 Ladies and gentlemen, good afternoon and welcome to the beautiful headquarters of the Lowey Institute here at 31 Blyth Street for the 2023 Owen Harry's lecture. I, Michael, fully love the executive director of the Institute. I'd like to start by acknowledging the traditional custodians of the land on which the Institute stands, the Gadigal of the Eora Nation. I pay my respects to their elders, past and present. Let me also send my best wishes to all my friends in Israel after Saturday's attack by Hamas, and I must say I was very pleased to see the sales of the Sydney Opera House lit last night in the colours of Israel's flag. Ladies and gentlemen, this year, this year's Owen Harry's lecture will be delivered by Shivshanka Menon, the 2023 Rothschilden company, distinguished international fellow at the Lowey Institute. Owen Harry's, for whom this lecture is named, passed away in June 2020. He was one of the giants of the foreign policy world. In Australia, he was an academic and a prime ministerial advisor. He also spent nearly two decades on the international stage, first in Paris as Australia's ambassador to UNESCO and then in Washington DC as the founding editor of the national interest. Owen provided counsel and advice to many young scholars of international affairs, including me. He always encouraged us to think big and to address the most important and pressing international issues. If you're going swimming, Owen once reminded me, swim in the deep waters, not in the shallows. And let me acknowledge also Tom Switzer, head of CIS, who was Owen's great friend and protégé and has done so much to propagate Owen's memory. Thank you for being here today, Tom. The Harry's lecture has now been given by many important figures over the years, including US diplomat Kurt Campbell, who was an author of The Pivot to Asia, Steve Hadley, National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Ambassador Shyam Saran, the former head of the Indian Foreign Ministry, Jean-Divide Lavit, a French diplomat and advisor to three French presidents. Jake Sullivan, who is now President, Biden's National Security Advisor, Professor Frank Fukuyama, the Secretary General of the OECD, Matthias Corman, and the eminent strategist Sir Lawrence Friedman. And this year, we're very fortunate to add to this impressive roll call the leading Indian diplomat and scholar Shiv Shankar Menon. Shankar held many of the most important positions in the Indian system, including as National Security Advisor to Prime Minister Manmohan Singh, as foreign secretary or the head of the Indian Foreign Ministry, as well as ambassador or high commissioner to China, Israel, Sri Lanka, and other important posts. Since leaving government, he has held affiliations with the Brookings Institution, the Harvard Kennedy School, the National University of Singapore, and Ashoka University. He's also written widely on Indian foreign policy, publishing two books with the Brookings Institution Press. One of the institute's flagship programs is the Distinguished International Fellowship, by which we bring an international policy rock star to Australia. And of course, this year, that's Shankar. And I'd like to take this opportunity to thank Rothschild and its Australian Chief Executive, Marshall Baillier, for its support of this fellowship. So now, it's my pleasure to invite this year's Rothschild Fellow, Shiv Shankar Menon, to deliver the 2023 Owen Harris Lecture. Shankar. Thank you, Michael. Thank you for that generous introduction. And thank you for asking me to deliver this very prestigious lecture in honour of Owen Harris. I'm deeply conscious, after what you said, that I follow in some very large footsteps in paying tribute to this remarkable thinker, advisor to PM, ambassador, academic, essayist. It's really quite a remarkable legacy. Hard as it is, I will try and pay him the tribute of following his example of being realistic, of self-control, discrimination in the best sense of the word, which is even harder understatement. But let me try. I was speaking about Asian geopolitics and how it's changed, and how in the view of one Indian, at least, we, India and Australia, might respond to these changes that we see around us. Because today, my own sense is that the peace that has enabled unparalleled prosperity across the region in the last 30 to 40 years is at more risk than it has ever been for a long time. The way I see it, we are today in a world adrift, a world between orders, rather than a world which is orderly or subject to any form of bipolarity, multipolarity, whatever you want to call it. This is an era of great power rivalry, of competition, and the balance of power is shifting very rapidly. And this is, to my mind, evident from the pathetic response that the world made to COVID, for instance, from the absence of any response to the big transnational threats that we face today. And there hasn't been a binding international agreement of any consequence on a transnational issue for decades. It's rather sad when you think of that. So in this situation, to speak of an international order, forget about adjectives like liberal or rule-based, but to speak of that really is very inaccurate. Besides, even the so-called rule-based order was never very orderly or liberal for much of the world. The killing fields of the Cold War were in Asia, where something like 1,200 people died every day during the Cold War, as long as the Cold War was going on. And the trouble is that deaths by conflict, displacement, refugees, this has actually grown since 2008, actually really from about 2010 onwards, these numbers. So what we see today is a world where the major powers disagree not only on the rules, but on their own internal hierarchy among themselves. What keeps us going is what Kurt Gamble calls the operating system, which is a few general rules of the road, such as peaceful settlement of disputes, freedom of the high seas, which the great powers choose to respect when it's at no cost to themselves. When there is a cost, they choose to disregard it. So we are now back to a time and a more normal time of a contested order. This is normal, I think, in an international system based on sovereign states. It has always been so, but not to the extent that we see today with the means that we have. Is this a multipolar order? It flatters governments to say so, because they like to think of themselves as a present or future pole. But frankly, it's misleading. If you look around the world today at the distribution of power, in economic terms, the world is multipolar. There are at least three large economic regions, North America and the USMCA, the EU, and I would suppose a nation sphere based on maybe the RCEP centered on China. But in military terms, the world is multipolar. There's only one superpower who can project military force where she wants, when she wants, across the world. And politically, thoroughly confused. That's the only way to describe it, quite frankly, when you look at the way the politics work. And politics is now increasingly local, populist and authoritarian. And local considerations are driving international decisions to a much greater extent than we've ever seen in the recent past. The pillars of the post-World War II order are crumbling, whether it's non-proliferation regime in Northeast Asia, in the Middle East, whether it's the Bretton Woods institutions, which count for less and less in the economic calculus, and the multilateral system based on the UN. And what makes this different from previous rounds of great power rivalry is technology, which has redefined and redistributed power, and made it intangible, think digital, think AI, and has empowered both states and non-state actors. The other is the globalized economy, which we're all part of, and the dependencies that it has created, and the new domains of contention, whether it's cyber, whether it's space, whether it's undersea, which have actually changed the ways in which states contend. And what this means taken together is heightened geopolitical risk for all of us. So we're in the midst of recalibration of geopolitics and the global economy. What that means in Asia is that power is now much more evenly distributed among us in Asia than it has ever been since World War II, while the Warsaw Pact and NATO accounted for over 80% of world GDP, and a similar proportion of military power at the height of the Cold War. Today China and the US, between the two of them, account for less than half of the world's GDP, and slightly higher proportion of world military power. Asia is also the most heavily nuclearized and militarized region of the world. Over the last 25 years, Asia's reaction to the growing geopolitical uncertainty has included the rapid accumulation of weaponry across Asia, led by China, and there's a belt of weapons of mass destruction which now extends from the Mediterranean to the Pacific, all the way from Israel to North Korea. So the kindling for conflict has been collected, and the possible sparks are there in the series of flashpoints that you see from the East China Sea, Senkaku-Tiyau, to Taiwan, to the South China Sea, to the India-China border, all of which, and the Middle East, Yemen, other places, all of which are live today. And we've just had a reminder of how serious terrorism can be and is today over the weekend in Israel, where not just a shocking terrorist attack, but an attack with huge political consequences took place in Israel. The other elements of order are also breaking down with nuclear weapons ambitions and pursuits in North Korea and West Asia, probably giving other people ideas. There's the additional risk that countries might start believing the propaganda that Russia's nuclear weapons kept NATO and the U.S. from intervening directly in the Ukraine. So there's a disjuncture at the heart of our geopolitics in Asia today. We are more connected, especially in maritime Asia, we are more connected than we ever were before, economically. And our people, quite frankly, are living better, longer, healthier, more prosperous lives, more of them are living a better life than ever before. But at the same time, our geopolitics and our domestic politics is pulling us in the opposite direction, is leading to conflict and trouble. You look at our domestic politics. Over the last decade or so, we've seen the rise to power of new authoritarian leaders, first in large developing or re-emerging countries. Now you even have the right coming to power in Europe. And this has been fueled by fear that globalization threatens both their identities and their jobs. And that fear has spread. As the slowing world economy makes it more difficult for regimes to produce economic outcomes, thereby reducing their performance legitimacy, they rely increasingly on nationalism for their legitimacy. And the result is that it makes the normal business of diplomacy, of give and take, of bargaining, of negotiating peaceful solutions to issues, much more difficult because of this rising tide of nationalism in the country. So what has kept the peace then? That enables us to continue growing so far this, the years of peace since the Vietnam War, which has really led to the tremendous economic spur across maritime Asia. I would point to two things, the balance of power, which is not natural. There's no invisible hand at work in geopolitics. It's something that needs to be worked at and has been worked successfully for many years until now. And the other is the balance of terror. I know it's not a popular or politically correct thing to say, but if you look at the balance of past right now, we started with a hub and spoke system security architecture based on the U.S. in maritime Asia, which kept peace for a while, but that has been adjusted over time. New partners have entered the architecture. Partners, not allies, like India, like other Southeast Asian countries. And these now buttress the traditional order based on the U.S. And they include a strengthened set of bilateral security arrangements with the U.S. and whether it's Japan, whether it's Korea, whether it's Australia, and new plurilateral formations like Quad, like AUKUS, like and such like, which compensate somewhat for the insecurities that the shifts in the balance of power have created and the rise of China, which and China's recent behavior. The U.S. is now central to the security calculus of all of maritime Asia. At the same time, a ring of maritime states from Japan to India also have increased their own defense intelligence security cooperation as a hedge against diminished U.S. interest and the unpredictability of U.S. politics today. So we've strengthened defense security intelligence links among ourselves and what to my mind that and the reemergence of Japan have really been among the most remarkable developments of the last decade and a half in Asia. So what Asia's geopolitical flux therefore makes much more important is sub-regional balances, whether in the Pacific where you've seen a shift and increased Australian effort or in South Asia, we are now next to the main geopolitical fault line, which is between China and the U.S. When the Cold War had its main fault lines in Europe and quite frankly, South Asia at least from an Indian point of view was a backwater and this was useful. It left us alone to follow our own devices but that's no longer true. We are now close to the vortex and I think there's no opting out of it. At the same time, this geopolitical flux that I'm talking about also opens up opportunities for countries like Australia, like India because not only are they sought as partners in this rivalry between the big players but we also can develop a role of our own. Certainly within the sub-regions you've seen that happening over the last few years. You look at the Middle East, you've seen a host of powers like Saudi Arabia, like Turkey, Iran taking initiatives on their own separate from their relationship with the superpowers and you see this flux operating in various forms. In fact, one reason for that terrorist attack in Israel may have been in order to stop those political changes which were heading in the right direction, whether it was in terms of a possible rapprochement between Saudi Arabia and Israel and even what was happening between Saudi Arabia and Iran and the others. Now, in this kind of fragmented, polarised world which I'm talking about the means to deal with it also have to be ad hoc by definition. If there's no one single order, if it's not bipolar, if it's not multipolar you then look for... I have a mantra which I'm sure some of you have heard me say before about issue-based coalitions of the willing and able which frankly it would be a different set of partners that you'd work with depending on the issue and maritime security for instance India and Australia are natural allies and partners but on cyber security you'd need a different set of partners and in each set what we see therefore now is an era not of coalitions, not of alliances but of coalitions an era of the unaligned, not of the aligned and we saw this after the Ukraine war we saw the reaction of the rest of the world it consolidated the West, the Russian invasion of Ukraine it also may help actually in some ways to consolidate China-Russia relations but for the rest of the world they opted out of having to choose and we're really unaligned rather than nonaligned because this is not the old bipolar world which enabled a nonaligned movement so what should we watch going forward? I have a list of five things but I won't go through it for lack of time one of course is China-U.S. relations which seem now while both sides are trying to manage them it seems as though it's structural and likely to continue for the foreseeable future the other is China's trajectory which must engage our soul to my mind what China is going through is what other medical East Asian economies did too after 30 to 40 years of fantastic growths but they are now facing the consequences of that growth and are going through an economic readjustment which in all the other cases was more painful than they expected but more than that the others at least went through a reworking of the political and social contract at home as well I think the Chinese know they learn from history they've seen what happened in other countries and they've chosen their own path to deal with the consequences of reform whether they'll succeed or not I don't know whatever it is we're likely to face a powerful China it could well be a powerful and frustrated China and that's not going to be easy the other third the world economy I think that's something that we are in a fragmenting world economy but we are globalized and there's only so far the decoupling can go without doing harm to everybody involved we've as far as the world order is concerned we've seen the end of multilateralism as we knew it after World War II and because the traditional multilateral system is failing we're now as I said looking for other ways of dealing with the issues plurilateral and other coalitions all of them which are short term temporary but adjusted to the situation the last thing I would watch the fifth thing that I would suggest is worth watching is the middle powers in the global south because we tend to ignore the impoverishment of the global south that's happened and the level of disenchantment which is high about 40 countries want to join BRICS today which tells you something about aspirations, what they want what we saw in the Middle East my mind was also an expression of Palestinian sense of disenfranchement and of being disengaged from the world and I think so it reflects both but the global south is looking for alternatives and frankly it is essential if we are to solve some of the big transnational challenges whether it's climate change, whether it's global debt whether it's terrorism and so where are we today? Do we really face a serious risk of conflict? I'm not sure that all this adds up to war between the great powers I know people like to draw analogies to late 19th century, early 20th century Europe where we were in a globalized world with great power rivalry but I think so far at least the larger powers have shown an ability to manage conflict but that doesn't mean that we don't face a much higher risk of civil wars or proxy wars and that's exactly what we're seeing around the world today What does this mean for India and friends like Australia? There have always been multiple views in India on India's role and how she should behave abroad Traditionally since independence, 76 years the view has been that India's primary function is to transform India because there are too many poor, hungry, illiterate people at home and therefore the function of foreign and security policy is to make that transformation possible Now this naturally exposes us to accusations of freeloading on the system of not being a responsible power normally said by people who want you to do something else in their interest That's understandable Today, however, India has grown to the point where it has a certain capability a certain influence, the fifth largest economy in the world and a whole new middle class with different ideas with larger ideas of India's role middle class which reads books like Why is India not yet a great power? It's a different... and there is a fundamental discussion going on about the purposes of policy in India and the kind of India that we want to see Actually, despite that though when you look at actual state behavior there's a level of consistency and continuity in Indian behavior which is quite remarkable I suppose it's a function of geography, history, the basic drivers, resource endowment and so on To my mind, interests are a much better predictor of Indian behavior If you look at India's primary interest, as I said, in transforming itself in working to create a peaceful periphery within which that transformation can take place and in working towards creating an external environment which helps that transformation and you'd have seen the evolution of India's policy on climate change, for instance or its policy on integrating with the world economy which has steadily grown with India's capability and I think that is a much better indicator of where various governments of whatever political persuasion will go in India in the future while maintaining a level of strategic autonomy because it's very hard to look around the world and to see another country at the same level of development with the same kinds of resource endowment with the same geographic position and the same set of interests entirely the same There was a time when an Indian diplomat used to be defined as somebody who can hold two contradictory ideas in one mind at the same time and there's some truth to that because today, for instance, when India looks at the world we have both a continental security issue and a maritime security issue I mean the world's biggest land boundary dispute is between India and China and yet when we look to see our natural partners are well, those in the Quad, Australia, the US, Japan and we work together on maritime security through the Indo-Pacific When we look on land, who do we see? Who are the available partners? The West is absent, quite frankly So we work with Iran, we work with Russia This is a completely different set of partners So this is why I say we have to hold two contradictory ideas in our heads at the same time It's a function of where we are and what we are today Today our border with China is live since 2020 and both sides frame it as a sovereignty issue making it that much more difficult to negotiate As long as you define it as a dispute left over by history it's not your fault, it's left over by history, blame the British but also it's a dispute, you can resolve it by give and take which means you accept the possibility that you'll get something but you'll lose something as well Once you define it as sovereignty and territorial integrity this is non-negotiable, especially for leaders who base their leg towards your nationalism So we seem to have worked ourselves into an impasse while we are structurally tied together economically We're our largest and our second largest trading partner in very fundamental ways So when I look at India and Australia together what I see is an increasing congruence because of India's maritime and other preoccupations and I see a congruence that will grow also because of India's preoccupation with its own transformation Because frankly from India we look at Australia as a partner who can help us in our transformation and contribute to it We don't see Australia purely as in geopolitical terms as a balancer to China and that's not the way we look at the relationship So for me therefore it's the broader aspects of the relationship and there's a lot that we can do together quite apart from building resilience capabilities working across the board in maritime security or on crisis management mechanisms in maritime Asia which I think we really need I sometimes wonder whether India and Australia can't work together to make IPEF into a sort of norm and rule setting organization like the OECD is for Europe, at least for our part of the world because the new frameworks of cooperation in Asia, Pacific and maritime Asia are really open and inclusive if you compare them to what existed in the Cold War which were closed, the Quad, the IPEF, RCP, CPTPP they're all open ended in a sense that earlier arrangements weren't So we would like to work together with Australia clearly and what we've seen in the last few years is a real improvement and a deepening of the relationship which our foreign minister likes to say that of all the relationships that we enjoy this is the one that has progressed the most in his tenure So I hope we can work together to keep the region plural, open and most important of all peaceful Thank you Thank you very much for your attention Shankar, thank you for a very interesting, wide-ranging lecture Thank you also for agreeing to sit down with me to take a few questions from me and then from the audience I do want to ask you about the Hamas surprise attack on Israel but I'll come back to that First of all I want to ask a few questions about the Asian order and especially about India Let me kick off with a question about Mr. Mordi You alluded to the tilt towards the United States under Mr. Mordi's prime ministership especially the membership of the Quad still practising a multi-directional foreign policy but it feels quite different from the old, non-aligned foreign policy of the past How do you judge Mr. Mordi as a prime minister and as a foreign policymaker? Will he still be prime minister? Will he still be next year after the election? And how much is at stake in terms of this shift in US foreign policy? Is that up for grabs in the election, do you think? Or would that continue regardless of who is prime minister? I can't predict Indian elections I have a very good record of being consistently wrong so I'm not going to improve on that but because frankly Indian elections are decided much closer to the event I think people make up their minds the swing vote is fairly large according to all those who study this Besides foreign policy is never an issue in our elections it hasn't made the kind of difference and that's what I study rather than domestic politics On the other question about India-US relations it's interesting, it's been a steady transformation as India has opened up integration with the world economy India-US relations and broader India's relations with the west have steadily improved some of it might be related to the rise of China and the shifts in geopolitics that I was talking about but it's also I think out of a fundamental Indian conviction that you can't transform India if you have bad relations with the US bad relations with the west, bad relations with China what kind of India would you be transforming it into? So I'm not sure that so you see this tremendous continuity from for the last two to two and a half decades and these are governments of very different political persuasion that we've had right through while in opposition much of what the BJP said on India-US relations they have contradicted in their practice since in fact the relationship today is I would say with the US we do almost everything that allies do short of a commitment to mutual defense which is really quite remarkable when you look at the transformation from just the beginning of this century till now so given that do I think that if there were a change in government there'd be a huge change in Indian policy experience tells me no I'm sure whoever comes will say I am new I'm better, I know everything better, all my predecessors made a mess but that's democratic politics it happens everywhere but what you actually do I think has what India has actually done I think has been fairly consistent whether you call it multi-directional you know we've each government uses different words they used to say non-alignment then they say genuine non-alignment then I think Vajpayee started saying strategic autonomy now we say multi-directional for me it's more the underlying Indian interests that they follow which in power I think lead them in the same direction now the fact that we're much closer to the West today I think is an adjustment to today's geopolitics as we see it there was a time when we were regarded as very close to the Soviet Union in our minds we were independent and non-aligned and we saw ourselves as following a strategic autonomy but autonomy also means the choice that you have a choice that you have the ability to choose who to stand with and who not to stand with depending on the issues alright you mentioned official terminology one piece of official lingo that has become very fashionable both in India and Australia in recent years is the Indo-Pacific reconceptualizing the Asia Pacific as the Indo-Pacific of course in Australia we like it because it puts us right at the centre of the region with the Pacific to our eastern the Indian Ocean to our west but it is also one of those sort of wonky terms that doesn't really translate into the way ordinary people think about the world or the way cartographers have thought about the world for much of history do you like the term the Indo-Pacific is it useful is it likely to change people's thinking on the underlying issues or is it more of a cosmetic issue I think it's useful I think it's a despite its history I mean it started as World House Hofer's term it was a German term and I mean it actually started as a Nazi German term to create space for a role for Germany in a British dominated world and it's quite ironic how the term comes back and now it came back to us through the US and we adopted it in 2009 I think it was the government of India started using it but I like it because it focuses on the fact that you're dealing with a with a united body of water and the room lens all the way from the east coast of Africa to the west coast of the US and I think it matters because this is where the contention is today and this is where whether it's trade whether it's energy flows you name it these are the most dynamic economic areas in the world and the center of gravity of world politics and economics is here in the Indo-Pacific so I like the term my only fear is that it hands over our fate to the Navy's and that we forget about the Army's who also matters so I'm torn between sort of maritime Asia and Indo-Pacific but frankly I mean for me it's much more muchness I mean whichever word we know what we're talking about. Alright in your remarks you alluded to some of the moves that Australia has made in relation to the new geopolitics you described and the most the sort of signature initiative is AUKUS this arrangement with technology partnership really with the United States and the United Kingdom to help Australia put to see a fleet build and deploy and operate a fleet of nuclear powered submarines and also cooperate on other advanced technologies what is the Indian view of AUKUS also what's your view of AUKUS if you were an Australian strategist you talked about sort of stepping in Owen's footsteps as a discriminatory strategist with prudence and discrimination do you think it makes sense for Australia to want to operate nuclear powered boats given our geography and the changing geopolitics well it's a tough argument I mean I can't I can't speak for India because there are different opinions in India and I'm just I'm retired and now I can claim to be a professor but there are elements in India who especially on the right who I think suffer from an acute case of AUKUS-NV I wish they had something like this there are those who think no it's destabilizing and so on for Australia I suppose it's a choice between do you wait at home to receive the visitor or do you meet them outside it's a classical dilemma between forward policy and the defensive reactive policy I'm not sure how that's something that you have to decide among yourselves for me even the fact that AUKUS has been talked about and has already changed the geopolitical landscape because it question it brings into question China's bastion strategy in the South China Sea it also opens up the in many ways it opens up the defensive calculation the defense calculations of a whole host of countries across the region and not all of them are unhappy with this not everybody wants to be stuck in just China US rivalry and pick a side and to be just the objects of their policy and in some ways AUKUS actually opens that up opens space up for the others which is why if you look at the reactions they haven't been negative in fact and ultimately I would say they tend to be on the positive side but ultimately it's your decision I should ask you what you think alright well I'm in favour of it on balance because I think it gives Australia deterrent punch and it gives us the and I think given the geography of Australia given the length of our coastline Australia and the other sources of our security and prosperity having ships with that range and speed and lethality make sense that's my own view but let me come to one of the big issues in India's bilateral relations in recent weeks and that is the allegations by Canada's Prime Minister Justin Trudeau who said a few weeks ago that Ottawa had credible allegations that the Indian government was linked to the murder of a Canadian citizen and a Sikh activist on Canadian soil and I'd like to ask you about this I know you're retired you've just said that you're retired and you're a professor so you have no you haven't seen any signal intelligence or anything like that but you were the National Security Advisor some years ago and you've operated with India's intelligence operations and the balance of probabilities when you look at what is publicly available what do you think happened here what has been the reaction in India and what impact do you think this incident will have on India's relations with the West? Well I can tell you from the depths of my ignorance that I knew them the intelligence agencies were not set up for this this isn't what they were organised for and so I'm amazed actually when I heard that but Prime Minister Trudeau was careful he said potential allegations he didn't say potential evidence he said credible allegations he didn't say evidence and he said of potential linkage and both governments have been very careful after that and what they say on the record Jayashankar I think said in New York that we'd look at evidence and we'd see what there was that's not true of the media leaks and all the stuff that has been appearing but that's all leakage, that's spin so I tend to discount that and go by what the governments do and the fact that they're being so careful to my mind suggests that they want to protect the relationship and are looking for besides states function on their interests much as we like to present what we do as value driven and I think in practice ultimately states function on their interests and in terms of interest there is tremendous congruence today between India and the West basically all right let me ask you a couple of questions about what happened this weekend and then I'm going to go to the audience and give you an opportunity to ask Shankar some questions on Saturday half a century after the beginning of the Yom Kippur war Hamas launched surprise attacks on Israel including rockets and terrorists walking the streets of Israeli towns with automatic weapons, killing people I think the latest count was 700 or so Israeli casualties and at least 100 hostages who've been taken by Hamas presumably back to Gaza a quarter of a century ago you were India's ambassador to Israel so maybe I can just first of all ask you what did you think when you first saw those stories when you saw those images of towns that you visited what was your immediate reaction? Shock, I mean real shock that something of this scale where terrorist attack on this scale could occur also surprised that nobody had picked it up not just the Israelis who have tremendous capabilities but the rest of the world also because something on this scale can't be organized very easily it takes time and so and of course concern for our friends in Israel and we've been sending messages to friends hoping that they're okay and from some of them we still have to hear back so I think that was the first reaction of concern for our friends it's there's no question it's a worrying situation because it changes as I said the direction of political travel in the Middle East certainly postpones it how long it changes it how long lasting the effects will be it's too early to say it will also change I think the course of Israeli politics internal politics right now and let's see it's but it's worrying it really is as you mentioned there had been talk of a new Middle East characterized in part by the rapprochement between Israel and some of the Gulf states normalization of relations between Saudi and Israel with the the grandfathering in I guess from the United States if you squint your eyes what do you think will happen I mean is this the end of the new Middle East is it the return of the old Middle East or do you think that the Americans and other forces can contain and limit the effect so that some of those positive developments can continue in the future I would never say it's the end of anything and politics is a process I think it makes it more difficult certainly and maybe not right away also the other problem is you're getting into an American election cycle so I'm not sure how much of a role the US will be willing to play at a time and they're preoccupied at home and when there are unless there are clear gains that they had which seems more difficult now but I wouldn't write it off I wouldn't say because I think the reason the Saudis were even talking about improving relations with Israel the reason you've seen so many things shifting in the Middle East even Saudi Iran relations were shifting the reason I think that was happening was because their interests had changed and the nature of the US interest has also changed fundamentally now that the US is an energy exporter and what so I'm not sure that we should just write off what was happening before the attacks the attacks will probably postpone much of that and they'll probably come back in slightly different form they'll have to but the attacks are probably designed just for that to stop that process which they saw as marginalizing themselves the Palestinians and pushing them out of the actually out of the politics of the Middle East and making their life much harder so that's probably one reason why they did it but also why there are good reasons for the process ultimately to be picked up again Alright, who would like to ask a question of Shivshanka Menon Yes, there's a gentleman down there and a gentleman here so I'll ask you to wait for the microphone give us your name if you would and then ask a short question please My name is Pavan Luthra from the Indian League Media Group thank you very much for sharing your thoughts Quick question, in case we have a re-emergence of Donald Trump as the president of the US in a few months time what impact do you think would that have on the world affairs You know, if you look back over the last four American presidents I don't think you could find more different personalities if you go back to, well, Trump Barack Obama Bush, Clinton and we've all survived that quite well I mean, in the US relations certainly have kept on that same trajectory of improvement right through so I'm less worried about because for two reasons one is as I said, there are basic interests involved on both sides, US interests our interests, your interests as well but secondly, the US system is designed for failure not so much to fail as for failure with checks and balances in the system if one part of the system doesn't work there's always somewhere else you can go to get your work done and it's quite remarkable actually if you look at how many crises and how many defeats and war and so on the US system has coped with which other more rigid and sort of homogenous systems would have probably found difficult to deal with they'd have cracked apart but the US system is I mean, I've I first went to the US in 64 when I mean, there was civil rights there was the Vietnam war came I had to go to the back of the bus when we crossed the Mason Dixon line you know and you think of I've seen the US fail or collapse or decline five times in my lifetime and it's never happened so US politics is in a class by itself but I'm not that worried about this I know other people and maybe it's somebody's wish in Beijing and other capitals but I don't see the fundamentals shifting that much but certainly it's not going to be easy to deal with some of the tactical stuff let me just ask a follow up on that though I agree with you that declineism is a constant America is apparently always declining except it's not but what about what Donald Trump has done and is doing to the Republican party the Republican of course it was Republican president that ushered in the nuclear deal with India but that old GOP George W. Bush's GOP is withering on the vine it's disappearing it's being primaried out of the Congress and it's being replaced by a new much weaker on alliances much more focused on its own sort of on America's own problems does that concern you that the Republican party of Eisenhower and Reagan and George H.W. Bush and George W. Bush may be coming something much more trumpified well they're also aging themselves and they're sacked their own speaker you know I think the American people are smart enough to figure out what they're doing and whether they want to go down that path or not and I think so I'd rather leave it to them to make up their mind how they how they deal with this new GOP that is in the process of being formed and I'm not sure that that's a party that's going to be able to function very efficiently and but let's see what they do let's see how they sort it out among themselves all right this gentleman here yes Claude McConaughey having presented several times at the United Nations OECD and various other places around the world on world peace and its structures I used to admire observed that India maintained a very pluralistic political position on many different things successfully my question is about its military supply base which it also uniquely well except for one other country has for what it would better term western supplies eastern supplies and indeed itself do you see that trio being necessarily reduced to two supplies in the foreseeable future five, ten years it'll take time I mean the trend is in that direction you know in 2006 80% of our defence imports were from Russia by 2019 that's down to less than 30% around 26% also percent but some of the main platforms are still Russian so while the trend might be for increasing defence imports from the west and for increasing domestic manufacture increasing indigenarization as we call it there but I think as long as these platforms are in service these big platforms some of the fighter aircraft for instance tanks and so on there still will be some something from Russia but clearly what's happened in the recent past in terms of China's relationship with Russia and the closeness that especially after the Russian invasion of Ukraine the dependence that Russia now has on China clearly there will be an attempt to diversify further and to see whether we can't speed up the diversification but the answer is totals you know going to as you said two sources the west and indigenous that's going to take a little while alright I've got one question here from yes sir hello Hamish McDonald I met you in Beijing when you were ambassador in your book choices written about 2015 you discussed whether India had a strategic culture of its own and you tended to play that down and in favor of portraying India as foreign policy and strategic policy produced by much the same rational calculus as anyone else I'm just wondering after ten years of Narendra Modi if you'd be that of that opinion has for example Hindutva jumped from soft power at all into your hard power calculations I'm not sure it has because it's not a developed ideology in terms of foreign policy it's not as though it offers an alternate foreign policy and so I don't think so and this is why I think if you look at their actual practice it's been ten years of BJP government in power it doesn't suggest such wide deviations from the previous practice it suggests actually more continuity than change in what they've actually done also because we've had a BJP government previously we had NDA under Vajpayee and I don't if you look at that if you look at Narasimha Rao Manmohan Singh there was most of what they did was much the same so that's why I tend to see more continuity than that doesn't mean the rhetoric stays the same all the way it's presented stays the same there are two or three aspects where I think the ideology does come into foreign policy practice the diaspora for instance in relations with the diaspora I think are different today than they were earlier we started originally with Gandhiji's advice to the diaspora used to be be like the sugar in the milk so assimilate dissolve yourself into the societies where you are but add taste to it you know so maintain in a sense some identity but be part of that society and that's shifted over time I mean so that's one aspect where maybe Hindutva ideology has come into the practice of foreign policy but otherwise it's hard to think of other examples Shankar I'm going to take the chair's probe and ask you the final question about Australia India relations you mentioned that the external affairs minister Dr Jay Shankar said actually from this podium last year that of all the bilateral files on which he was working he was happiest with the progress in the Australia India relationship but if we would be ambitious for the future what would be what should be the kind of vector of our ambition do you think what is the interest what is the interest that is most common between India and Australia what would you like to see New Delhi and Canberra do in the future to really strengthen this bilateral relationship I think what I would like to see is us working together in this region in maritime Asia and not just in terms of hard security issues but in terms of the other building resilience providing public goods I think we made a beginning in Quad and I think that's actually very good but also I think we need to involve the rest of the region in many of the things that we have started doing ourselves whether it's in technology whether it's in development so I think that there's a lot that we could do together but for me it's important that we carry the region with us that it's not just the two of us heading off in our own direction and worrying only about our own interests Ladies and gentlemen Shankar said at the beginning that he realizes he has big footsteps to fill he's shown that he's got big size 12 boots he's shown that he deserves to be in that impressive role call of former Harry's lecturers thank you for showing I think the carefulness, the thoughtfulness the discrimination the intelligence that characterized Owen's work in your own lecture today thank you for answering our questions from Indian foreign policy through to the events over the weekend through to AUKUS we really appreciate you being here as the Rothschild Fellow and ladies and gentlemen please join me in thanking Shiv Shankar Thank you Thank you for your very good Thank you