 Before we start, I ask everybody to make sure their phones are turned off and start with myself. Norman Chatton House rules apply, so the presentation is on the record and the questions and answers afterwards are confidential. We're very lucky today and I'd like to welcome Jacob Parry-Cules and I hope I've pronounced it correctly. He's the head of the United States of America's Chatton House. Jacob has had a distinguished academic career and has worked for a number of international NGOs and bodies and is currently, as I said, deputy head of the United Nations and America's Chatton House. He has been involved in a very interesting program which takes at this point of departure whether there is a divergence between, a growing divergence between the U.S. and Europe in the area of foreign policy or whether this is part of a cyclical trend. We certainly have seen in the U.S. a questioning of what were either two sacrosanct commitments to multilateralism, the questioning in the special area of environmental issues, but also in human rights and certainly in trade. The question is, is this a rupture or is this rhetoric? And in Europe we have seen a growing inward-looking EU placed with threats on its borders, which is notably from a research in Russia, but also from threats within the EU itself in relation to what our understanding is of the rule of law, whether that is still a common understanding across EU member states. So the question is whether we are seeing a temporary hiatus or whether we're seeing something more permanent. And we do recall last year that Angela Merkel, after a very difficult G7 meeting, took the view that maybe it is now time for Europe to develop its own and take responsibility more clearly for its own future, its own security. So with those opening comments, I want to hear what Chatham House has to tell us about its thinking on this subject. Jacob, you have the floor. Thank you very much. Thank you all of you for spending your lunchtime with us. The title of this talk is Transatlantic Relations Converging or Diverging. As Mary said, it's based on a report that came out a couple of months ago, based on research that my colleagues and I did. The report itself was written by our program, Hadzania Wicke. And there's a very short version of this talk where I just sort of say, well, diverging, obviously. Thank you very much. But as is often the case, it's a little bit more complicated than that. With that said, it's hard to make the argument that the transatlantic relationship is going through a smooth period. It's plainly not. There's a nationalist moment on both sides of the Atlantic that has a variety of expressions, a variety of repercussions, a variety of versions of nationalism. There are left-wing nationalisms. There are right-wing nationalisms. And frankly, I get a little bit frustrated when people just say, well, Donald Trump on one hand and Bernie Sanders on the other, or Jeremy Corbyn and UKIP. I think we do a disservice if we just kind of lump all of those things together. But I think it's fair to say that there is a general backlash against globalization and against multilateralism. And the transatlantic relationship is nothing if not based on a multilateral, rules-based approach to global governance, which nationalism stands in opposition to. So this is a difficult moment. It's always going to be a difficult moment. And this is where I normally pivot to a sentence beginning with Donald Trump and Brexit, or Brexit and Donald Trump. But that's a little bit to the side of the point. Those are probably the two most obvious signifiers of this moment in the transatlantic space. And they will have significant and long-lasting repercussions, if not necessarily in a predictable fashion, but we'll come back to the question of prediction towards the end of the talk. But I think what we as research institutes have to do, what's incumbent upon us, is to try and see past the daily noise, the tweets. And there were some more tweets. I glanced at my phone, just a glance, on my way up the stairs. And there were some more tweets about shiny, smart, new missiles coming for Syria. So there's a lot of noise. It's constant. It's been a noisy couple of years. But to try to see past that, without ignoring it, without minimizing the importance that events like an apparently imminent American strike on Syria will have, to try to divine longer-term trends and to see where this relationship is going. Now, I should stop for a moment and note here that my subject, my area of expertise, as you can probably tell from my accent, is the U.S. I'll talk a little bit about Europe, but primarily from the point of view of its relationship with the U.S. My colleagues on our Europe program are better equipped than I to talk about UK, EU and inter-European issues. But to return to the question of short-term versus long-term, it's not easy. The President of the United States does not make that process easy. The way in which he makes decisions is not transparent. His influences may or may not be transparent, but the decision-making process is clearly very different than it has been in previous administrations. We can't and shouldn't rely on assurances that the adults are in charge, that the system will prevail, that this is all just a sort of brief expression and then things will return to normal. That's especially important to say as we leave the Tillerson-Cone-McMaster section of the Trump administration and move into the Pompeo-Cudlow-Bolton era. But also, we have to bear in mind that fundamentally, Donald Trump is not the Trump administration. The Trump administration is not the United States federal government, and the United States federal government is not the totality of the U.S. role in the world. So let's then take a step back and talk about the transatlantic relationship and the U.S. role broadly within that transatlantic relationship. And I think it's important to distinguish, since Chatham House is a London-based, but not exclusively Britain-focused institution, that we draw distinctions between the U.K., U.S., U.S.-EU and U.S.-Broader-European relationships. And there are divergences and complications within that broad rubric. One thing that we predicate our analysis on is the idea that the transatlantic relationship, broadly the U.S.-Europe, is predicated on a combination of interests and values. We've done a series of research projects looking at perceptions of the U.S. in various regions of the world, specifically perceptions held by foreign policy elites, not only members of foreign ministries but also high-ranking figures from business, media, academia, people who are involved directly or indirectly with the making and shaping of foreign policy. And what we came to from that is that Europeans, broadly, tend to be the only people who talk about shared values with the U.S., that in Latin America there's a discussion of a shared American culture. In Asia, in the former Soviet Union, there's a lot of discussion of interests and hard power issues. But Europeans talk a lot about a shared set of values with the United States, and that, as far as we can tell, is unique. And that, I think, lends a kind of stability to the transatlantic relationship because it means that interests can diverge, that approaches, policies, specific issues can lead to divergences, but there is fundamentally a sort of value-based glue that holds the relationship together, in the same way that you can have an argument with a close friend and still fundamentally be friends with that person because you have that basis. So, Trump notwithstanding, the U.S. government has broadly seen Europe as a valuable, sometimes reluctant and or limited partner in the post-war, post-World War II specifically era. Trump's complaints about Europe and its failure to burden share with the United States are not new. Obama had these complaints, Bush had these complaints, Clinton had these complaints. The difference is that European governments, by and large, see Trump as more willing to follow them through, less dedicated to that relationship. And as a result, there's been, as you indicated, a set of statements from European governments that they're more willing to sort of take on autonomous roles. That doesn't necessarily mean that the relationship will diverge. It means that Europe is taking more responsibility. That isn't inherently a break in the relationship. And we can see that because when we look at the past, we can see that there have been significant breaks in the relationship, usually over military actions, like the Suez in 1956, the Vietnam War, the Iraq War in 2003, but not exclusively. The revelations of NSA surveillance by Edward Snowden in 2013 led to significant damage to the relationship, not all over Europe. It was localized in some places. Germany had a particularly strong reaction. But at the end of the day, that combination, the glue of sort of shared interests and shared values, has held the relationship together. And I think it's important to stop here and draw a distinction between the relationship completely ending and the relationship changing. Obviously, it's not a solid state. The relationship does evolve over time. But fundamentally, there was still a strong relationship between the two sides after those particular instances. To the US-UK relationship. Now, this is one that I think in the press is often reflected in, well, you know, the President and that's not just a Theresa May, Donald Trump thing that was true with Cameron and Obama. It was true with very, very obviously with Blair and Bush. But actually, the relationship is at its strongest and most durable at the sort of day-to-day operational level, outside the leader-to-leader relationship. The obvious case is the military, security, law enforcement relationship, the relationship between the intelligence agencies, the military, the security forces broadly are very, very strong, as strong as they are between two countries anywhere in the world. You also have significant cultural links between the two countries. American students studying at British University, something I have a little bit of experience in myself. And, you know, Britain sending actors to take many of the best roles in Hollywood. Just a couple of ideas there. And then strong economic ties as well, links between the city of London and the financial centers in the US. The leader relationships can and do vary in intensity and affection, and they can result in policy convergences or divergences with significant ramifications. Blair's decision to go into Iraq in 2003 alongside Bush being a clear and obvious one there. But to a large extent, the important aspect of that relationship is outside of the leader-to-leader. Now, the US relationship with the EU is a lot more complex, as you can imagine. Not least because it's not a bilateral country-to-country relationship. It's a relationship with a country with a multilateral institution. And I think it's fair to say that Trump is hostile to the EU. He doesn't really like multilateralism. He prefers to deal with the world as a series of bilateral deals. He can go into a room and have a relationship with somebody and have a negotiation in which there is a winner and a loser. And the EU isn't a good partner for that kind of viewpoint. He also has long-standing views about trade. He views the EU as a mechanism by which particular countries, specifically Germany, can leverage their advantages over the US, will leave that to the side. There are American institutional, beyond Trump, differences in approach to various topics, Russia, Iran, trade, which are, again, not unique to Trump, are about the differing positions in the world of the two sides. But in the broader view, the EU and the US benefit from the same kind of rules-based world order. And it's hard, not impossible, but hard to imagine a single disjunctive American administration changing that. But, again, going to this question of the signal versus the noise, if Trump and Brexit are signifiers of a broader nationalist move that weakens the EU, that leads to a more inwardly focused, more protectionist, less engaged United States, then each divergent interest can have greater ramifications in the relationship down the line. Now, public opinion research and our own work on elite perceptions of the US support the view that there is broadly a reservoir of goodwill in Europe towards the United States. And you can see that from the bounce back of views not only specifically of Barack Obama, but of the US and its role in world leadership between 2008 and 2009. Now, that then sort of sloped off a little bit as the excitement over the end of the Bush era met the reality of any US administration taking policies that Europeans wouldn't necessarily be in favor of. But there is that reservoir, even though at the moment, most measures of public sentiment towards US leadership and Donald Trump specifically are very low, I don't think we're yet at the phase where we can say that's irrecoverable because clearly it's been recovered from in recent history. So that's the background, why we think it's important to do this project and what's new in this project, what we did to sort of actually add to the body of literature on the transatlantic relationship was we carried out a bunch of simulation exercises. We actually got a group of experts into the room to walk through three crises in one negotiation that might in theory drive the two sides apart. And we think this is a valuable exercise. We have to be a little bit humble and I think analytical humility is a really important theme in our approach to the world because clearly there are big events that can change trends but as long as we're careful as we were in this report to balance the results of simulation against historical inquiry, literature review and the various other elements of established social science I think it can be a really valuable exercise in testing assumptions and seeing how countries would react under specific hypothetical circumstances. You do have to be careful about picking which scenarios you are simulating. You have to be careful that you can pick people who can accurately represent a complex country, institution, department or body. We spent a lot of time developing a roster of experts that we could call on but it does allow us to test assumptions and to see how actors might react under a set of circumstances. And what we picked up from these simulations which were a breakdown in the Iran nuclear deal a conflict between Japan and China over disputed islands in the South China Sea a conflict between Turkey and Russia which admittedly was immediately sort of we ran that one in May 2016 and then the next month Putin and Erdogan had a press conference together and announced they were friends again so clearly we made a bit of a difficult prediction there and one negotiation over the use of autonomous weaponry which if you're interested there's also a UN debate following the exact same lines going on in Geneva right now and we ran these all from late 2015 to late 2016 now clearly conditions have changed somewhat since then but I think the again the point isn't to accurately predict future circumstances it's to divine national interests and on that basis we actually struggled quite a lot to in a crisis drive a lasting wedge between the US and Europe even when it was clear that the two sides had different interests which was particularly clear in the Asia Pacific scenario where Japan and China were at odds and the US has a much greater military presence than a substantially different economic approach to the region at the end of the day the Europeans and the Americans didn't approach things fundamentally differently and there was no diplomatic spat between the two it was more that they took complimentary approaches so what can we learn from all this again I think we have to draw a distinction between prediction and projection I think it's difficult to actually predict future events to say with any degree of confidence this will happen at this date and this party will win this election this country will vote this way on this referendum there are very statistical methods of doing that they all I think took a little bit of a hit during their elections in 2016 they still have some value but I think the role of analyzing the transatlantic relationship in this way is not about saying this event will happen it's more saying what are the trends in which these individual events can happen how will those events, how far can those events push things within the bounds of the feasible and our projection on that basis is that the transatlantic relationship will survive, will it be changed will it be changed significantly very probably but that the glue that holds the transatlantic relationship together the major structural factors despite the noise despite the the difficulties that we've had in sort of having a civil transatlantic conversation over the last couple of years that those are still much less powerful than the things that hold the relationship together because it doesn't take that much historical memory to look at other down cycles in the past but that doesn't mean we should be complacent as I say the mere fact that there is a continual relationship doesn't mean that it's optimal it doesn't mean that both sides are getting everything they could or should be out of it and history is driven not only by trends but by events and those events, both trends and events can move things away if we, our values are actually shifting a more nationalistic moment then an event which we may or may not be able to predict may actually have more of a divergent impact than we might be led to believe so it's, as I say, it's not an optimistic view but I hope it's not an entirely pessimistic one either and with that I will look forward to your questions thank you all very much