Cody Englander
Staff Writer
At 10:45 a.m. Tuesday in the Amphitheater, Michael O’Hanlon and Kori Schake discussed the global order and world affairs through the lens of U.S. defense and diplomacy. This lecture was part of Chautauqua Lecture Series’ Week Four theme “The Future of the American Experiment: A Week in Partnership with American Enterprise Institute and Brookings Institution.”
O’Hanlon currently holds the inaugural Philip H. Knight Chair in Defense and Strategy at Brookings Institution, while being an adjunct professor at Georgetown University and Columbia University.
Schake is a senior fellow and director of foreign and defense policy studies at American Enterprise Institute. She worked in the U.S. State Department, National Security Council at the White House and as a senior policy adviser for the McCain-Palin 2008 presidential campaign.
The lecture began with each speaker noting a pro and a con six months into President Donald Trump’s second administration. According to O’Hanlon, the recent NATO conference Trump took part in was positive for the administration.
“President Trump took pride in helping induce the allies to spend more on their militaries, which is overdue, and he’s kept almost all U.S. troops in Europe,” said O’Hanlon.
Shrinking areas of the government as a sort of reform has been particularly negative, according to O’Hanlon, using Elon Musk’s Department of Government Efficiency (DOGE) as an example.
“What happened to the Agency for International Development, and Elon Musk’s DOGE effort in particular, strikes me as taking the idea of reform to a ridiculous and counterproductive extreme,” he said.
Schake focused on the negative aspects of the economic policies that the Trump administration put into place.
“I’m genuinely shocked that nobody in the Trump administration appears to have passed Econ 101 in college,” she said.
The U.S. economy didn’t take the 4% to 5% jump as expected when the new administration came to power, which has had reverberating negative effects. Schake compared this to the growth rate of China’s economy, which both speakers cited as the main competitor to the United States.
Schake noted America’s global allies as a positive for the administration.
“In this particular moment, they need to build in buffers for what Americans have chosen, and they are doing that in a way that is stabilizing the system to a greater degree than I thought possible,” said Schake.
Along with the NATO conference, the speakers discussed the announcements from the White House on Monday involving the Russia-Ukraine war.
“President Trump said as of yesterday, he would consider putting 100% tariffs on countries doing business with Russia, as a way to put more pressure on Vladimir Putin,” O’Hanlon said. “I wonder if that’s economically realistic. Because to do all the forensics to figure out which countries are doing business with Russia — by the way, I think we still are, too — it reflects a growing seriousness that we need to put more pressure on Putin.”
O’Hanlon proposed putting economic sanctions on Russia. His idea would be to encourage American allies to withhold the current $300 billion in frozen Russian assets and give $10 billion to Ukraine monthly. As for Ukraine’s future in NATO, there is still a long way to go.
“I was always skeptical that it made sense to bring Ukraine into NATO, and I still am skeptical,” said O’Hanlon. “Security alliances are such psychologically powerful entities that I always thought the Russians would react badly and that there might’ve been other better ways to help ensure Ukraine’s long-term security.”
He stated later that he isn’t averse to Ukraine eventually becoming part of NATO, potentially as a way to conclude the ongoing Russia-Ukraine war.
Schake viewed Trump’s announcements with less enthusiasm, but acknowledged them as steps in the right direction.
“I am less confident than you are that administration policy is unidirectional,” Schake said, “namely, that Trump won’t reverse himself several times more on this.”
If there are more economic sanctions placed on countries doing business with Russia, this could have consequences for America’s relationship with India, which would receive 100% tariffs from America if Monday’s announcement comes to fruition.
“That’s not only going to impoverish a lot of Indian families, but we need India’s help in managing China,” Schake said.
The speakers shifted their discussion of international conflict regarding Russia to the recent bombing of Iranian nuclear facilities by the United States.
“One of the things that surprised me about the Trump Administration — I would’ve guessed in January that they would’ve sold Israelis the tankers, the fighter bombers and weapons to do this themselves,” said Schake. “I think that’s actually more characteristic of how President Trump approaches these issues. But he saw an opportunity to significantly set back the Iranian program, and I think it was a reasonable choice given where we were.”
She was also surprised that Iran appeared to not have anticipated the strike and, to her judgement, be so concerned by domestic politics that they “haven’t thought creatively about how to impose cost on us for this.” This doesn’t negate the fact that Iranian retaliation against the United States is entirely possible.
“I really worry that in a two year timeframe, we’re going to see Iranian retaliation, as they did blowing up synagogues in Argentina to penalize the Israelis, as they did killing Israelis in Bulgaria several years later,” said Schake. “I think we need to be worried about the kind of response from the Iranians because that’s where I think we are likely to pay the price of the attacks.”
O’Hanlon used two historical events to discuss the hardships of pursuing further conflict. He noted the ideology behind justifying the Vietnam War as a “domino that needed to be prevented from falling” was more wrong than right. In the other direction, he cited Osama bin Laden declaring war on the United States in 1998 as a grave mistake, believing that bin Laden’s thought process was based on America’s past failures in global conflict.
“The sum total of the recent U.S. experience made Osama bin Laden think that he could attack us and get away or maybe cause us to disengage from the world,” said O’Hanlon.
Schake disagreed almost entirely with O’Hanlon’s points about the Vietnam War and bin Laden.
“I think the problem with the Vietnam War wasn’t that we wanted to prevent the fall of Vietnam to communism, as influenced by Russia and China,” said Schake. “I think it was worth doing, and if we had done it in a way that legitimized and permitted Vietnamese national sovereignty, that could have had a very different trajectory.”
She noted the American overreaction to bin Laden, and his terrorist threats, and “the way we chose to prosecute that threat, actually did a lot of damage to America.”
Regarding America’s status as a global super power, the conversation shifted to a different country that has emerged as a competitor to the United States.
“I think China is the No. 1 most powerful, best resource and potential adversary of the U.S. in military terms,” said O’Hanlon. “Therefore, it should be at the centerpiece of American strategic planning
and thought.”
According to O’Hanlon, maintaining and improving the U.S. military presence in East Asia provides a good chance at preventing a war with China.
“I have a lot of respect for modern China, even though I have a lot of criticism,” O’Hanlon said.
He advised approaching China with an equal amount of criticism and respect as a country.
Schake was more nervous about the Chinese military.
“They have tripled the size of their nuclear force. China has 271 times the shipbuilding capability of the U.S.,” said Schake. “A war with China is not going to be a short war. It’s about industrial capacity over time.”
Schake cited how America had 290 ships in their Navy, compared to China’s 371. O’Hanlon viewed the issue with less distress.
“We have bigger, better ships,” said O’Hanlon. “We have a lot more amphibious assault ships, long-range nuclear power attack submarines. If you compare tonnage, we are still ahead of China two to one.”
While Schake had doubts, she has four major reasons why she isn’t incredibly worried.
“America has fought a lot of recent wars and are pretty good at it,” Schake said.
America has spent years training for a war across an ocean as large as the Pacific, where other militaries may not be as adapted to the terrain.
“The second thing that makes me reasonably confident we have time to manage this is that Xi Jinping has had to fire 200 senior leaders in the Chinese government,” Schake said.
The third advantage is having the benefit of allies, according to Schake.
“The fourth advantage is broader and more strategic,” Schake said. “I think we have already seen peak China. That China has already activated the antibodies against their continued success.”
O’Hanlon closed the conversation with a discussion on Trump’s proposed “golden dome,” a defense system against various missiles. America currently has a limited missile defense in Alaska and California.
Schake isn’t sold on the idea Trump proposed earlier in the year.
“If we could solve this problem, we would’ve solved this problem sometime in the last 40 years,” she said.
She believes deterrence is the best policy because when comparing the golden dome to the roof of the Amp, Schake said, “I think they’re about equally defensive.”
Throughout the morning’s conversation O’Hanlon and Schake disagreed on a number of issues. Both began their careers on different sides of the aisle politically. There’s been much disagreement between the two, but after all these years, they continue their professional relationship and personal friendship.
“If I care about something, I’m probably going to be disagreeable,” said O’Hanlon. “If you disagree with me, but are still my friend, at the end, maybe we can patch it up. Even while we are feeling a little emotion, we can try to keep it within certain bounds in recognizing we are all trying to figure out hard problems from which none of us can possibly have all the right solutions, so we have to learn from each other, including across the political aisle. I think that’s what’s needed today.”
