 I don't think it's going to be the Asian century or the Pacific century or any of that stuff. I think it is going to be a global century in a way that it was not even in the 20th century. And so the question then becomes what is the place of Asia and which parts of Asia in the global century. And the most important thing for the United States is to stop thinking that it can run the world. Because what it is no longer is the Cold War half century. And so the habits of power that the United States has acquired are the greatest, I think the greatest obstacle to this global century evolving in a positive way. Australia I don't pretend to speak for. I do think that Australia is in a very interesting position, more interesting than the United States. But if I were Australia, I wouldn't hook up with the United States so closely. I would try to see what kind of a position Australia can fashion that actually represents Australia's geographical, economic and cultural condition. I don't mean that you would break with any of the United States or any of the other powers. But Australia is in an interesting position. I think first and foremost just to understand that it's a changed world. There have been many decades now where the US has been under the impression that it has control over the Pacific. That's how it's come to be known as an American lake. And Australia has very much seen itself fitting into those larger security arrangements. The world is not so simple anymore. The US needs to come to terms with the fact that there are new and rising powers, most obviously China, but also India, Indonesia, Brazil and other countries. So it's going to be a difficult shift. And this is taking place at a point in which there is the rise of strongly nationalist movements within the United States itself that want to think blindly about the continuing maintenance of American power in the world. The fact is American power is not what it used to be. The US has to deal with a much more complicated environment. And managing that domestically is going to be a major issue in the decade or two to come. I don't know if it's how they get themselves prepared so much as they should reflect on their actual military roles in the region, whether they're going to continue the way they have. They need to reflect seriously about power. They need to reflect about how the governments and the military stances have not been necessarily open and accepting. And it's really a pity sometimes when I see international education and language programs being cut for knowledge about Asia, that there should be an open stance towards engagement and understanding rather than one that's based on fear or power. I think obviously one needs to engage but sometimes it's important to listen. I think there's a tendency on the part of the United States and Australia to sort of want to earnestly go in and engage and problem solve and come up with the solutions, which may not be the solutions that those in the region are necessarily comfortable with or necessarily feel are the right solutions. And therefore if they're not acceptable then they're not going to work. They're not going to be effective. They're not going to have legitimacy. So I think we've got a point in time where we really need to spend more time at a deeper level of engagement in trying to understand the countries in the region, how they perceive their problems and how they perceive governance and how they perceive security, how they perceive power, how they perceive development. And then sort of try and get to a situation where we can actually have more of an open debate and discussion and negotiate some of the obvious tensions and conflicts that exist rather than coming in with our own agendas and trying to impose it from the outside. The U.S. is not particularly good about conceiving itself as anything but the indispensable nation. It certainly looks for points of cooperation and common and congruent interests with countries in the region. We've seen that in the recent pivot towards Asia, which for the most part has been welcome. But I think that there's a lot of self-congratulation in Washington. It kind of takes a top-down picture view of the region. I think that as the U.S. prepares for the Asian century, it needs not to just take a top-down look at the region. It really needs to keep its ear to the ground and have a heck of a lot more sensitivity to local concerns. Or its actions may actually reduce the potential that it has to craft a regional order in line with both its interests and those of many countries in the region. I think that we need first to understand what the Asian century really means. And I think there's big conflict ahead in Asia. And so understanding that process, some of the reasons that I just talked about, much greater inequality than the data indicate. A big problem with the delivery of education and the stalling of growth and social conflict within Asia. So it's a great question, and I don't have the answers. But understanding that the Asian century is not just going to be a smoothly upward trending wonderful improvement, but there's great conflict on the way, I guess, is the first step. The big question in this next 10 years also is China's rise. Whether it will be peaceful or will be not so peaceful, and that is a question. I think it is important for US and Australia to play kind of a peacekeeping status quo role in the region. It's a delicate balance that two countries have to strike. That is, on the one hand, you do allow China's peaceful rise. And happily to accept that China is going to be a regional power. On the other hand, you also want to prevent obligerant, and hopefully not, a military China's rise that plays a disruptive role in the region. And that balance is not so easy to strike. But I hope with the lines between the United States and Australia and other countries that this would help to keep the peace in the region. So the US role, along with Australia, is to keep that peace. I don't think it's going to be the Asian century. I think it's going to be the global century. But I think that the growing prosperity of China and of India is not going to define any kind of Asian century, but rather a new global configuration that we will have to deal with. But the major problems, as I said earlier, will be the growing disparity between economic development on the one hand and resource availability on the other. So you're really dealing with a global resource and environmental crisis, and I think it will be the century of those problems and not of the Asians. The 21st century is certainly, I think, going to be an increasingly Asian century in the sense of the proportion of world GDP that is generated in Asia as compared to the other continents. And it can certainly be peaceful. It can be mutually beneficial to everybody. But it has to be managed and there has to be this understanding of the appropriate absorption of the rising powers into the global community. The proportion of voting rights in the IMF, membership in the Security Council, all of these things, you think that people will anticipate and they can adjust towards it. But when it comes to the crunch, who's going to give it up? There's that issue. So these frictions might accumulate. And that is what could give a darker cost to the Asian century than one might otherwise think. I mean, it's almost a too simple answer, but it's to better understand how we intersect with Asia and how Asia is intersecting with us, how we perceived in Asia, beyond how we perceive Asia. I think we need to better understand the basis on which we are understanding Asia. But of course it's incredibly important to understand how Asia is understanding us. I think that seems to be a fairly fundamental starting point for better approaching a time period in which Asia is even more important than it already has been, which is incredibly important to begin with. We have to say, how can we work with Asia, which has developed important economic models in recent time where we have rather failed, how can we work with Asia to deal with fundamental world issues, to do with poverty, hunger, conflict, and so on? We have to start rethinking Asia, not as the place where we sell cars and export Christianity and immerse ourselves in wonderful cultures and exciting people. We have to say, we have failed in the advanced west. We had the opportunity and we've failed to deal with the major world issues. We need to work with these people and look at Africa and the other key areas that are serious challenges to global balance and global survival. I think to fully engage with Asia, not just sort of piecemeal engagement but a big strategy and a big push, especially for Australia, is to build on our strong relations with Asia. We're a very big energy supplier to Northeast Asia to build on that sort of relationship we already have to fully engage at all levels, people movement, cultural links, and to bed them down. I think it's probably not so big a problem for Australia. Seeing the development of Asian studies there from our exchange today, I think in a lot of ways Australia is probably much more aware of this as an issue. But I think in America we really have to wake up and realize that we're not at the center anymore. There's a big shift that in Asian studies we're aware of this but I think that knowledge hasn't trickled down to the wider population. So for instance when there are budget cuts in my neighborhood in New Jersey, Chinese language is the first thing to go or if I tell people what I work on they're kind of bemused to think that that would be relevant at all. So there's this real ignorance about, I mean I think we see it in our economic decline and the fact that our debt is bought by China but we don't yet understand in America how central the role of China and East Asia is going to be for the future and how possibly peripheral our role may become. One of the obvious answers for that is that we should prepare ourselves in the realm of knowledge that we need to make a serious and an honest attempt to understand the countries of Asia. To not simply assume that Asian countries will or want to be replicas of ourselves but that they will want to stride the world stage on the basis of their own traditions, their own cultures, their own distinctive characteristics as societies and to understand that sort of a background there's no substitute really to understanding studying deeply the languages and the cultures of particular Asian societies and I think that's the challenge that lies in front of both Australia and the United States today. And in the US we see a growing trend among K through 12 teachers concerned that they don't have enough knowledge about Asia to transmit to their students in classrooms. Unfortunately the kinds of knowledge that they see most easily to be able to access are about literature, the arts, philosophy, ways that essentialize culture as different and not necessarily thinking more broadly about the linkages, the complicated politics, the complicated economics. So I would like to see a broader dissemination of opportunities for future teachers and teachers today to really engage with Asia on a real one-to-one personal level. I think the rise of Asia in general and this is not just China but the increased clout of Asian countries in the world and increased influence of Asia requires the United States and Australia to rethink education policy. Requires governments in both countries to ask whether or not our populations, our young people, future generations have the knowledge and skills that are required to interact with Asian cultures but in whatever domain be it socially, culturally, economically, politically and I fear that in Australia in the last decade we've gone backwards in our cultural literacy both in the ability of Australians to speak foreign languages, Asian languages but also in the general understanding and awareness of the histories and people and places that are on our doorstep. In some ways the angle that intrigues me the most, it's not the ones that we talk about most often which really to do with foreign policy and defence on one hand and economic and commercial things on the other. I guess what I'm most curious about is the implications of the transformation of Asia for our universities and that's something I think that both Columbia and ANU are well positioned to think about. We know that in some parts of Asia, certainly not all parts, but in some parts of Asia there are just formidable good universities emerging and in the end that's because governments are putting in lots of money and they're putting them into strong institutions. It's not happening everywhere in Asia, it is happening in some places. And universities like Columbia and ANU which have both made great investments over many years in generating knowledge about Asia are going to have to think carefully about how they relate and what their value add is in a world in which really great universities exist in Asia and are writing about the region themselves.