Hi, welcome to Conversations. I'm Bill Crystal. I joined, very pleased to be joined today by Aaron Friedberg, professor of politics, International Relations at Princeton, author of Getting China Wrong, great China expert, but more broadly, a strategic policy expert, a particular practitioner, two years in the White House at the beginning of the Iraq War. Maybe we'll come back to that a minute. And I just want to say, it was it a very nice

ceremony, whether it's a series of substantive panels honoring your four decades? Is that right?

Teaching in Princeton? I'm going to be one year shy of that when I retire at the end of this semester.

Okay, so almost four decades. Yeah, that's really something though. Very impressive. And you had no Princeton connection before that, right? You're...

I'm sorry, yeah, I've been here the whole time. But I mean, you had no, you hadn't gone to Princeton. I mean, this is sort of like, yeah, yeah, yeah. I was rejected, actually. Oh, really? Did they know that when they hired you? That was like, yeah.

I didn't tell anyone. Did you lot, do you lord it over them a lot of students? Every so often, Kennedy made some remark, and my version of it is I got the best of all possible world's a Harvard education and a job at Princeton. Oh, that's good. That's good. Anyway, well, It was a really terrific event, a very nice tributes to you, obviously,

but so many students you've had over the years and colleagues. instant. Oh, that's good. That's good. Anyway, well, it was a really terrific event, a very nice

tributes to you, obviously, but so many students you've had over the years and colleagues, but really a high-quality set of discussions, I've got to say, so I really enjoyed that. So thank you for including me in that, and thank you for joining me today. Thank you. It's a pleasure to see you again. So let's talk about where we are in this war that we're now, what is it, March

night, March 18th, to get it straight Wednesday, we're two and a half weeks in.

What, how did it happen? What its implications are? Where might go? What its implications are, especially I really want to focus on that for Asia, your area of specialty, but also for the broader

geostrategic, geopolitical context. I was thinking you came to Washington in 2003 shortly after the

beginning of the Iraq War, right? For two years to work in the White House. Yes. And so you saw a war

being managed from the White House. You saw it pretty close up even

just before it began, certainly in its beginning stages, and then as various adjustments were being

made. So you're familiar with how that process works and how chaotic it can be. What strikes you

from the outside looking at the launching of this war?

Well, in that case, and I have been thinking about it a lot, although I arrived on the scene after things were, had been set in motion.

And in fact, as where things were about to unravel in the summer of 2003, but, you know, in that case, whatever one may think of the outcome,

the Bush administration went to great lengths to try to justify what it was going to do,

to try to rally congressional support, to try to persuade allies. I mean, it succeeded to varying

degrees in those things. but it took it seriously

and did get a vote from Congress supporting what it was about to do. There were critiques after the

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