 OK, welcome everybody. I can see people are starting to arrive. Just give people a little bit more time to stream in. And we'll get started in a minute or so. OK, it looks, I think, like we have most people. OK, there's still a few people streaming in. So I'll just give it another moment, and then we'll get started. Right, good afternoon. My name is Mae Vryan. I'm a lecturer in history and grand strategy to the Department of War Studies at King's College London, the co-director of the Center for Grand Strategy as well. It's my very great pleasure to see so many people here today to celebrate the launch of Lord Peter Ricketts' new book, Hard Choices, which I have a copy of here. Lord Ricketts has been a visiting professor at the Department of War Studies for several years. And I know that many people on this call today, King's staff and students in particular, have benefited in this time from all of the richness and the energy that he has brought to the intellectual life of the department. And we're very grateful for that. Among many other things, he's contributed time and expertise in giving guest lectures on undergraduate modules, on MA modules, and spending time with PhD students. He's certainly added a lot to my modules on grand strategy and statecraft and on diplomacy and foreign policy in particular. Lord Ricketts has given public talks and run employability workshops and engaged, I think with enthusiasm it's fair to say, with all of us in engaging with these really first-order questions and debates that academics like to get into and like to really start to tease out. And sometimes that seems to be kind of at odds with the reality of what it's like to actually do foreign policy and national security strategy in real time. And I think that it's fair to say, certainly from our Centre for Grand Strategy, Lord Ricketts has been really central to helping lots of us staff and students alike to challenge our assumptions and bring on our debates, I think, in quite interesting ways. So, in fact, reading the book, I hear echoes of lots of debates that I've been present for at various times over the years and influences of conversations with John Buu and Corey Shacky and Andrew Earhart and lots of other colleagues and students from across the School of Security Studies. So it's great to see these ideas now germinated fully and in print in this wonderful book, which is the reason that we're here today. It's to celebrate this new book and to hear a bit more about where it originated from. As a historian myself, I'm very gratified to see that the first section starts with this really deep reflection on historical foundations, woven in with reflections from personal experience. And then the second half of the book, really getting into those really tricky, knotty questions of what Britain needs to do going ahead. Obviously the timing for all of this couldn't be more perfect. As many will know, the government recently published the Integrated Review and the dust has started to settle on that and people have had time to digest that document beyond the first hot takes on it. And so naturally the conversation is turning to what next and what can be, how this can be implemented and how the various ambitions of that text can be realized. So to tackle this and perhaps lots of other things too, very pleased to welcome today, Lord Peter Ricketts and Professor Szilarn's Freeman. Lord Ricketts is by way of introduction, which I'm sure isn't needed. Former chairman of the Joint Intelligence Committee, UK permanent representative to NATO former permanent secretary in the foreign office, former national security advisor, ambassador to France, and lots of other things too and contributed to lots of publications and someone who's a real landmark in sharing thoughts and experience from across all of that experience in print and as I say, through his academic networks. He's also obviously a member of the House of Lords. So Lawrence Freedman is emeritus professor of war studies at King's College London. And again, no stranger to anyone on this call, I think all through numerous landmark books in the area of strategy war studies. And again, also a contributor to all of these debates in both the academic and in the public spaces too. So our structure of our conversation today, Lord Ricketts will first give us a few minutes of introduction to the book and its key themes, just touching on some of the ideas in there and where they came from. We'll then bring in Professor Freedman to ask some really difficult questions and to grill him. And we'll have a bit of a dialogue back and forth there. I think between the two of them, please feel free from the very beginning really to contribute your questions in the Q and A box. We'll be collating those during the conversation and we will get to those in the second half of the event. Just a couple of housekeeping things. The event is being live streamed and I'm not sure if I need to ask you to mute your microphones. Maybe I do, but anyway, please do just in case. All right, that is all from me I think. I will now pass over to Lord Peter Ricketts. Thank you very much indeed, Nave, and more than generous introduction and great to know so many people are with us. I'm so sorry we can't be doing this physically and have more personal contact. First thing I want to say is that I have benefited enormously from being able to discuss my ideas as they developed over the last three or four years with students at all levels, including many kings. And some of my best and sharpest critics and challenges have come from young people as we discuss these subjects. As you say that is very much shown up in the book and a huge benefit I've had. Why did I write this? We've all heard a lot about the rules-based system set up after the Second World War being now under real strain. What I can bring to the discussion is that I spent 40 years as a practitioner inside that system starting as a young diplomat in Cold War NATO in the 1970s, but also seeing the UN and the EU closely work on crisis management and tackling strategic issues as they cropped up. And I thought I could usefully try and distill some of that experience to help thinking about why we are where we are now and how we should approach the big decisions which I feel are facing this country but also other Western countries as well. I think Brexit brought us to a crossroads. I think the pandemic has sharpened the issues that we now need to tackle. And the argument I make in the book is that we really do need now a new national strategy. I use the word strategy with some caution in front of Laurie Friedman who is a world expert on strategy but I hope we can discuss that. I think a good strategy for the UK needs to be based on some very clear priorities and a hard-headed assessment of how Britain really can use its influence in the world. As Maeve said, I grounded the book in history. Kings made sure of that. And I'm fascinated by the parallels with that period during the war and the post-war when thinking germinated about the shape of the future peace and particularly fascinated by the Atlantic Charter agreed at the meeting between Churchill and Roosevelt in 1941 partly because the Foreign Office has a precious late draft of the Charter with Churchill's manuscript on it which I first knew as a young diplomat and then when I was permanent secretary I had hung back in the office of the PUS as a bit of an inspiration because I think you can trace from the Charter which was essentially drafted by the then Foreign Office Permanent Secretary Alec Cadogan, not a figure that is well known today but I think a really influential one who wrote out many of the principles which then fed through into the UN Charter and helped shape the landscape in which I spent my working life. So the first part of the book looks at that historical legacy. It looks at how the structures actually functioned, why the UN and NATO are the shape they are why they have proved durable as well as the problems they've had why it proved impossible in the 1950s to graft onto emerging European economic construction anything on defense with the collapse of the European defense community in 1954. Then I follow that through to look at how it felt working in the international system from the Cold War and through into the post-Cold War. I essentially tell a story of a shift from the US as the indispensable power as Madeleine Albright called it to a very contested power over the Iraq intervention and then to a power which wasn't really interested in leading at all anymore in the case of the Libya conflict which I was involved with and which was for me very much a turning point in thinking about America's willingness to continue the role that it had played since the late 1940s. Second part of a book is then a stocktake on how fit the UK is for tackling the big challenges ahead. Here I do spend a chapter on strategy what historians call national brand strategy which I prefer to call national strategy. And my contention there is that for many reasons modern democratic politicians find longer term strategic thinking really difficult. I'll be interested to know whether Laurie agrees or not with the analysis that I've developed there. I think all democracies are suffering from the tyranny of the immediate, the fire hose of 24 seven media and social media. I think they also are not in the habit of thinking strategically. I think Western allies of the US have had many decades under the protective umbrella of the US. They haven't had to pose themselves first order strategic questions. And I wonder whether there's something about the natural selection process in British politics with our first pass the post system and our unwritten constitution that tends to favor the tactician, the presentational expert over people who attach importance to thinking strategically. My own experience of politicians is that they really hate choosing. Choosing always means disappointing somebody. There are always losers that then have to be compensated or you risk making enemies. And yet making good national strategy is all about setting priorities. I think one of the conundrums of UK national security policy over the last 20 years is that while we profess to have a growing number of priorities in practice for many years, we really only had two. One was countering terrorism after 9-11 and the other was the successive wars of intervention. But over that time, other threats developed and they didn't get the attention that they needed. I think national security inflation continues. And I think it remains difficult for politicians to be making choices and the integrated review published last month rather shows that full of good ideas, very well written including, I'm sure, the leadership of John Buu, but in the end not making choices among all the priorities that are discussed there. I also look at our capacity to influence as a country and the damage that I think has been done by the way in which Brexit was conducted by a number of other decisions the government took outside the integrated review as well like the cut in AIDS spending. The final section of the book was the most difficult to write because it was a moving target. And there I've tried to focus in on what I think are the essential choices that still need to be made as we fashion a new national strategy. I don't think these choices have yet been made in the integrated review. We can, I hope, discuss any questions. The first one I looked at was coming to terms with the fact that Britain is an influential, strong, middle-order country that no longer had a pocket great power. I think the integrated review went a long way towards recognizing that but we kept seeing poking through it this exceptionalist rule Britannia approach overestimating Britain's capacity to lead and to influence in the world. A nostalgia for the past which is an obstacle to good policymaking in the present. I make the case that Britain is most effective when it works closely with allies and I would want Britain to be at the forefront of trying to reform the institutions which have served us very well over the last seven decades. Secondly, I talk about the awkward choices which a middle-order power that Britain is face. For example, doing trade deals and we see that at the moment over the UK-Australia deal. For example, in the difficult trade-offs between standing up for our right arm, values, human rights and also doing necessary commercial deals with countries whose values we probably don't share. Thirdly, we need to fashion a China policy which works for the UK. We will always be obviously a security partner of the US in dealing with China but we have our own commercial economic imperatives as well and also we need to keep China engaged in the big global issues and particularly climate change given the summit later this year in the UK. And fourthly, I believe it's vital in fashioning a durable, new national strategy that we get back to a mature, constructive relationship with the European Union. It was very obvious that the European Union was largely airbrushed out of the integrated review and I don't think the Indo-Pacific tilt and although there are merits in doing more in the Indo-Pacific can be a substitute for a good working relationship with the EU. I don't think that we can go all that much further with bilateral relations with France and Germany if the wider economic relationship with the EU remains rancorous and fractious. So I think that is the top priority. And then last point, I really believe that a national strategy is not something that a government document can lay down. However good, it needs to have wider buy-in, it needs to be understood and to the extent possible accepted by a broad range of public opinion and especially younger people. It's younger people who are going to live with the strategic decisions that are made in the next few years. And one of the reasons for writing the book was that I hoped it would help to give the next generation of people who will be coming into positions of power a sense of how Britain was able in the past sometimes to exercise disproportionate influence on world events and to suggest how we might be able to do so again in the future. So that's what the book's about. Laurie, over to you. Peter, thanks so much. And let me start by recommending the book. It's a great combination of historical analysis, personal reminiscence, interesting policy ideas. And it unsurprisingly shows a diplomat's sensibility. It's about how you work with others and the challenges that poses. It also, and this obviously interests me, talks quite a bit about strategy. And I think one of the things that might be interesting for us to talk about is the challenges as you put it of developing such a thing as a national strategy. I wanna just make really a couple of points to start and then to try and get a response from you. The first is I'm skeptical about long-term strategies because I think the problem is that you set objectives and then stuff happens, like the pandemic is a very good example of that. A map changes your view about what you need and what is possible. So we do live in the short-term and how good your long-term objectives are, you're gonna struggle if they can't survive short-term shocks. Also, one of the difficulties you have is what is still basically a status quo power, although we've got a rather disrupted status quo now, is you're not trying to completely revise the international system. So I mean, there's a perfectly good argument that China has got a long-term national strategy at the moment. It has a view about where it wants to be in 10, 20 years, but it's different from where it is at the moment. And I believe it has got the resources to get there. We're not quite in the same position. We wanna manage stuff, keep our improved relations with our closest neighbors, make sure we stay as close as we'd like to be with the Americans, manage difficulties in our neighborhood and so on. But that's different from having a very sort of strong revisionist aim about what the future should look like. Certainly, and I'm sure you're wholly correct about this, but it comes from living in the short-term, is the politicians don't like to make definitive choices? They'll have to keep their options open. I mean, it's not just that they don't wanna offend people. As you point, I think you mentioned the Australia trade deal. Somebody's gonna be offended out of that. It's kind of avoidable, but you have to make a decision on it. But they like to make those decisions as late as possible. And they like to keep their options open. And one of the questions in the sense is what forces a decision? What is it that suddenly makes it impossible to avoid offending somebody or other you've got to actually decide? And lastly, related to that, sometimes you choose without realizing you're choosing. As you started, I was delighted to see as well with the Atlantic Charter, which I think is a much underappreciated document. And I was really pleased to see it there. One of the consequences of the Atlantic Charter, you could argue, is it was a death knell for empire because the rights that it affirmed there were inconsistent with imperialism. And I think the Americans just saw that. And I suspect Churchill did it in his own way too, but as he was there to protect the British empire, it was a bit awkward. But given the fact that we needed the United States so badly at that time, and given the fact that these were values that by and large we held to, at least when running our own country, they were good, it was as good a place as any to start. So I suppose that my question, let me just respond to my queries, is whether it ever is really going to be realistic to set out now a strategy that is going to see you that much into the future. You have a view about what you'd like the world to look like, about Britain's potential placement, but one way or the other, things are going to keep on happening and your strategy will in the end be decided as much by events as by, as well as by serious planning and forethought. Well, thank you, Laurie. And I'm fascinated to hear you make that case of all people having studied it so closely. And of course, I very much agree. It's why I don't like the phrase grand strategy because it does make it sound as if you can have a master plan and the master plan on rules in a smooth way into the future, of course, it's never like that. Muddling through crisis management, managing problems is the stuff of daily politics, particularly in democracies. But I think there is a risk if you don't have some kind of lodestone for your policy and that you drift around and you just bounce from one crisis to another. And I talk in the book, you will know very well, the famous Future Policy Study which Harold McMillan commissioned in 1959, reported in 1960, led by the cabinet secretary of the time, Norman Brooke, which is a very, very comprehensive, hard-headed look at where Britain really was, pretty honest about its weaknesses and which I think, pitchfork McMillan into thinking seriously about applying to join Europe as well as locking in the deterrent with Kennedy. And so I think I'm looking for something like that, not a strategy that's going to have a step-by-step path to a glorious future. But since throughout my career, we could have said that British grand strategy was really, keep close to the Americans and also be an influential player at the heart of European affairs. Well, one of those two pillars is now very much shaky. The other one with a changing America doesn't look quite the same either. America is not giving the same priority to European securities it did throughout my career. So it seems to me we do need to fashion a broad sense of what our real top priorities are. And I think there's quite a lot of rhetoric around, there's an awful lot of exceptionalist rhetoric about standing alone, Britain's still a great country, which I think is misleading. There is rhetoric about the Indo-Pacific as somehow the key is the future for the UK, which I don't think it is. I think there's a measured case you can make for doing more in that huge region, but we're never going to be a central player there. So can we shape an approach which at least has a number of fairly settled, longer-term objectives? And then how we get to them, of course, will always be subject to disruptive events. I think that's what I'm looking for because I feel at the moment, we've left one pattern behind and we haven't really yet got a new pattern. What forces a decision? I mean, usually a crisis. As you say, politicians will always put off difficult choices until the last moment, and then they will make them very rapidly under the pressure of events, not always the best way of doing it, but that's not a lot we can do about that. Civil servants and commentators and academics can help, I think, by getting a bit ahead of the curve and helping politicians to see the next problem coming down the road, which could be a pandemic or a climate catastrophe while they're busy coping with the immediate. So, yes, the Atlantic Charter was no doubt a rather painful compromise for Churchill and Cadogan, and not sure whether they did actually quite understand the implications, the empire of what they were signing up to, but they had a number of key priorities, including locking the Americans into a future system of international security, which they succeeded in. I would like to have one or two absolutely key priorities for the future where we can be applying our energies because at the end, strategy means choosing a few key targets, in my view, and I think we are pretty scattergun at the moment. Thank you. I'd like to move to substance, talk a bit about the under Pacific and the China issues, which are very large in your book, but let me just quickly come back on a long-term strategy. So, there's a difference between a searching inside a look done in the cabinet office, the no-holds bar that you put to a prime minister, and a document for public consumption, which will be read by friends, allies, enemies, whatever. And the best you can hope for that, which to be honest, I think the integrated review did quite well, is some sort of general orientation. To your environment, I agree with you on the absence of a seriously you policy, but we can come back to that as well in a moment. But the most important documents are those either like the Atlantic Charter or the UN Charter or whatever that are meant to last, which most, as you know, strategy documents, how good they are don't last. Another short half-life. Or the hard-hitting internal ones. I mean, one that I always remember, which you no doubt will remember too, because it was from a distinguished occupant of one of your posts, Nico Henderson's valedictory from the embassy in Paris, which got leaked to the Economist, which was the most hard-hitting critique of British foreign policy I, at that time, had ever read. And it was sort of a moan and a ment about national decline and how we weren't taken seriously anymore. And that was, what, 1978-9. So that, I think, probably had far more effect than any sort of, I mean, thatcher certainly picked it up and brought Nico Henderson back and sent him off to Washington. So there's a difference between what's going on in the middle of government and what you can do in a public document. And then just how events make a difference. I'm just thinking, I don't dwell on the pandemic, but one of the things that people are thinking differently about is supply chains, is self-sufficiency. Because the vulnerability that comes from relying on globalization, when all of a sudden, certain stocks become sources of enormous competition like PPE and have vaccines or whatever, has made a difference to people's thinking. And so that's a shift at a short term. You won't find very much of it three years ago in long-term documents. Yet it's very much ingrained in minister's minds now that actually it's better if we have some more stuff at home. Now, we would have dismissed that in the past as being autarkic and unrealistic. But you can see the appeal now. So that's the sort of thing I mean about how it's not just that the short term stops us thinking about the long term. The short term makes us think differently about the long term as well. Yes, I agree with that. Disruptive events sort of push the course of history out of its path into a new path. But one of the lessons, surely, that we have to learn from the pandemic is to think more deeply about resilience. I think one of the risks is that we will now plan for the next pandemic, and the world will be much better prepared for that. But the next disruptive event probably won't be another pandemic. It'll be another area. It'll be on digital connectivity or the environment or some other area. And therefore the practice of thinking about how to make our societies more resilient seems to me to be very important. You're clearly right about supply chains. Suddenly globalization doesn't look quite as attractive as it did. The other factor playing into that, of course, is China. And the realization that we've actually outsourced a great deal of manufacturing, including some of the really sensitive national security equipment to China and that we don't have sovereign capacity to do that in the West either. And those are examples, I think, of risks that grew up while we were busy thinking about countering terrorism and dealing with Tony Blair's walls of intervention. And actually we hadn't thought that the West didn't have a really good 5G telecoms technology or perhaps the Chinese were monopolizing manufacturing in certain key areas. Then the pandemic comes on top of that and we realize that vaccine research and vaccine production capacity is a really important sovereign capability as well. Yes, the world moves on, but we need to draw some general lessons and then set some new priorities, I think, to make sure we're better prepared for whatever the next disruptive event is, spending the money now to be resilient, ready for what may happen five or 10 years down the road. Let me just move it into the sort of Indo-Pacific, which we call it Indo-Pacific now, rather than the Asia-Pacific itself represents a geopolitical shift and China. So it's a key theme of your book or one of the themes of the issues is that a competition is developing between the US and China and while in the end, inevitably, we're going to be closer to the Americans and the Chinese. That isn't really a choice. Somehow we've got to chart our own path in all of this. I think that's fair summary of what you're saying. Yes, it is. And that's true. But I mean, first, you know, the Americans like us also have to think about the trade issues. I mean, the Americans are no more than they're able to suddenly stop trading with the Chinese and the Chinese, of course, to loan an awful lot of American debt. But also it's not just a question of positioning ourselves in this great competition. The Chinese challenge goes beyond sort of the manipulation of technology and control of supply chain and so on to almost a form of censorship. And we've seen that not just for concern of Americans but our allies like Canada and Australia who find themselves coerced, were threatened by China because China in some way feels slighted by comments they've made about the Uighurs or whatever and that's making those sort of comments too. So I think the Chinese issue is actually quite a hard one to duck because it comes back to values as well. Yes, we've got to work out a sensible trading relationship with China. Maybe there's a broader issue about whether we've allowed trading relationships just generally to get too caught up with whether we approve or disapprove of the trading partners. But it's not an issue that... It's not just a question of finding some point that doesn't offend the Americans too much. It's actually finding some point that's consistent with our own values. And also, I mean, it's just interesting the extent to which China has made things more difficult for itself by sort of wolf warrior diplomacy which by going on the offensive so quickly every time something happens it doesn't like is actually making some way starting to make the choice for us. China 10 years ago as you know very well in the book seemed like a pretty attractive partner for the UK. It's a country we have to deal with now but it doesn't seem bad attractive as a partner. Well, absolutely. I think it's the key national security issue for the next generation I think because the competition or the confrontation whatever it will be between the US and China is going to shape the next 20 years. It's not a new Cold War and I think it's right that we are careful about the facile analogies which are misleading. We have got somehow to cohabit on this planet with China as a major player the fact that China will be a decisive influence in whether we can have a successful climate change conference at the end of the year just shows that there are areas where cooperation is important and it's good to see John Kerry is trying to make common cause with China in that area. So yes, we do have a similar kind of balancing act to the Americans but of course the Americans as a global superpower have more scope or flexibility to apply more pressure to China in certain areas. One of the points I make in the book is that I believe now outside the EU Britain is rather more exposed to China trying to pick us off trying to address particular sanctions or pressures on the UK as they have done for example on Australia recently. We don't have the protective cover of being one of the EU for our trade policy and wider economic policy. So we are more exposed. I think the UK is right to stand up to China on Hong Kong and the Uighurs with a wider partnership of other countries as possible. I do feel we're not quite there yet in terms of having a clear UK approach and particularly a place where western countries can make common cause together on China. We've done it in ad hoc groups of like-minded countries but if we're going to set up sustainable long-term arrangements to make sure for example we're not caught out on dependence on China for high-tech manufacturing capability we need an institution. It's no good just doing that through a G7 or Alliance of Democracies. That doesn't have the staying power and the capacity to implement decisions taken. I personally am quite attracted to the idea of using NATO augmented by allies that have worked closely with NATO like Australia and Japan as a clearinghouse as a place where perhaps western policy can be thrashed out on China and then there can be some follow-up to it particularly in the area of avoiding security dependence. So I think we need a little bit like the 1940s we need creative thinking about the machinery for giving our cooperation more durability and more strength and depth as well as being a motor for creative policy ideas it's really going to be one of it is the structural challenge of the next decade or two I think. And so we're starting to get some quite interesting questions coming in which I'd like to turn to in a moment but let me just put a couple of points before we go to the questions. So following on from that obviously another big picture of the book is the need to work out a relationship with the European Union for reasons that we can all understand it's all been a bit bruising so it's going to take a while before we can do that. But one of the I mean one of the striking things about the EU which has been pretty evident over the past year is it's actually not a very agile decision maker and even on China they've been they really struggled to agree a policy because they don't agree with Hungary playing a sort of spoiler role. So it's not going to I mean obviously we're the ones who walked out but it's obviously not going to be that easy yet for reasons you point out the Americans are not particularly focused and we've seen even over the Israel-Gazers fight the Americans not being sort of as in there as you would have expected in the past and that's a general view on European security as well they haven't walked away from us but the energy isn't there either they don't want to get as involved in stuff in the way they did in the past or their focus is on the other part of the world. So Macron talked about the need for more European strategic autonomy but you also note in a rather nice passage in your book that the French do have a tendency for sort of grand eloquent gestures and calling for great initiatives while we're still worrying about the detail of the reality that they're going for the sort of more performative aspects but then you're left with a question of how actually do you follow that up so if this is the case do we have to use NATO for this purpose is there a way by which we can be part of European a more autonomous European strategic thinking or how we sort of just rode off into the middle of the Atlantic and not be part of that anymore I think this huge debate to be had in the EU on what they see their role in the world as being I think the EU is very divided on that at the moment as you say which is why it is so difficult for them to make decisions on policy towards for example Russia and yes the French are at one end of that spectrum and there have always been rather leery of the term strategic autonomy because it's not quite clear autonomy from whom and I think certainly at earlier stages for the French it was autonomy from the Americans being able to stand alone in Europe without help from the Americans I think if you ask in Berlin what they mean by it it's much more about sovereign capacities for manufacturing equipment so they are deeply divided and Britain leaving I think punches quite a big hole in the EU's global role and the debate about it of course we've now absented ourselves from that debate and I don't know how it will go but the pressures in the EU to pull back in towards being more of a regional organisation and not getting too involved in the big strategic issues out there beyond the European region I think is real and that is difficult for Britain I'm completely perplexed as to why the British government didn't negotiate at least some kind of structure for a continued dialogue with the EU on foreign policy, defence and security it's putting its hopes in maintaining close relations with France and Germany in the E3 okay up to a certain point on issues like Iran that's possible there will always be limits to how far the France and Germany are prepared to go in the end their main loyalties will be towards solidarity with their partners so at the moment Britain is around the edges and until we can get over our current taboo about anything to do with cooperation with the EU I think we're going to stay on the edges so this rather important debate you'll write the EU is often slow at moving but when they do fashion a policy it tends to get written down into legal text and it tends to have some real economic clout to it because of the scale of the EU so EU sanctions on Russia have more impact than just British sanctions on Russia and therefore it is in our interest I think to see the EU continue to be active in problem solving in the world to the extent we have any influence and we should be having a structured dialogue with the EU as long as alongside that with many other countries around the world as well I think it increases our value to Washington by the way if we're seen to be having a productive relationship with the EU I would like to carry on myself but I think I should bring in a number of very interesting questions we've got from the audience I'm going to start with one from Alan Shukra and he basically says you've described the UK as being rather poor at grand strategy who's good? Are there any countries in a similar position to the UK that you think do it better? Okay very good question one possible comment reply to that is that the authoritarian countries probably find it easier to lay out grand strategic plans they are not subject to the same kind of level of contestation and debate and challenge as we are in western countries so the Chinese find it easier to lay out a grand plan from here to 2049 when they will be fully emerged Soviet Union, Russia love 5 year plans problem with uncontested strategies of course is that they may be completely wrong and take the country off the rails but Singapore I first knew in 1970s as a young diplomat then at the start of his 30 years as the leading politician in Singapore he had already laid down the main lines of a strategy which has proved enormously successful partly through continuity and through durability of the policy I think there are western political leaders who are strategic thinkers and two I would pick out Barack Obama is one Emmanuel Macron actually and perhaps the position of a president makes it a little bit easier just slightly above the minute by minute fray that British prime minister is involved in to take the time to think strategically in the end I think it does come down to creating the time I don't think it's impossible for a British prime minister to do it but I think this system makes it extremely difficult to carve out the time to do it I mean Lee quite new I think he is one of the great strategists and Singapore has had remarkable strategic direction is of course an authoritarian state well on the way to that yes on the spectrum and quite small and if you look back at Singapore at some time in Singapore talking to them about this they don't actually set out the grand strategy that would have them being where they are at the moment essentially at each stage they up their game every time they face a new challenge rather than retreating they up their game and we're very focused it's harder when you're a multi when you've got so much that's going on in the middle of the country but they set out a combination of a liberal economic policy to encourage investment and a very stern political and social policy of discipline which by and large has remained in place for 30 years and proved for Singapore to be a good framework but yeah it's the scale of a laboratory of course it's not the same thing perhaps one or two points that we can retain from it now there's a couple of questions about values can we pin this down do we have core values as a country there are about two or three questions on similar sort of lines is that or is it rather vague and nebulous in the end well we do have values yes and I think the British public British voters would expect the country to stand up for the rule of law for human rights we've been at the forefront of setting norms for example on human rights on international rule of law from the laws of war through to the international criminal court and this government to their credit have been doing that I mean they've also I'm afraid driven a coach and horses through our reputation as a country that stands up for the rule of law by threatening to break international law but that hopefully is a parenthesis we can close the brackets on that now the problem of course with foreign policy is it's never black and white it's never easy standing up for rights has to be balanced with as I was saying the need for a working relationship with a number of countries whose values we absolutely don't share getting that balance right making sure that we can have some impact in the human rights stands that we're taking means partnerships means lining up with other countries and other countries vary in their willingness to stand up and take risk issue by issue depending on how much they feel it's in their national interest it's been quite striking on Hong Kong for example that is rather been the English speaking countries that Canada's Australia US UK who have links of family links of community and historical links with Hong Kong rather than the Europeans Europeans have other issues that they stand up for so it's not black and white and trying to run a foreign policy that is entirely based on on human rights and values is very difficult some of us may remember Robin Cook's effort to set out what he called an ethical foreign policy which fairly quickly ran into the sands of problems with arms sales in particular so foreign policy is a game of compromises at the end of the day but indeed I think in the mix has to be the UK showing that it stands up for human rights you mentioned Robin Cook and arms sales and the trouble is as soon as you start insisting that you have an ethical foreign policy double standards start to loom large and foreign policy is an arena of power as well as values and as you were saying with China it's true with other countries Saudi Arabia comes to mind as well that for all sorts of reasons you don't want to alienate completely yet you can be quite cross with them at times so there is a question of how it's actually trying to relate it to another question we've received from the audience about how you make strategy work with the young which neither you nor I have any place to appreciate at times but in a world of expediency and compromise which is actually the world of diplomacy in many ways it's not so easy to appear sort of bold and moral and that the compromises that you feel you have to make in the name of national interest are quite off putting when you're an idealistic 16 year old Yes but I think it's a job of all of us to explain to idealistic 16 year olds that it's absolutely right to have ideals and that we hope that they will feel proud of the country that we are showing to the world but yeah it's a difficult old world out there we've also got to pay our way in the world and by the way after the economic hit we've taken over Brexit it'll be all the more important that British companies go out there and win contracts and win investments and so on and that means dealing with regimes whose values we don't share and it means being prepared to sell defense equipment to countries whose values we don't share if we are satisfied that there are guarantees about how they will use them otherwise tens or hundreds of thousands of jobs in the UK will go so yeah foreign policy is about pragmatic choices I mean hard choices is a phrase that comes to mind it will be issue by issue but I don't think the British public would want the British government to abandon any idea that we were also a flag carrier for rights and values so the challenge in a way is to find a language which can explain trade-offs and choices and priorities without seeming to abandon not over promise that we are going to be a knight in shining armour because we won't be we have to make pragmatic choices so there's a few questions about the strategy making including from John Gears and I see so the one is given as you point out in the book you set up the National Security Council structure do you think it's fit for purpose still or where would you like to see changes and I think John's question was whether we need to bring people broaden the nature of the foreign policy elite that a lot of this stuff is only going to be addressed in government by small numbers of people how do you broaden that a bit but I think the starting point is how does that fit into the National Security Council structure is it fit for purpose of course I don't know how it is operating today but I really do think it's a good structure for governments that have to cope with a very wide range of risks and threats because it's flexible how it operates will depend very largely on how the Prime Minister of the day wants it to operate because it needs to be chaired by the Prime Minister it needs to be a place where the Prime Minister shows he or she takes decisions so that key ministers need to be there not just send their parliamentary secretaries and regard it as a decorative part of the Constitution it needs to be a place of challenge where official advice is taken apart and scrutinized and put back together again and in the end of decision and I think it is a place where you can perhaps not expect ministers to spend afternoons just talking about long term strategy but you can have a bit of a mixed diet of managing today's crisis that might be checking that you're following up the decisions you took a year or two years ago so that things are being implemented and what went wrong last time is put right before next time so when I set up the National Security Council I also created an official level body which is the perm sex of all the departments represented on the NSC because I thought that they were an underutilized group since they spent all their time managing their departments and fighting with the Treasury for money that they would love to get their hands back on policy and actually they did and so from time to time we would go away and spend an evening talking about longer term issues for example China, even in 2010 it was very interesting there was an economic community in Whitehall and there was a security community in Whitehall on China and they almost never met except around that table and when they met they found that some kind of compromise had to be reached to have a China policy so that is one of the things that National Security Council can do if it's used properly and regularly I was a bit alarmed to hear it hadn't met very much during the first year of the pandemic I hope it isn't meeting more now because you do need to look out beyond the immediate and that is one of the things it can do just on diversity of approach in the national security world I think John Giffen is absolutely right it mustn't be an elite hobby done by a few civil servants and military and intelligence chiefs and then some elite commentators Laurie from outside actually I think it has diversified quite a lot in the last couple of decades one of the results of 9-11 and the sudden realisation we had a homegrown, radicalised, terrorist risk is that we found ourselves talking to social policy makers because people who knew about community cohesion people who knew about dialogue with Islamic groups then when cyber came up we found ourselves talking to cyber geeks and specialists in protecting grids and sensitive technologies so the domain of national security keeps spreading out and now I'm sure public health experts are very much part of that as well I think it's one of those who can help with science and technology cooperation against future pandemics the question is keeping it kind of within some kind of bounds but yes opening it up and as I said at the beginning I'm also very much in favour of getting voices from young people into the debate which is why I say that I don't think you devise a strategy by writing a government document you need then to expose it to wider views and to hear from younger people what their priorities are that climate change comes back very quickly the environment very very high on the list and that is indeed a national security issue and all that raises a question which is again raised by a couple of people in questions about how integrated well it poses how integrated is the integrated review but it might be better how integrated can be the implementation of the integrated review how do you coordinate amongst all these things because they may be apart from agreeing on how irritating the Treasury is they may not agree on much more so does this in the end require a strong Prime Minister to say you do this sorry I know you've got other things on your mind but this is what national policy is in this area can that sort of coordination be done without a strong Centre you certainly need a strong Centre you need a strong Prime Minister absolutely and was the integrated review integrated I would say it was comprehensive I wouldn't say it was integrated with no disrespect to the authors and that's partly because some very big structuring decisions were taken outside the framework of the integrated review and the decision to bump up our defence spending by four billion pounds a year sent a very powerful message about our hard power ambitions and then to slash the aid budget by about the same amount sent another message about our soft power aspirations although the integrated review says that we are a soft power superpower so I think those extraneous decisions in a way parameters for the integrated review actually and then the authors had to navigate around those two rather big rocks that had been put in the way but in the end governments can only be coordinated at the top level it needs the Prime Minister and his or her cabinet ministers to be sitting around the table with their advisers and thrashing out what is going to be the priority what will the choice be and there will be some who are not satisfied with it but in the end governing is about choosing and whether or not Prime Ministers like it they have to do it sometimes and in this area, a broad area of national security there's no better place you've got the right advisers around you to thrash out decisions on everything to do with the country's safety and security there which means it should be a very busy committee and should be meeting pretty frequently so I'm just again looking at the many questions that we have just remember coming back to China one of the questions in a sense, can China be satisfied China's ambition is too much that in the end there will be very little choice but to resist in some ways and then another one is I think we've got with a bit already is about the difficulty of working out an independent view between the US and the EU a general theme of your book anyway but I suppose there's one way to put it is containment one way or the other despite not wishing to have another Cold War does it still have to be part of the policy towards China and doesn't that in a way push us back a bit to the Indo-Pacific because the main containing is going to have to be done there yes I mean on China I'm not sure containment is quite the right phrase because containment carries with it the baggage of the Cold War the Cold War was much better than me it was an ideological struggle between two systems and the Soviet Union seemed to have the ambition of global dominance for its ideology which I don't think China does in the world and impose Chinese system on the world China wants its own space a very large space it wants to be recognized as one of the two leading powers in the world including in the institutions which were set up before China was a leading power and that's inevitable for a rising power but I don't think it's seeking global domination I think it would be seeking coexistence with what they would recognize and so perhaps coexistence is a better word than containment because there will be some areas of deep competition even confrontation I hope not military confrontation but certainly economic and technological and some areas where China and the US the Chinese system and the American system will have to work together for the benefit of the planet I think environmental degradation is one of the few things that really cuts through in Chinese public opinion and China has to be responsive to that and there will be others as well public health not least so I think we need a new model which is something like that can China ever be satisfied well who knows of course Xi Jinping's policy is not necessarily Chinese policy for all eternity his two predecessors had a much more cooperative view of at least economic relationship with the west they wanted China to be a successful economy working with the west where it was in China's interests and this wolf warrior type approach to the world is very much as Xi Jinping potentially the next president after that will recognize that we are one planet and there are global issues where China needs to be a good global citizen so coexistence without conflict I suppose would be the kind of aim I would try to work towards but there will be many many bumps on that road on working with the EU and the US of course we're in a different world now with Joe Biden in the White House all those tensions across the Atlantic have at least receded of course America is not the same place as it was when Barack Obama walked out of the White House it's moved on the Indo-Pacific now looms much larger for the Americans it did even when I was there I mean in office 10 years or so ago and Europe has to adjust to that reality I think transatlantic relations are going to be much more cooperative there will be much better dialogue that at the end of the day American interest is not in what happens in Europe and we have to recognize that let's talk about the Indo-Pacific as well but that's probably a long enough answer to that question there was a couple of questions were it an abrupt change of direction but you do raise the issue in the book and it's to some extent an issue aggravated by Brexit which is the integrity of the UK itself David Omond for one asks about the implications of Scottish independence for the UK I saw one other question as well from Russell McLeod who who asked should this have been part of the integrated review it would have been very difficult for the government to address it as part of the integrated review but it's the sort of thing you would hope in turn to be there thinking about anyway so what do you think is Scottish independence which is obviously a serious possibility something that is going to be could knock us off sideways in terms of our foreign policy or would we still be a pretty large country even after that and wouldn't necessarily make as much difference as people assume oh I think if bits start falling off Great Britain it would make a massive impact on the country's standing and reputation in the world I mean economically it might not make such a huge difference but if we can't keep our own union together I think that sets a very very bad signal about England and what England wants in the world don't know it would be a massive issue I hope that the government is thinking about the implications of Scottish independence I'm not entirely hopeful that they will be I have vivid memories of David Cameron instructing Whitehall not to think about the implications of losing the Brexit referendum because you don't plan for something your determined won't happen so it may well be that actually there's a bit of a planning blight in Whitehall on thinking the unthinkable about Scottish independence at the moment and clearly it is on the agenda to me the most worrying thing is that what was a union of consent now seems to be a union of coercion since it's very clear that Scottish opinion is moving in favour of another referendum and if Westminster blocks that then it's hard to say that we have a union of consent anymore of course the strategic foreign policy and national security implications would be enormous I mean they would only be one of an enormous laundry list of issues starting with the currency and the border and the economic and commercial relationship but the strategic relationship with the deterrent based at fans lane obviously the very large scale of British military deployments in Scotland all kinds of thorny issues would arise immediately my own guess is that this issue is going to be on the agenda from now on I can't feel that a second independence referendum is going to happen all that soon there are quite serious economic issues the Scottish to think about as well but my goodness the fact we're even talking in those terms shows the fragility of the union and we haven't of course mentioned the potential implications in Ireland that continued tensions over the Northern Ireland protocol and the new interest that seems to be being created there in the potential one day of a united Ireland so Brexit has shaken very hard some assumptions that we've all had for several centuries about the Great Britain and what keeps Great Britain together that's already quite worrying so the Northern Ireland one also brings in the Biden administration a bit looking back we haven't talked that much two things we haven't actually talked that much about one is Brexit the other is Russia and I think just perhaps because we're a few minutes left I would just be useful to raise both of those on Brexit one of the things that often struck me was the absence of the Americans in the debate over after 2016 Obama didn't necessarily make particularly well judged contribution while the referendum debate was going on but you could imagine previous administrations would have been in there trying to sort out relations amongst their major allies and they were just absent from the Trump that was obviously if anything sympathetic to Brexit but now we have the Biden back and Biden of course makes them secreted as Irish heritage and I'm just wondering if this could be an issue which after all everybody who's following Brexit knew was there right from the start and was worried about government promises that it could be sort of easily smoothed over do you think this actually could become a point of tension with the US administration or do you think in the end the pressures to somehow find a fudge on this will help us get through it Well first of all Laurie you say all of us had in mind the Irish problem I don't remember during the referendum campaign much discussion at all about Northern Ireland actually in Ireland I suppose people were aware of it but I don't think it was really a theme of the referendum curiously and then it emerged obviously as vital I mean the short answer to your question is yes I think this is an issue which would bring the US administration in pretty hard if they thought that Britain was going to renaig on the protocol or invoke Article 16 and suspend the protocol because they didn't think it was working properly and the Irish went in in Washington to say that this was a real threat for Ireland I think that would certainly bring the administration very rapidly in to try to do what they could to broker some kind of a compromise of course it's awkward territory for the Americans but I think they would be very very sensitive to Irish lobbying that the British had decided to in some way renaig on the deal they signed in the protocol and that has to be a conditioning factor for their policy and they can as they are doing issue various threats and menaces about what they might do to suspend parts of the protocol but they have to be cautious I think that if they go too far Washington will be seriously alarmed and I think this is an issue that could even cut across a wider US-UK cooperation because of the strong sensitivity to Irish concerns not just in the White House it could for example further complicate the likelihood of a free trade deal which is already not exactly top of the agenda but I think it would go very rapidly down the agenda as Congress thought that Britain was walking away from its commitments on Northern Ireland Very challenging enough as you say just finally the dog that hasn't bought yet and actually doesn't really appeal that much in the book which is Russia now five years ago that's what we would have been spending a lot of time talking about do you think in a sense Russia unlike China which is clearly one way or the other on the ascendant Russia isn't it's got its hands full now in Ukraine and Syria a manner possibly as about as far as it goes and it's already had the effect of giving NATO a sort of new lease of life how worried should we be about Russia as a security problem I think we should be pretty worried about it as a security problem and I think as a strategic player Russia is clearly on the down with path it's a reckless disruptive force that has to be managed and deterred but is not playing much part in global politics it's not playing any real part in thinking about the future of the international system it's a negative force rather than a creative positive force so to my mind it's not as important as China from that point of view future international systems but yeah it's a real security threat and their willingness to behave recklessly in cyberspace and we've seen just recently with the SolarWinds of sensitive US institutions it goes on all the time and they are willing unlike western countries now I think to use their armed forces pretty aggressively to advance what they see as their political interests they did that in and around Syria they've done it in Ukraine with very mixed effects so while the west is walking back from a boots on the ground approach to use of the military and they're still investing heavily which they cannot afford to do in their military so both as a military player and in cyberspace they are a serious threat but they're a disruptive force rather than a country that can play any useful part I think in constructing the future and finally I think we're almost running out of time one of the early questions we got was Jenny Gaskath about how much you think academic writing has been useful to you in writing this book you've spent time in the department and they've said how useful you've been talking to students and contributing all sorts of ways has it been useful to you do you think there's a worry amongst academic especially in the IR field that it will get a bit arcane and remove from practicality and the hard realities of foreign policy have you found academic writing useful? I mean I may disappoint academics listening if I say that in my 40 years as a civil servant I didn't honestly read much academic writing somehow the career of a busy civil servant doesn't lend enough time and space to it and some of the way in which academic thinking is presented is not shall I say as accessible either in terms of its length or its style to non-specialists since retiring yes I have read a lot I think the things that really strike me are the books that have strong ideas and advance a strong argument which you can contest but is at least a strong argument rather than being too buried in IR theory because as soon as the theoretical side of IR starts I don't know the theory and that rather turns me off so I would urge academics and commentators to pitch ideas maybe even solutions to busy policy makers and a good one will cut through they cut through particularly in America I think because of the style of American administrations are formed by those who were in think tanks four years ago but they can cut through here as well so if you can make your writing accessible not too long and with some powerful ideas you will get noticed even if the output of articles and so on probably doesn't make an enormous impact among busy civil servants is that diplomatic enough? Very diplomatic and probably quite true so thank you very much Peter this I'm going to ask May Ryan to say our farewells but for myself I very much enjoyed the conversation and also thank you participants for their excellent questions May Thank you Laurie and that really is a wonderful note to end on Peter that was really good food for thought I think and really rallying quite to us academics to think about how to adapt our work and to think about our ideas is powerful I think that's good and to think about that can be translated for ready application and I think it's a really important challenge to put to all of us I think within academic debates and seminars we can often really focus on what should be different and what should be better and conversations with people who have had the practical experience of trying to make those decisions and trying to implement policies with all of the uncertainty and conflicting information that happens in real life it's incredibly important for us to have that engagement but I think taking the next step of really thinking about what our ideas can offer to that mix I think is really important it's something that the Centre for Grand Strategies we spent a lot of time thinking about we've learned a lot from you about and we continue to try and take that forward so thank you for that I hope that everyone on the call will feel galvanised and motivated to help think ahead to the next decade and how to set Britain on the right course with exactly that in mind so we are out of time and all I would do is just say a few very quick thanks for us to Lizzie for setting this up and the team at the School of Security Studies thank you very much to Laurie for excellent sharing and for asking nicely difficult questions thank you to our audience and our participants today throwing in some brilliant questions and comments that have really helped shape the conversation and of course finally to Peter thank you for writing this excellent book that's brought us together today congratulations and look forward to having lots more conversations about it and hopefully at some point being able to raise a glass in person a nice warm glass of King's wine and a soggy sandwich from the buffing well here to that thank you all very much indeed thank you mate take care