Erin B.:	I'm Erin Bronchetti in economics. I'd like to welcome you. I hope your semesters are off to a good start. Please don't throw your food at me when I tell you I'm on sabbatical this year. I'm sort of blissfully unaware of the excitement of the past week, but I hope it's gone well for you and I'm excited to see so many of you. 
	This is the first café of the Second Tuesday Social Sciences Café. As many of you probably know, this series has been convened in the sciences for the past two years, so I'm excited to have the opportunity this year to bring it to Kohlberg and focus on the social sciences. We have some wonderful speakers lined up for the year. I hope you'll keep an eye out for the notifications and join us as often as you can. We have four of these talks every semester. They're a bit different from faculty lunches, which is why I'm starting so early. We give both the speaker and the audience a little more time to engage with the topic, so the talk will last about 30-35 minutes, and then we'll have 10-15 of questions and discussion at the end. 
	So in keeping with that tight schedule, I'll just take a moment to introduce our speaker. To give him a proper introduction would take more time than I have, so I'll try to focus on the highlights. Dominic Tierney is an Associate Professor of Political Science here at Swarthmore. Before coming to Swarthmore, he did his undergraduate work at Oxford University in Modern History, where he graduated with the double first-class distinction. I did a little investigating and found out that means he achieved basically the highest grade possible. He went on to complete his doctorate in International Relations also at Oxford, but during his doctoral studies he spent some time at Harvard as a Knox Memorial Fellow. Between getting his Ph.D and coming to Swarthmore's faculty, he held two post-doctoral fellowships, one at the Mershon Center for International Security and Public Policy at the Ohio State University, go Buckeyes, and the other as a post-doctoral fellow in National Security at the Olin Institute for Strategic Studies at Harvard. 
	In addition to his scholarship and teaching at Swarthmore, he is a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute and a correspondent for The Atlantic. He has published dozens of journal articles, book chapters, book reviews, op-eds, and other papers, but he is very well known for having written three highly regarded books, the first of which was "Failing to Win, Perceptions of Victory and Defeat in International Politics." As an aside, this book won the International Studies Associations Best Book of the Year award and was nominated for best book of the decade ... "FDR and the Spanish Civil War, Neutrality and Commitment in the Struggle that Divided America," and most recently, "How We Fight, Crusades, Quagmires, and the American Way of War."
	So in light of the political and military unrest over the past summer with many of these crises continuing, I feel extremely fortunate to kick off this series today with Dominic Tierney as our speaker, with his talk entitled "A World on Fire, Barack Obama and the Crisis of Global Order." Please join me in welcoming Dominic Tierney.
Dominic T.:	Thank you. Well, first of all, thank you so much for that overly kind introduction. It is a great pleasure to see so many people here and to kick off this exciting Social Science Café series. 
	Last summer, I visited the Palestinian Authority Headquarters in Ramallah, and on the way back, I stopped off at a Palestinian theme park called Mukhmas Funland. Now, this is an amusement park West Bank style, with tall concrete walls and barbed wire. It has a roller coaster, which is 14 feet high, so it doesn't quite compete with Six Flags. The ferris wheel offers incredible views of Jerusalem, although it's actually one of the best vantage points to look at Jerusalem and is therefore under the eagle-eye of a local Israeli military base.
	Like many theme parks, Mukhmas Funland has surreal rides, which will spin you, disorientate you ... but the difference is that, because Mukhmas Funland is fairly sparsely attended, you can ride these surreal rides over and over and over again. I think that this is a useful symbol of some of the conflicts that we face in the Middle East. This talk is going to cover a lot of ground, far too much ground, but I'd be happy to talk more in detail if you have any questions. 
	I'm gonna discuss a little bit the alleged crisis in global order, President Barack Obama's response, and what to do next. Is the world in fact facing a crisis of global order? Order would mean a stable structure where, as J.F.K. put it, the weak are safe and the strong are just. Now some argue we face a new, dark age of war. We see on the television every day images of chaos, included a masked madman holding a crude knife to the neck of an American on his knees. Other books, however, other scholars, other writers like Steve Pinker, and better angels of our nature, suggest that we in fact live in a golden age of peace and prosperity and that we forget how brutal earlier eras were. There is truth in both positions. The key is the difference between interstate wars or conflicts between countries, and civil wars or conflicts within countries. 
	So first of all, the good news. Since World War II, countries have almost stopped fighting each other. Territorial expansion by force is no longer acceptable. Great powers haven't gone to war for 60 or 70 years. It's a very different environment than say, the 19th Century world of international relations. Now countries, of course, have not suddenly become paragons of virtue. International politics remains a contact sport full of furious rivalry and intense competition. Interstate wars do still happen, but they're very rare. Many respectable countries have essentially given up the war game, especially in Europe. Now there are many reasons for this interstate peace ... memories of the World Wars, nuclear deterrents, the spread of democracy, the United Nations, globalization and international trade. There is another world, a fairly strong and fairly durable order of liberal capitalists and democratic states, where weaker countries can generally regard themselves as being safe from predatory neighbors. 
	But now for the bad news. Conflict still exists in the form of civil wars or organized violence within the boundaries of a state. Of course there's nothing new about guerrilla warfare. The insurgent however, now dominates the military stage. About 90% of wars today are civil wars, and in fact, in those cases where states do compete militarily against each other, it's often in the context of the civil war, for example Russia versus the Western Ukraine, or Iran meddling in the civil war in Iraq. In other words, the world is both ordered and disordered. Large parts of the globe are stable ... East Asia, Western Hemisphere, Western Europe. Other parts are unraveling.
	So let's look at a few cases here on the map extremely briefly just to remind ourselves about the conflict environment, and we'll begin here in Syria. So the conflict in Syria began as part of the Arab Spring in early 2011. It began as peaceful protest, but the Assad Regime cracked down and over time, it evolved into a brutal sectarian civil war in which, perhaps, 150,000 or 200,000 people have died and almost half the population has been internally displaced. Assad has used violence systematically to radicalize the opposition. In other words, he has attempted as a systematic plan, to target the moderate groups and actually encourage the rise of Islamic State, also known as Isis. I think on the belief that, if Isis becomes a significant enough threat, then the West or the powerful states will no longer seek regime change.
	So Isis of course has been dramatically strengthened by the civil war in Syria. It's almost akin to natural selection. The civil war in Syria is so brutal that, as an armed group, you either get better or you die. An Islamic state has emerged from the survival of the fittest as a tough and well-organized Jihadist group, skilled in urban fighting with control over much of Syrian oil and a marked capacity for effective propaganda and social media campaigns. 
	So let's move over to Iraq. As you can recall, the US invaded Iraq in 2003. The country soon deteriorated into civil war and unrest until in 2007, the surge of US troops in the Awakening Movement, which was an attempt to reach out to Sunni opponents, helped diminish the violence. The US left in 2011, but since then there has been a marked deterioration in Iraqi security. Maliki marginalized Sunni opponents and then the civil war in Syria seeped over the border into Northern Iraq, first in a drip feed and then in a torrent of Isis fighters. Isis now controls large parts of Northern Iraq. 
	So how much of a threat is Isis? Well, threat is a product of both intentions and capabilities. In terms of intentions, Isis is highly threatening to the US as allies. It has a virulently anti-Western ideology. It's willing to commit horrific brutality and seeks to build a new caliphate. Isis is too extreme even for Al-Qaeda, which broke with the jihadist group in early 2014. The question is how capable is Isis? On paper, they have perhaps 10,000, maybe 15,000 fighters, which is only a small fraction of even the Iraqi military, but they have shown the capacity to sweep through Sunni areas. The real test is whether they can replicate the success in Shia areas of Iraq and Kurdish areas. There are hundreds of Western passport holders who are currently fighting for Isis and other jihadist groups, especially from Britain and France and Western Europe. In fact, amazingly, twice as many British Muslims are fighting for the Islamic Jihadists than are fighting for the British Army currently. 
	So let's move over to Ukraine. The ousting of the pro-Russian regime in February and the quest of the new pro-Western regime led Russia to seize the Crimea and also aid the civil war in Eastern Ukraine. Many assume that Putin is a kind of evil genius with a grand strategic plan of which intervening in Ukraine is simply the first step, but in fact, more likely, the Russian response has been improvised. There is no master plan. It's more a mixture of opportunism and fear. In fact, when you look at the Ukraine crisis, it's really a crisis among the weak. All of the countries involved in the Ukraine crisis are in various states of disrepair. First of all Ukraine, which has really struggled since the breakup of the Soviet Union to get its economy in order and is deeply divided between the pro-Western/pro-Russian blocks. Even Russia, which some see as strong, is actually fundamentally vulnerable because of its reliance on energy exports, and it also faces demographic problems. The last 20 years for Russia have been a story of massive strategic retreat as NATO and the EU have expanded. 
	The US, of course, is currently in a mood of caution and wariness, and the European Union, meanwhile, has only recently emerged from a crisis that looked like it could destroy the entire single currency and the EU project. It's economy is very vulnerable. 
	Now let's look down to Israel and Gaza. Israel unilaterally withdrew from Gaza in 2005 while retaining control of the West Bank territory. The message here is that if you get the withdrawal process wrong, then you may well be back. Hamas took over shortly afterward and since then, there have been three major Israeli military incursions into Gaza, the last which, hopefully, has ended. That alone killed 2,000 Palestinians, most of them civilians, and dozens of Israelis, most of them soldiers. It seems the absolutists on both sides in the Israeli/Palestinian struggle are currently winning. Certainly when I visited, there was little optimism about the peace process. 
	Then over here we have the forgotten war in Afghanistan. Most Americans, I think, have mentally checked out of Afghanistan, but in fact, the United States is still involved in a major counter-insurgency war with tens of thousands of US soldiers there. The US has been in Afghanistan for 12 years. We're currently in the process of a drawn-out withdrawal. By the end of the year, there will be fewer than 10,000 troops there, which will then be withdrawn over the next two years. Afghanistan recently had an election, but the results are still disputed and the future of Afghanistan, in some regard, rests on reaching a deal between the major political figures.
	Meanwhile, over here in Libya ... As you can probably remember, back in 2011, the US participated in a regime change mission, which overthrew Gaddafi. Then we sort of forgot about Libya. A National Transitional Council nationalist government took over, but Libya is deeply divided between Islamist militias and more nationalistic groups, and in fact, the militias have refused to cooperate and have now taken over large parts of the country.
	So this was just a cursory glance at major conflicts, all of which are unique, all of which have long historical roots, all of which you can unspool back decades. But at the same time, in a globalized world, these conflicts are often connected. Islamic State of course has moved from Syria into Iraq. Russia is not just fighting in Ukraine. It's also a patron of Assad in Syria. So we need to carefully calculate the ripple effects when thinking about dealing with one of these crises. If you push on A, how does that affect B? 
	This is also the era of strange bedfellows. Just consider over here, Iran. The US is involved in a major nuclear crisis with Iran. We're trying to reach an accommodation to stop Iran from developing a nuclear weapon, but Iran is also a de facto ally of the United States in the fight against Isis in Iraq next door. In fact, even in Afghanistan, Iran could also become a de facto ally of the United States. You may know, Iran is no friend of the Taliban. In fact, they nearly went to war back in the 1990's when the Taliban ran Afghanistan. 
	So let's turn then to the Obama Doctrine and the President's approach. Presidential doctrines are as American as apple pie. There is this idea that every president should have a single, clear, defining foreign policy principle ... the Monroe Doctrine, thou shalt not colonize the Western Hemisphere ... the Truman Doctrine, thou shalt not spread Communism around the world. And so naturally of course when Barack Obama became President, people immediately asked, "What is the Obama Doctrine?" In fact, he'd only been in office a few days when people started asking, "What is the Obama Doctrine?" This doctrine is like the Holy Grail. People have searched for it all over the world. The internet is full of theories about what it looks like. Skeptics doubt whether it even exists. Obama has actually resisted doctrinaire thinking. But at the same time, his foreign policy is driven in large part by the principal of "not the Iraq War." 
	The centrality of this principal is really no surprise. After all, Obama rose to the presidency in large part because of his opposition to the Iraq War. Remember back in 2008, he outmaneuvered Hillary Clinton in the primary, I think, in large part because of Hillary's vote for the invasion of Iraq back in 2002. Then this was also reason why he defeated John McCain. Of course there's a wider psychological dynamic here, which is that people tend to learn much more from failures than from successes, right? We sort of forget about successes and we fixate on failures as a source of learning. We do that in our ordinary every day lives, but we also do it in foreign policy terms, so it is no surprise that the Iraq War, which is widely deemed to be a failure, would be a major source of learning.
	It's hard to find any aspect of Obama's foreign policy that has not been fundamentally shaped by the "not Iraq" dynamic. The extrication narrative that Obama has put forward is based on a responsible withdrawal of US forces from the Middle East. He is more restrained about using force than Bush. Obama favors precise and surgical military operations ... special forces raids, drone strikes, which of course have escalated dramatically in the Obama presidency. He supports multilateral military operations like, for example, in Libya, and has a strong aversion to any kind of prolonged Iraq-style nation-building. So Obama's initial response to Islamic State was quite cautious ... limited air strikes. He came out and explicitly said, "We don't have a strategy yet," which many people think was somewhat unwise to say, even if you didn't. 
	In recent days, it seems that the United States is moving from containment to a more limited rollback strategy, a more aggressive rollback strategy. In other words, rather than simply trying to keep Isis restricted to the Sunni areas of Iraq and Syria, the US is hoping to ... well it's talking about ultimately defeating Isis. So most likely we'll see stepped-up air strikes, the provision of more weapons, the Kurds and the Iraqi regime, but without many American boots on the ground.
	So let's try to connect the state of global order and disorder and the Obama Doctrine. How is the President doing? Well, there's no question that these issues that we've very briefly touched on here are horrendously difficult problems. Interstate wars, which have largely disappeared, are often relatively neat and clean, even if they're very bloody. Civil wars can be extremely intractable. It reminds me of a situation in chess ... some of you here I'm sure are chess players. There's a situation in chess called zugzwang, which means move anguish. What that refers to is a situation in chess in which any move you make is likely to worsen your position, but you have to move. In a sense, Obama with some of these crises faces his own kind of zugzwang. 
	There are no easy solutions. After all, in 2003, with the intervention in Iraq, the US tried an aggressive regime change strategy. So what was the result of this large scale invasion? Well, chaos and civil war in Iraq. So therefore, let's try something different. In 2011, the US tried a very restrictive operation in Libya in which we would lead from behind, let the West Europeans take the lead, no nation building, no US ground forces. What was the result of that in Libya? Chaos and civil war. 
	So okay, let's avoid military intervention. Let's look at Ukraine and we'll try sanctions, right? Economic sanctions ... which are at best, however, a slow strategy, rarely get countries to change their core policies. Just think about decades of US sanctions against Cuba. What has been the result of sanctions in the Ukraine? Well, arguably, continued civil war and worsening chaos. So whereas sanctions have not been effective, and different military options have not been effective, let's just try non-intervention. Well that's what we tried in Syria, okay? The US has basically tried to keep out of the Syrian Civil War. What has been the result? Well, a dramatic worsening of the civil war. It has metastasized until the point where now tens of thousands have died. Chemical weapons we used ... and, as I mentioned, a huge percent of the population is either refugees or internally displaced and it's now seeping across the borders into Iraq.
	So we can see by looking at those different strategies, the difficulty of the kind of menu of options that Obama faces with these crises. And he also needs to maneuver through American domestic politics. What is the American mood? Well, the American mood tends to swing between a more interventionist position and a more non-interventionist ... I wouldn't say isolationist, but a more non-interventionist position. Currently, it is closer to the non-interventionist position in the wake of Iraq and Afghanistan. There is certainly little appetite for prolonged nation-building missions. It's almost like we are hungover. That is the mood today. We are hungover. 
	The truth is that Americans do not do introspection for very long. Interventionism will reawaken. The mood will shift because US culture is deeply embedded with notions of exceptionalism and idealism and universalism, right? Many Americans believe that, if you scratch beneath a foreigner, you will find an American trying to get out. So if you look at the post-Vietnam period, which in some ways bears a comparison to today's mood, you will see there was initially a mood of some reflection. People talked about a Vietnam Syndrome, a desire not to get involved in similar kinds of conflicts. But the pendulum shifted. Reagan clearly tapped into something in 1980 and 1984 with mourning in America a more upbeat, confident, and also bellicose foreign policy. 
	Hillary Clinton therefore, in pure political terms, is probably being canny and pitching herself as somewhat more hawkish than the President because, by 2016, I expect the mood will have tilted a little bit back in that direction. We have doves in America who are wary of almost any intervention, and wisely I think, have called for the US, some doves, to just essentially leave Iraq and Afghanistan. Obama also has to maneuver, outmaneuver, the hawkish elements. The Neocon Hawks in America, I consider as the anti-Cassandra's. So what do I mean by that? Well back in ancient times, Cassandra was cursed. She could see the future accurately, but nobody believed her. Well the Neocon Hawks are the anti-Cassandra's. Their predictions about the future are almost always wrong, but we keep believing them. 
	How effective, therefore, has Obama been? Well ... In many ways, he's avoided the eras of the Bush administration. Unilateralism, a missionary belief in spreading freedom, a wild overconfidence. Obama's slogan "Don't do dumb stuff" actually has quite a lot of merit to it. Obama is also a splitter rather than a lumper. Some people are lumpers. They like to connect enemies together in a sort of grand coalition. Just think about some of the early Cold War warriors who lumped together the Communist adversaries into a monolithic block. Or the Bush administration's language of the War on Terror that lumped a lot of different adversaries together, the axis of evil, into a single entity. Obama's more of a splitter, I think to his credit ... focusing on the differences between many of these adversaries, which can allow a more sophisticated strategic response.
	There, of course, is indeed much we can learn from the Iraq War, about the consequences of regime change, about the failure to plan effectively for post-war occupation, about the lack of pre-war debate about the War in Iraq. But there are also some problems and issues with the Obama foreign policy. Focus on avoiding the mistakes of Iraq could, itself, prove dangerously rigid. One of the core lessons of Iraq is no boots on the ground, no nation-building. This can lead the United States to forget about the day after regime change. In fact, Obama recently described a lesson that he had learned from US intervention in Libya. This is a quote. He said, "We and our European partners underestimated the need to come in full force if you're gonna do this." In other words, regime change. 
	Then it's the day after Gaddafi is gone when everybody is feeling good and everybody is holding up posters saying "Thank you America." At that moment, there has to be a much more aggressive effort to rebuild societies that didn't have any civic traditions. So that's the lesson I apply now every time I ask the question, "Should we intervene militarily? Do we have an answer for the day after?" And I think that mistake of failing to plan for the day after is partly influenced by the lessons of Iraq. Furthermore, even if we never again want to do Iraq-style nation-building, we're almost certainly going to be engaged in some kind of stabilization mission, peacekeeping, humanitarian intervention. We need to be ready and prepared. After all, 90% of the wars today are civil wars. 
	Just to give you an example of the irrationality of the US military ... Back in 2006, the US military set up the Irregular Warfare Center. This was to try to institutionalize some of the lessons that we'd learned from counter-insurgency in Iraq and Afghanistan. We made a huge number of mistakes early on in the wars, going in with a lot of force, smashing down doors, this kind of thing. Eventually we learned lessons about more effectively winning hearts and minds, so we set up the Irregular Warfare Center to try to institutionalize these lessons and ensure that we don't forget them. Well, this year the US Army has announced that it is closing the Irregular Warfare Center since, of course, we would never need that again, even as irregular warfare is the dominant kind of global warfare. 
	Furthermore, Obama's extrication narrative could become a full-blown retreat. The President really took his eye off Iraq after 2011. The sense was, we're out and we don't have to worry about that anymore. The period after 2011 was such a critical period in Iraqi politics. There were efforts to create a national unity government that then founded. As I mentioned, the violence seeped from Syria into Iraq. But the Obama administration never publicly criticized Maliki. The basic principle was, keep Iraq off the front pages and that's good enough. You also see the same thing with Afghanistan. You see a kind of lurch from almost an obsessive interest when the war is at its height, to just a "this is not our problem anymore" mentality. 
	So back in 2011, the US had 100,000 troops in Afghanistan. We were spending a hundred billion dollars a year. It was wildly disproportionate to our interests there. In fact, we were throwing around money on basically anything. The US actually paid for an Afghan version of Sesame Street called Sesame Garden, and there's a great photo of the US ambassador at the time, Ambassador Crocker, standing next to the Grover character from Sesame Street in Kabul. The New York Times actually had to run a correction because it had originally said he was standing next to Cookie Monster and they corrected it and said he was standing next to Grover, which is one of my all-time favorite New York Times corrections.
	By the way, they had to get rid of the Dracula character from ... the Count. See, we don't really get this in England. The Count. They had to get rid of the Count character because the Afghan kids had never heard of Dracula. They didn't understand the fangs, so they got kind of freaked out. I actually talked to Ambassador Crocker about Afghanistan. I did find time to ask him about Afghan Sesame Street. He said it was very popular with Afghan kids, but even more popular with their parents. So anyway, the putting money into Afghan Sesame Street sort of captures the moment when we were absolutely focused on the war, perhaps even overly focused. Now we're leaving ... people just want to turn the page and get out as quickly as possible. I think that that kind of lurch in attention is not necessarily in US interests. The danger is that we end up with a kind of moon landing view of the world. What I mean by that is, the focus is on getting Americans back safely and not really caring about what we leave behind. 
	So what then is the strategy finally? There's no quick fix for Isis. There are some hawkish voices today saying, "Let's defeat them. Let's essentially go to war with them." There's no quick fix since they are well-established, well-trained, and they can move easily between two different civil wars. Any attempt of the US to directly defeat Isis would take tens of thousands of troops several years. That said, the US can have an overall strategy that aims to defeat Isis over a period of time. The group faces internal contradictions that may eventually lead to its implosion and this process is gonna require US leadership. The US remains the most powerful country in the world. It does have more resources than other actors, and it can build a broad alliance that will support the new regime in Iraq, critically reach out to Sunni Iraqis, protect Kurdistan as a rare island of stability in the region. 
	We need to think long-term. What happens after Isis does retreat? What is the end-game? What happens the next day? The main lesson here is that we left Iraq and now we're back. These are the wars that never end. I'll stop there. Thank you. 
	Go ahead.
Question 1:	What is Isis's strategy in going after America? Is it just pure recruitment? Is it because now it's about Iraq rather than Syria? I mean, if they had stayed in Syria and not involved us, we would have just let them do what they do ... potentially. 
Dominic T.:	Well, Al-Qaeda had the far enemy/close enemy strategy. So in other words, Al-Qaeda was famous for seeing the regimes of the Middle East as the near enemy, the close enemy. They wanted to topple them and create what they saw as a genuinely Islamist regime. Then the United States in the west was the far enemy, that was effectively backing these regimes. It's not clear yet the extent to which Isis subscribes their explicit sort of strategic dynamic. 9-11 was therefore an attempt to strike the far enemy as a means of ultimately defeating the near enemy. 
	What does Isis get after, sort of, going after America? Well, it's a recruitment device in part. Isis is extremely sophisticated in its use of social media and other propaganda devices. The fact that hundreds of fighters are willing to travel across Europe to the Middle East is really a sign of that. Where the United States fits into Isis' strategy is largely gonna hinge on how the United States acts, and how involved the United States gets. Isis' self-perception of America and it's role is sort of yet to be explored or outlined. 
Question 2:	So the civil wars have extended [inaudible 00:32:34] and exacerbated the humanitarian crises in bordering or moderate states. I'm wondering if you've given analysis, or thought about, what the US's role could be in helping to stabilize those kind of situations more aggressively and more- 
Dominic T.:	Sure. Right, sure. I mean, that's a great question. Let's just take the Syria case, for example. If the United States is not willing to intervene directly in Syria, and it's certainly a very problematic case for direct intervention, stepping up it's efforts on the humanitarian front make a lot of sense ... not just in humanitarian terms, but also in strategic terms. Right? So millions of Syrians have moved as refugees into neighboring Turkey, Lebanon, and Jordan. In fact, the refugee camp in Jordan across the border, I think, is now the 4th largest city in Jordan. And that's a refugee camp of Syrian civilians.
	Many of these countries are extremely poor and impoverished, and the arrival of vast numbers of Syrians is enormously destabilizing. Jordan has been, for example, a relatively stable ally of the United States for many years. The destabilization of Jordan would be hugely problematic for US security. It would also be very problematic for Israel's security as well. 
	The US has provided, I think, one or two billion dollars in aid for Jordanian refugee crisis. I think that will be a situation where we could step that up fairly dramatically and try to help more. As I said, not just for moral reasons, but also for strategic reasons. 
Question 3:	President Obama has a press conference scheduled for tomorrow to discuss his strategy for Isis. What do you expect? 
Dominic T.:	Never make predictions. That's the first ... especially about the future. That's the first rule.
	I think ... Obama will announce a stepped-up program. He will use more aggressive language. I think that's partly because he wanted to do his deliberative phase. He tends to have a deliberative phase and then choose his kind of action. Again, this is the anti-Bush, right? In the sense that Bush was the decider, the sort of go-with-his-gut. Obama's ... "I'll do a deliberative phase." Back in 2009, for example, before the surge in Afghanistan, Obama spent several months in a long, drawn-out discussion of what to do in Afghanistan. There were 25 hours of meetings. They were discussing everything. Then he made his decision. 
	So he's had his deliberative phase. I think he's also been stunned by some of the criticism, which has included not just the sort of normal voices, the Republican hawks, but also some Democrats. And I think many Americans are concerned. There is this sort of narrative beginning to emerge that Obama is disconnected, unduly passive, perhaps just exhausted. Actually exhaustion would be the most understandable really. 
	So what I think that you'll see ... his tone will be more confident, more aggressive, and he will outline a strategy that he will describe as defeating Isis. In fact, if you read between the lines, it will be actually fairly cautious still, with lots of escape routes. In other words, he won't make massive commitments. Probably there will be additional support for the new Iraqi regime, including military support and probably stepped-up air strikes perhaps, including in Syria as well as in Iraq. 
	So I think the tone will be different. I think the substance will be incrementally different, but the goals will step up. This is important because, as a president, once you establish a set of goals, it's hard to dial them back. Right? And you do get boxed in, which is why Obama, in many ways, to his credit, is very cautious usually about putting the flag down ... If the United States says that his policy is to defeat Islamic state, well that is our policy and that will bind, not just Obama, but President Hillary Clinton or President Mitt Romney, whoever comes next. We are bound by that and so we want to be very careful about the commitment that we make, but I expect there will be some greater commitment. 
Question 4:	Once you get past [inaudible 00:36:54] plan, what would your instructions or day after plan [inaudible 00:36:58]? 
Dominic T.:	Sorry, day after plan ... Has there even been a day after-
Question 4:	A successful day after plan. 
Dominic T.:	So I should just finish an article on the difficulties countries have with long-term planning. It is the story of many wars that leaders often leap off the cliff edge without any real plan for the endgame. Japan attacked Pearl Harbor ... I was just reading the sources on ... They attacked Pearl Harbor. They had no idea how they were going to defeat the United States at all. Right? They had a really good plan for striking Pearl Harbor, and then they just hoped that everything would be fine, right? Despite the fact that the United States was ten times as powerful as Japan. 
	Before we think, "Oh, crazy Japanese imperialists," think that the United states attacked Iraq without any real plan for what was gonna happen after regime change. This does seem to be an endemic problem that countries face, and that includes the United States with all of its vast intelligence resources. There are various reasons why countries are prone to ignore the kind of later stages, the end game. Partly, these are reasonable considerations after all the initial steps and the campaign are fairly easy to work out, and then the later stages are necessarily quite foggy. So we just tend to ignore those and hope it's okay. 
	I think human psychology also plays into this. Leaders tend to be very overconfident on the eve of war. If you remember before we invaded Iraq, people were talking about US troops being greeted as liberators like France in 1944, this kind of thing. Overconfidence is very common on the eve of war and it can lead countries to ignore the end game, right? If everything is gonna be great, then we don't need to worry about the day after. And there are other dynamics as well, but the net result of this is that actually it's a pretty general pattern that countries tend to only think one or two steps ahead. I think that they could do a lot better in that, even if the future is very murky.
	My suggested solution, by the way, is to start at the end. Not to start with the initial step striking Pearl Harbor, getting rid of Saddam Hussein, whatever it is, but actually to start with final strategic success and outline what that would look like, and then not just work forward to that, but actually work backward from that. And have, at all times, in mind ultimate success, the ultimate goals. In other words, in Iraq, that would be a stable Iraq. In World War II, that would be the United States signing a peace treaty with Japan, right? And have that as ... the ultimate success, as the goal. Countries tend not to do that. Go ahead. 
Question 5:	This wasn't in your talk, but to what degree in your analysis of the disruption of the nation-state models of region and kind of post-colonial theory kind of considerations of reorganization of border? Like you didn't talk about the Kurds and their desire for their own autonomy [inaudible 00:39:51] and so forth.  
Dominic T.:	Sure, I mean this is a vast topic, which I won't be able to get into. States are exhibiting various degrees of strain because of extraordinarily complex historical processes, fragmentation, and unification. In Iraq, for example, as you know, the Kurds are probably moving fairly rapidly towards statehood. There is no simple picture though. I think some people see the world as one in which states are disintegrating and you can find examples to fit that story. After all, the country I was born in, Britain, is on the verge of disintegrating. Scotland could be about to become independent, right? And you can tell a narrative there about a desegregation of states, splintering, and so on.
	And yet there's another narrative, which says the story of the last hundred years or two hundred years is really of states being remarkably successful at creating strong, fairly strong, institutions and building the allegiance of their citizens. Just look at states like India or Turkey, right? They were created relatively recently with no real historical example to build on, right? And yet, today Turkey is a relatively cohesive Islamic country and India is, in some ways, an emerging great power. So I don't see any simple story, and if you were to try to drill down and work out the dynamics and distinguish ... it would obviously be extraordinarily complex. But it's a great question. 
Question 6:	You said reliance [inaudible 00:41:24] some of the regional players are weighing more heavy ... it seems like Syria, Iran, and Turkey have natural enemies, or are natural enemies with Isis. Are they reluctant, or are they not even tempted to act? 
Dominic T.:	Actually, Syria and Iran have acted fairly decisively against ... well, sorry. Iran has acted fairly decisively against Isis. It's moved some of its forces into Iraq. The Syrian story is more complex because Assad is playing a very devilish strategy really, which is that he has focused his enmity and his resources against the relatively moderate opposition groups in Syria and has left alone Isis.
	Now until very recently, for example, Syrian government air forces wouldn't really strike Isis areas of Syria. Isis sells oil to the regime, right? It's this kind of loose almost ... I wouldn't say alliance, but sort of nonintervention pact almost. So why does Assad follow that strategy? Because he wants to swing international opinion and the logic is the enemy of my enemy is my friend, right? If Islamic state is the enemy and Assad is their enemy, then Assad is now our friend. There is a logic to this strategy and it has actually been quite successful. The West has stopped talking about regime change in Syria. I think Western foreign policy has not yet come around to the position of keeping Assad in power. We still sometimes rhetorically say we would like to see a post-Assad regime. That is very, very low down the agenda now. So there is a logic to it.
	The moment Assad's position is secure, I predict that he will turn all of his enmity against Islamic state. And you could see an absolutely vicious crack-down, but at the moment, the kid gloves with which the Assad regime deals with Isis is really driven by this logic of regime survival above all else ... which dictates Assad's decisions.
Erin B.:	We have time for one question.
Dominic T.:	Go ahead.
Question 7:	So you said that [inaudible 00:43:39] nation-states to be sort of short-term interested. You would manage to have appointments in places like Cypress and Somalia [crosstalk 00:43:47] for like decades. So they may be a more suitable buy-in for such long-term nation-building?  
Dominic T.:	Sure. I think the ... we don't really like nation-building. Americans hate nation-building, and you can understand why. I think in some form, it's gonna be inevitable, a world in which conflicts are civil wars, right? Peace-keeping operations have actually been quite successful in recent years as long as, crucially, there is a peace to keep. So, in other words, if the combatants in a civil war have actually signed some sort of deal, then peacekeepers can go in and keep things stable and stop the civil war from erupting. There's been some success with that, for example, in Bosnia and Kosovo, in recent years. Reasonably stable, still very problematic issue areas, but they've been reasonably stable since the 1990's.
	The reason for this is ... It leads to current political science literature, is that the combatants in a civil war cannot credibly promise to the other side that they will stick by the terms of the deal. There's nothing they can do if they hate each other, even if they want to stick by a peace deal, there's nothing they can do to prove that they will. So if you bring in a third party peacekeeping force, like UN Peacekeepers, then they can sort of oversee that and build trust and enforce the peace agreement, which might not otherwise happen.
	That said, different entities sort of bring different resources to the table in terms of peacekeeping. The UN can deal with usually a relatively small number of opponents, but UN Peacekeepers cannot deal with a large insurgency. The African Union is sometimes the most legitimate entity for peacekeeping, but it's also the least capable. The EU ... it can be good at certain aspects of peacekeeping like election monitoring, this kind of thing, but it doesn't really have many military assets. Then there is NATO, which is probably the most capable, but is also in large parts of the world, the least politically legitimate.
	So different actors bring different elements to the table, but peacekeeping is likely to be a key element as we look ahead to the coming decades. 
Erin B.:	Let's all give ... Thanks.