Transcript
BRUCE JONES: Our view, watching events in the world, looking at the nature of events that we are confronting was that the incoming president, President Obama, would have to devote a greater amount of attention to the question of America’s role in the world and the nature of the challenges we are confronting in the world and the nature of the American policy towards and within international order and international institutions. We created this project to ask those questions and went about it in a way that we think US policy has to go about doing its work. i.e., rather than thinking and consulting in the United States and then going on the road to sell those conclusions, we created a much more consultative international mechanism to inform our thinking and inform our conclusions from the outside.
This involved two major parts; one was an international advisory group that we established to do the project, as well as a US advisory group. The US advisory group was a bipartisan group with people like Madeleine Albright, Sandy Berger and others. Internationally we wanted senior scholars and officials from different parts of the world to help us think through the nature of the issues and the nature of the challenges. We had people from Africa, people from Europe, people from Asia, Wu Jianmin who was at the time President of China’s Foreign Affairs University, was our international advisor from China and very actively involved the project. We held consultations globally as well in Mexico City, in Doha, Beijing, Delhi, London, Paris- in many capitals trying to get the international input into our sense of the US foreign policy thinking.
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