 Good afternoon, everybody. Welcome to the Ford School. I want to really thank all of you for being here. It's great to see so many people come out for this program. I want to thank the Librethal Rogel Center for Chinese Studies and Mary Gallagher for making this event possible today with us. Nearly half a century ago, our namesake, Gerald Ford, traveled to Beijing as Minority Leader for the House. Part of a series of meetings in 1972 that catalyzed Sino-American rapprochement during the Cold War. Since then, China has risen dramatically on the world stage, as has the importance of the U.S.-China relationship, one that features a great deal of cooperation, but also, as we've seen, many points of tension. U.S.-China relations are now central to many of our most pressing domestic and foreign policy discussions. Whether we consider President Trump's planned meeting with North Korean leader Kim Jong-un, where the possible effects of U.S. tariffs on steel and aluminum, whether we focus on global financial markets or on climate change negotiations, U.S.-China relations are crucial. To help us understand the dynamics of this critical relationship, we are delighted to welcome Danny Russell to the Ford School and to the University of Michigan. He is a diplomat in residence and senior fellow at the Asia Society Policy Institute and a career member of the senior Foreign Service at the State Department. He served as Assistant Secretary of State for East Asian and Pacific Affairs from 2013 to 2017. After serving for years at the White House as a special assistant to the President and senior director for Asian Affairs at the National Security Council, he was one of the key architects of President Obama's strategic rebalance to the Asia Pacific, including efforts to strengthen alliances, deepen U.S. engagement with multilateral organizations, and expand cooperation with emerging powers in Asia. Before joining the NSC, he served in a number of important diplomatic roles in East Asia, Europe, and at the State Department headquarters in Washington. He has an extraordinary record as a diplomat and deep knowledge of China, U.S.-Chinese relations, and the broader international politics in which they are embedded. We are very privileged to be able to learn from him today and also appreciate the time he is spending with faculty, students, and visiting scholars all day long. He will begin with some prepared remarks and then open it up for Q&A. Please join me in welcoming Danny Russell to the Ford School. Hi, everyone, and thank you very much, Michael, for the introduction. Thanks to Mary Gallagher for getting me out here. It's an honor to be here. My background, my expertise is in foreign policy. I've been a diplomat now for 33 years in the Foreign Service, but I'd actually like to start with a question about astrophysics. And the question is, what's up with the space-time continuum? I mean, is the universe expanding? Is the universe contracting? Is time accelerating, decelerating? And the reason I ask is that it seems like depending on whether you're standing in Beijing or Washington, D.C., the world, even the universe, looks pretty different. In Beijing, right now, the National People's Congress is underway. Not only was there a lot of drama in connection with cementing Xi Jinping's leadership status and removing term limits, but at the same time, there's also been a very significant set of announcements about changes in government structure, to government party reform. It should come as no surprise to anybody who's been paying any attention that the net effect of the changes is to strengthen the party's control, at least in the short term. Mary Gallagher had a great piece a couple of weeks ago in the New York Times pointing out some of the longer-term pitfalls in this trend line. In Washington, the pace of change is, if anything, even more breathtaking and the character of the events more shocking. Summit with little Rocket Man? Rex Tillerson out, Mike Pompeo in. HR McMaster maybe out. John Bolton maybe in. And you notice I'm not even mentioning Robert Mueller, Stormy Daniels. I'll stay away from all that. But if you're in Washington, it sure feels like time is speeding up. And it feels like the universe is kind of closing in on you. You can get whiplash standing still just from the news crawl on TV. But at the same time, America's aperture seems to be tightening, constricting in a way. There's the banner of America first. There's the withdrawal from the TPP, Trans-Pacific Partnership. There's the walk-away from the Paris Climate Accord. There's the turn-away from multilateralism. There's the sentiment expressed, again, just yesterday that America's allies are really just freeloaders. That global engagement has been a losing proposition for the country. The focus on hardening our borders not on sustaining global leadership. We seem to be sending signals that rightly or wrongly are construed by many friends and partners overseas as signals of abandonment that reinforce a sense of diminishing international agenda on the part of the United States. Whereas on the other side of the spectrum is China. Now, we all know that the Chinese horizon is the time horizon is historically a long one. And if anything, it's lengthened. It's not just that we may be looking at Xi Jinping third term, Xi Jinping fourth term. Who knows? But also it's the centenary goals of becoming a modestly prosperous society by 2021, of achieving socialist modernization by 2035, of becoming a great power and realizing the China Dream by 2049. But it's also the vow to make China the definitive leader in artificial intelligence by 2030. That means something. That's a kind of Kennedy man on the moon caliber national commitment. So China's field of vision internationally its global vision is expanding also. National rejuvenation goes hand in hand with greater global stature. Hide and buy has been supplanted by the community of common destiny by the new security, the new Asia Security Model by the Asian Infrastructure Investment Bank by the Belt and Road Initiative by the Strong Army Dream by Xi Jinping's speech at Davos in 2017. There's no shortage of indicators and engagement by China in the world post hide and buy seems to be driven by a number of different factors. Some of them are obvious ones, economic, military, geostrategic imperatives, even demographics as the expatriate Chinese population expands and China gets dragged into issues and areas in defense of its citizens or to protect its investments. There's also the very human because we can dynamic and that factor is driven both by China's economic cloud but also by the growing military strength of the People's Liberation Army. But the push to elevate China's global stature clearly is also a mechanism to strengthen Communist Party's hold on power. It's part of the substitution strategy where national pride, increased prosperity, these sorts of things help compensate Chinese citizens for the lack of civil rights, the lack of political space. Now, there's a lot of discussion also about Xi Jinping's not just his motives for pursuing more ambitious global status but his goals in pursuing them. My own belief based on my experience is that China is not out to replace the United States as the superpower provider of global goods. I'm prepared to take the Chinese authorities at their word on that one because China is not and hasn't been a missionary culture, not a proselytizing culture. It's not Wilsonian. It's not altruistic. There was a China first policy. There was a make China great again policy long before Donald Trump came onto the stage. And look, Xi Jinping may be a devotee of Lenin, but he's no Trotsky. He's not trying to promote global communist or socialist revolution. He's not exporting that ideology. In fact, the China model is conspicuously laissez-faire when it comes to the politics of other countries. But it sure does look like China seeks to discredit and delegitimize the Pax Americana post-war liberal order. Why? My hypothesis and my experience is that probably the main reason for this is to relieve China from pressure to comply with international rules and international norms in areas where it finds it inconvenient. In my engagements, all American diplomats find that China routinely invokes a kind of core interest waiver that international rules don't apply to China on issues that it proclaims are fundamental core interests to it. And the fact of the matter is that increasingly China's powerful enough to get away with that in many cases. In addition, China undoubtedly sees, we know sees opportunities to occupy abundant space opened by U.S. missteps or even U.S. retreat. As I mentioned, Davos, where Xi Jinping became the mantle of the champion of the open global trading order, not something you would have expected given China's actual policies, I mentioned TPP, where the withdrawal really left open the multilateral trade arena and abandoning the Paris climate change agreement, which ironically was a product of a U.S.-China deal, and relegating the United States once more to the position of majority of one in an international arena. So on the one hand, what has emerged is Washington sees in China a growing swagger, a sense of entitlement, even hubris. They're building a non-Western form of capitalism and a sinocentric form of economic and security, the New Asian security model, whatever the label is. At the same time, Beijing sees the U.S., which is increasingly and publicly defining China as the threat, as a country that's out to defend a rigged status quo, that the United States is seeking to use international rules and international institutions, which China had no hand in developing as instruments to contain China, or worse, to weaken China and to divide it. So this is not a great dynamic. There's a key question in all this, which is if China is in fact going to fill the void left by American retrenchment, what are the tools that China is going to use to motivate other countries, the rest of the world, to go along with it? Will it rely on coercive tools like economic leverage, or can it build consensus around common interests and universal principles? And if so, what are those interests? What are those principles? Put it this way, is there an export model of the China Dream? Well, shift gears for a second and just do a quick inventory on the U.S.-China relationship, including then and now. So the then, at least for me, was when I was loaned by the State Department to the incoming Obama Administration in January of 2009. And the starting point for the Obama Administration that I was part of was the value of the Asia-Pacific region to America's economic interests, which were under tremendous stress, as well as to our national security interests. So the theory of the case was to put equal emphasis on strengthening alliances, engaging and supporting regional institutions for rulemaking, promoting soft power and the values agenda, democracy and human rights, not as a sermon, not as a rebuke, not as a lecture, but as a guiding principle of our behavior and our policy. But also engaging with a span of emerging powers that includes Vietnam and Indonesia, India, but of course importantly, it includes China. And we were deliberate, though, in developing an Asia-Pacific rebalance strategy with a China component to it, not developing a China strategy with an Asia-Pacific component to that. Secondly, we operated from the conviction that number one, competition is legitimate and can and should be healthy. That meaningful co-operation, if it's meaningful, is worthwhile and can coexist with competition. Third, that we weren't going to ignore the real differences or paper over the significant differences and points of friction between the U.S. and China. We were going to try to deal with them. We weren't going to go along to get along. We weren't going to give a pass or barter concessions. If North Korea supports us on North, excuse me, if China supports us on North Korea, well, we'll be differential towards China's self-proclaimed core interests. We didn't do that. Thirdly, we worked to improve communication at all levels. Leader level, of course, because hey, China is an authoritarian country. You've got to be talking to the leaders if you're going to have an impact. But also to expand horizontally, to try to widen communications across the spectrum of stove-piped agencies and elements of Chinese government, Chinese society, to cover the range of issues encompassed in the U.S.-China relationship and vertically in the sense of not just at leader level but down through the working level where implementation has to take place. And also along what call it the Z-access, the people-to-people, the institutional, the academic, the connectivity between businesses through exchange, et cetera, et cetera. We tried to do all that. The last element in my description anyway is what I'd call the three R's. Resolve, reassurance, and rules. So by resolve, I mean that the United States showed that we would stand firm on issues and values important to us, including on matters like international law, universal freedoms, and that applied in the South China Sea. It implied it in the Senkaku. It's applied in the Taiwan streets. Reassurance in the form of, as Obama said, again and again and again. The U.S. welcomes the peaceful rise of China that is whole, that is at peace, that's prospering. And we worked to demonstrate that in what we did, not only in what we said. And rules in this sense that there shouldn't be a superpower exemption from international law and from universal norms. Notwithstanding all of the failures of the United States in history to fully honor international law or own obligations, the conviction that we held and that America holds that no country, neither the U.S. or China, can exempt itself from the rules that were bound by the same rules as big, as small countries, withstanding that we have the power to flout the rules. And that was a key component of our South China Sea strategy where our arguments were based on international law, not on merely an opinion about sovereignty. But that was then, this is now. And now the Trump administration is showing a mix of cordiality on hand and belligerence on the other towards China. President Trump has publicly declared his feelings towards Xi Jinping are incredibly warm that he celebrates the great chemistry that they have. At the same time, he sees no contradiction apparently in turning the trade relationship into battle space, holding up the prospect of sanctions under Section 301, putting in place punitive tariffs. The papers are talking today about a $100 billion spanking. Although, he tweeted $1 billion, maybe two decimal points, is just sort of doing business in the Trump era, I don't know. The late and lamented Rex Tillerson, the secretary, vilified Chinese development in Africa when he was just there last week, warned against the dangers of the Belt and Road. And most significantly, much more significantly, the national security strategy, the national defense strategy, the nuclear posture review, three important policy documents issued by the Trump administration in the last four months. All characterized China, and China is always lumped together with Russia, as the preeminent threat faced by the United States. Not terrorism, not pandemics, climate change, not anything. China. This is not an abstraction if you are reading this in Zhongnanhai, if you're a senior Chinese official. These are not just words because the Trump administration has also significantly boosted defense spending, because the Trump administration is talking openly in Congress's passing legislation to encourage visits to Taiwan by U.S. warships, all kinds of changes to our relationship with Taiwan and beyond that. You know the old saying, even paranoids have enemies? Well... So back in 2011, I remember Aaron Friedberg wrote a book in which he made the case for the inevitability of U.S.-China strategic conflict. And that theme has been resurgent now with, say, Graham Allison's book on the imminent threat from the Thucydides trap. I have throughout all of this time been arguing as forcefully as I could against that thesis of a kind of inescapable clash for a couple of reasons. First of all, it seems based on determinism, that there's something inexorable about this dynamic, but my point has always been, and I felt strongly about working directly for the President of the United States and the National Security Advisor, leaders are not billiard balls. They don't have to move according to these pressures. They don't have to yield to these kind of mechanistic forces. And averting strategic rivalry, ensuring that we didn't act in ways that were going to drive us towards conflict, was a very important component of Obama's approach to China. And I happened to believe was a component of Xi Jinping's approach to the United States as well. Secondly, this thesis is predicated on the decay of the existing power. And my argument was, hey, China is rising too, but you know what, so is the United States. Look at the shale gas revolution. Look at energy more broadly. Look at IT and innovation and entrepreneurship and these sort of magical digital unicorn enterprises, Airbnb, Google, Uber, Facebook, you name it. Like, America is not disintegrating. It's thriving. And thirdly, my argument always was, there are strong institutions in the regional and the international scene that serve as hedges against confrontation in innumerable ways. And in fact, taking the example of APEC or the East Asia Summit, in the Asia Pacific region, institutions are thriving and are strengthening. That was then. Because if the Trump administration is in fact taking an overtly confrontational approach, designating China as I mentioned as the principal threat to U.S. economic and national security, well, maybe I can't rule out that the billiard balls are going to collide. And what if the United States really comes to believe that America is in decline and therefore needs to be somehow made great again? Or even what if the U.S. is just in withdrawal? And also, what if global institutions are accorded less value by a U.S. administration that denigrates multilateralism at the same time that China seems to have enhanced its influence as Xi Jinping did in Davos or created competing institutions like the AIIB or the Shanghai Cooperation Organization? Well, you could argue then that the guardrails and strategic rivalry are starting to look a little flimsy. Now, there are very specific issues in the U.S.-China relationship that can be, that are, sources of tension that have the potential to disrupt the relationship and destabilize the region. North Korea, where there's overlap but not complete unity in our respective objectives. Maritime issues, South China Sea, East China Sea, more broadly freedom of navigation where there's an inherent contradiction between conventional maritime law and China's assertion of indisputable sovereignty over disputed features in international waters. Taiwan and cross-strait relations, that's always played a huge role in U.S.-China relations. Trade, I mentioned today's headlines about a $30 billion parking ticket the Trump administration says is getting ready to issue against China for forced tech transfer and other serious offenses. There's a basket of law enforcement issues, the so-called Fox Hunt operations where Chinese security officials essentially coerce or even kidnap Chinese citizens from overseas from the United States or other countries or the exit bans that are put on American business people, citizens sometimes preventing them from leaving China often at the behest of a business partner. Influence operations, the activities in parliaments, in local governments, in universities, think tanks, labs, media, et cetera, you name it, Australia's kind of exhibit A for that problem. But beyond any of the specific points of contention, we can increasingly see a broader international struggle for, say, geostrategic or geoeconomic primacy. And a case study in that is the One Belt One Road or the Belt and Road initiative. It's always struck me that the Belt and Road project or initiative is a kind of a roar shark test. Different people see very, very different things in different perspectives depending on change metaphors, sort of what part of the elephant you're touching. So is it a ambitious 21st century silk road that unites the Eurasian continent in a network of trade and energy routes setting the stage for global prosperity? Is it a heavy-handed strategic play to establish military outposts and essentially recreate a kind of Han dynasty-imperial system of tributary states around China's periphery? Is BRI a neocolonial form of spheres of influence by a state capitalism? Or is it the flagship of a new globalism? Target countries are wary of exploitation, of unsustainable debt loads, of influx of Chinese workers, some of whom will never go home. But who's not up for a little free money? So you've got these contradictions. You've got differing views even within China. Today, you're not going to hear a lot of Chinese disparage the question in the party line. But it is not unusual. It was not unusual, certainly privately to hear many business people, even officials, scholars speak dismissively of BRI projects as sort of a vanity play. Risky, wasteful investments that endanger Chinese lives and capital that generate financial mismanagement through expanding government subsidies to SOEs. And there's also the debate about what's behind BRI. One driver is to export excess capacity, steal concrete labor, construction equipment, foreign currency reviews. Another driver is energy security, commercial interests, feeding China's factories and getting its products to market, developing China's rural west and beyond. Military advantage. It's true that the acquisition of ports expand the capacity of the PLA Navy to operate a blue water navy. It's certainly true the maritime Silk Road provides access to the Indian Ocean, the Persian Gulf. There's not anything intrinsically diabolical about that. Any country would want to defend its maritime commercial and supply routes. So the real issue, in my view, is the lack of trust and the lack of strategic trust serves to handicap China's ambitions through Belt and Road and particularly in East Asia, because there's no question about the need for infrastructure investment in East Asia. There is a question, however, as to whether the investment and the commercial projects aim to simply become a source of leverage, of economic strong-arming, is Belt and Road about connectivity and commerce, or is it about co-option and coercion? The question relates to a bigger one, which is to what extent is China prepared to shoulder international burdens, to show restraint and to accept limits, to adhere to standards in order to win trust and to allay some of these fears? Xi Jinping has set incredibly high expectations. Expectations for China's future for national rejuvenation, both at home and abroad. And to meet these expectations, surely the Communist Party's going to have to win the trust and the confidence, not only of its citizens but of its foreign partners. Now, of course, a relevant consideration is the extent to which America is sending signals of detachment, of disengagement. Because if China is the only game in town, then that's the game that countries are going to play. But to me, the most profound and the most unanswered question is this. What is it that China stands for? That non-Chinese will believe in and will support? Development? Great. Trade? Great. Infrastructure? Great. Let's say fair politics? Maybe great. But none of those are principles that non-Chinese will feel are worth fighting for. So ultimately, we may we don't know how the intersection of the Chinese dream, the China dream and the American dream is going to play out on the international stage. But after my own three decades working on foreign policy, my conviction is that the United States and China are simply going to have to find ways to work together to surmount and to reduce our mutual suspicion, to identify a shared interest in building global governance systems. And building systems that both accommodate China's legitimate interests, but at the same time preserve the foundations of a rules-based order that is respectful of universal rights and universal freedom. So where I come out is the US shouldn't walk away from its global leadership responsibilities and China should seek to endure and ensure that its international initiatives complement and not undercut existing international institutions. So that's my thought. Let me stop here on the floor to your thoughts. Thank you very much. Thank you very much for that overall assessment. I'm Bob Axelrod at the Ford School and Political Science. I grant you the strengths that America has that you outline. Close it. I grant you the strengths that America has as you outline. But my question is are the terms of competition changing in the last decade and probably the next decade in China's favor, and I've mentioned three examples. In the South China Sea it's clear that they're asserting themselves more than ever. In foreign direct investment they are asserting control over technology and the terms of investment of American businesses and in terms of foreign influence as you say they're expanding their influence in countries where they invest and so aren't the terms of the competition moving in China's favor? I think those are three very different instances. The short answer is we don't know. In the case of the South China Sea the major drivers of advantage to China have been extraneous events. The election of Rody Duterte and the Philippines combined with the coincidence that the Philippines took the chairmanship of ASEAN in 2017 combined with the results of the US presidential election and administration that either chose or was only able to focus on two issues pertaining to Asia's Pacific region North Korea and the merchandise trade deficit. And as a result the dynamic in the South China Sea altered dramatically and rapidly. Prior to that point you'll recall in the aftermath of the judgment handed down by the law of the sea tribunal China was back footed and was in retreat from earlier absolute assertions about sovereignty over the 9-line et cetera et cetera. We and the claimant states and most of the ASEAN countries certainly and interested countries certainly had their hands full trying to shape China's behavior in the South China Sea but I think things were definitely not going the way the Chinese had envisaged them. That's different now. In terms of foreign direct investment into China the Chinese are perhaps killing the goose that lays the golden eggs. It is certainly true that Chinese regulations, Chinese practices and the prejudicial treatment the leverage that the huge Chinese market offers have combined to compel the transfer of a lot of intellectual property and a lot of technology to China. And I think people who paint a caricature of China merely as the bandit, the robber, the thief incapable of developing its own intellectual property or competing technologies are making a very big mistake. But the fact is that China has been operating in a way that is inherently unfair and I'd argue unsustainable even though they can get individual companies for a period of time to hold their nose, hold their breath and to make sort of deals with the devil when it comes to localization of data and sharing of technology and so on and so forth. So that's an equation that we haven't seen the end of yet. I think though that there are abundant indicators from the international business community as well as from international legislatures and governments that enough is enough and that inevitably the cost to China for this kind of predatory and prejudicial behavior will start to rise. In terms of foreign influence, China's influence overseas, well I tried to make the case that the variables there are the behavior of China itself as well as the behavior of the United States. If the United States and the network of western liberal free market democracies flourish and remain as available as advocates if not guarantors for an open system, for a rules based system particularly in the Asia Pacific region then my experience is and mainly I'm not unbiased, but my experience is that that is the preferred partner, that these are the partners of choice for most societies not all governments, some of the strongmen in Asia are only too happy to deal with the Chinese because they can trade national interest for personal gain, but generally speaking countries in Asia in my experience while they do not want to have to make a choice between China or the United States they do want to have choices and they want to have the ability to make their own choices and even if they don't chronically choose to align themselves with the United States or do what the U.S. says a credible U.S. presence engagement involvement and the expectation that the United States is going to speak out speak up and maybe act in the event that rights and borders and international law fundamentally compromised gives them the latitude to make their own choices so not a succinct answer but that's what I've got. Hi there, thank you so much for talking to us today my name is Amara, I'm a first year MPP student and my question to you was how do modern diverse religious practices within Chinese society impact both domestic and foreign policy how do those practices relate to this idea of Chinese morality when they communicate with other nations? Well speaking from my own experience the efforts by Obama, Hillary Clinton Vice President Biden, John Kerry other senior U.S. officials congressional delegations and people like me in our engagements and encounters with Chinese leaders and Chinese officials to make the practical and pragmatic case for religious tolerance for the respect for respecting different creeds and faiths within China was like talking to a brick wall and my Chinese partner counterparts at least were number one brilliant debaters who availed themselves of the artesian well of American hypocrisy whether they were reaching back into the late 19th century or they were going to Charleston or another modern episode in the United States they could paint picture of a vicious corrupt intolerant racist religiously intolerant America that makes your blood run cold moreover I found them categorically resistant to very practical fact-based arguments about the effect that their policies in Xinjiang have among the Uyghur communities and of the trouble that they are cultivating the petri dish that they're making which is just so ripe for the introduction of extremist doctrine and the ISIS type jihadist message and we went to great pains to share information with the Chinese that would help them see what the return of foreign fighters from Syria looked like and where what we knew was happening further west in Central Asia etc but I've never been part of a discussion or a process with the Chinese in this area in which they didn't devolve almost exclusively to give us names and we want you to outlaw all Uyghur related Uyghur sympathetic groups we just could not get through to them and we have the issue of home churches as well as the tug of war underway now with the Vatican over the authority to name priests and so on and so forth so every experience that I've had as a diplomat dealing with religious related issues has taken me to a dead end in terms of how other countries behave I haven't seen much evidence that countries like Indonesia or Malaysia, Muslim majority developing and emerging economies and societies in East Asia have allowed their concerns about the treatment of Muslims within China to interfere with business so I just can't report I haven't seen evidence there so I'll limit myself to that I have the microphone from somebody but I can pass it down after it's a pretty simple question it's what do you think is the best outcome of a meeting between Trump and Kim Jong-un and I just want to preface it by what I was surprised to see in the media reaction as a kind of victory because it seemed to me to be such even Dennis Wilder, I think talking up Fox News about this is something that only a Republican administration can do and making a comparison to Nixon going to China because it seems to me that it's just another part of the failure of American foreign policy regarding North Korea we are now saying that we will meet and bilaterally with North Korea which is something that the other administrations prior to Trump said they would not do and they are much, much closer to having nuclear weapons or have nuclear weapons that can hit the US mainland so the basic question is what could be the best outcome sure, well, yeah oh you don't mean the Trump Tower Hotel in Pyongyang look there are plenty of people who are as the saying goes putting lipstick on a pig but this is not this is not Nixon going to China and you can ask Henry Kissinger, you can ask when Lord, you can ask Dave Roy, this is not that that was a thoroughly considered meticulously planned deliberate strategic move, more to the point it was an American move what's happening now is a North Korean move this is the North Koreans whatever they may have actually said to the South Koreans setting up an outcome that they've aspired to for now three generations demonstrating that the American president, the world superpower will come and deal with the leader of North Korea as a peer and doing it moreover at a moment when North Korea is in complete defiance of international law and has rebuked and frustrated the United States and all its partners, thereby in effect legitimizing North Korea and nuclear and ballistic missile programs establishing, okay, you may not like it but you got to deal with me and you got to deal with me as I am as nuclear power and that is the Kim family agenda, not the Trump family agenda, not the U.S. agenda, so it's not Nixon to China, you could argue that the closest technology is Jimmy Carter to Pyongyang in 1994 alright, he was no longer sitting U.S. president but he went in a missionary spirit of conviction that if you sat down face to face with the North Korean leader, you could reason with him you could make a deal, you could silence the drums of war that are beating in Washington, you could get a pause and you could save his face that was what Jimmy Carter set out to do and to a certain extent you could say alright, well, he opened an alternative path, both sides hit the pause button and negotiations in fact did ensue using that as the model probably the best thing that one could hope for in a Kim Trump summit is that it doesn't go badly, that it results in both sides agreeing to pause any escalatory moves and to open the door to some kind of negotiation, but the fundamental problems in the equation are utterly unchanged and unaffected or to the extent that they are affected it is not to our advantage because number one, North Korea's status and stature, which is not trivial is radically enhanced, the leader domestically but also North Korea more broadly related to that number two and very importantly is sustaining and intensifying international sanctions against anybody is a bailing the boat exercise it takes constant, constant work you've got to maintain a lot of positive pressure just to keep the business as usual deal makers from reverting to making money, which is kind of what this sanctions busting and black market is really all about and not every country is nearly as motivated as the United States or Japan to implement sanctions once you see the picture of Kim and Trump shaking hands sitting down at the table and the headlines are you know, sigh of relief spring has come, olive branches and doves, Bambi and Thumper the level of sanctions enforcement is going to drop precipitantly and so there's a second dimension which North Korea has already moved far along towards its goals thirdly, North Korea's MO is divide, create gaps split, it operates in the gaps among the five major powers around it and already one could impute gaps between the United States and Japan what the hell just happened between the United States and China the lingering fear on the Chinese part in the American push for China to crack down on North Korea is that the Chinese said we're going to alienate North Korea forever while you Americans are going to go in the back door and make some sort of deal and leave us hanging well, what's going on? and even South Korea it's one thing to have inter-Korean talks where the South is in the lead but where is Moon Jae-in the head of South Korea left when it's Donald Trump who's now taken the chair and the financial complications and risks associated with this move does not make it more advantageous in getting at the negotiating objectives that we have on the nuclear issue but the biggest risk Mary is the simple one If your starting point is the ultimate authority the most diplomatic actor that a state can produce it's leader, where do you go from there? what if it doesn't work and God forbid what if it goes badly so I think the notion that there's a hidden genius in what may otherwise be described as a Hail Mary pass is something we should suspend judgment on until our own receiver has caught it and taken it across the finish line Thank you I think you rightly focused on US-China relations in the talk but I'm curious to hear your views on kind of the other countries that are stepping up in the Trump era Japan with the new TPP Germany, you have the Japan EU trade agreement Japan also providing a lot of financing for infrastructure in the region that arguably competes with the Belt and Road initiative is this a hopeful sign that even if US leadership might experience some turbulence that other countries are willing to step up to the plate and uphold the international order or is this simply not enough and too limited and so I'd be interested to hear your opinion on what to think about that One would love to think that there is an option whereby the model of the primacy of America as a superpower and as the leader of various alliances evolved into a more co-equal fraternity or sorority of peaceful like-minded free-market democracies that would be a good thing The United States I think historically has accepted and embraced the principle that it's willing to take a smaller relative share of a bigger pie and that the growth of the land in Europe etc. isn't a threat it's an asset etc. The TPP example however raises some real concern because while you may see individual countries or groups of countries stepping up to some degree you're not going to see an emergence of a substitute for the United States if in fact the United States is retreating or retrenching certainly not one that shares the commitments to universal rights and values In the case of the TPP this began as an emergency effort to make the patient alive or to cryogenically preserve the trade agreement for the day when America came back to its senses and decided that that was just an epileptic fit we're here, we're in, we're back everything's okay I discussed this with a number of Australian and Japanese and Vietnamese and other counterparts and that was really the thinking behind the TPP 11 like let's just not let it die maybe the Americans will change their minds in the process of sorting out what a TPP without the United States would and wouldn't be something interesting something happened the 11 countries formed their own trade agreement yes it's cannibalized from the parts that were the original TPP but it's now a real thing, it's a thing and they're pretty happy with it and not all of them are so utterly convinced that we gotta have the Americans back and hopefully the Americans come back into TPP are their terms so what has evolved is not just sort of either a substitute for the United States or a straight up outgrowth of what the United States champion they've done their own thing and in doing so they've learned that they had better insulate themselves from the United States they needed to diversify their economies a way to be less dependent on the United States they learned that they couldn't rely on the United States so that's the cloud that surrounds the silver lining of the TPP 11 now I think it's right for the Japanese, the Australians, the US and others in looking at the Belt and Road and looking at China's infrastructure projects to decide hey we are not going to just seed the field we're not going to disappear we have a lot to offer the countries in Central Asia the countries in South Asia, the countries in East Asia the only game in town personally I think that presenting it as a rival or as a counter to Belt and Road is two dimensional thinking it's not all that credible and it sets it up in the wrong way I think that if the US, Japan, Australia, India began with an inventory of the attributes of our investment there is important governmental work in terms of development assistance but the vast majority of money that flows into these regions comes from the United States and it's private money but the most crucial investments are foreign direct investment in East Asia vastly outstrips that of China and when you unpack it they are trying to make money but they are bound for example by US law that prohibits bribery the foreign corrupt practices act that's no small matter or traditions of corporate social responsibility that having traveled around and seen a lot of these projects and companies are really admirable and impressive and they have other accomplishments and attributes that are tremendously appealing and of value to the target countries to the host countries whether it's on environment labor standards, whether it's on debt sustainability etc. I think those are good grounds to compete but the goal ought to be convergence because what China has in terms of resources in terms of construction capabilities etc. are immense what it doesn't have is a commitment to the standards in these kinds of projects that we consider to be desirable and so the goal is not to produce head-to-head competition in my view the goal is to try to shape the direction and the character of China's own investments and projects Thank you, that's a great point to finish on we appreciate very much your insightful remarks and responses to our questions, I hope you'll all join me in thanking Danny Russell for coming here