It is wonderful to be back, resuming the dialogue we had when I was teaching here a year ago, only this time in my governmental capacity. Let me offer a broad-gauged look at the kind of challenges we face as a country and how these will affect the work of intelligence. This will be mostly from a U.S. perspective, but I hope these thoughts have wider relevance.

For those who don’t know, the National Intelligence Council, or NIC, is a center of strategic thinking that reports to the Director of Central Intelligence in his capacity as head of the Intelligence Community as a whole. The NIC consists of a Chairman and Vice Chairman and 12 National Intelligence Officers – who include former ambassadors, senior academics, retired generals, and senior intelligence officers – as well as their deputies and various support staff. We participate in policy deliberations at the highest levels and provide analyses of key foreign policy issues for the President and other senior policy makers. My own role is to manage the overall effort as well as represent the Intelligence Community in principals’ and deputies’ committee meetings of the President’s National Security Council.

I should acknowledge that the NIC was also the producer of the now-famous National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq’s weapons of mass destruction programs. I will come back to that NIE in a few minutes, but I will speak more broadly first.

We are the government’s foreign policy think tank; at least, that’s the way I conceive of our role. We have both the mandate and capacity to think strategically and over the horizon, and we are better placed to do so than any other part of government. Much of our work is dominated by current issues, especially the situation in Iraq. But we have a responsibility to maintain a longer-term perspective as well. And I would say that we have a particular obligation to do so at this particular juncture in history.

A World in Flux

My starting point is that we are facing a more fluid and complicated set of international alignments than anything we have seen since the formation of the Western alliance system in 1949. (Such a statement would not have been accurate during the 1990s, however. Throughout the decade the elements holding together the international system were stronger than those pulling it apart.) I would attribute the current flux to three chief factors:

• First, it is a commonplace but nonetheless true that with the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet empire we lost the galvanizing element that held together that system.

  • The bipolar world of the Cold War has been replaced by a unipolar global system – to which the world is still adjusting.

  • And because the Cold War ended peacefully – not with a bang but a whimper – we may not fully have appreciated how dramatic a transformation this was.

• Second, 9/11 was a turning point. Because those attacks were directed at the United States and carried out on American soil, we were uniquely affected. Our friends and allies offered sympathy and support, of course, but they did not and do not feel the same sense of urgency that we do, so the international consensus of the previous era has eroded.

  • It is a politically useful rallying cry to say that countries are either with us or against us, but it is more likely than some countries will be with on some of the issues some of the time.

• Third, the breakdown of consensus over Iraq reflected a fundamental restructuring of the international system.

  • I would add that it wasn’t just because of this particular incident: that would be too simplistic an historical judgment. If the clash hadn’t occurred over Iraq, it would have occurred over something else.

  • These trends will also be affected by the plans for a changed US military posture around the world – announced by the White House last week – which will loosen our ties with some traditional allies and expand them with others.

So we are facing major flux in all the areas of the world that we have traditionally considered vital:

• The greater Middle East is obviously in tremendous flux, and U.S. involvement there will be more direct and intense than ever before. Looking out 15-20 years, it is hard to imagine this region staying much the same.

• East Asia is also on the brink of major change, as China continues to move toward greater economic openness and political flux. The key question is whether that political system is sufficiently elastic, and its leaders sufficiently imaginative, to accommodate continued rapid economic growth and the social pressures it will bring.

• And on the Korean peninsula, a unification scenario cannot be far off, with all the uncertainties that entails.

• The US-European relationship, too, has already changed from a single transatlantic security community to an alliance a la carte. And, again, this is not the consequence of particular personalities or policies but of a deeper structural change in the relationship. These changes were building up throughout the 1990s, but they were largely obscured by the sugarcoated rhetoric of undiminished transatlantic solidarity. Iraq brought them into full view.

The Challenge of Unipolarity

An underlying aspect of this structural change relates to the challenge of a unipolar international system. I see that you are holding a conference on this subject later this week. We at the National Intelligence Council did so as well, engaging a group of IR theorists in a series of three conferences (which included Tom Christensen) last spring and summer. The report of that group, prepared by John Ikenberry, is on our web site.

The core issue has to do with what we might call the problem of American power – not just the use of American power (whether we are using it wisely or unwisely), but the very fact of having such unrivaled power. We are in an unusual, perhaps unique, period in international politics in which one country dominates so thoroughly. And this creates new challenges for American policy:

• It is harder to maintain alliances, because other countries lack the capacity to be full partners.

• It may prompt other states to make common cause against us – as France, Germany and Russia did earlier this year – in an effort to constrain American power.

• It can create resentment on the part of others and foster anti-Americanism.

• And it may tempt us to take on more than we can handle, simply because there is nothing to stop us from doing so. As Ikenberry and Co. argued, unipolarity selects for unilateralism. (In this regard, it is worth noting that unilateralism did not begin with the Bush Administration. The same charge was leveled at the Clinton Administration, in which I also served.)

Challenges Facing the Intelligence Community

All of this adds up to a new set of challenges and demands on the U.S. Intelligence Community. Let me highlight just a few of them.>

1. Strategic Surprise

During the Cold War, there was very little that we didn’t know about the Soviet Union – at least within the universe of things we needed to know.

• There was a defined threat, which focused our collection and analysis.

• We even knew the Warsaw Pact’s battle plan.

• After the Cuban missile crisis, there was an increasing recognition on both sides that a certain amount of transparency was stabilizing. Each side allowed the other a degree of unfettered intelligence collection, in order to reduce the danger of miscalculation and misunderstanding.

• It is worth noting that the role of intelligence in keeping the Cold War from turning hot is one of the neglected stories of the last half-century.

Needless to say, that degree of maturity doesn’t exist among our present-day adversaries – some of which do not even occupy a defined territory.>

And unlike the single massive threat of the Cold War, we must now worry about threats emanating from almost anywhere.

• A recent RAND project on “red-teaming the terrorist threat” – an effort to imagine what targets international terrorists would go after next – came up with dozens of scenarios, each of them plausible.

2. Denial and Deception

The threats we worry about most come from adversaries who are practiced in denial and deception – that is, from closed, authoritarian systems that deny access to their weapons program and develop elaborate programs to deceive outside weapons inspectors as to what their activities really signify.>

• We obviously faced this with respect to the Iraqi regime, which built D&D into its entire WMD program – and refined its D&D capacities over by a dozen years of international scrutiny.

• In the NIE on Iraq WMD – about which I will say more shortly – we were aiming at a very difficult target.

• Every Iraqi program had “dual-use” built in that provided a plausible cover story: this was the game of hide-and-seek that Iraq had been playing with UN inspectors since 1991.

• And we are facing a similar situation now in North Korea. I wish that those who are second-guessing the Intelligence Community’s assessments of Iraq’s WMD program would look at a current issue like North Korea’s nuclear program and appreciate how hard it is.

• We are applying the most sophisticated technical systems and best interpretive and analytic capabilities – and still can’t be sure.

• This isn’t an intelligence “failure” in the making; this is just the way it is.

In the Q&A someone is likely to ask why the U.S. invaded Iraq but not North Korea, which already has nuclear weapons and arguably poses a greater threat. So let me launch a preemptive rhetorical strike: What makes you think North Korea has nuclear weapons? How do you know?>

• That “knowledge” is in fact a judgment – one based on solid evidence and sound reasoning, but still a judgment, based on imperfect information.

3. Smaller, More Mobile Targets

We have gone from an era in which we were looking for large things in more or less fixed locations – armored divisions, missile silos, etc. – to one in which we are looking for small things on the move.

This is true in the war against terrorism and in counter-proliferation efforts, and it is also true of our support to war fighters.

• During Operation Iraqi Freedom, we needed to direct special operations units to individual buildings in which a key leader was known to have arrived an hour before – and then to tell them which door to enter.

• This requires ever more sophisticated technical means as well as improved human intelligence – and synergistic use of all the sources of intelligence from overhead imagery to communications intercepts.

Now and in the future, intelligence and military operations are going to be fused, from the battlefield to the national level. There was a remarkable, unprecedented level of military-intelligence cooperation in Afghanistan and in Iraq.

• During Operation Iraqi Freedom, we held three teleconferences daily with Centcom. This was real-time information-sharing calling for quick turn-around assessments, coordinated among all elements of the intelligence community.

• Obviously, this level of direct support to war-fighters stretches the intelligence community thin for other tasks. Even as we speak, there is a very difficult tradeoff between assets devoted to the difficult security situation – which obviously takes priority – and those assigned to the Iraqi Survey Group that is searching for weapons of mass destruction.

• Analytically, we are looking at such issues as the scope and evolution of the jihad, the actions of neighboring countries, and the workings of the black arms market, as well as issues related to political and economic reconstruction.

4. The Burden of Preemption

The doctrine of preemption imposes an extraordinarily high standard on the Intelligence Community. US intelligence will be measured by whether a case has been made that justifies and legitimates intervention.

• We will be asked not merely to indict, but also to convict – and, through our covert action possibilities, to prosecute as well.

• These functions obviously go well beyond what the Intelligence Community traditionally has been called on to perform.

• Those putting together the Iraqi WMD estimate never conceived of their task as one of making a case for intervention. Intelligence is policy neutral. We do not propose, we do not oppose any particular course of action.

• Moreover, candidates for “preemption” tend to be the hardest targets.

• Intelligence judgments about them will be just that – judgments, based on evidence that will rarely be conclusive or incontrovertible.

5. Public Scrutiny: The Iraqi WMD Estimate

That brings me to the Iraqi WMD estimate and the extraordinary public scrutiny it has engendered. My deputy, Stuart Cohen, wrote a superb editorial in Friday’s Washington Post, so I won’t try to recapitulate all his arguments. Besides, he is true expert on the subject, having served on the first UN inspection team in Iraq a decade ago.

But let me offer a few additional points about that NIE, which has spawned a cottage industry of misinformation:

First, the judgments of that estimate were honestly arrived at. The estimate was published before I arrived, but I know the four National Intelligence Officers who put it together.

• One is a Mormon bishop and one of the world’s leading experts on nuclear programs. Another is a PhD physicist from CalTech and head of the Denial and Deception board for the entire intelligence community. A third is retired Army general and graduate of West Point and with an MPA from the Kennedy School. The fourth is a politics PhD from Princeton and author of perhaps the best book on international terrorism.

• Three of them were appointed NIOs during the Clinton administration. The fourth goes back long before – all the way back to Carter, I believe. They are not “political,” and they are absolutely incorruptible. If anyone ever told them to alter their judgments for political reasons, their response would be to dig in their heels even harder.

Second, the debate a year ago was never about intelligence. I took part in many such discussions right here in this auditorium as well as in other venues, and the debates were not about intelligence but about policy. There was broad agreement, within governments and outside, about Iraq’s WMD programs – based on UNSCOM and UNMOVIC, foreign intelligence, and US Government assessments made over three administrations.

• I was just in Europe a few weeks ago and reconfirmed that the British, French, and Germans all held the same basic judgments that we did.

Third, there was a powerful body of evidence on programs and a compelling basis for judging that they had weapons. The fixation is now on the weapons, but the programs – the capacity of a regime that had actually used CW on ten separate occasions to weaponize large quantities on short notice – were arguably just as worrying.

Fourth, as to the weapons themselves, the amounts of CW we estimated Iraq to have had would fit in a backyard swimming pool or, at the upper limit of our estimate, in a small warehouse. A tremendously lethal arsenal of BW could of course be much smaller. And this in a country the size of California.

Fifth, as David Kay, head of the Iraqi Survey Group, has pointed out, there were ample opportunities before, during and after the war to hide or destroy evidence as well as weapons. We may never know definitively what Iraq had at the time the war began.

Conclusion: The Challenge of Global Coverage

Meanwhile, the preoccupation with retrospection on that NIE is taking a toll. One of our challenges in the NIC – one of my principal challenges – is to keep our focus on the larger strategic issues before us even as Iraq dominates the agenda.

Let me conclude, as I began, with some broad observations about the intelligence challenges of the early 21st century. (Or, as one MPA applicant wrote in his public policy paper, the challenges “for the next millennium and beyond.” Now there was a young man with a vision!)

As I argued at the beginning, we are likely to see major change in the Greater Middle East, in East Asia, and in the transatlantic relationship. And we are simultaneously waging a global struggle against terrorism, which can take us into countries and regions traditionally low on our list of priorities. It is an exciting time to be in government, but also a demanding one.

The threats and issues we now face are dispersed and global, and they grow out of complex cultural roots.

• This means that both the breadth and the depth of our coverage has to be correspondingly greater.

  • New analysts being brought in will help enormously, but cannot entirely fill that gap, particularly given the priority that must be attached to Iraq, terrorism, and WMD programs.

Let me mention a few ways in which we are trying to meet these new strategic challenges. Within the NIC, we have just created a new NIO account to deal with transnational threats, including terrorism – not to duplicate the work of the many organizations dealing with day-to-day counter-terrorist work, but to look over the horizon at broader trends that day-to-day operators may miss.

• For example, we know that failed states can offer safe havens for terrorists. But which states will fail, and which of those will in fact be attractive sites for terrorists?

• Also, we need to monitor global trends in political Islam – not all of which are associated with terrorism, let me hasten to add.

• What about other sources of global terrorism? Will Leftist terrorism, which virtually disappeared from Europe after the disbanding of the Red Brigades and the Bader-Meinhof gang, make a comeback? Will class-based terrorism make a revival in Latin America?

On these and many other issues, we must look outside government to find the expertise on which we must draw. Here the NIC can play a critical bridging role between outside experts and policy makers. Having spent a career wandering between these two worlds, I see this as one of the principal roles I can play.

In addition to calling on outside experts to review all of our estimates, we maintain regular contracts with hundreds of academics and other experts.

• As I mentioned, earlier this year, we engaged a group of international relations theorists in a series of three conferences to examine strategic responses to American preeminence – how other countries are reacting to U.S. power. We reconvened just last week with a deeper look at East Asia and will follow up with looks at other regions over the coming year.

We also convened a group of leading thinkers from five continents to explore anti-Americanism around the world. It’s a delicate subject to be batting around in Washington, so I’m still trying to figure out how best to present their findings to my counterparts on the policy side!

Finally, we just launched an ambitious, year-long project called NIC 2020, which will explore the forces that will shape the world of 2020 through a series of dialogues and conferences with experts from around the world. For our inaugural conference, we invited 25 experts from a wide variety of backgrounds to join us in a broad gauged exploration of key trends.

• These included prominent “futurists” – the longtime head of Shell’s scenarios project, the head of the UN’s millennium project, and the director of RAND’s center for the study of the future.

• And Princeton’s own Harold James gave the keynote address, offering lessons from prior periods of “globalization.”

• Beyond that, we had experts on biotechnology, information technology, demography, ethnicity, demography, and energy, as well as more traditional regional specialists.

Later on we will be organizing conferences on five continents, and drawing on experts from academia, business, governments, foundations, and the scientific community, so that this effort will be truly global and interdisciplinary. We will commission local partners to convene these affairs and help set them up, but then we will get out of the way so that regional experts may speak for themselves in identifying key “drivers” of change and a range of future scenarios.

• As the 2020 project unfolds, we will be posting discussion papers, conference reports, and other material on our unclassified website, so I encourage you to follow the project as it unfolds over the coming year.

It may seem somewhat self-indulgent to engage in such futurology, but I see this as integral to our work. If we are entering a period of major flux in the international system, as I believe we are, it is important to take a longer-term strategic review.

We are accustomed to seeing linear change, but sometimes change is logarithmic: it builds up gradually, with nothing much seeming to happen, but then major change occurs suddenly and unexpectedly.

• The collapse of the Soviet empire is one example.

• The growing pressures on China may also produce a sudden, dramatic transformation that cannot be understood by linear analysis.

As I used to say in class, linear analysis will get you a much changed caterpillar, but it won’t get you a butterfly. For that you need a leap of imagination. I’m hoping that the 2020 project will help us make that leap, not to predict the world of 2020 – that is clearly beyond our capacity – but to prepare for the kinds of changes that may lie ahead.

Thanks for your attention. I look forward to your questions and comments.