The debate that you're about to hear is the final installment of the America Debates series.
This series of live debates in cities across the country would not have been possible without the generosity of an organization that's deeply important to me and has been since college.And that is the Foundation for Individual Rights and Expression.
If you care about free speech, FIRE is an organization that should be on your radar.Go to thefire.org to learn more about how you can support their efforts to protect free speech and free thought for everyone.Come on!I don't like the spotlight!
Well, guys, it feels so good to be back here on the Upper West Side, where Columbia students are right where I left them just a few years ago, roaming the streets and greeting me tenderly with cries of die, Zionist bitch.
We have an amazing evening ahead, but before we get started, I want to take a moment to thank an organization that I've been involved with since I was a student at Columbia and that I'm so proud to be associated with today.
And that is the foundation for individual rights and expression.Please give them a round of applause.So let's set the table.
I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that we're standing here tonight on the precipice of what could be a third world war. At the very least, the thing that we used to refer to as the free world is burning at its outer edges.
Just a week ago, Iran launched the largest ever ballistic missile attack in history against Israel, while its proxies, Hezbollah and Hamas, continue to wage war, making use of the steady flow of information and funding and weaponry from Iran, which is ever closer to having nuclear weapons.
The war in Ukraine that Tim mentioned continues to rage, with both sides engaged in intense fighting across multiple fronts.
After over a year and a half of relentless Russian bombardment, Ukraine is barely holding the line as the grinding war of attrition drags on.
According to the Wall Street Journal, more than a million people on both sides of this war have been injured or killed so far.
And then there's China, which has lately been attacking Philippine and Vietnamese vessels in the South China Sea, terrorizing waters with impunity as the world watches anxiously.
Moscow, Beijing, and Tehran, and I didn't even mention North Korea, have solidified a new axis of autocracy, united in their goal to unravel the Pax Americana and undermine American dominance.
But the question on our minds tonight is, what should America actually do about this state of affairs?
One thing is for sure, and I think it's something that both sides tonight will agree on, which is that we as America are woefully unprepared for this moment.
There was a recent report that came out, a bipartisan report, from the Commission on the National Defense Strategy, and it painted a pretty devastating picture.
It warns, quote, the most serious and most challenging threats since 1945, including the real risk of a near-term major war.
The report concluded this way, the nation was last prepared for such a fight during the Cold War, which ended 35 years ago, but it's not prepared today.So that's our level of preparedness.What about public opinion and morale?
Well, many Americans are saying they don't want the United States to continue leading the world order.
A 2023 Chicago Council survey revealed that 42% of Americans think we should stay out of world affairs, which maybe sounds like a low number, but is the highest recorded since 1974.
And isolationism is no longer a paleocon phenomenon on the right or a pacifist phenomenon on the left.It has moved firmly into the mainstream of both parties.
Now on the stage tonight, we are five writers and journalists, kind of a bunch of laptop jockeys who have never taken up arms.
But foreign policy is quite literally a matter of life and death, and not just for millions of people around the world, but of course for the more than two million Americans that serve in our armed forces.
We're standing here tonight, less than 27 days from the presidential election.And of course, it's conventional wisdom that American voters don't really prioritize foreign policy, at least typically.
But this year, given the state of the world, that might be very different, which is why this debate could not be more urgent.
Now, you might be thinking, how can a neocon who shills for the military-industrial complex possibly be the moderator of tonight's debate? But I assure you that my commitment tonight is not to any particular ideology or strategy.
It's to foster a robust, honest, and serious debate about American power and the way it should be used.And fostering this kind of debate is at the core of our mission at The Free Press.
And one way of noticing that is the fact that every single debater on stage tonight, and they have very different views, have all collaborated with The Free Press in some way.
So let me take a minute to introduce the four brilliant people debating tonight's proposition.First off, arguing that yes, the U.S.should still police the world, is Brett Stevens.
Brett is an opinion columnist for the New York Times, don't hold that against him, and editor-in-chief of Sapir, a journal of Jewish conversations, which is one of the most important Jewish publications in the country.
He's a former foreign affairs columnist at the Wall Street Journal, and he was awarded the 2013 Pulitzer Prize for commentary.He is also the author of the highly relevant book for tonight's conversation.
It's called America in Retreat, The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.Everybody, please welcome Brett Stevens.
Joining Brett is Jamie Kirchick, contributing opinion writer for the New York Times, writer-at-large for Airmail, and contributing writer for Tablet.He is the author of The End of Europe, Dictators, Demagogues, and the Coming Dark Age.
He is also a senior fellow at FIRE.Please give it up for Jamie Kirchick. Now for the other side.Arguing that no, the U.S.should not still police the world is none other than Matt Taibbi.
Taibbi is a journalist, the founder of Racket News, and the author of 10 books, including four New York Times bestsellers, and writes unbelievably on the First Amendment and other issues that I know are so important to this crowd.
Please join me in welcoming Matt Taibbi. Last but not least, joining Matt is Li Fang.Li is an independent investigative journalist primarily writing on Substack at lifang.com.
He regularly breaks scoops that we are jealous of, and from 2015 to 2023, he was a reporter for The Intercept.Please give it up for Li Fang. OK, here are the rules for tonight's debate.
Each debater is going to get a five-minute opening statement explaining their position on the motion.We're going to go to Jamie, then to Lee, then to Brett, and then to Matt.Then we're going to get into it.That'll be the debating part of the debate.
And then at the end, we're going to do closing statements for two minutes each.So let's take a look at the initial polling results.Should the US still police the world?We have 81%.
for Brett and Jamie and 19% for Lee and Matt, that they have the advantage because they only need to change a few percentage points to win tonight.Okay, so that's where we stand.Is everybody ready?Yes, come on.
Be it resolved, the US should still police the world.Jamie Kirchick, we'll go first to you.
Thank you, Barry, and I hope we will provide all of you with an evening where hypotheses are tested, ideas will be challenged, and tough questions will be asked, just like at CBS News.
I hope we will all provide you with a debate that's more edifying than the ones we've all been subjected to over the past couple months.It's a low bar, I know, so come with me as we beat Medicare and eat some pets.
I'd like you to imagine a world where America is not the policeman.You don't have to imagine because we lived through it.Well, not us in this room, but humankind did earlier in the last century in between World War I and World War II.
America was an isolationist power.It came home from Europe after the First World War, did not want to get involved in any sort of conflicts abroad.And what happened?
We saw the rise of fascistic, totalitarian, territorially expansionist powers, genocidal powers in Germany, Italy, and Japan. And it led to the worst war, the most destructive war in human history.
There was a League of Nations back then, the predecessor to the United Nations.It was feckless.It couldn't stop any of this from happening. So I think there should be two questions that you have to ask yourself tonight.
The first is, does the world need policing?Which I think should be self-evident.Like any community needs policing, whether it's a neighborhood, a city, a country.And if you agree with that notion, then who should do the policing?
And I hope that my colleague and I will convince you tonight that the United States is the only answer to that question. So fortunately, after World War II, the United States learned its lesson and it became the global superpower that it is today.
And what followed from that?We have seen in the eight decades since the end of World War II, the greatest growth, human growth, the greatest increase in human prosperity in humankind.The number of democracies increased. since 1945.
Global GDP growth was exponential.Now, what allowed for this to happen?It's, you've heard the term, the liberal world order.But who undergirds that liberal world order?Who protects the sea lanes?
that deliver all the goods that we consume, that we eat, that we buy.It's the U.S.Navy.
There are networks of alliances across the world that the United States has created, whether it be NATO in Europe or our alliance structure in Asia with Japan, the Philippines, South Korea, Taiwan in resisting Chinese expansion.
This is what being the global policeman looks like. It looks like post-war Europe, the greatest American foreign policy success story, a continent totally destroyed.
And through the generosity and the foresight of the American people, with the Marshall Plan and the deployment of troops to resist Soviet encroachment into Western Europe, Europe today became the envy of the world in terms of quality of life, democracy, human rights.
That is thanks to the United States and its global policeman role. Why do we remember the 1990s so fond?
It's not just because Office Space Fight Club, being John Malkovich, the talented Mr. Ripley, The Matrix, and Austin Powers, the spy who shagged me, was released in this single year. of 1999.That's not the reason.
The reason is because it is the only decade where American global hegemony was unchallenged.We had won the Cold War.We were on the verge of winning the Gulf War, and we faced no competitor on the world stage.China was not a global power yet.
The worst atrocity in that decade, the Rwandan genocide, was the result of the United States not taking action, of not leading the free world in preventing a genocide.
Now, today there are dozens of countries whose existence in survival depends upon America being the global policeman.
You could say the entire European continent today depends on the American nuclear arsenal, which has prevented the Soviets, the Russians, they're the same, okay?
Prevented them from conquering that continent, preventing them from going further than they would already be in Ukraine right now. South Korea, one of the world's most advanced and important economies.
It exists because the United States patrols the 39th parallel like a cop on the beat.Now, what are the alternatives to America being the global policeman?You might say the UN.
I would respond that there's no two funnier words in the English language than international community.The UN has no business governing its own cafeteria, let alone the world.
I see my time is running out, and I know Barry is very strict about this, so I'm just gonna stop and say, the alternative to America being the world's policeman is not world peace, it's world anarchy.Thank you.
Thank you, Barry.I really appreciate you having me.I wanna thank FIRE, the Free Press, the staff here tonight, the theater, everyone who made this possible, my mom, Vicky, who's here tonight.
The question before us today is whether the United States should still police the world.We had a great debate about the role of policing in society very recently, so these concepts are still fresh in my mind.Let's talk about this framing.
In our country and in most Western industrialized countries, despite what some activists say, Police are generally highly trained and enforce public safety laws that are democratically enacted under constitutional restrictions and civilian oversight.
When done correctly, policing serves a foundation for a civilized society. When police overstep their bounds, there's usually accountability, as there should be.But policing can be very dangerous if practiced without safeguards.
Look at how police operate in Saudi Arabia, China, or Russia.In authoritarian systems, police are completely unaccountable and are used to force obedience, crush dissent, and terrorize the public.
All too often, American foreign policy takes the form of policing that is much more akin to the authoritarian model.We force our belief systems on others at the barrel of the gun.
When we act unilaterally and attempt to use the awesome might of the American military and intelligence forces for regime change, we tend to have disastrous results. There are, of course, some cases where U.S.
intervention has generated some positive benefits, but the unilateral policeman mindset has generally led to catastrophe.Consider two of the recent examples of hawkish policing blowing up in our faces, Iraq and Libya.
In the run-up to the Iraq war, politicians and pundits sold us a bill of lies, phantom weapons of mass destruction, and false ties to al-Qaeda.
Our intervention in Iraq resulted in an insurgency that caused the deaths of hundreds of thousands of people.The ensuing instability fueled the rise of jihadist groups such as ISIS and gave Iran a new ally in the region.
Likewise, we were told that U.S.-led NATO bombings of Libya would bring about, in the words of one aide to Hillary Clinton, quote, democracy and inclusivity. That war, instead, resulted in an ongoing dystopia and rump state.
Weapons from Libya, either stolen from Gaddafi's government or taken from US supplies to militia, militias have reportedly ended up in Syria, Nigeria, Egypt, and Mali, fueling civil wars, violent uprisings, and extremists.
The ongoing chaos of the post-Qaddafi state has empowered violent criminal gangs that funnel migrants from Africa into Europe.
There are countless examples, ones that Matt and I will discuss and I'm sure we'll dig into later in the debate, but before we get bogged down in examples and counter-examples, I want to state exactly where I stand.
I would like to see an America with greater engagement with our adversaries, more multilateralism, and a foreign policy grounded in respect for the legitimate concerns and viewpoints of all countries and all peoples.
A textured foreign policy with a confidence to settle old grudges, to end cycles of distrust and violence, and to find common ground for a mutually beneficial future.
And with that, I want to close with another thought about how to think about this debate.Like many of you, four years ago, I experienced a painful whiplash.It almost cost me my job.
In 2020, woke journalists harassed newspaper editors and demanded so-called moral clarity in all of our reporting.
In other words, in the name of social justice, there is an intolerance for questioning activist claims, a rejection of viewpoint diversity, and a myopic obsession with partisan slogans around racial identity.
You either supported the demands of the movement or you were a racist.You were either an ally or a white supremacist.The pro-military interventionist crowd uses the very same tactics.
Recall George W. Bush's words, you're either with us or with the terrorists.There are many iterations of this.You either blindly support NATO expansion in Europe or you're a puppet of Vladimir Putin.
You either stand with the US or you stand with Iran. This black and white thinking, whether it's practiced by the extreme BLM left or by those in Congress who want to bomb America's adversaries, is simple, crude propaganda.
The war hawks and the woke left both embrace a utopian vision, a moral fundamentalism and a reckless hubris. They both believe they can remake the world through force.This worldview is reductive and counterproductive.
With every bomb dropped, every civilian killed, every child left hungry from sanctions, every city looted by riots, every school locked down for no reason, we create vicious cycles of backlash and more conflict and more suffering.
Let's reject one-dimensional thinking in all of its forms.
So a guy is driving down a country lane, and his car breaks down next to a farm.And so he opens the hood of the car, smoke is coming out, he's trying to figure out what's going on, and a pig with a peg leg comes out to greet him.
And the pig says, what seems to be the problem? Driver's a little startled.He says, well, I don't know.Something's the matter with my car.So pig gets up on his hind legs, inspects the engine, says, ah, I see there's a gasket that's blown here.
I think I might have a spare part in the barn.I'm going to go look for it.So as the pig goes back to the barn, the farmer comes out.The farmer says, ah, I see you met my pig.And the man says, yeah, how did he lose that leg?
And the farmer says, you know, this pig, he's incredible.He's not just the mechanic for the farm.He's my accountant.And let me tell you, he keeps the books like better than KPMG would.
And the man, the driver says, well, interesting, but how do you lose that leg?And the farmer says, you know, it's not just being a mechanic and an accountant.
He's the chef, and I just can't tell you what a relief it is for my wife and my girls that he just loves to do the cooking and cleaning, takes care of everything.The driver says, well, that's interesting, but how'd he lose the leg?
And the farmer says, you know, a pig like that, you just don't eat them all at once.Now, why do I tell this joke? because it's funny and because I think it is a fairly apt metaphor for the argument that we are having on this stage.In this metaphor,
The pig is the United States as the world's policeman.The driver, the guy whose car is broken, is all of us.And the farmer, who is a little bit heedless and indifferent to the fate of his pig, are my distinguished opponents on the stage.
And I say that with genuine affection and respect. Now, Barry mentioned in her introduction that about a dozen years ago, I wrote a book called America in Retreat, The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder.
And when I started writing that book, we had just withdrawn from Iraq, supposedly in triumph and relief for the end of the war.And I felt a sense of disquiet.I thought that as America retreated from the global stage, disorder would grow,
and that disorder would follow us.What happened after I wrote that book is that ISIS took over much of northern Iraq and Syria, and we were forced to go in and deal with the threat of Islamic State.
What happened is that Russia seized Crimea and the Donbass as the first stage in their attempt to conquer a sovereign state.What happened is that we withdrew heedlessly and clumsily from Afghanistan, and disorder followed us again.
What happened is that Russia launched the biggest invasion of a European state since the Second World War.What happened is that Hamas and Hezbollah, emboldened by a perception of American weakness and hesitancy,
perpetrated the greatest massacre against the Jewish people since the Holocaust.Now this matters because here at this stage we may still feel relatively safe.We may feel that the encroachment of disorder hasn't yet reached us.
We may feel that if we adopt a more idealistic policy, a policy of greater engagement with our adversaries, as you just heard Lee suggest, that we might find greater peace and security.
I would ask engagement with Khamenei, engagement with Putin, engagement with Xi. Let me close with this because I have 20 seconds left.It is a cliche in life that there are certain things that you only value when they're gone.
Your health, your personal security, your waistline when you were 25 years old. The security of the world, which is now hanging in the balance, is one of those things you will only value when it's gone.
And having America as the world's policeman is the only margin between us and the chaos that's encroaching.Thank you.
Well, thank you to Barry.Thank you to the Free Press and to FIRE and for everyone who came out tonight.My name is Matt Taibbi.I'm a 54-year-old reporter and father of three.
My special qualification for this debate is probably that I spent the first dozen years or so of my career in the former Soviet Union, where I was given an involuntary education in American foreign policy. I was also embedded in Iraq.
I've written features on drone assassination, army contracting fraud in Iraq and Afghanistan, and I've written two books on policing, including two years that I spent interviewing people in nearby Staten Island about how broken window strategies look on the ground.
Now, you're going to hear a lot tonight about America's responsibility to help other countries and intervene around the world to provide stability.And these arguments, of course, sound compelling.
There's an incredible amount of suffering in the world.I know, unfortunately, because in the course of my work, I've been forced to see a lot of it.And the human instinct is always to do something.
But one point I hope to convey is that there's often a huge gulf between what help looks like in a news article or in a setting like this and what it looks like on the ground.Are we really helping or are we making things worse?
There will be a lot of talk tonight, I suspect, about Vladimir Putin.I saw how Putin came to power.I knew his name long before anyone else on stage tonight.He was the deputy mayor of St.Petersburg when I lived there.
He was actually the rector of Leningrad State University when I was a student in another university across town.
I was a vocal opponent of his promotion to the Kremlin, unlike most of the Western reporters in Russia at the time who were focused on the fact that he'd been handpicked by our ally, Boris Yeltsin.
Here's how Canada's current Deputy Prime Minister, Chrystia Freeland, who was a correspondent like me back then, introduced Putin to her readers.Prepare to meet a kinder, gentler sort of Kremlin chief.
It's forgotten, but many Westerners look forward to Putin as a more sober, alert version of Yeltsin, who is seen as a Democrat and a good guy.
The problem, and this is a consistent theme in American foreign policy, where we're often stuck in that fundamentalist mindset Lee referenced and assessing leaders through a simplistic black hat, white hat format.
is that Yeltsin had provided presided over one of the most corrupt, disastrous periods in Russia's history.
Hundreds of billions were looted during his presidency, including nearly 50 billion in IMF loans, much of which ended up in about two dozen Swiss bank accounts.
Dozens of journalists were assassinated, including a few I knew, like top secret editor Artyom Barovik.And the first four years of democracy, life expectancy for Russian men dropped from 64 to 57.
Russians saw that we supported Yeltsin, they hated us for it.And later, when Putin announced that he was standing up to the West, he became popular.
There's no question we played a role in Putin's rise, not just through our support of the man who appointed him, but by helping fuel an anti-Western sentiment that barely existed when I first arrived in Russia as a student in 1989.
In hindsight, I think we'd be in a much safer place if we'd executed a Marshall Plan style effort to rebuild the Soviet Union and incorporate Russia as a strategic partner.
But failing that, doing nothing at all would have been an improvement on what we did do.Even open enmity would have been preferable to helping the way we did, which is why I ask always, are we really helping?
What I saw was clearly the rule, not the exception.It would take longer than five minutes to give you a passing list of America's disastrous interventions.
The Washington Post a few years ago said we attempted to overthrow 72 governments between 1945 and 1989.
That includes lowlights like 500,000 to a million people killed in CIA-backed massacres under Suharto in the 60s, nearly 2,000, 2 million civilians killed in our Indochinese wars, 160,000 people massacred in Guatemala,
Tens of thousands more in Chile after the 1973 coup, the El Mazote massacre in El Salvador, and more recently 200,000 civilians in Iraq and 50,000 more in Afghanistan and on and on and on. Countries have a right to defend themselves.
There are situations where you have to fight, but the cause has to be right and the objective has to be clear.
Lack of a clear goal has led us to invent metrics like body counts and truck kills and has made us weaker over time and dishonored our soldiers.Anyway, thank you very much.
I want to start by putting a theme that both Lee and Matt hit on to your side of the debate, which is they're accusing you of being binary thinkers, of basically being the woke version of foreign policy, fundamentalists who see the world, as Matt said, in terms of white hats and black hats, in terms of civilization and anarchy.
I want you to contend with that accusation.
Well, I hope I'm not. Look, I think there's a simplistic critique of our side, which I know our friends will not undertake, which is, well, if you're for the world's policemen, you think every intervention was great.
and everything worked out brilliantly in Iraq and Afghanistan and Vietnam.There are a lot of valid critiques to make of the conduct, both tactically and strategically, of American foreign policy. We're not here to debate that.
We're asking a broader question.We're not asking whether the United States might not police the world better, because of course we can police the world better.
In my crazy view, I sometimes think we don't police the world enough, but that's the subject we can get into.But that's not the subject.The question is whether we should police it at all.
And so in this respect, there is an apt analogy to the debates that we're having or had at least a few years ago in this country.
Because the argument that I think you guys are making, and I don't want to put words in your mouth, is you want to basically say, in a global sense, abolish the police.Let Israel and Iran work it out.Let Russia and Ukraine work it out.
If China wants to invade Taiwan, What business is that of ours?We're a sovereign country.These are problems far from our shores.And the argument I want to make, and I think that Jamie also made in his opening statement too, is a very simple one.
Without the benefit of American power undergirding global security, usually in areas that are already at peace, whether it's in Europe,
Japan, South Korea, other places around the world, we will see a global anarchy that reminds us of the 1930s, both in terms of what happened then and where it was heading.
Are you guys saying abolish the police?Matt, you said the cost has to be right and the objective has to be clear.You both pointed to many, many examples where you feel that the cost wasn't right and the objective wasn't clear.
Are there examples where American foreign policy has met that standard?And contend please with Brett's accusation that you're saying abolish the police.
Well, clearly, World War II was a situation where the cause was just and the objective was clear.We were attacked, we fought back, we defeated the enemy.That's the classic example of a just war.
Don't tell Tucker Carlson.
Well, Tucker's not on stage here. We should only be fighting, I think, wars of necessity.And we have to ask ourselves every time we get into one of these interventions.And since 1945, we've engaged in countless interventions.And has it made us safer?
I think on the whole, you'd have to say no.I've been all over the world and almost everywhere you go in the world, we have a record somewhere of supporting dictators or massacres and engendering hostility among the local population.
We need the support of people overseas if we want to accomplish our objectives and we want to properly police.You need to cooperate with local governments.And you can't do that if the people hate you.And I think what we've done
especially in the last 20 years with the disasters in Iraq and Afghanistan, is throw our weight around in ways that has sullied our reputation and dishonored our soldiers and weakened us overall as a country.
I don't have a dogmatic view on this.There are clearly points in history and potentially points in the future where the U.S.
can play a positive role in preventing genocide or some type of humanitarian catastrophe, but not to make this so abstract about policing.I mean, to boil it down to what we're actually facing,
People like Brett made an argument recently in the New York Times that we need to be bombing Iran, that the U.S.should work with Israel to bomb not only the potential nuclear sites, but bomb their civilian infrastructure, their oil infrastructure.
Let's be clear, that's a call for regime change. That's a call for a cataclysmic war that I don't think any of us truly understand the ramifications.And we look at similar arguments that were made for Libya, for Afghanistan, for Iraq.
There's no discussion of what happens next.What happens to that mass exodus of refugees?Where do they go?Who's actually signing up to serve in this potential war that you're floating?You know, you want to talk about how
Should we have no police or abolish the police?I don't think that's exactly the topic at hand.The actual policies that we're facing are questions of whether we bomb another country and engage in another regime change war.
There's a conflation that they're drawing.They're conflating regime change, war, military action, with the majority of what America does in policing the world is just having a big military, having a nuclear arsenal, having soldiers in Germany.
They're not fighting.They're sitting there as a deterrent to aggressive authoritarian powers acting in aggressive ways that we don't want.
That's why we have however many military bases, hundreds of military bases around the world in dozens of countries.Those soldiers aren't fighting.They're preventing wars from happening.And that is what America is doing on a daily basis.
And we don't see it, OK, because we've been living our lives relatively peacefully in this country.9-11 was a such a shock because something like that hadn't happened before.
But, you know, we go to sleep every night pretty much not thinking about what's going to happen tomorrow.
And we're able to do that because of the brave men and women and a pretty big military budget that protects us and protects the entire world from aggressive powers.
Since the numbers came up on the screen, I've been thinking about how unusual this audience is compared to most Americans.
I think that if we were in a very different room in a different neighborhood... How unusual this audience is compared to the rest of this neighborhood.Yes.Fair enough.But... I wanted to quote a few numbers from a recent Pew survey.
28% of Americans, only 28%, said that promoting democracy abroad should be a top priority.31% said it should be given no priority at all.Are Americans just foolish?Or what are they not getting about your argument?
Jamie brought up the example of the 1930s, and there's a famous story in the 1930s where I think it was the Oxford Union decided that under no circumstances would Oxford students fight for king and country.Very famous example of
what we now remember as shortsightedness, foolishness, appeasement of the era.There's absolutely no question that there's legitimacy to what Lee just said.
You can undertake actions which are reckless and foolish and that history remembers as mistaken. You can also be guilty of inaction in the face of threats which are clear and present and imminent.
Iran, according to the Secretary of State Tony Blinken, is between one and two weeks away from having enough nuclear material to develop at least the fissile material for a bomb. Iran just fired 180 ballistic missiles or more at Israel.
Iran has been saying for a very long time that Israel must be wiped off the map.And Iran has been at war with the United States, including through the murder of hundreds of American service members for 45 years.So the question then is,
Are there circumstances in which you look at a hostile, aggressive, fundamentalist regime like the Islamic Republic of Iran and say, we have to push back in some forceful way.By the way, I wasn't calling for regime change.
I was calling for pushing back against aggression in the region, or else we are going to invite further Iranian expansionism.
Right now, 12% of the world's commerce is not getting through the Red Sea because Iran has decided to fire missiles and cruise missiles and drones at commercial shipping.That affects all of you.
And I just want to make one brief point that Matt raised. This is not ultimately a debate about the benefactions we can bring to strangers around the world.That's a good thing to do.
This is a debate about what we owe ourselves and our children as Americans, our security and our prosperity.I'm sorry.Go ahead.
You guys don't have to wait for me, by the way.You can be meaner.Both sides.
In some respects, there are things even about the premise of this debate that bother me.Don't hold back.
I really don't like the idea of well-fed, upper-class intellectuals deciding they support wars or military engagements in places overseas when someone else is going to do the fighting.
I was embedded in Iraq, and that was also after somebody said there were only a few minutes left before a dictator was about to acquire a nuclear weapon.
I felt incredibly uncomfortable about the fact that these poor kids from Oklahoma, these Oklahoma state troopers who were reservists who had been called up to multiple tours, that they had to take a bullet for me, which seemed ridiculous.
There were people in that unit who died driving people around the country for a war that was absolutely useless and wrong.
And so when I cover presidential elections and I go around the country, and I saw this especially in 2016, where over time you could see that there were more and more veterans appearing in Donald Trump's rallies when he started talking about the endless wars.
There was a tremendous exhaustion and resentment that built up among the people who actually fight for the United States about these wars.
There is no cost to them that makes sense, especially because they're not seeing a commensurate amount of investment in their own communities.And so that's where all this anger is coming from.I have three kids myself, three little boys.
There is no amount of risk I would tolerate to see them harmed.And yet we ask, our own soldiers to go and lose their lives and give up their arms and legs for causes that are completely abstract to them.
Barry, can I respond to this?
Yeah, you don't need to ask me.Yes.
This country has an all-volunteer military.There's no draft.People join the military, and they're proud of their service.And that kind of argument is really low, because these people choose to do what they're doing.We don't have a draft.
They choose to do what they're doing because they have no economic choice in most of those communities.
Well, then that's another debate, Nat.That's another debate.We're not debating that.Why aren't you fighting, Jamie? I'm too old at this point.Are you?You're not, I don't think.
I'm 40 years old.You've changed, you know, not that long ago, although a little while ago, you were asked by the AP at a pro-Iraq War rally that you organized.When I was in college.Would you go serve?You said, I can't serve right now, I'm in college.
Now, because you're too old, you won't serve?I mean, come on, Jamie.
We also have a civilian controlled military.So I don't know who you expect to be making, calling the shots here.Look, I'm a civilian.I'm an American citizen.
I have just as much right as anyone else in this room to offer their opinions on foreign policy.Thank you.It sounds like you guys want a militarily controlled government.
No, I just want some consistency, some skin in the game.I remember four years ago seeing... So only people who serve in the military can have an opinion on foreign policy?Can I say something?
Four years ago, we saw academics and NGO liberals encouraging young people to go out and riot and commit violent crime, knowing that they wouldn't be impacted.It was young people who would get arrest records, who could ruin their lives.
I mean, that disgusts me to see people urging others to be in harm's way. It's the same dynamic here.
If you feel so strongly about war, about fighting these enemies abroad, I mean, I don't think it's that much for Matt or others to ask for putting some skin in the game.And you're not that old.
In Ukraine, they're now relying on- They're trying to tell you look really excellent. Look at the people fighting in Ukraine now.They're forcing conscripts who are in their late 40s and 50s to fight in the trenches.
They're fighting a war of their survival.I think this is such a... It's ad hominem for one.
Look, I embedded in Iraq... Let me explain.
I embedded in Iraq I embedded in Afghanistan.I went as a Jewish journalist to Pakistan just after Daniel Pearl was killed.I was in Ukraine recently.I don't mention these things, but I, as a journalist, went to places.
And what I saw when I embedded in places like Sangin Valley, which was the most dangerous place in Afghanistan,
was soldiers, Marines who were proud of their service and who were heartbroken, heartbroken when they saw the way in which we betrayed our Afghan allies, those interpreters, millions of women.
with a feckless withdrawal that dishonored the service they did in that country and that invited the very aggression we sought to avoid in other places, which we considered more central, like Ukraine, to our interests.
There is a direct connection between what happened in August of 2021 and that withdrawal
Listen to Tom Tugendhat, by the way, my dear friend, conservative MP who served with honor in Iraq and Afghanistan, the shame he felt at the betrayal that we perpetrated there.
And then notice that just six months later, we saw global disorder explode around the world.That's when the talk about China invading Taiwan began.That's when actually your kids were more at risk. Because right now we have a volunteer army.
The idea, I don't know how old they are, maybe if they turned 18 they signed up for selective service.Right now it is a notion.It is a fictional legal requirement.
But what happens when you allow disorders to mount at the edges of what seem like the edges of the world is they come closer to home and they put your kids at greater risk, not at less risk.
Better to take care of your cancers when they are small and manageable before they metastasize.
One question that I want... Do you want to quickly respond and then I'll put a question to you?
One question I've wanted to ask this side of the debate before tonight is this.I think the chink in the armor of this side is Iraq, Libya, a bunch of failed wars that Lee mentioned.Okay, okay.We're just talking about the past 20 years.
But I think maybe the weakest side for your argument is, if not us, who?In other words, if America withdraws from the world, we know that someone is going to come in and fill that power vacuum.
Are you guys arguing tonight that someone else could do it better than us, or that there's some other way of the world being governed that we haven't yet discovered?
Well, look, I don't take a dogmatic approach to this.I believe in multilateralism and engagement.You know, when Brett talks about Iran getting a nuclear weapon, I think we all share a concern around nonproliferation.
But the question is how you get there.Brett has written many times about bombing Iran and about how even invading Iraq somehow intimidated Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, which of course is not true.It is true.Briefly, it was true.
Let's lay out the timeline.In 2003, spring 2003, Iran reportedly gave up some of their nuclear ambitions, paused their program, perhaps because of intimidation from seeing the Iraqi army fold so quickly.
By August of 2005, they restarted their program.It was in their rational self-interest seeing themselves surrounded by enemies to get a nuclear weapon.Now, there are two ways to kind of remove the nuclear threat from Iran.
We've seen one, multilateral action, the JCPOA, this kind of treaty reducing sanctions and having inspectors come in, stopping the kind of dangerous weapons level uranium enrichment. That led to a pause of Iranian nuclear ambitions as well.
And we've seen from congressional review reports, IAEA inspectors, even Mike Pompeo confirming that Iran abided by that deal.So we can take that approach.
We can take the approach of multilateral engagement with Iran, or we can take the other approach of invading its neighbors and bombing it and attacking its civilian infrastructure and starting another regional war.
I mean, those are really our two choices.
I also like to add the idea that the strongest argument against, in your article about why you didn't regret your decision to support the Iraq war, I think you said the strongest argument against going in was that it would
deter Iran or that it would we would encourage Saddam Hussein keeping in power.But you left out the most important thing, which is that it's morally insane to attack a country that didn't do anything to us.
And that the results of that decision radiate out to everything America does.It left the entire region in chaos and it badly weakened our prestige all around the world.And I just I don't understand the idea of thinking in those terms.
You want to respond to that?Go ahead.Go ahead.Look, we can have an endless debate about the war in Iraq.The truth is, if you have a long memory, you will remember that Saddam Hussein was a 25-year security nightmare.
And there was a weapon of mass destruction that was found and destroyed in Iraq that had resulted in the death of over a million people.And its name was Saddam Hussein. And that is something that should be considered when we talk about Iraq.
There were many mistakes that happened, mainly in the conception and then in the wake of the invasion.
And I'm more than happy to acknowledge, in fact, in the article that you just referenced, Matt, I fully acknowledge all of those mistakes that were made.
But the idea that somehow we had this happy situation in the Middle East that was just somehow upset by the invasion of Iraq is historical amnesia, OK?It's simply Is it better now?And I just want to make one more point, OK?
One of the points that Matt made, which I find upsetting because of the kind of self-hatred it expresses for America, is this idea that we just go around the world intervening and ruining people's lives.
Well, those Afghans who were trying to cling to the sides of American C-17s as they were exiting the Kabul airport, didn't hate America.They were desperate for America to stay.
The Vietnamese boat people who risked everything, their children, to go out at sea in the South China Sea in shark-infested waters, hoping to be found by the United States, didn't hate America.They depended on America.The Bosnians
and the Kosovars, who were saved by American intervention against a genocidal regime in Serbia, didn't hate America.
This country, for all of its blunders, and we can go over them, they are numerous, for all of its blunders, this country has been an extraordinary force for good.And with due respect to European multilateralism,
I'm absolutely for working with our allies when we can, but the idea that some condominium of French diplomats working in tandem with their good friends in Moscow and our partners in China are going to solve our security crises is a fantasy.
It's a nice one, but it's false.
I would also say, yeah, thank you. Whatever you think about the Iraq war, if you have the strongest position against it, I don't think that it detracts from what the resolution is tonight, which is should the United States still police the world?
As Brett said, it doesn't mean we have to police the world perfectly.It doesn't mean that we're going to make no mistakes.
But I would even add the Vietnam War, any war, any intervention that you thought was inappropriate or set the world back or caused harm,
The question you all have to decide tonight is do those interventions and do those mistakes, do they outweigh the benefits of American global leadership?And I think the answer is very clear.
I just don't even know how to answer that.I mean, just taking a look at Vietnam, there were tens of thousands of people who died from horrible birth defects just from the use of Agent Orange.
Have you ever seen pictures of those kids that went on for decades after we left that country? What could possibly justify?
How do you measure that and say that there's some other thing that turns out, the math turns out in our favor when that kind of thing happens?I can do that easily.
Anyone here the see the film The Killing Fields?In Cambodia, the killing didn't stop when America retreated.That's when the genocide began.And a third of the country was murdered in three years by Pol Pot.That's what happens when America withdraws.
And I think this is the fundamental difference.Your proposition is the idea that as soon as we get out, and Jamie said this in his opening statement, that peace and better solutions emerge.
Actually, as soon as we get out, that is when genocide and killing and chaos and starvation occur.So just on the humanitarian argument, it's hard to make the case that American withdrawal leads to great results.
Okay, and just I want to respond to that because that's something you argue a lot, Brett.I've heard you say it before anonymously.You really did your homework today.
You really did your homework.Digging back through the Yale Daily News archives.
That's really impressive.Don't get triggered, but you know, you've said this a lot, that the Cambodian genocide was a result of us withdrawing. Cambodia was thrown into chaos because of the secret illegal war from the U.S.
bombing Cambodia, killing 150,000 people illegally with no congressional oversight.With the rise of the Khmer Rouge, the U.S.supported that.Here's your idol, Henry Kissinger, from a declassified report.This is your words.
Speaking to the Thai foreign minister, the Khmer Rouge's posture is, quote, as a counterweight to North Vietnam, Quote, we will be friends with them.They are murderous thugs, but we won't let that stand in our way.
We are prepared to improve relations with them.And who ended the Khmer Rouge's reign of terror?That was the Vietnamese army that invaded.And after the Vietnamese army invaded Cambodia and ended the genocide there, what did the U.S.
do out of just sheer bloodlust and revenge? We pushed for sanctions on Vietnam for stopping the Cambodian genocide.We pushed for the exiled Khmer Rouge representatives to continue their representation at the United Nations.
The suggestion that Henry Kissinger, whom I detested, is my idol, is the most insulting thing that's been said this entire night.Henry Kissinger hated me.
If you did your homework, you should look up my interview with him, speaking to Henry Kissinger on China or not, where he refuses to answer any of my questions, because he's an ultra-realist, and I'm one of those neocons who believes... I can post my research notes online after the debate.
You guys have an offer.This side has not offered their alternative, right?We are very clear about what our position is.America must police the world.They have yet to offer a viable alternative.
That's what they have to do in this debate, is offer you an alternative to what we are arguing.
Well, let's actually... Let's go to the question of... Yeah, Lee.I'm sorry.
Go ahead. Invariably in these debates and in the very beginning of the shame he brought up Hitler.So let's address that there are two models We had two world wars fought with Germany
At the end of the First World War, there was an attempt to subjugate, humiliate, and oppress the German people.The Treaty of Versailles had penalties, sanctions, war reparations.
In 1923, the French and Belgians invaded Germany to collect on those war reparations and shut down the German economy.That created an economic disaster, hyperinflation.Germans were starving in the streets.What did we do after World War II?
Those are the conditions.What did we do after World War II, Lee?Jamie, one moment, please. Those are the conditions that gave rise to Hitler.This kind of bullying, intimidation, sanctions, and humiliation.
Instead, I think what Matt and I generally agree with, I don't want to put words in Matt's mouth, is the resolution to World War II.Cooperation, investment, creating civil society and mutual respect.
which is exactly what we didn't do after the Soviet Union collapsed.
This is just bad history, okay?This is simply bad history.What happened is that after World War I, we set up a feckless League of Nations.Which we didn't join.Which the United States didn't even join.
Whether it would have made a difference is now essentially a moot question. Absolutely true.The French behaved badly in the wake of Versailles.
But the real problem is actually that Western powers refused to enforce Versailles and allowed Germany to serially violate it even before the collapse of the Weimar Republic.
And then when Hitler came to power, they sought a policy of appeasement, engagement, understanding. which led to Munich.Some of you have heard of this disagreement.
What happened after World War II is we went in, we conquered Germany, we emplaced hundreds of thousands of American troops in Germany, and now the most miraculous thing, we complain that Germany's a pacifist state.
You know, there's an old joke about German food.What's the problem with German food?No matter how much you eat, within minutes you're hungry for power.
That joke is 100 years out of date because the United States chose to exercise its responsibility as a world policeman.
And now the miracle of miracles, Japan and Germany in the first half of the 20th century, the two most militaristic countries, are today two of the most peace-oriented countries, democracies, allies, and friends.
I'm not going to ask you guys to weigh in on Kamala Trump, but maybe one way of making this... I don't think that's so funny.
Maybe one way of making this debate a little bit more concrete for people is to ask each of you, who is the American president that to you embodies the way the US should be prosecuting foreign policy abroad?
Who did it the best, closest to your vision?
Very easy answer, Harry Truman.Yeah.Harry Truman was present at the creation, as Dean Acheson's memoirs called, formed NATO, desegregated the military, the Marshall Plan, basically created the Cold War foreign policy of America.
The containment policy was started under Harry Truman.And fought Korea.Korea, absolutely, yeah.
Roosevelt probably or Truman.But one thing I have to point out is that we've changed our tactics since then.The exact decision that we made after 1945 with Japan and Germany is the decision we didn't make after the collapse of the Soviet Union.
We did not do a gigantic Marshall Plan investment with that country.We chose instead an immediate plan of encirclement and intimidation.
What do you mean by that?
Well, we began expanding NATO to Russia's borders almost immediately after telling them in negotiations.
When did we tell them we wanted to enlarge NATO?
When Shevardnadze had negotiations with James Baker.I interviewed the CIA.
There was a document where they signed that we're not going to expand NATO?Was this a conversation between foreign ministers and some kind of- It was.
They said that we will not leapfrog East Germany one step towards- That's not a diplomatic talk in a private room between two guys.It doesn't matter to you.
It's not an agreement to not enlarge NATO.
It matters to them, and they have nuclear weapons. They have a very long memory.They've been invaded multiple times from the West in their history and gone through extraordinary suffering to a degrees that Americans can't possibly understand.
So they're understandably a little bit paranoid about Western powers coming up to their borders.That's again bad history.
All right, it's bad history.Let's remember who in 1939 invaded who, okay?In 1939, Russia, which was not being threatened by the Polish cavalry, invaded Poland in tandem with Nazi Germany, expansionary powers who thought, take what we can get.
And if you are an Estonian, or if you are Czech, or certainly if you're a Pole, you are very grateful that America has included you in the NATO alliance so that they have that security.
The tragedy for Ukraine, the reason a million people are dead or injured now is that Russia, which is the aggressor, not the victim in this conflict, thought it could take what it could get when it could.
Why is Germany surrounded by Friends, countries that admire Germany, it's all peaceful.Germany's surrounded by friends.These are countries that Germany did really bad things to.Okay, Poland, Czech Republic, terrible things.
France, Russia is surrounded by countries that hate it.Why?Because they're in fear of Russia.And the reason is because the Russian regime is very different than the German regime.The German regime was born through American tutelage.
It's a liberal democracy.Russia has not had a democracy as you know, in its thousands of years of history, except maybe a little brief time when you were there, maybe it was a democracy.
But this is something much deeper in the Russian, I hate to use the word soul, but in Russian tradition and culture, there is no democratic history in that country, at least not enough to govern it.
The reason why we're dealing with a problematic Russia now is not because of what the United States did in the post-Cold War era.
I don't think it was a bad decision when a group of small, embattled, fledgling democracies in Central and Eastern Europe wanted to join NATO.We won the Cold War.We won. And you know what happens when you win?
The countries that you're working with, they are allowed to join NATO.They're allowed to make a consensual decision to join the NATO alliance.Russia doesn't have the right to just invade its neighbors at will.That's not what... But we do?
We don't invade our neighbors.We have very good relations with our neighbors, Mexico and Canada.But we have the right to invade other countries.
Well, we did invade both countries, but that was a long time ago.
Not now. It's true.Okay.Thanks, Brett.That was really helpful.
We are gonna put two minutes on the clock and we're gonna mix up the order.So we're gonna go Lee, Jamie, Matt, and Brett for some closing statements.Lee, we're gonna start with you.Okay.Lee's mom, how's he doing?
Our position is backed by evidence, by consistency, and by the reality of the consequences of war and aggression.But perhaps it is difficult to defend our position only because it is not easy to articulate in one or two minute sound bites.
To understand each conflict, there's a deeper history and nuance that is all too often ignored in our national debates.Our entire media system is filled with war escalation rhetoric.Fear sells newspapers.
Fear is an easy way to mobilize voters on both sides of the aisle.Fear is often more compelling than intellectual scrutiny.
If there's one thing that Fox News and MSNBC have in common, it's their focus on the latest foreign bogeymen and smearing any dissent as foreign agents.
My more pragmatic anti-war views represent a majority of how ordinary Americans feel, but I may represent a minority when it comes to elite media and political discourse.
When countries are subjected to intimidation, sanctions, invasion, and occupation, these are the conditions for a mass exodus of refugees, violent backlash, and embittered cycles of revenge.We've seen this story play out over and over again.
Engagement requires humility and the ability to look at the world through the eyes of our worst adversaries and seek opportunities to extend an olive branch.
Think of John McCain traveling to Vietnam and promoting trade and strong relations, a friendship that requires burying the past.Menachem Begin and Anwar Sadat making peace between Israel and Egypt, a truce that stands to this day.
The peaceful transition to democracy by former military governments of Poland, Taiwan, Brazil, Argentina, Spain, and Tunisia, which required engagement, not bombs.
And the modern history of our country, from the civil rights movement to the gay rights movement, shows that peaceful engagement from opposing viewpoints, rather than violent coercion, produces momentous reforms and a world worth living in.
I urge you to reject the question today.
Well, thank you all again for coming and listening to us.And I want to assure Lee that Brett and I do not believe that you or Matt are foreign agents.We never said that.I don't know who you have in mind when you make that argument.
I'm just going to reiterate what I said a few moments ago, which is that we've argued our side.We've told you what we believe.It's in the motion that you are voting on this evening. They are opposed to the motion.
They have yet to offer a viable alternative.What do they want?Do they want a world where the United Nations is policing the world?Is that what they want?Is that really a feasible solution, ladies and gentlemen?
Do they want a world where China is policing the world? Do we want to live in a world where China is the most influential, powerful force on earth?I certainly don't.
Do we want to live in a world where Russia and Iran and other non-liberal democratic countries are the most powerful?I think it should be very clear what the answer to that question is.And I've yet to hear it from our opponents.
Regarding NATO enlargements, because this is something you often hear over the past couple of years, I would just ask you, what do you think the world, in Europe in particular, would look like today had NATO not enlarged?
Had NATO not brought in Poland, had NATO not brought in the Baltic States, Czech Republic, Slovakia, Romania, Hungary, all those nations that had lived under Soviet tyranny for 40 years, do we think that Vladimir Putin would have just, this hardened KGB man who has the blood of hundreds of thousands of people on his hands, do we think that he would have come to power and just
not invaded those countries again, and not tried to rebuild the Soviet empire, which is what he's doing right now in Ukraine, a country, let me remind you, that is not a NATO member, because no NATO member has ever been invaded, because NATO is the most successful military alliance in history, and it is something that America birthed.
Oh, there we go, all right, good night.
The late Colin Powell summed up the difference between soldiers and politicians in his 2021 memoir.
My constant unwelcome message at all the meetings in Bosnia was simply that we should not commit military forces until we had a clear political objective.
He went on to say the debate exploded at one session when Madeleine Albright, our ambassador to the UN, asked me in frustration, what's the point of having this superb military if you're always talking about if we can't use it?
I thought I would have an aneurysm, Powell said.We often overlook the impact our desire to use our superb military and exert influence has on our own culture.
During these years of world policing, we've changed our own culture in a way that simultaneously worsened our lives and undercut America's argument as a beacon of democracy.
Think of all the things that we've changed about American society since 9-11, since beginning with the Patriot Act and the surveillance programs that were undertaken by the NSA.We instituted torture, secret prisons, extraordinary renditions.
We abandoned the Geneva Conventions.We assassinated thousands of people by drones, including an American citizen. We illegally collected the communications of everyone from allied leaders to our own citizens.
And as Barry knows very well from the Twitter files, most recently we've begun instituting mass censorship in defiance of the constitutional principle that made us a symbol of freedom in the first place.
If we want the world to emulate our values, we have to make sure that we're protecting those values.But the tendency has been to lose a little bit of ourselves every time we try to expand our reach.We've been accused of not stating our objective.
This is all about the difference between empire and being a nation.I think the duty of being a nation is to grow and live and defend ourselves from attack.I think we're capable of doing that and we don't need to be the world's policeman.
I urge you to reject the motion.
I just want to begin by saying I have such respect for Lee and for Matt, and for the honor, integrity, and intelligence they bring to an important position.
And I'm so grateful to have really the honor to share the stage with you, and especially to my dear and old friend Barry Weiss.This is an incredible forum, and I'm just proud to be a part of it.Now I'm going to whack you, Matt.
Thank God, thank God the Clinton administration did not take Colin Powell's advice to do nothing in Bosnia and stopped a genocide from happening there, stopped the annihilation of children in Srebrenica and other cities, stopped chaos from engulfing the Balkans and the rest of Europe.
Sometimes American power, often American power, is a great force for good in this world.Don't give up on that thought. Also think of this, wishful thinking is the narcotic of the democratic mind.
I dearly wish that there were great multilateral solutions to the challenges that confront us in Iran, China, proliferation, so many other issues.
But the world is what it is, and the margin between civilization and barbarism for the past 80-odd years has been provided by American power.And we should maintain it.Use it better, but maintain it.Last point I want to make.
Leon Trotsky, who I have reason to believe my grandmother slept with, I'd like to say you may not be interested in war, but war is interested in you.This topic does not matter to the far away regions of the world.
It matters to you, your safety, and the safety of your children, and indeed Matt's as well.Thank you very much.
Thanks once again to Jamie, Brett, Lee, and Matt.Thank you all so much for joining us tonight. Thanks for listening.To watch the filmed version of the full debate, and I highly recommend doing so, please go to thefp.com slash events.
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