 It's a great pleasure and a distinct honor to welcome his Excellency Dr. Mohammad Jawod Zarif on behalf of the Center for Arab and Islamic Studies, the Middle East and Central Asia, and to introduce him tonight. As the voice chancellor said, our center seeks to enhance understanding of the issues of the day as they relate to the Muslim Middle East and Central Asia. Over the last 22 years of its existence, we have hosted a number of distinguished experts and policymakers, prominent among whom has been the former president of the Islamic Republic of Iran, Dr. Mohammad Khatami, who delivered a public lecture precisely in this room seven years ago, as well as earlier the Foreign Minister, Saeed Kamal Kharrazi. Our speaker this evening is another imminent and accomplished statesman from the Islamic Republic. Dr. Jawod Zarif of course needs no introduction. He has been the public face of Iranian diplomacy and scholarly excellence for more than two decades. He is one of the most frequently photographed, interviewed, and cited diplomats, especially since the election of the reformist moderate Dr. Hassan Rouhani to the presidency of the Islamic Republic of Iran in August 2013. As you all know, Dr. Zarif has gained worldwide respect for the nuclear deal that he concluded with the world powers in July last year. His emphasis has always been on engagement, negotiations, and resistance, and support of the search for a stable Middle East and world order. On a personal note, I met Dr. Zarif for the first time at the UNDP conference in Bangkok in 2000, which the former and late Australian Prime Minister Malcolm Fraser had asked me to co-chair with Prince Nuruddin Suhanouk. Dr. Zarif was at that time Deputy Foreign Minister in the head of the Iranian delegation at the conference. He kept an elegant silence until the very end of the first day of the conference, and then when he spoke he impressed all of us with a brilliant exposition, clear, precise, and eloquent. This of course made me not only to have the highest respect for him, but also in seeing Dr. Zarif in action to recognize what a high caliber diplomat and scholar is like. I don't want to dwell too much on Dr. Zarif's formal biography, but to refresh your memory, let me make a few references to it. Dr. Zarif has served in Iran and various ministerial and policymaking capacities. The post that he has held prior to his current position include Ambassador to the United Nations, Chairman of the UNESCO Cultural Commission, Chairman of the Political Committee of the Non-Aligned Movement in Durban, Head of the Political Committee of the Organization of the Islamic Conference Summit in Tehran, and Head of the Executive Committee of the Islamic Interpolymentary Meeting in Tehran to mention just a few. In addition, Dr. Zarif has taught for more than two decades at the university level, including the Faculty of Law and Political Science at Tehran University. He has an impressive record of scholarly publications in English and Persian on various international issues such as multi-lateral diplomacy, international organizations, disarmament, and other political security issues. Ladies and gentlemen, I am very happy to inform you that Dr. Zarif has kindly agreed, although I haven't really asked you yet, but has kindly agreed to take a few questions after his lecture. It is with immense pleasure, therefore, that I call upon his Excellency to address us this evening on the subject of resolving crisis in the Middle East and Iranian perspective. Would you please join me in welcoming Dr. Zarif. Thank you. Bismillahirrahmanirrahim. A very good evening to all of you, and thank you very much for that gracious introduction. It's so good to be so many old friends and to see some new friends in the hall. Let me first of all thank A&U for organizing this important meeting and giving me this opportunity to exchange some thoughts and hopefully to hear your views and engage in a dialogue with you on issues that affect our world today. They affect our world today regardless of where we live because we live in a globalized world. And if we really understand what we mean by a globalized world, we need to understand that in a globalized world we will either lose together or win together. The challenges and opportunities that are before us in a globalized world don't recognize borders, regions, ethnicities, religions. They affect us all. It's a tourism if we say today that you cannot protect your environment if others are polluting, emitting greenhouse gases. It's not too difficult to understand that if you have poverty in most corners of the world, prosperity for others wouldn't mean much. But it has been difficult for particularly policymakers to recognize one reality that our security is also interconnected. That we cannot have security at the expense of insecurity of others. It is impossible to live in an island of security in a turbulent, insecure ocean that is our world. If we needed any reminders, 9-11 was the reminder we all needed. The greatest military power on the face of the earth could not provide the most fundamental requirement of any nation state to secure its citizens. If you went to New York as I did a couple of weeks after September 11th, 2001, you see in the faces of New Yorkers with whom I had lived for so many years, a frightening posture. They were frightened. They saw anybody looking foreign and they would go and call the police that another suicide bomber is around us. It showed that with all the nuclear weapons, with all the power, the might, economic, military, political, media, everything you name it, United States had it, it could not secure its own citizens. So we all need to recognize the fact that security in our world is indivisible. We either all live in a secure environment or we will all be victims of insecurity. I guess those of you who remember Sydney last year know that ISIL is not a threat only to Syria nor to Iraq. It is a threat to people living in Sydney as much as it is a threat to people living in San Bernardino, as much as it is a threat to people living in Damascus at Deep and Aleppo. Because you cannot contain insecurity in one corner of the world. And if we begin to grasp that reality, then we will have to start looking at our problems from a different paradigm. I was happy to hear that my former boss, President Khatami, had the occasion of addressing this meeting here. At that time, he presented the idea of dialogue among civilizations as a new paradigm for international relations. Dialogue among civilizations was not simply a nicety, it was a requirement. And I had the honor of serving in the group of eminent persons on dialogue among civilizations and we produced a book called Crossing the Divide, which unfortunately was lost in the noise that was meant to start a war, the so-called war on terror. Unfortunately, our work came out in 2001, the year the United Nations had designated as a year of dialogue among civilizations, but that was the year that we started to start war on terror. So nobody wanted to listen to the fact that terror was the product of the insecurity of the feeling of deprivation, the feeling of alienation, the feeling of disenfranchisement without trying to justify it, just trying to understand it. Terrorism is the violent, in our view, perverted outburst of the feeding of people who have been deprived of the possibility to participate in a world that glorifies might, glorifies military power at the expense of others, glorifies security brought about at the expense of insecurity of others. That's where you have terrorism. When you, not meaning you, when somebody, whoever that may be, considers the killing of civilians in a fight against terrorism as what? As collateral damage, collateral damage, that is removing any legal barrier against the use of force. When people talk about all options being on the table, almost with impunity, as if we lived in the 19th century, as if we do not have a UN Charter that calls for avoiding, refusing, and rejecting the use of force unless in self-defense. People forget that and say all options are on the table. What are we inviting when we say all options are on the table? We are glorifying military force and by glorifying military force, those who do not have it, those who do not have the normal, usual ability to use symmetric warfare will use asymmetric warfare. It's all the product of a mentality that believes you can gain security at the expense of refusing to accept that everybody needs to live in a secure environment. And the recognition of that will move us from a concept of alliance coalition for security to the concept of security networking, where all of us need to fill the gaps in order to create a secure environment. In order to get there, we need to move from the paradigm that has dominated international relations for the past two centuries at least, the paradigm of exclusion, the paradigm of defining some outside, if you watch the movie, The Circle of Friends, so that you could exclude them. You could blame every problem on them so that their insecurity would not matter. We need to move from that paradigm to a paradigm that is based on inclusion, that unless everybody is secure, nobody is secure. And if you believe that's an idealistic representation of a world we need to live in, I tell you that's a very real possibility. We did it. We did it in the nuclear negotiations and we succeeded. Let me tell you how. For years, we had a nuclear problem. Iran believed that since it was living up to its commitments under the NPT, it should not be worried about what others say that it should limit its nuclear program. We had the right to have our nuclear technology for peaceful purposes. The United States believed that any even small nuclear program by Iran for Iran, in Iran, is tantamount to a bomb. And since in a perverted view of the world, they had defined having a nuclear weapon as equal to having security, they thought anybody in the right mind would try to go for a nuclear bomb. So if Iran had a nuclear program, it would be tantamount to having a nuclear bomb. So Iran wanted an unlimited nuclear program and the United States wanted, Gareth Evans knows, a zero enrichment option. And that prevented us from being able to resolve it because for Iran, success meant failure of the United States. And for the United States, success meant abandoning by Iran of its rights. We had objectives that were mutually exclusive. And although we had a plan in 2005, whose parameters were exactly the same lines of the plan that actually brought us to the end of the nuclear crisis, we could not resolve the issue because the two major sides of the problem defined their objectives in a diametrically opposed way as a zero sum alternative. If we were to win, the US should lose. If the US were to win or gain, achieve its objective, we had to abandon ours. What was the outcome? The outcome is easy, just simple arithmetics. When we started this coral with the United States in 2005, Iran had 200 centrifuges, hardly operating. When we started the negotiations in 2013, Iran had 20,000 centrifuges. So the policy of zero enrichment, the zero sum conception of US policy, enabled the United States to gain a sum total of 19,800 centrifuges operating in Iran, major achievement. Zero enrichment defined in a zero sum game led to the United States losing 19,000 centrifuges by Iran gaining. What did we gain? We went from a positive 7% growth in 1985 to a negative minus 6.8% growth in 2013. Zero sum inevitably leads to negative sum. If we define our objectives in a zero sum scenario, we end up reaping the consequences in a lose-lose situation. We can in fact change the way we define our objectives and see what we can gain. I've heard an example during the introduction to my speech a couple of days ago in Thailand and I saw it to be too reflective and illustrative of the issue. So I share it with you again. A boy playing football or something comes home thirsty, sees his younger sister having used every bit of water in the kitchen to make jam. Marmalade or whatever. But he sees an orange sitting on the table. So he says, I can take the orange and basically dress my thirst. Picks up the orange. Sister runs after him. I need the orange. So she grabs the orange back from him and being bigger and more powerful, he takes it back. Sister goes to her room crying. His mother comes in, says, what's happening? And he says, I want to eat the orange. Mother says, your sister wants it too. He said, okay, I'll cut it in half. She'll be happy. I'll be happy. That's a zero sum perspective. The best way, half and half. Mother says, no, go talk to her. Imperative of dialogue. He goes to the room. Does the sister, what can we do? I can cut the orange in half, you can have half. I can have the other half. And her sister says, no, I only need the peels of the orange. You can have all of the orange. Just let me peel it for you. I'll take the peel from my jab and you can have the orange. So instead of getting 100%, he gets 110% because somebody peels it for him. That's how the way we look at defining the problem can lead us to resolving it. And that comes through dialogue, through listening, through abandoning this practice of monologue that we politicians have been so used to, just talking, preaching rather than listening. So when we started the nuclear negotiations anew in 2013, having enjoyed six years for myself, six years of early retirement, other foreign ministers, can we start redefining the nuclear negotiations in terms that we can consider a single objective or common objective. And that's what we did. If you look at the JPOA, which was adopted in Geneva in 2013, within 100 days. And that was the most important ice breaker. We made it possible to have an agreement. And then the JCPOA, you see we have defined a single objective rather than two diametrically opposed objectives. Instead of repeating the American objective that Iran should never have a nuclear weapons and any nuclear program will lead to a nuclear weapon. As President Obama recently said in the Saban Center that if I had my way, I would not have left a nothing bolt in Iran's nuclear program standing. That's the zero sum that they were looking at. And instead of us saying it's all right and it's not of anybody else's business, we decided to define our common objective as follows. Iran should have a nuclear program that will always remain peaceful. Same objective. We wanted to have our nuclear programs. They wanted it not to lead to nuclear weapons. The way we defined the objective made it possible for us to reach a resolution based on a model that was available in 2005. Senator Evans knows that. We both talked about it in New York when he led the International Crisis Group. We talked about the same model. He reminded me of that as we were walking in. We had the same model. It wasn't operational because of the way we had defined the problem. We need to start realizing the fact that our destinies are bound together because we live in a globalized world and start redefining the problem. So instead of defining the problem in our region as Iran and Saudi Arabia are trying to gain influence at the expense of others, we have to come to the understanding, after having tried all the wrong options, that Iran and Saudi Arabia will suffer together if Daesh, ISIS, or the so-called Islamic state, which is neither Islamic nor a state, would take over Damascus or Baghdad. Not only Iran and Saudi Arabia will lose, but everybody else will lose. If we start redefining the problem, that Daesh is nobody's leverage, that if you see at this equilibrium in the region, the way to deal with it is not to try to harm your competition, but rather try to define possibilities that you can work together. And I believe we can establish that. I believe we can bring it about. If Iran and the United States, which called each other the great Satan and the access of evil, can find the possibility on one issue, we haven't resolved other issues, we haven't even tried, on one issue that was the most divisive was taking the region and the world to the brink of war. People were talking when we should take military action. If we could resolve that difficult issue, then why can't those people who call each other brothers and sisters cannot sit down and redefine the problems. Redefine the problems in terms that would be acceptable to everybody. All of us should accept a set of principles. Those principles include respect for sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-intervention, then accept a set of confidence-building measures on commonalities, ranging from tourism to freedom of navigation, even to maintaining nuclear safety in the Persian Gulf, because all range of nuclear power plants are popping up here and there in the Persian Gulf as if it's a status info. But that would threaten the water supply there, so we need to work on nuclear safety together. Two tourism, cultural interactions, free flow of oil, stable oil markets, you know another zero sum perspective. You remember last year we were almost asking the Saudis not to glut the world oil market? Now who's hurting? Who's going to financial institutions asking to borrow money? Not Iran. It's Saudi Arabia. We live in a globalized world. You cannot gain at the peril of your neighbor. So if we start talking about commonalities, if we start developing common objectives, if we start trying to rethink, redefine our objectives, then I think all problems that exist in the world today can be addressed through a red redefinition of the problem. If you only could understand, just look at our own histories. Anytime we try to gain at the expense of others, at best it was a temporary short-term gain. It can't be a long-term gain. We need to realize that. We need to realize that otherwise we will live an environment in an environment which will be unbearable for all of us. And I'm happy that people realize that in Paris and agreed on some sort of very package. Of course there were given takes, unfortunately. We need to realize that unless we all consider terrorism, extremism, as a joint threat, doesn't matter where you live, what religion you belong to, it's a threat against all of you. If we all were to recognize that as long as a single nuclear weapon exists on the face of the earth, there is a possibility that extremists will have access to it. There is a possibility of accidental use. That nuclear deterrence is what, is what it stands for. Mutually assured destruction, which is what? Mad. It's mad. It's mad to try to gain security at the expense of insecurity of others. Because it's impossible. It cannot be achieved. We have a much better alternative before us. We tried it once. I hope we succeeded. I hope we can even further succeed on building on the nuclear agreement. I hope we can gain the most important prize and that is peace and security in the Persian Gulf region, which is our lifeline and we're willing to go the extra mile in order to achieve that. Because I think the other alternatives are too costly for all of us and we don't have to take those alternatives. We have much better ways. Thank you.