 Well I'm David Horner and I have the honour of chairing this afternoon's session, Strategic Thinking Concepts and Challenges. As some of you might know, I've been working at SDSC this time around at least since 1990. But much earlier in 1980, I was working at SDSC when the centre then just 14 years old held a major conference, the same one as this one, New Directions in Strategic Thinking. Professor Robert O'Neill did most of the organising and planning but somehow I got my name on the cover of the resulting book as a joint editor. So I'm delighted to be involved in this conference with a similar focus admittedly for a new era. Back then in 1980 the Cold War after a period of detente was about to warm up again. The previous year the Soviet Union had invaded Afghanistan. The Moscow Olympics opened two days before we began our conference in 1980. The led by the United States and the assistance of US President Jimmy Carter, 65 countries boycotted the Moscow Games because of the Soviets involvement in Afghanistan and this prompted the Soviet-led boycott of the 1984 Olympics four years in Los Angeles four years later. And how the wheel turns. President Vladimir Putin is now talking about a return to the Cold War. The Rio de Janeiro Olympics are about to begin in two weeks time and the International Committee, Olympic Committee is presently considering whether to ban the entire Russian team. At least seven papers in our original conference dealt with strategic concepts governing the superpower policies and world order. And given the changes in world affairs in recent years it's therefore appropriate that we look again at the relevance of Cold War strategic concepts and this will be the topic of the first paper by Professor Robert Asen. Rob is an old friend of SDSC. He was a student here in the late 1980s and returned to SDSC after he received his PhD at Kings College London and was director of studies in our master's program from 2002 to 2009. And Rob is now professor of strategic studies at Victoria University of Wellington where he works closely with the Centre for Strategic Studies. He's an honorary professor with the New Zealand Defence Force Command and Staff College and an adjunct professor here at SDSC. His latest book is called Asia's Security. This afternoon's second speaker will be Professor Thomas Christensen who will also reflect back on the Cold War but in particular looking at alliances after the Cold War. Professor Christensen is the William P. Boswell Professor of World Politics of Peace and War and director of the China and the World Programme at Princeton University. He received his PhD from Columbia University and since then his research and teaching has focused on China's foreign relations, the international relations of East Asia and international security. And he's not just a scholar but also a practitioner. In 2002 he was awarded the Distinguished Public Service Award by the US State Department and from 2006 to 2008 he served as Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs with responsibility for relations with China, Taiwan and Mongolia. And he's the author of numerous books and articles. I liked his book Useful Adversaries. His most recent book, The China Challenge, was an editor's choice in the New York Times book review and was selected as Book of the Week on CNN. Our third speaker will be Dr Nicola Levinghouse who will continue our connection with the Cold War and we'll talk about nuclear strategy after the Cold War. Dr Levinghouse is a lecturer in international politics at the University of Sheffield in the United Kingdom. Prior to this appointment she was a lecturer in the Department of Politics and International Relations at the University of Oxford from which she received her D. Phil. Her research focuses on Chinese views of nuclear weapons past and present as well as ideas regarding nuclear responsibility in the global nuclear order. Her most recent book is China and Global Nuclear Order. Each speaker will speak for about 20 minutes. We'll have a joint question and answer session for about half an hour. So please join me in welcoming our speakers and our first speaker Professor Rob Asen. Thank you. Thank you very much David. Great privilege to be here. Just before we kicked off David told me that in the years since I went back to Wellington that my accent had got stronger. So I'm just kind of glad we don't have simultaneous translation running because I'm sure mine would be put on Channel 6 right you know but no I'm from a country that doesn't have many submarines at all but has fewer changes of government than happened here and I'm very grateful for the invitation. There's a Maori word for family it's often you know a family called whanau and I don't know if Gareth is still here but Gareth if Gareth is here just to say that it doesn't mean nuclear family it means it means a kind of an extended family and a sense and I know my colleague from CSS in Wellington David Capu will be surprised me to say there's a sense of common identity but a sense of common perspective so I regard this place the people here some of the people I met last night as kind of my academic whanau and I'm really grateful and I'm extremely it's very moving to see the way the the SDSC has evolved under Brendan's terrific leadership so congratulations Brendan and two to the rest of the center and all of the wider supporters that you have it's wonderful to be here. I realized too that I actually came here in the first half of the history of the SDSC which is a bit frightening but as David said in the late 1980s I arrived in in Canberra after an overnight bus tour from Melbourne arrived in the rec center with no sleep tried to get to the university by taxi it was 37 degrees I went from from from shop to shop getting drink to drink not the sort of by that mean I mean non-alcoholic beverages that would come later of course but but you know 1988 the penultimate year of the Cold War and one of the and I joined a much smaller masters program than the very large and successful masters program that that that exists today alongside the undergraduate program and the the wonderful program that that Dan leads out at Western Creek and and in our masters program in the original core course there were six lectures on a subject that you wouldn't see dominating core courses and strategic studies today or not or not too many of them and that was that topic six lectures was basically the strategic nuclear balance between the United States and the Soviet Union and I owe a lot to those lectures and to the wonderful academic who gave them that was of course our great friend Professor Des Ball and Des examined in detail the stability of that super power nuclear balance and it was the concept of stability in that Cold War period and particularly as it emerged Tom Shelling's work on that idea that formed the basis of my my my PhD work at King's College and I think I'm sure had it not been for the encouragement and guidance of SDSE academics here who had taught me here in Canberra I'd actually have had little chance in working in London with the wonderful Lawrence Freeman who spoke to us this morning so to be here for that too was was very special so you might expect that I'm going to focus on stability in in these 20 minutes but I actually want to look at something that's a bit close but another topic that we covered but we just only in that 1988 core course and there was only one lecture on the on that topic and the topic was crisis management and our lecturer was Coral Bell now in this book conventions of crisis management you come across an idea that Coral says she borrowed from the American Soviet specialist Marshall Shulman so unlike Melania Trump she actually acknowledged her source and and the the the idea is to regard the relationship between the main protagonists of the Cold War as an adverse partnership and that's what I'm going to focus on today in my in my short paper now that's what an adverse partnership is kind of what those two words and combinations suggest they should be it's to regard adversaries even when they are our very serious rivals as potential partners a prime focus for the limited cooperation that goes on here is the conscious management and I say that word conscious liberally of the conflict between them avoiding its escalation into something both will regret now an adverse partnership also implies that we should not be fooled into thinking that the parties are no longer adversaries that because they work together suddenly their rivalry has disappeared by adverse partnership Coral explains in this book I do not mean to imply anything particularly cordial trusting or friendly only a consciousness between the dominant powers that they have solid common interests as well as sharp conflicting interests so why is this idea of an adverse partnership important and and and why in a cold war context and I've got two answers to that the first I think is that when we talk to our students about the Cold War many of whom were born the first political memory of a lot of my students is 9 11 so got no chance like me of remembering the the last days of the Cold War but but it's not surprising that some of them see the Cold War because of what they've been reading and hearing as a period of unrelenting zero sum competition the idea that the principal adversaries of this Cold War can be regarded as partners as well as it as competitors suggests that that sort of view is false seeing Soviet Russia in the US as adverse partners is a reminder that Cold War tensions waxed and waned and while these tensions were very serious and dangerous they did not lead inevitably to war I know Evelyn and this really concept course you're going to be teaching you're going to be doing some of that stuff on the Cold War historiography and I think it's a fantastic case study for that sort of work because it kills two birds with one stone if you like secondly the conception of a US Soviet adverse partnership was important for these Cold War debates themselves and Laurie touched on some of this earlier the argument I think wasn't that they were adverse partners we wasn't quite so hard for Coral when she come came to to write this book which was published in 1971 and and the super power detente which of course was fairly short-lived was well established by then the ABM Treaty a product of the salt one talks would be that would those talks would be completed the following year and that arms control agreement indicated that Washington and Moscow believed that they had a common interest in regulating a major aspect of their Cold War competition they both saw mutual survival and not just their own survival as a core interest now but that sort of point about adverse partnerships even though he might not have used that language was actually revolutionary when a when an economist in the late 1950s in the United States was arguing that the nuclear arms superpowers had common interests as well as competitive ones that was Thomas Schelling who argued that it was best to characterize the US-Soviet bilateral strategic interaction as a non-zero-sum bargaining relationship I think there's an important distinction between bargaining and grand bargains I think a lot of bargaining is going to be going on I'm not so sure about the grand bargain but we can sort of get back to that later on perhaps they were in other words adverse partners Lawrence Friedman identifies this logic perfectly when he argues in his epic evolution of nuclear strategy at the centre of the strategy of stable conflict was the concept of incomplete antagonism now for Schelling strategy was a question of manipulating risk but this only worked if the other side shared an interest in keeping the competition within limits threats of harm were often more important than actual violence and they were also more meaningful because actual violence could be so utterly devastating in the nuclear age once the Russians broke in America's nuclear monopoly a full-scale nuclear exchange would resemble the category of absolute war which Klausowitz has suggested was kind of philosophically necessary but practically unreachable and I think that's how Hedley Ball a close follower of Schelling Schelling's work saw this. Ball suggested that in the nuclear age that the nuclear age had also rendered obsolete another observation that he attributed to Klausowitz which was that war did not exist in a single instantaneous blow. Ball also favoured the logic of adverse partnerships even though he again probably didn't use that term as a precocious scholar who took up his ANU chair a year after the SDSC was established Ball argued that the great powers had a special responsibility to nourish their common interests in the working of an international society and principal among these common interests was the avoidance of major catastrophic war Ball saw their fairly crude equilibrium created by their competition and armaments as an accident of history one of his favourite terms. Stable deterrence to be sustained would only come about if the Americans and the Russians took deliberate steps to manage their conflict now it would be wrong to suggest that this theme was recognised consistently by all who adopted it in fact we've already heard about Hedley's talk to the conference here in 1980 and when he published in that year and he was back at Oxford at that stage he published a piece called The Great Irresponsibles where he launched a stinging attack on both Moscow and Washington for ignoring their great power responsibilities to international society including what he saw as their retreat from arms control one of the main measures of managing their conflict and yet barely half a decade later and a year after Hedley's untimely death in 1985 John Lewis Gaddis would describe in his long piece essay that there were these rules of the game that both the United States and the Russians had adhered to in order to maintain a measure of stability in the otherwise hazardous relationship the ironical thing here is that Ball probably would have agreed with Gaddis because Ball tended to disagree with quite a few things that he himself had said which made writing about him that much more fun now these perspectives could be right simultaneously if partners also were adversaries we couldn't expect their partnership to be smooth or always consistent they had a rocky marriage where they could not live with each other but they couldn't live without each other either and I think that helps paint a more realistic view of Cold War strategic relations and the cardboard cutout varieties we see in so much of the modern discussion either this kind of notion of unrelenting competition or this kind of sort of we look back with sort of rose-tinted spectacles at this great period of stability forgetting that some of the crises that were survived in the Cold War could have gone very bad and therefore that makes it quite important to lay out I think some of the factors that made for an adverse partnership in the Cold War and I think there are five of these and one of these has been touched on already but I want to take a slightly different take or not the first of these is that for a 2016 audience and it's already been noted that the first thing that doesn't come to mind about US-Soviet partnership is the strength of their economic relationship we might think that containment was possible because they were members of separate economic systems and that argument has been used to say why containment by the US of China is impossible I'm not sure that I agree with that comparison but things were more complex you know there was at least some economic exchange including things like wheat wheat sales something that Marshall Shulman who Coral Bill borrowed her adverse partnership from her idea from his idea from was talking about in the early 70s but it would still be rather odd for us to think that the Russians and Americans at a time of crisis could fall back on their economic relationship which was not particularly close so the Cold War adverse partnership was based much more on restraint in the political military arena and that brings to mind a second important factor that partnership to use the sort of terminology that Schilling would adopt was as much tacit and informal as it was explicit sorry tacit and informal as it was explicit informal now there were latter cases of a latter the ABM treaty that I've already mentioned obvious measures such as such as incidents at sea arrangements but as Hedley Bull argued these should be seen as symbols of an underlying and mainly informal understanding between East and West most of the restraint was unilateral and involved tacit signalling as opposed to formal negotiation that that that tacit signalling mattered a great deal Coral Bell asserted and I'm quoting here the basic instrument of crisis management is what I shall call the signal by signal I mean a threat or offer communicated to the other party or parties to the crisis such signals she added are not necessarily verbal messages some of the sharpest and most effective of them are movements of military resources of various sorts a third factor is that these threats of force and other signals were used to sustain the central agreement that the parties relied upon this was the informal agreement to avoid actual major hostilities there might have been a tacit understanding to deflect the competition into other areas you know proxy wars competition for allies the arms race itself the crucial point though is that so much of the conflict management that occurred came not from carefully calibrated exchanges of actual violence it was conflict management through coercion and the management of coercive diplomacy itself a fourth a fourth issues or factor stems from that the incredibly high stakes of the game you know shelling talked about mutual deterrence is the exchange of all possible hostages and lorry talked about you know why do we not think a bit more about the consequences of nuclear use today and it was this high stakes game was being played during the Cuban missile crisis as well and and when I think both sides stated that crisis and at the brink of the apocalypse the arguments of shelling and bull and others really gained wings they really gained momentum it meant that the fostering of an adverse partnership was not desirable it had become essential a fifth factor also has to be mentioned how dependent others were on the adverse partnership that the two great nuclear powers were willing and able to strike the adverse partnership was an agreement between the elite powers and it meant a willingness to subordinate the interests of even close allies if these got in the way the two main powers remained in a kind of an oligopolistic or more specifically duopolistic situation although in Asia with China's emergence more of a triangle began to emerge now an obvious question and this is what I want to move on to the last part of the talk is whether this formulation has continued relevance my answer is yes but only to a point and I want to explain that with reference to to the case that's already been discussed in the last very interesting session the relationship between the United States and China how that relationship evolves what it means for Asia's security and what that then means for Australia will I think be the most important set of connected questions for many of the next 50 years of the strategic and defense study centre so it's no idle consideration now on the first of these factors I don't have to remind you of the significant economic relations that exist between the US and China and that gives them a common commercial interest that the Americans and the Russians largely lacked but that itself may be something of an accident of history it's a as much a consequence of a decision made by Deng Xiaoping and his successes for China to engage the global economy and of the activities of it of self-interested American private enterprises as it might be seen as a deliberately choreographed situation and as we've heard already this interdependence is not a is not the guarantee of commitment to active conflict management that some of us that some may want want us to think as for the second factor we don't actually see a great deal in the way of formal conflict management at least not in the direct US-China relationship the two sides do meet regularly in the US-China economic and strategic dialogue they work together in formal responses to the security challenges involving third parties so the the involvement in the in the in the nuclear agreement with Iran their ability occasionally to vote for the same Security Council resolution on North Korea once it's been watered down enough but beyond that what can we really say but we should actually be thankful that an adverse partnership doesn't have to have you know counting rules or China's involvement and whatever will become of start it'll be nice but it's not absolutely necessary it does not necessarily require an Asian version of the CFE treaty conventional forces in Europe nor does it require something almost impossible the East Asia summit becoming you know really institutionally you know structured and robust it's in their informal collaboration that hopes for US-China a US-China adverse partnership are more likely to lie and why think it can be said that Washington and Beijing seem to recognize they have a common interest to use one example in not allowing their South China Sea grandstanding to escalate to war they seem to recognize a common interest in avoiding war in the East China Sea and in ensuring through compact compatible unilateral signaling that Tokyo does not push either of them too far in that direction but I'm still a bit unconvinced about how far this informal understanding really goes nonetheless the third factor also seems to be met this is a mutual commitment to use coercion rather than war itself as a way of managing the conflict and indeed as a way of avoiding severe escalation to war while there has been no major power war in Asia for decades evidence of threats of force are not at all difficult to find in the last few years as we know the United States alongside its allies Japan and Australia have accused China on multiple occasions of using coercion to seek to change the maritime status quo in East Asia both in the South and in the East China Seas now whatever the merits of these criticisms it must be accepted that Washington cannot and does not accuse Beijing of using violent force including actual hostilities to achieve its foreign policy objectives it's not yet a sometimes overlooked fact is Washington's reliance on coercion to achieve its strategic objectives in Asia including perhaps the protection of what Washington sees as the status quo that coercion includes America's freedom of navigation patrols its extended deterrence commitments to key regional allies and the strengthening of its defense cooperation with South Korea to stall a greater challenge from North Korea that coercion also includes America's direct deterrence of China now this coercion on the part of China in the US is not one of Hadley Bull's accidents of history its conscious activity designed to influence the expectations and behavior of the other side and to influence the expectation and behavior of others in the region like Australia like New Zealand etc like our Southeast Asian partners and further afield there is evidence to suggest that China and the United States wish to avoid war in their relationship there's also evidence that they can manage some of their coercion think of the cooperation that followed the downing of the EP EP three spy plane and think of the now reasonably regular management of some fairly hairy moments on the high seas but it is a bit less clear how well they are able to manage their coercive interactions in a properly heated bilateral crisis there's a nice piece by Avery Goldstein on on on crisis stability that I recommend to you one of the reasons for these concerns is connected to the fourth factor and I'm not I'm not long cool yeah the fourth the fourth factor the adverse partners had seen the abyss in the the abyss in the Cuban crisis I don't think that China and the US have seen that abyss now they're not as scared as we want them to be but they shouldn't be as you know we don't want them to be too scared but I do wonder if they see an adverse partnership as completely necessary in their relations and of course it matters to the rest of us the Indo-Pacific region as Australia likes to say the Asia Pacific region is as New Zealand continues to say that means a lot for us but what does our sense of the management of their conflict mean to them how what what opportunities do we do we have my final point is this I will wrap up the idea of an adverse partnership is relevant to me not just because we might be able to draw some parallels and non parallels between that Cold War competition and cooperation and the US-China competition and cooperation I think it can tell us a lot about what the meaning of our subject is it's something I think a lot about as I teach core course back in Wellington I don't have I sort of coming to a bit of a view on this I think what an adverse partnership reminds us about strategic studies is that at its heart at the heart of the adverse partnership and at the heart of strategic studies or the heart of strategy to me is the management of conflict not just the management of war which is a subset of conflict not the mere study of conflict because as Bernard Brody once said strategy is a theory of action not just the pursuit of ends through available means because to manage conflict is is is to have a deliberate influence on other actors in our interactions with them and therefore strategy is much more than the resort to conflict and even the resort to threats of conflict strategy is the conscious regulation of of conflict as a fact of international life and that occurs whether we're in a hot war in a cold war or somewhere in between so thank you for your patience thanks well thanks very much thanks to Brendan for inviting me into the center for inviting me for this great occasion I also wanted to thank Jasmine Henkel and the administrative staff who've done a really great job hurting academics from around the world into one location and everything seems to be running so smoothly so I want to take a chance to thank them tremendous honor for me to speak here today to speak on the subject of alliances after the Cold War can't think of a better location than Canberra and Australia and talk about these things because from an American perspective there's no better ally in the world than Australia and there's very few bilateral relationships if any that are more important for the subjects that I'm going to talk about today in terms of US power and the rise of China in Asia I could talk about alliances more generally like the topic title suggests but I want to focus on East Asia and the challenges to stability posed by the rise of China and how alliances and security partnerships in my opinion are a key element of the proper solution to those challenges so that we can maintain peace and security in the region to the benefit of all not just for the United States its allies and its security partners but for China itself I think alliances are often ignored when people talk about the power shift in East Asia they talk about China's capacities in the region vis-a-vis American capacities but they don't take into account the tremendous advantages the United States has in its alliance system one of the many reasons that China is not going to be nearly as powerful as the United States anytime soon for decades to come is the very robust alliance system and the security partnerships that the United States shares enjoys around the world and globally the United States has some 60 plus allies and I'll talk about security partnerships in a bit they provide great material power they provide intelligence they provide access to American forces they provide diplomatic support and I think they're what's often underappreciated is the network of alliances so that if you have to do operations in Afghanistan it's awfully useful to have access to Singapore if you're doing operations in the Middle East it's awfully useful to have the Navy in Yokoska and I think people miss that aspect of the network of American power around the world so that's the US picture now what about the Chinese picture well China has one ally North Korea it has some security partners if you want to use that term for China's relationship countries like Zimbabwe Sudan Pakistan a veritable rogues gallery of actors that add very little material power to China there are some Chinese scholars who would like China to reach out to more alliances and form alliances around the world but as I tell my students when they say there's a trade-off between arms and allies that that's the wrong way to look at it arms are something you can build at home alliances are more like dates you have to get the other side to agree to go on a date you can't just choose to go on a date and China has a hard time convincing lots of countries to become permanent security partners and China doesn't seem particularly inclined to be seeking formal alliances I don't consider Russia an ally of China so people want to ask about that later I can talk about why I don't I think Russia and China have been brought together artificially they're natural rail politic uh competitors but they've been brought together artificially by some of the diplomatic policies of my own country the United States and the European powers and I think that that's an unfortunate outcome I don't think it's a permanent outcome I think it's sad and ironic given what I've just said that one U.S. candidate on the presidential campaign trail who claims to make America great again is actually making destructive comments about alliances which is really the foundation of America's lead over any kind of rival competitor in the international system and is one of the greatest sources of American existing greatness and very destructive and irresponsible statements have been made in my opinion about that alliance system by that candidate so if we look at the Asia Pacific I think there's no region where alliances are more important than the Asia Pacific on the negative side I think China's dysfunctional relationship with the DPRK in North Korea is a source of instability in the region and also and this is often missed uh has huge opportunity costs because it prevents the creation of a true northeast Asian security mechanism that would involve the United States its allies and non-allies like Russia and China the existence of the North Korea problem has been the major force for preventing that sort of outcome which would be constructive on the positive side I think the alliance system and the strategic partnerships that the United States has is a great method to manage the obvious and predictable instabilities that are created by the rise of a new power in a region in this case it's China I think you have to add security partnerships to alliances because the United States has some pretty important ones in the region there's Taiwan a security partner in the United States Singapore which is cooperates with the United States on a level that exceeds most allies of the United States around the world New Zealand which with whom we had problems in the cold war but is a close partner in our relations are getting better and new potential partners are actual partners like Malaysia and Vietnam allies bring to the United States additional capabilities Japan has a tremendously sophisticated military infrastructure and is starting to become more assertive Australia already has a first class military and is investing in the Navy and I think appropriately in subsurface naval forces in the future which will be very relevant and some of the partners and alliances allies of the United States bring to bear capabilities that are actually more appropriate to various problems than American forces are when I think of maritime militias fishermen were really raised before carrier battle groups are probably not the most appropriate response to armed fishermen so we need to have smaller allies with coast guards who have awareness who can engage at appropriate levels and I think the United States can enjoys that and can enjoy more of it in the future the alliances are important because they bring to bear that extra military power they also bring to bear economic wherewithal presence intelligence and diplomatic knowledge on the ground in the area that American diplomats often don't enjoy themselves and I think in terms of the East Asia region in terms of China's strategy to counter the United States allies are very important and the depth and diversity of alliances is very important to the United States because my view is the Chinese strategy has been to raise costs to forward deployed US forces and their bases in the region and that's going to be more difficult to do if there are more places where the US can operate and at greater distances from China that strategy is going to become much more complicated if the US has more access in various places I think the deepening of relations with the Philippines was a big gain for the United States recently and I think that as I'll say in a moment I think China has lost a lot since 2008 in its own strategic portfolio by scoring own goals and and and alienating its neighbors I wouldn't say to the advantage of the United States because the US doesn't want to see an unstable East Asia but certainly not to the advantage of China and I'll return to that um improvements of US relations of Malaysian Vietnam are important the tightening of strategic cooperation among the regional allies without the US in the picture is important Japan and the Philippines are getting along more Australia and Japan are getting along more Vietnam and Japan are getting along more and on occasion and this really gets China's attention Japan and South Korea sometimes are cooperating on strategic issues and I can tell you from having spent a lot of time in China including in 2010 2011 nothing gets China's attention like Japan and South Korea getting along because they realize how difficult that is to arrange so I would say that the prospect of tightening alliances and expanding alliances and security partnerships for the United States has um a very positive effect potentially on Chinese assertiveness or aggression in East Asia the Chinese have long had what I would consider an inordinate fear of encirclement and containment by the United States and its allies that fear is not justified by reality I can say as a former policy person as well but it can be played upon in constructive ways the recent deepening of relations between the United States and its regional partners and the deepening of relations among those partners themselves has certainly been noticed in Beijing and if I were a Chinese strategist advising my own government I would say we sir are in a much worse position than we were in 2008 regardless of the artificial islands regardless of the assertiveness in the South China Sea and regardless of the ongoing military modernization we have created partnerships and relationships that are not going to work towards our long-term advantage and we should return to the very successful strategy of 1997 to 2008 of reassuring our neighbors and keeping them from becoming too close to the United States which is their general tendency anyway not to be too close to the United States if that strategy of holding out that prospect of encirclement is accompanied by moderate policies that avoid unnecessarily provoking China and creating a nationalist backlash in China this should give China pause about taking actions such as using their new artificial islands as offensive launching pads against the current holdings of other disputants in the South China Sea all things being equal it should be a deterrent against that kind of Chinese strategy and I would say that the long the the increasing U.S. relationships in East Asia are not only a long-term force multiplier for the United States but in that sense they're also a short-term deterrent asset for the United States because the prospect of those relationships deepening and more of them being formed should give China pause before it takes aggressive actions in the future it can also feed it usefully into domestic debates in China in ways that are often missed I think in academia and that is that there are moderate views in China and there are hawkish views in China as Evelyn laid out so well before and when the hawkish views fail when they're implemented when China is very assertive and it leads to these new relationships people notice and what that actually does within the Chinese system is it empowers more moderate views who are able to say I have a better solution to our security problems than the ones we've been following for the last few years and we've seen this in the past in my book the China challenge I try to outline where we've seen this in the post Cold War world no better example the nai initiative of the middle 90s was cited by the architects of China's outreach to Southeast Asia as a major catalyst for China to actually accept the arguments that they were already making within the system to reach out and reassure China's neighbors the idea that China could be encircled by a more assertive U.S. alliance policy in East Asia got traction and those people say we have a way to prevent that we'll improve relations with our neighbors we'll stabilize the region and everybody arguably benefited from this because the U.S.-China relationship is not a zero-sum game the U.S.-China relationship is not a zero-sum game the U.S.-China relationship is not a zero-sum game so when China actually behaves constructively towards its neighbors we should congratulate it and we should realize that that would be for the benefit of all of us and we should encourage China to go down that road in 2010 North Korea was obnoxious even by North Korean standards by attacking South Korea twice China basically initially played defense lawyer for North Korea saying everybody stay calm nobody should overreact to all this the United States the Japanese the Australians the South Koreans everybody was upset and eventually China came around and I was living in China at the time on sabbatical leaf in large part I think because not only did the United States tighten its relationship with Japan and South Korea but Japan and South Korea started to tighten their relations with each other and China started to see that its dysfunctional relationship with North Korea was running against its long-term regional strategy I think that happened to a lesser degree recently when China pressured North Korea through the UN Security Council resolution process and if Victor Chah's recent research is right China has actually started to pressure North Korea economically in a serious way for the first time since about 2006 2007 and I think the increased cooperation between the United States and the ROK particularly on the theater high altitude air defense system got China's attention about the costs again of its dysfunctional relationship with North Korea and led to an adjustment not a total change but an adjustment in China's strategy towards the North so these lessons I think hold out hope that we can manage the East China Sea and the South China Sea issues from a position of strength and that alliances and security partnerships can be a big part of that now I'm going to finish my my talk today by saying something about my own country that some people might not like from my own country and that is that the reliance of the United States on alliances and security partners has a stabilizing effect in East Asia for another reason and that is that the fact that we rely on allies and security partners in East Asia keeps us away from our worst demons we have a lot of wacky strategic ideas in the United States about how we should handle China and the fact that we rely on allies and and security partners in East Asia who know better and we would alienate them if we were to adopt any of these wacky ideas is a should be a major restraint I hope it will continue to be should be a major restraint on the actual adoption of those wacky ideas one of those ideas is John Mirschheimer's idea that we should treat China like we did the Soviet Union and we should have sweeping economic closure to China in the name of power because China is closing the power gap therefore we can stop that process by stopping China's economic growth but the great irony would be that we would lose all those allies which is such a major US advantage over China because those allies have very robust economic relationships with China and would not want to lose those relationships so we would actually weaken the US position severely if we were to adopt John Mirschheimer's position he's not alone in that he's just the most famous advocate of it globalization to get to to Amy's excellent presentation today globalization is different now than it was before world war one there's transnational production chains that involve US allies and China and the United States in ways that should be a deterrent against Chinese aggression but should also be a deterrent against US stupidity and I think that that's a major stabilizing factor that is often missed when people study the structural shift that's happening in East Asia today um a second thing that you hear in the United States is that globalization is hurting American workers and the trade is bad for the United States once again I'll cite one of our presidential candidates who has been pushing this there was another presidential candidate Bernie Sanders so we have Donald Trump and Bernie Sanders basically on the same page that we should level massive tariffs against China one would hope one would hope that the alliance damage that would be done by such a policy because Korean businesses and Japanese businesses and Australian businesses would all be hurt by the huge damage done to China not let alone the retaliation that would come out of China if that were adopted so so one would hope that that would be enough but again there seems to be an ambivalence about alliances as well and fortunately the last piece of American strength that makes the United States stronger than a lot of powers around the world is safe immigration oh oh immigration is not safe either um so anyway obviously I'm quite concerned about the presidential campaign but all things being equal that should be that should be a force for moderation siding explicitly with the various disputants in the south China sea for the United States would be a mistake and if we were to do it we would alienate lots of regional actors potential partners and there are some who would like us to do that siding with Taiwan independence which is a perennial in american domestic politics there are democracy we should support them no matter what they do would alienate lots of existing us allies and would alienate lots of non-allied partners in east asia many of whom actually have beijing's one china principle not the more ambiguous us one china policy or australian one china policy they actually believe that taiwan is part of china which is the prc that includes the ro k soul south korea that also includes taiwan and lots of so that would be a tremendous blow not only for the us china relationship in a destructive direction but a tremendous blow for the factors i've talked about today and then in the south china sea we can we can stay out of those disputes and still assert principles and support the international order and international law and i think there's a temptation always to say why don't we just side with one of the disputants on one of these rocks or shoals i think it's unnecessary it would be counterproductive and again the alliance system and the security partnerships should prevent us from going down that road and the one exception is really senkaku diayu and i think it's been held handled quite well senkaku diayu has a special history for the united states the united states transferred administrative control to japan as part of the okinawa reversion and the united states recognized japanese administrative control although not sovereignty and as such the alliance applies and i think since it does it was good for the president to say that in tokyo um and i should have a deterrent effect and at the same time according to all public reports the united states has tried to dissuade japan from poking china in the eye unnecessarily on the island disputes and that's also smart and you end up with a relatively balanced situation so i think the alliance system and the alliance system and the security partnerships that the united states has handles both sides of what is uh successful course of diplomacy course of diplomacy has two elements one is a credible threat and the other is a credible assurance to the other side that if it doesn't misbehave in destabilizing ways that it won't be punished and have its lunch taken anyway and i think the uh the alliances and security partnerships give the united states the power the capacity the access necessary to have a credible intervention threat if china were to become very belligerent in east asia we need to maintain that and at the same time those alliance relationships those alliance part those security partnerships that the united states enjoys have a sobering and moderating effect on american strategy towards the region that makes the assurances that the united states is not trying to harm china every day in every way credible and believable so i think it is a major force for stability i think it's underestimated when people look at g2 or new type great power relations and i think that's one of the major reasons why the chinese raise things like new power new type great power relations because they know it drives us allies and security partners crazy when we agree to that terminology um and i think it's a mistake to go down that road so i've spoken for too long they let academics into the government but we're still academics so i still blather on forever um but i'll stop now and uh i look forward to your questions later and i'll turn it over to nikola um well i just like to say start first of all by saying thank you big thank you to the center to a new tip in particular to a but also obviously brendan and jasmine for inviting me to um this conference i've been here all week and it's been a fantastic week so thank you very much um i've been asked to talk about post-cold war uh nuclear strategy which is a bit of a beast of a subject really and so what i'm going to try and do is probably a little bit ambitious but i want to uh focus on um um kind of big thinking about um the cold war post-cold war period rather than a specific thing um and i my starting point is to push back a little bit at this kind of um discourse that has come about and has become popular of talking about hangovers and you know the persistence of a cold war mentality and way of thinking about nuclear weapons you know from the cold war into the cold post-cold war period i'm not saying that doesn't exist and that that is a problem but in this paper what i want to do is suggest that there might be more distinctive aspects of the post-cold war period that have been shaping uh nuclear strategy um and in particular i want to actually give a sense of the conditions um since 1990 um under which nuclear nuclear strategy has developed in particular the ideas and the events that have shaped our thinking and if there is time i would like to talk a little bit about also the challenges we face in um our study of uh post-cold war nuclear strategy now the first kind of big thing that i came across when i started writing this paper was the term post-cold war um it's a very difficult term i find um it's very clunky it's uh it implies this kind of you know everlasting um never-ending uh monolithic period that is forever rooted in in the cold war and that in itself is is is a problem is a hangover as well um so the whole point and this is why i went for this kind of long view in in the paper was to kind of chop up and start to unpack that period a little bit start to discriminate between different um events and so forth in the post-cold war period so i start with a very specific time period in mind which is from 1990 to 1997 and um in this first immediate post-cold war period my big argument is that nuclear strategy isn't the big deal it it's not in the spotlight because obviously at the end of the cold war some major events as we all know i didn't experience it directly but um the the end of the soviet union of course and the dispersal of the soviet nuclear arsenal and the many problems that that presented meant that the immediate focus was of course on safety and security issues and and rightly so um and that meant very much that um you know in the united states they started to talk about not mutual short destruction the condition of the relationship that existed between the united states and the soviet union the cold war but mutual short safety that became some of the language they used that really i think highlighted the kind of deprioritization of strategy early on in the post-cold war period um and that also this this push towards safety and security the loose nukes problem and how to deal with that gave impetus and momentum for what eventually became in the 1990s a very important period for arms control and amplification again i don't want to give a long list but you know among these important um uh developments was of course um the npt the non-proliferation treaty getting indefinite extension um china who i the country i work on more um signing up to a whole host of important treaties too and and the list list goes on so so really this first period is not about strategy actually however um there are some important things that happen um in in this 1990 to 1997 period um and one of the things um that happens and i guess shape somewhat what are the possibilities for nuclear strategy after the end of the cold war the first is the 1999 1991 persian gulf war perhaps more important than the end of the cold war for a number of nuclear weapon states as i'm going to highlight later um the persian gulf war um lauritz freeman mentioned in his uh in his uh keynote address um kind of heralded this new age right of revolution military affairs but also it displayed to certain countries like china the the awesome power um of the united states um and its capabilities uh the potential role for missile defense is becoming increasingly real um and and and so forth and then another event that was important was the 1995 1996 taiwan straight straights crisis again it re-emphasized the the kind of awesomeness of um um in in some respects to china at least of and u.s dominance um as um a military power so these were two events that i think they they're within this early cold war post-cold war period but they later actually inform how we think about strategy in certain countries a third development that indirectly uh comes in this period is an intellectual one as a discipline um vipin narang who who wrote a book recently about regional um powers and then nuclear strategies um he highlights when he talks a lot about the hangover thesis he highlights what what he um and others have talked about as an existential deterrence bias in our intellectual discussions around nuclear strategy it kind of started to emerge around the late 1980s and the early 1990s and basically the existential deterrence uh bias is all about saying that strategy and posture doesn't matter uh just having a couple of bombs is enough to to deter and in effect what this does is it intellectually frustrates discussions about strategy so what i'm trying to communicate here is that in this early period 1990 to 1997 strategy faces a lot of challenges in terms of its development you know moving beyond the cold war so the next part of the paper which is the big part of the paper is to suggest that we do have a radical return for nuclear strategy um in a world of of course many many nuclear powers now um again i don't need to give loads of examples of what happens you know in the late 1990s and early 2000 south um south korea india and pakistan test nuclear weapons um the north korea is very clearly on the nuclear path um iran and and and other countries and of course there's iraq war so there's a lot of bad news um on the on the nuclear front in in this period but sorry there are also broader broader shifts in the global order during this period the late 1990s early 2000s that actually i feel have um important um but less well known um implications for the possibilities for formulating nuclear strategy i'm going to talk about two the first is the rise of regions in world politics and the fact that they become the international politics really becomes one of regional centers of power and what this means for nuclear weapons and how we think about nuclear weapons is i'm going to borrow a term that andrew hurrell from oxford uses is we start to have regional forms of nuclear order prior to that we'd had more global forms of nuclear order and what what what does this mean for nuclear strategy it doesn't seem immediately obvious when you might think oh regional forms of nuclear order might be institutions in asia that deal with nuclear weapons or ideas around nuclear weapons are particular to to a region what i what i understand and how i use it in this paper is i'm suggesting that particular reasons let's take asia um have particular developments particular nuclear challenges particular nuclear approaches to how to deal with those challenges let's take asia north korea six-party talks and and other ways of of dealing with that problem or the fact that asia is defined by um a very intense um um missile defense activity all these things shape the nuclear strats strategies um of the countries in that region or involved in that region so what i'm trying to say is that the regional lens for understanding of the developing nuclear strategy become ever more important in the post-cold war period and this becomes increasingly evident um um since the um early 2000s so that's the first development um the second is perhaps one which is which is easier to accept perhaps and a little more obvious one is the increasing is the um role of um rogue actors so north korea uh non-state actors um such as al qaeda and the pressures that these developments put on nuclear strategy because these actors are considered not to be rational so how can you deter these kind of these kind of actors and it's not just that they're not rational or at least they're perceived not to be rational but that outside of global nuclear order and of course that in itself is not unique to the to the to the to the post-cold war period because china for many years during the post during the cold war was outside of global nuclear issues but now the numbers are huge india pakistan north korea they are all outside north korea obviously leaves the npt in 2003 so this problem multiplies that we had um in in in the cold war so those are two particular pressures now in this environment of these particular pressures um i'm arguing that in the post-cold war particularly around the early to mid 2000s we see a rallying call for the for for an urgent new task for building strategy and the and the task is to uh to pursue and attain credibility credibility becomes the new big thing for nuclear strategy um in the early to mid 2000s and it it's not a problem for the united states the united states doesn't need to pursue credibility um it has dominance um and um it's it's it's strategy is really focused around preserving that in many respects but for all other nuclear weapons states it's all about the new task is where where is our basis for credibility in the post-cold war era so they all want this um credibility and they all go about it for different reasons with different results so let me first talk about obviously i'll start with the easy ones india and pakistan new nuclear weapons states they have to develop a nuclear strategy so they have a very good reason to want to see credibility china though china's been a been a nuclear weapons state for a very long time tested in 1964 but it's taken an incredibly long time and in my my recent book one of the the arguments i make is that china is an incredibly slow nuclear actor and so it's really not until um well i'm in the book it's not until the 1980s china has a nuclear strategy but it's really not until the 1990s when um modernization starts to kind of start in in china that china can start to think about um being a credible nuclear weapons state and how it can communicate that so china has this urgency too um israel um has an urgency particularly after the 1999 1991 persian gulf war it starts to think about it wants to have a more independent strategy with less reliance on the united states for instance russia huge impetus for credibility um if you look at what it decides to do it it abandons no first use in 1993 it starts to increase its reliance on nuclear weapons throughout the 1990s and into the 2000s up until today um and that was because russia was was very much a weakened nuclear actor at the end of the cold war so they all had different reasons basically for for seeking credibility and as a result what we see is um in the in the late uh 2000s we see different types of postures coming about postures in order to seek credit credibility and and roughly um the reason i'm kind of trying to pull it apart is because often when we talk about post cold war nuclear strategy we talk a lot about lowering the the reliance on nuclear weapons but that's only one part of the story um and in fact it kind of i think is misleading um the that it's true that on the one hand china and india for instance like to make the case for pursuing a particular posture built around retaliation restraint right so for instance they have small nuclear arsenals they're de-alerted so they're not ready to go in 15 minutes for instance um they're mobile in order to keep them survivable and protected they're uncertain over the amount of numbers they have the types of weapons they have and where they're located but it's overall a restrained um a restrained posture which is to suggest that they have less reliance on nuclear weapons in their overall overall strategy but the big point about this you know it doesn't matter whether you buy that argument or not whether they're restrained or not is that they both were very desperate india and and china to communicate that their nuclear weapon strategy would be fundamentally different to that that had preceded them in the cold war with superpowers it was a politics of of of differentiation differentiation now the united kingdom's nuclear strategy of which i'm not an expert but certainly there wasn't that much variation really between the cold war and the post-cold war but where there was important variation and where the uk is is a leader is that it has reduced the number of nuclear weapons that it has quite drastically in the post-cold war period so like china and india its overall posture is about reducing the reliance on nuclear weapons so as i say there is this story out there and it is a legitimate story to argue about nuclear weapon strutting the post-cold war era as being one of reducing the reliance on nuclear weapons however there is also a rather negative story to be told about russia france and pakistan of course all nuclear weapons states too and they have increased in many respects perhaps france not so much but they have increased their reliance on on on on nuclear weapons so that there's so basically i want to kind of be a bit fairer to the way that that nuclear strategy has evolved in terms of reliance and and over reliance on nuclear weapons another problem that we find during around this period and it's not a problem that i identified myself but brad robert's identified in his recent very good book on us nuclear weapons strategy is that in this environment of the post-cold war era where everybody's looking you know for credibility and so forth the relationships between these countries these nuclear armed countries is very much starting from a clean state in the sense that there aren't any nuclear legacies between these countries so often we talk of you know the united states and the soviet union you know they had a bit like robert eisen mentioned you know they had these talks and and you know there was a hotline between united states and and the soviet union and so forth there's nothing like that between china and and the united states nothing like that between china and india or india and pakistan so there isn't a relevance here of nuclear legacies in the post-cold war nuclear dynamic and of course why does this matter i mean it would seem obvious why it doesn't matter i mean it would seem that having dialogue is a good thing but because credibility is so crucial in this period and and and therefore communication is also crucial too and if you do not have a nuclear legacy or a base in which you can have dialogues and so forth it's very difficult to communicate so it becomes harder that's what i'm trying to say it becomes harder for countries to have credible nuclear strategies in in in in this period and then i kind of end um in our kind of more recent period and i try to suggest that there are some particular challenges to nuclear weapons strategies in the more in more recent years the first of these is probably one that is well known to everybody and it's this idea of the nuclear weapons free world but also the praga gender that president obama has put forward of course there are different things but the overall drive is to reduce the reliance on nuclear weapons and also things like the humanitarian impact of nuclear weapons which is is is still ongoing but it's it's a largely NGO driven but also certain countries in the world have driven this initiative and all these things what they've tried to do in in some respects some more than others as i say the praga gender is probably not half as radical as the others um is is is trying to um delegitimize um deterrents actually and they can be can be viewed as part of an abolitionist um aim for that's you know long-standing well beyond uh the post-cold war period and so what i look at in this in this in this um kind of uh late 2000s period is how successful this is this kind of climate has been in shaping nuclear strategy and my view is that it hasn't been that successful deterrence despite being under attack in this period remains still very much very much um very very relevant still and in fact deterrence although i don't trace deterrence particularly in this paper um deterrence has been under so many attacks and Lawrence Freeman's in the room so he knows deterrence better than anyone deterrence has been under such intense uh attack over so many years i think deterrence or at least the proponents and and supporters of deterrence have become very good at defending it anyway um so deterrence doesn't doesn't um it doesn't it isn't dented by this period but there is a second development in this period that i think is more worrying um and more worrying not necessarily for deterrence but but where it fits in and this relates to a term which i don't particularly like but for one of a better term and it's cross-domain deterrence it's the idea of having deterrence in all sorts of domains nuclear cyber space but also much many more other um many more other uh domains so in the UK they've used this term for spectrum deterrence which kind of brings in what Amy Amy King was talking about includes you know economic statecraft and the use of sanctions diplomacy and and everything else so it can be a very big um uh can be many multiple uh domains and it's unclear where nuclear weapons strategy fits in um in in this um in this um in this type of of deterrence in particular i think it's relevant for China which is as i say a country i study the most China has been writing military writings in China have been consistently talking about you know integrated deterrence and viewing this as a real opportunity to have a much tougher nuclear strategy much tougher a more credible one than they've ever had before because of cross-domain deterrence because they can actually have a more offensive cyber and other arms and have a first use arm in these areas where they're limited in the nuclear domain i'm hopefully okay one minute then i'm gonna end with some of the challenges as a discipline and i started studying nuclear weapons issues in in 1999 at at at Aberystwyth University and so i've always followed um the the nuclear field and as a discipline with a lot of interest and i want to highlight um a couple of things that i think are important for thinking through challenges um and how we study it the first is that on the on the positive side nuclear strategies become much more global right um it was it was really difficult um you know before probably the early 19 or even throughout the 1990s defined book length treatments on Chinese Kazakh Brazilian you know nuclear history and strategy and those things are changing now we have country specialists in particular coming over to the nuclear field and doing some really important work largely that's because of archives opening up uh but also i think um it's because these are real gaps that we have in understanding um strategies um and also the role of his of historians i mean historians are still very important um in the study of nuclear strategy uh and of course nuclear history so that's a very positive thing it's become more global our understanding of nuclear strategy uh we also have more tools for understanding strategies of things like open source satellite imagery digital remodeling these are all things that you know in the uk king's college london but in the united states at the monterey institute they do really good stuff and these are tools that can sharpen our intellectual and analytical um frameworks for thinking about nuclear nuclear strategy well there are some bad news okay there are some bad news and the big thing that worries me is my recent project which i look at nuclear ethics is the fact that we don't have um philosophers and theologians interested anymore in the ethical aspects of nuclear strategy it concerns me greatly um so part of my project at oxford um up until recently was to um to to look at um why we have this absence i would interview people like jeff matman henry shoo and the like and it really worries me that we have lost um their voice in in they ask questions that we don't tend to ask in international relations they have a particular framework and they will be very useful particularly for thinking through cross-domain deterrence they can ask questions about the civilian role and the role of combatants in cross-domain deterrence um they can talk about the the ethics around non-state actors in these new um regional um uh domains i'll end there well we've certainly had some interesting uh thoughts and we have a little bit of time for questions and the first person i can see is dr ewan graham i think we've got a microphone coming ewan thanks very much ewan graham from the loy institute um my questions for thomas christensen i'd like to ask you about three t's one of which ends in p but i'll reassure you it's not the donald it's the trans-pacific partnership yeah um the trans-pacific partnership and it puts me in mind of amy king's presentation earlier in terms of the linkage that's made between economics and security one very striking connection that has been made perhaps not um advisedly was the ash car to use the uh the metaphor of an aircraft carrier to describe the trans-pacific partnerships influence um regardless of that put that aside if the us doesn't get the tpp across the line i think the us is going to be in a very difficult spot having put credibility uh on the sustainably on the sustainability side of the equation i think really in question and it's that sustainability question far more so than the militarization part which dominates the private conversations among the allies in in southeast asia um that's t number one t number two you mentioned briefly thailand and taiwan um is thailand the dead man walking of the southeast asian alliance network um i say that partly in jess but partly not because it's noticeable by its absence um joe biden was in sydney yesterday gave a tough thumping speech on the um rude health of the alliance system mentioned all of them by name except one yeah um third t is taiwan which you mentioned very briefly but mainly as a risk and it occurs to me that the us could actually probably do a lot more imaginatively and creatively to bring um taiwan into the has been effectively air brushed out of the rebalance um and i think without having to um focus on the risk of encouraging the independence movement um taiwan i think has been obstructionist in in the south china sea partly because that space hasn't been created for it i think that's one reverse risk about not engaging taiwan um proactively so i just put those to you as two kind of semi ellipses within the alliance system is this on can people hear me it must be on them thanks for the excellent questions the tpp unfortunately has been treated as a major security strategy uh the first problem arose when the obama administration came into office i served in the bush administration the obama administration came into office and declared the pivot to asia as if we had been absent before um and uh said we had been absent because of the wars in iraq and afghanistan and they were back um and the tpp became the poster child of the economic branch of the pivot the tpp was created by four members of apek other than the united states in the previous administration's term in office uh the united states started negotiating the ppp i remember in 2008 when we decided to do that when i was at the state department um with the thesis that it would open up trade and investment throughout the region at a time that the doha round had run into trouble and uh would eventually make china jealous and china would then open up its own economy more so as to become a member and everybody would benefit so it was about as far from an aircraft carrier as you could get but unfortunately got caught up in the propaganda elements of american foreign policy during the obama administration became a quoted equated with security policy um and the one thing i would agree with with the whole picture is if it fails now not because of that not simply because of that rhetoric but if it fails now the u.s will lose credibility because we've asked a lot of different countries to do things they've never done before to meet the high standards of the tpp uh countries like japan on agriculture and it would be a shame if americans in their closed mindedness particularly in this election year were unable to see the tremendous damage to our prestige if we put all these countries out and have them solve all our domestic problems and then say never mind so i do worry about it as a security issue but through that backdoor analysis not because it was a great thing and i thought it was very unfortunate that when we finally got agreement president obama said if we don't write the rules the chinese will write the rules the chinese don't have a rulebook an alternative rulebook they're living by the old rules the tpp are a good set of new rules and we're trying to push it forward and we can't do it if it doesn't go through china's not going to write the rules they're just going to live by the old ones and we'll all be worse off for it um china doesn't have an alternative on thailand i think it's sad it has a lot to do with the domestic politics in thailand and domestic politics in the united states in that order because of the nature of domestic politics in thailand it's very difficult for american political leaders to talk about thailand in the same way that it did before all the coups and all the repression and that that's just unfortunate i think thailand remains an ally certainly china doesn't have an ally as useful as thailand and its side of the equation so if that's the weak link so be it i don't think taiwan i don't like the rebalance i don't like the pivot um we were in asia i always say you know how do i explain to my wife why i wasn't home for two years if we weren't involved in asia during the bush administration was i playing golf what was i doing um um uh the issue with taiwan i think more than american attention had a lot to do with the strategy of the previous administration in taiwan which was um uh to try to unravel some of the tension created by its predecessor that's the good part of the story uh the chan shui bien administration which i think did create unnecessary tensions and cross-strait relations and i said so and i was in the government but i think it went too far in the other direction thinking that a nice approach to china would solve taiwan security problems on its own and the united states doesn't give weapons to taiwan the united states doesn't force weapons on taiwan taiwan requests the weapons the united states reviews the requests and then we offer them but if taiwan isn't that interested in it strengthening its own defenses there's not all that much the united states can do about it um i think that a very militarily strong taiwan with a very moderate strategy towards the mainland is the right box in the two by two uh table it's hard to get that because those who believe in a moderate strategy of the mainland tend to underplay the defense piece and those who want to play up the defense piece now often poke the mainland in the eye unnecessarily so uh you're stuffed with what you get the um uh and and uh taiwan isn't so much a risk it's a vibrant democracy of 23 million people it's a by by by the mainland standards it's a chinese entity so it's a chinese democracy a vibrant chinese democracy of 23 million people and if china wants peaceful resolution the great strategic asset of taiwan is to keep it strong enough so it has to be peaceful resolution and if it's going to be peaceful resolution it's going to be have to be have to be a china that makes itself more attractive to taiwan and that kind of china even if it were militarily and economically stronger would be a china we could deal with so that's the great strategic value of a taiwan that is not forced to join the mainland against its will much more than it being a submarine tender or a launching point for power projection it's the opportunity that taiwan has to help uh further reform on the mainland reforms that would benefit china and benefit the world because again it's not a zero-sum game so there's my long answer to your excellent question okay then more questions yes down down the back there thanks hi thank you rod lion from aspy my question is actually to nikola and i'm sort of left wondering after your presentation where geopolitics fits in your scheme of things because it seems to me if i look at the future the bad news is not a shortage of philosophers the bad news is that geopolitics is pulling the pulling the world towards more intense nuclear competition and perhaps towards nuclear proliferation uh it's true that some of the some of the countries you describe have a condition of a nuclear clean slate but that just means they have their strategic slate to put in its place and the strategic slate between several of those countries is not cooperative it's not even sort of the um the sort of adversarial partnerships that that rob was talking about it's more conditions of enduring rivalries i would say uh and when you put alongside that the the current presidential campaign in the us and the apparent desertion of their allies by at least one of the major candidates aren't you just going to see a far greater risk of proliferation and nuclear competition and that's a bigger worry than nuclear philosophy chance yeah um i mean i wasn't trying to suggest that philosophers have the answers even though my husband's a philosopher um no i mean i wasn't trying to suggest that i just think it's it's a genuine loss for the for the discipline um and um i don't think they have an answer to your question in particular but i i actually agree with you and in the actual paper because i didn't have time i actually say in the section where i talk on the lack of nuclear legacies that these are replaced by geopolitical relationships so i i actually don't disagree with you um and of course um that's particularly relevant in the case of the united states and china and in india and pakistan and all those others but but but i think my point still stands and that's the that's not the point i was trying to make the point i was trying to make in the paper was that because these countries don't have nuclear legacies they don't have cold war nuclear relationships they don't have strategic they don't have the strategic nuclear strategic basis for talking through and communicating their nuclear strategies in the way that you know the united states and russia now do so i don't disagree with you but that slightly wasn't the point i was trying to make in the paper