 Hello everyone, just that this is the last, the 2023 Peace and World Summit round the table session. So I'm going to introduce the chair of this round the table, the retired U.S. Marine Corps Colonel William McClelland. Norwich class of 1991, McClelland currently serves as the 56th commandant of Cadet and Vice President of Student Affairs at Norwich University. He was commissioned into the Marine Corps in 1991 after graduating from Norwich. As a Marine, McClelland developed into a distinguished leader. He commanded the 1st Battalion, 5th Marines and the 1st Marine Regiment and the Crisis Response Marine Air Ground Task Force for the U.S. Central Command, as well as serving as an advisor team leader in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He served overseas in multiple operations, including desert, thunder, Iraqi freedom, enduring freedom and inherent resolve. In his final tours, he served as a Director of the Marine Corps Command and Staff College, followed by serving as a Marine Corps Liaison to the U.S. House of Representative Teff. So now I turn it over to Kamadan William McClelland. Thank you. Thank you, Yang Mo. Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to our final round table in our fourth annual Peace and War Summit, where we're going to discuss looking forward Western strategy towards the Middle East. And I'll point out it's Western strategy, not U.S. strategy. I'd like to begin introducing... I hope we have our fourth panelist joining us, and Yang Mo, when he does come, if we could just have him come right down and join the panel. But I'll start with Dan Cheriak, who is the Director and Principal of Cheriak Consulting Incorporated in Ottawa. He's a senior fellow with the Center for International Governance and Innovation in Waterloo, the fellow-in-residence with the C.D. Howe Institute in Toronto, a distinguished fellow with the Asia-Pacific Foundation of Canada in Vancouver, and an associate with BKP Economic Advisors in Munich. So covers the entire continent and across the pond. He's had a 31-year career with Canada's civil service. He retired as the Deputy Chief Economist at the Department of Foreign Affairs and International Trade, and he's written extensively on international trade and finance, innovation and industrial policy, economic development with a particular focus on the digital transformation and the economic and technological roots of great power conflict. So he brings a great deal. Dr. Allie Disboni is a welcome Associate Professor and Chair of Military and Strategic Studies Program at the Royal Military College of Canada. He's an associate fellow at Queen's University. His current research includes the formation of the Wahhabi State in Saudi Arabia, the genesis of ballistic missiles in the Middle East, and right-wing radicalization in selected NATO-armed forces. He's published numerous collaborations, one of which was the future trends of Canadian military operations in the Middle East and the terrorist resourcing model as applied to Canada. And his latest collaboration is developing strategic lieutenants in the Canadian Army. He's a media commentator on Middle East and Iranian politics, and he received his PhD from the University of Montreal and speaks four languages, English, French, Persian and Arabic. Dr. Jeremy Pressman, right next to me here, studies international relations, protests, the Arab-Israeli conflict, US foreign policy in the Middle East. He co-founded and co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium, an event-counting project that's tallied and made publicly available data on all manner of protests in the United States since 2017. He received his PhD in political science from MIT and previously worked at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace. He's held fellowships at Harvard, at Brandeis, at the University of Sydney, and the Yukon Humanities Institute as well as the Norwegian Nobel Institute where he was a Fulbright Fellow. His most recent book is The Sword is Not Enough, Arabs, Israelis and the Limits of Military Force, and he's written several other books that will come to play during our discussion. And at the end we have our own Dr. Nick Roberts, an historian of the modern Middle East and Islamic world. As many of you know, he's an assistant professor of history here at Norwich, and for this academic year, he's the inaugural W. Nathaniel Howell post-doctoral fellow in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He earned his doctorate from Notre Dame, and he earned his masters of arts and history from Georgetown. In his current book project, A Sea of Wealth, Said Said bin Sultan, his Imani Empire, and the making of an oceanic marketplace, draws on research from more than a dozen archives across four continents. So those are our panelists. Now before we get into the questions I have for them, I wanted to give a short preamble. When I was a student here in the late 1980s, the Cold War with the Soviet Union and the rise of Japan as a challenge to our economic power were two overarching themes that we grappled with as students. It permeated the national security framework, and all students thought about it, not just those that were getting commissioned. The situation on the Korean Peninsula was not far out of our students' minds. Many of us concerned and studying how we might apply our trade to that conflict should it come out. European command and Pacific command were the dominant voices in the Department of Defense. And despite a brief jump in importance during the First Gulf War, Middle Eastern concerns played often a distant third to Europe and Asia in terms of strategy formation in the United States and the West in general. After the attacks of 2001, the Middle East and the global war on terror became the dominant considerations in national security and foreign policy decision-making for the next two-plus decades. My first year back here at Norwich, past becomes prologue, and I find our focus, again, focused back not on the Soviet Union, but on Russia. And I find the other half of our mind focused towards Asia, not this time with Japan as an ascending global power, but now it's China replacing Japan as our economic adversary, but now combined as a military adversary as well. Korea, again, runs third. The regions of the world covered by UCOM and now Indo-Pakom again dominate our discussions about national security exactly the way they did 35 years ago when I was a student here. And yet there remain substantial problems in the Middle East. We've touched on Iran and their nuclear ambitions, Israel-Palestine, the remnants of ISIS and its offshoots throughout the region, Russian and Chinese activities in the region, and, of course, we still have the flow of oil that afflicts global markets. With all of those observations in mind, I'd like to pose the first question to the panel. Can you describe our historical pre-Gulf War strategic approach to the Middle East and give us some idea of some approaches that the West got right during that era and what we got wrong during that era? And I know Dr. Roberts, you had some ideas immediately that we were discussing before the panel. If you could kick us off. I'd like to keep this to about five minutes. Right. So, very quickly, one of the things that I think the United States got right in the Middle East actually I would say has nothing at all to do with the Middle East or anywhere else in the world. And that is that the United States did a much better job decades ago of keeping its own house in order. That the past, let's say, 20 years, you know, since 9-11, I'll just say some examples from my own personal life. Since I graduated college, the cost of living, average cost of living in the United States has increased 60%. My generation has 3% of wealth in the United States. It's the lowest percentage any generation has ever had in U.S. history. And so here I'm drawing on, for students in the room, Dr. Richard Haas, the outgoing president of the Council on Foreign Relations, has a great book where he says, Nation Building Begins at Home. And so I would submit that one of the things that the U.S. did right in the world, not just the Middle East, is take care of itself. The second thing I would say it did right was it practiced restraint. So, for example, the 1954 invasion of Egypt for control of the Suez Canal by Israel, France and Great Britain, President Eisenhower said, not on my watch, he stopped it immediately. And in fact, the power of that was not just stopping a conflict, but that actually made the United States look incredibly powerful on the world stage. So restraint itself can be a tremendously powerful show of force. So those are two thoughts I would provide for the first question. I'll have a go as well. The United States is a big player in the world and it doesn't always pay attention to the impact that its own decisions for its own purposes have on the rest of the world. You know the phrase that oil is black gold. In the 50s and 60s, it literally was because the price of oil in terms of gold flatlined. You knew exactly what the value of oil was in terms of gold. When President Nixon took the dollar off gold, the price of oil in terms of gold gyrated enormously. It was enormous amount of uncertainty injected into the world economy and no economy was more subject to the uncertainty and to the implications of wild gyrations and the value of its principal commodity than the Middle East. And the rest is history. I would say in terms of what you just got right before Gulf War in 1991, if I got the question right. I think a couple of points. Containment, George Cannon doctrine against Soviet Union, I think generally it was positive. Realism, most of the time, depending, gives good insights into how contain adversaries and foes. Mutual containment, Iran-Iraq war from U.S. perspective, that was kind of weakening. The two strongest adversaries of the state of Israel but also states were not in line with U.S. interests in the region. So that was losing Iranian monarchy as an ally was on the downside of the picture of things before during Cold War. I'm going to stop there. Just two quick points. One is, since we're talking Western strategy, maybe to connect to Dr. Roberts point and bring in Britain, which was a country that had a long run as a global empire, but eventually, as it happens, its material capabilities could no longer keep up with its responsibilities. And so we see first, as Dr. Roberts mentioned, the Suez War and the British's humiliation there, excuse me, in the 1960s, the end of the significant British role in the Persian Gulf. So a reminder of material capabilities and what your economic and political base at home is like is ultimately going to affect your ability to project power and to be involved abroad. Well, thank you. Thank you all. Now, to take it to the next step, we all saw Western strategy change remarkably after the attacks of 2001 and evolved during the global war on terror. What overarching lessons do you think we should have learned that must remain in the minds of Western strategists today as they analyze our approach towards the Middle East, keeping in mind the ascendancy of Russia and China back to the place that they used to occupy? Dan, please. I have one snippet to add here. Insofar as American interventions in the Middle East were qualified as an investment in America's security, we fight them over there so we don't fight them over here, then the principle of investment applies and you have to take into account the uncertainty. As the uncertainty effect rises, the hurdle rate for that investment soars. And I don't think that the hurdle rate for the investments in what looked at this way in terms of going into Iraq or elsewhere were taken into account. And so you have to be extraordinarily certain of the outcome of the event and war, of course, is the most uncertain event possible, which guides you to restraint. I'm going to say a couple of words. I'm not super optimistic about Washington, D.C. leadership. However, I'm very optimistic about the American forces generation rising from Afghanistan and post Iraq, publishing books, being part of the national debate and how to make policies, how to think of the world. And most important in my view, because it impacts the world, how United States defines its own national interest. So I am confident in the potential of that generation of military and military policy leadership to contribute to that. I'll add something, which is yesterday I made a misstatement, which is so I see four students that we reached to another professor and I took to D.C. And I said, we went to all of these government agencies and institutions and they all said, no one here in D.C. has time to read a lot, right? I said, we need it on one page. I was wrong. There was one place we went in D.C. where they said the opposite of that. And that was in the Pentagon. We were meeting with the Army G2, Head of Army Intelligence. She said to the students, you guys need to read books. And she said, not just read books, you need to read books with footnotes. And the historian in me was just leaping with joy. She said, you need to read the footnotes more carefully than the book. And so one of the things I think that we've learned from this 20 years of the global war on terror is just how deeply we have to study and think and red team ourselves to think about all the different possibilities, things that could go wrong, things that could go right. Beginning with the labels we use, like the idea of a war on terror. Terrorism, there's a great book out there by a guy named Randall Law, History of Terrorism. He says, terrorism is as old as humankind and as new as this morning's news. You're never going to get rid of terrorism. And so, you know, some deep, careful study, deep, careful thought, you know, about how we were to respond to 9-11 I think would have done the country a lot of good. I think just to build on that point, there's a risk when you define something in terms of an amorphous concept instead of many other conflicts which are defined in terms of a specific enemy. And so, I would second that and also the way it's kind of had an open-ended function in time. And if you think about September 11th, 2001, 21 and a half years ago, and if I'm doing my math right, and here we are with Congress debating whether to finally close the authorization for the use of force. So, I would build on that point first. The second thing I would say is about nationalism. I think sometimes we forget how powerful nationalism is, how powerful people's devotion to their own society is. And it's kind of ironic to me that we forget that because we each feel quite passionate about our own society, and particularly at a school that trains many military leaders, people who've made a decision to help defend and advance the national interests of their country. We often, and I don't just say this here, we often forget the extent to which people in every country feel that way about their territory, about their culture, about their society, about their agency. And so I think sadly the last 20 years have been a reminder of that, that we need to be quite cognizant of. Well, now then with that as a preamble to the heart of the panel, acknowledging the emphasis of national security making on Europe and Asia Pacific region at this time and taking into account the lessons you believe we should have learned from our deep past and our recent past, I'm gonna call you out and ask what should Western Middle Eastern strategy look like in the future? And if you could run it through the lenses of your various backgrounds where we touch on not just military posture but what economic policies, what sort of partnerships should we be developing, what should be our diplomatic priorities and what sort of desired outcomes would we like to see in the information realm that will maybe mark our future in the Middle East as a little bit more successful than what we have exhibited in the past. And we've got 20 minutes to chew over this topic so I'd love to see where it goes. Should we just go down the line? Yeah, I'll start with you Nick. I'll start with a few things. So one is, okay let's bring some history into the conversation which is that I think that one thing we're seeing is that the Middle East is now as it always has been enmeshed in global, whatever global is. So China, Russia, Africa, this is all a very interconnected part of the world and neither the United States nor any other country is ever going to be able to compartmentalize it away from the rest of the world. That being said, I would say that one of the things that I think the United States should do is instead of very often our reflexes let's identify our weaknesses and think about we can improve but the United States has some tremendous strengths that no other country can imitate and that is kind of going off my last question is this idea of culture, of soft power. I remember a decade ago, long time ago, I was in Tunisia living in North Africa, I was driving along the border with Libya and it was quiet, just olive trees and stuff like that and all of a sudden I thought I was going crazy because I thought I heard American pop music and I checked the radio, I know the car radio wasn't on, I'm in the middle of nowhere along the Libyan border and I said, I get closer to this building I said, that's Beyoncé. The fact that I was hearing Beyoncé playing in the middle of the desert of the border with Libya, that's American power and I would say that's not a bad thing. I mean, come on, Beyoncé is amazing but this brings up broader points. I often say to my students, hey, did any of you ever think, I'm going to go get my undergraduate degree in Shanghai. Everyone wants to come to the United States for an education and for culture and so I think that kind of leaning into those strengths and not necessarily looking at everything in the world through a military lens or just through an assumption of this is a problem that needs to be controlled by the military because first of all, that's bad for the military to begin with but those are some thoughts maybe to just get us started but also speaking even broader what we're seeing in the Middle East and the rest of the world is really a, I wouldn't say it's a decline of U.S. power because we don't even need to speak of the United States as a constant reference for everything but what we are seeing is kind of a return to a more natural, you could say, organic homeostasis on the world stage so it is incorrect to talk about the rise of China or the rise of India or the rise of Iran we're seeing the re-rise of Iran and China and India these countries, these societies have always been tremendously powerful and flourishing and I think what we're living through is an acknowledgement in the United States and certain parts of Europe that the world is kind of returning to this more organic homeostasis so if I can follow up what the Middle East needs most is stability and development and a reduction of uncertainty uncertainty is a killer for economic development and the United States policy has not been oriented towards stability in the Middle East it has been a wrecking ball by going in militarily into Afghanistan into Iraq and the sanctions which are imposed on Iran also represent a form of economic warfare so the question is how do you then build down that instability and reduce uncertainty and here you are talking language which is very similar to China's China's values are stability and the iron rice bowl it is providing economic certainty moderate prosperity if you will to their population so there is a point where if we go into continue with our Middle East policy is now a contest for hegemony between China and the United States that exacerbates the uncertainty about what that outcome will be you heard from Ambassador Alutani that they don't want to choose because that forcing that choice creates an uncertainty as to which way they will go and what that will imply for their societies and their economies so I think we need to find a language on which we can agree with China and which emphasizes that which is most important for the Middle East so that's where I would put the emphasis on in relation to the military posture the withdrawal from Afghanistan was also destabilizing it was done rapidly and as we heard yesterday from one of the students it was now well-prepared in terms of handing the human side of things I would not recommend that the United States even if it wants to withdraw and build down its forces in order to refocus its focus on the Far East that it should do so on an extraordinarily stable, predictable well-signaled manner and just emphasize the stability for the region and certainty for its populations I'll leave it at that A few points here I'm not sure to what extent they have internal consistency but I do my best to be in coherence with other input here A student presentation yesterday about some international issues for optimism again they presented about North Korean stuff Iranian proliferation and they brought a neocritical perspective I liked it very much so that's being said I'm a bit worried about an American side the polarization in the society and politics how they can America first and America as a however you want a branded peacemaker deal breaker, leader of the free world this tension in the U.S. foreign policy needs somehow to find a middle ground or compromise otherwise one president you correct me if I'm wrong gets into some international commitment and the other sees that maybe U.S. wants to rethink that or revise that so that's a second point Russian and resources you heard about Paul Kennedy theory of the fall rise and fall of empires that applies to China actually people are saying that China is getting involved in Middle East is a good thing because they are getting back to reality now they cannot be on the margin they are in the game so coming back to Washington this overextension of course is a consideration that U.S. Nick talked about the number of the military bases in the world it's a lot and the military commitment so that's something to think about American dream there is some still there but there is debate how that dream can go forward I think Americans despite polarization there is a consensus I may be wrong there is a consensus across the nation that nation building and state building we should go beyond it using military forces and mission to export liberal democracy good intention but doesn't give the expected result so I don't see the future generation of security mission would be for nation building they're rather for the stabilization assistance and stuff like that so that would be I'm going to finish on this one before going to Jeremy is the focus on counter-terrorism approach toward Middle East maybe that should go we got to go beyond that counter-terrorism U.S. policy to Middle East like one hammer and all problems look like an A and go beyond the perspective of what Ben said in terms of development other stuff in Middle East that the nation needs but that gets us back to the question of polarization Chinese, Russians and others they are a bit also asking themselves what does really Washington think I'm going to finish on this Jeremy Saudi Arabia we know why Iranian got close to Saudi Arabia previous round table somehow but we don't know why Saudi Arabia kind of got close to Iran we know Iranian reason but the other way around we're not sure does Saudi Arabia think or ask themselves questions about what U.S. intentions or long-term, short-term, middle-term medium-term plan is in the region so again I get back to polarization somehow impacts the views and perceptions of the partners in the NATO and beyond about what U.S. direction is despite the noble intention yeah go ahead so one general thought and then maybe some more specific thoughts I tend to think we're in the midst of a global struggle right now and it's a kind of age-old struggle it's the struggle between popular social movements and popular mobilizations of people trying to take control of their political destiny in the face of repressive governments that want to maintain power and want to weaken and stop those movements and we see that in Iran right now we've seen that recently in a diverse array of countries Belarus, Sudan other many other countries around the world so there's nothing new about that in some sense but we're in a different technological age and I think some of the early thinking about some of the new communication technology social media and otherwise was that that would work to the great advantage of the popular mobilization but I think what we've learned in recent years and why is it for those scholars who are studying the success and failure of social movements are they observing a kind of decrease in the success of social movements when they're trying to overturn their repressive government maybe it's because those governments have started to master those tools and understand how they can actually use those tools against the popular mobilization against the protest movements and so while I think in a moment like that there's going to be a temptation for a powerful government like the United States to want to intercede I don't have a perfect answer on this but I think it's something the United States should be very cautious about whether we're thinking about a country like Belarus very close to a major U.S. adversary and allied with a major U.S. adversary Russia whether we're talking about Iran obviously a decades-long hostile relationship between the two the ability of the temptation of a superpower is to want to jump in, to want to influence events and that's got to be something that's very carefully calculated because oftentimes I think the risk is that we're going to taint the protestors or taint the popular mobilization by trying to make a connection and then just a few specific points sort of less related to that for the United States in terms of thinking about the Middle East I suppose one of the biggest questions is to think about the reliance on authoritarian governments and we've talked about the previous panel talked a lot about authoritarianism and again there's nothing unique to this about the Middle East or even this current particular period as those of us who are older in the room know that the question of what kind of governments the United States should ally with was very central to the Cold War as well all around the world and important U.S. allies that helped the United States win that Cold War some of them were not democratic countries and that was a crucial part of the fight but I think what we also see in the Middle East if not other places is sometimes the cost that the United States pays by allying itself with a segment of society a segment of the elite at the expense of maybe the opinions of a wider swath of the population and you know there's no easy answer to this I don't have the answer but I think about two different kinds of relationships sometimes the United States has been consistent relatively consistent with an authoritarian country like Saudi Arabia and that's difficult when you have differences with Saudi Arabia when Saudi Arabia when the leadership kills a Washington Post columnist and then you're trying to grapple with that but you've taken a position of consistency that's very difficult at the same time we could look at a country like Iraq and the U.S.-Iraqi relationship where we've talked about yesterday about some of the back and forth the United States working relatively closely with Iraq in the early 1980s to very different situations go for 1990 sanctions into the 2003 invasion so it's not an easy question but I think we really need to be cognizant about the costs of setting ourselves against where the majority of the population thinks and maybe Iran is a cautionary tale and I defer to some of my colleagues who know more about Iran but thinking about the U.S. proximity to the Shah and then the total flip to since 1979 and 1980 in terms of U.S.-Iranian relations the second point I wanted to make just on the side here is about the particular and I'll be brief on this is about the particular mix of instruments that the United States uses in its foreign policy to caution ourselves about even with a country like Iran where there's much hostility and much reason for that hostility and much tension to remind ourselves in the U.S. and maybe in other Western countries that the United States government retains the full array of statecraft the full array of instruments across the spectrum and we often say that to remind about the military dimension I actually mean the opposite here to remind ourselves that as much as economic sanctions are one tool economic incentives are another tool that states hold as much as the use of military force or the threat of military force is one technique that states have that the United States or other states also have the possibility of diplomacy and negotiation and so the first I want to say two final things about this a lot of the attention that's been on this Chinese role in mediating the Iranian, Saudi, whatever it is we'll find out maybe it's nothing maybe it's something but so one point is you have to have considered that you could use negotiations and mediation to have played a role in that and to the extent that sometimes the United States maybe doesn't put enough emphasis on the possibility of mediation and diplomacy you're going to miss that opportunity and then the last point I want to say kind of going in a different direction is we see I don't have to tell you that the United States right now is quite a partisan country we talk about polarization, radicalization fragmentation of the United States questions about US democracy I don't think we can understand January 6th without understanding the tenuous nature of American democracy right now so I think that induces a little humility but specifically on this question to use the example of China mediating between Iran and Saudi Arabia I know a lot of people said oh this shows that China is ascendant and this is where was the United States and stuff but I was just as a kind of thought experiment I was trying to imagine one of the media channels that might be more cynical or hostile towards the Biden administration had they learned that the United States was engaged in secret negotiations with Iran right how would that have played in Washington DC if it spilled out that the Biden administration was facilitating secret negotiations with the Iranians I don't know for sure but I think there would have been some partisan tension I'm not trying to point fingers on this issue on the other side what I'm trying to suggest is that part of the history that you steered us towards was a history where there wasn't unanimity in the United States on every step of the way that we've talked about but there was often a much stronger bipartisan consensus certainly about confronting the Soviet Union and that the loss of that of that consensus whether it's on the question of Israel-Palestine whether it's on the question of Iran whatever the question is trying to advance the U.S. national interest several of you talked about stability as being one of the goals and I'm often reminded when I was young my family would take these cross-country trips and it's several children in the back seat mom and dad were up front and we would leave Minnesota and the eruptions from the back seat parents would be involved in what to whom there was a sense of fairness about deciding what happened and by the time we hit the North Dakota border no one was interested in fairness anywhere what they wanted was quiet and it was a different sort of approach to achieving stability one was to get to the root of problems and try to settle it and eventually patients wore out and they just demanded quiet when you all approached stability can you give us any insights as to how people can maintain that first approach for a little bit longer because it tends to involve a lot more attention it tends to involve a lot more real discernment of what is the nature of the disagreement to begin with so there are different types of stability that can be achieved some are short term some are long term but each of you mentioned stability at least one point is there anything you can bring up that could help the strategist of the future achieve a stability that has some roots that allow it to stay more stable for longer because it addressed the right things I'll jump in here with an economic theory it's called the theory of second best you're probably not familiar with this but basically what it says is in an economic framework all parameters are set to optimum okay and then you take one and remove it from the optimal position now you're at a suboptimal outcome the question is does retaining the other ones at optimum is that the best outcome possible and the answer that the theory of second best tells us is that keeping the other parameters at optimum is not necessarily the best outcome then so once you're in a suboptimal world theory stops guiding you as to which direction to go you really have to fly by the seat of your pants in terms of finding out what next step is actually going to be better is it towards the optimum or is it towards something that you would normally not consider so when we're looking at the Middle East we're in just a whole lot of suboptimal positions so the way forward has to be something which is pragmatic and experimental and gradual and see what works and if you can nudge the system towards a more stable quieter outcome then you're moving in the right direction so pragmatic experimentalism on the way forward I think would be a thought as a principle in terms of in terms of enhancing stability and your read out should not be whether American interests are directly served but whether in fact the situation in the Middle East is becoming calmer related to that is it's interesting you bring that up because I've often said I wish I had studied more psychology and I wonder why it is in the minds of policy makers and perhaps all of us in that when we see one thing in the world we automatically think that it's coming at our expense so China negotiates this deal with Iran and Saudi Arabia that all of the questions were wow does this represent the decline of American power is this a bad thing for us and I always wonder why I mean in fact I see I can't see many reasons why it's not a good thing that China negotiated this deal between Iran and Saudi Arabia and I hope it holds true I hope it works because as Dan was saying the stability is a good thing and people country states talking to each other is a good thing one of the things if we're talking about how can the United States in the Indian Ocean region in the Middle East if the question is how can we extend United States influence and so forth one of the things that I would like to see a return to is a greater mindset toward the idea of soft power and especially education you know when other people come to the United States and spend four years to get an undergraduate degree and something that you know it's like an oil spot on a piece of paper I mean it does spread certain values and not even American values but you know greater tendencies toward just being understanding each other and so on and so forth economically in the region I think one of the things that the ambassador was talking about yesterday and this was a distinctly Emirati approach to the world is just a very idea he kept talking about you know let's not have ideology let's not have ideology just a very kind of down to the core of the issue you know approach to the world and I think maybe the world might be going back toward that you know let's not approach the world necessarily through some sort of grand ideology but rather just more basic goals so at this time we've got a chance for folks to line up and ask the panel what the burning questions you have I see we've got several students out there so I hope you got some questions because the Middle East is in your future and you will be grappling with opportunities and challenges throughout your young adult time Drogshan are you ready always thank you so much to all the panelists for being here and for sharing their insights from the previous panel something that I want to add to all the words or terminologies that they want to add about Middle East is one woman very important one I mean goodness we we dragged America behind us because we were being oppressed so let's not forget that obviously it's a metaphor but women were the rhetoric behind why America went to Afghanistan one of the country I come from but at the same time we mentioned family in the Middle East so women are the drive the number one drive to function like in the family and also they are the core and the fundamental element of how the society works even though they don't have much representation but it doesn't necessarily mean we can undermine their role I'm going to call you out here Dr. Ali here I'm sure your mother plays a big role for you to sit here in this chair so for you you should be the first one to mention it and then for Professor Roberts mentioning the soft power here about the role of the United States I believe that's an amazing and an excellent point but something about the symposium in the past two days we see that the question is about the impossible mission of like peace in the Middle East but do we see the names that are mentioned United States, China Japan all these other elements if we are looking at it at this as a novel do we see the Middle East as a protagonist here or all these other countries as the protagonist so if you could have the insight about that and something specifically to Colonel McCullough here how do you see this symposium being an element for Norwich community to be able to support the students that come from that region in this community it's to not make this symposium so detached from the members that have come to this place but rather bring it in an existential way to say each one of us how we can play our role and what could be to take as the leader of the community for you so I appreciate your responses ahead of time thank you quickly on this Valentine was supposed to be here she had some emergency couldn't make it so we shuffled around the panel so she would be really the best person you could connect them to answer and your question also brings in the critical theories and alternatives and constructivism in the peace building that's a big deal now in international debate schools and also media women minorities you're right our today's panel well made it best because we didn't have much time we're a state focused non-state actors a bit but we didn't go well again it was conceived originally that Dr. Muqaddam will be here but that didn't happen so however Nick brought up a lot of critical voices in terms of defense investment and the impact on a U.S. economy how how it created a monster that we cannot control Frankenstein scenario anyway so we had a lot of critical voices but where do you want to go in the program to be covered but for some reason beyond our control very very quickly so we can get as many questions as possible I tried to do justice to your question in some way yesterday in my presentation in that we all we do need to acknowledge that we are here in the United States North Americans here on this panel debating what peace looks like in the Middle East this is not the Middle East Middle Eastern people debating for themselves what peace looks like in their countries and that is empire and perhaps a cautionary tale you know again I mentioned people don't like having historians in the room because a historian will say name me an empire that has not fallen apart and we'll talk more later as we always do but anytime we can get distinguished thought leaders in front of students about any topic we're fulfilling the requirement that I believe we have to challenge people's thoughts get them introduced to ideas they may not have heard before and to go back to their barracks room or their residence hall and fall asleep thinking about the new idea that they heard then we are being the university that we proclaim that we are so you and I will have many discussions as will all of the students here on this side we had someone patiently waiting I had a quick question about the new ideas and the new government types of there's a constant debate between nationalism and globalism and even the new thoughts of neo-medievalism and the rise of private armies in countries such as Turkey and how these will affect the Middle East for a positive or negative I think in the tension between globalism and nationalism you're highlighting an important facet of the last 40 years you're building on some of the things that Dan has said over the last two days about the changes in the international economy and how that has connected states and peoples in different ways but the extent to which it's often in tension with nationalism and it can very much create some of the instability that some of the foremost proponents of globalization purport that they're trying to avoid so I would say that in terms of globalism and nationalism that's one of the big tensions of the last two decades and it's a it's a continuing tension you briefly mentioned the word neoliberalism right? Neo-medievalism Oh, Neo-medievalism Neo-liberalism Neo-medievalism Oh, Neo-medievalism Sorry, so I'll stop I thought you said something I guess I can sort of add a little bit to what Jeremy said there in terms of like Like if you think about the evolution of the economy, the industrial economy at one point had increasing returns. So that meant that there were super normal profits and there was a lot of rivalry to capture those industries. And that was the era of the early phase of industrialization. And you saw empire building. Countries built empires in order to have captive markets and to have captive resources. Colonialism and the era of the scramble for Africa, for example, came out of the early industrial era, the economics of it in one way. If you look at history through an economic lens, when you get to the post-war period, that changed. By that time, the global economy was sufficiently large that the economies of scale were exhausted. So when I was going to university in the 70s, the stylized fact that we assumed was that there were a constant return to scale and a constant labor share of income. They're called the Caldor Facts in the economic literature. And these are indicated that the world was competitive. Now, how did the world evolve under a competitive framework? It involved by spreading industrial activity throughout the world. So we wound up with a made-in-the-world economy. The book, The Global Factory, was written in 1985, 10 years before the World Trade Organization was formed. That world integrated East Asia and other countries into it. And it wasn't neoliberal in the sense that we think of it as a bad thing, which is concentrating income at the top percentiles. It was very friendly to development. And it was not at odds with nationalism in any way. That was one of the best periods, in fact, for internationalism. What changed was when you had, again, technological changes that introduced new increasing returns industries and protection into the system through intellectual property, which then concentrated income. You saw the rise, the profit share of income start to rise around 1980, the labor share start to fall. And then all of that tension is transmitted into national political frameworks. And you wind up with populism emerging, being naturally stoked by the change in income distribution at the national level. At that point, you have the tension between globalization and nationalism, if you will. But it's not because of the industrial economy. It's because of this intellectual property. This knowledge-based economy. And then later the data economy. So what you really, what we have to do in terms of understanding the impact of globalization on our economies is to understand which segment of the economy, if you will, is generating that tension between global and national and address that with policies that dampen down the tensions internally. While we need is an income redistribution system in the West, because as someone said, Nicholas said, his generation has the lowest share of income of 3% of wealth. That's not a tenable situation going forward. We simply did not manage the distribution of wealth implications of technological change. So it's not a nationalism versus globalization. It's an understanding of your actual economics of production. I'll leave it at that. I'm going to just add one word quickly, is immigration and demographics is a big part of it, which is not properly economic process, but is the different societies, not only Americans, but others, non-Western societies. Resistance to globalization has a heavy demographic component to it, too. So what we'll do, let's take a question from both sides, because sometimes the answers somewhat weave together. So we'll get your question, and then for Sergeant Walker, we'll get yours, and hopefully we'll be able to answer both simultaneously. So my question is centered around both today and yesterday. So yesterday we heard talk about maybe letting the Middle East decide its own economic policies and let it decide its own fate in terms of its little hemisphere that it has. And I can't help but think about the Monroe Doctrine that we had in the early development of our country. So one big question that I had in order to spur the Middle East development, would it be more prudent in Western strategy to sort of implement a quasi-Monroe Doctrine in the Middle East, primarily not centered around making sure American or Western influences in the Middle East, but making sure that the Middle East maintains its own little sphere of cultural influence and its own sphere of self-determination? Good morning, gentlemen. So this question is actually kind of pointed towards you, General McCullough. I just finished a book called Wolves of Hunman Province about your unit in Afghanistan. And something that I found really interesting is a lot of your Marines were issued money right off the bat getting there, that they were kind of instructed to use towards the infrastructure in the area to kind of prop that up. My question is kind of bouncing off of that what he was going after. Do you see that working on a larger scale? I see it as kind of like a money pit. Like, do we throw money at the Middle East? Or is it better to just stick away? But I think there's another thing that's been brought up a lot at these conferences. Do we have a responsibility to help out here? We played a big part in the Middle East in the past few years. And it's been a part of my life since I was born. So, you know, do we have a responsibility to the Middle East to help out? And where do we attach that money to? How does that money get there and where it needs to go to actually fix the issue? Questions? I can take the first one a little bit. Maybe the end of that one. So I would say no. I wouldn't support a Quasiman row doctrine for the Middle East. I think the implication is, again, about a framework in which, as outsiders, we would know better than what the people who live in the region would do. And I don't think that's the direction in, you know, at this point in the 21st century that U.S. foreign policy should be going. I think we've seen the cost in the past, not just with the U.S., but many empires around in the last few hundred years, the cost of that approach. And so I don't think that's the direction that we'd want to go. I can jump in here. So if you think about the Monroe Doctrine and think about the economic performance of the region that falls under that, it's not been stellar. And basically, empires are extractive. They're not constructive. The place where America's influence was by far the best was in Western Europe and the Far East, East Asia, where America was building bulwarks against communism. So America was investing in Korea, in Japan, in Taiwan, in Hong Kong, in Singapore, in Southeast Asia, and making those countries wealthy with trade, providing incentives, as Jeremy was saying, as opposed to sticks. And East Asia prospered. Western Europe also prospered under American support. It was a Marshall plan that was injecting money and development as a bulwark against Soviets. So, but in its own backyard, America was extracted. It gave us the term banana republic, okay? So it's not good to fall into the sphere of influence of someone. North Korea is the worst country in the world, and it's in the sphere of China, but everyone around China is doing very well because they're able to balance against China and have the support of the United States. So think about the principle that you don't want to have to be in someone's sphere of influence, but America can do good and create allies, wealthy allies, powerful allies, by supporting their interests when they are, in fact, balancing. And in terms of throwing money, remember that money can be, if it's distributed, it can lead to all kinds of violence as people scramble forward. So throwing money at something, you have to be very, very careful about how you do it, and I would urge again, pragmatic experimentalism, if investment in a region can actually dampen a conflict, remove a bone of contention, then do it, but try it out, and if it works, roll it out. Can I say one thing for you, Matthew? On your last question to General McCullough, does the United States have a responsibility? My answer to that would be, as I said to someone yesterday, is turn your question into an answer, turn it into a statement. I would like to hear what you think, not now, but this fall, when you take my class, where we're going to be talking about just, that's one of the things, this class that a few people here have signed up for, the costs of war, we're gonna be debating these types of things, and anyone, I've already invited Colonel Dr. Krause, anyone's welcome to come join and talk about these things with us. So you've already got your homework. And I do have you captive for another year, so we'll have multiple discussions, but someone can guide you through some Thucydides, and when you start looking at people's motivations for taking certain actions through that lens of fear, honor, and interest, and realize not everyone on the world stage has the ability to work in their own interest, and sometimes their motivations are strictly through the fear and honor lens. It'll give you some insights as to how we interact with other places. They have a strategy they're trying to enable as do other powers that happens on the margins of where powers meet, and I've just given you a homework assignment. It's a tough book to get through, but it's worthwhile and you'll use it for life. So Dr. Roberts, I'm gonna direct this question primarily towards you. So you advocated for a much more soft power approach to the Middle East with education specifically. Are you advocating for a complete withdrawal of American forces from the Middle East, and if so, how would you suggest we deal with extremist groups that are inevitably going to fill the power vacuum in the Middle East, and also going off of that, to what extent do we have a moral obligation to protect people in the Middle East from groups like these? Good question, and I'm proud of you for asking me a tough question that I'm not really sure how to answer. No, and I almost feel like I'm a politician running for office and you're asking me like what my position is. I think that anyone saying let's withdraw would be silly from a policy perspective. But also, I don't think that we necessarily have to differentiate or say that soft power means the military is not involved. So there have been instances where the military has done some tremendous public good for the world. So let's say we have two Marine officers here. Let's just say there's a hurricane in country X. Huge, you know, infrastructures destroyed. Every Marine is a rifleman, but I'm pretty darn sure if people water to people starting to pass through the road, infrastructure running again. So the military is not necessarily always used for hard power, but I do think, I think it's fair to say that one of the things the United States has overextended itself. And that is something that the U.S. military has met with itself. Listening to last five questions, four questions. You see this tension between retreat, not retreat, sorry, isolationism and responsibility that Matthew said. So this tension is in the U.S. foreign policy. America first or as I said. So nation building and state building with military forces. Listen, don't forget, I'm gonna just give you catchphrases. Time is running. U.S. national debt is how much is it? 13? It's a lot. There is a nation building to do here as a foreign observer from Canada, as far as they can grasp, okay. Okay, pass the ball to you guys. Thank you. All right, it looks like, Yangmo, we should have time for one more. Okay, make them quick, concise. Awesome, good morning. So we talked a lot about stability and how the U.S. is tied in and the West is tied in with the Middle East. So kind of building off that stability and looking at it from the other side of the coin, are Russia and China as well interested in stability in the Middle East or is it in their best interest that the U.S. is tied up in Professor Roberts, as you said, potentially overextended in that region? So this question is open to the panel. With regard, so China's been a topic of the panel over the last few days and their role in the Middle East as well. And it seems that their overall message and vision for the Middle East, their poll of power as it is re-emerging, is in opposition to the American one of spreading this patchwork of liberal democracies that we were pursuing in the late 90s and early 2000s in the region. And given that vision hasn't come to fruition over 20 years of us attempting to do it, does the United States need to pursue a different course, one more of realism like we did with the Soviet Union in the 20th century or was this a failure of execution and on the ground during the early 21st century? So over the past two days, we've seen how complex of a question this is, but to make it concise, yes or no, do you think peace in the Middle East is possible? Yes. To the question, do China, first of all, want peace in the Middle East? I think one interesting thing, I think yes. But on the other hand, if someone can correct me if I'm wrong, but I believe that after 9-11, on the day of September 11th, the first foreign leader, President Bush Slovid, was Vladimir Putin. And Vladimir Putin said, hey, I would do anything, this is a huge problem for all of us, right? I'll do what I can to support. Now, things changed, but I can assure you that when the United States was admired in a two front war occupied Iraq and Afghanistan, Putin and the Russians and the Chinese were pretty happy to sit and watch that happen, because it was deeply heartbreaking about that. So, but yes, I would say peace in the Middle East is only possible, but it's likely. I agree very much with Professor Mottari who spoke last night, and we're seeing this last post-World War II, all of this stuff that is happening, if you look at the long arc of Middle Eastern history as a blip on the radar. So I would say, first of all, there's a halfway house between withdrawing your military from the Middle East and enhancing stability, stop shooting, okay? Be there, but don't shoot, and just try to tamp down. Second thing I would pick up on the point about Professor Mottari's comment yesterday, which I think it was at the dinner, so for the benefit of everyone here, he was talking about the possibility of kind of European Union-style confederation in the Islamic world in Central Asia, and if you now think about the dynamics of U.S. involvement in the world in the post-World Period where its greatest successes were in East Asia, where it promoted strong economies surrounding China and in Western Europe where it promoted and accommodated the European Union, trying to promote such a concept in the Middle East might actually be ideal. Just to give you a sense of the U.S. involvement in Europe, when the Europeans wanted their common market, their common agricultural policy, this was not in the U.S. interest, direct interest. It was in the interest of building Europe and the United States accommodated. So that's the kind of long-term thinking, taking short-term movements to try and promote some kind of integration, economic development. The European Union started out as a coal and steel community. You can build something up in the Middle East that would resemble that, that would be brilliant. Maybe we'd agree, I don't know, that peace in the Middle East is a very broad term, so when I think about that, let me focus in on a couple of things. I tend to think about Israel-Palestine because that's what I do a lot of my research on, but let me just set that aside and say, I think of three civil wars going on in the Middle East right now in Libya, in Syria, and in Yemen. And so I think if the question is, will those civil wars end, they will end. Civil wars don't generally last forever. And one thing I hope we can pay attention to in developing Saudi-Iranian relations is the extent to which that has a positive effect for the civilians of Yemen, right? The people who've been in a pretty brutal humanitarian situation for a number of years now. So do I think that peace in the Middle East can happen? Yeah, and I'm thinking in particular about those civil wars. In terms of the United States attempting to spread liberal democracy in the region, I have to say I think maybe taking issue a little bit with the question, just in a friendly way, that the U.S. has mixed motivations and sometimes the United States is pushing democracy and human rights. And otherwise, other times when it seems like that will conflict with pro-U.S. interests, the United States is much less willing slash unwilling to do so. And we've seen that repeatedly, for instance, with the U.S.-Saudi relationship. But bear in mind, the United States itself is wrestling with democracy. And so there's a certain assumption, I think when we ask that question, sometimes we know what we're doing and we're gonna teach other people that. Maybe we need to figure out what we're doing, right? And I say that with some humility about the struggles that our country faces right now. And I'll leave Russian China to others who are just. Just the last word on the, maybe it's a good exercise for you guys as students is also for scholars is the fragmented thinking about Middle East peace and conflict. When you think about the conflict in Yemen, or Libya, Syria, you've got to think also how it is connected to Iranian proliferation, right? To extremism, to U.S. action in Syria or Russian deployment in that country. And Chinese incursion. As long as you think in a fragmented way about the issues of Middle East, you want to go far. I understand there is a pragmatic side to it. You want to focus on problems one by one. You don't want to search for magic Johnson solution. However, in terms of analysis, you need to have as a student on Middle East a framework to connect Syria, to Libya, to Yemen, to Iran, Israeli situation and all that. For example, I finish on this. You cannot ask Iranians be it monarchy or mullahs now. And not to have ballistic missiles and nuclear weapon and allow and tolerate in nuclear Pakistan and nuclear Israel or whoever else comes up. It's just not possible, okay? So you got to just get them connected all those issues together. I would just point out two items. Earlier you heard us talking about the drive towards stability and military planner in the room. Both peace and war are not permanent states. I think that drives us at times to have goals of stability holding off war for as long as possible. Because once war is let off the leash, you don't always know the results that you're going to have. The passions of the people become inflamed and stability seems to be more in line with many of our goals to hold off the leash coming off for as long as possible. When it comes to what some of our adversaries do there in the Middle East, I'll go back to what I told Matt about looking at things through those lenses of fear and honor and interest. When we see our adversaries doing things there, just because they're doing them does not always mean that it's in our worst interest to have the results that they may achieve. At times, even your adversaries goals may align with your interests. And it requires I think a clear eye and a clear analysis. If they are willing to undertake the work that is required and it achieves something that achieves perhaps the stability that we would hope for, hold off war as long as possible, if someone else does it, maybe that's better for us. It's worth entertaining and policy makers should look through that lens for condemning actions that we may have taken on our own had someone else not done them. That can help you analyze those things. And I think a lot of time. Okay, thank you so much. Let's give a round of applause. So the last two days through a series of presentations and discussions we had a great opportunity to broaden and deepen our understanding of the Middle Eastern region and the dynamic global community. Distinguished speakers and guests, thank you so much for your participation in this year's summit. I think I have some comments to do, but especially just right now some scholars and people, they talk about the possibility of the rise of outbreak of World War III. So witnessing the Russian expansion of war and just the North Korean nuclear and missile kind of tensions and US China strategy rivalry has been intensifying. So that I think even just during this summit, we just learned a lot of kind of complex problems in Middle Eastern regions. So I think definitely just the current leaders, national leaders and international leaders, they have to be really cautious and make every effort to prevent the rise of these kind of military conflicts or so try to promote peace and stability in this world because billions of people's lives are contingent upon their strategic decisions. But future leaders, right? I think it's really important for you guys to deepen and broaden your perspective and knowledge over all these kind of international conflicts and problems and issues and tangled problems so that just the witnessing and facing this challenging world, but because of you guys, when you guys become the leaders of this nation and this community and the international community with deep knowledge and just the humble character and just the strategic kind of insights and all those things just so we can make this world a better place to live in. So anyway, thank you so much for your participation again. And at this point, we end Norwich's 2020-3 Middle Eastern Summit. Just I hope you have a nice day and just to see you at the future summit. Thank you again. Thank you.