 Thank you very much. I'm not sure it's possible for me to live up to that introduction, but I'm grateful for it. I want to thank Joe Farrelly and the staff here for the opportunity to pay my very first visit to Ireland. And it's traditional when Americans come to Ireland to talk about their Irish ancestors. And of course, President Obama did exactly that when he was here earlier this month. I wish I could do the same, but the sad truth is I don't have any Irish ancestors that I'm aware of. I have Irish friends here in Dublin. I live in a city where Irish roots run very deep. I think Guinness is one of the wonders of civilization. But again, as far as I know, there's no one in my family background, and I hope you'll forgive me for that. I will try to make up for that by giving an interesting talk. And to give you the bottom line up front, I think President Obama and his team have done a few things well, but by and large I think he will end his first term without any major accomplishments in foreign affairs. This is partly because there weren't any easy problems on his to-do list in foreign policy when he started, but I think it's also because America's position in the world is slowly being transformed and in ways that the American foreign policy establishment has yet to really come to terms with. And in particular, I think we're nearing what you might call the end of the American era, but we haven't quite admitted that to ourselves or drawn the right implications from it. And I'll say a little bit more about what I mean by that later. So just by way of background, we ought to remember the enormity of the task he began with. In addition to inheriting the greatest economic meltdown since the Great Depression, something I hardly need to emphasize here, he also inherited a very difficult situation overseas. We were losing in Iraq, losing in Afghanistan, and the United States was about as unpopular internationally as it had been ever in its history. So it was sort of a cliche in the United States back in 2008 that he faced the greatest challenge of any president since Roosevelt in the 1930s. And his big advantage was that many Americans and many people around the world were willing to give him the benefit of the doubt. I think that sense of hope and what he might accomplish is the reason he got a Nobel Prize in his first year as president, not for anything that he had done, but rather for what people thought he might be able to do going forward. The problem is it's not clear to me yet that he's done anything to deserve it. And I'll say a little bit more about that as I proceed. And I should add, I say that as someone who voted for him with some enthusiasm and sent as much money to his campaign as the law permits me to do. So I want to be clear where I'm coming from on this. So let me say a few words about his successes and then talk about the places where I think he's fallen short. Certainly he has helped improve America's image around the world, beginning with his inaugural speech. There was a clear change in tone. And if you look at things like the Pew Global Attitude Survey, which tracks world public opinion, there has been a sharp and enduring increase in the number of people around the world who have a favorable impression of the United States. Since he became president, the exception to that by the way is the Middle East. And I'll say a bit more about that too. A second success story I think is the relationship with Russia. It's not become a warm friendship by any means. But after a period of strain, he's managed to gain greater cooperation with Moscow than President Bush did. They successfully negotiated a new arms control treaty, which is of some value. And Russia has been more cooperative on issues like Iran or even Libya. And then you might have expected otherwise. I will also give them some modest credit on Iraq in so far as they have kept the United States on course to get out of Iraq. But that process started before he became president. And the more important point I would add is that Iraq is going to be in very bad shape for quite some time to come. It's going to be hard to claim Iraq as some kind of success story, right, even for President Obama as he takes us out of there. I think he also deserves a decent mark on the broader question of nuclear security. He has recognized that the security of nuclear materials worldwide to prevent terrorists from stealing them, things like that, is in fact a major issue. He held a successful summit on this problem in 2010 with leaders from nearly 50 countries around the world coming to Washington. I think this has put the United States on the right side of this agenda. It makes us look a little bit less hypocritical when we press countries like Iran over their nuclear programs. But I would not say that there's been a major breakthrough here and one could argue that our dispute with Iran, with North Korea, and conceivably also Pakistan have gotten worse over time as well. And then finally, if I'm putting out success stories, he deserves some credit for his handling of the hunt for Osama bin Laden and the successful, I guess captures the wrong word, killing of Osama bin Laden. This was not just good luck, right? It was clear that he put much more emphasis on trying to find bin Laden than Bush had done in the latter part of his administration. And I think he also showed good judgment in sending special forces in rather than simply sending a drone or a cruise missile. That said, I think it's only a qualified success. It's not clear that bin Laden himself was that important to global terrorism, except as a symbol at this stage. And I would argue that in fact Al-Qaeda's entire mission in a sense has largely failed. Its popularity was declining in various parts of the world. I think the Arab Spring that got so much attention and continues to get attention is actually inspired not by the Al-Qaeda agenda, but much more by a desire for transparency and democracy and a set of more traditional liberal values as well. And finally, getting bin Laden didn't end our obsession with terrorism. We're still worried about Al-Qaeda clones in various parts of the world like Yemen, Iraq, North Africa, and elsewhere. So there's a set of successes there, but none of them seem to me to be transformative. And that's pretty much the end of my list of success stories, although I could probably add a few if I was pressed. Let me now talk a little bit about the places where I think things have not gone as well. I'll start with Afghanistan and Pakistan. Back in the election campaign in 2008, he said he wanted to get out of Iraq and focus much more on Central Asia, which was a very clever way to look strong on national security while being opposed to the war in Iraq. He then added 17,000 more troops right after taking the office in the spring of 2009 and another 30,000 the following year. Unfortunately, I think it's increasingly clear that the war is just not going well. Despite the upbeat reports we occasionally get from military commanders there, the literature on counterinsurgency warfare tells you that success requires an effective local partner. Outside powers can't do it entirely on their own. And it's again increasingly clear that the Karzai government is not an effective partner. It's unpopular. It's corrupt and ineffective. You also need a lot more troops than we actually have, even with the additional troops that he sent to have a successful counterinsurgency campaign. We've conducted a number of offensives in the last year or so. They have not produced, in my view, decisive results. And in fact, civilian casualties in Afghanistan hit a new high in 2010. Our European allies are increasingly heading for the exits. We're not getting much cooperation from Pakistan. And perhaps most important, the war is now costing the United States over $100 billion every year. And that's for a country whose entire gross national product is only $14 billion. And if you think that's an effective investment of resources, then we probably have a significant disagreement. Any sort of meaningful victory there is still going to take years. Now, in my view, he simply blundered when he decided to escalate our involvement there. And also, the rationale that he has given for this, that we need to prevent Afghanistan from becoming a safe haven for terrorists, is not a very convincing rationale any longer. First of all, Al-Qaeda has safe havens in other parts of the world, and they are better than Afghanistan would be. Al-Qaeda has cells in Yemen, in Pakistan, elsewhere. And those are more effective places. Second, it doesn't need a safe haven or a large training base in order to attack us. The 9-11 attack was conducted primarily out of Hamburg, Germany, and out of Karachi in Pakistan, not out of training bases in Afghanistan. So even if the Taliban regained power in Afghanistan, Al-Qaeda went back in, they wouldn't be able to organize a large training base there because those we could see and those we could attack. The bottom line here is that if the issue is Al-Qaeda, Al-Qaeda is not going to be a lot weaker if we're completely successful in Afghanistan. It's not going to be a lot stronger if we withdraw, and if that's the case, there's no reason to keep fighting there. Bottom line here is the United States is not going to determine the final fate of Afghanistan. That's going to be up to the Afghan people. The only real question, and I think this is increasingly clear in Washington, is whether the United States and its allies get out quickly or get out slowly, but we're going to get out. I'm hoping that Obama uses the death of Osama bin Laden as an opportunity to change course. We may see that begin to happen. My point is that even if he does get out, Afghanistan is not going to look like a big success story for the United States. They may try to spin it as such, but it's going to be hard to convince people that this is some great and glorious victory, even if we do get out quickly. What about Iran? Here Obama made a very sharp symbolic break with President Bush's approach, saying he was willing to talk to the Iranians, hinting at greater flexibility. He made a number of gestures of openness in the first year or so. The difficulty is that the United States remains obsessed with Iran's nuclear program. And the problem there is that there is a broad consensus in Iran in favor of having full control of the nuclear fuel cycle, having an enrichment capability. Even the leaders of the Iranian opposition, the so-called Green Movement in Iran, support nuclear enrichment. And of course enrichment is the one thing that we are saying that they cannot have. And in fact, if you look at the evolution of Obama's policy, it is now virtually identical to that of the Bush administration. We are essentially saying they have to give up enrichment first and then we'll talk about the things that they would like to discuss with us. We've been gradually ratcheting up sanctions, which of course is what the Bush administration did as well. We occasionally hint at doing something more, perhaps using military force. None of this of course has altered Iran's interest in possibly pursuing a nuclear capability. If you're trying to persuade someone not to develop nuclear weapons, of course, threatening them with military force is perhaps not the best way to convince them that a nuclear deterrent is not something that they need. Now, to his credit, he's done a very good job of lining up more international support for the American position. I think he has correctly decided not to use military force, which would not solve the problem. And we may be able, we may have been able to slow their progress through various forms of covert action, most notably the so-called Stuxnet virus, which appears to have been an American effort to sabotage their nuclear program. We have not however tried the one approach that might work, and I say might because I'm not sure it would, which would be essentially a deal where Iran is in fact allowed to enrich uranium under appropriate safeguards. It pledges not to weaponize, not to go forward and develop weapons. We in turn would pledge not to try to overthrow the regime, not to support those who are trying to do so as well. This might not work, but I think it's the only possible way to head off, but I would characterize this as a sort of latent Iranian nuclear capability, a capacity to develop weapons if they so chose down the road. But again, the bottom line here is you're not going to see a lot of progress on the Iranian problem in the rest of Obama's first term in my judgment, which brings me to the exciting topic of Israel and Palestine. He started off, you may remember, saying he was going to push very hard for a two-state solution in his first term. He was not going to wait to his second term. And in his Cairo speech in June 2009, he said a two-state solution was in America's interest, the Palestinians' interest, Israel's interest, and the world's interest. He said unequivocally in that speech that Israeli settlements must stop. Unfortunately, everything that has happened since then has been a humiliating retreat. The Israeli government refused to stop building settlements. The Palestinians quite rightly refused to negotiate while Israel was taking more and more land each week. And the United States, of course, ended up looking weak and ineffectual. A couple of months ago, Obama then caved in again to the Israel lobby by vetoing a UN Security Council resolution that condemned the settlement building. Even though that resolution was supported by over 120 countries in the General Assembly and by every other member of the Security Council, all 14 members except the United States supported it. And the most amazing part is the resolution was, in fact, completely consistent with American policy, because American policy is at least formally to oppose settlement building as well. But nonetheless, we vetoed the resolution. It was the first veto, by the way, that the Obama administration has cast in the Security Council. Now, last month, he gave a pretty good speech at the State Department, followed by a speech to APAC, the main organization of the Israel lobby. He once again restated his commitment to a two-state solution. But, of course, he said absolutely nothing about what he was going to try to do to bring it about at this point. And he made it clear that he opposed any effort to have the United Nations recognize a Palestinian state in September. This, to me, makes no sense at all. He has said repeatedly that he believes the Palestinians should have their own state, which is something, by the way, that President Clinton said, and something that President Bush believed in, too. The peace process is dead in the water at this point, and he's now shown he's unwilling to take on Israel's hardline supporters in the United States. So given that, why not let the United Nations do something that might begin to break the deadlock, might begin to get more diplomatic activity underway? And then that was, of course, followed by Prime Minister Netanyahu's speech to a joint session of Congress, in which he made it clear that he has actually no intention of allowing the Palestinians to have a viable state of their own. And while he gave that speech, he got 29 standing ovations, which proves that the American writer Mark Twain was right when he said that Congress contains the smallest minds, the selfishest souls, and the cowardliest hearts that God makes. Now, what does this all mean? It means there's not going to be a two-state solution anytime soon and possibly never. This problem is going to get worse during the remainder of Obama's presidency. And the results of this are entirely predictable, that the annual survey of Arab public opinion that's conducted each year by the University of Maryland showed that Obama's approval rating throughout the Arab world went from 45% in 2009 to about 20% today. This situation, in my view, is a tragedy for all concerned, including the United States and Israel. And here we should all sort of heed the words of former Prime Minister Ehud Olmert of Israel, who said in 2007, if a two-state solution fails, Israel will face a South Africa-like struggle for political rights. And if that happens, the state of Israel is finished. That is Ehud Olmert talking, not me. And Obama's failure on this issue is not good for anyone. This brings me, then, finally, to events in the Arab world. And let me say a little bit about that and how we've responded and then get to my second big theme about the decline of the American order. I'd say over the last 40 or 50 years, American strategy in the Middle East has rested on two basic pillars. The first is the special relationship with Israel, this relationship of unconditional support. The second was support for various pro-American monarchies like Saudi Arabia and Jordan or military dictatorships like Egypt. And our goal was to keep Israel safe and to keep the oil flowing. And what made this strategy work was the fact that our Arab allies didn't have to pay much attention to public opinion. And so they could cooperate with us, even though their populations were angered by our support for Israel and by Israel's treatment of the Palestinians. People were also angry at us for propping up a set of governments that denied freedom of expression, tortured their political opponents, were, in some cases, economically stagnant. And it certainly made our talk about democracy and human rights look rather hypocritical. That structure is now crumbling in various ways. We don't know how this is all going to turn out. But I think in the future, one thing you can be confident of is Arab governments are going to be more attentive to popular sentiment in the future than they have been in the recent past, either because they've moved strongly in a democratic direction and therefore politicians have to cater to public opinion or because they're going to be worried about more upheavals happening down the road. What that means for the United States is that if we want good relations with these countries, we are going to have to make our policies more congenial to Arab peoples, not just to Arab rulers. And that's going to involve some shifts. If Arab states pay more attention to popular sentiment, it will make the Israeli-Palestinian conflict much more of a problem for us because although these upheavals in the Arab world are not about the Palestinian issue, that issue does resonate very strongly in these populations and it's going to be very difficult or more difficult going forward for the United States to have good relations with these societies if we're still on the wrong side of that issue. All right, now if you put all that together, I'd say it's ultimately not a very successful foreign policy. It's not as bad as his predecessor, of course, but the Bush administration is not exactly the standard to which you want to aspire. It's setting the bar awfully low to say that you've been more successful than the Bush administration. And I think one consequence, and I'll get back to this at the end, is it's going to be very difficult for him to run in his foreign policy record when he goes for re-election. He's not going to get much political capital out of that to the extent that it matters very much to Americans. Which all brings me to the last broad theme I want to discuss briefly. And to put this as provocatively as I can, I think we're witnessing the end of the American era. And by that I mean the era in which the United States was largely responsible for shaping events in almost every corner of the world. Now in saying that, I am not saying the United States is finished as a major power and that it's going into terminal decline, rather that this unusual era of global primacy that began in 1945 is rapidly waning. And that's part of the reason why Obama is having such trouble achieving his foreign policy goals. So let me say a little bit about what that era was like and then what is changing and what it means. The end of World War II left the United States in a remarkable position. In 1945, the American economy was fully half of the world economy. We had 50% of gross world product. We had the largest Navy and Air Force, sole possession of atomic weapons, military bases all over the world. We were a major creditor nation. We didn't owe anybody any money. And in fact, we had a positive trade balance. Former imperial powers like Britain were deeply in debt. Germany and Japan have been heavily damaged by war. We also had a lot of goodwill and prestige in part because the United States had supported decolonization and other popular movements there. And we were in a very favorable geopolitical position. No enemies nearby. Didn't have to worry about protecting ourselves in our own neighborhood. It's about as favorable a position as any great power in history. And what we did with that was to build a political, economic, and security order in virtually every part of the world except the Soviet Union and Warsaw Pact. Not only did we bring most of the world into a set of institutions that were mostly made in America, we exercised a dominant influence in many parts of the world for the next few decades. We played the leading role in creating the United Nations, the IMF, the World Bank, the general agreement on tariffs and trade. And we were the most influential member of each of those organizations. Marshall Plan helped rebuild Europe. NATO secured the peace, prevented Soviet expansion. We built an equally durable alliance system in Asia through bilateral treaties with Japan, South Korea, Australia, New Zealand, the Philippines, several others. In the Middle East, as I've already mentioned, the United States helped create and support Israel. But we also had close security ties with Saudi Arabia, Jordan, the Shah of Iran, some smaller Gulf states. So we got reliable access to Middle East energy. And we had a position of hegemony in the Western Hemisphere, which we'd had for a long time. The United States didn't pay much attention to Africa, but we did enough to ensure that our strategic interests there, which weren't very great, were protected. Now let me just say two points about this. Our position in those areas was challenged at several points during the Cold War, but never endangered. So we lost the Vietnam War, but the alliance network in Asia held firm. And China actually became a tacit American ally in the 1970s. The Shah of Iran fell in 1979. Iran became an adversary. But our position in the Middle East remained intact. Oil kept flowing out of the Persian Gulf. Israel became more powerful and secure. And Egypt actually eventually abandoned the Soviet Union and realigned with us as well. So we were challenged, but it was never really undermined. Second, this is a very unusual situation in world history. It's rare for any country to have this kind of global influence, let alone a country whose population is only 5% of the world's population. It wasn't going to last forever. But then the Soviet Union collapsed in the late 80s. And I think that event blinded us to the fact that several things were altering the American position fundamentally. We had this one triumphal moment. We missed what the bigger picture was. So what's the position now? We're still the world's largest economy, only about 25% of gross world product now. And we will not be the world's largest economy for much longer. China will probably pass us in the next decade or so. In terms of our overall security situation, this is the good news. It's actually better, you could argue, than it was during the Cold War. In 1986, the United States and all its allies put together produced about 49% of global military spending. And if you put all our possible adversaries together, they were about 40%. Today, the United States and all its allies produce about 70% of global military spending. Our various adversaries, if you add them all together, is about 15%. So in a sense, we're in a better shape. That's the good news. The bad news, however, is the United States has ended up carrying most of the burden in Iraq and Afghanistan, as I mentioned, over $100 billion a year, at $150, if you count both wars. We spend more than 4% of our GDP on defense. Our NATO allies spend about 1.7%. Some of you may have noticed Secretary Gates was here last week complaining about that fact, like every American Secretary of Defense. We still think of ourselves as this indispensable nation to use Madeline Albright's phrase. And we tend to see it as some sort of foreign policy victory whenever we get stuck handling some intractable problem in the world. And of course, and this is the really bad news, we're facing major long-term fiscal problems. And I say that with some hesitation here in Ireland because your problems are worse than ours and I don't want to sound like I'm complaining. But our situation is not good, particularly for a country that aspires to be a global power. Beginning in 2001, we cut taxes and then fought two very expensive wars. We then had a major financial meltdown, which required a massive federal bailout and stimulus package leading to a budget deficit in 2009 of $1.8 trillion. The International Monetary Fund now projects the total federal debt will equal America's entire gross national product by 2015. Congressional Budget Office is forecasting persistent budget deficits over the next decade. Some ratings agencies are now warning about downgrading American credit worthiness, which hasn't happened in a long time. What all this means, of course, is that the American defense budget is in fact going to be cut. Secretary of Defense Gates has already said so repeatedly. And that's going to limit what we can try to do overseas. So that's one thing that's changing. Same time, we're witnessing the emergence of some new power centers in the world. And the obvious example is China. As China grows wealthier, it will convert more of that wealth into military power and its own defense budget, by the way, by about 10% a year now. And if China is like other major powers in the world, and I think it will be, it's going to use that growing capability to make itself more secure. And that almost certainly means challenging the American role in Asia. Why? Because China would not want other major powers in its backyard for the very same reason that the United States didn't want European great powers in the Western Hemisphere. If the United States can have a Monroe Doctrine which says that major powers should stay out of the Western Hemisphere, China will want something similar. They will want to try and push the United States out of East Asia over time, because that's going to make them more secure than having us there in strength and with close alliances. What all that means is over time, I think we're very likely to see an intensifying security competition in Asia between the United States and China. And then finally, we've also seen in the last 20 years or so the emergence of a set of regional powers, like Brazil, Turkey, India, arguably Russia, who have reformed their economies, become wealthier, more powerful, more assertive. None of them, in my view, are going to be true global powers, but each is going to be increasingly influential in its own region and increasingly able to chart its own course without having to pay much attention to what Washington wants. Given that there's a lot of anti-Americanism in some of these countries, such as Turkey, and that they're democratic, so politicians pay attention to public opinion, these are countries that are simply not going to do Washington's bidding if they see their interests differently. Now, having said all that, I want to make it clear I don't want to overstate this. The United States is still the world's strongest military power. Its economy is more diverse and technologically sophisticated than any other. The dollar is still the world's reserve currency. Many countries around the world want American protection, want a close relationship. But I think if you combine the economic problems we have at home, China's rise, and the gradual diffusion of power to other areas, it means that this era we've been in where the United States could create and lead security orders in virtually every part of the world is coming to an end. And I think you see signs of this almost everywhere, but especially in the problems that Obama has had in a variety of different places, most notably the Middle East. And one final way to see this is to sort of compare our situation today with the situation at the beginning of the American era. The Marshall Plan was $13 billion of economic aid to Europe. And it was all grants. It was just money that was given. It wasn't a loan. $13 billion in 1948, it was equal to 5% of American GDP in that year. Now, people talk about trying to do a Marshall Plan for the Middle East to help the Arab Spring take root. If we did the equivalent today, it would mean investing $700 billion in helping Egypt, Tunisia, and other Arab states get rolling again. Of course, nobody thinks the United States has $700 billion to throw at that particular problem now. Or on a smaller scale, in 1991, after the First Gulf War, the United States expressed its gratitude to Egypt for its support by forgiving $25 billion of Egyptian debt to the United States. Today, after the Egyptian Revolution, we have offered $1 billion in loan guarantees, which is not the same as a loan, and $1 billion in loan forgiveness. Suggesting, again, that our capacity and our clout, our ability to shape events, is much more limited today. Again, I want to reiterate, this does not mean we are all washed up, or irrelevant, or about to fall from the ranks of great powers. My point, rather, is that the past 60 years or so, we're really quite unusual. It's very rare for any single country to have been able to create and lead security orders all over the world. And the question is, what does this mean, then, going forward? Before I say that, let me just say one final thing. Why don't we get this? Why haven't Americans figured this out yet? Because I'm not that smart. The first problem is, remember that Obama is having trouble in part, because many of the items on his agenda were not easy to fix. You were not going to fix the Arab-Israeli conflict in a couple of weeks. So a lot of the items on his foreign policy agenda were difficult to resolve. But second, after 50-plus years of global leadership, the Cold War, lots of international activity, the American foreign policy establishment is, in a sense, addicted to intervention, addicted to feeling like it has to get involved almost everywhere, and also finds it very hard to resist the use of military power. Republican parties very heavily shaped by neo-conservatives who love using power. And the Democratic Party has been the home to liberal interventionists, some would call them liberal imperialists. Again, both groups believe very strongly in the use of American power. And it's worth remembering that the president who won the Nobel Peace Prize in his first year in office is also the president who escalated the war in Afghanistan, has not closed the prison on Guantanamo, has sharply increased our use of drones and targeted killings in Yemen and Central Asia, and then, of course, took us to war along with the British and French to try and overthrow Muammar Gaddafi in Libya. And it's in part because his advisors aren't, in fact, all that different from President Bush's. Remember, most of the top people, most of the top appointees in the Obama administration's foreign policy team were vocal supporters of the invasion of Iraq in 2003. Hillary Clinton supported the invasion of Iraq. Most of the people who worked for her in the State Department did as well. Most of the top officials in the Pentagon did too. Obama didn't, but he's the exception within his own administration. Major think tanks in the United States, like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Carnegie Endowment, Brookings Institution, American Enterprise Institution, their basic mission centered around identifying global problems and figuring out what the United States should be doing to try and solve them. Now, they don't always agree on what those solutions ought to be, but the point is that doing less is rarely one of the things you will see one of those organizations recommending. And I'll finally, I'll just quote what the former president of the Council on Foreign Relations, Leslie Gelb, said in a column he wrote last year. He admitted that his own support for the Iraq War reflected, and here I'm quoting, an unfortunate tendency within the foreign policy community, namely the disposition and incentive to support wars to retain your political and professional credibility. In other words, to be taken seriously in Washington, you have to show your tough, you have to show your resolute, and you generally have to support a hawkish approach to most problems. So even if Barack Obama wanted the United States to make a much more dramatic shift in foreign policy, have a more restrained foreign policy, he would be hard put to find very many people in the foreign policy establishment to support him. I think that's why you see many of the usual suspects in many of the usual jobs, pursuing the same policies we've pursued in the past and with much of the same result. All right, let me just wrap this up now because I've gone on a little too long. Just to repeat it one more time, these developments do not mean the United States is plummeting as a world power that we're suddenly weak and vulnerable. What it means is that our ability to impose our preferences on virtually all of the world is gonna decline. It's not gonna go away completely, of course. That means going forward, the United States has to be a lot more selective about where it invests its blood and treasure. We're not gonna be able to run political, economic and security orders in every corner of the world anymore. And despite our historical ties to Europe, I would bet Europe is going to actually get a lot less attention in the future. Asia is gonna get a lot more. Now that's actually good news. From a European perspective, it's first a sign that Europe really isn't in danger. Europe is in fact stable, relatively peaceful, faces no serious external threats. And it also reflects the fact that getting a lot of attention from the United States is not always a good thing, as has been shown in some parts of the world. Second point, if I were an Obama insider, and you can probably tell at this point that I'm not, I would be a little worried. The American economy is still not doing particularly well. Events in the Middle East and in Japan, which I haven't talked about, could slow our recovery even more. There are no big foreign policy achievements to brag about in the campaign. There's lots of evidence that incumbent presidents have a tough time getting reelected if the economy is weak, and that's one reason why you see so many Republicans now testing the waters, thinking about running. None of them look very appealing to me, but it's, again, it's quite early in the campaign. And Obama also can't rest on the fact that, well, he finally got bin Laden. I would just remind you that the first President Bush won a smashing victory in the 1991 Gulf War, and he was defeated by Bill Clinton 18 months later. In other words, voters have short memories, foreign policy doesn't matter very much, and as President Clinton famously said in the 1992 campaign, it's the economy, stupid. So if I were Obama's team, I would be worried because I think he's in for a real dogfight in the 2012 election. He has a reasonable chance of getting reelected, but it's not gonna be easy. Now my hope, given my own preferences, is that he's learned a lot in his first four years. He does get reelected, and then he rethinks his approach to a number of issues where things have not gone particularly well. I have to admit I'm not that confident. He will be able to turn things around because as I said, foreign policy establishment he's working with is stuck in particular rather conventional positions, but this is one set of issues where I would be delighted to be proven wrong. And now I will be even more delighted to take your comments and questions and give what answers I can. Thanks very much. Thank you. Thank you.