Please join me in welcoming Graham Allison to the stage. Thank you. Thank you. Wow. Allegra winners ride. Rain Man David Sackett. And it said-- We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy. Love you guys. I see Queenie Kinloch. Really an honor. Graham, thanks for joining us, and thanks for agreeing to follow that routine.

Graham Allison was founding dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy School of Government and remains a professor of government. He's a leading analyst of US national security and defense policy with a special interest in nuclear weapons and terrorism. He's most famous as the Assistant Secretary of Defense for Policy and Plans from 1993 to '94, where he coordinated strategy and policy towards the states of the former Soviet Union.

Bill Clinton awarded him the Department of Defense Medal for Distinguished Public Service for reshaping relations with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal. And he's since become the longest serving member of the Secretary of Defense's Defense Policy Board, having served for eight secretaries of defense.

And he's the only person to receive the Department of Defense's highest civilian award from both Reagan and Clinton administrations. Graham is one of the world's most cited experts on the bureaucratic analysis of decision making, especially during times of crisis. I read his book, Destined for War-- Can America and China Escape Thucydides' Trap?, which was published in 2018 and I think was very prescient about the moment that we're in today.

A couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk tweeted out several times that everyone should read this book. So congrats. We get a little promotion from Elon as well. Thank you. That must have helped sales. Congrats on that. The theory that when one great power threatens to displace another, war is almost always the result, is at the heart of his analysis on the U.S.-China relationship.

During the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote, "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power and the fear which this caused in Sparta." And Graham says the trap triggered nearly every war, from the Peloponnesian War to World War I, to the War of the Spanish Succession, the Thirty Years' War, and now threatens to light the world on fire once again.

Graham, thanks for joining us today. If you wouldn't mind, just frame for the audience and for us here on stage the point that you make in your book about Thucydides' trap and where we find the relationship between China and the U.S. taking us, and where it specifically sits in that evolution of, call it temperament, today.

Thank you very much. And it's a pleasure and honor to be here. I'm a fan of your podcast, and I think how you've made this thing work, I don't quite understand, but I appreciate it. We have a friend in the deep state. He's sitting over there. We're not going to name names, but he made the introduction, and we appreciate it.

In any case, it's a pleasure to be here. And the summary you gave, I think, is a very good place to start. Let me do four or five quick bottom lines. The first, as I wrote in this book, which was published just as Trump became president, in Relations Between the U.S.

and China, expect things to get worse before they get worse. (laughter) That's exactly what I would say today. And why? What's driving that? This is a classic Thucydidean rivalry. As David said, Thucydides taught us 2,500 years ago that when a rapidly rising power seriously threatens to displace a ruling power, shit happens.

That's normal. And in most cases, the outcome is war. So what we're seeing today and what we're going to see even more intensely tomorrow and a decade from now is the fiercest rivalry history has ever seen. China is not just another great power, but it's going to be the biggest power in the history of the world.

The U.S. is a colossal ruling power, which has been the architect and guardian of the international order that allows us to live today in the 78th year without great power war-- a pretty amazing accomplishment. And so the U.S. is not going to fade away comfortably. When that confrontation occurs, most often the outcome is war.

In the book I look at that last 500 years, there's 16 times we've seen a rapidly rising power threaten a colossal ruling power. Think of Germany's rise beginning of the 20th century and the challenge to Great Britain. That became World War I. So most often, of the 16 cases, 12 ended in war.

Four ended in no war. So if we were just doing statistics, war is not inevitable. It's just structurally likely. And the cases in which war didn't occur were cases in which somehow the parties managed a degree of strategic imagination that bent otherwise trends, or what you called earlier the physics of the situation.

So, the Cold War. I'm an old Cold Warrior. In the rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union that had dominated 40 years of American history, the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the edge of war multiple times, Cuban Missile Crisis, about which I've written a book, The Most Dangerous.

But there was ultimately no hot war. Well, that's a big deal. Had there been a hot war, we wouldn't be having this podcast. Los Angeles wouldn't be here. Boston wouldn't be here. So a real war, a real bloody war, is catastrophic. It could be, and today, absolutely catastrophic. So, what I said to David when he invited me to come was, "You folks are in the business of strategic imagination." That's what you do.

That's how you've come to have a degree of confidence in what you do. You imagine something that seems slightly crazy, it seems almost unimaginable. Somehow you put pieces together. Some of the time it works, and lo and behold, yikes! Our life has got smartphones, or it has the net, or it has AI, or it has vaccines, or it has, it has, it has.

Amazing. So I'm hoping that you'll devote some of those gray cells to the geopolitical challenge that China poses to the US today, which will be the dominant geopolitical challenge for the rest of our lives. I don't think there's anything inevitable about the outcome. I think, though, if we settle for diplomacy as usual, or statescraft as usual, or imagination as usual, then we should expect history as usual.

But that's not, that's the trend. That's not inevitable. So if you ask me, bottom line, quickly, a war between the US and China in the year ahead, a no, I'd give you 99% on that one. War between the US and China in the next four years, no, I'd say 90%.

No, okay? War between the US and China over the decades ahead, if both stay on the current paths? I don't like that thinking. We have, it seemed like, three decades of incredible collaboration with China and the West, and America specifically. And just look at what happened with the iPhone and the number of people who rose out of poverty in China.

And it seemed to be going really well. And it seemed like the NBA was playing games there, and we were sending movies there. Everything seemed to be on the right track. And then something seems to have gone horribly wrong. And a two-part question, what has gone horribly wrong? Why has this happened so quickly?

'Cause it seems like it's changed since COVID in such a rapid fashion that's caught us all by surprise how this has come apart. And what does China want that we don't seem to understand? - Okay, two great questions, and I'll try to be brief. So maybe in your world, a better way to think of it is to have an established, entrenched company and a disruptive upstart.

- Got it. - When the disruptive upstart is 1% of the business, welcome, 5% of the business, welcome. 10% of the business. Now it's moving faster and more rapidly. All of a sudden, one begins to think, wait a minute, where is this going? Could it actually imagine, it will displace me.

So China was, at the beginning of the century, 10% of the US GDP. Today, it's 3/4 of the US GDP. So it's quite plausible that China will have a larger GDP even by market exchange rates than the US. Well, wait a minute, we're number one. That's part of who we are.

So in a Thucydidesian dynamic, basically the seesaw of power begins to shift. Think of a seesaw on a kid's playground. The guy with the bulk is on one end, the little guy's on the other, and he begins bulking up. All of a sudden, the seesaw begin moving. The dynamics of that is Thucydides' trap.

So the perception changes. I used to look down on you, now I'm having to look you in the eye, I'm looking up. The psychology changes. Who the hell do you think you are? I created the environment in which you grew up. You should be appreciative. -Yeah, we let you make our iPhones.

-You should take your space. Seriously, our normal place is to be running the show, and your normal place is to take your seat at the table. So many, many people imagined that China would just follow the paths of Germany and Japan and take their place in the American-led international order.

That was a pretty good idea, except they hadn't thought very carefully about history. Germany and Japan were defeated by the use of the war and occupied by the US, and then we wrote their constitution, and then we produced a kind of training school. So China wants to be-- this is a leak one news slide-- China wants to be respected as China, not as an honorary member of the West.

-What happened in the late '90s-- I guess it started with Clinton-- where it seemed like a good idea to admit to the WTO, and then Bush kind of just put the nail in the coffin and did it and actually supported it. We could have not supported it. Some people say it was a trade-off for China's support for the Iraq war.

Who knows? But the point is, it happened. But I'm sure you guys were sitting in the engine room scenario-planning what happens if this happens. And it's fair to say that from that context, we didn't necessarily get it right. So what did you get wrong? -Again, it's good to go back to 2000, and just to remember, in 2000, China was somewhere between 5% and 10% of US's GDP.

The people in 2000-- 80% of the people in China were trying to live on $2 a day. So the place is a miserable, struggling mess. The US has been in the business ever since World War II of trying to encourage economic development in countries. So Clinton and Bush together-- Clinton said about the WTO, "It's a win-win-win situation.

It's going to be a win for everybody. China's going to be lifted up. That's what we would like to do, because people's lives will be better." And actually, there's been an anti-poverty miracle in China that as human beings, we have to admire. People that used to get a few calories now get enough calories to eat.

That's got to be a good thing. The idea that this might work so successfully that China could become-- could have an economy as large as ours didn't occur to anybody at the time. A few, few people as outliers. But that was just kind of not in the imagination. And then secondly, this was in a period of great hubris in the US.

We had won the Cold War. We were living in this bubble, which the most famous thesis of the period was Frank Fukuyama's "End of History." So everybody has become democracies and market economies. And if they have McDonald's, they can't have wars because people would prefer to get hamburgers than wars.

You can hardly say that today without laughing. But that was sort of well-known-- that was conventional wisdom at the time. So if you had come along and said, "Wait a minute. "If China's very successful, "it's going to come to have a GDP about the size of the US, "and then it's going to have-- back to your question-- "it's going to have its own aspirations." The Chinese have a view, understandably, and Ray talked about this earlier today.

Sorry, for 4,000 or 5,000 years, they were the predominant power in all the world they knew. So their story is the normal conditions of things is that we're at the-- they're Confucian, so hierarchy-- harmony and peace comes from hierarchy. They're at the top of the hierarchy. That's the normal place.

They were displaced from this by Westerners with technology 150 years ago. They call that the "century of humiliation." And their aspiration is to go back to normal. And normal for them is China is the "center of the universe." China is the sun around which the others-- there's, you know, as you remember their thing about, you know, you can't have two tigers in the valley.

There's the big one and the other one. So I have two comments. The first is just a reaction to this. I'm sort of on the opposite side of you, which is that because of China's population woes and because of, I think, some of these technological things that are sort of on the horizon, I believe that we're sort of at the edge of an era of abundance that will create a massive peace dividend, because a lot of the justifications for war go away.

That's my personal view. But I have taken the time to try to steelman your point of view, which is we go to war. And the best steelman that I can come up with is very practical, so I'd like you to try to dismantle it. Which is you have massive youth unemployment in China and waning growth, and so the simplest and most reductive way for China to basically grow and to appease 25% of young people, mostly men, from not uprising, is to essentially create demand.

And the best way to create demand is to essentially create a war machine. And that is why they go to war. Is that-- - I would say I appreciate that option. I've worked very hard on the 12 scenarios for getting to war. If there's a war between the US and China in the next year or four years or decade, how is it going to happen in my view?

The most likely. Not this way. It's going to happen the same way the last war happened. Now if I were to take a quiz here, since I know we live in the United States of amnesia. (audience laughing) When was the last war between the US and China? I'm not going to give you a quiz, but I'll tell you the answer is 1950.

What? Okay, and what happened? In 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea. Almost pushed them off the whole peninsula. The US had just won World War II. That's five years after the end of World War II. MacArthur and American troops were in Japan. They came to the rescue of South Korea.

They pushed the North Koreans right back up the peninsula. And 38th parallel, which had been the starting point, they pushed right across without even thinking, and were pushing right towards the Chinese border, the Yalu. So you're now one year, this is 1950, one year after Mao has just won the Chinese Civil War.

He hasn't even consolidated his position. The US is Superman. We've just dropped two bombs next door in Japan at the end of World War II. Monopoly of nuclear power. The possibility that China would attack the US, it was unimaginable, certainly to MacArthur. But Mao, seeing the US coming up to his border and not knowing where else he might stop, sent his peasant army to war with the US and beat the Americans right back down the peninsula to the 38th parallel.

So wars happen often not because anybody wants a war. At the beginning of 1950, if you'd gone to Mao and said, "I got a good idea. Why don't you go to a war with Superman?" He would have said, "You're out of your mind." If you'd gone to Truman in 1950 and said, "How about we have a war with the US?" "Forget about it." So you don't have to have an intention of either of the parties.

I think the most likely way a war will happen in the US and China, something happens in Taiwan, either we're unduly provocative or the Taiwanese provocative. - I'm going to hand it to Sax, but I want to just make one comment to get your reaction. If that's the framing, what about India?

Because now India's ascendant, it's got a growing population, it's got huge economic growth, and unlike China, who's not necessarily ever been subjugated in a war, the Indians have this memory of basically having Judeo-Christians that dominated that region of which we all had to get liberty, which is almost even worse maybe.

So just frame India in that context. - Another great question. Again, nobody knows, but the Indian story, either theory one, India is about to become a serious rival to China. That's the fashionable story today. Theory two is India is the country of the future and will always be so.

We've been through already five of these cycles before where we declared India was about to rise rapidly, and lo and behold, India turns out to be India. So India has a lot of internal problems itself, as was mentioned earlier today. About 20% of the population are Muslims. Modi is basically undermining the multi-ethnic democracy that Nehru had built by getting support from the majority by oppressing the minority.

So that's a complicated problem within, and a lot of other components. So if you look at the rivalry between the US and India in the 20th century and just graph it, you discover that lo and behold, in every year virtually and every decade for sure, the gap between them has grown in China's favor.

Now, not this year. India is growing much faster than China this year and last year and maybe next year, so we can look at the trajectories. I think it's quite possible, and I think the American strategy, which I think is the right one, is that this is a long-run game, a long game.

So there's going to be a long rivalry between the US and China. We believe that a more liberty-centered, open, democratic political system will perform better over the long run than a party-led autocracy. Xi has a different idea. He says things are too chaotic, information is too uncertain. You can't let people just-- My God, let people vote and look and see what happens in the US.

So we need to have order. And so our party-led autocracy, we believe, "Well, we play this out over time." If the US had to play this game, only US versus China, I think we lose. But if the US plays this game with a group of allied and aligned, of whom we now see in the quad India and Australia and Japan, and then in AUKUS we see Britain and Australia and the US, and then the trilateral that we just saw with Japan and South Korea.

So you're seeing a configuration-- I call it "more guys on our side of the seesaw." And that can go over a long period of time, and it may turn out that democracies fail internally. I think it's a big challenge. I think there's no certainty about that. It may turn out that autocracies fail in the way autocracies have historically failed.

-It is an incredible framing because you have an autocracy in China and a democracy here, and then somewhat democratic is how we're, I think, describing India right now. Is India the most important relationship for America to get right at this moment in time? Is that the relationship we really need to be focusing on since that seems like it's the linchpin or the fulcrum?

-Well, I would say that's a good question, and I'm not sure. I am probably unduly skeptical about India because my impressions are overly shaped by Lee Kuan Yew. Lee Kuan Yew was the founder and builder of Singapore, and his great hope was for India, but ultimately he became to be despairing of its internal complexities.

Modi seems to be a different character. If you look at the way he ran the province that he ran before, the state, he was very effective. He's very ambitious for India, so I'm hopeful about India. If India emerges, it has the potential alongside, I don't think only India, Japan, South Korea, Australia, and even maybe the Europeans, again, depending on what happens here.

So you could have a group of aligned and aligned, not all agreeing on everything, but agreeing on enough, that says we're trying the complex problem of governing a society, we believe has to start with the freedom and liberty of people. That's what we think is-- and we think that's essential for the dynamism of innovation and invention, and lo and behold, there's a lot of evidence for that, and if we're the freest and most open society, lo and behold, a bunch of people come from other countries where they're not so free, and they do their thing here.

I'd say thank God for that. So under those circumstances, played out over a long run, you can imagine a story that turns out pretty well. In the case of the US and Soviet Union, just to remember, it's hard to believe, but if you go back and read your economic textbook that was published in the 1960s, Samuelson was the--basically for economics, it says by the '70s, the Soviet Union will have overtaken the US economy.

That was kind of a well-known fact. -Why didn't that happen? -Well, lo and behold, it didn't. The reason it didn't happen is because dictatorships have a hard time in the long term versus democracies? Well, there's about ten reasons why there's weaknesses in an autocracy, and you're now seeing a lot of evidence of it in the Chinese system, particularly after Xi became even more autocratic in guaranteeing his lease on life with the recent coronation, where he's got his third term unprecedented but without a term limit.

So basically, if I'm the autocrat, and especially if I come to think, as he does, he's got the thought of Xi Jinping, they write this into the Constitution, so this contains all wisdom. One of the problems the guys are having with their AI machines is you can't ask a question that has an answer inconsistent with the thought of Xi Jinping that declares what's true about this and that.

He doesn't talk much about mathematics or science, so you can ask those questions. Tencent's AI machine is a pretty good competitor for GPT-4 in the science or math, but if you ask a question about how do freedom-centered societies perform, it can't answer that question because the thought of Xi Jinping says this.

-He says this. -Does not compute. Another one, if you choose people for loyalty more than for competence, look at a company and see how that works. So seven reasons, yes. One of the points you make in your book is that-- and I think your book came out around the time that China and the US had achieved rough parity in terms of purchasing power parity, their GDP.

-Roughly, yeah. -Roughly. I remember one of the points you made is that China has four times the population of the US, so its per capita GDP was one quarter that of the US. If they merely got to the point of having half the per capita GDP of the US, then their economy would be twice as big as ours.

China has a lot of really smart, hardworking people who are studying subjects that we aren't studying as much as we should in the US, like engineering, like science, and so forth. There are reasons, I think, to believe that their incredible rise could derail. The demographics are a problem, maybe if the economy becomes too centrally controlled.

But let's just assume that it does continue its rise. I guess the question would be, will the US have to effectively recognize that they have a sphere of influence in Asia in order to avoid a war? I mean, is that what we're going to have to do? I think, so I appreciate you're starting with the basics.

Structural realities are harder to deny. So again, Americans don't like this, but just do the arithmetic. If Chinese are only, if their economy is only half as productive as ours, and these are pretty talented people and they work pretty hard, they'll have a GDP twice ours. I'll do it again.

Wait a minute, twice ours. I'll tell you in a rivalry between A and B, and B has twice the GDP. So we can have twice the size of the defense budget. We can have twice the intelligence budget. It can have twice, twice, twice. That's reality. Now, can I find enough allied and aligned on my side to make up for some of that?

Yeah, that seems right. So that's one way. We need an alliance strategy more than they do. That's right. We need it. But if you said over time in relationships like that, if you're going to avoid war, will there – I mean, a sphere of influence – again, there's a great abstract debate about this, but in reality the sphere of influence is the shadow that power casts in some realm.

So if you're more powerful, you have a sphere of influence. So in the South China Sea today, on the Chinese border, they have more ships, they have more missiles on the land. So lo and behold, we don't call that their sphere of influence, but if you look and see what happens in the area, we don't operate our ships the way we did when I was in the Pentagon in the Clinton administration.

So if there were an event in Taiwan, which is 90 miles off their shore, like Cuba is on our shore, and halfway around the world for us, the likelihood we're going to have the ships and the planes and the other – excuse me, no, that just doesn't work that way.

You can look at the geography and see the tyranny of it. So will there come to be some degree of difference and accommodation if a war is to be avoided? And the answer is yes. Now then it becomes ugly because you say, well, okay, well, in what respect? And I know you guys – I saw earlier did the question for Robert Kennedy about Taiwan.

I think that's a good question not to answer, not to answer. Yeah, I mean, this is where I worry about the competence of our foreign policy establishment because I think it only has one gear, which is forward and double down. In the United States, we have a doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine, which says that no distant great power can bring troops, weapons, or bases into our hemisphere because we do not tolerate other great powers having security threats amassed on our border.

But our foreign policy establishment cannot comprehend that other great powers want a similar Monroe Doctrine. I think that was a huge contributor to the war we have in Ukraine right now. So we have this theory. I mean, I'm part of this establishment that you're talking about. So why did you invade Ukraine?

It's not as – That's such a gross implication. It's not as uniform as you say, and it's not always as unsuccessful as you say. But overall, I think you're more right than wrong. So basically, we say we're the exceptional nation. So what does that mean? We make the rules, and you're supposed to obey the rules.

But we don't obey the rules. So we say we're for the rule-based order. Excuse me, the rule-based order was the basis on which we invaded Iraq? I don't think so. That we occupied Afghanistan? I don't think so. So the U.S. has made a lot of mistakes of unnecessary wars.

A lot of the unnecessary wars was because people with wrong ideas dominated people with right ideas. But there was a debate and a discussion. So we need more people with the right ideas getting into the conversation in an active way. But let me just do one other footnote here.

We have to remember, this is 9/11. So this is a big day for me. This is a day in which airplanes hijacked by terrorists killed 3,000 people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, including many people that I know extremely well. What would a world be like in which that happened every day or every week or every month?

We'd be totally intolerable. We wouldn't be doing what we're doing. Why is that not happening? So people did some right things. So there's been a pretty active program by the U.S., some of it with mistakes, but overall, that's played a significant role in the fact that people who plan and train to conduct major terrorist attacks in the U.S.

are taken off the chessboard. Every day people go out hunting. Every day people find people. And I would say thank goodness for this. So I think that's an interesting point. Certainly al-Qaeda hasn't been able to hit us again in that way. I do wonder whether there were two tragedies on 9/11.

One was the thousands of people who died. The other was the way that we reacted to it. Like you said, we went into Iraq, a total non sequitur. Stupid, yes. Stupid and a non sequitur, and then we stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years. And again, not in Assyria. Yeah, on sort of the nation-building grounds.

We then went into Syria. That's still going on. There was Libya. And there was very little debate about all of these things at the time we made these decisions. It's almost like the U.S. foreign policy establishment, in reaction to 9/11, became almost deranged. And, you know, compared to say the 1990s where I think there were real foreign policy debates, there was a real foreign policy debate in the '90s on NATO expansion, it doesn't seem like we have that many debates.

Not within the policy elite. Maybe we're having them. But it doesn't seem like the policy elite debates anything anymore. It's just this sort of bellicose, hawkish rhetoric at all times. Do you agree with that, Graham? From both sides. From the inside. Yeah, I mean, again, I live on the other side.

I live on both sides of this curtain. And I would say inside, there's much more debate, and there was much more debate, than we take credit for. George Bush made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake in invading Iraq in 2003. Who said that to him? His father's closest advisor, Brent Scowcroft, who was joined at the hip with the father, said to him, "This is a terrible, dumb mistake." He even went so far as to write an op-ed about it after he had-- Now, he did not write an op-ed without talking to Bush's father.

Would George H.W. Bush have done this? No. If Gore-- If the count had gone right in Florida and Gore had been president, would we have gone into Iraq? No. So, electing the right president and having the right-- So, if it had been the Bush 41 team, rather than the Bush 43 team, we wouldn't have made that mistake.

So, how would you-- You mentioned this RFK clip. One of the things that he says is that we've gotten things backwards now, where there's a military-industrial complex that essentially wants to maximize revenue. That's like logical in the capitalist system. But then what it's done is it's perverted the intelligence-gathering institutions to essentially be writing the justifications for these wars before these wars happen.

Is that conspiracy theory or is that-- I'd say it's complicated, so-- But it's not a no. I think it's true. It's not a no is what you're saying. No, it's-- Why is it complicated? We live in an extremely dangerous world. But do we, though? This year-- But, Grant, can I ask you, do we really, though?

Absolutely. Really? Had thousands of people not been taken off the chessboard, you would have seen many repeats of 9/11. And if you were living in a place-- and somebody I know was trying to make a last trade on the morning of 9/11, and a plane crashes in and the building is knocked down, all of a sudden the conversation changes.

So there's that. I don't want to take the gravity away from it. That's the terrorist piece. Let's take war. This is the other big event most people don't realize. This month is the anniversary of the end of World War II and the beginning of 78 years in which there's not been another great power war.

Excuse me. In history, that's almost unheard of. Why is that? Answer, a lot of good fortune, a lot of grace. But also lots of things that the U.S. did successfully. So I think that security dominates everything when you don't have security. And the geopolitics to provide security is very complicated.

Now, the structures that do that often end up making big mistakes too. So I'm not trying to make excuses for the mistakes, but I think the overall of it is that the security order that's been built in the past and survived for the last 70 years has been a big deal.

I agree with you. I want to ask, what you said there, which is through the framing Chamath has here, we have this military industrial complex, we have this complicated relationship with China, and then we have Taiwan. And we have this incredible policy of ambiguity, and it seemed to be working really well.

And now are we having the proper debate on Taiwan? The debate we should be having on defending Taiwan, not defending Taiwan, providing them with arms? Because you seem to believe in the book that this is going to be what it's about. Let me add to that question, and this is going to be our last question because we do need to move on.

In your role in defense planning, and you look at the Department of Defense today and the U.S. defense industrial complex, are we equipped for a hot conflict with China? And if we're not, does that change the positioning and the strategy that China then has and how they think about what they're going to do next with the U.S.?

So the first one is no, we're not, and it certainly impacts China. In fact, I think if you were able to green field the Defense Department today for half the money, you could get twice the bang for the buck. So bureaucracies are complicated, difficult. The fact that we haven't had another great power war, I'm prepared to pay a little extra for, but if you said how efficient is it, not so much.

And I think the big question we should ask ourselves is for rational actors in Washington or here today us and in Beijing, are there more reasons, more incentives, to compete between the U.S. and China or alternatively more incentives to cooperate? So we've been to all the ones to compete, but for cooperating, excuse me, if we have a war, we destroy ourselves.

So we have a pretty powerful interest in survival in not having a war and not allowing something happen in Taiwan or this or that. If we live in an enclosed biosphere on a small planet, either party's greenhouse gas emission can make the place unlivable for both of us. If we don't find a way to cooperate in dealing with that.

We have a financial system that's so entangled that a financial crisis in one place can become a depression everywhere. So if we don't find a way to do it. So I would say it's a good assignment for everybody. Make your list of the reasons, incentives to compete and turn the sheet over, incentives to cooperate.

We need a lot more strategic imagination in that space, and I'm hoping some of you guys and other folks will put some of their gray cells onto that problem. Instead of this de facto posturing that everyone seems to hold today that we're going to go to war, this is our enemy, and just be a little more thoughtful about the long-term relationship.

Graham Allison, thank you so much. Amazing. That was absolutely fantastic. Thank you. Wow. Another standing ovation. We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just using this, it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.