Ambassador Robert Blackwill

It's too far away.

It's not important enough.

We seem to have a recent inclination to lose wars.

No.

But that's where American leadership comes in and explains to the American people, here's why we're going to war.

But it will be a tough sell.

Just again, to use a historical analogy, we will never know whether FDR and the American Congress would have declared war on Germany once Pearl Harbor had occurred if Hitler hadn't declared war on us first.

because the body of opinion was, let's concentrate on Japan.

They're the ones who attacked us.

Germany hasn't attacked us.

And that decision by Hitler to declare war four days later after Pearl Harbor, that's what Merle LaGuardia called a doozy.

Yes, I do agree with that.

And in that context, I think we are headed for not a multipolar world in which the superpowers are first among equals and so forth, although there's a lot of talk about the middle powers now and so forth.

That's a historic doozy.

I think we're headed for a bipolar world that will be very familiar to us.

And it will be the Cold War, too, basically.

Yeah.

Well, in that sense, there'll be many differences.

But in that sense, and it will be the United States and China trying to attract these major other countries in the international system, beginning with and including the four you mentioned.

Well, I myself am an optimist in several respects with respect to your question.