“How do we expand the community of free market democracies around the world?”
Michèle Flournoy is the Co-Founder & Managing Partner of WestExec Advisors. She was also the United States Undersecretary of Defense for Policy from 2009-2012 under President Obama, where she served as a principal advisor to Secretaries of Defense Robert Gates and Leon Panetta. At the time of her confirmation, Michèle was the highest-ranking female official in the Pentagon.
“We can’t afford to divorce ourselves from the world.” While isolationism has its merits, we should be using our presence to shape the direction of the world, instead of enacting large-scale regime change. We need a core set of principles as it relates to countries like Russia and China. Smart or smarter engagement is the way forward, not lack of engagement.
What region worries Michèle the most? The Asia Pacific and Indo Pacific. This area will have the greatest impact on our economy, as our prominence as their primary security partner clashes with China’s position as the primary trading partner.
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SPEAKER
Michèle Flournoy
U.S. Undersecretary of Defense for Policy
(2009-2012)
MODERATOR
Anthony Scaramucci
Founder & Managing Partner
SkyBridge
EPISODE TRANSCRIPT
John Darsie: (00:08)
Welcome back, everyone, to SALT Talks. My name is John Darsie. I'm the managing director of SALT. When we do SALT Talks we try to bring you access to leading thinkers, innovators across technology, finance, entrepreneurship, and geopolitics. Today we're very excited to bring a speaker from the geopolitical realm. Our guest today is Michèle Flournoy. If you're not familiar with Michèle, you very soon will be, I think. She's one of the leading national security voices in the United States. She was the undersecretary for defense for policy in the Obama administration. She served under secretaries of defenses Robert Gates and Leon Panetta.
John Darsie: (00:53)
Today she is the founder and managing partner of WestExec Advisors, which is a strategic advisory firm that advises US and international companies and financial institutions on geopolitical factors and how that might affect their investment landscape. Michèle, at the time of her confirmation, was the highest ranking female in the history of the Pentagon, so we're very excited to have her on. It's not the first time Anthony has interviewed Michèle. I'll let them talk a little bit more about that, but I'll kick the interview over now to Anthony Scaramucci, the founder and managing partner of SkyBridge Capital, and the chairman of SALT, to interview Michèle Flournoy.
Anthony Scaramucci: (01:34)
Okay. You guys can hear me okay? And Michèle, great to have you with us today. Thank you so much for joining us. I thought for people's... I think your background is fascinating. I was just wondering if you could spend a little bit of time telling our listeners and viewers about your background, and then we can talk a little bit about directionally where the nation needs to be going.
Michèle Flournoy: (01:57)
Sure. Well, great to be with you, Anthony, and glad to see the SALT Talks continuing online. So, I came of age kind of coming out of grad school where I focused on international relations at the height of the Cold War. So, in the mid-1980s the issue of the day was the nuclear saber-rattling between the United States and the Soviet Union, Reagan and Gorbachev, and it seemed like that was the issue of the day. If we didn't solve that one, we wouldn't be around to solve anything else. So, I cut my teeth in the field starting out working on nuclear weapons issues, nuclear arms control, and so forth, and that really continued for the first decade working under different think tanks and academic institutions until I had my first chance at government service in the Clinton administration and was asked to come in and recreate a defense strategy office in the Pentagon. Now, if you think about that, it's a little scary that there was a time when there wasn't a strategy office in the Pentagon, but my job was to help reestablish that, and that's really when I broadened to defense more broadly.
Anthony Scaramucci: (03:09)
But take us back for a second, because I think this is very important. So, this is sort of the mid-'90s. You're coming into the Pentagon, and there are people on this call, frankly, that haven't been to the Pentagon. I've had the opportunity through the Business Executives for National Security to tour the Pentagon, meet with various defense secretaries, and we've had several of the secretaries of defense at SALT. But for somebody that is not aware of the expanse of the Pentagon and the nature of the Pentagon, take us back to your first few days there and sort of what you were thinking about, and the tenets of that core strategy.
Michèle Flournoy: (03:49)
Well, I think that for a civilian coming in, it's a daunting experience because it is a unique place, a unique culture. For some political appointees it can feel like landing on a different planet. I was fortunate that my dad had served in World War II, my husband served 26 years in the Navy. I was very familiar with military culture, I was part of the broader family, so I had that advantage in terms of coming in to the environment. But even still, I think as a young political appointee it takes some time to sort of show your value, to find your place, to understand how the place works, how to get things done and make things happen.
Michèle Flournoy: (04:33)
But I think the thing that I really focused on initially was trying to figure out how to design a strategy after the end of the Cold War. Really, the key paradigm we'd worked with for decades was suddenly gone. Now what was it about? I think the early attempts at that was trying to look at how do we expand the community of free market democracies, and that was really kind of the core idea of that first strategy. Ironically, now, at a time when we're seeing the return of so much authoritarianism with China, with Russia, other dictatorships, that question's actually very relevant again. How do we strengthen the group of free market democracies around the world and really leverage these incredible allies that we have?
Anthony Scaramucci: (05:28)
So, when you got there, we had this 40-ish, 50-ish-year idea of containment, and the goal was to contain the Soviet Union and to reject communism around the world, and obviously, this was in the aftermath of the Reagan Doctrine. President Clinton was coming up with his own doctrine. He wanted to secure the peace around Iraq, and the no-fly zone restrictions, and all of those things, and now today, do we need a new doctrine? I know you authored a white paper in 2007. Do we need a new doctrine, and if we do need a new doctrine, what should that doctrine look like to create peace and prosperity over the next 25 to 50 years?
Michèle Flournoy: (06:14)
Because we can't really afford to focus just on a singular threat like the Soviet Union, I'm not sure that a doctrine is as helpful as a set of core tenets or principles, and I do think that we need to kind of go back to first principles in this very different landscape that we're in. We have fundamental shifts in the balance of power with the rise of China, a resurgent Russia, other rogue states not disappearing, Iran, North Korea, and so forth. We still have to manage the counterterrorism problem. We also have a period of profound technological disruption, which means that if the US military just stands still and doesn't figure out how to integrate some of those new technologies, we will actually lose our military edge and our ability to deter and defeat adversaries. So, it's a very dynamic landscape, and I think that any one doctrine might straight jacket us, so I think it's better to think about core principles at this moment.
Anthony Scaramucci: (07:22)
Okay, so what would some of those principles be?
Michèle Flournoy: (07:24)
Well, first and foremost, we have to recognize that we are very integrated into a global economy and set of international relationships, and so we can't really afford to divorce ourselves from the world. The security of Americans at home, the prosperity of Americans at home depend on us shaping and trying to manage and influence what's happening overseas. For goodness sake, we've just been the victim of a pandemic that came out of China, is now a global phenomenon. We can't just pretend that we can protect ourselves by being Fortress America. So, the first thing is we have to stay engaged in order to protect ourselves at home.
Anthony Scaramucci: (08:12)
So, what would you say to one of my cranky relatives, Michèle, who believes in that whole isolationist strategy and believes that we should disentangle ourselves from the rest of the world? What would your rebuttal to that be?
Michèle Flournoy: (08:28)
I'd want to draw them out on what is driving that, because I think where there's a seed of wisdom there is that we shouldn't be doing large scale military interventions around the world to change regimes and try to impose democracies. I think we've seen that doesn't work so well. But saying we don't want to do that is not the same thing as saying we should just pull back from the world writ large. We should be using our economic strength, our technological innovation, our diplomatic abilities to try to shape the environment in ways that are favorable to our interest, because I think the key argument is if we don't do that, we risk having small threats become very large threats and be quite costly by the time they reach our shores.
Michèle Flournoy: (09:23)
Plus, we have a unique asset in our alliances. There's no other country in the world who can bring together coalitions of the willing, like-minded states who have shared interests, to take on problems together, and therefore share the burden. So, in my book, isolationism... There might be a core worry that we really have to attend to, but I don't... I think when you really get into what's the strategy that's going to best protect us as Americans, it almost certainly involves some degree of smart or smarter engagement.
Anthony Scaramucci: (09:59)
It's interesting because in the 1940 election with Franklin Roosevelt when he was running against Wendell Willkie, there was a lot of isolationism, Charles Lindbergh making those speeches, and Roosevelt said something that rings true even today: if we don't engage every hour every day of our failed engagement, it means we have to catch up at some point in the future. Of course, that caught up to us after December of 1941. John mentioned the fact that you and I have met before, and just for the viewing audience, General Mattis asked me to have a meeting with you, and so we met, and I don't think I ever told you this, but then General Mattis called me and said, "So, how did the meeting go with Michèle?"
Anthony Scaramucci: (10:42)
I said, "Well, I think she's the smartest person I've ever met," and what I said about you, Michèle, is that if you could take a drinking straw and you could drop it down on the earth in any location on the earth in any of the seven continents, you knew more about that situation, more about that location than anybody that I've met. So, with that, I want you to talk about one or two locations on the earth that you're worried about as an American that is concerned about our prosperity and our national security. Drop that straw for me and tell me, "Okay, here are two places that if you were in a briefing with me and we were talking about our national security interests, these are places that are concerning to me." What are they?
Michèle Flournoy: (11:30)
So, the first one would be the Asia-Pacific or Indo-Pacific, because if you look at what is the region that is going to have the biggest impact on our economy and our security in the next 50 years, it is Asia-Pacific, and the balance of power is shifting there. For most of the countries in the region, they prefer us as their primary security partner, and they count on us, but their primary trading partner is China. As this competition between the US and China heats up, they feel very trapped in the middle, and they don't want to be forced to make choices that they'd have a hard time making.
Michèle Flournoy: (12:20)
I think the biggest challenge for us going forward is how are we going to manage the competition with a rising China in a way that allows us to be the most innovative, competitive economy on the planet, even as China's grows, that deters any sort of direct conflict, military conflict, with another nuclear power, and that continues to sort of strengthen the rules of the road that will constrain China's course of power or manage that in the future. So, the first place I would focus on is the Asia-Pacific and a more nuanced and strategic approach to our relationship with China.
Anthony Scaramucci: (13:11)
When you think about history and... Graham Allison wrote a great book called Destined for War, which I know you're familiar with, and it's the notion of Thucydides's trap, where a rising superpower is threatening the existing power structure. Dean Allison, the dean of the Kennedy School, he referenced probably 16 different episodic events over the last 2,000 years, 12 of which ended up in a war, and one of the things is if you have different systems, different religious systems, different cultures, it usually raises those tensions. So, I'm wondering if you could remark on that, and what would you suggest to the American policy-makers and American politicians to defuse that?
Michèle Flournoy: (13:59)
I thought Graham's book had a lot of great insights that we should heed. I don't think it's inevitable that we ultimately find ourselves in conflict with China. I think there are a few things we need to focus on. Number one, the most important thing in this competition is to invest in the drivers of our own competitiveness here at home, be it science and technology, research and development, our innovation ecosystem, smart immigration policy that attracts the best talent from around the world, and then keeps it here. Look at Silicon Valley. Half the founders are either immigrants or first-generation Americans. Investment in 21st century infrastructure. There's no reason why we shouldn't be the world's leader in 5G. So, invest here at home to really drive our own competitiveness.
Michèle Flournoy: (14:48)
Number two, on the security front, invest in deterrence. This is something we really figured out, the art and science of deterrence in the Cold War. There's deterrence by denial, meaning you keep an adversary from being able to achieve an objective. There's deterrence by cost and position. You threaten such great costs if they go ahead that they choose not to go there. We need to refine that art vis-à-vis influencing Beijing, and that will require some investment in technology in our military and other instruments of power. And then the third piece is go to old diplomacy and dialogue, first and foremost with our allies, getting on the same sheet of music with them about how we push back on bad Chinese behavior together. We share the same trade concerns, the same intellectual property concerns, the same security concerns. We should be pushing that collectively.
Michèle Flournoy: (15:43)
And then, dialogue with China. We want to try... We need a strategic dialogue with China that makes it very clear where our interests are, where our red lines are, what they can expect if they cross those red lines, and also areas where we have to cooperate. You can't solve climate change without the Chinese. You can't solve proliferation without the Chinese. For God's sake, you can't... We're seeing that we can't deal with a pandemic very effectively without figuring out how to work together with the Chinese, as bad as their behavior was at the beginning. So, we just need a much more sophisticated, comprehensive strategy for dealing with China.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:31)
But I think you're saying something very nuanced. You're saying listen, it's not black and white.
Michèle Flournoy: (16:35)
It's not black and white.
Anthony Scaramucci: (16:36)
They don't have a perfect system. Obviously, there's aspects of their system we don't like. Certainly, there's aspects of our system that they don't like, but yet we need a very strong bilateral relationship, and we need to find ways to reduce tension. So, I accept all that, I guess, but the question I would ask you is... Because you know a lot about cyber warfare, and you know a lot about the theft of our intellectual property and the theft of our designs on our military systems and so forth. How do you handle that with China? At some point we have to say enough is enough-
Michèle Flournoy: (17:15)
Absolutely.
Anthony Scaramucci: (17:15)
... and at another point we need the bilateral relationship. So, how do you handle those things? How do you square that circle?
Michèle Flournoy: (17:22)
I think we have to be very clear-eyed about bad behavior in cyberspace, theft of intellectual property, espionage at companies and universities, coercion in the eastern South China Sea, and we need to push back on that, but I think part of deterrence is communicating clearly your interests and your resolve, and we have to have dialogue not just to pretend that everything's fine, but to really go after and solve some of these issues. Again, I just think that the... I think the administration, the current administration has disadvantaged itself by defining things very narrowly in terms of trade, and primarily tariffs, and by approaching this just bilaterally, because again, so many of our European friends, our Asian friends and others, they have the same issues with China. We'd be much stronger approaching them as a coalition to push back.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:25)
Do you think the Trans-Pacific Partnership, the TPP, was a step in that direction?
Michèle Flournoy: (18:32)
Absolutely. I think the TPP was a high standards-
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:36)
Okay, see, I actually thought it was [crosstalk 00:18:37].
Michèle Flournoy: (18:37)
It was a high standards trade deal.
Anthony Scaramucci: (18:39)
100%. I actually had a lot of pushback with President Trump, then candidate Trump about that, and then Secretary Clinton obviously came around to his point of view, and he was basically making the point to me on the campaign that it was an emotional thing, and he was playing emotions as opposed to the long-term strategic issues. You were going to say something, go ahead.
Michèle Flournoy: (19:00)
I think these high standards trade deals, whether it's TPP or the Transatlantic one that has been considered, or even the renegotiated North American deal, you have to accompany them with investment in the US labor force and US competitiveness, because there is dislocation happening in the economy. It's not necessarily because of the trade deals, but it is maybe accelerated by some of those. It's mainly automation. It's now obviously the aftermath of the pandemic.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:36)
Totally.
Michèle Flournoy: (19:37)
But we've got to couple our trade initiatives with some serious and targeted investment in the rescaling of the US workforce to regain our competitive edge.
Anthony Scaramucci: (19:49)
I totally agree. I want to take you back to 2012. It's the last presidential debate. It's Governor Mitt Romney with President Barack Obama, and Mitt Romney intimated that he felt that Russia was going to be one of our greater adversaries going forward from 2012, and President Obama had a reasonably to very good rebuttal; that's sort of a Cold War line of thinking. But Russia has, in some ways, been an adversary for us, and I was wondering if you could describe for our audience your feelings about our relationship with Russia, some of the adversarial things that they've been doing to us over the last half-decade, and where do you think that that's going?
Michèle Flournoy: (20:35)
Yeah. You know, I think at the time, Russia did not... Russia was sort of playing by the reset. Medvedev, I think, was still in. Putin had not reemerged in the way he has now. So, it seems like the Russia threat was on the back burner. I think Senator Romney... He was right in looking at the longer term. Russia has reemerged under Putin's leadership as a revisionist power. He would like to reestablish a sphere of influence for Russia in and around Europe. He'd love to see the undermining and breaking apart of NATO. He would love to compete with us for influence in the Middle East and other regions, and he's willing to use the sort of gray zone, the sort of hybrid toolbox of propaganda, disinformation, cyber warfare, support to political parties, and shadow NGO, front organizations. I mean, he has taken the KGB playbook that he knew so well from his time in intelligence and put it on steroids as an instrument of the state, and that's what we're dealing with, and that has included intervention, as we've seen in our own election cycle, through use of social media, so...
Anthony Scaramucci: (21:58)
So, let's-
Michèle Flournoy: (21:58)
Very real threat now that we have to deal with.
Anthony Scaramucci: (21:58)
Let's look at it from the other side, because I'm fascinated by this. I'd like to get your reaction. President Putin has a GDP roughly the size of Italy. It's a relatively small economy. It's less than a tenth of the size of the GDP of the United States, yet he is really punching over his weight. So, how is he doing that? Is it just the disinformation playbook? Is it tremendous resources spent on the military? What is he doing that is allowing him to expand his influence so successfully?
Michèle Flournoy: (22:36)
Well, he has made a disproportionate investment in parts of his military, so they really do have some serious capability. They need to be taken seriously, particularly in the nuclear domain.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:49)
And the hypersonic missiles, right? I mean, he's got...
Michèle Flournoy: (22:52)
Hypersonics.
Anthony Scaramucci: (22:52)
Hypersonic. He's got advanced rocket technology that a lot of people don't talk about in our media. Is that fair to say?
Michèle Flournoy: (22:59)
That is fair to say. Cyber. He has broken all of the international norms in terms of his willingness to use cyber for offensive purposes, his willingness to use social media for offensive political purposes. I think he has been very tactically skilled at exploiting vacuums that we create. When we don't lean forward in Syria, or we pull out of certain relationships, Putin has been able to step in. When the US does not provide a key defensive technology to an ally, often Russia or China will try to step in. So, he's very skilled at finding the vacuums and stepping into them. I don't think he's 10-foot tall. I don't think we should overestimate Russia as a great power, but I do think we shouldn't underestimate his capacity to make mischief and just create headache after headache after headache for us.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:18)
Okay, so I want to open it up a little bit, Michèle. John Darsie is indicating to me that he has a few questions from the audience, so I want to turn one over to John. But I really appreciate this. Thank you so much.
Michèle Flournoy: (24:32)
Sure.
Anthony Scaramucci: (24:33)
Go ahead, John.
John Darsie: (24:34)
A big piece of news today is that the United States is no longer considering Hong Kong autonomous from China. What do you think the future impact of this change is, and what's your view on the geopolitical risk in the APAC region and whether the US and China are sort of headed towards a Cold War type scenario?
Michèle Flournoy: (24:53)
Well, I do think that the passage of the national security law with regard to Hong Kong by the Communist Party as they're meeting for their big congress in Beijing right now... It's a real shot across the bow. I think the administration is right to say, going up to the hill, "We cannot certify the autonomy or the autonomous governance of Hong Kong." What is not understood is if... That does not trigger any immediate sanctions. The legislation they were responding to in terms of making that determination does not have anything automatic about it, but it does open the policy debate and discussion both within the administration and on the hill as to how to respond to China's overreach in this instance.
Michèle Flournoy: (25:49)
I think there's a very strong... It's one of those rare areas of bipartisan support that we care very much about holding China to its commitment of one country, two systems. The two systems part is very important. I think the biggest thing here that China will have to consider is not just sanctions, but if the financial community does not believe that they can count on the rule of law as they've known it prevailing in Hong Kong, Hong Kong will experience tremendous flight of capital and tremendous flight of a number of financial institutions, which is not something China wants to handle. So, I think the next step is we need to make that very clear to Beijing, that they are playing with fire here, and the Hong Kong that they've enjoyed the benefits of the economy there, it's not going to survive if they press this issue any further.
Anthony Scaramucci: (26:59)
Michèle, again, I interject for a second, because I'm interested in your reaction to this. How does that relate to Taiwan, and how does that relate to our interests in Taiwan in terms of how we've been positioned over the last 60 or so, 70 years now of our defense perimeter there?
Michèle Flournoy: (27:16)
Yeah. No, I think it's very similar in that China's made a... China sees Taiwan as part of China, but it's also been clear that they have not pursued reunification by force, and I think, again, we need to be very clear in our policy that reunification by force would meet with a very substantial response and have very dire consequences for China writ large. I think it's very important for the US to be clear on that and for the international community to speak with one voice on that. But you're right in thinking the waters that they test and the techniques that they use in Hong Kong could show up down the road in Taiwan. It's obviously a different situation, but there are some parallels that are worth paying attention to.
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:17)
When you stop and think of the American military and you look at the expanse of the budget, I think it's $750 billion, something like that, not including the black ops and the other stuff. My question is, is it enough? Is it being spent appropriately, and what are things that we could do to make it more efficient and more productive and more modern?
Michèle Flournoy: (28:48)
Yeah. So, I do think that [crosstalk 00:28:50].
Anthony Scaramucci: (28:49)
The first question, though, is it enough? Are we spending enough?
Michèle Flournoy: (28:52)
Well, I think that the levels of spending that we have now are sufficient to the strategy that I think that I would certainly like to see us pursue. I think, though, that we have to be realistic; that the pandemic and its aftermath is going to put a lot of pressure on the defense budget, whether it's a second Trump term or a Biden administration. You now have other things like pandemic preparedness competing for national security dollars. You have tremendous investment that needs to happen domestically, and with the defense to budget 50% of discretionary spending, if you're not going to touch the [crosstalk 00:29:43] welfare kind of programs, defense has always got a bullseye on its back. The problem is we're in this era where if we don't invest for a very different kind of warfare in the future with different technologies, we will lose the very military technological edge that we need to prevent those wars in the first place. So, this is a period where we can't just walk away from investing in modernizing the force, and I hope we don't do what we did in the last decade, which was, after the...
Anthony Scaramucci: (30:25)
Sequester and the whole thing with-
Michèle Flournoy: (30:28)
Yeah, the Budget Control Act, the sequester. This is really driven by the Republicans in Congress with some support on the Democratic side, but it became... It was a terribly blunt instrument. It caused profound pain in the military in terms of really hurting readiness in a way that we are still recovering from. It's like taking a sledgehammer to an operation when you need a scalpel. So, I hope that we're much more careful going forward if there are understandable pressures on defense spending going forward.
Anthony Scaramucci: (31:07)
Michèle, there's been some discussion in Washington about pandemic preparedness, and after 9/11 there was a cabinet-level agency created the Department of Homeland Security. Do you think something like that could potentially happen in a Trump second term or a Biden administration, where they create a Department of Global Pandemic Defense? You think it'll escalate to that level?
Michèle Flournoy: (31:32)
You know, I hope that we do a careful lessons learned once we're past the worst of this, because too often when we have a problem we reorganize the deck chairs and we create a new organization with a new acronym and we think we've solved the problem. I don't think this was an organizational problem. I think there were leadership challenges. I think there were certainly under-resourcing of key accounts, whether it was CDC, NIH. You didn't have a single person in the White House who was empowered and held accountable for dealing with pandemics; that was a problem. So, there were a lot of weaknesses, but I'm not sure the answer is creating a new federal department or a new bureaucracy. I think there are other issues that will probably give us better preparedness in the future if we address those.
Anthony Scaramucci: (32:31)
Okay. I'm going to kick it back to John. He has a followup question for you. Go ahead, John.
John Darsie: (32:36)
Hey, Michèle. This question revolves around NATO. So, President Trump has obviously been very vocal about pressing our allies to meet their funding commitments for NATO, and he's generally undermined that treaty. There's a few different questions relating to NATO that have come in. One, how does NATO need to evolve? Some people acknowledge that while President Trump might have gone too far in his adversarial tone to some of our allies that the treaty does need to evolve. Was expanding NATO right on to the Russian border a step too far, and sort of a provocation that Russia would never really accept?
Michèle Flournoy: (33:17)
So, I do think this topic of burden-sharing with NATO has been one that has transcended administrations. I mean, one of the first speeches I helped Secretary Gates with in the Obama administration was going to NATO and really being very tough and saying, "We need you to do more," but I think making that the sole focus of the issue kind of misses the point. The truth is, NATO has fought and died alongside us in Afghanistan. They've shown up in the Balkans, they've shown up in Afghanistan. They are currently showing up in northern Europe as a deterrent in the Baltic regions in the frontline states to make sure that Russia knows that NATO is present and would not accept any kind of Russian conventional military mischief.
Michèle Flournoy: (34:12)
So, NATO, I think, still has some very important purposes. I do think it needs to adapt for the future back to integrating new technologies, maintaining interoperability, and sort of rethinking some of its strategic concepts going forward. But NATO is an unprecedented alliance. It's a huge strategic advantage for us. It is where we look first for partners when we have a challenge that we need allies to come alongside us. So, I would not throw it away. I would give a lot more care and feeding to strengthening and adapting the alliance for the future. In terms of NATO enlargement, I think the vision was really trying to pursue the opportunity of Europe whole, free and at peace, and I do think that was a valuable and important vision.
Michèle Flournoy: (35:08)
I think the two places where we probably could have done better, should have done better are A, managing the relationship with Russia. There was an opportunity to bring Russia into a more integrated relationship with Europe very early on. I'm talking an immediate two, three years after the fall of the wall and the end of the Soviet Union. But that did not... I think valiant efforts were made. It was not successful. That's the first missed opportunity. The second is if you're going to expand NATO in 26, 27, 28, larger and larger numbers of allies, I think you have to reexamine some of the decision-making inside the alliance. Right now, just about everything is based on total unity, or we don't act. That, I don't think, is a terribly viable solution for every single situation that NATO is going to have to deal with. So, I do think some of the ways that the alliance work need to also be maybe updated in light of its much larger number.
Anthony Scaramucci: (36:31)
Michèle, 72 years ago President Truman, at the protest station of then Secretary of State Marshall, agreed to the concept and the formation of the State of Israel. I'm a pro-Zionist, even though I'm not Jewish, and that state and the Middle East has been an issue of concern for the United States for the last 80 or so years. Every administration has tried something to try to see if they could create some semblance of peace and some semblance of cooperation. Are we any closer to that? Is it even possible? And if it is possible, what are some of the things that we would need to do to make that happen?
Michèle Flournoy: (37:19)
I personally believe that we're farther away from Israeli-Palestinian peace at this moment. I do think that the US's real relationship is a strategic one. It has deep historic roots. You have strong... You traditionally had strong support on both sides of the aisle. This has been a bipartisan issue, not a partisan one. I think that what worries me is I think... Prime Minister Netanyahu and the Likud Party and others around him have become so frustrated with the lack of progress in the peace process. Some of it is they should own as being... They haven't done everything they could have done, but a lot of it is they have a divided Palestinian authority.
Michèle Flournoy: (38:13)
You have PLA and the Hamas. It's hard to negotiate with a divided partner, and I would fear that out of that frustration they're about to go down a unilateral path where they will take steps to annex territory, make decisions that will basically, in effect, preclude a two-state solution. If you preclude a two-state solution and negotiate a two-state solution, you're setting up either an indefinite and worsening conflict and terrorism for Israel in the future, or you're heading towards a unitary state where Israel will have to decide whether it values being democratic more, or having a Jewish identity more, which, again, you never want to be in that position. So, I hope that, to the extent that Israel feels it must take unilateral steps to show up its own security, it does so with an eye to keeping the door open to a future negotiated solution with the Palestinians, because I think that's the only way you get a lasting piece at the end of the day for Israel and for the region.
Anthony Scaramucci: (39:33)
I think it's well-said, and I certainly hope it happens. I traveled throughout the region, and certainly would like that to happen. Before we let you go, we promise, usually, a hard out on these talks at 45 minutes, but this has been very fascinating. So, I have to ask you this question. You've been all over the world, you've seen the perspectives of the American perspective, the Russian perspective, the Iraqi perspective, the Afghani perspective. I want you to imagine the average American, if there's such a thing, and there's something about your life and something that you've learned about the world and America's role in it that you could share that you would want them to know, what would that be?
Michèle Flournoy: (40:17)
I think universally, even in countries where we might consider them competitors or adversaries, many people see the American experiment, our democracy, government for the people, by the people, et cetera as the ultimate ideal. I mean, they really do have that image of America as the shining light and the example. It's why so many people want to immigrate here. It's why so many people want to send their children to be educated here. But I think that if we're not careful and we become too divided and too acrimonious in our own politics, and we fail to show up in the world and lead by example, we will lose that position, and that soft power, that power of example, is stronger than just about anything, and we should not give that up. We should fight to be better than that, to be our better selves, and to be that example again.
Anthony Scaramucci: (41:31)
Well, we greatly value your time. We greatly appreciate the opportunity to be with you today. John Darsie is texting me that he wants to get invited to your inaugural as the first female secretary of defense. My only request is that you include me on that invitation, Michèle. With that, I want to say thank you very, very much for your contribution to our great country and all the great work that you've done on behalf of the American people, and I hope I can get you to our conference once we can go live and be in person. I think you'll really enjoy that, and I look forward to having you there as soon as we can get out of our current situation.
Michèle Flournoy: (42:09)
Great.
Anthony Scaramucci: (42:09)
But thank you again.
Michèle Flournoy: (42:10)
Yeah, thank you, and thanks to everybody who joined.