 All right, I've succeeded in staring you down into silence Hey, we we've really saved the best for last an extraordinary speaker We've got Robert Kaplan here as our final keynote speaker He's recognized obviously as one of the world's leading thinkers and writers on global affairs And in fact has twice made the list of foreign policy magazines top 100 global thinkers He's a senior fellow at the Center for new American security and a senior advisor at Eurasia group He's a best-selling author of 17 books all of which are currently in print His latest book is earning the Rockies how geography shapes America's role in the world He's been an extraordinary guest at the War College and we're honored to have him here as our final keynote speaker Thank you Well, thank you so much for that lovely introduction and again it's a great honor to be back at the War College for the strategy forum and What I'd like to do is give you a tour of the world in about 35 40 minutes And I'm sure there are areas I won't get to and you can raise them in the Q&A afterwards First of all, let me start at 30,000 feet and then get down a ground level Technology is not Defeating geography what's happened is that technology has shrunk Geography and made it smaller so that the world is more anxious more claustrophobic More tied together than ever before but it's like my wrist watch. It may be small And you have even smaller watches, but to understand it You have to take it apart to see all the weird the wheels and gears and you know and everything that makes it tick And that's why river systems ports Mountain ranges Etc are more important now than they've ever been Precisely because the world is more integrated and smaller globalization means integration but integration means more points of interconnection and the more points there are of interconnection the more Possibility for military and other kinds of flare-ups so it's precisely because of globalization and because of integration that the world today is more anxious and claustrophobic than it's ever been in its history because every place matters in a way that it didn't If you just pluck one string somewhere the whole web vibrates the whole strategic Web of the world vibrates, you know people talk about short sharp wars in the South China Sea I don't believe it because precisely because of connectivity Wars and conflicts have a have a means to migrate to other regions in a way that they never had before So that the conflicts or the rivalries in the Baltic Sea Basin the Black Sea Basin the East and South China Seas are more interrelated than ever and one could ever have imagined a few decades ago You can eat in fact the word Eurasia has a meaning in the way that it didn't a decade ago a decade ago It's just a geographic term for the supercontinent, but now we have a co hearing Eurasian conflict system That never existed before And now let me go lower into certain into details But let me just give you one example of what I mean take Indian China for instance Indian China for most of history were two great world civilizations that really did not have much to do with each other They were separated by the high wall of the Himalayas Yes, Buddhism spread from the Indian subcontinent into what is today China in Middle Antiquity and Yes, the opium wars brought the two part the two parts of Asia together in a conflict system But those were aberrations that those were exceptions to the rule But because of the way that technology military technology has defeated distance We now have an Indian Intercontinental ballistic missile system that can hit any city in China You have Chinese fighter jets in Tibet that can include India in their arc of operations You have Indian warships occasionally in the South China Sea you have South you have Chinese warships through You know more and more in the Indian Ocean You have Chinese port building projects throughout the Indian Ocean in Myanmar Sri Lanka Pakistan Tanzania etc. You have the Chinese building a Military facility in Djibouti at the Straits of Babel Mondab all of which are surrounding India So it's precisely because of technology that a new Geography of rivalry has been created between India and China that never existed before So this is how technology Enhances geography rather than defeats it and I could play this out throughout the world in other examples I just happen to use India and China All right, let me go lower and and talk about I'm going to talk about the Middle East Europe and then finally Asia All right, the Middle East Why is there so much conflict? Why do we have failed states semi-failed states? What's happening in our era that you don't read about in the newspapers? What's happening is that for the first time in modern history the Middle East is in a post-imperial situation Empire and imperialism may be dirty words in the current academic world But in fact most of human history human beings have been governed by one empire or another The British the European empires were merely the top slither of an imperial system Tradition that goes back to dozens of Chinese empires Iranian empires Indian empires even African empires a Hundred years ago in 1918 the Ottoman Turkish Empire collapsed in the Middle East So that was one imperial system gone During the during the Ottoman rule you might have had instability wars But what but you didn't have the fight and the argument over territory? between Sunnis and Shiites and Arabs and Jews and Palestine Because everyone owed fealty and sovereignty to the sultan You know everyone's political boss was ultimately the Turkish Sultan and Constantinople. That's gone It went away in 1918 and if you ask me the Middle East a hundred years later Has still not found a solution to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire Then you have the British and French imperial mandate systems which Governed may not have governed fairly or nicely, but they governed what is today the Levant? What is today greater Syria and greater Iraq that? Disappeared at you know in the years following World War two then you had the rule of what I call post Imperial strongmen people like Gaddafi in in Libya the Assad family in Syria the string of Iraqi military Dictators that that started in 1958 that only culminated in Saddam who's with Saddam Hussein in the late 1970s Well, who are these people? Why do I call them post imperial because they governed according to? Borders that were drawn up by the European colonialists that often were averse to ethnic and sectarian Boundaries and therefore they had to invent new Secular forms of state identity in order to govern and they governed may not have been nice, but they governed And they're all gone or mostly gone Then you had the American system, which is the British Oxford scholar John Darwin calls an Imperial imperialism in all but name in other words The American no American official will ever use the word imperial system to define What we are in the world, but that doesn't mean it doesn't really exist if you look at the at the at the frustrations challenges of American foreign policy of the breadth of our deployments and installations around the world of our economic and diplomatic Throwweight we we can only be compared with former empires because they're the we are in an imperial like Situation even though a US official would be fired if you ever use that term That's disappearing And when I say disappearing what it means it means a number of things it means that we cannot fix complex Islamic societies on the ground It means that the American military can save face in Afghanistan, but it can never win in Afghanistan It means that it's on the while America was a successful well-functioning Democracy in the print and typewriter age it doesn't mean that that's going to continue in the digital and video era Yeah, yeah, it's still up in the air what remember the industrial revolution Happened in the mid late 19th century, but we only saw its effect in war in 1914 the the digital video revolution happened in the mid late 20th century, but we only demonstrably saw its effect on politics in 2016 In other words, there's a lag time before a technological revolution has an effect in military or politics in a big way So we're in a new era and it's unclear that the United States can you know can project power The way it did in the Middle East in the past and we can go into lots of details on this on the The the Saudi Qatari split all of that. Let me move on to Europe because in Europe we're also seeing the erosion of an imperial system The European Union is like the Holy Roman Empire in its later phases. It's not Disappearing it's not going to go away it may even revitalize But it's going to share Influence and impact with other things going forward the European Union is It it's imperial Because it governs from far away Brussels yet yet yet, but essentially Influences daily life in Greece in Bulgaria and other places at the other end of Europe. It's only partially Democratic it's elitist. It's heavily bureaucratic it's what I call the necessary Empire and it's necessary because only the European Union has the possibility of Calming the still troubled Balkans and many and other parts of Europe Places like Hungary and Poland have no future without the European Union Essentially though their leaders may say something different now Let me go around Europe and tell you my worries We'll start with Russia in the During the Cold War Russia had the Soviet Union had several hundred thousand troops in the heart of Europe in the heart of Germany Now Russia has far fewer number of troops to the east of the Baltic States in the Kola Peninsula in place It's places like that, but it though the threat is not as demonstrable as it was It's more ambiguous and subversive Remember a leader like Putin or any other leader of Russia You can imagine knows that his country has been invaded by not just Hitler and Napoleon But by Swedes, Lithuanians, Poles, Teutonic Knights, etc. And therefore Russia requires a soft Traditional zone of imperial influence throughout central Europe Central and Eastern Europe to prevent that happening again so that what Russia is doing is it's buying media through third parties It's buying off corrupt politicians. It's you know, it's running information warfare. It's you know hacking Using, you know gas pipeline influence It's doing a number of things which are all subversive all infinitely Deniable all intended to buy Russian influence in central Eastern Europe and to weaken those states essentially and The states are very weak in many cases because what is the why is the European Union? Remember is weak is is troubled because it's so ambitious and why is it so ambitious? It's ambitious because it seeks to govern from Brussels the former Carolinian Empire Prussian Empire Hapsburg Austrian Empire Byzantine and Turkish empires those aren't just names those are those indicate different patterns of development and culture It's not an accident that the weakest countries in the European Union are in the Ottoman Byzantine Area in the southeast If you look at the Balkans today the war in the former Yugoslavia has continued in every way except in the shooting Romania Croatia Slovenia are the relative success stories The rest of the former Yugoslavia as well as Greece as well as Bulgaria are either semi-failed states failed states or states going nowhere And this is all the former Byzantine Turkish part of Europe and only the EU has the power to bring real stability to the region but meanwhile the Russians and the Turks are Seating influence into this area and the only country with the power to stop the Russian Turkish March is Germany And the question about Germany is this that I raise the most Influential in terms of leaving a legacy ruler of Germany in the 20th century was not Adolf Hitler It was Conrad Adnauer Adnauer who is Chancellor of Germany from the late 40s throughout the 1950s for a long time Basically invented the pattern of German rule since the mid 20th century Every German Chancellor since Adnauer the center right or the center left has followed the Adnauer mold in terms of no experiments conservative bourgeoisie society a Deep-felt moral and historical legacy to the to what happened in World War two and to being a member of the West in the Cold War Angela Merkel is the latest in that line, but my question is Will future German leaders follow in the Adnauer mold or is Merkel the last or the next to the last German leader who will be an Adnauer like Chancellor? And that's the question because World War two is seventy five three-quarters of a century away Time moves on a resurgence of German nationalism would not be provocative It would be natural and it could take all kinds of forms more isolationism more You know a separate deal with Russia you name it so that Europe is Don't take European security for granted in other words and the American the liberal Democratic order that America the liberal The project of liberal world order that America has pursued in a leadership role in both Europe and Asia may be coming to an end And because of changes in American society itself, let me move on to Asia Where again you have this question about the continuation of the American-led order Why are we reading so much about about the South China Sea the East China Sea? Why is this in the news so much? Because these territorial disputes in some cases go back centuries. Why now again? There's a deep underlying reason Asia is the opposite of the Middle East instead of weaker failed states You have strong states throughout the Cold War and a Asian countries were internally focused Mao Zedong was internally focused in uniting China through revolutionary upheaval and then Deng Xiaoping was internally focused in uniting and strengthening China through pseudo-capitalist development You know Mao united China at great human cost and and and Deng made China economically consequential in the world but the truth is that three decades of You know of double-digit economic growth does not lead to peace and freedom. It leads to military acquisitions So China has built a great Navy and you know ballistic missile system Air Force And it's done so for the same reasons the United States did so between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of the Spanish American War it America became rich. You know it had double-digit economic growth rates for most of the years between 1865 and 1898 and thus we had new trading Relationships around the world new security concerns and a question of status entered into it We felt we deserved the great military China is following the same path. China is not a rogue state It's you know, it's developing militarily in a very very normal way I I would argue to go with the world's second biggest economy. So China is now externally focused Japan which was more or less Externally neutered because of its quasi pacifism as a result of of its bad experience with militarism in World War two now has to be Externally focused because it sees the Chinese military growth is an existential threat And then you have Vietnam which was internally focused throughout the Cold Wars We all know in wars and upheavals now Externally focused, you know building up a Navy Air Force Etc. The same with what with what used to be called the melee peninsula now Malaysia Wars and rebellions throughout you know during phases of the Cold War all these states which were internally focused have They're now at peace. They've been building infrastructures bureaucracies they've become strong and what do they do they acquire Militaries and they project power outwards and that leads to Disagreements about who controls what in what area of the South and East China Sea It's a very normal historical pattern on the Conflicts and rivalries in the South and East China Seas represent the the result of Development of economic development that you know success stories don't lead to peace in World history they lead to a new level of military rivalry and that's what's happened You can talk to the Chinese all day about how why they shouldn't be doing what they're doing in the South and East China Seas and they will not be convinced because they should not be convinced because what they're doing in the South China Sea Strategically is not much different than how we approach the greater Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th century We needed the control of the Caribbean to unlock the Western Hemisphere Strategically for us and with that we had power to spare to affect the balance of power in the eastern Hemisphere in the 20th century and that's what the history of the 20th century was all about America tipping the balance in two world wars in the Cold War the Chinese need Essential control or parity with us in the South and East China Seas Because it unlocks for them the wider Pacific much more importantly the Indian Ocean and it also Allows them to soften up Taiwan even further because Taiwan is in the middle of the east and south China Seas it makes perfect strategic sense. They're doing exactly what they should be doing Except that their geography is different from us So they see things from a different geographical perspective as one Chinese student said to me when I was in Beijing He said you Americans come from half a world away with your warships You know into the South China Sea that makes you hegemonic Well our warships in the South China Sea means we're merely in our adjacent waters that we should control That's that's how they look at it and from the China and I would argue that the Chinese are already at war and they're winning in a way war to the Chinese is You know, it's political. It's military and only in the last result. I mean it's political It's economic and only in the last resort is it military and if it's military it should proceed by Microsteps so you never have to fight in other words change the facts in the water or on the ground Through steps so small that a reaction against those steps would seem like an overreaction And that's essentially what they've been doing with their island building everything Let me talk for a minute or two about one belt one road what it really is because it's connected to the South China Sea One belt one road the new Silk Road is a Chinese branding operation It's a branding operation for in fact what to a significant extent They've already done and they've just given it a name which is build roads railways pipelines throughout set former Soviet Central Asia to bring an oil and natural gas from former Soviet Central Asia Into into Western China so that China is less dependent on the narrow Strait of Malacca for its oil deliveries And for its energy deliveries it also provides China with an aspirational grand strategy a Direction an intellectual direction, so they'll accomplish some things of the one belt one road They may not accomplish others, but they have a grand strategy. They have a direction Alright, so it's partly a branding operation another thing it is is China is very worried About the Muslim Turkic Uighurs in Western China the Uighurs are a greater threat to China than the Tibetans are Because the Tibetans of course already operate in the international system They have a Dalai Lama who's used to speaking to international diplomats The Tibetans can be negotiated with they have a Cosmopolitan the lead of their own, but the Uighurs are more of an Inchoate For something that can blow up the whole system from below given an environmental Emergency or something like that so what the Chinese need to do is to surround the Uighurs And they're doing it with one belt one road because they don't want the Uighurs to have a rear base in fellow Turkic fellow Muslim former Soviet Central Asia and And Finally Why are the Chinese? Building such a great Navy in the first place so the question should be is why do they have the luxury to do so? Given that except for the early Ming dynasty They don't have really that much of a maritime tradition at least going deep into history They're a continental power, you know, even though now they're a maritime power But why can they do this because for the first time or one of the few times in their history? They they have security on land so that they have the luxury to go to sea and one belt one road Provides them with more security on land and well And I believe that what one belt one road is also about is to link up in a very organic sense China and and Iran to make an unbeatable combination because because the real The real tension in in Eurasia that's rarely Contemplated is China Russia You know China in Russia can be tactical allies. They cannot be strategic allies The Chinese are beating the pants off the Russians in Central Asia. The Chinese have more money to throw around The Russians can't have a formal alliance with China I don't believe because Putin would be the junior partner in such an alliance and he couldn't tolerate that So there are limits to Chinese Russian cooperation. Let me just sum up with a few points here. I would say that We live in a world where all the great powers are in an absolute sense declining I think the US is declining in you know In the sense of its political system We have you know We have a partisan dysfunction in Congress that we have not seen since or since 19th century frontier days As I said, I'm not convinced that the digital video era will be as Kindly to American democracy as the print and typewriter era was It's unclear that we will continue to provide leadership to the degree that we have in you know in Informer decades. I think In terms of Russia Russia could in the future be a low calorie version of you of the former Yugoslavia You know, it's it's internal cohesion is at risk. There is no clear succession process for Putin The Chinese are obviously stronger than Russia much stronger But now I go back to Samuel Huntington's book of 1968 political order and changing societies Where he essentially says the more the more The more vibrant the more economically developed the more a country becomes the more Complex it society becomes and the more complex it society becomes the harder it is to satisfy that society So they're precisely because of the way China is developing It's unclear that its current dynasty because the Communist Party of China is merely the latest in the series of Chinese Dynasties going back to antiquity Whether whether whether the party can hold on in the 2020s So there are real question marks for China Russia the United States And I would say for Europe as well for the European Union as well. So who's benefiting well I don't see anyone is I think we may be entering a period of history Which I call an age of comparative Anarchy which means more anarchy than during the Cold War or in the immediate post-Cold War era it means powers which are not necessarily strengthening in a relative sense We also are entering a kind of a geopolitical recession of sorts because of the US provides less Coherent dependable predictable leadership than in the past you have the rise of Regional bullies you have a decline in global public goods such as free trade packs fighting climate change You know things like that so that You know so that's how I would put it. I would say that the the The biggest question I have for the world if you could narrow it down to one specific question Which of course you can't but think of it like a quiz show In a way I would say is what happens to China in the in the next over the next decade or next 15 years Because I know that the Pentagon the US military establishment is all focused on the Chinese threat to a greater extent to the Russian threat on a somewhat lesser extent And they do this because this is what bureaucracies do, you know, they have they have a goal You know, they have here's our enemy. Here's what we need to do And if the enemy does not materialize we've still learned so much along the way of trying to combat it that you know It works, but I'm not a hundred percent Convinced of this. I think we may see a much weaker China in the 2020s Precisely because of economic and political and intellectual development in China I think we may see a much weaker Russia in the 2020 in the 2020s But weaker can be an ironic phrase The reason is because all sometimes the weaker estate gets internally the more aggressive it gets externally because External aggression is a way to kind of gather in a Nationalistic impulse which can stabilize the society that's getting weaker internally But then the question becomes to what level does it internally weaken because of it internally weakens catastrophically, then it's less able to project power externally But if it internally weakens only moderately it could become much more much much more aggressive Externally and I think that's what we're starting to see now with the Russians with the Chinese We're starting to see the implicit the implicit External results of not weakening but more complexity intention in governing Russia and China Because remember Russia in China are the two places on which the whole organizing principle of Eurasia hinges And to governing Russia in China is getting harder to do. It's not getting easier to do and therefore Nationalism is a weapon in the hands of the leaders That they that they can use in this regard. Let me you know the whole Washington foreign policy establishment is Tied up with how do we combat China in Russia? You know, how do we fight a war in the South China Sea? How do we fight a war in the Baltic Sea Basin or in the Black Sea Basin? and And wouldn't it be better if we had different leaders than Vladimir Putin or Xi Jinping? I disagree with this I think Xi and Putin are as good as you can get in Russia in China I think anything that follows Putin while initially may be more hopeful and liberal Will eventually be far more chaotic and remember Russia? Still has the ability to destroy the United States in 30 minutes given its nuclear arsenal I think after Putin is either more chaos more nationalism the chances of it moving in a liberal Democratic direction are there they exist, but they're less likely than the other two possibilities I said I think what Xi Jinping is doing in China makes perfect sense He's centralizing power building a personality cult around himself so that they he can therefore Decentralize at the provincial level to allow Economic reform she every morning. I'm convinced says to himself. How can I always do the opposite of what Gorbachev do? You know, don't liberalize at the top don't listen to the West to the Americans They don't know anything about you know about this system, you know the only way to economically reform China is first through more central control not through less central control So, you know to that extent China remains predictable Anything beyond she may be very unpredictable So that's what I leave you with it's not a pretty picture But because as I said at the beginning Technology and the defeat of distance through tech through technology has made Has made geopolitics more fraught more anxious more claustrophobic than ever before. Thank you very much Questions where? Yes, yes, if I can push the button if you view China as a country with an awful lot of people and very little in the way of natural resources and Within view another country with very few people and a lot of natural resources Wouldn't you think that China would be looking at very hungry eyes at moving across the border into Russia By Russia, you mean the Russian Far East Siberia, yeah, all right. Yeah, Siberia is to the west of the Russian Far East actually in other words over you know over the Yeah, yeah means Chinese Manchuria has a has a hundred million people there abouts the Russian Far East has about seven million people and It's and its population is declining and the Russian Far East is rich in timber in gold in all kinds of Resources the Russians I think are slowly becoming terrified of a Chinese demographic imperialism in you know into China on I think that the Chinese have Economically in a way dominated out of Mongolia, which was part of former Chinese Dynasties, they've taken back Macau in Hong Kong They continue to soften up Taiwan, you know, which is a decade long Process because the Chinese goal is to win and extend your territory without ever having to fight You know because simply by having to fight means you made a miscalculation somewhere along the line and So I think that's a real day, you know, that's a real threat that the Russians face Let me just say a word about North Korea because I didn't mention it in my talk You know it may preclude a question Which is don't think of North Korea as a communist state think of it as a national fascist state like Chow Cheskew's Romania in the 1980s in this sense that you know that that a real enemy is Japan For the for the Koreans because Japan ruled the Korean Peninsula for 35 years from 1910 to 1945 Often in a very brutal way so that Japan is as much a threat to North Korea You know Rather North Korea is as much a threat to Japan as as North Korea is a threat to South Korea Maybe let's go back to questions Yes Colonel Justin Sapp. I'm a student here, sir I very much enjoyed your book several years ago Imperial Grunts and as a special forces officer I was kind of wondering as you look to the future What do you see as the appropriate role for us land power beyond counterinsurgency especially for soft Infantry and the Marine Corps All right, it's a very good question. What I see is that States in Eurasia are either weakening or not getting stronger We've seen the collapse of states in in greater Syria and greater Iraq Iran and Turkey are much stronger because they represent age-old imperial systems and And they're much more coherent with their geography than Syria and Iraq, but they're not strengthening is states They have enormous problems internally We don't know what the future of former Soviet Central Asia will be a number of those states have leadership transitions up ahead so We're gonna face more and more. I think Instability in Eurasia and other areas of the world We're where we're going to have to be comfortable where we're gonna we're not where where they're gonna they're gonna be very few Opportunities for large-scale interventions, but perhaps more opportunities for Interventions at the battalion level and below or something like that and Where we may have to Intervene in a low level off the headlines way of Aiding proxy forces because we won't want to get involved directly to directly ourselves So I think that the future of soft special operations forces is very good In that sense that you know that the opportunities For intervention will exist more at the small More in the in the lower scale than in the large-scale manner Good day, sir. Thank you for your lecture Luton escalating from Croatian Navy. I have question about Balkan Like you said many countries in Balkan are still in stable We know that I don't know which mean reason was to buy time to solve the problem in Bosnia Herzegovina Didn't really succeed So how you see attending those issues from European Union as we know that European Union especially Germany is very dependent on Russian gas oil and How they can avoid the trap of Russian influence in the area. Thank you. Yeah As I said Romanian Croatia and Slovenia with the strong suits in the Balkans. I would say that That Russia Russia is able to weaken the Balkans very cheaply You know, it doesn't cost them much money to undermine Democratic systems there to the degree that they even exist I think that that The that the Balkans are historically a zone of Balkan of Russian influence I think an unstated reason why we were able to be successful in the former Yugoslavian to Interventions was because it happened to come at a time of unusual weak Russian influence when Russia was in that it was in the post Cold War chaos of Boris Yeltsin's regime and Could not project power so we could do whatever we wanted in the former Yugoslavia. That doesn't exist anymore I think the only way to keep the Russians Influence in southeastern Europe at a minimum is number one a strong Germany That's you know moderate Politically which exists now. I would say the German political system You could make an argument now is healthier than the American political system healthier than the British political system Whether that will continue. That's another matter a strong Germany and more importantly a strong European Union because because if if both Albania and Kosovo and Serbia can get into the European Union Then they no longer have disagreements with each other because they're all part of a larger imperial entity The same way Middle Easterners were part of the Ottoman Turkish Empire, you know, you know That's how there is no solution outside of the European Union for the Balkans I would argue and the European Union and Germany are tied together In this respect because Germany is really the engine behind the European Union Germany and France You know true both countries, but a little bit more Germany than France So I think a strong Germany that helps revitalize the EU I think there's reasons to hope because the elections in France went very well I it looks like the elections in Germany in the fall will go very well So I think that's the key Germany plus the EU keeps the Russians weak in the Balkans Yeah, yes Look the Americans with everything they're doing two two carrier strike groups near North Korea Or is it three for a few days then one is coming home our bombers and Guam what all this is is that you know every threat we make or every Statement of force we make regarding North Korea means to send a message to China saying help us out here You know do something I'm skeptical that this will work I'm a bit skeptical because the Chinese have more skin in the game than we do the Chinese have a Landborder with North Korea They're afraid to to Experiment with the North Korean regime because it could lead to an implosion of the North Korean regime Which could lead to millions of refugees coming from North Korea across the Yalu and Tuman rivers into Into into into China itself so also China would much rather have A kind of You know Reformed communist regime reformed authoritarian regime in North Korea like China itself But bringing that about is very difficult and just because the Chinese have more influence in North Korea than we do or anyone else Does does not mean that China can still influence you know You know issues of the North Korean regime that that regime considers for its very survival So China may not be able to you may not be willing may be hesitant to undermine the North Korean regime The Chinese are terrified that a collapse of the state or a weakening of their estate would lead to not only refugees But also to an eventual greater Korea Democratic and free governed from Seoul that That's not good for China We can argue to China that it's good for them But it isn't what's better for China is the current situation with all of its problems with all of its difficulties provided that there is no use of nuclear weapons and This gets me to Libya because when we toppled Gaddafi We made it that much harder to convince the North Korean regime to give up their nuclear weapons Because Gaddafi had given up his WMD program. He had been cooperating in us with us on an intelligence level And what did we do at the first hint of? Uprising's against him we emotionally sided with the Demonstrators and we eventually created the conditions for his violent murder For his violent murder the North Koreans look at this and say no no The only thing that protects our regime is nuclear weapons, you know, especially after Libya So I think it's it's very hard I mean, it's a good policy to ratchet up military pressure to try to convince the Chinese I'm worried of a trade-off. I don't think we should trade Taiwan for North Korea in any sense of the word I don't believe that we should say to the Chinese Diplomatically, you know, you know Indirectly that significant help on North Korea will make some concessions on Taiwan because Because that would be selling out not only an ally but Taiwan is the poster child of a successful democracy in the developing world and and and so it's it's an iconic state in the world for what we represent in the world and and and and no Chinese Reassurances on Taiwan that they would give us would be believable, you know over time Yes, one more question. Yes Thank you for your lecture Regarding your comments about Iranian Chinese alliance, could you expound more on that? What events do you see of the Axis developing between Iran? Iran has had a problem. I didn't speak much about Iran in my talk. I'm sorry I would say that think of Iran Iranians have a Civilizational sense of themselves that only the Chinese and the Indians have in other words It's a real civilization that coheres with a state Iran is eternal. It was always there will always be there It's unclear that that's true for a number of states in the Arab world still Iran though is curiously lacks prestige in former Soviet Central Asia And you would think it would because Iran is as much a Central Asian state as it is a Middle Eastern state Iran's two oil producing zones are not only the Persian Gulf, but the Caspian sea Iran is close to Ashgabat the capital of Turkmenistan. I mean, it's just an hour or two away and yet Iran lacks certain prestige because the the former Soviet Central Asians are turned off by Iran's religiosity the you know Central Asia's former Soviet In in in all that that means Soviet culture still Permanates Central Asia in a sense that it's secular. It's you know It's against any demonstrable show of religiosity I think what what China does for Iran and what Iran does for China is it gives them both more leverage in former Soviet Central Asia Because Iran is at the western end of Central Asia and and China is at the eastern end of Central Asia So that and if you think of the Tang dynasty other Dynasties in Chinese history if you Google the maps of these dynasties You will see that a number of them had trade routes that went as far as the interior of Iran So China building a bridge to Iran Coheres perfectly with Chinese history. Thank you very much First I'd like to thank all of our speakers our scholars our academics Thank you so much for making this current strategy for him so extraordinary We started off this current strategy for him yesterday morning with a video that talked about the extraordinary contributions of your US Naval War College to the nation To the Navy to the Joint Force and the contributions of the panelists here today the keynote speakers I know we'll have a long-lasting effect in terms of the dialogue that's so critical for our nation right now That video was of course sponsored by the War College foundation And we have a special relationship with them as somewhat of an alumni association But really just a group of generous supporters whose efforts provide a margin of excellence here they underscore our capabilities and And directly enabled this conference Which could not take place without our War College foundation Finally, I say thank you to the students. This was for you. I hope this stretched your brain I hope this and enabled a bit more of the critical thinking skill set with which we are about to graduate here in Less than 48 hours now unless I've lost track of time So congratulations to each one of you I encourage everyone here to pay it forward become a member of our War College foundation or or other Institutions that support our great Navy our joint force and our great nation So in final closing, I'll simply say God bless us everyone. Thank you