 Good morning everyone and welcome to CSIS. I'm Reginald Dale, I'm the Director of the Williamsburg CSIS Forum, which is a partnership between CSIS, the Colonial Williamsburg Foundation in association with the College of William and Mary. And the panels that we're going to hear this morning in fact constitute the concluding sessions of the second conference in the Williamsburg CSIS Forum. All the panelists here have been attending our discussions in Williamsburg over the last three days, on which we focused on the future of Europe and the various threats to it, internal and external, and by internal I mean the growth of populist, Eurosceptic political movements in many of the countries. General is fairly obviously the Russian move against Ukraine, which is not so much a military threat to the EU, but a threat to its unity and the strength of its institutions, its ability to agree an effective joint response to what has happened. This is the, as I say, the second conference in our series. We have one conference a year. The first one last year was on Egypt. Shortly after that there was a military intervention in Egypt. This time the military intervention didn't even wait for our conference to begin and happened just the week before. I'm beginning to worry about this coincidence between our conferences and military interventions. So I'm a little concerned what will happen when we hold our next conference next year on Africa. These two panels will be moderated by Heather Conney, who is the head of the Europe program at CSIS. So I'm now just going to hand over to her the conduct of this concluding Williamsburg session. Reggie, thank you so much and thank you all for joining us. I have to tell you, if there is a nirvana for a European analyst, I've been in it the last several days to be surrounded by the people that I read, I listened to very closely to help me understand world events, and they all came to Williamsburg and we talked about the future of Europe and we talked about the seismic event that occurred while we were discussing it, the annexation of Crimea by Russia. So I can't begin to tell you what a pleasure and a delight it is that I can share my nirvana with you this morning and we can share three incredibly thoughtful and insightful journalists who've agreed to be with us today. We have Gideon Rockman, the chief foreign affairs commentator and a weekly columnist for the Financial Times. We have Dr. Joe Jaffee, who is the editor of the weekly, the German weekly desite, and of course Roger Cohen, a columnist for the New York Times, all having extremely distinguished journalistic careers. CSIS has a tradition of when the president plans to make a trip overseas, we very typically do a briefing for the press and sort of tell them what's important, what to look out for. We'll be doing that a little bit just CSIS scholars tomorrow morning, but I thought there can be no better opportunity to talk about the president's trip to Europe next week with Roger, Gideon, and Joe to get their insights what they think is important. I'm sure when the White House was planning this trip very long ago, they had no idea that this trip would be this critical, this vital. I think they started out thinking, yes, this is the third summit of the Nuclear Security Summit, an initiative that President Obama started. This is part of an important legacy for him in this important initiative. He was going to visit Brussels, perhaps to buttress criticism that he has never been to Brussels as president. He has made eight trips to Europe, but never visited the capital of Europe. And so, hitting that as well, and then he's off to Rome, I think first and foremost, to see Pope Francis, but probably also to now meet the new Italian Prime Minister, Prime Minister Renzi, and then he's off to Saudi Arabia for an even more difficult conversation and an even more difficult bilateral relationship. But now the world has changed, and so this trip has changed. So I thought what we would do is talk, have a conversation with Gideon, Roger, and Joe about not only what's at stake for this mission. I won't call it mission impossible, but it's going to be a tough mission for the president as he confronts this new challenge. But I'd also love your take, the three, on really what the state of the mood in Europe we've had, this is the first time the president will travel really after the full and devastating impact of the NSA revelations, particularly on US-German relations. We have in two months European Parliament elections, which will perhaps change the nature of how Europe democratically speaks about the future of the EU. So there's lots going on, and I can't think of three people whom I want to listen to and what their thoughts. So with that, we'll start with Gideon, we'll go to Joe and Roger will clean up, we'll have a little bit of a Q&A up here, and then we'll welcome you into the conversation. So with that, Gideon, thank you again. Well, thank you, Heather, for a very kind introduction, perhaps excessively kind, but I'll take it, it was very nice of you. And also for arranging the whole forum, it's been really a great time to be here in Washington, trying to figure out how the Americans are going to react to this joint challenge that we now face after the Crimea incursion and indeed annexation. I think we have one small thing to thank President Putin for, which is that he's made what would have been a rather peculiarly chimed trip into a very well-timed trip. It was peculiarly chimed because to have an US-EU summit now was a bit strange because, as Heather mentioned, the whole of the European establishment is about to change. We're going to have European parliamentary elections. The commission is going to be reshuffled over the summer, so the people of Obama's meeting won't be there in a couple of months time. And I realize that's a typical kind of European winch, we've said for years, you haven't come to Brussels, you haven't come to Brussels, then he comes to Brussels and says, you're coming at the wrong time. But he was sort of coming at the wrong time, but nonetheless now suddenly this is a very relevant trip. And of course, the US-EU summit is just one bit of it. There's then the Nuclear Security Summit in The Hague, which actually is now going to have a G7 summit in the margins. The G7 is back, the G8 is no more, and that will be an extremely important meeting. And interestingly, actually, I just saw that originally President Putin was expected to come to the Nuclear Security Summit, but he finds himself otherwise engaged. However, Xi Jinping, the lead of China, will be there. It's a big deal, this thing. So there'll be a kind of almost a mini-UN happening in The Hague just after the US-EU summit. So let's just backtrack briefly and look at the US-European agenda. What will Obama and the leaders be talking about? Because it will not just be the commission, although they will change, you'll get the leaders of the European Union nations meeting him. I mean, some of the old agenda, most of it will survive, although recast in this new framework of the events that have just happened in Russia. And I think one of the big questions is, will T-TIP the effort to create a transatlantic free trade area? Will it now get a big boost because of what's happened in Crimea? And theoretically, one would imagine it would, because it always had a kind of geostrategic or geopolitical rationale behind it. Of course, people want an extra economic boost after the tough times we've been through on both sides of the Atlantic. But there was also a sense that maybe we on both sides of the Atlantic had to kind of rediscover each other and create a larger bloc. Oddly, not vis-a-vis Russia, but vis-a-vis China, you'd hear that from both American officials and European officials that if the West were to have any chance of continuing to shape the global economic agenda and the regulatory framework and so on, perhaps it was no longer enough just to be the EU and the US if we formed a single trading bloc, it would have economic spin-offs, but it would also have political spin-offs. Well, that political agenda has now been ramped up by what's happened in Russia. However, I must say I'm skeptical. I think you'll see an increase in the rhetoric about how necessary this is. I don't actually see it being enough to overcome the entrenched obstacles, which you have on both sides of the Atlantic. Will Harry Reid suddenly say, OK, I'll give Obama fast-track on this? I doubt it, although maybe the Americans know better. Will the French farmers or other protectionist groups in Europe suddenly say, well, because of what's happened in Russia, we drop our objections to this treaty? I don't think so. So there might be a little boost to it, but politics and political concerns are pretty entrenched. So I doubt we're going to get a huge surge in TTIP. Heather referred to the NSA and how we're going to get over that. I mean, I think everyone's good. I suspect we'll tiptoe a little bit around the issue. I don't think it's particularly in the Americans' interest to have a long and open discussion about it. And I think that the Europeans, having registered their disapproval, don't want to turn this into an open row, particularly now at this time. However, it has done some damage to America's image, less actually in Britain, because we're obviously complicit in the whole thing. But in Germany in particular, where the issue was taken very seriously and the symbolic thing of Merkel's phone being bugged. And I would add, actually, I think that one of the central tasks of facing American foreign policy in Obama in particular, and even more important now in the context of what's going on with Russia, is to rebuild the German-U.S. relationship, which is the key relationship, and is in much worse shape, I think, than people realize, that the bit that they've seen is the row over the NSA and the stuff that was in the German papers, and quite cross by her standard statements by Angela Merkel. But I think even before that, it was in disrepair because of a row that happened over Syria, where the Germans failed to sign a joint letter that the Americans were putting together backing Obama's position, short-lived position, as it turned out, about military action on Syria. But that provoked a really bitter row between the principles in the White House and the chancellery, which, as far as I can tell, has not actually been mended. And the fact that these people don't get on with each other and don't speak to each other regularly is a problem and has to be fixed, I think, now more than ever, because what Germany decides to do on sanctions is going to be almost as important as what the U.S. tries to do, because the Germans, as well as being the largest economic power, are also at one end of the European debate on what to do about Russia. They've always, for a mixed of economic and political reasons, been keener to build a kind of, what I guess in other contexts we would have called constructive engagement with Russia. They've never been on the punitive end of things. They continue to have a big economic interest, and it's not just pure, you know, filthy, lucrative and dividends for energy companies. They're actually direct implications for the living standards of Germans. 30 percent of their energy comes from Russia. Our colleague Wolfgang, who is with us, said to me, conversation, you know, if they don't get Russian gas, Germans will freeze, because they, okay, we're going into the summer, but this could be a long, long standoff, so it's a really, really serious issue for Merkel. So how the Germans react is going to be very important, and I think one of the things that Obama will swiftly discover, I'm sure he knows it already, but he'll see it in person, is that there is, as ever, no single European position on this. I mean, I think the Europeans realize that there has to be an effort at the European unity. And the Germans, in particular, will very much want to try and stay on the same page as the Poles, who are, you know, obviously the neighbors, you know, the eastern end of the EU, but they represent the people who are most alarmed about Russians and most keen on a tough response. And at the beginning of this crisis, you saw the Polish and the German foreign ministers together with Laurel Fabius of France going to Kiev together, and I think people were very pleased with the symbolism of that, because the two ends of the European debate, the Poles and the Germans, had a common position. Now, whether that common position can survive, this now much more pressured situation, is going to be very important, and I think the Americans potentially can play a constructive role in trying to bring the sides together and to make sure that at least we don't display our divisions in public to the Russians, because that, of course, can only encourage them. I think trying to think about how Europe and the US will react together to this. We all know the agenda, the kind of specific issues that they're going to talk about sanctions and so on, and I think nobody has any appetite for a military response, although there will be some discussion about how tough you are on reiterating Article 5, whether you start moving military assets into the Baltic States, whether you begin to offer the Ukrainians something rather more substantial than a meal ready to eat as potential military assistance. Those issues will be very important, and then there'll be this question of what kind of sanctions and how can we make sure that we all suffer equally, because the odd thing about globalization or this economic relationship we've developed with Russia is that it does differentiate very much from the situation in the Cold War, where there wasn't really an economic relationship. There weren't huge Russian banks with stakes in the city of London and so on. That's changed, and it gives us leverage over them, but it also gives them leverage over us. So we have to work out, are we prepared? We can certainly do them some damage economically, but in doing so we damage ourselves, and how do we strike that balance and how much pain are we willing to take, and so on. And also, we have to try and begin to think through the Russian reaction, because if Putin is in full great patriotic war mode, well, one thing we know about the Russians is that they can take a great deal of privation when they feel the national interests are at stake. So I don't think we should be overconfident that these economic sanctions will force Russia, which is in a kind of nationalistic mode, to change course. But nonetheless, we have to try and do something. I also think that a lot of the reaction of the Europe and the US together will come down to the personalities of leaders, as it often does. And I think that it's potentially significant that the two most important leaders, Obama and Merkel, are both intrinsically quite cautious people. And you saw that in the Libyan crisis, when Obama and Merkel both were very reluctant to go for military intervention, and that was driven by Cameron and Sarkozy, who are both quite hot-headed, actually. Cameron, despite his sort of languid air, is actually faced with a crisis, somebody who wants to act. I think Obama is somebody who wants to think. And Hollande, I mean, Francois will know more about it, but he seems slightly paradoxical at home. He seems very paralyzed overseas. He's actually been quite activist with Mali and so on. So he might be in the sort of Cameroonian, we've got to do something, camp. But I think in the end, Obama and Merkel are more important. And their instincts seem to be just as human beings and as leaders to be more intrinsically cautious. So I suspect we're not going to get sort of Churchillian, Harry Truman-type speeches we're going to get something that aims, obviously, to look firm, that aims to avoid looking ridiculously weak and so on, but that's not going to be tub thumping. I think there's a bit like, I don't know if some of you will probably have heard Scowcroft and Brzezinski last night, and they were still saying, look, let's not ramp it up yet. We may get there, but for the moment, let's try to keep a space for some sort of rapprochement with the Russians. And I suspect that's the instinct that for the moment will prevail, but this is a moving situation. Who knows what it will look like by the time Obama arrives in Europe? I mean, if there have been incidents in Dignetsk and the Russians are beginning to sort of look greedily at Eastern Ukraine, then the whole situation is different once again. And a final point about how the Russians might be reading this and how everybody's behaved, I mean, I think it's important that we look forward and not have a who lost Crimea debate. But it's very striking for me to see that the shape of the U.S. debate about, well, is the only consequence of Obama's weakness in the commas, that he was cautious over Libya, that he on Syria obviously drew a red line and then erased it. And that's an interesting debate, but I think that my guess is that actually, as much as thinking about America's reaction or lack of reaction or weakness or lack of weakness, President Putin will have looked at European weakness and the European reaction. Because after all, let's remember this started as a tussle with the European Union over the fate of Ukraine. And a bit like Stalin has meant to have said to the Pope, how many divisions does the Pope have? Well, how many divisions does the EU have? We don't, the EU doesn't really do military power. It doesn't think in those terms, it thinks of itself as a soft power. We've got a sort of nascent military ambitions and it's very, very small stuff. And just more generally, what Putin was facing as a European Union that's incredibly internally focused, that is obsessed with the Euro crisis that is recovering barely from a very severe recession. A couple of these countries that are in still deep, deep economic trouble, a European Union that's facing European parliamentary elections where populists far right, far left could get up to 25% of the vote. This is not a European Union that's really up for a confrontation with Russia. It may have to gird itself and get there anyway. But I think if I was sitting in Moscow, you would think these guys are a shower. They're internally divided. They're obsessed with their own little problems. They're not thinking strategically. They're not really gonna be a problem. And for the European Union to overcome that actually fairly accurate assessment and get its act together is going to be a really big challenge, but not just for next week, for the next couple of years and more. Katie, and thank you so much. That was terrific. Joe, I'm sure you have some thoughts on the US-German relationship and the role that Germany will play throughout this crisis. Thank you, Heather. I don't pretend to know what Obama is gonna say and do in Europe. But so I wanna make it easier for myself and just step back and describe the new stage where both he and the Europeans are going to be operating. And a nice way to draw the contrast is to look back at 2008 and before the election when Obama had a real triumphant gig, and I mean gig, at the Victory Column in Berlin. He drew 200,000 people, which is probably as much as a free concert of the Rolling Stones would have gotten. From that, and he bestowed the stage then as a kind of rock star and redeemer. Leaving a little grudge as a footnote between him and Angela Merkel who had told him, no, you can't do a Reagan, you can't speak in front of the Brandenburg Gate. So he had to move off about half a mile to the column. So it didn't start off on a good foot between them. But Putin, as I tell you in a moment, has done worse to Merkel. So he's the rock star and redeemer. As you know, mortal redeemers never deliver what they promise. And so disappointment was about to set in very quickly. And if you say go into the Pew Charitable Trust figures, you'll see that the approval rates for Obama began to decline pretty quickly after this and down by double digits in all of Europe. And the Middle East, by the way. So why, what, but there's, so how do we explain the decline? First of all, it's of course, it's frustrated expectations. Earthly redeemers don't redeem, but the other Europeans didn't like a few other things like the drone violence which went up compared to the Bush administration. And of course, more recently the NSA snooping in Europe by the Europeans conveniently forgot that the Brits in the GCHQ and the French with the DJSE were doing exactly the same thing only on a somewhat smaller scale. But the Brits being in a much better position than the NSA because they set a stride about eight transatlantic cables which all end up in London. So NSA snooping, disappointment in somebody who couldn't possibly deliver what people expected to him. And I think most importantly perhaps was a sense of, hey, this guy treats us differently than previous American presidents. Previous American presidents, we've had spats with them, big spats, but never were we faced with the kind of indifference that Obama seems to exude. And that indifference of course became more concrete in these shibboleths are like rebalancing pivot. Europe is no longer a problem, we have to play the next power game in Asia. So this was kind of, and of course, where America actually did pivot to was not so much towards China and the Pacific but toward the Middle East. And you know all this Syria and Iran and I don't need to bore you with this. Now this was the stage until two, three weeks ago. Now the new stage is really quite interesting because it displays two pretty interesting watersheds in the affairs of nations and the European-American alliance. What surprised me is two things. First, first time there was the American superpower no longer taking the lead as it had done in the last 70 years. And so the action kind of fell upon others notably on Germany. And that's the second surprise because that's not the game plan for Germany. It hasn't been for the last 50, 60 years. It was happy in its cocoon of alliance and integration and happy and not to have to indeed loathe to take a strategic role. I don't think the Germans moved to center stage because they're so strong but mainly because the others at this point are so weak. Think about France. And Libya dashes off, takes the lead in the bombing. You don't hear much from Paris these days. The Brits for decades, faithful American lieutenant always by its side, what did they do? They vote in their comments not to get engaged in Syria, which kind of pulled the rug under Obama but I think he was happy to have the rug pulled out from under him because he was pretty leery to actually use force in Syria. So here's that first watershed, the surprise about how the old players shaped up and showed up in a new way. The second watershed, we've been talking about everybody's been talking about over the last two, three weeks is what we might call the return of history. Meaning the return of the kind of history which dominated the first part of the 20th and 19th and 18th century. Power politics, zero sum games, constant readiness to use force for all the big, great players. And surprise, surprise, after 70 years or so this was the first time borders were changed by violence, I mean after the verdict of World War II but lots of borders of course had been changed by violence. So here the two watersheds are two surprises. And if this is the return of history in the sense I've just outlined, if it is returning, what does the stage look like? Let's look at the two key players that I've just mentioned. And they share some interesting similarities though they're far apart in size, population, power, economy and so on. I would submit that neither Germany nor the US is very comfortable with its role. Why so? Well the US has been in a retraction mode. Obama's America has been in a retraction mode. I don't have to go through the details except to stress one key engine of retraction which is this oft repeated phrase by the president. It's time for a little nation building at home. I think he said it about a dozen times in various speeches. So it's retraction to kind of, it's in a way the final victory of maybe of George McGovern and his campaign slogan, come home America. Plus of course the opinion figures in this country which tell us pretty much, pretty clearly, we've had it with all this war stuff. Iraq, Iran, Iraq, Afghanistan. Enormous application of force, enormous expenditure but there's not much to show for it if we look at what the Middle East is doing. So suddenly the United States is being dragged back into a game in Europe. It thought it could safely abandon. Now the Germans, unlike the Germans of the 20th century are not exactly pushing onto center stage. They found out that they didn't do very well in the 20th century trying to grab hegemony by blood and iron, in fact they failed ever more miserably. So they're not kind of rushing in like a latter day, William II. They're kind of being dragged into it just like the United States is being dragged into it. So hacks like us, we always have to come up with a nice little phrase to amuse or not to lose our readers. So I'll do this one, I'll call them, I call both of them the two great Agarba powers. Those of you a bit older know the movie Canon may remember great Agarba and her famous line, I want to be alone. And that's why she had a huge sunglasses on. I think there is a bit of great Agarba here. I want to be alone, which was so expressed in the campaign against Mitt Romney when Obama chided Romney. Hey man, haven't you figured out that you realize the Cold War is over? Well, the Cold War is back, except it's not a Cold War in the classic sense because the ideological dimension is missing. Now the Germans had totally abandoned a satidic role in the last two generations, and they kind of saw themselves as what they call a civilian power and one that is lodged in the heart of the EU called the Empire of Peace. We don't do war, we do all kinds of other stuff. We trade, we give aid, we help people build democratic institutions, we are diplomats, we are intermediaries, we don't do war. But this is kind of the situation, I mean this is the mindset with which these two key players bestow the stage, but suddenly strategy is back, heart power is back, zero sum games are back, zero sum games, meaning your gain is my loss. And both of them are facing an opponent whom, who I think is probably the most brilliant strategist on the global stage today. This is no Tsar Nicholas, the first who got Russia into the Crimean War in the 1850s and sustained enormous losses. He was impulsive and vain, this guy is not impulsive, he's not vain, he's very smart, and he knows an opportunity when he sees one. And boy, it was hard to resist this opportunity, it's like my turf, I have some historical claim to it, the West is far away, the balance of interest is on my side, local power is on my side. It was perfect, notice I'm not making any moral judgment, I'm just giving you like a theater critique, somebody who turned out to be a brilliant, brilliant actor. Minimal force, maximum gain, and even better, the man has by doing so gained what we call street cred. And why street cred important? Once you establish a reputation for the willingness and the ability to use force and to be ruthless about it, you don't have to use force and conquer next time. You've established a reputation, you're so nasty bastard, and so people will, you don't have to wield power in order to have it, and so he may stop here because he has now so much intimidated to the Ukraine that the Ukraine will do spitting. However, if he goes further, I don't think we're gonna do much about it either, because again, it is our periphery, but his center, he is close, he's got the determination, he's got the street cred. So how in the end will the game unfold? Well, I don't think we'll use military force, I'm pretty sure, to dislodge, to dislodge Putin. To dislodge somebody is a hell of a lot more dangerous than to slip in when nobody's looking, too much risk. And so both the US and Germany will use civilian coercion, and you've got the papers and you know what the list is like. Kick them out of the GA, the travel bans, freeze bank accounts, the EU is now extending again an association agreement to the Ukraine, and we'll do a number of demonstrations of military power, demonstrations, not use of military power on the eastern edge of NATO to reassure Poles and Baltics. The problem with this is that the timeframes don't match. I mean, Putin has grabbed the Crimea and he will not consolidate. These civilian sanctions that I've outlined will take a long time to achieve its goal. You can't redirect gas flows overnight, you can't redirect trade flows overnight. And if you look longer into the future, it takes a while to reverse what is true for the entire West which is a long-term decline of defense spending. Those chickens have finally come to Roost in the United States too, but take the great power of Germany which spends 1.4% of GDP and much less than the Brits, much less than the French and certainly a lot less than the United States. Joe, you wanna just wind up real fast? I'll be almost done. So what are we doing here? We're looking at, maybe there is a new Cold War but minus the ideological component, certainly Putin has won the first round and may win the second round if he goes to the Eastern Ukraine and because the Ukraine is more important to him than is to us. And I think we really do not, we find it very hard to reverse some of the trends that I've mentioned but if this game persists, you can't just let the other guy play the game. We will willy-nilly have to restart playing the old game of power politics again. Thank you. Thanks so much, Joe. Roger. Thank you very much, Heather. I must say that Nirvana for European analysts had been pretty high on my list of oxymorons before you suggested that it might actually exist in reality, so I'm grateful to you for that. I'm not sure I can add a whole lot after those two brilliant exegesis from Gideon and Joe, but this is a very important trip to Europe, much more important than it would have been a couple of months back. Brussels is not, Brussels is a rather anodyne date line. It's not Sarajevo, it's not Sevastopol, it's not even Paris or Berlin, but I do think the moment has come despite the date line for some powerful symbolism. I think the body language is gonna be almost as important as anything to demonstrate that transatlantic unity is not just some quaint idea from the 20th century but is still there and still matters. Let's face it, President Putin has acted because he has perceived the European Union as weak and President Obama, the United States in general, has distracted, looking elsewhere, pivoting to Asia, winding down on the post-911 wars in a phase of retrenchment. And that is the basis on which he has acted. And I don't think we can have any illusions any longer about him. I think we were inclined to think, he really thinks the breakup of the Soviet Union was one of the greatest, geostrategic tragedy of the 20th century and it was such an almost farcical statement that we waved it away, but the fact is if you look at the invasion of Georgia in 2008 as a kind of trial run for this, as his whole perception of the post-Cold War humiliation of Russia, the need to recreate, if you like, the Soviet space, there's coherence, there's a plan, as Joe just said, there's a strategic mind at work and he means what he says and he cares about it. And if the language he understands is force and I think, unless there is a strong response and a united response above all from the United States and Europe together to this and a reassertion of the importance of the Transatlantic Alliance and of NATO, then we could be heading in a very worrying direction. If you look at Putin's speech, it's really worth reading for anybody in the room who hasn't yet read the whole thing. It's very clear the way he's thinking. He talks not only of the grab for Crimea, the unjust way in which Crimea was taken away from Russia, but he talks repeatedly of Eastern Ukraine and South Eastern Ukraine in exactly the same language. So it is far from impossible that Crimea will have a sequel and I think we need to be very realistic and clear about that. Clearly we're not moving, and the President has said it, we're not moving in the direction of the use of military force, but certainly Ukraine has requested communications equipment, intelligence sharing, assistance, other material and I think they should get it. I think we should make that clear. I think as Joe said, we should underscore the importance of Article Five and the fact that that is a solemn commitment to the security of the Baltic States. Make that very, very clear. I think there was a powerful piece in my newspaper today about the possibility of, I mean these second tier lieutenants who were targeted in these sanctions, I mean that really was. That combined with meals ready to eat, that just does not cut it, ladies and gentlemen. And I think the language, leg crossing, body language from the White House throughout this crisis, that doesn't cut it either. I mean, this guy doesn't cross his legs in the Kremlin, he doesn't. And we need a sense of resolve. This doesn't mean we're hurtling to war or as soon as you say something like that, a lot of people these days immediately start talking about Iraq and Afghanistan. And these have been long and extremely burdensome wars that have marked the United States and will for many years to come. But US resolve matters in world affairs, US red lines matter. And I hope that we will get from this visit a series of coordinated. My sense of Germany is, Germany acts with caution and Germany is hesitant about leading for obvious reasons. But there is real shock and indignation in Germany. I mean, this is real and it goes from Chancellor Merkel on down. I mean, Germany thought it had a relationship with Russia wherein it could use its influence to prevent this kind of thing. And it did not happen. So I think there is resolve. These two leaders as Gideon said are cautious, but I think both have a sense that this is a watershed moment. It's a pivotal moment. There hasn't been an annexation in Europe since World War II. And the German for annexation is Anschluss. And we know what happened then. The situation is combustible. And I think the best way to make it less combustible is not through weakness, but through resolve. Calibrated resolve, intelligent resolve, but it's still that resolve has to be there. I'll be brief because we don't have a whole lot of time. I'd just like to say a couple of words about the German-American relationship, which I think is absolutely key. And I think is in the worst condition I've seen it in for a very long time. It goes down from the leaders. Joe alluded to the unhappy beginning with Chancellor Merkel rightly in my view, saying you're just a candidate. You can't hold a rally at the Brandenburg Gate. This did not go down well with the President or with his aides. And ever since there have been problems. There were huge problems over Syria, as Gideon pointed out. Nazi and Stasi history mean that privacy has a central and cardinal value in German society that may be hard for Americans to understand. And as a result, the whole NSA scandal has had an impact in Germany, unlike elsewhere. So I think there's a lot of work to be done in trying to repair that German-American relationship. I think Foreign Minister Steinmeier has had some interesting ideas. He's talked about the fact that while the Atlantic Alliance may resonate for people of our generation, we have to think about how German youth, Snowden is much more popular among German youth, I would submit, than President Obama today. I mean, Obama was a rock star in 2008. If there's a rock star in Germany today, it's Edward Snowden. And that is a serious state of affairs, ladies and gentlemen, and it needs addressing. Steinmeier has proposed a kind of cybersecurity summit or conference or dialogue. And I think more than TTIP or these sort of far-off ideas, we need something in the nearer term that really addresses these issues. Because young people in Europe need reminding of what the transatlantic alliance, the most successful alliance in human history, what it has achieved, what it means, and why it's important in light of what President Putin has done today, has done of late. There needs to be, finally, I think, some real focus on just helping Ukraine out right now. The country's in financial chaos, and there needs to be a program of assistance, and it needs to be coherent. And for that, the United States and Europe must work together. John Cornblum, who's sitting right here, reminded me of a breakfast that when the president went to Berlin last year, he made a speech in which he mentioned the European Union not once, not once. And this is noted, and so there's a lot of work to be done, not only in redressing the US-EU relationship, but this whole sense that the United States, under the Obama administration, simply lost interest to a large degree in Europe. The president did the dutiful minimum. He did what was deregah, but he didn't do more than that. And I think we're seeing part of the price today of that, I think, somewhat foolhardy disregard for this pivotal alliance in global affairs. Thank you. And all transatlanticists said, amen. We have about 20 minutes or so before a coffee break for some good questions. Let me throw out a few and then we'd like to open this up and if it's okay with the panelists, why don't we gather some questions and then we'll let you sort of have a final round and closing comments. We keep focusing naturally on the role of leadership here and you've just heard a very sobering assessment of the likely bandwidth, politically, economically, for that leadership. So my question is sometimes the moment makes the leader. They don't come to it willingly. Can we foresee that this is a moment where the transatlantic leadership will come forward? I've been very impressed by Chancellor Merkel's statements, but again, we can do the rhetoric. That part we do fairly well and have done fairly well so far. We're very not good at the implementation part and I think the weakness of what we are, actions speak louder than words and some ways Mr. Putin's actions are louder than his words although his words are very loud as well. So I'd like you, can this be a moment? And what does the president have to say in Brussels? He's planning a major speech which I am sure now has been rewritten and will be rewritten as they're on the plane on the way there. So question one, what does the president have to say? What does Europe have to say to move, have this message of transatlantic unity? NATO, NATO is six months out, less than six months out from a summit on September 4th and 5th. Prior to this, NATO was searching for its new purpose after Afghanistan and wasn't finding it very quickly. Secretary General Russ Musin was here. It was in Washington, gave a speech yesterday, again a very tough speech. But does this repurpose NATO? In some ways, Putin I think this is all about NATO in some ways. This is all about NATO getting too close to Russia and there's a lot of commentary. This is, we've caused Crimea, we've caused Crimea, we've done this, we've pushed too far, we've pushed too close to his interests. How does NATO have to respond to this? And we are also going to select a new Secretary General of NATO. What does that individual need to do? So those are some thoughts for you to consider and now please, colleagues, if you have a question raise your hand, please identify yourself, speak very loudly in that microphone because sometimes it's a little hard to hear. Keep the questions short please so we can get a few in. We'll start here, Carolyn with Mike, thank you. Mike Masetic, PBS Online NewsHour. Do you think that these events will force the EU into more strategic thinking in Washington, their lack of strategic thinking and Kissinger's columns and Scowcroft's comments yesterday, the EU has become sort of a pinata to bash on. And if not full strategic thinking, will it at least increase communications which are formally non-existent at the moment between two organizations that sit in the same city, the EU and NATO? Great, we'll just stay in this cluster was there another hand raised? Yes, sir. Costadino Skinalopoulos from American University and the Transnatic Academy. I actually myself posed the question to Mr. Rasmussen yesterday about NATO finding a new role in the world and he said that a NATO has no new role in the world and it doesn't have to reinvent itself in the 21st century as it did after the end of the Cold War. I certainly agree with Mr. Cohen on the fact that the US has to show to the European public the vitality of the Transnatic relationship, particularly to the younger generation like myself who has come to a world where we take it as a precredition, we take it as something for granted. But back to Ukraine, I think that it seems that the Ukraine crisis illustrates a crisis to the Transnatic relationship because I think that the EU underestimated the attractiveness of its own model while on the other hand the US got a very late wake-up call. Had the EU put membership on the table, we could have averted possibly this crisis, I think. Yesterday Mr. Rasmussen called the defense summit something remarkable, the EU defense summit in December. Personally, I think it was a remarkable failure, but as we're heading towards the NATO summit in Wales and NATO is electing a new secretary general, don't you believe that it's time to have a serious dialogue, a transatlantic dialogue when it comes to security and defense and that we need the truly strategic relationship between NATO, the EU, and the US and we think the relationship between these institutions based on a pragmatic understanding of the European security. And essentially, don't you think that it's an imperative that the EU develops a new security strategy following the failed and ineffective security strategy and outdated security strategy of 2003. Thank you. Great, thank you. I'm going to, let's see, we'll take a colleague here. Thank you. Tina Khideshawli from Georgia. As it was said, it's clear that Putin has a strategy and he has a vision and this vision is very clear and strategy is very simple. He wants to extend his empire based on the force, brutality basically, I would say even more. It's there. My question and well, comment, I don't know, is that what is it that Europe and the United States are opposing to this vision? All we hear today is talking about the sanctions and I don't think that it talks about sanctions is the vision. It's kind of reaction. It's okay, you are a bad guy, now we are gonna cut the whatever from your Freezer Bank accounts of unimportant people actually, but that's another story even if it is of the important people, it's still the reaction. I think what this US European Union summit should be about is exactly about this vision, whether Europe is ready to extend the borders of free world as opposed to empire world that Putin is proposing to that part of the world, whether Europe is ready to extend its borders beyond what it is today. And my question to the panelists is whether, what do you think whether Europe and the United States are ready for this extension, whether the enlargement is an answer and this part of that positive vision that we are looking forward from that part of the world where I come from? Because otherwise again what we are looking today is leader of one nation with a very clear vision with a very strong strategic plan, moving ahead year by year picking up the pieces that he lost after that big geopolitical tragedy as he called it, and there is no vision from the other side. And obviously it's not question just for this US US summit but because it is happening right now obviously, that's the statement we would expect today, but also it's for the NATO summit obviously in the US. Thank you. Thanks so much, Tina. I think I saw a hand over there, did I miss it? Nope, do you have a question? Mic, back there, right in the corner. Sorry, right in the corner. I'm Terry Murphy, I'm also with CSIS. Once upon a time, a very, very long time ago, I received personal letters of commendation from the Commander-in-Chief of the United States Navy or United States Forces for getting quote unquote special weapons to the Cuban quarantine line, the Cuban Missile Crisis. Jack Kennedy was highly criticized for weakness at the Bay of Pigs, et cetera, et cetera, but somehow or other he found some strength to say, this far and no further, no further. And when I hear Mr. Cohen talk about article five, I really don't need to hear anything else but that word, article five. Are we prepared to defend article five this far and no further? Thanks, Terry. We have two, we'll take the three questions here, so one in the back and then one there and there. And then we'll wrap it up. Thank you. My name is Jeannie Nguyen, Good Voice of Vietnamese Americans. Would this be an opportunity for the US and EU and NATO to work to expand the energy market for the US? So the US can help to establish oil and gas through Ukraine and help to supply the EU, especially Germany and Britain, Great Britain with oil and gas. That way we show that we're supporting our allies and we also show to Russia that it's only weapons energy to the EU is now being shaken. If it doesn't shape up its own actions. Thank you. Stanley Kober. We have said that there has been no forcible change of boundaries in Europe since the Second World War and that's true. But there was an Asia, the Vietnam War. North Vietnam sent practically its entire army south and conquered South Vietnam, Anschluss, incorporated into United Vietnam. We have reconciled with Vietnam. We now recognize it. Presidents have visited. What are the lessons of the Vietnam War that would apply today? Thank you. Mehto Kolosky, United Macedonian diaspora. Mr. Cohen said perfectly, I think the trial run in 2008 with Georgia. I think the Bucharest summit where we needed to make clear decisions on NATO enlargement, we failed on Macedonia, Georgia and Ukraine. I think we're seeing the mistakes with Georgia and Ukraine. And hopefully those same mistakes will not happen with Macedonia, but I do want to know last month, 40 members of Congress sent a letter to Kerry urging clear support for an invitation for Macedonia, Montenegro, MAP for Bosnia, Georgia and a partnership for peace for Kosovo. Where do you see the US position on this in light of the NATO summit? Will we see a clear decision on NATO enlargement? Well, panelists, that was a wonderful array of questions. So I think, Gideon, if you're ready, we'll just work our way down the line. Okay, well, there are lots of questions, so I'll try and answer as many of them as I can. On the question that was asked of Rasmussen and does NATO need a new role? Well, I guess they're beginning to think their new role is their old role, that it comes back to the question of how do you deal with Russia? NATO enlargement, I think people will be very cautious about that in the current mood because we're suddenly realizing we are focusing on exactly what article five means. Are you prepared to, in the end, you have to fight for these countries and you have to ask yourselves, are you prepared to do that? I think that they will, my guess is they won't rush to expand NATO in the current mood. If things get much worse, then maybe there'll be a sense that that is a step that has to be taken, but I don't think it's high up the agenda right now. The question of the EU's strategic failures, and you said that it's fashionable to bash the EU here, which puts me in an unaccustomed position of actually trying to defend the EU. I mean, I think that there's often viewed from this side of the Atlantic a kind of misunderstanding of what the EU's all about, to see it simply as a kind of geo-strategic player. Actually, for most people inside the EU or operating it or citizens of the EU, that's fairly low down the list of what the European Union's about. It's a common market, it's an area of free movement of people, and it's a currency area. Its goals traditionally have been kind of economic and social, the strategic aspect is relatively new and not really being thought through, you're correct about that. And I'm not sure that we necessarily want to now one thing the Europeans are really good at, inverted commas is spending years on agonized debates about the purpose of the Union. I'm not sure it's now necessarily the time to have a debate about the EU's strategic purpose. I think NATO is an institution that exists and that works. And really that I think is the institution that's going to have to do the strategic thinking about how to deal with kind of military aspects and the strategic aspects of all this. The question of EU enlargement to Ukraine is felt to be, I know here, a sort of massive missed opportunity by the European Union. Why didn't they do this years ago? Viewed from European capitals, the answers are quite, you know, simpler that there was very little appetite for further enlargement amongst the populations of the European Union after the last enlargement. That the, what's actually involved in incorporating a country into the EU is massively complicated and it's a process of many, many years. So I can see what the Scowcrofts and the Kissingers are driving at when they say, look, you know, why didn't these guys get their act together? But it is more complicated than it seems from this side of the Atlantic. Energy and gas, I think that's going to be very important and I think that could be one very positive thing about this crisis if it gets the Americans to kind of resolve the debate about the exports of this new energy Bonanza in the US, that would be good news, I think actually for America as well, but also certainly for the Europeans. And just a last thought on, you know, this theme that's underlined a lot of what we've been talking about, that Putin has played a fantastic hand and we've been, you know, hopeless and don't really know what we're doing. I mean, I think it's too early to say this is a master stroke on the part of Putin. I mean, it seems to me if you look back at the history of the last 20, 30 years, one of the lessons is that countries that use military force, generally it looks quite good the sort of day after or the month after, it often doesn't work out too well. So for Russia, you know, going into Afghanistan in 1979 was arguably the death knell of the Soviet Union. I'm not sure that the interventions in Hungary, Czechoslovakia looks so great in the light of history. He may get away with Crimea in the sense that there's an element, it's a strongly pro-Russian area so that you may not get an insurgency. If he goes into East in Ukraine, I think that would be a disaster for Russia in the long term, even though it might look strong in the short term. And even for us, as we think about our responses to this kind of thing, you know, Obama's not wrong to think that actually American military interventions in recent years haven't worked out so well and that perhaps one should think about other responses before you start rushing to put on your military fatigues. And so I think that, as I say, he uses force in the modern world. It's kind of has a certain retro thrill, but it doesn't actually work out that well generally. Roger, we'll just walk down the line. Thank you. Well, on NATO, I have colleagues on the op-ed page who've argued this view that the great mistake after the end of the Cold War was extending NATO eastward. This gave Russia a sense of being cornered. And here we are. My view is more or less exactly the opposite. I think it's the greatest achievement of the post-Cold War years was precisely extending the protection and security of both NATO and the EU to these nations that had been enslaved within the Soviet empire. And I think what we're witnessing today is how much foresight and diplomatic brilliance was shown in achieving that. If Lithuania, Latvia, Estonia, to name the most prominent examples and perhaps the most threatened nations by Putin's vision of a reconstituted Soviet space, if they were not within these organizations, they would be eminently at risk. And if there's any sense left of this far, but no further, it is precisely in Article 5 of the North Atlantic Treaty Alliance. And I still believe in it. I think, I don't believe the United States will renege on that commitment. That is a treaty commitment. And whatever the retrenchment, whatever the wavering, whatever the erased red lines, that is a treaty commitment. I believe it's credible to Moscow. And I believe the fact that it is in place today diminishes the risks of this combustible situation escalating. I don't think we should allow any veto from Moscow on the extension of the EU or NATO to other nations further east. And I think it's the moment to make that clear. That doesn't mean that these things can be accomplished overnight and they won't be. But personally, I'm in favor of leaving the door open because I believe that history shows us that that's the way you lock in peace, freedom, rule of law, security, values to which many people on the face of this earth are deeply attached. Yeah, the piñada of the EU. That's what it is to many people in Europe too. EU bashing is a great British sport and not only a great British sport and the EU has had enormous problems, as everybody knows over the last few years. Nevertheless, I think countries wanna get into the EU and it's not for nothing. Serbia and Kosovo have resolved their difficulties there. Having been at war recently, why is that? Because they both wanna get into the EU and they know what they have to do to get there. So EU communications are weak. The EU's efforts to build its image and to have a global image that reflects its actual importance, weight and achievements. And we've just been talking about this. Is there a European narrative? Americans know what they celebrate on July 4. What do Europeans celebrate? How can we revive this remarkable but amorphous thing? And I think those are issues going forward. Just finally on the, and by the way, Macedonia, what I said about leaving the door open, certainly that applies to Macedonia. There was a question about the Vietnam War. Well, nations and relations do repair themselves over time and we've certainly seen that with Vietnam. We also know that the cost of that war and the tens of thousands of American dead and the imprint of it on the American consciousness is indelible. And I believe in perhaps a little more of a minor key, the experience of the Iraq and Afghan wars on the American psyche and consciousness will also be indelible. So we don't want to get into wars. Wars are terrible things. We're speaking here on the centennial of the outbreak of World War I, but I think if the post-war decades tell us anything, it's that the way to avoid wars is through resolve. It's not simply through folding and weakness. Thank you, Roger. That's great. I know you have three minutes to bring us home. I'll pick two questions. One about NATO and one about Cuba. Cuba is a very interesting analogy. First of all, NATO doesn't act. It's governments that act. Just like in the crisis, it wasn't the EU, it wasn't NATO, it was various foreign ministers that did. And in the past, it was obviously the United States that acted. And if I had my brothers, I would I would suggest to Mr. Obama to do a re-pivot. Go back to the central arena and do what, for instance, John F. Kennedy did in 61 when he was challenged by Khrushchev. He was a young man. I'm gonna teach him fear. One of his responses was put, I think, 30,000 fresh American troops into Europe. But again, NATO and the EU don't act and there's a nice little story which has the advantage of being true. Katharine Ashton, the foreign policy representative, was asked, Henry Kissinger asked 40 years ago, what's the phone number of the EU? He says, we have a phone number, it's mine. You dial my number and then you get the computer and it says, for Germany, press one, for France, press two, and so. So the re-pivot is one word I would use. Cuba is interesting because it was the reverse. It was when the Soviet Union challenged the United States on its turf, where the balance of strategic power, the balance of regional power and the balance of interest was clearly on the side of the United States. You don't want to challenge the other guy on your periphery. You want him to have to dislodge you from your center which is what Putin has done with the Crimea. That's why it's gonna be very difficult to dislodge. Now, in the long run, yes, I think in the long run history favors us. Russia is what the Soviet Union was, an extraction economy with nuclear weapons. Whose fate depends on the price of energy. The reason why the Gorbachev Soviet Union went down was that the price of energy suddenly hit the same real level as before the 73 oil crisis. So that's on our side. Putin has taken a giant leap backward from the global markets, from investment, from exchange, from technology transfer, not good for the economy. Empire is costly, the mess. Yes, you'll have to pay a lot to clean up the mess that is both the Eastern Ukraine and if he grabs it and the Crimea. And, you know, within five or 10 years, there will be oil and gas coming from the United States, but don't think that's gonna start flowing today. There may even be gas from the Israeli fields in the Mediterranean, but that's kind of a kind of medium-run consolation. The nice thing about history being on our side, which I kind of believe is that if history is on our side, we don't have to do anything. We just let history come to fruition. The problem with policy today and tomorrow is that the time frames don't quite match. So I'll come back to the beginning. Coalitions don't organize themselves. There has to be an organizer. There has to be somebody who assumes the cost. And that's why I demand from Mr. Obama. Mr. Obama, stop this pivot bullshit. Come back to Europe. I don't think he will. I like two words, resolve and repivot. I like it. Please join me in thanking our panelists for a wonderful discussion. Thank you.