 Good afternoon to you all and please welcome you to the IIE webinar and we're delighted to be joined today by Elizabeth Braugh, a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute, who's been generous enough to take time out of her busy schedule to speak to us. Elizabeth Braugh will speak for about 20 minutes or so and then we'll go into Q&A with the audience. You'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on the screen in front of you. But please feel free to send your questions in throughout the sessions as they occur to you and we'll come to them once our speaker has finished their presentation. I would ask that you would keep your questions succinct, that you give your full name and your affiliation when asking questions. Just a reminder that today's presentation and the Q&A are both on the record. So please feel free to join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIEA. So now I'll formally introduce Elizabeth Braugh and hand her over to you at the end of this brief introduction. Elizabeth is a senior fellow at the American Enterprise Institute where she focuses on defence against grey zone threats. She is also a colonist with foreign policy and political Europe, and the author of The Defender's Dilemma, identifying and deterring grey zone aggression. The book was published in 2022. Elizabeth is writing a book about globalization and geopolitics for Yale University Press and she's a member of Gellus Technologies and Advisory Board member and a member of the UK National Preparedness Commission and a member of the steering committee of the Aurora Forum. So I'm looking forward to what I'm sure will be a fascinating reflection from Elizabeth. So Elizabeth, Zoom is all yours. Thank you very much, Mark, and thank you for the invitation to join you and it's such a pleasure to be talking about grey zone aggression, not because it's a pleasant subject, it's an unpleasant subject, but it's such a pleasure because many, many people, many leading institutions, including yours, are beginning to think about grey zone aggression and yours has, your organisation has obviously thought about it longer than many others. But the great thing is that the conversation is happening and I mean, remember, even three or four years ago when I tried to articulate or articulated various grey zone threats, many people's response was well, you know, it's not that big of a deal. And now we are realising collectively, I think as Western societies, that it is a big deal, because with grey zone aggression, you can, you can cripple societies in ways that are almost as damaging or as damaging even more damaging than using military force. And yet you can do so with impunity, because we as Western societies are well set up to defend ourselves with against military attacks. And yes, those military attacks would still be damaging, but we would know what to do. And with grey zone aggression, we don't know what to do because it's not the military attack, and yet it's not nothing. So that raises the question, what is grey zone aggression? It is the use of aggressive means below the threshold of armed military violence. And what's interesting is that it can be both legal and illegal means. So if we think about, for example, subversive business practices. In many cases, those practices are legal, for example, acquisitions of companies. And when it comes to acquisitions of companies, that's something that happens every single day of the year. And in fact, it's part of the lifeblood of any free market society. And so that is how it's supposed to work. And then relatively recently, countries began noticing that oops, maybe there is a strategy behind the sort of acquisitions that Chinese companies are conducting in our countries. And people realize that, oh, Chinese companies have bought up many of our cutting edge technology companies and they are no longer Irish or Swedish or British or German companies. Chinese owned companies focusing on the Chinese market. And their IP now belongs to those intellectual property, now belongs to the Chinese owner. Then grey zone aggression can use illegal means as well. And that includes, for example, weaponizing migrants, which we have seen Belarus do to try to weaken the European Union. It's brought, as I'm sure you all know, it brought migrants to Belarus and transported them to the border, borders of Poland, Lithuania and Latvia, and encouraged them to try to cross the border illegally. And that put those countries in a dilemma because you don't want to be inhumane by pushing back people who say they want to apply for asylum. On the other hand, you have to act because this is an effort by another country to weaken yours by very sinister manner using human beings. And that's what those countries did in the end, they put up fences and only left people through who had some sort of medical condition. But there were many people who said, well, you know, you're being inhumane. So grey zone aggression can take on all kinds of shapes and forms and that's what makes it so difficult to predict. It's not like military aggression where you have a pretty good idea of what the adversary can do because you know what sort of equipment the adversary has and then you just have to figure out in which formation and at what time the adversary might use it. But grey zone aggression really can be anything, anywhere. And the Americans are a good example of why the wake up call that is taking place now is necessary because they didn't think that the anywhere would include them. They are so used to their geographic position in the world, protecting them against national security threats. And then we saw in 2021 May of 2021 that hacking attack the ransomware attack on colonial pipeline and colonial pipeline is a pipeline that that supplies the fuel of all kinds to the east coast half of that fuel is supplied by colonial Russian hacking or hacking group targeted colonial and managed to cripple or occupy parts of it and then issued its ransom and demand and that then cost colonial to shut down the whole pipeline, which is what you have to do. And that would have been managed well, but people then ordinary citizens then responded by saying, oh, that's going to be a shortage. I better fill up on on petrol because otherwise I won't be able to drive to work. So people stockpiled petrol to be able to get to work which makes is a logical response from an individual perspective it's an absolutely disastrous response from a societal perspective, because the east coast ran out of petrol. And it was an absolutely crippling shortage and the federal government in the end, had to step in and release fewer from the fuel reserves. So, that again illustrates how it. Graze zone aggression can strike anywhere east coast drivers on on the US East Coast had expected that they would be at any sort of risk of gray zone aggression. And another recent example in the US which highlights that can be anything anytime. What's the Chinese balloon and the Chinese spy balloon, and the Chinese spy balloon has I must say done wonders to raise the profile of brazen aggression. It was clearly a balloon. And it was a balloon in US airspace and yes I have been balloons in the past but the fact that ordinary citizens could see it meant that US government had to do something. The US has a powerful military that is very good at deterring aggression, but here was something flying into US airspace without permission. So that is gray zone aggression you get to do something, but because it wasn't a fighter jet it wasn't clear what was to be done. It would have been escalatory for the US Air Force to shoot it down. But yet, if it keeps flying through. If any object keeps flying through US airspace without permission, then it looks like the US military is not able to defend the country's borders, including its airspace. It's not going to be done and so the military had to have a good think about what needed to be done and in the end, as you know, they shot it down off the coast off the east coast, but even then, and China accused the US military of escalation and overreaction, there is exactly the dilemma that the defender always faces if you do nothing then you're essentially implying that the gray zone aggression is that you don't know what to do if you do something. Then the perpetrator can, if the perpetrator is has been identified, the perpetrator can accuse you of escalating. And this is one of the defenders dilemmas. The other dilemma is that you don't always know know who the perpetrator is with cyber aggression. You may have a good, a good idea of who the perpetrator is the state backing the conducting the aggression or backing it, but you may not have strong enough evidence to be able to publicly state which country it was. So, the identity of the perpetrator is one challenge, and the response is one challenge. And then another challenge is, do you have, can you respond to every single act of gray zone aggression. And if not, where do you draw the line. And if you look at cyber aggression is just not possible to respond, meaning to punish every act of cyber aggression. Not even every act that is conducted or backed by hostile government, but above which level do you respond and that's where it's not really clear where we should put the threshold as liberal democracies. And another example of that is, if you look at what's happening what happened last week in the in the Taiwan Straits, where, in response to President size meeting with speaking McCarthy in California, China retaliated and not in a military way she's entitled to have meetings but China, they did want to retaliate and it did so by sending out what they called an inspection flotilla and into the Taiwan strait and this inspection flotilla could the Chinese government said, I inspect the commercial vessels traveling through this, this straight and we should remember that the Taiwan straight is one of the world's busiest waterways, about half of all container ships pass through the Taiwan straight and in the middle of the Taiwan straight is the median line, which is not an official maritime border it's just it's an unofficial one that has been observed by by China and Taiwan for decades. And this maritime this this inspection flotilla gave itself the permission or the government the Chinese government gave it the permission to inspect all kinds of vessels in the Taiwan straight. Now it didn't do it this time, but it may do it next time. And the question is, and if it does it. There's a first of all that that's global shipping will be massively distracted because once you start conducting inspections in a in a body of water where the passable part is very narrow. The traffic is a maritime traffic will back up very quickly with which will cause disruption to global shipping. And the question is, how do you respond then, or if you don't respond the first time, what is the number of times that you can tolerate before before you respond meaning before you retaliate and if you if you decide to retaliate with which means and we should remember that that's causing disruption to global shipping is is obviously extremely harmful to lots of countries but it would also a disruption or inspection of vessels traveling through Taiwan straight would also frighten a global shipping away from from from sailing to Taiwan because they would say who if we are expected again that's going to be even more disruption we would better find alternative ports we'd better stop trading or transporting cargo to and from Taiwan. And all of this, every time it raises a question when do you respond from which level do you consider brazen aggression and unacceptable. And another example of that is the artificial islands that China has built in the South China Sea. There are islands with military installations on them it's it's clear that they are islands but when China first started pouring concrete down on the bottom of the sea in the in the South China Sea countries of well you know it's it's just a bit of concrete that we can we can let it pass. Well, every step countries that well, you know, what can we do and it's just a little bit of construction and now the islands are there and it's too late to retaliate. Another form of, of grace and aggression is of course disinformation, which is not also not illegal but which causes enormous disruption to our societies, it's it's much more well known than these other forms of grace and aggression simply because we have been aware of it for, for years now especially since the 2016 US presidential election campaign. But it continues to permeate our societies and if we are seeing, especially with regards to the one Ukraine that that people of all political persuasions unwittingly unwittingly make themselves into conduits for falsehoods. And some are maybe acting on behalf of Russia or have a synthesis for for Russia but others are just, they just share content lay like, and, and they, they don't have the skills to verify that information or they are too lazy to verify it and I think frankly speaking, most of us don't have the skill to verify a lot of content that that is shared on social media in particular. So that is damaging, but what is even more damaging that then the specific pieces of this information is that it creates this feeling among people that you can't really trust any information so it's it becomes a very, people develop a very cynical attitude towards information that it's, you know, a, yeah, I may, I think it's true that for it's true or what does it matter whether it's true. I like it. And if we think about the consequences for that it consequences are that they cannot be absolutely crippling to our societies that are based on intelligent discourse based on facts. If we can't agree on facts, I worry that our democracies will become ungovernable. If we dis if we discuss and debate based on different sets of facts, how can we possibly have an intelligent, let alone productive debate in our societies. So that's where we are. And then the challenge is that hostile countries or actors operating on their behalf can keep innovating, whereas we on the defender side can't base our response on on previous events because the other side can come up with something completely different. But what we can do is raise awareness of this and and bring the public with us, and because this aggression really affects everybody. And that's why I think people would be more motivated to do that part to keep their country safe, whether it be Ireland or or any other country simply because we don't want our societies disrupted or brought down or harmed by by hostile states. And we all enjoy our well functioning countries and and and and our freedom and and and the opportunities that we have within our countries. We have a fantastic way of life, a fantastic quality of life in our countries, and all of these different forms of disruption and a great zone aggression would harm or do harm that way of life. And so if we think about people's attitude generally towards the military in various and in some quarters people are very willing to to serve in the military, whereas others are less willing to serve in the military, but when it comes to grace and aggression. Why would I, I'm convinced that everybody would want to be part of minimizing the harm that raise an aggression can do simply because we want to maintain our way of life in our societies and that I think is a fantastic not just all parts of government, but the private sector. The third sector, and the wider population in in in in making the country safe. So if you think about what ordinary citizens can do. The first thing of course is information literacy and and I remain convinced that if libraries public libraries were to often offer information literacy classes courses, a lot of people would take them because I think it's embarrassing if you don't know how to tell truth from from falsehoods. I think also will reach the point where employers will require that that's prospective employees have some sort of information literacy certification simply because you can't have a become run a company where in our information economy, where employees don't know what constitutes or how to verify information that is just too risky today. So information literacy is one step and it's interesting that the Finnish government calls information literacy, a civic competence which is absolutely the right way of putting it. And then you can, you can involve the wider public or parts of the public by training them resilience such as first aid disaster preparedness disaster response. So that if something happens, whether it be caused by mother nature like a pandemic or whether it be caused by hostile set that you have a critical mass of people who know what to do. And I'm speaking from the UK here in the UK. Young people who are part of the dv schemes of Duke of Duke of Edinburgh scheme did fantastic work during the pandemic and essentially doing chores for elderly and isolated people who who couldn't very who couldn't really look after themselves or go to the supermarket during the pandemic. Those young people did it. And the Duke of Edinburgh scheme is a fantastic scheme, I think it can be replicated in other countries and also with with people in the UK who are not part of the daily scheme, for example, people who are a little bit older. And if we look at when a crisis occurs in different countries, people then invariably want to help but I think if we can organize ourselves before crisis then we, we are in a much better position to, to tackle the crisis and and reduce the harm it does. Another thing that is really important is involving the private sector and it used to be until very recently that the private sector was seen as just going about its business companies make money, pay taxes and and as a result, contribute to the prosperity in our countries and we thought that that was that's where their obligations ended. But now what we're seeing is two different things. First that they are they are being targeted by grace and aggression simply because of where they are based. It can be either through cyber attacks, and I would love to hear if, if, if you all, I could do a show of hands but I can't but anyway, maybe we can get some sort of indication in the Q&A of who remembers not Petya which was a crippling cyber attack. Six years ago conducted by Russia against Ukraine but then traveled on and brought down the, the, the, the, some of the biggest multinationals in the world including Merck, the pharmaceutical company which was then left unable to manufacture its, its crucial HPV vaccine. That is just a hugely damaging effect. It brought down Merck which is large, large, the world's largest shipping company, it brought down Mondelez which is a snack giants, it brought down the company that makes lots of the household goods we use here in the UK. And they of course had nothing to do with, they don't have any, any adversaries that would wish their meals simply because they are Merck or Mask or Mondelez. They, they were just targets. On that occasion they were accidental targets because the aggression was directed against Ukraine in the first place. So in the last sessions companies are targets are, are the intended target simply because of where they are based that's what happened to colonial pipeline, but then on top of that. It's not just cyber attacks. It's, it's attacks punishing Western companies if they're, if the home government does something that also like the government doesn't agree with or feels, feels offended by. For example, when Lithuania invited Taiwan to open the representative office in Vilnius, China responded by blocking imports of all Lithuanian goods. So those Lithuanian goods, which were also parts of, of products made in other countries, they were just stuck in Chinese ports, but Lithuanian companies, they consider themselves neutral, and they discover they are no longer neutral. And the same thing happened to Australian wine makers when Australia called for an investigation into the origins of COVID China responded by slapping punitive tariffs on Australian wine and Australian wine makers as a result, lost their biggest export market Australian wine makers don't consider themselves geopolitical. Well, they had a rude awakening. And we're seeing that over and over with different companies, HMA, H&M, Ericsson, and so on. And there is no way a company can protect itself against geopolitically motivated harm being, being done to it. And that too is brazen aggression because no, no company has a right to export to any other country under particular conditions. No company can complain to the World Trade Organization, but it's not, it's not an egregious violation of the case that the home government would then take action against the offending government. So the company really is on its own. And for example, what happened to Ericsson in China was that Sweden decided to not to use Huawei for its 5G. And then low and behold, Ericsson, which is one of the world's most globalized companies, has used to have a massive market share in China now, less massive and nevertheless, it's biggest market anywhere. And now essentially shut out from the Chinese market where Ericsson doesn't have the right to have a certain percent of the Chinese market, but it had been operating on the basis that, you know, this is a globalized economy. Companies compete against one another and the best company wins. Well, Ericsson was punished because of something the Swedish government had done. And as a result of that, companies now are motivated in a way that they haven't been in the past, motivated to try to be part of the solution to try to work with the government to reduce the harm and ideally to try to predict it. So that companies have a better way of trying to deflating the harm before it occurs, or at least to reduce it when it does occur. And this is so different from the way companies have operated in the past where they only consider tactical risks like corruption, kidnappings and so forth. And that's the basis on which they did business abroad. No more. Now they have to consider geopolitics and it's interesting that there is an annual survey done by Willis-Tarrs Watson, which is a large global insurance broker. And every year Willis-Tarrs Watson releases a survey of political risk, meaning risks other than the ones caused by mother nature. And this survey last year when it was released last spring showed that China, except if it was now considered China, the riskiest countries to do business in. And that's, it used to be Iran, Angola, those sort of countries. Now it's China. And that's just a sign of how much things have changed in recent years. My time is up, but the bottom line is that we are, we have entered uncharted waters, the globalised economy meeting geopolitics, where almost anything can be instrumentalised for grey zone aggression, and that is depressing and really quite frightening. The good news is that in the past, we have governments haven't utilised civil society, including the private sector to try to keep society safe. So we have this totally untapped potential, which is where I think we can build lots of expertise and capability and collaboration to try to keep our country safe, even though it's not possible to completely shut grey zone aggression out. And that also frees the military up to focus on what they are really good at, which is military defence. If we think that we can use the military for grey zone defence, then it means that the military has to do lots of things that are not the military's core expertise, and it would also take them away from what is their core expertise, and that would be hugely damaging. So with that, over to you, Mark.