 We are going to have a shift in our thinking today from the underpinning to an assessment of the present and then we're going to look at the future of strategic studies. I think this is going to be a fascinating conversation for us. In this particular session we have 90 minutes and with the military precision that we saw yesterday we will finish exactly on time. Each speaker in this first session will speak for not more than 20 minutes and that will give us around 30 minutes for questions before we go to morning tea. Now I read a lot of materials that come across my desk and the word strategic appears more often than not in all sorts of booklets, books, discussion papers, websites and whatever. For many people being strategic is a status symbol but it doesn't necessarily mean they're being strategic and that in part I think is the problem we confront as strategic thinkers. It is everywhere. 19 years ago when Hugh White and I were designated to be the junior day archer in defence we spent a fair bit of time talking about this question of where the strategic thinkers come from and we concluded I think they fell off trees. Like Margaret Thatcher when she was Prime Minister in Britain we thought that was not actually a very good answer, that we needed to do something more about creating a situation in which we could encourage people to get into strategic thinking and we could educate and train them in the processes that are so important. In one way or another I think that became the genesis of what is now the Australian Strategic Policy Institute and of course as most of you will know, here was in fact the first director of asthma. Nonetheless, that question where the strategic thinkers come from is a really important one because in today's age of greater uncertainty in our strategic affairs we ought to be seeing a return to a new golden age which is of course the theme of the next session. In our panel today to make an assessment about the strategic situation of today we have a stellar cast. First we will hear from Professor Hugh White, a colleague of mine over very many years and one I absolutely know is ready to ask the tough, hard questions and provocative answers to encourage debate in exploration of the issues. He's got to look at the situation pertaining today from an Australian perspective. He will no doubt talk about the contestability of ideas and he will be looking at our situation from an enormous amount of experience that you can read about in the conference brochure. Following Hugh we're going to hear from Mr Peter Ho from Singapore, a very experienced senior public servant having worked in some very fascinating and demanding positions in Singapore from a strategic studies perspective. Peter today is very much associated with the Centre for New Strategic Futures and I did spend some time last week trawling through that site to have a look at the work they've been doing. Peter will speak about strategic studies from a South East Asian perspective and I'm looking forward very much to hearing what he has to say because I think this is a nascent area where there is growth already underway and of course his particular address in this session will lead into one of the topics in the final session of the conference. Finally to round off our speaker list we're going to hear from Professor Elliot Cohen who will address the tricky topic of training the next generation of strategic thinkers. In my notes I have remarked not educating so this should be kind of interesting from my perspective. Elliot of course has written extensively on matters of strategic studies and a range of associated matters. From my own perspective his book on Supreme Command which addresses the relationships between civilian leaders and the military in the context of decision making in crisis that remains a standard text for the education of all our future leaders and I don't just mean military leaders. For more detailed information on our speakers the detail is in the conference booklet but without any further ado I now ask Professor Hugh White to lead off our proceedings. Hugh. Well good morning and thanks Chris it is sort of traditional to say just say to the proceedings what a pleasure it is to share the platform with my co-appearers but on this occasion it really does mean something Chris and I as you've been kind enough to say go back a very long way. Peter and I did a lot of work together when we were both public servants civil servants in helping to construct the remarkable relationship we have with Singapore and I think I can honestly say that no one has taught me more about American strategic policy and perspectives than Elliot. He and I have been talking about this for 25 years I was not being scary anyway long time. So I'll be here and can I just say how nice it is to appear at the 50th anniversary of this institution and to congratulate Brendan on picking up the pieces when I handed it to him and bringing it together so well to look for the institution to look so sort of bonny and blooming at its 50th birthday but as I'm afraid Brendan might regard as characteristic I'm going to express my thanks to him for giving me this opportunity but not quite doing what he's told me to do. I'm very happy to speak on strategic studies in practice because it does seem to me that ours is primarily a practical discipline that is we bring scholarship to bear on real practical questions urgent and very important questions that governments face and I'm very happy to speak about Australia specifically and I'm going to be a bit parochial this is going to be very Australia focused because SDSC has always and should always put Australia at the centre of its business what is our job our job is to bring the instruments and tools and virtues of scholarship to bear on the strategic policy questions that Australia faces and so as this is an anniversary I do think it's fitting to do that by reflecting a little bit about history as a framework for getting into our analysis of what we need to do in future of Australian strategic studies and in particular the history of the distinctively Australian strategic questions how we've approached them in the past and what they can tell us about what we need to do in the future now Bob O'Neill and his splendid address to us the other night reminded us that questions of strategic questions questions about the role of unforeseen international affairs have been with us since European settlement of this continent since modern Australia emerged so there was no Europe pre-strategic innocence where Australia is just a collection of sweet young things on a continent of our own living in innocence we were born in strategic sin if you like we were absolutely a product of British power as Bob mentioned the product of the extraordinary preponderance of British maritime power in what we now call the Indo-Pacific area after the seven years of war we were amongst other things established to provide a naval base and that was a naval base reflected in very active strategic rivalry in this region the astonishing fact that Laparis turned up in Botany Bay what was it four days or something after Arthur Phillips first fleet arrived there just tells you how intense was the strategic environment in which Australia was born and our teenage years if I can put it that way the first few decades anyway were overshadowed by the Napoleonic Wars and it's something I think we don't pay enough attention to that Australia wouldn't be today what Australia is today Australia would have never have got going as it is today had it not been for British success in those in that long and terrible battle and even in the piece that followed Australia never quite lost consciousness of strategic issues you only have to go to Sydney Harbour and see Fort Denison sitting there absurdly in the middle of the harbour to see that really all the way through our history we've had a sense of strategic risk and the policy responses required for us but here's the big point for the first century after European settlement there was no distinctively Australian strategic questions people in Australia thought strategically about our security but our thinking about that was absolutely embedded in the extraordinary global and global empire in which we are part and inseparable from it our strategic questions were all imperial not national that changed and every so often history does your favour and allows you to put a date that changed in 1883 you could say that changed in April 1883 because in that month colonial governments alarmed by European intrusions into the southwest Pacific and conscious of the changing distribution of power in Europe sort that had driven that European intrusion the French and the Germans in particular sort a strong imperial response from Whitehall to remove what was seen to be a significant deterioration in our strategic environment and didn't get it Whitehall said no that was a new situation and the Australian statesmen they were all men of the time knew it if they could not they knew that they could no longer assume that Australia's strategic interests and objectives were identical with those perceived in Whitehall and that we could rely on Whitehall to uphold them we could no longer assume in other words that London would make Asia safe for us and we had to start thinking for ourselves and acting for ourselves to pursue a distinctly Australian strategic policy responsive to Australian strategic imperatives and they immediately saw with astonishing speed the key factors which would govern the way we had to think about those questions they saw a strange paradox that Australia is uniquely with the uniquely except for New Zealand uniquely isolated from the main centres of global power but uniquely engaged through our alliances as we now call them with a global balance and the tension between our geographic isolation and our strategic investment produced the key dilemmas that have shaped Australian strategic policy one could say ever since and one way of expressing that dilemma is to say that the distance from the major power centres and particularly from our great allies meant that we couldn't depend on our allies the way we had in the past the way we'd like to and the scale of our own continent and the slenderness of our own resources meant that we had to depend on our allies because we couldn't do it by ourselves we couldn't depend on our allies but we had to depend on our allies that is the dilemma which has driven and shaped provided if you like this locomotive force for Australian strategic thinking ever since and looking back how clear-sighted that generation was people like deacon and service and so on and how courageous they were in facing what must have been for them a psychologically as well as practically extraordinarily stressful recognition and how decisive they were in responding to it one of their responses of course was federation and they did it it must be said not without a great deal of public debate but without the benefit of an academic strategic study centre to tell them what to do and they built quite a sophisticated policy to balance these imperatives to balance the imperatives for a while so the imperatives for looking after ourselves to depend on our allies or defend for ourselves and it was lucky they did because the strategic era they ended up facing we ended up facing in the ensuing century between the 1880s and shall we say the early 1970s was more demanding than they could possibly have imagined the first world war second world war cold war in Asia what would they have thought had they could could they have seen what was coming at them in their country and of course the approach we took which included a very strong commitment to supporting our allies globally carried terrible costs for us we are just a few days past a centenary of from L after all and I don't think we explore enough whether those decisions particularly the decision the first world war was the right decision whether it was the right way for Australia to reconcile those conflicting tensions I mentioned I'm not at all sure that it wasn't but I don't think we can be I think we'd learn a lot from really asking whether it was or not which is not something I think we do in 1966 when Tom Miller set up SDSC those key questions how much do we depend on our allies how much do we fend for ourselves driven by that fundamental dilemma were still there they were still they were still the same challenges but what he decided and what others around him the others had supported him decided was that it might help to bring scholarship to bear on those questions partly that was a reflection of international trends a discipline of strategic studies of granite elsewhere in the world in circumstances which Laurie set out for us for elegantly yesterday but also in response to astonishingly powerful local imperatives it is no coincidence that SDSC was founded 50 years ago this year Australia then was right on the threshold indeed was already within an astonishingly complex transformation of our strategic environment which in some ways I think we still don't understand was certainly one of perhaps biggest transformation of our strategic environment since that traumatic moment in 1883 it completely overtook the grand strategy of the day for a defence which we developed to deal with the post world war two post colonial era Asia that we found ourselves living again and again look look look at what was coming to Australia in the years after 1966 what they didn't know they were doing they didn't know it was coming when they set up SDSC but escalation and we just got into Vietnam escalation and failure in Vietnam the British withdrawal list of sewers and the Guam doctor were just around the corner but also not yet at all clear in 1966 but just around the corner was the transformation of Southeast Asia as a strategic region into something far more benign than we could possibly have imagined the transformation of the US-China relationship and with it the major power order in Asia after 1972 taken together that they produced the end of the Cold War in Asia and the creation of a US-led order in Asia which which we've been the enormous beneficiaries ever since that whole set of developments in the years after 1966 was the biggest shift in the role of allies in the in the Asian order and in Australia's security since 1883 and it drove of course a fundamental new set of policy choices for Australia new answers to the question how far we defend on our depend on our allies and how far to defend for ourselves and SDSC was right at the heart of that you know since one way of thinking about SDS history is to date it not from the data which the institution itself was established but the data in which Tom Miller published a book Australia's defense which was the first serious systematic academic attempt to get a head around it get our heads around those questions and right on the fly leaf of the dust cover of Australia's defense big writing can Australia defend itself can Australia defend itself that was the question the SDSC was established to answer at a time when the future of our alliances in Asia was profoundly uncertain and of course that debate that followed shifted the balance between self-reliance and the alliance in a long process that led from 1966 to 1976 decade later 40th anniversary of the 1976 white paper very important moment itself and of course 10 years on to 1986 and the Dib review 30th anniversary of the Dib review of a very important anniversary it took us 20 years from 1966 to get our heads around what that meant and that's actually nothing necessarily wrong with that they were very big questions and of course it would accompany by major public debate major public debates of intensity and sophistication and volume and passion on defense and foreign policy issues that we in Australia today can hardly imagine it was driven of course partly by Vietnam that provided the kind of emotional locomotive but it was also driven by a very broad public understanding of how Asia was changing and what that meant for us if you doubt that go back and read that great text of Australian self-imaging at the time the lucky country Donald horn the first chapter the beginning of the first chapter of a lucky country says something like I was sitting on the porch of the something a rather club in Hong Kong and my Chinese friend said to me you know you're going to be people from all over Asia the lucky country was all about that question of how Australia related to a rising Asia and it was about questions of identity it was a very strong element I think to drove that debate in the 60s and 70s questions about how we see ourselves exactly the point that Brenda was making in his speech over dinner last night and in that SDSC played a key role in all of that a very important feature of that was that the participants at that stage in that era all had direct or they'd relatively direct experience of a major war in our region all by Neil story sitting around the family radio on the 10th of December very important when we think about what they did then is very important to remember that that was a generation for whom the idea of major power conflict in Asia with profound and very unsettling implications for the kinds of relationship we had our allies that was a lived personal experience and it profoundly affected the way they thought about the questions their understanding of Australia strategic risks and their sense of the policy imperatives and so they built a post-Vietnam strategic posture of which the self-reliant defense of Australia was right at the core although with very carefully limited conception of the strategic objectives that we would have in that implementing that policy and here's the paradox that the policy that we built on that basis that people at SDSC and Paul of course in particular had such a big role in developing paradoxically became a golden age for our alliance of the United States partly that's because the whole posture we built was only possible because of one of the key features of the strategic shift that I mentioned before that is the emergence of the U.S. as the uncontested dominant power in Asia in fact it took Australia back to something very like what we'd seen before 1883. Before 1883 British power in Asia had been uncontested and so although we had a few strategic thoughts it was all pretty easy after 1972 after Nixon went to China despite defeating Vietnam U.S. primacy in Asia became uncontested and that simply meant that the alliance ended at a golden age in which the costs to the U.S. for maintaining its alliance in Asia and the costs to Australia supporting it were very low and the benefits were very high our interest and objective were very clearly aligned and very cheaply achieved and as a result slowly over the decades that followed the alliance became again more and more central it became more and more natural to assume that a very strong alliance at very low cost a very strong alignment of strategic interest was normal and this became for example in recent years decade or so became kind of enshrined in a wiggish model of our strategic history whereby what we've seen all of the bumps and lumps and anxieties have been washed away and what we've seen is a long arc of ever-increasing Anglo-Saxon global prominence dominance producing Tony Abbott's favourite strategic concept the Anglosphere. Well those of you who know something about my preoccupations will imagine we're not going to take this next because it does bring us to today. The core question about Australia's strategic position today is whether or not the United States will continue to play the same role in Asia and the same role in Australia's security as it's played since the mid-1970s and if not what do we do instead that is that is what will determine the way in which we see the balance between depending on our allies inventing for ourselves and it arises of course because of a really very big shift in the distribution of power in Asia over the last few decades and particularly over about the last decade with a corresponding shift I would say in the strategic objectives of the great powers in Asia especially China and a very substantial return to strategic rivalry in the region of a kind dominated the region and shaped Australia's strategic situation in that ugly 90 years between 1883 and the early 1970s and this is a question the questions that arise from that of ones that we have the country not yet effectively addressed we've tried we've tried a particular in three white papers over five years you know 9 and 13 and 16 all of them show deep ambivalence on this core question about how far we can assume the United States will continue to play the same role and therefore we can continue to operate on the same basis all of them acknowledge the fundamental shift but all of them conclude there's no reason fundamentally to change our policy all of them are confident that despite the fundamental shift in distribution of wealth and power if the strategic order in Asia and America's role in it will not change and their confidence of that actually becomes more strident with each white paper it seems to me that these that the 2009 white paper was the best of those three the most it engaged most seriously in that in that dilemma and the 2016 one least seriously those 56 is that the right number anyway I think it's 56 occurrences of the phrase rules based global order let's be clear rules based global order is a euphemism for US primacy and the 56 recurrences of that is the number of that phrase is that bell ringing nothing's going to change well good luck with that I think the extent of the complacency in our strategic policy is overshadowed by the over hyped decisions for very modest and exceptionally slow increases in our maritime capability in effect Australia is doing nothing to respond to what is a really fundamental change in our strategic order a change which is comparable to the changes of 1883 and 1966 to which our predecessors responded with such figure so those are the questions we need to debate we need to debate how big actually is the challenge to the US lead order this is a subject on which you can legitimately debate and it involves judgments about China's power and judgments about China's ambition and result it involves judgments about America's power and about America's objectives and resolve it's a judge that in beds amongst other things judgments about the value of US allies and how much use allies really are touches that Tom touched on yesterday and and the attitudes of other great powers in the role they'll play for example Japan and India all of these things are up to debate none of them are we debating with the clarity and force that we need to debate we also need to ask ourselves well what are the alternatives what does it mean for us if US order if the US role in Asia does significantly change what are the alternative what kinds of alternative orders in Asia might we have as a basis for stability if the US law order no longer proves sustainable and what are the implications for Australia if there's no stability to be had and if we end up living in a much more contested region now the debate on that second question has hardly begun because we're still stuck on the first question and I think it's partly because not just are Australians I think far too optimistic about the answer but I think Americans are too it does seem to me that that the right of the heart of the US approach to China today is it is it generally not universally but generally a very serious underestimation of the sea of the seriousness of the challenge that China poses and it's been a lot of time talking about that just to pick up on the point that Alan being made yesterday about the relationship between economics and strategy that relationship is very complex but it's a very big simple thing right at the heart of it and that is that the primary source of strategic weight is economic scale as economic power shifts strategic power shifts as strategic power shifts orders change you'd have to believe that Asia could be transformed fundamentally economically and be unchanged strategically to be as confident of the future of US primacy in Asia as I think our policy today as I think US policy today presupposes and I think that's extraordinarily unlikely now on one way one level it's not surprising that we're finding a set of questions so difficult to deal with they are extremely uncomfortable the practical applications that in terms of the order we might see in Asia and the kinds of responses we might make to it are immense immense as big of foreign policy questions or strategic policy questions as Australia has ever faced and what one might call the psychological implications are very big too with respect to Brennan's point last night these are questions of identity when I started working on this issue some years ago I remember a very dear friend and colleague of mine saying to me here I just completely disagree with you about what you're saying when I read the power shift quarterly essay and Australia which did not have the kind of reliance we have with the United States today would simply not be Australia I think a lot of people believe that I don't think we can afford to define our identity that way much as I love America and it's worth making a point that partly because of the practical and partly because of those identity issues refusal to engage in these questions is totally purely spectacularly bipartisan neither side of politics wants to touch it but I think also underlying that is a kind of a deeper thing Laura Tingle a couple of months ago a few months ago published a really good quarterly essay called political amnesia in which he said that one of the things that's gone wrong with Australian government over the last decade or so and I think we'd all agree something has gotten wrong with Australian government over the last decade or so is a great inability to understand our own history and I think that's something that's hitting us very hard in our field our approach to strategic questions today based on the assumption not just at the alliance that it exists today is nice but that it's always been that way we've forgotten that the alliances have ever been different that we've thought about our strategic situation differently from the way we do we can't imagine Australia without it and we don't have a sense I don't think strong enough of what SDSC's role in that has been I think it's a vital to getting Australia's strategic policy right I think it's vital to getting SDSC's role in the future of Australian strategic policy right that we remember that history a bit more clearly thank you very much first I do not consider myself an expert on strategic studies secondly I do not think that a Southeast Asian perspective on strategic studies exists in fact as far as I'm aware in Southeast Asia there's only one institute that is properly focused on the full range of strategic studies and that is Singapore's S. Roger Adams School of International Studies or RSIS and my encounters with strategic studies have been tangential and my first encounter was when I was in military service and studying in our command and staff course and of course strategic studies was part of that program and some years after I completed the command and staff course I led a review of the whole command and staff college system and unsurprisingly the review asserted the importance of strategic studies so not only did strategic studies remain at the core of the various programs run by the command and staff college but the department of strategic studies was also established the teaching of strategic studies was outsourced to the new institute for defense and strategic studies which later on became a full school the RSIS that was I think about 10 years later in 2007 and this gained for the command and staff college access to a team of experts whose primary business was strategic studies this enhanced the quality of teaching in this important area for military officers and in return it anchored strategic studies as a core capability of the RSIS or IDSS so at this point it might be useful to ask a basic question not the basic question of where the strategy come from but why is strategic studies important I discovered its value later on in civilian life both when I worked on plans and policies in the Ministry of Defense as well as in my various postings to the Ministry of Foreign Affairs and later on when I was in charge of national security and intelligence coordination and it was in these positions that strategic studies came alive to me in fact far more than it did when I was doing my military service it provided an important foundation to help me understand the world to discover the drivers of grand strategy to uncover the impulses of foreign policy and to develop an instinct about our nations and governments respond to challenges it helped me to connect strategy to operations and plans and to frame decisions in their conceptual intellectual historical and ideological context but I also found that strategic studies are largely based on hindsight and historical insight while my experience in planning and policy making taught me that things never follow a predictable trajectory especially the medium to long term indeed one of the foremost challenges facing anyone in the business of planning policy making is the challenge of strategic surprise now most of us have heard of black swans a term coined by Nicholas Nassim Talib and these are rare hard to predict events that have a large game changing impact and later on in 2002 this was after 911 US Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld introduced us to a relative of the black swan the unknown unknowns and in Singapore and I'm sure in Australia you've had your equivalent we've had encounters with black swans and unknown unknowns in recent years the Asian financial crisis of 1997 98 911 uncovering of the Jamiah islamaya terrorist network in December 2001 the global economic and financial crisis Arab Spring if you will the rise of ISIS Brexit and so on you know the list is almost endless but one thing that is apparent to me is that the frequency of such strategic shocks is increasing and the amplitude of their impact is growing we can have a whole discussion on why but I got no time now then it explained in a way why when he said everything is connected to everything else and globalization increases his connections as does the internet and in such a connected world what happens in one part of the world is going to affect other parts of the world you can't hide this is a so-called butterfly effect which postulates that the flap of a butterfly's wings in brazil can set off a tornado in texas the danish philosopher soren kirkegaard once said life is understood backwards but must be lived forwards in other words you can look backwards in time to understand why something happened you know if you're very sophisticated you call this retrospective coherence but in more simple language it's hindsight and that's what strategic studies do very well but hindsight is not necessarily able to tell you what is going to happen when you look forward in time and that is the problem we cannot predict the future at this point I would like to introduce to you a new member of my menagerie the black elephant now what is a black elephant it is a cross between a black swan and the elephant in the room the black elephant is a problem that is actually visible to everyone the proverbial elephant in the room but no one wants to deal with it so they pretend it's not there and when the problem blows up everyone pretends to be surprised or shocked behaving as if it were a black swan all human beings whether you are a man in the street the highest decision maker in the land we all have blind spots the tendency of the human mind is to underestimate sudden crisis whether because of their own cognitive biases or because it is inconvenient to admit to the obvious so initially through hesitation and until events reach crisis proportions nobody takes any action this can lead to military failure for example the japanese attack on pearl harbour 1941 yom kippur war 1973 isis could arguably be described as a black elephant uh president obama admitted in 2014 that the us underestimated the threat posed by isis fighters in syria and overestimated the effectiveness of the security forces in iraq most recently i myself was astonished to learn that the treasury in the uk had made no contingency plans for brexit truly this is another example of a black elephant my view is that we must learn to think as systematically about a future that is inherently volatile uncertain complex and ambiguous just as we think about the past that is known or knowable in this regard strategic studies can do a lot to help reduce the frequency of strategic shock and when the inevitable shock occurs to mitigate its amplitude or intensity there are foresight methodologies ways to think about the future systematically even though you should not pretend that you're predicting the future there are ways using these foresight methodologies to overcome some of our latent biases and our inherent cognitive limitations one of them is the famous scenario planning method which was developed and pioneered by shell the oil giant and shell famously avoided the impact of the oil shock in the 70s because of scenario planning it was only all major i think to make money out of that period but i have not seen much evidence that strategic studies has adopted such tools and perhaps it's too unconventional in singapore the ministry of defense needed an imperative to find ways to better anticipate changes in technology and in the operating environment and in the late 80s it started using shells scenario planning techniques then in 1991 encouraged by the ministry of defense's positive experiences with scenario planning a scenario planning office which is now called the strategic policy office was set up in the prime minister's office to apply the technique to issues affecting the entire nation and not just the defense and security sector today national level scenario planning exercises around every few years and apart from these efforts which deal with issues at a national scale focus scenario planning studies on specific issues like climate change or when significant geopolitical change seems imminent are conducted in the singapore experience we have discovered that when scenarios are well crafted and articulate imaginative yet plausible ways in which the future could evolve planners and policy makers will begin to move out of their comfort zones begin to think the unthinkable and more willingly explore fresh strategies scenario planning helps to inculcate an anticipatory mindset in planners and policy makers so that they instinctively raise what if questions on the issues they deal with but scenario planning unfortunately is not very useful in locating black swans and the unknown unknowns the Nobel economist and strategic thinker former shelling explained one thing a person cannot do no matter how rigorous his analysis or heroic his imagination is to draw up a list of things that would never occur to him so to address this deficiency even if partially in singapore we have adopted other tools while scenario planning remains the base a wider range of foresight tools such as horizon scanning backcasting causal layer analysis are now deployed collectively we refer to these tools as scenario planning plus or sp plus and these tools help planners to discover some but certainly not all of the black swans and unknown unknowns lurking beyond the horizon horizon scanning tries to identify the big game changes by looking for emerging trends and issues and delving into them to see where the threats and opportunities are and what are the big game changes now a lot of them some of them are to be found in the current wave of technological innovations taking place in the it sphere information technology it's not just about data and data analytics it is also includes the internet of things cloud computing drones robotics 3d printing but this is not just about innovation and opportunity there's the downside serious people like bill gates steven hawking elon musk have all warned that artificial intelligence might pose an existential risk not to the country but to the world cyber threats we all know now are very serious last year three power grids in the ukraine were brought down by hackers using technology switch look remarkably similar to studs net and earlier this year steve siphoned off 81 million dollars u.s. dollars from bangladesh bank in a sophisticated cyber heist the other big issues demographics is a perennial waters and other many countries are going to face water shortages because they have carelessly drained their water tables in others have used up a non-renewable resource underground water furthermore many other countries are now facing the effects of climate change such as changing weather patterns and disruptions to rainfall and the resulting water shortages are not near inconveniences they are an issue of survival and therefore have huge security and strategic implications now such emerging strategic issues have the potential to become game changers the question is which ones should we focus on which ones are going to evolve into the big challenges and which are going to be big opportunities and this is where strategic studies can develop a deeper understanding of such issues and to separate the existential from the merely inconvenient we could problems are highly complex that causes and other influencing factors cannot be easily determined furthermore they have multiple stakeholders who see these problems from different perspectives and they will have different different goals this means that there is no immediate or obvious solution because nobody can agree on what the problems are in the first place never mind what the solutions should be crisis are often wicked problems terrorism is a particularly wicked problem some of you might be surprised by this assertion because you think that all of us would want to get rid of terrorism except of course the terrorists but even if everyone agreed that terrorism should be banished it is not clear to me that the policy prescriptions would gain universal acceptance if it were the case then terrorism would not be the persistent problem it is today and ISIS would not be a serious threat we all work in organizations that respect hierarchy and this is how human systems work but in a wicked problem where there are multiple stakeholders more likely and not there will be different organizations managing different parts of the problem it should be an imperative to be able to bring these different organizations together to address the wicked problem in its totality and in Singapore we call this the whole of government approach attacking the Jama'a islamaya is a wicked problem for Singapore and it's not just about removing the immediate threat that ji posed to Singapore security in December 2001 it also requires engaging multiple stakeholders including the community groups it means engaging the private sector to develop the protective systems processes and infrastructure this approach clearly needs not just many agencies of government coming together but bringing in the people and the private sectors in a way it was not just a whole of government approach but a whole of nation approach the Singapore approach wants to fight the ji network with a whole of whole of nation network in the context of strategic studies it seems to me that the analog of the whole of government approach is the net assessment approach one that is done very well in the australian office of national assessments information from all sources across disciplines are shared evaluated holistically so that complex situations are studied as a whole and not just in their paths this approach helps connect the dots by thinking broadly by considering how different events drivers and agents interact with each other we can see the larger picture and obtain a better fix on the possible outcomes however efforts to understand a complex world often rely on an assumption that what is complex can be reduced into simpler subsets that are easier to evaluate and when re-aggregated will produce results that approximate the real world this approach is called reductionism it is rooted in the belief that complex phenomenon can be analyzed in component and simpler parts now unfortunately despite the enormous importance of this approach it gives a false impression that investigating the features of a of things in at a holistic level is less informative than investigating the properties of the components and i would argue that strategic studies have tended towards the reductionist approach rather than looking at situations in a more holistic way net assessment horizon scanning all require this ability to look at situations holistically and this is important because as i said earlier everything is connected to everything else so this is an argument for strategic studies to move beyond its traditional focus on politics and security and to enlarge the view of the world to see how economics demographics societal issues culture environment technology all interact with each other to produce the complexities of our operating environment before i conclude i would like to connect my remarks to the topic which is the southeastern perspective maybe there's no southeastern perspective on strategic studies but there is a difference between how people look at issues in his studies of culture of cultures the geography of thought richard nisbert identified a major cognitive difference between western and asian and asian includes southeast asia between western and asian cultures at the risk of oversimplification after looking at a picture of a i'll say a horse westerners tend to remember the horse but asians will also recall the background whether the there were clouds in the sky whether the sky was blue whether the grass was green the question is whether strategic studies can normalize this difference perhaps by taking a more holistic and interdisciplinary approach and in so doing create a better and common understanding of the big challenges and issues good plans and policies acknowledge uncertainties and complexities of operating environment strategic studies should likewise acknowledge these uncertainties and complexities and embrace the tools of foresight and future thinking look at issues holistically from which they can derive new insights that can inform the work of policy planners and policy makers thank you thank you i want to uh i want to begin uh by congratulating sdsc and i want to thank my hosts for their hospitality uh if i had been invited to speak as a policy expert i would have begun by glaring at who white and saying preponderance but i won't do that um instead i would have paul deb is encouraging me but uh uh so i'm tempted but i won't the the topic i was given was training the next generation of strategic thinkers i think i was given that in my role as a school teacher and since that's really what i am and how i think of myself i'm quite happy with that up to a point so like a good school teacher let me begin by looking closely at the exam question and i'm going to begin by rejecting the first word training and the reason why i reject it to give you a sort of a shorthand version is it seems to me that training means preparing people to do well what you think they ought to do in the way that you think they ought to do it education i believe is preparing other people to do well what they think they ought to do the questions they think they ought to ask in the way that they think is most appropriate we continue to parse the question there's a missing word the word is we how do we propose to educate the next generation of strategic thinkers strategic studies is not value neutral most of us here are not i know i certainly am not interested in educating strategic thinkers for the islamic state i'm not actually interested in educating strategic thinkers on either the russian or the chinese general staffs strategic studies as it the term in the form that now exists is after all a post world war two phenomenon of the west it spread out from there and it did to some extent in various ways spread to the old soviet union and to china although there it was quite different let me be very clear that doesn't mean that there wasn't a lot of very sophisticated strategic thought in those countries and lots of other countries and indeed i would say one of the weaknesses of strategic studies is it often ends up simply being a gloss on american national security policy and defense policy and how americans have thought about these things as opposed to exploring other nations strategic thought but but the fact is strategic studies as a field has been it's very interesting in a number of ways it has been civilian dominated unlike the situation in particularly in i would say in russia and china and it is not value neutral nor indeed would i argue should it be it presupposes some very basic presuppositions beginning with the idea that war is a bad thing and should be used reluctantly not necessarily as the last resort but reluctantly i would argue that strategic studies as it now exists also presupposes a basic political stance in favor of free institutions and limited government and i think that's inevitable what about the word generation what's the next generation well again you have to dissect what do we mean by generations always an interesting topic for intellectual historians let me suggest that there are four generations of strategic people who've been writing about and thinking about strategic studies there is a found was a founding generation of which there are really only two major figures left both alas and frail health uh michael howard and uh and remarshall both of their nineties other figures familiar many of us here headley bull sam huntington elbert bolster ramond aron these were the people who founded the field and they had their distinct set of intellectual projects dealing with the advent of nuclear weapons the protracted conflict of the cold war civil military relations they were profoundly shaped by the second world war which they had either experienced very directly or to the experience is uh at that age where you become a political awareness say in one's teens there was a successor generation which is represented here if i might say so i think babo neal is the uh the senior representative of that successor generation it was a smaller generation for a variety of reasons a lot having to do with vietnam and other things molded very much by the cold war and i would i would say that many of those of us and i would view myself as coming at the tail end of this generation most of us expected that to go on pretty much forever um and that affected our intellectual projects arms control the conventional balance in europe to some extent post cold war stability operations the revolution and military affairs there's a third generation which is represented here just speaking about the americans i would i would point to people like tom christensen and howl brands and dan morriston who came of political and intellectual age in the 1990s for whom 9-11 was in some ways a defining shock their intellectual projects had included things like terrorism studies counter insurgency grand strategy hybrid war whether or not we think that's a useful term civil military relations in a different context asian great power politics and then there's a fourth generation and in many ways that's the generation that uh i think we should focus on and that's some of the younger people out here in this audience people whose memories of uh 9-11 will really be that of adolescence if that the point that i want to make is those first two generations were powerfully shaped by the cold war and by the second world war and that left its intellectual imprint on the field and part of our challenge going forward as teachers is how to get beyond the thrall of both the second world war and the cold war another part of part of that question of who's the next generation is we have to say well who's the audience who we trying to educate i'd say it's actually quite a large audience includes bureaucrats and academics analysts and think tanks in some cases politicians opinion shapers soldiers very large and diverse group who are going to do different kinds of things with their lives well what about the word strategic uh and of course there's a large debate about security studies versus strategic studies there is an old-fashioned definition of strategic studies as being about the preparation and use of military power to serve the ends of policy that is a definition which is old-fashioned narrow and intellectually restrictive and that's why i like it i think the the danger in much broader definitions of strategic studies is the danger of intellectual diffusion it's the danger of equating the word strategic with the word important and so this way i think i might respectfully disagree with my friend peter hoe it seems to me there can be issues which are extraordinarily important issues of national policy uh which in some cases involve danger to life and limb which are nonetheless not really strategic in the sense of strategic studies as i think about what about thinkers but what do thinkers do other than think they write i suppose interestingly they write a little bit differently now than they do in the past but i want to use that as a way of raising a warning flag about the intellectualism of strategic studies seems to me as i reflect and think about these remarks and i reflect on the field it seems to me it is sometimes valued ideas over implementation concepts over contingency abstractions over personalities and circumstances sometimes indeed theology over the practical arts okay so what are the implications for education well in some ways i would say as they ever were and i want to illustrate that with two quotations so the first is from you know you always have to have a sacred text the sacred text and strategic studies is on war um and so i begin with a quotation from the introductory note to posthumous's work where he says that you know this is not a book for napoleon napoleon doesn't need this book napoleon acts on instinct and the rest of us can't really improve it and then this book can't turn you into napoleon he then continues yet when it is not a question of acting oneself but of persuading others in discussion the need is for clear ideas and the ability to show their connection with each other so few people have yet acquired the necessary skill at this that most discussions are a futile banding of words either they leave each man sticking to his own ideas or they end with everyone agreeing for the sake of agreement on a compromise with nothing to be said for it clear ideas of these matters do therefore have some practical value i've been in the situation room in the white house and deputies committees meetings that is exactly what happens clausenitz knew exactly what he was talking about and that's why he says the purpose of theory is to guide the self-education of commanders it seems to me that the fundamental idea here in clausenitz about what is the use of all this it's not that different from that of a near contemporary cardinal newman it is famous and powerfully intellectual lectures on the idea of a university which in many ways shaped the notion of liberal education as we have understood it what newman says is that a liberal education is the education which gives a man okay it's gendered language i understand a clear conscious view of his own opinions and judgments the truth in developing them and eloquence in expressing them in a force in urging them it teaches him to see things as they are to go right to the point to disentangle a scheme of thought to detect what is sophisticle and to discard what is irrelevant it prepares him to fill any post with credit and to master any subject with facility it shows him how to accommodate himself to others how to throw himself into their state of mind how to bring before them his own how to influence them how to come to an understanding with them how to bear with them i would submit that at its heart strategic studies is oddly enough a branch of the liberal arts or at least it is in a certain way understandable as liberal education and that in some ways it's actually not so because actually it is connected in a certain way with citizenship it is connected with the idea or at least the supposition of unfettered public debate about critically important issues and so in that respect strategic studies is as it ever was but of course in other respects not um and let me suggest in particular four ways in which the strategic education of the future should probably differ from that of previous periods and put these four in its four challenges the first is the diversity of the problem i can clearly agree with those who say you know it's a mistake to say well cold war it's easy the cold war was simple and there's nothing it nothing like that nonetheless at least certainly from an american point of view um but i think more generally there is a tremendously diverse range of strategic challenges out there the jihadi islamist terrorist threat the rise of china revanches revisionist states like russia or iran or north korea phenomena which may not be entirely new but again i'll use that term hybrid war which i understand is highly problematic on nuclear proliferation and so on can we prepare people adequately to address all of these questions i would say probably not it is in many ways a more diffuse field in terms of the problem set out there than it was in the past is it nonetheless important to make give people a kind of general competence so that they can understand and discuss those issues i would say absolutely and so that is one part of the educational challenge strategic studies has always been in many ways a like a syncretic religion um it is and i think needs to be multidisciplinary now at the outset what really represented i think was a synthesis of a very old-fashioned kind of political science and history with a dash of economics as brought in by people like claus door today it is important i think to be much more diverse and i thought amy king's remarks yesterday about bringing economics together with the study of national security issues were very much to the point i would go beyond that i would build for i very much agree with uh peter ho's remarks about psychology there's an enormous amount to be learned from the study of cognitive psychology where there's really been tremendous advances as we think about for example decision making there needs to be more with anthropology perhaps more of the material sciences personally i'm somewhat skeptical of big data kinds of studies but i understand that they're here to stay certainly a need for much more area expertise including linguistic fluency which is something that has lapsed in many ways in recent years particularly i would say vis-a-vis asia and i would say at the end that military history remains the ballast thirdly the study or at least the awareness of the the challenges of implementation and not just ideas i referred earlier to the intellectualism of strategic studies a dangerous gap opened up in the aftermath of the vietnam war in the 1970s as a generation of academics who fundamentally had very little life experience outside the university world at the time grew up and had very little knowledge either direct or vicarious of how governments and military organizations actually operate and whose instinct was to have a kind of standoff relationship with the official world in the united states are late there's been an interesting academic movement to bridge the gap and there's some welcome signs we still have something of an in-and-out system of government which i and several others here have been the beneficiaries of but this is still a challenge the fourth challenge has to do with what i'd refer to as communal entropy when i went to my first double i double s conference in 1985 uh it was several hundred people and all the greats were there you know at what wall says stetter sam huntington michael howard um and we had the time to talk that's not what the double i double s is like now it's not just because of how the place is run these are much larger much larger communities and it's hard to keep them cohesive let me conclude by saying something really directed at the professor's present most of us as academics operate in a world in which our professional incentives point to everything except the quality of our teaching at best you get some rewards for the quantity of your teaching how many enrollments how many courses but not the quality of our teaching for too many people it's the price we pay to do what we really want to do that is something to fight against and to reject i know i'm here because of sam huntington other people are here because of michael howard others are here because of bob o'neill and hugh strung and laury freedman i began by identifying myself as a school teacher that's not false modesty it's because potentially at any rate i believe there's no more important or more satisfying job in the world if we have responsibility again i'll speak to the professor's present it is to make sure that we grow not only the next generation of strategic thinkers but the next next generation of teachers as well thank you are we connected great uh well i think there is plenty of scope for significant questions so i guess my role is to try and hurt that into the next 20 minutes or so what i propose to do is to take three questions in a block at the time and hopefully be able to assign one of these wonderful speakers to answer them so who would like amy you and evelyn thank you very much for three really stimulating discussions um my comment more than a question but there's a question tacked on the end is perhaps for hugh but anyone is is welcome to respond we're celebrating two anniversaries this year the 70th anniversary of the anew which was set up in part to understand asia and the pacific pacific at that particular time we're also celebrating the 50th anniversary of sdsc and as as hugh mentioned tb millows book in 1966 focused on australia's defense and relationship with asia that book was deeply anxious really about australia's place in asia it was very worried about all the threats to australia from asia and i think there's a stark difference in understanding those two anniversaries when you think about the anew's goal of setting up to try and understand asia from australia but trying to understand asia and strategic studies and perhaps sdsc as about our defense from asia and it's something i worry about in our discipline about whether it is actually possible to fuse together the policy practice real world aspects with the academic study of whatever it is we study do we always have to start from a national australian perspective as hugh said or a singaporean or an american perspective um and if so isn't that fundamentally going to shape the sorts of questions that we ask if we start from an australian perspective we're always going to be worried about the threats to us from asia uh others have asked and i think myself included and not remotely interested in studying from an australian perspective and and never have really been and sort of think about the region from outside of australia but is it possible to as elliot cohen was saying bring in anthropology area studies economic psychology and also start from that national perspective can we can we even possibly try to do that thank you this is um partly an obstacle but let me begin with an observation response to peter howe and it's really a question for hugh wise and elliot cohen um the observation in relation to brexit is that it goes much further than the treasury uh it's related to this whole issue of scenario planning uh in the life of the last government uh the national security risk rate which is established in 2010 refused to put the EU and the possibility of british exit from the EU onto the list of strategic risks um and the line despite the fact that the joint parliamentary committee uh addressing the national security distraction raised that point the line from the government is a we don't want it to happen therefore we're not going to plan for it um and be that the EU is and it goes exactly to what amy said yesterday is an economic issue and that is not a security issue um and i raise it just because in relation to scenario building it's extraordinarily difficult to escape political presumptions that underpin scenario building um i'm tempted to go on i make a think of so-called war games i've attended organized within the UK where actually we've never got to war because we've been so busy thinking of reasons why we shouldn't go to war when the function has actually been thinking how we would fight a war if there were a war so i think there are inherent difficulties uh which don't invalidate the process of of even going through scenarios of war games but but i'm not sure that we've got the answer to how we necessarily get the amount of certain presumptions unless you have an immediate contiguous threat uh that makes that so self-evident you know i think if you're Finland facing Russia you can do it but but but but it might be rather harder uh when particularly for australia to put it in a national context the threats come from so many different directions but my substantive question is this um as i listed to you the more you went on the more i thought if you take australia right what you're saying and put the uk in is exactly the same set of questions uh because both of us are dealing with the problem of the u.s alliance and its centrality and how we handle that relationship how central it becomes here we are at the opposite sides of the world and actually the core question is um where is the u.s going uh what is its priority in terms of its alliances and how far should we configure our defense policy around what we think the u.s might or might not be doing um and it makes it extraordinarily difficult to be able to resolve the issues that we confront because we're not sure of the guidance or the sense of direction we're getting from the united states so my my sort of flippant question is is geography important here because this is you know the other side of the world raising the same question or is really the core issue the question of the united states and what its intentions are i mean elliot gave you an answer which was preponderance uh but of course i'm afraid that's not going to convince all of the people all the time professor go thank you i'd like to thank the panel for a really stimulating start to the second day of this conference thank you for that i've got two questions um the first is for peter um peter i wanted to take the opportunity to connect what you were saying to what you were saying and to ask you a slightly naughty question about whether you might have any advice for australia about the black elephant of the decline of you as preponderance which i was talking about yesterday um my second question is for elliot um elliot let me declare that i am here because of rosemary foot and kong yuan form um two non strategic study scholars who have had a huge impact on the teaching of strategic studies and related disciplines um in the uk and in asia actually um my question to you is posed in the form of a proposition which i wondered what you would think about um i think your remarks really highlighted a central tension that we've always had in any centers that teach strategic studies is that tension between the policy relevant forms of education that we have to do which we must do and the research and scholarly foundations of that teaching um and there are there are some of us a very few of us who are fortunate enough to have traversed the two worlds of scholarship and policy but i think we'd agree that that's not the norm most of us fall much more heavily in one of those worlds only with some degree of acquaintance with the other one either through research or through association or affiliation one way or the other now i if you accept that that's the norm and that you know um those who actually seamlessly move between the two are the rarity what do we do with that right and here's my composition um my proposition is mutual respect to begin with right um i stand on the scholarly side and i've always said to my audiences that you have policy expertise which i don't have right but i have research expertise which i don't believe many of you do have how do we talk across that and bring to each other channels and information and data and findings which are mutually useful right um is the challenge um and i wondered what you thought about that and how that may or may not feed into experience of educating strategic studies scholars and practitioners thank you okay so we'll start with you and come through the panel that way right thanks samy sure great great yes have a great question right at the heart of the issue this is it in discreet um but sometimes you write lines and speeches for one's principles that live in your heart and a line i wrote for hawk ones was that australia should seek security not from asia but in asia he added in and with asia which broke the rhythm of the sentence and i've never forgiven him but it but it's a terribly important thought but i actually think it cuts directly to the point i'm making because the great temptation for australia is to think with an anglo-saxon dominant great power in asia we don't have to worry too much about those guys and there is a reason why the decades after 1948 were a golden era in australian strategic studies and there's a reason why the last couple of years have been shall we say a bronze era in australian asian studies is it like more we become confident the united states will dominate asia and make asia safe for us the less we've felt we have to build our own future in asia and so it is so i think in in fact understanding what i would see is at least the potential fragility of us preponderance is essential for understanding why it's so important to get ahead around it now the second point to make is that my conception of strategic studies is slightly broader than elliott's i love the line about it's narrow and old-fashioned and backward looking and that's why i like it i absolutely but i just broaden it out slightly you know my definition is to descend into the role of armed force in international affairs and that means that includes the construction of orders in asia or elsewhere which reduce the role of armed force in international affairs and to me one of the core objectives of strategic policy one of the core objectives of strategic studies in supporting policy is to help conceive design and create international orders in which the use of armed force becomes less likely and the reason why people like evelyn and you have a vital place in sdse is because that's exactly what you contribute so i do think a central role for australia central role for strategic policy central role for strategic studies is to help imagine what kind of border in asia will reduce the risk of us finding ourselves having to defend ourselves from asia i also think we have to go against the possibility that doesn't work but i think the really important thing for us and against the message i was trying to convey is that we better stop assuming that the only conceivable model and the only model we have to worry about and think about is the one in which the united states primacy does it yep united states primacy has done it that's why i love it so much but i don't think we can assume it continues to do that work in the future here there's a marvellous passage at the beginning of michael howards the continental commitment in which he says anyone studying british military defense policy from the turn of the century through to i think he was writing in the 1970s will be struck by a remarkable series of continuities and he then has a long and beautifully elegant sentence constructed with semicolons in which he says you know the balance between our concerns in europe and for the empire the balance of our alliance on the united states etc etc there are about half a dozen elements you can run through that and reframe it precisely to mirror australia and so the basic point you're making is absolutely correct there are curious similarities but there is and so i therefore think you know i'm basically agreeing with your basic point but i do think the geography makes a huge difference because for britain as ever perhaps less this month than last month there is an alternative there is europe there is a strategic concept for britain in a in strategic integration with europe in a sense you know the whole point that michael howards was talking about the whole history of british strategic policy or the last behind it's realistic is the choice between whether it sees itself as an oceanic and global power in which the alliance with the united states is central or it sees itself primarily as european power contributing to maintaining a stable international border in europe and whatever happens to the alliance with america britain still has that option to deal with whatever strategic the most intense strategic problems for britain will always emerge in europe that's close to home and there is always that option for britain and one of the reasons why i think brexit's a bit peculiar because i think it has huge implications for what british sees his role in europe at a time when europe's own strategic future is very much up for grabs and it's turning it's back on that turning back towards of what you might call a more global oceanic alliance dominated at a time at a point where i think the u.s. role including the u.s. role in europe is much less assured than it has been in the in the in the past whereas australia has no such alternative at the only concept we've had stretching back to 1883 or 1788 is either to to the tool to answer it has has has been to depend on an ally or to try and stand by ourselves and i actually don't think either of those is going to work for us which gets back to point about amy i do think whatever future australia has it's not going to be well it could be to try and become a switzerland of the south pacific i don't actually think that's going to be our best option i think our best option is going to involve some kind of integration even with the united states is not playing a critical role or any role it kind of requires some kind of integration but we still have to build that i think for britain it's it's ready made or at least it's there building on 500 years of mostly pretty successful strategic history well there are a lot of questions and issues which were raised by the uh three people from the floor and i'll try to respond by taking a practical policy making viewpoint and i'll i'll link all the questions together with an assertion that we have entered a very unusual phase in which follows a period where changes were taking place but at a fairly gradual rate i think we have entered a phase of our history which change is actually accelerating there are a whole lot of reasons for this you know some academics call this the Anthropocene because this is the first time human beings are impacting on the global environment but the key point is changes accelerating and because changes accelerating you cannot expect that what worked well for us in the past is going to work well for us in the future they're going to be more big shocks not black elephants but the black swans and unknown unknowns and their frequency is going to pack up and governments and any policy maker any planner any academic who is thinking seriously about the future has to be prepared to set aside all the all the past glories and think about a much more uncertain future all assumptions cast aside let's look at things afresh and that is why it's actually very important to find techniques to help you overcome some of these emotional attachments to things that brought us to where we are today and start looking at things afresh whether it is a US preponderance or whether it is the relationship between the United Kingdom and Europe or whatever you know things are going to change and the more we spend time thinking about that kind of future I think the better off we are going to be and that is why I made this argument for thinking about the future I just want to add one more thing on this risk problem I'm familiar with the national risk register in the UK and I used to be very skeptical about the risk register it might not have identified Brexit as a risk but generally the purpose I think of talking about risk in a public way is to get some kind of consensus about what the important challenges are it's a social risk is a social construct when it comes to dealing with the big problems so in the Netherlands you know everybody agrees that flooding is a big problem in Japan everybody agrees that earthquakes are big problem until you have something like Fukushima occur but once you can agree on what the problem is it's a bipartisan consensus and resources are all made available so the question is is there enough conversation about what the future risks facing a country are and a future risk for a country like Australia could well be diminishing of US preponderance but this is for Australia to to decide so that's my response yeah so let me try to address each of them Amy to your question it seems to me actually it's very useful to start from a national perspective that's not just my view that's Aristotle's view you know in in the politics Aristotle says that the beginning which is the beginning of political science is you start from the position of the citizen and that leads you to ask questions which get bigger and bigger and given that this is a practical kind of field I think that's where you start that doesn't mean that you're blinkered it doesn't mean that you're chauvinistic it doesn't mean that you can't think about lots of other places but I think it's a place point of departure it's very good in part because it keeps you practically minded here to the the issue of the UK register so my my response would be that there is no bureaucratic process that can prevent a failure of imagination or failure of intellectual courage and some of this is just having the courage to say you know what this could happen and if it happens we're going to have to deal with it that's about that's character that is fundamentally about character and to some extent about judgment and again to go back to what I was saying about education part of we used to think that part of the job of education was developing character it's certainly about developing judgment and and so I would take it from there to your point about the the alliance so let me just first in American perspective you know I fully understand you know from point of view of the UK you know poor Australia you know here you are chained to this big crazy beast so from our point of view you guys play us like a fiddle you really do you really do my former student roger nobles the deputy command in general in down range there are all kinds of brits and australians wandering around the pentagon we actually pay attention to you we get concerned when you're upset with us so so I would just ask you to imagine what it's like to be you know the poor benighted hegemon who who feels more like gulliver than you know the overlord you know the other thing is I'd like to quote a great governor general of australia my favorite world war two general William slim who has this great passage and defeated to victory who says you know allies oh god awful the only thing that's worse than going to war with allies and go to war without allies and that's an important thing we should all remember and americans better remember that and that's very much to tom christensen's point yesterday and I hope you people remember that too you've got a really good alliance my view is you know you wouldn't have that alliance you get a chance to be a client of china not an ally a client and I don't think that's a very promising future future for anybody I do think those first order questions though for all of our publics need to be addressed and they need to be addressed by people like us and that's a plug for my next book which will be out in january everyone three three responses to your question my old mentor sam huntton used to say that the job of the old center for national affairs which I think was much better than the current one at harvard was he said we're in the business of policy relevant basic research I think that's it's a nice phrase and I think it captures something that's that can be quite valuable I'm not saying that's all one should do I mean in in you know just know from my own writing I periodically flee to the 18th century when the 21st gets too ugly um but but there's something to be said for that secondly I think it is very important particularly when training young academics but but in general you know students is to develop in them empathy not sympathy but empathy with people who actually have to make decisions and just from the technique point of view I think a lot of that that's why I'm a big believer in staff rights which we do a lot of simulations historical case studies simply bringing policymakers not to badger them about how they're handing relationships with the country but just tell me what your daily life is like and how decisions get presented I think there's that that's really important for us as academics to do with policymakers conversely there's actually I believe a fair bit that academics can offer the policymaker and it's partly because we are fundamentally childlike and we often ask childlike questions my favorite childlike question which I periodically asked is so why do you think this is going to work but why is the things that you're saying we should do or that we are doing what just tell me the story of how that leads to the outcome you say you want that question actually get at least in my government doesn't get asked very often and there are very rarely good answers when it does get asked