Victoria Nuland

Well, thank you, Munk team, for the opportunity to join this great audience and my colleagues here on the stage for an important conversation.

Let me start where Secretary Pompeo finished.

Neither the United States nor Canada nor any of the great democracies can afford to cede the world to monsters or allow them to upend the global order that has benefited free nations for 80 years.

Mike and I believe, as he said, that the US and our allies are far better protected by confronting those monsters before they grow powerful enough to threaten us at home or to destroy the foundations of the world that we have built.

But as you've heard, our opponents have a different view.

They called it offshore balancing, a realist grand strategy in a piece that they co-authored in 2016.

And here's the key tenant of that strategy, and I quote, if there is no potential hegemon in sight in Europe, in North Asia, or in the Gulf, then there is no reason to deploy ground or air forces there, and little reason for a large military establishment at home.

As the great crooner Sam Cooke would say, ladies and gentlemen, what a wonderful world that would be, right?

But it's not our world.

From Putin's four years of vicious war against Ukraine, to China's coercion of Taiwan and its neighbors, to Iran's refusal to give up its nuclear weapons capability and its dominance now at the Straits of Hormuz, the dangers, the monsters seeking to dominate Europe, Northeast Asia and the Gulf are growing stronger.

The professor suggests that the U.S.

turn to regional forces as the first line of defense.

If those powers cannot contain a potential hegemon on their own, however, the U.S.

must help get the job done.

Thank you both for that.

That's precisely where we are now on all three continents, and it's been that way for most of the last 80 years.

Our allies need our help keeping monsters at bay.

Maybe each could do more, but we are not, sadly, professors in your wonderful world.

We should have learned that lesson in the last bloody century.

As long as humans roam the Earth, monsters will emerge among us.