 Well, good morning, everyone. Welcome to the Center for Strategic and International Studies. My name is Heather Conley. I'm Senior Vice President here at CSIS that conducts our research for Europe, Eurasia, and the Arctic. We are absolutely delighted to welcome Dr. Liam Fox, member of the British Parliament for 22 years, looking after the constituents of North Somerset. Many of us know Dr. Fox as being the former Secretary of State for Defense, who was named by Prime Minister Cameron from 2010 to 2011. And CSIS claims Dr. Fox as one of our own. For coming last year for a conversation we held in Williamsburg, Virginia, on the future of Europe. And I assure you that Dr. Fox gave us a very lively and spirited debate about what the future of Europe will look like. And I'm sure some of that will be reprised for us this morning. Prior to former Secretary of State for Defense, Dr. Fox served as many shadow secretaries, while in opposition for health, for foreign secretary, as well as for Secretary of Defense. A general practitioner, Dr. Fox, can also give us some insights on health and health care issues as they relate to the United Kingdom. I'm also delighted to welcome two guests with us. We have General Brent Scowcroft with us, former U.S. National Security Advisor, and Judge William Webster, former FBI and CIA Director. We're delighted to have you both with us and Dr. Fox. I think that gives you a sense of the importance that we subscribe to this conversation and we look forward to your remarks. Dr. Fox will give us opening remarks and then we'll transition into a discussion and welcome our audience today for a lively Q&A on the future of the U.S.-U.K. special relationship. But I think we'll have a broader conversation about the variety of international challenges we face. So with that, please join me in welcoming Dr. Liam Fox. Well, good morning, ladies and gentlemen, and it's a great pleasure to be back here at CSIS. It is not a quiet time in global events. In fact, I can never remember a more turbulent time in global events, but what a better time to talk about the relationship between the United Kingdom and the United States. In fact, when Winston Churchill first used the term special relationship, he did it during his speech in Fulton, Missouri, which is, of course, better remembered for his use of the phrase iron curtain for the first time. But when Churchill spoke about the special relationship, he did so as a wartime leader. And it was basically an intelligence relationship, a military relationship. Somewhat Disney-esque, gooey-eyed connotations that special relationship gained in later years are not, for me, the concrete foundations that it has. This is a relationship about our security in a dangerous world, and there are so many threats in this very interdependent world. And one of the changes that Churchill would have been astonished to see is the level of interdependency that we now have, and we have had so many warnings about just how interdependent we've become in recent years, whether it's the terrorist attack of 9-11, whether it's the natural event of SARS, whether it's the Japanese tsunami, whether it's the 2008 banking crisis. What is very clear is that contagion in one part of the global economy will very quickly spread to the rest. In fact, the whole concept of over there, I think, is a term that might become somewhat dated as we go ahead. When I was writing the book that I wrote about global security threats rising tides, it was pointed out to me that back in 1993, not exactly a very long time ago, there were 130 websites in the world. At the end of last year, there were 654 million, which is a whole change, a quantum leap in information, but it's also a lot of terrorist haystacks in which to hide terrorist needles, and that's something I want to come on to in a moment. But I wanted to set out the generic range of risks that we face before I come to some of the specifics, but I set them as failing states, the rise of religious fundamentalism, the spread of transnational terrorism, financial imbalances, competition for commodities, and that's before we even got to the state-on-state threats that we face. And I began by setting out what the risks I thought were of failing states, and the one that I actually identified was Pakistan. And I said Pakistan, not out of malign intent, but because of sheer instability. Most of us politically will be used to dealing with our opposite numbers, but in a country like Pakistan where frankly we're never really sure who's in charge, whether it's the politicians, the military, or the ISI, we have to develop a whole range of relationships. And of course, from a British perspective, I was very interested as to why after 200 years of common history, India, after partition, went on to become a relatively stable, prosperous, and increasingly middle-class economy, whereas Pakistan effectively ruled backwards from the very beginnings, perhaps it's something we can discuss. But I was interested that at partition, nobody knew what to call Pakistan, because it didn't correspond to any natural, historical, or geographical entity. So in fact, as an acronym, Pakistan was actually a made-up name, made up of the initials of the provinces of Punjab, Afghania, Kashmir, and so on. And I think that it's a fair bet that if your country's name is made up, then it's not probably the most stable entity that you're likely to see. And I say that this is a worry because here in Washington, with all the focus on Iran at the present time, people seem to have forgotten that Pakistan's sitting on something like 120 nuclear warheads and has recently brought into play two new heavy water plants that will enable them to produce about 24 nuclear warheads a year from now on. It is the nuclear problem that nobody seems to want to acknowledge and talk about in detail. Then of course, we've got to the rise of transnational terrorism. It's nothing new, but it changes its manifestations. And of course, the worry that we have is that this nuclear proliferation in places like Pakistan will find its way into the terrorist game. And people say, well, if it's so easy to make a dirty bomb and there's so much fissile material out there, why have we not seen one? And yet, nobody seems to know that in 1995 in Izmailovsky Park in Moscow, the nuclear material was there, but it just wasn't attached to a bomb. Or that in Chechnya, we have had fissile material attached to mines. So the threat is there and it will increase. And we need to look at our whole issue of proliferation in light of the increased terrorist threat. We also need to understand some of the other risks that are coming from left field. And one of the ones that I constantly talk about is the risk of competition for communities, and in particular, water. And people talk about China, but they very often miss out one of the really important parts of the equation, which is that 48% of all the people alive on our planet today get their drinking water from a river that arises on the Tibetan Plateau. So why do you think China is so intent on Tibet? Is it the Dalai Lama, or is it the fact that it's the world's greatest resource in terms of fresh water? Unless we know the data, we will not make sensible interpretations of events and therefore are likely to make policy mistakes. The rise of religious fundamentalism, particularly Islamic fundamentalism, is there for us all to see. And we're facing this crisis now with ISIS, the latest manifestation of this, but I'm doubted it will be the last manifestation of it. We need to be very, very clear about the threats that Islamic State posed to us. First of all, the humanitarian threat, the immediate threat to the population that live under their control. We've seen what they're capable of, beheadings, crucifixions, setting people on fire. And for a video camera, things that we thought had been violence, we thought had been left behind in the Middle Ages. The second threat, of course, the further destabilization of the region, they would love to see a full-blown religious war. This is, in fact, part of what they're trying to achieve. And then, of course, they will be the University of Jihad if we allow them to do so. And they will export terror to Western democracies if they get the opportunity. And we've seen cases in the United Kingdom of people who've gone to fight for ISIS and then come home. Personally, I don't believe you can have a sabbatical from civilization and then come home. No Jihad gap here that you can come back and say you're very sorry that you did it. So we have to, again, think about the domestic problems. And then nuclear proliferation itself ran clearly the big issue. When Rouhani became president, there were so many in the Western Commentariat who were describing it as a breakthrough, a new moment in the relationship. Big disappointment there for the people of Iran. They've not really noticed much of a difference. The repression, the executions continue apace in Iran. And what people seemed to fail to understand was that the shots are still called by the Supreme Leader. And if you read, there's a wonderful little book by Karim Sanjapur from the Carnegie Endowment called Reading Khamenei. And he has a political consistency that most Western politicians would kill for. His belief in the purity of the Islamic revolution, his hatred for the United States, his contempt for the existence of the state of Israel, all very, very consistent over a long period. And I think it is absolutely unbelievable that people still will look at the evidence in front of them in terms of what Iran is doing in terms of its nuclear program and say, well, maybe they're not trying to achieve a nuclear weapons program. There is no possible excuse for the levels of nuclear work that they're doing and enrichment at the present time other than that they're trying to get a nuclear weapons program. The clandestine way in which Natanz and Iraq were developed says to me that this is not a country that is open about its intentions. And there is a problem here, a generic problem in the West which is that on too many occasions in recent times in foreign policy we have allowed wishful thinking to take the place of critical analysis. Because we want something to happen, we have used the data to try to make it look as though that is what's happening and it's not happening in the case of Iran. Why should we worry about a nuclear Iran? Well, first of all, it does provide an existential threat to Israel with all the implications that that has for wider policy. Secondly, I think it would mean the NPT is not worth the paper that it's written on. And if Iran gets to nuclear weapon status why should Egypt, Saudi Arabia and Turkey not want to follow them? And that means a nuclear arms race in one of the most unstable regions of the world. And after all the work that was done particularly in the United States at the end of the Cold War to stop proliferation and to stop the former Soviet States being able to have nuclear weapons surely we want to leave something better to the next generation than a new nuclear arms race. This is a challenge for all of us. I worry about what is happening today in terms of the negotiations. Some say we need to get a deal. I actually think no deal is better than a bad deal. And what do I mean by a bad deal? I think any deal is a bad deal that allows Iran to become a threshold nuclear state because of the dangers that I've mentioned. I particularly worry about the potential of a bilateral agreement between the United States and Iran that doesn't come from the P5 plus one. We need to stand together in the face of international threat and not be divided. And I'm sure that's something we'll talk about in our wider conversation. And then on this happy list of the threats we face we didn't really think that we would be facing a state on state threat to the extent that we're facing today from Russia. And if ever there was an example of wishful thinking displacing critical analysis, it is in Putin's Russia because we have so wanted Russia to become a useful partner in the international family of nations that we have simply been turning a blind eye for too long. There are two basic principles followed by Putin which make it extremely difficult if not impossible to normalize relations with Russia. The first is that Putin still clings to the idea, the old Soviet idea of a near abroad. In other words, that he should have a veto over the policies of his immediate geographic neighbors. And we've seen what that has led to in recent times. And the second is his concept that he believes that the protection of ethnic Russians lies not with the countries or the constitutions or the systems of law under which they live but with an external power, i.e. Russia itself. And these two views are the root of many of the problems that we face and we can see the manifestations of these today in Ukraine. I do not believe that you can take Putin's word on any agreement when it comes to his borders. I think that what is happening in the Ukraine is truly shocking. The annexation by force of Crimea, the destabilization of the eastern borders of Ukraine, the fact that while NATO carries out normal military maneuvers and exercises, Russia is actually testing weapon systems live in eastern Ukraine from the book Missile System to the Strelas System. These are real time testing that Russia is actually carrying out and we are standing by and arguing about whether we should give the Ukrainians the means or not to defend their homeland. Just think about it. If we are actually saying we cannot give Ukraine the secure comms or the anti-tank capability or the UAVs for targeting and surveillance that they need because that might exacerbate the crisis. That is a bully's charter. That simply says we will never give anyone the means to defend themselves because that might make the aggressor even more angry. This is a ridiculous policy for us to hold and we need to recognize that the defense of the Baltic states, for example, begins in Ukraine and we are only one miscalculation by Putin away from potentially getting an Article 5 involvement on continental Europe and we need to waken up to it. We have been serial appeasers of Putin and it has not got us very far. When he had a cyber attack on Estonia, we did nothing. When he cut off Ukraine's gas, we did nothing. He invaded Georgia and he's still there and we did very little. We made some sanctions in response to what's happening in Ukraine and Crimea but appeasement has a bad track record. It had a bad track record before, it's got a bad track record today. So why should we in the United Kingdom still look so much to the United States in an era of all these potential problems because you are the world's biggest economy, because you are the world's biggest military budget bigger than the next 11 combined, which is very reassuring when you are a close ally of the United States but more than that, we need to have a partnership of values because in all these problems that we face in the world, we need to understand that we are who we are, not by accident. We are who we are by design and by decisions that were taken by those who went before us and we are built on the concepts, both our nations of our ability to exercise a free market, our economic liberty in a free market. We understand the value in terms of prosperity and security in free trade. We understand the need for a rule of law applied equally to the governing and the governed independently and we understand the concept of rights across race, religion, and gender. These are what make us who we are and we need to take ownership of these and we need to be expanding these in a very unstable world and to my American political colleagues, I would say this, there has never been a time when we were more able to shape the world. In the era of globalization, we need to shape it in our image and buy our own values. This is not a time for America to look inwards. This is not a time for America to become more isolationist. There has never been a time, I believe, where America was more needed on the pitch than it is today and that's probably, I think, Heather, the best place to begin our conversation. Perfect, thank you. Well, thank you, that was wonderful, a great tour de force. I think what we'll do, I'll spend a few minutes, we'll have a conversation with us and then I'll turn you over to our audience. I will warn you that CSIS audiences are very tough. They ask very tough questions so I'm a mere warmup to what you're about to experience but you gave us a broad tour de force. I think I'll focus a little bit more on Europe in our questions and let me start with Russia since that's where you concluded. The murder of Boris Nemtsov. Do you think that's a turning point? Well, we see a different environment within Russia. I think one of Nemtsov's, one of his most poignant remarks, literally days before his murder, was that he felt that there needed to be a Maidan in Russia, an awakening in Russia, which in some ways I think is the most powerful threat to Vladimir Putin than to anything. Did you see these unbelievable images from Moscow, literally steps from the Kremlin? Did you see this as potentially a turning point for Russia? It's potentially, but again, given the level of control and repression that exists there, we've had these false dawns before. Being a vocal opponent of Putin is not a safe position to be in as Litvinenko, Nemtsov, Politskaya, you name them, of the very long list, the growing list of enemies of the Russian president who have been silenced. It would be nice to think that we would get a change. Honestly, I'm just not optimistic about it. You've had some conversation as recently as yesterday on BBC One Radio talking about the level of defense spending. Very concerned about British defense spending, the lack of a commitment to 2% of gross domestic product towards defense spending. I'd like to pull you out a bit on that and really offer some reflections. Is NATO ready to confront Russia? We have seen extraordinary military mobilization, snap exercises. I saw a statistic that since David Karaman has been Prime Minister, Russia has overflown or gotten very close to air sovereignty of the UK 43 times. Are we ready to confront this challenge militarily? Well, you added the word militarily at the end. I think our biggest problem is having the will to confront. You can have as much military capability as you like. If you haven't got the political will to use it, it becomes largely redundant. And I think that is of the two elements of NATO of its political personality and its military capability. It's that political one that I worry about and I think this is where the 2% comes in because it's not just the abilities it gives us in terms of military equipment. It's about our willingness to show our longer term commitment to the alliance. And only four of the NATO allies meeting their 2%, which remember is the floor. 2% of GDP supposed to be the floor of our spending, not the ceiling of our spending on defense. And if you look at what happened, for example, in the Libyan crisis and the campaign in Libya, the European elements of NATO would not have been able to even carry that out without the United States because we simply didn't have the reconnaissance capability. We simply didn't have the air-to-air refueling capability. And the big problem with a lot of the European members of NATO is that so many of them were very quick after the Cold War in particular to get into NATO. And they all recognized what an opportunity it was for everyone to get the insurance policy, but asking just a few others to pay the premiums for us. And we are in a position where there are too many countries taking a free ride on the United States in particular, which is why I think it's very important that Britain shows the moral leadership to make that 2% commitment. We have given our word as a country that we will play our full part in the Alliance and we must do so. Last week I was in Poland and the world from Warsaw looks very different from it does from either London or Washington. And there is a palpable fear there about what is going on. And the geographic proximity of Putin is getting them to waken up. And they are of course going to increase the defense spending as our countries like Estonia, but they're coming to the threat late in the day. So we do need to get our political act together inside NATO. And there's a related issue here. And I know this is, we did talk about this at Williamsburg, but I go back to it again. Part of the problem with NATO is the European Union. And the European Union trying to take on a defense and security role, that is not what the EU is for. That is what NATO is for. And if we try to duplicate what NATO is doing inside the European Union and worse, if it ends up having the diversion of funds away from the scarce funding that we're giving NATO into duplication in the European Union, that can be of comfort only to those who are our enemies. I'm gonna turn to the EU because I definitely want to hear your thoughts on the Eurozone and immigration issues as you're seeing them. Before I leave Russia, I just, you're opening remarks and you mentioned Prime Minister Churchill. And I have to say, I struggle with this. What would Churchill say today? On the one hand, he presciently described the rise of Nazism, wartime Prime Minister to create that defense. There's no choice between war and shame. You'll have shame and then you'll have war that will come later. But he was also at Yalta and also in some ways agreed to a sphere of influence. We need a new strategic framework for this challenge that Putin is presenting the West. How do you strike that balance between the values proposition, but again, the political will to meet Mr. Putin with strength? Well, first of all, we have to provide ourselves with the capability and we need to have a better sharing of that capability, but we also need to be willing to confront him. We're necessary. We've seen his modus operandi. We need to have a stronger presence in the Baltic states in particular. And let's be very frank about what he's doing here. He's got Kaliningrad in the Baltic. He's been bullying some of the smaller Baltic states interfering politically, funding pro-Russia candidates. He's been encouraging Republic of Serbska in the Balkans to see the illegal referendum in Crimea as a precedent. He has still got forces in Georgia. He's created virtually a client state in Armenia. He's now annexed Crimea. How many lessons do we need in what is happening here? This is the ability now to cause instability at will in terms of European security. We need to counter that. We need to have a larger and permanent presence in the Baltic. We need to beef up the Baltic air patrols. We need to look at countries like Poland and see whether we need to have a greater permanent NATO presence there. We need to use the powers that we have to show that we are not going to allow this concept with sphere of influence to take hold. For example, we should be sending our naval power into the Black Sea just to show that we have every right to do that and that this is not the personal pond of Putin. So, there are things that we can do, but we have to have the will to do it and we have to have the leadership to do it. Let me turn to the European Union. In some ways, the May 7th general elections is in part not completely about the future of Great Britain in the European Union. Obviously, you've been a critic of the EU and Britain's role in there. Expand a little bit on what you've been watching for the last several years, whether it's within the Eurozone and how the 19 Eurozone members have been dealing with an ongoing economic crisis. Certainly, the last few weeks with Prime Minister Zipras has... How long have you got? Ah, well, you have a couple minutes. You can go. Well, first of all, in terms of the UK election, the Conservative Party, my party, believes that we should have a referendum because no one under about 57 years of age in the UK has ever been able to take part in a referendum about our membership. It's one of my earliest political memories as the referendum of 1975 because my parents campaigned on opposite sides. Oh. It was a tense household. It was a tense household. My parents still have the same views that they held then. But Peter Mandelson, Lord Mandelson, said in Britain that, and I quote, Europe is too important an issue to be left to the lottery of the electorate, which I think tells you all you need to know about the mindset of the bureaucracy in Brussels. And in an era where people across Western political systems seem to be losing faith in the political system itself, giving people a say on their own destiny, I think is one of the ways in which you restore faith in that system and you keep faith with the people. So that's one side of it. The Eurozone, well, a lot of our European partners are now becoming serial economic self-harmers. And the whole concept of the Euro, which of course we decided to stay out of, I think has been a disaster. I remember on the night we were voting on as in the House of Commons, John Major saying to me, who in their right minds would go into anything in life that doesn't have an exit? And we're now discovering with the Greek situation exactly what happens when you don't have an exit. The Euro was always, I think, intellectually and economically flawed. There were two basic models that the Euro could have taken. First of all, to say it is so important for this concept of ever closer union, we will do everything to make it work, right up to and including full political economic and monetary union. But they didn't do that. Or they could have said it's purely an economic project and only the countries that make the grade are allowed to join. And they didn't do that either. In fact, the wrong countries were allowed to join, countries that were never close to making the convergence criteria. And then having been allowed to join, they followed fiscal policies that made them diverge rather than converge, building instability into an already flawed architecture. And we're living with the consequences of that today because what you're getting is monetary policy effectively applied across the whole continent that suits Germany the biggest continental economy. And I'm afraid that memories are too short, are too long rather and history is too short for people to accept what they perceive as austerity being applied to them from Berlin. And the reason that I mentioned my parents' positions on the European referendum was that my father said we must join what was then the common market. He said to diminish the tensions that drove Europe to destruction twice in a century. And I worry now that what we're getting in the Euro is the recreation of those tensions economically that will lead us to many of the same disadvantageous positions that we had before. How do you go about de-risking the Euro is for me the big question. Well, you can go back to the national currencies and abandon the Euro, that's not gonna happen. You can throw out the outliers in Southern Europe in particular, that's Greece, Portugal, Spain, probably Italy, but that would undermine their drive towards ever closer union, so that's not going to happen. The third would be to throw out the biggest outlier which is Germany and clearly that's not gonna happen because Germany likes the Euro because it's a way undervalued currency for the size and strength of the German economy. And Germany's done very well out of that. And the fourth way is for the countries inside the Eurozone to move to full political, economic and monetary union. And I spoke to a senior member in Brussels recently who said, you're quite right, those are the four options and we'll take none of them. And what we will do is continue to take the risk effectively and hoping that the bomb goes off and someone else's watch. And I regard the Euro now as being the single biggest threat to global financial stability because what is happening in Greece will be replicated in the future because the basic problem is not being sorted out. And the most important issue for European politicians I think is the de-risking of the Euro. 58% of young Spaniards are unemployed. How long do you think you can tolerate those levels of unemployment being foisted upon a population for what is effectively a political project? This is not a sensible way to be running either the economics or the long-term social stability in Europe. And I wonder how many young Europeans on the current trend will be sacrificed on the altar of the single currency before European leaders waken up to the truth of what's happening. Sending aside the Eurozone, which itself has got its own rhythm at the moment, are you undervaluing, though, the incredible benefit the United Kingdom has received from being part of the single market? In fact, over the last five years, trade between the United Kingdom and the EU has increased. I mean, can this conversation about the UK's role within the European Union, are you not completely under emphasizing the great economic benefits that you enjoy as well as London as the financial center, which is benefiting from being within the European Union, but not, obviously, of the Euro? Well, we were told, of course, that if we didn't join the single currency, that would be the end of London as the economic center. Didn't quite work out that way. I take a very simplistic view of this, which is money goes to where money can be made and money can be moved. And money comes to London for both those reasons. Money can be made because of our regulatory and taxation framework, especially at the moment, and it can be moved because of our system of commercial law. So that will continue to make it attractive, whether we're inside the European Union or not, and I haven't really noticed Norway or Switzerland suffering hugely for not being members of the European Union. Of course, there are gains of being inside it. So what I would like us to have is a debate that looks at the ledger in terms of its pluses and minuses, but in a very realistic and hard-headed way. Britain would have to look to see whether we're Britain to leave the European Union, what that meant in terms of our trade. Worth pointing out, however, that the rest of our European partners export much more to us, the one country, than we export to them, the other 27. So the balance is very much in one direction. So I think that we do need to have this debate, but I really rather dislike some of those who will say, oh, we couldn't stand on our own if Britain could not exist outside the European Union, which is clearly nonsensical, given the success of some of the countries in our neighborhood geographically who are. What I would like to see is a renegotiated relationship with Europe. I'd like us to go back to the concept of a common market. I want to be able to cooperate with our European partners where it's in our mutual interest to do so, but I want to be able to keep separate the levers that Britain might need to use in Britain's national interest, where ours to differ from theirs, which they do on a whole range of issues. One political party that has benefited from the sort of anti-European Union, even anti-immigrant stance, has been the United Kingdom Independence Party, UKIP. So I'd like to turn a little bit to the domestic politics and put that crystal ball on the table for May 7th. We have the commentary class has certainly been speculating that what we are about to witness on May 7th is going to be a real mess, a hung parliament, a very difficult coalition framework where the smaller parties, particularly the Scottish National Party, perhaps UKIP on the other side may be determining what a future British government looks like, help the average American understand what's going to happen on May 7th and then what are the implications for us? Shall I also give you the lottery numbers this week? The bookies always have this right. I have to say, I followed them as much as you go, but... I tend to go with the bookies as well, rather than... I think people are more circumspect about where they put their money than where they put their opinions, but... What does look like it's happening at the moment is that the two main parties are increasing in strength again at the expense of the smaller ones, a classic squeeze as we get to an election and for all the talk of breakthroughs in a country like Britain with a first pass to post system is very, very difficult for parties to break into that. I think that... And you will say, with some justification, you would say this. As a former chairman of the Conservative Party, I believe that when you have an economy where we have created 1.85 million jobs, 1,000 jobs a day since we've been in office, with historically low interest rates and low inflation rates with people really feeling the growth in the economy now feeding through to their own pockets, I think that it's very hard to see why the public would throw out a government that's provided them with that. I happen to think that the current Labour Party leader is uniquely unqualified to lead the country in a way that I've never known them in my 23 years in Parliament, but I wouldn't intrude on their private grief any further. On that one. And I think that when it comes to the election, people will look at the economic record of the government. They will look at the fact that in David Cameron, they have an experienced Prime Minister at a time when international security is not looking great. And I think that they will decide not to make the change. I think the Conservatives will be the biggest party. I think that we'll be close to an overall majority. And I remember the first election that I was elected in 1992, the scenario was not that dissimilar to this one when in fact we were not ahead in any opinion polls. And John Major won the highest number of votes any Prime Minister won in history. So the electorate when faced with actually putting the cross, I think we'll think very hard. As a member of Parliament, you served on the Constitution Committee and had a great deal of focus on constitutional affairs. For those of us who've been watching the Scottish debate, obviously last fall's referendum, which was a bit of a heart-stopper, weren't quite sure how that would evolve. And now we see where the Scottish National Party is going to be doing, we think, very well for May 7th, which may cause Labour to not do as well. But what does this mean for the United Kingdom? Is it becoming more disunited? And will this election begin to pull at the very fabric of the United Kingdom? Well, I always thought that Tony Blair's constitutional proposals for devolution were imbalanced and would have repercussions. We argued at the time, it was my responsibility at the time in the House of Commons, and I argued that what was happening was a recipe for the rise of nationalism. I didn't think actually ever it was such a heart-stopper the referendum, and your faith in the bookies would have been well placed because they said 87% of the chance of getting a no vote on that referendum. In fact, they paid out the day before. The referendum actually took place. Some of the bookmakers, they were so certain where they are of the outcome. The trouble with it is that the pro-independent side who lost the referendum think they won and have been continuing to push more and more in that direction, and that has been a problem. It is also now very apparent that Labour Party looked like they will do very badly in Scotland, and I think that's a problem of their own making. Again, how they've approached all of this. What will it mean if there's a big SNP grouping? Well, that will depend, of course, on the wider outcome. The nightmare scenario is a Labour, for me, a Labour-SNP coalition. And the reason that that's a nightmare for me is not just that yet more money will move from my constituents up north of the border into Scotland. And Scottish voters are already at far more spending per head than the voters in England do. But the real worry is that the SNP are a unilateralist party. They believe in abandoning a nuclear deterrent. They want a nuclear-free country. And I wonder what price the Labour leader would pay to get the peas to Downing Street. That worries me more than anything else, and it should worry our American friends. Absolutely. I'm going to my last question, and then I'm going to bring our audience into it. I'm going to ask you the question that I get asked very frequently by journalists. Does the United States still have this close, exclusive relationship with the United Kingdom that it has in the past? Does the United States still consider itself a European power? Is it still engaged as it was in the transatlantic relationship, or has it decided we're going to maintain our alliance, but we're really focusing on the Asia Pacific region, India, these other great opportunities? And we just don't see those opportunities in Europe. How would you answer that question? I always thought that the whole concept of the pivot was a little bizarre. It's not as though the Atlantic was going to disappear any day soon. Clearly, the United States does have to focus on Pacific affairs. It is a Pacific power, but it's also an Atlantic power. It's not got the luxury of choosing which way to look and global security for the very reasons we were discussing because of our interdependence. It's not something that you can decide which geographical area you're now going to worry about and which area you're going to disregard. It's not like that, as events in Ukraine are showing. The US is still the global superpower, economically and militarily, with that come responsibilities. And we need the US to be in the game. So I wonder what signal Mr. Putin got that America was not going to be as focused on its transatlantic area, but was going to focus on the Pacific. I wonder what signal he took from that and whether that's actually been advantageous to wider security. Interesting. Well, thank you. OK, I've given you your warm-up. I'm ready to unleash the audience. If you could please raise your hand. We have a microphone. If you could identify yourself, please, with your name and affiliation. We have about 15 minutes. So I'd ask for the comments to be short, the questions to be very focused. With your permission, I'll bundle a few questions and then you can fire away at them. So with that, please. Sir, we have one right there in the front. And then one to the side. Thank you very much for a realist view of the world or a Tory view of the world. My question follows on Asia. I was going to ask her about the pivot. But does the UK, or EU, or NATO see Asia as sort of outside its purview? Is that something to be left to the US? How does it define your interest in East Asia and how are you pursuing those? Thank you. And we had a question right up front here, Marcy. We'll stick to the side for a moment. Thank you. Michael, I go with DevEx. You've spoken quite a bit about diplomacy and defense and the need to build political will in those areas. I wonder if you have any thoughts on the third D development and how the relationship between USAID and the United States and the Department for International Development in the UK has transformed, how you think it should transform in the future, and if that's a significant aspect of what you're talking about. Thanks. Great, let's take one more. We have, oh, right there, Marcy, right there to the side. And then I'll perhaps go over the corner next. Thank you. Dr. Fox, thank you for joining us today. Major Scott Smitson, United States Central Command. Real quick question. It seems like one of the emerging narratives in the debate about the future of NATO is that there are some member states that increasingly are oriented to the East, and I think Ukraine fulfills that narrative, whereas others from the Southern periphery can be concerned about instability in Libya. How did we, the United States United Kingdom, help change that narrative from an or to an and? Great, so we had Asia as that outside NATO's purview. A question of development, which the United Kingdom has played a great leadership role in development in the world, and South versus East, that's a great question. Can NATO do both? Do they have to choose? Can the alliance be united in addressing both conflicts? Well, the very first question, I think, goes to the heart of this entire discussion. I think increasingly you have to understand the implications of globalization, that we can't simply disregard other parts of the world simply because they're not close to us geographically. And I think of the 20th century as being the century of the block, which was defined by our geography. And so we cooperated with countries that were close to us in terms of physical geography, rather than countries that were like us in terms of our values or our political systems. Increasingly, the world is shrinking because of the effects of globalization. And as I said at the beginning, we can't afford to disregard risks that are rising in Asia any more than we can do risks that are rising in Europe, because they will both affect us very quickly. I think politicians have a problem with this, if I'm allowed to say that. I think that politicians on the right resent the loss of sovereignty that inevitably comes with globalization and therefore tend to not want it to happen. And politicians on the left dislike the unavoidable importation of strategic risk that comes with globalization that has to be paid for. And our systems of government also with a very neat way in which we have little silos that say that's economic policy, that's trade policy, that's foreign policy, that's security policy, fail to grasp how globalization is developing and the interdependence and the unavoidable risk that comes with that. So we do have to look up more widely at risk and emerging risk and recognize that whether we like it or not, it's going to happen. The question is how well we prepare for it. So I think if Fukuyama had called his book The End of Geography and not The End of History, he'd have been a lot closer to the mark in terms of the world that we're emerging into. In terms of, it is, you cannot choose the conflicts. This is the problem with security and saying, well, we're going to reduce our spending because we think the world is becoming a safer place. Conflicts choose you more than you get to choose the conflicts. And that's one of the lessons of history, and we have to be ready for the unexpected. And Libya showed some real shortcomings. It also showed the dislocation, I think, of our military action and our plans for longer-term political stability. In fact, really, since the Marshall plan, I can't think of an example of where we've got both the military action and the reconstruction and stabilization right. So we have a lot of thinking to do there. Where does aid come into all of this? Well, it's very useful in terms of being able to help out, I think, in the short term. And that's its main value, my own views, that if you want to alleviate global poverty, you do that through free trade. And I think capitalism has actually given a much greater step up to the world's poor than any amount of aid program can do. But I do think that specifically well-targeted aid is very useful. And I don't just mean in terms of physical or monetary poverty. I think that we should be using our aid budgets to get a change in behavior and values. In particular, I think that our taxpayers who provide this money live by certain ethical values. And I think that we should be using our aid budget more to get a change in behavior. For example, I think that countries that exhibit religious intolerance that do not give women equal rights, that don't send girls to school, we should be trying to use our aid as a lever in those cases. We should be trying to apply the values that our people live by to those countries that we give aid to. And I think that there's in the aid debate, it's been understandably focused on public health, which as a doctor, regard as hugely important, and the alleviation of poverty. But I think there are other things that our aid budget should also be involved in. And that's the promotion of our values. And I think that if you go back to what I was saying at the very beginning, that we are who we are by design and not by accident. If you believe that as I do, then I think you've got a moral responsibility to ensure that other people are able to benefit from those values too, which is what I see our aid program as being a very important part of. I just don't, however, buy this idea that you can diminish your need for hard power by having more soft power. That really is an and, not an or. One quick question, then I wanna turn to the audience again. I've been meaning to ask you this question. We follow very closely the House of Commons vote on Syria. And clearly US-Syrian policy has been a great conversation topic here, lack of thereof, or that we do have a coherent policy. Was that a real turning point in how at least democratically, the United Kingdom looked at foreign policy challenges? Or was that in some ways trying to litigate the past and past decisions about Tony Blair's decision on Iraq? It was an aberration and it was a mistake. I wouldn't take it as reading too much into how Britain sees its role. This was a House of Commons that was recalled from their summer holiday three days before they had to. People who are on their family holidays don't take very kindly to that. There wasn't a great deal of preparation done in terms of briefing members of parliament about the actual issue. A lot of it was about domestic politics and I wouldn't read too much into it. However, I think that the damage, irrespective of the reasoning of the produced the outcome of that vote has been very substantial because I think there are two things you shouldn't do in politics as in life. First of all, don't make promises you know you can't keep. And secondly, don't make threats you're not willing to carry out. And if you draw red lines and you say they will not be crossed and then they are crossed and you don't do anything about them. The one thing you can be sure of is that your next red line will be tested. And I think that it wasn't only about the specific issue. It was about how many of our allies as well as our enemies perceive our willingness to enforce the policies that we've set out for ourselves. That's a very dangerous world to get into. Absolutely, I think we have time for maybe two more questions we can get out. One there and Leo looks right there. Dot Fox, good morning. My name is Paul Tenant. I'm an exchange officer, British exchange officer working in the Pentagon. I just like to ask about information operations regarding Russia in particular. And I'd like your opinion on just how costly it was to cut the Russian speaking BBC World Service in 2011 as far as I can tell the only reasonable means of countering RT Russia today as a state sponsored information control network. And if you agree with me that it was with hindsight certainly extremely costly whether it can be reversed. Thank you. Leo Michelle National Defense University. Among the big defense issues that you cable face in 2016 will be the main gate decision on replacing the current tribe and deterrent. How strong is support within the conservative party for a like for like replacement? And very quickly, since you were defense minister at the time that you signed the two defense treaties with France in 2010, are you satisfied with the level of British-French defense cooperation? I'll add one more to that. Any predictions on the strategic defense review SDSR for this year? All right. All right, that's how you're gonna end up on a strong note, last five minutes. On the question of information, as well as forgetting about the concept of deterrence in general, we also seem to have forgotten the value of propaganda. You would think that we had entirely lost our institutional memory from the Cold War. Both of these are really important things. Russia is now becoming extremely adept as ISIS are, for example, in conducting an information war. And despite having all the technology and all the tools at our disposal, we seem to fail to understand the importance or the potential that it gives us. So I'm entirely with you on that and we need to really raise our game right across the whole information piece. In terms of nuclear deterrence, yes, there's very strong support inside the conservative party for replacement. The biggest arguments in Britain against it are that, well, why would you spend so much money on a system that you'll never use, which utterly fails to understand the concept of deterrence, which is that we're using it every day. It's a deterrent. And then when they say, you can't really afford 20 billion in terms of capital costs for the new program, I point out that we were very happy to spend nine billion for three weeks of the Olympics. But we're reticent about spending 20 billion for 35 years of protection from nuclear blackmail. It does seem to me that we want to think hard about our priorities on that one. As for the SDSR, clearly the next defense review will have to take into account that heavy initial cost in the capital program for the nuclear deterrent that I think is factored in, but it's a big cost. And I would say that the defense budget is driven by four things. There are four drivers and constraints. The first is the international security environment, which is deteriorating, which suggests you need an uplift in the budget. Secondly, it's driven by the commitments already entered into our 2% NATO commitment, our commitment to upgrade our nuclear deterrent. And it's also the gaps that we decided to take in 2010, but which we will not be able to take again. Maritime surveillance capability, for example, that's probably going to be another billion on the budget just for the one item. Then you've got the fiscal position, which is improving dramatically in the United Kingdom because of the long-term economic plan that we've put forward. And then the fourth one, I think, is your international obligations and your willingness to have a role in global affairs. And I think that we have given our words as a country as a member of the Alliance, we need to keep that word. And I think if we want to be able to propagate the values and systems that I've been talking about, we have to be willing to provide the means, if necessary, to protect them. So I can see no option, really, than a rise in the budget. I feel to see how you can actually produce what we did in Future Force 2020, set out in the 2010 defense review without increasing the budget, never mind filling in the gaps that we will have to because of a deteriorating security picture. I think it's inevitable the budget will go up. I think smart politicians would turn a necessity into a virtue. Well, Dr. Fox, it is always a great opportunity to have a great discussion with you. You've given us a lot to think about. We're gonna focus in on the outcome of May 7th and see what the future holds for British politics. But although the US-UK relationship may be complicated and evolving, it's clearly, vitally important. And we're delighted that you could spend some time with us and please join me in thanking Dr. Fox for a great discussion.