 Good afternoon, distinguished guests. Welcome to the 38th Annual Horus E. Reed Lecture. Let me open the lecture by acknowledging your stand on traditional and background territory. I'm Kim Brooks, Dean of the Schulz School of Law. It's a great pleasure to say a few introductory words about this lecture and about the man after whom is named. The Reed Lecture was established in honor of Horus E. Reed, who was the dean of the law school from 1954 to 1964. The lecture was established as a joint project between his family and the law school. His son, I hope, will join us shortly. And other family members, Michelle, my mom, and Russell McKinnon are here with us today. Horus Reed served this country in many ways. He served in the First World War, was chair of the Regulations Revision Committee, Royal Canadian Navy during the Second World War, was a longtime member of the Nova Scotia Labor Relations Board, a longtime member of the Conference of Governing Bodies of the Legal Profession, a longtime member of the Conference of Commissions on the Uniformity of Legislation, Honorary President of the Nova Scotia Barrister Society in 1966-67, and Canadian Delegate to the Conference on Private International Law at Hague in 1968. At the law school, he was touted for his follow-up achievements, for his ability to teach, and for his superb administrative skills. In recognition of his exemplary life, Dr. Reed was appointed an officer of the Order of Canada in 1973. His other honours include honorary degrees from Acadia, Queens, Windsor, and Dalhousie. In commenting on his remarkable life, I can do no better than to quote briefly from two paragraphs from a lengthy editorial of March 1st, 1975, in the Hall of Acts Carol. Horus Emerson Reed, O.C. O.B.E.Q.C.B.A.L.O.B.L. by Ms. J.B.L.L.D. Board of Dean of Dalhousie Law School and Legal Scholar and Legal Teacher of International Renown was in the great tradition of beings of law at Dalhousie. In many respects, he exceeded the talented in distinction of his predecessors. And editorially, no doubt, he exceeded the talented distinction of those who follow him. Horus was an architecture scholar of international renown, but he also brought to his teaching and benevolence and humanity which were among his most admirable qualities. Kindly and apical, readily available to students and colleagues alike by whom he was held in respect and with affection, he presided as dean over a lengthy period of unparalleled expansion and development to the faculty of law and marked it firmly with his personal philosophy and objectives. Welcome to the Reed lecture. This year's Reed lecture, the Obama administration's unfinished human rights agenda will be given by Sterling Professor of International Law, Harold Coe. Professor Coe, who served as Yale Law School's 15th dean, has recently returned to that school after serving for four years as the 22nd legal advisor to the U.S. Department of State. Professor Coe has 13 honorary degrees and more than 30 awards. He has authored co-authored a books and published over 180 articles. He's a fellow of the American Philosophical Society and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. Surprisingly to me, in the face of his myriad contribution and his prodigious output, he is a man who tends to his own female. As a concession to the shortness of life and of this hour in particular, I'll stop with this two brief introduction of the internal inquiry of Professor Coe. Enjoy. Thank you, Dean Brooks. It's great to be here. This is my first trip ever to Nova Scotia and to Halifax, but I've lived here in my imagination for many years. When Sid Crosby knocked us out of the Olympics, that was one time. Ellen Page, a big hero of my daughter who known for Juno, X-Men and Inception. The person you may not know, Stan Rogers, the great country singer. My brothers and I used to sing, three little Korean guys. I'm a broken man on a Halifax pier. The last of Barrett's privateers. But when I became an international lawyer, I heard of Ronald St. John McDonald, the first Canadian and non-European Court of Human Rights. And of course, John Erskine Reed, the only Canadian elected to the International Court of Justice. So it's a great honor to fill out this experience with this lecture in honor of Horace E. Reed, who as you heard is a figure of great distinction in this great country. Let me ask about the Obama administration. This is its sixth year. Frankly, they're having a rocky time. The question I think we ought to be asking though is, is there a human rights strategy? What are the unfinished issues and what realistically can be achieved in the next two and a half years before the president leaves office? I've spent 34 years as an international law professor, five as a dean, 20 plus years as a human rights lawyer. And then now, during that time, some 10 years in the US government, four as legal advisor of the State Department, and three as the assistant secretary of State for Human Rights in the Clinton administration. Just to give you a feel of some of the things I did in the upper left corner representing the United States at the UN Human Rights Council in Geneva, upper right corner at the Nuclear Security Summit in Moscow, lower right corner, Guantanamo, which I visited now 19 times, starting with representation of Haitian refugees in 1991, lower left-hand corner, Iraq, left side, Afghanistan in the middle, Greece during the financial crisis on the far right in Korea with Secretary Madeline Albright at the funeral of President Kim Dae-jung, a friend of my family. And then many courts, the International Court of Justice in the Hague on the left, European Court of Human Rights in the middle, the African Court of Human and People's Rights in Tanzania on the top right, and the International Criminal Court in the Hague on the bottom right. This is probably the most famous picture of me. Or so my mother will tell you. Secretary Clinton and I were flying into Libya after the fall of Qaddafi from Malta, and they put us on a military transport, which is, you know, looks like in the movies, except that they put these business class seats in the middle, and I was the ranking person, so I sat behind her. People started taking our pictures, and so we started texting to each other, and what I actually texted her was, look over your shoulder, which is what she is actually reading in this now famous meme. I worked on many issues, some of which I'll talk about. This is Chen Guangchen, a blind Chinese activist with whom I spent two weeks in China getting him out of the embassy in Beijing where he had come in. Many of these issues revolved around September 11th, but also WikiLeaks, natural disasters in Haiti, Japan, the Fukushima nuclear power reactor, Arab awakening, a whole range of human rights issues, all aspects of our relationship with various international criminal courts, emerging issues in cyberspace, private international law, and then public health and the environment, particularly global climate change. I played many roles. I was the managing partner of the legal advisor's office at the State Department, which has some 200 international lawyers, and we work frequently with your defate legal office headed by my dear friend at the time, Alan Kessel, who's now in London. I was a counselor to the secretary, playing the role of a general counsel. I was a manager of conflicts within the State Department, which is a far-flung operation, and there's a tradition in the US that the legal advisor is a spokesperson and conscience of the US government on international law issues, which means that if the US is sued somewhere or challenged on its international legal justifications, I defend, as they say in the movie, Iron Man, we don't have anyone but you. And so, if you're not prepared to do it, you shouldn't do it. In government service, I learned a lot of things. This is my brother, Howard, who is the Assistant Secretary of Health and Human Services, the number one public health official in the United States. He just stepped down and is now going to teach at the Harvard School of Public Health. My mother loves the picture because she thinks Obama works for us. But when you're in the government, there are four things you learn. First, you're not the only lawyer. The State Department, as I mentioned, had 200 lawyers. How many lawyers do you think are in the Defense Department? We had 200. Just take a guess. 17,000. 17,000. Then you add in lawyers for the Justice Department, 11,000. The Treasury, the United States Trade Representative, the Commerce Department, National Security Council. And what you find out is to reach a legal position in the US government, everybody needs to agree or sign off on the same document, which should make you realize how amazing it is there are any legal positions at all. And one of the amusing things about academic life is you hear people say, well, the government's legal rationale stopped at the moment it became interesting. The reason it stopped is that's the moment when they stopped agreeing. So they just put out what everyone could agree upon. Obviously, you're not your own client. My client was Hillary Clinton. She's an absolutely outstanding lawyer, absolutely outstanding. Her speed of uptake is phenomenal. And she was Secretary of State to a pretty good lawyer too, Barack Obama. And most interesting, they don't care what you wrote as an academic. That's not precedent of the US government. It isn't. So when an issue came up, whatever review I might have expressed in my personal capacity, they don't really care what I put in a footnote when I was coming up for tenure at age 29. What they care is what are the legal opinions of the legal advisor going back to the 1800s, which are the US government's positions. And people ask me about this. My point is given that you have a choice between something that I said when I was coming up for tenure at 29 and people will often say, isn't that inconsistent with what you said as legal advisor in 2009? Usually it's not. In fact, I've yet to find an actual inconsistency when comments are set in context. But even if it were, what would you trust more? Something that I said early in my career when absolutely nothing was on the line or something 30 years later after a lifetime of working on these issues when all the resources of the US government are at my disposal and when we're working on issues of life or death. I'd say trust me now. Now you have many roles as I've described and perhaps most important and least understood outside of the government is you play the hand you're dealt. There's a famous story about two guys from Galway. They're walking down the road. One guy says to the other, how do we get to Dublin? And the first guy says, I wouldn't start from here. Well, you know, everybody would like to be the legal advisor of the US State Department in the time of peace and prosperity. But the better truth is, if you're in the middle of the worst financial crisis since the depression, three wars, then you throw into the mix earthquake and Haiti, nuclear meltdown in Japan, dramatic and not very fortunate changes in China and Russia, and then throw into the mix WikiLeaks and a bunch of other things. And you might well say I wouldn't start from here. But the short version is you don't have a choice. You play the hand you're dealt and you do the best you can. So some people will say when my lecture is finished, how come you don't ratify the Rome Statute? Or how come you don't ratify the Disabilities Convention? Or how come you don't ratify the Framework Convention on Tobacco Control? The short answer is in our legal system, you need 67 votes in the Senate, 67. And those 67 votes are not there. After November 6th, it'll probably be even fewer. These are politically unavailable right now. That doesn't mean people don't want these things to happen. Look how hard it was for Obama to get the votes for healthcare, which is only a majority, or to get people confirmed for the Supreme Court. So when I'm talking about what the human rights strategy is, I'm not gonna talk about things that are not achievable even though I'd like them to be achievable. And now when I respond to colleagues in the faculty lounge who say to me, you know, how come Obama doesn't do this? I say it's not politically achievable. What would you do instead that's better? What would you do instead that's better? And I very frequently find they just simply don't have an answer. So the two questions that are really worth asking are, how do you achieve achievable human rights goals in the time that's left? But perhaps most fundamentally, how do you adapt 20th century law to address 21st century human rights issues? One of the first things that arose when I became legal advisor, when someone came and told me, there is a frozen embryo of a large panda bear at the dock in Baltimore and it is owned by a large Asian nation. Is it entitled to foreign sovereign immunity? Now it occurred to me that the framers of the foreign sovereign communities act and the foreign sovereign state immunity convention had not thought of this issue. More than that, most of the lawmaking that occurred in treaties was after World War II, most of the national security laws in the United States was after the Vietnam War. Right now we're in a deadlock where it's pretty much impossible to make new treaties. So the question is exactly what do you do? Now I wanna suggest that there are two broad approaches. The first is a black hole approach. If the framers didn't think about this issue, it must be a legal black hole and we can do whatever we want. The alternative is what I prefer, what Montesquieu called the spirit of the laws, translating from the law that is to the law that needs to be used to adapt to the current situation. Translation as opposed to black hole. Now this is an important point because there is a world of difference between saying there is no law to apply and saying we have tried to map the law that exists onto the facts that now exist. You might disagree with our interpretation but it's still an effort to operate within the frame of law. And then the question is, is there an overriding strategy? And I would suggest there is. It has not been perfectly applied. I'll be the first to admit that. There's many examples of failure as of success but there has been an overriding strategy of the Obama administration that I think is not only a good strategy but should be continued by whoever is the US president next, whatever that party may be or whoever he or she may be. And that is international law as smart power. That's the thesis of this read lecture. By which I mean engage, translate and leverage. When in doubt, the United States should engage on human rights issues around our values. When in doubt, we should translate existing law to current situations, applying the spirit of the laws to the new situation. And when in doubt, we should try to use law with other tools to produce policy. Diplomacy, development, technology, markets and international institutions. And tactical and strategic application of military force where it is the only alternative. But as part of this package. Now I would contrast that to the last administration's approach which I think was not engaged, translate or leverage. It was unilateralism, black hole and going it alone. And if you did not like that approach and I did not, you should consider whether engage, translate and leverage international law as smart power is a better approach. So where did this come from? Let me start with President Obama's speech at the convention in 2004. Here he is, look how much he has aged. I mean these jobs are killers. But then his inauguration speech his first where he said a new era of engagement has begun where respecting the law and living our values doesn't make us weaker, it makes us safer and it makes us stronger. Secretary Clinton said American foreign policy should use smart power, the full range of tools at our disposal to achieve outcomes. This is also an important theme of her book, Hard Choices. I think if she were to become president it would be an important theme of her foreign policy going forward. I think it's clearly correct. My colleague at Yale, Paul Kennedy says in a book called The Client and Fall of the Great Powers that historically great powers have tried to use hard power, they've been tapped out, they go into a period of imperial overstretch and they're replaced by others because they have too many commitments overseas, winning support at home and mounting debt. If that's true, what is the alternative? How do you maintain influence and leadership? And that's by using a full range of tools at your disposal. Now I want to illustrate this with regard to five sets of issues and this will be very panoramic. You may not agree with any of the examples or most of them, but what I want to suggest is that this approach is more likely to achieve positive human rights outcomes than any alternatives and in fact the one, the strategy this administration is trying to apply to its unfinished agenda. So let me start with a simple example, human rights. When our administration came into office, Ansan Tsuchi, the great human rights leader, Nobel Prize winner, was in house arrest in Burma. The decision was not just to leave that issue but to engage with both the Burmese regime and with Ansan Tsuchi to try to translate action for action in the same way as we had imposed sanctions on a up and up basis to dial them down while monitoring the conduct of corporations and try to leverage that with other things to include her in the government. And as I speak, she is the chair of the Parliamentary Committee on the Rule of Law and Human Rights and I had the pleasure of meeting with her not long before I left office. Or take the issue of the rights of lesbian, gays, bisexuals, and transgendered persons. The United States was not a party to the UN Human Rights Council. When it began, the Bush administration boycotted it. At considerable diplomatic costs, we reengaged and then started to use it as a forum for discussion of breaking issues. And in December of 2010 on Human Rights Day, Hillary Clinton chose to go to Geneva and to say LGBT rights are human rights. Do you see that this is a pure translation exercise, 15 years earlier at Beijing she had said women's rights are human rights and human rights are women's rights. She translated protection for a group that previously had not been fully protected into the apparatus of human rights law and combined these with a set of domestic initiatives, the elimination of don't ask, don't tell in the military, granting of same sex benefits, administration support for marriage equality and the Unconstitutionality of the Defense of Marriage Act. As of yesterday, our Supreme Court denied review in five states enabling same sex marriages to go forward in five states of the union, now in 60% of the United States. So without a definitive Supreme Court ruling on this issue, there's dramatic progress being made through the tactic of engage, translate, and leverage. Or how about this? Chen Guangchen was a so-called barefoot lawyer who supported the reproductive freedom of Chinese women. He lived in Shandong province. He escaped from house arrest and went to Beijing and the question was could he enter our embassy? We got a call, I happened to be in China at the time, to not engage would be tell him to go away. Secretary Clinton, as she recounts in her book says, come in. And the question to me was, was it lawful for us to admit him? I argued that the United States had a diplomatic right to admit him for limited purposes, namely getting medical treatment. He came in, that was the translation, and then we leveraged his situation without of a major university operating in China and in New York City, NYU, and moved him first out of the embassy and then to NYU, and he's now living successfully in the United States. Engage, translate, and leverage. Now there are many obvious areas in which this strategy had to apply. Hong Kong, which as you know, the umbrella revolution is going on as we speak. Dark places like the Central African Republic, Sudan, Sri Lanka, follow on to the Civil War there. North Korea, where parts of my family still live. Iran, human rights issues. And a central question, which faces us as a legal matter, whether the international covenant on civil and political rights and the convention against torture should or should not apply extraterritorially, if not whether we're treating these areas outside US territory as new black holes. What about international criminal justice? There's a long story to be told here. The US backed international criminal justice at Nuremberg and then as you know, it famously did not sign the Rome Statute in 1998, but President Clinton before he left office did sign it, leading to a boycott by the last administration, which led to this awkward situation that the United States supported international criminal justice at all the ad hoc tribunals. Yugoslavia, Rwanda, Sierra Leone, Lebanon, Cambodia, but were opposed to the international criminal court. When the Obama administration came in under the directions of Secretary Clinton, I was the head of our team on this, we decided that we would engage. So we went for the first time to all the meetings. We made a clue that we did not oppose the object and purpose of the Rome Statute that we were a supporter of the court, even though we could not ratify the statute anytime soon. And we supported all pending prosecutions before the court, switching from hostile to prosecutions to favoring it. Now there's obvious unfinished business. President Uhuru Kenyatta of Kenya, who is under indictment will leave office next week for a week to go to the Hague to testify an amazing experience, but virtually unnoticed in this environment. The prosecution in Libya, which threatens to pit a fledgling court against a fledgling Libyan government. And then the crime of aggression, which is said to be implemented in 2017. And what a country like Canada ought to be concerned about is can this be used to prosecute Canadian officials for promoting or supporting humanitarian intervention? This is an issue not much discussed, but very important for the credibility of international criminal justice going forward. In public health, all the talk in the United States is of Ebola. And Ebola obviously is a serious issue. There are some 3,000 deaths in West Africa. One recorded case in the United States currently ongoing plus a few that have been solved. But let's be realistic. Suppose we uncovered a disease that contributes to 5 million global deaths annually, likely rise to 10 million a year that led to 100 million deaths in the 20th century caused a death somewhere in the world every six seconds. And if current patterns continue, we'll kill a billion people. What am I talking about? Smoking, yes, smoking. Tobacco is the largest non-communicable disease. It contributes to 5 million global deaths annually. It now has shifted through the work of the tobacco companies to low and middle income countries. Tobacco consumption there through aggressive marketing has more than doubled. Three quarters of the world smokers now live in the developing world. And we know that non-quitters die 13 years earlier and use billions of dollars in healthcare costs. The Surgeon General's report 50 years ago probably saved 8 million lives in the United States. But more than 400,000 Americans, and I know a comparable percentage in Canada still die prematurely, 600,000 people die each year from secondhand smoke. Now you notice that this is an article written by a co. It's not mine, it's my brother. And we've agreed to try to work on this issue going forward to help define a human rights issue to avoid preventable non-communicable disease caused by addiction and promoted by under-regulated private production and consumption. So how can we address this issue? A strategy has emerged called the Empower Strategy, monitor smoking, protect by smoke-free laws and smoke-free campuses. I don't know if this is a smoke-free campus. But every campus should be. Offer help to those who want to quit, to warn with warnings in plain packaging, to enforce bans on tobacco advertising, and to raise cigarette excise taxes if they're done in Mexico, Turkey, and the Philippines. Take a look at this, the evolution of health warnings in Uruguay where now the packages are 80% covered with pictures of the consequence of cigarette smoking. Uruguay is currently the subject of international arbitration by Philip Morris. And Philip Morris' resources massively overwhelmed those of Uruguay. And this provision was put in by the then president who was a doctor and a cancer specialist. How about refugees? Obviously the issue currently facing the United States the most is relief for unaccompanied central American miners who are fleeing from gangs who are threatening them in countries like Guatemala, Honduras. The question obviously for asylum law is are they a social group? And there's a further question. In our political process, we have a deadlock. There was a bill passed by the Senate on comprehensive immigration reform. The president has deferred till after the election an executive order that would defer deportations which were deferred by something called the DREAM Act until comprehensive immigration reform bill can be discussed. This was deferred to try to help the Democrats in the midterm election, which is coming up in a few weeks. But obviously it's an important issue to be resurrected. What about technology? And if I found out anything in my time in the government is that technology has changed all of these issues. Take this question. A lesbian couple living in another country. One mother is an American and an embryo fertilized is implanted into her. Neither the embryo, egg nor sperm, is American. So she has no genetic relationship to this fertilized embryo. But she carries it to term within her own body and delivers it in a foreign country. Is the baby American? That's one of the issues that we're currently facing in a world with extensive in vitro methodologies. Now it turned out that U.S. law said the mother and child must have a natural relationship for the child to acquire U.S. citizenship. And natural had been read to mean genetic. So my office during my time reconstructed natural to include gestational. I didn't think that was a leap. After all, the alternative is if the child would be born stateless. And the controversy over this issue continues to go forward. But it raises an even bigger question, which is what rights do clones have? I don't know if anyone here is a clone. In 10 years, 15 years, we're gonna have people who were born through extraordinary in vitro methodologies sitting in our law school classrooms. They will cover. The question is, if they are outed as clones, will they be treated as lesser persons? Can their bodies be harvested by their principles for spare parts? Kenzo Ishiguro in his haunting novel, Never Let Me Go, describes the situation. Who has rights in this cloning? And when do they attach? Now the biggest issue in technology is cyberspace. And cyberspace has four dimensions for human rights purposes. One is intellectual property and piracy. Everyone knows that. Well, internet freedom, e-commerce, and cyber war. Now interestingly, the Universal Declaration of Human Rights said in 1948, a remarkable piece of prescience. The right to freedom to seek, receive, and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers. They seem almost to be speaking of the internet. Which raises a question about surveillance. What are reasonable expectations of privacy in an internet age? Is bulk collection a problem? Senator Leahy has a bill that would end the government's collection and storage of phone metadata and require foreign companies to retain those records with intelligence agencies obtaining them only after getting court approval. But imagine this. Most of you are voluntarily giving huge amounts of private information about yourself to Steve Zuckerberg. And if you're doing that, you should just assume that if there's a subpoena, a government agency in the United States can get it. Now the question is, is that what you want? Now, what about cyber conflict? There is extensive conflict already going on in cyberspace. And imagine this, if someone uses a computer command to open a dam or to shut down a hospital, people will die just as surely as if you bombed them. Now, some like the Chinese who have extraordinary capacities in cyberspace. A tip for you, if you go to China do not take your computer. The budget of Chinese intelligence for cyber surveillance exceeds the budget of the People's Liberation Army. So is it a black hole? Or is this an area to which we should translate existing rules of the laws of war? The US position, and I wrote an article about this in the Harvard International Law Journal, is that the laws of war apply in cyberspace. It's not a law-free zone. And so we have engaged, translated and leveraged at a series of new fora like the group of governmental experts and the World Conference on International Telecommunications to try to engage in the beginning of a legal regime on cyber conflict which we're trying to leverage into government and private cyber standards setting. How about soldiers? Oh, guess what? In the 21st century, fewer and fewer actions are done by soldiers. They're done by people like Sylvester Stallone, Arnold Schwarzenegger, Jean-Claude Van Damme and others of their type. The expendables one, two, three, five, whatever. Are they regulated or must they follow the laws of war? A lot of the activity in this area is again, engage. To develop a non-binding statement of principles and practices known as a Montreux document to translate this into an international code of conduct which we've now applied to 500 plus major security companies to avoid future incidents like blackwater and leverage through private contracts to try to internalize norms of humanitarian behavior into contractor activity. Now, obviously on war there's a huge amount of unfinished business. The United States exceeding to the Landmines Convention to help develop a treaty about autonomous weapons. Again, the issue of territoriality in the Covenant on Civil and Political Rights with regard to surveillance issues. The US will address the territoriality issue with regard to the torture convention in November next month. But far and away, and this brings me to the last part of my presentation, the greatest challenges we've faced on human rights with regard to Arab awakening. And you see the list of countries that have been implicated at the bottom. What struck me, or in fact it struck Secretary Clinton and she told me, is she said, you know what, most of these people don't want to join Al Qaeda. They would like to have control of their own lives. They're pushing their nations away from repression and discrediting extremism. So the question is, how can we build on that? So on September 11th, 2011, she suggested a smart power approach to counter-terrorism. The longer term approach is to use diplomacy, development, education, people-to-people outreach to challenge jihadist ideologies, propaganda, and appeal. But she acknowledged that you will not change the mind of Osama bin Laden, except through precise use of force. Now the press only likes to talk about the force. And they only like to talk about drones. As if drones are the issue. Suppose this, suppose that the winner of the popular vote in 2001 had been elected president. And suppose that the day after Congress passed an authorization for use of force against Al Qaeda, he went on TV and said the following. Last week, thousands of innocent civilians of many countries were killed at the Twin Towers in New York. They were killed by a transnational terrorist group. We know who they are. We have now declared war on them under US law. We have support for military action against them under international law. And so, we will do the following. In the next period, we will attack Al Qaeda and destroy it. We think there are only about a thousand people. We think we can devastate it. We need to attack their strongholds in Afghanistan. Let me tell you what we will not do. We will not invade Iraq. We will not torture people. We will not open Guantanamo. We will not kidnap people and do extraordinary renditions. But here's what we must do. If they're all gathered together, bin Laden and his senior leaders in Torobora, I will use whatever methodology is available to me to target them, including drones. And I will do it transparently and with the support of our allies, and I will do everything I can to minimize civilian casualties. God helped us that this is over very soon. Now, if he had done that, I think he would have gotten a lot of support. And you see what ended up happening instead, which is all of the roads that should not have been taken were taken, which has made the subsequent exercise how to get back to where we should be. Now, drones therefore are a tool, not a strategy. The much broader approach is engage, translate, and leverage. And the broader approach should be ending three wars, Iraq, Afghanistan, and al-Qaeda through a combination of reducing our military engagement, continuing our civilian engagement, developing our ties to civil society. And most important in my colleague, Dick Holbrook, who led this effort, support the new government in Afghanistan now to, in the post-Maliki period, support the al-Abadi government in the Kurds and Iraq to promote democratic governance in Egypt and to try to reduce tensions with Iran through the nuclear negotiations which are supposed to conclude in November. Now, President Obama finally clarified that this was his approach in May of last year, saying, there is no global perpetual war on terror. Our goal should be to end this forever war by defining the nature and scope of the struggle. He said that drones can be part of a smart power approach to dismantle specific terrorist networks. What is the unfinished business here? First, disciplining drones, acknowledging the facts and underlying legal explanations, consulting with Congress and our allies and discussing our standards, closing Guantanamo, where 149 people remain. I do believe that Guantanamo will be closed before the president leaves office. I think it might be a few minutes before he leaves office. But choosing an exit strategy over a perpetual war. For example, 11 of the current individuals who are in Guantanamo have been cleared for transfer, but the Secretary of Defense has not signed those exit forms. Also, we need a block strategy with regard to a country like Yemen, from which about 70 of the detainees are citizens. Now, in the middle of all of this, something unfortunate happened, which is the rise of ISIL. And the question now is, how can you fight ISIL without perpetuating war? There is the question of how to link this to the Afghan drawdown. I've written a blog post in Just Security Blog, which suggests three legislative measures. ISIL-specific authorization for the use of military force. This is a proposal that Adam Schiff, our congressman has suggested, combined with repealing the two authorizations to the use of military force that exists, the one for al-Qaeda and Iraq, to still seek a Security Council resolution to engage in a number of reforms designed to promote accountability. Whether the President will return to this issue after the midterms depends. After all, if he loses the Senate, he might be entirely on the reactive. But the key is, it seems to me, strictly defining who the enemy is. On September 18th, 2001, our Congress declared war against al-Qaeda, the Taliban, and associated forces. If we can reach some sort of accommodation with the Taliban through the new Afghan government and define associated forces in a restrictive way, then the key is to make it clear we're not at war with everyone who aides America, including every self-radicalizer. This leaves three other issues. What about humanitarian intervention, the debate over the responsibility to protect? When I went to Libya with Secretary Clinton, the strategy there was misunderstood as a hard power strategy. It was not. It was a smart power strategy, engage, translate, and leverage. Join with allies, translate the notion of responsibility to protect to the notion that Qaddafi is the one who had actually forfeited his own responsibility to protect, and to try to enforce a series of activities to protect civilians and rebuild the country. And I think it worked for the purposes for which it was designed. Many in our country now continue to focus on Benghazi, which I can say more about in question and answer. So what happened with Syria? A similar kind of thought. But when you look at the goals, securing chemical weapons, getting a ceasefire, ousting Assad, giving humanitarian aid, securing accountability, what's clear is there's a mismatch between the objectives and the soft power tools. There was no threat of force available. The Russians were persistently vetoing. Obama is better in stating principles than he is in the politics to get it. And most important, the diplomacy on Syria, Geneva II, died. And this led to this ironic result with regard to chemical weapons. Last fall, and you all remember it well, Obama suddenly threatened the use of hard power with regard to chemical weapons claiming a red line. It would have changed the issue to our conduct and called into question whether he was committed to engagement, soft power, and ending war. It looked a lot like exactly what he had forsaken of the last administration. And this is really shocking. It allowed Putin to be the defender of international law, Mr. International Law. We must stop using the language of force to return to the path of civilized diplomatic and political settlement, he says, just before invading Ukraine. Now, interestingly, over time, the administration's position mutated back. The threat of force was actually leveraged into a diplomatic process. The notion of Kosovo was applied to how to respond to these use of chemical weapons. This led to the chemical weapons arsenal being removed entirely the summer. The organization against the proliferation of chemical weapons won the Nobel Peace Prize. So what about ISIL? Obviously, smart power alone is not going to end them. It's both a human rights and a security issue. This is James Foley. He is the first American who was beheaded. He is a person I spent hundreds and hundreds of hours. He was previously captured in Libya. My team worked night and day and we got him out of Libya and then he went into Syria. Was captured there and then he was beheaded. Now, this brings us to today. Roughly 130 Canadians are estimated to be fighting with groups like ISIL. One Canadian citizen from Hamilton was supposedly killed last week. The beheadings continue and there's a major debate I read about in the Globe and Mail about whether Canada will send humanitarian aid, yes, but also fighter planes, surveillance, and military advisors for six months and perhaps beyond. There are a whole range of issues. Under domestic law is ISIL or the Coruscant Group, a splinter group of al-Qaeda and if so, how many others are in there? Will the President seek a new statute? Under international law, how long will the U.S. rely on a collective self-defense rationale or will it seek a Security Council resolution? How much will all of this help strengthen Assad perversely? And the issue which has almost escaped the radar is the United States Senate and House and Senate have now voted to arm vetted Syrian rebels. My own view is that if it's the right rebels, if it's done in the right way and if it's done for the right motives, it is still lawful under international law. It's not clear whether it's sufficient but it seems to me a lawfully available step. Finally, Ukraine. There's an emerging position which I know the Canadian government supports, supporting the people in government of Ukraine in direct dialogue with the Russians, treating the referendum in Crimea's illegitimate and unconstitutional, targeting smart sanctions on plutocrats, a strategy of multilateral outcasting. We face the reality that hard power is not a live option in the Ukraine. Smart sanctions are the only approach. Can it lead to the appropriate outcomes? And I found myself being quoted by none other than Putin on the Kremlin website, the argument that I made at the International Court of Justice supporting Kosovo. Well, I'm sorry, Vladimir, Crimea is not Kosovo. Ukraine was a stable territory, not a breakaway state. There was no human rights crisis. 10,000 had been killed in Kosovo. Kosovo declared independence only after a UN lengthy process where Crimea independence was declared almost immediately. The International Court of Justice in Kosovo does not call for broad-scale succession in Quebec or Scotland or anywhere else. It says international law regulates declarations of independence conjoined with the illegal use of force, which is what happened in the Ukraine. The treaty, so-called where Crimea became part of Russia, is an illegal agreement, and so was the referendum. And my question will be where will this be fought out on a legal battlefield? The International Court of Justice and International Arbitral Forum are somewhere else. Let me conclude on this note. The Obama administration has many, many challenges. It has much unfinished human rights business. But the steps I have outlined, while ambitious, are achievable. But what's more important than any particular outcome is the strategy. Engage, translate, and leverage treat international law as smart power. I think it's the only approach that has the possibility of long-term success. I think it's an approach that John Erskine read, that Ronald St. John McDonald and that Horace E. Reed would have supported in their time. And I hope very much it's one that's able to be achieved in the next two and a half years. Thank you very much for inviting me, and I hope to hear again.