 Welcome everyone for joining us this morning on this webinar of the series organized by the Kings Japan Programme at Kings College London. My name is Alessio Patlano and I'm the director of the Kings Japan Programme and I'm the reading and decision warfare and security at the Department of War Studies at Kings. I am particularly delighted today because during these times of lockdown and social distancing reading a book is back on the menu as a good thing to do in order to have some quality time and the reason why I'm delighted is that the book that we're going to be talking about today is a really good book so that really means something in terms of quality time coming your way. But in order to introduce you to some of the comments of the book we have today the author and I am very pleased to welcome Professor Rory Metcliffe from the Australian National University. Rory welcome and thank you very much for joining us today. I know that Australia is quite late in the day so I'm particularly grateful for you making the time to connect with us and to make the conversation the discussion about the book even more sparkly. I'm super pleased to introduce Professor Sir Lawrence Friedman. Rory Professor of War Studies at Kings College London. Rory good morning. Thank you very much for joining us today. The book in the Pacific Empire, China, America and the context for the world's people of region I think is bringing to the table a number of different topics and themes that are incredibly timely if anything and perhaps during these last few months of COVID-19 becoming a pandemic some of the core themes in the book are likely to remain incredibly relevant for the foreseeable future. One thing that I took away that was for me very important is the idea of trying to reintroduce notions and concept related to the conceptualization of space and how space affects the way we look at international politics. The international security status and international relations for a long time and the idea of geography or the relationship between geography and strategy geography and security and has been perhaps long forgotten a bit too much and in this respect and in the Pacific Empire brings us at the very heart of what the implications of looking at international security and international relations with an element of geography in it may be all about. The rule of the games are as follow for the next 15-20 minutes Rory will introduce the book and Rory will then comment on it and on the back of that we will continue the conversation with all of you following us through the webinar and the Q&A section is open so you can easily sort of send us a question directly and so that I will be able to sort of bring them to the speakers. Rory without any further ado please the floor is yours. Thank you thank you very much Alessio and it's a real pleasure to be with you all and with this group and a particular honour to have Lawrence Freedman to have Lorie introduce or frame the conversation. Not only are we colleagues from some time back and I really value the visits you've made to Australia over the years Lorie and the work you've done with us at various institutions such as Lowy and ANU but also it's a little known fact that your evolution of nuclear strategy was one of the books that really got me into this space back in the dim dark days of the late 20th century so thank you. Look what I'd like to do in the next little while is introduce some of the core themes of the book. Inevitably this conversation I'm sure will go to current and future challenges and the whole COVID-19 context that massive strategic disruption and whether it will be an accelerator of trends or indeed a rupture but I want to first set the scene with I guess why I guess geography matters so much and why geoeconomics matters so much in what many of us imagine as the Asian strategic space. Why this is of global significance and why it is in some ways a China centric conversation but also and this is where I think the interests of my own country Australia come into the into the puzzle and why I think this is a conversation very relevant in Britain and Europe and globally. Why multi-polarity is increasingly the name of the game as well and really what are the challenges and choices ahead for for China so if I can cover some of that space in the next few minutes I'll be happy and to help me in that I'm going to share the screen my computer here for a moment I'm going to share a few of the maps that really are the mental maps that are the guideposts for for the book so let me just do that and try to bring up some some images that I think will will help. So the the book is divided into three parts and it's a classic past present and future framing if you like but it's using using the the return and I believe there is a return to a two ocean framework of maritime Asia as the I guess the the portrait for the strategic narrative for the past really 20 to 30 years now. The book argues that as you can see in this first map that the the connectivity between the Indian and the Pacific Oceans and their repositioning as arguably the global centre of strategic and economic gravity or really of economic and strategic gravity that is what has brought about this reimagining of what was known for some years in the late 20th century as the Asia Pacific it's reimagining as the Indo Pacific playing China in particular into a much larger strategic space bringing China into contact and increasingly competition with a wide range of other powers and of course India but not India alone feature in that in that framing and of course I note that there are India China Frictions even today although land rather than at sea and then finally creating this framework for thinking about empire and the international edition of the book that we're talking about today Indo-Pacific empire of course is a bit ambiguous about whose empire do we mean but I think one question I want to raise in Reader's Minds is Xi Jinping's China essentially an empire in the making or even a colonial project on on speed and therefore can we look to the history of empires past and wonder whether in fact China is is carrying the seeds of the failure of its ambition to dominate the Indo-Pacific region. The idea of the Indo-Pacific really returned and I say returned because this is actually an old idea returned into vogue in statecraft over the past decade and Australia seven years ago and this map is in fact borrowed or adapted from an Australian defense white paper was the first country formally to declare that its region of strategic interest was the Indo-Pacific it matches our two ocean geography but it also reflected the fact that the wealth and the power of the big states around us particularly China were being projected now across the two oceans and the energy transport routes the the trade routes and so forth and more recently the big infrastructure power play at the Belt and Road reflect that in the last few years we've seen then a rapid or most acceleration of countries other countries redefining the region in this way as well their own variations the Japanese the Indians the Americans importantly when the Trump administration three years ago I guess declared its interest in an Indo-Pacific region but even others Indonesia France some voices in Europe and I think there's a healthy debate in the United Kingdom at the moment as to whether its engagement in this part of the world is through this two ocean lens I argue and we'll go through a few other maps in a moment I argue that this is in many ways about mental maps it's about the framing that decision makers that leaders have in their minds that strategists have in their minds when they're conceiving of what is their geographic extent of priority interests what is the kind of power projection that they need to think about who are their potential competitors who are their friends what are the regional structures and organizations that matter and a lot of the as the book argues a lot of the framings of an Asia-centric region a maritime Asia-centric region over the years regardless of the name have had a really interesting striking similarity a resonance throughout history and so this modern idea of the Indo-Pacific actually much of the book argues is in a sense a return to a norm throughout the history of maritime Asia it was a two ocean region a region where the connectivity between South Asia and East Asia between Chinese civilization Indian civilization Southeast Asian civilizations was much more if you like of a continuous band of contact rather than separate sub-regions were broken up and had very little traffic with each other and we'll come back later as to why this actually matters for power and power competition today but just to take a journey throughout some of that submerged history that the book retells if you look at this particular map of framing of the region from the early 15th century a Korean map and you can the clue there is the fact that there's a very large Korea and a very small Japan in this in this particular depiction you see essentially East Asia South Asia Southeast Asia really is one as one unified one unified block in fact a very small Africa over there with a gigantic lake in the in its center and an interesting emphasis on the archipelago on seaports so even before the colonial the European colonial era there was this this proto if you like Indo-Pacific going back to previous civilizations the Hindu and Buddhist empires of what Europeans would consider to be the Dark Ages and the medieval period but a flourishing flourishing commerce and strategic and diplomatic interaction in Southeast Asia from South Asia then of course China's early forays into the Indian Ocean the treasure fleets of Jinghe and so forth but importantly the book argues that although the maritime mattered greatly in that history that economic and strategic history it was not a China-centric region China had tributary systems in East Asia but never was able to sustain a full system into South Asia and the Indian Ocean so the book is partly intended as a corrective to the fairly much the propagandist view we get out of China today that China by right is the dominant power across this very very broad region the historical narrative continues of course through the colonial period and it's striking that fairly much any depiction of Asia from really the the early early 16th century right through until the 20th century almost always captured this single frame of South Asia and East Asia of the Indian Ocean and the Pacific Ocean as one system because this was the system obviously that mattered to commerce and politics and the power of the European empires it was also a system that mattered to local societies and civilizations and just as colonialism quite brutally broke the the system that held sway in Asia broke a lot of the connections between Asian societies it also bound them together again with the global system of commerce and geopolitics that essentially laid the foundations of the present era I particularly like this map of course because it from 1571 it has a tiny little hint of Australia in it and even then the Dutch map makers knew that our beaches were quite good it's labeled beach but it does play North America South Asia East Asia South East Asia all into that one Indo-Pacific frame moving forward to I guess more recent times as I said the era of colonial empires consistently looked at this two ocean system a map an Australian map from 1848 which in fact was written was was produced by the explorer who was trying to find a route to export cavalry horses from Australia to India an overland route showed our connections with South Asia with East Asia with South East Asia all has been equally important and there's a fascinating resemblance between this map and the framing that the Australian government likes to use today and even more intriguingly the framing that China uses when it looks at a very very fresh world view a maritime Asia-centric world view a map that accompanies the Belt and Road and we'll come back to this Chinese map in a moment because if mental maps you know if maps and the the artificial one-level division of regions as units of organization in diplomacy and strategy if they reflect a kind of strategic wishmaking on the parts of the the nations that dominate that map making this Chinese map of a world where interestingly the American continent is is sundered and cast to the outer edges of the universe and where the Indian Ocean is at the center of things with its connectivity its resources and so forth this could be a very interesting signal of what is to come and this map was in fact produced in China in the year the Belt and Road was established in 2013 it's a state sanctioned map popular with the Chinese navy and you can see that pivots just as nicely as the Australian map does to capture some of the unity the continuity of maritime Asia what does this matter it matters for a few reasons i mean the book makes what seems to be a an obscure argument and that is that we're no longer in the age of the Asia-Pacific we're in the age of the Indo-Pacific and some will say well so what but it also argues that this explains part of the imperative of China's it's very ambitious strategic power play and also explains why it's actually going to be very difficult if not impossible for China to dominate the much larger regional space that it is seeking to dominate we all have heard of the Belt and Road China spends about 10 billion dollars a year to tell us about the Belt and Road the signature initiative of Osijian Ping the Belt and Road of course is about it's about infrastructure it's about investment it's also about influence Chinese geoeconomic power play and many of the Belt and Roads advocates argue that in fact the land and the sea are equally important in this vision the the road is the sea the belt is the land i would argue that in fact for a number of reasons the sea will continue to outweigh the land not least because of the you know the extraordinary cheapness and efficiency of sea transport and the special versatility that sea power has and that China's maritime silk road is really the Indo-Pacific with Chinese characteristics ever since in 1993 China became a net importer of oil and began to look out and to look east sorry to look south and western across the Indian Ocean the seeds of this Indo-Pacific era were sown and when in 2008 the Chinese navy began to make that journey that journey into the Indian Ocean ostensibly for counter piracy but also to protect China's energy interests and establish as we now see the beginnings of a permanent military footprint in the Indian Ocean China was becoming an Indo-Pacific military power as well i'll conclude on a few points about what this means for i guess the future of power relations in the Indo-Pacific and the interests of many countries caught up now in this opportunity for new kinds of multipolar collaboration to limit Chinese influence and also to manage American dysfunction because you know the Indo-Pacific means many things to many people it's become a popular shorthand in some ways and some argue that it's really just a shorthand for balancing Chinese power because it legitimizes for example bringing India into strategic balancing arrangements with let's say Australia Japan and America the quadrilateral dialogue or perhaps other arrangements too my argument is that the Indo-Pacific is first and foremost a reflection of the the connectivity and the expansion of China's own interests and presence across the Indian Ocean into South Asia into Africa into the Middle East and the naval and maritime power that China is seeking to project now to protect and advance those interests and the the clash or the coexistence of multiple major powers across this two ocean strategic system where the interests of every trading nation are engaged and that's where for example the United Kingdom comes into the picture it's also in some ways and I don't like to use the word microcosm because the Indo-Pacific is an enormous space and that's one of the criticisms of the concept but it is a laboratory a very large laboratory for China's power relations with the rest of the world more broadly it's still I think difficult to say whether China genuinely aspires for global dominance but it certainly aspires for regional dominance in the Indo-Pacific region and the extent to which new arrangements among the many middle players of this region the countries that are not the United States or China the extent to which these players can actually at least moderate China's I think more assertive power plays and also can encourage a more constructive re-engagement in the region by the United States and to some extent provide some hedging and some insurance against a diminished American role in the region that whole dynamic has lessons for the global system as as well and so you know I wouldn't be a a narrow geographic determinist and say that essentially ultimately it's geography that matters in global power politics but geography is returning as a major factor in the Indo-Pacific is the place more than any other where I think that is the case final point which is about the the future so the book went to print on the 8th January at a time when of course perhaps not even the senior leadership in China knew exactly what was going on with the the COVID-19 what became the pandemic and in some ways I think this now provides a moment to really question all of our strategic judgments about balances of power about the economic basis of power really about the the the priorities and the effectiveness of a whole range of countries including China we had that initial moment where we thought this would be a China centric and China contained problem wasn't the case it became everyone's problem and and there are plenty of countries that appear according to official figures appear to be faring worse than China although of course there's no knowing what China's real data is at the same time though the experience of the last few weeks has shown or last few months has shown I think a new appetite for coalitions and creative coalitions to protect their interests push back and also protect what there is of a rules-based international system in the Indo-Pacific and globally and there are perhaps a few examples I'll come back to in the in the discussion on that but let me leave it there and what I'd love to do now I'll switch off my slides and rejoin you for the conversation Matthew yes Rory thank you very much for a very comprehensive overview very fair one also very articulate and complex book there was one line that that for me sort of sums up everything that that somehow you were saying it's true we're no longer in the century of the Asia-Pacific we're in the century of being the Pacific and in that sense behind that simple line there's so much to Vancouver and this link will shift that the maritime and the maritime connectivity element brings about I think it's central to many of the points you've raised Rory what do you think well first I think it's a great book I learned an awful lot from it I like the historical perspective I like the geographical perspective you pulled back at the end from the from the former kinder it's not determinist but it reminds us which I think in Europe we can often forget not only just how big this area is and the distances involved but how much that that shapes perspective secondly I think the in a way it's an argument that probably is now almost one everywhere except in China that this is probably the best way to view this part of the world narrowing it down doesn't help very much it overstates Chinese influence and potential and I think that that point is is very effectively made but it's a point that still needs to be made because to some extent there's I mean though you mentioned Rory the the American sort of adopted this terminology a lot of the American debate is about strategic competition between the United States and China with not much of a looking for anybody else the point came home to me when reading Allison's Thucydides trap which is all about this transfer which he expects to know what he believes now is going to be disruptive between the US and China between this global Hegemon's or whatever but it just completely ignored India and Japan and and all the other parts and there's lots of balances in this part of the world not just one so I mean it reinforces a view I think I've had for some time that the sort of super power perspective that the middle range powers or lesser powers doesn't help us very much especially in circumstances where China in some ways surprisingly given I would have thought how well the quieter diplomacy of the previous era was going has decided to become much more assertive the sort of if we can talk about antibodies in the system at the moment one of the reasons why this has become strategically such a fascinating part of the world is because you can feel the pushback against the assertions of Chinese power in ways that they might have avoided by just being a little calmer and quieter and it's I don't think Z is that well understood as a political player and it's ambitious only not in Europe and you know when you're being compared with Trump all the time everybody can look reasonable but and he's made a very a very strong power push and both internally and in terms of his own position and externally and he's playing for very big stakes I think and how this works out is quite interesting I wanted to make a couple of points first you you mentioned American dysfunction and while we're obviously and I don't want to make his corrected words with the virus but I think we're about to enter an incredibly important period in international history but that particularly in American history what happens in November matters a lot because I'm not personally convinced that American institutions and power can easily survive much more of this I mean this has been a pretty bruising period and it's not you know you don't have to use melodramatic language to realize just how serious this is and the mismanagement of Asian relations by Trump in all sorts of ways has created anxieties and aggravations that might have been avoided and we'll have to see I think there'll be an appetite if if Biden wins to retrieve the situation I think people will be very quick and keen to do that but it doesn't somebody doesn't bear thinking about what happens otherwise I think we the question of the impact of of COVID-19 is is really I mean we're at the start of something I mean because whatever happened to the health crisis we're now in the mother-of-all economic crisis which is going to go on for for some time but the health crisis isn't over and even China has had to acknowledge that they haven't as they were claiming beaten the disease it's quite interesting just to look at the shifting narratives around this Rory mentioned this a bit that started off as a really nasty China problem then it became an Asian problem then a European problem now it's it's slowly but surely becoming a developing world problem and but initially the view was say February that this is bad for China that they'd lie to their own people that they hadn't been straight with the rest of the world and then that sort of shifted because as we were making our own mistakes the Chinese could claim to have done a an effective job in in ways that we couldn't necessarily emulate but they were sort of bragging about it and I think that this is now caught up with them because people's memories aren't quite as short as they may have hoped and the fact is that having had the experience of SARS when they were two in 2003 when they were too slow to tell everybody they've done it again and again made all made our own mistakes but it doesn't alter the fact that we wouldn't have had the chance to make these mistakes if or not was bad if China had acted more openly and explicitly and you can see that in the recent who meeting that nobody wants to go along with the Americans and and shut down who but nor are they going to let China off the hook the other thing is is the Belt and Road I mean the the amounts of debt that people owe China is staggering staggering amounts I mean well over 500 billion dollars quite a lot of it taken out quite recently not always a very generous interest rates and lots of countries are now starting to ask China for forgiveness on their debts or or at least restructuring I think this is going to be a really big issue for with a lot of countries you have a complication which I don't I think with China you saw the danger of of the sort of ethno-nationalism within China leading to some pretty unpleasant incidents with African students and so on which African countries noticed and it sort of fits in with a narrative you hear in Africa quite a bit about Chinese racism but leaving that that that part of it aside you know is China just going to seize assets around around the developing world I think it's going to be quite an economic hit and I think it can forgive them and these are debts greater than you know the IMF and this is big big business and it's going to take a lot to get all of this going again I mean so I think that this seems to me to is likely to be one of the big stories of the next year and and I'd be interested in Rory's view about how this feeds back within internal Chinese debate because you mentioned in the book a lot of misgivings within China within Beijing about whether this was really such a wise thing to do and the sort of profligacy in handing out loans keeping your own construction companies going while you know some of these projects have now had to be stopped I think it's a it's a really interesting question let me just my final point which is sort of more more European one I think what I've been when the antibodies reach Europe as well and you can see that in the UK debate which I'd say for the first half of the of the past decade going in really until a few years ago was really anxious to do whatever deals it could do with China seeing it as a pretty you know this is the economic powerhouse best to be part of it but there's quite a lot of pushback and partly it comes back to COVID-19 but it's also the sort of the wolf diplomacy as well the the reluctance to accept any slight against China's good name and to insist that everything that it has done us for the best in all possible world and this is causing quite a bit of pushback becoming a major issue within within the conservative party now because of the question of 5G and so on and it creates really interesting questions about how this might because nobody and again it's an important point of the book nobody thinks China is a power that in some way sort of be defeated or you want to see humiliated and it's got to be an important part of all dialogue and international cooperation and so on but when you can't when you lose trust in it and as you might you can't you can't trust the data there's now number of reports of scientific publications being censored because they don't fit the narrative of it possibly wasn't our fault in the first place and we dealt with it brilliantly um I think for all of those reasons uh there's a skepticism so I think this is uh really quite a critical time for China's diplomacy whether they can sort of regear a bit to re-engage uh in ways that uh don't alarm people so much and and and if they don't I think the all the all the Japanese, Indian, Indonesian, Australian etc linkages that the Rory Port points to in what again is an excellent book will become even more important thank you very much Rory for for for your comments I there's a there's a lot of strands that comes up um in the conversation I think three points that you were making the fact that that first of all one of the good one of the strings of the book is that it is not just about the major power competition it's also about everybody else and and and the point you were making that with US leadership being questioned there is not an automatic transfer towards China which increases the importance of the question of for everybody else guys what are we doing how are we sort of going to step up to the plate in that sense and of course the question that for China is not an easy pathway towards the top as it was imagined or discussed that even just a few years ago because we're starting to see all the problems that come with the growing Chinese influence and impact on international politics and geo-economics the point you were making about the incredible debt that they are accumulating around the developing world and the third point that you raised the question of how all of this until there recently it seemed to be almost an elemental conversation in Europe almost on the sidelines of everything else whereas right now it's gaining much greater central focus in ways that we've never seen but in this way even the ruling party even the Tories here in this country at the moment have at the moment about four or five different you know school of thoughts about China and you asked me this question two years ago I didn't think anybody would have sort of imagined that today we would be where we are so I think the book is very important in that sense because it really fleshes out the importance of everything else other than major power competition being at the center of the conversation that we need to have. Rory while you gather your thoughts of some reaction to Laurie let me also raise one particular question that has already actually two questions that have already been typed in which are linked to some of the points that Laurie raised and I'll start with one about Singapore in which James is saying my country Singapore is in a very similar strategic position as Australia facing similar pressures it enjoys a close security partnership with the United States while simultaneously being economically intimate with China consequently like Australia we're under increasing pressure to choose sides how viable is our continued hedging strategy and related to this there's another question from Charlie about the impact of Covid on the middle players as it were countries like Australia Japan India as and even can they see what is happening with Covid some sort of an opportunity any specific new agenda items for the next planned or rescheduled strategic meetings like as in summits ARF as in regional forum as in US summits and by allowed at a high level meetings like the two plus two formats in other words is Covid with all the points of respect to you and Laurie we're making is possibly creating an opportunity to to widen strengthen an agenda of bilateral and multilateral sort of relations in the region I'll start with these two Laurie the four is yours okay thank you and thanks to to Laurie for that that generous pricey as well and I'll I'll begin by addressing I think Laurie's key question about the I guess the fate of the Belt and Road and then I that I can then I think lead into a few of the other questions so you know the thesis in my book is firstly you know at one level a a different description of the region that has in fact a historical validity but the question then becomes what do we do with that and I think in China's case you know China is in fact it doesn't like the term Indo-Pacific but it is prosecuting an Indo-Pacific strategy and a Eurasian strategy at the same time and this is not sustainable in my view because there are a whole lot of factors that are on the horizon for the Chinese leadership in fact I suspect when you think about the many things that keep Xi Jinping awake at night you know the demographic time bomb in China debt both in China and indeed those debts that will never end up being paid to China environmental pressures and the whole question of dissent you know China's got this very angry periphery which we've seen inflamed over the past few years you add those factors to the almost the impulse I would say to build an empire on speed and it's an impulse that comes from the fact that the party's legitimacy and particularly the legitimacy of this this hyper-authoritarian leadership comes in many ways from demonstrating Chinese greatness on the world stage and I can't think of another great power if you like whose external certainly not in the current era who whose need to project some kind of external assertiveness and dominance is so wrapped up with the survival not just of the of the regime but of the system at home so these are the kinds of contradictions that the book has pointed to and I think in many ways the COVID situation actually accelerates the narrative on a lot of these yes we see a certain degree of Chinese hyper-defensiveness and hyper-confidence at the moment and of course my country is going through a very interesting and unpleasant rush with that right now but I think there are plenty of other countries who'll have their turn or have had their turn already but in fact this could be this this this this rush into hubris could in fact bring the reckoning much sooner than the book projected the book really talked about the 2030s and the 2040s as being the time when you know if you like a turning point could come but it could be sooner now and I think even though the other powers and this is where I'll get to that point about the options for Singapore, Australia or the other middle players even though we're all suffering and there will be grievous economic harm to every country over the next few years I think in many ways we're also all going to be tempered by the experience and I don't mean that in a pleasant way but I do think in fact that a lot of countries are discovering their capability for suffering and for ruin and for sacrifice in ways that certainly a lot of a lot of our citizens over the last 10 to 20 years really could barely imagine so it's actually going to become harder I think for China to use the tools that it uses of actually quite limited coercion to change our policy settings to affect our interests because we're already enduring in some ways the the kinds of of damage the China is threatening us you know this wolf warrior diplomacy we hear about and we're having that here in Australia it's a very odd kind of big bad wolf warrior diplomacy because in many ways the house has already blown down and the big bad wolf is huffing and puffing at us when it's already inadvertently done a lot of harm to our economies and societies through its failure to control the pandemic so this is all a recipe for not for containment not for overconfidence on the part of the rest of the world the middle players little powers the democracies and others countries like Vietnam which are which are not democracies but it is a recipe for a renewed kind of patient confidence not just waiting out China but a confidence that in fact China is risk averse to China has pretended over the past 10 years that it's willing to take all sorts of risks but if you look at the true story in the South China Sea in the East China Sea in the confrontations with India and there's another one on right now you know China has this paradox of having an impulse towards a kind of expansion but at the same time a risk aversion the PLA hasn't fired a shot in anger as far as we know since the the 1980s against Vietnamese Marines or Chinese students this is a powerful military but it's not tested and I think the leadership in fact is nervous about testing China so the recipe for the rest of us is I think to use this present time to strengthen and diversify our web of partnerships to build webs of dialogue and interoperability and trust really is creatively as we can and going to that point about the impact of COVID on the middle players a really interesting little green shoot that I'm seeing at the moment is the establishment of a quad plus dialogue India Japan Australia the United States Vietnam South Korea and New Zealand that confers regularly on COVID response on COVID management within our countries and I suspect increasingly on questions about the strategic picture supply chain security and so forth there will be many more processes like this and the challenge will be really to coordinate them and put substance behind them so I think we're at this I think I agree with Laurie that this is an inflection point but it's also the start of a very long game brilliant thank you very much for all of this and I have a quite a few questions so what I will try to do in the some conscious of the time try to bring them together and but before I do just would you say basically picking up on your very last point that perhaps China is as a tactically opportunistic or the way to recognize tension the way to reconcile the tension between the country that looks really sort of as you say dispersed towards expansion but in the very risk averse overall conceptualization of its action perhaps you could say that tactically it's very opportunistic and as a result of this whenever you go on opportunity you try not to waste an opportunity and you see that sort of a more aggressive or assertive behavior but it is operationally more sort of denial oriented and in a way that it doesn't want to expose itself too much and now going back to one of the points that you raised in your talk about the quads and I have quite a few questions about it so I will try to sort of bring them together and because we have still quite a few questions what we'll try to do is if you can sort of like shorten up the answer so that I can try to squeeze in as many as possible and two questions on the quad really are about whether the quads is still relevant in a post-covid environment and in particular within this context will the sort of COVID-19 context accelerate a conversation within the quads to make it even more multilateral and attached to this there was another question about the quads in which one of the key points that was asked was one thing is about facilitating people coming together in terms of a multilateral security context but another different thing is transforming their coming together into an operationally viable tool of statecrafts the two not being the same and where do you think we're going starting from the quads so is the quad going to survive post-covid is it going to open itself up what does it need to actually deliver in terms of being a viable tool for as far to the broad original architecture and security terms so I'll sort of cut to the the chase in a way I mean the quad the quad relateral dialogue is criticized for two contradictory reasons one is it's seen as threatening to China it's the nucleus of an Asian NATO it's the you know it's the posse it's a containment strategy the other criticism is that it's just a conversation in fact that it's weak at all bark and no bite that none of the quad members certainly in the quad framework are ever going to take risks on one another's behalf I mean yes US and Japan US and Australia have alliances and we obviously put a certain degree of confidence in those alliances but the quad itself is never you know for example India is not going to come to Japan's rescue in the east China sea or Japan to India's rescue on the border now you know I think in some ways a lot of that is asking the wrong questions because we shouldn't fetishize the quad you know I've never known a a meeting to be you know more words to be spent describing a diplomatic process that are actually expended inside that process but the quad has done one great thing and that is it's made the world safe for just about everything else you know it's been the phantom menace as I've written China's but all of this attention on the quad a lot of the real action is going on elsewhere it's the bilaterals it's the trilaterals it's the whole web of new security arrangements and dialogues in the Indo-Pacific and it so happens that we've achieved almost a quad by stealth through all those other arrangements and we're finding other countries Vietnam for example creeping into those arrangements too so I don't think we need to fixate on whether there'll ever be a quad alliance I do think the quad isn't going to go away that it's a dialogue that keeps strengthening it's now at ministerial level it's getting into more sensitive issues I think it's fair to assume that it doesn't just talk about disaster relief or naval activities this is whole spectrum of issues such as such as 5G such as geoeconomics such as technology such as supply chains such as COVID response where I think the quad will be useful but it's the quad plus it's all of the other arrangements I think that are going to be important and in many ways it's really about Chinese choices China's behavior and choices it's unlikely that we'll see the quad steadily move to a much more formal alliance system there is increasing I guess military exercising among various quad members but what we'll probably see instead is opportunistically in response to Chinese activities statements and I guess gradations of response by either twos or threes or fours of quad members other countries in the region and really signals setting limits to Chinese behavior in time and this goes to the wider question of the book in a way I think the this tension between China's risk aversion and yet its impulse to assertiveness and expansive assertiveness I think the way that this reconciles and it's probably not reconciliation it's more of a kind of a a friction the way that this resolves is going to be in incidents that China can't control because the Indo-Pacific empire if we assume it's China we're talking about here and and the Eurasian empire of the the rest of the BRI is going to lead to a proliferation of pressure points where expectations are raised that China has to do something you know Wolf Warrior is in fact the Wolf Warrior movies are in fact the second Wolf Warrior movie recommended to all viewers here is a fascinating kind of Rambo like window onto Chinese public expectation on the PLA and it's not for nothing that the making of Wolf Warrior 3 has been stopped by the Chinese government because they don't want these expectations raised further whether it's in Africa or South Asia or the Indian Ocean or the South Pacific or Central Asia China's and China's interests are going to get into trouble and there'll be an expectation on the PLA to act and of course as we all know from military history size isn't everything and you just cannot control the situation once those first shots are fired so i do argue that the quad members and the other middle powers have to hold the line strengthen our linkages and in some ways be ready for those occasions when when China stumbles because they're coming bro I couldn't agree more I mean the point you were making just there and perhaps it's symbolic but at the same time it gives you to think in a country where the government has many fingers and different pies at all times so this idea that Wolf Warrior 3 at the moment is is getting under wraps and nobody knows whether it's going to happen or not but at the same time we've seen from satellite imagery that the build-up of the base in Djibouti continues to be carried out really speaks to the point you were just making it's a country that at the moment is struggling to find a way to continue to increase its influence without at the same time raising question about expectations of being more involved in international security Laurie would you like to jump in here and if you have anything to add before I go to the last one the question yeah um well I haven't got a lot to add it I mean Djibouti is one of the most indebted of all countries also to China I think that I mean one of the interesting things to is the sort of anti-globalization movement as well that we now have to sort of crank in which is different from the one that we thought this isn't the occupying this is everybody looking at what's happened over the last few months and wishing that they had their own supply chains and more resilience and so on plus the fact that they can't afford as much as before so I think the how this reshapes trading relations is is uh is also an important part of this uh I haven't got an awful lot I mean I don't I mean I haven't got anything to disagree with on what Rory said I think you know it was it in Libya um not quite a decade ago less than a decade ago um but the Chinese got got into trouble and and other people had to help them out um I think if you have direct interest and a lot of your people I mean you know they have exported quite a lot of people in order to be part of these infrastructure projects um then you create risks you create risks of hostage situations of uh local violence and disturbance of your local clients uh getting into trouble I mean Rory talks about these sort of things um and um uh it only takes one of these to go wrong when when everybody else is watching that you get quite a lot of blowback and whereas I think you know up till recently there would have been everybody sort of rallied around and you try and help them uh because who knows who else is going to get into these sort of situations I I think you know this this is China's um strategy you look with it you make it work uh so I I it doesn't take very much you know one crisis in the wrong place and you get a very different perspective on on China's strength the crisis in the right place they may look very strong you know it it's uh there's an arbitrariness about this the but it's something that I think will um will will grow but you know I think you just have to keep on coming back to to the economic circumstances which allow China to grow so fast and effectively don't obtain in the same way anymore and that you know cranking that into our calculations is going to be hard because there's so much more to be understood yet um but I'm sure that's as worrying as anything else in in Beijing and I have uh this one last round of questions that really will sort of allow us to slowly draw the different threads together and I'd like to keep you both on because one certainly will concern the both of you and very briefly there's a question here the US alliance system the hub and stotes as it were um was constructed in in a if you want conceptual framework that was very much Pacific Western Pacific oriented um is it changing or should it change now that we're moving into a context of an Indo-Pacific framework unfolding from that there's a specific question about British defense policy and strategy and which I think is quite important in the sense that how is this all that is happening at the moment on the back of the debate that we were already having in this country last year going to affect British broader defense diplomacy and you know defense engagement if you want in the area in years to come and the specific um uh element of this question which I think is very important concerns the idea that the first deployment that the QEC task group would have done would have been towards the Asia Pacific um do you think that what is happening over the last few months will affect that and in a way will bring the British government to be more careful and perhaps postpone that deployment to avoid uh getting unnecessary attention and the third question which was sort of like bounces off from the previous two really is given what we've been discussing so far in what areas you think that's in Europe and sort of why the broader west uh we have overstated PSC's influence and conversely in what areas we have underestimated the speed and the rapidity of of Chinese influence and here I think the question at the moment in this country over 5G and in particular the the risk of communism being overtaken aggressively by Chinese counterparts as it was the risk a couple of weeks ago with a small but very important microchip manufacturer here in the UK I think it's it's a very topical question so are the alliance systems that were built during the sort of West Pacific conceptualization in need of a rigid and is that already happening what does this all mean to the UK in particular as we consider that the QEC first deployment was bound that part of the region and what is the impact on the fence engagement of all that is happening and have we underestimated China in some respect have we underestimated it in others um you go first Laurie you should have the last word anyway Laurie quickly on the on the US alliance um it's obviously and also the difference between Europe and in the Pacific we'll now call it is that in Europe the US is an an alliance in the part of the world it's got alliances and that makes an enormous difference but in both cases the sort of commitment especially in the nuclear field that the US took on in the 1950s are problematic I mean they put simply if the question was being raised now they wouldn't be taken off because these are high risk commitments they're accepted because the sort of part of the of the order of things it's the and they've worked in the alliance system has been has been good it's helped maintain a degree of order but um the doubts that Trump has expressed are not unique to him and I'm not sure we'll we'll go away to some extent the way that he's expressed them means I think we're now then they're now out there it's uh it doesn't matter so much as long as there aren't big challenges being mounted um but if things get more tense more conflictual um then I think uh the problematic aspects of alliance especially in in in terms of nuclear guarantees uh certainly won't go away on the UK and the on the UK carried well one of the things we've learned over the last few months is uh aircraft carriers aren't necessarily a good place to be in the major of covid um the the uh Americans in friendship had uh and probably others have had some trouble in that regard um I think the um I I think if you look at the way the debates are developing here I think the idea that the UK is going to go charging off as an independent strategic actor um just to assert freedom of navigation is uh is overstated I mean we we have to work with others um an awful lot of the carrier concepts uh depend on working with the US I mean it it's very integrated with it with American thinking uh deal with American aircraft to a degree also with the French there's a lot of discussion quite interesting discussions with the French uh because I'm not if we sent these if we had a serious task force um we wouldn't be able to provide the the uh escorts to go with it they don't have enough so I think that I think that there's some quite interesting questions that will open up there and it's important that Europeans show that they have an interest still uh strategic interest in what goes on but they're going to be bit players I mean I think it's unwise to project that they could do much more than that but you know and the uh it doesn't mean to say that they should be absent on um I think this question of Chinese influence um you know it's partly threats but it's partly inducements and there's um the Chinese have been able to uh put a lot of money into things and um it's not something that can be ignored some of us are old enough to remember when the Japanese were the ones who were supposed to be doing all of this in the late 80s um and they just bought everything inside because it seemed so cheap and given the way that their currency had been uh overvalued and um it didn't in the end ended up not doing them a lot of good because the economic conditions changed in part because their currency become overvalued so uh I think I think what's happened is that is that the the Chinese are not in a stronger position economically as they were I mean I think that just stands to reason from what has happened the their their budgets are going to be under pressure their their their internal debts um the trade isn't going to be they're in recession now the um the trade is going to take a long time to recover consumers are not going to be buying as much as what they want skepticism has grown about what they can offer about whether it's a lot of their a lot of their stuff is as good as it's it's claimed to be this is one of the problems with some of the belton rote initiatives the infrastructure isn't that good always uh so the so there's more skepticism and that gives um that gives europeans and others a bit more leverage you you don't you know you've got to you come up to other places you can think about doing more for yourself so again you know my hope would be that you just have a more balanced conversation with China you don't you know it's not a question of shutting it out or ignoring it you can't it's it's too important and there's too much mutual gain to be to come from cooperation but you just have to hope it's a bit more balanced and that the Chinese don't push their luck um and don't assume as you could really reasonably assume from the behavior of many european countries including the uk um up until the last few years um that the europeans are just um you know kataoic that we we want what they've got so badly that we'll agree to anything i just don't think that's the case anymore um and hopefully hopefully that will that'll lead to a more balanced relationship wonderful thank you very much lori and roi yeah look i um i don't disagree with those observations i'd i'd say three things and i mean on the on the the alliance system uh you know the book makes the argument that in fact again a lot of the great power relations uh in maritime asia were often playing across the two oceans it's just that perhaps because from about 1970 until uh sometime in the last 20 years we were calling it the asia pacific and we were thinking about east asia and treating the indian ocean as a separate space we weren't really noticing it but of course if you were the um the russian navy on their way to the battle of swishema or the um great white fleet um you know 100 over 100 years ago you were you were doing indopacific things the first world war at sea was an indopacific war and so on the the role of india in um or indian volunteers in defeating japan and the second world war was an indopacific thing so the u.s alliance system itself um although it was more east asian from the very beginning if you think about the involvement of australia as a u.s ally an indopacific country with with an indian and pacific ocean um sure was an indopacific alliance and so the role of australia now is actually becoming more important than the u.s alliance system because of our extraordinary vantage point at the the fulcrum of the two oceans secondly it doesn't have to just be allies that the united states engages to um to balance china and if the u.s was smarter about this game as it sometimes has been and perhaps yet could be it's going to find the right way to engage india india doesn't have to be an ally it just has to be india in order to complicate life for the for for the chinese and i think just to wrap up on that u.s point despite the you know the despair in fact that some of us see it the way america is at the moment and the way uh that that trump has been degrading american power and prestige uh there's still an enormous amount the united states can do in this region and i suspect that if the u.s comprehensively competes with china it's it's going to have to stay in the indopacific to do it on britain i think i agree wholeheartedly with that point that no one wants or expects or even hopes to see you know the the royal navy and full splendor sort of steaming to the to the rescue of the indopacific but that's not the point you know the point is that this is a sea of many flags it's a global region the south china sea is everyone's business and it's the center of the indopacific and whether it is the british or indeed the french the americans the japanese the indians the australians various asian countries there's going to be a balancing dynamic there as long as we're in circumstances short of fully full-scale confrontation or escalation to major power war and then of course it's going to be a a different game but most of the action in fact all the action at this stage happens at lower thresholds and i would emphasize for britain the the non-military engagement in the indopacific i mean if you look at what small and middle countries in the indian and pacific oceans need they need the ability to make wise decisions about how to spend chinese money or how to reject chinese money and how perhaps to accept other money or change their development pathways and so any kind of experience and training and development assistance in rule of law accountability transparency governance is what is needed and that should not be provided by any one country and even a more frugal or economically constrained britain is going to have a big part to play in that so i think countries like australia would welcome britain into the region in that regard and then finally that goes to the point about overestimating or underestimating china because it's in china's interest to project three messages one is that china's rise is and china's dominance is inevitable secondly the china's dominance is benign and thirdly that you will get hurt if you stand in the way now of course there's an interesting set of contradictions within the three parts of the message but that's what they are and it's important to interrogate all of those aspects of the message because in many ways the antibodies as we've heard this evening in many systems are beginning to wake up and in a way the sort of the the antibodies of the antipodes if you like the australian experience encountering and identifying china's influence interference and coercion is instructive for the whole world and so far australia is willing to pay the price of of that instruction this is in the end about achieving a settling point with china it's not about desiring confrontation it's certainly not about containment and it's certainly not about wishing for i guess the collapse or the unraveling of china but it's about finding a settling point and i still believe there are those in the chinese system who who can do that in some ways the right calibrations of pushback and respectful setting of limits is going to help china in the end find that settling point too so i'll i'll leave it there wonderful thank you very much this was a very rich um conversation that that spun across a number of different themes perhaps the to sum it all together it seems to me that one point that certainly comes across in the book and what we've discussed today we all must pay more attention within the india pacific to actors and then regional actors other than the united states and china if we want to have a picture that is articulated and it allows us to grasp where the dynamics of the international security of these people to the parts of the world are going in a way i could sort of turn the point that you raise in the book and is we really need to pay attention to what kind of maps the different actors are using because these will tell us or give us an indication or where the possible direction of travel is the second point that i take away from the conversation is that in in this process of paying attention to others um i think what comes across particularly for actors like the uk like some of the european actors who are in a way external but intrinsically connected and integrated with the region through connectivity global trade um there is an increased interest in some strategic visibility in that part of the world and as a result of that play through alliances bilateral relations and multilateral interactions in order to maximize the impact of that visibility and in a way it goes back to the point you were making worry about history and important of the history the indian pacific concept as we were discovering it today it's a rediscovery of an idea that existed for a long time and we've discussed this before in the 1960s when the india pacific was first used in the digital documents was about linking to others because you couldn't afford but to do it by yourself which links to the last point again that that that came across very powerfully during the entire conversation about connectivity and how connectivity in order to generate prosperity and stability it needs to sort of focus not just on matters of competition but also on matters of security and stability whether it is governance at sea whether it is rule of law whether it is about economic management of debts and therefore increase the procedures to ensure transparency and sustainability of projects the india pacific is this overarching broader concept that allow us to sort of identify the different layers of the question i am particularly grateful for the both of you to allow us to understand this in much greater depth and before we thank you both in the traditional fashion well very quick notes that some of the maps that rory kindly shared with us today you can actually find them in the book as i will show you and in caller which these days is a rare thing and perhaps it is evaluated by the book now you're too much of a gentleman so i'll do the sales pitch don't worry um i'll do that's all right and on this happy note thank you very much for everyone that followed us very from facebook with the live streaming and here and hopefully we'll see you soon with the next webinar certainly we have another one coming up next week we're talking with Sheila Smith at the Council of Foreign Relations on the latest book Rearming Japan thank you very much everyone rory lory thank you very much for showing you thank you very nicely done i appreciate it thank you all stay safe bye now bye