during the time they were closed due to the coronavirus pandemic. bookstore chain focused on reorganizing the departments providing greater selection and making the stores writer area book tv will continue to bring you new programs and publishing news. you can also watch all of our archived programs anytime at book tv. >> .. newt gingrich quickly climbs way to the upper echelons of republican leadership are refusing to accept republicans were destined to be the minority in the house. he worked with present writing to bring about real positive change in america. according to speakers gingrich new book, "trump and the american future: solving the great problems of our time" from the spread of the coronavirus to the highs and lows of the

economy and onto the election 2020 will continue to be a process of change. he's hit with us today to discuss his book and his thoughts on america. we invite you to join our virtual program coming to you from our air force one leadership academy oval office with newt gingrich and john heubusch. >> speaker gingrich, just terrific to have you with us at the reagan library. as you know we originally had planned to have you live and in person as with so many times. i want you to know, this pandemic is behind us and you are able to travel and things can be said again, you still -- we would love to have you out at the reagan library again with your new book, or the next one you write. so thanks so much for joining us today. >> i want to say first of all i am a huge fan of the reagan

library, and particularly the educational work you do and the way you create learning experiences for young people. i cannot remember a time when we visited that we do not just a wonderful experience, so i can assure you as soon as i'm allowed to get back on the west coast i will be dropping in to see you. >> terrific. love to have you. i've known you for years. you are an intellectual and historian. you are an imaginative guy. i wonder, mr. speaker, could you have ever imagined a situation like the world and the united states pine itself in today? you ever imagine a pandemic to literally stopping the world and

its track during your lifetime? >> no. when i first started writing "trump and the american future" it was at the peak of great economics, lowest lacked unemployment in modern history,, lowest latino unemployment. everything was going well. we were negotiating toughly with the chinese that seemed rational. and then boom, you start with what originally was the chinese virus. now given a different name for political reasons. then you go to, the first time i've ever seen countries deliberately create a depression. then you go to politicians deciding what you can and can't do. then you go to people being totally fed up, weeks isolated worried economically and then yet the tragic death of george floyd and all of a sudden the

country seems to come apart at the seams. if you asked me could i've imagine putting all of that together, i think the answer is no. i've written a bunch of novels. i don't know i would've had the imagination to put them on, and people who said it was unbelievable and then of course you also have impeachment in the middle of that and you have all sorts of things. the level of turmoil in some ways resembles the late 1960s except the left is better organized and more totalitarian now than it was in the late '60s. very similar kind of turmoil. >> in fact, you mention the '60s as a decade. i was trying to think back to what's the closest experience at america has had in the last century what we're facing today. when the pandemic initially arrived, people are comparing a

halt to the economy to the 2007-2008 period. as i thought about period. as i thought about it i thought, and i want you do on this, whether in you think it's been sent world war ii, attack on pearl harbor, and nation literally mobilized, and a very different way of course but i think that might be the closest experience we've had in the present day. >> i think that's right. i have written things for publication and for the white house saying this is a largest mobilization ever since world war ii. and, in fact, i i wrote a piece which turned out to be unusually impactful because i was over here in italy and so i had seen this building from about six weeks before washington did. i wrote a piece and said whatever you're planning to do, triple it. because you don't understand yet how big this is going to get. i think that was probably --

people read it because i -- they knew i was here and to change the conversation and lead us to the very, very large bills they passed in the effort is to stabilize the economy. but it's a really i think the challenge right now, and i think it's compounded because we are probably as politically divided as we've been in a long time. i have a good friend who is a civil war historian at princeton who says the language used to attack trump resembles the slave owning newspapers in south carolina attacking lincoln in 1860. the level of vitriol the degree of hatred is unlike, even roosevelt never got to the depth of kind think you're getting about trump. that of course all feeds into this, this whole ability how do you mobilize the country for the

countries of his deeply split? a lot of people as we found, a lot of people all of a sudden decided social distancing as long as you ideologically pure and doing the right thing. a very strange, very complicated time. >> in fact, a core theme of your newest book is that america finds itself in a cultural civil war. i know you are a civil war historian. i wonder if you can explain that to us? >> actually i recently wrote a newsletter entitled three generations of brainwashing. the core of the newsletter is reagan's farewell address where he says the one thing the most

deeply regrets is not being able to institutionalize teaching patriotism in american history and that he's really worried that we are losing the ability to talk to ourselves about who we are and if that happens that the country starts to disappear. i think he was exactly -- when you go back and you read and you realize he gave this in january of 1989, he is amazingly pressing it to where we are today. partly i i suspect because as governor of california he had dealt with mark kruse at it with the radicals of berkeley we had a pretty good instinct about it was going to be. but we are clearly in a cultural civil war. when you clearly have people of accepted a lenin and stalin maoist view of how to organize and how to treat other people, you clearly have people who

despise america. when you refuse to stand for the national anthem, it's not because you are repudiating racism, it's because you are repudiating the united states and job a lot of that. you're the surprisingly large number of people today, it's almost like the radical generation of the '60s that has now had almost 50 years to grow and strengthen and gather more force. so in that sense i think we are in a very deep cultural war, which will many ways affect -- over the next half century. >> in fact, i look pretty closely and i think that you turned the book into your publisher early, mid-march as the pandemic had struck in a major way. so this book was written

pre-george floyd. >> we do have a chapter in their on poverty and a chapter of the big cities that relates to this. we probably don't have as strong a chapter as we should have on the question of race in america. but again i don't -- i had to reduce i didn't redo the book one for covid and one for self-imposed depression, so it was pretty wild, the most complicated book i've ever written. >> it's a magnificent book, mr. speaker. really, you cover the waterfront. it's just amazing, especially the back half of the book, my gosh, you cover all the ground. it's just great to see it. i bet had you written the book or finish it next week, for example, you would double down

on your thinking about this being a cultural civil war because of the addition of this whole issue over racism and george floyd, right? >> actually, and i do a podcast of the week which are free and reduced newsletters, free newsletters. i've done a series of recent exactly this, , but i would say for me, too much of an intellectual, the really big moment was when they "new york times" reporters forced the firing of their editor because he had published an op-ed by a conservative senator. and i thought it we had gotten to a point of tyranny on the left where one conservative opinion piece in a virtually totally left-wing newspaper was such an active heresy that the

man who admitted it had basically fired, , get rid of i. and then i watched a principal in vermont in a town that is 97% white who tweeted, shouldn't all lies matter? following day she was fired. and then you're part of the woods there was a professor at ucla who actually read martin luther king, jr. is a letter from the birmingham jail and was then suspended. how they could offensively on the left to read kings letter which of course is about nonviolence and is about the american -- king was very much saying to america, you have to erupt to the great dream yet, not i want to repudiate america. you look at all the ages think this is truly a cultural civil war. black lives matter the popular right now because it's the slogan but when you look at the

organization which has as one of its explicit goals the destruction of the nuclear family, now, why do you want to destroy the nuclear family i'm not sure. it strikes me as irrational socially and i guaranteed step towards weakness but it's in there. you realize that people who guided black lives matter are inherently anti-american. in the sense they want a totally different america and they want to replace the america that exists today. the other example is the congresswoman from minnesota who is somalia by background. how you can leave mogadishu for minneapolis and have a grudge rather than gratitude i think is one of the great things with studying. she left a society which is a disaster, dominated by warlords, people starving, no sense of

individual opportunity, a very impressive behavior for women -- oppressive behavior. >> comes to the most free us up with a side in the world and she's angry. i don't get it. you would think that it's -- in fact, i would be curious if somebody, i try to get a friend of mine who lives at their to go ask of you that she really think mogadishu is better than minneapolis? she behaves like we somehow done her a terrible injustice by making her be an american. >> what do you think, you know, of course a conversation, i debate, a discussion about the issues of racism are of course important. i wonder what you think about the evolution of the argument on the left though now where this new phrase is coined systemic

racism, this concept of your a racist but you just don't know w what. >> first of our think you have to acknowledge that african-americans more than any other group experience slights, and they are very famous african-americans tell me, and tim scott, the senator from south carolina, introducing the bill on police reform said, i think he was stopped six times last year. and he is a u.s. senator. i think in that sense where to start by acknowledging that it is more challenging to be black and that there are inherent difficulties to overcome. the question then becomes, a simple test which i will be writing about, and that is is it more important for blacks to succeed or for whites to feel guilty? now, for some bizarre reason the left has decided that white guilt, announcing that you are guilty, feeling bad about the

guilty, taking a a need to proe your guilty, somehow achieves things. and i said in an interview i did yesterday, i would be a lot more sympathetic to all of the multimillionaire nfl players who want to take a knee if each wynette and founded a charter school and actually helped children succeed. but i'm totally unimpressed by people in america who were made in the millionaires who now want to oppose on the rest of us their particular viewpoints. i think we need a conversation, and the nice thing about the left is they can't contain themselves and because they own the news media they have no feedback mechanism to save you are nuts. so, for example, the california assembly just past by 56-five creating a commission reparations which is the number one goal of the black caucus in

the california legislature. well, reparations is both morally and mechanically hopeless. it's a fight that the left will lose badly, but they just have to do. they can't stop themselves. pelosi's $3 trillion bill includes paying health hundred dollars per person for every illegal immigrant in the united states as part of the stimulus. now, that's overreach on a skill which i suspect 75-80% of the country would disagree at pages gotha item after i'd like this. if they had some ability to be self disciplined, they would probably be dramatically more dangerous than they are. >> i got i galley copy of the book, mr. speaker, and i think your title was initially trump and the american future, building a better america in the

future. as the book hits the shelves i think you change the tower cam updated it to solving the great problems of our time. tell me why the shift. >> i felt as i i looked at alle things that were merging that we needed to shift towards a world, open problem-solving. i think in the world before the pandemic and before the depression it was easier to imagine trump really continuing to solve things at a rate that was amazing. now we are in a situation so complicated with so many unknown parts that i think we are all going to have to pitch in to solve it. i don't think trump by himself can be the solution. i think you can leave the solution but it's going to take millions of americans to get us out of the ditch that we are in. >> i know you've commented on

this before because you are a historian, but now we seem to see an acceleration of this phenomenon, and that is that the left believes we can improve the future by destroying the past, this rush to pull down not just the civil war monuments and monuments of american presidents, of the revolution. i comment on that and what's happening in america today on that front. >> again, part of this is where maybe come part of the reason i wrote the recent article on the three generations of brainwashing is it hit me that we have lots of people are so badly educated, better understand how much they are simply out, they're doing a street dance we have done before. without the french revolution. we've had the russian

revolution, 1917. we've had maoism. we know how these things work. if they could read, they could read not just 1984 but they could read and understand what orwell who had been -- was actually in the brigade in the spanish civil war when stalin decided to wipe it out. so he'd seen up close, then hit of course mussolini and hitler. it's very significant that he puts 1984 in britain. it's not describing moscow. he said no, the tendency of the society will be to create a totally false story to then have a memory hole and which will put everything that doesn't fit the story and we will reserve the

right for the state to change the story whenever it wants to. that's what these people are doing. where does it start, where does it stop? for example, should the suffragists, probably almost all of them believe in traditional marriage. therefore, have their statues pulled out because they were not adequately sensitive to what 100 years later would emerge as the gay-rights movement. the idea that washington who more than any other single person created a framework within which people could say that the rights came from god, or that jefferson actually wrote the words, that these people are anything less than historically astonishing figures who advanced the cause of human freedom. it's an absurdity. but what you dealing with is a mob and the mob has no mind, has emotion and it doesn't understand it is beginning to set up patterns that are totally

unacceptable. and i think very, very dangerous point and by the way in seattle, washington, in the middle of all of this new purity there is a seven-foot tall statue of lenin which was put their years and years ago. some guy bought it when it was being thrown away in the fall and soviet union. i don't object to lenin being there because i think it's a great opportunity to teach people what a monster he was and how many people's lives were destroyed by him. but as a conservative, , if they get tonight that jefferson, and not knock down limit, this is crazy. but it's both an act of cultural warfare and it's an act of proving that they have the energy and the drive and the courage to rebel. you have to see it as both things coming together and i think it's a very, very dangerous pattern here but again goes back to this idea that three generations we told people

things that allies. reagan once said it isn't what they don't know if that is so troubling, , it's what they know that isn't true. and i think that's what we're seeing today. >> i'd like to touch for just a second on russia meddling in the election and the rest of that. i think that president trump would make a point that he won fair and square, you know, whether russia set up a few facebook sites and that sort of thing, it's fairly irrelevant. but i wonder if you think that at the present time with america in this cultural civil war if, without knowing it but at present, the russians of the world are intentionally stoking the fires and trying to set

americans against themselves. >> i think they are if they can. look, there's a very long historic tradition of countries meddling in other countries. we have been the dominant country know for a long enough period that there are people who actually resent us and would like to knock us off. i feel the chinese more than i fear the russians -- i fear -- both of them i suspect are involved. i went back and read clark clifford said 44 page memo to harry truman he wrote in 1947, an amazing document. he routinely talks about communists. this was before the so-called red scare. this union is time is about mayor is communist. that's where it was. he wasn't doing anything about

it necessarily but it's easy for us to forget that in the '30s there was enough nazi penetration that the house originally was set up to go after the nazis, not the communists after world war ii was enough communist penetration that they're going after the communist and then we were told you were not allowed to do that, so we had to lie about whether not there were any communists. one of the reasons reagan got into politics was his awareness that there were communists in the screen actors guild. i looked at all of that and i think that they can try to interfere. they might be able to -- wonder that they ship arena as with centralized elections is that it makes fast easy. right now elections are run down at the county level and its chaotic and it has huge disadvantages but it's really hard to rig because it's just

too decentralized. on the other hand, messages on twitter or facebook or what have you, or ads, they have russian tv station whose total penetration is not very much, they have, i don't think there is a comparable chinese station or chinese newspapers. i just think it's the nature of the modern world and this of course is a huge fight as early as washington's penetration when the french sent some people over to try to get us to be anti-british and and of little because people just didn't want foreigners interfering with the american system. we've had a long history of that. i think it's good the administration is set up, change to work on this. i think we have in bill barr and amazingly competent attorney

general, a very serious and dedicated patriot. i suspect will be okay on that front. i will worry much more about democrats stealing the election as they do in california with vote harvesting energy about the chinese are the russians. >> is a fair to say that pre-pandemic, you likely felt this race in 2020 was president trump's to lose, that now maybe not so much? has he will he got a real fight on his hands? >> i think when you first set out to write the book i thought trump has a very substantial advantage, and i would've said at the time that my expectation was he would win and win by a big margin. i think now it's up in the air. but it think it depends in part on what happens. if the economy starts to come back enough, that people feel like we see hope, then i think

the president has a huge opportunity to win. if the economy stumbles and it feels like whatever trump's magic was that he ain't got any more, and it think there's a problem. the challenge for democrats is i did newsletter the other day on biden, she would come pelosi's and is that this not election between president trump and president biden, election between president trump in the machine in which biden is the weakest of the three. a number of french wrote me and called me and said just really scared still didn't come start think about biden, losey and schumer like in the room with no supervision. it would be wild. i think for the moment is truly ironic. biden is the candidate who is so weak that the longer he can hide

the better off he is. and so i think the morning he starts campaigning, if he ever does, it will be so painful to watch his inability that a think he could melt pretty quickly. >> you made a point in the book that president trump made a bet, and that is that his use of social media could beat the news media. he's been at it now in that war, using those tactics for several years. do you think that technology such today that with his grasp on social media still gives him an advantage over a unified media on the left, or are we seeing as a result of all this

cultural war and balancing of that power? >> i think without social media, trump would've been driven off the field. this is a guy, we know that as early as i think the summer of 16, people were writing columns that say we might have to impeach him. on the day he was sworn in, the "washington post" had an article about whether or not trump would be impeached. so he has had 92 or 93% hostility every single day for winning the election to today. if you have not had a huge social media base, he would've been broken. as it is he actually has a slight advantage. he has gotten them, he's got a

lot more people thinking about fake news than i would've thought likely to or three years ago. we had the expense of going -- the second-largest egyptian collection outside of egypt. for strange reasons, but anyway, so we got a guide to take us through this museum. we are going through what of the halls and he points to a statue and he says, people will tell you ask, that is fake news. i've said when i have an italian guy in an egyptian museum using donald trump's language. that's cultural impact. i would say that, i mean i wish he was a little more disciplined and i wish he probably did, deleted at least 10% of his tweets before he sent them. but having said that, his ability to keep pounding away i think has saved his presidency, and it would have been crushed

in a pre-information environment because the media hates him at a level i've never seen any candidate face with a level of hostility at trump has to with every day. >> it's an interesting point that you make about trump's, his style of pounding away just relentlessly always, always counterpunching, whether counterpunching up or down. that's how he plays it. do you think that the left has learned something from that? i get the sense that they have become as relentless in the attack as well. >> but i think they were already were, period. that's with the did to jerry for. ford slips or hits his head

getting off air force one ever becomes a relentless series of jokes. i think there are two different stories to trump so that you touched on them and blended together. one is he believes in counterpunching and a think he learned that by coexisting with page six in new york. i think he learned early on that every time they would hit him, he would hit them. as long as he did that he was getting lots of publicity. whenever in the early days he's relatively unknown real estate young guy and he wants to rise. he wants to get known, and manhattan is probably asked tough as a private there is for doing that. so one part is this deeply held belief that you always counterpunching. but the other part is that he's a genius at ranting. you come back to his first book, the art of the deal, which was a

bestseller for years and years and years. you look at how many trump towers, trump hotels, trump golf courses. one time i would use before he was a candidate and he gave me several trump ties and said the reason there were successful was they are two inches longer than most ties and so americans are big people. you may remember he once did this entire shtick where i think late in the campaign for romney said something to trump is not really a business guy so he brings in trump steaks, trump water, 25 minutes bringing products out. he had the number one tv show which was posted on the air for i think 13 years.

relentlessly positively radiant that's of the apprentice and the trump ties and so forth. and he understands counterpunching but there are different patterns. they happen to fit together but their very different patterns. >> instance, let's talk about his instincts for a minute. you have worked with a close, a number of american presidents. trump seems to me to be in a class all his own from the standpoint of governing, actually running come operating the federal bureaucracy environment purely through instinct. i know there are processes and papers are written in briefings and the rest of that, but he seems to govern, learn, educate, decide purely by instinct, and that's often saved him.

he's often done quite well by that as you know. i wonder if it's sustainable? >> well, we'll find out in about five months. i would say that the president he is the most like is andrew jackson, in that jackson was both a populist and a disruptor. jackson had an extraordinarily strong personality. once shot a man off the balcony of the white house. and jackson was i think very hard to manage. because he followed his own inner instincts. so in many ways i see trump as a jacksonian type figure. he -- but the other thing to remember which is really, i mean, i am frankly very deeply impressed with trump as a person.

you know, reagan had eight years as governor of california. clinton had something like 12 years as governor, or tenures as governor of arkansas. george herbert walker bush had been vice president for eight years. george w. bush have been governor for eight years. obama grew up in politics, serve in the state legislature, understood the game. trump is a business guy. i mean, he has opinions but he doesn't have policies. he doesn't, he runs a very small shop that has lots of people out around the world but the actual core trump enterprises is very small. and so he really doesn't have the kind of depth, the background to learn how you run

systems. i think he's getting better and better at it but the first couple of years were pretty chaotic and he didn't understand the legislature and, frankly, his instinct was right and there is was wrong and he is told by republican leaders in congress that they could repeal obamacare and that's the first thing they should do and, of course, they lost by one vote when john mccain voted no. what he should've done it started with the tax bill. in fact, i would've argued that tax bill first, then to infrastructure, then you can consider obamacare. but they tag him down the fantasies line where, i think you learn from that of his instincts were better than theirs. and that's the other thing to remember. it's why people like john bolton go nuts and other people who are never trumpers, trump is a genuinely disruptive figure who came in from the outside,

determined to change things. while everybody was a big investment in the world order is going to be terrified and offended and say how can you do this? well, that's what he was elected to do. that's why he won. i think so many ways he is living out what his his commitment they got him elected, the more traditional members of the establishment are deeply offended both by its language and by the risk-taking. but, in fact, he is pretty shrewd and he is pretty clever. >> i often get asked the question, compare ronald reagan with donald trump. i often kind of like a back to thinking of the times that reagan was in the white house. i visualize reagan as a fox, reagan as a prizefighter when

boxing was popular in america. trump, on the other hand, seems to me that he is mma. this is gloves off. this is really, really tough stuff what do you think of that court to you by that comparison? >> i wouldn't have thought of it quite that way. i think that reagan had a remarkable sense of playing a a role. i think it was the role of a lifetime and i think that he had an instinctive belief really grown out of sort of as an eisenhower type tradition of what the president should be like. for example, he would never take his coat off in the oval office. a good friend might have been with him just before he was sworn in, had a very bold idea. which would would've shaken thm

up radically. after the dinner, paul was a man, after dinner break and turned demented paul, it's really a very interesting idea, but i wear the white hat. you know, just to have a guy who wears a black hat do something like that. i think reagan had come in a way to get a real sense of limitation any new how to build his strengths while minimizing his limitations. he also had acquired i think disciplined presidents, remind you of fdr, had a huge level of discipline in that reagan was almost always pleasant. but people have made a real mistake if they thought that there was soft is under the pleasantness because he was actually very tough and very willing to do what he believed

in. the other thing i would say is that reagan really begin moving to the right after his drinks with the stalinists in the screen actors guild in 47, and been all through the 50s both as an anti-communist and increasingly because of nancy's father on taxes and other issues, and the guy who hired him at general electric. because reagan wouldn't apply. he did 375 speeches for general electric and you'd always go by treatment is covered always get conservative economic books to read on the train because reagan didn't drink much and didn't play cards. so reagan evolved into being very, very vocal. trump is not just a real estate guy. he's not a finance guy. he is a construction guy. so trump is very capital hanging out, there's a -- a great series

the must have made in the nights of trouble one of his hotels doing every job. so 1. he's dressed up as the guy who greets you at the door and he walks a dog for the lady and he comes back and she says oh, that's really great. my dog a sloppy. he looks at her and says do i get a tip? but he's cleaning rooms with the maid. he's checking people in. and he was having the time of his life. but there was a non-intellectual relaxed happiness about trump who, he's a very extensional way reagan was not. reagan was very long-term and had a very good sense of history. trump really is in the moment. now, he's really, really smart and he's getting better pretty fast. and it's not that he's

simplistic. but that he tries to find core principles and then operates off of those principles over and over and over again. sometimes you can't figure out, i always figured at every president come it's my job to understand them. some austin to figure out if you do something, i don't start with one, that was done. i start with what is the thought they were doing? with a reagan you had a lot of very long-term i'm going to move the system, defeat the soviet empire. with trump you get a lot more sort of daily opportunists. >> whether trump is in office for four more months or four more years, as you say, you are a real student of the presidency and i wonder if there's one or two things that you feel that trump has perhaps forever changed about the presidency,

given his style and now he has carried himself? >> i actually doubt it. the reason i doubt it is, again, the back to andrew jackson. there are certain people who just filled the room. the next person ain't going to fill the room the same way. almost certainly whoever succeeds trump, whether it is next january 4 years later will be more managerial, will be more organized, will have better staff workers. all of which are things which simply cripple trump. it's not what he needs, it's not what he wants. my first instinct is to say i don't think that he will have semiliquid change the presidency. i think he will significant change the country. if yes four more years i think

it will be bigger. and in some ways he's tried, for example, the national security council now has been shrunk back to pre-obama pre-obama size, as probably good, but in a lot of ways the machinery just runs. it's going to run out of trouble or it's going to run under somebody else. >> the last question, and you cover this extensively in your new book. has nothing to do with trump, just as everything to do with china. this is overstating it but do you see us literally at war someday with china because of the direction everything is going? and i don't necessarily mean some terrible thermonuclear war, but it just seems to me, conflict seems almost

inevitable. >> we just saw the chinese kill 20 indian soldiers for no particularly good reason. i assume they're sending a signal to new delhi about something. we just saw north koreans blowup -- south korea which i think was pretty alarming. the challenge we have, the support of why last year i i we trump versus china, because i found my own, i i felt i had me some significant mistakes in analyzing china, and i begin to understand the mistakes, my whole interpretation changed. i've been looking at china since 1960. it's one of the reasons i worry about things like the "new york times" rebellion. the chinese communist party is a leninist, stalinist party, consciously so.

deng xiaoping in think years at lincoln university in moscow, with khrushchev secret speech attacks stolid and 56, the the chinese were horrified because stalin was their great leader. they believe in him and couldn't understand why khrushchev would do heresy. xi jinping is the general secretary of the chinese communist party. that's the base of this power. he is the chairman of the military commission of the people's liberation army which is the military wing of the party, not the government. it's not a government army. and he is president of china. which is his least important job. when you understand that, you understand that in their mind they have left a century of humiliation and once again are becoming the central kingdom, or the middle kingdom.

it's very formidable. you have 1 billion people who work hard and are smart. they don't follow any rules that we understand. so if they can cheat and steal they will. it's caveat emptor, and gigantic bold type. let the buyer the wear. because if we can still from you we will and it's your fault or not having stopped us and stealing so shame on you. i think that's what we're up against. i can imagine both a flashpoint particularly over taiwan or the south china sea where you would have real exchange of combat. i would worry about it escalating of both sides, because whichever side is losing would be tempted to go up the escalation ladder just because they would be so shocked to lose. it think it's the most difficult challenge for us to try to think

about how to get to a world 40 or 50 years from now where we have contained china with minimum conflict but if not been allowed to dominate? and i think that's one of the most important questions with to ask over the next few years. >> perhaps the question of our time. mr. speaker, it's been a delight to have you with us. thank you so much. thank you for writing yet another -- >> i want to thank you, john, for your leadership and of what you think your team for their collective leadership. the reagan library is a national treasure, it's an extraordinary institution. every american should visit it, if that kids and grandkids they should make they should get there. i am so grateful that you have dedicated to convening the

spirit of ronald reagan, and i think in the sense you have created a a real building blocf our future that gives us hope that we will continue to be a unique country. >> anti-semites, mr. speaker. thank you again for being with us. our best to callista and stay safe there. >> thank you. >> booktv on c-span2 has top nonfiction books and authors every weekend. coming up this weekend --

watch booktv on c-span2 today. >> during a virtual event hosted by the commonwealth club of california, former defense secretary robert gates took a critical look at the use of u.s. power around the world since the end of world war ii. here's a portion. >> how the united states had gone from the position of supreme power, probably unrivaled since the roman empire come in every dimension of power in 1993 to a country today by set by challenges everywhere. and i thought about how did that happen? how did we get here? so i began looking at all of the major foreign policy challenges we have had since 1993 and thinking about what we've done and what we had not done that

contributed to the decline in our role in the world and of power in the world. and what i came up with was a set of nonmilitary instruments of power that had played such an important role in our excess in the cold war against the soviet union, and has largely been neglected and withered after the end of the cold war. at a time when we continued to fund our military, we basically dismantled all of the nonmilitary instruments of power, from diplomacy to economic leverage, to strategic communications and more. we can go into that later. and as i looked at the situations, at these challenges from somalia and haiti in 1993,

and others, right up to our relationship with russia and china today, and north korea, it occurred to me that, that we had failed in many respects to figure out how to compete with these powers outside of the military realm. and so, and the reality is, of the 15 challenges that i write about, for all practical purposes i considered 13 to be failures and that's why in the title the word failure comes first. the are a couple of successes and they are important, interesting lessons to be learned from those as well, but we had a lot of problems during that 27 year period and i would just conclude by saying, you know, the wars in iraq and afghanistan both a began with

very quick military victories. and the problem that i identified come whether it was iraq and afghanistan or somalia or haiti or others, was that once we had achieved military victory, we then changed our mission. we then decided to move to trying to bring democracy and reform the governments of those countries, and that's when we ran into failure. >> to watch the rest of this program visit our website booktv.org and do a search for robert gates or the title of his book, exercise of power. >> hi, everyone. i'm heather moran and i'm the ceo of sixth and i. sixth and i of the nonprofit center for arts, entertainment and ideas and the synagogue that reimagines have religion and community can enhance peoples everyday lives. embed in the dna of our organization is a