 to New America. I'm Peter Berger. I run the international security program here. It's a great honor and privilege to introduce Jim Shudeau, who of course many of you know as CNN's chief national security correspondent, also CNN anchor, and the author of this new book, The Shadow War, Inside Russia and China's Secret Operations to Defeat America. The book was extracted in various forms in the Atlantic and also the Wall Street Journal, and it's had a lot of critical success. Jim, as you probably, you may not know that Jim was also the chief of staff at the US Embassy in China, so he knows the China story quite well. He's a graduate of Yale University, a former Fulbright fellow, lives here in Washington with his wife Gloria, former journalist for ABC News. They have three children. So I'm going to turn it over, and he's reported around the world, Asia, Europe and the Middle East, and I'll turn it over to Jim, who will make some opening observations about his, about the book, and then we'll open it up to a Q&A. Thank you very much, Jim. Thanks so much to all of you for taking time out of a busy sunny Friday. Thanks to the folks watching at home on C-SPAN. Appreciate having you here as well, and thank you to Peter for inviting me to New America. Peter was one of the first people to read a manuscript of the book early on, and since he didn't throw it back in my face or tear it up or embarrass me in another way, I thought that I was probably okay moving forward with this, and he was also kind enough to write one of the blurbs on the back of the book. I wanted to start by getting at how I came to write this book, what my intention is, but also what the process was to recognizing what I call the shadow war here, really connecting the dots on a number of fronts on which both Russia and China are contesting the US, seeking to surpass the US, and these were fronts of a shadow war that I experienced firsthand, on the ground, on the ground in Ukraine as the little green men took territory in Europe in the 21st century. I was on a spy plane over the South China Sea as China manufactured territory in the midst of seas claimed by half a dozen nations including US allies, US treaty allies, such as the Philippines. I went on a US nuclear submarine under the Arctic where US submarine forces are training to track more capable, quieter Russian submarines, another front in this war. I spent weeks traveling around US space command. President, of course, has talked about a space force. I wrote about this for the Wall Street Journal. The fact is the US already has a space force in the US Air Force space command, and there is already a space war underway in the heavens above us. So I was traveling to each of these fronts over the course of many years, both regarding Russia and China, and seeing that there were there were connections between these. They were not isolated, and in fact they were part of a strategy that both Russia and China are using with great effect. Now you write about anything today, you talk about anything today, and it of course is colored by the hyper-political environment that we are in. I want to be clear. This is not a political book. As I look back at how Republican and Democratic administrations have approached Russia and China, I spread the blame around widely because there has been consistent mistakes by both Republican and Democratic administrations in their approach to Russia and China. And just to establish that point, I want to read a section which is actually the last three paragraphs of the book in my epilogue that get to my personal motivation for writing this, if you'll bear with me. I write, my personal motivation in writing this book is far from political. I am writing this solely as a concerned American. I've always thought that living overseas cements rather than weakens your patriotism. Yes, you can often better identify your country's weaknesses from abroad, but you can also better recognize its strengths. In its vision, there is no question that America has far more to offer the world than China and Russia. The shadow war is in large part a battle of those visions. I see this book as alerting my fellow Americans to this war and the threat it presents to what our country holds dear. As the great Eric Severide once said of journalists, all that we try to do is live at the growing points of society and detect the cutting edges of history. The shadow war is one perhaps defining cutting edge of American history. And I feel that I spent a lot of time overseas as a journalist covering China, covering Russia, covering the wars in the Middle East, which is where I first encountered Peter Bergen, serving most of the time as a journalist, but for a brief time as chief of staff to the US ambassador in China. And as I saw the outlines of this shadow war, I also found that it shook my sense of my country and its place in the world. And I got three kids, as Peter mentioned, and I want their future to be as free and peaceful as my present and past has been. And that is part of the reason why I felt the need and the drive to connect the dots in a way and talk about this in the public conversation in a way that I don't hear. I don't hear journalists talk about much, but I certainly don't hear our lawmakers or our president speak about too much. I'm going to go back to the beginning of the book because this also gets to another reason I sat down to write to write these pages. A consistent error of the shadow war, and again, one committed by Republican and Democratic presidents and administrations is misreading Russia and China. I have the benefit in this book and they're the first people I think in my acknowledgments of having spoken to a good couple of dozen US intelligence officials, military commanders, diplomats, as well as European diplomats and intelligence officials, current and former, who have served multiple administrations. And they gave very honest and often self-critical insight to say, we miss this. We persisted in errors, even delusions. One of those being, and Director Michael Hayden put it in this term as did Ash Carter, mirroring. Mirroring in that we looked at Russia and China and imagined that they want what we want, even in the face of contradictory information and events. Fact is they don't want what we want. Doesn't mean we got to go to war, but they have different interests, they have different aspirations, and they want to play by different rules. Now, that's one mistake, but the trouble is committing that mistake even when you had contradictory evidence. And I begin the book with the poisoning of Sergei Skripal. You remember spring about this time last year, in fact, on the streets of Salisbury, two Russian agents use literally the most powerful nerve agent ever developed in the history of the world. More powerful than VX, which we don't make anymore, Novichok, to attempt to kill Sergei Skripal and his daughter Yulia. They, thankfully, and almost miraculously survived, a British woman who picked up what was a Nina Ricci bottle of perfume in which the Novichok was hidden, thought it was a Nina Ricci bottle of perfume, put it on her wrist and she died within days. Her partner, he luckily survived as well. You remember the outrage from this, and I spoke to numerous European diplomats and officials afterwards and they said to me, this is different. We have never seen anything like this, and Russia has been aggressive, but man, now they've used a nerve agent to kill someone on British soil. I speak with an intelligence official who describes to me how it was later discovered that these two Russian agents brought in enough Novichok to kill these two people, but they brought in enough to kill thousands. So brash that the Kremlin dispatched, and it is the view of U.S. and British intelligence that this was okay from the very top, that is, Vladimir Putin, dispatched two agents with enough nerve agent, the most powerful in the world, to threaten the lives of thousands of Brits. They think, you know what, we can get away with this, no problem. But as I was covering that story, I said, wait a second, this sounds familiar. Because when I was in London 12 years before, I remembered and covered the successful assassination of another dissident on British soil, Alexander Litvinenko, not with a nerve agent, with a very powerful radioactive agent, Polonium 210. So let me read from the opening chapter of the book. In 2006, 12 years before Skripal's poisoning alarmed the world, the Kremlin had already calculated it could get away with murder on Western soil. And it would be proved mostly correct. Britain's belated response was to expel four Russian diplomats a full decade after Litvinenko died. In 2017, the U.S. Congress would impose sanctions under the Magnitsky Act on Andrei Lugovoy, one of the two murderers, the only Russian national to be targeted by the United States. The penalties for the 2006 operation, delicately measured and long delayed, were clearly insufficient to change Russian behavior, perhaps laying the groundwork for a repeat on the streets of Salisbury in 2018. To add insult to grievous injury, Lugovoy, one of those assassins, would be elected a member of the Russian state Duma, where he still serves today. Two deadly operations on Western soil, using weapons that threatened the lives of thousands, carried out under orders from the Russian president 12 years apart. For Russia, it is difficult to identify one single attack as the opening battle of its shadow war on the United States and the West. However, the events of the last decade showed two consistent and disturbing lines, growing Russian aggression and persistent Western delusions about Russian intentions. The same pattern is discernible regarding China, which was launching its own inaugural battles in another arguably more existentially dangerous shadow war on the United States. In that, you actually see two consistent errors, one being persisting in this delusion in the face of starkly contradictory evidence, such as two alarming murders on Western soil, but also the response being too weak to change the behavior. Throw some sanctions on there. Yeah, you tried to murder someone on the streets of the UK with something that threatened the lives of thousands. We will make public statements critical. We will impose some sanctions. 12 years later, Russia calculates it could do it again, and they did. We will invade a country in Europe, a sovereign country, annex the territory in Crimea, continue to occupy the territory in the East. You will slap some sanctions. You will make some critical statements. But low and behold, five years later, we still control that territory. We, in the case of China, will create unsinkable aircraft carriers in the South China Sea. Yes, you will make some contradictory statements. Yes, you will fly over the islands. You will sail by those islands. And low and behold, four years later in that case, we still hold the territory. And by the way, we're increasingly militarizing those islands. Despite the Chinese president having made a promise to the US president, they would not do that. Those consistent errors over time. And that's always been striking to me here. I want to get to the many fronts of the shadow war, because these are the dots that I try to connect here. I think that Americans, oh goodness, that shows you what a nervous topic it is. Americans are aware of some of the fronts, and we talk about them on CNN, and you'll hear about it from the halls of Congress. People are aware that Russia has interfered in the US election. We talk about that a lot. They know that Russia is in Ukraine. We don't talk about it that much. We talk a little bit about the islands in the South China Sea, but rarely framed in the idea of this challenging the very idea of sovereign borders. That idea and treaties enforcing that idea have kept the peace in Europe for decades. It's important when a nation violates those and is allowed to violate those. That's another front. How many folks here know that Russia and China have already deployed weapons in space? Wow, it's too smart an audience. Normally when I ask that question, not as many people raise their hand. Well, he's done his research. I hope you'll catch up. There's a chapter in here on this. In fact, I did a documentary on this for CNN. So Russia has deployed what US Base Command refers to as kamikaze satellites, highly maneuverable, able to move from orbit to orbit, to circle like a predator circling its prey in multiple orbits, and disable essential US satellites either via directed energy weapons. Yes, there are lasers in space or old school just ram it, right? I mean, things in those orbits travel at 17,500 miles an hour. Even a spare nut or bolt can be destructive, but darn big satellite with little jets on the back and can do a lot of damage. China has, in addition to kamikaze-like satellites, deployed what US Base Command calls kidnapper satellites, grappling hook. They call them maintenance satellites, but if you ever saw Moonraker, they can also grab satellites right out of orbit. I would say Hollywood's a good 20, 30 years ahead of the game on this kind of stuff. Why do they target our satellite technology? Well, we're more advanced in satellite technology than any other country in the world, but also more dependent on it. Smart bombs aren't smart without GPS satellites. Drones don't fly. Any of you ever been embedded with US soldiers in the field? I've always been amazed when they take out their hardened laptops and open it up and through the Red Dot system, if you've ever heard about that, I can say, oh, there's a bad guy on the other side of that berm. That's a combination of satellite-based communications, but also surveillance technology that allows soldiers on the ground to be aware of their surroundings and where the threats are coming from. So we're more advanced, more dependent on that, but also the issue is you take out a few of those, you, paralyzed, could be too strong a word, but you certainly gravely disable the most powerful military in the world. And I speak in this book to a lot of deployed military commanders who say, I don't know if we'd know how to fight today without those capabilities, because we've grown so used to them. The US Navy is actually teaching folks how to use sextants again, just in case they end up in this situation where this stuff doesn't work. So that's the space front of the shadow war. Another one is under the waves. Got a whole chapter in here on submarine warfare. Again, Hollywood ahead of the game. Think, hunt for red October? Quieter submarines are first attack weapons. Russia and China have both been deploying faster, quieter submarines, more difficult for US submarine forces to track and detect. That's a problem because that weapon can show up off the coast of your homeland and if they get through and they have gotten through before, can in the event of war launch nuclear weapons without warning. And you will see every once in a while you'll read headlines about a Russian sub showing up off the coast of Florida. I'm sure you're familiar with the story of the Chinese sub that popped up in the middle of the US carrier group without warning. Interestingly, the Chinese not doing so well in the nuclear sub category, but they've got really capable diesel-electric subs, which in some circumstances are quieter, and they're good at doing this. That's another front in the war. I take particular focus in this book on the Arctic because the Arctic is another field of play in the great game because as the ice shrinks, it's more accessible. There's talk of the Northern Passage. But submarines are an extension of American and Russian power up there. Another front in the shadow war. Of course, there's the cyber aspect as well, election interference being just one facet of that, but there's a whole chapter in here on China's extremely successful efforts to steal US private sector and public sector intellectual property. I focus on one gentleman, Sue Bin, Stephen Sue, who is a Chinese businessman with a lot of friends in the US. And over the course of four years, I've seen hundreds of gigabytes of data on the F-35, the F-22, and the C-17, three of America's most advanced military aircraft today. And you can Google these pictures. You might have seen them already. China is flying three jets that look remarkably like the F-35, the F-22, and the C-17. Stealing works. I speak to Bob Anderson in this chapter, former head of counter-intel for the FBI, who was involved in the Sue Bin case. And he says that in his view, the FBI is aware about 10% of what China is up to in terms of these kinds of operations. He makes the point that with the growth of cyber capabilities, that they don't even need the physical guy on the ground in the US as much anymore. And he talks of that you have these kind of farms of tens of thousands of very capable Chinese hackers basically doing what he refers to as a national service program for the government of hacking into US systems. And they do a damn good job of it. Now, if you think China is a more subtle player in this game, think again, Bob Anderson, who has been involved in a lot of these cases, and he's a former cop in Delaware, so he talks like a cop. He's one of my favorite interviews in the book. But I'm just going to read the way he describes Chinese intelligence. The Chinese are more vicious than the Russians. Anderson told me, pausing to make sure I was listening, they will kill people at the drop of a hat. They will kill families at the drop of a hat. They will do it much more quietly inside of China or in one of their territories, but they absolutely, if they have to, will be a very vicious service. This is blood sport on each of these fronts and don't underestimate how the other guys are willing to operate in these battles. I think the final point I'll make before I let Peter Grill me and members of the audience grill me as well is the point of it being another mistake that successive presidents, again, Democratic and Republican, have all calculated that they could get these relationships right. You remember? President George W. Bush looked into Putin's eye and saw somebody he could work with. Learned later, not so much. Think of the invasion of Georgia. President Obama and Hillary Clinton, they had the reset button months after the invasion of Georgia, didn't work out so well, came around to figuring it out. President Trump, of course, has calculated and still calculates that he can get it right in some way. Now, on Russia, he still will not call out Russian behavior on a whole host of fronts, whether in person with the Russian president or via his Twitter account or the many other forums where he's been given opportunity to do so. On China, obviously, he's being more aggressive in the trade front, particularly trade secrets, et cetera. Of course, the question is, has his approach changed or solidified Chinese behavior? We're going to be seeing that over the course of the weeks and months to follow here. Again, as I come back to this, it is a pattern of years, a pattern of learning that if you speak to submarine commanders, if you speak to the commanders of spy planes, if you speak to folks inside the NSA operations center who are fighting the cyber attacks by the thousands every day, intelligence officials, they speak about this threat from Russia and China in very clear terms. They are desperate for leadership from the top. You don't hear that discussion from the top or even really from the halls of Congress. And that's what you need to come up and articulate and pursue a credible strategy for pushing back. Final point, I will say, so it's not all a downer. The final chapter of the book is a host of solutions, if you want to call them that. But tactics, as part of a broader strategy to push back against this, I pulled half a dozen smart people with far more experience than me on this. Jim Clapper, Michael Hayden, John Scarlett, the former head of MI6, Ash Carter, et cetera, and we kind of crystallized that at the end because there is a way forward and some of these are ways that are already being pursued. But all of them come back to the fact that you can't pursue that in a contiguous, credible way unless you have an articulated strategy from the top and backing from the top. That's what the guys from the subs all the way to the top say they don't have yet today. That's the shadow war. I look forward to my interrogation. Well, thank you, Jim, and I guess the first big question is, I mean, do the Chinese have a version of the Monroe Doctrine in Asia where they just want us out or do they have something sort of more expansive which is they want to replace us as the world superpower or do they not really know they're just working it out? What do you think? The latter. And it's that their ambitions have grown over time. And I speak a lot to Andrew Erickson who's done a good amount. He teaches this at the Naval War College. He describes how in 1949, actually prior to 1949, China laid out these goals in detail, a flowchart of how they were going to approach their power. The first thing was let's solidify our control and Han China, Han-dominated China, then solidify control in the environs, Xinjiang, Tibet. Watch the history, did that in the 50s, right? Strengthen, build the military, go out to the first island chain, the second island chain. What they refer to as the near seas and then at a later date, the far seas, et cetera. And you've seen in their moves, well, for instance, the man-made islands, 600 miles off their shore, but they now have a naval port in Sri Lanka, right? They now have a military base in Djibouti. Belt and Road is designed in a sort of soft power way to extend its power. You've seen them very active on the African continent, but increasingly so in Latin America. So they have both economic interests beyond and slowly but surely establishing capabilities beyond to help enforce those interests. Bigger picture question which is related is that folks will always ask me, which is a bigger threat, Russia or China? And when you ask the Intel folks, they will put Russia and China at the top and typically say Russia, bigger short-term, more dangerous short-term threat, longer-term China is the real threat because China has the true capability of overcoming the U.S. in time. It's not guaranteed, but they have a capability to stronger economy, bigger population, et cetera. And does China want to surpass the U.S.? Absolutely. Read the speeches, read the editorials in the state media. This is about regaining their rightful place on the top of the world. That's the way they look at it. Yeah, because they feel since the opium wars of the 1840s that they've been kind of essentially humiliated. Exactly. And what's interesting about that is Russia has a similar kind of victimization mindset going back not as far, going back to 1991, the collapse of the Soviet Union. They feel that they were humiliated. Gorbachev, as folks in this room know better than me, is a villain, not a hero in Russia. And what's interesting is Chinese leaders study the fall, the collapse of the Soviet Union. China studies it because they say we don't want to be that. Yeah. And so you were in the Obama administration working for Gary Locke as his chief of staff. And I mean, Obama, my impression is Obama did go to the Chinese at a certain point, sort of say knock it off in the intellectual property, the cyber intrusions. And it kind of worked at least for a period. Is that true? Well, I talked to Rick Leggett, who was a former deputy director of the NSA, highly involved in this. He was head of their NTOC, basically their Cyber Operations Response Center, that kind of thing. He said that after Obama delivered that warning that there was a discernible downturn inactivity in terms of volume, but not a substantive change in China's aggression. Yeah. That's still as active in terms of what they were taking away in the private and public sectors. There is this, the book by the two Chinese People's Liberation Army Colonels, Unrestricted Warfare from 1999 in which they basically lay out what they're going to do. Yes. So, I mean, what is it that they're going to do? And I mean, you touched on a lot of it up here, but just in general, they know they can't beat us or they, for a long time, they knew that there was no point in trying to build 11 aircraft carriers and try and compete on that level. So what is their approach? Their approach is fundamentally asymmetric. The shadow war is by its nature asymmetric warfare because they know Russia and China calculate. They can't beat us like this. Russia can't gain the territory in Europe by rolling the tanks across the border. China in a carrier on carrier, I mean, they've got this old Ukrainian thing that they've actually made some progress on, but they're not going to build 12 aircraft carriers. So they do it in an asymmetric fashion. And it's interesting. The strategies, Russians' jarosim of doctrine, you certainly heard that. And again, he, like the Chinese, wrote a public essay about this in 2013, kind of laying out, little green men, hybrid war operations, et cetera. The Chinese call it something different, but it's very similar. It's called Winning Without Fighting. And the idea is, again, finding ways for David to beat Goliath in military terms. And this is a piece of the shadow war that I haven't emphasized yet, but do a lot in the book. Below the threshold of where the U.S. reacts consequentially or by shooting back, in effect. For instance, let's send some little green men into Ukraine, take the territory slowly but surely. You have it and, you know, there's no war similar with China and the South China Sea. The thing is that over time, they stretch the threshold, right? So if you're successful there, and then you push a little bit further. I'll give an example or two examples. What do folks in the U.S. National Security circles worry about now as a next front? Estonia, right, or the Baltics. They're NATO members, okay? Article 5, et cetera. But would the U.S. really go to war to defend Estonia today when the president questions the usefulness of NATO? Or when Tucker Carlson does a segment on a show two months ago, questioning whether U.S. boys and girls should go to die for Estonia? What does the Kremlin calculate about that? Will they push that limit further and go after a NATO partner? You go to the Pentagon, they talk about Taiwan, right? We have a long-standing treaty and commitment to Taiwan. But how many folks in this room, would the U.S. go to war today if China invaded Taiwan? What if they did it more slowly? What if they did it Ukraine style? You know, these are questions. And they're stretching that threshold over time. I mentioned NATO. I mean, looking at it from a Russian and Chinese perspective, I mean, Russia certainly saw NATO expansion in Eastern Europe as being highly threatening and part of our sort of... And I'm sure the Chinese feel similarly about lots of things that we've done. So what is their perspective about us in terms of our... Because, I mean, you're portraying, rightly, I think, that they have a plan and they are expanding. But how do they see us? They, meaning Russia and China. Yeah. So a couple of things. I don't want to entirely equate them, although it has struck me, and one of the reasons I wrote this book is that their strategies and approaches are so similar for two countries from different continents, languages, histories, et cetera. Very similar approaches. But their view of us is not dissimilar, right? They have a sense. I spent a lot of time in China. And you hear some of this in Russia, too, of America as a declining power, right? They look at us as having our best days. They laugh a little bit at us with our internal divisions and other issues that we've shown. They also seek to exacerbate those divisions and issues. I mean, as you know, and I talk about this a lot in the book, a lot of the election interference was not just to advantage or disadvantage one candidate or another. It was just to expand these fissures. And that works. Michael Hayden talks in the book a lot about the take a knee protests in the NFL where Russian trolls were very active because it was a nice wedge issue and the Russians could help drive that wedge in deeper. And he makes a great point there. One way they knew the Russians were involved in this early is that the trolls were screwing up the hashtag. Instead of take a knee, they were calling it take the knee because when you're translating, it's hard to get the particles right and some of the Russian trolls were using the wrong hashtag because they were getting in there. They're into Black Lives Matter, that kind of thing. So they view us as declining and having seen our best days and they also seek to kind of accelerate that in any way that they can. When historians write the history of the Trump administration, will they say basically on the really big thing, which was China, because Russia at the end of the day, the economy is the size of Spain. It's really an on player. But on this big thing, he got it really right and maybe the tactics weren't right or there was more freedom of navigation exercises that we did try and apply a lot more pressure on them. Is it too early to tell what historians will say? Is there something to the idea that on this thing, he's kind of more or less getting it right even if the tactics are wrong? Well, credit where credit is due. Trump is confronting China on bad trade practices in a way that previous presidents, Republican and Democrat have not. Certainly on stealing trade secrets but also access to the Chinese market. When I was at the embassy in Beijing, it just amazed me, US companies of course knew they were getting raked over the coals, their technology stolen, their access denied or restricted and so on, but they were too afraid and they would report it to us but they would say, listen, don't make a big deal of it. I don't want you guys to stick your necks out on this because they were worried about being punished even more or denied access. It's like the almost battered wife syndrome in this. It's changing now, companies getting more public about it, but for so many years, first you had this delusion that, well, you open China up economically, it's going to liberalize over time. No, and then you just had straight up fear. I don't want to go there because I'm going to be punished more. So Trump is confronting that in a way that was necessary, frankly. Now, the trouble is, knowing the Chinese psyche, if you beat China over the head with a baseball bat and say, we, America, are telling you to change your economic model, which you have calculated is in your national interests and you have calculated has served you pretty darn well in the last two and a half decades, three decades, and who can argue with the results, brought several hundred million people out of poverty. If an American president comes and says, change it or I'm going to slap tariffs on you and puts you in a position where to make a deal, you have to back down. I have to make the point to people, China is an authoritarian regime. It is not a democracy, but it has domestic politics and domestic politics prevent a Chinese president from being seen to be cow-towing, I use that word on purpose, cow-towing to a U.S. president. So Trump might have had the predicate, to quote the great Bill Barr, but has the tactic hardened the position. Jack Ma has made this point publicly that we are not in a months-long trade war, we are now in a decades-long trade war with China. So then you're saying, the tactics are potentially so intrusive that this is actually maybe not the right way. Identifying the problem is one thing, but if the tactics are sort of... Yeah, this is basically a Trump tactic with everything, right? With allies and adversaries. Beat them up, you know. Steal tariffs on Canada, tariffs on Mexico over the border. Iran, we're out of the deal, you better cut a deal with that. North Korea, we're going to squeeze you economically. Where has that worked so far? Well, I hope you remember Ronald Reagan was widely derided as a sort of amateur actor and somebody who was out of his depth who essentially ended the Cold War by basically two approaches. One is extreme confrontation in places like Afghanistan and I'm in the budget team, but also going to Reykjavik and sort of, you know, really playing nice with Gorbachev. So, I mean, getting these things right obviously is very hard, but I mean, there is this sort of, is he using sticks and carrots or just sticks or to quote the great Ali G, what if he doesn't, what if they don't like carrots? But like, what is the right mix? Because it's not... You don't know yet. Yeah, we don't know. We'll see. One, it's not in your book so much, but it strikes me it's sort of interesting that, I mean, when you have the Chinese putting in concentration camps of a million people, it seems that our response, and I say the United States and maybe even the world in general's response to this has been somewhat muted. Is that a reasonable... Is it existent at all? Yeah, I mean, why do you think that is? Human rights have stopped being a priority of this administration's foreign policy on any, I mean, Saudi Arabia relationship. Yeah. And it's been set up as a false choice because you'll hear from the administration of the President's defenders, we can't throw the entire US-Saudi relationship in the toilet because of this. That's not... I mean, the US has had credible, long-standing relationships with friends or frenemies where they've contested on these issues while maintaining security relations. I mean, the US has a very deep relationship with Israel at a time when it was still contesting settlements, right? You know, and calling them illegal through Republican and Democratic presidents. But now, in this administration, none of those issues are a priority. Speaking of the administration on Russia, it seems that you have the sort of Trump position and then you have the rest of the government position. And the rest of the government position seems somewhat... Yeah. ...robust. I mean, so how would you characterize that split and does it even make it... If Trump is sort of rhetorically embracing Putin but the government kind of grinds on... Yeah. ...sanctions people and puts... What difference, if anything, does it make? Well, we'll see, right? I mean, a couple examples of that. First of all, in the cyberspace, and I talk about this in the book, under the Trump administration, cyber command, and I'm sure there are folks in the room who know this better than me, has been enabled to use offensive measures to... There was a good piece... David Ignatius wrote it. I think it's in today's Washington Post about, you know, basically go out and attack the hackers before they come, you know, out in the far battlefields and cyberspace. So they've been given more offensive flexibility than the Obama administration was willing to grant them because Obama was worried, and this is not an isolated school of thought, that you could easily get into an escalation kind of situation if you go too aggressively. Trump administration has, you know, again, credit where credit is due. They've been willing to push back there. On the flip side, as you know, this president has not made election security in the state a priority one cabinet-level meeting. You know, how does that affect the response? Can you have a whole-of-government response? You speak to folks in that space. They will say to me all the time, you need a whole-of-government response. NATO is another one where you have this kind of contradictory response where, yes, you have... And this started under the Obama administration, but there's been consistency here of deployment of U.S. forces in Eastern Europe. You had some Marines in Estonia, small contingent, U.S. Marines, 1200 or so, I believe in Estonia. You had an F-15 wing, I believe in Poland. You have some more exercises, all that kind of stuff. So that's good in terms of deterrent. When you have that at the same time that a president is saying, well, would we really defend a NATO ally? Is it really necessary? That kind of thing. Which signal does Russia read as more definitive? 12 F-15s in Poland? Or the president's saying, not a big deal to me. We don't know yet. But there's real concern. If you speak to the Estonians, they're concerned. Well, actually, that raises an interesting question, which is President Trump has actually been quite lucky, and the sense has been no crisis. And if you go back to the George W. Bush before 9-11, which was the ultimate crisis, it was the P-3 Orion incident. So, I mean, could that happen again? What would that look like if there was some kind of crisis between the United States and China that went beyond just like this trade thing? Well, we thought about that when I was on the P-8 over the South China Sea. So that was a P-3 in 2000. So the P-8 has now replaced it as the principal U.S. surveillance aircraft. And we were flying over these man-made islands and got challenged by the Chinese Navy eight times. The challenges became more and more aggressive. What did they say? This is Chinese sovereign territory. Get out, you know, quote, unquote. Now, they did not, at that time, they did not have deployed aircraft on the island, so they couldn't scramble aircraft to challenge you in the air. But they are doing that more now. So 2000 was the P-3. So think of China's growth in military capability, economic power, and ambition in the two decades since. China less likely to back down, saving face domestically if you were to have a collision like that. Remember, Chinese pilot died in that collision. So what we're trying to do now, it would be a heck of a lot harder to find the off-ramp if you had that kind of collision in the skies. Is Chinese nationalism a bigger force now than decades ago? Yes, absolutely. How can you measure it? So, I mean, I was on the ground there for a couple years in the embassy, and we would meet with a lot of Chinese groups of all ages, and one stuck in my mind. We went down to Tianjin and met with college students, and we were talking about the South China Sea, and what struck me was that the college students, so 18 to 22, were, I asked them the question, and this is a question you hear from U.S. military strategists, are the U.S. and China destined for war? Classic rising power against an existing power, a lot of conflicting interests. I asked them that question. What struck me was that the kids all thought, yes. Their professors didn't from a different generation, but the kids, three out of four, were like, yes. What kind of thing? And you're proudly so that, well, don't hold us down. And think of that generation as being a generation that only knows China on the rise, right? Their parents and teachers remember the depths from which they came. I'm not saying that because 25 university kids in Tianjin think they're going to war, but that was just one data point that stuck in my mind. You read the editorials in the papers, you listen to Xi Jinping's rhetoric in response to the tariff war, there's an increasing bravado. Graham Allison, of course, has written about this at the Thucydides trap, and it made the point that the only time that a rising power was really accommodated by the world. Superpowers are the rise of the British, the rise of the Americans that was accommodated by the British. But obviously Britain and the United States share laws, customs. Sort of a language. Yeah, sort of a language. So how do you come down on the question of that conflict is kind of inevitable? Me personally, I don't think it's inevitable. But I think we have to do a lot to avoid or to reduce the chances of that. And some of that is in the final chapter. One is we've got to negotiate treaties in cyberspace and in space because you have to set the rules of war so that you could avoid paths to conflict. You have to set clearer red lines and enforce those red lines so that you don't tempt behaviors that may reach a breaking point and kind of head them off before they get to that stage. I mean, the point folks will make often is that the U.S. and the Soviet Union had like $2 billion of trade a year. The U.S. and China have $600 billion. Many, many multiples. So we have a tremendous mutual interest in keeping a peaceful relationship but also keeping a peaceful world. Now, what's interesting now is you're seeing the fraying of that and there's been a lot of writing in the last few weeks in the midst of this trade war about how you could see yourself retreating into economic silos to some degree. But we're a long way from that because we still have so many symbiotic interests. So you hope that that makes a difference. Russia, it's one of the reasons why, again, going back to who's the bigger threat is that you'll often hear Russia is the kind of more dangerous one because you don't have those kinds of connections. Plus Russia's, you know, the declining power, a little bit more of a chip on its shoulder, are they therefore more dangerous and more likely to swing back? Yeah. Well, let's open it to questions. You have a question? Raise your hand and wait for the mic. And we'll start with a gentleman in the blue t-shirt here. Oh, thank you. Do I have to wait for the mic? Yeah, it'll be there in five seconds. I have a question. Can you identify yourself? Sorry, just... My name's Jeremiah Rosman. I'm a national security analyst for the Association of the U.S. Army. So I was recently at an event at Brookings where Angelina Stent, I think she wrote the book, Putin's World, said that if Putin did buy Trump, he must be having buyer's remorse. Basically saying that the Trump administration has been quite hard on Russia. No one's been tougher on Russia than Trump, as the president said yesterday, right? Yeah. So I guess he'd agree with that. No, no, I don't. Listen, I'm glad you're out. I mean, get to your question because I... My question is how do you and how would China and Russia, in your opinion, interpret the administration's national security strategy and national defense strategy that kind of refocuses the U.S. for great power competition, specifically naming China and Russia for the first time since the end of the Cold War? It's a fair question of debate, right? So President Trump, his administration, had taken steps that the prior administrations did not. One in the cyber realm, right? Enabling... Not true. It's not like we're turning off the lights in Moscow, but, you know, more aggressive cyber activity. He gave, for instance, more offensive weapons to the Ukrainian forces. You know, again, a step that the Obama administration... I mean, there are a lot of restrictions on where you could use it, but, you know, I'm just citing examples of things that the prior administration did not do. On the flip side, the president, in his public comments, won't point out or challenge the Russian president, particularly on election interference, watered down the Deripaska sanctions. I mean, there's been a lot of reporting on that. So, you know, you have some conflict there in the steps, and then, of course, the president's comments about the NATO alliance, which is arguably your best tool for pushing back against Russia, right? You and your European allies together pushing back. So, you have some cognitive dissonance, you know, in the midst of that policy there. So, I don't think the president can credibly say that no one's been tougher. It's a different approach. Yes, some things, but in other ways, weaker, right? How does it all fit together? That's the question. And has the president recognized, acknowledged the degree of the Russian threat and articulated for the American people what he's doing about it? I would say, no, but I think it's a fair question. You know, how does that fit together when they've done some things, but not other things, some of them conflicting, you know, when if you listen to, for instance, the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, or it's an American general, the way he talks about Russia, you're like, oh, okay, I guess we're okay. And when he travels to European capitals, he makes them all feel fine. And then the president says something, and he gets called, and he's saying, what is it, you know? I don't know. We don't know. So, that conflict is important. Then you have to wonder, as I was saying earlier, what is the Kremlin, you know, which one does it listen to more? Does it listen to the Supreme Allied Commander in Europe, or does it listen to what's coming from the president, you know, as you make those calculations? Okay, this lady over here in green, and then we'll come in front. My name's Caroline Haggis. I'm a fellow at the Stimson Center. I was wondering if you could take the U.S. out of the analysis for a minute and speak to the relationship between Russia and China. Are they using these tactics against each other? How competitive is that relationship in your opinion? Right, yeah. A lot of folks ask that question. Are they working together on this? No, they have their own interests. I mean, there are, I mean, like any country, you know, where the interests coincide, they might be working on the same side of things. I think if you watch North Korea, for instance, both Russia and China like to make themselves involved and sometimes play spoiler. There's a reason both Russia and China are helping North Korea evade sanctions, you know? How did North Korean missiles make so many advances, you know? I mean, there's Iranian help, probably some Russian engines on those missiles, too. So you have some spoiling going on there that both of them are doing, but to their own interests, not like they sort of sat down at the table and say, let's do this together. And there are areas where they actually are in direct conflict. If you look in the east of Russia, low population, there's a lot of Chinese influence there where Russia is very concerned about it. So they're not working together unless it serves their interests and there are other places where they're working against each other. Primarily, though, they're both interested in China's case, straight up surpassing the U.S. In Russia's case, dragging down the U.S. where it can kind of in a zero-sum game sense. To any degree that we are diminishing the U.S., we are adding to our own power and stature, et cetera. Jonathan, in front here. Albert Weidt, a pro bono attorney, but since 1962, I've worked in the government on U.S. military and intelligence ways to deal with threats from China and Russia. But since Tiananmen, I'm equally involved in human rights in China. So my question relates to your last comment as to one of the things the U.S. could do or the ways to avoid this Thucydides trap, which was treaties and agreements for a country like China that daily violates its statutes, its constitution, and many, many international treaties regarding torture and international relations at the drop of a hat. In that kind of a country, what good do you think the treaties would do in terms of really protecting us, except maybe if we see they're violating it, warning them, but we do that all the time. No, it's a good question. It's a great question because part of the shadow war is intended to disrupt the, quote, unquote, international rules-based order that the U.S. helped put in place post-World War II to reduce the chance of conflict, a whole host of organizations, UN, WTO, et cetera, NATO. And from Russia and China's perspective, they see that international rules-based order as fundamentally skewed against their favor, right? So they look at that way. That said, these countries do make treaties when they're in their interest, right? The treaties they're violating are treaties they have signed. True. No, I mean, if you look at Russia's violation of the INF, right? And China, too. No question. So that's a problem. Now, of course, we would like to hold ourselves up as being the great defender of international treaties, but if you look in the last couple of years, we've unilaterally pulled out. I mean, we pulled out of the JCPOA what you think about it, but it was a treaty negotiated by the U.S. The president has raised questions about the NATO treaty pulled out of the Climate Change Agreement. If you're a foreign country partner, you say, well, wait a second. Are U.S. politics so divisive and so on a pendulum that if I sign a treaty with the government here in the next election, is it going to swing back here and then it's not going to be worth the paper it's printed on? So the U.S. has added, you know, what kind of partner are we for those treaties? That's a problem. We also have to gain back credit credibility so that you could create circumstances for that. Yeah. Okay, this gentleman here in front, and then this gentleman. Aaron Goldzimmer, donor advisor. I mean, you've spoken a couple of times to our internal divisions, and it seems to me that in a very real way, like, we are much more focused on, like, the threat of the other political party than we are on Russia or China or climate change or any other very real threat that we face. Yeah. So to what extent does this problem of our not being able to have leadership that recognizes and takes seriously these threats, to what extent does that just reduce to a problem of U.S. political dysfunction and there we are again. And of course, it very much, as you said, in their interest to exacerbate that. Jim Clapper tells a story early on. I mean, he asked a question. He said, you know, he makes a point. He said that the U.S. is not very good at responding to things it hasn't quite seen yet, right? And it gives the example of 9-11. He says that if in August of 2001, George Tenet had said, listen, American people, we've got to walk you all through detectors. You've got to take your shoes off and no liquids on planes because we've heard a lot of chatter and this is the price you have to pay to prevent this. People are like, what? You know, I'm not going to do that. You know, what is the Pearl Harbor, right? That's going to spark action. Now, you can argue that 2016 election interference was, right? I mean, that's a remarkably bold, impactful, you know, strike at the core institution of our country, a presidential election. And yet because of the division, you have close to half of the country and a president who won't acknowledge it as a real thing. In the president's case, seemingly because it diminishes his victory, but even the facts of it, it's not just the president, right? Because I'm sure you've talked to people and you see it. Was it really that big? Oh, it was really, I mean, one trope I hear repeated. Oh, it was $100,000 worth of Facebook ads. That's all it was. Well, you clearly haven't read the Mueller report, right? And yet people just kind of persist in that because they can't let go. So have we already seen the Pearl Harbor, but not reacted to it because of the division? That's a big problem. That's a huge problem. And, you know, trade is, you know, China and trade is interesting because on that plot, you do have a bipartisan agreement. China is a bad actor. We got to do something about it. A lot of the, you know, disagreement is on really not so much how you react to it, but the degree of the reaction. That's another reason why a lot of folks think that this trade war is going to be years and years long because even if you have a Democratic president, are they really going to pull back from challenging China? I mean, maybe not the tariffs that Trump is using, but they'll still use a tough response. So maybe on that issue, there's more agreement, but on the other issues, there's not. And that's, how could you move forward if you can't, if folks on the same side can't even agree about it? Was pulling out of TPP smart? No, absolutely not. It was a massive, massive victory for China. We'll do this gentleman, Mark, and then this gentleman. Thank you. Thank you, Peter. Thank you, Jim. Mark Jacobson currently at Amherst College. Jim, my question, I'm going to try and take the White House out of this for a second as hard as it is. The type of warfare you've described, not going to challenge the nature of war that it never changes, but the type of warfare you've described is one that the Pentagon has problems with because there's not enough blast heat and fragmentation and one that USAID and State Department have a problem with because it might be in their purview, but they don't like to use the word war. In your interviews that you've seen, do you think that conceptually the senior bureaucratic leaders, uniformed and not uniformed, understand this and are willing to engage with these threats the way one would a classic quote, war by mobilizing elements of national power? I think finally, yes, now. Now, it took time and it takes time, but you're right that it's hard to capture the attention of the American public or even lawmakers on the Hill because there's not a big hold in the ground, ground zero in New York and that's part of the brilliance of the strategy because it's meant to be shadowy and below the threshold. So it works. It's really damn good. Now, over time, folks, and again, it's not just the kind of bespectacled eggheads. It's the guys driving the nuclear subs. They talk about it this way or the folks driving the spy planes. They know it and they are and the folks at space command. You sit down there, you meet them. They call themselves space warriors. They use that phrase phraseology today. So they feel like they are. So that's not theoretical. It's playing out in real terms, but it is harder to grab the attention it's harder to grab. There's less pressure on a president, for instance, to confront it because it's not as visible, tactile, that kind of thing. It's probably harder to get money spent on things, although Pentagon has no problem getting money for anything else right now. So forget about the money part. It is harder to focus attention but at least they're talking about it and they're concocting strategies and taking some of the steps, not all the steps. For instance, space command. I mentioned in the book how in 2015 General John Highton, then the head of space of command, now the head of strategic command, went out there and raised the alarm about this and said, guys in classified session to all these space people said, you got to get it together because we're getting our butts kicked and here's what we got to do. So those folks are thinking in those terms but we're not thinking in those terms. I'm Mike Nelson. I primarily work on Internet policy and cybersecurity but when I did a Washington DC scan of your book which I just bought 20 minutes ago, looked at the index. How many copies did you buy? And the index makes it clear this is a comprehensive look at a lot of interesting fronts in the war and you haven't talked about a couple of them. One of them is in the Arctic and the Arctic isn't in the index but Norway is and you talked for several pages about what the Russians have been doing to claim the Arctic as their space. Just yesterday there was a very interesting... You're saying I don't talk about it? No you do. I froze my tail off to talk about the Arctic by the way. I did not see in the index the word Venezuela and there's been some very interesting things going on there. Too recent for this book sadly for a May release. What would you do about the Arctic and what would you do about Venezuela? On the Arctic, because I do talk about that Russia has an enormous force advantage in the Arctic. They have what they call an arc of steel along their northern coast which is dozens of airstrips, military bases, naval bases, loads of subs deployed plus they have icebreakers and the US Navy has how many icebreakers? Anybody know? They say operational but the Navy has none. Russia has like two dozen. Our primary weapon up there if you want to call it or a force projector is the submarine so that's going to be the US focus. The US is more active. The ice exercises that I go on are now... Britain had dropped out of it now they're back into it. You have some sense among the allies that we have to do better up there. The US is pushing back doing its best to track better and so on. There's definitely attention being focused up on the Arctic whether it's enough is a question because Russia has an enormous force advantage. Venezuela is interesting there aren't little green men. What's interesting about Venezuela little green men in Ukraine the Russian forces in Venezuela are straight up uniform patches on their arms. Russia is not hiding its military interest in Venezuela or when they land a nuclear capable bomber there so it's pretty front and center Russia's interest there. The US talks about military options my understanding is they've never really been seriously considered there that's more like a cage rattling but it's also interesting because that is in our backyard. That's a real challenge too. In a way you can kind of look at it Russia might look at the US in Ukraine now we don't have uniformed soldiers in Ukraine but Russia did believe that the Maidan was all concocted by the CIA so it is definitely if it had happened earlier it would have been a chapter in the book on the shadow war. This gentleman here and this gentleman here and then also us in the back and then we're going to wrap it up. My question is in the 21st century it seems Russia China and the United States have not learned a lesson of history pointed out amongst others by Kennedy in the rise and fall of great nations that becoming a superpower is a parrhic victory. That's a good question. We're going to put all these questions together. The one at the back and then Hugh on the back for your hand up. Herbettle community activist peace justice and environment and I'm getting increasingly pessimistic. I take heart in some developments like the greens gaining in Europe recently and the Green New Deal and some other progressive efforts I would call getting traction, a lot more attention and support here in the US and yet we grew up on the dystopian novels in 1984 more recently Handmaid's Tale that already exists in China and Russia to some extent in many other countries already now we saw it in Nazi Germany the question is where do you see the long-term optimism especially when every time the US the war I mean we've never really been out of this through the Cold War and all but every time we get in the war our civil rights are violated suppressed and we become more and more like the countries we're opposing. Okay I'm in front of Hugh down here. Hugh Grindstaff THIS for Diplomats Yesterday General Ashley head of the Defense Intelligence Agency gave a talk at Hudson about China and Russia's arms it sort of brought me back to a sense of reality that we are up against two forces they really wanted to destroy us but yet being in the military now and being at a high level you'd have to think to yourself how far do I go to really defend my country in that sense that you're left saying if I say something wrong I'm gone So peric victory, optimism and pessimism Okay I'll do one first One of the problems with Shadow Wars there's no beginning no end right you read the Gerasimov Doctrine if you want to call it that it's permanent war there's no signing on the Missouri at the end of this there's no shelling of Fort Sumter it sort of begins silently and continues on and that's part of the issue so you have to make a lot of long term changes to push back and you're not going to put out the fire but you want to keep it to a low smolder it's kind of like fighting a forest fire a little bit that kind of thing you're not going to put it all out with a fire hose and that's hard for Americans to do we like beginnings and ends but we have to adjust to the adversaries strategy if we want to effectively push back against it is it a peric victory to be a superpower well, here's the thing this is happening as politically there's a drive to pull back that's part of Trump's appeal and strategy we don't want to get caught up in this stuff anymore but you do that at your own peril obviously from being involved in these issues and the fact is I mean the American argument is granted I don't know that I swallow this entirely but there is evidence just ask Southeast Asian nations whether they'd rather have the U.S. and Asia or not they want the U.S. and Asia in part to be a counterbalance to China because they don't want to get bullied by China so they like an international rules based order they don't want to be told what to do they don't want to be dominated not mind having the U.S. policeman present there you know you may have a lot of pushback in Europe against U.S. presence there but will they you know will they like it if Russia successfully carries out a coup in Montenegro right you know what they attempted or if they invade the Baltics no so you know there are benefits to us and our allies to having us present so as nice it would be to walk back we would pay a cost for walking back if you're asking about what we can do about it I think be informed call your congressman be aware and also be aware on the positive side that there are loads of folks in uniform and out in uniform that are thinking this way that are already pushing back I've met them I'm impressed by them I'm sure many of you know them some of you probably are them so I think we're going to be okay thank you thank you should I get the sign sign yours name