The School of Foreign Service Lloyd George Lectures on the Future of the Global Order sponsored a discussion on national security featuring The Honorable Stephen Hadley (National Security Advisor 2005-2009) and Ambassador Susan Rice (National Security Advisor 2013-2017) on February 27, 2019. The conversation between the two former national security advisors was moderated by Professor Charles Kupchan.
Kupchan started by asking for reflections on “the strange political moment that we are passing through.” Rice said, “We are at a moment where the severity of our domestic political divisions are, in my estimation, a significant impediment—even threat—to our national security.” Hadley agreed, adding that the international system “is under enormous pressure from both geopolitics and domestic politics.” Expanding on the current geopolitical issues facing the United States, Hadley noted “the return of great power competition, Russia and China, and the return of ideological competition.”
Rice talked about the need for burden sharing, saying, “We cannot do everything. We have to be realistic. We have to be somewhat selective. And we do need to bring others along with us to share the costs of burdens of maintaining a world that is based on some level of rule of law.”
Commenting on continuity between administrations in foreign policy, Hadley said that there’s more continuity than popularly acknowledged, but that “this President was elected to be a disruptor and to call into question a lot of those premises.”