‘60s hardly had an opportunity to vote. I mean, we have to make adjustments to this great democracy year after year. You couldn’t vote when we first founded this great country unless you were a land owner, unless you were very sophisticated. So we’ve got to have a frame of reference when we judge other people and other governments.

And what Putin did when he came in – there was complete chaos in Russia. Now, do I subscribe to all the methods? No, but one thing he did do – and this is certainly in the national security sinterest of America and the world – he stabilized Russia. He did it the Russian way, but you’ve got to remember where they’re from. What is their culture? What’s their history? Their history is not American. Their history is different. We’ve got to be smart. That’s another part of what I’m saying is a frame of reference in dealing with people, some tolerance here, too, as to where they’re coming from, where their history is coming from. We try to move (her in?) directions, we try to encourage them, we tried to influence them, we try to do the things that foreign policy do do.

But before we judge Putin too harshly here, go back and remember what Russia was going through when he took over. A destabilized Russian with the nuclear weaponry it has – we better get very (cerebral?) about what could have happened here if some things hadn’t stabilized. So before we’re quick to judge the rest of the world, we should inventory our own situation a little bit.

Q: (Off mike.)

SEN. HAGEL: Yeah, I’ll do that.

Q: Given the strategic push by China in Africa in (inaudible) resources and so forth (inaudible).

SEN. HAGEL: Well, we’ve been doing some pretty good work in Africa. Thanks to General Jim Jones, a former NATO commander and the deputy USAREUR commander, and General Chuck Wall (sp) (inaudible) trips the last two years working around Africa trying to bring some coordination to exchange programs, help through economic assistance – doing things that make a difference. (Inaudible) you guys are so much aware of, the human condition. When we can enhance the human condition in a country, that makes more friends for America than anything else we can do – just the human condition.

Now, on China. When I was in Africa last time a year ago, I was in nine countries in the Gulf of Guinea, that surrounding area (inaudible). Every country I was in, China was there. And here’s what China was doing. They were doing long-term energy contracts, but they’re doing something else. Every country I was in, they were either building a railroad for the country or a soccer stadium for the country or doing something to enhance the quality of life for the people of those countries. That’s what they were doing, and they were making a lot of friends.

We need again – back to my point – to be doing things that are smarter for us. You talked about hearts and minds, about what Eisenhower talks about hearts and minds in his 1961 speech.

I’ll take one more and we’ll wind up. Yes?

Q: Thank you. What is your assessment of what we should do (off mike) and what would the consequences of that be?

SEN. HAGEL: Well, I think it’s really dangerous to be talking about using military force against Iran. We obviously have the mightiest military force in the world. That capability is there, that option is there. I think what we should be doing about Iran is I hope – which would be the beginning – when Ambassador Crocker meets with the Iranian ambassador would be the beginning of a new arc of interest where we can explore all our differences. I don’t think you can ever dictate to a country, especially like Iran. Iran is one of the most powerful countries in the Middle East, if not the most powerful. It has resources. It’s sophisticated. It has a 3,000-year history. They are smart people. This is not a disorganized, chaotic society. We have very little good intelligence on Iran, on where their nuclear capabilities are, what they are.

So I don’t think you could put preconditions on any nation if you’re serious – we’re serious about dealing with them. I don’t think even isolate issues. We’ll talk to you about Iraq this month and then if you comply with all the things we’re going to tell you to do, then we may talk to you about your nuclear issues in two months. I don’t understand that. Why wouldn’t you take the entire arc of problems and disagreements that you’ve got? You build relationships based on a foundation where you can agree. You build that foundation. It may be thin, and Iran’s case it probably will be.

But let’s not forget we went into Afghanistan, for two years we worked very closely with the Iranians on Afghanistan. They gave us invaluable intelligence. Why was that? They want to be buddies with us or they like us or they want to help us? No. Very clear: it was clearly in their self-interest. They didn’t want the Taliban on their border, all that represented, the consequences of that. They truly, absolutely didn’t want the drugs coming in – the poppy, opium coming in. It was very much in their interest.

Those common-denominator interests are what we have to find, and then we work through those differences. You do it in a very clear-headed way. You don’t delude yourself into thinking somehow you’re going to convert them or they’re going to be better next week or you can sweet-talk them. It doesn’t work that way. That’s not foreign policy. That’s not engagement. Nations respond in their own self-interests. Individuals respond in their own self-interests. That’s good. That’s good because it’s predictable. The world becomes very dangerous when there’s great unpredictability. That’s what we don’t want because that leads to miscalculation, misunderstanding, and conflict.

Thank you.

(Applause.)

(END)

TRANSCRIPT PROVIDED BY
DC TRANSCRIPTION & MEDIA REPURPOSING