 My name is Barry Colfer and I'm the Director of Research here at the Institute of International European Affairs in Dublin. I'm delighted to welcome those of you who are here in person and also those who are here online. And I'm pointing over here because I was recently told I always pointed up here to welcome those who are joining online, but that's actually a light. So, pointing at those at home, it's lovely to have you here. And for those who braved the weather today for posterity, because of course all of our events are recorded. This is a snow day in Dublin, so when we woke up with the giddy promise of a snow day and schools and crashes around the country are closing, geopolitics never closes. So the Institute remains open for business and just a real sincere thanks to those, especially our speaker, obviously Nigel Inkster. But those of you who could come in as well, it's much appreciated. So we're delighted to be joined today by Nigel Inkster, who is formerly Director of Operations and Intelligence at MI6 and Senior Advisor for Cyber Security in China at the International Institute for Strategic Studies at truly eminent think tank in the think tank world. Nigel will provide an address on the topic of re-risking geopolitics. So Nigel is going to speak for about 20 minutes or so. And then of course we'll go to Q&A in the traditional format. So those who are here in attendance with us, you can raise your hand and a mic will come to you. And those of you who are online can use the Q&A function. And just a reminder that the discussion today is on the record and you can participate in the discussion using the handle at IEA as ever. So I'll now formally and briefly introduce Nigel Inkster for handing over to him. Nigel Inkster is Senior Advisor at the International Institute for Strategic Studies and a Director of Geopolitical and Intelligence Analysis at NODO Economics. Previously Nigel served as Director of Operations and Intelligence for MI6 and served in the Board of MI6 for seven years. In 2017 Inkster was appointed to the Global Commission on the stability of cyberspace, participating in the drafting of its eight norms related to non-aggression and cyberspace. The author of the great decoupling China America and the Strogopher Technological Supremacy in China's cyber power. Nigel's lifelong fascination with China started when he studied the language and culture at Oxford. I'm also delighted to say on the way up Nigel told me he's currently listening to Ulysses, which we all know it's one of the great ways to access choices to listen to him. So this is also a visceral experience for Nigel because he's in the middle of Joyce in Dublin, obviously you are making this address. So Nigel, great to have you here. I invite you to the podium. Well, firstly, thank you very much for inviting me to come here. I hadn't had much engagement, any engagement actually with this institution but I know it by reputation and it's really nice to be here and what a lovely building you have. It's very interesting to reflect on the speed and scale with which geopolitics has come back to the fore. You know, if I suggested maybe even five years ago that this was an appropriate topic for discussion, I think, you know, people would have been looking around nervously wondering who had the number to summon the men in white coats. And certainly I think for people in the private sector, international corporations, the return of geopolitics has come as a major and unwelcome shock. All of a sudden the realization that actually you can't any longer expect to do business around the world as if you were in New York or Chicago has taken a while to assimilate. And my sense is that many private sector corporations are still struggling to come to terms with it. But the fact is geopolitics is back after what in effect has been a 30 year holiday that we more or less enjoyed since the end of the Cold War. But if one looks, you know, a kind of, you know, across the wider course of human history, it's actually the 30 years that we've just been through that is the anomaly, not the situation we're in now. This is a list of recorded history. Major power confrontation has been the norm. And it's just taking us a little while to get back to, you know, an understanding of this, you know, I grew up in the Cold War. It defined pretty much everything we did. That was the normal one simply accepted it and adapted to it. And we did so in the event quite successfully absent a few near misses with on the nuclear side. And you know, I think this is clearly where we're going to get back to. Well, what has driven it? Well, you know, there are a number of factors, but I think the big one is the unipolar moment is over. And many parts of the world are now chafing under a US led international order, which they no longer perceive to be fit for their purpose. And nowhere is this more true than in relation to China. A country that whose modern history has effectively been driven by, you know, the whole concept of the century of humiliation, the fall from grace, from being one of the most prosperous, well governed and powerful states on the planet to kind of indigent outlier pillared as the sick man of Asia. And everything that China has been doing for the last 150 years is about getting back to where they think they were. You know, to a significant degree, we're at the kind of apogee of the chain dynasty around the 18th century when enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire and lightness, you know, were, you know, sort of very enamored of the way China ran things. And this has gone through various phases, you know, the establishment of the People's Republic, the, you know, the chaos of the Mao years, the Cultural Revolution, then finally coming blinking into the daylight and deciding that the thing they had to do was to develop their economy. And pretty much from I think 1978 to 2008 or that 30 years if my math is not out. We have a China that appeared very much to be a status quo power that effectively did not have a foreign policy beyond doing the minimum necessary to ensure the conditions for economic development quite happy to free ride on US supplied security goods and really not a challenge. Well, you know what has changed. Essentially, I think they're always were cracks in the relationship between China and the United States, pretty much from the start. But, you know, it has progressively become more difficult to paper them over. I think 2008 was a critical turning point. The Beijing Olympics, the international, the global financial crisis. I think at that point China, which had experienced several charged growth following its entry to the World Trade Organization was feeling more powerful, more skeptical about the benefits of the US led system the Washington consensus, and increasingly feeling that it was time for China to assert itself and kind of set the terms of the debate going forward. This began to happen under Hu Jintao but it really achieved take off under his successor Xi Jinping who was appointed Secretary General of the United States to be the only one of his titles and actually really matters in 2012. And at that point, we had, you know, the China dream, the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation this concept of China effectively returning to the global status it enjoyed, you know, during the high years of the Qing dynasty and a kind of method for getting from here to there in terms of, you know, the very vague formulation of a community of common destiny for mankind. You know, now when this first term first began to surface, I don't think most Western politicians paid it any attention. Why would you? There was no substance, so it was so vague as to be, you know, virtually meaningless. That was a mistake. This is important because what China is doing in the community of common destiny is actually proposing an alternative system of governance to the US led global order. And, you know, this is couched in language that seems benign, inclusive, moralistic, but actually when you drill down and look at what it really is, it is self interested, hierarchical, illiberal and coercive. It is a design that is, you know, aimed, you know, China knows that we're not going to be persuaded by, you know, this formulation, but it is aimed at the global south primarily. And we're seeing a lot of buy in from countries in the global south that didn't even exist as countries when the US led order was set up and no longer feel that it particularly benefits them. So this is where China is going. And, you know, we now find ourselves in a situation where relations between China and the US have become very tense towards, I think in the latter part of 2023, there was widespread international concern that the relationship between the US and China would spiral out of control and into conflict. And there was a period in the latter half of 2023 when I think Xi Jinping was effectively blanking the United States in the belief that any attempted engagement would only result in outcomes detrimental to China's interests. That has since changed to the extent that the two sides are now talking, both have looked into the abyss, you know, don't like what they see down there, and are making some efforts to at least manage the relationship and try to put a bottom under it. But the simple truth is that what divides these two great powers are issues of ideology, values and geopolitical interests that are diametrically opposed and very, very difficult to resolve. And, you know, we're looking really at three areas here, you know, what in an auto economics we come to call the three T's of trade, technology and Taiwan. Trade, well, we saw, you know, basically, when China entered the WTO in 2001 on developing country terms, which was the only way it possibly could, when GDP was that low. The good times were rolling. Everybody was making lots of money in China. Nobody stopped to really think and take action about China's signal failure to live up to its commitments under the WTO to open up its markets and in particular its capital market. And that was a major contributing factor to 2008 financial crisis, a build up of unsustainably large savings glut that nobody could ever cope with. And we're talking to Mervin King, former governor of the Bank of England about this, who said, you know, we better hope China doesn't open its capital account up because if it did, we wouldn't know what to do with the money. And he's absolutely right. We wouldn't. So, you know, there was a big problem there. We had the Trump Donald Trump initiating a trade war in 2018. You know, Trump, I find it sort of intriguing figure. He's solipsistic, narcissistic and ignoramus and a Bulgarian, but he's not stupid. And I think his instincts on China, although, you know, it was really a case of, you know, Trump arriving at the right answer for the wrong reason. You know, he's a mercantilist. He sees international trade in zero sometimes. And, you know, he persuaded himself that, you know, the U.S. was being ripped off by China. And actually, in many respects, he was not wrong. How he went about dealing with it is another matter. But I think, you know, it probably was a moment to actually put a mark in the sand and say, you know, this cannot be allowed to continue the way that it's going. And actually now, I think it's clear that China is looking to develop an alternative global trading system that is very much based on interaction with the global sound. Again, that, you know, that has become, you know, the focus of China's activities in these areas. Then there is technology. We saw China moving rapidly to industrialize and to embrace the benefits of information communications technologies, whilst recognizing their subversive potential. And the thing that surprised everybody was, you know, Bill Clinton said, you know, managing the internet is like trying to nail Jell-O to the wall. Well, the Chinese have managed to nail a lot of Jell-O to the wall and have really actually, you know, managed to tame the internet to the point where they can't stop people from saying things they don't like. But they can damn well know who's saying when, and they can come after them as and when it suits their purposes. China has established itself as a major player in the manufacture of communications technology equipment. Major U.S. corporations like Apple, Nvidia, Qualcomm derive a huge percentage of their annual revenue from trade with China and from, you know, manufacture in China, saving on costs. I think Qualcomm derives about something between 40% and 50% of its total revenue from China. It's really quite amazing. And, you know, China has made itself a kind of global center of what might one might term trailing edge semiconductors, you know, 28 nm upwards. The U.S. is now trying to, you know, reign on China's parade, preventing it from going further up the value chain, starting with Donald Trump with the 5th generation mobile technology. We saw in 2018 that, you know, Chinese national champion Huawei was making a bid to become the kind of global supplier of choice on 5G technology, much of which was derived from U.S. intellectual property. But it turned out that, you know, no U.S. company could actually manufacture an end to end 5G system. You know, the manufacturing had been so much outsourced that the U.S. could no longer put it together. Well, I mean, you know, sort of fairly crude coercive techniques were applied by the U.S. to prevent allies and partners from moving to Huawei. And under Biden, we've seen an intensification of that policy under the so-called Sullivan doctrine, Jake Sullivan's speech in 2022 to Eric Schmidt's special competitive studies project. He said, you know, until now we've been content to just stay a couple of generations ahead in these technologies, but some of them are now so critical to national security interests that we have to establish as large a lead as possible. And this has been followed up by a fairly swinging embargo on the sale of advanced semiconductors and the equipment for making them to China. And this is hurting, but at the same time, it's also paradoxically incentivizing China to, you know, double down on indigenous innovation. Most Chinese corporations in this game up until now wanted to have American technology because it was better, you know, more advanced, more reliable. And now they find themselves, you know, at risk of being deprived of it, their only alternative is to turn to Chinese suppliers. And we're now beginning to see, you know, the sort of positive interaction between, you know, design implementation feedback, which is, you know, critical for moving up the value chain. And most of us in the, you know, who occupy that sort of interesting niche between China and technology take the view that the US is not going to be able to, you know, keep China down long term. The best they can hope to do is to kind of buy a decent interval to get themselves in a better position than they currently are in terms of diminishing reliance on Chinese manufacturing. And then the third T is Taiwan. An irredentist issue for China, Xi Jinping has said that the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation cannot take place until national reunification has been achieved. And with that is that over the years, Taiwan has not been moving closer to China, it's been moving further away. And poll after poll indicates that more and more Taiwanese identify as Taiwanese and not Chinese, as was true of their parents, many of whom came with Jankai Shek at the end of the Chinese Civil War. Taiwan occupies a particular strategic situation as part of the first island chain, which China sees as something that boxes it in, and which United States sees as critical to maintaining its domination of the Western Pacific. And Taiwan is also the, you know, through the Taiwan semiconductor manufacturing corporation, the producer of about 50% of the world's semiconductors and about 90% of the world's most advanced semiconductors. We're talking here, you know, 9753 soon to be two nanometers. Pretty soon we're going to hit the subatomic level and then that's going to get very interesting. So Taiwan, you know, is important. The Taiwanese talk about the Silicon Shield, you know, TSMC, I've never been particularly persuaded by that argument, but it's, you know, it's one that has had currency. So the worry is, if China cannot achieve reunification by peaceful means, that it might feel it has no alternative, but to pursue reunification through non-peaceful means. So in order to economics, we monitor this on a monthly basis using traditional classic, you know, intelligence analysis methodology. And at the moment we reckon that the likelihoods, you know, three to six months of the use of military force is pretty low, about 15%. And that could change very easily and quickly under certain circumstances, particularly because since 2019-2020, the United States under Trump but also under Biden has put pressure on China over Taiwan by increasing engagement, increasing defense sales, and generally just getting more involved in dealings with Taiwan. The US position on intervening in the Taiwan Straits and the event of conflict has been one of strategic ambiguity, neither saying they would nor they wouldn't. But Joseph Biden in the last two years has at least four times to my recollection said that the US would intervene, even though on every occasion his officials have walked it back. I think, you know, when somebody said something four times, you kind of have to suspect that they might actually mean it. And, you know, this probably is the flashpoint that could most easily ignite between these two major powers. Consequences, I was tempted to say unpredictable, but they're not unpredictable. Actually, they're all too horribly predictable and are likely to result in major discontinuities and interruptions of global supply chains that some estimates have put at $10 trillion just kind of for starters. And as we all know, when it comes to armed conflict, it is very rarely, if ever over by Christmas. Once conflicts start, they tend to take on a life of their own their own dynamic. And, you know, the trend is to greater prolongation and it's very interesting to see that the Chinese people's Liberation Army are now starting to looking having looked at Ukraine, think very seriously about the implications of a potentially prolonged conflict over Taiwan, rather than the sort of Putin s, you know, coup demand that, you know, decapitates the regime and then it's all done. So, you know, we have this situation, which kind of, you know, in a sense, I always say when it comes to, you know, global actors in today's world, a country like Russia is the weather but a country like China is the climate. And I think, you know, the contestation with the potential to, you know, lapse into conflict between the US and China is probably the most consequential factor shaping today's geopolitics. And I find it very interesting and I'm sure, you know, some of you will have been to the United States talking to people in the security sector writ large. There is an almost fatalistic assumption that at some point soon the US and China are going to go to war. You know, it is that serious. So, you know, this shapes everything and it has consequences for other disruptive actors who we are now seeing the obvious one being Russia. We've seen this bromance between Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping developing over the years when Xi Jinping went last year to see Putin I think for his birthday. No one else would go and celebrate Putin's birthday but Xi Jinping will. You know, two Billy no mates getting together. You know, Xi's parting words to Putin were, you know, we're seeing changes that have not happened for the last 100 years and we are the ones who are making them. And for, you know, just as China chafes under the US led system and aspires to change it so to does Vladimir Putin. And there can be no doubt in my mind that Putin's activities have very much been enabled and encouraged by the relationship that has developed with China with Xi Jinping, even if, as is clearly the case, he's Russia as the junior partner in the relationship and a lot of people in Russia aren't happy about that but you know that's kind of the way it is. And you know, I remember when when when when the Ukrainian invasion kicked off, Joseph Borrell jumped to his feet and said China must intervene with Russia to stop this, which I think was a very silly thing for Borrell to say, you know, the idea of all people should have known better that there was no way China was going to do this. You know, China has made its choices, and it's quite clear that it will stick by Russia, you know, pretty much through thick and thin, although China in China's defense, it has clearly intervened with Putin to say no nukes. You know, that much I think we can be reasonably comfortable but anything else really. Nobody will ever know whether Xi Jinping knew that Putin was about to launch this invasion of Ukraine. You know, the jury really is out. I suspect if Xi Jinping was told he was given, so to speak, the Prozac version, it'll be a quick coup d'etat, three days tops and, you know, you won't notice you won't see the joint. That's probably what he was told. And clearly China's disconcerted about the way things have been played out, but they're not going to change their position. Similarly, other malign actors are being emboldened. Iran, North Korea. We've seen in recent months, the gentleman who is referred to in Chinese social media is Kim Fatty III, Jin Sanpang, otherwise Kim Jong-un, declare kind of ex-cathedra that North Korea is no longer pursuing reunification of the Korean Peninsula. It is designated South Korea as the main enemy. It is doubling down on nuclear testing. It has done six nuclear tests so far. It has developed a suite of short, medium and long range missiles that are nuclear capable. It has provided a lot of munitions and other military support to Russia in the Ukraine conflict and in return has been getting from Russia supplies of advanced military material and assistance with its nuclear and satellite launch programs. China is not very happy about this because China doesn't want anything to rock the boat on the Korean Peninsula. But this has happened and we now have a nuclear armed North Korea that might be tempted to engage in the kind of military provocations that we've come to know and love over the years, secure in the conviction that now they are immune from retaliation because they've got the nukes. And that I think also creates a very, very dangerous situation. Meanwhile, we're seeing a very interesting development, the kind of rise of middle powers seeking to navigate these shoals of great power competition but also pursuing to varying degrees some level of strategic autonomy. If we look at Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states, they have said in terms, this is what they're going to do. They're going to pursue their own strategic road. They've got very considerable resources to bring to bear. Saudi Arabia has got a $1 trillion fund which is all about enhancing their capabilities. The worry at the moment I think with these states is that they have aspirations and means but very few of the underpinning institutions that would actually make it feasible for them to engage effectively in these areas. But if one looks at, for example, the situation we see now in Israel and Gaza, ironically, I remember in the 1970s, the then Israeli Foreign Minister Abba Eban observed that the Arabs never missed an opportunity to miss an opportunity. Well, now I think we're looking at Benjamin Netanyahu and thinking much the same thing. There is here potentially the makings of a solution here which Saudi Arabia and the Gulf states would be very keen to support in return for recognition of Israel. And there are indications that even Iran might be persuaded to go along with this if the conditions were right. But it's clearly not going to happen. Netanyahu is in thrall to a group of right wing lunatics who are keeping him in power and out of jail. And as long as that remains the case, we're not going to see any movement. And of course, everything that happened in Gaza simply reinforces the difficulties of coming to any kind of acceptable compromise if one is there. So this comes at a time when the United States now are no longer dependent upon Middle Eastern oil supplies, effectively not just energy self-sufficient, but now an exporter of energy. And of course, those exports that helped Europe get out from under Vladimir Putin's energy blackmail attempt, wants to get out of the Middle East so that it can concentrate its firepower on its major priority, which is China. And the $64,000 question in all of this, and I'll end with that because I've probably spoken for long enough, is the US presidential election. In a sense, I think in many ways, and this is particularly true of US-China competition, we're in a kind of phony war period where everybody is waiting to see what's going to happen at the end of 2024. And of course, you know, the $64,000 question is what a Trump 2.0 administration might look like. On the one hand, we see evidence of significant move by Trump Republicans towards greater isolationism. On the other hand, the names that are being now bandied about as possible, China team for a Trump 2.0 administration, seem to consist entirely of China Hawks, people like Elbridge Colby, who take the view that the United States must henceforth focus all its firepower on the main threat, which is China, at the expense of all other US commitments and that of course includes NATO, which Donald Trump has repeatedly said he wants to withdraw from. Mercifully, it turns out that under the US Constitution, he's got to get the Senate on side in order to do that. The US Senate has an almost perfect record of not ratifying international treaties concluded by the US government, but they did actually ratify NATO. So, you know, they're kind of on the hook here. But we really just don't know what's happening. In Beijing, there's a guessing game in diplomatic salons about which option China would prefer, you know, another Democrat administration or Trump 2.0. And we really don't know. I've looked into this and, you know, there are arguments both ways. I don't think the Chinese themselves are quite clear what the right answer is going to be. But we have this kind of looming uncertainty, which leaves us in very unclear situation. We can expect malign actors like Vladimir Putin to seek to take maximum advantage of any uncertainty that may arise. But so this is, I think, the situation we're in. We've transitioned from a world of relatively low entropy to a world of very high entropy in which it's becoming increasingly clear that many of the institutions that we've come to rely on really aren't fit for purpose for the situation that we're dealing with, but hard to see how we come up with any new ones that we would actually like. And, you know, I sort of half seriously coined this concept of Inkster's first law of contemporary signology, which states that the Chinese Communist Party normally has half a point. And when they do, it's always the first half. Yes, current international institutions are not fit for purpose. No, China's recommended solutions are straight out of the frying pan and into the fire, and we wouldn't really want to go there. So we have this uncertainty and I think we're going to be learning to manage it for some while to come. It's perhaps not a very happy situation, but as I said, it brings us back to something more like what has been normal over most of the course of human history. So we'd better get used to it. It's coming whether we like it or not. And I always say in relation to China, the reality is that China isn't going to go away. It will change us, whether we like it or not. And the question is how far we allow it to change us and, you know, how we adapt to the reality of its continued existence. I'll end there. Thank you.