 Critical moment. I am so touched that so many people have come out and above all so honored that President Robinson is here with us the Ireland's great Human Rights Trailblazer. I asked how I should what the honorific was that I should use with Mary Robinson and you know was it president or commissioner, you know Mary that was the answer of Mary's. So thank you, Mary and and thanks to Jill Donahue for her persistence and for Barry Andrews and to both of them really for their amazing leadership of this Institute, which takes on ever more importance in a time of polarization, which I will talk about in a time of fake news at a time when the ground beneath our feet around facts and science seems to be shifting in pockets, but ever-expanding pockets, I think arguably in an ever-expanding number of countries institutions like this one that seek to ground policy in analysis and rigor become ever more important. When I got on the plane in Boston last night and we headed over the Atlantic in the quiet dimmed cabin of Erlingus it hit me about just how monumental the last few days in the United States have been. We had an incredibly contentious and expensive mid-term election breaking all records and of course an election that has huge consequences for the United States, but also potentially has very important knock-on consequences for the world, which I will talk about. A few key races are being contested at this very minute. The President has already fired his Attorney General throwing the federal investigation into ties to Russia into potential danger. He's also, I gather, threatened to shut down government if Democrats follow through on the pledges that some made to use their perch now in control of critical committees in the House of Representatives to investigate corruption in his administration. A key meeting between the North Korean and American teams negotiating over, hopefully, some version of denuclearization was canceled amid mutual familiar recriminations. All of this, and it's only Thursday, Democrats gained control of seven state-level legislatures by flipping a total of 367 seats from red to blue. Democrats gained seven governorships. This is huge. And I should note that one of the unanswered questions about the Obama years, which I was happily a part of, is how it was that the Democrats slipped so much across the country in terms of controls of state legislatures in terms of control of governorships. But we're just now in the process of clawing back, and this Tuesday election was huge in that regard. And it included really important wins for governorships in places like Wisconsin and Kansas, really difficult wins, in fact. So if I were President Trump, and it's no secret, I'm not, I would view the election as a warning, and that's not how he processes information. It appears. But remember, again, 2016, the election was won by 78,000 votes. I mean, think about it, with a country of 330 million people in the states, 78,000 votes spread across three states, Michigan, Wisconsin, and Pennsylvania. Those were the three states that Secretary Clinton had expected to win, that were lost. And on Tuesday, Democrats swept every race in these states for Senate and for governor. Shoring up President Trump's base in those states will be, for him now, priority one, as he looks, as he inevitably does, to 2020, most specifically and most importantly, the war in Yemen. Many Democrats are eager to do more than the Trump administration has done so far in responding to the murder of Jamal Khashoggi. And they may advance legislation that would halt arms sales to the Saudi government. This, by the way, raises questions about Europe, the United Kingdom and France, and what the posture will be. In the old days, when the United States, namely until January 20, 2017, when the United States, whether under Republican or Democratic administration, would have been contemplating a move like that, which would have been a rare thing in its own right to contemplate. But what you would seek to do is to multilateralize that move and sort of eliminate the prisoner's dilemma and get a bunch of countries to jump together so that the effect is greater. And then you use your leverage to try to secure the outcome that you seek, which in that case, of course, is complex. But beyond the gruesome and outrageous state-sponsored Khashoggi killing, I think the most urgent action you are likely to see is a long overdue, much more forceful and much more effective push to end U.S. support for the Saudi and Emirati war in Yemen. So what I think you can expect is some version of a bill that basically prevents the United States from providing aid, intelligence, and refueling to the Saudi-led coalition. This is support. I should stress that we in the Obama administration should have revoked long before we left office. And that's something I think that all of us have very significant regret about. Maybe in the discussion we can talk about the logic of that, which few at this point can understand. There is a bipartisan coalition for the bill along the lines of what I'm describing in the Senate. Rand Paul and Mike Lee and others have pushed actually something like this. So this is a rare issue where there's at least some bipartisanship. What is not clear is whether you could muster the votes in order to overcome a veto. So you'd need a veto-proof majority and that will be hard to come by. But again, the idea that now there'd be a body that can put issues like this on the agenda and force people to take really difficult votes, juxtapose those votes then with the images that you see with what aid workers. And I know we have people from concern and goal and others in the audience are saying is going to be the worst famine in any of our lifetimes. No matter our age in this room, no matter how we are, there will never have been a famine in our lifetimes like this one. And yet, you know, we're just on autopilot continuing to fund this madness and worse to fuel and to arm this madness. Interestingly, we already see statements from Secretary of State Pompeo and Jim Mattis seeming to want to get ahead of the legislation. I don't know if you noticed that, but just coming out last week, sensing I think that especially with some of the excellent reporting, sadly late reporting that has been coming out of Yemen, at least in the American press of late. And I think the Europeans and others were ahead of some of the mainstream American press. But Madison Pompeo came out, called for a ceasefire, called for a cessation of hostilities. And I think, you know, well and apart from the images, what that appears to be is an effort to get ahead of legislative action, because no executive branch wants to be seen to be doing anything, of course, in response to the Congress. The second big area of influence, which has bearing also on European budgets, is our American federal budget, whether that's foreign assistance, development assistance, support for the UN. The budget is negotiated through the House and Senate. And in fact, President Trump's very vocal and determined efforts up to this point to gut humanitarian aid, to gut UN peacekeeping. These efforts have actually up to this point been stymied largely by people like Lindsey Graham and other slightly more internationalist Republicans in President Trump's own party. But now there will be even more leverage on the side of, you know, in effect, a kind of bifurcation between President Trump's nationalist isolationists. We don't want to be a part of institutions. We don't believe in giving foreign assistance to anybody who doesn't vote with us 100 percent of the time at the United Nations or whatever that rhetorical view that he has articulated. Now you will have even more ballast on the side of a more internationalist set of investments in an international architecture that Trump has, with some exceptions, indicated very little patience with. So that could be quite significant and it could translate into some writing of the accentuated imbalance between our investments as a country, America's investments between defense and diplomacy. So that's a space to look to. It's not clear, you know, none of the candidates who have been fighting for their lives and clawing out these victories in these 30 plus house seats that were flipped have felt the need to articulate what their foreign policy platform is. And perhaps that's something we can talk about in the questions about, you know, the American public and I'll come to some of the polling on this a little bit later. But this is the time now between November and January that you're going to see individuals, some of whom were involved in making foreign policy for the Obama administration, like our America's assistant secretary for human rights, Tom Malinowski, a Polish immigrant, a dear friend of mine and my families who helped work with John McCain in a bipartisan way. He was at that time the director of advocacy director of Human Rights Watch to reinstitute the torture ban and build it into US legislation, which boy, are we glad it's in legislation given again the change in presidency. He worked with John McCain also on the McNitsky Act, which is the human rights sanctions legislation that has been used under President Trump. Over the last, you know, nearly two years now. And now he's going to represent the seventh district of New Jersey as a congressman and he ran his entire platform was hashtag reject fear. And he actually just used his campaign to talk about how he had seen fear mongering in other countries and the way in which the other was sort of parodied and marginalized and demonized and stigmatized. And the ways in which that led to ruin for so many communities. And he managed to translate that into a message in New Jersey. A fun fact, Tom Malinowski, and you can follow him on Twitter. He's a he'll be an incredible voice, I think, for a sane and compassionate foreign policy going forward. But as it happens, President Trump's favorite golf property is in his district. And so one of Tom's slogans was, we're going to turn Trump's putting green blue. It worked barely. It was a very, very narrow victory. He beat a five term Republican incumbent. So foreign policy is not, again, on the tip of everybody's tongue, who voted of the 114 million who voted very few. I suspect with this have been a driving factor. But the third issue is the one that you have been reading about, which is the question of oversight. And here, again, oversight and accountability are very different than the ability to actually put through legislation yourself. So this is going to have to be coupled with some across the aisle outreach if actual legislation is to be achieved. But one should not diminish, again, the importance of the investigatory powers of the House, the hearings and also the ability to agenda set through the mandate that you have to summon. Administration witnesses to discuss, for example, what is being done to ensure that the election interference that occurred in the 2016 presidential elections will not be repeated, whether by Russia or by China or by a non-state actor, whether in an election season related to an election, or just on some big legislative vote, or just as it's being done now to exacerbate social divisions, which I'll come to in a second. Just summoning witnesses, getting them to be transparent about what is being done. The answer, unfortunately, is very disturbing. But that in itself, as we know, as any of us who've served in government know, when you have to go and publicly testify to what you are doing, you know, occasionally at the last minute, you see people saying, you know, I really don't like what I have to say. Can we can we do something about this so that I can actually have some more to say when we go from Wednesday to be amazed at how often that happens. So whether it's the Rehinga and the complete absence of U.S. Diploma Seaboard in even being a factor in trying to summon diplomats or create a kind of contact group to figure out some shared approach to either in the short term enhancing the dignity and the welfare of those people who've already been purged in what looks like it was basically a systematic genocide. Or North Korea to get more transparency on these negotiations, which appear mainly to be photo op to photo op. But whether it's climate change to understand again better what's being done to forget the national policy on climate change, but to actually the scientists who work within the U.S. government and where they have gone and what their welfare is and how science as a predicate for policy can do. Restored anyway, all of these topics and so many more are ones that Democrats will now have a chance to put forward when you're in the minority. You know, you're really at the mercy of the agenda that is set by the party in charge of your body and to an extent, I think that has surprised people. The GOP really has told the line, the Republican Party has told the line with what President Trump would have wished to be the topics of the day up on Capitol Hill. And again, that was predictable to some extent, but the extent of deference given that within the Republican Party, there are very different views on trade than the ones that President Trump has pursued. There are very different views on NATO, very different views on Russia on human rights. Perhaps not so many different views on climate change, unfortunately, or at least none that are articulated. Certainly very different views on how to engage dictatorial regimes like that of North Korea. I mean, look at all the sound bites about when we were talking to Iran, those all flipped again in deference to the president. So what will happen now when that debate gets opened up in a different way? Okay, so systemic risk of monumental proportions, not just to the global economy as I dealt with, but to the international order as we know it and to world peace. In the meantime, amid all these analyses and warnings, China is stepping up and stepping in to influence countries on issues where the United States has enduring interests. And issues where the United States has vacated willfully really a leadership role. So this was going to be a contested space no matter what, but what one wouldn't expect. Some of you might have read Thucydides' Trap, or the book is actually titled Destined for War, but it looks at rising powers, challenging status quo powers. There's no real model for an occasion where there is that tension, those tectonic plate shifts and potential clashes about to, not necessarily military clashes, but structural clashes about to happen where the status quo power kind of ducks out and hastens the rise of a rising power like China. And that book was written, of course, before Trump's election could was even a gleam in anybody's eye, even Trump's maybe. At the 19th Party Congress, President Xi described the 21st century as a new quote, era that will see China moving closer to the center of the world, end quote. He cited climate change and trade as the main areas where China was going to exert its influence. It would be interesting to hear President Robinson's views on China as a constructive force also in the climate space and whether that can be sustained in a manner that actually causes a race to the top. That's one area which I'll talk about where they've done incredibly important things as the U.S. steps away. But it goes without saying that on both climate change and trade, these two areas that President Xi has pinpointed, these are areas where there are substantial economic benefits for those countries that develop the rules of the road in those areas. China is the world's largest investor in renewable energy. It has launched the world's largest carbon trading system. Last year it accounted for half of all the solar installations in the world. Xi, who's going to be with us, it seems forever, is also pushing forward with a massive trade deal that will include 46% of the world's population, 30% of the world's GDP, and some of our allies who had been part of the Trans-Pacific Partnership that Trump abandoned, allies like Japan, Australia, New Zealand, Singapore, and Vietnam. But this new China-led partnership will not include the United States. The 16 countries involved in the deal are expected next week to announce that they will conclude negotiations on the mother of all trade agreements maybe in 2019. So again, that could be 46% of the world's population encompassed in that and very related to the decision by the United States, of course, to step away from the TPP. China is also turbocharging its diplomacy, and I know we have a number of Irish and other foreign ambassadors here in the room tonight. And I'm sure this is something that you and your colleagues have seen all around the world, the enhanced and ever-expanding Chinese diplomatic and foreign aid and development presence. At the UN, the US remains the world's largest donor, and I think at least for now still wields the greatest influence. But in 2019, just next year, China will overtake Japan as the second largest contributor to the UN regular budget. Now that sounds kind of normal and natural, but if you look at where China was just 10 years ago, because the amount that you pay is calculated on the basis of your GDP and per capita income and so forth, it's a complicated formula. But China was nowhere, and it's just every year steadily doing more and more, and the more you pay, the more leverage you have, of course, in changing the rules of the road as you see fit. Bloomberg estimates these are murky numbers, but that China's total foreign affairs budget has doubled since the beginning of President Obama's second term in 2013. That's a short time to double. We don't know the baseline, but these are the estimates that are out there. China's foreign aid, we know in Africa and Latin America, longtime friends of the US, has increased each year by an average rate of 22%. So think of that exponentially. It's controlling everything and getting to dictate what NGOs do, which is of course what would happen, what happens for any NGO that attempts to work within China, but this is an effort to internationalize the domestic norms. So we need somehow in the West to develop a foundation for a partnership with China that is mutually beneficial and order enhancing without succumbing to some pretty hard to resist temptations. So one is the temptation to reflexively resist China's rise, and the other is the temptation because China is so powerful to whitewash the deeply problematic domestic regional or global policies. We made the first of these mistakes in the Obama administration. We lobbied everywhere and totally unsuccessfully to try to prevent China's establishment of the Asian infrastructure bank. Again, just trying to fight this rival institution when the writing was on the wall. Trump, I think before the trade war, made arguably the opposite mistake of showering President Xi with praise in a seeming attempt to curry favor. One of Xi's most trusted and influential advisors is a man named Liu He. Some of you may have come across. He's a key counselor to Xi on how to manage relations with the U.S., and he has told Americans who meet with him, quote, I don't think that the U.S. and China are enemies, are real enemies, are terrorism, climate change, and the challenges arising from technological change. And so again, if you think about what forward-looking diplomacy, really hard diplomacy given conflicting views on how to manage norms, but these would be the areas that one could begin to build out a cooperative structure with. And we did this in the Obama administration through the Paris Accord starting first with Beijing. And again, the secret of effective multilateral diplomacy is that you don't start mega multilateral, you start with small groups and the most influential stakeholders, and then you seek to build out. I think that's one of the reasons the Paris negotiations proved a success. And its corollary is that one of the reasons Copenhagen failed, it was a big scrum without that kind of framework. So on that, on Iran's enlistment in the nuclear negotiations that gave rise to the JCPOA, excuse me, China's enlistment in that. I mean, these are great examples. Imagine the anti-poverty initiatives conceivably that could be hatched collectively if we were able to at this point, again, before things are too far gone, put our heads together on disease and hunger. And even on cyber, which is a very, an issue of great contention between the United States and China, you know, President Obama's second term, we were able with China to come up with a set of norms where we agreed not to conduct state-sponsored cyber attacks on private sector companies. And our intelligence community actually reported that in the wake of the agreement to these norms, which a lot of people are skeptical about, norms, norms, you know, will they do any good, but the number of attacks dropped precipitously. So thinking about how to broaden that agreement on cyber attacks so that it encompasses civilians and civilian infrastructure is the obvious next step. Again, if we had a rich and fulsome and aggressive diplomatic agenda. But we can't turn a blind eye either to aggressive actions in the South China Sea, the abduction of booksellers, extra-territorially. We're now seeing so many extra-territorial actions as people feel impunity. It seems to going beyond their borders, whether to poison somebody in London or to murder somebody at their consulate in Turkey. And China is very much a part of this despite its rhetoric about the importance of sovereignty, foreign policy. First, it'll be really hard to get bipartisan or fulsome support for ambitious foreign policy undertakings. So you're likely to see fewer ambitious foreign policy undertakings. For example, we can't even secure an authorization to use military force to replace the one passed 17 years ago in the wake of September 11th. Because bringing the parties together, if you say X, I want to be for the opposite of X. It is second, hard to agree across party lines on the lessons of foreign policy failures. So you can't kind of dig into something, even as we did in the 9-11 commission or in the 70s with all the Cold War excesses. You know, with the church committee and other reports when we looked into how to massively circumscribe covert operations. That could happen in part because you could look at things and try to do things differently, but from a bipartisan platform. There's a greater risk as we've seen with polarization of dramatic policy swings from one administration to the next. And these are extremely destabilizing globally given our connectivity. And it used to be that we had these things called international treaties that made it through the U.S. Senate in the U.S. George W. Bush's administration, hardly a tree-hugging embracer of international law, ratified 163 international treaties in those 8 years. The Obama administration, 20, and again because of the 67-vote threshold that we need in the Senate, not because we wouldn't have wanted to ratify more treaties. The Trump administration so far, 6, covering extradition and other bilateral legal issues. So the amazing thing is to see actually how Russia and others who interfered in the election, but how useful they see these divisions to be from their standpoint. And how do we measure that? Well, first we have the election interference, which we now know about bots and trolls, flooding social media, yes, pushing Hillary or Trump, but really much more systematically interested in taking the fissures within American society on race, on religion, on guns, on gender, and widening them. So here are some examples. Again, some of you may already be aware of, but when we had the Charlottesville Unite the Right, the kind of quasi-Neonazi rallies, Russia, we have evidence of this, amplified voices both from the alt-right, neo-Nazis, and from Antifa. So actually taking tweets done by those and amplifying them or doing their own tweets to create, again, both division, more division, and then the impression of more division, which is a bit of a doom loop when you begin to think about faith and democracy. The content Russia circulated was seen by at least 126 million Americans. We also see them do this on Black Lives Matter, pro and against. And again, now even the Marshall Project is tracking this and offers a daily snapshot, basically, of what Russian-linked bots and trolls are doing, and it's always some version of this. We saw this with the Parkland shootings, pro-gun control, pro-NRA all linked, again, back to these Russian accounts, and most recently with the very divisive Kavanaugh hearings, the same thing. So this is not, it's a mistake to think about interference as an election phenomenon or division as something which, of course, is exacerbated in election season, but this is a steady state phenomenon now. They believe that the more divided we are, that that's an asset for them. So it seems as though instead we have replaced the kind of end-of-history triumphalism that we experienced in the 1990s with its kind of doomsday opposite right now. And that's, I think, a challenge for all of us. Now, what has happened is a wake-up call, right? We can't take for granted even science, right, the resilience and the status of facts, the durability of liberal institutions, the fact that my husband can edit a book called, you know, Can It Happen Here? In 2017 is a reflection of the fact that people are not grappling with questions that we thought were the stuff of a prior era or indeed a different galaxy. And so that wake-up call, of course, is useful and many of the structural issues that I've described are really daunting to imagine tackling. But the despair is helping no one at the present. And so thinking through, again, the advantages of the resiliency of our institutions, the advantages of our possibility of self-renewal. You know, maybe we didn't get as wholesome and fulsome as self-renewal on Tuesday as some might have liked and across-the-board thumping, which would have been, from my standpoint, of course, preferable. But seeing, again, the ways in which people come out and vote with their feet and show the importance of citizenship, again, in the face of policies that they find disturbing, is just a reminder that the power to write the story of this century, the power to decide which of these two models ends up being one that takes adherence, more adherence, and not fewer. Which of these models is the model that gets to shape the rules for everybody else within the international order? That power fundamentally comes back to citizenship. And it is worth remembering that today, notwithstanding the backsliding that we all know about and the declines in freedom in a bunch of countries, there are more democratic countries in the world in 2018 by most metrics than ever before. So we're still in that world, but it doesn't feel that way. And so it does feel that a challenge for all of us, especially at institutions like this one, is to take up the cause of strengthening, of course, our democracies through voting and through serving and other means, but also taking that show on the road and not running for cover just because the geopolitical dynamics are changing. I come back to Churchill, who I know is so popular in Ireland, I just thought, everybody in Ireland's got to close with a Churchill quote, but democracy is the worst form of government except for all those other forms that have been tried from time to time, including now. Thank you so much.