 Well, Ellie, thanks for joining us for this year's ANU Crawford Leadership Forum, which, as you know, is the fifth one in this series in which we explore the theme of global realities and the implications for Australian domestic choices. This year, I guess, the global realities that are hitting us like a tornado of those associated with the United States' performance on the world stage. I mean, we used to the United States occasionally demonstrating its exceptionalism, but nonetheless being basically committed to the liberal world order that created after the Second World War. Maybe we could get used to the idea of the U.S. as moving back into the kind of isolationist mode that we're so familiar in the first part of the last century. But what we seem to be confronted with under the Trump administration is something brand new. I mean, what Robert Kagan has called the rogue superpower, a state which is simultaneously asserting itself very aggressively on the world stage, but in a way which is contemptuous and multilateral institutions and contemptuous, frankly, of alliance relationships. Is that an accurate characterization of where the United States is at, given your background there for the last 10 years and a member now of the U.S. Study Center? Yeah, I think it is, Gareth. What has struck me is that not only is the Trump administration not prepared to incur the costs necessary to buttress the international rules-based order that America helped to build, but that some of its very animating principles, you know, its transactionalism, its protectionism, its suspicion of multilateralism and of alliances, those principles run counter to the very international order that, as I said, it helped to set up. And I think that is a major departure from previous presidencies, really, in the post-1945 world. So this is a radical shift. This is a radical president. And it's a very uncertain geostrategic environment that we find ourselves in. Is it a permanent shift, or is there a chance that if the Trump administration is as short-lived as most of us hope it will be, that we will revert to some kind of normality, or is this a paradigm shift now, and the United States really has abdicated an awful lot of global authority and credibility? Yeah. I think it's too early to say my sense is, and this could be the triumph of hope over reality, that this is going to be a one-off as opposed to an enduring phenomenon on the American, in terms of the American body politic, that you will see a bit of a correction, certainly at the midterms, and then at the next election. But the problem is what damage will be wrought on the international stage in the meantime? As you say, the erosion of the American credibility, the credibility, structural credibility of its alliances, for example, the erosion of global norms, of international multilateral institutions. That damage is significant. And I suppose the risk, in terms of the American body politic, is while Americans don't normally vote on foreign and defence policy, as Trump continues to comport himself as he is on the international stage, to what extent will his beliefs in terms of foreign policy on trade, what extent will that permeate through the American body politic? That's a risk. Of course, what we have to be focusing on at this conference is the implications of all of this for Australian policy. I've described them for some time now as being less United States, more Asia and more self-reliance. What's your own take on how Australia ought to be conducting itself in response to this new dynamic? Not only America is sort of strange new abdication of authority, but also, obviously, the simultaneous rise of China, the assertion of space for itself strategic and otherwise in our own region. How do you see the implications of that as being for our international relations generally? Well, I think the good news for Australia is there's a lot of room to manoeuvre, a lot of scope here. A lot of states are as discombobulated as Australia is with what's happening in the world stage, the Trump administration's unpredictability, the rise of China, the revisionism of Russia, for example. And there is a lot of scope for Australia to strengthen its regional partnerships with countries such as South Korea, Japan, Indonesia and India, and I think also to strengthen partnerships more farther afield with European states and the United Kingdom. I think it's important for Australia to have an active multilateral agenda, not only in the region, to continue to work in and strengthen the East Asia Summit, APEC, cooperate with ASEAN and its institutions and then globally maintain its membership of the Human Rights Council, maintain its active involvement in the United Nations. It also has to, I think Australia has to continue to encourage America to play as a constructive role and being constructively engaged in the Asia Pacific as possible because there are large swathes of Washington, even this administration, which is trying to flesh out this free and open Indo-Pacific strategy at the moment. And there's scope for Australia to seek to flesh that out, work with them to flesh it out, to cooperate when we can. I think also it's important to acknowledge that the US alliance remains very important to Australia, but I do think also it's time for Australia to sort of step up and have a, start a national conversation about the cost of defence. While the alliance is important, this is a geostrategic environment where there's increased regional military modernisation, as we were talking about before, we have this sort of less certain alliance guarantee on the part of the United States, Australia has to start talking about how much it would cost to increase its defence spend. That's a national conversation we haven't had. It will require economic trade-offs, but I think we need to start having it. Well, that's essentially what I mean when I talk about more self-reliance because I think we do have to come to grips with that reality. Maybe we're simply never going to be able, because of the fact we're defending an entire continent, to deal with a really existential risk without support from our American, hopefully, allies. But there's an awful lot of other contingencies where we can arguably do a lot better than we have in terms of preparedness, and that is going to cost some money. So that's the political task, I think, to sell that, to no doubt still rather sceptical Australian public. One of the issues we're going to deal with, of course, is how to manage our relationship with China as well as the United States. And my perhaps naive instinct is that we've got to get away obviously from just this one-dimensional economic relationship, but my instinct is there's a lot of possibility for working with China on this broader multilateral agenda to which you've referred, the pursuit of global and regional public goods. I mean, China has played itself into that space rather well on climate change. Maybe there was an element of cynical opportunism there in picking up the ball when America dropped it, maybe also on trade policy. But my instinct is that China's not to be regarded wholly cynically at all when it talks about being a responsible stakeholder in the wider international order. It just wants to be a player in that order, a rulemaker, if you like, rather than a rule taker. What's your perception of how we should approach China? Well, I think we have to realise that China is rising economically and it wants to sort of shape the global environment, strategic environment, which it finds itself, and it wants to shape the rules-based order. And what is interesting to me and important, I think, is to acknowledge that the rules-based order isn't static, it can evolve. And where there is scope for accommodation of China within that rules-based order, I think that should occur. And a great place for that to happen is in the multilateral domain in areas such as climate change, disaster relief, for example, disarmament. I think there's great scope to work with China there, because naturally they want to comport themselves as a global power as they are, and there's scope to work with them in that regard. At the same time, I suppose we have to come to grips with the reality of Chinese assertiveness in the region, in particular, we've seen it in the South China Sea, which is a bit troubling because that does involve a degree of distaste on Chinese part for a rules-based order, tearing up of the Law and the Sea Convention adjudication. It also implies a little bit of a Chinese enthusiasm for that hegemonic reach into Southeast Asia, treating the countries of the region as, if not wholly owned subsidiaries, certainly as appropriately tributary states, Kowtowing and so on, as they have done in the times past. How do you think we should react to that in the South China Sea in particular? I've perhaps surprisingly been a little bit of an enthusiast for these freedom and navigation operations, not as a tale in Charlie on the back of a United States convoy, but perhaps in association with Indonesia or Vietnam or other regional players. What are the risks associated in that kind of stance and what are the rewards in being just a little bit more firm in making clear our unhappiness with that push? I think the risks are that China seeks to make their displeasure known in ways which are not palatable to Australia. The rewards are that if we work with other states in the region and we caulk with them and work out what they're prepared to do, that we'll discover that there is a lot of appetite for pushing back on China's encroachment into the South China Sea. And there is a lot of appetite in the region to stand up to it, I think, and to enforce what many have thought are important norms and rules of the road, such as freedom of navigation. So to my mind, the presence operations that we've done for many years and we should continue to do, freedom of navigation operations, it's very interesting to see whether Trump administration is going to take those. I mean, my concern is that there's been such a focus on North Korea and trade and they've really seen the region through that prism, I'm not sure where they're going to take the South China Sea issue. And I think that the Obama administration probably as well as the Trump administration took their eye off the ball a bit and it's something which we are where we are because of that. Well, Ellie, we've got a hell of a lot to talk about on this purely international front over the next couple of days of this Crawford Conference. We've got a hell of a lot to talk about the implications of these new international dynamics for domestic Australian policy. We've barely even scratched the surface of economic policy, but of course the Trump trade war and the other assertiveness is going to have implications for Australian wages, jobs, growth issues as well as a multitude of other domestic policy issues which we'll be talking about. But it's terrific to have you join us at this conference with the best and the brightest of the Australian policy making community from the public sector, from business and from the academics and think tanks. So thanks very much for joining us this year and I think we're going to have a fascinating forum. Thanks, Garret. I'm looking forward to the next few days. Thank you.