 Y Llywyddyn i'n ei ddweud ar gyfer y ddwyddiadau, sy'n ddweud ychydig y cyfnodd y Llywodraeth, a'r cyfan o hynny yn ymweld, sy'n bryddo'r oedden nhw'n amser i'r Llanthog Ynysgol, sy'n hynny'n gwneud amser i'r Llanthog Ynysgol, ychydig i'r Rhwng. Y Llywodraeth yn ymgyrch ymgyrch ymgyrch y Llanthog Ynysgol, ynghyd yng Nghymru, yfodol o'r gweithio pan-n poemxigol. A'r dyfodol iawn ddow'r awr i gyfer eu Llywodraeth ondanan yn eu gwaith. Mae'n ymddangos hynny i gweithio armein, community sy'n ei gweithio. Mae'n gweithio yn ymddangos hynny i gweithio. Mae'n gweithio hi fod yn ei gweithio'n eu Gweithio. Mae'n gweithio i gweithio'r gweithio a dyfodol iawn. Mae'n gweithio i gweithio'n gweithio, yn hynny i gweithio'r gweithio. y fyrdd yn ymddangos gyda'r newid. Rwy'n rwy'n ymweld i'r dda'r dr Steltsen Mwller, sydd yn lleoli'r Robert Bosch, yng Nghymru yn y Ffelly, yn y Llyfr Gweithgaredd Yng nghymru yn y Gwyllgor mewn Unedigol Fynggellol, ac mae'r Gweithgaredd Fynggellol Ars Sgolwyr yn y Gwyllgor Fynggellol erbyn amddangos gyda'r dr Sgolwyr. Internal försö off set! H lived which, as you can see gives me both infinite authority again for whatever I said. It is lovely to be re-enacted, that suggests I didn't do everything wrong last time. It is lovely to be in Dublin. I wish I had more time, but I'm ancard Curlyg varyf, not just called a warm reception. ac i gyflawni'n cyflawni'n gyfarfodd i'w gwheiddiadau. Mae'n blaen i gwiriaeth amser, dyna'n cael ei wneud. Mae'n syniad syniadau yn Washington o'r iawn o'r cyflawn i'ch gwiriaeth. Mae'r brogylch yn ddod o'r cyflawni'n cael ei gwirio'n byw. Felly dyna'n ddangos cyflawni'n ddangos cyflawni. Felly, mae'r ddwyf yn gweld i wneud i wneud yma yma yma yma yn y cyflawni, o'r ddysgu yma oherwydd, But when you asked me for one was that I never know from one way to the other what's going to be going on in Washington. It's really one of the facts of life of living in Washington and trying to understand what's going on and pontificating about it afterwards. Is that you so often sit there and pinch yourself and say did that just really happen? And what the hell does this mean now? So, with that caveat, that I could be wrong in a week or something, something else happens, and everything shifts. Let me give you sort of 20 words that's worth of what I think, what my thinking is today this morning in Dublin. I went to the Munich Security Conference, which is sort of the people are with me is a key bell of weather of what's going on in the transatlantic alliance and other relations. I was also in Washington last week for the NATO Schindig and if you went to those two you could probably think you'd be excused for thinking that well this wasn't you know in German you would say Aber hattwch gan ddychgybwyrd, y Dentist wasnt that bad. In Munich for example people had still had a searing memory of last year's military security conference where you just had an incredibly glum sense that the western order was falling apart and nobody knew what to do about it and nobody had an answer to the challenges of the disruption coming out of Washington. This time at least you had a I have to say really robotic speech from the vice president in which he essentially you know the essential message was our way or the highway but you had a really feistian spirited response from Nadia Mackle which she got standing ovations for something that is quite rare in Munich. And you had a speech from Joe Biden reassuring everybody know the other half of America loves you and you had I think most importantly a historically congressional delegation that went out of its way to engage with Europeans and others that was very very present visible and very determined to make an impact and it aims to demonstrate support. And then at the NATO anniversary meeting in D.C. I sort of at the last minute got an invitation to listen to Secretary General Stockberg's speech in the rotunda in the capital which is really quite unusual. I had never done that before and I have to say it was most impressive not least having to navigate what seemed like kilometers of tunnels underneath the capital to get up into the visitors gallery. And then you had you have a secretary general who really gave a good country speech and a Congress that appeared to be determined on both sides of the aisle to show love and support. He got standing ovations after every third sentence. We were literally sitting down standing up standing down standing up all the time. It became a little bit absurd but after everybody was good natured and went along with it. But if you look closely you'd see that I started counting empty seats on the Republican side and the 45 empty seats and the Republicans did not get up every time the Democrats go up. And then you looked at the Democratic sides and some of the people looked a little too young to be members of Congress. I assume that they would send staff, kids and interns to take empty places as well. So it was actually helpful to be there as it's so often is. I then went to this reception where Pompeo gave a quite warm, pernative speech and stood there for a group picture with the foreign ministers and all of that seemed to be reasonably cheerful. And of course the key news item of that week was nobody left the alliance. And I have to say I think some of us including me had sort of been holding their breath on that one because it would not have been difficult for the boss to have tweeted that this was that he had had it with all this pomp and ceremony. And of course this was a NATO ministerial not a NATO heads of state summit on purpose so that the president wouldn't have an excuse to be there. So I would say on the whole while this all the optics of all this were okay and nothing bad happened, I'd say that the impression of stability and harmony and agreement is deceptive. And I will try and explain why I think that and why I'm still really really worried. If you look at the state of transformation relations right now in the third year of Trump, I think you have to say that on both sides things are looking pretty great. You've got on the American side transactionalism coercion or threats of coercion support for nationalists and authoritarians, not just in the rest of the world but in Europe, notably Hungarians. But a lot of this is in a sort of state of suspension. We now have a new threat of economic sanctions and we'll see where that goes. But it's actually taken Washington surprisingly long to get to that point. And for the longest time you have threats and repetitions of threats and more threats but nothing really happened on those sanctions. And that I think has been a notable part of the atmosphere there. It reminded me of what in World War II people used to call the board again, which of course was followed by a real game. So I hope that's not an accurate association. The other thing that you see of course is that where the administration does carry out policies, they often end up bogged down in coherence. And because there's less and less politically appointed staff, because there are so many vacancies, not just at the top levels but at the lower levels, and people are coming in as acting office holders who are sort of ripped out of another function or are actually too junior for that office and therefore can't be acting as a designated sort of placeholders until someone is found and then it takes a very long time for this to be filled and the result of that is that on the levels underneath them people sort of operate on autopilot without sort of, not just without instructions I think but also without a sort of coherent sense of strategy. There is a general sense of incoherence about American foreign security policy as a whole, that for somebody like me who has been used to thinking about people who execute and make policy in America as sort of like nuclear engineers on the bridge of a big aircraft carrier or a big nuclear power plant is really quite disconcerted. I mean my experience of policy discussions in Washington is one of sort of very carefully calibrated, minus fuel sort of adaptations of policy and a general sort of unwillingness except in sort of very remarkable circumstances to avoid major disruptions. And here of course you have the opposite, disruption is the rule but it so often remains oddly sort of non-invetted in overall framework or remains without consequence. On the European side you have a variety of approaches from strategic autonomy to like-minded alliances, that of course is the German approach, I think a quite healthy increasing refusal to be triggered by everything that the President tweets in the morning, that I think is actually a good development. And I think you also have a fair amount if diplomats on both sides, actually Americans and Europeans are to be believed in Washington, a fair amount of sort of very quiet but professional cooperation on urgent and current issues underneath the waterline. But I think that we also need to see that the perception of Europe in Washington and I think it is not inaccurate sadly, is one of a continent that is weakened by its own severe divisions on key policy issues that is also rarely capable of coherent approaches that when it tries to produce coherent approaches such as trying to resist the cancellation of the JCPOA, the formation of a separate Iranian financial vehicle, these things end up not really shifting Washington in policy, they end up peaturing out. And add to that of course any amount of national aligning, not least from my own country, but give me the same as Ambassador, all of us are capable of being nationalist opportunists when we choose and we do do this. And there is an abundance of national egoism on view when you look at Europe and Washington. And I say that as a committed European. So what I think we have currently is something of an unstable equilibrium of mostly inaction. And you have that in transatlantic relations, you have that in the relationship between what you used to think of and I still think of as the West versus the rest. And you have it also domestically in the balance between mainstream politics and the populace. It's not true certainly, things haven't been settled but they're sort of suspended in there. And the reason why this worries me so much is that I think that I see the risk of the exhaustion and delegitimisation of western rules and institutions of national democratic institutions being exhausted and delegitimised. That creates a vacuum for challenges and adversaries to explore. It's very real. I see an increased risk of miscalculation, misinterpretation, accidental escalation. And if that weren't enough, what worries me most under these circumstances is the toxic impact left mostly unchecked of an increasingly hostile and dark narrative in America about Europe and indeed about Germany. For which as I see some factual basis, I see things that one might be concerned about or angry about or just criticise in policy terms, but he is embedded in a sort of larger approach to the world that I find genuinely not just concerning but distressing and actually makes me afraid. I don't say this lightly but it makes me afraid for the future. And here I've brought some things to quote at you. Many of you will have to have some motive or even read the Pompeo speech in Brussels, which got almost no coverage oddly in the American press, but of course was widely reviewed and commented on here, and in which you will recall he said that he thought from what he could see the EU was clearly an institution headed by unlikely bureaucrats. Many said at another point that as far as this administration was concerned they were there to protect nations and nationalists and sovereignty and that international institutions that didn't protect the interests of nations and of people ought to be disassembled. And people in the room and elsewhere read this as exactly what it was meant to be, which was a very fundamental critique of the EU. You add that to the president's known penchant for tweeting or for referring to the EU as a foe and you have reason to be concerned. Now you will presumably know, Ambassador, that there have been reports coming out of Washington that the recently departed most senior Europe diplomat in Washington, West Mitchell, told German diplomats that if they wanted to have a general explanation, a blueprint of the EU administration's Europe policy, in other words if they wanted to have the meaning of the Brussels speech and explain, they should read Yoran Hozoni, the virtue of nationalism. I don't know whether any of you have tracked that. I have seen an excerpt from the Wall Street Journal. Somebody over breakfast looked at this and thought, Jesus, what is this? This is the Wall Street Journal editorial board going sort of batch it crazy again, dropped it. Then I heard the story, bought the book and asked our library to get me all the reviews that they could find since its publication. I came back with a snack this fat. They're all glowing reviews. He's since received the Conservative Book of the Year Award and he has just published another piece which I recommend to you last Sunday, Why America Needs New Alliances, together with another Israeli author, to explain. Yoran Hozoni is a, somebody I hadn't heard of before, until then. He is the head of the Herzl Institute in Jerusalem, a little think tank. He is a historian and a political philosopher and the virtue of nationalism is, I will, I mean I'm going to be, it's a very frank review. I think it's terrible political philosophy and inasmuch as it is attempts to be an exegesis, particularly of European history, I think quite egregiously gets the facts of European history wrong. It is quite easy to dismiss it on those two counts, but that would be a huge mistake because what he does of is an incredibly powerful narrative that connects the small O small Z, orthodox Zionism, with American evangelical fundamentalist political thought. And for that I would urge you to read the book and also to read what's recently written in Wall Street Chamberlain. And basically what he says, and I wrote a piece about this in EFT if you want, that's the sort of short, the executive summary for the nervous of what I'm about to say. Basically he says, empires of bad nations are good. There's two kinds of bad empires, one is liberal interventionist America and the other one is the European Union. He doesn't spend a lot of time with liberal interventionist America because he thinks that America under Trump is now in its way to self-reform and betterment because it is now a rediscovered sovereignism and nationalism. But Europe and the EU particular are the problem, not least because he seems to be obsessed with this. This is all a tool for Germany to require not just domination in Europe but beyond it. That of course is where I think would be a tactic to become a little alarmed. The other thing about the interesting thing about his EU narrative is that he suggests that Western Europeans and Germany in particular are essentially holding other European countries hostage. Particularly Eastern Europeans who have been so courted by this American administration. What he suggests is that Europe and European nations will only be free once the EU disappears and nations can be nations again. In other words, the idea here literally is that the clock is turned back. The EU as a framework disappears and you find you return to some sort of a notional and of course historically non-existence version of national statehood. It didn't exist in Eastern Europe or in Western Europe for that matter because we went down that route so quickly after the war. So this is an extraordinary historical suggestion but it appears to have an extraordinary amount of traction in Washington. Now again, I'm not suggesting that this is the party line of this administration. I've got this one data point and the fact that this guy is getting traction in the Conservative press, is getting prizes and so on. I have a couple of other sort of conversations and I think match this. I think that this is a good match but it is not yet sort of the perfect explanation. What I am saying to you is that we need to understand that this take on Europe is afoot and we need to have a narrative of ourselves that counters it. And I can say to you that I go to sort of all the round tables and speeches by European diplomats and economists and what not who come to Washington and I spend a lot of time travelling in Europe. And my overall assessment is you know what, we are far from having that kind of narrative. Not just because we are still so concerned about our own domestic affairs or about our own battles with populists with our fears of the European elections. But also because I think we are genuinely struggling to find a European unified voice. And even where we do find it, like on Iran, that is essentially a Franco-German-British interestingly still undertaking that the others let us do. But I think that we have not been able to counter this particular take. If we are not able to do that, we have a real problem. It is our problem, in other words, not theirs. And we should be grateful for this because this holds up a narrative which we may feel is distorting. But it does catch some of our nastier problems, doesn't it? And so I think that we are actually well advised to take this seriously, to take a look at it and to think long and hard about what to do about it. I mean, I'm conscious of the passage of time, so I will, I can certainly give you vings of literature recommendations. I'm not going to throw this at you, but it will, has only been worth following on Twitter because he seems to have a distinct purpose with this. And I think he's setting himself up as a political commentator on Europe and America, aren't he? And this new article by him is interesting because it also takes on meeting, not to see. Because it suggests that some allies are worth more than others and that if the Western Europeans in particular, and I will read you that actually, if the Western Europeans don't shape up, they should just be dropped. Well, let me read you this. A central question for revitalised airlines of democratic nations is which way the winds will blow in Western Europe. The democratic nations point is interesting because he also proposes that, I mean, because he thinks Hungary and Poland under its current government are good allies for America. For a generation after the Berlin Wall fall in 1989, the US administration seemed willing to take responsibility for Europe's security indefinitely. European elites go accustomed to the idea that perpetual peace was at hand, devoting themselves to turning the EU into a borderless utopia with general's benefits law. This isn't wrong. But here's what comes next. Europe has been corrupted by its dependence on the US, comes as a critique of Germany, world's fifth largest economic power, cannot feed more than a handful of operational combat aircraft etc. None of this is in America's interest and not only because the US is stuck with the bill. When people live detached from reality, they develop all sorts of fanciful theories about how the world works. For decades, Europeans have been devising transnationalist fantasies to explain how their own, supposed moral virtues, such as their rejection of borders have brought them peace and prosperity. These ideas are then exported to the US and the rest of the democratic world via international bodies, universities and so on, which is an extraordinary denial of America's role in the creation of multinational institutions and transnational norms. It's now all a noxious influence coming from Europe that I find quite remarkable. This is new. Having subsidised the creation of a dependent socialist paradise in Europe, the US now has to watch as the EU's influence washes over America and other nations. This is also the language of the hard right. It's the language of infection, of viruses, of the perfect body being rendered impure. This is quite precise in the way it's articulated. For the moment it is hard to see Germany or Spain becoming American allies in the new, more realistic of the sense of the term we have proposed. Trans is a different case altogether. Prospects are better with prospect to Britain. The UK may yet become a principal partner in a leaner but more effective security architecture within the democratic world. There you have it. There are other authors in Washington who you could read, in particular the conservative think tanks, who write similar things. I am inclined to think that a lot of this is aimed at creating coalitions between Israel and America, between the fundamentalists and orthodox Zionists. These are quite parochial interests at work. But as you can see the narrative that is being devised here is quite powerful, it's sticky, I think it's working and it's toxic and we don't have an answer to it. Now, we obviously have a couple of pressure points coming up for us which are now demanding a lot of our attention and political resources. For us in Europe it's the EP elections at which the populace are projected to gain between 30 and 40% of the EPCs, giving them not a blocking majority, but a distinct capability to gum up the works of governments and of legislation and of course the selection of the executive in the EU and there by possibly undermining even further the effectiveness and the legitimacy of the European project. On the US side we're already in the middle of the campaign for 2020 and it's not clear to me at all at this point that the Democrats or actually other Republicans have a good chance in this election. Trump has turned out to be an extraordinarily powerful force despite the fact that he is continually shedding responsible cabinet members and restrictions, maybe because of that. I mean there is a distinct possibility that this administration will found it on in a crisis of its own making because it is so clearly headed for a sort of quite fundamental conflict with the American system of constitutional governance. But it has survived so much so far that I at this point am sort of unwilling to place bets on that and that we have an electoral clock that is inexorable and the administration way may well power on past that. So that's a depressing picture I've painted, I'm sorry, but I do this because I think that we need to understand the seriousness of the situation we find ourselves in. I think I see fixes to all this, I think I see people responding, I think I see counter movements in our own policies and societies trying to grapple with our own vulnerabilities, which is where I think, which I do think is the first order of the day, is fixing all the vulnerabilities of the problems that the populists exploit to undermine and destroy mainstream institutions and politics. But I do not think that we have the luxury of ignoring the viability of the health of the European project or for that matter the transatlantic alliance and world order while we try and fix our domestic problems. That's where I'm going to leave you with. Again, it's not a happy mode, but I think this is quite literally the most serious crisis that I have seen in my working lifetime, not just of Western border but of democracy in Europe. I think now is the time to stand up and fight for it. Thank you.