 An impossible problem. I think that that title was already criticized, but we're going to keep it for a little while We have three panelists today. They're all going to speak for 15 minutes each We also have one discussant after they are done. I'm going to introduce them individually our first Panelist is Mr. Dan Suriak Mr. Suriak has written extensively on international trade and finance innovation and industrial policy and economic development With particular focus on the digital transformation and the economic and technological roots of great power conflicts Thank you very much, and it's a great pleasure to be here. I lived in Ottawa for the longest time and this Montpellier or Montpellier as you say call it here is only four hours away and I don't know how come I never visited but I'm very very pleased to be here for this conference and Yeah, as I was mentioned, I had a long career with the government of Canada as a trade economist And you wonder what is a trade economist doing at a conference on international relations? and so I shall Do it start with a bow to to that discipline by paraphrasing Klaus of its and saying that war is seems through an economic lens is an extension of economic rivalry and That then tease up nicely the topic that I've been tasked with discussing which is The implications of us China economic rivalry for peace in the Middle East So just very very briefly China and the United States are an opposite size of the world and from an economic point of view They are neither natural enemies nor natural Partners and for most of their hit of the US history It was really a minor part of the picture for the United States Modern history starts with Deng Xiaoping's visit to the United States and to Washington in 1979 Which then sets up a China's opening up and China then launches into its era of industrialization when it opened up to the world the The the nascent industrial structure that China had was basically Became defunct. It was not operational and not effective for the integrated global System of training production. So it was industrializing to noble At the same time and for completely different reasons the United States Was entering the new era It was on its heels to some extent because of the challenge from Japan the red sun rising era and Me and it was doubling down on innovation as its strength. So this was the Beidou Act of 1980 passed by the Carter Administration and then fortuitously IBM released its personal computer in 1981 and 1982 there was computer-aided design CAD cam software was released for the per for the personal computer Putting powerful industrial design tools on every desk in America's universities with the impetus given to The universities to commercialize their their their knowledge development through the Beidou Act and In retrospect as we look back this launched the United States on to a magnificent run They disposed of the you disposed of the Japanese challenge like that Defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War Saw a magnificent technological rise that sent that they made the Nasdaq household name Rising to the unipolar moment you enrolled your former rivals The Soviet Union in China into the system that you had created which is the WTO led Rules-based order and you were there on top of the world Okay, in this period what was happening America's patenting was soaring And you were developing a knowledge-based economy and you were naturally placed to profit or to Capitalize in this economy because of the system of universities which you had across the country and this is broad Broadly spread prosperity for the United States. It did shift prosperity from the industrial Centers like Cleveland and and other places to the university towns. So there was an internal strike, but America rode that moment and China of course had 30 years of developing its industrial skills. So both economies Benefited a message from this essentially symbiotic Relationship and there was no conflict in the final year of his administration. George Bush delivers State of the Union address he mentions China only once in the same breath with India as a large emerging market That's going to be important for it to deal with with issues like climate change So then what happens? And then there are other issues which I think my fellow panelists will like to comment on But we then have the Obama pivot to Asia and that pivot to Asia takes two specific forms one is the launch of the trans-pacific partnership which was explicitly couched as a means as a contest between who is going to write the rules of the road in the Asia Pacific China or the United States the second component was the airsea battle doctrine, which is basically Formulated and you guys know much more better than this But it was formulated to counter the fact that China was developing a modern Navy at great speed So this now China and the United States are on it now on the course of from enemy to at least frenemy Okay, now what's happening in the economy in the late? 2000s there are several new technological developments which are going to launch a new kind of economy one of them was the development of neural nets by Jeffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in 2006 One of them was the development or the application of GPUs to neural nets by Stanley Engan his team at Stanford in 2009 And then the critical one was the release of the iPhone by Apple in 2007 the iPhone then lost the mobile age and the mobile age said enormous amounts of data flowing into the cloud neural nets drive off data and so the combination of these three Developments enabled a new kind of economy the data-driven economy and It also opened up a whole new kind of sphere of social media while Facebook had been around since 2004 many of the major Social media companies were formed in 2010 coming out of the great financial crisis and where Data is the new oil for the economy For so it's for society and politics. It's been called the new plutonium It's very destructive and very and can be very damaging. So just kind of hold that thought in mind So now we're moving into this new economy at the same time as the as the US is now trying to exploit its new technological developments and it is doing so with companies like Google and Facebook dominating the globe Operating at a global level. I mean at one point Facebook had more clients Than the populations of the United States China and the European Union put together. That's the scale of these companies as So as the United States is with is exploiting its first move advantage China is actually moving into the knowledge-based economy 30 years behind the United States But it is starting its patented activity. It's training legions of patent examiners it Establishes new specific intellectual property Courts and it starts litigating internally ferociously. It's learning the patent game And one factor that was driving this was the fact that one of the first things Obama did was to actually lodge a section 301 investigation of China There's a cup the two massive reports were released which showed that if China observed The same prop IP laws as the United States. It would mean a very significant benefit to the United States I've written on this and I've put figures on the order of 500 to billion to 900 billion dollars for the value of US IP. We're talking serious money Okay, so China is is is adapting and is now moving into the knowledge-based economy and doing so very very successfully But as I said at a 30 year gap, it's international Economic receipts even in 2021 are a fraction of what the US has about 6 billion the US has got about 128 billion to give you a sense of the gap But it has moved into the game and in 2021 China passed the United States as the largest buyer of technology. Okay, so people talk about China stealing You're actually buying the technology now in great amounts. That's what's happening in the KBE or the knowledge-based economy At the same time China is also moving into the data-driven economy It had been a perfecting its system of Sensorship and whatnot for for the internet behind the golden shield project the so-called great firewall and it was developing companies behind that firewall that would then become giants paralleling the Microsoft and the also the the the Googles and the Facebook's in China Alibaba and Tencent for example and because of again a curious coincidence that there was a Strife between in a room tree between the Uighurs and Han Chinese They shut down Facebook and Google in China to control the information flow and Very shortly thereafter. They basically booted Google out of China completely So they then developed their entire ecosystem of data-driven firms behind the great firewall And they were in direct competition now with the United States for to capture the value of this economy By 2018 the combination of China's technological sort of developments Had allowed Huawei to steal a march on the other companies working in 5G China was now the world leader in 5G technology That was the split-neck moment for the United States And that's when the United States went into overdrive in the technological war to slow down China and actually to to catch up in in 5G so that meant that China was now moving from Frenemy to now actually a significant technological rivalry There are a lot of other things that happened around that time under the Trump administration That make absolutely no sense to a trade economist certainly the trade war that was launched on China with tariffs Was damaging to the United States and did not damage China in particular It was just bad for the world and then there was the the Atmospherics with the you know China virus the China steals China cheats etc. Etc. Simply put the two countries into a rhetorical contest that spiraled down So that's what's happening with China in the US in the industrial sphere They're cooperative in the knowledge-based sphere China is joining the US in the data sphere China and the US arrivals. Okay, what does this mean for the Middle East? So we go to the Middle East and we talk about again the strife comes out of the basic economics of the situation in the 1970s as has already been mentioned There were two major oil price shocks the US was a net importer of oil and a moved into the Middle East to a secure It's supply. Okay oil put drove the United States into the Middle East China was not there at hearty at all through the the entire period of The last two centuries with the possible exception. I don't know too much about this During the Mao years of exporting ideology you guys know that better than I do Basically China was not in the Middle East the US went in big time and in competition with the Soviet Union to ensure that it could Control its supply of oil and not be held hostage as it was during the oil price shocks so now we fast forward to The current period the United States is no longer a net importer It is a net exporter of oil and gas the fracking revolution had meant that its reserves on both accounts are at all-time highs It is no longer dependent on Middle East oil in that same fashion China is now dependent on palm Middle East oil and of course It's also got Russia which is being blocked from the European markets with China is actually got lots of oil to deal with and the Americans Have got their own So oil has ceased to be a major issue for the United States in the Middle East and the logic says That the US will lose interest in the Middle East for that reason not entirely and not immediately But certainly it will be with in a phase of withdrawal Meanwhile the US containment of China Which was extraordinarily beneficial for China just to give you a figure to carry around in your mind China became a 75 million 75 trillion net worth economy Under containment from the United States its foreign policy elites might have hated it But it was the best thing possible China could not do anything stupid on the international stage Because of that containment, which is very very effective now China However wanted to break out from that and its method of breaking out was the Belt and Road Initiative and that took it to places where It could go and it could not go into into the United States It had trouble in Western Europe which were which was allied with the United States But it could get into Eastern Europe. It's certainly gone to the Middle East and gone to Africa So the Chinese breakout strategy Brought it to the Middle East in what fashion building infrastructure, which then used up its Excess capacity that it had developed to build its own cities and its own infrastructure in the 2000s and As to spend some of the money that they had accumulated in foreign exchange reserves and So China is moving into the Middle East in what fashion not to look with it's partly about oil But it's largely now about Industrializing the Middle East. What does the Middle East want as ambassador out? Otaibi said this morning. He says they're trying to diversify away from oil as much as they can They're looking to develop green energy sources Saudi Arabia. Okay is looking to build green energy They would probably love to export Hydrogen to Europe and probably electricity and I've got lots and lots of Sun power and who provides the solar panels China there's a natural partnership there which is on that score a very hopeful point for the Middle East as the Dementally suffered from the natural resource curse Which basically says if you've got a natural resource that people fight over that will lead to internal strife and divisiveness and External interference that's exactly what happened as that natural resource curse is lifted in the twilight of the oil age The Middle East may be left to its own devices to actually sort out the various political problems that we've heard about so much and to close up Then it's the the major fighting point of the modern economy data the Middle East doesn't have It's a small population economy only the Gulf States and Israel are actually in that game So no one's going to go fight in the Middle East over its data So I'm hopeful on both scores and I will wrap this up by Basically saying that in terms of the hegemon games, maybe the Middle East has seen its fill I don't think they will that there will be a pack Seneca per se But and if it does it will come with some unsavory elements, but basically the industrial economy is a cooperative one It's not one that's divisive. So I'll leave it there Thank You mr. Syriac If you have questions, please try to jot them down and hold on to them So at the conclusion of all of our presenters You'll have an opportunity to come down to the microphones and ask any questions that you have our next presenter is Dr. Richard Morris an associate professor in the Russian Maritime Studies Institute at the US Naval War Colleges Center for Naval Warfare studies his current research projects focus on the maritime dimension of Russia's Syria intervention and he also specializes in US-Soviet relationships during the Cold War Cold War First, thank you to young mo for inviting me and organizing a wonderful wonderful conference It's a tough act following Dan Syriac over there who but You did provide a good introduction with the Belt and Road Initiative Was what China has been doing in the Middle East specifically since 2013 but if you take a If you wind the clock back to 2004 Analysts at Booz Allen Hamilton working for the Defense Department did a study on global energy futures And they saw what China was doing even before they announced the Belt and Road initiative And they called it something called a string of pearls that They believe that China was establishing Ports and facilities primarily for economic purposes But also to make enrads that could then be used for naval bases Logistics support facilities and intelligence collection facilities as well so We've seen some elements of that develop in different places across the Indian Ocean and whatnot for China But looking forward after 2015 Russia as a result of its intervention and the Syrian Civil War Has pursued a similar strategy, and they've actually been somewhat more overt about Trying to set up what they call material logistics points or Logistics centers The only one they have right now is in Syria It's important to kind of contextualize this Syrian ties with Russia deep back decades and the wake of the Second World War The Soviet Union Russia's forebear Helped the Syrians establish their military after they broke away from being a French protectorate They've had relations with the Assad family hafez al-Assad the father of the current Autocrat of Bashar al-Assad They had close ties with him in the 1960s and 1970s and actually started their presence there Ties expanded especially after Egypt kicked the Soviet Union out of its bases and on the Red Sea and It was kind of a heyday in the 1980s of US Russian relation or US Soviet relations in this in this time period So 1991 changed everything with a dissolution of the Soviet Union Syria kind of went on the back burner and the Soviet Union which had Material logistics points or PMTOs Not just in Syria and having had them in Egypt, but they actually had them on the Red Sea and What was then Ethiopia? They also had them in Qamran Bay from 1979 to 2002 These support facilities they went by the wayside The Qamran Bay facility like I said closed in 2002 The Syrian facility stayed open But there was very little activity that was going on after the dissolution of the Soviet Union until Really the Syrian Civil War started after a group of teenagers wrote anti-regime graffiti on the wall of their school in Darra city and southern Syria and they were arrested and then unwisely the Police tortured them and then released them. So it got kind of widespread notice at the time and resulted in nationwide protests and The Assad regime clamped down In that period Russia Actually was kind of keeping everything at arms length Russia was very clear that it was going to Continue to honor contracts for weapons deliveries. It was the primary supplier of weapons to Syria and It wasn't going to get more involved than that so Fast forward another few years the Syrian conflict has gotten very bad by 2013 for the Assad regime The regime had lost most of control of most of its most of its territories to different groups The Syrian Democratic Forces Also the rise of ISIS which talked about in earlier panels And they come streaming across the desert in 2013 and 2014 to take large parts of Syria and Iraq so the Assad regime is kind of on the ropes and starts to use chemical weapons and the Obama administration is Draws a red line, which it then kind of ignores as the Syrians continue to use and expand their use of chemical weapons until an attack in 2013 and late 2013 in Damascus in the eastern suburbs of the city and which Anywhere from we don't know the exact numbers, but anywhere from 500 to several thousand People died in the attacks and the Assad regime used nerve agent So the Obama administration comes out and says it's going to punish Assad and is poised to strike and Incomes Vladimir Putin to various diplomatic channels with Secretary of State Kerry at the time to kind of save Assad in exchange for to avoid a US strike or allied strike because the French and the British Were kind of on board the British actually backed out but the Assad regime this sorry the Putin government Made it a deal with the US to kind of Avoid a US strike on Syria in exchange for Syria giving up its its chemical weapons That's 2013 Russia tends to honor this agreement and The chemical weapons were removed there have been additional chemical weapons attacks in Syria and we saw US retaliatory strikes for this But they were nowhere near the scale of what happened in 2013 and they weren't with sophisticated nerve agents but Russia doesn't intervene for two years after this it's 2015 before they intervene and they intervene in 2015 because The Assad regime was kind of again on the ropes. They gained back some some areas, but we're still lacking control of One of the most populous cities oldest continuously inhabited place Aleppo and and northern Syria and The story is that the Iranians actually approached the Russians to try to have the Syrians Asked for Russian assistance and and fighting this asking for intervention. So Russia comes in kind of as a white night and Agrees that they're going to conduct a campaign against the armed groups that are illegal in Russia such as ISIS or Really just any Syrian opposition group and that is what they do You can judge the the motivations in different ways Ostensibly Russia went into Syria to fight terrorists and to support the legitimate what they view as the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad Reality is probably very different It was a place for them to test weapons. It was a place for them to gain influence. It was also a way for Russia to Increase its foothold in the eastern Mediterranean within firing range of the Suez Canal and the northern entrance and exit and Kind of reestablish what had been missing since Soviet times. So The Russian Federation introduced a maritime doctrine in 2015. There was no mention of Syria There was no mention of material logistics points But as a result of what is viewed in Moscow is a successful intervention on behalf of the Assad regime the maritime doctrine was revised and expanded and just in 2282 in July and it is very explicit about Maintaining that presence in Syria and eastern Mediterranean and not just that but actually expanding it Trying to establish additional material logistics points and places like the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean Dahuk is no longer in Ethiopia. It's not Eritrea But there's there have been press reports about Sergei Lavrov the Russian Foreign Minister visiting Eritrea to try to set it up There was an agreement that was actually signed and ratified by the Russian Duma or Parliament with Sudan to establish a PMTO the Sudanese have actually not ratified it yet under a military government right now and The military has said they approve of the document, but it needs to be ratified by civilian legislature, which doesn't actually exist yet Sudanese problems internally but Russia does have its site on Strategic locations the Red Sea Horn of Africa Also all the way across into the Indian Ocean South Asia, etc It's aspirational at this moment, but it is indicative that The way that Russia views its intervention in Syria and its kind of role and trying to establish a multi-polar world system Vladimir Putin has been very explicit about trying to establish multiple multi polarity and Saying that hegemony the US dominated world order is not is not appropriate for the world and It's been kind of a champion of that, but alas with Russia's disastrous war in Ukraine the means and the ability for Russia to actually Expand these materialistic points is somewhat questionable and Looking at traffic flows of military cargoes from the Black Sea the Syrian Express Through the Mediterranean to the port of Tartus. You see that there was a peak really in 2016-2017 and it has been kind of on the decline since then with the Turks closing the Turkish Straits Last year as a relative Russia's attack on Ukraine there are no more no more visible military traffic Shifts and it's primarily gone to pardon me It's primarily gone to commercial carriers, which we saw that shift kind of began a few years ago When Russia started its intervention that used everything including timber carriers For Arctic timber carriers were used to transport military cargoes Again Russia has these aspirations the means are somewhat questionable But it does suggest that maybe there is a a Russian string of pearls out of the Syrian Express Thanks Thank You dr. Moss Our next and final presenter is Dr. Nicholas Roberts the historian of the modern Middle East and Islamic world He's an assistant professor of history at Norwich University and For the academic year of 2223 the inaugural W Nathaniel Howell postdoctoral fellow in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf studies at the University of Virginia So thank you to everyone for being here, especially all my students in the room I fully expect each of you to be down here ready to roast me as soon as I finish And happy now ruse to everyone in the room celebrating I'm going to begin as historians often do with an anecdote a few months ago. My landlord was at my house We're in a room where I keep all of my books He was looking through all of them and he said geez you must really like reading about the Middle East I Shrugged and said you could say it's something of a pastime Then he got very serious and he looked at me and he said, you know They've been fighting each other over there forever. You know, they're Sunni and Shia. It's all tribal over there He seemed puzzled when I responded Wow, how very European of them My landlord's comment was unsurprising. I've heard it a thousand times His comment reveals a distinctly American ontology a Structure of knowledge about the United States and the rest of the world and that comment no matter how seemingly benign is one small manifestation of Empire Throughout the United States throughout the 19th century the United States emerged as a new form of Empire on the world stage Many scholars have shown how intervening in the broader Middle East has become fundamental in Implicit and explicit ways to everyday American life Part of this includes a pernicious history of Countless academic forums just like this one Questioning whether peace will ever be possible in the Middle East and if so how that peace might be brought about With the United States as the analytical point of departure There are many reasons offered for why peace might be impossible They typically include the ostensible lack of a European style reformation age old religious feuds separate lack of separation of religion and politics sectarianism tribalism or inherent inclinations toward violence Each of those is historically illiterate and I'd be happy to bust all those myths in the discussion period But what the American reflex for debating peace in the Middle East usually fails to account for is that by all accounts? the US US government and military actions in the Middle East to include the actions of local rulers supported Financed and armed by the United States have been the most significant causes of death and destruction in that region's post World War two history In my paper, I argued or suggest really that the United States has manifest a particular form of power that allows it to attempt however successfully To act by means of absolving itself of its own history creating fortifying and sustaining that which it later tries to expunge Historian RF dearlich once said that to define as to name is to conquer I would take that a step further and suggest that one way American Empire has manifest is not just by defining But by defining a present by means of eliding entire histories beginning with human beings We can begin by going back in time then to Baghdad Iraq in 1979 when Saddam Hussein seized power His seizure of power would have neither surprised nor worried American or allied officials In fact, he had been an American asset already for decades Recall that as Saddam seized power Iran was undergoing its own revolution Itself the direct result of an American coup aimed at ridding Iran of its democracy Saddam immediately set about planning and invasion of Iran and American support for that war was neither tacit nor entirely covert In what is now known as the green light memo then Secretary of State Alexander Hague wrote in 1980 to US President Ronald Reagan That the year prior President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran The Iran-Iraq war came at an astonishing human cost There were millions of casualties, especially from Saddam's almost daily use of chemical and biological weapons The US was aware of the use of those weapons, but it was also aware of more in November 1983 the State Department admitted that the Iraqi government had purchased the infrastructure For their chemical weapons program primarily from Western firms including possibly a US foreign subsidiary The full scale of American support for Saddam's war in Iran came to light in the 1990s Including several court cases which are now mostly declassified and public in 1994 investigation by the US Senate revealed dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq Including anthrax and insecticides with the crop spraying helicopters for dispensing those insecticides in December 1988 for one example Dow Chemical sold one and a half million dollars worth of pesticides to Iraq a US Export-Import Bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find quote no reason to stop the sale At the center of American policy was Donald Rumsfeld After several meetings with the Iraqis the United States began supplying Iraq with more weapons more technologies and more money But also publicly condemned Iraq and Saddam for the use of chemical weapons That was a public statement that surprised the Iraqis The Iraqis were so caught off guard by the public condemnation because the weapons They were using had come from the Americans and their Western allies To be sure Saddam's blunders in the war devastated his country a situation He made far worse when he invaded Kuwait in 1990 in that war the American military trounced Saddam's forces International sanctions squeezed the life out of Iraq no fly zones monitored the country and thousands of international weapons inspectors Confirmed that though Saddam wanted his neighbors to believe he was still powerful There were no more weapons programs and barely even a military at all The Iraqi people could live nothing but the most meager standard of life in September 1995 The United Nations World Food Program Announced that more than four million Iraqi civilians a fifth of Iraq's population Was dying of malnutrition because of the sanctions That number included two and a half million children and six hundred thousand pregnant or nursing mothers The report warned in a hauntingly prescient statement quote 70% of the population has little or no access to food the social fabric of the nation is disintegrating People have exhausted their ability to cope Beginning almost immediately after 9-11 The bush administration began planning a war with Iraq the US military's most senior commanders were caught off-guard Some voiced their opposition to the detriment of their careers According to the eminent journalist Mark Perry in November 2001 after a White House meeting Discussing the war in Afghanistan President Bush pulled aside Donald Rumsfeld once again at the helm of American policy and ordered him to begin preparing war plans For an invasion of Iraq and quote to get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein and quote As Perry described Rumsfeld sent orders to general Franks at his sent com headquarters Where air force then major general Victor Renuart received them Their responses to those orders are on the slide in front of you Nevertheless and despite these objections the war played on Upwards of half a million Iraqi civilians died from direct US military actions in Iraq The war took an already devastated Iraq and buried it The paradox of the war was not just a scholarly abstraction And I will add here that it's something the united states army concluded in its official two volume several thousand page long self-study of the war in Iraq Operation Iraqi freedom was begun by means of shock and awe One American official in Baghdad described the strategy as such quote The only way we can win is to go unconventional terrorism versus terrorism As We've got to scare the Iraqis into submission. He said Most of Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed and as civilian deaths mounted in november 2003 Donald Rumsfeld secretary of defense was asked if he had an idea how many civilians had died He responded. We don't do body counts on other people Rumsfeld's statement reveals a broader historical phenomenon of the united states in the middle east In which it has sought to create a Unidirectional narrative that elides the voices the lives and the histories of the subjects of its empire His statement reveals the american imperial reflex of absolving itself of its own history divorced from the functions of the present It illuminates how the united states has the power to act as if the rest of the world Its peoples and their histories are somehow separate from itself It is an imperial world in which the united states can act and can impose but cannot be held responsible I'll end here then on a part of this interconnected history that i'm certain will be unknown to most of those in the room We'll turn to afghanistan and the idea of militant jihad usama bin laden graduated college in 1979 and went directly to afghanistan He was part of a wide movement of arabs going there to fight alongside the afghanis and expelling the soviets who had invaded that same year Only two days after the invasion national security advisors of big nev brazinski wrote a memo to president carter He noted that muslim countries would quote be concerned with the invasion Noting also that it was something quote. We might be in a position to exploit He continued to add we should concert with islamic countries both in a propaganda campaign And in a covert action campaign to help the rebels The covert action campaign operation cyclone is now well known But the propaganda campaign is only recently being unearthed By 1987 the the united states was annually sending through pakistan 630 million dollars to the mujahedin Arabs and afghans fighting the soviets This money was used to train pay and arm Nearly 20 000 mujahedin fighters every year But as brazinski called for the u.s. Supplied them with more than guns and money beginning in 1986 the u.s. Government teamed with the university of nebraska at oma to create the quote education program for afghanistan This program created and printed millions of textbooks that were disseminated throughout afghanistan and pakistan From a headquarters they built in pashawar These textbooks were for ages k through 12 They magnified an understanding of jihad as a violent mandated individual and collective duty For fighting non muslims namely the soviets With titles such as the alphabet of jihad literacy These textbooks were part of an american strategy of indoctrinating young muslims In the region to fight at any cost against the soviets In a first grade language arts textbook for example the entry for the equivalent letter d Taught del is for dean or religion Our religion is islam the russians are the enemies of islam It also taught zeal is for dome or oppression Oppression is forbidden the russians are oppressors we perform jihad against the oppressors In another textbook the entry for the equivalent letter k taught cobble is the capital of our dear country No one can invade our country Only muslim afghans can rule over our country A fourth grade mathematics textbook taught the following problem quote The speed of a kalashnikov bullet travels at 800 meters per second If a russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from the mujahed and the mujahed aims at the russians head Calculate how many seconds it will take to strike the russian in the forehead As recently as 2013 leading scholars purchased copies of these textbooks throughout afghanistan and pakistan In 2011 distinguished political scientist professor dana bird Purchased a copy of a first grade pashto language textbook which taught that t was for topak Or gun quote my uncle has a gun. He does jihad with the gun M the textbook taught was for mujahed or a person who does jihad Afghan muslims are mujahedin it teaches i do jihad together with them Doing jihad against infidels is our duty As professor dana bird noted the only differences In the 2011 copies of the textbooks that she purchased and the originals from the 1980s Were that the images on the cover showed allegiance to the taliban and references to the soviets had been replaced with references to the americans In fact when the taliban were created and came to power in 1996 They ruled that these textbooks would be used as their official curriculum So forums asking whether peace is possible in the middle east can aptly use things like the atrocities of the taliban The atrocities of bashar al-assar in the syrian civil war Saddam's gassing of his own people as evidence for the importance of these forums Yet they almost never reconciled the extent to which the united states Has been tied up with creating and sustaining the very things that later tries to expunge That as history shows us is almost always the problem of any empire Events at countless universities and think tanks just like this one have a pernicious history behind them They reflect a very long history of how the idea of the middle east in the american imagination has been crafted to attain an ontological Disposition divorced from america's own history A disposition rooted in violence and fabricated narratives that largely elides american violence against others As rumsfeld's statement and the recent statement of president joe biden reflect Violence so this historical narrative goes and so donald rumsfeld and joe biden Might readily agree only counts as violence when it's their violence not american violence rumsfeld's statement that the united states does not count the deaths of others reflects the core of empire definition by elision The ability of the united states to debate whether peace is possible in the middle east on terms that do not account for its own role Since 2001 in the deaths of more than one million civilians and the displacement of millions more Reflects a particular kind of american empire The power to define whose life matters to radically alter the lives of others and to disrupt the entire historical arcs of human communities By means of absolving itself of its own history. Thank you Thank you. Dr. Roberts So our discussant up next to potentially synthesize some of the information or stimulate further conversation is Dr. Moktari He served as a professor of political science at the national defense university's Near east south asia center for strategic studies in washington dc and at norwich university For three from nearly three decades his fields of expertise and interests include Comparative government and politics international relations and diplomacy political economy and political philosophy Well, thank you very much. It is back. It's nice to be back on campus I was on this campus teaching for about 20 years. My office was in ainsworth Next building here for 20 years Well, let me start with three announcements Very brief Today is the first day of spring And uh at exactly five 23 And 28 seconds spring starts That also is the moment that you that the iranian new year begins So happy new year to you The second announcement is that it is an iranian tradition For a speaker to apologize To his audience for addressing a group More knowledgeable than he So on that note, I apologize to you and finally I have been asked to discuss three papers in 10 minutes Each one of those papers has taken at least several weeks to prepare To devote three minutes to each is neither just Nor proper. So I apologize to you guys for for that Now to discuss any issue of international relations There are really two ways to do it One is the time slice Method you take a slice of time a period and you study it The second version of studying international relations or second method Is a chain link a manner of studying Which means you look at what you're interested and you try to see what has led to Or influenced that event In my personal view the second one Is more likely to give you an accurate conclusion And the reason for it is very simple Humans Have a tendency to use their historical experiences To interpret things We create a lens through which we see things we interpret things and historical events affect that A country that has been mistreated by a neighbor Even 10 years or a hundred years later would have reservations dealing with that neighbor Uh, therefore that chain link manner of speaking Is is really uh and more Gives you a better understanding of what it is you're trying to study Now ignoring historical experiences Really could be very costly And of course when I say that I also mean Acknowledging what each nation has done in the past Sanitizing the history Uh really creates misunderstandings and mistrust Therefore it is to advantage of all concerned To to really study history and present history and acknowledge it as it really is Now turning to the individual papers again, I have to be very brief And deal with generalities Uh the first paper China's economic rivalry Professor of three reacts Is a timely analysis And it is well done And it is strong on elegant theory My personal concern is that implementation Is seldom as elegant as as theory Things get sort of messy when you implement policies Theories etc For instance, uh The economic theory that war is a continuation of economic rivalry Does not really explain Economic policies with the aim An intention of controlling and other countries Politics or political decisions The chinese Belt and road initiative which has been mentioned Illas face that One wonders if the chinese initiative really is a political policy for political reasons Or it is for Something other than economics So that that is a concern I have About economic theory I also Everybody is talking about china as concerned about china But I also think that china Might have its own Prestroica moment before very long You remember how the soviet union from the point When I was a student The soviet union was increasing its its GDP and so on at the rate of Six percent united three percent and people were projecting that oh, this is off You know before long they are going to surpass us well that Didn't happen of obviously When I was in washington, I was talking to A An old hand at old china hand who had spent years in china and studied china spoke chinese Several dialects of chinese And I told him what do you think it just returned and what do you think he said well china today resembles an elephant riding a bicycle Downward and juggling things and as it picks up speed it has to juggle more things it's handed more things to juggle So that is that is the image of china that he had and I think it is actually not far from Being true so We should take things with a grain of salt when we When we look at china And and project things a year ahead the second paper by Professor moise Again, I commend him For for the systematic study of of russian naval supply capabilities To syria and and also the problems of logistics I would draw attention however to the general mood Of russia and russians In 1976 I was invited to go to to the soviet union Remember dude, that was the height of the soviet union bryzhanov was was was the fellow In charge I went there and As a journalist I was there and I saw the infrastructure of the country outside of Moscow Was really in bad shape They have had a bumper crop that year and they didn't have storage for them. So Dump trucks would come and dump the grain On the highway and by the way when I say highway is two lane highway not not four lane on six lane on that sort of thing And and therefore if you wanted to go from one place to another place you had to go zigzag On the highway to avoid these these Piles of of grain There are other problems and I would talk to them. I was about For for such a great country. I mean these problems are you know, and the response was but we are a superpower That image of being a superpower somehow compensated for everything else that was wrong now imagine The disintegration of soviet union imagine what that has done to their psychology They were very proud of being a superpower all of a sudden that has melted away and there is a psychological problem That I don't think we appreciate Now um Mr. President Putin Is reacting to That that great loss of prestige that great loss of all all the things that things that made them proud of themselves Without that he's looking for opportunities to reassert to regain that that prestige Now he has been successful in a number of Uh, measures he has taken But he has uh blundered into the most recent attempt of show and show of force in in ukraine But nevertheless, uh, we should pay attention to that psychological problem that they are dealing with The russian foray into into syria and the syrian conflict was a response to an opportunity And the opportunity was on the one hand the uh, arab spring And on the other hand the assumption that uh, the Assad regime would fall by just a Little push it would fall apart. That was a wrong assumption. And uh, that gave the uh, the uh, The russians to in fact, um Get involved. There was an opening for them And To assert the prestige And and the power It is it is really very hard for them to to come to grips with with Not being a superpower Anymore now the paper clearly points out that the russian naval lift Capability is limited Uh And it really cannot do very much beyond the russian territory Um, but russia's weakness again, I emphasize that very weakness of russia Uh, is the reason that they are looking for opportunity any opportunity they can seize to uh To deal with that psychological hurt that they feel The third paper, uh by professor roberts Uh On question of peace in the middle east I must say it's a thoughtful and thought provoking analysis It brings to mind the very classic Contrasting views of colonizers and uh, and uh And colonies Now the very term that we use very often without really thinking you've added middle east That illustrates this point a middle middle east Compared to what? uh You know after all we we live On on the earth is is is around If there is an east there must be a west there must be a center. Where is the center? You know think about that our center is london And that implies something that that just should not Be dismissed easily The imagining of of the middle eastern as as a backward violent unruly Group of people Who threaten the united states interests? And they have to frankly they have to be whipped into shape Uh and forced into stability Is is one of those misperceptions? That has that colonial tint to it That of course ignores the reality that it was the west That cut and pasted the map of the middle east And chopped up its historical socio political communities And of course now We have to deal with that I give you an example Much of the crises in the middle east in the past 40 years or so Could be traced to the iranian revolution Very few people have paid attention To a crucial decision made at doha This is in uh The opic conference in doha in 1976 At which the Saudis were persuaded through the efforts of uh two gentlemen Mr. Rumsfeld Donald Rumsfeld and William Simon of the united states to pump up More oil than There was a need for it To reduce the price of oil and that resulted in Basically forcing the iranian government into bankruptcy Now the intention was to clip the wings of the Shah of iran because he was being too powerful The result was a revolution that didn't help the united states didn't help the oil prices didn't help anyone I was attending a track two conference some years ago in jordan This was about two two decades ago um One of the people who was with me Actually was my boss Was ambassador roger harrison ambassador harrison in fact had been ambassador to To jordan for a number of years Now during one of the sessions of of this track two conference There was a country the representative of a country who talked about history and so on during the break we came out an uh Ambassador harrison In jest, you know took me to the south and he said I quote here the nation the nations who Insist on carrying the heavy burden of history on their backs paralyze themselves One of the secrets of your success is our short memory We forget and move on Now he said this in jest But it so happens that almost in every one of these statements. There's a grainer truth And the grainer truth here is in fact that some countries rely and depend and attach themselves to their history so much That changing becomes almost impossible because they lose their identity if they do that but We should take into account that some of these nations seem obsessed with their histories because That is all they have left Now such attachments may be a source of pride aspiration an identity but it also colors that vision That lens that filter through which they interpret things and therefore Knowing their history and their background and what we have done In dealing with them really is important to Prevent misunderstandings mistrust and misperceptions Thank you 10 minutes Thank you. Dr. Maktari Now we have a few minutes for questions from the audience If you have a question you'd like to ask to any of the presenters, please come down to one of the mics in the front First come first served Okay So what do you guys think about turkey's main involvement in like syria and other areas and more specifically During the period when trump removed forces from Rojava in syria Is the turkish intervened after the syrians Sorry after the russians intervened in syria and they still control a large part of the north Because of their Essentially because of their turkish problem that they have with the various groups and being concerned At least that's the reason they put forward that the attacks that originate from kurdish groups so They haven't left though and there's Questions, I know a sod was there was talk of a sod meeting with urdogan But a sod apparently refused as long as there were turkish troops in syrian territory so impasse for the foreseeable future until some mean changes In terms of controlling the turkish straits, I think that the turks are being an honest Custodian of the montreux convention of 1936 Which is what regulates it they made the correct call a state of war does exist within the black sea Regardless of what the russians are calling it the special military operation It's another name for a war So they rightly closed down the the turkish straits But not just to russian and ukrainian military traffic, but to all military traffic So it's to try to I don't know put a Tamped the the level of violence and try to prevent it for expanding so Good on the turks and in that one. Would it restrict romanian? Like romanian commercial trafficking there due to the closing The romanians because they're a riparian state They Their navy is not particularly large, so they really just focus on the black sea They don't have the interests outside of that. Okay, so and say with bulgaria The russians are the the the dominant force if you want to call it the naval force in the in the black sea Although after their cruiser was sunk in april of last year They have basically been sidelined for the most part They're conducting precision strike against targets in ukraine using something called the caliber cruise missile But other than that, um, the turks actually have the the next largest naval force But it's divided between the black sea and then the agn Okay, thank you Over to my left Hello, my name is maddie. I'm sophomore at dartmouth college my questions mostly for dr. Roberts And so in your presentation, which was really fantastic and enlightening You talked a lot about the how the u.s. Has a very selective view of its past Dr. Maktar you also mentioned this and saying that the u.s. Has a short-term memory, which is true And so something I came across in my own research is in past years Several middle eastern leaders have referred to the u.s. Is own violent history when trying to absolve themselves of their own crimes And so i'm interested to know in your research and your opinion dr. Roberts What you would say about how our recognition or our lack thereof of our own violent history in the united states From native american removal to slavery and the legacy of that how that plays into current international affairs And just a little anecdote at dartmouth. We had a speaker a few weeks ago That came and said that essentially talking about slavery or Teaching children about the 1619 project how that was kind of making us disunified in international affairs So i'm curious to know how you would respond to that and what your take on how our domestic history plays into our international presence Sorry, that's a long winter. Thank you. Thank you mattie for the great question and thank you to both dartmouth students for being here I thank you for asking that because it allows me the space to make a point that I want to make and I'm going to make that point by coming at you guys way out from left field right now Which is I love Notre Dame football I Criticize the hell out of their coaching staff and all of their players I don't criticize oklahoma football michigan football texas football because I don't love oklahoma or texas or michigan football I love Notre Dame football So i'm cognizant of the fact that we are at a military school There are active duty military officers in the room and I just criticized the u.s. military on the one hand That's what makes us american on the other hand it raises a bigger point I think about humans and and what we do with knowledge which is we criticize that which we love It's the only way to make something better So that's kind of a long way a long winded way of saying I think it's tremendously unfortunate How politicized scholarship Is in the country right now, you know like Slavery is terrible. This country was you know the last of the of the Western you know democratic countries to abolish slavery and so on and so forth It's mind-boggling to think how could that ever become Something controversial to talk about in a scholarly setting, you know that this country was a slave holding country um I do think though that the you know the thing about history is you really can't control it The sources are out there and people think for themselves. Um, I mean this is entirely my opinion But if I were to advise any of the politicians running on these things I would say, you know You're you're never going to beat knowledge And so yeah, I think and the only way anything is ever improved is by talking about it and debating it So I think the more discussions we have whether we agree with them or not the better As another historian history is full of contradictions The same the same people who wrote about freedom and liberty and and are defining documents in the united states Close to half of them were safe holders. How do you reconcile this? It's the contradictions that make history interesting But it's also an understanding of that that allows you as nick was saying to Kind of figure out ways forward So as as professor muster said, you know one of the unfortunate things too is and I wanted to begin Actually my remarks. I didn't because of time With an apology to the students in the room and that every single one of you without exception has come of age in a time of this unprecedented polarity and superficial thinking where you are Inundated with either x or y And almost nothing in history is either x or y I have a student who was a combat medic in both Iraq and Afghanistan. He saved the lives of countless Iraqis and and afghanis. He was in syria as well That's true. It's also true that that the united states military did things that led to the deaths of civilians So nothing is ever x or y Good afternoon. Thank you for your wonderful presentation by the way This question is for all the presenters For professor moss, uh, I found your work to be especially interesting given the Naval focus which I have a personal interest in regarding the Russian string of pearls as it were and its relation to utilizing syria as a means to reclaim lost logistical avenues economic infranchisement and of course a call back to Perhaps a grandiose image of what Russia may have been How now is the conflict in Ukraine affecting this Russian string of pearls? and will this concept perhaps be diminished by the fact of Russia's own internal destabilization Economically socially my review frame it as well as in syria For their benefactor as as they're benefacti actually That is a shift because of that perceived success In I think that perceived success in syria also led them to have overconfidence in ukraine You see these uh, these successes often lead to bad thinking down the line because you've learned the wrong list so the Russian ability to actually Have more than a string of pearl Artists but to actually expand it is it's highly questionable, especially with the turkish straights clothes But again, they came out there with their Maritime Vladimir Putin has come out and said that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century That's very loaded statement And it's a perspective and it's it's again about prestige So they might desire to kind of regain that glory the practical limitations on it and then just the resources that they have Are highly highly questionable one of the One of the military bloggers I follow a Russian guy named Alexander Shishkin The defense budget is not paid to cover it's not just going to like bounce back And The money doesn't have to come from somewhere and ships are very expensive to build Russia's going to have to kind of reorient its priorities Thank you Hi, my name is uh, brian connelly. I'm a student in the strategic studies and analysis program here um What got me into this program um was My 18 year old self asked me why i'm standing in marja afghanistan as a marine fighting The very first battle there in a city that we built Back in the 60s and i've been confused as to the Spiral of events. Um, what strategic studies even is You you mentioned soviet invasion and i'm wondering um Decades predating that Afghanistan had a very bright future ahead of it We went there, um As i'm sure you know to build a dam to start their agro economy build a few cities for them What we thought was a benevolent civil Augmentation for them um that very quickly spiraled it after coup after coup into insurgency into the taliban soviet invasion etc How do we think of the world as a as mill young elite like young leaders when It seems sometimes two truths are true at once where Often people think of us as trying to establish an empire and revolting violently when we think that we're helping and then we end up fighting there and dying again We seem to Ripple over and over and it's been confusing myself and my marines for years. Is there any kind of quick answer to that? Um, thank you for the question. Um, my answer would be To ask you to turn your question into a statement and hear what you think which we could do afterwards, but One thing i i'll say is uh, you know, I just said you can't control knowledge I mean one of the things i think we we have seen come about from the 20 years of war Is a tremendous amount of whatever you want to call it trauma pressure second guessing of our own service members you know Being told that you're going to liberate a country and bring freedom to a country and then saying no, no, no, it's shock and awe uh Raises fundamental questions and and our service members think for themselves and they've written about it since then and created movies and You know that paradox of mission Um was very apparent. I'd say to the people who were there um And they began to questions, uh, profess professor mokhtari talked about the borders One of my very best friends, uh, was uh was in iraq And he was accompanying a patrol that was out and of course they saw it was a You know no go zone. No one was supposed to be there And they saw a shepherd a man an old man with his sheep They stopped him. They had a translator. They said hey, don't you know no one we have to arrest you No one is supposed to be here right now You're too close to the border. It was with the border with iran The shepherd responded through the translator. Why did you guys put the border between me and my sheep? So these sorts of you know, what the heck am I doing here? Um We're evident to the service members. That's why I said in my presentation. This is not a scholarly abstract I'm not making this stuff up But I'd love to talk with you more after Sorry for my non-answer One more succinct question Uh, my question is primarily for dr. Roberts, but if anyone would like to also add to it Um, you mentioned the importance of recognizing the role that america has played Acknowledging both the good and the evil um in middle eastern affairs and as it was mentioned before in panels Um, there is a need for accountability because the united states cannot erase what it did its role in the middle east um, but everything is very theoretical and How do we give practical advice to those making those decisions? In how to actually turn this accountability into actions and not merely saying yes, we are responsible Yeah, the short answer is just read books Uh professor michael thunberg and I were just in dc. We take students to dc every year Uh where he does I I just go along to help and uh all the government people we were talking to They said hey, you know, no, we don't have time to read long things. You guys got to learn how to you know Take your stuff and put it into one paragraph Well, hey, i'm the taxpayer. I want you to read long things You know because when you don't we do things like invady rock So read books or afghanistan so read books That's my answer Thank you for the questions. That concludes this session. Can we get another round of applause for our presenters?