 Endowment for International Peace. I'm Ashley Telles. I'm a senior fellow here at the Endowment who works in the area of international security, including the security issues relating to Asia. This afternoon, we're going to have a discussion on TV Paul's latest book. I must say, latest book because he has a line of, I believe, 18 books as of now, which he has either published or edited. And we have two wonderful discussions to discuss this book at different dimensions, both from a academic perspective and a policy perspective. Let me start with a brief introduction to the School of Policy and Government at George Mason University. But I knew Ellen when she was in the US government for many years, including one of the events that I really was looking forward to it. And being with Ashley is great because he appreciates the kind of theoretical, as well as policy interest I have. So we just had a very interesting discussion about India, why it is the way it is. And we agree on many things that great works are needed to create and understand the phenomenon called India, the challenges it faces and where it is going. But that's for the next time. Today, I'm going to very briefly go over this particular book that was actually a result of a debate that took place some 10 years ago in the Journal of International Security. Some of you are probably aware that there were a few articles, Bob Pape and Steve Walt and myself on the side of self-balancing. Then Bill Wolforth and a few others on the side arguing that there's nothing called self-balancing. And then there are criticisms resulting in quite a bit of backlash to this concept. Then I went back to history and I realized there's a lot more to this than the critics or even the proponents have understood. That's how I ended up with this book. And the starting point is great powers are, unfortunately, violent actors. They do a lot of good things, I don't want to say, but they are potentially also very violent actors, partly because of systemic reasons. And the point that we often worry about, whether these great power wars that kill more people than any other causes in the 20th century, Cal Holste has this very interesting data, shows that other than natural reasons, most people died in, or the highest number of deaths occurred because of great power wars or great power proxy wars or other things, great powers have done. I'm not bashing great powers, but I do want you to appreciate that great powers have the ability and the capacity to cause extraordinary harm if they want. Of course, that's because of certain processes taking place, including the power transition issue that IR theory has talked about. Those are these trap that attract a lot of attention. And whether there is possibility for crisis escalation as we are witnessing a few years to come. Now, additional approaches balance of power tend to look at basically military buildup, internal processes or external balancing through alignment. Then of course, you have deterrence, you have containment, but what this puzzling is, you haven't seen the intense balancing activity, especially since the end of the Cold War, especially toward the United States, and China has not been balanced sufficiently as we see what is happening. And then Russia too, of course, there is a little bit more there, but clearly not the full-fledged balancing that is historically been addressed as the pattern of behavior of states. So these are some of the factors that probably are causing this intense absence of hard balancing as the one that I mentioned. Decline of territory, presence of economic globalization, widespread presence of international institutions, certain norms, military technology favoring defense, or deterrence, or offense, threat environment, being somewhat benign. So balancing against threats happening more as opposed to balancing against power. Now, the debate is based on this idea that hard balancing was only one aspect of state behavior. And that a lot of things are happening underneath that and that we don't capture that. Even policymakers are doing things that are not to be characterized as hard balancing. So soft balancing is sort of, I redefined it. One of the criticism was this is a woolly concept and it needs to be defined properly. And so I tried to define it and you can see that definition is sort of restraining the power of a state through international institutions, concerted diplomacy via limited informal enthance and partnerships in the economic sanctions to make its aggressive actions less legitimate in the eyes of the world, hence its strategic goals more difficult to obtain. What we are talking about is limited tacit indirect balancing, balancing late. But there is an in-between category limited hard balancing which involves some amount of asymmetrical arms buildup. So my formal alliance such as strategic partnerships, a lot of them are happening today, especially US and India had a little bit of that. Russia, China, there's no formal alliance like NATO but there is coordination. And this is a transition process. If limited hard balancing becomes intense hard balancing then it goes to the top level. But then there are other things like buck passing, binding, bandwagoning, non-alignment, et cetera. Won't go into all the details that's out in the book. The key source of international, soft balancing is international institutions. Institutions are very important in that context. Neither liberals who extoll institutions or realists who condemn institutions as irrelevant understand or appreciate this task of institutions. They are useful beyond the collective action of solving problems for restraining great powers in particular or any threatening states. So realists like Misha and Martin to reject institutions, I think it's a mistake if they are not useful at all. Why do great powers put so much effort into it and creating and maintaining them even though they don't often do this? The first two World War, Cold War period we noticed hedging became important strategy with the engagement, soft balancing. You have cases, U.S. and Kosovo soft balancing efforts, U.S. and Iraq, much more intense involving allies too. And China has not faced the kind of balancing yet and posing a lot of a symmetric strategies. Russia, of course, there is a lot more limited balancing taking place. So historical places are what really fascinated me. The Congress of Vienna that you know, the Korea ended the Napoleonic War and the concept of Europe was a classic case of soft balancing plus some hard balancing. And never given the importance in terms of its role in restraining at least for a short period of time. The League of Nations, the effort to restrain Japan's aggression in East Asia, China, Italy and Ethiopia, neither succeeded. By the way, soft balancing can fail and generate intense nationalism. This is what we often have to be careful that none of this is foolproof methods to achieve international security. And there was some efforts by Europeans, but the non-aligned countries is something I'm anybody interested in that concept. The Western scholarship and general impression is it was a totally useless movement. I agree up to a point that it didn't achieve all its goals, but you dig deep to the whole one-to-one process. First time, 50 very poor weak countries joining together questioning the international order of the times. And made some contribution in creating the traditional non-use, the nuclear issue, decolonization, a whole host of issues, a normative anchor and I call it a kind of a light soft balancing. And this is not theorized sufficiently, this whole non-alignment business. And then you have ASEAN, quite a bit of work going on with respect to China. There is a court of conduct going to the tribunal dealing with the law of the sea. And the common feature of all the use of institutions to legitimate or illegitimate or delegitimize the behavior and power of the opponent. And that is where the whole source of this sort of balancing takes place because in the contemporary world, collective legitimation of the United Nations in particular is needed for interventions. And this intervention is sort of, if it needs legitimacy, if it doesn't have legitimacy, what happens is the intervention can take place, but post-war settlement, post-war country construction becomes very difficult as we found out in Iraq for instance. So legitimacy is important, but the great power should have the ability to appreciate legitimacy as a phenomenon. Now here you notice the behavior of these states. This is not typical hard balancing. Even Japan, it's going with India or ASEAN, mixing strategies, US as Japan, US not Japan of course as an alliance hard balancing, but still when it comes to China, the behavior seems to be quite different. China's territorial, I already mentioned all this. This is sort of Russia's Ukraine adventure, you know a lot of things are happening obviously. So the question is maybe this is the reason that you don't have intense threat to sovereignty. In European system it was the threat to sovereignty of states that caused states needed to balance. Expansion states would not let you live alone. So there's more threats. Now I want to talk a little bit about what are the ideal conditions that is useful for balance of power, so balancing law threat environment. One thing that is to be thought about institutions as such is the first two decades or three decades are the golden age of institutions after a great war or even like the end of the Cold War. We forget the institutionalists, often institutionalists are like anything, any social institution requires nurturing. Even your democracy requires nurturing. What is missing is this expectation that institutions will just survive, thrive and prosper. You don't have to do anything. That's not the case, institutions fatigue happens. The war fatigue is what creates institutions, but the institutions don't persist if we don't allow them to persist as it is happening in the current environment that to a point. And by the way, democracy is same, my little understanding of what it is. It doesn't necessarily mean a linear progression towards greater democracy because we need to think about how to strengthen democratic order. International order is one that allows great powers opportunity for economic progress without Congress. Whatever people say about American policies in the post-Cold War period, one thing that did the US did for this rising power phenomenon at least up to this point, is allowing this rising power such as China, India to grow. And that is globalization's achievement. Of course it may have some blowbacks later that we are slowly witnessing, but whatever it is, it really avoided or postponed the whole transition conflict for a period of time. How much great powers believe in legitimate power? How do they, the previous issue, look at previous historical, the Germans and the Japanese thought they will never be economic powers under the, if they didn't fight wars. That's not the case with today's world. How they perceive institutional legitimacy an important point. No thoroughly descent China revisionist state, low levels of nationalism, technology and doctors do not favor quick conquests as the tank and the aircraft did for the Germans. So there are two concepts that IR, international relations are very important, soft laws, soft power, I won't go into, so why don't we talk about soft balancing in that light in terms of, soft concepts are not bad all the time because states often don't have the capacity to engage in hard options. They have to have flexible options, especially weaker smaller states. So the emerging order is what I'm worried about. Things are changing. States are constrained, but suddenly you find the initial stages of a great power round of rivalry happening and threat system is changing and whether soft balancing has an opportunity there. Unfortunately in the short term probably not, but may not be in the long run partly because other states, the secondary states, Europeans, Canadians, even India and all don't have options of big arms build up confronting directly. They may have to look at institutional means creating their own institutions, limited alignments, on tans, at least to face the challenges that they are experiencing from the US at this point. So the book is, was written at a time when Trump was coming to power so I don't have all the answers, but I conclude by saying the US should not abandon institutions. I'm sure that's music to many of your ears here because US power as everybody knows was built around this institutional leadership and if it loses that power and go back to the intense hard balancing, it may be very hard to convince your allies or adversaries or even to achieve the same goals that you can achieve without doing coercive balancing strategies. And an intense arms race in the international arena is going to hurt everybody, not just these weaker challengers because that's the last thing we want even for the United States. There's a lot of other things it could do with that resources that will be going into this. So with that nice note, I will stop there and then let's have a conversation. Thank you very much. Thank you, thank you TV. Ellen, do you want to speak? Yeah, just from here, sir. Well, thank you. Thanks to Ashley for inviting me to this interesting conversation and congratulations to TV for really a wonderfully useful, informative and intellectually enriching book. I recommend it to all of you. I found it living in that sort of in between space between this scholarly ivory tower and the real world of messy policymaking. I particularly appreciated your sometimes a little bit mischievous take on the people who believe too much in their theories. So this is a very agile dynamic concept of an IR theory. It adapts to changing circumstances. It's not rigid. And so I think it's enormously almost reassuring to those of us who are perhaps sometimes intimidated by the theories or the people who are constantly trying to prove scientifically that one theory is more right than another. What he's really come up with is a living, breathing, conceptual framework to think about international relations. And really, if more countries pursued soft balancing, the world might be a more peaceful place. And I think we do live in a world where we have less expectation of great power military confrontations. There's all kinds of things that happen on this continuum from soft to hard in relations. And where do we put cyber, for example? I mean, cyber is an alternative to military force. And it can be mean-spirited and destructive and coercive. But it can also be, at the soft end, a platform for cooperation and for exhibiting the manifestations of globalization. So I really found it enormously useful and almost uplifting of how the international relations system can evolve into the future. So I have just four topics that I thought I would zoom in on. One is you only very briefly mentioned what I would call your soft set, your soft law, soft power, soft balancing. But I actually thought they do work together. Soft law, I was just with my students talking about the resolutions to try to end the Iran-Iraq war and how UN resolutions would go from kind of urging countries or expressing dismay to resolutions that invoke Chapter 7 of the UN Charter and expect member states to actually use military force to change the behavior of combatants in a conflict. So a very nice demonstration that sometimes the soft approach, you work it for as long as you can. If it proves to be inadequate, you then transition to something tougher. And so that soft law thing exists in institutions and is an approach that many countries would work with. And in fact, what we could say about that sometimes softness is all you can get when the great powers are in disagreement. But you move along that continuum to harsher measures when they are willing to see shared interests. So even when the great powers are cooperating in an institutional setting, you may not always stay at the soft side of the continuum. You may actually find that you have to move along. But you don't rule that out. You say that that is part of the experience of international politics. So soft power, I wonder whether at some point soft power is in a way an American concept that is in some ways maybe distinctive to the way we think about America's role in the world. But I wonder whether soft power also belongs, you could tether it even more closely to your soft balancing concept. And here I would just like to, one of my points is in your descriptions of globalization and how countries have to net out whether globalization is a positive or a negative for their own security, we're still looking principally at official governmental interactions and at the big macroeconomic interactions. And I wonder if in the soft power world you would add to the list the capacity of civil societies across national borders to work together, cooperate. I mean, in a way, global NGOs and communities of interest that are not governmental are really part of soft balancing. They are part of the ways that states try to influence each other, find common ground, and shape each other's incentives to avoid conflict. My biggest issue is, and I'm not necessarily in disagreement with you, I'm just asking for a little more discussion of it, is the treatment of sanctions. And whether sanctions belongs, is sanctions always on the soft side of the ledger, or are sanctions sometimes on the hard side of the ledger? Because sanctions are coercive. And as you acknowledged in one of the vivid stories in the book is a reminder that sanctions that really hurt another country can lead to nationalism, can lead to aggression, and then you have no choice but to move to the harder options. So Japan before World War II, Japan's national sense of purpose changed to the darker side because of sanctions. So sanctions didn't succeed as a war prevention tool they actually led to the worst war that we have all known. And I also thought that countries think about sanctions and use sanctions in very differential ways. So the United States, as we know, the US Congress very often uses sanctions as a default position, or you could argue the executive branch sometimes sees sanctions as part of an escalatory process of pressuring another country. So I went to the Department of Treasury website. We now have 29 active sanctions programs from the Balkans in Belarus to Yemen and Zimbabwe. So there's a sanctions program for virtually every letter in the alphabet. And we overuse sanctions. Other countries where I thought soft balancing wasn't quite sufficient is that other countries can't sanction us. They can't. We're too big. They need to use the US economy in some ways as a global actor. So the piece about sanctions isn't even. It's not evenly available to all actors as a tool. So I thought that was something we might talk more about. And then just a last point is, and connected perhaps to that, is the US always the outlier? Is the US always the exception that proves the rule? How much do we? Now, I think that we do soft balance in some cases. I liked the discussion of collective soft balancing, whether it's the non-aligned movement or the European Union, that it's not just a binary proposition between two powers. It can be regions versus a superpower. It can be used in many different variants. But on globalization and whether globalization, so I guess my concern is that I think that Bill Clinton was the last American president that could comfortably see globalization and American power and American interests as completely convergent and compatible. By George W. Bush in 9-11, globalization cuts across American interests or American power in sometimes negative or difficult ways, whether it's 9-11 and the fact that terrorists could use some of the tools of globalization to do harm or whether it's this anxiety about America's leadership role and power in the international system. So I see that rising powers benefit from globalization as for sure and that positive for them. Although they may also be experiencing this loss of national identity, what tribe do we belong to, all the identity anxieties that we know color our politics now. So that interweaving of globalization and soft balancing I thought was a really important part of this book and something that really is a food for additional thought. Thank you. Thank you. Richard? Thank you, Ashley. And thank you for the opportunity to read this book. Congratulations. I would tell everyone to go read the book and you should go read the book. But I once had a grad school professor who reminded me that you honor an author not by reading their book but by buying their book. So the choice is up to you. But you might want to look into both of those things. But congratulations on the book. I found the book fascinating on multiple levels. And maybe for starters is that as someone who spent other than being an adjunct here, his life since grad school out of the academy and in the policy world, the idea that there would be a fight over weather, soft balancing as you define it in this book, exists, is kind of unfathomable to me. I mean, obviously it exists. I mean, there's been the entire premise of our China hedge policy since I was working in the Bush administration. And we do it to Russia. We do it to China. Others do it to us. I just hadn't realized it was a questionable proposition. If you need an example, then look at what happened last week when the Congress passed a bill signed by President Donald Trump to establish a $60 billion development investment facility, brand new. And the Washington Post in New York Times had an article about how in the world can you get bipartisan support for essentially kind of a foreign aid type of thing. And one of the sponsors was a Republican congressman who said, I went to Washington to kill foreign aid. He said, but this is about China. It's about responding to China. So if you need an example, you got one, I think, that fits right into what you're talking about as recently as a few days ago. Also this notion that balancing is an automatic scientific process. Anyone who has worked in government knows there are no such thing as automatic scientific processes. You get people in a room and they try to come up with decisions. And it's a very human kind of thing. I remember my Hans Morgenthau and the billiard balls clicking off each other. I always found that a little irritating. Conceptually I get it, but it just didn't seem to match up with the reality. So it's hard to think, actually, of a case of a country that's done hard balancing without some version of the soft balancing. It's not like you would only have a military alliance and only have a buildup, but not pursue any of these other things to try to balance power and the diplomatic of the economic spheres. And so fleshing that out, I think, was a major contribution here. I thought I'd take up just three of the books more specific intentions and offer maybe a different perspective or raise a question about them. The first, and then I'll ask a couple other questions. The first is that in the book you say that hard balancing, including formal military alliances and matching military buildups, has appeared to be sidelined for most states right now as a foreign policy tool. And I'm not sure that's true in Europe or with Russia. So NATO is continuing to expand. Montenegro joined. Macedonia will join. The forced deployments are changing in Europe as NATO redeploys forces to the east. They're talking about a permanent basin in Poland that would not have been, is only relevant in the Russia balance equation. There's soft balancing going on to be sure. But I think there's some hard stuff going on as well in Europe. And then, of course, Russia, to the extent of which its motivations are driven by concerns about US domination, Ukraine, Crimea, Syria, military interventions might be an element of, in their minds anyway, an American or a Western bloc kind of balance approach. I do agree in Asia, though. But here the story seems to me to be not just soft balancing, but much more this limited hard balancing that you talk about in the book, which is sort of the military diplomacy, for lack of a better term here. The joint exercises, the military exchanges, the strategic agreements, and so forth. And it's hard to imagine new allies joining the five US treaty allies in Asia, irrespective of everybody's concern about where China is going. But the mechanisms that are going on go well beyond international institutions and the things you highlight as elements of soft power. I mean, no one's sanctioning China, not meaningfully anyway, as a way to balance. What they really fear is that China will essentially sanction them by coercing them economically. The international institutions, the most relevant ones, taking TPP out for a second, are China-led or China-driven, like RCEP in the East Asia Summit and things like that. So to me, it seems like the real phenomenon is this limited hard balancing with Japan and Australia as kind of key nodes in this security network that is being built mostly informally throughout the region. India is kind of in a different way is emerging as a note of its own. But all of these countries are developing closer security relationships with each other, with the Vietnam's and Singapore's and Philippines and others in the world. And so that seems to me to be kind of the story of Asian security right now. The second contention that I would highlight is for two decades after the Cold War, you say in the book, little balancing has been going on against the United States, and now that is actually happening. It seems like, as I kind of mentioned before, I think a desire to balance American power is a clear drive of Russian action. Moscow genuinely seems to think that a color revolution in Moscow could be taken advantage of by the United States and sort of gotten rid of their sovereignty and political rule. It's not clear to me that what China is doing is balancing the United States. And I mean, I really don't know. Is it acquiring power projection capabilities to balance US power? Is using economic coercion against South Korea, against the Philippines, against Japan and others to balance the United States? Or is it driven by a sense of status and historical inevitability and ultimately a desire to dominate East Asia in a way that the United States has dominated the Western Hemisphere? Now, maybe that could be construed as balancing behavior. But I think it's at least an open question about whether, in fact, is. And it's also not clear in Asia that there are around the world that any smaller states are trying to balance against the United States. If anything, particularly in Asia, the appetite for greater partnership with the United States extends almost everywhere. You can leave a couple out. Cambodia, Bios, North Korea. Well, actually, North Korea. Take that. Put it in the other category for now. I would say how long it stays in that category. But it's not clear to me that the United States is being balanced against right now. And then the third, is it soft balancing against the United States? When it has been practiced recently, has worked that Obama withdrew troops from Iraq because of the perception that international legitimacy wasn't there for the operation. US didn't enter Libya or Syria because they didn't have UN authorization and so forth. And again, I would take, I think, issue with this because it seems to me that Obama would, whatever his publicly articulated rationale, withdrew from Iraq because he thought this was an endless war. He was elected to end and that he wanted to focus on nation-building at home and that continued indefinite deployments and expenditure resources in Iraq and Afghanistan was not going to allow him to do that. Rather than, back in 2003, you couldn't get a second UN Security Council resolution. Of course, we did have a UN Security Council resolution in Libya. And of course, the US is in Syria in a pretty major way. Strangely enough, you may be seeing some soft balancing against the United States among a few of our NATO partners. If it could be construed that way, there are now 15 NATO members that are meeting on their own without the United States. And they're coordinating their positions and talking points. Mostly, it's defensive so that when the next ask for more military spending comes up, they can all be together on a United Front. But you can see the front edge of what could be almost balance against the United States. Let me just close my remarks three quick questions. The first is, how do you know when a balance of power has actually been achieved? There's an assumption built in all this, I think. You can sort of feel the equilibrium that everybody would kind of feel it at the same time. There either is a balance of power, there isn't a balance of power. But I think history, even recent history, shows us that leaders see threats where, objectively, historically, they don't seem to appear. And then other times, they don't see a shift in the balance of power when it's actually occurred. And so how do you know when you've gotten there? What is it that we're sort of looking for here? And how can leaders not see that it's an existential threat to the United States eventually about the domestic character of the regime in Laos in the 1970s? So grave that we had to go to war to prevent the balance shifting. Second is, how much potential can soft balancing, even coupled with this limited hard balancing, have in Asia? And this is a question, all of American policy right now, it appears to me, is premised on balancing China through limited hard balancing and, to some degree, the soft balance, all these security relationships, all of some increase in military, but no new allies and things like that. But what does it add up to? Does it add up to, or is it a step? If that doesn't work, you've got to go to the hard balance. I mean, can we actually imagine China, instead of pursuing policy X, if per pursues policy Y, because it sees the security network being built around it in Asia, without any of the really hard edge kind of things? And then the third and final thing is this question of international legitimacy that you touch on in the book, how much does that matter? And does it matter? It clearly matters differently to different countries. But for example, does it matter more in democracies than it does to autocracies? And so it's a more effective instrument against democracies than it is against autocracies. It seems to me, at a minimum, it varies with the perception of threat, not getting a second UN Security Council resolution was not enough to dissuade President Bush from going to war in Iraq. But the idea that you should have one was enough to send him to the UN a second time, because it really did matter. So it mattered. It just didn't matter enough to prevent the war. And would that have been different if it was Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping? So I think you've now got a whole bunch of questions and everything else, but a few thoughts that often response to your fine book. Thank you, Richard, that's great. There are a whole set of questions, obviously. Richard formally asked you some, but there were questions implicit in Ellen's presentation as well. I was wondering if you want to take about five to seven minutes and try and answer some of these. And I have a set of questions myself, even though I didn't comment on the book. And the audience will have some. And the audience will certainly have questions, too. If you don't mind, yes. I have a feeling. Fantastic. I feel my spirits are lifted, because you rarely, I'm kind of an IR theory crossover guy. You rarely speak or engage policymakers who rarely say good things about IR books in the way these two and three have done, because it feels like I should continue this trajectory. The pressures in academia is somehow impress your peer group, which is a typical IR theory person who will go to ISA or APSA, and engage in this. Wilshimer is correct. No, he's not like that. And there's a lot of pressure on the younger colleagues to write this micro IR. Very sad thing to say that and prove that one is right. And I'm one of the few among the senior cohort now trying to say, let's try to bridge the bill, bridge this across, because the policymakers are not paying attention to us purely, because they don't have this choice. Mishimers or Walsh's choice of, until you have a proper bipolar system, there's no stability. Come on, there's no way it's going to come anytime soon, as far as we know. You already alluded to that. So I'm very impressed that I'm happy that I came. Cyber, yes, that is symmetric balancing. The Chinese are doing symmetric balancing, which we don't have a proper theory, OK? I wrote this book, my dissertation was why weaker states attack stronger states. Asymmetric deterrence and all these themes are still understudied. And sanctions. Yes, I acknowledge sanction is one element, and sometimes sanctions can have. Actually, there is this. John Mueller talks about sanctions against Iraq. Iraq was almost like carpet bombing, because it killed a lot of children without the proper medication, things like that. Fantastic observation about soft power and how NGOs in particular, they can help soft balancing by pushing states to take certain positions, or of course, certain positions. Within countries, they can protest, nuclear disarmament. And then that affects the way we think about this issue. So areas where I could not go in, because then the book will be massive, and I don't want to dilute my main message. Nationalism, yes. Actually, there is one contribution in this, is not to say that I'm not wedded to this soft balancing. I think it has dangerous aspects, too. And the two cases I have, you mentioned one, that is the Japanese case. The other one is Italy. You know what the Mussolini told his people that the new Roman Empire around the corner, then who is challenging us? The Brits and the French. So it was Italy, yes, at least one prize. You know, by the way, the people have very little historical reading of it. The alliance between Mussolini and Hitler was not automatic. In fact, there was a period when the Allies thought Mussolini will be with them. One British prime minister had to resign over this issue. They gave concessions, 300,000 square miles of Ethiopia was given to Mussolini with the hope that he will join them. Anyway, that's another story. Nationalism could happen again in China today. This is one thing that Mr. Trump's policies make, the kind of economic, not just sanctions, but the other kind of policies, creating a backlash that we don't expect. I would say that Asia is a theater where a lot is happening. We haven't theorized or understood what BRI does, whether it is soft balancing or hard balancing or preventing hard balancing. How do you balance this economic infrastructure growth when that is little military? Of course, now they are trying to build a few bases. So I think a kind of economic sanctions is taking place, too. In India, refusing to join, that's not sanctions, but at least economic statecraft up to a point. Not thought through carefully or anything, but something is happening there. Is the US always the outlier? I don't think so. The cases show that the US is, but since the end of the Cold War, the biggest player is the US and the biggest regional intervener also is the US, so it creates opportunities for others to some respect. China-Russia interaction is something that we need to pay attention. Just had this big exercise, but before that it was much soft balancing. Now they are entering the limited hard balancing territory. They are not coordinating sufficiently yet, but there's no alliance as far as we see. How do we picture that? How do we explain that? I think this three mechanisms I mentioned, that transition is interesting in facing the threat they are facing. Good question about what is China doing? And I mentioned the asymmetric balancing. That is why the US doesn't have a proper answer. What we are doing is building this big aircraft carriers and all other high-end weapons. That is not what China is trying to do. Of course, it is also building, but to negate the American power through these asymmetrical means. And that's where I think the US, if it wants, and then $60 billion is a good idea, but it's not enough to $600 billion or $1.3 trillion, that is what BRI is. So legitimacy, yes. Legitimacy is a very important case. Even though Obama, probably you are closer to administrations, but at least he used this idea. We need to gain our legitimacy back. We need to get our respect back. The European allies don't like us. We want to be there. I mean, I don't know how much you believe in it, but legitimacy is a very important concept in the great power system. If you read English school, go back to history. Great power status is based on some kind of legitimation. Sustaining that requires legitimacy. The moment you lose legitimacy, you become a rock state. Rock states are not that great power supposed to be. But then we have to go back to the European historic diplomatic history. That's a very tricky part. Yeah, this NATO process is not alone. There is TTP without the US. Canada is taking a whole lot of initiatives. I don't want to trumpet too much. I don't know how effective they are going to be, but this NATO thing is a Canadian initiative, by the way, I think. And there are a lot of other groups. Europeans are meeting to think about ways to restore their alliance or kind of friendship with the US, but at the same time, soft balance. Because what else do you do? Finally, yeah, I don't think that the US, whether it is a democratic states, are more prone. But Gorbachev talked about legitimacy. What was he trying? The Soviet Union, by the way, used a lot of propaganda, of course, was also trying to gain legitimacy in the developing world. The non-alignment was their way to go to these countries. Different ways of propaganda in a big way. But legitimacy has always been part of great power competition, great power status, soft power, et cetera. China's strategy is also legitimacy. If you look at BRI, it gives them a lot more legitimacy if it's an economic initiative rather than a pure military initiative. So I think I covered much of I can. But what you just told me is enough menu for another five, six books and five, six dissertations, which I encourage the younger scholars to do. Because much work is needed. IR is IR and foreign policy analysis, all kind of stuck in this traditional versus post-modern critical theory or constructivist kind of discourse. And often the contemporary or the big issues that we witness today, or the Thucydides trap style, coming war. But what do we do in between? To prevent the war, we as agents, policy makers or scholars, have a role to play. And that is where these ideas need to be understood strategies. But by accepting that it's a human endeavor, it is not science. The final point is about balancing. This question is the historical book, it's a full of it. When is the equilibrium? Is it the philosophers debate about rules or fun to read their language? They thought they enlightened them to Europe thought this is a science. It's an art. It is human created. Or is it something that happens equilibrium? So that question I cannot answer because no philosopher would answer properly. But this is probably going to continue forever. Thank you. Thank you. Stevie, I'm going to ask you two or three questions in the hope that we can trigger a wider discussion. I found the book fascinating for a reason that only academics would sort of think about, which is you set out to critique a particular version of realism that is almost mechanistic in its obsession with the balance of power as a system. I think by the end of the book, you actually end up rehabilitating realism because what you succeed in doing is to shift the focus from a balance of power system to the phenomenon of balancing, which is much more dynamic and much more diverse. And what you're essentially telling us is that power begets countervailing influences on power. And it does not always take the form of military responses. It can take a variety of forms with military responses at one end of the spectrum all the way to diplomacy at the other end of the spectrum with institutions in various forms somewhere in between. So it seems to me that the heart of your critique is not about a realist view of how politics unfolds, but a particular mechanistic version of realism that no matter how appealing it is in theory is not satisfying as a description of how the world actually works. Is that a fair reading of the book? Yes, but I am not calling myself a realist. The problem is realism has now become those who are familiar with the Walsy and neo-structural. Then you have offensive realism, may shine more, neo-classical realism. If anything, that you are right, going back to kind of classical, prudential realism where the institutions international all have. The Henley Bulls and the Morgan though was referred Morgan though confuses a lot. So there's a lot of things we consider. But I don't want to PG and hold myself. What I'm saying is that balance of power matters or threats matter. You cannot wish them away. This is another problem with many of the IR perspectives or the critical variety. Don't want to see this phenomenon at all. The great power conflict, it's not that important. Somebody asked me another venue, a Canadian diplomat. Well, isn't the more important things are all the other non-traditional security issues? I said, yes, but at the same time, if this thing, the great power things get into the number one issue as it could, all these other things become subsumed by it. Look at the Cold War. Even Canada will have to join this fight in some fashion. So there is a lot of room for understanding and I don't want to dismiss the concerns of other issues that people may have. But yes, there was a period we thought non-traditional issues are important. Today it's back. This issue is not going to go away. It's going to the cycles of power and ships are happening. So I'm very realistic about international order. I think international order subjects should not be left to a bunch of small scholars or even policy makers for that matter. Great power was needs to be studied like disease. We have hospitals. We have big scientific programs. But how many scientific programs exist to understand these phenomenon and other than, of course, we entrust the policy maker at the top level with the decision for war and peace, which is very problematic. Especially if we get reckless leaders. I don't want to name anybody here. Just that leaders come and go. Some of them are, you know, the kaisers of the world cannot probably handle this thing. They are given this extraordinary godly power. And that's why we need to think about understanding this phenomenon more than what we do. And I think IR as a discipline has a lot to do with it. But so my effort is to bring good ideas from every some. Okay, English school should be happy. I bring legitimacy. Constructivist would be happy. I talk about norms and liberals would be happy. And liberals don't address this power dynamics of institutions. A big mistake. Go ahead and I can bury. You know, I can bury has a great book. But the point is how do you understand the power dynamics? The utility of these institutions. So I'm agnostic about calling any systems. But maybe if you, you know, characterize it that way, that's great. Well I want to bring Richard and Ellen into the conversation. One of the things, one of the questions that TV asks in the book has to do with the rise of the United States. And why countries have not traditionally balanced against American power. And I thought one way, one possible explanation of that story is that even though in the abstract, power is supposed to sort of evoke its own balances. In practice, what evokes countervailing forces is actually threat rather than power itself. So if you can imagine the United States as a powerful country, that actually has a very appealing ideology, right? The liberal ideology originally was meant to be something that affirms a universal set of values. Is it possible that a country, however powerful it grows, can actually preempt balancing? Because its power is married to a worldview that is at its best, inclusive, and creates space for others to participate from the benefits of its own growth. And I think the United States certainly at the beginning was seen as such a power. It was seen as an enlightenment power that even as it was powerful, rejected power politics was more interested in sort of preserving a certain desirable global order, as opposed to muscling the global system and reproducing it in its own image and likeness. How do you see this? How do you explain the United States and the relationship that the United States and its power with the rest of the world? Sure. I think a lot of it does have to do with the character and aims of the United States and the world. And to the degree to which countries detect a revolutionary flair to that, the color revolutions, they feel threatened by it. But when we're building an open international economic order which is open, it's not a trade block. Anyone can do it. You can come on in the waters fine. We don't have territorial designs. We don't typically go around the world overthrowing governments, although there's some exceptions to that. But certainly not for world revolutionary sorts of reasons, fascism, communism, these kinds of things. I think the character of the regime matters a lot. I think geography also matters. And yes, the United States has global power projection capabilities, but I still think geography matters. I remember a couple of decades ago meeting with a Mongolian official who was just waxing rhapsodic about the possibilities of a close Mongolian relationship with the United States. And I said, let me ask you, why do you want such a close relationship with the United States? We're far away. And he said, exactly. You're far away. He said, look where we are. Russia to the north, China to the south. We want a big friend who's not around here. And I think geography does matter. I mean, certainly look at the Russians. I mean, they feel more threatened by political developments on their periphery than they do political developments further away for obvious historical reasons. So I think this combination, I think, the most of it is the character of the regime, but I think geography matters as well. So I think your question resonates best if we think of the bipolar world of the Cold War, where alliances allowed smaller states to not have to do their own balancing, but to be part of some larger team effort that balanced against an agreed, shared adversary. But I think that TV's book really includes many other scenarios where small to medium-sized countries have to balance against each other. It's not all about this binary proposition that there's two systems that are competing in the world and that countries line up. But it is interesting to just reflect on the changing nature of alliances in a less hard balancing world, in a messier world where policy options are shades of gray and not black and white. How do we think about which countries we hope or try to achieve to be magnetically pulled to our model versus other? I mean, look at the US-Saudi relationship right now. It's been exposed that the shared values thing isn't really working, is it? And yet there are shared interests so that these alliances that are less than alliances, compare NATO to our alliances with countries like Saudi Arabia, where there was always this discomfort, that it was a pragmatic, mutually interested economic or energy transaction. But it surely wasn't like the NATO alliance, where there's a whole political package that works. So I'm sort of talking around your question. But I think it's a question about when do alliances have a logic to them and when do they not? And from the perspective of a Korea or a smaller European state, they're sort of outsourcing the balancing to us, right? They don't have to do the balancing themselves. Can we take one second to the bigger picture that you raised is very important that the United States helped to create these institutions in the post-war order. The problem what we are facing to the United States has helped to raise the expectations of rising powers, the globalization, by allowing them to be successful economies. Now the United States is suddenly drawing from that. This will have enormous consequences internally, nationalism. I can imagine a situation if China goes down. I mean, I'm not saying it's going to happen. Chinese nationalism will rise. And that has historically happened. If you look at the 1930s, 1910s, the German argument was that we are going to lose this whole thing because the established states don't want to give us anything, even when they are very successful. And the naval arms race is starting to build up. Japan's biggest complaint was that we can't survive as a great power without conquest. So this problem of withdrawal has its deeper implication. And it takes 10 to 20 years to develop a kind of rivalry mode. Right now we are in a pre-rivalry mode, at least with China. But it can develop as new arms buildups takes place. A lot of encounters in this whole South China Sea business, which we didn't mention, close temptation to strike when they are weak or them to do something. All these are consequences. We need to think through actions that may look temporarily bringing more work to the United States. What will that do to China's internal structure? And how will they react in a larger picture? Let me ask you one last question before I open it to the floor. And that has to do with some of the causality in your argumentation. You put a lot of stress, and rightly so in some ways, on institutions as devices that can sort of tame power. And that's essential to your soft balancing story. But it seems to me at the end of the day that when great powers confront institutions they don't like, they do have the capacity to simply ignore them when they want to. And China's behavior with respect to the unclossed tribunal ruling on the South China Sea is a great example of where you get a ruling which tends to undermine the equities of the great power in question. And the great power simply pretends like the ruling didn't exist. So in that sense, to what degree are institutions or rather effective institutions really proxies for power as opposed to having some power in their own right? So for example, if you don't have other great powers like the United States or the Western powers who are willing to buttress institutions like the unclossed tribunal, what value would you assign to these institutions in being able to do what you hope or expect them to do with respect to balancing? Yeah, the example of non-alignment comes to the picture, which actually used the UN a lot to talk about arms races, nuclear testing. At that time, or decolonization, nobody believed them. They have no power to change the world. The imperial powers of Europe could stay on. But they changed the narrative surrounding the notion of decolonization, surrounding racism by the international politics. A lot of this norm entrepreneurship happened during that period. And we need to give credit to people like Nehru up to a point. I'm very reluctant to tell. It's all because of that. But it changed the narrative globally. The limited test ban treaty was quite a way to appease the so-called third world groups in the United Nations, the 18 Nations Disarmament Committee. And this whole idea of decolonization, resolution of the UN pass affected the way the French and the Dutch and the other, they look at their colonies. Cannot go direct causality, but it is a setting up of certain ideas. So the ASEAN states do not think their efforts are useless. They are engaging the Chinese continuously through this code of conduct. And their argument is that imagine without that negotiation, China could go the other way, completely uncontrolled. So restrain for now, hope for the best, because you could have a regime change in China. If you didn't think is leave and somebody will come up and say, OK, China needs the support of these states. Maybe we create a system by which sharing the wealth of the South China Sea, which, by the way, they are talking with the Philippines now, as far as I know. So there's a lot of these mechanisms could happen. But often what happens is great powers are big in egomaniacs. They cannot accept that they are adopted a policy because the UN said so. But they are sensitive. I mean, there is very clear atoms for peace proposal was a way to appease these so-called developing countries. So I agree with you that, but it is not a complete use of what we call proxies of power. That is kind of the Meshheimer line, which I think is we have to look at in the totality and the long-term implication. If China wants to be a legitimate power in Asia Pacific, what it should do? Can it completely ignore institutions, law, everything? It hasn't, by the way. I mean, it's playing around the edges, except South China Sea, of course, I agree. And it is using the opportunities to create a new narrative and developing even the way it is going around building these bases. It's very reluctant to push these countries to accept bases. Of course, sometimes it does. And the debt trap is another thing that's going to happen, challenge Chinese order. The Chinese have created their own institutions, Shanghai Cooperation. That's where they talk about the centralation issues, the whole bricks, the two banks that have been created. So if I advise the Chinese, they should create more institutions and bring in countries like India to soften this potential for great power conflict with the United States and use it as a soft balancing mechanism. And I think before Xi Jinping, they had a peaceful rise strategy, which relied on institutional mechanisms, too. Now, yes, the institutions can be ignored, but at the same time, we end up going to the same institutions. Even if you say we don't like UN, but where do you go after the reconstruction of Afghanistan? A whole lot of things think about institutions do a lot of little things that we don't acknowledge often. Maybe in the big picture, it's a very different thing. It's a short term that behavioral attributes or changes cannot be given a bad name for an institution. Not that I am a pure institutionalist, but I think institutions have their role in the total mix of international politics and grand strategy. Well, thank you. I want to open the floor to comments, questions. Just identify yourself. You can direct the question to the whole panel or any one person in particular. Jessica. From Carnegie. Thank you all for really interesting discussion. Balancing is basically against threat. It's defensive. It's negative. But governments are always, at the same time, pursuing positive interests. And I wonder whether the nature of those positive interests has changed enough that this whole concept, which thinks of nations as billiard balls, is any longer really, it's very hard for us to divorce ourselves from it, but is any longer really valid. One example, there was an interesting op-ed piece in the Financial Times last week by a group from the eminent persons from the G20. And it argued that the vastly greater multi-polarity in the world system and the lessening of organized conductor of relations, but at the same time, vastly greater interdependence constituted a new world order that is just totally different from a 19th or 20th century world order. So if you put those two together, that balancing, we're only looking sort of at one piece of the picture. We're not thinking about governments that are worried about going underwater from climate change or governments worrying about how to control financial volatility or governments worrying about global epidemics or other positive interests that they want to pursue that don't come from any localized threat, does that change make this way of thinking OBE? Big question. Anyone who has thoughts? I have my own thoughts which I will talk about. I will start and then maybe they can. Because it's a big question, a very important question. I think the premise, at least from my point of view, I don't reject what you said about, as I talk a lot about economic independence, globalization, et cetera. But I don't agree with the point that we have to look at as a binary perspective, that there is this big change that's taking place. And therefore, this element is as important as those who served in the US government would know a certain segment of the American military is probably worried a lot more about China and the rise of China and the Thucydides trap problem. So if you look at governments as you all work so constantly, certain segment is focused on this issue. My own take is that we should never ignore this issue and leave it to a small group of policy makers. Part of it is if we ignore it, you don't know when the next crisis will start. There will be one very close encounter. And then these other things become less important. Other things are valuable things that we should deal with become less important. Or we should not ignore this potential for intense arms race, potential for nationalism. That can really take away the whole achievements we have or concerns we have of the other things. So my thinking is that we need both understanding of these segments of state action. But to say one is more important than the other, it's more like a desirable state of affairs than what it actually is in terms of state action, spending, military priorities, et cetera. I'll stop there. Yeah, Richard? Just to add a bit or add a thought, I think if the idea is that positive some pursuits among countries on its own will be enough to deter violence, I don't think we're anywhere close to that. And if you look at, you're shaking your head, so maybe that's not exactly what you meant by this. OK, well, moving to an order in which we do not rely on balance of power as military deterrence alliances and so forth, I don't see how we get there anytime soon. So just a few recent examples. What's the difference between the Senkakus in China's response and Scarborough Shoal? Well, the United States said the Senkakus were inside the defensive perimeter of the US-Japan alliance, and it didn't say Scarborough Shoal was inside the defensive perimeter of the alliance with the Philippines. And China reacted very differently in both of those cases. Russia invaded Georgia and Ukraine, but not the Baltics. What's the difference? Will the Baltics remember a NATO? And they knew they would elicit a response from the other NATO countries, including the United States. And they bet accurately that we would not if they went into Georgia and Ukraine. I think alliances and security guarantees are going to continue to matter to the basic conduct of deterrence and balance of power will matter. But the trick is it's not only that. It's not only defensive, right, because we do have these global economic issues, environmental issues, and all this other stuff. And the hard part, and I think you see this manifested with China especially, is that our agenda is not just balancing against China. Our agenda is also working with China on some of these things. So how in the world do you go to China and say, well, we like to work with you on, well, maybe not the current administration, but in general climate change, on stabilizing the global financial markets and the global economy on North Korea on any of these kind of issues that don't put us at each other's throats. But at the same time, we distrust you so much in your buildup that we want to gang up with everybody else to balance against you. That's the situation we're in. And the answer has been, I think, thus far, the sort of limited, hard balancing and soft balancing. At the same times, we have this kind of episodic coughs and spurts of engagement with China. It's not pretty, though. It is. That's exactly right. So if I understood where you were heading, it is true that I think there's a lag time both in our analytic understanding and in the reality on the ground of the countries that were the club of successful countries that had big stuff and could influence and shape the behavior of others. And what's emerging but hasn't yet quite crystallized around a consensus of an alternative world order is that globalization effects really mean there's a much, much larger club that have middle classes, that have upwardly mobile people, that don't have territorial disputes with their neighbors, that are interested in being positive players on the world scene. So I mean, I think if I'm understanding you right, that really the political center of gravity is no longer in a very small finite number of states but is distributed globally and that that could come together as a new system. But I don't think we're there yet. And I do think that when you get cooperation among 80 or 100 countries, it is still because there's some shared threat danger risk that they face. So I mean, I actually think the climate change issue is a really good laboratory to test this proposition, which is that you had both rich countries and countries that are only newly prosperous or whatever but are willing to a little bit change their thinking about their own destiny. They want to blame the countries that industrialized 100 years ago for having caused the problem, but they are still adapting. And what you get is both the soft and the hard responses. So I mean, that voluntary adherence to new norms. So the nation state isn't the only actor. The nation state isn't where all the power resides. And so you've got this spectrum of international cooperation that looks pretty different than late 20th century experiences. But again, you were saying, is this a new system? And I'm not quite sure that anybody in it would agree that it's a coherent and reliable system yet. There was a great book that was written, I think, in the 80s. TV will know this. This is Graduate School Memories by Robert Cohen, called After Hegemony. And essentially, the argument in Cohen's book was this, that you're going to get states who have positive sum objectives in various issue areas. And they're going to use the deepening institutional architecture of the world to pursue their interests. And that would become self-sustaining so that you don't have to worry about problems of the old order, which were balancing and conquest and so on and so forth. I think the argument is sustainable if you believe that these deepening institutional interactions, which are now commonplace, can sustain themselves without someone outside the system that is willing to bear the costs of upholding it. And I think where I had a real intellectual sort of problem with Cohen's argument was that he somehow believed that whatever came after Hegemony, and the book was titled After Hegemony because he saw the fruits of this deepening interdependence to be one of the great successes of Hegemony. Hegemony brings this about. It brings new patterns of interaction and cooperation. And then he goes on. So up to here, I'm with him. But then he goes on to say that even if Hegemony disappears, this structure will acquire a certain existential capacity to survive. And I'm deeply skeptical of that proposition because even in a system where there are no security risks, so you're talking of financial. You're talking of the financial system. You're not talking of security competition or anything like that. There is a problem of how gains get distributed. Some people gain more. Some people gain less. And sooner or later, the question arises as to who should bear the price to maintain the system if the benefits to them individually are not proportionate to the contributions they are making in sustaining. And the great thing about Hegemonic powers is that because they have so much power, they're happy to maintain these systems because they cost little in relative terms and the payoffs are great. And so my view is before we declare that this is a genuine system and an alternative to sort of the world of power politics, I think we need to be able to convince ourselves that this system can actually remain in existence long after the great powers that brought it into being disappear from the scene. And my profound reason for skepticism is this because I fear that if the US withdraws from its active engagement in this institutional structure. So in some sense, the US, let me put it this way, the system survives because the US is present. It's just present invisibly and behind the scenes. And that's a good thing because the moment the US presence becomes manifest, then the political controversy is about management begin to dominate. But if the US withdraws, and then it would be a great social science experiment. I mean it would be a great social science experiment to see whether the system can sustain itself if the US sort of opts out or if the US sort of reduces its contributions. I'm just not convinced that that system would survive. Now again, we can't prove this either way right now, right? But the historical evidence at least, for I would say the last 100 years suggests, that when great powers withdraw from the institutional arrangements that they have brought into being, those institutional arrangements either atrophy or they survive only if other great powers step into the breach, create their own institutions, right? Or to create substitutes. And that is what I find most barrisome about any American temptation to withdraw from the management of the international system. Now we don't have to do this aggressively and we don't have to do this in a way that is alienating. But I think the expectation that somehow the system would survive because there are enough rewards to be distributed to all, I think may be a product of excessive optimism rather than anything else. Yes ma'am? I can understand the discussion of the spectrum of soft power, hard power in the context of Europe and increasingly Asia. But I wondered if you would talk a little bit about those areas where there are potential new hegemonic powers. And I'm thinking particularly of the Middle East and Iran's ambitions and the extent to which those kinds of tools of analysis would be applicable to the kinds of conflicts, relationships and interests that states in the regions have shown or might be persuaded to show vis-à-vis the great power, soft power spectrum. Absolutely. Ellen, do you wanna take a crack at that? Well, I think for sure we are seeing Middle Eastern states starting to behave more like much great powers, UAE, Saudi, Iran, Turkey, Egypt, much less so. Egypt used to be the one that you would expect to play that role but they're not. So you have these wannabe hegemones if you will and they're using the old playbook. I don't see them as really good at soft balancing quite frankly. They don't do well, they don't really trust other countries, their brittle autocratic systems themselves, they wanna be accepted as they're asserting primacy and their primacies are clashing with each other and they are really in some cases disruptors. There's a new think tank report comparing the failure of the UN to resolve the Libyan, Yemeni and Syrian civil wars and enemy number one is the Middle Eastern countries meddling. I mean that they are such spoilers because they're each on this fast trajectory to demonstrate their own power. So I think they're using the old playbook not any kind of a post balancing playbook but it's not clear that they're achieving real gains for their own security and their own regional stability. So both Iran and Saudi Arabia I think do have soft power which is different than soft balancing. I mean they have very much tried to use those tools and yet there's plenty of people in the region including the other states that see them as threats not as positive influencers. Richard do you wanna address this? Well the only thing I would say is I mean it is kind of a blast from the past when you see these kind of vague axes being formed with you've got Egypt, Saudi, the Emirates, Israel sort of on one side and then at least they believe you have Iran, Qatar, Turkey, you know on the other side how coherent that other one is but you get I mean the proxy wars, the meddling in each other's politics. I mean it's all kind of the playbook stuff and so there's a little cockpit in which this is all taking place but a lot of this could be ripped right out of the Cold War. Counterfactually if they played soft balancing there would be much more peace I think in the Middle East is that they are stuck in this hard balancing hard real politic. Using by the way there is that ethnic or Gia Sunni, Gia divide of countries creating balancing around these two coalitions. Look what they have brought in. Have they brought in peace? So this is a problem with balancing. They're buying by the way a lot of weapons too internal balancing is happening. So my problem is they should look at other regions like ASEAN okay it's not the perfect example I mean the countries there don't play this much intense balance of power each other. There are other models out there even Africa has model of Latin America to some extent. So the Middle East is not a good place to argue that soft balancing you know working because they're not even trying they don't they haven't been socialized into that mechanism. Although in the past there was some effort called cooperation council you know during Nasser's period there were all these ideas about greater cooperation. So they are not completely immune to it but their narrative has become so into this hard real politic plus ethnic divisions and the great powers are not helping either as far as I see Russia is part of the problem and the United States is some extent. And so how do we understand this without this strategies of states built around old playbook exactly the word which are not going to resolve the problem at all. If at all they'll receive they need institutions they need norms they need a set of ideas to create a better order in the region and I don't see that happen. Yes sir. Greg Tillman arms control association. I'm wondering how what insights that Professor Paul's book might have for thinking through the prohibition to ban nuclear weapons a treaty that has recently been agreed to by the majority of countries of the world but none of the countries that possess nuclear weapons. And in this context I recall a book from last year by Hathaway and Shapiro Yale law school professors called the internationalists making a very impressive argument that the 1928 peace pact the Kellogg-Briand treaty that outlawed war by many measures had a profound impact on the behavior of other states. And so I just wonder what you think how we should think about the soft balancing of countries that accept an outcome that is very different than what the great powers today accept. To begin with soft balancing is not a panacea for all the major issues the world is facing but I will go in a little bit more on the subjects. I have another book called the tradition of non-use of nuclear weapons where I look at, this is a Nina Tannenwald there's a book called nuclear taboo and mine is kind of counter or not counter we agree on many things but I call it a tradition along with great minds like Thomas Schelling and people like that. Anyway, the argument there is that the efforts by the non-nuclear states to create a tradition has been partially successful and has caused the transformation especially with Gorbachev period that period and Gorbachev's acceptance of some of that. And the whole, I just mentioned the test ban treaty a whole host of arms control efforts during the 60s and before that had some impact by the non-state I mean non-great power states. And the end of the Cold War there was a period of intense activism including your group that produced a lot of nice reports, et cetera. Today what's happening is our attention has moved away from nuclear weapons. It's no longer considered as an existential threat although we all know it is but it somehow is not in the radar screen. So the so-called NGOs or the peace groups that fought for nuclear freeze for instance are nowhere in sight and as a result it is not constraining these great powers who by the way are engaging in one of the most intense arms build up behind the scenes. Russians and United States, China to the summation and India all of them are building nuclear weapons the better, the more advanced systems and not getting much attention internationally because it's not viewed as something that is important or attention that they should deserve. So what else we can do to create that ban? I mean some people would say that ban may not be a good idea to begin with considering we have the power transition crisis potential there, but at least to reduce the nuclear arms build up. Reduce the amount of money being wasted. Trillion dollar is going to go into the modernization of US weapons alone in the next decade or two. How can we reduce that by engaging arms control a little bit more intensely with the Russians and the Russians themselves, you know the waste of money that's going on into this. And it just brings into this final or relevant issue that is you are seeing this build up going on extraordinary build up in conventional weapons too without anybody questioning the US budget allocations. Nobody questions the need to raise this budget keep growing. This is the case in almost every other country as far as I know. This is one holy cow no one want to take on. It's one area where expenditures can go on. And so it is not just nuclear weapons it's conventional weapons too. With the idea of balancing, hard balancing by the way unless there is some other purpose in building up. And this threat that is perceived in the future if we don't have all these weapons we're going to be in deep danger is a very powerful narrative for politicians and people who you don't want to stand up to that kind of narrative. So your question is a deep one unless you have a great power rapprochement we were very close to that at the end of the Cold War a kind of a nuclear free world. I think we are moving away from that today. It's unlikely to come back unless you have some deep crisis or a kind of a Gorbachev phenomenon again. I don't see that anytime happening in our near future. Peevee, you've provoked me to ask a follow-up question to your answer because you described this as if it was a narrative which has somehow taken hold of decision makers collectively in the world and therefore are pursuing this, right? To what degree is this a response even if it is a misguided response? But to what degree is this a response to what they believe are genuine security needs? In other words, is there something that connects this development to some objective realities in the world as opposed to simply this being a product of false consciousness? You mean conventional arms buildup as well as nuclear? Both. Both. Yeah, that's a fascinating question. Why are they, do they have any great understanding coming from some real source suggesting that threat environment is going to radically shift? We need to build all these weapons. Or is it a technological momentum that's going on? Or is it military industrial complex which Mr. Eisenhower, by the way, raised at his last speech? There is that process that, I mean, you don't have to be a Marxist to believe that there is a connection between production, innovation, and budget allocations. Certain individuals and institutions benefit a lot from these budget allocations. But I think it's more than that. It is the uncertainty that these decision makers think of the future. They are expecting great competition to emerge. They're expecting great rivalries to emerge. And then in order to deter, in order to prevent, in order to lose their hegemony, to some extent, for hegemonic powers, they need to be up on the technology spectrum. I won't blame them on that one, though. We don't know what new technologies can do. Because if the latest next technology will cut away, by the way, that may be one way to reduce nuclear weapons as irrelevant, which is the next technology which we don't know what artificial intelligence to cyber or whatever. So a lot of these fears are correlated with this uncertainty of the future. And that far, you can say, there is an Arctic system. But the point is whether building X number of these big aircraft carriers, they're more like status symbols, show off, swaggering as Robert Hart talks about in one of these pieces. Or should we, that means the Chinese calculations may be smarter. Look at what they can face, the symmetrical ways with these big aircraft carrier kind of forces. So some narrative may be based on the old understanding of what hegemony is. US hegemony is dependent on aircraft carriers and bases and big guns. Those guns are then become part of our expectation about the future. And I think it is risky because, I mean, sure the US is also spending a lot of effort in these non-kinetic other mechanisms too. But that competition is going to probably cut away some of the wastage that we will see, but maybe a new wastage that will come in the future. So the general question is hard to answer why leaders are socialized in this way of thinking, or is it the reality of international politics? Any other, yes? I have a new, a new exchange visit at Georgetown University from China. So it is not surprising that I'll have something to do with China. One comment and one question please. The comment is about South China's arbitration. The Chinese perspective is that the arbitration is not in the spirit and the letter of uncross itself because there is one clause in the, in uncross that says arbitration has nothing to do with the sovereignty and maritime delimitation. And that arbitration is about sovereignty. The other one, another clause is countries are allowed to opt out of the procedure, provided you said in writing beforehand, China along with about 30 other countries opted out of the arbitration process. So this opting out in China's understanding constitutes part of the uncross. So that's, according to the Chinese interpretation, the arbitration itself is not quite legitimate and that's my comment. Another question is about the softer balancing. I understand it is quite easy to understand a softer balancing against a bigger player by smaller ones, but the United States being the only superpower, wherever you threw your weight, the balance is easily lost. Is there any likelihood that a small player could take it for granted the U.S. support in dealing with its disputes with a bigger player in its region, such as South China Sea? I'm yet to see, well, there are many cases of disputes, territorial disputes between China and its neighbors, and I'm yet to see one case, a single case, where the United States is not critical of China. So maybe some small player will want to use the U.S. support as a leverage to say in its dispute with China. That will that likely bring the U.S. into a dispute or conflict, which the United States is not willing or not ready to. Thank you. Anybody want to respond about the unclose? Can I make just a quick comment on this? That defense is why I think international institutions and international law still matter to great powers, and that institutions are not just a projection of the power distribution that they're absolutely free to ignore it. I mean, they're free to ignore it when they don't like it, and that there's sort of nothing to it because China's position on the South China Sea is totally fascinating. China's position is not that, well, we don't care about the law of the sea, we can do whatever we want, we're a dominant power in the region. Everything we're doing is compliant with the South China Sea. You guys are, and the whole rest of the world misunderstands the actual application of law of the sea. We're a member of the law of the sea, the United States is not part of the UN Convention on Law of the Sea, the arbitration, there's some technical reason why the arbitration should not have, rulings shouldn't have applied. It's all done within the construct of this international law. So how much of international law and institutions matter to great powers? Not enough for China to get out of the South China Sea if they get a ruling saying you should or you must, but enough to confine their arguments within this. I mean, you can see this with Russia, right? It's not, well, we can kill spies on other people's sovereign territory because we're a great power and we like it. We didn't do that, these arguments are, and of course the United States, I mean, back in 86 when the International Court of Justice ruled against the United States in the Nicaragua case and awarded the Sandinistas a $500 million judgment. The United States said, we don't recognize the jurisdiction, we have all these legal reasons why this doesn't apply. And then the minute there was a change in government that gave $500 million to the government of Nicaragua, surprise, surprise, it was the same amount that had been awarded in the judgment. So these things matter, they don't matter absolutely, but they don't matter zero, either. And I think that goes to the point that TV was making about legitimation, right? The institutions create legitimacy. And legitimacy becomes something that you cannot assume. I think that's the response. What kind of a superpower China wants to be in the 21st century? Can China afford to acquire these territories without the support of the regional states and some level of international legalization? Can it get the required legitimacy to become or fulfill the dream of certain Chinese leaders at this point to become the next superpower? So there is a lot of question, what does China want? What kind of international order? Is it selective use of certain international law, certain practices to justify or not to justify, or to question the United States presence there or whatever? I think if China ever wants to become accepted, legitimate, great power, which it preserves of Asia Pacific, it may have to either create new international legal means or improve what is already there. That's where its position on South China is a very weak one. I don't want to dispute with you on whether it is prudence or whatever. But everything else China has done, there's a lot of smartness in China's grand strategy, except this one. I think this one has very narrow kind of old style, acquisition of territory, questioning the idea of non-use of force to acquire territory, et cetera. So there's a lot of problem with that grand strategy element. And without institutional support, China will have a tough time maintaining this claim, partly because look at what the US is doing now under Mr. Trump. There's more freedom of navigation. That is the biggest challenge, as far as I see it, for international crises. And it was the British threat that it felt when the Germans started building naval force to their hegemony that led to that rivalry. Britain and Germany were not bound to be enemies. The Kaiser is the grandson or nephew of the British king. And there's a lot of family connections there too. So what China is doing may look benign now, but I think there will be a period when the US will be under tremendous pressure if China builds military strength in South China Sea to question because that is the US hegemonic sphere it feels. So the questioning will happen. And so in that sense, it's China's interest to somehow solve this problem through legal or other means other than prolong this. In the long run, it's not good for anybody, including China for that matter. So in a sense, the US challenge is not supporting any of these states directly because the US is careful, I guess. You don't want to, it's Taiwan probably. But the point is this freedom of navigation, how far the US will go or how far China will resist it. And now if it includes the aircraft moving around too, we are actually in the early phases of a potentially very dangerous zone of conflict. And for great powers, you only need one core issue or core area of their hegemony control that can lead to that kind of rivalry. So institutions, whatever we have may be bad or law may not be sufficient, still don't reject that rule to solve this peacefully. Yes, sir. Leonard Campbell. My question is about Ellen's comment relating to US use of sanctions. I think you said overuse, but then also later you said that no other country was able to essentially enforce or impose sanctions against the United States due to its size. I'm just wondering if you can foresee a scenario perhaps in the future. So not recent future, but obviously thinking long term where countries essentially decide that the terms and conditions of dealing with the United States becomes so onerous that it's just better to essentially opt out, particularly if sanctions are or have been imposed for a lengthy period of time where perhaps the institutional memory so to speak doesn't exist. So there isn't anybody to say, oh, I remember the good old days where we got whatever from dealing with them. No, it's an interesting question. I don't know whether there's enough technological changes going on in financial flows of whether countries can bypass the banking system and do transactions, but they're working on it. They're working on, and transactions, can you sell oil and denominations other than dollars? Could you boycott the United States? You could do other things if you wanted to come up with some equivalent punitive tool against the United States. You could decide if you had an existing trading pattern with the United States, you look for other suppliers of a particular commodity and say, we don't wanna trade with the United States anymore. We wanna reduce our dependence on the United States. And I think that is happening in small ways, but it's not yet at a point where countries have such easy options. I mean, look at the way the Europeans are trying to keep the Iran nuclear agreement intact, but it really requires being exceedingly creative and entrepreneurial about how you could bypass the, and how they could avoid secondary penalties against themselves. It's early November that Europeans are gonna have to make some very hard choices about how they can keep some sense of normalcy in their transactions with Iran and avoid penalties from the US. But it's a good way to be thinking about what signs are we seeing of alternative mechanisms that would reduce reliance on the United States. And look, I think it's not desirable from an American interest perspective, but it may be inevitable as countries see the relative decline of American influence. It's not just out of anger or total hatred for the United States. It could be just a practical measure of seeing that the United States isn't the all-powerful center of gravity anymore and other channels start to open up. Well, on that note, I'm gonna adjourn the discussion this afternoon. I wanna thank all of you and actually congratulate you for coming to an event that at least on the face of it is actually, appears quite abstract, but as the discussion this afternoon showed that there are really practical consequences from even abstractions. So for the brave and intrepid among you who came this afternoon for a discussion on soft balancing, which is the subject that sort of keeps professors and IR theorists employed, congratulations. I hope to see all of you at some point back at the endowment. Thank you very much for coming and a very special thanks for one moment. And a very special thanks to TV and to Richard and to Ellen for spending time with us this afternoon. On a more commercial note, I have, I owe it to TV to let you know that are there books outside? I don't know, I'm asking you. Yes, there are books outside in case you wanna get your Christmas. I will sign them. He will even sign them. And I also wanna flag another book that TV has edited, which for those of you who are interested in more practical things is worth a look. It's called the China-India rivalry in the era of globalization. It's very different from this book, obviously, but very interesting for those of you who care about Asian politics and in particular, developments involving China and India. Well, there are a series of contributors, but TV Paul is the editor. So... Actually, my introduction says it's a managed rivalry because of globalization. All right, so that's like a part two to this study. So thank you all very much and thanks to all of you for coming this afternoon. Thank you. Thank you. Congratulations. Thank you.