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Sept. 8, 2025 15:41-16:31 - CSPAN
49:50
Sen. Elissa Slotkin D-MI Discusses U.S. National Security
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elissa slotkin
sen/d 37:46
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nick schifrin
08:31
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Next, Democratic Senator Alyssa Slotkin discussing her vision for national security and foreign policy at an event hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations.
This is just under an hour.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Thank you very much.
Welcome, everyone, to today's Council on Foreign Relations meeting called A New Vision for America's National Security.
My name is Nick Schiffer.
I'm the Foreign Affairs and Defense Correspondent for PBS News Hour, and I'll be presiding over today's discussion.
Welcome to everyone here in New York and also to the 400 members that are on Zoom joining us virtually.
Senator Slotkin does not need much of an introduction.
She brings a unique resume, as we all know, former CIA analyst who served alongside U.S. troops in Iraq, former Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, for the last eight years, an elected politician.
We'll try not to hold that against you.
And like me, like so many people our age, forgive me for aging us, we were here in New York on 9-11.
And that has changed her life and so many of our lives.
Without further ado, Senator Slotkin, the floor is yours.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Join me, Nick, up on stage here.
Okay.
Well, thanks to CFR for having me, and thanks, Nick, for that introduction.
I'm really happy to be here because you all are really the standard bearer on bipartisan thought on foreign policy.
This body was actually founded between the world wars at a time of real disagreement and debate over America's role in the world.
President Wilson was championing the League of Nations.
The Senate was opposed.
Ordinary Americans were split.
This council emerged from that lack of consensus to answer one fundamental question.
How should America engage the world to keep us safe?
Today we're faced with a similar question, and it feels appropriate to try and answer it here with all of you.
This is personal to me.
As you heard, by training, I am a national security professional.
I'm also what we now call a 9-11 baby.
I happened to be in New York City on my second day of grad school when 9-11 happened.
It completely changed my life.
I was recruited by the CIA and served three tours in Iraq alongside the military before serving at the Pentagon and the White House under two presidents, one Republican and one Democrat.
Here's what that experience taught me.
A national security worth its salt must do two things.
First, protect U.S. citizens, the homeland, and our way of life.
And second, advance American prosperity.
That's it.
But that's easier said than done.
In the years since I left the Pentagon, the world seems increasingly chaotic, contested, and out of control.
Authoritarian powers are on the march, coercing smaller neighbors.
A full-blown revolution in technology is underway.
Institutions we all grew up with are fading.
The global economy is fragmenting.
We all know, especially in this room, that the old playbook isn't working, and we don't yet know what the new playbook looks like.
President Biden nibbled at the margins of this playbook.
President Trump is burning it all down, the good with the bad.
With all that noise, it's easy to spend all our time on the issues of the day.
Troops, American troops in U.S. cities, Ukraine, Gaza.
But for our safety over the next 50 years, we have to think longer term.
Because if I've learned anything as a CIA officer and a Pentagon official, if you don't give the future a seat at the table, you make America less safe.
So let's get back to basics.
I went, to do that, I went to what most in this room would probably think is an unlikely source, Michiganders.
Since 2017, I've been representing the greatest state in the Union, Michigan, in Congress, first in the House and now in the Senate.
I often feel like I have one foot in the national security world, one foot in my life in Michigan.
So when I decided to give this speech, I wanted to do something that most national security types wouldn't think was important.
Reach out to regular Michiganders and get their thoughts on the subject.
Last month, I held town halls on national security in Benton Harbor and Troy, Michigan with people across the political spectrum.
For 90 minutes each, we talked about what they saw as the greatest threats to their safety and prosperity and what they expect from their government.
Here's what I heard.
First and foremost, economic stress is impacting every aspect of their lives.
No matter what we're talking about, our discussions veered into the cost of living, trade, tariffs, and how U.S. policies could hurt the already struggling economy.
Michiganders across the board saw China as the single biggest threat to American economic security.
To them, China owns everything.
The clothes on our backs, the phones in our pockets, our treasury, our debt.
And in the words of one Michigander, when you have someone entrenched in your own house, how you deal with them is very important.
Second, technology is putting our citizens on the front lines and the government isn't doing enough to protect them.
From social media to AI to cyber attacks, tech threats were top of mind for everyone who attended those sessions.
One Michigander said it well.
Warfare is still on the ground.
It still rockets, but it's also changed.
Cyber warfare can be just as brutal.
Their bank accounts, their hospitals, their kids' data, everyone had a personal story of being hacked or ransomed.
On AI, most seemed to know it's coming, but they didn't know what it meant for them.
They heard AI can do some good things, but they also feel a new round of job loss, which we've seen firsthand in Michigan.
Regardless of the type of technology, Michiganders feel utterly unprotected, like the government was shrugging their shoulders on these threats.
That's a direct quote.
Some folks brought up President Trump's approach to burning things down.
For most, to be honest, the jury is still out.
And there's a message in that ambivalence.
Many Americans have lost confidence that we know what we're doing abroad.
And they have good reason to feel uneasy.
They've seen and fought the forever wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
They see support to Ukraine and Israel without resolution, all while the middle class is suffering at home.
While most Americans still genuinely believe in a strong American role in the world, there's no mistaking that there's a trust deficit after the last 20 years.
Before I move on, I just want to flag what didn't come up in those town halls.
Traditional security issues like missile defense, nuclear weapons, and major terrorist attacks were not top of mind.
Michiganders still expect their government to protect them from those things, but as a rule, they're focused on their pocketbooks and their kids.
I count this, frankly, as a victory.
For all our faults, we should be proud that for almost 80 years, we haven't had another world war or a nuclear exchange.
And despite how President Trump paints those who work in national security, we should continue that critical work.
So that's what I heard from Michiganders.
And while they may not use fancy language, it's clear that they understand warfare has changed.
So informed by them, I'm going to focus on three big things that, if we get right, will define American security for the next 50 years.
First, we need to treat economic security as national security and be ruthless about growing the middle class.
Second, we need to win the tech race, just like we won the nuclear and space races.
That's especially true for AI.
And third, we need to fundamentally rethink how we protect Americans since they are now on the front lines.
First, on economic security.
We need to treat economic security as a national security priority because it is.
I believe in my bones that the existential threat to the United States is not coming from abroad, it's the shrinking middle class here at home.
Using the term existential is not hyperbole.
If you want to understand how the U.S. got to this fractious, authoritarian moment in our history, all you need to know is that the American middle class has shrunk since its high water in 1970.
In the last 50 years, the share of Americans in the middle class has fallen by nearly 20%, and all of that lost wealth has moved towards those who already have it rather than those who are striving for it.
That's not a political statement.
That's cold, hard fact.
What does that mean for everyday Americans?
It means we can't, people cannot provide to their kids what was provided to them.
A home of their own, a fishing cabin up north, a trip to Disneyland every so often.
These are the things that define a comfortable middle class life.
And when Americans can no longer afford them, they feel angry.
They lose their dignity.
They feel shame.
And they start looking for someone or something to blame.
That's how we begin to tear each other apart from the inside and how voters end up jumping into bed with anyone promising change.
Back in June, I fleshed out an economic war plan to grow the middle class through domestic policy.
But the truth is, this needs to be a national security policy as well.
Because while the wars of yesterday were fought with tanks and guns, the wars of today are economic and they are underway.
China certainly has been engaging in economic warfare for years and has gone so far as to build it into their national security strategy published this year.
So to get our heads in the game, there are three things we need to do to protect the middle class.
First, we must ensure that the dollar remains the world's currency.
We built the global financial system after World War II and we have deeply benefited from molding that system in our own image.
Dollar dominance means lower interest rates for things like mortgages and car loans, more valuable 401ks, cheaper imports, and lower inflation.
But right now, the dollar is being undermined largely by our own actions.
Trump's efforts to bend the Fed to his will, his sloppy tariffs, and a self-generated trade war.
Already the dollar's value has fallen more in the last seven months than in the last 50 years.
Countries are looking for alternatives.
This all plays directly into the hands of China, who wants to run, obviously, the world on their currency.
So we need a comprehensive plan to maintain the dollar as the leading global currency.
That also means, and I know this is controversial, especially in New York, leading on the money of the future.
Just as countries like Kenya are skipping traditional banking and going right to mobile money, we want the digital currencies of tomorrow to be keyed to the U.S. dollar.
Despite Trump's abuse of the meme coin, we need to double down on dollar-backed stablecoins.
And the U.S. government should issue a global digital dollar, just like the Chinese did back in 2020.
The second thing, we need to treat our critical supply chains as national assets, national security assets.
While some items like Rubik's Cubes and Ladies Razors will never again be made in the United States, critical items like pharmaceuticals, chips, autos should be made at least in part in the U.S. China has weaponized these supply chains, giving them a veto on our economy that we should not accept.
We therefore need real industrial policy that strengthens American industries and offers taxpayer a return on their investment.
We need to stand up a sovereign wealth fund to invest in technologies that usually scare off investors.
And then we need a rare earth reserve to stockpile critical minerals, just as we set up a strategic petroleum reserve in the 1970s after the oil shock.
By the way, as someone who comes from Michigan, let me just say that smart industrial policy also means prosperity for the middle class.
New manufacturing, engineering, construction jobs.
And critically, it means spreading the wealth across America, not just enriching 18 tech executives in Silicon Valley.
Lithium And CHIP Alliances 00:13:11
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
But if we want to do any of that, we need allies.
When I held these town halls in Michigan, most people understood that our friendships keep us safe.
To that end, we need to expand participation in our partnerships, not shrink, and think more creatively about our Cold War organizations.
What if, for instance, in addition to military alliances, we had a lithium alliance or a CHIP alliance?
One can imagine a NATO-like body where countries agree to shared export controls, shared tech, and protection against Chinese coercion.
But to protect our economy, we also need to acknowledge that there is another key battlefield, and that's technology.
We are in a tech race right now with China, whether most acknowledge it or not.
And there's no area more important to win than on artificial intelligence.
I had the opportunity to visit Los Alamos National Lab this past weekend.
They are building a new AI research center that will be housed at the University of Michigan, GoBlue.
Los Alamos was the birthplace of nuclear technology 80 years ago.
And I left this tour with the distinct feeling that AI raises some of the same fundamental questions that nukes did.
How should they be used?
By whom?
Under what rules?
Only this time, we are creating a technology that can become smarter than the humans who are designing it.
And unlike nuclear weapons, AI is almost entirely created and controlled by the private sector.
The last time we were in a race like this, we won by setting up the Manhattan Project.
We brought together the brightest minds of a generation, including many foreign and immigrant scientists.
Research funding exploded.
Years later, Congress set up the Atomic Energy Commission, where government leaders worked with the private sector to develop civilian nuclear energy.
Together, they mapped out the rules of the road that still govern nuclear power today.
We need the same level of ambition now, updated for the modern age.
If Congress were at all healthy, we'd be setting this up right now, today.
And I'm ready to work with anyone who actually wants to win this race.
But it's not enough to just invent the new technology.
You also have to adopt that technology, especially in the military.
We all know that the wars of the future will be fought with advanced tech.
But the Pentagon has simply not kept pace with adopting that tech, and our defense industrial base is falling far short of delivering at scale.
China is literally eating our lunch on this score.
They're able to take a new weapon system from IDEA to the hands of their soldiers in five years.
For the U.S., it's 12.
To help speed up that adoption, we should actually take a page from Ukraine and whenever possible, start with commercial technology that's already on the market and adapt it for military use.
We literally need to take a battle axe to the old way of doing business where we spend excessive time and excessive money building the next big toy, only to use it for just one threat.
Finally, in this new era of economic and tech warfare, it's our citizens who are now serving on the front lines.
And they are under attack.
Every day, our adversaries are using commercial tech to target Americans.
Some of those attacks are American individual, are on American individuals or businesses, scamming seniors or hacking schools.
But other attacks are on our infrastructure.
The Chinese government putting malware into our water treatment plants or hacking every single phone in America.
A Russian group hacking our oil pipelines and shutting off gas to the eastern seaboard.
These attacks target our civilians in an attempt to effectively make us go blind, deaf, and dumb.
Make no mistake, these are homeland attacks, and AI will only make it worse.
It's therefore critical that we reorient the government to protect our citizens at home.
We need to train a cyber national guard that deploys to help prevent or respond to attacks.
We also need to go after these criminals at much higher rates by equipping and resourcing the FBI and DOD to take down their operations abroad.
And on the national level, we need a new vision of homeland security, updated from my era of 9-11, with new playbooks, new authorities, and new capabilities to protect Americans from digital warfare.
We have the most sophisticated hacking tools in the world, so instead of being scared to use them, we need to fight back and hit our enemies where it hurts.
If China is going to target our power grid and local water systems, we need to take offline the servers they are using to do that.
And if a cyber attack in the U.S. causes the same damage as a physical strike, we need to treat it as an act of war.
To sum up, we need economic security to be a national security priority.
We need to get our ass in gear on the tech arms race, particularly on AI.
And we need to protect Americans at home from these new threats.
We do that, and we have a good shot at protecting American security and prosperity into the future.
This will require a fundamental reorganization of the way we look at national security work, and old habits die hard.
But our security, once again, depends on our ability to change and adapt.
To that end, let me put in one final plug.
Our entire national security approach, what we all grew up with, is based on the National Security Act of 1947.
It created the Department of Defense.
It created the CIA.
It was an incredibly important document at the time, and that reorganization helped us win the Cold War and the space race.
But we're long overdue for change.
The good news is that we have a rare moment of opportunity here.
Trump is indeed burning everything down.
But instead of snapping back to the old way of doing things, we have to build something new out of the ashes.
I am not naive.
I know we have real problems right now, but a real lack of leaders that are focused on the future is a problem.
If leaders are able to rise above their partnership partisanship, America still has a really good hand to play.
We still have the best workers, the best researchers, the best innovators in the world.
Our economy has been the envy of countries across the globe.
And we have a very long history of doing the impossible.
That's what this moment demands of us.
That's what the American people demand of us.
And that is what is our duty to deliver.
So thanks so much.
Appreciate your time.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
And thank you, everyone.
We'll take about, I think we've got about 20 minutes or so that I will take, and then we'll go to the members in the audience as well as online.
And what I'd like to do is start big picture, especially on your economic vision, and then kind of zoom in to some specifics.
So you had a line toward the beginning.
President Biden nibbled at the margins of a new playbook.
One of his foreign policy slogans, of course, was foreign policy for the middle class.
I looked, the most recent Gallup poll judged President Biden's approval on foreign policy as 40%.
Your phrase is economic security as national security.
So how is your vision different than President Trump's?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Well, I think, first of all, the whole reason I wrote the speech is because it's very easy to get stuck in the conflicts in the headlines.
And I think if I can say about the Biden administration, they got very deeply mired down in the conflicts of the day.
Not that they're not important, right?
Ukraine or Gaza, they are important.
But what they didn't do was A, go whole hog on a sort of national security approach to industrial policy.
And they certainly, I think, could have done more laying out the kind of 40 or 50 year plan, again, based on economics and technology.
Some of the things that I'm calling for in the speech were things that I would have been thrilled if they had suggested.
But I think, as often happens, we just don't have a lot of space for thinking ahead.
And we all know that Washington is not functioning well right now.
And one of the casualties of that is like I'm sitting in the Senate as a brand new senator and there's just not a lot of talk about these future threats.
I mean they're not even future, they're here.
So I just wanted to put something out, a little something, to say that if we don't think about this dramatic change that's happening right now, we're really not doing what we need to do to keep the American people safe.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
So the steps that the Biden administration took, things like the CHIPS Act, things like the National Security Supplemental that had a lot of defense industrial base investment for many years, what, just not enough?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
It was a good start.
It was a good start.
And I think, again, you know, and I voted on the CHIPS Act.
I mean, you do what you can, but I think we need to make a deliberate decision.
Again, could be controversial, that we as a country are going to push forward a real thoughtful industrial policy.
That's not a bad word.
And I say this, yes, because I care about national security, but in this room, I feel the need to make the point again.
There is a problem with the fact that the middle class is shrinking like this.
I live in my farm town, Holly, Michigan, and people cannot live the lives that their parents were living and they are mad.
And this, if you're unhappy, we can't have a consistent policy as a country if we're constantly pendulum swinging from Bush to Obama to Trump to Biden to Trump.
That reflects the fact that people are unsettled.
So if you care about a strong American leadership role in the world, and that means we have to be consistent with our allies and our adversaries, you should care and give a crap about the health of the middle class because they're not going to give people in this room permission to do what they want to do abroad unless you are actually making it so that they can live lives better than their parents.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
I think it's started to age us again, but I think our generation is the first on average that is less well off than our parents, I think, as a generation.
All right, so if that's the prior president, let me ask the big picture question about the current president.
So from the very beginning, President Trump's foreign policy approach has been intertwined with talk of the middle class and his foreign policy tools have overlapped with what we have historically thought of as economic tools.
And this isn't just about tariffs in 2016.
He and Bernie Sanders both emphasized early on how the Trans-Pacific Partnership and other free trade deals were hitting the middle class.
That pushed Hillary Clinton, that pushed Obama against the TPP.
So how does your frame differ from what has been a key aspect of his foreign policy approach for nine years?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I mean, I think the president is a populist.
And I think, you know, my experience with Trump is that he's usually got the wrong answer for the right question, right?
He's picking up on something that's very real in the country, right?
This issue with the struggling middle class.
But then his answer on what to do about that, I very frequently disagree with, maybe not always.
And certainly, the sloppiness with which he conducts his economic policymaking, again, people in this room may know better than me.
It just, there is some real basic problems with the economic sense that it's making it.
And as a representative who very much, you know, I won the tightest Senate race in the country.
I won by 19,000 votes out of 5.6 million voters.
It was dyed, okay?
It was a cost of living election, period.
And voters voted for whoever they thought was going to put more money in their pockets.
Saudi Arabia and the G7 00:07:48
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
He successfully won that campaign because he said he was going to lower costs.
And I challenge, I challenge anyone to tell me what part of your budget has gone down and not gone in some cases up precipitously.
And this fall with everyone, including probably everyone in this room getting notification that their private health insurance is going up by 10 to 15% starting January 1, he is not, whatever he claims to care about, the results do not match what he says he gives a crap about.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
So let's zoom in.
Let's do the economic stuff, the tech stuff, and then the cybersecurity stuff, if I can get through all of it.
Global digital dollar.
That sounds a lot like a central bank digital currency.
Is that what you mean?
A government-sponsored coin?
Because as you know, the Republicans have emphasized or been pushing a more private solution.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, so we worked on some cryptocurrency legislation that we voted on in the last couple of months.
And I think that's, again, a good start on stablecoin.
But I do believe that we need a government-issued digital currency.
The Chinese did it.
I think there's demand for it.
It speeds up the commerce.
It's cheaper.
And the world is going digital.
So we either kind of get in the game or we shouldn't be surprised that it's all ceded to these private entities.
So I think we need one.
And I think that the government should want one, right?
We should, again, if my premise is that...
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Although it does have to be an act of Congress.
I mean, I mean, I'm here to say that.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Like, let's talk.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
If Congress creates it, then let's do it.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
So I would argue that this administration hasn't always yielded to Congress on things that are congressional responsibilities, but I'm ready to talk.
But I think that that's something, if we want to keep up with the pace of change and how so many of our own citizens and citizens abroad are transitioning to digital currencies, then it's just kind of, we need to do it.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Sovereign wealth fund.
Traditionally, these are created by states, Alaska and New Mexico have one.
Countries, of course, with some kind of abundance of assets.
We usually associate it with oil and gas.
And they usually create sovereign wealth funds in order to diversify future revenues to get off of oil and gas only.
It seems to me, though, that the only surplus in the U.S. economically is debt, right?
$37 trillion.
We're the largest debtor in history.
So is the sovereign wealth fund a good use of money?
And what's it for, if not to diversify future revenue?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I think it's about placing strategic bets on things that traditional investors see as either too long-term or too risky in some cases.
You have to have a return on investment.
It has to make sense to the taxpayer, that's for sure.
But we often talk about how we don't have enough access to rare earth minerals.
That's a huge problem for us, right?
China holds that over our heads all the time.
But traditional investors would say, well, look, that's such a long lead time.
I'm not sure I'm going to invest in that.
Or China's flooding the market.
They're lowering the price.
So it seems like a bad bet.
But for us strategically, that could be really important.
So I want to make sure that we have options on the table to do really big things and place bets on behalf of the American people that will return investments, even if it's in 20 years, but it's something we know we need.
Think about active pharmaceutical ingredients.
It is downright scary to me how few of the sort of source materials of our prescription drugs we actually control.
It's another point of leverage on us.
I think about getting our military the insulin they need or whatever it is that they are required.
I think we should be thinking strategically about investing in APIs.
That is something that the private sector has shied away from.
And so I think the sovereign wealth fund just puts another tool in the toolkit.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
The president talks about, has talked about sovereign wealth fund, of course, usually related to technology.
And historically, innovation, entrepreneurial creativity comes from, frankly, anywhere other than the United States government.
It sounds like your vision is a little bit different, but the criticism usually is that if the government is picking winners and losers, couldn't that, in fact, reduce innovation, the very innovation that you're trying to create?
And do you really expect USG management, U.S. government management, to be the most effective?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, but I'm not calling for like the entire system.
We're not going back to the nuclear age when if you wanted big research dollars on a piece of technology or on nuclear weapons, it was controlled in the hands of the federal government.
That system, that bird has flown the coop, right?
And now most of the interesting technology that we all deal with comes from the private sector.
I'm just saying that in some cases, the federal government needs to get in the game and be additional to our great innovators, not at the expense of.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Let's talk about specifics on technology, lithium and chip alliance NATO-like.
So the experts I spoke to about this have talked about a single market for this to achieve economies of scale, to have market influence.
And usually it's seen as a kind of G7 Australia vision, some kind of common market, some kind of alliance.
But the president has talked about this, and I should say the president is working with Australia on that very idea.
But the president's also looked toward the Gulf on this, not just for money, but Saudi Arabia has the fourth largest rare earths in the world.
Who would be your allies in this if you were president, if you were designing this?
Would it be our traditional G7 and Australia allies?
Or could you go beyond those traditional allies?
And how much might values in other realms, i.e. Saudi Arabia, influence the list of allies in this kind of?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I don't, I, again, I think that we just need to kind of really widen the aperture on what we think of when we think of partnerships and alliances.
I tend to think of them as mostly military.
And then we have some of our economic ones.
I just think that it is in the world where we all need common things, but we don't have access to those common things like lithium.
You can see an assemblage of countries, maybe a bunch of NATO countries, but not all.
Maybe a bunch of the G7 countries, but maybe not all.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Could it be with someone like Saudi Arabia?
unidentified
Sure.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Sure.
I mean, I think to me, the world is requiring us to kind of think in a more kaleidoscope kind of way.
And so we're going to have different alliances on different things.
And I think that in that case, we're going to be working with people that we need, right?
It's part of, like, I look at, this is a little off topic, but just like what this administration has done with India.
unidentified
Okay?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Like, that's dumb.
That's dumb.
And we see like, you know, the military parades, and there's the prime minister of India who just, to me.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Protein ping you're talking about, in Beijing.
Yes.
unidentified
Yes.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
And it is like, you know, you see all these folks together.
We should be trying to peel away a country like India and bring them into our orbit rather than alienating them and pushing them into the arms of China.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Which, of course, before the last few weeks was the consensus bipartisan forces.
unidentified
I thought we were there, but apparently not.
Technological Risks and Deterrence 00:08:13
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
And one more on the rare earth, on rare earth reserve, the one big beautiful bill has $2 billion for a stockpile.
Is that the right approach?
Is that just a good start, as you said about the Chinese?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Well, I think we have to look at it.
I just think that this idea that we need to make, you know, again, can be controversial in a room in New York, but like the free market isn't perfect at preparing us for emergencies, for natural disasters, and certainly for the technological risks that are coming at us right now.
And so I do think that some sort of reserve for the things that we need is essential.
We just got to look at how to set it up correctly.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Let's do cybersecurity in the couple minutes that I have left.
Quote, I'm going to quote you back to yourself.
If China is going to target our power grid and local water systems, we need to take offline the servers that we are using or that they are using to do that.
So let me ask different questions about salt typhoon and volt typhoon.
The SALT Typhoon is what you referenced in your speech.
This group of Chinese hackers that has infected all of our telecommunications, perhaps to the point where every single American cell phone was hacked or a version of that.
So the obvious questions when you talk about going on offense, does the U.S. government even know what to target and where to target and who they are?
And how do you go on offense, the crucial question about this, and create deterrence rather than escalation?
unidentified
Yeah.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Well, first of all, let's dispense with the idea that there's any deterrence now on cyber threats, right?
And there is no one sitting in Beijing or in Moscow being like, I wonder what the Americans will do if I go into every single cell phone in the country.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
They listen into the president's phones.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
They know.
They know what we'll do.
We're, you know, and look, there's stuff that happens in the secret squirrel corners of our government.
But in terms of what we can say to the American people, we are doing to respond to this.
I would say some parts of our community have largely been, well, at the Pentagon, we say, admiring the problem, right?
Like looking at it and talking about it.
Oh my God, it's amazing.
But what do we do about it?
And it's difficult.
I admit it is difficult.
As someone who did military planning at the Pentagon, we don't have good doctrine on this.
And I'll tell you, it's confounding.
I think about this all the time.
Imagine a hacker based in China or in Russia takes out the power in Michigan in the middle of February and 180 elderly people freeze to death in their homes.
Well, a foreign actor just killed a bunch of American civilians on our soil.
What is the right response?
What does proportionality look like?
Americans don't tend to kill civilians, kill grandmas in their homes in Moscow.
But if the attack came from there and they killed our people, how do we respond?
It's confounding, right?
I get it.
It's tough problems, but like tough noogies, we're there and we've got to work through it.
But I deeply, deeply feel we need to reset deterrence and that will take not just words, but action.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
But again, going back to my question, do we know where to point our offensive tools?
And how do you do that without escalating further?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
I think we often can trace where these things are coming from.
The intelligence question, it's what to do about it that confounds people, which is the doctrine, right?
So, okay, they just killed 180 Michiganders.
I know the server.
I think at a minimum, we can be talking about taking out the server.
But we're all dependent on technology now.
Does that mean we're going to take out something that hurts a bunch of their civilians?
This is the kind of complexity that we have not sufficiently worked through.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
And you're jumping to a hypothetical attack on critical infrastructure, which is what Bolt Typhoon is, which is a separate set of Chinese hackers that have burrowed into our critical infrastructure.
But do you see a difference between hacking into our phones and causing physical damage?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
For sure.
I mean, with anything.
It's like, you know, it's just as we treat, you know, a one ISIS guy, you know, carrying out a small terrorist attack in an American city is very different than 9-11, right?
There's a difference, and there's a difference in cyber threats and digital threats.
But I think to me, I don't believe that we have yet had in this country the cyber 9-11.
We will have it.
We've had a lot of things that you're mentioning that a lot of insiders have heard about, Salt Typhoon.
I guarantee you, most Americans don't know what Salt Typhoon is and what it actually did in terms of access to every American phone, potentially.
But one day, you know, I hope it never comes, but I believe, especially with AI, we're going to see a cyber attack that is so shocking and so dramatic that it shakes us out of our day-to-day, just like 9-11 did when I was here that day.
And suddenly, Americans are talking about cyber threats in a way that we haven't before.
I think that the colonial pipeline was the USS coal attack.
It was the attack that's like, we knew it was bad.
We knew something was going on.
Just like the USS coal attack off of Yemen before 9-11.
So I don't want to get there.
I want to prevent that.
And that's where I think the responsibility of leadership comes in.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
And then one last one for me, and I'll zoom out.
So you mentioned the National Security Act of 1947.
It is being kind of amended today.
At 4 p.m., the president will announce the secondary name of the Department of Defense and the Department of War.
I assume that's not what you meant when you said rediscussion.
unidentified
That is not what I meant.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Can you give us a back-of-the-envelope vision for what it is that you would change in an act?
How does the structure of the U.S. government need to change in order to enact the kind of foreign policy envision?
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
So the National Security Act creates the big departments and agencies that we know about, and it creates the National Security Council.
It creates kind of how we engage with each other around the government and lays out a bunch of priorities.
To me, as someone who served in the White House under a Republican president and a Democratic president, I think, and I think there's many in this room who will agree, the siloing between national security and economics was profound.
There's a few people, and Mike Froman might be one of the few who actually did the link between the two.
But I think that is that should be gone.
And if you are, we should all be on the same page.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
The National Economic Council somehow merges with the National Security Act.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
I think it needs to be much more elevated.
We need a whole different group of folks who can come in and help us on these big tech questions, right?
It's hard to be a good government bureaucrat and then decide the rules of the road for new technology that's hard to understand.
I see this every day in the Senate.
And then I would say we need to, the idea that the Secretary of Defense and the Secretary of State and then whatever we're going to do on aid abroad are three separate kind of entities that may or may not talk, I think that that is gone.
What is the point of having them working sometimes at cross purposes?
And I think the best, the closest we ever came was Bob Gates testifying with Hillary Clinton when she was Secretary of State and he was Secretary of Defense.
If you got to work together on common goals.
And then things like how our embassies are organized, right?
If we care about economic prosperity back home, if we think we should be more competitive abroad, if we see China just gobbling up space in places like Africa, shouldn't we be competing as well?
Time To Rewrite 00:03:44
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
And therefore, do we have the right people in our embassies?
Shouldn't we have a bunch of more commercial officers sitting there?
I think there's a ton to think about.
But the bottom line for me is we just need a complete rewrite.
You don't throw at everything, but you recognize that we're in it.
80 years is a long time to work off the same sheet of music.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Things worked pretty well, but it's time to change.
Yeah, great.
unidentified
Okay.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
So we have about, I went a little bit long, 15 minutes or so.
We'll start in the room and we'll go to the phone lines, as it were.
And all right, so let me go right in the middle there on the right side first, and then we'll go across the room.
unidentified
Thank you so much.
This is great.
I'm Alexandra Starr with International Crisis Group.
I wanted to get your reaction to the news this morning that appeared on the front page of the New York Times about the abortive SEAL Team 6 effort.
The one question you cannot answer.
I wanted to get your reaction to the decision to green light it, but also the fact that President Trump went ahead with it without informing Congress.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Yeah, I will be, I know.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Just quickly, I will say something because I know you can't.
So this is an extraordinarily rare piece of journalism that has the level of detail that is classified in here is rare even for unique stories in the New York Times.
And it's basically has SEAL Team 6 submarine movement off the coast of North Korea to the point where they were trying to get on to plant a listening device and they had little mini subs that are called wet subs.
They get on.
It goes badly and it's aborted.
That's the story that I know you can't talk about.
The point that she's making is something maybe that you can talk about, which is the use of, well, the lack of informing Congress, it seems like, for many years about that particular incident.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
So, and I will, this is not a dodge.
I literally was on the train this morning preparing for this speech.
So we saw the article, my team and I said, holy crap.
unidentified
But I did not read the pressure.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
But what I would say is, I think Donald Trump has taught us all that what we thought were laws were actually just traditions in our country.
And the tradition of informing Congress, certainly on some sensitive issues, some formal notifications, he's also just done away with.
But it's not the first nor last time that Donald Trump has done this.
The bigger question is, what the hell do you do about it?
What do you do about it when someone goes against those long-held traditions and just doesn't inform the Article I branch of government as laid out by the Constitution?
And we are currently living in that hellscape and trying to figure that out.
And I think it hits right down the fairway as a new senator because you want the place to work.
You want to be that co-equal branch of government.
And between that and so many other things that he's doing, it is clearly confounding the other branches of government on how to deal with someone like this.
Master Work and Ventilators 00:03:50
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
And Trump 2 is a lot different than Trump 1.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
All right, let's go to this side of the room.
I saw someone right there in the middle as well.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
I just have to say, this man with white hair right here is my professor.
He was my professor and the head of my international security program at Columbia that got me into this crazy life.
So you may have to.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
All right, we may have to.
unidentified
Absolutely.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
So yeah, the gentleman who's just raising his hands now, and then we'll come back to your old professor.
unidentified
Hi, my name is Hall.
I'm a startup founder.
I drive a Michigan assembled vehicle many years ago.
I was a tank commander.
My vehicle was American-made in Ohio.
But these days, we can't fulfill our tank, possibly can't fulfill our tank productions on time because the industrial base is hauled out.
As you know, our Navy ships are all behind schedule.
And we are in the position of asking South Korea to teach us how to make shipping.
There's probably more people here than master tool dye experts within the United States.
What do you say?
We need a Manhattan plan to reindustrialize America.
What does that look like for you?
What do the outcomes look like?
And just a fun one for you.
How do you think Michigan has a role to play?
I want them in Notre Dame family.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
I'll pay you later for that question.
Thank you.
So 100% that you are right, and I think Ukraine really laid very, very bare how thin our defense industrial base was.
And, you know, in Michigan, we feel very proud that we have sixth and seventh generation master manufacturers.
It's our tradition, it's our bread and butter, it's what we do.
And we look around at other states and we're like, do you make anything or build anything?
Like, what do you actually do in your economy?
Right?
We are kind of a bread and butter kind of place.
And I think part of having and making a decision as a country that you need an industrial policy comes with a recognition that you should still make things and grow things, right?
It's that the free market on its own will not ensure that we have, when we need it, a strong industrial base to make the new things, right?
Remember during COVID when we all thought for a hot minute that we really needed ventilators, that that was going to be critical.
Well, who do you think they turn to to make ventilators?
You can't go, with no offense, to Silicon Valley and be like, make me a ventilator.
You need people who make shit.
And that to me, the minute we lose that, it's that and frankly, our ability to feed ourselves by ourselves that should always be must-dos in the United States of America.
Michigan has a big role to play.
We currently make 60% of everything that our soldiers shoot or drive.
And but I also have been very open that we can't just do manufacturing the way we used to do it.
We need to combine with founders like you and others to do 3D printing and advanced manufacturing and bring in all the new techniques and robotics.
It's not going to be the greasy floor of our grandparents' generation.
So that's our challenge: take what we do, that master work we know how to do, the best precision manufacturing in the world, and add in all the cool stuff that you guys are doing so that we can be the best manufacturers of the future as well.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Okay, let's go to the online audience for a question.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
Don't forget my question.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
I'll come back.
unidentified
We will take our next question from Tom Nagorski.
Mr. Nagorski, please accept the unmute now prompt.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
We've all forgotten after COVID.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
Former boss.
elissa slotkin ▲ ● ▼
How to unmute.
nick schifrin ▲ ● ▼
By the way, Tom Nagorski, former boss of mine.
We're going to do a former president.
Tom, can we?
We can't hear you still.
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