 Thank you very much, Admiral Carter. And let me tell you what a pleasure it is to be back here. By the way, this used to be called the blue bedroom, but I guess you changed the color scheme. And those of you who've been dragooned into coming tonight, as we used to say about the reading in S&P, it's only a lot if you actually do it. So in terms of my remarks, they're only going to be tough if you actually listen to them. But it is really such a pleasure to come back here. I mean, the extraordinary views looking out there at the Newport Bridge, which has that beautiful shape to it because they were anticipating aircraft carriers coming under it a lot. I guess that changed at some point. But nonetheless, what a pleasure it is to be back here. I've had the opportunity to see some of my professors here. And people often ask me, what was your most interesting assignment that you had on the Foreign Service? Was it running around with Balkan warlords? I kind of like Balkan warlords, but that's another subject. But really, coming here in 93, 94, and having the opportunity to work and study shoulder to shoulder with my military colleagues, even though they would not give me the papers that their colleagues had done the previous year so they could help them with this year's papers. I mean, I had to ask State Department people for their papers for the previous year. But anyway, it was in 1993, I mean, we were already, our country was already undergoing some of the post-Cold War trauma, frankly. I mean, we already had the situation in Somalia. We already had our people going into harm's way in some very complex places. And so coming here and having the opportunity to really understand how the military viewed some of these issues, I think was for me really crucial to, frankly, the rest of my career, which began after the graduation. I gather you don't do it out there on the deck anymore. Yeah, it was out on this cement deck here. And so I recall, you never know what's gonna happen here in June. It might be a snowstorm, but in that day, it was 94 degrees weather and I think several people collapsed. But certainly, I mean, after that day and then to go forth and work on these issues confronting our country, and to do so, I think with a very much of a renewed sense that this is, to coin a phrase, all hands on deck, this was a situation where I think since that time, since the end of the Cold War, I think we saw more and more of the fact that the State Department, the various service branches, we were all in these things together. It is not to say that we all have to be doing the same things, but we sure do need to understand what each other is doing. And to some extent, part of the challenge of all this is really to be able to stay in each other in our own lanes, but also just to make sure that we are really one team, one mission as an expression that we've heard a lot in the last 20 years. So I felt that the foundation for me of working with our military in places like Bosnia and Kosovo, working especially with the Navy out in the Pacific and working on issues like North Korea and then finally coming back to Iraq, I felt that for me, some of the things that really laid the foundation for me were indeed here at the Naval War College. I always remember one of my S&P seminars. S&P just seems to, you don't forget those seminars. You may forget some of the reading, but I always remember there was an Army colonel there did logistics and I was giving the usual state department sort of hand waving about, well, we were doing some case study. I said, why would we figure that out? And he said, you don't understand, we need to know. And for me, I always remember that line, we need to know. This was someone who was doing, he was in the skit, he was playing the logistician and he said, we need to know. And so strategy and things like that, you can kind of explain away or kind of add hawk it, but I think in things like what the military needs to do to execute their mission, I saw that very clearly at the war college. So it's a great opportunity for me. I understand the state department has really ramped it up here. I think there were three of us here at the time. And one of the problems of being state department here is you can't just take the gentleman C because everyone's expecting you to be smart or something. So we really did have to do the reading and write the papers from scratch and things like that. So, do you see the reaction of those people on that? Anyway, so what I thought I'd do is maybe talk about some of the current crises. I always think back, when I look at where our country is today, I always think back to before Poland had these wonderful leaders like Lek Wołęca and the Pope for that matter, they had not so wonderful communist leaders back in the 50s, 60s, and 70s. And there was a particularly annoying guy named Władysław Gomuka. And he was a party first secretary starting in about 1956. And one time, Władysław Gomuka stood up in front of a large crowd in Krakow. He was known for very long speeches and not very successful metaphors. And he got up and he said, you know, comrades, just a few years ago, our nation, our fatherland, stood on the very edge of a deep abyss. And I am here to tell you comrades that today we have taken an important step forward. And so when we contemplate some of these issues, we do have to be careful not to take that important step forward, but perhaps even if not a step back, but we need to think about what our country is confronting. And are these crises that we really need to engage in unilaterally, that is in the sense that our national interests are so engaged? Are these crises we need to work with others? But perhaps most importantly, are these crises that engage more than just one issue for us but a broader issue? You know, looking back today at Bosnia, I read so often that somehow Bosnia was a human rights situation and that's why we finally intervened because we could not stand aside while innocents were being killed. And like a lot of statements like that, it is true, but only partially true. I think what made Bosnia so enduring, so difficult, ultimately hard to resolve, but ultimately one that we did solve it, that we were able to address it, was that it was not just human rights as important as that is and must be to our country and its future. It was also that because of Bosnia, this Atlantic Alliance that I think we are so committed to and I think events of the last weeks or months is more reason to be committed to that Atlantic Alliance. That that Atlantic Alliance was very much corroding because of Bosnia. We were in such a kind of out of sync with our European allies. We didn't really know what NATO was going to be after the Cold War. We didn't know, is it an alliance that deals with Soviet threat? Well, it's hard to continue to be an alliance that deals with the Soviet threat if there's no Soviet Union anymore. So we had to, I think, look very carefully at what NATO really meant. And we could see that our inability to kind of speak the same language on a crisis like Bosnia was causing, I think really frayed nerves and a very kind of difficult way forward with the Europeans. So I think really when we look at why we addressed Bosnia, why we got together with the Europeans on Bosnia, it really was to address the corrosiveness that had seeped into the NATO alliance. And that was certainly as important, if not more important than the issue of human rights. So I think a crisis as a crisis would engage is not just one issue, but a broader range of issues. And I think people who now look at Bosnia and say, what were we doing there? Need to understand it was a lot more than what was going on on the ground, horrific as that was. And as much as people felt that we needed to have a, not only a policy, but an action plan for dealing with that, we needed to engage in Bosnia because it did affect our core interests, namely our Atlantic relations. So when I look at some of the crises today, and I don't mean to give an exhaustive list, but I will mention the top three, and that is to me the situation surrounding Crimea. I would not call the crisis having to do with Crimea. I mean, after all, most people couldn't have spelled Crimea unless they looked at the Tennyson poem from over a hundred years ago, but it's not about Crimea, it's about Russia. And I think we need to think very hard about what that relationship means to us and what kind of future we can have with Russia. I think we also need to look very hard at the situation in Syria. There are those who feel that Syria is also a hideous human rights problem, which it certainly is, but I submit to you, it's a lot more and a lot more dangerous than that. And finally, I think we need to look at some of these, the nuclear wannabes out there, Iran and the North Koreans. I mean, the North Koreans, they are people only a mother can love, I tell you. And so we need to look very hard about how we're addressing these. Not only the threats these two countries confront, but also the friends, partners and allies that we have in confronting those issues and to understand that these issues are beyond just the question of the behavior of Iran and North Korea, but how we manage it with our partners. I think Russia is especially a difficult proposition. People often describe Vladimir Putin as some kind of great sort of Russian patriot, Russian nationalist who's now using Russian nationalism to further his aims. I submit to you that he is not so much a Russian nationalist as he is, a person who is really committed to his own future. It reminds me a little about of Milosevic. I don't wanna draw too close an analogy between Vladimir Putin and Slobodan Milosevic, but I never felt that all those wars in the Balkans that Milosevic was particularly dedicated to a greater Serbia. I think he was much more interested in a greater Milosevic, and I think he used Serb nationalism in order to further that agenda. And I think we see a lot of that today with Putin. And the more you look at the symbols of this gentleman who came out of the Soviet era, came out of the KGB of the Soviet era, the crosses that he wears, which are especially visible when he's not wearing a shirt, but that's another subject. I think we can see someone who is probably more dedicated to the Soviet Union than he is to Mother Russia. And the problem with this is I think it's understood, especially among Russian nationalists, that he's not particularly dedicated to the cause of Russian nationalism. And we used to see this all the time with Milosevic because the people who really believed in the notion that somehow Serbia had been mistreated, oh, starting about 1389 and every year since, those people who are very much believing in this notion of that Serbia had kind of died or been held up as a martyr, also never believed in the idea that Milosevic was a Serb patriot nationalist. Therefore, there was always an effort to try to push him on these issues. And even when Milosevic had long since lost interest in some of these nationalist projects, he went along with them because he realized his own personal reputation depended on his getting out in front of them. In short, people who cynically use nationalism are rarely people who can stand up in front of nationalists and say, we've gone too far, we need to slow down, we need to manage this in a different way. Those are people who often get carried by the events of the day and always want to be out in front. So I think the danger really with Putin is not only what he did with Crimea, but also what could possibly come in eastern Ukraine. Anyone who's lived in Poland knows that the Poles often say that a Russia without Ukraine is just Russia. A Russia with Ukraine is the Soviet Union. I think people, especially on that eastern flank of NATO, are very aware of what it could mean if you see a further dismemberment of Ukraine. Certainly what has happened in Crimea, I don't need to go over the history with all of you, but Crimea, it could be argued, is kind of Russian territory. I mean, it's the decision by Khrushchev to give it to Ukraine on the anniversary of the 300th year of Ukraine being linked to Russia. And then Yeltsin's own interest in Boris Yeltsin's own interest in essentially dismembering the Soviet Union and making common cause with Ukrainian nationalists and essentially leaving Crimea in Ukraine. I mean, from the point of view of a Russian nationalist, this in and of itself is not enough to say for them that Crimea should be part of Ukraine. But I think our country and many other countries have wisely taken the view that first of all, if you have a situation where a neighbor takes a part of another country and claims it as its own for historical reasons, you have a problem. And so I think the Western nations have been correct to try to increase the cost to Putin of taking Crimea. The concern of course is it's not just about Crimea, it could well be about the dismemberment of Ukraine. And of course, as this continues, and I hate to use chess metaphors when discussing Russia, but there is a point in chess where things become forced moves. You simply have no choice. You have to move your knight this way or your rook that way. And so I think we are getting into forced moves, but we can see the outcome of these forced moves and they may not be good for Russia, but they may not be good for us either. The idea first of all, that we're gonna have sanctions against Russia, there is no other choice at this point. We have to have sanctions against Russia. The concern though that we should all feel is the fact that as we push forward with sanctions against Russia, we are dismantling the last 23 years in which we've tried to bring Russia into the family of Western nations. So it's very much, I think, of a loss on our side. And to some extent, for someone like Putin, it might be precisely what he wants to have. Not unlike the children's book we all read about Brer Rabbit being thrown in the briar patch. That's exactly where Brer Rabbit wanted to be. And being thrown out into the cold is very much where Putin may want Russia to be. So I think there are a lot of concerns about the policy choices that we have and frankly don't have a lot of choice in putting forward. And I think sanctions is certainly one of those. I hope that as we manage this very difficult issue with Russia, we'll do a couple of things. First of all, I think it's very important that for our eastern native flank that those countries really feel that NATO is utterly committed to them. I think if you're Polish, what runs through your mind is 1939. In 1939, of course, Poland had a treaty with France and the UK by which if Poland was invaded or attacked by Germany, France and the UK would declare war on Germany. Well, they dutifully did that in September of 39. They declared war on Germany but they did not attack Germany. They did not send any forces to help Poland resist Germany. And in fact, they sat and did nothing. It became known by historians as the phony war, the winter of 39 and 40. And the war really didn't start again in Europe until Germany attacked westward, including against France. So I think the Poles can be understood to be a little concerned when people express support for them when they don't see the signs of that support. So I think it has been very important to see if we can sort of thicken our presence in Poland and maybe the Baltic States as well, make sure we're doing more exercises there, training, et cetera. I think we need to show that these countries, that the decision to bring them into NATO was not just a decision to somehow do something nice for them but rather a decision that had real meaning for their security. So I'm concerned that we make sure that we do things on the ground in this Eastern flank of NATO to reassure them and real things on the ground. The second thing I think we need to be concerned about is as much as it is understandable and I would argue we have no choice but to kind of throw Russia into the deep freeze, I think we do need to look for cooperation and multilateral efforts. We are going to need Russia in Syria and I'll get to Syria in a moment. We are going to need Russia there. We're gonna need Russia and some of these other multilateral issues including in North Korea. So I hope we can kind of keep that door open to cooperation and keep some kind of ties to Russia especially in areas where I think it is very much in our interest to do so. So I think that's another area where I think we need to really be very careful that we don't really take in effect dead aim at some of our most important issues going on in the world as we try to find ways to punish Russia. Finally, I think it is crucial that today we kind of hold Ukraine close that we do these things like credit guarantees, et cetera, et cetera. This is probably not a good time for tough love with the Ukrainians but I'll do it anyway and which is to say at some point Ukraine needs to get a little serious. They are, they have been independent for some 23 years. They have one inept government followed by a corrupt government and in Yanukovych's case they had a twofer there, quite inept and quite corrupt. This is not acceptable when your neighbor is Russia. You can get away with this kind of thing if your neighbor is say Canada but their neighbor is not Canada. That was not a, I never talk about internal affairs so but I think Ukraine in short really needs to step it up and step it up seriously. It is truly difficult to have a neighbor like Russia and Poland was very aware of that and again I do look to a lot of inspiration from the Poles but Poland understood that. Poland developed civil society. If you look at the kind of people who emerged on the Polish scene in 89, Leszek Balsarowicz, Tadeusz Mazowiecki, I mean this was unbelievable these people who emerged and really answered the call of history. It's as if Poland, their experience in the 19th century under Tsarist Russia taught them that they would have to keep schools going, keep a concept of Polishness going and so when the moment came in 1989 I think by all accounts and Poland was ready. I think Ukraine has to put it mildly not come close to that example and yet I think a lot of Ukrainian history is now going to unfold very rapidly in the future and so they need to be ready for these challenges and they need to start getting serious about economic reform. They need to start getting serious about political reform. I was frankly pleased to see that when Timoshenko, one of the sort of oligarchs of Ukraine, albeit a Ukrainian nationalist came forward and said pick me after Yana Kovic had her in prison she got a kind of tepid response in my dawn and I think she went off to Germany for a while for convalescence. I think that was the right response to Timoshenko if I can sort of engage in a little internal or inside baseball in Ukraine but I think they need to look to a new generation of leadership that is going to be serious about the conflicts, the problems they face. Ukraine frankly is one of these countries and there are others but one of these countries that has really not looked at its own history very honestly and I think some of the Putin is not correct to dismiss all of the Ukrainian nationalism or Ukrainian ambition for European Union. He's not right to dismiss that as a case of Ukrainians being somehow a bunch of ultra-nationalists. I mean the right sector as it's called in Ukraine is probably a 5% proposition. It's certainly not much more than that. That said, I think Ukraine has a history that they have to be, if not honest with us then maybe they ought to be honest with themselves. If you look at German battle formations in World War II, the Wehrmacht, there are a lot of Ukrainian units. This falls below the level of inspiration for the rest of us and I think the Ukrainians really need to step it up a little. We'll see how they manage events in the next weeks and months. I was very pleased to read this morning that they have moved in on some of these pro-Russian demonstrations in Eastern Ukraine, recovered some of these administrative buildings. That's going to be a process that they're gonna have to engage in with a certain amount of discipline that frankly they've lacked in the past. So it's my hope that Ukraine has kinda gotten the message but they have to, as I said, they're gonna have to step it up. So I think this is going to be a tough one. We're gonna have to work with the Europeans on this. I think part of the issue is going to be long-term. We're going to have to step up sort of LNG, more energy relationships with Western Europe. That has been happening. It probably needs to be happening at a much faster rate. I think there's a hope that we've been warning the Europeans since 1978 and you can look it up that they need to diversify their energy resources. I think there's some signs that they can do that but that is gonna have to be something important in the years ahead. I think our administration has done well to bring the world together. I mean, we even had a UN General Assembly vote against the Russians. And so I understand why our administration has been reluctant to try to push for more economic sanctions because if you're Germany, this is not welcome news and I think you would start getting some real problems in that solid alliance that we've had up until now. But nonetheless, some of these longer-term issues need to be addressed. So I think this is going to be, this crisis in Crimea is gonna be with us for a long time. CNN may not have noticed that because they've been on all Malaysian airlines all the time but I think we're going to, we're gonna see this issue that was started in far away Crimea as one that is going to dominate the are thinking about East-West relations for some years to come. Another issue that is looking more and more like a hardy perennial is the issue in Syria. Now I know that if you pick up a newspaper in this country, you think you've got a Darth Vader there in the form of Bashir al-Assad and then you have a bunch of little Ewok villages in the form of the opposition and you sort of wonder, well, this is easy enough. I submit to you, this one is very complex and I also submit to you that our country misunderstood it because we didn't do the reading and I think it's... It was very important to understand that, the first question you should ask in these situations is not how do we get rid of that dictator? That's the second question maybe. The first question is how did that dictator get there in the first place? And I think if you ask that question first, you could start informing yourself on the second question which is can we get rid of that dictator? And so when you look at I think what was going on in the Maghreb, there was this sort of galloping history in the form of the Arab Spring or the Arab thing or whatever we're calling it today and there was a sense, well, gee, we're a little slow on Mubarak and after all, the world was calling for his removal and we weren't quite ready to do that and so we're a little slow there. Gosh, we got criticized in the New York Times editorials which is tough to sleep when that happens and so I think there was a feeling that maybe the next crisis, we're gonna be a little faster and then in being faster, we'll look a little more prescient, we'll say, you know, he's gotta go, two weeks later he goes and you know, whoa, good thing we told him he has to go and he's gone. I think there's a complete misunderstanding of what Syria is. There's no question, by the way, I'll circle back to Mubarak for a second. There's no question that Mubarak had outlived his shelf life. I think people were quite tired of the guy but on the other hand, people who work with you for 30 years and you know, take bad guys off the street and you know, wrap them up in duct tape and deliver them to you. We had a little of that in Bosnia too. You know, he did a lot of good things for us and so I think it would have been unseemly for us to be the first to be demanding Mubarak's departure. I mean, I'm not saying he should have stayed, although I think some Egyptians are rethinking that but certainly it was not for us to be the first. So in any event, we rushed out and said, Bashir al-Assad must go and I think the problem with that was he wouldn't leave and the reason he wouldn't leave is if you start, you know, just Wikipedia, Syria, if nothing else, you can figure out that it's a pretty complicated place. There's a reason the Alawites are there. There's a reason the Druj, the Christians, the Kurds continue to support Assad and the Alawites and it has to do with their concerns about what the Sunni majority would be if they reached power. Now I think there are also a lot of Sunnis by the way who support Bashir al-Assad. So it wasn't at all clear that by shaming Assad and saying you must go that he was going to comply. I think the hope was by saying we'll never deal with that guy is that we could somehow marginalize him but I think we ended up marginalizing ourselves. We ended up in a situation where we could not talk to Assad, we could not talk to anyone who thought that somehow Assad or even people around Assad could be left standing after all this and so we ended up in a situation where the United States became not the mediators between the main parties into the conflict in Syria, we became mediators among the so-called Syrian opposition and so we had diplomats, you know, inviting these disparate members of the so-called Syrian National Army, of which there are like 10 Syrian National Armies and so we'd invite them to the State Department and I kid you not, they actually threw plastic water bottles at each other in a fifth floor conference room. So it was the United States, speaking of water bottles, I thought I had one here but, over here, thank you. So I think the United States ended up, we ended up marginalizing ourselves through this thing. The second thing we did was to get behind a proposal by which we would support provisional elections. Well, I think being Americans, we all love elections. Sometimes we love them more than others but they, you know, we understand, can't have a democracy without elections, got it. I submit to you, you can have elections though without a democracy and if you have a country in which there's no civil society, there are no functioning institutions, elections will do no more than simply provide you with a census. They'll tell you how many Sunnis there are, how many Shia, how many Kurds, et cetera. Because when there is weak governance, people often revert to previous forms of association. And so to say we need provisional elections in Syria, in the absence of any concept of what we're doing, looking forward, is simply to say we need a census in Syria and I can tell you what it is already. I can tell you how many Alawites there are, Kurds, et cetera. So what's the point of the elections? So I think we fail to understand some of the lessons we've learned over the years and again, I don't want to claim that Bosnia was the epitome of all that's good in the diplomatic world but I'll tell you, people always say, well Syria is just like Bosnia. It's very different in one very important respect. We sat with Russians, Brits, French, Germans and we worked out something called the Contact Group Plan. And what was important about the Contact Group Plan was we identified what Bosnia would look like in the future. Now some people don't like what Bosnia, what we decided Bosnia should look like in the future. But nonetheless, people started getting the picture. Bosnia would consist of two entities. They'd be a Serb Republic and a Croat Muslim or Croat Bosniak Federation. Bosnia would have a collective presidency of three presidents who would take turns. Not necessarily my cup of tea, but at least, if you're sitting in a foxhole in Bosnia, you started kind of getting what it was gonna look like. Bosnia would be divided with 51% of Bosnia under the control of the Bosniak and Croat Federation 49% under the Serbs. We established right of return of refugees. In fact, when you look at what happened in the subsequent year when we negotiated in Dayton, Ohio, it was simply to elaborate and implement the Contact Group Plan of the summer of 94. Such that by the time O5 rolled around and by the time we started, we were prepared to go to Dayton to try to finalize this, everyone in every foxhole knew what it was gonna look like. And so no one ever wants to be the last person to die in a civil war. Very few monuments to the last person to die in a civil war. And so people, essentially, even though we did declare, get a ceasefire declared, people were ready to stop fighting because they wanted to see the outcome in Dayton. I submit to you that we haven't done anything like that in Syria, so nobody out there on the ground has any idea what Syria is really gonna look like in the future. And it still seems like a winner-take-all situation. And so I think there's a lot to be concerned about whether Syria's ever going to end. There are those who say, well, you know, two years ago we could've solved it, can't solve it now. I think two years from now, people will say, well, two years ago we could've solved it, but we can't solve it now. I think with a little more diplomatic push and a little more diplomatic smarts, we could kind of identify what it is that Syria should look like in the future. Now there are those who say, well, how can the great powers solve this? Shouldn't this be up to the Syrians? Sorry, Syrians. When you have a war in which a couple of hundred thousand people have been killed or poisoned gas, chemicals have been used against civilians, you don't necessarily get to dictate what the international community is going to think about your country or what it's going to come up with about your country. And that was certainly the message to Bosnia. In fact, today you can read where Bosnians are saying, you know, these international community, they came in, they set up these structures and these structures don't work. And I would say to any Bosnian who makes that point, to me, we didn't start the war, you did. You managed this miserable process. So do not be surprised when the international community comes in and then do not be upset when the international community does not come up with precisely the solution that you would have liked to see because once you have created this kind of havoc, you are gonna have to live with the consequences. So I think we need to really step that up in Syria. And I think we also, if we can't talk about, you know, if we can't foresee a Syria with Assad in the future, and frankly, I can't see how Assad could play a role in the future, you don't have to lead with that. I mean, just from a diplomatic point of view, you can kind of work on what the institutional sectarian arrangements might be. And once everyone kind of gets what the overall shape of the country is going to look like, then maybe you can say, of course, we don't think Bashir al-Assad is exactly God's gift to leading this place in the future. And then you can get to that. But this, I think misplaced decision to go after Assad in the first place without any idea of what we're heading for, except for some kind of Sunni stand in Syria, I think was really, really a mistake. I might add that the reason I feel very concerned about dealing with this Syrian situation is a point that I should have made earlier, which is left on its own, it's gonna get worse, and it is already metastasized to other parts of the Middle East. That is already, we've seen Islamic radical fighters in Iraq, I realize that there are people who think that somehow Iraq's problems are caused by a difficult prime minister, a guy named Nouri al-Maliki. There is no question that Nouri al-Maliki is a difficult leader to deal with. He is no fun. If he ever had charisma, it cleared up a long time ago. I can assure you of that, but this is not about Iraqi domestic politics. This is about people who do not respect any notion of nation-state borders. And this is about Sunni on Sunni violence first, and then Sunni on Shia violence second. So this is, I think if we do not get to the Syrian situation, we're going to see the Iraq situation deteriorate. We're already seeing the situation deteriorate in Lebanon. And frankly, I'm worried about Jordan. So I think Syria qualifies as a real crisis because it's not gonna go away on its own and it does touch a lot of interests of ours. Finally, and I'm kind of mindful of the time because I would like to have the opportunity to take questions. We need to really be serious about these nuclear negotiations. I am very supportive of the basic six month freeze that we got with Iran, but needless to say a six month freeze with Iran is not going to take care of our problems there, even if it has bought some time for us. I think if Iran is allowed to go nuclear, if Iran is allowed to weaponize the nuclear materials that it is making, it will make a complete mockery of the NPT if that hasn't already been done, the Non-Proliferation Treaty. And I think sooner or later, this Shia bomb will be followed by a Sunni bomb either put together in some rogue basis in the Gulf States or even in Saudi Arabia. I think Iran is a very serious problem that requires I think our addressing diplomatically and ultimately if that fails and ultimately if nothing else works, I think we have to defend what I believe to be a vital national interest if Iran is allowed to get away with creating a nuclear weapon because if they do that, we will not be able to manage the problems of the Middle East. We will not be able to keep this issue from spreading. So for those who think that somehow it was a mistake to relax sanctions in Iran that we should have simply poured on more sanctions, I understand the point of view except I think everyone should stop and think as to what their own personal reaction would be to sanctions. If someone sanctions me, I don't know about you but if someone sanctions me, my reaction is not to say, oh my gosh, I better give in. I better do exactly what this person is asking me to do. That's certainly not my reaction. And I think if I were an Iranian mullah, I would have the same sort of thing where I just don't feel that I want to give in. So people who say, well sanctions brought Iran to the table, therefore they'll bring Iran to their knees, I think have to really think through the logic of that because I'm not sure it's really true, especially given that Iran has been heavily sanctioned and yet their nuclear program has gone forward despite these sanctions. So I think we have used sanctions as an element in diplomacy and I think it's been well used but I think it's time to see if we can cash in on the use of those sanctions to see if we can get those Iranians who are interested in a different course for their country and I would include University of Denver graduate Javid Zarif, who's the Iranian nuclear negotiator. I would include him in the category of people in Iran who somehow want to show the Iranians that they can create a situation where Iran is more a part of the Western world than certainly these mullahs have wanted Iran to be. So I think it's basically the right approach but the question of course will be, will it work? I think in any nuclear, in any negotiation you can't put, you can't front load all of what you've got to offer and hope that the other guy comes through with what you want. You have to do it on a kind of step-by-step basis. You have to do it in a way that if the other country somehow renegs on what they've done that you are in a position that you are in a position where you haven't given everything away up front. So I think that's kind of where we are with Iran. I don't know if this is going to work but I sure know that six months is not an eternity and in short we'll know soon enough whether this is going to work. I think we need a lot of countries to support this approach. We certainly need Iran's neighbor Turkey on board with this but I think we also need to have these kinds of secondary sets of conversations we've been having with the Iranians that is namely the broader relationship. Iran's support for terrorism. Iran's support for his Bullah. Iran's support for getting in the Syrian civil war. I think we need to address all those in a separate set of negotiations and I think we've been doing that and I think that's really the right approach. So I give the administration pretty good marks on Iran and I think we will know sooner enough what the issue, how this, whether Iran is interested in this deal or not and I think the one argument that somehow when you when you relax sanctions they're hard to tighten again. I appreciate that argument but I don't think they're impossible to tighten again and so I think if Iran is seen as completely turning its back on this I think we will be able to ratchet that up but with the understanding that that hasn't worked up until now to dissuade them from their nuclear programs and so we may have to look further down the list. Finally I think North Korea, we see more and more signs that North Korea has, if it ever had an interest in nuclear disarmament certainly isn't displaying any of those interests today. I think it's especially important at this point to understand that there's I think limits to what we can do with the North Koreans and directly and that really at the end of the day our issue with North Korea is really going to be a question of the quality of our relationship with China and whether we can establish the kind of patterns of cooperation we need to establish with China. I think this is an especially important time to work as closely as possible with China. First of all, I think pushing Putin as I think we have to do kind of opens up the possibility that Russia and China will have a closer relationship. After all it was in February 1972 the Shanghai Accords when we essentially broke the Sino-Soviet access I think you can make a good argument for saying that when the Shanghai Accords were signed it was not about a US-China alliance it was about the breaking up of this Sino-Soviet relationship such that I don't think the Soviet Union ever recovered and I think if historians trace the Cold War the end of the Cold War they can go back to Shanghai and see how it began with Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon then. But I think as we need to really be alert to Russia-Chinese rapprochement I don't think the Chinese look at the world the same way Vladimir Putin does but I think we need to be aware of that of what is happening in that relationship. Secondly I think we need to get a lot smarter and a lot more aware of what's going on internally in China and it is not a pretty sight. We have a Chinese leadership that I think is increasingly facing I think deep concerns within the society about the efficacy of this kind of communist governance together with a kind of go-go economy and so I think there are a lot of people in China who are very unhappy with the government and this unhappiness spills out in different forms certainly there are many Chinese who feel that China has to do a better job on human rights and certainly if you look at the blogosphere in China you see a lot of human rights stuff there but if you look carefully at the blogosphere of China you see a lot of other things going on namely heightened nationalism in China. I think to some extent it's instrumental it's to say that coming from people pushing the party government apparatus it's to say hey you call yourself so tough you say you are there to protect us from another century of shame why are you allowing the Vietnamese to get away with this in the South China Sea. So ironically some of the critics that the party state structures of China are facing are coming at them from a more nationalistic basis so this is not easy to manage these issues and I think if you're Xi Jinping and you wake up in the morning and look at your inbox you're maybe not thinking that North Korea should be at the top of the inbox you're thinking about these other I think much more homegrown and more serious issues for China. To be sure I think there are a lot of people in China especially in the party especially in the PLA the People's Liberation Army who consider somehow who have a kind of zero sum thinking they don't look in terms of win-win for them as some kind of I don't know Burmese politician but they look at it more in terms of zero sum and I think many of them see if North Korea goes down and ironically it's the Chinese who feel that if we really push the North Koreans that somehow North Korea could collapse and they would see that as a victory for America and a defeat for China. So we need to convince them that South Korea would be a very good neighbor to China. I think they got an inkling of that when the South Korean president some 10 months ago Park Geun-hye went to China and but it almost kind of backfired on the Chinese leadership because a lot of Chinese people again through this blogosphere were saying why can't we have one of those? Because I think there's a real deep unreal I mean a deep, deep sense of disquiet really about the Chinese leadership and whether this party structure is really up to the task. So China's facing a lot of issues and so dare I say it, well we probably have to be more patient as we ask the Chinese to be less patient on North Korea but we also need to understand that if we don't have China with us on this North Korea issue, we're not going to solve it. I think it's been significant that as they invited Park Geun-hye to China last year, the South Korean president, they've never invited Kim Jong-un to China and so clearly the Chinese are unhappy with the course of events in North Korea. Chung Song-taek's demise, I mean I wouldn't call him a reformer, I don't think there are too many people in North Korea who fit that description, certainly not Chung Song-taek but he may have been a sort of black marketeer but I think the Chinese felt he was their black marketeer and therefore they are very unhappy with Kim Jong-un essentially arresting him and then perp walking him out of a party meeting and then shooting him. I think the Chinese are very unhappy with that but they're really not sure what to do about it. So I think that's another area where the key to North Korea may be in a sort of a carrom shot that is to mix the metaphor that is we need to really work with the Chinese and develop better patterns of relationships. You know there's a lot of discussion in this country that somehow we're in this mess because we have a president who's not tough enough. I submit to you the real problem is we have a president who's not close enough to a lot of these people who's a bit of a distant figure does not have the kinds of relationships that I think we need with some of these leaders. Not that having a close relationship with Vladimir Putin is gonna solve the problem of Crimea but I think the problem is we are seen as distant partially because our president is not a sort of up close and personal person but I think we're also be increasingly seen as distant because there's a sense that the United States has kind of had it with all this and we're kind of withdrawing pulling back from the world and certainly if you live in Colorado as I do and you see the problem of Pueblo County not being able to get money for school roofs you can understand why people in Pueblo County are maybe not so thrilled about sending their tax money off to places like Afghanistan. So I think a lot of as we get ready to manage this tranche of issues and they will be with us for some time we need to develop I think a better consensus of what our country needs to do in the world and I think we need to develop a more systematized active approach to these issues. You know, I don't know why people in our country are so kind of at odds with each other. You get the sense that people don't really communicate very well with each other they don't have a decent respect for the opinions of others. I think we could do a lot better. I tend to blame internet shopping for all this. You know, frankly, if you buy a book and then after you've clicked on the book and it says, hey, if you like that stupid book we've got five more stupid books which are just like the one you just bought. So really I would like to open up a website that says, you know, if you're gonna read that you better read this because this will give another vantage point and another approach to the issue. I think too often we're becoming increasingly compartmentalized with people that we agree with. It happens all through things, you know. I used to follow baseball by following, you know, wherever I was I'd read about, you know, I might have to suffer through reading about the Cardinals or something but I knew something about the rest of the league or the MLB and now I just read about the Red Sox because I can go right to redsox.com without knowing anything about what the other teams are doing. In short, I think the internet which is supposed to make news and universal has actually had the perverse effect of kind of compartmentalizing us and having us only read stuff that we're kind of inclined to read in the first place. So I would encourage you next time you order a book and they suggest five similar books. Ask them for five opposite books to choose from. So anyway, where did I learn those enlightened thoughts from the Naval War College? And so for those of you who are here, congratulations. For those of you who are getting perfect grades, congratulations and for those of you who are not, maybe you too can become ambassador. But let me tell you, my time at the Naval War College really helped me steer the rest of my career and it wasn't a week that went by when something, usually from S&P I must say, didn't come up where I realized where I learned to think or where I learned to point my boat. So thank you very much and we'll do some questions. So how should I do this? Just, you know, I was once in the audience when we had a CNN reporter named Peter Arnett come and speak, I think it was a New Zealander or something and he was a Gulf War reporter and he, this guy from New Zealand gets up. I mean, I love New Zealand, don't get me wrong. And he started talking about some botched military operation and the first question was, sir, what would you know about a botched military operation from a successful military operation? So anyway, we'll see if there's. So yes, sir. Hi sir, thanks a lot for being here tonight. I really appreciate it. I'm Army Colonel Paul Riley. I've got a question about Russia and I'd like to take you back to your SMP days and Thucydides and why he believed that states would go to war with each other and that was honor, year, and interest. And so thinking about a couple months back or a month back when we started seeing Russia moving into Crimea, I tried to think about our interests at the time and I tried to decide whether we should use military force or whether we would use military force or how we would use military force in such an instance. And in my mind, we didn't, this didn't rise to an interest in which we would be deploying military forces to somehow counter this. Then as the time went on, I asked myself, well, what happens if Putin goes into Eastern Ukraine? What if he goes into Transnistria and Moldova? At what point does this trigger our honor or our fear or at what point does it actually become an interest? I suppose our NATO relationship would trigger an interest but at what point does a military move into Eastern Ukraine or into Moldova that isn't directly affecting a NATO ally? At what point does that cause us to deploy military forces in some manner? And that's basically the essence of the question. I think it's a very important question and phrased another way, what are the tripwires here? And I think it's very difficult to talk about our country going to war over Transnistria. I think it's very difficult to talk about our country going to war over Eastern Ukraine. But I don't think it's difficult to talk about a real stepped up effort with the Eastern flank of NATO and understanding that should those things happen, we are into I think a long term competition with Russia and I think we need to be very much more present on the Eastern flank of NATO. Again, if we get to that point where the Russians are essentially taking over the equivalent of the Sudetenland or something, I mean, we have a very serious problem that requires a serious response. I am not of the view however that we can sell the American people on the idea that we need to declare war on Russia. I am of the view though that we need to really reorder our priorities and make it understood to our people generally, but I would say we need to step up our capabilities to deal with this. My view is that Putin has done this out of fear if you will, but fear in the sense that I think he has, Russia has some of the dysfunctions that I described in Ukraine. Russia has never been able to diversify its economy beyond hydrocarbons. It's not at all clear that, you know, when Russia is 85% of their exports are hydrocarbons, I think Russia is in some economic distress at this point, and I think we are going to have to kind of be prepared for a long term competition which we will prevail, but we will prevail insofar as we, I think, keep our allies very much close and with us, and I think we're doing that. And I would simply like to see a return to more bipartisan forms of foreign policy. I'm a little too naive, I'm not naive enough to say that politics stops at the water's edge, but I think we do need to kind of develop some national consensus on what we do about Russia. And just because you got a CNN camera on you doesn't entitle you to say anything in the world you wanna say, and I think some of our politicians from the legislative branch, I'd like to see a little more support for the administration during this time, you know, you can certainly vote them out of office as soon as you want, but we need to do a much better job of not sounding weak and divided, but strong and united, and I think we can do that. Yes. Good evening, Ambassador, thanks for coming by, sir. My name is Lieutenant Commander Suggs from the intermediate class here at the War College. Sir, my question is to ask you about a sense of some of the diplomatic leadership and senior officials' thoughts and opinions on this very difficult and uncertain age that we seem to be going in, not a lot different than how you described your experience at the War College and after the Cold War. Well, I think the American people do need to, if not be reenthused, but perhaps better informed about why these issues are important and why we cannot be indifferent to them and why we cannot turn our backs on them. I think it would be helpful, though, if our country could do a little better job, or I should say, inside Route 495, otherwise known as the Beltway, there can be a little better effort at consensus on why these issues are important. I must say, I was, when Assad's forces used chemical weapons against civilians, my reaction was those forces that did that, we ought to just hit them and hit them hard. I didn't feel we should go to some kind of ask permission of Congress or go anywhere. I just felt when you use a banned weapon, you should pay for it. And so I expressed that view and I was quite surprised by the reaction of people around me in Colorado who very much opposed that idea. So it's not to say that people who don't agree with me are uninformed and I'm, you know, but I really feel we can make the case better than we've been doing. And I think the trouble is every single issue gets thrown into this mosh pit of politics in our country. And I think there's a successive politicization of everything right now. I'm not saying that everything was great in the late 30s when you had people, you know, in the FDR administration who wanted to be more active and yet the rest of the country didn't. I'm not saying these are unprecedented issues, but the shrillness, the, you know, the attacks, the vituperousness of these kind of internal, of our internal dialogue, I think is a lot worse. You know, certainly it's 24 hour news cycles. It's a lot of things, but we need to do, I think a much better job of informing our people of this. You know, again, and going back to the use of chemical weapons, I mean, I just never thought I'd see, you know, the use of chemical weapons against civilians in an urban area and then no one does anything about it. And that's kind of what happened. I think the ultimate resolution where I think we've been able to get these chemical weapons removed and, you know, there has been progress on that. I think it was a good idea, but I just don't think people should get away with that kind of stuff in this world. And so I was kind of disappointed in the reaction. Yes, sir. Ambassador. I'm in trouble now, but okay. No, go ahead. Yeah, yeah. You know, some of this public diplomacy stuff, I'm a little worried about, you know, if the 20th century gave us Atchison Kissinger and, you know, Holbrook and the 21st century gives us Twitter accounts. I get a little worried about this. I think a lot of diplomacy is, by definition, something that ought to be in more traditional channels. I also, look, I would like to see that regime in Cuba ended a long time ago. But I worry, and I don't know what Senator Leahy said about this, but I do worry that sometimes it seems that we are, you know, using what are perceived as sort of old-fashioned propaganda tools or propaganda approaches through new tools. And so I guess what I worry about sometimes is, you know, we have all these programs for public media. I know Alec Ross. I know all these guys who've been working on this. I get a little worried whether they are done without a sense of priorities of what we really need to do to safeguard our national interests. And so, you know, I don't know the details of what AID was doing there, and it may have been quite, you know, quite okay. I don't know. I mean, I certainly would like to help civil society in Cuba, don't get me wrong. But I just think we need to be a little careful how we proceed in some of these things. I, you know, I'm all in favor, you know, when the issue is human rights, I think we need to speak up and speak clearly. But I think sometimes, you know, when we start telling countries how to organize everything in their country from their parliament to their baseball leagues, I think we need to be a little more careful on that. And the reason is I think, you know, we, as much as we are maybe helping civil society in one country, a lot of countries will say, what are they doing now? Next time they'll come after us. And so I just, I just wanna make sure there's been some prioritization of these issues as we go forward on them. And Lord knows we need to do a much better job of public diplomacy, of explaining to countries what we're doing. But I get worried when there's a sense that somehow we're using this as means to topple governments that we don't like. Not a, there'll be a quiz tomorrow, you know. Okay, okay. Yeah, yes sir. Yeah, I think we've kinda done okay on that. I think these are not new claims by China. The newness of it is their efforts to enforce it and to enforce these claims. I was in the Philippines a few weeks ago and I was very struck by the fact that many Filipinos are referring to the Chinese as bullies. I heard that word a lot in reference to the Chinese claims. I was very struck by, you know, people used to talk about what a, you know, foreign, what a soft power juggernaut China was and, you know, other leaders would go and listen and spend, you know, three days in a country while our leaders spend, you know, three hours in a country. But I was very struck in visiting Southeast Asia, how many enemies China has made through this. Again, I think it has to do with internal dynamics in China. It has to do with the fact that use of these new technologies, these sort of microblogging type stuff that's going on in China big time is basically people are upset with the government but how do they come at the government and they kind of outflank them on the nationalist issue. And I think the Chinese have handled it very poorly because they try to react to it by saying, what do you mean we're not being tough? And so I think the problem is that when Xi Jinping gets up and looks at that big inbox, you know, Philippine public opinion is not the first issue that he cares about. So I think China is kind of causing a lot of problems for itself. I don't think these problems are necessarily new and I think to understand China's relations with neighbors, they have a different historical patrimony. I mean, I think the relations with neighbors in Chinese past is relations with tributary states. And that's why I'm a strong believer is if you wanna understand what's going on in the world today, you ought to study some history. I mean, I must say all the history I studied is now political science. And frankly, all the political science I studied, you know, like Russian agriculture or policy, that's all history. But I think people need to have a little better appreciation for how China's operated in past centuries. And my point there and my point in a lot of things is things change more slowly than you think. And I think a country like China has to overcome a legacy of many centuries, not just a legacy of the last few decades. When I look at the way China has attended Beijing, for example, when the missile launcher shows up in North Korea, I have no doubt that very few people knew about that in China, in Beijing. But for centuries Beijing, you know, there's always been this struggle between center and periphery. And the center always tries to pretend that they're really running everything. And so I think they continue to do that to this day and say, oh yes, we planned exactly that, but I don't think they have. So I think there is a big future for people who wanna learn Chinese and understand what is going on in that country because it is really, I think, going to be with us for a long time. And by the way, for people who think that this is all about, you know, that somehow we ought to use the Thucydides, that somehow war is inevitable between the rising power and the established power, you know, fly to Beijing, take a cab, 45 minutes north from Beijing, and have a look at that great wall and ask yourself, do you really wanna get into a fight with the people who build a thing like that? So thank you very much. All right.