 Thank you for inviting me to come back up. I always love the drive up to Sheboygan, and especially the drive back when there's no traffic around Milwaukee. So I'm going to start with the liberal international order. Last Monday, the United Nations General Assembly opened the same day that Queen Elizabeth II's funeral was being held in London. And these two things together just sort of underscore the real stability and continuity that we've seen in the international system since 1945 at the end of the Second World War. The post-World War II order, political and economic, was structured by the victorious allies even before the war was over. But it really is established in 1945. And since then, it has really produced a very consistent increase in the quality of people's lives There's been a high rate of economic growth globally, and standards of living globally have also increased enormously. I've also enjoyed what many have called the long peace. So you had two world wars in Europe in the space of two decades. But since the end of 1945, we have avoided great power war in Europe. In fact, Putin's invasion of Ukraine and notwithstanding interstate war between two states has become increasingly rare. There's only a handful of cases since 1945. Civil war continues, but wars between states really have gone away. And this can be laid at the feet of the liberal international order. But in the last two decades, and especially in the last 10 years, there have been increasing concerns that the liberal international order is eroding. Questions about challenges from the outside, coming from China and Russia, who both chafe at the rules of the liberal international order, but also challenges that are coming from inside the liberal international order. So the liberal international order is basically a rules-based system enshrined in institutions, in norms, and in laws. It is a way of providing a measure of stability and predictability to the international system. The three main elements of this are the security order, where the UN and the UN Security Council in particular are the centerpiece of that, and it's a rules-based order. The non-use of force except in self-defense is kind of a foundational norm. The importance of state sovereignty, territorial integrity, non-interference in international affairs, or internal affairs rather, et cetera. Vladimir Putin's invasion of Ukraine is a fundamental challenge to the security-based, rules-based liberal international order. The economic piece of the order is represented by the so-called Bretton Woods Institutions, the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, and the World Trade Organization, based on the very basic principles, open markets, and free trade, which many people just kind of wrap up into thinking about globalization. Both China and Russia, to one degree or another, are included in this economic piece of the liberal international order, and in fact, it has helped China in particular with its slow and peaceful rise. The most contentious part of the liberal international order, though, has been the human rights piece, because this also is wrapped up with notions around representative government and the push for democratic forms of government, especially in the post-Cold War era. So since 1990, 1991, the idea that the best forms of government are representative, which again, that is something that China and Russia are not fully on board with. The norms and practices that are typical of the liberal international order, the key thing here, the key practice, is multilateralism, right? So that states should act together according to an agreed upon and generalized framework of conduct that specifies the appropriate thing to do in specific situations. It cedes authority to international institutions in pursuit of political stability and economic growth, so ceding authority to the UN and all of its organizations, right? And using global governance to work towards the common global good, so collective problem solving. And since 1945, there have been deeply ingrained habits of cooperation that have emerged at the international level, right? Political scientists would say that this is an example of how the international order is quote unquote sticky, all right, because as states participate over and over in the rules, they begin to internalize them, right? And then they follow them as a matter of course. The United States since 1945 has been the champion and the leader of the liberal international order. From the perspective of the United States and our Western allies, this has been a benevolent leadership role that the US has been willing to produce public goods that other states cannot, such as security, free trade, financial stability, based on the strength of the US dollar, freedom of navigation, et cetera. But that the United States, unlike most great powers, is actually willing to play by the rules of the system. So it's a benevolent hegemon. In much of the rest of the world and especially in Russia and China, they have a far less benign view of the liberal international order. They think that this is an agenda that is just basically put in place to serve the interests of the countries that are already powerful, that this is a way for the United States to ensure that it maintains its leadership and it's just imposing its values, et cetera, on everybody else, right? So over the last 10 or 15 years, again, there's been tremendous turmoil around the liberal international order. You probably have seen pieces in the newspapers or in magazines, people talking about the challenge to international order that is posed by, usually by China because China is clearly the largest competitor to the United States, right? But also by Russia. And in the last several years in particular, we've seen a real erosion of the basic practice of multilateralism at the international level. So, Brexit, Britain is leaving the European Union. The way countries were unable to coordinate their COVID policies in the face of a clear, common enemy, right? The disease does not respect state boundaries, right? The United States withdrew from the Global Climate Change Accord. Again, a problem that is not going to be solved unless there is multilateral collective problem solving and it is a problem that is basically coming for all of us, eventually, right? So the two big challenges here, one is from within, right? And here, the three things that you could look at are what we would call democratic backsliding, right? The rise of populist, nationalist and anti-globalist movements and then questions around the U.S. leadership of the liberal international order. And then the challenges from without are coming from Russia and China who have been pursuing very aggressive, kind of sharp policies in an effort to erode the leadership of the United States, right? So I'll look at each of these issues in turn. So democratic backsliding basically is talking about the erosion of democratic norms and practices across a broad range of civil and political liberties. Freedom House is an organization that for years has been keeping track of this. If you go to the Freedom House site, any country that you wanna look at, they use the same methodology. You get a score on a scale of one to four in each of the little subgroupings that they have. But basically, their data shows that after the end of the Cold War, 1990, 1991, there is a tremendous expansion in the number of states who become more democratic, right? Multi-party elections, more civil and political liberties, respect for a peaceful transfer of power, et cetera. However, since 2005, the trend has been exceedingly alarming. So what this chart is showing on the top in the green, the number of countries who score on the Freedom House scale improved. So they became more democratic. On the bottom, it's the number of countries that declined, became less democratic. And you can see in 2005, we're still on the upswing. 83 countries saw dramatic increases in democratic practices, and only 52 states declined. But from 2006 forward, it has been an alarming trend, right? Nearly three times as many states are seeing a decline as are seeing their practices improve. And even more alarming is that a lot of this is happening within the core of the democratic West itself, in the United States, and in core countries in Western Europe. So among the kinds of challenges that established democracies like the United States are facing, and I would say here, you could also say the UK, Sweden, Poland, Italy, given the election that just happened there over the last couple of days. So Freedom House looks at these four main categories and says within established democracies, what you can see is attacks on media freedom. An undermining of the notion that the media has the right to independently report on what's happening, efforts to block information, and actual persecution of journalists, arrests, et cetera. Secondly, undermining the rule of law, weakening judicial independence. Thirdly, perverting elections. And here's where the United States is specifically, has really seen an erosion in its democratic practices. Fraud claims, opaque financing, and the manipulation of electoral rules have undercut public faith in balloting. And then finally, the discrimination and mistreatment of migrants. And here, this is ranging the fool from those who are attempting to come into countries illegally to those who are coming in legally to seek political asylum, which is the right of every person in the international community. The migrants that were flown to Martha's Vineyards, they were asylum seekers. They were in the United States legally. They had a legal right to seek asylum. But those kinds of anti-immigrant, anti-asylum, anti-refugee attitudes, again, if you think about the reaction of the Europeans in 2015 to the Syrian refugee crisis, the worst refugee crisis since the end of the Second World War, you can see why there are concerns about the way in which democracies are treating individuals that are coming into their countries. And I don't know how well you can actually see this, but this is just showing from the Freedom House 2021 report how the United States has fallen in different categories and who it's on par with. So in terms of executive elections, right, and respecting peaceful transfer of power, belief in the outcome of the election, et cetera, the US has fallen from a four to a three on par with Brazil and Poland, right? In terms of political domination, so here this is thinking about things like the use of political violence and political intimidation, the US has gone from a four to a two on par with the Philippines and Bolivia. And for equal treatment, so this is looking at discrimination against like racial minorities or treatment of migrants and asylum seekers, again, United States has gone from a four to a two where it's on par with Ghana and Greece, right? Those are not typically the countries that the United States sees as its democratic peer group. So democratic backsliding has been a huge concern for the liberal international order because a big piece of the liberal international order is this notion that democratic government, right, not only is the best form of government, right, because it allows people to be represented, but democratic government produces peace at the international level, right? So it's well documented. Democracies do not go to war with other democracies, right? So the more democracies there are, the lower the chances there is going to be of war between states at the international level. The second major trend that is to challenge to the internal piece of the liberal international order is being driven by the rise of populist, nationalist, anti-globalist movements often on the right and the far right. In many places, including the United States, what used to be beyond the pale on the far right has now become firmly in the center of the right. You see a backlash against free trade, kind of anti-immigrant, anti-refugee sentiment, it far right nationalist movements that are literally shading into fascism, and these are being exacerbated by the kinds of disinformation campaigns that the Russians have aggressively been pursuing, including against the United States in the 2016 and 2020 elections. The kind of disinformation that is making appeals to people's emotion and makes it difficult for publics to share a common understanding of the facts. And without a common understanding of sort of like the baseline, there's no way to have a public debate, right? If people can't even agree on what the truth is, there's no way to talk about how to implement policies. And just thinking about the election in Italy, the party that has just come into power literally is a direct descendant of a party that grew out of Mussolini's in the World War II period. It is very anti-immigrant. In fact, the woman who is soon to be Prime Minister in Italy traffics in replacement theory, right? That's the idea that migrants are coming in to replace Europeans. And so you see this not just in the United States, but we've seen the rise of far right parties in France, in Britain, in Sweden, right? Hungary and Poland in particular have now are not even really considered democracies. They're in that illiberal autocracy category. And a third piece to these concerns, the challenge from within. Questions about U.S. leadership. The U.S. has been the champion of the liberal international order since 1945. And after the Soviet Union collapse, the U.S. was really the sole superpower, right? And that's one of the reasons why there was kind of this push after 1990-91 towards more democratic forms of governance. But there have been real questions about American leadership since the election of Donald Trump. There are real questions about whether or not the United States remains committed to the existence of a liberal international order. And if it is not, the question you have to ask yourself is then who is going to be in charge of the international order? If it's not the United States around the values of the liberal international order, what are the values of China going to look like as global ordering principles? What would the world look like if Russia and its political values were in charge? So there's reason to be concerned about the fact that the United States seems to be withdrawing, or for a while, seemed to be withdrawing from its role as the head of the liberal international order. The Trump administration kind of threw multilateralism out the window. Relationships with good allies, such as NATO, were severely eroded. Many Europeans had a real crisis of confidence in the United States. The administration withdrew from the Paris Climate Accord, from the Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action, the JCPOA, which was the nuclear deal with the Iranian. It had moved away from free trade and actually put in protectionist measures. It harangued our NATO allies, and actually there were questions about whether or not the United States would respect the collective security aspect of NATO, which is the core of the entire organization. And then the erratic policies of the administration in Syria, for example, basically making policy by tweet, the US is withdrawing. No, they're not withdrawing. Yes, we are withdrawing. No, we're not withdrawing. I mean, that kind of whiplash for the international community, you look at the United States and think, their policymaking process is in chaos. And then finally, the events of January 6th have been really alarming to those in the international community who look to the United States. How can the United States champion democracy and freedom and human rights when it almost wasn't able to have a peaceful transfer of power itself in 2020? So, I mean, January 6th is not just a concern for the United States as a domestic matter. It has had repercussions in terms of how other states in the international system look at the United States. So then you also have, in addition to challenges from within, the challenges from without, from Vladimir Putin and from Xi Jinping of China, both of which again, chafe at the liberal international order. They think that the United States is a declining power. They both view the West as in complete disarray. And so that this is a moment that they can challenge and reshape the liberal international order so that it is less liberal and more in keeping with their notions of international order. And there are three aspects of this challenge. What we would call modern authoritarianism, transnational repression, and then just your ordinary domestic repression. So the kinds of governments that Russia and China represent are advancing a different set of values against the liberal international order. Majoritarianism, so a prime example of this, the quote unquote referendums that Vladimir Putin and the Russians are sponsoring in Ukraine over the last several days where they've gone door to door with guns and asked people to quote unquote vote for whether or not they want their areas to become part of Russia. Lots of places in the world where you continue to have elections, but they are not democratic elections. Sovereignty, human rights standards have no place. A dictatorship of law, use of vaguely worded laws to harass and punish opponents. We very much see this in Putin's Russia revisionist history. Here, Putin with Ukraine is telling a new story about Ukraine and its history with the Russians, portraying the leadership of Ukraine as being Nazis, saying that Ukraine is threatening Russian national security and is threatening Russian speakers within Ukraine's boundaries. And in July of 2021, Vladimir Putin published a 7,000 word essay about Ukraine in which he said that Ukraine could only have true sovereignty if it was part of Russia. I mean, the Russians signed off on Ukraine becoming an independent state in 1991. And here's Putin saying, no, it can only reach its real destiny if it is with Mother Russia. A redefinition of democracy, so this is what you might think of as euphemistic language. So you have a non-democratic system, but you say it's a democratic system. It's just a special variant that takes into account your culture and your history and your values, et cetera, right? To try again to push back against critiques that are coming from NGOs or the UN or for countries in the West about the quality of civil and political liberties in those places. And then the return of the leader for life. Vladimir Putin has been in office since 1999 and there's no sign that he's planning on leaving office anytime soon. And President Xi is now president for life in China. Related to this is the domestic repression that we see in both China and Russia. In particular for the Chinese, the several year long campaign against its Uyghur population, which many people believe rises to the level of genocide. And even if it doesn't, we're talking about significant crimes against humanity with these massive detention centers that it's been built rounding people up largely based on their identity, not because of any action that they've taken. Although to China, going to mosque is enough to land you in a detention center as a religious extremist and terrorist. You could also see the same thing happening in Russia just in the last several days with all of the protests about the war in Ukraine and this mobilization of 300,000 people and the way in which the Russians are putting those protests down. And as if that is not enough to repress your own population at home, Russia, China, Saudi Arabia, Rwanda and Turkey have all begun to engage in a practice which Freedom House has called transnational repression. This is where you go after your dissidents and people who are in exile in other countries. So in other words, Saudi Arabia trying to pursue its dissidents in Canada and the United States to get them to come back or killing Jamal Khashoggi in Turkey. Assassinations, I mean the Russians have assassinated multiple individuals outside of Russia. So have the Rwandans. The intimidation and threats, Uyghurs who are in exile in Europe say that when they would try to call their family members who most likely had been detained by the Chinese government, Chinese security forces would call them back and warn them that if they spoke publicly about what was happening to Uyghurs in China their relatives would be at risk. And it's becoming a more common practice. So it used to be if you went into exile you could continue your critique of the regime in relative safety, but that is just simply not the case anymore. These countries are pioneering new ways of surveillance intimidation, et cetera in order to try to police what their exile populations are saying far from home. So this is the sort of the situation for when the Biden administration comes into office. And one of the early things that Joe Biden says is America's back. Trying to signal to the international community that under his administration the United States was going to return to the values of the liberal international order, in particular, for example, this return to multilateralism and to the careful, attentive nurturing of relationships with our allies. So on the first day in office the Biden administration rejoined the Paris Climate Accord and the World Health Organization, which the previous administration had pooled US funding from despite the fact that we were in the middle of the COVID pandemic. The United States decided that it would run for a seat on the UN Human Rights Council, which it had not done for several years and was elected in October of 2021. Biden held the summit for democracy, where we gathered countries to talk about the threats to democracy, both within countries and the threats that are coming from them, from without. So the multilateral piece has been very important. And I'll talk more in a second about how that has manifested in Ukraine because it's a very clear case study there. Another thing that the administration has done since it's come into office, it has attempted to revitalize alliances and to coordinate policies with our allies. So he revived an informal organization which had been dormant for many years, the so-called Quad, Australia, India, Japan and the United States. So democratic countries focusing on the Indo-Pacific region. And the Quad says that it's a free and open Indo-Pacific that is inclusive and resilient. And while they don't say this is geared towards China, certainly the Chinese see this as being geared towards them and it is clear. Part of this is about containing China's power in the Indo-Pacific region. So among the things that the Quad has been doing, they're working together on climate change, on cybersecurity, on infrastructure. Again, there's no direct saying this is a challenge to China, but many of you have probably heard of China's massive infrastructure project, the Belt and Road Initiative. Well, this is these four countries saying, well, this might be our way to counter the Chinese on the Belt and Road Initiative. Just in the last few days, the Quad has come out with a new policy on illegal fishing. Again, to try to rein in China. I think it's actually the New York Times today or the Washington Post, but on the front page, there's a story about how the Chinese are fishing in the Galapagos Islands and sort of mapping out the way in which they are going about that. So the Quad is this emphasis on their shared values and in particular, they say the peaceful settlement of disputes, the non-use of force, and opposition to unilateral efforts to change the status quo. Again, this is a nod towards China's very aggressive policies in the South China Sea where it has multiple conflicting claims to territory and water with most of the countries that are in that region. A new formation that the Biden administration put together is the so-called AUKUS, Australia, the United Kingdom and the United States. This is a more of a defensive alliance, again geared towards China, but the idea here is the US and the UK are going to help Australia to gain a nuclear submarine capability. So only a handful of countries in the world have nuclear submarines. The United States outstrips everyone else there. If the Australians get nuclear subs, they'll only be the seventh country, but then that would mean that they, along with the United States, nuclear subs give you an edge, a military edge against China, again in the Indo-Pacific region. And this was really an important step forward because Australia has historically been kind of reluctant to do anything that might alienate China, but it's become increasingly alarmed by China's aggressive actions, especially again in the South China Sea. So the big example that I can offer here for how the sort of multilateralism has worked for the administration really has to do with Ukraine. So I just wanted to start off with this. So just to show you, the blue areas are the areas that have the majority of Russian speakers in Ukraine, and of course, the areas in red, circled in red, Crimea, and then those two separatist controlled regions. That's where the Russians had taken control in 2014, right? And you might remember when they invaded Crimea, they denied they did it. People talked about the little green men because they were wandering around in Russian military uniforms. Putin said they were on vacation. They had chosen to be involved here. But so that's where we were in 2020, 2021, as the Biden administration comes into office, that you already had significant portions of Ukraine that were being held by the Russians. And there is a very uneven balance of power between these two states, despite Russian's propaganda to its own population, that its security is being threatened by this kind of evil Nazi regime and Kiev, Russia clearly, militarily, had the edge on Ukraine in just about every category. Since the Ukraine situation has arisen, there has been both a high demand for US leadership, but also a really successful multilateral effort on multiple fronts by the Biden administration. With Ukraine, we are seeing the benefits of having seasoned foreign policy professionals in charge of the State Department, the CIA, the Defense Department. And Joe Biden himself probably came in with more foreign policy experience than any recent president with the possible exception of George H.W. Bush, right? Bush 41. So over the summer of 2021, concerns within the United States began to grow about Russian intentions towards Ukraine. And US intelligence began to more carefully monitor what was happening in and around Ukraine. And in fact, early on the United States, oh, sorry, didn't wanna do that. Early on the United States authorized several tens of millions of dollars worth of weapons to go to Ukraine for defensive purposes out of US inventory so that they could immediately be delivered from the Russians. In mid or late October, Biden's national security team called meeting at the White House, Mark Milley, the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff gave a detailed briefing to the president in which he laid out the information that the United States had and which they believed that it had become clear that the Russians were going to invade Ukraine. A full-fledged invasion of Ukraine, not just simply taking some of its territory. Apparently the United States has extraordinary human sources inside the Russian government in addition to other forms of intelligence, listening devices, satellites, et cetera. But the intelligence was so detailed that when Biden said, so are the Russians going to invade? His advisors said yes. The only thing we can't tell you is the exact date. And so from that point in mid to late October, the administration mobilized in an effort to ensure that it was coordinating its policy with our allies in Europe as well as with the Ukrainians. Okay, one problem for the United States in trying to go out and say to everyone the Russians are going to invade Ukraine. Well actually there were two problems. One is US intelligence has a bad reputation because the George W. Bush administration used faulty intelligence and lied about the invasion of Iraq. So it's one French security source said, American intelligence is not considered naturally credible because it can be politically manipulated. So both at home and overseas, there were some questions about how much you wanted to rely on American intelligence and then the disastrous withdrawal from Afghanistan where the Biden administration is saying, oh the regime is gonna hold on and then the regime evaporates, right? Again, undercut the reputation for US intelligence. So that was one thing that they had to kind of contend with. The other one was, as a Ukrainian foreign minister said, the US is telling you something completely unimaginable. Another person said, if someone tells you that they've come across plans, right, that are completely bonkers, you're going to look at those plans and say, those are completely bonkers. It's not going to happen. And the Russian plan to invade Ukraine struck most people as not being rational, right? That just didn't make sense that the Russians were actually going to go ahead and do this. So within days of that White House meeting, Biden sent emissaries out to multiple locations, right? So he sent the director of the CIA who had formerly been the ambassador to Russia to Moscow where he had a face-to-face meeting, albeit by video, because Putin was still in that kind of paranoid place about COVID. You might remember the pictures in the ballroom of him on one side and everybody else on the other. So Burns goes to Moscow, he says to Putin, we know what you're up to. And there will be consequences. And here's a letter from President Biden spelling out what those consequences are if you dare to do this. So put the Russians on notice that the U.S. knows what's going on. Secondly, he sent Avril Haynes to NATO to talk to, first, France, Germany and Britain. The British were on board with the Americans almost from the beginning. They also believed the intelligence was pointing that they were going to invade. But France in particular, up until about two days before the invasion, still fought. Putin could be stopped from doing this. But so the U.S. begins to share its intelligence with its closest NATO allies. And on the sidelines of the Glasgow summit at the end of October, Tony Blinken pulled President Zelensky of Ukraine aside and said, we need to have a face-to-face and I have bad news and here's what we think is going to happen. And he said Zelensky was sober, he was deliberate, but the Ukrainians didn't believe it, right? The Ukrainians also thought that it was insane that the Russians would try to do this. But Zelensky has also said since then because when all of the kind of background to how the U.S. had managed this situation became public, there was a huge uproar in Ukraine against Zelensky, basically saying, you had months of warning, why didn't you tell anybody, right? And Zelensky said, because the only way we were going to be able to hold out against the Russians was if the whole country was together. If we panicked people, everybody runs for the exits, the economy is gonna collapse, it would actually soften Ukraine and allow the Russians to more easily take over. So throughout the fall, there is a consistent pattern of high-level meetings on the part of top Biden administration officials and Biden himself with our NATO allies, giving them more and more and more of the intelligence, right? Repeatedly meeting with the Ukrainians and saying as apparently at one meeting the Americans greeted the Ukrainians by saying, guys, you need to start digging the trenches, right? And the United States sent the intelligence more broadly eventually to all of NATO, right? So that was the managing of the allies meant that when the invasion actually happened, you have a significant coordination amongst the US and the Europeans towards the Russians. To show everyone who were skeptical about what the United States was saying, over the fall and early winter of fall of 2021, early winter of 2022, the United States began to reposition a large number of its forces in Europe. So moving pieces around, so sending things from Greece to Poland, for example, or from Germany and Italy and sending them to the Baltics. So strengthening what was happening in NATO to ensure the Russians understood they should not touch NATO. Okay. This was the situation in February 23rd, which was when the Russians actually moved ahead to invade, right? Oh, one other thing I should say about the US actions before that, we did what they called pre-bunking the intelligence. So before the invasion of Crimea, the US intelligence community was pretty certain that that was going to happen, but they didn't want to, they didn't want anyone to get any sense of methods and sources, so they didn't release the intelligence. This time they decided, we're going to start selectively releasing intelligence publicly. Even if the public doesn't necessarily believe what we're saying, it's a signal to the Russians, we know exactly what you are doing. So at one point, for example, the Biden administration came out and said the Russians are planning a false flag operation. I don't know if any of you remember the movie Wag the Dog, right? Where they fake a war. They run like an eight minute section of they film a movie. It's a refugee girl with her dog trying to hide from shelling. Well, that's what they said. The Russians were going to claim that there had been a Ukrainian attack either on Russia or Russian speakers. They were going to show dead bodies, et cetera. And that was going to be the pretext for the invasion. Well, if you say it publicly first, then the Russians can't actually do that. And so the pre-bunking of intelligence meant that the Russians basically just simply had to cross the border into Ukraine. They couldn't come up with any kind of pretext because the US had already preempted that. Once the Russians do cross the border into Ukraine, it comes fast and furious. The United States was able to coordinate a massive vote at the UN General Assembly. 141 countries voted in favor, and only five countries voted against, calling for the immediate, complete, and unconditional withdrawal of Russian military forces. Many of the delegations put little stuffed animals around their name plaques when they were voting to highlight the threat to children as a result of what the Russians were doing. The US has coordinated the provision of lethal military aid. Nearly every country in NATO has been sending aid to the Ukrainians since the war started. The US had made at least two tranches of aid before the invasion out of its own inventories to help the Ukrainians try to stiffen their defenses before the Russians came in. And in fact, at this point, NATO has really strengthened its eastern flank. Sweden and Finland, that had previously been outside of NATO, joined this summer. So now, you have more of northern Europe that belongs to the defensive alliance, which very much upset Vladimir Putin. And perhaps what was really the most shocking to people, I mean, you might remember when this happened and all the discussion about, well, are they going to close Nord Stream 2, the pipeline that carries Russian gas into Germany? Are we going to stop importing Russian oil, et cetera? Because the Americans had been planning before the Russians moved four months. Within the space of several weeks, there were massive sanctions that were placed on the Russians and not the ordinary ones either. All the things people thought the Europeans, for example, would not be willing to do, cutting the Russians off from Swift, the global bank messaging center, holding the Nord Stream 2 pipeline, cutting down on Russian oil and natural gas, which many European states are heavily relying on, including the Germans. So there has been massive movement in terms of a unified sanction regime for which, again, American leadership was critical in ensuring that that took place. Just last week at the UN Security Council meeting, every state in the Security Council condemned the Russians. And that includes China, India, and Brazil, which are all nominally either critics of the liberal international order or actually considered friends in some ways of the Russians, Sergey Lavrov, the Russian foreign minister, came into the Security Council a minute and a half before he had to give his speech. He gave his speech, and he got up and left. He left lower level people. He did not want to hear the denunciations from all the other members of the Security Council. And it is particularly important to see that India and China are beginning to put some distance between their public positions and where the Kremlin is at. And of course, recently you've had tremendous change in the areas of control so that the Ukrainians have gone on a counteroffensive. There are several US weapons systems in particular that apparently have been instrumental in allowing the Ukrainians to be able to move this quickly and to gain this much territory. And this gives you more of a sense. So that's where the Russians were about a week, two weeks after the invasion. And this is where they are at as of September 25th. So they have lost significant portions of territory they took in Ukraine already. And the Ukrainians are now pushing into the areas that the Russians have occupied since 2014. So the Biden administration has acquitted itself well around the Russian invasion of Ukraine. It has kind of redeemed its reputation as far as foreign policy goes because of the, again, the disaster that was the US withdrawal from Afghanistan. Although to be fair to the Biden administration, it was left holding the bag that every previous administration was responsible for the debacle that was the US occupation in Afghanistan. But the US is helping the Europeans to feel less worried about whether or not the US is up to the challenge of Russia and China threatening the liberal international order. This, of course, the invasion of Ukraine is the biggest threat that we have seen really since the end of 1945. We have avoided a major land war in Europe since the end of 1945, but this has the potential to escalate even further. Although one of the key policy points of the Biden administration from the beginning has been keep the war within Ukraine. Don't let it spill over into NATO. Don't let this become a Russia-NATO conflict because the consequences of that could be incredibly severe. So I would be happy to take people's questions or comments at this stage. How was the previous administration brought to everything as an isolationist? We can take care of ourselves and the hell with everybody else. In a couple years, people are gonna have to make another choice. What do you foresee happening if that administration returns to the leadership of the country? Do you think that attitude will come back again? Absolutely. I mean, the liberal international order is under a great deal of stress. And if the chief champions of that order, the United States and core democratic states in Europe, like France, Germany, Britain, and Italy, if you cannot rely on them to uphold the order, then it becomes easier for Russia and or China to change the rules in ways that favor them. And of course, the Chinese are more invested at this point, not in the liberal part, but in the international order part. They want the world to be orderly. It actually facilitates China's rise. It is upset because it does not agree with the notion that you could abrogate a state's territorial integrity, for example. It is concerned about the referendums that are being held because if you can hold referendums in territory and then claim it's yours, couldn't Taiwan hold a referendum and then claim they're independent? That's not the kind of precedent that the Chinese want to see set. But that being said, the rules of the system would be very different if China was in power, right? As the chief hegemon. And so yes, it matters who gets elected in 2024, not just for US politics, but really for the stability of the international system. I mean, really, I do has it, I just would not like to think what the reaction would have been if the Russians had invaded Ukraine two years ago because the policy making process of the previous administration in Syria, for example, was shambolic. They did not like to listen to experts, the constant denigration of US intelligence and of the US military. Those things undermine morale. They undermine the US's reputation and so-called its soft power, the kind of the power of its ideas and its values. So yeah, who gets elected president of the United States matters not just to the Americans, but it matters at the international level as well. Other states look to the United States. If the US cannot have a peaceful transfer of power, what does that mean for states that don't have the same kind of deep democratic roots and infrastructure that the US does? It just, it calls into question whether or not democracy as a system of government is really the best way to organize your internal affairs. What is your opinion on the Biden's foreign policy administration that it's having an economic effect on Europe? They seem to be in great, great trouble. Their currencies are crashing, they're looking at a very bad winter. This is a direct result of the Biden administration and the sanctions that they've put on Russia that for the most part have backfired. So I would say the sanctions on Russia have not backfired. Russia has taken a tremendous hit economically or I mean the sad part of it is for ordinary Russians, this has made their lives much worse. The Russians are really feeling the bite. So they've been able to sell oil and gas on the open market, but they have had to heavily discount it, right? In fact, they've been discounting it so much, the Saudis bought Russian oil so they could use it domestically because they can export their own for more money, right? So the Russians are in serious trouble. They do not have the economic capacity really to sustain the kind of pain that is being placed on them. Part of what is gonna happen in terms of the winter and concerns about fuel, that's not the Biden administration's fault really. I mean people have been warning the Germans for years. Don't rely on the Russians for your oil and natural gas because the Russians have a clear pattern of manipulating oil and gas. They did it to Georgia, they did it to Ukraine, they did it to Belarus where they turn the tap on and off when they want something. But the invasion of Ukraine has really kind of concentrated people's minds in Europe that the Russians are a genuine threat, right? And especially the Baltic states which feel like they've been saying this for a while and people weren't listening, but now in Germany, in Poland, et cetera, there is real fear about what the Russians might wanna do. The United States has been attempting to help the Europeans to find ways to stockpile oil and gas to find alternate suppliers, et cetera. But I mean, the alternative of not placing any sanctions at all on the Russians, the message that that sends then is any country can just invade and gobble up another country, right? And that is a threat to international order. Russia is made. It absolutely is. Do they want the whole country? The whole country. So Vladimir Putin wrote a 7,000 word essay that was published in the summer of 2021 where he very clearly laid out his belief that Ukraine was a part of Russia that it had been artificially and unfairly detached from Russia when the Soviet Union collapsed. And if you look at the plans, right? Where did they come in? So the Russians came in on three fronts from the south in the Black Sea area from the central part over here on the east and from the north. Look how close they came to Kiev. Why do you think they did that? The Russians planned to assassinate Zelensky or they hoped maybe he would flee the country. The only part that the Russians may not be interested in taking is the far west part around Liv because Putin believes that that part of Ukraine, like a rump Ukraine, they could leave that because those individuals are unrepentant Nazis and hate Russians. But absolutely, Vladimir Putin, their military plan and you can see it if you look at the way in which they went about that invasion, they were headed for Kiev. And the belief was, if everybody remembers back to what it was like on February 23rd, no one thought we would be here eight months later. Everyone thought Ukraine was going to fall because the Russians do not respect the laws and rules of war. Their way of dealing with opposition is they level it. The Grosny rules from Chechnya or what they've been doing in their bombings in Syria. So yes, absolutely the Russians were going after all of Ukraine, except again, maybe they would have left a little bit of a rump Ukraine but there really is no doubt that that's what they were doing. And you don't feel that NATO's disregard for the Minsk agreement, was there any factor in this? So that's Russian propaganda, that is Russian propaganda. So let me ask you, so if Ukraine wants to join NATO. But it was agreed that there would be a lawful stay between Russia and NATO. Why should the Ukrainians be bound by what the Russians want the Ukrainians to do? It was an agreement. Again. It was created after World War II, correct? This is Russian propaganda that tries to blame NATO for what's happening. The Russian line here is they're only trying to ensure their own security and NATO was coming too close to their borders. But you have to ask yourself, the Ukrainians have slowly and steadily been trying to orient themselves to the West, to Europe, to NATO, to the European Union. They want to join those organizations. And in fact, I mean, one of the things that Zelensky said when the Americans were saying the Russians are coming was then let us into NATO. And that Biden explicitly told Putin that over the summer, Ukraine is not joining NATO anytime soon. So that is just a made up threat that somehow NATO was threatening the Russians because Ukraine wanted to join. Just because Ukraine wanted in didn't mean NATO was going to let them come in. But Ukraine is an independent country and if its population decides as they have in two popular uprisings in the last 15 years, that they want a pro-Western, more democratic government then their wishes should be respected. What does the intelligence community think about Putin's threat of using tactical nuclear weapons and is there a hierarchy? So the second part is, yes, absolutely. So the Russians have 10 kiloton tactical nuclear weapons that they could use on the battlefield, which are smaller than the size of the bomb that was used at Hiroshima. They also have the big gigantic kind that could blow everything up at once. Unfortunately, people who, the analysts who know Russia well and who know Putin well are all saying publicly, this has to be taken seriously. Again, no one thought it was rational of Putin to try to invade Ukraine and take the whole country. From an outside perspective, again, that looks bonkers, but that's what they tried to do. And Putin has now staked his entire legacy in Russia on this invasion, right? That, I mean, the part of this was a grandisement for Putin. He wanted to go down as the Russian leader that restored Russia to the great status it had had when it was the Soviet Union, and which it had lost as a result of the Soviet Union's collapse. He doesn't wanna have to lose because domestically, that is gonna be extremely problematic for him. And so I don't think that we can just simply dismiss that as saber-rattling. There has to be some serious thought given to how you ensure that they actually don't do something like that. Thank you, we have time for one more. So I was wondering, when it comes to equity injustice in human rights, how is the LIO making sure that BIPOC communities are uplifted or what policies have they added for the 2024 election outside of immigration on a global stage? So the immigration issue is an area of the liberal international order that was never really settled, right? So there's supposed to be free movement of capital, but the question about free movement of people was never really established. And so many states do not want to allow migrant laborers to come in even legally because they think they're competing for their jobs or they think that they're, again, they're going to replace them, that they're gonna change the demography and the culture of the country. And that's why you see that there have been these anti-migrant, anti-immigrant, anti-assailant backlashes all over the world. And so for minority populations, whether they be racial or ethnic or religious, et cetera, even in established democracies, they are concerned for their status because these nationalist, populist, anti-globalist movements also tend to be ethnically chauvinistic, right? And so that is an area of the liberal international order where, I mean, the human rights order in general has been slowly but steadily being built. There are real gaps, et cetera, in that. I would say just thinking about the Biden administration in particular, it was extremely upsetting to most human rights advocates that he met with Mohammed bin Salman, the Saudi crown prince, because he had promised during the campaign that he would not do so, that he would make Saudi Arabia a pariah. But one way to ensure that the Europeans are able to hold up to not having Russian supplies of gas and oil in the winter is by getting the Saudis to put more oil and gas onto the market. And in a hierarchy of interest between security and human rights, the United States administration after administration consistently will put security above human rights. What were the, Ukraine gave up nuclear weapons back to the Russians, and the agreement was that Russia would guarantee its sovereignty under that agreement? That's correct. Yes. So the Russians themselves are the ones that said Ukraine should be independent. This notion that somehow it was unfairly ripped away from it is just the revisionist history that Putin is trying to offer to explain to his own population why they needed to move into Ukraine. But yeah, that was the agreement. The Ukrainians had about a third of the Soviet Union's nuclear warheads, and they gave them up peacefully in return for guarantees of their sovereignty and territorial integrity by the Russian regime. Would you comment on the role of eugenics in the problems we are having in our democracy, one of the things about Putin saying, for instance, calling the Ukrainians Nazis, which obviously we know their background. Is there any general feeling about what is going on here politically with all of these the cowboys, the groups that are appearing and disrupting our democracy? Is there something you could say that would be compelling to all of us? So I mean, that's really, that's a domestic question. And I have colleagues at the college who do the domestic stuff. I just do the international piece. But what I would say is that the reason why they're calling the Ukrainians Nazis is because they are trying to rally the Russian population around memories of World War II, right? And that is a kind of like a sacred collective memory for the Russians. And so if there are Nazis in Ukraine, then you know what you have to do when there are Nazis that are operating. It's a, I mean, there is one militia group within Ukraine that clearly has fascistic tendencies, but the Ukrainian government itself is not controlled by Nazis. I mean, Lodomir Zelensky himself is Jewish, but I wouldn't want to comment on that domestic piece in the U.S. Thank you, Beth, on behalf of the U.S.