 Well, I'll begin by acknowledging, as we do, the first Australians on whose traditional lands we meet and to pay respects to the elders of the Ngunnawal people past and present. My name is Rory Medcalf, I'm the head of the National Security College here at ANU and it's a real pleasure again to welcome a distinguished international visitor to the College. Really as part of our work in really reaching out to the broader community, to the academic community, the media, civil society and other colleagues on some of the key national security challenges facing Australia and the world. So of course our visitor who we're here to hear from shortly, Nick Rasmussen, is really one of, I think it's fair to say, one of the most experienced and expert international practitioners in the field of counterterrorism and of course, although as we look at the strategic and security landscape facing Australia at the moment, there's a lot of issues on the horizon to do with interstate challenges, to do with foreign interference, to do with geopolitics. Nonetheless, the threat of terrorism is evolving and enduring so I think there'll be some very special insights you'll hear this evening. A word or two about the National Security College, most of you know who we are or you wouldn't be here this evening but just to emphasise I think the very distinct place that we hold in the ecosystem, if you like, of academic and think tank and other public engagement outfits in Australia these days, the National Security College is really quite unique because we work as a formal partnership between the Australian National University and the Commonwealth Government. So we are, I guess you could say we're both trusted and independent in the work that we do, bringing together policy makers, policy practitioners, national security practitioners, academia but also business and civil society for conversations about the hard issues, the difficult issues where we really need to build national policy going forward. We have an academic program of course but more than that we provide really the executive training to something like a thousand Australian government officials a year on a lot of the issues that you hear our public lectures covering. A really important part of our outreach in recent years has been the development of this distinguished visitors program that's supported by the Vice-Chancellor of ANU by Professor Brian Schmidt and of course our first distinguished visitor under that program was, it has been Jim Clapper, the former US Director of National Intelligence who joined us very recently for his second stay with ANU as a distinguished visitor. Next, if you like, on the list of our visitors it's great to welcome Nick Rasmussen who will be joining us for the next few weeks. In fact I think this is Nick's first public engagement straight off the plane yesterday so if our speaker looks like he's in a different time zone I'm sure he'll pull through but we're very grateful Nick for you sort of hitting the ground running. Just a few words really about Nick's background and really why it's such a privilege for us to host him here today. So the speaker you're about to hear is a national security practitioner with more than 27 years of experience in the United States government including much of that in the US intelligence community and for much of that really specialising in the challenge and the threat of terrorism and counter-terrorism. In fact I think Nick Rasmussen joined really the CT effort I think six days after 9-11 so I think there's a real story there. But a couple of points just to emphasise. One is that in his most recent senior appointment in government as the director of the National Counter-Terrorism Centre from 2014 to 2017 originally appointed under President Obama but also serving a year under President Trump and before that a whole series of senior appointments going as we said right back to 9-11. One interesting point to note of course is that while serving as special assistant to President Obama and senior director for counter-terrorism Nick Rasmussen led really the development of US counter-terrorism policy and strategy including support for policy deliberations leading up to the US military raid against Osama bin Laden and of course senior appointments under the Bush administration as well. This evening I really look forward to hearing insights obviously on the counter-terrorism agenda and that challenge but also about decision making on national security more broadly in the United States under past administrations but also under the I guess the rather unorthodox administration where we're dealing with here today. There'll be time for some Q&A afterwards and I'll invite my colleague Jacinta Carroll to facilitate that. But right now I'd like to ask you to join me in welcoming Nick Rasmussen. Thanks Rory for the very kind introduction and more than that thank you for the opportunity to pursue the fellowship experience here with the National Security College over the next three weeks. It was particularly it was a particularly appealing prospect to come to Canberra for me because throughout the history of my involvement in counter-terrorism work that Rory briefly sketched there was really no closer partner that I had across all of the different experiences I had in the counter-terrorism world than I had with Australian colleagues. No closer sense of partnership. I used to say to my staff at the National Counter-terrorism Center when I was getting ready for some senior engagement whether it was with a senior Australian leader from ASIO or ASIS or one of the other politicians or any of the different elements of the Australian government that actually didn't feel like I needed to be prepared. I didn't need to be given some set of talking points about what to say or what to think or how to engage with my Australian colleagues because we basically brought to the table already a commonality of values, a commonality of views, a commonality of understanding about the terrorism threat and so it was really a conversation among the closest of partners which made it easy but also particularly fruitful because hearing how the set of counter-terrorism challenges is managed here in Australia was often very instructive to us in the United States. What I thought I would do this evening and again leading into question and answer because obviously that's the much more interesting part of the evening and I hope to make this much more of an interactive back and forth rather than a speech. But what I thought I would do is briefly cut across three different topic areas, lay out some thoughts on each and obviously follow up on any or all of them over the course of the conversation. I first wanted to talk a little bit about the terrorism situation as we perceive it in the United States right now. Secondly, I want to say a few words about domestic terrorism in the United States right now which we treat differently and you can challenge me to explain why we treat it differently and I won't have a really good answer for you because I'm puzzled by that myself, why we would somehow put some kinds of terror activity into one bucket and other kinds of terror activity into another bucket. And I think that we've skirted around that question for a while in the United States and now we're going to be pushed to answer it more comprehensively because of some of the recent developments we've seen in the United States. And then after having talked a little bit about terrorism of both kinds, I want to broaden out as Roy suggested and talk a little bit more about how national security policy might look in the period ahead of the United States, particularly in the wake of the midterm elections and particularly in light of the, as Roy also indicated, the idiosyncratic decision making style exercised by our current leadership. So that's broadly speaking the three areas I'd like to cover, but I'll first start, as I said, with terrorism in the United States. And in many ways it's a strange time to be a senior counterterrorism expert or leader in a leadership position in the United States. And maybe that's why I left. Maybe that's exactly why it was time for me to get out. For most of the period after 9-11 I would argue that if you were in the terrorism business or you were a senior counterterrorism official, you had pretty much first claim on talent, on resource, on time and energy of senior officials. It was the singular, most singularly important national security issue we were facing in the United States for much of the period after, in the period since 9-11. It certainly was tied to other issues like the conflict in Afghanistan, the conflicts in other parts of the world, certainly in other key conflict zones around the world. But if you were looking to do something in the counterterrorism space and you needed to acquire resources or people or talent, you generally, as I said, had first claim on that. I would argue that's not the case anymore. And Jim Clapper, who was here as a fellow just a few weeks ago, Jim Clapper was my boss for much of my tenure as director of the National Counterterrorism Center. And once a year he and I and other senior leaders of the intelligence community would go in open hearing testimony in front of our Congress to lay out the whole array of threats that touch on U.S. national security interests at home and around the world. And in that testimony, which is comprehensive, by the time it was all laid out on paper it was often some 50, 60, 70 pages long as Clapper laid it all out and the rest of us chimed in with our bits and pieces of it. But progressively over time terrorism and counterterrorism moved from being way up high in paragraph one year after year after year to falling slightly lower in that litany of other national security challenges. And it's certainly not an afterthought, I wouldn't argue that. But certainly at the point when I left government 11 months ago, the testimony would often say, here's a whole series of national security threats we face. Oh yeah. And then this terrorism problem persists in much of its current form. And then it laid that out. But over time that challenge of dealing with the counterterrorism set of issues has become a little more complex because it is now no longer job one across the national security community in the United States. It sits up there along with a number of other first tier top tier priorities. And I don't have to articulate what those are. Obviously the threat posed by Iranian nuclear capabilities, potential Iranian nuclear capabilities, the North Korean nuclear problem, the challenge of Russian malevolent influence in the United States and exercised in other places around the world. The growth of China as a national security challenge to the United States, both in the Asia Pacific, but also globally. All of these, the set of cyber threats that you can tie to state actors around the world, all of these national security threats have creeped up in importance in recent years to the point where counter terrorism and terrorism aren't job one or aren't don't sit there alone at the top in the way that they once did. And that would be OK, except for the fact that I don't really think you can objectively look at the situation and say that we are past our terrorism challenges, that we don't have to worry about that set of issues anymore. So we've got this this problem of prioritization, I would argue, at a time when the problem that we were focused on most counter terrorism really hasn't changed or diminished as significant as significantly as we might like to think it has. If you think if you're looking at it inside the United States, if you are looking at the principal threat that we face inside the United States, it's from what we call using our term of art in the United States intelligence community homegrown violent extremists individuals who are not necessarily tied by direct order by direct contact by direct communication with foreign terrorist organizations like Al-Qaeda or ISIS, the Islamic State, but individuals who are instead radicalized, who carry with them the narrative of those terrorist organizations, but without necessarily having that direct command and control communication relationships. At last count, or at least the last public accounting of that count of the FBI director, director Ray, articulated in public testimony that there are over a thousand active FBI investigations spread across all 50 United States, involving some manner or some form of involvement in that kind of homegrown violent extremist activity. That's a lot of cases across quite a geographic span. This isn't, as we saw in the period after 9-11, a terrorism problem where, as I said, in the period after 9-11 that terrorism problem was often concentrated in a few large metropolitan areas. New York City needed to worry. Chicago needed to worry. Los Angeles and Washington needed to worry. But if you were actually living in 48 or 49 of those 50 states, terrorism probably really wasn't on your agenda. The homegrown violent extremism challenge, though, as I said, can be found literally everywhere in the United States. It could be in a rural area. It could be in a suburban area. It could be in a major metropolitan city, but it is not, as I said, the kind of problem that we faced in the immediate aftermath of 9-11. So, yes, that threat of attack directed or organized by a foreign terrorist organization like ISIS or Al-Qaeda is, in fact, down. And it's down largely due to the battlefield success we've had in theaters around different conflict zones around the world. And yet I find myself cringing when I hear senior officials say ISIS has been defeated or Al-Qaeda has been defeated. The analysis of my intelligence community colleagues who are still in government service, of course, is that we're a long way from achieving that objective. And I'm not saying that in order to ampe, hype, or otherwise exaggerate the threat, but just as to provide an honest assessment of where we think we are in the effort to degrade the terrorist capabilities of those organizations. Looking at ISIS, we expect ISIS to continue, even as it has lost much of its territorial caliphate. We expect ISIS to continue to be able to operate as an insurgent force for pretty much the indefinite future across large chunks of Iraq and Syria, and also to be able to continue to try to plot external attacks. Admittedly having much more difficult time doing so, having experienced the pressure of the counterterrorism campaign against it. And we also expect to see ISIS to try to continue to run or to operate itself as a global enterprise, working with various networks and affiliate organizations around the world to try to carry forward a global ISIS brand. And you could say much the same thing about al-Qaeda as well and its network of affiliates. Even with the remarkable amount of pressure that has been put on al-Qaeda, particularly core al-Qaeda operating in Afghanistan and Pakistan, the network still retains the ability to operate as a network, and increasingly it finds ways to communicate as a network despite the pressure that's been put on it. And so I try to look objectively at the threat, and I still see a lot to be concerned about. At the same time, I recognize, as I said just a few minutes ago, that that set of terrorism concerns does not sit alone, does not sit in isolation, and as I said sits alongside a host of other really critical national security threats, all of which demand their fair share of the resource pie. And so as I left government, one of the things I was most concerned about bequeathing to my successor was that he or she for the first time was going to face the potential for a decline in the amount of resources devoted to the problem set that he or she was going to be asked to focus on. And yet that problem set wasn't going to be in any way easier or more manageable than it was before. It was just going to have to be done with less of a share of the resources. And in my conversations with colleagues since I've left government, that effort, that project is underway. We as a government across the board of the United States are likely to be facing a period of declining resources. President Trump recently asked each of his cabinet officers to come in with a budget that is 5% less than what each of them had just submitted in the months leading up to the recent budget process. So imagine putting a 5% cut across all of the defense, intelligence, law enforcement, and national security establishment. Where does that cut come from? It's hard to imagine it's going to come from all other areas and not counterterrorism. And so again, I expect that my colleagues doing counter terrorism work will be expected to do more with less. And yet the tolerance that I would argue the public has for failure or potentially a dropped ball or a missed signal or some error in the project, we still operate very much in a zero error rate environment in the counterterrorism world. That is what you expect of your government, of your law enforcement and your intelligence officials. It's what you should expect of them. But I would argue that that record of achievement will be harder to sustain in the United States if we are in a period of declining resources. And so again, this huge set of looming questions about resources is coming at a point when I think the tendency will be to try to be somewhat complacent about the terrorist threat because we haven't actually had recent experience with terrorism of this particular sort inside the United States. I think to myself if we in the United States had experienced in the last four, five, six weeks what you have experienced here just in the last four, five, six weeks with the two incidents in Melbourne, I wonder allowed to myself about whether that might trigger a relook at the way we're thinking about resource decisions. And yet I think to myself though we haven't had incidents like those in Melbourne in recent days, there's absolutely no reason to feel complacent about that fact. It's only in most cases as a result of good law enforcement work, good intelligence work, and then of course a fair amount of luck that causes us to avoid exactly those same outcomes. So again, stepping back and looking at the counter-terrorism environment, I'm not here to tell you that it is more scary than before or that it is as scary as it was at its peak. I'm simply here to say that it's a persistent threat and one that's unlikely to significantly diminish at least in the time horizons available to most public policymakers. Second set of issues I wanted to mention is one I probably wouldn't even have touched on had I been here six months ago and that is the issue of domestic terrorism in the United States. And my own view is that this is the piece of the terrorism problem that we're at risk of growing the fastest or the most rapidly in the United States. And yet I would also argue that it's the part of the problem set that we are postured least well to deal with going forward. And I'll come explain why in a couple minutes. And again, looking objectively just at volume, I mentioned a few minutes ago that Director Ray, our FBI, director spelled out that we had some 1,000 cases across 50 states dealing with traditional home-grown violent extremists of the just for lack of a better term, the jihadist motivation. That number is equalled by the number of FBI investigations. Again, roughly 1,000 FBI investigations involving individuals involved in some form of domestic terrorism. And that, of course, can be everything from driven by ideologies ranging from violent anti-Semitism, race-based ideologies, environmental terrorists, any of a number of different ideologies. But the distinguishing factors that these individuals are not tied to some foreign terrorist organization or some ideology propagated by a foreign terrorist organization. And that is why we have chosen to categorize them differently. So this caseload is roughly equal between those two problem sets. And yet I would argue that we don't look at the problems in the same way in terms of the saliency and the public debate. And at the same time, I would also argue that the rhetoric that you see much more of in the United States these days that includes angry rhetoric, often verging on hate speech, and other forms of speech that can easily be viewed as incitement. All of that is much more prevalent than in previous years. And I would argue more likely to trigger violence of the sort you saw at that horrific shooting attack at the synagogue in Pittsburgh a few weeks ago. So I would argue that this is a problem we are likely to see gaining in prominence, more likely to see increasing in volume as compared to what we've seen in recent years. And why do I say that we're not postured to deal with this problem set, perhaps as effectively as we're postured to deal with other challenges to national security in the United States? The reason I say that is if you think about the responsibility a government has to conduct a whole of government response to a national security challenge. When you're talking about regular terrorism, and I throw the air quotes around the word regular terrorism, but the terrorism of the sort that involves foreign terrorist organizations or individuals motivated by foreign terrorist organizations, our response is really quite tried and true at this point. We have a very, very well developed interagency organizational process across all of the different organs of our government. We actually have a fair amount of muscle memory, I would argue, unfortunately, having lived through so many of these events. And now were we to face an event like you faced in Melbourne just within the last 48 hours, 24, 48 hours, I know what would have happened in our system. The White House would have called a series of meetings around the Situation Room table at the White House. 10, 11, 12 different agencies of government would have gathered around the table. Each of those organizations bringing to the table its own set of capabilities and resources, what it does well, what it does uniquely well, and there would have been a conversation among each of them, among all of them, about coordinating and syncing those activities to make sure that it all was operating as part of a cohesive whole of government operation. That's what would happen if we had a terrorist attack overseas. That's what would happen if we had a terrorist attack at home tied to a foreign terrorist ideology. Contrast, what happened after Pittsburgh? Well, I wasn't in government, so I don't know. But what I suspect happened was everybody looked around and said, should we have a meeting? Because the number of actors in government who actually were involved in managing the response to something like Pittsburgh is much smaller. It's treated as a law enforcement activity by the Federal Bureau of Investigation. And this is by no means any attempt to disparage what FBI is doing to investigate and bring justice to the perpetrator of the Pittsburgh attack. But FBI comes at it after the event has taken place and comes at it with the idea of how do we bring this individual to justice? The Department of Justice would be around the table for that conversation with the same mindset. And the Department of Homeland Security would also be around the table for the purposes of talking about how to engage with communities around the country to share information with them to make sure that they're postured themselves to deal with those similar kinds of attack. Three cabinet level departments or organizations around the table to manage a domestic terrorism incident. 11, 12, 13, 14, 15 organizations around the table to bring a similar amount of government focus on a question of international terrorism. And again, that's a simple and raw way of looking at it, but it tells me that we're probably not yet in the United States at the point where we have a whole of government response to the domestic terrorism problem that is likely to grow in the period ahead. And this isn't about me poking at the Trump administration in this regard. I would argue that had this similar type of incident happened a couple of years ago during the Obama administration, we could very easily have found ourselves in the same position asking, gee, are we really mounting a whole of government approach? Have we drawn on all of the different capabilities we have as a country to counter a domestic terrorism incident? And why are we treating it differently, as I said earlier, because it's this kind of terrorism as opposed to that kind of terrorism? So again, I think the Trump administration will find itself facing a set of challenges in this regard. But I would argue that these are challenges that any administration would have faced. The challenges to the Trump administration perhaps are more acute because of the president's political rhetoric and because the president has thus far proven somewhat unwilling to speak candidly or openly about the degree to which certain adherents to extremist ideologies identify with the president even if he says that he doesn't identify with them. So I would argue that we are at a point where there's going to be some demand for more of a whole-of-government response to this domestic terrorism problem. There is a glimmer of good news in this, in my mind, and that is just a few weeks ago, and it went relatively unnoticed. But the United States, the Trump administration issued its 30-plus pages of a global counter-terrorism strategy. And it contained all of the language you would expect dealing with the usual set of terrorism challenges we've faced in the period since 9-11. But it also highlighted and identified domestic terrorism as something being worthy of greater government focus and attention and response. So it was heartening to me to see that the domestic terrorism problem was lifted up and given some prominence in that strategy document. But as with all strategy documents, what matters is not the strategy document, but what follows there from. Resources, programs, programmatic activity, actual prioritization. And that's something that we'll only be able to tell with time. Will the administration make this a priority? Or will they back up their words in the strategy document with actual programs and dollars and rhetorical commitment? So third and last set of issues I wanted to talk about is an attempt to broaden out a little bit beyond the pure set of terrorism and counter-terrorism issues for which I was directly responsible in government. And as Rory indicated, my experience in government doing counter-terrorism and terrorism work, the thing in our system is what it did was put me at the table for most of the key national security discussions across a whole range of different issues to include policy in the Middle East, policy in South Asia, policy dealing with Iran. So again, counter-terrorism was viewed so broadly inside our government that it put me at the table for most of those discussions as well. And what I thought I would do is quickly sketch what I think that national security landscape will look like in the wake of the mid-term elections that we had just a few weeks ago. I think it's fair to say that based on the way the first two years of the Trump administration have played out, we now have a president who is perhaps more confident in his instincts, more confident in his own judgment on matters of national security and foreign policy than he was at the outset of his administration. In many ways, I would argue that the president feels validated and vindicated by certain approaches he has taken so far on issues like Iran, on issues like relations with our NATO allies, on issues related to North Korea. On any number of issues, I think the president feels like his approach, his instincts, his policy inclination has largely been borne out and validated. I'm setting aside for the moment whether you agree or whether I agree with that judgment. I'm just providing my sense of how I think he's proceeding at this point. And then similarly, or in a companion fashion, most of the areas where he is unhappy or unsettled about American foreign policy or national security policy right now, happen to fall in areas where he feels like he's been pushed to act against his natural inclinations or things he declared to be policy preferences or choices in the campaign. Basically, he was forced to go against his own views, his own wishes, and in a sense was pushed by his advisors to do things he didn't want to do. And I would put into that category our sustained and continued involvement in Afghanistan, where the president was very clear that he wanted out and wanted out on a very rapid timetable. And yet here we are largely having sustained US policy in Afghanistan in recent years. And in Syria as well, where the president made very clear during the course of the campaign that he didn't see why we were in Syria. He wondered why it made sense for the US to be involved in trying to bring a solution to the Syria conflict and certainly was opposed to the idea of military deployments in Syria and Iraq. And yet here we are having sustained both that diplomatic approach and those military deployments. So again, I'm seeing at this point my sense as a president who is more confident in his own judgment on these national security issues. And as a result, less feeling like he needs to be reliant on senior advisors who have years of expertise or experience in dealing with these issues, the so-called establishment experience, establishment set of figures who have long experience in national security affairs. I would also argue that the president is less attached to regular order decision-making of the sort that you were taught in public policy schools, whether it's here in Australia or in the United States. The fundamentals of process and procedure in our National Security Council system, I would argue, have largely looked the same under both democratic and Republican administrations in at least over the last couple of decades. Some of the acronyms may change. Some of the exact descriptions of how policy committees are formed and what function they perform change. But by and large, the National Security Council system in the United States has looked the same for most of the last 20 or 30 years. And yet this administration does not have a particular attachment to that National Security Council decision-making process. The fundamentals of the process and procedure of the NSC system, as we've come to know at the United States, simply don't hold value on their face for this president and for his set of senior advisors. And that concerns me. And we can talk more about why it concerns me in the course of the Q&A. The second change I would point to in the post-midterm election environment, of course, is tied to the change in control of the House of Representatives, which, again, if you'd simply turned on the TV a couple of weeks ago on election night, you would have thought that there was just a modest win for the Democrats in the House of Representatives when actually, in fact, it has become a much more significant win, as different races have been called in the last couple of weeks, as certain election results have been slower to come in. So the president faces a much more uphill battle in dealing with one of the Houses of Congress than he anticipated, certainly than he faced during the first two years, and probably even more so than he anticipated having watched election night returns. And what you can expect because of that is much more aggressive oversight by House committees that will attempt to limit the president's freedom of action on key foreign policy priorities. And in many cases, we'll put the administration on the defensive in dealing with the Congress. I can tell you, from having served in positions where I was required to appear before the Congress, that requirement can suck time, energy, and effort, and rise to the top of your priority list faster than almost anything else you work on in government. If you are going to be spending time in front of committees that are responsible for oversight of your operations and are responsible for creating the budget support for all that you wish to do, nothing else takes greater priority than that. And so having those committees now chaired by men and women and senior democratic representatives who were elected with the idea that more oversight needs to be inflicted upon the Trump administration, you can expect a much more confrontational relationship between the House of Representatives and the president and his administration. Just two very simple examples. The House Intelligence Committee, House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, has flipped from being run by Devin Schiff, one of the president's most ardent defenders and supporters on all matters related to Russia and Russian influence in US elections. And now instead is most likely to be chaired by Adam Schiff, one of the president's most articulate and vocal critics on that same set of issues. So one can only imagine the agenda of hearings and public and closed hearings that the Intelligence Committee will want to begin scheduling early in calendar 2019. You can imagine that various Trump administration officials will be asked to appear in those hearings, explain their behavior, explain why they either accept or don't accept the Intelligence Community's conclusions on Russian interference. All of that stuff will be much more on the agenda. And as I said, we'll suck up time, energy, and attention. The House International Relations Committee is almost certain to engage in a series of steps to try to block or limit the degree to which the administration can continue to cooperate with Saudi Arabia in the wake of the Khashoggi murder and in the wake of the rather public and rather extraordinary exposure in public of the Intelligence Community's conclusions about responsibility for that murder. These are just a couple of examples where you can expect the Congress to be much more activist, much more interventionist, much more willing to try to thwart and block and prevent the administration from pursuing the priorities that it has set for itself. So you can anticipate a harder time for the president, a harder time for him to do what he wants, exactly at the moment, as I said earlier, where he is feeling most confident that he should be allowed to do what he wants because, as I said, feeling validated and vindicated by the approaches he has taken thus far. So thus, you can expect clashes in the period ahead. And with many of those clashes playing out, I would argue, in public. Lastly, I think I thought I would finish with just a few words on the regular order decision-making process that I described or alluded to a couple of minutes ago. And you might have seen this weekend in the US, there was some criticism levied by the president against Admiral Bill McRaven, a storied figure in our American Special Forces community. And by all accounts, the architect of at least the military portions of the raid that brought ultimate justice to Osama bin Laden. On the one hand, having the president criticize someone like Admiral McRaven for most of us was probably just another day in American politics right now. It is what it is. It's hard to be surprised these days by almost anything you see in American politics. On the other hand, it was pretty extraordinary to see that that was played out in a public interview like that. And it underscored, at least it underscored to me, just how freely the president feels comfortable in rejecting conventional wisdom and regular order in terms of national security processes and decision-making. And why do I say that? Because the bin Laden raid in many ways, something he went out of his way to criticize and to criticize the architects of, the bin Laden raid was, in my mind, a tremendous policy and strategy success. And it turned out that way precisely, in my view, because the decisions were arrived at using those tools and those processes of regular order that, as I said, are not necessarily things that this president feels attached to. In this case, the case of the bin Laden raid back in 2011, regular order meant using intelligence to its full effect, using intelligence to try to generate options, to guide decision-making. You were, in fact, relying on provision of good intelligence, acquisition of good intelligence, and then intelligence analysis to tell you what it means and what you can do with it. In August of 2010 was the first time that President Obama was briefed on the idea that there might be a compound at which, in Pakistan, at which Osama bin Laden might be located. And from that period until May 2011, when the operation actually took place, that intelligence picture was refined almost on a daily basis to provide the best possible window into what our options might be if there was a decision made to go after the compound. In the case of the bin Laden raid, regular order also meant a formal meeting structure, very much in line with what I described earlier of our National Security Council system. And in our system, the key decision-making bodies of the National Security Council system are the deputies committee and the principals committee, where the number twos of our organizations meet to tee up decisions for the principals, the cabinet level, minister level decision makers of our government. And over the course of, and those committee meetings are organized to review intelligence, to make sense of the intelligence, but to then to review options, to develop policy courses of action, to assess risk, to develop means of assessing cost benefit, and ultimately to make a recommendation to the president on what a proper or what the appropriate course of action would be. And over that period from February 2011 to May 2011, when the president ultimately made the decision to authorize the military operation, there were 14 such meetings of our principals committee and deputies committee to sort through all of the different issues associated with the decision to carry out an attack or a military operation in another sovereign country to satisfy a core counterterrorism objective for the United States. 14 different meetings sequenced over those two to three months, each of which, I would argue, put us in a position to make a better recommendation to the president to bring us to a place where the president could actually make an informed, thoughtful decision about whether it was the right thing to do. Regular order, I would also argue, meant doing an extraordinary amount of homework across different agencies and departments of government. Each of the options considered during the run-up to the bin Laden rate, and there were a number of options considered, generated additional requests for intelligence analysis, both intelligence information and intelligence analysis, and also requests for ever more refined intelligence analysis. Each option also generated what we would call branch and sequel development. If this, then what? If we do this and there is this result, what will that require from us at that stage? And if you're doing that across a number of different options, think about the way that exponentially expands the homework assignment to each of the departments and agencies of government who were involved. All of this was, I would argue, very structured and very rigorous policy analysis of the sort that you would teach if you were giving a course on it, but it was also taking place under conditions of extraordinary secrecy. The information was being held extremely closely and there was very, very limited involvement by staff except at the most senior levels and there was almost no sharing of information horizontally or vertically within or across all of the different organizations involved. Now operating in that way where you restrict information and you restrict participation, that very much increases risk and increases the risk that you can have some form of groupthink or some form of self-reinforcing dynamic in the group that will limit actually imagination. But maintaining that secrecy also preserved decision space for President Obama in a way that a wider group might not have allowed him to do. The inclusion of a wider circle of people in the decision-making process would almost certainly have led to a leaking of the information at some point which would, of course, cut off certain options. Of course this story we know because we know how it turned out it does have the positive happy ending because the outcome at least from a United States perspective was a good one. And my first takeaway from that was that we actually did get a good outcome because we did things in the right way, that there was a structured, rigorous, repeatable, predictable process by which information was evaluated, courses of action developed and then rigorously debated and people on all sides of the issue for against and neutral were heard and their views incorporated into the President's thinking before he ultimately made a decision. My second takeaway, even after saying what I just said was that we also got lucky because luck certainly plays into most foreign policy and national security successes. I say that because I can identify in retrospect at least three really, really bad big mistakes that were made in the course of the very work I just described as being so admirable in the decision-making run-up to the bin Laden raid. Each of those mistakes could have given us a bad outcome by having the information leak out or in some other way thwarting or making the decision process unsuccessful. And I won't go into the details of those three mistakes, but one of them involved very early on sharing of the information in legitimate channels, sharing of information about the potential for a bin Laden compound to exist with key members of Congress as part of satisfying the Congress's right proper oversight role. But of course, sharing that information with Congress rather dramatically increase or even select members of Congress rather dramatically increased the odds that it would leak out beyond the set of the senior decision-makers who were actually involved in the decision. Luckily, that was managed and contained. Second major mistake we made was the exclusion. Again, I would argue the exclusion right up until the last of senior officials from the FBI and from Department of Homeland Security, even though we knew and assessed that whatever happened as a result of the bin Laden raid, there was a chance that domestic terrorism inside the United States would increase in the aftermath that al-Qaeda or al-Qaeda-motivated individuals might seek to retaliate against the United States in the aftermath of the 9-11 or in the aftermath of the bin Laden raid. And even though we knew that intellectually still for purposes of keeping the group tight and keeping the group small, the decision was made not to include of senior officials from FBI and DHS till literally the last moment. And so any effort they might have wanted to engage into prepare to somehow be postured on their toes, if you would, was removed because again, they like most Americans only found out about the raid as it was happening. And again, I look back at that and say that was a mistake to have operated that way and we accepted some risk because of making that decision, but again, we escaped the worst outcome. And then the last of the mistakes I think we made in the course of achieving what was otherwise a good outcome was something that sounded good in theory but was executed actually, I would argue quite poorly and that was a red team exercise that was commissioned at the very, very last couple of days or weeks leading to the president's decision. All of this debate over how much of, what were the odds, what was the likelihood that Obama that Osama bin Laden was present at the compound in Pakistan led to a very vigorous debate over how much we could rely on the intelligence judgments that were being made. And some senior officials were not quite comfortable that we had made those, we arrived at the right judgments and so one of the senior officials around the table at a very late juncture said, why don't we commission a red team analysis by a set of analysts from outside the group who's been looking at this problem for so long and get a set of fresh eyes and that way we'll have more assurance that we've made the right intelligence judgment. And of course, who could argue with a step that would give us more confidence, better judgment, more certitude. And yet we executed it extremely poorly. There turned out to be no way to bring into the picture at a very late juncture a set of people who had no background or very limited background on the issue and ask them to in a very compressed period of time only seeing a slice of the information to reach a judgment that was actually all that useful. And unfortunately that judgment that this red team made was that the chances that bin Laden were at the compound were somewhere a little less than 50%. And of course that introduced very late into the policy deliberations significant doubt. Well, wait a minute, why are we doing this if we're not even 50% sure that this is the right intelligence answer? And of course, even putting the number 50% out there was faux fake precision of the highest order and attaching numbers to something where numbers shouldn't be attached. And again, I would argue that these were missteps in our policy process that we somehow escaped because we had an extremely smart and thoughtful president who found a way to work around the flaws of the process that was serving him well, but not as well as it might have. So my takeaway is that we had this good outcome but that we did kind of narrowly skirt a couple of missteps that might have taken us in a bad direction. But my main takeaway is that process work that this process of regular order is to be relied upon whether it's dealing with an issue like the Bin Laden raid or something is how to respond to a the Khashoggi murder dealing with the Saudis. And that when you rely on that process you generally bring to the table the full array of insights, expertise and experience from around the government rather than just relying on a much smaller tighter circle where biases may be more present and where information may be more limited. And unfortunately my last takeaway is one that is not all that encouraging. And it's that I don't anticipate that this administration will change its policy or change its approach to this question of regular order decision making by all accounts the number and frequency of senior level meetings on national security challenges and problems is way, way down from previous administrations and not that raw meeting count should be a final arbiter of whether somebody's doing a good job or not. But what it tells me is that decisions are then being made in much smaller circles in much more ad hoc gatherings. And to me that raises policy risk and the opportunity for mistakes to be made. To me the best way to increase the odds of policy success and to reduce the risk of failure is to rely when you can on regular order. And that regular order doesn't place a premium on instinct or feel or gut in approaching tough policy issues. It actually seeks to step through in a methodical way, both the intelligence picture, the available options and the cost benefits associated with those options. And again it's only one episode in history this bin Laden raid, but it's one I would argue that it can be used to illustrate when how we can benefit when regular order process is followed. But given the events of the weekend and with the way that the bin Laden raid was again in the news, I thought I would quickly spin through it for the purposes of this discussion. Why don't I stop there? I'm happy to talk about any of the issues related to terrorism and counter-terrorism, but also broader national security decision-making as Rory indicated. I served for a full year inside the Trump administration and so I had a chance to be a participant in national security decision-making across a number of administrations. And I'm happy to talk about any of it. What an amazing invitation there. Let's think about questions going from Bush straight through to Trump. I'm Jacinta Carroll from the National Security College and just very quickly before we get into Q&A, what an extraordinary thing to have these insights from someone who has been on the inside of national security in the most powerful country in the world during such an extraordinary time. So thank you, Nick. And of course being the National Security College and being committed to good public policy, what a beautiful way to round out our discussion of these difficult issues. And I would note the generosity of the University of Arizona and the McCain Institute in lending you to us. As you see from above us and Nick's bio, he is the senior director of the counter-terrorism program, but also walking the talk on public policy and developing a program on public policy in your academic role, Nick. So we always look forward to that. We now go to Q&A. We do have some microphones. I'll be just pointing out and if you could just wait until the microphone gets to you and state your name and any affiliation as well, please. My name's Katrina. I'm currently studying a Master's of National Security Policy. So thank you very much for coming along to Australia and speaking with us today. I know you spoke about it a lot in your speech, but I was hoping you could unpack actually a lot more about what's happening in process. And I think it's quite extraordinary that people actually haven't commented on just how much intelligence was leaked by what has gone into the Washington Post article. I mean, it looks... On Khashoggi. Yeah, and it looks pretty much like straight signals intelligence. I mean, it can't be much more. And at the same time, you have a very odd situation with the firing of Myra Rakaddel this week over a fight with the First Lady. And it does seem to be that process is breaking down. Is this just because there aren't enough people in the right places? And as we've seen in OSD, there are so many vacant seats. Or is this far more about Trump's process? I think there's a couple of things to unpack there, and I'm not sure they all connect in one single thread. There is no... It is an absolute truth that this administration still has many, many senior-level vacancies in critical positions. And certainly President Trump has at various points complained that his nominees are not getting through the Congress and the Senate process, confirmation process, with sufficient speed and there probably is some grain of truth to that argument. On the other hand, there's a whole number, I mean, there's an unprecedentedly large number of vacancies for which no nominee has even been put forward. Or the nominee is sufficiently problematic that you can't blame the Senate for giving it the scrutiny that they are. And so I tie some of that to being this was an unorthodox administration with an unorthodox transition. And so generating that list of names for positions was simply a much more challenging task. In my own case, I stepped down on December 23rd of last year from the director of the National Counterterrorism position and we sit here today, 11 months, 10 and a half months later, and my successor is not yet confirmed by the Senate. And regardless of your politics, that's just not a good thing. There is someone who has been identified and nominated, but that person is not yet through the process for whatever reason. And if that can happen in a position as critical as one in the National, as critical as one in the counterterrorism field, imagine as you look across the whole of government, how often that is happening. And that leaves a lot, large swaths of these national security organizations, not leaderless, but with individuals who are in a sense in a holding pattern. And that just is challenging. Break, break, separate from that, the kind of succession of moves to new national security advisors, the single most important person serving the president in terms of guiding structure and process on national security decision making, we've moved from Mike Flynn to HR McMaster to now John Bolton. And I would argue that based on what we've seen so far that HR McMaster brought much more of a rigorous adherence to structure and process than either his immediate predecessor or his immediate successor. And he was, I think, swimming upstream for much of that period of time and wanting to bring rigor and structure in order to decision making processes. Again, my sense is, and some of this has been just reported publicly in various press accounts, Mr. Bolton sees more virtue in bringing very small groups of people together with the president to consider options in a very closed setting. And again, while that increased, again, I don't wanna sound like I'm totally bashing here because the way things leak in Washington, you expose yourself much more to that leaking problem by having wider meetings with more people attending, more people attending who you don't know, who you don't trust. And that constrains the conversation and constrains decision making in its own way. Correcting for that, though, can put you at risk of other forms of policy or other forms of vulnerability. And as I said, if you bring a group together that is like-minded or thinks and talks alike and has already made most of a decision before they've even met with each other, then obviously that can constrain the way that options are looked at. And I think that's something I would worry about. I mean, again, I don't know that this has happened or not happened, but in the Khashoggi case, what I wish or hoped would happen would be a meeting around the situation table where the intelligence community could lay out in great detail for the president if these are the conclusions that they reached, why they reached them, on what basis they reached them, what level of confidence they had in their judgments. And then that would open the door to a policy discussion where everybody would be operating on the same page of intelligence. You wouldn't be able to say, I think I've heard this or I'm told that this is what the intelligence community views are. And I'm not confident that that kind of meeting with everybody around the table would be the standard operating procedure in this administration. So bring comments. Thank you. My name is Diego, doing a master's here in IR. Two questions. The first one is regarding Hezbollah. Considering the increased intention between Iran and President Trump and Hezbollah presidents in Latin America. And the second question is regarding domestic terrorism in the US. The ban has historically anti-government, especially originated from the Turned Iris School. So Timoth MacKay would be the biggest example. And considering the last election of the lower house with the highest number of minorities taking seats and the possibility of Trump losing the election if you expect that tension to increase in the US. It's a good question. I'll answer the second part first. I think it's one of the things I worry about personally is, again, I find myself in sympathy with the president when he says, wait a minute, why are you holding me personally accountable for the actions of some individual who did some horrific thing? I didn't recommend that anybody pursue violence. But I think the atmosphere that we are in right now that we find ourselves living in right now where political rhetoric tends to be extreme. When political rhetoric is extreme, it is heard by certain fringe audiences as leading them to do extreme things. And while that is always true, it was true at the time of Timothy McVeigh, I would just argue that with volume and velocity, we've increased the odds of that happening in the period going forward. And while you can argue that, I mean, one of the criticisms that I think some analysts face in Washington right now is that everybody says, but what about? And then points to something on the other side of the political debate as if there's kind of an equality or parity in the degree to which the language is extreme on both sides. I don't think you can argue that there is such a parity. Hezbollah, though much of the post-911 era has focused on, in the United States for counter-terrorism has focused on al-Qaeda and more recently ISIS, it was always the case that we felt like Hezbollah was a first-tier terrorist organization with global reach and global capability and we as the United States had to be prepared to deal with what Hezbollah might seek to do in terms of its asymmetric capability at any point. And we always judged, and at least at the point I departed government service, our judgment was that if a conflict with Iran over the nuclear program or some other issue arose, we would have to account for, in our decision-making, we would have to account for the likelihood that Hezbollah would be used as a proxy or would act on its own in support of Iran and would do so, as I said, in asymmetric ways. And we couldn't simply count on a battlefield war against Iran. We would have to, if we were to engage in conflict with Iran, we would have to expect that the conflict would have an asymmetric dimension to it. And the way we always, the way I always thought about it was, Hezbollah, its leadership has a well-defined, well-resourced capability to carry out these terrorist operations around the world. And over time, they have developed a playbook, in a sense, a manual, that they can simply pull off the shelf at any point and they've already gotten the work, the investment, the infrastructure in place to carry out these operations and we would have to assume that they could begin to operate in this way almost immediately. And so, as a result, we would have to plan in our own military and intelligent circles to be able to counter that. And it was something we would have to factor into any decision to amp up or escalate with Iran. Just behind, oh, sorry, in front, and then you- Thanks, Nicholas. I've just got a question with American foreign policy in and around the Middle East. If we look at Libya and then Iraq and Afghanistan and now Syria, you know, there's this constant agenda of regime change and I'm not necessarily against the idea of regime change per se, but it seems like the Middle East now is more of a breeding ground for Islamic extremism because a lot of these policies have effectively failed. I'm sad to say, you know, because it started out with this war on terror, really. I suppose it was Islamic extremism. It's sort of degraded into this, well, shit fight in the Middle East. I don't know how else to put it. It's kind of nightmarish. Have you got some sort of rationale between how this is going to resolve itself? Short answer is no, I don't. And I guess I've seen an evolution in my own thinking over the course of the last 16, 17 years dealing with terrorism. My own view is that we have often articulated strategies and policies that say we will go to X part of the world and fix the problem that created the terrorism problem that we are facing. And I actually, several years ago, kind of transitioned in my own mind to a different framework which is we need to bring much more humility to that project because that project has not turned out particularly well when it has been tried. And instead, think about how can you mitigate or manage the terrorism problem that you face rather than trying to throw some massive amount of resource at it with an interventionist strategy. You know, you used regime change, but I would argue it's not just regime change. It's other places around the world where we have felt that we could, through infusions of assistance, through much more aggressive involvement, that we could not dictate outcomes but lead to outcomes that would make the terrorism problem less acute for ourselves. And I just don't think the track record of that is very good at this point. So what's the policy prescription? It isn't sit at home and wait for it all to happen because I don't think that's, in a way, what I'm talking about requires in some ways to be more aggressive in going after particular terrorist bad actors. I don't back away from that requirement or that commitment that the United States has shown. But I would back away, in my own mind, from thinking that we have the toolkit that allows us to actually solve the underlying drivers of extremism in large parts of the Middle East because I don't think that's within our reach and we shouldn't convince ourselves that it is within our reach. I think articulating it as a war on terror made it seem like we could win that war when instead, this is something Clapper used to say when we were working together, we should talk about mitigating and blunting and keeping at bay these set of terrorism problems not articulating it in terms of winning or losing or defeating or victory or defeat. We've got time, unfortunately, only for two more questions unless we do them really quickly. So just up there and one there. That's okay. If we can, there's lots of hands everywhere and if we can up there. Hi, Nicholas. My name's Ethan. Thanks for everything you've said so far. I just wanna come back to Afghanistan and Pakistan if I can. You mentioned that the Trump administration has been persuaded to keep the previous course in Afghanistan and obviously Osama bin Laden was in Pakistan. How do you reconcile the fact that on one hand the top leadership of the Taliban and al-Qaeda in Pakistan and that the Pakistani government is widely thought to be either incompetent at counter-terrorism or actively facilitating it and on the other hand Pakistan is supposed to be an ally of the United States and you have an imperative to stop, for example, nuclear weapons from falling into the hands of terrorists so you need to remain the ally. How do you reconcile that in your experience? Well, for much of the post-911 period when al-Qaeda was our principal terrorist adversary and al-Qaeda was still very operationally and very capably led out of safe havens in Pakistan, that issue took priority over all others and so I can't tell you how many times senior American officials were teed up to go to Islamabad to have this time were serious conversations about we'll only do this with you if you cease doing what you were doing to support various forms of extremism and that conversation was had again and again and again by policy officials, by military officials, by intelligence officials and yet the alternative from our perspective of walking away, of not engaging in some form of security cooperation with Pakistan so that we could, with their acquiescence, engage in counter-terrorism operations against our terrorist adversaries in al-Qaeda, that wasn't a policy choice. It just wasn't. Now, today, President Trump is coming at this issue differently and I think he would argue that I'm the first guy that's willing to call the Pakistanis out for double dealing on extremism. I'm the one that's willing to cut off aid to them. Well, I think he can do that and he's probably enjoying widespread bipartisan support in the United States for doing that because conditions allow it because we have achieved sufficient success against al-Qaeda, core al-Qaeda operating in the federally-administrated tribal areas. Sufficient success achieved against them that we aren't as reliant on Pakistani support as we were at an earlier stage. Easier policy choice in this environment was not a policy option, I would argue, at a previous time. On the Afghanistan side of the equation, I think the administration is to be commended for being open-minded about dialogue with the Taliban. I think all of our military commanders would agree that we have more or less reached the very definition of military stalemate across the 16, 17-year span in Afghanistan and what does that argue for? That argues for some form of dialogue that would produce hopefully a more durable outcome and at least that process is underway. I don't have any way to assess how willing and open the Taliban leadership is to that conversation but at least it's a conversation that I think the U.S. is pursuing aggressively now for the first time. Hi, thank you for your presentation tonight. My question's less politically focused. I'm interested in your thoughts on combating less traditional terrorist vectors such as cyber and softer vectors such as foreign interference or foreign influence. Can you say your name as well in any affiliation? My name is Annie from Department of Prime Minister and Cabinet. You know, the set of cyber threats tied to terrorist organizations was always something that we were very, very, during my period of government service, very worried about but it was in a sense the dog that had not yet begun to bark. We had seen terrorist organizations, particularly ISIS, engage in low-level cyber activity that probably rose to the level of harassment or modestly threatening but not, you know, truly, certainly not state actor capability levels. And so we've yet to find ourselves confronted with what do you do with a terrorist adversary that uses that tool. And I don't think we're really well-prepared for when that happens and there's no reason that it can't happen just because it hasn't happened. In most cases, it wouldn't take much more than expertise resident in a few individuals' brains to carry out the kind of cyber activity that you're talking about. So I would imagine, and with state actors in the cyber domain, you at least have tools that you can use to try to generate deterrence or to complicate the calculus of a state actor before they engage in some kind of cyber attack against the United States. I don't think we have those tools and that tool kit for deterring terrorists who use the cyber threat. In the absence of that strategy to deal with those folks, what we actually did was find a way to prioritize targeting with kinetic effect those individuals every bit as much as you would target a bomb maker or a terrorist leader who would be running a cell aimed at carrying out a terrorist attack in a Western capital. Those individuals who years ago might have been viewed as just a guy on a computer somewhere would now in a sense ratchet it up the threshold for attention in terms of intelligence collection and potentially for kinetic action because they were viewed as every bit of threatening as those bomb makers were. On the malign influence side of things, boy, I wish I had some special insight to share with you on that. And I actually think Australia may be ahead of the United States and being organized to manage that set of issues. I think we're dealing with it still in a very ad hoc moment by moment incident by incident way unless I'm missing something. I hope I am missing something. Here I think you've been at least facing up to that set of issues longer and therefore have demanded more of your government by way of a comprehensive response. I think we probably have something to learn from Australia in that regard. Fantastic. Nice to end on a positive note. I was making the list and we got to one at the end. Sadly for those who are still wanting to ask questions, we have to finish the formal Q and A session now but the conversation will continue outside and Nick has very kindly offered to allay his jet lag and stay with us to talk for a while. I would just like to note also that we have filmed this. It'll be available on the ANU website and the National Security website. There will also be an upcoming podcast interview with Nick on the National Security Podcast series. And I do recommend you looking at the variety of podcasts available on there as well. Nick, this has been a masterclass. As I was trying to list the topics that were covered, I came up with around 20 that were covered just in Q and A from leaks, public policy challenges, Hisbollah, populism, Osama bin Laden, the impact of the midterm elections, partisan politics in Washington, the vexed issue of regime change, cyber. We didn't even get to further interrogate something of interest to me. The insidious rise of homegrown extremism and how to really bring all these different policy levers together to deal with a threat that doesn't neatly split into international and domestic. You have a career wealth of experience. You've been on the inside of one of the most extraordinary administrations, well, two of the most extraordinary administrations in recent US history. But we thank you for your very candid reflections on that. Thank you. Security clearance when I came here. We'll see if I still have a... Yeah, we worked hard to keep hold of Jim's. We'll see how we go with you here. We'll see if I still have one when I go home. Look, Nick, thank you so much on our behalf. We are tremendously excited about you commencing your time with us and thank you very much for offering your thoughts this evening, and please join me in thanking Nick Rasmussen. Thank you.