 Okay, it's now past 1.30, so why don't we get started? Good afternoon, I'm Susan Fritz. I'm the senior deputy assistant administrator for Europe and Eurasia, for USAID. And I would like to start off by thanking CSIS for this conference, and also to congratulate my OTI colleagues, both past and present, for 20 years of important and high-impact work in many of the most difficult and challenging environments all over the globe. While OTI no longer works as much as it used to in Europe and Eurasia, it's played an important role in helping to bring peace, stability, and democracy in the Balkans in the 1990s. OTI's ability to get boots on the ground quickly and to rapidly deliver assistance in the areas of elections and media helped to provide the footing for a more stable and peaceful environment that we see today. I saw this firsthand in Bosnia. I was the first democracy officer for the USAID mission and worked side-by-side with my many OTI colleagues from 1996 to 1999. USAID's Bureau for Europe and Eurasia is again working with OTI on our efforts in Ukraine during this fragile period of the Minsk ceasefire. As that conflict emerged, OTI demonstrated the foresight, determination, focus, speed, and courage in getting on the ground and providing assistance that has been its hallmark. OTI's dedication and hard work in a dangerous and fluid environment is already yielding results and will continue to play a crucial role in helping Ukrainians move forward. I'm pleased that Orin Murky has joined us on our panel today. Orin will be the new country director for OTI in Ukraine, so we're very fortunate to have him today. At the same time, we need to be realistic that this conflict and other conflicts in the former Soviet republics are likely to be with us for some time as long as President Putin remains in power. Regardless of whether one would characterize the current situation in Ukraine as something that's heading towards frozen conflict, it does hold much in common with the frozen conflicts currently in Georgia and in Moldova. That is, you have areas outside de facto control of their governments with Russian-speaking populations that are more supportive of Moscow and with the clear and military and financial support of Moscow. For OTI and other organizations working on the front lines of conflict mitigation, having an understanding of what is likely to drive future conflict is crucial to knowing where to focus their efforts and resources. For this panel, we're considering the future conflict in Eurasia and Pacific. As we investigate this topic, we may want to consider the following questions. What are the likely sources of conflict in these regions over the next 20 years? There are a number of broad thematic trends that we might consider in this regard. How might changes in economic development and energy resources become contributors to potential conflicts? Will Russia's economic dependence on natural resources contribute to political instability? Will an economically ascendant China become more forward-leaning in its relations with its neighbors and with Russia? What about internal political development and social pressures for democratization as we've seen recently in Hong Kong? Will digital technologies and social networking create new pressures for change? Might popular uprisings and protests lead to protracted conflicts in other settings as they have in Ukraine? Will ethnic differences continue to be a source of conflict in these regions? What forces might potentially dislodge equilibria in Eurasia's frozen conflicts? Do Russia's actions along its periphery signal resurgent or perhaps even revanchist Russia? Is this phenomenon structural, cultural, or personal? In other words, will this outlast Putin? What are the prospects for conflict between Russia and the West? Between Russia and the states of the former Soviet Union? Between Russia and China? What role will allies and partners play in mitigating likely future conflicts in the Pacific theater, in the European Eurasian theater? And lastly, how might China's internal political development and foreign policy condition the chances for conflict in a number of arenas? As we consider the context in Eurasia and the Pacific, I would like to encourage all of us to reflect on the extent to which our collective contributions to conflict prevention, mitigation, and recovery in the region have been successful or not? Between the US government, international NGOs, the private sector, and other actors, are there lessons learned or things that we can change to be more effective as we move forward in this arena? How do we make the most of these opportunities to reduce conflict? With that, I'd like to introduce our panelists and to make their remarks and then we'll move to questions. First, we have Dr. John Denney. Dr. Denney is a research professor of joint interagency, intergovernmental, and multinational security studies at the US Army War Colleges Strategic Studies Institute. He's lectured at the Heidelberg Universities Institute for Political Science. Previously, Dr. Denney has served as a political advisor to senior US military commanders in Europe and as a strategic planner specializing in military to military relationship between the US and its European allies. Dr. Denney most recently authored the book Alliance Management and Maintenance, restructuring NATO for the 21st century. Dr. Denney. Thank you, Susan. Thank you, Susan. Good afternoon. My name is John Denney. I'm a research professor, as Susan mentioned, at the US Army War College, which is just two hours north of here in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. I am technically a government employee and so the views I expressed today do not reflect on my own and do not reflect those of the Army, DOD, or the US government. Despite my military haircut, what I call civilian camouflage, I'm not in the military, I'm a civilian. I've worked for and with the military now for about 20 years. And my role up at the War College is to function as a research professor. That means I get to usually write and research and sometimes teach on a variety of international security issues mostly focused on the gym environment, as Susan mentioned, J-I-I-M. And I tend to focus more on alliance relations, the forward presence of American military forces, energy security, and sometimes missile defense. I was asked today by Bob Lam and CSIS, to whom I'm grateful for this opportunity, to talk to you about the future of conflict on most of the landmass of the planet in less than 10 minutes. So that will be a more difficult task because I won't have the aid of the typical DOD 50-slide package that will be projected here behind me with reams and reams of notes and points on it. So I'm gonna try to be brief. I'm gonna give you overviews and then we can get into details if you'd like during the Q and A. But I'm gonna talk a little bit about conflict in Asia, conflict in Europe, a little bit about sort of a domestic angle on each of those things, and then finally whether and how the military might be prepared to mitigate those challenges. All right, first, conflict in Asia. We can imagine a couple of different ways and when I say conflict in Asia or conflict in Europe, I'm talking about really the next five to 10 years. I'm taking not a long-term view at all. I think anything beyond the 10-year timeframe gets into the realm of guesswork, frankly, and becomes just difficult to project. So I am looking five to 10 years out when I give you my outlook. You can imagine a number of different ways in which conflict in Asia would manifest itself, right? I mean, first there might be conflicts not involving the US. So I think of China and Vietnam, India, Pakistan, these kinds of things may not draw the US in. They would probably be localized. They may not affect the US too much. Again, it depends upon where they might unfold. There's the potential for conflicts that don't initially involve the US, for example, between China and the Philippines, to have what we would call political science a chain-ganging effect. That is because the Philippines is a treaty ally of the US to eventually pull the US in to some kind of broader conflict. A third category of conflict might be direct US and China state-on-state conflict. I think that the way I've just described them is really, coincidentally, the likelihood that we might see over the next five to 10 years. That is, I think we're more likely to see smaller regional conflicts, specifically between China and some of its smaller neighbors that are not allied with the US. For a couple of reasons, we can go into the Q and A, into detail on the Q and A on that. I think direct state-on-state conflict between the US and China is highly unlikely. And I think the primary reason for that is not here in the US, but in China. The Chinese are beset by a number of huge internal challenges. Corruption is a huge one. According to Transparency International, China ranks about 80th on its list. It's not quite about halfway. So not the worst off in terms of perceptions of corruption, but the popular perception is that it's a huge problem there. When given China's size, it is indeed a huge problem. Secondly, environmental degradation. Massive problem in China. Thirdly, the contradictions within the Chinese system, and nominally communist country with huge disparities of income and wealth between the rural areas and the city areas. And then finally connected to that, this huge housing bubble they have. That eventually is going to pop. We've seen evidence of it already popping in some cases in some limited markets. All of these things together over the last couple of years have led to a number of protests, riots, civil disturbances, this sort of thing that the Chinese are spending a great deal of time and energy focusing on. In 2010, there were 180,000 protests, riots, and other mass incidents. That was 10 times the number that occurred a decade prior. So the Chinese leadership right now is focused primarily on maintaining internal security. It is not in their interest to pick a fight with the United States or even to pick a fight with the United States' allies in the region. And I think for that reason, conflict there is going to be fairly limited, at least between the US and China. I think the larger challenge that we faced in the Pacific, the Indo-Asia Pacific region as I call it, is really not so much war or small scale conflicts or insurgency or hybrid conflict, but really collapse of North Korea. When we think about the kinds of things that would pull the US in, this is the one that I think has the greatest potential to draw America in. The North Korean regime, I think, is unlikely in the next five to 10 years to lash out. I think the regime realizes and knows very well that that would mean the demise of the regime and therefore has no interest in that. I think a greater likelihood is that the regime would either collapse, it would collapse for any number of reasons internally. And we can again go into that in the Q&A if you'd like to get into the detail of that. That would necessarily involve the US, for the primary reason that we have a treaty alliance with South Korea and with nearby Japan, and there would be massive economic challenges from South Korea associated with that. You can think back to what the West Germans faced when East Germany sort of folded in upon itself and merged with West Germany. The Germans are still paying for that. They still pay for that every day and their taxes out of their paychecks. And today there are still huge disparities between the West and the East in terms of employment and economic development. The disparities today between the South and the North and Korea really are several orders of magnitude greater than between East and West Germany in the early 1990s. So this strikes me as the greatest source of conflict and challenge for the US in that theater. Turning to Europe, conflict in Europe, specifically with Russia, I'm of the view that Russia remains a declining state. There's some evidence to indicate that at least in terms of demographics, perhaps they've reached the bottom of this trough that we've seen in terms of declining birth rates and falling life expectancy. There's been some leveling off of that now and that's a good thing for Russia. But in terms of their economics, in terms of their development, they remain largely resource extraction dependent. As you may know, 50% of their budget, the Russian federal budget depends, relies upon royalties from oil and gas. 40% comes from oil alone. And so in terms of the military as well, the military capabilities, Crimea notwithstanding and we can go into how that might have been a very unique case in my view. I see Russia as a declining state, therefore I do not see a high risk of again major state-on-state conflict going on in Europe. I see a greater likelihood of what Russia has done, as Susan mentioned, with these frozen conflicts in Moldova, in Georgia, and what I think we'll see in Eastern Ukraine. That is a long-term Russian interest in maintaining, if they could get away with it, friendly regimes on their immediate periphery. And if they can't get away with that, then unstable regimes that the West is unwilling or unable to fully embrace. And their interests are served by therefore maintaining a certain degree of instability in Eastern Ukraine over the long term. Now let me give you a domestic angle on why I think this major state, before I jump to that, what's the future of conflict in Europe if it's not gonna be major state-on-state conflict? I think the future, at least as far as the West is concerned, is to maintain assurance against these sort of low-level conflicts that Russia seems to like fomenting amongst its neighbors, to maintain military readiness in the event that there is some sort of a crisis, so the NATO can help aid the Latvian government and the Polish government, et cetera, to maintain deterrence against the Russians, and then to also maintain intra-arrability. That's not a future of conflict per se, but it's the kind of things I see the military doing in Europe specifically over the next five to 10 years. Now a quick domestic angle on why this is unlikely, major state-on-state conflict, we've heard this story before, right, about, well let me back up a second, much of the conventional wisdom on state-on-state conflict between China and the US or Russia and the US is predicated upon the theory that the US is declining, Russia and the Chinese are rising. That logic is predicated upon this view that America is indeed declining. We've heard that story before, right, in the 60s it was against the Soviets, in the 80s it was the Japanese, and the 2010s it's the Chinese, so the first part of the 21st century. In the 60s and 80s, the US managed to break out that logic through a combination of increases in technology and or productivity. And I see the same thing occurring now, and the principal driver now in my view is unconventionally sourced fossil fuels. I think that will be the engine that prevents this trajectory of a downsliding United States and a relatively rise of China and Russia. And we're seeing that now to some small degree in terms of the price of oil and the impact that's gonna have certainly for Russia. Now finally, if I have just a few minutes left, is DOD ready for this? Is the Department of Defense ready to handle these kinds of challenges and conflicts that I foresee? My view of the evidence is mixed. On the maybe not side, I think we can look at the major strategies that DOD has put out over the last couple of years. I'm thinking of the 2012 Defense Strategic Guidance, the 2013 Strategic Choices and Management Review, and the 2014 Quadrennial Defense Review. All of those focused to some degree logically or rightfully on getting out of these long-term stabilization reconstruction conflicts in Iraq and Afghanistan and returning to a focus on major peer competitor types of conflict and preparing for that. Of course, if you read the QDR, you're gonna see things in there about terrorism and non-state actors and environmental degradation and climate change, et cetera. But if you look at the majority of evidence in terms of modernization, that is acquisition programs, in terms of structure, that is how are the military organizations at the military services structuring themselves? And if you read between the lines in terms of what the strategy is focused on, my view is the QDR in particular and the other strategies as well make a pretty definitive choice in favor of peer-on-peer, state-to-state conflict. That I think is worrisome. I'm also concerned about the limited degree of funding we have dedicated to training and equip programs. Now, admittedly, they have a mixed track record. We can talk about that in greater detail if you like. So anyway, training equip programs, exercise and readiness programs or their international allies, other mill-to-mill security cooperation programs. All of the funding for that, in my view, could be boosted in a way that would reflect this new security environment that we're heading into. Now, what about the positive evidence that we see? First, there is indeed a continued, I should say maybe a growing realization that engagement is important. And I would look here to a document that was referenced upstairs in the luncheon that just came out like about two weeks ago. This is the Army's new operating concept for how the Army will employ force in the future. It's an Army strategy of sorts and it basically outlines an Army focused less on the peer-on-peer conflict, the big two major theater war conflict preparation, and more on limited conflict, small teams of Army soldiers going out and doing things, peacetime engagement, that is what we would think of as phase zero, phase one kinds of operations, mill-to-mill engagement, all trying to prevent conflict in the first place. So I think that at least the senior leadership, senior military leadership kind of gets that. That's a positive thing in my view. Whether and how that now trickles down to the rest of the military services through the services in terms of structure, organization, personnel policies are a big part of this. Acquisition policies, that remains to be seen. And I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Dr. Denney. Very enlightening and interesting presentation. I'm sure there'll be some great questions coming out of that. Now I'd like to introduce Orrin Murphy as I mentioned earlier. Orrin is the new OTI country representative for Ukraine, but he has over 15 years of overseas experience in transitional countries, including Indonesia, Thailand, Burma, Pakistan, and Uzbekistan, as well as Lebanon and Sudan. Prior to joining OTI Ukraine program, Orrin served as inter-news' Asia Regional Director for seven years. He worked for OTI as a field advisor in Nepal, Sudan, Sri Lanka, and in Washington. He also served as regional program manager for USAID Implementing Partner DAI on OTI's Indonesia program. So with that, I hand the mic to you. Thanks. Yeah, although I am the Ukraine country rep for OTI now, I'm actually not gonna speak about Ukraine. It's a little bit of a bait and switch because I'm going tomorrow, so I have not much to add right now of value. There's many smarter people in the room about Ukraine. So I'm gonna talk a little bit more about my experience in Asia, which is where most of my professional life has been spent. I'm also conscious of the fact that we're after lunch, so I hope everyone's not digesting too much and we'll be able to focus. So Asia is quite difficult to talk about just because of its incredible size and also the incredible diversity in Asia and drawing any kind of sweeping generalizations about Asia, you do so at your peril. Having said that, I'm gonna draw some sweeping generalizations. So from what I've seen over the past few years in Asia, I guess over the past decade working there, there is quite a bit of, I guess, room for optimism and then also cause for concern. I think probably the greatest room for optimism has just been on the incredible economic expansion of Asia, which has had a huge impact across all aspects of society. Granted, the growth has been a bit uneven per country, but overall, the trend has been very positive and the Asia of the 1960s compared to the Asia of 2014 is a totally unrecognizable place and millions of people have been pulled out of poverty as a result of economic growth and that's something not to, I guess, dismiss out of hand. I think the big question moving forward is how that wealth is gonna be used, how it will be distributed and then to a certain extent, what degree of say citizens are gonna have and how the wealth is being used. Across the region, citizens are increasingly aware of the wealth that their countries have and then particularly now, they're increasingly aware of the amount of wealth accumulated by both political leaders and politically connected business people and so I think this idea of corruption and how prevalent corruption is, is actually one of the major challenges facing the region and could potentially be one of the greatest sources of instability kind of at a sub-national level, I guess we're at a national level. Some countries have been very successful in confronting it head on or at least are attempting to confront it head on, others are not. Indonesia, I would say, is one of the countries which where I worked for several years where if you were to tell me in 97 that Indonesia was gonna become a model of kind of progressive democratization, I would say that that was an unlikely scenario but they've actually gone through and established independent corruption eradication commissions and other things which have been fantastic for making incremental change on things like corruption. Other countries like China have employed less transparent attempts to eradicate corruption often through targeting high level officials and arresting them for corruption whether or not that is based in like some kind of systematic process or just a symbolic gesture I think is an open question at this point. What I think is clear is that citizens are increasingly aware of the disparities and wealth that they have particularly where public officials are concerned and while corruption is probably, I wouldn't say this is a brand new trend in Asia, I think it's been around for quite a while, I think there are some other trends which change this scenario a bit. Perhaps the biggest change that I've seen has been the expansion of telecommunications infrastructure across the region and this in conjunction with the expansion of wealth has meant the democratization of information in Asia and that has had a huge impact. I just think of when I first moved to Indonesia in 1995 if I wanted to get in contact with friends I got on my motorcycle, I drove 15 minutes, I saw them knocked on the door and then went home. We didn't have mobile phones in rural areas even landlines were not particularly prevalent and now of course, I mean I think in Indonesia it's 1.5 mobiles per citizen in the country. In Burma, three or four years ago when I was going there to get a SIM card for your mobile was about $2,000 and now they're expecting with these two new telecommunications firms entering the country, they're projecting that by 2016 75% of households will have access to a mobile. So the implications of that are massive and frankly I think most people don't even can't completely get their head around it least of all the Burmese government and citizens in the country. But I think again it offers some real cause for both hope and also concern. The ability of people to connect online particularly in a region where most of the media has been dominated by state broadcasters and that's still very much the case in places like even in Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, all these countries there's a real heavy reliance on state broadcasters. So all of a sudden to have people being able to participate in the online space is massive and this has had implications for corruption where there's often public shaming of officials who are wearing flashy Rolexes or have beautiful cars or houses. I think it's been a bit of a game changer in terms of documenting human rights abuses so there's visibility now where there never was before I think the saffron revolution in Burma. Many people thought that there was not as violent a crackdown on that because of the ubiquity of footage of what was going on. I think the big question is will this become a source of instability or could it leads to conflict and I think to some extent what happens depends on how governments choose to respond to an increasingly assertive public. The more authoritarian regimes are gonna be tempted to crack down. We've seen that happen in places like Vietnam, China, other places. I think some other countries are actually using increases in input to respond to their concerns and that builds legitimacy and also probably greater stability. What's clear is a lot of countries in the region particularly the more authoritarian ones view this democratization of information as a real source of concern and are investing huge amounts of money in suppressing it. And that can be done either through censoring the internet it can be done through draconian internet laws which basically enable them to arrest people on for publishing information which goes counter to the national interests of the country and there's many examples of laws like that around the region. One other I guess big area I see potential conflict which John touched on earlier was around natural resources in the environment. The rapid economic growth has not come without a cost to the environment and I think that this has implications both regionally and then also at the subnational level. Regionally the quest for energy has led to a lot more attention in places like the South China Seas and then similarly in the Mekong and other major waterways damming of rivers for hydropower has led to tensions between neighboring countries. At a subnational level I think citizens in some resource rich areas who perhaps are a bit otherwise marginalized are feeling that they deserve a greater share of economic wealth. This is certainly true in places like Ache and Papua in Indonesia. It's also been true in places like Burma, Cambodia, Vietnam and so forth. And then I guess finally, I would just like to touch a little bit around the idea of political and social inclusion. I think most countries in the region are still struggling with what level of political and social inclusion they're gonna have with their citizens. Few countries in the region frankly are fully democratic and I think the one issue to watch is how an increasingly affluent and informed public begin to assert themselves and insist on participation in government decision making. I mean protests in Hong Kong appear to demonstrate that there is a rise in citizen engagement you could say potentially. However political protests and mobilization are not necessarily democratic and there have been worrying trends in places like Thailand where you have mass movements who are actually trying to roll back democracy and go away from direct elections. And then I think at the future stability in the region at a subnational level will largely depend on how successful governments are in accommodating the competing demands of citizenship particularly in religiously and ethnically diverse countries which most of them are. And unfortunately I would say the region is littered with examples of poor accommodation of pluralism. Religious tensions in Burma, Malaysia, Sri Lanka, Thailand, the Philippines, China, all of them to some extent have experienced conflict around this at the subnational level around ethnicity or religion. So you know and unfortunately I mean in my view that's probably likely to continue for the foreseeable future. So on that cherry note I'll end and I guess we can have some questions. Thank you, Orin. I'll start with a question and then we'll open it up. I think we're supposed to have a mic. I don't know if somebody has a mic. Okay, so I'll start with a question and then we'll open it up for the audience to ask questions. I wanna go back to Russia after talking a little bit about Asia and back to sort of this notion that Russia may be on a decline and go back to Putin himself and talk about Russia. I wanted to ask Dr. Denny whether you feel that the phenomenon that we're seeing right now of a resurgent Russia, whether it's structural, cultural, personal, is this something that when Putin goes away things will change for the better or are we likely to see this kind of conflict at the periphery continuing? Thanks for the question, Susan. I think unfortunately, although what we've seen over the last decade or so has certainly been aggravated by Putin and by his personal outlook of the world, frankly I think a lot of this is structural, I think. And by that, I mean structural as well as state dependent. I think Russia views the world in a zero sum light and the US tends to view it in a positive sum light. The Russian perspective is that any gain for Russia is a loss for America and any gain for America is a loss for Russia. We've not been playing that game in the West for the last 25 years. We've been playing a positive sum game where the view is our rising tide lifts all boats. We need to pull Russia into these Western institutions. We'll give them not a seat at NATO's table but they'll have an office there and they'll make this NATO Russia council and we'll let them into these other bodies, Council of Europe, et cetera. That in my view hasn't worked and I think the lesson the West is learning now is that we can't continue to play a positive sum game with the Russians and think that somehow that will safeguard Western interests. I think that what Russia has been pursuing is dictated in many ways by Russia's history, by its place in the world. I mean we have to think that this country, remember this country is surrounded by no major water or mountainous borders and so it has, it perceives itself to have potential adversaries everywhere and so in that context and this is going back centuries. If Russia has perceived its way itself this way for centuries, my view is that's likely to continue. I don't see that changing even if Putin leaves the stage. Thank you. Another cheery note. Now I'd like to open it up for questions. If you can wait for the microphone. Hi, my name is Mindy Reiser. I've had the opportunity to work in Central Asia and the Caucasus and also a recent trip to Burma, a little bit of a different region. My question is with regard to certain regions that are problematical. You haven't much talked about the Northern Caucasus and Chechnya and we all remember what happened a few years ago and the devastating results to the people who were in that school and their children there. I also am wondering about the Balkans. There was a war a while ago and ethnic hatred is still there. It's not on the front pages but I'm wondering if there's any chance that those who wish to cause trouble could. If you want, I can take the Balkans question and then if somebody else wants to take the Caucasus. In addition to serving in Bosnia, I just spent four years in Serbia and also worked in Kosovo for two and a half years so I follow the Balkans closely. I think Bosnia continues to be problematic while a lot of good work was achieved by OTI as well as USAID and other donors. Early on I was very disappointed going back to the Balkans after having left for a couple of years to find things in the state they are, particularly in Bosnia. On a brighter note, what you do see is a lot of positive developments in terms of the relationship between Kosovo and Serbia. You have the dialogue which has yielded some results. You have a normalizing of relationships. I was in Kosovo when Kosovo declared independence so to go from that in 2008 and early 2008 to only what six years, four or six years later to see where we are today, I would never have guessed that so I think that's all very positive. I think we still obviously have some remaining problems but when a lot of experts that you talked to don't really see either Bosnia or any of the Balkan countries going back to war and that's all very positive. Doesn't gloss over some of the issues such as constitutional reform that's necessary in Bosnia and other problems in the region but I don't see us going back to the conflicts of the 90s in the former Yugoslav states. You raise a very good point about the fact that we didn't address a couple of different areas. I mean I was giving you sort of the vast picture. So yeah, to get into the details of specifically the North Caucasus, Chechnya and Edom in the South Caucasus, the North Caucasus specifically fits into, in my view, the way I look at it is it fits into this model of the Russians being a declining state and so far as they continue to have major problems in terms of integration domestically. My wife is a, she works for a company that allows her, that makes her travel overseas for business trips and occasionally and I mean people who have been to Moscow and to Russia will tell you this that there's a real divide between some of the ethnic religious minorities outside of the capital and those that think of themselves as culturally Russian and so those divides remain and it's not just in the North Caucasus. The inability to manage that beyond simply sort of forcing integration I think is one of the challenges Russia will continue to face. With regard to the South Caucasus just across the border if I could take your question and expand upon it. Yes, as I mentioned in my view I think that it's in the Russian's interest to maintain first if they can friendly neighbors and if they cannot unstable neighbors and so I don't see any impetus on the part of the Russians to get out of Georgia for example and to allow that conflict to thaw. I think they think if that were to occur Georgia would instantly become a member of NATO and they perceive that to be against their interests and so I don't see that happening. Thank you. Hi, I'm Patrick Hickey from US government accountability affairs. You probably don't remember me but I spent a fair amount of time in the Balkans in the 90s haunting your door but my question's really actually turning to East Asia Pacific where the folks I work for are spending a lot more time in concern on Capitol Hill. One thing that a question has arisen on the Hill is whether goes the president's rebalancing policy towards Asia. There was supposed to be more emphasis on our East Asia Pacific relationships. The Trans-Pacific Partnership was supposed to be his signature cornerstone policy initiative over there but what's resulted so far is really just sort of new or renewed security arrangements with all the nations that are in confrontation with China so I just want to get your perspective. Are we sort of having a 21st century equivalent of containment policy shaping up against China? 21st century containment policy, let me answer that question last. First let me get to the, whether the rebalance, I think we have to, first two points. The rebalance in my view was not a moment in time or a specific policy per se. In my view, it's been unfolding for 20 years. I mean if you look at, for example, the context I'm very familiar with, the American military presence abroad. If I had one of the 50 slides that I had planned for this briefing behind me, I'd pull up the backup slide now that has, it's a great big chart that shows a number of American military personnel deployed overseas, active duty, and you see that's 1990 it's huge, you have this huge number of Americans overseas, then there's this huge dip. The chart is also color coded by region and the area where the huge dip came from was Europe. If you look at the numbers for Asia Pacific over the same 25 year period, basically from 1990 to the present day, you'd see that there's been great consistency there. If you look at it in terms of economic trade, in terms of our trade relations, I think you see the same thing. Europe is still very important to America. However, East Asia, Asian trade relations are growing in importance. So I see the rebalance, at least as it was promulgated over the last three years or enunciated, I should say, as just the latest iteration of what's been going on for at least 20 years, maybe 25 years. So at the same time though, as I mentioned, Europe still matters. If you look at America's top 10 trading partners today, four of those are European countries, three or four of them are East Asian countries. That balance will begin to shift over the next 20 years, I believe, and East Asia will become increasingly important, not just in terms of the rank, but in terms of the volume. So for now, I think what we've seen over the last year or two, that is new conflicts in the Middle East in terms of ISIS and instability in Iraq and in Syria, and conflicts in Europe, in terms of Russia, invading, frankly, Ukraine, these are just reminders, I think, to all of us, and certainly to the administration, that while it continues this gradual 25 years in the making now, refocusing or emphasis on East Asia, we still have to pay attention to what goes on elsewhere. We have to be able to walk and chew gum at the same time. Europe and other parts of the world still matter to us and our allies. That will not change with an enunciation of oh, we're rebalancing, here we go, turn on a dime, that's not gonna happen. And I don't think that was the expectation, frankly, when the administration made its announcement. Are we seeing containment in China? Of course, the administration will say, no, we are not. I think there's plenty of evidence to indicate that no, we are not. I think, however, there's also lots of evidence to indicate that while it's not containment, we're playing an offshore balancing role that looks an awful lot like containment to the Chinese. I was at a conference here in town about a year ago, a little over a year ago, and Michelle Flournoy spoke of an interaction she had when she was in office in the Pentagon with some senior Chinese military leaders. And she invited them into her office for this bilateral discussion. And she had her staff work up two charts. One to show the array of stuff, military, diplomatic relations, alliance relations, et cetera, that the U.S. had arrayed against the Soviet Union in the 1980s, the height of what you might think of as the Second Cold War. And it was a huge array of stuff, right? Lots of things, as you would imagine. Then she showed them what America has today with regard to China in terms of military forces, trade relations, alliance relationships, and it paled in comparison. The Chinese were incredulous. They did not believe her. And so even though we may think of this as simply offshore balancing, helping our partners, the Philippines, Vietnam, et cetera, the perception in China is that it is indeed a containment and that's where it's problematic. Kerry Gordon, I'm with USAID, on assignment at National Defense University teaching national security studies. Question for Dr. Denny on whether you see anything to the idea of a Sino-Russian rapprochement these days. They seem to be cozying up to each other. They had some energy deals recently. They seem to have divided sort of sphere of influence where Russia won't criticize China in South China, East China Sea. China was curiously silent on Crimea. What Russia was doing there, they seem to be kissing up in a lot of different forums, the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and other places. Is there anything to this or is there so much history of mistrust between these two countries that we shouldn't make much of it? Thanks. My view is really the latter. I mean, I've got some colleagues that think that indeed there's room for concern there on the part of the US, but my take honestly is that most of the evidence points in the opposite direction and that is that looking at this from the Russian perspective, I think history tells us that it matters most to Russia to matter in the world. And juxtaposing themselves with the US by cozying up to China periodically allows them to do that. From the Chinese perspective, I think we need to remember that the Chinese are, as we've discussed, resource, they're resource dependent upon external sources and so there are great reasons for them to look to the Russians for assistance in that regard. But beyond that, I really don't think there's concern of some sort of triangulation. I think that it's mostly for domestic political consumption in each of these countries. In China's case, there's an economic argument to be had. Russia may also make something of an economic argument. They signed this long-term agreement with the Chinese for resource trade. I think time will tell whether that actually lasts as long as it's purported to. So I'm not too concerned about it. I think that the rival raid that is inherent between two large land powers that share a border will inevitably push them toward rivalry. Certainly there will be some cooperation in some areas, but I would take more of a structural approach, a structural view of this, and that is that these huge land powers are going to be rivals before there ever will be allies. Hi, I'm Morgan Courtney from the State Department. I wanted to come back, John, to your comment about North Korean collapse and that you said that it would happen for internal reasons and I wanted to come back to that and ask you what you thought about that. And then, second is a question for all of the panelists on how you see South China Sea and East China Sea playing out. On North Korea, I mean, I think there are any number of scenarios that we can imagine. I mean, we just heard in the last month, right? The Korean leader was out of sight for over 30 days and that caused all sorts of rumors to be unleashed about. Well, maybe he's been deposed, maybe he's died, not good, right? Lots of concern. And then he appeared miraculously when these rumors started flying, appeared miraculously last week to be at least in decent health. But there are I think any number of scenarios that might play out where the country would implode. I'm not saying that's likely, but I think when I envision what conflict might look like, certainly in the Korean Peninsula, but also more broadly in East Asia, that's the one that worries me most in terms of its potential to really wreak havoc upon US allies and in the region. And that's why I'm most concerned about it, not because it's likely tomorrow, but it's the one that has the greatest potential for as I mentioned wreaking havoc and perhaps has the greatest probability as well. On the South China Sea, I mean, I think, I mean, obviously there's been a lot of confrontation in the water between China, Vietnam, the Philippines to a certain extent. And I think it's an area of concern. Again, I agree that I think it's unlikely that there'll be an actual armed conflict over territorial waters. I think everyone has too much to lose. I think China likes to assert itself and seems intent on showing that they're a global power and this is part of their increasing assertiveness. But I mean, speculation could be completely wrong, but I do think it's fairly unlikely in the near term. I think the implications are interesting for the US because it means to what extent do we support other countries in the region, including countries like Vietnam, which don't have great track records on things like human rights, freedom of the media, political participation and so forth. And do we reestablish military ties with Vietnam? What does that mean for our other efforts towards democratization? So I think that's probably one of the areas of, I guess from the seat where I'm sitting, areas of interest. But yeah, I think it's unlikely that there'll actually be a real conflict over it. Thank you. My name is Nahal Kazami, I'm from the State Department. My question is for Dr. Denny regarding Russia and your point that what Russia really wants is to matter in the world. And also, it's sort of view of the world as being a zero sum game. Obviously at the end of the Cold War, we thought that we could make Russia feel like it mattered by playing a positive sum game and turning them into status quo players as well by bringing them into institutions, inviting them into the G8, even though they were not a post-industrial economy and they weren't even a major economy, supporting them, keeping the Soviet Union seat on the Security Council, even though they had basically no ability to actively support international peace and security outside their borders. If bringing them into institutions and getting them into a positive sum game doesn't work in terms of getting the Russians to feel like they matter on the world stage, what do we do? Do we make them not matter? Do we try to marginalize Russia or is there something that we can do to change the calculus in our relationship with Russia? That is a great question and it is the subject, as you probably know, of heated debate right now in this town. Clearly when it comes to your security interests globally, we need the Russians in some places, right? We need the Russians in Iran, for example, or at least we needed them, maybe now not so much and that may be changing, but at least we perceive that we need Russia with regard to Iran. The Europeans, our allies, will certainly tell you Russia is too big to ignore. The Germans in particular are very keen on maintaining themselves as the bridge between the West and Russia and I don't see that changing. However, there has to be a reappraisal of the U.S. approach and of the Western approach to Russia. What we've done the last 25 years hasn't worked and you can rattle off the issue areas in which it hasn't worked. Stretching back to at least Kosovo, right, in the late 1990s, more recently we think we can think of Russian obstructionism on Libya, up until very recently there obstructionism on Iran, certainly in Syria. There are a number of conflicts globally where the U.S. has an interest or at least we perceive to have some important interests and the Russians have stood in the way of not just our interest but the West and arguably many of the countries around the world. So what we have done hasn't worked. Does that mean we've returned to a Cold War policy of containment? I don't think that's going to work. That's not in the interests of our allies certainly, at least as they perceive them and I think it's unworkable because that would require an allied multinational response. Is there something in between, maybe not containment but retirement? Maybe so, maybe there's some sort of way to limit Russian influence. How do Russians maintain influence over things we in our European and East Asian allies care about? We've seen over the last decade it's been largely through energy resources and so maybe there are things we can do to help lessen the dependence of certainly our European allies on Russian energy and we're seeing them take some of those steps themselves now but maybe we in the U.S. can help to push that along. I don't claim to have all the answers here but I think there at least needs to be a reappraisal of how we're treating Russia and how we go forward here understanding that Russia is not interested in a positive some game and that they will continue to play the zero some game for the foreseeable future. Alexander Melikishvili, IHS, thank you for your informative comments. I would like to return to Europe and ask you a question. There is a school of thought that believes that basically the invasion of Georgia followed by the recent adventures in Ukraine were basically preparatory steps for another probing act which would entail Baltics. Now Baltics as you know are covered under article five and in this regard I would like to ask a rather provocative question regarding the attitude within the alliance. I mean alliance is the topic of your expertise so I cannot ask you this question because there is far from consensus on this issue within the alliance. The public opinion poll that was conducted in late June, please correct me if I'm wrong but more than 70% in Germany emphatically rejected coming to the aid of any of the Baltic states in defense of the article five. So I was wondering if you could provide your way in on this. Thank you. Yeah there continues to be a pretty significant divide within the alliance. Divide may be too strong of a word but as you can imagine an alliance with 28 countries stretching from the Baltics down to the Iberian Peninsula there are differing threat perceptions, right? I mean how do you think the Spanish feel about the Russian threat to Latvia right now? Not too thrilled, right? The Spanish are much more concerned about illegal immigration across the Mediterranean, right? That makes more sense than focus on maritime security in that context. So you've got different threat perceptions within the alliance. However right now the Baltics and the Poles are having this rather regrettable sense that I told you so. They've been clamoring for more attention to this issue that is Russian adventurism along their borders for at least a decade now. And most of us in the West, me included, you'll see I've written on this, really didn't dismiss that but downplayed it in terms of the priorities that the alliance needed to focus on. That has now fundamentally changed. And I think there is a consensus within the alliance that the European security situation has fundamentally changed. There remains disagreement though over what to do about it. The downing of MH17 over Ukraine, I think had a great effect of consolidating a lot of the older European allies, specifically the Germans, Italians, the French who were less interested in a more aggressive approach to Russia. Merkel in particular has really done a significant change now in terms of her policy toward Russia. And I think many in the States within our security establishment are pleased to see that she's really changed her tone and that's been manifested in terms of the policies that we've seen coming out of NATO and the EU in particular. Whether or not now what Russia has done in Ukraine and Georgia will be replicated in the Baltics, that continues to be this subject of differing viewpoints within the alliance. Certainly there are those in the Baltics, academics, think tankers and like government officials who are very concerned about the potential for that. I mean Latvia has I think a 40% ethnic Russian population or no, Estonia 40%, Latvia 25% or so. And so they view themselves as potential targets for a similar kind of hybrid war if you will which is what some are calling what the Russians did in Crimea. My view though is that Crimea was probably one off. The Russians were unable to replicate that in Eastern Ukraine and they clearly tried. In fact, they went farther than they did in Eastern Ukraine with a pretty explicit invasion of Eastern Ukraine and still unable to cement the kind of political change that they've seen in Crimea. I think the lesson for them is that that is not as easy as they thought. I think the circumstances in Crimea and we can go into detail if you want were unique in many ways. The combination of factors and circumstances are not the same in Eastern Ukraine and certainly not in Latvia, Estonia or Lithuania. So while I don't see the same potential that doesn't mean that the West, the US specifically, the UK and Germany don't need to reassure those allies. And so for that reason, the kinds of things we're doing with these rotational deployments of American soldiers to the Baltics to Poland of the alliance in Wales early in September at Summit promulgated a new readiness action plan. We're gonna have this spearhead force, a couple thousand soldiers in Poland with a headquarters element that'll be able to go and do things very quickly. That's all very good and necessary. But at the same time, I'm not terribly concerned about war breaking out in Estonia right now. Thank you. I'm Lieutenant Colonel Sylwia Szawowska from the Polish Defense Attache Office. I would like to ask you about the sanctions and Russia. You are saying, I couldn't agree more about kind of solidarity and having a common stance towards Russia to have any impact really on their policy. But what I fear is that in the most important areas like energy and so on, there's some countries, NATO countries, still conduct business as usual policy. So we, in my opinion, that could be, you know, for Putin is just a kind of encouragement that really, you know, his policy, he will not be really punished by his policy because he has almost, you know, everything not changed or everything like previously. The sanctions are not this spectrum of, sorry, sanctions is not that broad as it could be. And my question is, do you think that next step will be Moldova, for example, or, you know, Eastern Ukraine even more? What is, what do you envision in the near future in terms of Russian policy, in terms of that the unit, real unit of sanctions is not really possible to be achieved, I think. Thank you. I think you had really two questions in there, right? First was about the Western response and policy, and the second is what's Russia's policy? Why is Russia doing what it's doing? Let me take the first one first, is this really business as usual? You know, up until the last round of sanctions on the part of the EU, I would have said, yeah, I would have said, yeah, you're right, there's just not enough being done, the Europeans are soft on this, they need to do more. And along with them, the Americans, I mean, I think the administration was spot on, it didn't look so good initially, because it looked like the US was slow to react, it looked like we were gonna just give in to Putin and his aggression, but there was a good reason for that, and that was to bring the Europeans along. It's incredibly tragic, but frankly, the downing of that airliner is what changed all this. Once that happened, I mean, there was a real significant political change within Germany. You heard, I heard, Merkel and the leadership fundamentally changed their tune, and that became manifested in the EU sanctions that we've seen, the most recent round of sanctions. I do not therefore think it as business as usual, I would not assess it that way. I would agree with you, there is certainly more that could be done, and here we can get into the details of, well, what could the West do with regard to reducing its energy dependence upon Russia? There are a whole host of things I think that could be done there. So there's room for doing more, but really, we've had a pretty significant impact, I would argue. Business is not going on as usual, there's been a significant flight of capital from Russia to date. The Russian ruble has slid in value, oil is down right now. I mean, things do not look good for the average Russian. Average Russian, of course, doesn't get that. There was just a poll out earlier this week regarding the fact that some 70% of Russians polled, believe that, this was an RFE, RL, I think. Some 70% of Russians polled think that the sanctions are gonna be good for Russia, right? And this is the way Putin sells it. Hey, we're gonna become more self-dependent, more self-reliant, and it's gonna be good for us. That is just completely wrong. I mean, that economy is so integrated. If we were 25 years ago, and we had these sanctions, it wouldn't make as much of a difference. But that economy is so integrated right now with the global economy. It is, and will continue to have, the sanctions, a significant impact on Russia. Now, what's Russian policy at large? I mean, there's a part of being played around DC these days who can read Putin's mind, right? I don't claim to have any specific knowledge of Putin's mind, but it seems to me that what he did in Crimea and now in Eastern Ukraine was a tactical response to a strategic loss. And that is when he saw that he was unable to prop up the government, the friendly government in Kiev, and that government fell. I think it was a tactical, not knee-jerk, but short-term outlook response to do what he did in Ukraine. I therefore don't think this is part of a broad strategy to begin acquiring territory. I don't think that's the game plan, because after all, acquiring Crimea alone is going to cost the Russian state treasury dearly. I don't think that's in their interest right now, and I think they probably understand that. Thank you. You and McDougall, I work for the State Department. Just spent the last two years in Beijing, but I'm here today in a very unofficial capacity. I just had a question regarding your analysis of China. You laid out a series of domestic factors that in your analysis sort of made China less keen to see conflict abroad, but I think one could just as easily make the opposite argument, that these domestic factors sort of pose a challenge to the rule, and in the same way that we say partisanship stops at our shores, they might say, well, some sort of assertiveness or conflict abroad is helpful to us in terms of unifying public opinion, distracting from domestic concerns, and reinforcing the party's sort of narrative of legitimacy that it stands up to foreign aggressors and interlopers, and that might in turn make it a little bit more keen to seek a certain degree of risk, and not necessarily conflict. Add to that the increasing likelihood that you have a relatively inexperienced, sort of new, untested, and hypernationalistic military conducting very unsafe intercepts at sea and land, and I think you have the additional component of miscalculation. I mean, one might look at the USS Cowpens incident last December, where the United States and China were able to sort of resolve it peacefully in the moment and replace the United States with Japan in a similar instance, and it seems to be very difficult to both sides would be able to back away in the same way that the United States and China were. Last component to that is that you sort of said that there would sort of low possibility of high level conflict, but high possibility of low level conflict, in other words, a series of sort of low level kind of tactical actions that perhaps over time incrementally begins to fundamentally change the order in the South China Sea or even the East China Sea. And I wonder what tolerance, think strategically in big picture, the United States has for those kinds of changes, and at what point we might have to worry about a fundamental change in the order governing those waterways, the sea lanes of communication and the trade routes, and at what point we might think that things had gotten a bit too far, or how we prevent them from getting there. Thank you. You make an excellent point about conflict, the fomenting of at least small scale conflicts on the part of the Chinese leadership being within China's interest, at least in terms of being a distraction. I would argue it's not just a distraction, a tool for distraction, but also a tool to vent Chinese nationalism, right, which is seen as a resurgence perhaps in the last decade or more. I think that for that reason, I think you're right, that that is a risk, but for that reason I would argue that the Chinese are more likely to pick fights with neighbors, regional actors, that are not treaty allies. And so I would expect the Chinese to pick fights with Vietnam, for example, over Japan. And I say that with full knowledge of the dispute over the Senkakus. I think a Chinese military conflict with Vietnam is more likely than one with the Japanese or with other US treaty partners, because I think the Chinese leadership understands that they can only allow that rivalry with Japan or with the Philippines over certain geographic features, islands, et cetera. That only will go so far before the US does indeed come in. So I think you're right, but I think for that reason it'll be limited to just certain countries. Now regarding the aggressive Chinese military, yet there's certainly evidence to indicate that they have become more aggressive. I think in the US that we often make the mistake of conferring unity of action upon our adversaries. We made this mistake many times in the Cold War with regard to the Soviets and the monolithic communist movement. I think we risk doing the same thing with regard to China. There are obviously bureaucratic actors within the Chinese government that the Chinese leadership has more or less control over and authority over. And so the actions of a particular military commander in a certain military district may not always be known to the Chinese leadership at any given moment. So I say that as a means of getting to this point and that is that I'm not sure there's unity of action in every act that we see the Chinese military engaging in. And finally on the changing order, I'm gonna defer to Oran for the most part on this but I will say the more aggressive the Chinese are in that part of the world, the more we see those countries, Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam, Indonesia reaching out to the US. And so I think as the Chinese begin to understand a little more keenly how a security dilemma starts and evolves, I think we'll see a corrective action. I think they'll initiate their own corrective action. We've seen some evidence of this in the 2010 timeframe. There was a little bit of evidence of this. We also saw most recently with regard to that that oil drilling rig that they have now moved out of waters disputed between them and the Vietnamese. Does this mean they're gonna stop being aggressive? No, of course not. But it means that I think there's room for learning on the part of the Beijing government. But let me turn it over to Oran for his take on that part of the world. I don't have a lot to add, but yeah, I would agree with that. And I mean also, I mean, China and Vietnam did have a conflict in the not so distant past, which I think both sides pretty keenly remember. And the Vietnamese have no problem whipping up their own version of nationalism about that. And it did not end particularly well for the Chinese at that point. So I think I would agree that it's probably not in their direct interest to keep provoking that. On the other hand, it clearly does play well domestically and China does have a very strong control over information in the country. They've made a very big investment to make sure that people are getting exactly the message that they want. And they don't have to sell it that hard. So it does, a lot of this is quite popular. And I think China has felt that they've been under the shadow of the West and of the US. And so part of this assertiveness is, I mean, well, as many patriotism and nationalism is to assert themselves as an equal power in the global stage, much more than it's about actually trying to expand massive amounts of territory. Okay, with that, we'll wrap up. Thank you to both of our panelists as well as the excellent questions that came from the audience. We covered a lot of ground today, so I'm not gonna try to summarize it. I think it was a helpful panel in terms of looking at some of the trends in both Eurasia and the Pacific, as well as some of the interests of major players. And what that all means for the potential for conflict in both of those regions. So thank you very much for your participation today. Thank you.