 You mentioned Taiwan, and it's perfect segue into, let's call you His Excellency the Ambassador to Taiwan. Doug, the floor is yours. Well, thank you very much, and thank you to WPC and the organizers for this opportunity to share the stage and share some of the learning opportunities as a member of the audience. I'd like to start by framing my perspective on where we are with China in the Indo-Pacific today. In terms of the revolutionary challenge that China presents, China has now, I think, the fourth in a series of revolutionary challenges to the international system that we've seen since the Napoleonic Wars, which in that case ended in the defeat of France and the rebuilding of Asia by patient and complicated diplomatic work at that time. The next great revolutionary challenge was the fascist challenge, which was defeated and worn again. The victors made the determination of how it would be managed in the aftermath, and then the Cold War came along, and the Soviet Union represented a revolutionary challenge to the world, but it had an inward focus. It didn't really carry itself out to the same extent. And today we find China under guise of revising the international system, but increasingly talking about revolutionizing that system and changing it fundamentally. And China, unlike the previous defeated Napoleonic or defeated fascist forces or the collapsed Soviet Cold War era, the China today still has a foot in the world as we know it, the rules-based order. It's been profiting from that, but it also wants to change it. So I think we need to look in the long term at how we're going to find a new equilibrium, a new way to manage this Chinese ambition. China, as a result of being a product of four decades of involvement in the international system, of investment in China, and China's becoming major trading and manufacturing partner for most of the world, China has also made itself vulnerable. It has to protect those interests as it goes forward with its own ambitions. My administration came to office having inherited a chaotic approach to China in the Indo-Pacific under Donald Trump. If you recall, I think some mention was made earlier today of the finger-pointing that went on in Anchorage, Alaska, between the American diplomatic representatives and the Chinese. And the Chinese complained that the U.S. said it wanted to deal with China from a position of strength and derided that American position. Well, we had a couple of years passed by and the U.S. and the Biden administration has worked hard to reconstitute the quality of our relations to that, which prevailed before the Trump administration came to office. And we saw the U.S. in Japanese and Korean alliances strengthened. The alphabet soup has been mentioned of AUKUS and strengthening the Pacific Islands. We've been ignoring the Pacific Islands for 20 years, but China woke us up to our interests and concerns there. We have the AUKUS arrangement, which I'm hoping will be something material, but it's still a promise, not really a reality, and the Quad. Today, as Biden prepares to host Xi Jinping at the APEC meeting in San Francisco, I think he can take satisfaction that compared to two years ago in the Anchorage meetings, the United States now is in a much greater position of strength to deal with China as they go forward. Now, the APEC meeting will mark only one moment in the continuing competition between the U.S. China, despite a slowing economy, it continues to develop unprecedented military capabilities. The U.S. is challenged to upgrade its own military capabilities while being compelled to provide assistance to Ukraine and now to the Israelis in Gaza. The U.S. is also challenged by having old habits that have not been revised to meet modern requirements. Our military industry is falling behind. The ways of dealing with the military industry through Congress and through the Defense Department need to be upgraded. Our processes are slow. There are multiple demands on resources. Domestic demands are up because the American people are tired of paying for maintenance of the peace around the world. They want a peace dividend. All of these are putting pressure on the U.S. and ways that make it not easy for the U.S. to simply enter into a confrontation or make series of demands. We have to find ways to chisel away at our problems in the Asia-Pacific region, the Indo-Pacific region, and China will work all the while to make these harder. I understand China has announced that it's willing to be hosting a Hamas delegation shortly. China has interest in the Middle East. They need energy from the Middle East, more than the United States does. But we both have an interest in keeping the energy supplies from the Middle East going forward. There's a basis for a kind of standoffish cooperation between the U.S. and China on restoring peace in the Middle East. That has to be explored. It has to be found. At the moment, China seems to be rather eager to take advantage of the distress the Middle East is causing and hope that the U.S. will be further distracted from the Taiwan and Asia-Pacific sets of challenges that China is posing. The main area where the United States is falling behind and hasn't done enough to re-strengthen its position is economic. We should never have walked away from TPP in 2016 and the end of the Clinton campaign. We should be talking about CPTP. IPEC is a worthy effort, but it's not a substantial and attractive offer for the parties in the region who have become increasingly dependent on trade and investment with China itself. And I'm not optimistic that either the Democrats or the Republicans, should they take power in the next administration, would be willing to bite the bullet on dealing with the economic challenges that we face in the Indo-Pacific. Now a word about Taiwan, where I served as an unofficial ambassador. This now remains the most dangerous flashpoint in the Indo-Pacific region. Over the past year, the Biden administration has, in my view, retreated from its more confrontational approach to our past agreements with China on how to manage Taiwan affairs. We had an era where, starting with the end of the Trump administration and through the beginning of the Biden administration, the U.S. was sort of pushing the envelope on official dealings with the people of Taiwan. Since May of this year, when Jake Sullivan, the national security advisor and China's counterpart Wang Yi met in Vienna, the U.S. has been walking the line more carefully. It's what I call a restoration of diplomatic discipline. This is not something you do alone, you don't just retreat and yield to Chinese demands, but you also pair that with an effort to strengthen Taiwan's ability to deter aggression. China's growing military capabilities can't be dismissed, but they can't be confronted directly either except at great cost. The question is how to find the balance between deterrence and diplomatic discipline that keeps the peace in the Asia-Pacific region. What's the outlook for the 21st century in the Indo-Pacific? In my view, Xi Jinping and his revolutionary ambitions look to dominate the next decade or more with Xi himself in charge. A mixture of discipline and deterrence will be required if the U.S., despite competitions for national priorities at home and leadership in other parts of the world, will have to have a sustained, steady, measure-by-measure approach to the Indo-Pacific. My belief, however, is that the people of China and that the China we know today of Xi Jinping is not forever. And as we move forward in our efforts to incentivize peaceful resolution of disputes in the Indo-Pacific and make the alternative of using force unattractive, we also should keep the door open to the Chinese people at all times so that they understand that our competition is not with the people of China but with the behavior of a certain government in China and that if China is willing to change its behavior, the U.S. will be willing to cooperate to help make a 21st century that achieves what the Congress of Vienna did in the 18th century and what the bright men and women of the end of the World War II period did to establish a way of maintaining a balance in global affairs to stem this revolutionary disruption and to allow us to build a peaceful future. So thank you for that. Thank you very much indeed, Doug. I note that you are not allowing Xi Jinping to be immortal. You have a time limit for him. Do you have a guess at when China will change? You know, I have been lucky enough to know a lot of Chinese for quite a few years and when we can get together I think they're pretty frank about the shortcomings of their current leadership but they're also frank about the risks of taking on the current leadership. So the question is waiting out the current leadership and not closing doors to a more cooperative and productive future between China and the various countries of the region and the world for the matter.