 As we've heard, you're arguing that Donald Trump with thought bubbles and mistrust of alliances and lack of a clear foreign policy is likely to have a greater impact on our region than elsewhere. So perhaps you could tell us why you think that's the case. Sure. Let me start, Joan. Thank you for that. By congratulating Jonathan and Maury, this is a publication that we needed and so thank you very much for providing us with that and we really wish it every success possible. So I think if you look objectively at our region, at the Asian region, it's reliance on American power to keep the peace, to hold the ring has been much proportionally greater than pretty much any other region. The Asian region combines a number of attributes and the main ones really are the enormous power and potential power of the states here. You could argue that there are other regions in the world where some of the rivalries run just as deep, if not deeper, but the states aren't as big and powerful as they are here. Secondly, ancient rivalries and animosities run very deep in this part of the world. It wouldn't take much for some very significant powers in this region, many of them nuclear armed, some of them potentially nuclear armed to start going at each other in fairly serious ways. The last one is that institutions have never mattered much in this part of the world, unlike in Europe where NATO, the EU, the United Nations are taken very seriously and the rules of the road that are set down are taken very seriously. In Asia the command power of the state is much more important than external obligations to rules or institutions. So those three things mean that this is a very, very conflict prone region potentially and what has kept it from being conflict prone has been the overwhelming, particularly maritime power of the United States and the willingness of most countries in this region to accept that it's simply not worth taking each other on, that they were better off simply becoming prosperous. And secondly, up until probably the turn of the century, the unwillingness of serious powers in this part of the world to challenge US supremacy. And I would argue that that is the condition that has most changed. Because we've already pointed out that the dynamics of this region is different to see. But in your article as Jonathan has indicated, you also suggest that the way in which these countries in the Asian region perceive power is different from how we imagine, therefore their response to Trump may be different to ours. So can you expand on that a little bit? Yeah, if I can be an amateur historian, Joan. I mean, it's one of my pet theories that Westerners tend to see history as a straight line phenomena of human affairs just get better and better and better and humans get more and more sophisticated, whereas I think most Asian traditions tend to see history in a much more cyclical way of the rise and fall of power, the rise and fall of empires. And I think that one of the mistakes we make is that we just assume that they see history and progress in international affairs in the same way we do. I think one of the things we've got to do in this country is realise that they see these things in very different ways. We look at American power, I think, as simply the culmination of a tradition of advancing democracy and liberalism and market forces and everything else. That's why we become so outraged when we perceive American power being misused. I think that's less the case in our region. I think American power is seen in much more pragmatic, dispassionate ways. America has simply, or has been the latest of millennia of the rise and fall of powers, and American power is receding in the region, Chinese power is rising, and that is simply factored into a very cyclical view of history. Thank you. Huge topics there, but we are going to move on to the second paper for the moment. As we've heard, this paper will suggest that there is a quite serious prospect of war as a result of the crisis surrounding North Korea, or at least a realistic prospect of war. I think you suggest that Trump's threats, where they sound a bit like the school yard, are genuine. I wonder if you'd like to tell us, what do you think might be President Trump's motivation for so clearly, at least in terms of rhetoric raising the stakes? And whether this might have something to do with domestic politics, or just tell us more about what you think President Trump's possible objectives. Well, let me start by saying I share your concern, and Jonathan's expressed concern about the dreary outlook that we outlined in the paper, and I had hoped that by the time that article came to print that things would have changed. Over the last couple of weeks, we've seen this cheerleading team from North Korea and South Korea, the Delphic smile of Kim Jong-un's sister, the first of the Kim family to be South of the demilitarized zone in the last 25 years, and I thought, well maybe that might be a breakthrough. I had a chance to reread the article that Kim and I did together right before coming out here, and I'm alarmed to say that it holds up too well. Some things you want to change, but unfortunately the underlying dynamics there, let's go to the root of your question. I've spent the better part of 30 years working on North Korea, and during that time I've become quite accustomed to North Korean behavior, and an alarming trajectory inside North Korea itself, and so I don't want to suggest for a second that there isn't something that the entire world community should be deeply concerned about in terms of the increasing range of North Korea's missiles and their nuclear capabilities. Those are a challenge for the entire world, but I think what was at the core of our article was not that trend, which has been relatively trackable for 30 years, but rather the unpredictability of the U.S. response to that trend. And in the decades that I've been working on this issue, I have always been able to rely on the core assumption that whatever mistakes they might make elsewhere, that on the Korean Peninsula the United States would be the adult in the room, that they would have a very clear de-escutory strategy off-ramps to avoid any escalation in that process, that they would carefully factor in to account the interests of our allies in the region, as well as the potential impact of any conflict on allies in the region, and the wishes of our allies in the region. I hope all those things remain true. I cannot say with great confidence that they do, and I can say with relative confidence that they are not primary considerations in the mind of the United States President at this time. And so as to what's driving him particularly, he was told from the very outset in the briefings, the very few that he actually paid attention to from President Obama that this was going to be a major problem, and that was based on that known trajectory of the North Korean programs. He approached it in a typical way with a tweet in January of 2017 that said, this will not happen, period. Unfortunately, it has happened. And so the response to that is one in which there is a real concern about how measured the U.S. response will be, how coordinated the U.S. response will be, and an apparent growing consensus within the White House of the need for some type of a preventive, preemptive war. And it is that growing consensus in that community, I think, that really drove the alarm that Kim and I felt and focused on. Now what we didn't address because it seems to delve into the conspiratorial is domestic politics. It's the classic wag the dog scenario, which you don't want to go into the realm of Hollywood movies. But in an environment now where there is a U.S. president who's coming under increasing pressure and anybody who's followed domestic politics in the U.S. for the last several months and looks ahead at what the Mueller investigation is doing with Russia, one can anticipate that pressure will only increase. You don't have to be overly conspiratorial to think that there will be at least a temptation for action, which was, again, justified on its own rights from a U.S. America First perspective to be tied into domestic politics. So that's sort of a concern for sir. So Kim, if that doomsday scenario eventuates, what would be the implications for Australia? How might we, our government positions itself, if the conflict were pushed to the point of actual armed conflict? Well, how the government positioned itself would be the least of our problems. Were the calculations that many in the American military now have that they could do either a disarming first strike or a register, they don't use the term bloody nose, it's a journalist, but an exemplary demonstration say against a test that it would not break out into a general exchange on the Korean Peninsula ultimately involving nuclear weapons. And while it's absolutely certain Kim does not have nuclear weapons capable of hitting the United States, he probably does in relation to Japan, South Korea and maybe Guam. So these, if you didn't actually get everything and that seven or eight of these things were cut loose, we would cease to have viable trading partners. And the effect of that on our economy and the rest of it would be as nothing compared with whatever element of armed force we managed to commit. I don't actually think commitment's a big issue for us in the sense that the Americans and the South Koreans have exercised this till hell froze over which happened a few weeks ago and the, or seems to be happening in Pyeongchang, but the effect, I can only think of one element of our order of battle that might in any ways be useful to them and I won't go into that but we'll talk about it later. So I don't expect that anything other than support would be sought from us but the consequence of the calculation of being wrong would be enormous. I know nothing really about Korea but I got alarmed enough about it when I was in Washington towards the end of last year. I noted the fact that I was in the same centre as probably the scholar amongst the top half dozen in the world on North Korea in Gordon and so I went through my particular take on the American military and political elements I met when I was there and it had been preceded by a debate I had in another forum with a U.S. general, very senior ex-U.S. general in which he argued that the United States was already mobilising and that this would come to pass and in which I argued the other way and said that Trump wouldn't have the bottle for it. When I eventually got to Washington I found it was true. The United States was mobilising forward positioning of munitions, putting themselves in a situation where if a conflict emerged they'd be likely to be ready for it and therefore one needed to take it all seriously and look more deeply. There's three characters really in the American administration are critical here. One, McMaster, who's the principal adviser on strategic matters in the White House. The other, Dunford, who is chairman of the Joint Chiefs and Mattis, who is the Secretary of Defence. Of the three of them you'd say that McMaster and Dunford leant heavily towards the possibility of an outbreak. If it was necessary to their minds, in the case of Mattis exactly the opposite that Mattis has determined to get a position developed that permits the U.S. to do that but he himself is desperate that there should be a conclusion because while he has assured the President that he has a plan that would minimise the possibility of damage in South Korea and Japan he probably thinks that it might not work and the consequence of that would be devastating. So Gordon came on board and that's it. Shades of August 1914 sort of hover around us miscalculations and inability to control the logic of the forces you set in train. But over to Andrew now and your paper has a slightly different focus but it talks about Australia's defence position and particularly the possibilities of self-reliance and how we should be positioning ourselves particularly in terms of some of the President Trump's statements about allies having to do more to look after their own defence. Perhaps you can tell us really what your conclusions about the prospects of self-reliance are. We've already heard they know. You can say more on that subject. There are motions of self-reliance that need unpacking there. The Trump administration has been lecturing its European allies in particular that he wants them to be more capable, wants them to spend more. That doesn't necessarily mean that he wants them to develop their own internal defence sectors and in fact I think he'd be quite delighted if they spent more on more American equipment. I think that would be win-win from Washington's point of view. And Australia has largely escaped any of that sort of criticism largely because A, we are spending more. We've been on an upwards trajectory for about the last four years now and we're about to take off on a very much steeper one. And secondly we do buy a lot of American equipment. But the sort of self-reliance that I think that Washington is looking for is they want coalition partners and allies who can turn up to the fight and provide for themselves. Somebody who turns up, runs up the flag and then says where's the American intelligence support? Where's the American logistics support? Where are the American battlefield helicopters to move us around? And we did a little bit of that in Afghanistan. We had forces there with insufficient mobility. We had to rely on NATO or American forces. And there's a political usefulness to having coalition partners turn up but if they can turn up and look after themselves provide for themselves so much the better. How realistic is that an expectation of our defence forces that they can perform that kind of role? Well, we're patchy I think is the way I describe it but if you look at the Air Force that went to Iraq and Syria in the last few years we turned up there with our own air-to-air refuelling tankers our own airborne early warning aircraft and in fact there were days when Australian tankers and Australian control aircraft were essentially running the air war and supporting other coalition allies. So we turned up with the whole package and when you turn up with those assets that other people can use it's like a multiplier effect. So you become a very valuable ally indeed. So as I said it's patchy. I think there are parts of the Australian force structure where we would still rely on the support of others but there are elements where we can pretty much do it ourselves. What we can't do and what was the main thrust of my piece is design, build and support all of the equipment with Australian indigenous industrial resources. A country the size of ours with the natural advantages we have and the disadvantages we have in an economic sense simply doesn't have the economy of scale to do those things and if you look at Europe, most European countries don't either the trend in the last 20 years has been towards consolidation. Europe as a whole now produces a combat aircraft rather than Germany, France, Italy, Britain all producing their own they produce them in consortium. Has the British wing fallen off perhaps? Well, I'd like to now just give the panel a few minutes just to sort of bounce off each other's ideas. I don't know if any of you would like to respond to it. Yeah, look I might ask Kim and Gordon a question about the Trump foreign policy. I mean you went through in great detail Kim about who's in charge and everything. One of the things that I was in Washington a couple of weeks ago one of the metaphors that one of the people used to describe what was going on was that Washington is actually two governments at war with each other. That you've got the traditional administration, the people on the ground in the Pentagon in the State Department in the intelligence community who are keeping things more or less moving along on dependable tracks and then you've got the White House soap opera and I wonder if you both could kind of reflect on who's winning and who's losing and what would be the scenario of that doomsday or that bad thing happening. What is the capacity of the underlying Washington to resist? Let me start off with this because it's a really important question. Shortly after the inauguration probably two months in I wrote a short article which I entitled Follow the People because I having lived through 25 years in Washington and seen many transitions was very much focused on who ran what office because the U.S. system is very different than Australia. In Australia, again, given a parliamentary system and giving remarkably skilled and qualified bureaucracies that kind of carry forward the policy, whether it's a change of government or not there will be some changes of emphasis largely driven by the government, so to speak. Whereas in the United States, we have remarkably talented bureaucrats but they're all structured in such a way as to follow the lead from politically-affointed officials. So normally in a normal administration some 4,000 politically-affointed officials that come into a position of those approximately 565 or so are senior officials that are said to have confirmed. When I wrote the Follow the People article there had been only a handful, 20 of them confirmed. We are now over a year into this administration, assuming it's one term, a full quarter of the administration and I believe less than 200 of those 565 positions have been filled. So it's really unfair to characterize it as a war between two administrations because there isn't one other than one exception and that is the Pentagon. Because the Pentagon has one, I think many of us viewing the administration a year ago, I'll thank goodness for the adults. That has been modified from the plural to thank goodness for the adult. And those people who are interested in foreign policy, international relations, international security really put an awful lot of weight in Mattis because he has the full weight of the bureaucracy of the Pentagon behind him and that's enabled them to put out strategic documents which have been well-received in the region because they have the capability to do that. But if you look at the State Department, Commerce Department, all the others, they're very much at war with their own secretaries who have the explicit task of dismantling those organizations. So it very much is real, it exists, but one final thing that I'll point to that comes back to the topic of our paper and that really heightens my anxiety is that when you look at the people in that process, in December 9th of this year, Randy Shriver, remarkable Asia Specialist of the Great China Expertise, was finally confirmed to be the assistant secretary of Defense for East Asia and the Pacific. He now is the sole Senate-confirmed political official in the entire Trump Administration with an Asia background or Asia expertise. That's it. There's a couple of other people who have been politically appointed in relatively junior spots, but that's it. And so there really is nobody at home. So the last part of this play played out as Kim and I were writing our article. A close friend and acquaintance of both of ours, Victor Cha, a professor at Georgetown University, had been long presumed for the better part of a year to be the U.S. Ambassador to South Korea. Professor at Georgetown University had served in the Bush White House, one of only two people that I know, he and Randy Shriver, in the foreign policy Republican community who didn't sign on the never Trump letters, and so he was eligible. Well, he was knocked back, I think primarily because of his opposition to the idea of renegotiating the Korea-U.S. Retrait Agreement, but largely because of his opposition to the sad-bloody-nose approach. And so if you look at, again, across the entire political spectrum, and even if you look at just at Republicans, you'll find a widespread consensus of the risks associated with a preventative or preemptive attack on North Korea. And yet those people are not in the administration. Kim, do you want to comment on what Andrew said about Australia's capacity in defense terms? Well, what he said about the situation in the Iraq-Syriac conflict, now I'm absolutely right, we took all our stuff to the party. What used to infuriate me as ambassador is we had the capacity to do that in Afghanistan as well, and we'd damned if we'd do it. And so it wasn't an absence of kit that meant that we couldn't support our people in country with choppers to move them around and were so dependent on American and other enablers, that was our choice. And the thing that Obama loved about us is that we would come to the party with a full capability that we were not a flag. And I remember Tony Abbott, I was petrified when he turned up in D.C. because he's the anti-Obama. And I saw the briefing books that came out of DFAT and Prime Ministers, I was even more worried because I thought that Obama was going to give him a big workout. And so I spent a night writing weasel words to give the Prime Minister to use and what I thought would be a full court press on him. And he looked at them at Blair House and said, I don't want Kim, I'm going to be all right, that's all crap. And he said, fine. And we get over there and you see it's the full court press. Generally it's just the President, Secretary of State and the National Security Advisor. And then a few second line individuals. It was the President, the Vice President, Secretary of State, Secretary of State, United States Trade Representative, National Security Advisor. And he knew that we're about to be done over. And Obama begins an immensely erudite, charming, beautiful five minutes. And you could see the little hooks in each of things he said that you knew he was going to take up from global warming onwards. And he sort of said, oh God, this is going to be awful because normally you sit next to a Minister and you keep writing while the other side's talking and keeps pushing notes across in front of him or her. You can't do that in the Oval Office. It's out of your control and reach. And then Obama finishes and he says to Abbott, is there anything you want to say, Tony, before we get into the detail of this discussion? And Abbott responds and he says, yes, yes, Barack, there is. Most people come here with a list of complaints. I've got no complaints about you. Or they come here with a list of things that they want. I don't want anything from you. I just want you to know that I think you're about to get into a lot of trouble in the Middle East. And when you do, we will be there in numbers. And there was a sort of, ah, back in the room when he came out and said that. It's one of the giant falsehoods of reporting on the Australian-American relationship, that the Americans initiate and demand things of us and we respond. My experience had only ever happened once. Mostly it's the other way around. And until there's a settled agreement, the Americans will never write your letter because if you're going to say no, they won't write. And this was, but it was what Obama valued of us that we could do what Andrew said.