Sept. 29, 2025 18:00-19:04 - CSPAN
01:03:46
Transcriber: nvidia/parakeet-tdt-0.6b-v2, sat-12l-sm, and large-v3-turbo
Source
Participants
| Speaker | Time | Text |
|---|---|---|
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People Here Illegally
00:04:52
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unidentified
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Healthcare. | |
| So how many documented aliens do we have? | ||
| Do you mean I don't know what you mean by a documented alien? | ||
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unidentified
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Well, I mean, you said that their health care doesn't have that money that's going to go towards undocumented aliens. | |
| Well, are there documented aliens in this country? | ||
| I guess the way to think about this is there are people who are here illegally. | ||
| Right, they cross the border illegally. | ||
| And then there are people who like, are you know the immigration system? | ||
| They wait in line for a long time, they have a green card or they've been, you know, they've become citizens. | ||
| They used to not be citizens, they've gone through the system, they've become citizens. | ||
| Those people uh, you know that that's a. | ||
| That's the distinction. | ||
| So people who are like, crossing illegally, who don't have any status here like um, you know, those people cannot get the premium tax credits. | ||
| And actually it's really quite hard to get the premium tax credits if you're not here illegally, because it kind of works through your, your IRS system and most people aren't paying those kinds of taxes if they're here illegally. | ||
| So it's actually illegal to provide premium tax credits to people who are not here legally, but it's also very difficult to do so. | ||
| That's the distinction. | ||
| I mean I'm not really making it. | ||
| I don't really know who's a documented alien. | ||
| I don't think that exists, but I'm just making a case for people who are legally here versus like, who cross the border illegally, who didn't wait in line to come here through our normal legal immigration systems. | ||
| Those people are, those are, are not, should cannot receive health care through the ACA premium. | ||
| There's another category of people here legally, those who have made asylum claims and have been allowed in this country on asylum claims, another category of people who who the Trump administration is taking a a stronger look at. | ||
| Can you explain what happened with asylum claims during the Biden administration, the numbers of people who came in claiming asylum and were granted asylum versus those who weren't, okay. | ||
| So a lot of people came into the United States and I, you know the Center FOR American Progress has put forward a plan to fix the immigration system and it really does acknowledge a lot of the problems in the Biden administration which I will be the first to say should have been solved faster. | ||
| But so it's. | ||
| It's a. | ||
| So what happens? | ||
| It would. | ||
| What what happened is that people would come to the border, a lot of people would claim asylum. | ||
| They would, you know, they would be granted sort of an initial assessment that it's possible that they were, that they would get asylum like they had enough it. | ||
| They had enough to sort of get through the first phase of decision making and then they would essentially be allowed to be in the country and they would have to make their asylum claim and then the and then they would be it would take. | ||
| There was a giant backlog so it took too long for To get an adjudication of that claim. | ||
| Ultimately, people who went through the system, you know, it was like 25% would receive asylum so that they could get on a pathway to legal status. | ||
| But they would often be here for a long time with a sort of quasi-legal status. | ||
| Now, I do not think those people actually get the Affordable Care Act, but I would have to check just to make clear about that. | ||
| But I think that system was definitely broken. | ||
| And so I will say at the Center for American Progress, we have basically said that people should be adjudicated at the border. | ||
| You should raise the asylum standards so people are adjudicated at a high level. | ||
| Like basically, you have to prove that you should be subject to asylum at the border. | ||
| People should not be able to go into the country, and then they should be quickly repatriated if they do not are not subject to, if they do not receive asylum. | ||
| So instead of having people come into the country, make those decisions essentially at the border. | ||
| By the way, should note the website AmericanProgress.org is where folks can go to check out a lot of these reports that you do at the Center for American Progress. | ||
| And our immigration plan is there. | ||
| This is James. | ||
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unidentified
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We'll leave this here, but you can watch it in its entirety online at c-span.org as we take you live now to a discussion with former National Security Advisor John Bolton on foreign policy issues at an event hosted by the Harvard Kennedy School. | |
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Why You Stayed
00:05:12
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unidentified
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Live coverage on C-SPAN. | |
| Good to see you. | ||
| Good to see you, Ambassador. | ||
| Thank you for being here tonight. | ||
| Let me just pause on that for a moment. | ||
| I realize that's usually a throwaway line. | ||
| It's probably how every forum starts, but I feel like it's especially applicable in your case. | ||
| I think many, if not perhaps most people in your position, owing to, shall we say, recent events, might have chosen to bow out or to choose a convenient excuse not to be here. | ||
| That is not you. | ||
| I think we can say that, you know, political or policy disagreements aside, we should all applaud your courage, your convictions for being here. | ||
| So indeed, Ambassador, thank you very much for being here. | ||
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unidentified
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Thank you. | |
| Thank you. | ||
| We, of course, will save time for audience questions at the end, but we'll start with a few of my own. | ||
| I do want to start just briefly with that elephant in the room. | ||
| If we can just touch it briefly, because presumably the episodes that you wrote about in your book, The Room Where It Happened, which we'll return to, are at least in part responsible for some of the legal issues that you're facing now. | ||
| So I want to give you the opportunity to comment on the raid on your home, the raid on your office, some of the allegations against you that have surfaced since then. | ||
| So Ambassador, the floor is all yours to respond or not. | ||
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unidentified
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Right. | |
| Well, I'd love to talk about it at greater length, but for pretty obvious reasons, I can. | ||
| I will just say I'm very confident that there's nothing in the book that's classified. | ||
| That's why there was a pre-publication review. | ||
| President Trump back in 2020 made his views known, as he so frequently does, saying, well, there's a lot of classified material in the book. | ||
| And he said this publicly and it's in the press. | ||
| He said, be okay if he published it after the election, but not before the election. | ||
| What else do you need to know? | ||
| Ambassador, so let's widen the aperture just a bit from that narrow topic. | ||
| We can talk about the differences between this Trump term and the first Trump term. | ||
| I think one of them that people have commented on is the lack of advisors, probably yourself included, who kept this president perhaps a little bit more warped. | ||
| And there are many Americans out there today, perhaps including some in this room, who are now fearful of a presidency that seems unbound by checks and balances. | ||
| You can look at troops in the streets, attacks on universities, attacks on law, attacks on nonprofit, the firing of inspectors general and military JAGs, the encroachment on the independence of the Fed, other supposedly independent federal bodies, threats against free speech, the usurpation of due process, what seems like perhaps targeted political retribution against people like you and Jim Comey and others. | ||
| So, Ambassador, how do you think about this moment in American history? | ||
| How would you characterize where we are? | ||
| Some people have called us, called this sort of a managed democracy. | ||
| Some people have been even starker, calling this an outright autocracy or something starting to resemble it. | ||
| How do you think about it? | ||
| Well, I think it's important to understand that Trump is an aberration in American politics. | ||
| There has never been anything like this before and hopefully never will be again. | ||
| I haven't gotten any less conservative watching Trump in office this time or the time before. | ||
| The biggest problem with Trump is that he doesn't have any philosophy at all. | ||
| It's all about Donald Trump and his neuron flashes on a day-by-day basis. | ||
| I think the central difference in terms of staffing in the administration between the first term and the second term is that this time he consciously looked for yes men and yes women. | ||
| It's a myth that some supporters have that Trump was constantly fighting against his staff who were trying to make other decisions than what he wanted to decide in the first term. | ||
| That simply isn't true. | ||
| Certainly the task of the National Security Advisor is to make sure that the president has all of the pertinent information that he may need to make decisions, to know what the options are, to know what the pros and cons are, and then to follow up to make sure that the decisions are being carried out. | ||
| Obviously the president makes the final decision. | ||
| That's how it works. | ||
| But you can either make well-informed decisions or you can make poorly informed decisions. | ||
| And that's the principal difference I would say. | ||
| When you served in that role, did you feel like you had the ability to push back on the president when you felt he was making poor decisions to tell him that he was making a mistake? | ||
| I pushed back all the time. | ||
| I lasted 17 months. | ||
| All I can say is I to this day remain his longest-serving national security advisor. | ||
| We are obviously meeting on the heels of a high-level week last week at the United Nations. | ||
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Reforming UN Bureaucracy
00:08:40
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| You famously joked, or perhaps it wasn't a joke, but you at least said that you could lop off the top 10 stories of the United Nations and, quote, it wouldn't make a bit of difference. | ||
| I'm tempted to ask a couple things. | ||
| I'm tempted to ask if that made your first meeting with the UN Secretary General a bit awkward after you became the U.S. Ambassador to the UN. | ||
| But more seriously, I'm curious about your skepticism towards the UN and how you think about that in the context of some of our competitors and adversaries, like Russia, but more so China, moving in when the United States retreats from the UN, from other multilateral institutions. | ||
| Do you see that as a reason to stay engaged despite your skepticism towards these bodies? | ||
| Well, you know, Jean Kirkpatrick, obviously a former ambassador to the UN, was once asked by a reporter if the U.S. should withdraw from the organization. | ||
| And she paused for a moment and said, no, it's not worth the trouble. | ||
| And what she meant by that, I think, was that there are U.S. equities at the UN that need to be protected. | ||
| The central problem is the UN's main political decision-making bodies, the Security Council, the General Assembly, the Human Rights Council, are hopelessly broken. | ||
| The Security Council was broken during most of the Cold War by that split. | ||
| There was a brief flurry of activity in the early 1990s as the Soviet Union was dissolving. | ||
| We got resolutions authorizing the use of force to expel Saddam Hussein after his invasion of Kuwait. | ||
| We had involvement in the breakup of Yugoslavia. | ||
| But in the 1990s and thereafter, that window in the Security Council closed, and it doesn't look like it's going to reopen anytime soon. | ||
| The General Assembly, I spent as UN ambassador almost no time on General Assembly matters except for the UN budget in an increasingly vain effort to keep the budget down. | ||
| But there are pieces of the UN system, which is vast and sprawling, that's part of the problem, that do good work. | ||
| And the specialized and technical agencies, they stick to their mandates and avoid politicization. | ||
| The International Telecommunications Union, the International Civil Aviation Organization, the International Maritime Organization, the World Intellectual Property Organization, you don't hear of them, but they do good and important work from the U.S. point of view, the International Atomic Energy Agency. | ||
| So I think you have to pick your spots and try and identify what works. | ||
| The UN bureaucracy is a big part of the problem. | ||
| Government bureaucracies are slow moving. | ||
| A bureaucracy made up of bureaucracies is even more slow moving. | ||
| I don't see what the alternatives are in the future, for well or ill. | ||
| That's where we are. | ||
| Let me just press you on that because I take your point that the General Assembly of Security Council perhaps haven't been as effective as any of us would like. | ||
| But even if the United States disengages or steps back from these institutions, they're still going to be there, right? | ||
| And so what is your proposal for how we can step back without ceding that ground to others who have a vision of the world and one that is vastly different from ours and from that of our allies? | ||
| Well, I'm not saying we step back. | ||
| My one UN reform, I could think of a thousand UN reforms, I have one, and that is that the United States should reject the system of assessed contributions, where the U.S. pays generally it's about 22% of the costs of most UN bodies. | ||
| Other countries pay different percentages. | ||
| There are a lot of UN agencies, the World Food Program, UNICEF, the High Commissioner for Refugees, that are funded solely by voluntary contributions. | ||
| So I think the U.S. should reject any notion that we're bound by the vote of the General Assembly, for example, to pay 22% of the budget of the main UN, of the specialized agencies. | ||
| We should pay for what we want and expect that we get what we pay for and encourage other countries to do the same. | ||
| It would be a tsunami through the UN system if the link between the U.S. 22% and what they did was broken. | ||
| And it would force them to compete to show that to get U.S. dollars, to get our contributions, they have to perform. | ||
| My first experience at the UN in the Bush 41 administration was trying to keep the PLO, as it was then, from becoming a state member of the UN, first at the World Health Organization, because the PLO theory was, well, if we're declared a state by being admitted to UN agencies, then we'll be a state. | ||
| This is part of the fantasy of international life at the UN. | ||
| And we stopped that because then Secretary of State Jim Baker issued a statement that said if the World Health Assembly admitted the PLO as a state member, he would recommend to President Bush that the U.S. cut off all contributions to the World Health Organization. | ||
| And that held up until the Obama administration. | ||
| It was put into American statutory law that that would be the consequence until Obama waived it to allow the PLO to rejoin UNESCO. | ||
| I think that was a big mistake. | ||
| But what it said is American money matters, okay? | ||
| Our money matters to us too. | ||
| Of course, the UN isn't the only multilateral institution or the only area from which this current Trump administration is receding. | ||
| The beloved former dean of this school, Joe Nye, whom we lost earlier this year, coined the term soft power. | ||
| And by that, of course, as you know, he was referring to the strength in America's development, humanitarian, its human rights-related assistance through USAID, which you're a proud alum. | ||
| I don't know if proud is the right term, but certainly alum. | ||
| The State Department, our global public broadcasting institutions like the Voice of America and others. | ||
| Now, you don't strike me as the world's strongest proponent of American soft power, but I'm curious to hear your thoughts on the implications from stepping back from these arenas with the same dynamic, the competition we are trying to manage with Russia, with China, with other competitors and adversaries. | ||
| Well, I think there is a role for soft power, but I think the controversy, at least before Trump, was not about his disdain for these efforts entirely, but about how you apply that soft power. | ||
| So in the Reagan administration, when I served at AID, our objective was to reform AID, to turn it back into what its earlier predecessors had been, like the Marshall Plan, which is an instrument intended to achieve American national security goals, rather than what we saw emerging in what was called the basic human needs approach in the Carter administration, | ||
| which turned AID into kind of world welfare agency. | ||
| That wasn't the point for us. | ||
| Our effort was to have projects that encourage private sector development, private enterprise, discouraging government control of the economy in the third world because we felt that was the best path to economic growth. | ||
| If your generalized view is just to be giving away assets without getting credit or without advancing American objectives, we thought that was a mistake. | ||
| And the irony of what the Trump administration has done is it has effectively tried to abolish America's bilateral foreign aid program, has done nothing to cut contributions to the World Bank or the regional development banks where we basically get no credit at all. | ||
| So they've done it backwards among other things. | ||
| On the radios, on Voice of America, on all of the networks, this is a total self-inflicted wound. | ||
| I'm sure there were a lot of fads that were put into the agendas of the radios and the whole government communications network around the world in both Obama and Biden. | ||
| I think you fixed the fads. | ||
| The point was, these were communications vehicles that people all around the world relied on for accurate information, and now they're gone. | ||
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Unholy Alliance
00:15:27
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| And that is a huge vacuum which we have created for our adversaries to fill. | ||
| It was a huge mistake. | ||
| Speaking of those adversaries that have tried to take advantage of this moment, I think one of the perhaps more disturbing developments we've seen over the course of recent years is what I think you've called this unholy alliance between several of them. | ||
| We have Iran, Russia, China, North Korea, really deepening the collaboration between and among one another. | ||
| I'm curious what you think about this new partnership, this alliance, if we can call it that. | ||
| And then, you know, I think some have leveled the charge that America's approach to both these countries and others in the region has actually had the effect over the past 15 years or so of actually pushing these countries together. | ||
| Do you put any stock into that? | ||
| No, I think what's happening is there is a growing China-Russia axis. | ||
| I think it reminds us of the Sino-Soviet alliance of the Cold War, except this time it's China that's the dominant partner and Russia the subordinate. | ||
| They have outliers like North Korea, like Iran, formerly like Syria, like Belarus, like Cuba, Nicaragua, and Venezuela in this hemisphere. | ||
| Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin have declared a partnership without limits. | ||
| That doesn't have a good sound to it. | ||
| And I think we're going to see that they're assisting each other. | ||
| I think China has materially aided Russia in the war in Ukraine. | ||
| It's increased its purchases of Russian oil and gas, now the largest purchaser in the world. | ||
| It has helped launder sanctioned Russian financial assets through China's opaque financial system. | ||
| It says it's not providing weapons. | ||
| It's just probably providing all the pieces for weapons. | ||
| Somebody can snap them together once they're inside Russia. | ||
| Obviously, we've seen North Korea now incredibly supplying troops, fighting in Eastern Europe on behalf of Russia. | ||
| All of this bodes very poorly. | ||
| But I think the main element of threat is China, and I think actually Russia is potentially one of the victims. | ||
| You know, if you look at maps from the mid-1800s, the land on which Vladivostok, Russia's main port in the Far East, sits and other territory around Manchuria was Chinese. | ||
| I think if you ask what's the end of this century going to look like where you have a country to the north with a very sparse population and enormous natural resources bordering on the country to the south, it's poor natural resources with a huge population. | ||
| By the end of the century, Russian, far eastern Russia could be Chinese. | ||
| So I've put this point to Russians. | ||
| Have you considered what it means for Russia to become a junior partner to China when I was national security advisor? | ||
| And they said, we've got it under control. | ||
| We're not worried about it. | ||
| Well, I'd say guess again, fellows, because it's not going in the right direction for you. | ||
| But what it shows is that Chinese expansionism, Chinese efforts at hegemony along their Indo-Pacific periphery are real. | ||
| And nobody's watching the conduct of the war in Ukraine more closely outside of the participants than Beijing to see that if, bluntly put, America and its allies won't stand against unprovoked aggression on the continent of Europe, who really thinks they'll stand against it when China comes after Taiwan or more of the South China Sea or Southeast Asian countries or along the line of actual control with India. | ||
| So I think that's the nature of the threat, the main threat over the next foreseeable number of decades. | ||
| And I don't think we're prepared for it on a number of levels. | ||
| So let me actually dig in on your thoughts on China. | ||
| You were highly critical in your book, and I've heard you joke that President Trump is perhaps the best marketer of your book, certainly in recent weeks. | ||
| I take that point. | ||
| But you're highly critical of President Trump. | ||
| You write that President Trump sought to have President Xi enhance his prospects for re-election by increasing American agricultural purchases in the run-up to the 2020 election. | ||
| And I think some would argue that we're seeing a very deferential approach to Beijing in this Trump administration. | ||
| And you look at things like TikTok, you look at advanced microchips, you look at the lack of seemingly any attention that they're paying to human rights. | ||
| You look at some of what they've done vis-a-vis Taiwan. | ||
| And it's an approach that seems to prioritize perhaps a trade deal above all else. | ||
| So I'm curious what you think a more effective U.S. strategy towards China might look like. | ||
| How should we balance all of these things, including the PRC's increasing assertiveness in the Indo-Pacific, the looming specter of attempts to unilaterally change the status quo around Taiwan, and really China's broader global influence? | ||
| I think Trump wants what he called in the first term the biggest trade deal in history with China. | ||
| He sees that as because after all, he's the best dealmaker in the world. | ||
| He tells us this all the time. | ||
| He just brought peace to the Middle East today after a thousand years of conflict. | ||
| He's resolved it. | ||
| I hope you watched that announcement. | ||
| It tells you a lot about Trump, the way he did it. | ||
| But for him, he understands. | ||
| He thinks he understands trade because it's in dollars and cents. | ||
| I don't actually think he understands trade, but he does. | ||
| And I think he prioritizes it above other things. | ||
| There were examples in the first term, for example, where we would try to meet with members of the Asian Security Quad, Japan, India, Australia, and the U.S., really pushed by Shinzo Abe, the Prime Minister of Japan, one of the greatest leaders of America's friends in the world. | ||
| It's a sad loss that he's gone. | ||
| But all Trump wanted to do was talk about trade. | ||
| The bigger strategic picture was lost. | ||
| I think he's just done it again by sanctioning India for purchasing Russian oil and gas. | ||
| Didn't sanction Russia, didn't sanction Russia, but sanctioned India and didn't sanction China, which has significantly greater purchases of oil and gas than India did. | ||
| These are examples. | ||
| I think he's fascinated by China. | ||
| I tell the story in my book when Theresa May had him for lunch at Checkers. | ||
| We were out there before the famous Helsinki summit, and Trump got onto the subject of his 2017 visit to China, and he said to Theresa May, they gave me the biggest welcome that they have ever given any foreign leader in history. | ||
| And you just sit there and say, what do you say after that? | ||
| That's what he's looking for. | ||
| And I worry that our friends and partners along the Indo-Pacific periphery will be very worried about the outcome. | ||
| China, of course, is not the only country, the only area of which you're highly critical of President Trump in the book. | ||
| I'm not giving away too many spoilers when I say you have similar criticism towards the way he handled Ukraine, Russia, North Korea, the rule of law. | ||
| Was there a single moment during your, what, 18-month tenure as 17, 17, during your 17-month tenure as National Security Advisor, where you finally realized this relationship perhaps wasn't salvageable? | ||
| And then, you know, how did you think about this going into the administration? | ||
| You had seen this president on the campaign trail. | ||
| You had seen him for some time as commander-in-chief. | ||
| Did you have any misgivings going in? | ||
| Well, look, I had met him well before the 2016 presidential campaign. | ||
| I had met with him after he took office. | ||
| I've been called a lot of things over the years. | ||
| I've very rarely been called naïve. | ||
| I don't think that was the problem. | ||
| I did believe that, like every one of his predecessors, that the weight of his responsibilities, certainly in the national security space, the gravity of the decisions he would have to make would discipline his thinking. | ||
| I believed that up until I got there. | ||
| And I realized fairly soon after I arrived I was wrong, that nothing disciplined his thinking. | ||
| So it wasn't one straw that broke the camel's back. | ||
| I would say the last things that were on my mind were the idea that he would negotiate with the Taliban to withdraw from Afghanistan and actually take their word that they would honor their commitments, including the idea to bring them to Camp David, which fortunately never happened, and the way he handled Ukraine. | ||
| And I stayed until I was sure that the military assistance that he had held up would be released, and that was the day I resigned. | ||
| You and I have both worked in the National Security Council. | ||
| It's a very, in some ways, bottom-up institution that tries to surface the best ideas for the president to give him or her optionality and the greatest decisions based possible. | ||
| President Trump is clearly a president who chafed under the large bureaucracy that was the National Security Council, and I think we have another extreme now. | ||
| We have a Secretary of State who's also the National Security Advisor, who's also the defunct administrator of the U.S. Agency for International Development, who's also the national archivist. | ||
| Does it worry you when we have a single official who is playing all of those roles, overseeing all of the challenges and opportunities? | ||
| And does that structure give you as much pause as some of the greatest geopolitical threats we face today? | ||
| Well, I think it's a big mistake. | ||
| No offense to Marco Rubio, but the only person who held both jobs before was Henry Kissinger. | ||
| And President Ford ultimately recognized that didn't work either, that you couldn't have one person being both Secretary of State and National Security Advisor, and that's when he promoted Brent Scowcroft to the position. | ||
| I think the consequence now is that the whole reason for the creation of the National Security Council after World War II was to give the president a way of controlling vast bureaucracies dealing with enormous issues that the country had not faced at any time before in its history. | ||
| And that coordination mechanism is effectively broken now. | ||
| And I think you can see that in decisions that get made in one department or another, ultimately they may be reversed, like pausing assistance to Ukraine, like calling into question the AUKUS agreement, the Australia-UK-U.S. agreement to provide nuclear-powered submarines to Australia. | ||
| But these are symptoms of a process that is not working. | ||
| And there's no guarantee that there'll be a catastrophe. | ||
| Maybe we'll make it through and we won't see real negative consequences, but the risks are very high. | ||
| And the main reason is that people are now afraid to offer up policy recommendations. | ||
| They wait and see what Trump says. | ||
| And, you know, who knows what tomorrow will bring. | ||
| Let's talk a little bit more about you and your experience in that role and more broadly. | ||
| There's a caricature of you, not just from that role, but from your time in public service, a caricature of you that you've never met a regime change policy that you didn't embrace, whether that is Iraq, Iran, Syria, Venezuela, Lebanon, Cuba, North Korea, Yemen, Libya. | ||
| Did I leave any out? | ||
| Well, I could think of a few others. | ||
| Let me ask the question first. | ||
| You know, I think our experience over the past 25 years has given Americans an abject lesson in regime change and some of its perils. | ||
| And so I'm curious your thoughts, whether your thinking has evolved over the past 25 years, having watched our experience principally in Iraq. | ||
| Do you have misgivings? | ||
| Or are you less enthusiastic about these regime change options around the world? | ||
| No. | ||
| Look, you have two ways you can proceed with adversaries or countries that are causing you problems. | ||
| You can either see if you can change their behavior, or if you can't change their behavior, change the regime. | ||
| I would say in Iraq, there were a whole series of developments beginning with the overthrow of Saddam Hussein, really beginning back in 1990 when Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. | ||
| I think that's really one long struggle. | ||
| And I think that we did the right thing in overthrowing Saddam. | ||
| I think that decision was correct. | ||
| I think after the overthrow, the situation was mishandled. | ||
| But the policy we pursued after the overthrow was not dictated by the decision to remove Saddam Hussein. | ||
| They're distinct decisions and they should be judged on their various terms. | ||
| But I have no trouble saying in a number of other examples that regime change would solve problems. | ||
| It doesn't mean that all other problems are thereby eliminated. | ||
| But I think removing Maduro in Venezuela, which we tried to do in 2018 and 2019, and which I hope we can do today, would be the right thing for us and for the people of Venezuela. | ||
| I think that there will never be peace and security in the Middle East until the regime of the Ayatollah is overthrown in Iran. | ||
| And I think, frankly, our unwillingness over a sustained period of time to do what we said our policy was on the Korean peninsula, which is reunite the peninsula effectively under a free government like that in South Korea, has allowed the world's only communist hereditary communist dictatorship, just think about that for a minute, to get to the point where they've exploded six nuclear devices. | ||
| So I'm happy to take it on kind of country by country, but when countries threaten the United States, it should be our policy, either to change their behavior or get somebody else in who doesn't threaten us. | ||
| So I would love to get into country by country and maybe we'll do that in this conversation and the questions. | ||
| But let me just stick with Iraq for one second. | ||
| So am I right to think that what your contention is, had we sent in 100,000 more troops, 150,000 more troops initially, I've heard you say before that we were wrong to stand up, the coalition provisional authority. | ||
| Had we made different decisions on the margins that Iraq today would be a Jeffersonian democracy? | ||
|
Turning Questions Into Answers
00:12:22
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| No, and I don't particularly care whether it would be a Jeffersonian democracy as long as it didn't threaten the United States. | ||
| I think it was a mistake to become the government of Iraq, which is what we did. | ||
| I think the better course would have been very, very early after the overthrow of Saddam's regime to get as many leaders of different parts of Iraq together and say, congratulations, you now own the government. | ||
| You stand it up. | ||
| You figure out how you're going to do it. | ||
| We will hold the military ring around you against the Iranians, against the Syrians, and now you're going to decide what kind of government you have. | ||
| I've said somewhat offhand, I would have given him a copy of the Federalist Papers, said we'd be happy to explain parts of it that may be applicable to you. | ||
| But I do rest on this fundamental premise. | ||
| You do not create political maturity in other countries by making decisions for them. | ||
| You create political maturity by saying now it's your turn. | ||
| You make the decisions. | ||
| And I think had we done that, the result would have been different. | ||
| I can't say it would have been perfect. | ||
| But I do think the removal of Saddam Hussein removed a threat that had he ever gotten rid of UN sanctions, he would have recreated his efforts to get weapons of mass destruction. | ||
| I think people forget too quickly that he had kept together a cadre of 3,000 nuclear scientists and technicians. | ||
| He called them his nuclear mujahideen. | ||
| These were the people with the intellectual capability to recreate the nuclear program, whether there were centrifuges spinning or not. | ||
| These were the people he wanted, and he would have gone back to nuclear weapons. | ||
| So I have no trouble at all with the decision to overthrow him. | ||
| My point is that in phase two, we didn't pursue the optimum policy, and we can see the results. | ||
| I guess what I'm still trying to wrap my own head around is it seems so much of that rests on the idea that we heard before the invasion that we would be greeted as liberators, that we would have an opportunity to work with local authorities, to work with local groups, and that we could then help them coalesce. | ||
| Obviously, that wasn't the case, and I think the fact that we were greeted certainly not as liberators might suggest that some of what you're saying is a dead end. | ||
| I think we were at the beginning. | ||
| I think certainly in the Shia parts of Iraq, there's no love whatever for Saddam Hussein. | ||
| You could say the same for the Kurds. | ||
| But the difference is the difference between me and neoconservatives. | ||
| I'm just a simple conservative. | ||
| And that's why I would have gone as quickly as possible to the people of Iraq themselves and say, congratulations, you're in charge now. | ||
| And you figure out what to do. | ||
| We're not going to tell you through the coalition provisional authority what to do. | ||
| And let me say, for the CPA, it was staffed by people trying to do the very best they could. | ||
| In those circumstances, I don't question their ability or their good faith or anything else. | ||
| I just think it was the wrong thing to do. | ||
| I think we should have set up an interim government and pushed them into figuring out what they wanted to do next for their country. | ||
| I want to try and get to two more of these cases before we turn to questions. | ||
| One is Iran. | ||
| And today is a pretty meaningful day in the history of Iran with the UN snapping back sanctions on Iran, reimposing crippling multilateral sanctions that were relaxed under the Iran deal in exchange for the strictest nonproliferation controls on Iran's nuclear program that, of course, the Trump administration pulled out of. | ||
| The Trump administration in this term joined in with Israel's military campaign, degraded some of the nuclear sites, but we still have this impasse. | ||
| And I think some would argue that by going after these sites militarily, joining in with Israel, there's been this rally-round-the-flag effect in Iran. | ||
| And some might argue that the Iranian regime is stronger today than it was prior to June, precisely because the United States and Israel undertook this action. | ||
| It seems that regime change might be further off than closer. | ||
| But I would like to hear. | ||
| That would be wrong. | ||
| You know, nobody likes to see their country bombed, but the real reaction inside Iran, I think, is that the people as a whole saw that the regime was powerless to stop the U.S. and Israel from destroying its critical asset, which was the nuclear and ballistic missile program. | ||
| And that has contributed to the feeling that the regime's days are numbered. | ||
| Not that the people, not that the opposition know how to do it immediately, but instability is coming the day the Ayatollah Khamenei dies and he's in his mid-80s and not well. | ||
| It could come any time. | ||
| He's only the second supreme leader. | ||
| That is the point where the regime could fracture at the top. | ||
| And the regime is extraordinarily unpopular. | ||
| The economic conditions in Iran since 2018-2019 have been terrible. | ||
| The people look at the generals and the Ayatollahs and their families getting rich while the people continue to suffer. | ||
| There's enormous economic dissatisfaction. | ||
| The young people, two-thirds under 30, they know they can have a different life. | ||
| They can see it across the Gulf. | ||
| There's enormous ethnic dissatisfaction. | ||
| The Persian part of the population is only 50 or 60 percent. | ||
| Azeris, Kurds, Balukis, Arabs are unhappy. | ||
| And perhaps most importantly, most recently with the murder of Masi Amini three years ago, the Kurdish woman who refused to wear the hijab, we saw something really unprecedented in Iran. | ||
| We saw the women go into the streets, not challenging the dress code. | ||
| They were challenging the very legitimacy of the rule of the Ayatollahs who purported to pass on the will of God, whether it's on dress codes or forms of government. | ||
| And when the women said, we're not wearing that, we're not going to abide by the dress code, they were challenging the legitimacy of the Ayatollah to rule on anything. | ||
| And here's a big difference. | ||
| You can say this about all the Ayatollah and all the generals. | ||
| They all have mothers. | ||
| Some of them still have grandmothers who remember before 1979, and they have wives and sisters and daughters. | ||
| When you lose 50% of the population, that's a pretty big problem. | ||
| That regime is unpopular and unstable. | ||
| And I think had we continued with the military campaign against the nuclear weapons program, which the people could see was very precisely targeted, I think it would have been more destabilized. | ||
| So what I'm hearing you saying, just in short, is wait it out, let this regime topple under its own. | ||
| I wouldn't wait. | ||
| I would have gone back to the Bush 43 administration. | ||
| I would have been helping the opposition then, not militarily, but with communications equipment, with limited resources. | ||
| We can hear from the diaspora in Europe and the United States, which is pretty significant, and from inside Iran. | ||
| This regime is much more vulnerable than people think. | ||
| Venezuela, very quickly. | ||
| You've already told us that you, I think, remain in favor of regime change in Venezuela, so I won't ask that question. | ||
| But I will ask about the series of strikes that we've seen off the coast of Venezuela, the Trump administration targeting alleged drug smugglers, in some cases, according to public reports, even lethally targeting boats that have turned around, that have fully stopped. | ||
| Does it give you any pause that the administration may be doing this by many accounts in violation of domestic law, of international law? | ||
| Now, I think I know what you're going to say international law, but does it give you any pause about the way in which they're going about this? | ||
| Look, here's the problem. | ||
| I am very dubious about blurring the distinction more than it's already blurry between law enforcement and war. | ||
| I think they are two separate things. | ||
| We've talked about a war on drugs in this country for a long time, but it's not really a war. | ||
| It's a social problem and a law enforcement problem. | ||
| I'm not sure Trump can tell the difference, and that bothers me. | ||
| I think that it would be in the national interest of the United States to replace the Maduro government. | ||
| I thought that back in the first term. | ||
| I'm sorry we didn't have more capabilities to bring to bear. | ||
| I'm sorry the sanctions weren't enough. | ||
| I've told the story of a visit by the head of the International Red Cross after the failed April effort, April 2019 effort to overthrow Maduro. | ||
| And he was explaining he'd just been to Venezuela. | ||
| He said he had toured the hospital system. | ||
| This is 2019. | ||
| He said, I haven't seen a hospital system that bad since my last trip to North Korea. | ||
| That's what the people of Venezuela are suffering under, with infiltration by Russians, by Cubans, who kept Maduro in power in 2019, China, Iran. | ||
| Venezuela has enormous uranium in the ground. | ||
| I think it would be in America's interest, Venezuela's interest, the hemisphere's interest to put Maduro's regime on the ash heap of history sooner rather than later. | ||
| Okay, you've given us a lot to think about and to ask about. | ||
| So if people want to start lining up, we will turn to questions. | ||
| There are four microphones set up, and we'll turn to the microphones in just a moment. | ||
| Let me ask you one final question, more of a personal question. | ||
| One of the first acts of this Trump administration was a retributive act against you and several others, and it was to revoke your security detail. | ||
| I don't think we can talk much about it publicly, but there was at the time and probably still is a very real threat against you. | ||
| I'm just curious how you respond to that. | ||
| Not so much as a policymaker, a former policymaker, but as a husband, as a father, someone who now travels around the world without the protection that you were previously afforded. | ||
| Does that leave you concerned? | ||
| Right. | ||
| Well, just in my case, and for the others as well, this wasn't a case of chatter on the internet. | ||
| This was hard evidence about Iranian efforts to assassinate people from Trump on down for the strike against Qasem Suleimani. | ||
| So it was and is something that's very real. | ||
| I'll just put it this way. | ||
| Trump was asked a few weeks after he canceled my Secret Service protection, which President Biden had extended to me, and I said thank you at the time and will repeat it here today for doing the right thing regardless of politics. | ||
| Trump was asked, well, if something happens to Boltner, these other people, would you feel you're responsible? | ||
| And he said no. | ||
| We'll turn to questions. | ||
| We'll start here for each of the questioners. | ||
| Say your name if you're comfortable. | ||
| Just a reminder, as someone used to say here, that all good questions end with a question mark. | ||
| So we'll start here. | ||
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unidentified
|
My name is Louis. | |
| I'm from Scotland. | ||
| And I just wanted to ask you, Mr. Bouton, about the Palestinian news that we heard today. | ||
| So obviously, President Trump and also Prime Minister Blair in a certain capacity are going to have a role in the administration of the Palestinian state. | ||
| And I wanted to ask you if you believe that foreign leaders should have that level of power in a foreign state. | ||
| And also, if in the long term you see a clear path to self-determination for the Palestinian people who the UN have clearly cited as victims of genocide. | ||
| Well, I don't think there is a Palestinian state, and I don't think there ever will be a Palestinian state. | ||
| I don't think what was announced today is going to happen. | ||
| You know, I'm not sure Hamas is willing to sign up, and I don't think Iran is. | ||
|
Latin America's Complexities
00:07:09
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| I think that the Palestinian people have been misused for a long time, beginning in the 1950s and 60s by the radical Arab states who tried to push them up against Israel as part of the plan to drive Israel into the sea. | ||
| You know, in 1957, there were 300,000 people in the Gaza Strip, 100,000 natives, 200,000 refugees. | ||
| There was a UN plan to take the 200,000 refugees and put them on farms that were being set up on the east bank of the Suez Canal, which Gamal Nasser vetoed because he wanted to keep the Palestinians next to Israel. | ||
| That could have been the answer right there. | ||
| I think the effect of UNRWA, created one year before the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, has been to treat the Palestinian problem different from every other significant refugee flow in the world since 1945, to the detriment of the Palestinians. | ||
| They've been treated as the only hereditary refugees, and it has harmed them enormously. | ||
| I would eliminate UNRWA and I would replace responsibility from the UN perspective with the UN High Commissioner for Refugees, of whom you can say two things in all of their work over the years. | ||
| Number one, the High Commissioner has never forcibly moved anybody, whether to repatriation or to a third country. | ||
| Never forcibly moved anybody, number one. | ||
| And number two, there are no permanent UNHCR refugee camps. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Hi, Ambassador Walton. | |
| Thank you so much for your words. | ||
| My name is Jul Moreno. | ||
| I am a mid-career MPA student here at HKS. | ||
| I want to ask a couple of questions about Latin America. | ||
| So first, thank you for your words about Venezuela, the Venezuela case. | ||
| So what do you think about the situation right now? | ||
| It feels like the Maduro regime is pretty weak. | ||
| What is preventing the U.S. to do some kind of intervention, similar to what they did with Panama, with Noriega in the past? | ||
| And my second question is about the Chinese influence in Latin America. | ||
| So what are your thoughts about the megaport that was built in Peru and other actions that the Chinese government is taking? | ||
| When I go to Latin America, I feel like all the cars are Chinese. | ||
| Is the U.S. losing some influence there? | ||
| Does it matter? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I think that from the U.S. perspective, the best outcome in Venezuela is for the Venezuelans themselves to be able to take charge of their own government, to find and fragment the military and other aspects that keep Maduro in power. | ||
| One of the things we tried to do was to get other Latin American countries to step up in 2018 and 2019, which they did, freezing assets of the Maduro government. | ||
| And I think that, contrary to the myth, I didn't think the U.S. should use military force. | ||
| I thought we should help the Venezuelans. | ||
| Now, what Trump will do is anybody's guess. | ||
| He enjoys shooting these drug boats out of the water. | ||
| Whether that's a sign more is coming, I don't know. | ||
| But I think it's, as I said before, very much in our interest to see the Maduro regime overthrown. | ||
| And one reason is the rising influence of China. | ||
| And it's not just in Venezuela, but across the hemisphere through the Belt and Road Initiative and a number of steps they've taken to try and increase their influence at the expense of the United States. | ||
| We have had the Trump administration, for example, limit the sale of agricultural products like soybeans to China, and they've simply purchased increased soybeans from Brazil to the delight of Brazilian soybean farmers. | ||
| I mean, this is part of what's wrong with Trump's approach in a variety of reasons, and it bodes poorly for the United States and Latin America, I'm afraid. | ||
| Please. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ambassador Bolton, thank you so much this evening. | |
| My name is Amelia. | ||
| I'm a mid-career MPA student at the Kennedy School. | ||
| I also was a U.S. diplomat for the last decade until July 11th when I was rifted along with many other wonderful officers. | ||
| My question to you is, given the rifts, the accelerated departures we're seeing, whether it's in state, USAID, the broader interagency writ large, what's the immediate impact we're seeing in terms of A, losing agencies or that career personnel? | ||
| What should be done now to sort of mitigate that damage? | ||
| And how do we sort of restore our credibility with international partners in light of that and that social contract that we have not only with our employees here, but also abroad? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, I think it's going to be very hard to do. | ||
| I mean, I've been in the State Department in a lot of capacities at AID In connection with the UN, both in Washington and then in New York, doing arms control and international security. | ||
| I've been very fortunate to have the opportunities. | ||
| I thought the State Department in all the years I've been there needed massive reform. | ||
| In fact, what I said was it needs a cultural revolution to learn to be a more effective advocate for the United States. | ||
| But I tried during every job I had to work with the career people and say, okay, so here we have an administration that wants to go in this direction. | ||
| This is how we're going to do it. | ||
| I don't think I fired anybody that I can think of or tried to. | ||
| I simply tried to get, I wanted to learn the culture of the agency and each bureau at state is different from other bureaus, but there are cultures and make the culture work for the policies of Ronald Reagan or the two Bush presidents. | ||
| That's the right way to do it. | ||
| And I think, you know, the Foreign Service is probably the best educated part of the, at least it used to be, the best educated part of the federal bureaucracy, and they could be very effective advocates for the United States and its interest if they were pointed in the right direction. | ||
| I think the approach of the administration is leaving vast elements of our foreign affairs, national security infrastructure unused. | ||
| Trump likes to make every decision himself. | ||
| In some respects, that's great. | ||
| I hope he spends more time on the decor of the Kennedy Center. | ||
| I think it's in sad need of repair, and only he can fix it. | ||
| But you need to energize the rest of the apparatus that we have because there are vast amounts of issues that have to be addressed. | ||
| And when you ICE the State Department, as troublesome as it can be, as frustrating as it sometimes is to work with, you're just cutting off your nose despite your face. | ||
|
Why 2030 Feels So Far Away
00:09:56
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| It makes no sense whatever. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| My name is Teresa. | ||
| I'm a second-year MPA and international development student here at the Kennedy School, and I'm from China. | ||
| So you've been sharply critical on China's expanding global role from forging new alliance to leveraging international development, assisted biotechnology initiatives. | ||
| And you also see Beijing as the emerging great power rivalry. | ||
| So I want to understand from the U.S. perspective, what is first the most optimal solution, and second, what is the most realistic solution for the U.S.-China robbery endgame? | ||
| And what kind of policy, also from U.S. perspective, would you carry out to realize that optimal solution? | ||
| Well, I think the United States badly misunderstood what was happening in China. | ||
| There was a belief that China's economic growth would have two consequences. | ||
| One was international. | ||
| People said China is engaged in a peaceful rise and will be a responsible stakeholder in international affairs. | ||
| That turned out to be wrong. | ||
| The second point was that the growth of the economy, the growth of the middle class in China would make it more democratic. | ||
| And I remember vividly, beginning in the 1990s, people saying, well, there was an election for headman out in a village in a remote western province, and then in this province, and that will spread. | ||
| There'll be more local elections. | ||
| Then there'll be democratic elections at the provincial level. | ||
| And then there'll be democratic elections at the national level because of the growth of a middle class. | ||
| And it turns out that what we have in Xi Jinping is the most powerful Chinese leader since Mao Zedong. | ||
| So we were wrong on both counts. | ||
| And the direction that China is going in now, we've discussed some of it, but one thing we haven't discussed is China's effort to become a peer nuclear competitor with the United States and Russia. | ||
| It's estimated it'll have 1,000 warheads by 2030. | ||
| I think it may be in advance of that. | ||
| 2030 sounds like a long time away. | ||
| In the nuclear age, it's tomorrow. | ||
| And what that does to the United States, which ever since the beginning of the nuclear era, focused on a bipolar standoff between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and Russia. | ||
| And all of our weapons requirements, all of our delivery systems, all of our deterrence theory, all of our arms control strategies were based on a bipolar nuclear world. | ||
| There were a couple of other countries with nuclear weapons. | ||
| They were irrelevant. | ||
| It was a two-state standoff. | ||
| If China reaches near-peer capacity, we will be in a tripolar nuclear world. | ||
| And all of our theories, all of our requirements, everything we've done will be thrown out of date. | ||
| We have, just take a round number, 1,500 nuclear warheads deployed now. | ||
| Russia has roughly the same. | ||
| With China at 1,000, how many does the United States need? | ||
| 1,500 or 2,500? | ||
| Or maybe more than that, because we face different scenarios. | ||
| So China's development of a nuclear striking capability close to or equal to Russia and the United States, I think is the gravest threat to world peace in this century. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Ambassador, thank you for being here. | |
| My name's Luke. | ||
| I'm an MPP student here at the Kennedy School. | ||
| Going off the conversation about Iraq, I understand your realist argument that a country has a self-interest in changing the behavior or government of the country that opposes it. | ||
| However, what happens when the population of that country is opposed to the U.S. position, like in the Iranian and Cuban revolutions? | ||
| Does that require a forever war or the imposition of an authoritarian government backed by the U.S.? | ||
| While I agree that the U.S. should always advance its national interest, is that always worth the economic or political cost to the United States? | ||
| Well, sometimes the United States can affect the change that it wants. | ||
| But I don't think there's any question that the success of Fidel Castro in Cuba was strongly detrimental to the Cuban people and a threat to the United States. | ||
| And the collapse of the Shah in Iran, who was certainly no Jeffersonian Democrat, has not led to a better life for the Iranian people and has been a threat to the United States. | ||
| Sometimes you can do something about it, sometimes you can't. | ||
| But it's not what I'm motivated by is threats to the United States, not an abstract interest in Jeffersonian democracy. | ||
| And you sometimes have to make hard choices. | ||
| I think we have underestimated our ability in far too many cases and have allowed threats to grow that have caused real problems. | ||
|
unidentified
|
Thank you. | |
| My name is Yahya. | ||
| I'm from Pakistan. | ||
| I'm an MPA and international development student here at the Kennedy School. | ||
| My country and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia recently announced a mutual defense agreement. | ||
| There's been a lot of speculation on what that means for the Middle East exactly. | ||
| Does that mean that the U.S. is reducing its involvement and are Gulf states now being forced to look elsewhere for their security requirements? | ||
| My question is, how accurate of an assessment is that? | ||
| And what do you think the new equation in the Middle East is? | ||
| Particularly what effects is that going to have on wider conflicts such as those in a very tense and very nuclear South Asia? | ||
| Well, I think the impression that the Trump administration gives is an America withdrawing broadly from around the world. | ||
| And there are a lot of implications to that. | ||
| The most significant, and it may be playing out in the case of this arrangement that has been announced that you mentioned, is the decline of America's extended nuclear deterrent. | ||
| The extended deterrent is what we have used to convince many nations over the years not to develop their own nuclear weapons, but to rely on our deterrent. | ||
| The deterrent has been a counter-proliferation strategy. | ||
| But now in countries like Japan, they're discussing whether to get nuclear weapons. | ||
| South Korea is discussing whether to get nuclear weapons. | ||
| The topic has been present in the Middle East for a long time because of the perception that the Iranian nuclear program was continuing unchecked. | ||
| And I think this is one of the consequences of it. | ||
| So I think the almost inevitable outcome of a receding effort at American influence around the world is spreading anarchy. | ||
| And that's not good for other parts of the world that are becoming more anarchic. | ||
| It's not good for us either because it ultimately threatens us here in the United States. | ||
| Hoping we can take two quick final questions, so we'll group these last two and then we'll give the ambassador a chance to answer both. | ||
| So please go ahead. | ||
|
unidentified
|
My name is Juan Díaz Masa and I'm a graduate student at the School of Education from Venezuela. | |
| Ambassador Bolton, in 2019, you were a key architect of Trump's administration's maximum pressure strategy on Venezuela. | ||
| In hindsight, as you've mentioned, that policy failed to achieve a regime change in Venezuela. | ||
| On that, I have three questions. | ||
| Could you reflect on what miscalculations may have occurred in shaping those recommendations to President Trump? | ||
| Two, given Trump's current rhetoric toward Venezuela and latest actions, how do you assess his approach then and now more specifically? | ||
| And what keeps me up at nine, if you can, how do we get Maduro out? | ||
| Thank you. | ||
| Well, let me answer that real quickly. | ||
| Yeah, look, we didn't do enough in 2019. | ||
| Maximum pressure was not maximum pressure. | ||
| It's a good brand, you know, for people who like brands, but it wasn't effective. | ||
| It wasn't effective on Venezuela. | ||
| It wasn't effective on Iran. | ||
| It wasn't effective on North Korea. | ||
| I hope that maybe this time we will do more for the reasons we've discussed because I think Maduro's got to go. | ||
|
unidentified
|
I'm Jason. | |
| I'm an undergraduate. | ||
| Following the 2020 election, you said that several of Trump's domestic policies resembled policies that you had previously engaged in when planning coups internationally. | ||
| I think you said this to Jake Tapper. | ||
| Which specific actions were those, and which coup attempts, as much as you can divulge, did those resemble? | ||
| I was responding to what I thought were alarmist criticisms about what Trump was up to. | ||
| I think that he's not capable intellectually of having an authoritarian philosophy. | ||
| This is all about Donald Trump. | ||
| I will close with this. | ||
| Charles Krauthammer, an old friend of mine, now deceased, unfortunately, once told me, and I think said publicly, he'd gotten Trump badly wrong. | ||
| He originally thought of Trump as an 11-year-old, but he realized he was 10 years off. | ||
| He's a one-year-old. | ||
| And he sees everything through the prism, what benefits Donald Trump. | ||
| That's what it's about. | ||
| We could go on for another couple hours, but please join me in thanking Ambassador Bolton for his democracy is always an unfinished creation. | ||
|
America's Book Club Premiere
00:01:49
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| Democracy is worth dying for. | ||
| Democracy belongs to us all. | ||
| We are here in the sanctuary of democracy. | ||
| Great responsibilities fall once again to the great democracies. | ||
| American democracy is bigger than any one person. | ||
| Freedom and democracy must Be constantly guarded and protected. | ||
|
unidentified
|
We are still at our core a democracy. | |
| This is also a massive victory for democracy and for freedom. | ||
|
unidentified
|
This fall, C-SPAN invites you on a powerful journey through the stories that define a nation. | |
| From the halls of our nation's most iconic libraries comes America's Book Club, a bold, original series where ideas, history, and democracy meet. | ||
| Hosted by renowned author and civic leader David Rubinstein, each week features in-depth conversations with the thinkers shaping our national story. | ||
| Among this season's remarkable guests, John Grisham, master storyteller of the American justice system. | ||
| Justice Amy Coney Barrett, exploring the Constitution, the court, and the role of law in American life. | ||
| Famed chef and global relief entrepreneur Jose Andres, reimagining food. | ||
| Henry Louis Gates, chronicler of race, identity, and the American experience. | ||
| The books, the voices, the places that preserve our past and spark the ideas that will shape our future. | ||
| America's Book Club, premiering this fall, Sundays at 6 p.m. and 9 p.m. Eastern and Pacific, Only on C-SPAM. | ||
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