 So, right away you're probably recognizing that I'm not your typical CIA officer in agreeing to speak on the record to you in public. So I've written the book, The Russia Trap. The subtitle is, How Our Shadow War With Russia Could Spiral Into Nuclear Catastrophe. You can see nuclear catastrophe in bold white lettering there. If you're like most audiences and you see that subtitle I think your question immediately is, how can you possibly be serious? Because this question of nuclear catastrophe between Moscow and Washington sounds like something out of the mid-20th century. It sounds like Dr. Strangelove and Cuban Missile Crisis and school children doing duck and cover drills in their elementary schools, people building fallout shelters and stockpiling cans of food. And it really is something that we today don't think about. And we don't imagine that this is a danger that we have to reckon with anymore. We've been there, we've done that, the Cold War is over, the good guys won, and we've moved on to other problems, ISIS and Donald Trump and various other things that we want to worry about, climate change. Nuclear catastrophe is not something that is really on our list of things that keep us up at night anymore. And I argue in the book that it should be. And I do that not because I'm trying to scare people, but because we actually do, I believe today, face a danger of unwanted and unexpected nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia for reasons that we don't realize. And I want to lay out what I think those are. And I want to do that by looking at some of the assumptions that I think underpin our complacency about this problem. And I think complacency is actually a fair word to use right now. So the first assumption is that Russia represents what I would call a World War II problem. Now what do I mean by that? World War II was a war that began by design. It was largely the result of the ambitions, the aggressive intentions of Adolf Hitler and Nazi Germany. And international relations theorists call this a deterrence model problem. And the way you deal with problems like this is you deter. You show that aggressive state that you're ready, willing, and capable of fighting back and that you will do so. And the effect of this is deterring. That aggressive state realizes that it's in for a fight, that it will face real costs, real blood, and it reconsider its intentions as a result and you avoid war. And the one thing you don't do in dealing with a World War II kind of problem is appeasement. We've learned that lesson from Munich in 1938 very well. And we're applying this to Russia today. But the problem with this deterrence model World War II conceptual approach is that not all wars begin by design. Some wars spiral into being through an escalatory dynamic, a chain reaction of events that people don't foresee and don't fear. And that's what happened in World War I. World War I was not the result of design. It was not the result of aggressive intention. It was the result of a confluence of factors, entangled alliances, mutual misperceptions between Britain and Germany that caused each of them to regard the other as a deadly rival, not just a geopolitical competitor. New technologies, railway technologies that created a path dependency of mobilization that made the European theater highly susceptible to small events that could trigger large unexpected results. And so we had a situation where none of the European continent's great powers expected a Europe-wide war, but none the less happened. And that's a situation that I think we're facing right now with Russia. Second assumption behind our complacency, nuclear war will not happen, could not happen because engaging in that kind of conflict would be a suicidal act. An irrational act. And everyone knows that, so they wouldn't do it. Now, the logical outcome of that assumption is we can engage in a robust shadow war with Russia without danger that this would cross into the threshold of a genuine shooting war. And that kind of shadow war is going on right now between the United States and Russia. In the cyber domain, we're fighting it out quite robustly with each other. A lot of this doesn't show up in the public domain. Not a lot of it gets reported. You see a small hints of this in press reports now and then. But behind the scenes in the digital domain, this is going on every day and it's quite robust. In fact, the United States has created a new national cyber strategy that is called persistent engagement. It's also known as defending forward. And it's premised on the idea that we have to fight it out in the digital domain quite aggressively. Why is that? It's because defense deterrence doesn't work in this cyber competition. The offense has such a stark advantage over the defense that offensive cyber actors can penetrate just about any system they want to penetrate. It's a matter of will, not capability. So if you want to get into a particular system, you can. Given enough time and a little bit of technological sophistication, you can penetrate those systems. So the implication of that for the defense is, well, playing defense doesn't really work. I can't prevent intrusions and I can't really deter them. So I've got to go on offense. I've got to play defense by making that other side have to contend with my intrusions. I'll take down the botnets, force them to rebuild their capabilities. I'll get into their systems and force them to reckon with what I can do to them. I'll hold some of their systems at risk. I'll implant cyber bombs malware that I could detonate at some point in the future and cause them to worry about what would happen if they were to detonate these cyber bombs on our side. Now, we believe that the net effect of going on offense will be to create stability in this digital domain. But I think there are some problems with this that have bigger implications for why we might get into a spiral with Russia that we don't expect. What are those? Well, once I'm in the Russian system, I've planted some malware there. The Russians find it eventually. What do they do? Well, they can patch those vulnerabilities. They can take countermeasures against that malware. Now, what that means for me is I can't be complacent that once I've penetrated a system on the other side, once I've implanted malware, that it will work forever. In fact, it probably won't. So this is not like the nuclear balance during the Cold War where I had more or less stable, mutually assured destruction. I've got strategic nuclear missiles that I know are a stable and reliable retaliatory second strike force that gives me the assurance that the other side knows I can destroy it at any given time and that imposes some caution, some restraint, and strategic stability as a result. In the cyber domain, the dynamics don't work like that at all. I've got to constantly be looking for new vulnerabilities because the old ones go away. They pop in and out of existence, sort of like subatomic particles. And the malware that I put in the other side system to take advantage of those vulnerabilities also goes stale. It doesn't work forever. So I've got to constantly be updating this, developing new malware, finding new vulnerabilities. And the other side is driven by exactly those same concerns. So instead of a stable competition where we have mutually assured destruction that imposes restraint, I've got a domain here that actually is inherently a spiral model phenomenon, an escalatory situation where I've constantly got to be looking to out-compete the other side, to create new weapons, implant new weapons, find new vulnerabilities. And so this, I think, is a fundamentally different kind of phenomenon, a different environment than we faced during the Cold War. It is not a deterrence model. So we ought to be thinking very deeply about that assumption that we're dealing with a Munich kind of World War II situation and that we've got technologies that can help stabilize this, as I would argue nuclear technology did during the Cold War. It was very scary, very dangerous, but ultimately created a stable strategic environment. That's not at all the situation we're facing right now. Assumption number three, the measures that we took during the Cold War to manage the dangers of that competition between the United States and the Soviet Union are still at work today. And they're still creating more or less a manageable strategic environment between the two countries. That's not at all the case. So we had a number of close calls during the Cold War. Cuban Missile Crisis being one of the most noteworthy. Both sides looked into that nuclear abyss and realized we had a mutual interest in containing and managing those dangers. And we did something about that. We had a lot of ideological rivalry, very little mutual trust, a lot of broader political hostility toward one another. But we each realized that we had a shared interest in making sure that things didn't go really bad. So we created formal legally binding arms control treaties. We created a series of politically binding confidence and security building measures. Incidents that see agreements, various things that were all meant to make sure that things didn't spin out of control and create a disaster. Those worked pretty well in retrospect. We had channels of communication between the US and Soviet governments where we could talk to one another. We created the so-called nuclear hotline between the White House and Kremlin to make sure that in crisis situations we could talk and that we wouldn't get into problems due to miscommunication or lack of communication. All of those things are going away. Last year that we lost the INF Treaty, the ABM Treaty was abrogated in the early 2000s. It looks like the new START Treaty is likely to expire without being extended and renegotiated. And we don't have new arms control provisions, new confidence and security building measures that are aimed at managing the new technologies that we have, the new dangers that we face that are somewhat different than the situation that we face during the Cold War. And so this edifice of management tools that worked so well in the past is gone for the most part. And nothing is coming to succeed it and deal with the new situation that we're facing. I think that's a highly dangerous situation. I want to talk a little bit about how we could wind up in a conflict that we don't want by talking about what I regard as a very realistic scenario so that I can bridge that world of theory with the real world of how this might play out. So the United States and Russia are fighting a series of proxy wars right now. Ukraine is probably the most noteworthy. Syria is another one where this is going on. There are other parts of the world where this is also being fought out that are not getting a lot of press attention. In Syria, let's imagine a situation where the military de-confliction between the United States and Russia starts to break down. Not hard to imagine. That de-confliction channel has worked fairly well so far, but it worked fairly well in circumstances in which the broader missions of the United States and Russia in Syria were largely compatible. When we're each fighting ISIS in parallel, albeit through different means, but our goal was still essentially the same. Relatively easy to de-conflict because there's not a fundamental conflict between our purposes there. That has changed recently. The United States is now saying, yes, we want to fight ISIS, but we also have some other objectives, one of which is explicitly to prevent the Syrian government and Russian forces from taking control of oil and gas fields that were once controlled by ISIS. Well, that's not a de-confliction problem. That's a confliction problem. What you're saying is official US policy is to prevent Russia from taking control of certain parts of Syrian territory. You're now talking about a fundamental incompatibility of Russian and US purposes. So how do you deal with that? You're not going to deal with that through a de-confliction channel. You actually have to talk about how you manage this problem. And if you don't talk about it, you're going to figure this out on the battlefield. Now, that's a dangerous situation. Does either side want a direct conflict over Syria? No. I think it's clear we don't want a direct conflict with Russia. And our preferred way of avoiding that conflict is the Russians back down. They realize that we're serious. They realize that we're going to stop them from achieving certain goals in Syria. And they say, okay, we're not going to go there. We don't want that conflict. And what happens? We win. We achieve our goal. What happens if that's not how it works out in the battlefield? What if the Russians see an opportunity to achieve something with a little bit of risk, perhaps, but one where they think they can actually achieve their objective? What do we do? Let's spin this out a little bit and say, well, okay, the Russians manage to achieve a small victory on the battlefield tactically. They take an oil or gas field somewhere that's valuable. And the United States says, well, you know, this is not good. This aggression will not stand. We need to do something about this. We start to get into a confrontation. We put forces on the ground in this area in a hostile, threatening way to put an exclamation point between on our communications to Russia, and this is not okay. The Russians start to worry that there actually might be a military confrontation in Syria, and what do they do? Well, one of the things they want to know is, what are our intentions? Are we going to follow through? So how do they figure out that question? Intelligence. They want to gather intelligence on our intentions. And they're doing this in a very real world kind of thing. This is not theoretical. They want to know, are U.S. forces going to attack Russian forces in Syria? How are they going to do it? What are their targets? The best way to do that in the 21st century is through cyber espionage. It's to penetrate U.S. command and control systems to try to get targeting data, figure out what it is that we're planning to do. Now, here's where things start to get very interesting because let's imagine that the Russians actually penetrate a U.S. command and control satellite that controls our ability to use Tomahawk cruise missiles, for example, to launch strikes into Syria. And we detect that intrusion. The problem that we've got on the defensive side of all this is figuring out who, first of all, penetrated this system. Let's say we're able to understand that it's the Russians. The next question is, why are they there? Because if I'm a systems administrator, if I'm playing cyber defense and I find somebody in my system, I know two things. One, they can collect, download all kinds of data from that system, but they also can sabotage it. They can alter, corrupt, or destroy that data. They can cause my system to malfunction. And I can't know, just from the fact of their intrusion, what their ultimate intentions are. So if we're in a crisis situation with the Russians over Syria, each side is worried about what the other side might do. And I'm working in the White House and the National Security Staff, and I get some calls from the National Security Agency and CIA saying, we have a problem here, we think there are Russians in our command and control system. I've got to write a memo to the President of the United States, and I'm going to say to him, bad news, Russians in our command and control system. And I'm also going to say, and we don't know what their intentions are. It could be to collect information, it could be to sabotage the system, and here's the really bad news. And this is something that I think the general public doesn't grasp. Those command and control systems control not just conventional systems, they control nuclear systems as well. Because we've had an intermixing of conventional and strategic nuclear forces over the decades since the Cold War. Why? To save money. And because we didn't think this was a particularly significant development. This was an efficiency. But the upshot of all of that is, in my memo to the President of the United States, I'm going to say to him, we can't know whether if you push the button to launch strategic nuclear forces that it will actually work. Because we've got intruders in that system that may be able to, and we're not sure, interfere in your ability to do that. This I think is a classic example of what the theorists would call crisis instability. And the really bad news on all of this is, we don't think we should be talking to the Russians about this. Why? Because of that World War II model that is driving how we're conceiving of the problem. Because with that World War II problem, when you're dealing with this aggressive state, you don't engage. You don't try to strike bargains. You don't try to figure out the rules of the game. Because we know how those aggressive states react to that. They regard it as weakness, a lack of resolve, a lack of commitment to actually fight. And they take advantage of that weakness. So you don't do that. So we have a situation here where the prescription that we're applying to the problem is actually making the problem itself more dangerous, more difficult to resolve. Because in order to cope with the situation that we're facing today, where we have these new technologies, this entanglement between capabilities. Where we have a geopolitical competition that is producing a lot of potential crises, a lot of potential triggers. And the edifice of management that we used to use during the Cold War to contain all this is going away. And our reaction to this is don't talk to the Russians, because that will make the situation worse. We lack an ability to manage these situations. And I would argue, and I think this is the big takeaway from my book, we need to be talking about how to manage these situations. We need to engage about rules of the game. We need to recognize that we're in a new situation that requires new rules and it requires engagement. And that engagement should not be regarded as rewards to the other side for bad behavior. We engage with the Soviet Union despite the fact that there was very little trust, despite the fact that we were bitter ideological opponents. We can do that today. And I think it's very much time for us to begin that kind of engagement. Thank you. Well, thank you very much, George. I think it's fair to say that if you had reservations at the beginning about the subtitle of your book, whether or not we face a danger of unplanned for nuclear confrontation between the United States and Russia, I think you have in your presentation fully justified that subtitle. And as I was saying at the beginning, the government of the whole problem is an absence of communication, an absence of a whole network of agreements and communication channels which made a previous very delicate and dangerous situation which made it possible to manage it despite all indications perhaps beforehand to the contrary. And we now are in a situation where, as you say, nearly all of this has fallen away. I open the floor to questions or comments. Could I ask you in asking your question or making a comment if you would say who you are and what your affiliation is? Yes, Mary. Mary, remember the institution. When you were describing the situation there with two areas where the conflict is very obvious in the Ukraine and in Syria, and you were talking then about the responsibility of the official in the National Security Agency to write that memo, I just had an image of President Bush there, not Bush, President Trump there, sorry, and his position on the Ukraine and his withholding of, apparently withholding of military assistance to Ukraine and then his decision that American troops should be further drawn down in Syria. So I think it would be the brave person who would be sending that memo, I think, to the Oval Office right now. But there is an election going to take place in the U.S. And are there any candidates that would suggest to you that they might adopt a more robust but pragmatic approach to Russia than we see currently in the chief executive of the U.S.? Well, on the one hand I have enough faith in humanity to think that eventually we will adopt a more pragmatic approach because life itself will force that to happen. But I don't see any near-term prospect for fundamental change in how we're dealing with the problem. And that in part is because our domestic politics have become entangled in our foreign policies in the United States in ways that are much more extreme than any time in my lifetime. Russia is no longer a foreign policy problem in the United States. It's a domestic politics problem. And what that means is essentially we've lost our ability to discuss this rationally. So there are no candidates on the Democratic side that are arguing for a more pragmatic approach to dealing with Russia. It's politically suicidal for them to do that. And Russia and Ukraine have become such dangerous issues for President Trump that I think it imposes severe restrictions on his ability to maneuver when it comes to this. I wrote an article a few weeks ago on this phenomenon regarding Ukraine that I called groupthink resurgent. And my point in this was that although there is debate in the United States over what motivated President Trump to temporarily withhold security aid to Ukraine and the appropriateness of that politically, nobody questions the bigger conceptual model that we're using for understanding the problem in Ukraine. And it's exactly the same one that I referred to in my talk. We look at Ukraine like a World War II problem. That the problem here is that the Russians are trying to take over the country, trying to push as far eastward as they can, and that the way you deal with that is deterrence. You don't engage. You don't try to find compromises. You fight back. And every single testifier in the House impeachment hearing said exactly that. That Ukraine's freedom is our freedom. We're fighting against this aggressive expansionist Putinist state and we're fighting them in Ukraine so that we don't have to fight them in the United States. I think that's a misconception of the problem that we're facing. It's the wrong medicine to apply to the ailment. And we're going to wind up ironically in exactly the situation that we think we're avoiding. And what is that? Yalta. Yalta was a situation where the great powers got together and cut deals over the heads of Eastern European peoples and produced a situation in which Europe was split geographically, ideologically into warring camps. And the people on the Soviet side of that line were essentially in political slavery. We don't want that to happen again. And we think it won't happen if we fight back in Ukraine. But I think ironically what's going to happen is we're going to end up with a north-south dividing line running through the middle of Ukraine in a divided Europe between a Russian sphere of influence and EU and NATO sphere of influence that is highly unstable and quite dangerous precisely because we're applying the wrong medicine to that ailment. The reality in Ukraine is that neither side can win. We cannot bring Ukraine intact into NATO and the European Union exclusively and have that country remain whole because eastern portions of that country, Russian speaking portions of that country will fight back. They are fighting back, not just because the Russians are helping them. By the same token, any attempt by Russia to pull Ukraine exclusively into Russia's sphere of influence will cause the western portions of Ukraine to fight back. And both sides can succeed. They can't succeed in pulling the whole country one way or the other as a whole but they can certainly prevent full victory by the other side and the result of that is going to be a country that's divided in two. And that should not be our objective. I think it's a highly unstable outcome if that's where we wind up. My name is Paula Kelleher and I work via my Mellon and Lawrence international bank. So we hear an awful lot about US Bank obviously. We hear a lot about cyber crime and all the things that are being done. So it is very fast moving world. And I think my question is around then, you know, if you like the traditional ways of tackling problems that you've outlined and the modern way where, you know, the cyber thing seems to happen behind closed doors and people don't speak to each other. Do you think that there is enough, you know, from your dealings of reasonable people on either side? It's not what we hear in, you know, the media. It's not what we readers see about because it doesn't sell newspapers. It's not sensationalist but do you believe there are enough reasonable people to kind of hope that these sort of things are a bit further down the road or that new ways are found before we ever find out to prove your book or not? Right. I certainly hope my thesis is not proven. That would be a disaster. I do think there are enough reasonable people out there. The problem is they're essentially disempowered in our current political environment which actually promotes polarization. It forces people to choose sides. It penalizes those that seek some sort of pragmatic, more centrist approach to things. And there's no easy way of tackling that problem. The things that have produced this current situation are, you know, deep societal factors that don't lend themselves to easy policy fixes. And many of them are out of control of, you know, state government apparatuses. So I do think that the good news is there are a lot of reasonable people out there that do want to tackle these things pragmatically. The bad news is they're working in an environment that disadvantages them. And fixing that broader environment is a formidable task. Thank you very much. My name is Valerie Hughes. I'm with the Irish-Syria Solidarity Movement, a member of that. And I just wanted to ask you about the medicine. You were talking about medicine being applied for Ukraine, but the medicine for Syria. You know, in Idlib, your national interest article just recently said it was winding down. But the WHO today said it's among the world's worst situations. And Russia, our own Maliki Brown, working for the New York Times, has done exemplary work exposing Russian bombing hospitals. They've caught them red-handed bombing hospitals. And it's just the whole idea of dialogue when that's happening, you know, Macron reaching out to Russia, but not including, you know, is it just oil? The whole thing of protecting people from genocide seems to have completely gone out the window. And yet they're using this awful never-again narrative, like Vice President Pence was saying today we remember what happens when the powerless cry for help and the powerful refuse to answer. He said that at the Auschwitz Memorial. And it's really wrong to keep that, you know, in the narrative, since I just like your opinion on that, please. Thank you. Well, I think you've highlighted a very difficult issue where several things that are each good are in conflict with one another. I think those are the kinds of ethical problems that are difficult, most difficult to deal with, where you have two things that are good that are intentional with one another. So it's good to try to establish peace, to end war, to end violence, right? Also good to defend the sovereign right of peoples to make sovereign decisions about what they're doing. What do you do in a situation where that principle of sovereignty is intention with that principle of human rights? We've had to deal with lots of situations like that recently in the Balkans and other parts of the world. And that Westphalian world of saying, hey, you know, we experienced decades of devastating warfare because of this religious conflict, this clash over beliefs fundamental to what we value. And we're not going to resolve those tensions. We're going to say to ourselves, you know what, good fences make good neighbors here. The Protestants aren't going to win, the Catholics aren't going to win. We're going to agree to disagree. We're going to create a state system where we'll defend the sovereign rights of states to decide how they want to govern themselves internally and minimize the prospects for war as a result of that. But what do you do in a situation like that when you see a state authority using that sovereign right to abuse its own citizens? Now you've got things that are each good that are intentional with one another. And Syria is another example of that. And I don't have a good answer for how you reconcile that problem. I would say my instinct is you try to find a balance. You don't say, well, we're going to prize this one to the exclusion of this one and we're going to defend an absolute right to sovereignty at the expense of the human conditions of the people inside the country. And you don't do the other either. So what this is really about, I think, is how do you find a balance between these things that's pragmatic? And I can't tell you what that is. I will say that it requires talking. It requires negotiating. It requires engaging and debating over how you find that balance. So I do think that one of the requirements is we actually have to talk to one another about how we manage these problems and don't approach this from the point of view of, well, the other side is actually purely evil and we're purely good. So it's a good evil fight. I don't think that's it. Noldor, I'm a member of the Institute. I think your last point is material for a seminar and is of great interest. But just to return for a moment to the Syrian case, you talked about the danger of a confrontation in Syria and it's quite obviously the case. A relatively minor aspect I want to ask about. The particular Cassus-Belly or basis for a conflict that you mentioned that it would be the United States wishing to deprive Russia and Syria of certain oil fields which were held by ISIS. It seems to me rather unlikely. I appreciate that it's just an example and your general point is correct. But it seems to me rather unlikely because I just wonder both the United States and Russia are apparently more or less self-sufficient in oil resources and oil and gas are depreciating in value in this world of climate change. Is it really the case that the United States would be prepared for a confrontation in Syria which would reduce in effect to depriving Syria of whatever amount of oil and gas they have, which probably is not as great as in Iraq in any case. In other words, was your example, it was rather worrying to hear that the United States might be in your view prepared for a confrontation on that particular issue. I realize you were only given an example of a possible area of confrontation. Yeah, well your question gets to another conceptual prism that you can use as an analyst to understand how decisions are made. If you're looking at this through the lens of the rational actor model where you have a unitary state government making decisions based on national interests, you're absolutely right. Those oil and gas resources are relatively unimportant to the United States from the point of view of national interests. Not something that we would or should go to war to defend. It doesn't matter. The United States has become a net exporter of petroleum products. The Persian Gulf, which was once so central to US national security interests, not as important by any means today as a result of the changing energy situation. Oil resources in the world generally are less important than they used to be as we're seeking to pivot from our oil dependence and develop new sources of energy. So yes, from that point of view, makes no sense whatsoever. But if you look at this through a bureaucratic politics model or an organizational process model where decisions get made at lower levels that don't derive from those national interests, then you're facing a different situation in which, for example, a mercenary army wants that oil and gas, not because it's important to the national government, but because those individuals in the mercenary army can boost their bank accounts, engage in all kinds of things that are important to them as individuals or smaller groups. It can also be driven by factions within bureaucracies that have their own agendas that are important to their bureaucratic interests, not to national interests. And I will tell you that there are groups in the United States within the government at lower mid-level bureaucratic levels that are all in favor of taking the fight to the Russians. Why is that? Part of it is they hate Russians. Part of it is because it advances their particular interests within the bureaucratic struggle for power and influence. And they have counterparts in Russia that feel much the same way in reverse. So should we be in a situation where our international fates and national fates are being determined by people with very narrowly defined interests? No. But I think the reality is that those narrowly conceived interests are in fact exerting pressures today. Derry Fitzgerald, a member of the Institute. Thank you for a very informative presentation and I take your caution very seriously. My question is about the Russian intent, if you like. I mean, we look at, in Europe, we're aware of developments in the Bering Sea, the Baltic Sea, in the Black Sea, and in the Mediterranean Sea with the upgrade of Latakia. Innocently, I think we all think that there is no strategic land intent or land grab behind any of this. Is that a fair assessment from a Russian perspective? Well, there are a few big schools of thought on this question. There's the offensive Russia School of Thought, which essentially posits that Russia went through a very difficult post-Cold War period in the 1990s. And is now coming back and it has very big ambitions. It wants to undermine NATO, essentially break up that alliance, break up the European Union, re-establish its control over its former empire. First, in the former Soviet Union, but secondly, the broader Soviet empire outside of the USSR itself, and is on the offense. And so the intentions are quite big. There's a contending school of thought that says that all of this is defensive, that Russia reacted to NATO enlargement the way any state would react to the approach of a hostile military alliance to its borders. And is essentially playing defense to deal with this western threat. My own belief is that both of those schools of thought are partially right. And that's what makes this problem so difficult to understand and so difficult to deal with. I think Russia certainly is acting defensively in its own mind, so to speak. It is dealing with an expanding NATO military alliance, which has been pushing ever closer to Russia's borders, crossing the old Soviet borders, attempting to bring Georgia and Ukraine into the alliance. And they feel that this is in violation of understandings that they felt they had in that late Cold War period between Gorbachev and the George H.W. Bush administration. They regard this as threatening and they're playing defense. But I think that's true to some degree. But they also have bigger ambitions than just playing defense. In other words, they're not trying to be Sweden. You know, a former great empire which has said, we're out of that business. We want to develop internally and create a great standard of living for our people. They also think of themselves as a great power. They want to be a great power. Not so much to defeat and destroy their rivals, but to co-manage the world with them, to be part of the board of directors. Putin recently called for a meeting of the permanent five UN Security Council members. Why? Well, I think in part because that's his conception of what the world ought to look like. You've got these great powers that all sit down in the boardroom and decide how you manage things. And Russia is one of them. So it's not like they're just trying to play defense. They don't have these broader ambitions. They want to be a great power. In fact, they think that Russia can't survive unless it is a great power, which is sort of a paradox. It's a mix of offensive and defensive motivations, and it makes all of this very difficult to sort out and difficult to deal with. We have a little time left, but I have three questions. Maybe we can take them together as far as we can. Conor? Conor Daley, Slavonic Studies Department at Trinity College Dublin. My question is along these lines. It's following up the previous question, but you've identified a scenario where the problem is being misdiagnosed and as a result reasonable people, the voices of those reasonable people on the United States side are not emerging for various internal reasons. I'm wondering, what's your take on the internal dialogue within Russia given the, in particular, the succession problem that Vladimir Putin is facing at the moment? Can I just outline one possible prognosis that Valérie Salavier, who's a well-known analyst, has advanced? He's saying that by victory day in May, Vladimir Putin will be able to announce that he is the president of the Seyuznaya Gassadars for this co-federation of Russia, Belarus and parts of Ukraine and other lands to be specified. And that we can expect that announcement very quickly and that we can expect a very turbulent February and March 2020. Do you think there's anything to that? I'm here. Hi, my name is Michael Sanfi, Policy Planning Unit of the Department of Foreign Affairs. In fact, you did just touch on it in your answer a moment or two ago because when you were calling for a balance of interests and you said there should be talking, engaging, debating, it just occurred to me that the obvious place to do that is the United Nations, which you hadn't mentioned, but then you did mention Putin's call for a meeting. So my question really is, do you see the United Nations as having this obvious role or do you feel it's just too weak? What are the prospects? It just seems so much the obvious place to do engagement and debating. So any views on that? I'm here. Thanks, I'll keep it brief. Peter Gunning, I'm a member of the Institute. Could you say a little more about where the hesitation about rolling over or renewing the START agreement in the United States comes from? You described very well the edifice of agreements and structures post the Second World War that brought a measure of stability and predictability despite deep ideological differences. Would not the renewal of this agreement, I think it's possible to do it for a five-year term, not be relatively easily saleable on the grounds that there's a continuity in that preservation of stability and at least keeping weapons at the level that they are at currently. And I don't easily see how that could fall into the political divide in the United States. So I'll take the last question first and go in reverse order. There are two objections to the new START treaty among Trump supporters. One is that this is an Obama agreement. And I think one of the best practical guides to what Trump's policy will be on any given issue is what did Obama do? And I'll do the opposite. I'm only half joking there, unfortunately. The second problem though is what you might call the Jacksonian tradition, which Walter Russell Mead has written about in American foreign policy. One that has not been very popular until very recently, but one that I think President Trump really embodies. And the Jacksonian tradition is really one that doesn't call for engagement in the world, that essentially says the United States not only doesn't need to engage, it really shouldn't. It should mind its own business internally, focus on the well-being of the American people, and you deal with potential challengers or adversaries abroad by hitting them very hard with a very big stick, much the way the United States dealt with the Revolutionary Guards commander in Iran, Soleimani, I think classic Jacksonian approach. We didn't try to strike a deal, we didn't try to manage some sort of balance of power within the Persian Gulf area that a realist tradition would call for. We didn't work through international organizations to try to reach some sort of deal where the liberal international tradition would lean. We basically said, bad guy, you're doing bad things, boom! How you like that, and don't do this anymore, and everyone out there should recognize that these are the consequences, and then you go home and mind your own business for a while. And now what does this have to do with arms control? Well, arms control interferes in your ability to wield that big stick. You're tying a hand behind your back, and so arms control is not the solution to all of this. The solution is to be as strong as possible to show everybody that you're willing to use this might, and then they sober up, and they don't challenge you, and then you can go home and mind your own business. That's a more formidable challenge, and it's very much resonant with, I think, the Trump base in the United States of people that essentially don't want to engage in the world, they regard the world with suspicion, and they believe in being strong, not looking for fights, but when people pick on you, showing that you're willing and able to fight back. United Nations, I think, yes, if you begin from the premise that we need to be talking about these things, engaging with other great powers, the United Nations makes sense as a form in which to do that. I think the organization is only as strong as the engagement between the UN Security Council members is at any given time, which means that right now it's very weak, because our ability to engage with one another is very poor. Moreover, I think there's a lot of suspicion in the United States among those Jacksonians, among a lot of the base supporters of President Trump that think that this is a threat to U.S. sovereignty, to our ability to act independently with the kind of room for maneuver that they think we need in the world. Regarding Solivier and where President Putin might ultimately go in terms of some sort of union with parts of Ukraine and Belarus, I wouldn't rule it out, but I don't think it's the most likely scenario for a variety of reasons. One is that I think there's little support for that in Belarus itself. There was a period where I think that there was some sympathy for this sort of thing in Belarus. Right now what I see is the Belarusians attempting to maneuver between the West and Russia, using engagement with the West as leverage to fend off excessive pressure from Russia and vice versa. And it makes sense if one looks objectively at Belarus's geopolitical circumstances to pursue that kind of course. In Ukraine, I don't think Putin actually wants to unite with the Donbass, with Novorossiya. There is certainly a large segment of popular opinion in Russia that favors that sort of thing. Putin has resisted that pressure for reasons that I think are very pragmatic. It would be expensive, difficult to do, and would probably actually sacrifice the geopolitical advantages that Russia has by keeping Eastern Ukraine part of the broader Ukrainian state. And the primary advantage is that it reduces Ukraine's flexibility to join NATO and the EU. It's basically an internal political veto that is very much to Russia's advantage. It goes away almost entirely if Russia takes over that territory. So I don't think those are very likely. I think he has other alternatives for maintaining some hold on power. I think he will step down from the presidency. He will probably take some alternative position that gives him some degree of power, but probably less power, at least on paper, than he's now got. But it will give him an insurance policy. Insurance that he himself won't be attacked and arrested and his allies won't be attacked and arrested in the future. And some insurance policy that what he built does not go away altogether in Russia. And I do think he cares about the long-term fate of Russia. I don't think he's in it entirely just for Putin. I think he does have some concern about making Russia great again to coin a phrase. Thank you very much. Of course, there is a president for his taking a position that has less power than paper previously. And we saw what that resulted in. I'm not saying that he's going to come back as president, but I think a lot points to his ambitions to come back to a position where he still has quite a lot of influence. George, thank you very much. It struck me in your presentation that when you were talking about a member of the National Security Establishment, writing a memo to the president of the United States that you could speak with intimate knowledge of what this might imply. And I think we had the benefits of your formal experience in this regard today. But more than that, it is clear to me that you have given an awful lot of productive thought to all these important questions. And might I say humbly that I agree entirely with what you have come out with as a result of this profound thought that you have given to it. And I would recommend your book to anybody who is interested in these questions. It's extremely well presented in the sense precisely of what you have said to us today. Thank you very much. Thank you.