 Happy spring in Vermont for folks who are out of state. Welcome to Norwich University. I am Dr. Roly Brook and professor of history at Norwich. My specialty is the history of international human rights law and US foreign policy. I've taught classes relevant to this panel on the Cold War, human rights in Eastern Europe and genocide. Having served as Amnesty International USA's country specialist on Zimbabwe for 18 years, I'm well acquainted with investigating human rights abuses including war crimes, crimes against humanity and genocide. Before I introduce the panel, I humbly ask us to take a moment of silence right now in memory of the victims, each of whom are individuals with parents, partners, children, friends and who have aspirations, dreams, talents and a desire to live in peace as all of us do in this room. Thank you very much. I want to thank the staff of Norwich University's John and Mary Frances Patton's Peace and War Center including director, Dr. Travis Morris and associate director, Dr. Yang Mo Koo. I also want to thank today's panelists and you, the audience for your time and commitment to self education and public discussion of critical issues of international importance. It's an honor to moderate a distinguished panel. Let me introduce the folks on the panel. Lyle Goldstein is director of Asia Engagement at Defense Priorities, previously served as a research professor at the U.S. Naval War College for 20 years, his expertise includes maritime security and nuclear security issues. He has published seven books on Chinese strategy. He speaks Chinese and Russian and is currently writing a book on China-Russian relations. He holds a BA from Harvard, an MA from Johns Hopkins School of Advanced International Studies and a PhD from Princeton. Nicholas Gavostev is professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College. He currently holds non-residential fellowships with the Foreign Policy Research Institute and the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs. He has taught at Baylor, Georgetown, George Washington, Harvard Extension and Brown Universities. From 2016 to 2020, he served as the Captain Jerome E. Levy Chair in Economic Geography and National Security. Mary Manjikian teaches undergraduate and graduate courses in Intelligence, Disaster Assistance Management, National Security Affairs and Terrorism. She is the author of two books on cyber politics and is also a Fulbright scholar. She is a former U.S. Foreign Service Officer with service in the Netherlands, Russia and Bulgaria. Manjikian received her BA in Russian from Wellesley College, a Master's in Philosophy from Oxford University and an MA and PhD in Political Science from the University of Michigan. Lasha Chantaridze is professor and director of the Graduate Programs in Diplomacy and International Relations for Norwich University. He is also a Harvard University Davis Center Associate Research Fellow for the Center for Defense and Security Studies at the University of Mantova, Winnipeg, Canada and an advisory member of the Peace and War Center here. He earned his PhD in International Affairs from Queens University, Kingston, Ontario, Canada. Here's the format for today. I'd like to give each of the panelists two minutes to give an opening remarks on the topic of U.S.-Russian relations. I've then got three or four questions for the panel that will take maybe 25, 30 minutes and then for the rest of the time we'll open it up to questions from the audience. So let me start by asking Dr. Goldstein if he could prevent, and we'll go from then to his left on down the line for two minutes or so of opening remarks. Hi, thank you and so honored to be here. And I just would say up front that I'm glad we had a moment of silence there. I am appalled by the events of the last four weeks and condemn in the strongest terms what the Kremlin has done. Let me just lay out a couple of ideas here because I think kind of where my focus is. I think taking off of what Thomas Graham said yesterday that for all the moral outrage, moral outrage probably is not the best way to form up our national security policy going forward. Let me suggest two respects in which that I think is particularly important. And the first is concerning nuclear security and we heard a very important lecture yesterday from the general deputy commander of STRATCOM and I assure you he chose his words extremely carefully so you may want to reread your notes there but the nuclear shadows over this crisis are very considerable. And I'll just, I meant to tell the general this yesterday but I was just reviewing a article from the January, a January edition of Vanya Bazdrinya, a military review in Russian and this article stated quite emphatically, Russia is many times superior to the U.S. in terms of tactical nuclear weapons. Think about that folks. We have to be exceedingly careful in this crisis. I'll be glad to tell you more although I think the general did a fabulous job yesterday in laying out that Russia has absolutely prioritized nuclear weaponry for the last 20 years. Its capabilities are modern and ready to be used. The second thing I say may be more controversial here but I think it's just worth laying out that I think one of the questions that we were given originally concerned lessons from the Cold War and one of those lessons is to be exceedingly careful and avoid nuclear crises and nuclear escalation but another lesson I think from the Cold War concerns the spheres of influence as a way to prevent constant conflict and risk of escalation and war. We can go into that more but to me it's been a missing part of the discussion here and again we have to keep our emotions in check and think about what is best for the United States. Thank you. So briefly a few questions that I think we need to grapple with moving forward. The first is really addressing a question that we have dodged back and forth ever since 1991 which is is our problem with Moscow a question of personnel? Is it a question of regime type or is it a question of Russia as a geopolitical entity? Because how you answer that question has very profound implications for the policies you're going to adopt moving forward. If we think that this is largely a problem created by Putin personally then if Putin is removed does that create an opportunity for resetting the relationship? If you're talking about changing a regime which is talking about really replacing a political and business elite then you are going to run into the same questions that the United States did not adequately answer in the months after the fall of Saddam Hussein in Iraq which is how deep, how far do you go, what level of resistance does this engender? And if you're talking about that this is a question of Russia within it's essentially how it is composed as a state, as a multinational imperial internally colonized however whatever terms you want to use then the question is that no government in the Kremlin is likely to produce the outcomes that you want and therefore you are looking at the question of the Russian state. Related to that is the question of finally ending the strategic ambiguity about where Europe ends and the rest of the world begins. Is Russia part of Europe? Is Russia not part of Europe? Is Ukraine, Georgia, Armenia, Azerbaijan? Are they Europe? Are they not Europe? Are they sort of Europe? And really beginning to make those decisions and something that Tom said from the first panel which I think is absolutely important for policy is as we've seen a lot of talk of support in what Lyle refers to as kind of the moral outrage of what we've seen over the last four weeks is that gonna be sustained into long-term commitments particularly financial and economic commitments of both the European Union and the United States to make substantive investments whether it's in containing Russia, rebuilding Ukraine, integrating Eastern Europe into the core of the Euro-Atlantic world. And then finally the third issue that we have to consider is that the United States for the last 40 years has not wanted to see Russia and China essentially consummate their entente. Have we essentially decided now that we're going to write that off and we don't really have a problem with China being the beneficiary of the Ukraine war in terms of finally securing access to Russia's vast natural resource base and what is still a considerable military-technical base as well that essentially we are prepared to think that this newfound transatlantic and trans-Pacific unity now outweighs any possibility of a Russia-China link-up or at least of a China being able to absorb that Russian base because again that has profound implications for US policy. Lyle's already raised the nuclear issue so I'm not gonna put that but I think that's also what we would have to look at. I won't move. Thank you so much for the invitation. I feel like I've learned so much just myself from interacting with all of you. I just really appreciate the opportunity to be here. As we've talked about kind of NATO expansion over the past day or so and kind of sort of how Putin may or may not be feeling about the threat of NATO expansion, it seems that we've kind of described NATO largely as a military alliance and we've described it largely from a realist international relations viewpoint but I'm gonna tell you a little story. In the 1990s, the mid-1990s, so after Angela and I were in Russia, my family moved to Bulgaria and I was the press attaché and my husband opened the first security assistance office in Sofia, Bulgaria. And so his job was to bring the Bulgarians into the NATO alliance. And so we'd have all these experts from Washington and Brussels come over and we'd usually have them over for dinner and at some point I said to my husband, how come every second dinner guest is a lawyer? It didn't compute for me. I assumed that mostly he would be thinking about, through the interoperability of weapons, whether or not these folks understood the doctrine, whether or not they were getting sufficient English and French training. But as we sort of had these people over and I began to learn, what I realized was in order to bring a nation that's basically coming out of an autocratic past into NATO, the most important things really are issues like civilian control of the military. They brought a lot of people over who basically talked about soldiers' rights. This is how you set up something like a court marshal. These are the rights that your soldiers have. And so kind of what it showed me was that it's a military lens, but it's so much more than that. It's about rule of law. It's about these big questions and I wrote them down. How is the military structured? What is the military for? If you're the leader of this country, can you use the military to fight your own battles just because you feel like it? How does the military fit into the rest of society? What is transparency? Who's owed information about the military? What do I have to tell other people about the military? And so if you think about this, if you change the role of the military in your society, you fundamentally change your society. And so that's kind of, I guess, the constructivist ideas perspective. And so I think as we think about how Putin and why Putin was threatened by the rise of NATO, don't think about it purely from a realist kind of weapons-based way of sort of what you think in alliances because NATO in particular is so much more than that. And then sort of, I'll talk fast. I know I've probably gone over my time. I'm gonna put my intel hat on for a minute and if you're taking notes, write this down. In retrospect, lots of things seemed inevitable. And that's like a really good kind of intel analyst rule. And so that's a question that I found myself thinking about is I think about this conflict is, to some degree, there's sort of this sense of kind of inexorability, isn't it? And you think, well, you know, sort of as we write the story of World War II, we say, of course, Molotov-Ribbentrop wasn't going to work. Of course, appeasement wasn't going to work because it seems so obvious later on kind of down the road historically. And so if you want to challenge yourself, maybe kind of picture yourself writing the story of this conflict 10 years from now and think to yourself, what in retrospect is gonna seem inevitable, right? Is it inevitable that Ukraine is going to join NATO? Maybe we're going to postpone it. Maybe we're going to put it off for a few years. Is it inevitable that NATO is going to split apart? Is it inevitable that whoever replaces Putin is going to be significantly worse? So I'm not gonna give you any answers. I'm just gonna give you some interest in questions that you might want to play with. What was the question? Okay, yes, thank you. I'm, since you're young people here, you're students, a couple of things you have to remember. You get older and get real jobs and go work in your respective fields of professional occupation. In foreign policy, in diplomacy, when someone is talking to you, you have to somehow force yourself to imagine in their place. You have to see the world from their perspective. It's not an easy thing to do. It's very difficult, in fact. And a lot of problems we have now in Ukraine and elsewhere around the world because decision makers, diplomats, politicians fail to do that. They just assume that the world operates like they see the world. It doesn't. And the values and the arrangements we have, political arrangements here in the United States or Western Europe works similarly around the world. It doesn't. It's just that, say, if you study engineering and someone, an engineer comes to you and tells you, I have this very thin cable and it can hold five tons of weight. So what do you do? You ask them, okay, can you demonstrate? Can we see whether that actually works that way? And you go out and try to prove it or disprove it. If it doesn't work, well, maybe there are ways to improve it. And that's how modern science, modern society operates. The benefits you enjoy from this society is based on interaction like that. Whether it's biology, chemistry, any field. But unfortunately, in foreign policy, diplomacy, we use the old language. We use the language of tribalism and warfare. If someone comes to you and tells you, I'm really afraid what you're doing out there. Don't do it. The response is, oh, you are imagining it. We are not doing anything significant. You just misunderstand us. And it goes on and on. This conversation for years between Russia and the West since the mid-1990s. So that's a language of warfare, of fight, of conflict. And you imagine you do this, you tell this to your girlfriend or your boyfriend over and over and over. You know, someone shares his or her concerns with you and you tell them you dismissed them. Your relationship is not gonna last. You're gonna fight every day and your relationship's gonna dissolve. The same thing in relations among countries. So someone tells you, they're really afraid of something. Even if you think they're imagining that threat, you have to entertain the idea. Maybe something there. Maybe we can do something to alleviate your fear. And imagining also, in case of Russia, speaking about values and our own perception of the world being true everywhere. Civilian leadership over military, Mary just mentioned. Excellent idea here. Very bad idea in Russia. Because normally, Minister of Defense, who is a top military professional in Russia and the former Soviet Union, historically stood between the top decision-makers, civilian decision-makers and the nuclear button. Because the military in Russia, people in the uniform respect the top general, the top guy. They don't respect civilian leader. They don't know who he is. He's the hunting body or the fishing body of Mr. Putin. And he's incompetent, current. I'm talking about current Minister of Defense. The previous one was an accountant. So he's someone who can prevent nuclear war. A guy who has no influence over his boss's decisions is a bad idea in Russia. And there are a number of other things that the Russians and other countries have done according to Western standards that have misfired and worked actually to make situation worse. So remember these couple of things. It's very difficult to keep two contradictory ideas in your head and remain sane. But that's what it takes to be a successful decision-maker in foreign policy and successful diplomat. Thank you. Thank you very much for your opening remarks. I'm cognizant that this is both a panel on U.S.-Russian relations. That includes, of course, the current conflict in Ukraine, but also other issues. And so I wanna ask questions sort of in both areas. To begin with, Dr. Kovostev talked about the importance of framing the conflict. And there are several ways of interpreting the current conflict, the current war with Ukraine. Depending on how you define it also changes the options on how best to respond. So a couple possibilities. Is this an ideological conflict between the forces of democracy and autocracy? Is this a conflict about Russian security versus self-determination of its neighbors? Is this a conflict about Russia re-establishing itself as a global power after three decades of decline? Is it a conflict about Vladimir Putin himself needing to distract from his own low approval ratings and fear of political instability? Or is this conflict about something else? The question for the panel is how would you frame this war and therefore what general strategy might the United States employ in response? Okay, so that's a very complicated question. When war happens, and unfortunately in a large scale war like this, there are many reasons. There is no one single. You cannot boil down into one thing. People generally look for simple explanations, whether it's the origins of the universe or the complicated questions like this. So war, this particular war entails a lot of things. It encompasses power struggle, the competition for resources. One thing we have to keep in mind, the Russian Federation reached its oil production peak sometime 2019, 2020. It's expanding influence, it's self-determination, it's historical factors in relation with Ukraine. It's current Russian leadership's vision how the world should be, the world order, about new world order, they actually want to topple the existing Pax Americana, American dominated world order and create something new. Create something new, that's why they enjoy support by People's Republic of China, India, Brazil, and others who are also unhappy with this. So there are many, many aspects to this and they're not gonna work out as those who are fighting this war in vision. The Russian may want something and get something else, instead that may be worse. But a nuclear aspect of this confrontation makes things very difficult and unpredictable because otherwise the Russian Federation may have signed a peace agreement with Ukraine very similar to what Finland did with the Soviet Union in 1939 when Finland made concessions, didn't win the war, didn't lose the war, made some concessions to the Soviet Union and the parties, the two sides parted more or less amicably. Russia's possession of nuclear weapons and its belief that it is the strongest military power in the world because it has so many tactical, more than 2,500 tactical nuclear warheads, which by the way are not a treaty weapons, they're outside the treaty because they are not strategic weapons. Makes this outcome of this conflict unpredictable. I'd argue that this war is largely about norms. I think of Russia as a country that's kind of gradually been moving towards behaving like a rogue state in international relations. And in a sense what we had in 2014 was we had a large scale norms violation and we've had those really kind of repeatedly from Russia whether it was the bombing of Grozny all the way back in the 1990s. And so the question really is do we have any shared international norms that everyone buys into? Are we an international community? And sort of this question of norms enforcement, right? And I guess norms is an issue that's really close to my heart because I study cyber and we have these conversations all the time in cyber. What does it mean that we have no norms? And one of the things I always talk to my students about is I say if you look at the growth of international humanitarian law, it began in the 1500s with chivalry and all that good stuff. And so we have a body of international law that to some degree most of us subscribe to because we built it over 500 years. And then I always say, you know, and we don't have a body of international humanitarian law having to do with cyber because the internet was invented in like 1994. And so you really can't get those norms in a period of 30 years the way you can in a period of 500 years. But I think that when we look back kind of historically on this conflict that's one of the questions that we may ask is sort of when did sort of the waning of norms and norms enforcement kind of begin. And I kind of feel like militarily I don't think the United States should wait into providing a no fly zone. I don't think that NATO should wait into this. I also am extremely worried about escalation. I'm worried about cyber escalating to kinetic. I'm worried about kinetic escalating the nuclear. But there's something to be said for the West somehow taking a stronger stance in terms of saying, yes, we do have norms. We don't bomb buildings that are clearly labeled as having children in them. There are things that we in a civilized society do not do. And there's that concern that if we do not come together as a community to enforce these norms that supposedly we all buy into, I do worry it leaves the door open to China and Taiwan. But I also, it's really tragic if you think about the fact that we've had international humanitarian law for over 500 years, and yet we seem to still have these kind of major aspects of people not respecting it. And it makes you wonder about the future of international humanitarian law. So that's my upbeat answer. You know, the short answer to your question is it's all of the things that you listed which makes it difficult to come up with a coherent set of policy responses because if you decide to say, look, we can make some sort of geopolitical adjustment. But if that's not, you know, but then it doesn't address necessarily the ideological roots of the conflict, of the invasion, the question of norms, so on and so forth. And also the fact that, you know, we are grappling with this, we're in this period, this new cycle of adjustment where the system that has emerged after the end of the Cold War, and in fact the world that emerged after the end of the Cold War is changing. Technologically changing, it's changing in terms of environment and climate. It's changing in terms of population and demographics. And, you know, I think you have a concern from the US side is we and our allies wrote a lot of the source code of the post Cold War world and we're worried about losing the ability to write the source code of the era that we're entering into. And part of it is the question of norms, part of it, you know, up till February 24th, the sense that Russia and China would be able to write more of that code or push back against us, I think has been a part of it. In policy responses, I mean, one of the things that I'm finding very surprising is the extent to which a number of commentators are very cavalier about the nuclear question, that there really is a generational divide. If you remembered either you were an adult during the Cold War or you were someone who was dragged to watch the day after when it was on TV in 1983, I think seared a certain worry about nuclear escalation that frankly younger generations seem to be more willing to roll the dice on. Either well it won't have, I've seen things well, he won't use them, Russia won't use them, there are the generals will stop him which as Lasha points out has been eroded or that they won't work, I've seen that argument too. But that really raises these questions and I wanna bring it back to a point about US domestic policy, which is the bargain we've had since the end of the Cold War. Domestically in the US is that Washington gets a relatively free hand to intervene as long as the costs do not reach a certain level for the domestic population, which is we don't see our taxes increased, there's no draft, we don't see, and Tom pointed again this point, the gas price as a metric, that I don't have to pay too much at the pump. So now we are I think grappling with not only should we be doing from a systemic norm level in responding, but I think politicians here are also beginning, and Europe as well are beginning to navigate the question of how much can you ask of your societies and how long will that consensus last? And that has implications. Do we go in and try to essentially say, I've heard people revive the old patent line, right? Well, let's just settle it now, right? Let's go in and just fight it out with Russia and settle this once and for all. Of course, with the nuclear question being diminished or do you fight to the last Ukrainian, which is Ukraine you're doing a great service for the West and we'll be happy to provide you with as many tools as you need to do the fight, but we're not going to get involved. Do we encourage a settlement? Do we, does the United States, Europe, China all come together and do what the United States did at Dayton to end the Yugoslav Wars, which is you come in and you impose a settlement from the outside that none of the parties are particularly happy with, but which ends the fighting. And right now I don't just looking at our own domestic politics. I don't see, I see a lot of concern about how this plays out in November elections and other things. I don't know that the US has complete freehand domestically to be able to address this. And then again, the longer term question of what is the US-Russia relationship going to look like? Are we foreclosing the dream? And Mary, you talked about it and others about we wanted a better relationship with a different type of Russia in the 90s. Are we just gonna write that off and move forward and consolidate the Euro-Atlantic world? And how does this play out with China, with India? I mean, the point is that this issue is just so interconnected with so many other fundamental questions about what the US role is going to be in the world. And if we don't have a domestic consensus as we did during the Cold War about what we're prepared to do, what costs we're willing to pay, we're just gonna be tinkering at the margins or we're gonna ricochet from administration to administration and party to party and that's not a good position for having an enduring grand strategy. Yeah, I would echo what has been said that this is an immensely complex conflict but I think probably, I mean, we have to I think understand this as Putin's war. He didn't dream this up in two weeks as it has been said. He's really been preparing for this for years, if not decades. So how do we understand his motives? I think that is kind of the heart of the question and here I would say that on the one hand you have what amounts to a kind of very, very dangerous, noxious nationalist ideology. By the way, Russia is not the only country with such narratives that develop into policy. The fact that a certain type of regime, so he doesn't interact with many liberals and this probably has a lot of historical kind of overtones. We understand he is interested in history, let's say more than a little and has a kind of romantic viewpoint of Slavic brethren coming together and I think in the back of his mind he thinks Russia is a powerful country but could be so much more powerful with Ukraine hitched to the Russian wagon that all those resources and brilliant people in Ukraine can serve a greater goal, which is his dream. Of course, that's very unlikely to happen, especially now, but look, on the other side of this and I think we have to say it and here I think I disagree with some of my colleagues at the conference, but to me, NATO is part of these motives, a kind of fear of NATO, a loathing of NATO, I have very little doubt about that and I think there's plenty of evidence, just go through Putin's speeches, going back more than a decade, but it's deeper than that. I've monitored NATO activities in Ukraine for over the decade and I could tell you some details there, but to me it was really excessive and maybe the worst of all worlds that it didn't have a very strong war-fighting component, but it kind of hinted at such components and I'll just give you an example. By the way, there were almost continuous set of exercises, so one group of Americans would go in and then come out and then another would go in, so it was, in other words, you could claim there was no NATO base there, but it was continuous set of NATO exercises in Ukraine, but it was deeper than that, it was actual military infrastructure and one example I'm very familiar with is the port of Odessa, which has been in the news, your taxpayer money was funding a very fundamental upgrade of those piers, why? What did that matter? Well, you upgrade the piers to standards to take NATO warships and the Russians could see this trend of more and more NATO warships coming into the Black Sea and indeed using Odessa as a major spot and I believe in his speech right before the war, he mentioned the kind of NATO ops center that was, I don't know if it's officially NATO, but an operations center for maritime operations right near Odessa, so I'm just saying, to my estimate, and if you, we could go deeper and talk about Putin's assessment of Odessa generally, but I mean, in my view, this is waving a red flag in front of a bull and was very poorly thought out, so I mean, you know, we have to be, look, you know, Putin deserves full responsibility for this war, but as Americans, I think we better be honest with ourselves and realize that this was a, we made some major mistakes here, and by the way, I would just say, I've heard some things at this conference that I find a little bit disturbing, this kind of, you know, actually Putin, maybe Hitler turns out, I don't accept that, I think that's really quite a vast exaggeration of the threat and as Americans, we need to be realistic, not emotional and have a very, you know, objective assessment of the facts, thank you. Thank you. In my foreign policy classes, we talk about two equations that don't have an equal sign, power doesn't always equal influence, and secondly, what a nation sees at stake does not necessarily mean that a proportional response is the best if the resulting cost might be too high. So if you were playing Joe Biden's national security advisor, you're getting a lot of advice, particularly from folks who may not be in decision-making authority, and though who can be therefore kind of loose in terms of what they would suggest that you do. But if you were Joe Biden's national security advisor, there's been talk of creating, as some of you mentioned, a no fly zone, of escalating the types and amounts of weapons that could be sent, including big fighter jets and enhanced economic sanctions, yet you also fear crossing some kind of bright line that Putin has in his head that might escalate Russia's tactics and munitions choices or even lead to a direct attack on NATO territory. So what should President Biden do to straddle this line between giving enough aid to Ukraine but not too much? Okay, yeah, great question. And frankly, I'm a little surprised we haven't discussed no fly zone at all. It seems to me that really is the elephant in the room here. But before that, I just want to mention quickly, I mean, we need to there is some good news here. There's been a lot of bad news, but there's a little bit of good news here, right? The Europeans are stepping up. This is fundamentally a good news for the United States. I mean, I would say for decades, really the United States in a way has been honestly taken to the cleaners by European allies who, where we spent all the money and did a lot of the fighting and they spent tiddlywinks on defense to put it candidly. That's been very disappointing and had all kinds of deleterious results that I can talk about. But I'm very pleased that Europeans are seeing this as first and foremost a European problem. If they think that Putin is about to march on Berlin, I don't think he is. But if they are concerned about that, then they should. And I think any rational country right now wouldn't take a chance and would build up. And here, what Germany is doing is probably prudent, but I would like to see much more. I would like to see greater integration and countries all, why should they just spend 2%? Maybe they should come up to 2.5% or something like that. By the way, I didn't mention before, NATO aggregate spending versus Russia defense spending, 20 times what Russia spent, 20 times. So there's room for the Europeans, I think, to do much more, although they probably shouldn't be excessive either. Okay, let me come to the no-fly zone, sorry. Very quickly, I think it's a horrible idea. I think we had better think very carefully about ways in which U.S. and Russia or U.S. and NATO would come into combat. And there are many other ways besides the no-fly zone. But to me, this is hugely risky. And I consider it a, I'll just end by saying, those of us who follow the nuclear strategy like I do, we would like to keep the chance of nuclear war well below 1%, maybe even below 0.1%, right? Folks, we are nowhere near there right now. We are like, maybe the general would put a better number on it, but I'm afraid we're crossing 10%. Okay, that's, we do not wanna be here. And unfortunately, the major scenario that I see, and by the way, I can give you a citation to actually, Nick and I were both there at Naval War College. We did a study, and this is actually published online, but it says pretty clearly that Russia unlikely to resort to nuclear weapons unless the regime is threatened by something that happens on the battlefield. We may be about to see that. And as has been discussed, Russia has plenty of tactical nuclear weapons to use. We could talk about what the targets would be, we could talk about what the U.S. response would be, but I am very concerned about this, and a no-fly zone is one clear pathway to get there. So we had better avoid that, thank you. Building on what Lyle said, I think, and we've already seen the administration, I think, do this, and of course has suffered a lot of, it's easy to carp from the sidelines and to call for things that you know aren't going to happen because you wanna score political points, and I think we've seen that with some of these calls for no-fly zones because it's really easy to posture to say, well, I wanted to have a much stronger response, it's safe in the knowledge, it's not gonna happen. One of the things with that too, again, a lot of the commentary is all over the map because technically a no-fly zone is about keeping aircraft out of the air. What a lot of people have in mind when they're talking about a no-fly zone for Ukraine is what happened in Libya, which is you're using your aircraft to strike targets on the ground. You're looking to do a no-drive zone and no-artillery zone, and we should then just be upfront if what you're saying is that the United States or NATO, and NATO can only do this with the concurrence of its 30 members, wants to become a co-belligerent, then that's a realm, but just be open about it. And I think one of the things that the Biden administration has been doing is to really strip away ambiguity, is to be very clear and not to play fast and loose with terms, that if we wanna be a co-belligerent, we could be a co-belligerent, but not to use some sort of antiseptic term that the public thinks carries no risk for Americans or for Europeans. I think making it very clear that yes, for these years we've paid fast and loose with terms like ally, and it's been one of my pet peeves. Regretfully, Ukraine is not an ally of the United States. Ally does not mean we like you, does not mean you're our friend, and ally legally means we have a binding arrangement, a treaty obligation to do things for each other. Ukraine does not have any such agreement. The Budapest Memorandum is a memorandum, it's not even an executive agreement, and the Office of Legal Counsel weighed in on this in 2014, said this is not a binding, nothing in this memorandum is binding on the United States. We do not have a bilateral defense treaty. So Ukraine's not even been raised to the status of a major non-nato ally, which the president can do with the stroke of a pen. He could, any president since 1994 could have designated Ukraine a major non-nato ally, and that has not happened. And I think what you now have, and people are critical of us, we have this, well, and I used to hear this at the Loisak Group, and others, well, but there are virtual allies. Ukraine is a virtual ally, and they should be covered under a virtual Article V, that's not how it works. And I think that the president has been very clear about, yes, there is NATO territory, and that we are prepared to escalate, to defend, if there is an incursion. We will have the full range, but we're not going to kind of operate in this degree of strategic ambiguity about, well, you're sort of NATO, or the like. This also has obligations, but I think the president has been very clear on this and the people around him. Everyone knows Article V. I have a nice point I like to raise on Twitter, which is, you know, first rule of NATO Fight Club, you actually have to know what's in the treaty. Everyone quotes Article V, and think this means you go to war. It's not what Article V says, it just simply says you consult and take the measures you see fit to respond to an armed attack, and then you have little problems like Article VIII, which means that if say Poland decides it wants to get involved in Ukraine, which is Poland's sovereign right, to do so, it can't rely on the alliance. Because Article VIII says you can't take steps that essentially create international obligations for the rest of the alliance if the rest of the alliance has not agreed to that. Now again, if all 30 members of the alliance meet in Brussels and say, we will use, and you can use Article IV, we have a threat to peace and security in Europe, we all agree as the 30 that NATO will do this. But again, these are levels of diplomatic action and you have to hold, again, NATO is a, like the old Polish SIM, is, you know, libero veto. One NATO country can say we don't wanna do this and that's it. What should we be doing forward? I think Israeli Prime Minister Bennett got a very bad rap. I think people misinterpreted his advice to President Zelensky, which was not to surrender, but essentially is get the fighting stop now. Get a ceasefire. Every day this goes on, the damage that is done to Ukraine is irreparable. The Ukrainian, Ukraine was already the poorest country in Europe. It actually, Moldova actually went ahead of Ukraine, so Moldova is no longer the poorest country in Europe, it's Ukraine. There's a lot of reconstruction that's gonna have to happen. Get a ceasefire, put some things on the table and also let things take their course. If this war, which I personally think has done a major piece of damage to Russian power. You know, get a ceasefire now and then let kind of the process of what's happening in Russia play itself out in a way that may be very different a year or two years from now. So, and again, I think you're seeing the administration quietly encouraging the process Turkey is doing, the administration officially, I mean, not people on Twitter, but the administration has not poo-pooed anything Israel has been trying to do to get the two together. We've even cautiously said, look, if China wants to play a role in mediating, we would welcome that. And I think that that's good advice, getting this, getting the fighting stopped, and this is, again, we're back to the Dayton model. A lot of people didn't like the Dayton Accords, but the one great benefit of the Dayton Accords is that zero people have died in Bosnia as a result of fighting since 1995. So, if nothing else from just the basic right to life question, I think pushing for a cessation of hostilities, even if it doesn't give you the emotional satisfaction of marching into the Kremlin, frog marching, poots into the Hague, and raising the blue and gold flag over the Kremlin, which I don't think, but you're seeing people advocate that, right? This war cannot end until you have a battleship Missouri surrender. I think we'd be very bad for Ukraine and over time runs the risk that this conflict gets out of hand. Yeah, if I were speaking with the president, the first thing I would urge him to do would be to clarify his objectives. I think if we know anything from history, it's that wandering into a conflict without being exactly sure of what it is that you want to accomplish is a very bad idea. And so the questions that I think we really need to be asking sort of whether we're in leadership or whether we're just kind of the population is, if the United States either unilaterally or with NATO were to get more deeply involved in Ukraine, what would be these specific objectives? How would we measure whether or not we had actually met those objectives and what would be the plan for leaving once we had? I think those are questions that, they're good questions to ask. And what concerns me as you kind of alluded to that, when you hear people talk about kind of what the US quote unquote should do, there seems to be kind of this very broad set of objectives and sort of, you know, would the point of the US going into this conflict, you know, be the same as the US marching all the way to Baghdad and getting rid of Saddam Hussein? I mean, as what we're talking about, you know, deposing Putin, are we talking about getting Russia as a revanchist power to change its policy preferences? Are we talking about getting Russia as a revanchist power to change its behavior? Or are we talking about something on a much smaller scale, like maybe tomorrow no one will die in Ukraine? Because those are very, very different objectives. And so I think the first thing we really need to get a handle on is what exactly it would be that we would be attempting to accomplish if we were to wade further into this. And I don't think there is a consensus in American society. There's not a consensus, I think, in the Senate and Congress. I don't think there's a consensus in the media. And so that would be the first thing would really be to sort of clarify the problem before you attempt to solve it. In terms of risks, one thing I just wanna mention is we talked a lot about this risk of something escalating to nuclear, but I have been really interested by this sort of suggestion that someone floated that the ICANN, the International Consortium for the Assignment of Network Names, basically the people who kind of built and control the internet. It's supposed to be international, but kind of like the UN, the US pays all the bills, it's located in the United States. I think it actually has an office in Brussels as well. But there's been this discussion about let's cut.ru off from the root directory and basically disconnect them from the internet. And in terms of, and people kind of like it because it's something you can do, you can't sort of halfway achieve it, it's something you fully achieve, and maybe there won't even be any bloodshed, it's just something that you do. But I think the other issue we really need to think about is the idea of having, basically going back to a Soviet Union that's inscrutable, right? That whole sort of Churchill, a riddle wrapped in enigma, the idea that we're gonna be back to sort of looking at pictures and trying to figure out who's sitting next to who at the October Revolution military parade. I don't think that's something we wanna do. And so the question's also gonna be, how do we accomplish whatever objective maybe we finally agree upon in a way that we're not gonna get Russia to sort of, and that's why we shouldn't cut them off from the internet by the way, is we don't want to have a Russia where we honestly have no idea what's taking place in there. The idea that it could be sort of completely irrational and unpredictable. I think that's really a scary risk that we need to think about. If I were advising president of the United States, I would suggest that he resign. I'm serious. I fully understand these kinds of suggestions wouldn't go well in the White House, but I think the situation is serious enough to ask Mr. Biden to resign and hand over to Mrs. Harris. Mrs. Harris is an enigma for the Russian decision makers. They don't know her very well. Mr. Biden has been studied very well due to his long service and his connection with Ukraine, his son's connection with Ukraine. Besides, he also burned bridges with Mr. Putin. And he has zero influence and respect in the Russian leadership. And also, let's remember that the current Russian leadership comes from old Soviet misogynistic culture, which does not understand women. They are apprehensive women. And if Mrs. Harris too were put in act that she is aggressive, not towards Mr. Putin, but towards her staff, people around her, she is unpredictable. She throws tantrum here and there. Russians, Putin will get a message. No one wants someone to order 10 megaton bombs to drop to Moscow. And if you're facing someone who cannot understand, is aggressive, unpredictable, you may want to slow down. Okay, so. And the fact that when Mr. Putin announced war, invasion of Ukraine and war in the United States to stay away or face the worst day in your history and actually threatened us with nuclear retaliation, that message was taped two days prior. And he ended that section of his message by telling us that I have already given orders to my forces, relevant orders. So that tells you that he's cautious. He's still, the reason he taped it, because if you tell me you're gonna attack me with nuclear forces, you call for a first strike from my side. So the only thing I have left now is to attack you because the first strike is more, most likely win this kind of war. But he was being cautious, he prepared, he taped it, he got his forces ready, then he told us. So that suggests he's being cautious still. And he does not want unpredictable reaction by the United States. So that would be the best option for us right now. But as you will understand. You all in the audience have been very patient. Let me ask folks who have questions to come down to either of the two microphones for the time remaining. And if you could identify yourself before you ask the question, that would be great, thank you. And we can start on this side of the room. Is it on? There we go. Hi, good afternoon. My name is Cadet Rory Stewart. And my question pertains more to kind of our young generation of students in the audience that are aspiring diplomats. So in reference to this sort of crisis, what strategy or what useful asset do we have to sort of handle these conflicts for the future? And what lessons can we learn to take this step forward to kind of create a career where we're setting ourselves up for success for potential crises in the future or even to take over when we kind of move into that professional world? I guess I'd urge you to learn Russian. I think that again, one thing that we do see is that I personally view this as an intelligence failure. I think that we did sort of have some wrong information about Russian objectives, about Russian assets. And I think it's just really important for people to still learn foreign languages. I know there's a tendency for everybody your age, I have three kids your age, to want to be very careerist and think about what specifically is going to get me a job. But it's still really, really useful to understand a culture. I think one thing that maybe you got out of this whole conference is history matters. We kind of pretended for a long time that it didn't, but we've heard people make references over the last couple days to 1939 and Ivan the Terrible, the idea that we do need to understand our adversaries, we need to understand their history, we need to speak their language. And I just learned more about the process of diplomacy itself, something that I find myself thinking about is, if God forbid, 10 years from now, Russia looks like North Korea, what do diplomats do in that situation? Do we have exchanges? And how do you talk to people who are very different than yourselves? What a confidence building measures look like for neighbors that don't trust each other? And I think really, sometimes there's a tendency to, particularly if you want to be a diplomat, to be really, really interested in American foreign policy, but it's also really, really important to know those enemies and to know your neighbors as well. Yeah, I would just underline that as well. I mean, to focus on history, focus on languages, absolutely. I mean, can't say that enough. And by the way, new technology, I speak a couple of languages, but I was never talented at languages, but these new technologies, I mean, if you want to sit all day and watch Russian TV or Chinese TV or whatever, here in Vermont, you can do that. That didn't exist when we were studying. So you have a lot of advantages and take advantage and your skills will help our country in these circumstances. But one other thing I would say is that diplomacy going forward and how does our State Department work and so far, first of all, it's vastly under-resourced and US diplomats are an incredible asset to our country, but I fear we have most of them stamping passports, which we should be using their skills in a much wiser way. And I would throw on there, lately, over the last decades, our diplomats seem to be, we got to look on the website for what our policy is, just have a meeting, read our talking points, and that's pretty much what you want to do to me. That's not diplomacy. Diplomacy is give and take. It involves not just sticks and threats, it involves carrots. I mean, look at this meeting with Biden and Xi. The headlines, at least we're all, here are the 10 ways we're gonna punish China if they dare to help Russia. Maybe we should have turned it around, said how can we improve US-China relations and maybe that will have the effect that we actually want, so building incentives to cooperate. How you doing? My name is Cadet Lauren Simkins and earlier, I believe it was you, Dr. Goldstein, spoke about, I think you used the analogy, the red flag in front of the pole for some of the actions that precipitated Russian actions in Ukraine. Do you think that, and then you later spoke about, obviously, our NATO partners having an increased level of activity and funding in NATO. Do you think that the increase in activity and funding of these NATO partners, could that not serve to exacerbate that red flag in front of the pole issue, or do you think that the United States taking maybe a step back in terms of influence and control over NATO would actually allow, kind of mitigate those impacts? Oh yeah, that's a really interesting question. I'll just give you another example of the red flag, by the way, there are ballistic missile defense radars that we put up in Poland and Romania. And by the way, every year the Russians would come back and say, you cannot do this, this is really destabilizing and we know how much the Russians care about their nuclear deterrent, I mean, to some crazy degree, so no matter how we assured them that those radars are actually pointed at Iran, nothing to do with you. Do you think they really believe that? So in retrospect, I think that was a huge mistake, another example of waving that red flag. And sure, they thought next we were gonna build one of those in Ukraine, although you don't really need to because those, the ones back there were so important. But I mean, as far as the, I think, look, NATO increased European expenditures, that's definitely good for the US. I guess it allows us to focus on the Pacific, which has been our kind of strategy, by the way, the Indo-Pacific strategy published right, I think, the day before the war began, so it didn't get much attention, but so that's good. But you raise an interesting point. Could that make it worse? Could Germany, doubling its defense funding, just exaggerate all those Russian fears? And I think we have to be sensitive to that. But one bit of confidence I have is, Americans, we're kind of, let's say, we don't focus on, generally, don't focus on Ukraine, don't focus on Romania. Most Americans would have no idea where Moldova is, for example. Europeans do know these things. They know the details, they know the history, they follow these issues extremely closely, and they also know a lot of Russians, and they're aware of Russian sensitivities. So I have, that's why part of US policy should be empower the Europeans to take their security in their own hands, manage, they should be managing their negotiations, not relying on the United States to do it. Actually, if you review the diplomacy of the last four months, right before the war, could a deal have been made? I happen to think a deal could have been made. But part of it was this kind of tossing the football between Berlin and Paris and Rome and sending it back to the US. Oh, the Americans will handle it. This is a recipe for a disaster, which we have. Let the Europeans should lead on European security. Let me just touch base on, and this goes back to the question about diplomacy as well, about knowing your carrots, your sticks, what you're prepared to do, the level of creativity, because on the one you're talking about, and the Russians I think had some genuine security concerns. I mean, Ukraine has genuine security concerns too, and I think if we had linked the training that we were doing towards creating, moving Ukraine towards armed neutrality, right? A neutrality that doesn't depend upon the goodwill of your neighbors, but you can enforce it. We had a path in terms of what Azerbaijan has been doing. Azerbaijan has been officially neutral since 2012, but has a very robust military, has very robust capabilities that makes challenging them, raises a cost. We could have explored those options. We didn't. All of this talk about airspace, we could have said that as part of a Ukrainian neutrality deal, NATO countries will operate air defense facilities on the border with Poland and Hungary, which would give you coverage over most of Ukrainian airspace, but could not then touch the Russian security bubble. By the way, we did this with Cyprus. This was the Cyprus deal of 1997, and Cyprus was buying air defense equipment, and Turkey said this will allow Cyprus to target jets in Turkish airspace, so those systems were moved to Crete, so they can cover Cyprus, but can't touch Turkey. This though goes back to diplomacy. It means that you have to be able to sell this. You have to be able to get people to sign on a dotted line when they say, well, I want full membership in NATO, right? So that was Ukraine's push after 2014, Russia was never no membership in NATO. And also, finally, on your point there, I think which is very important, Lyle, my understanding is that then that last week of talks between Schultz, Macron, and Putin, one of the hangups was Putin saying to Schultz and Macron, and the Americans are on board with this, and Schultz and Macron saying we can't guarantee that the Biden administration will agree to any of this. And so Putin's saying, fine, let the canon decide as the saying goes, because why am I talking to you when I should be just talking to Joe Biden? One last thing on diplomacy, which is again, goes back to domestic politics. US still does not have a Senate-confirmed ambassador in Kyiv. We've not had one since 2019. It's 2022, so it's great that all these members of Congress have their blue and yellow on, and yet for some reason we can't get a nomination through the Senate Foreign Relations Committee. So again, domestic politics and domestic consensus on this matters. So you have a US diplomat in Kyiv who is not technically the personal representative of the president, and does not enjoy the confidence of the Senate to be able to be in that position. And as far as I know, even with the war going on, there is no move to expedite getting an ambassador in Kyiv. So just leave it there. Good morning. I'm Cadet Corporal Thomas Harwood. My question is just generally for the panel. What do you think the implications of recent events are on US foreign policy in the sense of interventionism in foreign conflict? Take a stab, start with that. This comes after the withdrawal from Afghanistan. How does that fit in the idea of a 20-year mission to reshape a society that essentially ended with the US packing up and leaving and raising questions about the efficacy of American power to intervene and to reshape, and that a number of months later you have, well, the United States should be prepared to intervene militarily in a conflict with the nuclear armed powers. So I think that it speaks to a real question about, and this goes back to questions about narrative. It goes back to questions about what are the goals and objectives? What are you trying to do? I think we have a sense that intervention still really is something that doesn't cost the US anything. We can intervene. And again, the last 20 years, to be frank, the United States made major mistakes, had major setbacks that didn't really impact the domestic lives of Americans. There's no sense that having more or less not succeeded as we wanted to in Iraq, having left Afghanistan, if there's any domestic. The problem is, is that if we're moving into an era of state-on-state competition with actors who have, just one thing about the Russia-Ukraine War is showing that Ukraine, which is a middle power, Ukraine is not Afghanistan. You have these people expressing these things about, well, the Russians are taking all these losses and America only took so many losses in Afghanistan. The Taliban had no air force, had no air defense capabilities, had no tank productions, had no, this is state-on-state war between what we would think of as a great power. But what is a middle power? And there are costs. And I think Americans have not internalized that even a short clash with a middle power is going to probably have costs that most Americans have not thought of. If anyone has read Stavridis and Ackerman's 2034, his novel of the next world war, which starts off with Americans being shocked at losing a carrier in the South China Sea and what impact that has on Americans, wait a minute, we lost a carrier? Not just a few people here and there in a roadside bomb attack. I think we haven't gotten there yet. So you have people saying, well, we can do a no-fly zone because what's going to happen? How many planes did we lose in the Iraqi no-fly zones? So we're still thinking, OK. One reason why General Milley didn't want to do the no-fly zone over Syria, as he said, I can guarantee we're going to start losing aircraft, Mr. President, and then two days later, you're going to be under pressure once American pilots are being paraded on Syrian TV to get us out of there. I don't know that we have a social understanding of the risks of what it would take to do some of these interventions because we've spread out the costs of Afghanistan. The individual cost on Americans was spread out over 20 years. And I worry, too, this is also what I call the call of duty effect. I mean, when you play a lot of call of duty, it just seems like, hey, let's just go in there and we'll just kick some and with no cost. But again, as the Russians are finding out in Ukraine, this isn't a video game. And I don't know that we've reached a social level yet that says we're willing to lose 5,000, 10,000 people in an intervention within a matter of weeks or months. It's always interesting, I think, to think about kind of buzzwords that you hear used by diplomats. And then maybe a couple years later, you say, whatever happened to whatever that term was that everybody was throwing about. Well, responsibility to protect. Remember R2P, that if this conflict hit a card 10 years ago or 20 years ago, it would have been all about R2P, right? There wouldn't even have been any other discussion. The idea that sort of a major power has a responsibility to intervene in a situation where genocide is taking place. And the whole thing with R2P was kind of like, this is not negotiable, this is not debatable, this is the way we understand the issue. And so something that it points to is kind of the expiration of that understanding that we are compelled, we're morally compelled, and that there's a consensus. Talking about the risk as we talk about it now is certainly a very different conversation than that R2P conversation. Well, maybe just one quick comment on there. And here I'm borrowing an idea I heard Nick Bosdev say a week ago when he spoke up around, but one thing the Ukrainians are illustrating is how highly motivated people with even some pretty simple weapons are able to defend their homes. And it's incredible actually to behold really. But I mean that in a way that gives some hope that perhaps we are entering an era where even a great power seemingly able to just trounce its neighbor, but maybe not. In other words, small medium countries have hope of reasonable defense and that can allow the US to not be, try to, let's face it, reviewing the last 30 years we have as my colleague said, made a lot of mistakes, certainly intervened too much, put too much faith in the use of force. So I think we need to go to another model where force is truly a last resort. And we make sure that stick is very big and strong, but we hardly ever use it and only use it when it's absolutely necessary. That's I think the preferred approach. And this, I think letting people defend themselves may be giving them the tools here and there, but we can see that sometimes that works better and Russia is severely chastised and may indeed lose a lot. So the Ukrainians are teaching the Russians a lesson if you will. Thank you. We have time for one more question. Hello everyone, Sergeant Cory Rafaunt. Thank you all for coming here and feeling our questions. So we hear a lot of talk about no fly zones and hammer them with more sanctions, things of that nature, but try and do things outside of the box when you're looking at diplomacy. Often just trying to prove one's right and one's wrong is not always effective, but if you're able to provide someone with a back door, so to speak, a way to step down and still feel as though they have won the argument, right? Is there a way in which we could set that stage? And by we, I mean, whomever in the world is able to do that and be, is there an entity or person who would be able to reasonably help to broker that deal? I'm thinking that's a mild question. It's all about the Asian idea of saving face, isn't it? Yeah, well, thank you, Mary. You set me up. Well, I mean, I've always been a fan of this kind of diplomacy of off-ramps. I think it's critically important. I mean, in the nuclear era, our presidents, Kennedy told us not to be afraid to negotiate. And indeed, people, not everybody knows it, but the Cuban Missile Crisis, which I urge all students of national security to review in great detail, by the way, note that probably the most dangerous elements of that crisis were whether tactical nuclear weapons would be employed. I interviewed former Soviet submarine captain who had literally his trigger finger on a tactical nuclear torpedo that would have taken out our amphibious group, and we didn't even know about it. Just saying these elements are so important. So what is that off-ramp, which in the Cuban Missile Crisis was the trade of the Turkish, the missiles in Turkey? So you have to kind of give face and the second, who can mediate? I think that was part of the question, too, is I think that's such an important question. And Nick Vazdev brought up the example of the Israelis. I think that should be fully supported. There are other countries, too. I think China, imagine China and Israel working on this together. I mean, if you will, two opposites, but two countries that know a thing or two about military affairs. China has a very wide experience with UN peacekeeping, people don't realize, but peacekeepers, I think, are part of the solution. And I love Nick Vazdev's idea of using a Dayton model. That's, to me, I think some good student papers can come out of this, even in the spring. I just want to introduce a note of pessimism, though I've been talking with some colleagues in DC. And one trend that they find worrying is what they're calling the Saddam Husseinization of Putin, that there was a point at which Saddam Hussein, after 1991, was just beyond the pale. You couldn't negotiate with him, you could try to box him in and contain him, but he was considered beyond the pale. And the question is whether or not Putin has reached that level, that no longer, we're not gonna weave the Ukrainian, well, President Zelensky says he still wants to meet face-to-face with them. But in the US political context, have you gone, have we crossed the Rubicon where having sort of set up a certain thing, you can't then say, well, now we can have an agreement and we can back away. And no, it will require we have to deal with someone else. And again, this is why my advice, the longer this goes on, the harder it is to walk back from statements and positions that you've taken. And this is on all sides, by the way. This isn't just that we're waiting for, Putin has offered no off-ramps of his own, right? He had the ability to offer off-ramps which he has chosen not to do because he's continued to insist on a maximalist agenda. So, that's an issue. But the Saddam, if Putin moves into full Saddam, and this is why the Hitler, leaving aside the Hitler comparison, I think the Saddam Hussein one is actually more relevant from a policy perspective because then there is a point at which you say, we cannot end this, we can try to contain, containment breaks down, and you're just left with all of this in limbo. And what that means for the world economy. If you freeze today, you just throw these couple points out, you freeze the wines they are today with no settlement, and you look at what the impact, and there's gonna be people going hungry around the world this summer because Ukrainian food exports won't be occurring. And then, longer term, you want climate change things. I mean, Russia was supposed to play a role with nuclear and hydrogen. Now, that's off, and everyone's back to discovering that they're gonna burn coal again. And so, yeah, again, if we Saddam Hussein and I is this approach, it's not just the geopolitics, but you're talking about impacts on climate, environment, demography, economics. So, a couple takeaways. This event could be the 9-11 of your generation in terms of foreign policy, and it could replace the Cuban Missile Crisis for scholars of a foreign policy 30, 40 years from now in studying how to escalate and de-escalate tensions. Diplomacy is an art and a science and compromise is not a dirty word. Always think about relations between nations from other nations' perspectives and their interests as well as your own. Domestic politics and public opinion in a democracy can be both a help and a hindrance in solving foreign policy crises. Conflicts can be easily started, but ending them is arduous, slow, and messy. And finally, hindsight, all things are clear and clean. 30 years from now, this will be a couple paragraphs and a textbook on U.S. foreign policy. With that, I'd like to thank our panelists if we could give them a round of applause, and now a couple words from Dr. Koo. Dr. Rollybrook, and thank you so much for your, just a nice management of these great panel discussions. So, yesterday, today, we had just a lot of talks and discussions and debates and question and answers. So, I think if I remember correctly, 2017, Dr. Travis Morris and I, just we had a vision to have peace and well-summit. So at the time, we decided the topic, just the first topic was North Korean nuclear missile challenges. And then, just at the time, we think thought about the Chinese, U.S. China just rivalry, and then Russian topic we chose. So five years ago, all this topic were in our thoughts, but thankfully, not thankfully actually, unfortunately, just the Russian invasion of Ukraine happened and then suddenly it became big topic and controversial topic. So over the last two days, we were able to promote our understanding of this very important issue and just the global challenges we are currently facing. So hopefully all of us just can broaden our perspective, especially future leaders, you can embrace not only the United States, but also the whole world in which there are so many difficult challenges and problems and issues, just the ranging from Africa and Latin America, Europe, Asia, India, China and everywhere. So hopefully all of you can play significant role in preventing this kind of conflict from taking place. If that happens, you can play amazing role in handling, making reconciliation and just the resolving the historical dispute and all those kinds of conflicts in the amazing ways. Thank you so much. And next year, 2023, March 20th and 21, we're gonna have fourth peace and war summit which addresses the topic of Iran and the Middle Eastern issues. See you next March. Have a nice day. Thank you so much for your participation and active attendance in this summit.