 Good evening. Welcome to the core club and to a joint, this is the second in a series of joint presentations by the American Enterprise Institute Center for New American Security and the New America Foundation. My name is Peter Bergen. I run the National Security Program for the New America Foundation. Today's event is being webcast live on CNN.com. I want to thank Richard Gillant, who's here tonight for organizing that. We're going to talk tonight about America in the Pacific Century and we have a wonderful panel to do that. Robert Kaplan, who's I'm sure well known to many of you, will be speaking for about 20 minutes. He's the author of a dozen books including a book called Monsoon which focuses on the question of the Indian Ocean and the future of power there, both American, Chinese and Indian. He is also a fellow at CNAS. He's also been recently appointed as the Chief Geopolitical Strategist at Stratfor and we're really thrilled that you've agreed to do this, Bob. To his left is Steve Cole, my boss, the CEO of the New America Foundation, two-time Pulitzer Prize winner. His book, which I'm sure will gather a great deal of attention, Private Empire about ExxonMobil will be coming out on May 1st. I'm sure Steve will have something to say about the Chinese and their effort to see gas and oil around the world. To his left we have Patrick Cronin. Dr. Patrick Cronin is a Professor of the National Defense University. He's also at CNAS as a Senior Advisor. He's an expert on the Asia Pacific. In fact, he was testifying Congress today on North Korea. He's held senior positions at US AID and a variety of academic institutions, including in London at the IWS. To his left, finally, is Thomas Donnelly, who is one of the country's leading experts on defense budgeting. The author of multiple books himself used to work in Congress as a professional staff member on the House Armed Services Committee. So, Bob, thank you. Well, thank you very much, Peter. It's a great pleasure to be here. Let me start this way. We've all been prisoners of two things growing up, the Mercator Projection and Cold War Area Studies. The Mercator Projection is that rectangular, you know, rendition of the map with North and South America in the center, the Atlantic Ocean and the eastern half of the Pacific to their sides so that the Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific are split up in half at the edges and consigned to the edges of consciousness. But if you look at a demographic projection of the world in 2050, say, you will see that nine of seven of nine billion people of the Earth's nine billion people will live more or less around these edges that are basically cut off with the Mercator Projection. If you include East Asia, Southeast Asia, the Indian subcontinent, the greater Middle East, and the eastern half of Africa, you have seven of nine billion people of which the greater Indian Ocean and its anti-chambers like the Red Sea and the South China Sea is the maritime organizing principle. And I emphasize the word maritime because even though we live in a jet and information age, 90% of all goods that travel intercontinentally do so by sea. Globalization is the age of the container ship. And two organizations that aren't always thought this way but in fact enable globalization greatly as the U.S. Air Force and the U.S. Navy because they more or less do more than any other organizations to protect the sea lines of communication, consigning piracy to being an exotic nuisance at the edges that, you know, in the western third of the Indian Ocean in some other places. So you take away this, you know, this unipolar American air sea power or you diminish it greatly and globalization may look very differently. Now in this world of, we'll call the greater Indian Ocean and the Western Pacific, it's, it's, we've been prisoners of Cold War area studies in this sense. At the end of World War II, the United States found itself a global power. It needed area experts for deep dived knowledge of specific reasons, linguistic, cultural. So the world was divided up into East Asia, Southeast Asia, South Asia, Central Asia, the Middle East, etc. Universities did this, think tanks did this, the CIA, the Pentagon, the State Department all did this. Now that's still very important because we still need area expertise. On the other hand, what you're seeing is increasingly on a daily basis interactions from one area to the other. The North Koreans and Northeast Asia give Syria and the Middle East nuclear technology that elicits in its railing military response. China and East Asia and India and South Asia fight for, you know, for developing natural gas pipelines and ports in the Bay of Bengal off Myanmar and Southeast Asia. India and China compete for natural gas rights on the Iranian plateau. Everyone is everywhere, so to speak. And so rather than a world split apart where you can look at the Indian subcontinent as one issue and the Middle East is another issue, the world, this world is becoming more of a fluid organic continuum where one area affects the other like never before. And so we're going back to a classical super region where you have Yemenis and significant numbers living in Indonesia on the opposite side of the Indian Ocean where you have Males living in Madagascar on the other side of the Indian Ocean. Everyone is everywhere and this super region is going to get more organic for these reasons. The connections between the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean are going to get greater because not only are their canal projects being thought of in the Isthmus of Khran in Southern Thailand connecting the Bay of Bengal with the South China Sea, you have Dubai ports worlds doing feasibility studies on land bridges across peninsula Malaysia because, you know, the increase in energy shipments, the increase in container shipments despite a global economic slowdown, despite the fact that Chinese economic growth will go down, is still going to at whole increase to make these land bridge and canal projects more feasible and thus have more connecting links between these two oceans. Now the real one of the main stories is that we are living in an era which is gradually receding. That era is the era of Western dominance of the Western Pacific and the Indian Ocean. Vasco de Gama took 23 days to sail from East Africa to the Indian subcontinent in 1498. That's an incredible achievement if any of you in the audience are recreational sailors. To cover, you know, 2,500 miles or so in 23 days he was able to do it because he had an Arab on board who knew the secrets of the monsoon winds which the Portuguese did not discover but merely reacquainted Europe with because the Romans and the Greeks knew it. Since 1498 you had the development of the Portuguese empire led by a man Alfonso de Albuquerque headquartered in Goa south of Mumbai covering ports everywhere from Yemen to Indonesia. Then you had the Dutch East India Company. You had the French in the southern third of the Indian subcontinent. You had the British Royal Navy and finally the United States Navy and Air Force after World War II. 500 years of Western domination but that is slowly receding as I said. During the era of high Reaganism in the 1980s you had a navy of 584 warships about. During the Clinton era it was in the high 330s. It's now down to 286 I believe by last count. Now numbers don't tell the whole story. Each of these ships pack a lot more equipment and firepower than those 580 odd ships of the Reagan era. Nevertheless numbers do matter because the fewer numbers you have the more that your deployment decisions are fraught with risk especially in age of globalization which is an era of more and more ships on the high seas. That need to be protected. Whether the navy will pop up over 300 warships in the next few years or gradually over the next 20 years go down to 270 or 250. Depends on what expert you talk to in Washington. There is procurement problems, you know great over costing delays and the fact that many warships commissioned in the 1970s and 80s will be decommissioned in the next decade in a decade following. So the U.S. Navy is I would not say declining it's plateauing out. At the same time you have the rise of indigenous navies and air forces for really the first time since the medieval age. The Chinese navy and air force people know a lot about it's been in the newspapers. Let me just tell you that the Chinese have a shop till you drop policy on submarines. They've acquired or built eight times as many as the U.S. since 2005. Four times as many since 2000. Submarines matter because naval warfare is gradually going under sea partly because surface warships are increasingly vulnerable to new ballistic missile technology to new missile technology. The Chinese you know Chinese defense budgets go up by double digits every year for the last 30 years. China is has no nefarious motives in my opinion. It's developing its military very much like the United States did after the United States started to become a great power. Remember like China the United States had double digit or high single digit economic growth rates from the end of the civil war right up to near the outbreak of World War One. And what did we do? What did Teddy Roosevelt do? He built a great navy and he dug the Panama Canal. And why? For the same reason that Chinese are doing the same thing. Because in the process of becoming a great economic power the United States suddenly developed trading interests all over the world and that necessitated a military to protect those interests. So China's military growth is organic. It's natural. There's nothing illegitimate about it. It would be odd if they weren't doing it. Nevertheless it is a fact. It is happening and it is changing power relationships in the western Pacific and beyond. India too is going from the fifth largest navy to perhaps the third largest navy. Singapore, Vietnam, Malaysia all acquiring submarines. South Korea, Japan modernizing a pace very quickly. Japan has four times as many warships as the British Royal Navy and will increase in that amount. Traveling around the South China Sea I noticed two things. Everybody's at shopping malls and the militaries are buying submarines. Submarines are like the new bling in maritime southeast Asia. So indigenous countries are rising and I can give the same numbers and stories about air forces too because you cannot disaggregate air sea ever since the invention of the aircraft carrier. Especially now and then cyber as well. So what we're seeing in Asia, in the western Pacific, in what people call the Indo-Pacific, the Indian subcontinent plus the western Pacific, is that we're seeing the development not of lumbering oxen cow land armies that are engaged in nation building wars or guerrilla uprisings like the Vietnam war, the Malaysian war in the 1960s. What you're seeing is the development of honest to goodness civilian military post-industrial complexes in all of these countries as the United States military plateaus out and the world especially the western Pacific becomes less of a unipolar military world and like the economic world, like the political and diplomatic world more in the direction of a multipolar military world with significant consequences for this. Now the two most significant countries in this part of the world are China and India. Now think of China moving vertically south towards the Indian Ocean and India moving east and west horizontally along the Indian Ocean. China has been developing state-of-the-art port projects in Lamu and northeastern Kenya in Guadar and Pakistan and Chittagong and Bangladesh and Kayakru and Burma in Hambantota and Sri Lanka. I visited most of these ports all except one in fact and what you see is individual Chinese companies developing ports for normal legitimate commercial reasons with no thought at the moment for to militarize them in any way but remember that's how the Venetian Empire began in the year 1000 you know as as commercial enterprises along the coast of what is today Croatia. It's how the British East India Company began the Dutch East India Company. People don't hold a meeting around a board table and say let's become an empire. These things occur gradually over decades and centuries beginning with pure commercial motives as an outgrowth of dynamic economic and political growth. The Chinese have also running the ports now in Piraeus and Greece in Rijeka in Croatia so the eastern Mediterranean is added to this as well. What I see coming is a kind of what they're developing is commercial throughput facilities to warehouse products finished goods for sale in Africa in the Middle East and military using these ports as naval bases is more problematic. The one port that it really doesn't have much use now but which is a long range venture is Guadaran Pakistan because when you go there there's nothing there except for Balooch rebels essentially. So there's real security problems. The idea of a road and pipeline link up through Pakistan to western China is problematic to say the least. On the other hand the port that Chinese are building in Burma is at the opposite extreme. That's going to be very functional or seems to be with road and pipeline going into Yunnan province in southern China and that's where we get into the whole issue where Burma is not just an issue of democracy it's an issue of regionally based ethnic groups with their own militaries who need to be assuaged in a democratic process to allow some of this road and pipeline development to proceed. China has what has been called reportedly a Malacca dilemma. 82% of China's imported crude oil flows through the Strait of Malacca and geography still rules. Malacca is no wider now than it was in antiquity. So China naturally is trying to see look for other means to get energy oil and natural gas into China. So these ports work in one direction that way. Another way is a new oil and natural gas pipeline across Central Asia to the North Caspian and to the Turkmenistan natural gas fields. To bring oil and natural gas into Western China and then there's the oil and gas and you know in coal and iron ore and the Russian Far East in outer Mongolia and Central Asia and you know an inch and within China itself. China is trying everything. If you ask me what is China's foreign policy I would say it's not a missionary foreign policy like that of the United States and the former Soviet Union. China is not promulgating democracy or communism around the world. It's not philosophizing. It seems to be a resource acquisition foreign policy. They will deal with any regime provided they can get natural resources which is not just oil and natural gas it's strategic minerals and strategic metals again to a totally legitimate purpose. To raise the standard of living of hundreds of millions of people into the global middle class and in the process they you know they become a great power. So India you know it's interesting in India. One of the most talked about people in India is among the elites that is. It is Lord George Nathaniel Curzon. Now Curzon was the viceroy of India from 1899 to 1905 and the reason Indian elites are intrigued with Curzon was not only you know was he one of the the best viceroys but he had a strategic vision where Delhi we're not Delhi because at the time the India was run from what is today Calcutta from Calcutta but it but Curzon saw the world from Calcutta not from London and he saw a greater India including Pakistan, Myanmar, Bangladesh, Southern Nepal with shadow zones of influence in Iran, Central Asia and Southeast Asia as well. And with that vision does coupled with Chinese virtual expansion is it makes China in India rivals for the first time in their collective histories because remember except for the spread of Buddhism in the third century BC China and India really had relatively little to do with each other separated by the high walls of the Himalayas two rich civilizations developing separately but because of the the collapse of distance due to the advance of military technology with Chinese fighter jets operating out of Tibetan airfields with their arc of operations including the Indian subcontinent and Indian warships in the South China Sea and Chinese warships in the Indian Ocean. You have overlapping spheres of interest for the first time and and when you can also factor in their economic heft their demographic heft they're becoming rivals though it's not a hot-blooded rivalry it has no ethnic or sectarian basis behind it so it's not like India or Pakistan it's more of a cool rivalry Indians like it when you ask them questions about it they want to be hyphenated with China they don't want to be hyphenated with Pakistan you know being hyphenated with China raises their stature in a way so this is the world we're inheriting as American power I don't you I don't say the word decline merely normalizes as other countries in relative terms indigenous countries rise up let me just end with a few words about the South China Sea. The South China Sea, think of the South China Sea the way Americans thought of the Caribbean in the 19th and early 20th century. When you say you're a specialist in the Caribbean you're not going to be invited to join a think tank or anything but there was a time in American history during quite a few administrations was the Caribbean was the center of American foreign policy you know mainly much of the second half of the 19th century and early 20th why there was a Dutch-American geopolitician Nicholas Spikeman at Yale in the early 1940s who divided the western hemisphere not between north and south America but between north of the Amazon and south of the Amazon because he said the Amazon is the real dividing point places like Venezuela and Colombia may technically be part of the South America but their Caribbean countries um so it was America's gradual naval dominance of the Caribbean in the late 19th century that allowed it to dominate the hemisphere and once it could dominate the hemisphere it had power to spare to help affect the balance of power in the other hemisphere the eastern hemisphere. China thinks of the South China Sea in similar terms China Sea is the South China Sea is a place rich perhaps in oil and natural gas uh it's 80 percent of its crude oil imports come through there uh that South China Sea is where you know gets three times as much traffic for energy than than the Suez Canal and about 15 times as much as the as the Panama Canal uh China bristles at the fact that the United States Navy and Air Force are the dominant powers there China has uh claims uh conflicting claims with all of the littoral states like Vietnam the Philippines Malaysia and others and we're China to be able to to dominate the South China Sea which I don't think is likely at all in the near future but we're able to it would then have power to spare to expand into the Indian Ocean and to uh you know and and to become a great power in the sense that the U.S. became a great power um after uh you know after it dominated the Caribbean and the and the way I this analogy of the Caribbean I didn't invent it was told to me by Chinese colonels uh because they said how can you lecture us when you did this and that to the Caribbean uh you know when I when I would ask them about the South China Sea so uh we're entering um we're entering a new world where American power is not in decline in absolute terms but in relative terms we're seeing the rises the of indigenous powers not just Indian China but Vietnam uh uh Vietnam Malaysia Indonesia other places we're gonna we're gonna have more of a complex India more of a complex power arrangement in in a maritime environment and the United States and I'll close with this has it basically experienced with some great exceptions an air land continental environment through much of the 20th century because the center of the action was Europe um and then the center of the action was ground wars in Iraq and Afghanistan but in focusing on Asia we're entering more of a maritime heir scene environment. Thank you very much. Thank you. We're gonna sort of have a discussion with the panelists can you know pose questions to Bob as well but I wanted to start with Tom Donnelly because I think so the burden of um some of what Bob just said was the idea uh as I understand it Tom and correct me if I'm wrong there was a debate inside the Pentagon um so in the years after 911 carefully disguised between people some people saying that China was of the nine four since apparently Colonel uh Carl Iconbury of Mandarin speaker who went on to become the commanding general in Afghanistan taking that approach and Andy Marshall the famous uh head of the office of net assessment uh now 90 uh taking the opposite approach and apparently Marshall won that uh debate so what's your personal opinion about about this Marshall? Well, Andy had an ally in Congress. Uh yeah now that um first of all I would say I just love Bob's presentation because I just the he correctly frames the issues I would say and he talks about the things that are critically important like geography, military power and the things that have always been the dispositive factors of international politics as long as we've recorded human history uh so that uh is clarifying to begin with and I'm perfectly happy to have those conversations on that on that ground just because it's the right conversation to have uh and I have some differences which we'll note out service over the course of the evening but uh uh take your question Peter there's still you know that debate still goes on it's very difficult to reduce uh thinking about China to you know to the you know sort of blue or red friend or enemies uh honor off dichotomy uh however the pattern of events has tended to tilt the you know it's Chinese behavior uh that's sort of made the Andy Marshall crowd if you will that sort of de facto uh winner in that because as Bob said uh they're acting like a traditional rising great power the the military that China is acquiring uh it is not a military that's going to secure its trade uh or reinforce the security architecture that currently exists things like submarines and highly accurate ballistic missiles that hold particularly American surface combatants and aircraft carriers at risk can only be described whether by without ascribing any intent to China as systems that are threatening to the current to the U.S. military the militaries of our allies and the security architecture as it exists so whatever Beijing's intent may be and I think it's a debate I'm not sure that the Chinese even really sort of have figured out what kind of world they want to live in and God knows uh we made huge mistakes and other great powers have made huge mistakes as we kind of blundered our way uh around the planet why should we expect expect the Chinese to be really any better than anyone else but the facts of the case are that China's military power is a serious threat to the continued uh preeminence of American military forces to those of our close allies or treaty allies and is inherently destabilizing so it's not just that we feel this way but it's gotten the attention of a whole host of uh other countries in the regions ranging from the Vietnamese to you know at one end of the spectrum apropos of us to the Japanese and the Koreans and and certainly it's gotten the Indian attention as well so that is a military strategic fact of life in the Indo-Pacific these days and probably the central fact Patrick Cronin you wrote a piece for CNN which I think came out today with uh this is part of a series the series is really about the election and you posed 10 questions for uh either Romney or Obama about China specifically what what are the what are the most pressing and most nettlesome questions if uh when they come to a debate uh on the matter of China that you would pose as a sort of uh emotional debate moderator well on Friday I'll see an old friend Professor Wang Joseph who recently received a lot of press attention because he says many Chinese officials and friends of his um are increasingly believing that the China-US relationship is becoming a zero-sum game it's it's really a strategic rivalry is dominating over a cooperation and I've long believed that uh for the reasons Tom stated that uh China's breakneck games in the last several decades means that we can't ignore China we have to consider relationship building infrastructure complex weapon systems that take decades to nurture and bring about in case Chinese intentions change along with their growing capacity um so asking the presidential candidates about how the United States sees China in the round how do we get this balance right because that is the tricky question for America's future the world is changing as Bob Kaplan stated it's very complex it's not just decline it's but it is relative decline and China ascent China's ascent may plateau itself it may even start to decline there are questions about the pace of Chinese change and certainly the internal domestic politics of China we certainly see signals right now that there are some very interesting trends that we're not sure what this portends but change happens and it's more complex so trying to understand how the next president of the United States will establish a relationship with China that builds cooperation but doesn't sacrifice strength at the same time doesn't sacrifice US influence which every country in the region wants two things they want more trade and economic interaction with China and they want a strong America present but not destabilizing the region Steve you've had some discussions with senior officers in the people's liberation army about a year ago yeah last summer what were they what were the sort of what were the substance of those conversations to the extent that you can get the hell out of the South China Sea yeah mostly that I was struck first of all I love listening to Bob it was a great presentation and delightful and one of its themes though that I wanted to introduce it which was a theme of my visit in in China is what is actually the relationship between military power and trading interests if if this is the world if China's foreign policy is not missionary but it's about resource acquisition and they're building a military to defend that policy or to promote it is that mercantilist attitude inherited from colonial and imperial experiences of the West in the 19th century is it really responsive to the actual world that Bob described of growing economic integration growing liquidity growing globalization I think this is an argument that the Chinese here sometimes and haven't quite taken on board yet but but here's what I mean all of the commodities and resources that China requires to industrialize and modernize except maybe arguably arguably natural gas and perhaps some special metals but certainly oil and virtually all of the other major industrial resources that they require these are global commodities that are traded on a global basis priced on a global basis are totally interchangeable and owning them may be an interesting speculative investment if you have too many dollars which is the Chinese position but it doesn't actually involve security unless you're in a complete global conflagration in which everyone is fighting to block the others access to global resources so this idea that the that resource acquisition inevitably involves the projection of territorial power and control in a world of greater and greater interconnectedness I'm not sure is is correct it depends at a minimum and then there's one other implication of that which is if you're trying if you're trying and you look out at that world and you still have this mercantilist attitude and you think well actually do want to own them all I don't care where they are I want to own them and then I want to build my own militarized supply lines to control them under any circumstances what's your problem the problem is that the United States Navy and Air Force is the guarantor of free commerce on the seas so you're not in a position to control your own supply lines well one alternative as Bob alluded to would be land corridors in central Asia that great movie you know there will be blood about the oil industry where one person eventually says to the other coveting his oil field and using horizontal drilling to access it and properly says you know I stick my straw in your milkshake and I drink it well a more stable strategy for China's resource inputs would be to stick a straw under Russia depopulating Russia and drink it and under central Asia as well that way you stay off the seas to the greatest degree possible as Bob says they're doing everything yeah but but fundamentally their orientation remains this kind of mercantilist one and it could involve actually investing in the wrong strategy from their perspective it may be that cyber and the rest of the investment space investments would be a much wiser way for them to think about their own position uh yeah um let let me pick up particularly on what Steve said first of all three things the first is that um you know who knows what China's motives are and nobody knows what they'll be in 20 or 30 years but you don't track motives because they can change and you could get motives the other guy's motives wrong so you you track capabilities and so as they develop capabilities we have to respond um the second thing that I neglected to mention is the biggest question in international affairs in my opinion is the direction of China's domestic society because we're China to have a fundamental socio-economic political crisis at home that could change the trajectory of their defense budgets or we could be looking at a different world in 20 years a world where Chinese defense budgets don't go up by 10 a year but only by four or five percent a year could be a different east Asia in 20 years um back to Steve's specific um question um actually the Chinese do have an historical model on this it's uh you know he's been popularized already already I'm not saying anything new it's Admiral Tseng Yi He from the early Ming dynasty um who traveled with his treasure ships is that his treasure fleet as he called them all the way to Somalia in Yemen um and some of his uh so he was a Muslim of Mongolian descent who sailed for China in the early Ming dynasty and some of his comrades on board actually made the pilgrimage to Mecca all right why am I bringing him up because the treasure fleet which went all over the South China Sea in the greater Indian Ocean combined military might with trade it was we're here to trade but we're the biggest guy on the block so watch out for us so it's you know it's a loving hand that wants international trade but it's a strong hand as well and China can uh you know China can project power now what brought an end to all this was an ill thought out war against the Mongols um so that China was the Ming's were devastated and they pulled back on their seafaring expeditions um and the very fact that China is building a great navy is sort of a luxury and because island nations build navies anyway because they're island nations but a great continental power like China only goes to see if it has the luxury of safe and secure land borders now now China's borders are not all safe and secure but they're more safe and secure than they've been in decades or maybe centuries um so that China is going to see because it has the luxury of doing so it's doing so because it's basically telling the world we're secure at home we don't have problems with the Kazakhs or the five million Russians in the Russian Far East because we've got a hundred million Manchurians on the other side of the border yes we fought a war with India was a low level war in the in the Himalayan foothills but it's not coming back anytime soon probably so that is China pursuing a mercantilist policy at the moment I think it is I think at the moment it it it feels unbraged at the fact that it can't really challenge the U.S. with anti-access in the South China Sea or elsewhere in the western Pacific if the if it depends implicitly on the U.S. Navy to protect the sea China's own sea lines of communication because the Indian Ocean is the world's global energy interstate but to a large extent because of China his China imports all this oil and natural gas from the greater Middle East across the Indian Ocean thanks to the U.S. Navy and Air Force into China and China doesn't want to live with that situation even though they can free ride on it yeah yeah because we're not we're not charging them for that and and because they're free riding their power is rising in the world where we're spending ourselves all over some would say to oblivion you know you know in in many operations around the world but nevertheless I you know I detect that they are they don't like this situation if I could chime in I mean the striking thing to me is is that we look at the facts and think that this is the marketplace in action the Chinese look at it and see the marketplace as a giant americans conspiracy that constraints well they you know we are wrong to abstract out the exercise of american geopolitical power in all its forms from the operation of the marketplace the marketplace doesn't operate if there are troubling things like wars that sort of disrupt the free flow of capital and goods and people and stuff like that so we at least need to acknowledge that the the international system to use the broadest possible term that exists is is a creation in time and space essentially of american power in the 20th century and particularly after world war two it's been a you know that's that's what was the argument made by the Carl Aikenberry cabal if you will we actually see china's national interests as well as Beijing does or as well as the Chinese do and they will naturally come around once they recognize the logic of all this well they haven't and maybe their appreciation of the logic is is pretty compelling at least to them isn't kind of the main counter argument to some of this to say you know we have 11 we the united states have 11 aircraft carriers and they have zero well we have 11 at the moment it may be 10 soon they have one and they're trying to acquire three but they don't need to project power globally if they're really trying to evict us essentially out of the littoral seas in the east and south China see this incident this past month in Scarborough Shoal in the Spratly Islands between the Philippines and China is emblematic of what we're going to see in the future which is more strategic rivalry between the US and China through proxies in a sense because what's happening the Philippines deployed as their flagship naval ship the Coast Guard Cutter we just sent them and China stopped it using civilian surveillance ships but they still managed to stop that ship from arresting the illegal fishermen at least from the Philippine corners view the Chinese fishermen the Chinese may have been sending a bigger signal than just saying we're going to do things when the Chinese say it's okay to do it here it's disputed waters and territories they were trying to send a signal I believe back to the United States if you want to increase your influence in this region even indirectly by helping the Philippines we will deny that because we want it actually moving in the other direction and it may not be a malicious view but that is the overall weight of their policy of their anti-access strategies and of their diplomacy let's throw it open to questions if you have a question can you raise your hand and identify yourself and Fred Kaplan so what do you think the U.S. often do about their motives Chinese murders are pretty logical so the other thing well their capabilities have been ominous but what do we do about it do we double do we use toward doubling the navy to be three more aircraft carriers? I think what we do about it is what we have been doing about it the navy is more or less plateauing out I believe that we can fulfill our defense capabilities well with the present size of the navy provided it doesn't get smaller or much smaller you know again the numbers game is so one-dimensional you know because there are so many other factors you can count missile launchers on ships and this and that but provided we don't go down to a 250 ship navy you know or something like that we can acquit our responsibilities well provided that we don't have another land war in the in the Middle East we can we can we can acquit our responsibilities well I think the pivot to the Pacific announced by Secretary Clinton although it's been criticized a lot basically it makes undeniable sense in this respect the pivot is 20 years late in a way you know we should have pivoted to the Pacific after the Berlin Wall fell but what happens Iraq invaded Kuwait that tied down not just the U.S. army but the air force and navy and no fly zones for a decade afterwards then there was 9-11 the two Gulf wars so the pivot is very natural there's nothing very ominous or even creative about it um it's natural because to the degree that the world economy has a geographic heart it's the western Pacific it's east Asia and to the degree you know where merchant sea lines tend to converge more than in any other part of the world it's east Asia so this is the economic heart of the world this is where our military should be focused to protect the balance of power and to allow the free trading system to um you know to to go on as it has um so i don't think that that there's anything um fundamentally wrong with our policy on this you can criticize you know the fact that it shouldn't cost four billion dollars to produce a new destroyer or 18 billion for a new carrier with all the planes on it you can write endless pieces on that how ridiculous that has gotten but in terms of having a you know a robust navy oriented with the with the west with the Indo-Pacific is the first among equals as opposed to the Atlantic in the Pacific you know in earlier you know in the late 20th century i think is fine and i think that we will have to accommodate ourselves somewhat to the rise of chinese naval and air power um in the region i think that's inevitable because the post-world war two situation where china was had its infrastructure devastated japan did as well and we were the only person on the block so to speak simply cannot continue into the future so we will have a more multipolar pacific the idea is that we will remain robust enough um so that china eventually is unable to finlandize places like vietnam and malaysia and the philippines right and just to add quickly the end of that thought the at issue is not a fiscally strained united states stretching over the pacific horizon to contest china's rise alone it is the totality of countries on china's perimeter who added all together vietnam philippines indonesia south korea japan australia not to mention you know burma and india that constitutes a pretty substantial part of the region's future and capability and i was just in vietnam uh last week we were talking about it i i'm not a deep expert on vietnam and i went to the all of the sort of national narrative museums constructed by the party to tell the story of vietnam and in one stage i actually took notes about the the totality of the displays how does vietnam see its own position against arising china well 80 percent of the narrative is about vietnam and china 10 percent is about the american war and the rest is about france and so you know we're not we're not it's not us who constitute the this the entirety of this narrative if i'm sorry if i could further sort of confound the uh this is i think an important what i would characterize bob's view is an excessively Tory blue water strategy approach to the specific to to do violence to history and and steve suggests a more quiggish uh traditional approach that that combines uh alliances uh you know again this is you know we're kind of imitating uh british imperial policy if you will so in addition to you know continuing to rule the waves and never being slaves uh combining uh in coalitions that can change and evolve with other regional powers particularly continental powers as bob rightly says uh china's maritime power projection is a bit of a luxury of historical circumstance and if you sort of ask yourself what is what are the chinese fear deep in their collective unconscious the most it's a land invasion where problems on the continent again maybe there's a message for us that we could you know remember if you're a country like vietnam which i think has about 83 million people it's like an evolving maritime turkey as i you know as i as i write it like it could be a real robust middle level power um if you're a vietnam or if you're a malaysia it's china's power is not just the fact that it's building submarines it's china's demographic power it's its economic power it's its geographical centrality to your region plus it's evolving military power it's all of those things put together so that you can rightly fear that were america you know the american air sea presence to measurably decline you could rightly fear a kind of finlandization by china patrick what were you what did you say when we testified on north korea today that we need a long-term strategy really it's a washington failure on both parties to force the community to come together on a committed long-term strategy for actually changing north korea's cycle of pervercation provocation um not to mention human rights abuses and that's not easy to bring about and frankly there wasn't a lot of tolerance to listen to what a variegated strategy would look like because it's not a simple strategy um but it's a very important one we talked obviously a lot about the tactical failures that led to the leap day agreement of the administration with the kim jong-un transitional government in north korea but those are tactics as opposed to the real strategy and so the real strategy issue is how do we break this cycle how north korea keeps imagine this the united states the great power goes to korea and has a nuclear summit brings all the leaders of the world together and north korea is off preparing its missile test even though they just promise not to test one and the next week they force the u.s navy the japanese navy maritime self-defense forces the south korean navy china russia all to congregate in the east and south china seas with their military forces on hair trigger alert i mean how does a 29 year old leader who you know had two bad years of boarding school in switzerland bring this about when we can't seem to orchestrate a more effective international pressure to change this pattern of behavior and it just reminds us how limited we are in our ability to execute an idea and see it through to success it's i can i can i you can read my testimony it's on the web of the center for new american security about how i think the strategy could go about but it's it's not all laid out there for for some reasons but at least the building blocks of it are there was a headline well we need three basic things we need new instruments of pressure some of those are the the precision guided financial measures that we we know about that we haven't really followed through on we we need a much more rigorous information strategy radio other means you can't keep china and south korea are so wealthy now compared to north korea that you cannot keep the information out in the 21st century the way you could before it's seeping in it's seeped in in a big way to the 50 000 north korean workers who are working at the south korean case line industrial complex that i've written about it's seeping across the chinese border they can't keep this out even kim jong-un seems to understand that information is going to have to be dealt with differently from his father and grandfather and the third leg besides an information strategy and a pressure strategy is there's going to have to be an engagement strategy a bad word in washington right now because you can't trust the north but if you're going one of the things that's unacceptable for i think should be for americans and american decision makers is that we do not have any direct access to kim jong-un his key regent jong-sun tech the two generals who surround him who advise them on everything zero contact with the top leadership is unacceptable for american taxpayers and i'd love to hear you know governor romney and president obama talk about in an election year how are we going to break that and start to maybe find out if we can change this top-down leadership i think you need the engagement partly to get the information in questions uh in the back questions are better well um thank you the um the question about whether regional architecture northeast asia could bring about successful soft landing in north korea um obviously the six party talks of china russia south korea japan the united states in north korea has been the multilateral effort at the last several years it's been largely focused on the nuclear issue the problem with focusing exclusively though on the nuclear issue is that if north korea really only has six to ten plutonium bombs are enough fissile material for six to ten and that's a supposition we don't know for sure but that's one of the best guesses that's out in the public they're hardly going to negotiate that away or trade it away in proliferated way the good news is they're not going to sell that to the middle east perhaps because it's limited they really need that for their insurance policy we need to figure out how to deal with some other issues though about north korea but how do we do that when the regime is so oppressive it takes all the money that comes in it steals food aid so this is this is the trick we've been trying in washington simply to coordinate with our chief ally in soul in over the years that's been either difficult or recently it's been very easy but just because it's easy doesn't make it successful as we see the the cooperation between us and south korea has reached an all-time high but we are no more effective in bringing north korea down to some kind of an agreement but the general position that we need a multilateral framework for helping to deal with this is going to be very important if we can overcome north korea cycle eventually i look at berm i look at manmar and i'll be going there next month and how they have shifted now they have unsung su chi and north korea has no you know not even the beginning of a reform movement forget about an unsung su chi an iconic figure of the governor's of democracy but nonetheless we need to start breaking up in in getting information in and seeing maybe it is chiang sung tech who thinks that he wants to be a gorbachev and reform the system he thinks he can save it but in the process of thinking he can save it maybe things change in a way that open this up we'll need the region together on this the other college he made about whether china looks at japan's history is important because we're just about to release a brand new report on the us-japan alliance called the china challenge and we call explicitly for a china japan u.s energy security dialogue so that we can deal with that issue gentleman in front yes jay philosophy i have a question for the for the panel and that may be someone with a bit of heresy but if china wants to evict us from the south china city uh and why don't we just leave let them have it they need it so much more than we do and they're going to need it more as they develop well 1992 we did leave subic and clark we left we left the naval and air base in 1992 and that's when mr freef then happened a militarized incident in the region where the chinese occupied a disputed territory so there are downsides to just leaving the region the key reason not to leave the south china sea and we're not there in a big way other than our potential over the horizon presence or passage through innocent passage but the the key reason is because of the reassurance that almost all the other countries surrounding china are seeking from the united states if we don't reassure them their policies end up being fairly negative including runaway nationalism including security arrangements that may not be favorable to the united states including the fact that we may just be downgraded much much further in asia's mind about whether the united states matter should be listened to on anything yeah look i mean uh as bob rightly said this is going to be the you know uh the hot house of global human development for the foreseeable future for decades to come the arrangements that now exist are a creation of american effort with allies and with others not solely an american effort but the the development of of china of japan of south korea of all the which is not just economic development but then political development as well if there's any you know trend in the region that gets you know it becomes so commonplace that nobody observes it anymore it's the democratization of a culture a political culture that didn't have much uh history of that uh previously so there's a lot to play for america's always been a pacific power and the world will look very different if the outcome is is is is negative i mean it won't be just confined to the region globalization means globalization there's been americanized globalization but if there's some other form of globalization that includes accommodation i mean china's not an ideological communist power but it is a nationalist uh you know more it's like a post-westphalian state and we're a post post with you know there's fundamentally common regimes of governance where uh what we're talking about here and so the world will be quite different and i think uh more more dangerous as well as less you know hospitable to american ideals american people and american interests um you raise a very fundamental question and what if i could rephrase your question is what exactly is the you know what exactly does america do i know what is its purpose with all these warships that cause billions and and planes i mean i mean one f-22 could fund relief missions throughout sub-saharan africa i mean i've actually done the numbers on this um uh so what are we there for and if we left what would the world look like afterwards and by the world you might as well take east asia southeast asia because as i said previously that's the heart to the degree that the global economy has a demographic and economic heart that's it it's that if you extract the american presence you know in in this theoretical way you framed it just leave completely suddenly in the indian china rivalry would not be so benign the indian russian rivalry would not be so benign uh the india the chinese vietnamese i mean the chinese russian rivalry would not be so benign the chinese vietnamese relationship would not be that benign these are countries that could easily go to war um the fact that most of their rivalries are benign the fact that in china and india and china and vietnam have not fought a war since 1979 china and india since 1962 despite the fact that what we see is really jockeying for position on the high seas more than real strong outbreaks of hostilities is because of the pacifying effect of an american military hegemon in the in the area and and that pacifying effect allows world trade to happen but wouldn't it be great if we had a war if we were not part of it? uh no i don't think that would be like in india if we had a war if we weren't part of it excuse me i'm i'm i'm yeah i i didn't hear your i didn't hear your question well remember it's not just democracy that america offers the world it's the protection of trade and commerce and look the again the great surprise historical surprise of recent decades has been the absence of great power war i mean europe has passed into uh it's almost unimaginable that there would be a war among european great powers who are no longer great powers you know that after 400 years of europe exporting its wars to the rest of the world that's something that we should let go of you know very reluctantly and not spin into a new set of you know just because it's traditional and historical you know our historical presidents presidents for competing power struggling again that's what's produced wars it's the absence of competition that's been remarkable about the recent decades and that's you know that's i think something very valuable let's gather up uh two or three questions this gentleman here my question is pretty so sure that china would not simply replace the united states as the guarantor of the comet would say that it would not like the united states buy into the international order why are you so sure that it's fundamentally different in the incentive to replace as a i'm not so sure uh you know it may it may buy in though would be different you know chinese hegemony would be different because china is different from the united states whether it would be whether it would be detrimental to the world system i i don't know i don't know i know that as china rises it's it's you know it's rising is very aggressive in the way that it's in the way that it stopped american ships and others though if you look at 19th century american navy in the early 20th century america was quite an aggressive power in its own right especially in conquering the western half of the continent um so that um so that you know this may be just you know the tendency of rising powers and once they've risen they become more uh uh um more um more amenable more confident with that confidence comes you know a more of a diplomatic attitude but i'm not so sure i'm peter i'm i should shut up okay i certainly couldn't agree more with the idea that our economy is the foundation of our strength and our position america has to get its own economic house in order and there are a lot of problems that we have to grapple with we certainly need when we talk about on a policy level things like a regional trading agreement like the trans-pacific partnership which is going to take years to try to negotiate what's missing behind that is the real business and investment and our manufacturing base those are the things that are unfortunately lagging way behind even policymakers who want to project an economic footprint because ultimately we should be leading with economics and diplomacy in the region just backed up by a strong military to help guarantee rules of the road and open inclusive system based on rules that's really our aim it's a favorable balance of power it's not conflict but we need that strong economy China's not necessarily stolen all of the high value complex systems integration that we are better at or innovation is also another glaring problem right now China may be a generation behind but if the trend is any future projection they're catching up i would just add that actually over the next few years i think the real one of the what could be a big news story is the you know the economic social tensions within China itself our problems are out in the open there's a lot wrong with the american system but it is fundamentally legitimate it's unclear how fundamentally legitimate the chinese system is chinese autocrats are certainly not like middle east autocrats you know they're not decayed reptilian people in their 80s who have not developed the economy who have giant posters on the board about how great they are you know this is a collegial leadership they retire at 65 they've you know they've given their people decades of economic growth that's lifted them out not just economically but provided personal freedoms if not political freedoms so i'm not making that comparison but nevertheless china could could face a real strong internal crisis built on the you know the revolution of rising expectations or something like that take one final question here i need to let others speak i do think they are aiming to build a long range nuclear weapon that can hit american soil i think there's no doubt and i think they'd like to test even in the next year possibly a uranium based weapon which would change the game fundamentally because it's harder to detect easy to proliferate and would give them a much more potent capability so it really puts us in a very difficult situation but i let tom answer how we get out of it well the one thing i would add to patrick's earlier exposition is we really need to figure out what we're trying to achieve i mean there are many paths that will take us there but the problem is we don't really know and neither do the chinese or the japanese or the other members of the six-party consortium or nobody knows what they want you know do we want regime the regime to survive but not be quite so crazy and troublesome well that's not likely but do we really want to face what the collapse of the regime would mean and that's that's a pretty complicated question when you start thinking about it prickly to start thinking about how the chinese would look at look at that i mean the balance of power on the korean peninsula will matter regardless of whether there's still you know neanderthals ruling in pyongyang i think may five what's to you thank you it just the final thought on north korea um we've seen in the 20th century the collapse of divided countries the reunification in germany, yemen, vietnam all of these cases happened without any prior warning uh it happened tumultuously relatively fast all the experts seemed wrong we should not rule out some sort of regime unraveling in our lifetimes in the northern half of the korean peninsula that would create the mother of all humanitarian emergencies and would really you know shuffle the cards in northeast asia well thank you for that