 Thank you very much, Mike, and thank you very much for the invitation to return to Newport. The strategy and policy department at the War College has been an inspiration and influence far beyond the United States, and it remains a model, I think, for those of us who try, however, unavailingly, to think about strategy, to give it context, and above all how to do it sensibly. I want to talk today about one component of that process, and that is geopolitics. On, many of you will be familiar with this, even if it was before, even my birthday, on the 21st of January, 1904, Halford MacKinder, director of the London School of Economics, who was actually a serial holder of joint appointments all over the place, but I think the LSE was to be regarded as principal home at that juncture, delivered a lecture at the Royal Geographical Society in London, which he called the Geographical Pivot of History. MacKinder saw a world which had been fully exploited and fully politicized, a closed political system, as he called it. The result was what today's politicians regard wrongly as a new phenomenon, an increasingly globalized world, one of my bet noir in terms of phrases used in defense policy guidance documents. We live in a world that is global by definition. As MacKinder put it, every explosion of social forces, instead of being dissipated in a surrounding circuit of unknown space and barbaric chaos, will be sharply re-echoed from the far side of the globe, and weak elements in the political and economic organization of the world will be shattered in consequence. In that respect, at least, MacKinder was right. By 1914, 59 countries in the world belonged to a system of international finance which established an exchange system dependent on the pound sterling, and which delivered a measure of international economic stability. The city of London was dominant in other respects, as Britain's merchant banks and its insurance and shipping companies underpinned the patterns of global trade. It was a system which also gave Britain, among other states, a vested interest in the rights of neutral powers and in the obligations of international law, the two principle reasons which it would cite when it went to war in 1914. Now today, MacKinder's lecture tends to be read in two ways. First, MacKinder came to the Royal Geographical Society not to praise Britain's pivotal place in this closed political system, but to bury it, or at least to point to its imminent decline. And second, he is seen as delivering the founding statement in the English language of a new discipline. If discipline is the right title, that is to say the discipline of geopolitics. I'm going to say a few words about both those readings of his lecture, and let me begin with geopolitics before I come back specifically to Britain. Geopolitics traces its origins to the work of Friedrich Ratzel, Professor of Geography at the University of Leipzig, author of a book called Politischer Geographie, published in 1897, who died in the very same year in which MacKinder gave his lecture in 1904. Ratzel saw the state in social Darwinist terms as an organism which was required to expand his territory in order to survive. Like MacKinder, Ratzel recognized the world had become a closed political system. Therefore, the living space, the labours realm into which a flourishing state could expand was simply no longer available. All the world's land space had been occupied. And that was a particular problem for Germany, locked in Central Europe, recently unified, and already the second largest producer in the world. So for Ratzel, Germany's expansion could only be by sea. Here there was space. Ratzel recognized that the sea could enable Germany to grow just as it enabled other yet smaller states to acquire empires from Greece and Rome to Venice, Portugal, Holland, and now Britain. The vision conjured by MacKinder's lecture was different. He argued that maritime power had had its day. For him, the states of Western Europe with their ready access to the Atlantic Ocean and global trade were no longer the geographical pivot of history. Instead, to quote him, transcontinental railways are now transmuting the conditions of land power, and nowhere can they have such effect as in the closed heartland of Euro-Asia in vast areas of which neither timber nor accessible stone was available for road making. Railways worked the greatest wonders in the steppe because they directly replaced horse and camel transport, the road stage of development having been omitted. So for MacKinder, the geographical pivot of history was what he called Euro-Asia or the world island, a land mass of 20 million square miles or half of all the land on the globe if the deserts of Sahara and of Arabia were excluded. For MacKinder, the great struggles of the 20th century would be those for the control of Euro-Asia and specifically those between Germany and Russia. As he put it in the jingle, much quoted when MacKinder is referred to and written after the First World War in 1919, who rules East Europe commands the heartland, who rules the heartland commands the world island, who rules the world island commands the world. This, by and large, is how we now remember MacKinder's contribution to geopolitics. So let me now come back to Britain. MacKinder was British. He delivered his 1904 lecture in London and his overt message was that Britain confronted an imminent and inevitable decline because its imperial and economic power rested on maritime power and because maritime power was a fading asset. When Paul Kennedy wrote The Rise and Fall of British Naval Mastery in 1976, he ended part two of that book which he called Zenith with a chapter entitled Mahan versus MacKinder. That chapter led directly and inexorably on to part three which predictably he called Fall. Kennedy's thesis, simply put, was that MacKinder had replaced Mahan. MacKinder's arguments about sea power rested too much on history, on 18th century examples. MacKinder, on the other hand, proved in Kennedy's words to be more prescient. The problem with this sort of interpretation is that its validity depends not only on where you sit but on when you're doing the sitting. How we see the past is influenced by our preoccupations and perspectives in the present. If you were sitting somewhere in Europe in 1945, MacKinder's stress on Eurasia as the global pivot of history would have looked reasonable enough. If you sit in Newport in 2013, it seems to me it does not. Not least because while Germany may dominate Europe at last, even if it doesn't want to, it does not dominate Eurasia and nor does Russia dominate either of them. The Russia-German antagonism may have proved centrally important over the intervening years since 1904, but today MacKinder's determinism looks overstated. By the same token, MacKinder's expectation of the decline of maritime power looks similarly overstated. Today, at least in all the figures produced by navies, 90 percent of the world trade still travels by sea. And when the United States worries about China, it is not concerned with China as a mainland Asiatic power, even as a power which might dominate Eurasia, but is worried about it as an incipient Pacific power, as an oceanic power. In the First World War, which broke out, of course, just 10 years after MacKinder had delivered his lecture, British maritime power proved more resilient than MacKinder had suggested was likely to be the case, or as Paul Kennedy believed to be the case when he was writing in 1976. By the end of 1915, Germany had overrun the Baltic states, Poland and Serbia, and effectively pushed Russia out of Europe. In March 1918, Germany imposed terms on Russia at Brest-Litovsk, which effectively deprived it of a third of its territory and its population. Germany now dominated the heartland, but it still lost the war. Britain, on the other hand, ended up on the winning side, and it did so for many reasons. But it included four, which seem to be particularly important in this context. First, it maintained control of the world's oceans. Second, it was able to sustain economic pressure on the central powers through the use of blockade. Third, it was able to use its financial strength to combine the resources of the Allies and to draw on the productive capacities of the world's neutral powers. And fourthly, ultimately, it was able to bring the greatest neutral of them all, that is to say the United States, into the war. And the United States itself entered the war, not least because of what was happening at sea in the German Declaration of Unrestricted U-boat Warfare. In the Second World War, Britain's strategy was both more of the same and more so. Mackinda, in other words, did not provide, sorry, so how do we read Mackinda today? Mackinda could not change Britain's geographical position. He could not simply lift Britain up out of its offshore position in relation to Europe and put it somewhere else, ideally somewhere in the middle of the heartland. The geographical pivot of history was, in this respect, not an argument about inevitability, not an argument that Britain was doomed to unavoidable decline because of its geographical location. The geographical pivot of history was instead a wake-up call. Mackinda was saying that Britain had to use policy and even strategy to address the challenges which geography threw up. The British political classes needed to match a geographical problem with a political solution. They had to make the empire work more efficiently. And it's worth remembering how powerfully and well connected Mackinda was. He was a former president of the Oxford Union. He'd been liberal imperialist candidate for parliament in 1900. And he was a member of all the proto-think tanks of the day, Lord Milner's kindergarten, the coefficients, the compatriots and so on, all of which were designed to make the British empire work on lines which would maximize its economic and military potential. So in this respect, the 1904 lecture was simply pushing at an open door. Since the 1870s, thanks not least to the Cologne brothers, Charles Dill, Spencer Wilkinson, and later Julian Corbett, Britain was developing an understanding of grand strategy at the need to relate imperial defence to Britain's economic position and to sustain a navy in its bases to protect them both. And in 1902, it reflected this burgeoning strategic thought in creating proper institutions for the formation of strategy. It established a formal body to make grand strategy which we call the commit of imperial defence. And in that very same year, MacKinder wrote a book which is read rather less often, Britain and the British Isles. And in that, MacKinder interpreted defence as essentially, as he put it, the protection of economic subsistence. He went on to say that the distinction between war and peace is an irrelevant one, since the pressure of strategical considerations, his words, is as urgent upon governments at all times. In other words, MacKinder, like many other of his contemporaries within Britain, was beginning to understand strategy in terms which were much broader than those taught at military academies, which saw strategies applicable not just in war, but also in peace and not just as a matter for generals, but as a matter for governments more broadly. Now, what has all this got to do with us today? And specifically, what has it all got to do with the United States today? Let me give you two preliminary answers to that question. The first answer follows directly from what I have just said, the fundamental importance of strategy to address seemingly intractable problems that Hardly needs saying here in this company. In the 20th century, strategy could not prevent Britain from having to confront problems of its decline, associated with its decline. But it did help Britain manage that decline. It did help it to manage it without catastrophic defeat, and to help it manage it with a degree of realism that it adapted rather than it collapsed. The second answer is also Britain's answer to MacKinder, that strategy can be used to manage geopolitics. This is important because geopolitics are back in fashion, not least in the United States. In 1904, MacKinder had anticipated the growing influence of the United States, pointing to its capacity to use the Panama Kamau, which was then in the process of acquiring, to balance its resources between the Pacific and the Atlantic, to concentrate its maritime power in one nation or the other, or to use the fashionable verb, of course, thanks to the President, to pivot, to move from one to the other. For MacKinder, in 1904, the Atlantic was more important than the Pacific. As he put it in his lecture, the real divide between east and west is to be found in the Atlantic Ocean. And for most of the 20th century, that remained more true than not. The Atlantic, not Euro-Asia, was the global pivot of history. In the First World War, Britain used the Atlantic to engineer the United States' entry to the war. In the Second World War, in 1940, Britain faced its greatest threat, when Germany, by dint of overrunning Norway and France, dominated the Atlantic coast of Europe from the North Cape to the Pyrenees. This was the German Navy's, not Hitler's, view of Lebensraum, a moment of triumph for German admirals. And it led to the bitterest and most protracted battle Britain fought in the Second World War, the Battle of the Atlantic. The key, not only to offsetting German domination of Europe, but also, of course, to the delivery of United States lend lease, and to the eventual reopening of the land fronts in Western Europe. Geopolitics flourished in the United States in the Second World War, manifested, of course, by the work of Nicola Speichmann. I never know whether he's Speichmann or Speichmann or, but there may be somebody here who can tell me how to pronounce him correctly. And of course, by the work of Edward Mead Earl in the seminars that he organized at Princeton, which led to the writing of the makers of modern strategy, one of the founding textbooks of the subject. Geopolitics flourished here because it was an essential tool in understanding the political and strategic drivers of the war. Hitler's push to the east was driven by economic needs, by the demand for Laban's round, not by ideological considerations, the need for land for German peasant farmers. And Britain's response was driven by the need to preserve the balance of power within Europe. Similar economic and broadly speaking international relations concerns, national interest concerns underpinned the opening of the Pacific War in 1941, with Japan too seeking living space, first in mainland China and then through the East Asia greater co-prosperity sphere. The United States' concerns in the Pacific were similar to Britain's in relation to the East Atlantic. But after 1945, we, and I use the we generally to speak to mean the United States, the United Kingdom and whoever wishes to associate themselves with that we, we lost sight of geopolitics. And one reason we lost sight was that we reinterpreted the Second World War in very different terms. It became a war of values, of competing ideologies, of a clash between liberal democracy against fascism and of good against evil, personified of course above all in the elevation of the Holocaust as the war's principal justification. Neither Britain in 1939 nor the United States in 1941 went to war to rescue the Jews. Certainly their persecution had begun before 1939, but their systematic extermination did not begin until after the Vance conference, until after 1941. This, the Second World War, was not a war of humanitarian intervention. But we reconstructed the Second World War as a moral crusade. It became enfolded in our understandings of just war theory. This became the war we had to fight. A war whose scale and whose truly massive loss of life were legitimized by the important ideological and value laden objectives at stake. The Cold War then perpetuated that elevation of ideology over geopolitics. In part it was of course a competition between competing value systems, between liberal democracy and its faith in free market capitalism, and communism and its belief in a command economy. But the Cold War also enfolded that competition between ideologies within a geopolitical and geographical framework with the result that we lost sight of its geopolitical content. We need to remember the geographical terms which we used to differentiate the two sides of the Cold War, the liberal democratic states from the communist ones. We used the phrase the west, pitched against, of course, the east. We put these in geographical terms. And the west formed an alliance, the North Atlantic alliance, which followed McKinder in seeing the Atlantic ocean as the global pivot of history. Ever since the end of the Cold War we have up braided ourselves for failing to change our armed forces in line with changing circumstances. We are criticized for having Cold War legacies in equipment terms. Just as important, however, is the intellectual baggage we have carried forward from the Cold War and which still, it seems to me, obscures sometimes what we are trying to do. This is an intellectual baggage which has even greater roots because, as I've tried to suggest, it goes back to the Second World War itself. In part, this has been because we have continued to present our reasons for resorting to war in ideological and value-driven terms. NATO's wars of intervention since 1990, in Bosnia, Kosovo, and now in Afghanistan, even if limited wars in terms of the resources allocated to them by the belligerent powers, have been waged, we are told, for values which liberals can endorse. But that is even more evident if you look at this from the other side of the Atlantic than from here. If European NATO powers justify their presence in Afghanistan, they do so in terms of human rights, humanitarianism, the principles of democracy, the overthrow of bloodthirsty and despotic regimes. But of course, it has been just as much part of the rhetoric here in the United States as well. George W. Bush justified the invasion of Iraq as part of what he called the forward march of freedom. In 2005, the United Nations went so far as to embrace these principles in a form which challenged their own charter. The charter of the United Nations carries a presumption against the state's right to go to war, except in cases of national self-defense. In 2005, the United Nations adopted the principle of the responsibility to protect R2P. Even in cases when that invoked the infringement or involved, I beg your pardon, the infringement of national sovereignty, it created an incipient clash between the charter and the responsibility to protect. But since 1990, ideology and geopolitics have been on diverging, not converging, causes. And this is now creating tensions for both of us, for both, sorry, for both of those, and for us more generally. Ideologies and geopolitics no longer overlap so neatly as they did in the Second World War and in the Cold War. The current impasse over Syria captures that for us exactly. Syria is now the greatest humanitarian crisis since 1990 and possibly since 1945. We are told that 93,000 civilians have died and over 1.5 million have become refugees as they have fled to neighboring states. And both those figures seem likely to be underestimates rather than overestimates of the reality. If anything should prompt the United Nations to invoke the responsibility to protect, Syria should. And yet the Security Council cannot agree the terms of a resolution. Instead, it is divided with the United States, the United Kingdom and France on the one hand, ranged against Russia and China on the other. This looks horribly like a Cold War split, horribly like an ideological division. And yet it isn't. Both Russia to a large extent and China to a lesser extent are now in some respects market-driven economies. Geopolitics and economic interests are more important than values and ideologies in explaining the great power politics which are producing status over Syria. For Britain and France, both focused on what the British Defense Secretary now, Philip Hammond, now calls the near abroad, invoking terms and vocabularies of the past. Familiar concerns for both those countries about the security of the Mediterranean the implications for Europe of change in the Arab world and anxiety over Middle Eastern security make Syria essential to their strategic concerns as Libya was in 2011 and of course as Libya promises to continue to be. Moreover, for Britain and France, Middle Eastern oil remains vital. For the United States, none of those geopolitical considerations are quite so central. President Obama is content in the phrase used now regularly in the British press to lead from behind. To get Britain and France to be the European States who are the net exporters of security, to use the phrase from the President's strategic guidance of January 2012 seems to be the principal objective of his policy. Why is the United States so reluctant to lead on Syria? First and most obviously, you are suffering from campaign exhaustion as a result of Iraq and Afghanistan. It would simply be domestically very unpopular as it is of course in Britain too. Secondly, there is the issue of economic austerity. I've been wondering about sequestration ever since it became fashionable and when it became fashionable and whether we need a new dictionary definition of what cuts involve. Anyway, sequestration and economic austerity since the crash of 2008 is another reason of course or are another reason for not taking on further responsibilities. Thirdly, the United States is increasingly self-sufficient and will be self-sufficient in fossil fuels, not least through fracking in a way in which European countries are not. And finally of course there is the pivot, the pivot to Asia Pacific and by implication the pivot away from the Atlantic. In 2013, the United States' geopolitical focus is no longer on the Atlantic but on the western Pacific and on the containment of China. But here too, geopolitics produce responses which do not conform with our ideological expectations. Let's take Australia as an example. Here is a country which has deepened its defence relationship with the United States and has done so not least because Australia and the United States share liberal democracy and the values associated with it. The obvious common strategic interest is the shared concern of both countries generated by China's rise. Apparently ideology and geopolitics are converging and yet and yet Australia's economy is booming. It is in that respect unusual in the western world though why Australia and for that part New Zealand should be described as the western world depends once again upon where you sit. And yet Australia's economy is booming and it is booming because of China because China's demand for Australian raw materials is almost in a neocolonial relationship with China. Economic self-interest pulls Australia to China just as its defence needs pull it to the United States. Australia's problem is reflected in the challenges which the United States pivots pivot poses for European powers including Britain but which no European government has yet had the courage directly to address or explicitly to address. How far should for the European powers, the European allies of the United States, how far should shared values require the other members of the North Atlantic Alliance to follow the United States in its pivot to the Pacific? When in Britain should we say no? And if you move from Britain to Eastern Europe what is their position as the United States pivots to the Pacific? They become more concerned about the bear to the east, about Russia. They're accused of exaggerating their fears in order to make sure that the commitment to Eastern and Central Europe remains but you can understand if you're a poll why you should be concerned about Russia. Certainly if you read a bit of history you should be worried you can understand why they should be worried and the same goes for other Central European states. For Britain, should Britain revoke its decision of 1969 to withdraw from east of Suez? My father I should say was a shipper and they used to trade to the far east and he thought in 1969 that this was going to be wonderful business because the conservative government in 1970 would redirect all the military equipment that his company had brought back from Singapore and places to the east and take it back to the far east. That is yet to happen. The company I'm afraid is no longer still going so won't save it at this juncture. Most fundamentally will an attack on the United States or Canada on the west coast of North America or in the Pacific be an Article 5 moment for NATO. At the moment most European powers where they address the obligations of Article 5 are much more concerned about the position of Turkey with its border on Syria when will the point be reached the Turkey reaches for Article 5 because they're concerned by infractions on the part of the Syrian armed forces. They forget that is European powers in NATO forget as too often the United States does too that the one occasion in which NATO has invoked Article 5 was after 9-11 that it was not to summon the great superpower to bail out the lesser powers but an action on the part of the lesser powers to show their solidarity with the United States. In my view the fact that the United States failed to respond to that offer of solidarity was a big political mistake and there was another set of geopolitical changes which promise to upset our understanding of how the free world might react that make it progressively more unlikely that it will behave out of shared values as opposed to perceived national self-interest and that change is a change briefly mentioned in the discussion yesterday afternoon the change is imposed by climate change. Climate change makes the control of territory more important than a common set of values parts of the world will run short of water of fossil fuels and even of food control of territory and the definition not only of frontiers but also of territorial waters and the resources beneath them will become central to definitions of national economic and social security the melting of the Arctic ice cap is already creating competition just as it also creates commercial opportunity and this process is converging with the West's realization that it confronts long-term economic weaknesses which could militate against the free trade assumptions which underpin liberal capitalism free trade and its flourishing are predicated on an expectation of economic growth in the 1930s the Wall Street crash and the slump led to protectionism and economic altarchy now such considerations the considerations generated by climate change and even the possibility of protectionism do not mean of course that we're all inevitably leading on to disaster or to major war the point is as for the arguments about geopolitics is that they should make us wary of that possibility and that we should be using policy adroitly in order to address them moreover in this respect Mckinda's attention to continental power looks more prescient in so far as the pursuit of national self-interest and economic self-sufficiency will favor the geographically larger states not only the United States but also Russia Brazil India and of course China and it will favor them because their extent will give them access ready or access to natural resources this promises to reverse the pattern of state formation which has been dominant since 1945 the collective security provided by the united nations but also by NATO and by the European Union has enabled the proliferation of small states in the world this reversed the pattern of the 19th century where states aware of the need to have military capability acquired security through unification as Germany and Italy did in the 21st century therefore geopolitical logic could have a similar effect as shared value systems and common ideologies become less important than the capacity to control your own material security through national self-definition and arguably could produce a focus on regional priorities rather than on that crazily titled increasingly globalized world economic self-interest and geopolitical concerns are making our values and beliefs less important than our rhetoric suggest the message makinda gives us for today is that policy must address and recognize these realities not that we have to accept them as inevitable it is a case for the importance of ground strategy whose absence syria made so obvious if i can come back and end simply with syria once more the amp house over syria shows exactly our strategic incompetence we are now chasing the problem rather than mastering it we are in danger of joining the hapless victims from syria by failing to have addressed a crisis which two years ago we could possibly have shaped we have lost our moment there how many more moments will there be before we lose our way completely thank you very much government stay here i could have gone talking Pete flatley ncc staff of 1993 in your discussion regarding geopolitics and ideology i i didn't hear you mention the possibility of changes in ideology based upon the fact that europe and other western nations are not meeting their own population replacement levels and that there's an increasing growth of the islamic culture within those areas so projecting that into the future do you see a change in the ideologies based on the cultural differences that will come about by these population shifts internally um it's a good question um and i think that uh i you stressed islam in in how you phrased how you phrased it um i'm less persuaded that that islam itself um is one of the principal causes of ideological shift say within european countries it is clearly a source of tension within european countries because it also uh provokes the far right um and that uh is i think a source of increasing concern uh for uh for governments within europe um so it's not uh that this is a one-sided argument but it is the lack if you like of an ideological unity and perceived unity within a country which does seem to concern people uh i was very struck and when when um they when lee rigby was killed in willage uh i'm losing track of time now two weeks ago uh the overwhelming concern of the british government uh was not that here was a major terrorist threat generated um by radical islam even if here was a self-motivated uh person or people who were driven by that but the response that it would generate from the english defense league um and comparable uh far right organizations and therefore the worsening uh in uh civil relationships which could follow from that and the social division which could come from that so the need to to control that uh was what was central so yes i think there is a real issue and it's of course it's something which is felt across a number of european countries in a number of different forms and it has a further driver which of course is coming back to the point uh that i was stressing the issue of long-term economic uh relative decline that the reducing of expectations in terms of people's wealth and the expectations in relation to national growth rates and the concern that that it is driven by that which tends to be stressed of course within europe in terms of a north south division because of greece and spain but it also seems to me has an east west dimension to it too particularly of course if it reduces a crisis a renew crisis for the euro um so yes i think there are concerns about that which is why i i would endorse the decision to give the european union uh the nobel peace prize i mean that actually seemed to me um a a timely reminder for many europeans who fail to make the connections between the lack if you like of an ideological consensus and the the the the security challenges they face um the tendency to see europe as secure as the net exporter's security to use the president's term uh to be remarkably complacent about that rather than to see uh the fissures that that are potentially emerging partly because of the breakdown of an ideological consensus although of course what i've been stressing is a geopolitical shift so yes i think i i think it's i think it's very important matt smith department of state you argued that the us missed an opportunity after 911 in not taking nato up in the software uh for assistance on the article five but as a superpower the united states is obligated to show that it can defend itself independently also nato has played a critical role in assisting the united states in afghanistan with its objectives there so i i'm having trouble understanding what opportunity was truly missed right um i i expected kickback on that um i i the the the point essentially was that um if you think of the sequencing between the united states leveraging uh nato support for its actions particularly in relation to afghanistan um that it was delayed um that required time that there was concern of course especially within afghanistan about the division of afghanistan to and a whole raft of national responsibilities and individual rules of engagement all of which seemed to me could have been potentially simplified if the recognition of the alliance commitment had been much greater from the outset um and i recognize that the the uh that the inclination of the united states is to think as an independent power as a superpower what the united states wants to do and the concern of course after nine eleven was what is right for the united states and how should the united states respond uh my response to that is that um you have a great many allies in the united kingdom is probably a principle among them who which are prepared essentially to subordinate their defense of foreign policies to the concerns of the united states because of the recognition of the value of the alliance but the quid pro quo seems to me to it seems to me to involve an element of uh it's almost respect for for the offer which seemed to me to be lacking in nine eleven after immediate aftermath of nine eleven and for which there is now a consequence coming back to the the issues of european public opinion you know one of the concerns within europe is the lack of trust and faith in the united states which has followed from the experience of the last decade um and where that matters is precisely in relation to something like the pivot to the pacific and how far those powers are prepared to follow you because of the recognition of their power of their own domestic opinion mr josh amon my question you mentioned a return to geopolitics in the 21st century you also talk about china's reliance on raw materials safe from australia or in a fair chance that given the other incompatibility 21st century values of oris for living room or those raw materials it's going to be more of a century for raw materials gained either through neocolonialism or other sort of economic rather than military i think that if you the short answer is yes i i think that would be the the bias that if you are looking to um the push is the push for resources absolutely my point in relation to how we understand the two world wars and particularly the second world war is that but i think as we get more you know as as our perspectives on the second world war change and i'm thinking here of of um how we interpret uh particularly in the the writings of something like adam twos how you interpret the the germany's policy in relation to the second world war we see the push for resources um and the economic motivations as important factors for going to war um now there are other ways of securing those resources and you can neocolonialism might be one however you went elect to interpret neocolonialism and china is indeed trying to leverage those resources by entirely but by by peaceful means not by military means um but what that suggests to me is that if it becomes vital in terms of national self-interest that you secure resources and if there is competition for resources and if there is protectionism and all those are ifs are important um that if there is protectionism um then these remain salient factors we have become it seems to me too concerned and too focused because the rhetoric has been so powerful uh to focus on the notion that what we're talking about when we talk about the use of instruments of national power is the pursuit of freedom uh shared values uh democracy and so on um and tend to underplay what are very often far more powerful drivers when states uh states use the the levers of natural power it's hardly a great surprise there i mean this is this is uh you know we all know that the rhetoric may be very different from the substance in the past as well as in the future but it's simply to emphasize uh that i think we need to be a bit more upfront about about the reality as opposed to the rhetoric sir thank you london question i have is that uh when you talk about ideology as an influence leading to decisions for conflict first i was curious uh if you see that as inherently a democratic issue as opposed to a states across the board and particularly uh looking at the united states with conflicts like for example spanish-american war which can be understood in geopolitical context but perhaps for the the average citizen was presented as a ideological conflict taking that question then extending it to the future of conflicts with climate-based and resource based conflicts for the future you mentioned in the answer to the previous question the idea of wars where there's protectionism and there's a need to get to uh resources or or access to those resources do you see a time though where united states if our ideology is inherently one of free trade uh one of international institutions which would present itself as a solution to these issues of resource conflict do you see a situation where the united states would adopt a position which is purely geopolitical based and at odds otherwise at odds with our stated ideology of free trade non-protectionism and so forth thank you um i think part of the answer to one of the issues everything i've said of course is what time frame why talking about i mean am i talking about the next two years well yes in the sense that we're confronting it seems to be some of the implications of this in the short term um in relation to Syria for example but also but also you know what i'm really saying is what is the general direction of travel over a much longer time frame that's what i'm trying to suggest and and in answer to your question if we're looking at the general direction of travel over a much longer time frame i can see the united states behaving in ways that seem now illogical given its democratic traditions because it will be seen as part of the issue of national survival um you know it doesn't seem to be impossible for the united states to behave in a more protectionist way um and of course there is much already in united states foreign policy that is protectionist uh in so far as formally uh you know the united states as is the case with europe um is committed to free trade but as is also the case both of course have elements of protectionism in the policy for totally understandable uh economic uh self-interested reasons um i i think the the the question the other question here that seems to be important and where the democracy part comes in is are we talking particularly when we talk about the importance of value systems and ideologies about democracies precisely because democracies by their very title assume that these are shared across the population as a whole um that the people of a country are the crucial element in legitimating what the government does that's precisely you know why we live in democracies and uh the concern of course that you can have uh the president saying uh getting my time right last may uh the beginning of may when he was in afghanistan saying to to president carzai um that the united states is with you beyond 2014 um and then of course addressing the american people on prime time television and saying the boys are coming home in 2014 now those things are not incompatible but when they're juxtaposed crudely like that and they're seen by an audience in in carvel when i was in carvel a month later i'm speaking in in carvel university um then you can see uh because i get there's a lot of kickback from it then you can see precisely why the messages become become mixed and the need to address your own people to behave as a democratic head of state can put you in a difficult position when it comes to issues of foreign policy and national self-interest interpreted in other terms um and exactly the same thing happens in british politics i mean david cameron repeatedly says we're coming out of afghanistan because the british people expected not because we've achieved the objectives we're trying to to fulfill in afghanistan now whether you know coming back to your question where does this leave us in relation to issues like protectionism um and and uh and and uh free trade and the answer would seem to me it made very well dependent democracy on what the people expect that you have democratically elected leaders and they find they're they're under pressure because living standards are falling and after all that is what will affect people's behavior when it comes to vote as much as anything else then it becomes very important for you to be able to react to that and that domestic circumstances will drive how you behave internationally morning thank you for your address richard lobin from the naval war college uh since you uh have indicated that we may have missed opportunities at the beginning of the syrian insurrection and uh since syria is not a naval power or air power uh what do you think the opportunities were that we missed and what would you advise us to do these days well the good answer to all those sort of questions is i wouldn't start from here um and for sure that applies to syria um and really the point of my comments was that there was a moment it seemed to be early in the crisis when if the desire uh was to support um state sorry support actors within syria that we saw as in a very common the moderate opposition um that there was a much greater chance of achieving that at an early stage of intervention in early stage now i realized the real challenge of course was to get a united nation security council resolution to enable that to happen um and of course one of the real difficult reasons for that being difficult was the way the united nation security council resolution over libya was perceived by russia and china to have been used in self-interested ways um so absolutely there was no perfect solution but the opportunity was there much earlier in the crisis before the crisis deepened that's really all i'm trying to say whereas the tendency uh has been to was to let the crisis grow because the lack of appetite for involvement and because of course the whole principle of intervention was looking shaky after the experiences of the last decade rather than a tendency of course to look at examples where early intervention had had positive effects um principally of course early intervention uh in in uh in unilateral terms um and instead to be guided by concerns about uh long i mean syria confronts the west and the world with profoundly intractable problems but those problems are becoming more intractable the longer the the longer the situation develops rather than what would i do well i think if we're we're all caught by indecision now the situation probably is that the best solution is to do nothing sadly um because they don't see that arming rebels is actually going to help um the situation at the moment uh what is the best chance of uh of a solution well if there's a civil war where both sides are equally strong and where actually the government may now be stronger then you have to have the government at the negotiating table and of course that is for the moment something uh which uh those on the the western invertecom side find very hard to accept but negotiation implies some degree of power and those who have the power need to be at the negotiating table thanks mike