 Good morning, ladies and gentlemen. It's my pleasure to introduce panel one, which is entitled on strategy. For many of you, especially those of you who are our students, this will harken back, of course, to Carl von Klauswitz on war. I say that with great trepidation after Sir Lawrence's talk here. With even greater trepidation, I would like to say that in his book on war, that wise pression, I was going to edit that out, but I'll stick with that wise pression. Endeavor to write a book that would provide a framework to approach the study of war. And so our panel on strategy will attempt to provide a basis for a discussion of strategy at today's forum. To that end, we have three distinguished scholars and dedicated teachers who've already greatly contributed to the study of strategy through their published works and their classroom teaching. Since you have biographies on all of our speakers, I'm going to keep my introductions to each of them rather short. Our first speaker is Dr. Hal Brands. Dr. Brands serves on the faculty at Duke University Stanford School of Public Policy. He is a historian with very broad research interests, including US foreign policy and grand strategy, the Cold War, Latin American diplomacy and security, and other strategic and military issues. Prior to coming to Duke, Dr. Brands worked at the Institute for Defense Analysis outside of Washington, DC. And he served as a member of the Rand Corporation's grand strategy advisory board. At Duke, he's an affiliate of the Duke program and grand strategy. And he serves as an executive member on the board for the Triangle Institute of Security Studies. He's published three books, the most recent being What Good is Grand Strategy, Power and Purpose and American Statecraft from Harry S. Truman to George W. Bush, which it makes an interesting and important contribution to the study of American grand strategy from the middle of the 20th century onward. Dr. Brands? Well, thank you for that introduction. And thanks to the Naval War College for having me up here and putting on this terrific forum. As Professor Pavkos mentioned, I'm a historian by training and a public policy scholar by profession. And so my work really focuses on the connections between the past, the present, and the future of American grand strategy. And in my time today, I'm going to look primarily at the present and the future. At the question of whether the United States has a grand strategy today, and if so, what its characteristics and prospects are. And as we're all aware, these are issues that have received quite a great deal of attention recently, particularly after the president's speech at West Point about three weeks ago. There was a great deal of hand-wringing over the notion that America lacks grand strategy, that we are rudderless in foreign affairs. I'm going to make a somewhat different argument today. I think the United States does have a grand strategy. In the sense that there are overarching strategic principles guiding US policy, I also think that those principles are at least plausible and defensible given the context and the constraints that we face. So that's the good news. The bad news is that this grand strategy also entails a number of challenges and dilemmas that really go to the heart of the grand strategic endeavor. And some of which could be fairly serious going forward. So before getting into any discussion of what US grand strategy is today, it's probably useful to address what grand strategy is in general. And building on what Professor Friedman mentioned a few minutes ago, to my mind, a grand strategy is really an integrated set of principles and priorities that give structure to a country's statecraft. It consists of a series of considered interlocking judgments about the nature of the global environment, a country's highest goals and interests within that environment, the primary threats to those goals and interests, and then the ways the finite resources can be used to deal with competing challenges and opportunities. And if you have a grand strategy, these judgments don't just exist in a vacuum, they're actually driving day-to-day policies on how you deploy military resources and allocate foreign aid, how much time and energy you are willing to spend on a given problem, and so on. And so at its best, a grand strategy is really the connective tissue that binds a country's highest objectives to its everyday dealings with the world. It's the theory or the conceptual logic that helps nations navigate a complex and dangerous international environment. It's not, however, a roadmap. It's not something with all of the twists and turns plotted out in advance. The world is just much too complicated for that. There's too much friction. And so a grand strategy is really just a set of generally coherent ideas about what we want to achieve in the world and then how we should seek to do so. And those ideas need to be firm enough to keep our policy anchored amid the geopolitical storms, but they also need to be flexible enough to allow adaptation and even improvisation in their implementation. So that's how I think of grand strategy. So then what is U.S. grand strategy today? Well, I'd say that over the past several years, this particular administration has pursued a grand strategy that consists of three big ideas, each of which is framed by a key geopolitical context in which we are today operating. And the first of these contexts is the post-Cold War context. By any standard, the post-Cold War order has been extremely favorable to the United States. It's an order that's been very stable and peaceful when it comes to great power relations, at least by any meaningful historical comparison. It's an order in which the democracies, particularly the United States, have enjoyed a clear preponderance of power. It's an order that's been very favorable to the advance of free markets and democracy. It's basically an order in which the United States can live very comfortably and very advantageously. And so the first principle of the grand strategy has been to preserve that order by sustaining the American leadership and primacy on which it rests. This is not a goal that's original to this administration. It certainly dates back to the 1990s, but it's one that this administration has picked up and it's one that virtually every administration strategy document has stated explicitly. And in practical terms, it's most evident in policies that are so longstanding and ingrained at this point that we often forget how significant they really are. Maintaining the world's strongest military is the backbone of the international order, reaffirming our alliance commitments and forward force deployments as a source of stability, opposing nuclear proliferation and other things that could disrupt the existing order, deepening the international economy through the promotion of free trade and so on. All of these policies reflect a basic commitment to preserving and extending a favorable international order, and that's the first and oldest principle of our current grand strategy. The second principle is newer, and it flows from a different context, the post-Iraq context. And by that, I simply mean the perception, an accurate perception in my view, that the United States found itself in a position of overstretch due to its post-911 wars, that the conflict in Iraq in particular had weakened U.S. power rather than strengthening it, and that after Iraq, U.S. military spending was bound to decline. And so this context shapes the second key principle of the Obama-Gran strategy, which is that yes, we need to sustain American leadership, but we need smarter, cheaper, and more prudent ways of exerting that leadership, particularly when force is involved. We need to avoid prolonged stability operations. We need to find more discrete ways of applying force. We need to get others to bear more of the load when force is used. And as we've all known and heard, the administration has boiled these ideas into a pithy bumper sticker. Don't do stupid stuff, right? Don't do something that will become another Iraq. And the policy applications of this idea are pretty easy to see. Think about the reliance of drone strikes as a primary and comparatively low-cost tool of counterterrorism. Think about leading from behind and the very light footprint in Libya. Think about the deep reluctance to get involved militarily in Syria. Think about the 2012 defense strategic guidance, the whole message of which was, we're not going to do another Iraq any time in the near future. All of these things have flowed from this second principle. So yes to leadership, but yes to limited liability leadership as well. And then all of these policies that I just mentioned also pertain to the third principle, the grand strategy. And that principle is framed against a third geopolitical context, which is the dawning of the Asian century. And this of course refers to the belief that the Asia Pacific region is going to be the cockpit of 21st century geopolitics and economic dynamism. And that the rise of China in particular presents the greatest long-term challenge for U.S. strategy. And so the corresponding principle is that we need to reorient our geopolitical focus to keep pace with these shifts. Most particularly, as this administration has viewed it, it means that we need to extract ourselves from such deep military entanglements in the Middle East, the region that has consumed American military energies over the past decade, and refocus on where the long game is. And this is especially true because our resources will be more stretched going forward. And so prioritization becomes more important. So this is obviously the rationale for the much touted and now much derided Asia pivot. It's the logic behind policies like the opening to Myanmar, plans to station Marines in Darwin, and so on. It's also a strong reason why there's simply been no desire in this White House to prolong American involvement in Iraq or Afghanistan significantly, or to get immersed in another Middle Eastern war in Syria. If you think that the Asia Pacific is the future, then bogging yourself down in the Middle East means getting stuck in the past. So that's the third essential line of US strategy today. Now, when I say that these three principles are a grand strategy, I'm not saying that they explain everything that the administration has done. And I'm not saying that these ideas are flawlessly correct and cohesive. What I am saying is that these principles have generally anchored the administration's thinking about big picture issues, that they are primary themes and key strategy documents, that they relate to another in fairly coherent ways, and that we can see their influence across a broad range of actual policies. In my mind, that's a grand strategy, or at least it indicates that there are grand strategic concepts guiding American actions. So then the question becomes, is this a good grand strategy? And at the 30,000 foot level, I think this set of principles makes fairly good sense. It's true that the post-Cold order has been very good to us and that we should want to maintain and extend that order as long as possible. It's correct to judge that the rise of China as a potential peer challenger is the most significant strategic problem that we face over the long term, and that if we're playing the long game, which is what grand strategy is all about, then our geographical priorities have to reflect that. And I would say that this grand strategy is also generally correct in judging that there was a degree of overstretch around 2008, 2009, that avoiding big mistakes is a worthwhile objective, and that you have to make the costs of American engagement bearable if you want to sustain that engagement over the long term. And indeed, given the resource limitations that we currently face, this emphasis on prudence seems fairly compelling. So that's the upside. We do have guiding grand strategic principles, and I think they are at least reasonable given the existing circumstances and constraints. The downside is that a grand strategy can simultaneously be reasonable and problematic, and that's certainly the case here, because this grand strategy has a number of dilemmas and challenges embedded within it. And some of these dilemmas reflect the way that the strategy has been implemented. Some of them are just inherent to the strategy itself, and some have to do with factors that policy makers can't fully control. And I won't discuss all of these issues for reasons of time, but I will just briefly point out a handful that could be significant going forward. And I should say that there's not necessarily an easy answer to any of these dilemmas because that's the nature of a dilemma, but they're certainly worth thinking about and debates over our grand strategy. So the first problem, which I think was apparent from the West Point speech, was that this strategy, it lacks rhetorical oomph. Preserving the status quo and avoiding big mistakes are good objectives, but there's nothing particularly stirring or sexy about them, right? Don't do stupid stuff is not an inspiring rallying cry. And that may seem like a meaningless quibble, but it isn't, right? Grand strategies rest on domestic support, and domestic support is easier to get when we can describe our strategy in terms that are intuitively appealing to people who don't spend a lot of time thinking about foreign affairs. And so maybe the answer is just better rhetoric, but I don't think that's the case. I think that the problem is actually inherent to the strategy. All things equal strategies that can be justified in terms of achieving some inspiring goal or defeating some massive overriding danger tend to package better than those that don't. This was something that the Clinton administration discovered in the 1990s, for instance, and I think the Obama administration is discovering the same thing today. So lack of rhetorical punch, that's one dilemma nested within the grand strategy. A second has to do with ends and means, and particularly that the ends of our grand strategy may be sound, but the means may simply not be there. So in other words, the objectives of preserving American primacy in the post-Cold War order are good objectives, but they may be endangered by the fiscal austerity in which we increasingly find ourselves. So remember, the goal of sustaining the post-Cold War order rests not just on having the world's strongest military, but one that is dramatically stronger than its rivals, and one that's so strong that it can shape events and provide stability not just in our neighborhood, but in regions around the world. And so in that context, it's hard not to worry about whether this aspect of US strategy will be feasible if the defense budget continues on its current trajectory, and particularly if subsequent rounds of sequestration hit. So even existing budget cuts are forcing shifts in the defense strategy that was outlined as recently as 2012, and despite efforts to shield US forces in Asia from the budgetary pressures, they're raising questions about whether and to what degree there is military substance to the Asia pivot. And so if the cuts go deeper, the problems are simply going to get worse and the means ends gap, or the potential gap will get wider. Now to clarify, this doesn't mean that we are in any near-term danger of not having the world's strongest military, but it could mean that we are losing the margin of dominance that makes our grand strategy viable. So reconciling means and ends is always a key dilemma of grand strategy, that's particularly the case today. A third dilemma, and one that's also becoming increasingly apparent, has to do with trade-offs, and particularly with how a less quiescent European security environment may complicate the Asia pivot. So I think a key implicit premise of the Asia pivot or rebalance was that Europe was basically stable and peaceful, and that it could therefore be treated as a relative economy of force and years to come. And that idea was premised on the notion that relations between Moscow and Washington would remain fairly calm and productive. Both of these judgments are becoming harder to sustain. We don't know how things are going to shake out in the coming months and years, but there's already an increased sense of insecurity in Eastern Europe, and U.S.-Russian relations have become more explicitly competitive than at any time since the Cold War. That doesn't mean that we're going back to Cold War levels of military commitment in Europe, but it's already forcing us to reconsider what level and form of commitment and what level and form of attention are necessary to maintain that climate of reassurance and stability that we're used to having in that region. It's possible that we can sort of just expand the size of the pie here by using OCO to fund the European Reassurance Initiative and potential follow-ons, but if that's not the case, or if it's only partially the case, then we're looking at some more difficult trade-offs across regions and priorities. So that's a third dilemma, that the trade-offs, the grand strategy, invariably entails maybe getting even harder for us. A fourth dilemma and one that pertains more to the Middle East than Europe is that it matters how we pivot from one theater to another. So there's no question that U.S. involvement in Iraq and Afghanistan was not as productive as we would have liked, or that reducing that involvement is important over time by refocusing on the Asia Pacific over the long term. But it's also true that a pivot that consolidates existing gains is stronger than one that undermines them by refocusing too quickly. And so the key dilemma for us has been and continues to be that we need to reduce military exposure in the Middle East over time and we've been doing that, but we need to do it in ways that don't telegraph weakness or undercut progress made to date. And this isn't an easy balance to strike, but I'm not sure that we've struck it as well as we might have. So if you look at the Iraq drawdown in 2011 and the recent events in that country or at the Afghanistan drawdown today, I'm not sure that we've made or tried hard enough to make those incremental investments that might protect what stability was gained along the way. And that is a real tension within the strategy because if we get out of the Middle East and Southwest Asia in ways that encourage instability, it'll only undermine our ability to be effective in other regions. So how we extract ourselves from one region may very well impact how effective we are in others. That's a fourth dilemma. And then all of these things tie into a fifth and final dilemma, which is that underreach can ultimately be as dangerous as overreach. So grand strategy is really about calibrating the use of power, using it energetically enough to be effective, but not so hyperactively as to be draining or counterproductive. But striking that balance is always hard and that's definitely the case now. There's no question that strategic prudence is valuable. And it was probably right to think that a period of airing on the side of discretion was warranted after the experiences of the last decade. But there is a danger in pulling back too far. There's a danger that we might liquidate existing commitments too quickly. There's a danger that the consequences of non-intervention or insufficient intervention in a place like Syria might eventually be worse than the consequences of a more assertive policy. There's a danger that excessive caution and use of force might look like weakness. There's a danger that too much retrenchment could undermine the stability of a post-cold order that's been very good to us. And looking at these various issues, I'm not entirely sure where the point is where the dangers of underreach exceed the dangers of overreach, but I'm quite certain that it does exist. And so as we think about what American grand strategy is today and where it's going, we need to be mindful of that fact. So I will just sum up by saying that I don't mean to sound excessively pessimistic or critical in discussing these dilemmas because there are always dilemmas in grand strategy. That's the nature of grand strategy. And also because I think that the grand strategic concepts here makes sense in a lot of key respects. But it's also important to think about the liabilities, the drawbacks, the tensions within the current grand strategy at the levels of both conception and implementation. There may not be easy solutions to these dilemmas going forward, but I'm sure that these are issues that we will be grappling with. So I'll stop there. Thank you very much. Thank you, Dr. Brands. Our next speaker is Dr. Aaron Friedberg. Dr. Friedberg is professor of politics and international affairs at Princeton University where he has served on the faculty since 1987. He is also the co-director of the Woodrow Wilson School Center for International Security Studies and is a non-resident fellow at the German Marshall Fund of the United States. He has also held a number of important policy relevant positions including the deputy assistant for national security affairs and director of policy planning in the office of the vice president from June 2003 to June 2005. He is the author of four books, has co-edited three additional books and has written many articles and reviews. His most recent book released earlier this month is the Timeline Important Beyond Airsea Battle, the debate over US military strategy in Asia. Dr. Friedberg. Thank you very much. It's really a pleasure and an honor to be here. I'd like to use my time to make an argument that I think is going to be familiar to everyone in this room, even if all may not agree with it. And it really highlights a point that Professor Brands made, a problem that he identified. I should warn you at the outset, I'm going to emphasize this problem without providing you with a solution to it. That's only because I only have 20 minutes, so. And that is this, for a variety of reasons, some better than others, the United States is in my view not investing sufficient resources, intellectual as well as financial in addressing our greatest long-term strategic challenge that posed by China's increasing power. And I think it's increasingly open and obvious efforts to displace the United States and establish itself as the preponderant power in East Asia. And I say we're not expending sufficient intellectual resources in this setting, particularly with some trepidation, because I think the Naval War College and the Center for China Maritime Studies Institute here at the Naval War College has done some extremely important work on this topic. But overall, I think there's a lot more that needs to be done. I want to touch briefly on three topics. First, what I see is the underlying dynamics of the U.S.-China rivalry. Secondly, the strategies that the two powers have developed for dealing with one another over the past 20 years or so. And then some words about the most recent developments, because I think the last five years in particular have been characterized by change, by increasing Chinese assertiveness. I want to at least touch on the question of what may explain it, how the U.S. should respond to it, and why it is that I am concerned that we may not in fact respond appropriately. So first, regarding the overall relationship between the United States and China, it's clearly mixed. It has elements of cooperation as well as competition. It's shaped by a confluence of forces, some of which might tend towards greater cooperation, some of which seem to be pushing towards competition. The key point that I want to highlight is that the competitive aspects of the relationship are not due to misunderstandings or misperceptions or even policy errors, although those play a role. But rather that they're rooted in deeper sources, and I would identify two in particular. One is the classical dynamics of great power politics, situations in which one has a long dominant power and a rapidly rising power, have historically been those in which there has been tension, not always open conflict, but often enough open conflict. And some considerable portion of what we see happening today in Asia is, I think, driven by these tendencies. Dominant powers want to hold on to their positions of advantage, and they tend to fear that rising powers seek to displace them, and rising powers for their part feel that the existing order is in various respects unjust and doesn't adequately reflect their interests. And as their power grows, they want to change that order, and they fear that the dominant powers seek to hold them down if not actually to crush them. So much of what we see played out, I think in the Asia Pacific, is driven by these kinds of dynamics. But there is a second factor which complicates things even more, and which I think doesn't get the attention that it deserves. And that is ideology. One often hears it said that China's rulers are no longer Marxists, they believe in the market, and so on, and therefore there is no basis for ideological mistrust or rivalry between the two countries. And while it's certainly true that they're not true believing Marxists anymore, they are still very much Leninists, by which I mean there are people who believe in the continued domination of a single political party, the Chinese Communist Party, and they're very determined to maintain that dominance. And as a result of that determination and that perspective, they view the United States and the Democratic powers more generally as posing an existential threat, regardless of whatever it is we say or do. They believe that the United States in particular is determined in the long run to undermine CCP rule in China and see it replaced with some kind of liberal democratic regime, and as I'll say in a moment, that perception is not inaccurate. So from these observations, I would derive the prediction, and it's no longer really a prediction because I think the future is here, and that is that if Chinese power continues to grow, material power continues to grow, but its regime does not change, then the competitive aspects of its relationship with the United States are going to expand and grow in importance, and the cooperative elements are going to be diminished in significance even if they don't disappear altogether, and that I believe is already happening. Secondly, regarding the strategies of the two powers, both, I would argue, have pursued largely stable policies towards one another in the large sense since the early 1990s. Both have also pursued mixed strategies, which I'll describe in just a moment, although there are some indications that these may be beginning to change. To take China first, Chinese strategy really has a point of origin, I think in an author in a sense, Deng Xiaoping, his famous 24 character strategy, which is usually summed up by saying we should hide our capabilities and bide our time, which is contained in a circular memorandum that was sent to top CCP officials in the summer of 1991. So after Tiananmen, after the collapse of the Berlin Wall, but just before the collapse of the Soviet Union. And I think what China has been doing for most of the last 20 years basically fits within this broad rubric. I would identify three axioms that I think have guided Chinese action down to the present, although again there are some indications of change. The first has been to avoid confrontation, particularly with the United States. I think China's leaders have recognized from early on that there was much to lose and little to gain by engaging in any kind of direct confrontation with the United States. And this is in part related to the second axiom, which has been to build what Chinese strategies referred to as comprehensive national power. So the concept that Chinese analysts write about and argue about endlessly, they're a little bit like American political scientists in this regard, is it more economic, technological, military, diplomatic and so on. But the general consensus has been that China started out and remains to some extent still relatively weak, certainly in comparison to the United States, and therefore needed and needs time in which to build up all aspects of its national power. And Chinese strategists and leaders talk in rather general terms, but about timelines. They identify 2049, which of course is the hundred year anniversary of the creation of the PRC as an important date by which they hope to have achieved certain objectives, building up China's economic capacities to the point of being, I think the term of art used to be a relatively well off country and also modernizing China's military. More recently, Chinese writers and leaders have referred to the period, the first 20 years of the 21st century as a period of strategic opportunity for China, during which it ought to be possible for China in fact to focus on building its capabilities and in which the international environment was believed to be relatively benign. So second axiom build comprehensive national power. Third, I think has been the notion that China needed to advance incrementally, even though China's leaders and strategists believed that they were in a sense on the defensive strategically or grand strategically, but this hasn't meant that they believed they could afford to be passive. To the contrary, they've sought opportunities to expand their influence, to strengthen their position over time and in particular to, I believe, to weaken and undermine the position of the United States. And the goals of this broad strategy, I would argue have been twofold. First and foremost, to preserve CCP rule. I think everything that the leadership of China does both in domestic and in the international domain is motivated ultimately by that desire and the belief and the importance of maintaining CCP rule. Secondly, and related to that, I believe that they have sought and seek to restore what they regard as China's rightful place as the preponderant power in East Asia. Not through conquest, not through war, but via maneuver and the gradual accretion of positional advantages, as Professor Friedman mentioned. And the axiom or the bumper sticker from Sunza is to win without fighting. And I think that's been the Chinese objective. I should note that, now this is my construction of what they've been up to. And I think there's evidence in the writing and in the behavior that supports this, but certainly it's a controversial issue and some would disagree. I think though that this has been a consensus strategy. Something on which everybody could basically agree in part because it was somewhat open-ended both as regards timelines and also regarding the precise definition of China's eventual position. There were questions that could be put off 20 or 25 years ago on those issues which eventually would have to be addressed. And I think part of what we're seeing now is a debate and a series of decisions being made about those specific issues. And it's pushing Chinese strategy in a particular direction. I'll come back to that in just a minute. So that's China's strategy. The United States too, I think, has been pursuing a mixed strategy. And interestingly, in contrast to the grand strategy that the United States formulated and pursued during the Cold War towards the Soviet Union, this is not one that has been formally defined. To my knowledge, there is no NSC 68. There is no single planning document that exists which contains the various aspects of this strategy. Indeed, it doesn't even have a name. Previously, it was containment. The former US ambassador to Afghanistan's Al-Khalazad proposed the term engagement, which was so awful that nobody adopted it, but there really is not a very good substitute. So it's mixed, I would say, organic. The pieces of it have grown over time, but I would argue that it's also been stable. Domestic political rhetoric about panda huggers and so on, notwithstanding, if you look at what successive US administrations have done, going back to the early 1990s, I think you see more continuity than change and that applies to this administration as well. And this strategy has contained two elements. On the one hand, engagement. The United States has sought to engage China across a wide array of domains, the economic, diplomatic, educational, cultural, scientific cooperation and so on. But at the same time, certainly since the mid 1990s, the US has also quite deliberately and self-consciously taken steps that are designed to maintain a favorable balance of power in the Asia Pacific. So engagement on the one hand and balancing on the other. And the balancing part of the strategy has contained a variety of different elements, maintaining and to a certain extent strengthening US capabilities in the region, working with traditional treaty allies like Japan and Korea and Australia, developing what I would call quasi-alliance relationships with other countries to whom we don't extend security guarantees, but who share with the United States to some degree a concern about the implications of China's growing power. And I would include in that category a very small country like Singapore and a very large country like India at the other end of the spectrum. What are the goals of this strategy? Well, I'm gonna use two terms to define them that no self-respecting American diplomat or public official would use, yet I submit that if you gave them sodium pentathol or put them under hypnosis and asked them, they would confess that in fact what they're trying to do is two things. One, essentially to tame China, to bring China into the existing American-designed international order and to cause its leaders over time to see their interests as lying in preserving and strengthening that order rather than seeking to modify still less to overthrow it. At the same time, although I think US officials have become more cautious about expressing this, certainly more cautious than they were, for example, when Bill Clinton talked about it in the mid-1990s, an underlying objective of American strategy has been ultimately to encourage the transformation of China, the liberalization of its domestic political order, not through direct action of any kind, but in a variety of indirect ways, including arguably by trading with China in the hopes that that would encourage economic growth, which would promote the emergence and growth of the middle class, which would play the role that historically the middle class has played both in Europe and in parts of Asia leading the push for political liberalization. Say a few words about recent developments. The Obama administration, I think, came into office its first term, not intending to discard this strategy, but as had happened a number of times in the past to change the mix of the elements within it. And in particular, I think, in the first couple of years of the Obama administration, the first term, administration officials sought to play up engagement with China and to downplay to some degree balancing. But starting in 2009, 2010, there's a series of incidents and events that were widely, and in my view generally, correctly interpreted, particularly and initially by people in the region as an indication of increasing Chinese assertiveness or aggressiveness. And that led ultimately to an American effort, I think initially, again, to respond to these anxieties on the part of friendly countries in the region to change, again, the emphasis in U.S. grand strategy, to play up the balancing piece of the portfolio and not to discard engagement, but for at least a little while, not to talk so much about it. So the president visited the region, for example, in 2011 and notably went to the capitals of friendly democratic countries but didn't go to China, working again with U.S. allies, deploying U.S. forces, talking about the commitment to maintain U.S. strength in the region, and so on. It's also included some economic elements, the so-called TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership and Economic Free Trade Area that's been proposed, clearly has a strategic rationale as well as an economic one. As Professor Brands mentioned, the pivot, the term was later discarded in favor of the bland sort of accounting terminology, rebalancing, and yet the pivot lives, I think even the president uses the term, even though other officials in his administration, I think have been strictly instructed not to use that word, and certainly since 2012, the administration has also renewed emphasis on engagement, on trying to find ways to achieve a new type, great power relationship with China as the Chinese like to say, but these efforts to enhance balancing have continued. There's been an ongoing debate over how best to characterize and explain Chinese behavior in the last five years. Is it really assertive or is it merely reactive? Is it a reflection of a coherent and deliberate strategy or is it rather the byproduct of various non-strategic, largely internal or domestic factors? 2012, 2011, 2012, people talked about the leadership struggle that was going on at that time, and perhaps that was an inducement to take tougher positions. Is it a reflection of the growth of popular nationalism? Is it the outcome of bureaucratic politics, the emergence of new entities like maritime and fisheries agencies that may have an interest in increased tension with other countries? Is it the product of the activities of a group of so-called rogue PLA officers? My own judgment is that with the passage of time, it's become increasingly difficult to sustain the view that there's been no change or that China is simply reacting to events or initiatives of others. Regarding the motives for this more assertive policy, while domestic factors do play a role in my view, Chinese behavior can best be explained as a reflection of a deliberate strategy for advancing towards Beijing's longstanding goals. Not going for broke, not certainly seeking conflict, but pressing harder in the face of perceived weakness. And this goes back at least to the 2008, 2009 financial crisis, at which time Chinese strategists seem to have assessed that the United States was in a period of decline that was more rapid than had been anticipated, and a hope that China might be in a period in which its own power would grow more rapidly than perhaps had appeared possible. I think there was some initial concern after the announcement of the pivot over exactly what the United States was going to do, but unfortunately, I think more recently, there's been a kind of reassessment, recalibration, and there is doubt on the part of Chinese leaders about the willingness and ability of the United States to follow through on the policies that were announced with such fanfare three years ago. Chinese behavior is rooted in confidence, but also in concern, concern about internal vulnerabilities, a recognition of slowing growth, and increasing awareness on the part of the Chinese public of the extent of corruption and the levels to which it ascends. And the new leadership, Xi Jinping at the top, appears to have embraced the use of nationalism, militarism, and an atmosphere of external tension as a way of consolidating personal power and also consolidating regime power. Overall, I would say that China's strategy and its goals haven't changed, but its tactics have become more aggressive, and it seems to be operating on an accelerated timeline. Continuing a rapid buildup of its military capabilities, expressing a desire for improved relations with the United States, while at the same time maintaining and indeed increasing selectively pressure on some of its targets, in particular Japan and the Philippines, US treaty allies, and also Vietnam. And I believe that the aim of these activities is to demonstrate the inadequacy of American security guarantees, to raise doubts about American staying power, to drive wedges, and to create situations in which resistance to Chinese pressure appears increasingly to be futile. Now I should say, and Professor Friedman mentioned this in passing, this may fail, and it may fail catastrophically. It could prove to be counterproductive. It could stimulate yet more balancing, or it could even trigger conflict, but the important point and the one I wanna highlight is that it could also work, and that I think depends a great deal on what we do. And that leads me very briefly to the question of what is to be done, and since I'm at the end, I've sort of saved myself from the necessity of having to say too much. Broadly speaking, I think we have to increase the balancing part of our strategy and devote more resources to it. We also, I think, have to modify some aspects of our engagement efforts with China, although I won't talk about that. And in particular, I think we need to develop a credible military strategy for countering China's growing anti-access area denial capabilities. Our position in Asia rests on our alliances, and our alliances ultimately rest on security guarantees, promises to come to the aid of our allies if they need our help, and our ability to sustain those promises depends on having a plausible and credible military strategy for doing so, one in which we believe, in which our friends and allies believe, and in which our potential opponents also believe. But there are reasons why we might not. There is, first of all, a lack of elite and public consensus about the nature and extent of the challenge, including within the U.S. military. And there is also a reluctance to speak openly about it for fear of creating a self-fulfilling prophecy. I think Admiral Greenert has left, so maybe this will spare me, but I disagree with him. I think it's going to be important for our leaders to find ways of talking about China as a military rival, because if we can't, as a democracy, our leaders are not going to be able to generate and mobilize the necessary resources in order to meet that challenge. Fiscal constraints that have been referred to are very real, but they're also self-imposed. They're not the result of an absolute lack of resources, but rather an absence of political consensus about how to bring essentially income and expenditures more closely into balance. And last but not least, a powerful reason why we may not deal adequately with this problem is our preoccupation with other issues, especially the problems of instability, disorder, and terrorism in the broader Middle East, and also now problems posed by Russia. And I want to emphasize, and this I think brings us back to the point Professor Brands made, these problems are real. They're urgent, and to some extent, they are inescapable. But I would argue that in the larger scheme of things, there are also a distraction from the grave long-term challenge that's posed to us by the rise of China. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Friedberg. Our final speaker is my colleague here at the Naval War College, Dr. John Maurer. Dr. Maurer is the Alfred Thayer-Mahan Professor of Sea Power and Grand Strategy. My predecessor is Chair of the Strategy and Policy Department, and one of the longest-serving faculty members at the college. He is author or editor of six books examining such topics as the outbreak of the First World War, military interventions in the developing world, naval arms control between the two world wars, and a study about Winston Churchill's view on British foreign policy and grand strategy. His current research includes work on Winston Churchill and Great Britain's decline as a world power. His most recent book is at the crossroads between war and peace, naval rivalries, and arms control between the world wars, the London Conference of 1930. Dr. Maurer? Thank you, Mike, for that introduction. Today, what I want to do is take us back over 100 years to look at another time when there was a superpower that faced a transformation of the international system where there were rising challengers to that global superpower. But first, I want to congratulate the students here at the Naval War College, who over the last 10 months have taken some demanding courses on joint military operations, on national security affairs, and on strategy and politics. And so my hat is off to you for the good work that you've done during the past year. But before you leave, quick, pop quiz. You won't graduate on Friday unless you pass this pop quiz. Okay, here it goes. Name that country. Sound like a talk show host, don't I? Okay, name that country. It's a global superpower. Look at these points. Okay, name that country. Now, I'm gonna make it easy on you. I'm going to give you some choices here. It's a multiple choice test. You have been doing essays. Some rigorous analytical work. Well, I'm gonna boil it down to a multiple choice. And here are your choices. And as you know, we would now go off the seminar and discuss all of these choices. Because we like to say there's no school solutions. Well, what I want to do is to look at Britain back at the beginning of the 20th century, to look at that as a parable, to cull some lessons from the British experience. Because as we know, the history of the 20th century, the early 20th century is one of great power war. We're rising and declining powers. The system became unstable and led to war. So we want to look at this worst case scenario to look and say, how can we prevent that? War is at the case that that is what we stare into the future. Well, in looking at the past, one of the best places to go is to, or the future is to look back to the past. And one of the classic texts that we look at here in the strategy and policy department is Thucydides' great history of the Peloponnesian War. Most of our thinking today, you can trace back when we want to think about international relations and rising and declining powers. We can trace back to the ancient Greeks and to Thucydides. And Thucydides gave us a formula, a model. How do you understand great powers? How do you understand leaders and peoples and armed forces? What motivates them? What leads to war? Well, he gave us a simple trinity, if you will. Why war? Well, to think about honor, fear, and interest. Mike, I got them in the right order. That's right. Sometimes they're not put in the right order. Well, there they are. Honor, fear, and interest. Motivating people. Quest for security. All three of these elements become a beginning, a starting point for analysis about American foreign policy today, China's foreign policy, to think too about our enemies, al-Qaeda and associated movements. What motivates them to fight? What drives them forward? Well, this simple model provides us with a starting point. Well, I want to go back to the international environment of the beginning of the 20th century. And there, there was a global superpower, Great Britain, the center of a great empire that the Brits like to say stretched around the globe, upon which the sun never set, to the north, the great dominion Canada, and in Asia, a great empire. Again, notice this. When you look at this projection of the British Empire, you see that in many ways, the British Empire was an Indian Ocean-Latoral Empire, stretching from New Zealand and Australia to Southeast Asia, Hong Kong, Singapore, South Asia today, modern-day India, Pakistan, through the Middle East, down to South Africa. Now, Britain as a global power faced challengers around the globe, faced a challenge from Imperial Germany that led to war in 1914, 100 years ago. Britain also faced a challenge in the Western Hemisphere from that rising superpower, the United States. In Asia, Britain also faced a challenge to that empire it had in Asia from the growing power of Japan. And that's what I want to focus on today, the rise of an Asian power to the British superpower. That Asian power was Japan. Now, initially, Britain sought to appease Japan, will work with Japan, to engage Japan. Here's a cartoon from Punch of 1905, showing that Britain and Japan could work together. And indeed, they formed an alliance in 1902. Here at the War College, we studied the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05. And our students know about this period of time, of turbulence in Northeast Asia. And indeed, the caption of this cartoon in Punch has a poem from Rudyard Kipling, that arch apostle of imperialism and race. And yet, he says that the British and the Japanese people can work together here to somehow bring about buttressing the power of Britain in Asia, to work with an ally, work with an ally against their common danger, namely Russia. Well, indeed, in the Russo-Japanese War of 1904-05, the Japanese battle fleet pictured here, all the battleships were built in Britain. These, Japan is able to defeat Russia because of its access to the British shipbuilding industry. So, Japan's success in this war depends upon a close relationship with Britain. Admiral Togo, Japan's great naval leader at that lopsided naval battle, the Battle of Tsushima in May of 1905. Here he is on the bridge of the Mikasa. Again, the Mikasa was built in Britain. Japanese strength depended upon an ability to get technology, warships, know-how from Britain. And indeed, even in the 1920s, there was a transfer of technology and know-how to Japan. In the early 1920s, there was a mission under Lorge Semple that led to Japan getting access to the latest weaponry, technology, and know-how about naval aviation. And here you see Admiral Togo being instructed about an airplane by Lorge Semple. Again, a massive technology transfer is taking place. And this is enabling Japan to become a much stronger power in this new element of naval power, naval aviation. Indeed, by the early 1930s, the Japanese have done so well in mastering naval aviation that they have become a rival at sea to Britain in this domain. Now, at the same time, there's also an economic competition taking place. Japan is rising as an economic power and industrial power. And if you were to go to the journal Foreign Affairs in the 1920s and 1930s, you see articles like these that I'm putting behind me talking about the Japanese economic challenge to Britain. As Japan's economy grows, it enables it to become a stronger military power as well, to be able to afford that naval aviation, those new platforms, new instruments of power. Again, you see articles like this that there's a trade war going on between Britain and Japan, that Britain's place as the workshop of the world, the leading industrial power is being undermined by this challenger in Asia, who's going to be able to translate that economic strength into military strength. And indeed, by the mid-1920s, the Royal Navy, the British Admiralty, is concerned about the rise of Japanese naval power. Indeed, they want to do their own pivot or rebalancing to Asia. Here is Admiral Sirajaki's, one of the leading naval figures in the Royal Navy between the two World Wars. And he's arguing that Britain has to build up its naval power in the Western Pacific, send forward-deployed forces there, but also build up Singapore as a naval base, that that's essential to try to deter Japanese aggression, to try to contain Japanese power in Asia. If Britain doesn't do this, then over time, Britain's going to be forced out. Its empire in Asia will no longer be tenable. Now, there's always a counter-argument. To pivot to Asia comes with a cost. In the late 1920s, the chancellor of the exchequer of the British government was Winston Churchill. Now, when the Admiralty came in with a bill for what they wanted to spend, Churchill looked at this and said, no, this is too expensive. And oh, by the way, there's not going to be a war with Japan. There's no chance of a war with Japan in our lifetime, he wrote to the Prime Minister, Stanley Baldwin. Why spend resources for a contingency that is remote and unlikely to happen? Of course, Churchill would be Prime Minister during the Second World War when Japan goes to war against the British Empire in 1941. Churchill's crystal ball is somewhat clouded here. Now, why is that crystal ball clouded? Well, it's back to budgets that Admiral Green had talked about today. Churchill, as chancellor of the exchequer, has to put together a budget for the government. He wants to balance that budget. Britain also has economic woes. He wants to incentivize economic growth by cutting taxes. So he wants to balance the budget and cut taxes. At the same time, he has a large entitlement that he has to meet. Again, illustrated in this pie chart by the white section there of the pie chart. In addition, Britain's come out of the First World War with a huge debt. A great deal of it to the United States. Another challenger, pure competitor. You have to pay that debt down. You have to meet those entitlements. And the British government is very proud of the fact that they have the most advanced social welfare system in the world at this time. But that comes with a cost. So if you have to pay off a big debt and you wanna meet entitlement spending, what's left over for defense? Well, not that much. Defense budgets are driven down to under 3% of GDP. Indeed, by the early 1930s, approximately 2.7% of GDP. That's the arithmetic of the budgets that Churchill has to face. So that is a great pressure driving down British defense expenditure. Now to the admiral, Sir David Beatty, who's the first sea lord, the equivalent of chief of naval operations in the late 1920s. Churchill's mad. He doesn't understand that by driving down defense budgets, the result is going to be British weakness. As he says, what's he doing here? He's trying to take a shelling off the income tax. Well, from a grand strategy perspective, if the admiral Lee wants to spend money to build up naval power in the Pacific for and against an enemy that many in the political leadership don't find plausible or cut taxes to revive the economy and hence the political fortunes of the government in power, faced by that choice, who is going to win? It's pretty clear. It's the economy that's going to win out in that trade-off. Well, when you looked at Japan at the time too, you would say, what kind of threat is Japan? In 1923, Japan had a major earthquake in which over 140,000 people lost their lives between the earthquake, the tsunami, and fires that occurred in Japanese cities. Japan looks broken at this time. Again, this is 10 times the loss of life of the recent Japanese earthquake and nuclear disaster. So when you look at the headlines of the time, you say Japan has troubles that it has to get out of. It's not a threat to Britain's position in Asia. And indeed, it was not just Churchill who held this view. In the 1920s, Franklin D. Roosevelt held the same views. Here's Roosevelt the first time he appeared on the cover of Time Magazine in 1923. Don't you love that photograph? That jaunty look with the pipe. Again, recovering from the effects of polio, he wrote an article in the Journal Asia. And in that article, he says, the points of disagreement between Japan and the United States, they're going away. There's no danger, real danger of war between the United States and Japan. Indeed, given the distances involved between the two countries, it's difficult to even imagine a war, a naval war between Japan and the United States. And this is from an individual, remember, who was assistant secretary of the Navy during the First World War, who is seen, among the political class, as being a big proponent of American naval preparedness. And in an article in 1928 in the Journal of Foreign Affairs where he's presenting a Democrat's view of what American foreign policy should be, he goes even further in his views about this. He says, there's no problems out there that need to be addressed by building up a Navy. Indeed, the Republican administration of President Coolidge is embarking on a naval buildup that's not needed. Now, we generally think of President Coolidge as the guy that wants to tighten the bell of government spending and cut taxes. And indeed, that was the case. But in 1927, he was in favor of a large naval buildup. Roosevelt was saying, this is a mistake. And indeed, what you need to have is a Navy more for policing purposes, because the danger of great power war is going away. You don't need to have that big Navy. That the Republicans are wrong, in fact, for trying to wanna build up that big Navy. Again, this is from FDR, who we normally think of as being the big naval advocate. And indeed, he says, hey, who's responsible for this? It's admirals who wanna generate public opinion toward building up a big Navy. Well, in Britain, Admiral Bady, his view of this is, I think, a very compelling argument. You have to think about these strategic questions in an interactive way. And he says, look, maybe the politicians are right that those dangers are overblown. But maybe the dangers are low because we're strong. But what happens once we become weak? I think this is important in thinking about strategy is always thinking about interactions that take place. Indeed, how can you deter another rising power? Weakness might encourage aggression. This is one of the consequences that happens. Look at this graph here. The top line is what the Royal Navy would have liked to have spent to modernize itself, to recapitalize its force over the interwar period. The bottom line shows what they actually got. And you can see the Delta, the difference between the two. It's quite stark, isn't it? Over a period of time, British naval power is eroding. Now again, we could argue whether the British Navy would have spent that money well if they had been given that top line. We could argue whether that is indeed the right amount or not. But what you do see from this graph is that over time, they're not funding the Royal Navy to the degree that the Admiralty thinks is appropriate if Britain is going to remain that global superpower. And indeed, British weakness by not preparing, by not building up its Navy, as well as at ordinary war period, does in many ways invite aggression. And by the mid 1930s, Britain's leaders understand this and are trying now to turn around. But was it too late? At that, I'll conclude. Thank you, John. We've had some very interesting and thought-provoking presentations during our panel today. So at this point, I would like to invite questions and comments from the audience. Yes, sir. Dr. Brands, you used, my name's Brian McGrath. You used a phrase that caused a little pain in my dental nerves and that was limited liability leadership. I was wondering if that phrase contains the seeds of the demise of a grand strategy that it is underpinned by. If taken to an extreme, certainly. I mean, I think that the, as I mentioned, the general impulse as of 2008, 2009, which is carried over today, is that the problem of American grand strategy in the period preceding the Obama administration had not been too little leadership, it had been hyperactive leadership, it had been excessive use of American power. And so the idea was to go in the other direction, not necessarily to exert, and I'm trying to characterize it as, I think defenders of the strategy would characterize it, not necessarily to exert less leadership, but to exert leadership in cheaper ways, in more prudent ways. And that's not necessarily a bad thing, but as I pointed out, grand strategy is all about striking balance between ends and means, between how energetically and how prudently you use your power and so on and so forth. And so if you get to a point where limited liability leadership is sort of becoming an end in itself, then yes, that can absolutely undermine the general climate of security and reassurance upon which the post-Cold War grand strategy has been premised. Yes, sir. My name is Bob Ruliner, I'm from Chicago. I had a question that the Bush administration after 9-11 very clearly felt that the overriding purpose of the grand strategy was to attack the jihadist terrorists, keep them in their place, and keep them from repeating the events of 9-11. Whether that strategy was effectively carried out in Iraq and Afghanistan, I'm sure it'll be a subjective debate for years to come, but that was clearly the overriding strategy. Are you suggesting now that the primary focus of our grand strategy should be for East China? Are you suggesting then that resources should be devoted there as opposed to what the Bush administration focused on, which is the combatting the Islamic jihadists? Does the rise of the apparent interest in Japan in rearming affect your view of the engagement that we need to have in the Far East? But I'm particularly curious about where the so-called war on terrorism fits with the focus on China in the Far East. It's a very large historical question. I mean, it could be interesting to go back and look how people's thinking evolved. But one thing is clear, after 9-11, people at the top of the Bush administration believed that there was this urgent need to somehow address the problem which had created 9-11 and did a whole variety of things then to try to respond to it, some of them more successful than others, arguably. I think it's sometimes hard, I find perhaps this is true more of my students who are younger have to increasingly recreate for them the sense of urgency and threat that dominated at that time. And in that context, although I think some people in the administration continued to have underlying concerns about China, there was a belief that as one high-ranking official once said in my presence, our plate is full. We have to focus on what we really need to deal with in the short run. Let me just make one observation about this broader story of the US response to China. But for 9-11, I think the United States would be much further along in dealing with the challenge posed by the growth of Chinese military power. And one illustration or one bit of evidence to support this view is the 2001 QDR, which actually defined very clearly the problem of the growth of anti-access area denial capabilities and laid out in very general terms what the alternative responses to it might be. I think but for 9-11, the Rumsfeld-led Defense Department would have focused on the so-called transformation of US military capabilities with a focus on China as a potential future rival. In the long span of history, I think it's gonna appear that two unanticipated events knocked us off that trajectory. One is 9-11, and the other is the financial crisis of 2008, 2009, because it would just at that time, I think again, at the very end of the Bush administration, and I think this probably would have continued, did continue in a sense under the Obama administration, turning back to this problem of the challenge of the growth of Chinese military power and now in the context of these tremendous constraints. I mean, I would amplify that. I would just say that the question of which region we are devoting resources to is always a relative question. I mean, as I think as the Admiral I expressed earlier, we've been in Asia for a long time. We've been in Europe for a long time, and so it's a question of how you balance between the various regions, and I don't underestimate the threat posed by Jihadists, particularly in light of the events of the past week or two, but I would wholeheartedly agree with Professor Friedberg that the greatest security challenge we face over the next decades is the rise of a country that could potentially, eventually, not just challenge for leadership in East Asia, but could potentially be a peer challenger as well, and so you just are not going to have the bandwidth to deal with the rise of China if you have 200,000 troops in the greater Middle East, and if you are fighting wars that are not just expensive in financial terms, but very costly in terms of sort of draining the level of activism that Americans are willing to do in international affairs, right? And that's not to say that we need to ignore the problem posed by Jihadists, but I do think over the long term, focusing on the Asia-Pacific region, I mean, that is going to be where the geopolitical action is. If I could jump in here too, one thing that I think is important to keep in mind is we can often get too much of a regional focus and just focus in on one region and look at another region. It's important to look at how all these regions interact with each other. What we're doing in the Middle East has an impact on Asia. What goes on in Europe, as you said earlier, how, and our relations with Russia has a big impact on our relations with China as well, and if we stay too focused on one region and just say, oh, I'm going to focus on that and come up with a strategy for that region, it neglects what is, I think, essentially important of putting all these regions together and think how they all fit together in some grand strategic framework and architecture. I think we have to get back more to a thinking about global strategy and not just regional strategies.