 We're very fortunate tonight to be joined by my friend Corey Sharkey and there's a lot for Corey to speak about. Russia's unprovoked, unjustified and brutal invasion of Ukraine is the most direct assault on the rules-based order, I would say, since the Second World War. But the response that is galvanised, especially from liberal democracy, shows that there's still life in the old order. In our region, President Biden is reinvigorating alliances and multilateral partnerships, including the Quad and of course, AUKUS. Of course, the US commitment to the rules-based order hasn't always been crystal clear. President Trump didn't observe a rules-based order in terms of his personal dealings with other human beings, in terms of American democracy or indeed the international world. In the middle of President Trump's term in office, we published Corey's superb Loewey Institute paper, probably still available in good bookstores for $15 or so, called America vs. the West, Can the Liberal Order Be Preserved? And Corey captured this desperate moment in the history of US politics and international relations when we had someone in the cockpit of the international order who thought the whole thing was a scam. And I think this was the first Loewey Institute paper which we've been publishing since Alan Gingel was in my chair at the Loewey Institute. This was the first Loewey Institute paper where we put a photograph on the cover. And I don't know if you can see it from there, but it's that famous photograph of Trump with his arms folded as Merkel and Arbe and Trudeau and Macron, everybody lean in to try to persuade him that international cooperation mattered. And we just felt that the picture deserved to be seen. We know now from reporting that around the same time, Secretaries Mattis and Tillerson briefing President Trump, I should say on the post-war rules-based order, had described it as the greatest gift of the greatest generation. And Mr. Trump had responded with a sort of paroxysm of rage. And Corey wrote about the international order at that moment from the standpoint of somebody who has been in the United States government and has worked for a number of great Americans who believe in that order. So we thought Corey would be the very perfect person we couldn't have chosen anyone better to speak to us tonight to kick off this conference. Dr. Scharke graduated from Stanford. She earned her doctorate from the University of Maryland. Her career has alternated between government service, including Stints at the State Department, the Pentagon and the NSC and think tanks, including the International Institute for Strategic Studies and AEI, where she now heads up their dynamic and brilliant foreign and defence policy program. To give you a sense of the breadth of Corey's thinking, she mentioned to me tonight over dinner that she's just finished a new chapter for Makers of Modern Strategy on Tecumseh and the Shawnee Confederacy. And the enthusiasm actually in the passion with which Corey was told me about that chapter tell you about that other aspect of Corey Scharke that I'm lucky to see. She's one of the superstars of our world and she has the CV to back that up. But what I really admire about her in addition to her professional achievements are her personal qualities, character, courage, idealism and a fabulous sense of humour. Maybe she needs a sense of humour like that as an internationalist Republican in Washington at the moment when the GOP, the party of a strong military, strong alliances and a strong US presence abroad is becoming increasingly trumpified. Or at least that's how it looks to me. But Corey might be able to tell us differently. President Kennedy was fond of quoting Hemingway's definition of courage as grace under fire. I certainly think that applies to Corey, although tonight she's not going to be taking any incoming fire, she's going to be sending it out. Corey is going to speak to us on the topic of the West alliances and the rules based order and when she's finished, I'm going to return to chair the Q&A and you'll all have an opportunity to ask her questions. So please welcome my friend Corey Scharke, welcome. So one thing he said is true. I do run a fabulous foreign and defence policy team at the American Enterprise Institute. And it is also true that I had the privilege a few years ago of writing a little book for Loewe about the international order and but the doubts I had about my own country's willingness to continue to be its strong spine and also and then looked at the alternatives to an international order that the United States was the backbone of. I'm a big fan of the work of John Eikenberry, the American political scientist who really is the best of the theorists of what the liberal international order is. And he imagines that the ultimate success of the order is when it actually doesn't require American power to uphold it. And so that would be a beautiful place if we could get there. But I was deeply skeptical that even though in my judgment the small and middle powers are the main beneficiaries of a rules-based order that then those small and middle powers actually could organize themselves and supplant substitute for American power at a time when that power was deeply in doubt for the reasons Michael already mentioned. I am delighted to have been proven in only three or four short years to actually be wrong about both of those judgments. I think even before American voters selected President Biden instead of President Trump you can actually see American public attitudes shift in advance of the electoral outcome. The Chicago Council on Foreign Affairs does annual polling on American attitudes and in 2015 and 2016 President Trump's three major arguments that allies are taking advantage of the United States, that trade is bad for the American economy and that immigrants are taking American jobs. All three of those had large swaths of American public support. And within two years that support evaporated. So as people saw President Trump's policies implementing those things they not only chose to repudiate the policies, they chose to repudiate the ideas underwriting the policies. And that makes me much more hopeful because as we have seen with Russia's invasion of Ukraine I do think it has the potential to actually genuinely strengthen the order in ways that will have enduring advantage and will help all of us manage the challenges that China is posing here in the Indo-Pacific and beyond. So in the U.S. part, the first part of what I was wrong about in my America vs. the West, so not only have American public attitudes shifted, Chicago Council has never had pulling this strongly supportive of trade in American foreign policy. So what you can see is the American political parties, both my own and the Democrats, are lagging behind public attitudes about trade. And that's a positive sign because in the entrepreneurial go-go of American politics, both parties are always turning keys in the locks trying to find out what American voters are actually going to support and reward. And so sooner or later somebody is going to come up with a better trade policy. Sadly, that's not going to be Joe Biden because he fundamentally doesn't think differently about trade than President Trump thought about trade as we have seen. The other thing though, I disagree slightly with Michael that it looks to me like the fever that has possessed my fellow conservatives begins to abate. And the data I will offer in support of that, the governor of Arkansas has publicly said Republicans cannot put Donald Trump at the front of our party if we expect to win elections. Arkansas, one of the most conservative states in the union, the January 6th hearings are showing the extent of corruption and the president and the people around him. Jack Pence, the sitting vice president in Trump's presidency, has repudiated the president since the election. So we see small but not insignificant signs of change. And I think those, we still have a great fight ahead of us. Those things need to be strengthened. But those are encouraging signs about what's changing in the United States. And the other thing which connects us to the small and liberal powers is that, you know, the world feels scary right now, I think, for people living in free societies. And that has actually helped us overcome what Freud talks of as the narcissism of small differences, right? We can argue about why Americans permit the death penalty. But everybody's banding together on Ukraine. And I want to see a show of hands. How many people would have expected you could have gotten Japan, Singapore, and the European Union to go in with the financial sanctions that we've already put in place? Anybody? I don't think I'd have bet a month's pay that you could actually get that far. And so I think what we are seeing is that all of us had for a very long time the luxury of taking the rules-based order for granted, right? That it worked naturally. You know, the complacency of President Obama is saying that the arc of history bends towards justice. When in fact it only bends towards justice when we grab ahold of it and wrench it that direction. And the good news of the tragedy of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is that it has served as a shock and an early warning for all of us living in free societies that we have a lot of work to do if we are going to protect and sustain this order. And it's actually really inspiring how many countries like Singapore, countries like Australia, like countries that are middle-sized powers, or in Singapore's case small powers, that are actually willing to step forward and put themselves on the line for common purpose. You know, the great economist Mansar Olsen wrote about the free rider problem. And that is the expectation that the strongest actors who can't avoid bearing the freight of outcomes will be taken advantage of by smaller powers free riding on them. And that's actually not what we have seen, right? The country giving us the biggest difficulty about imposition of the sanctions is Europe's strongest power, Germany, not its weaker powers. And with Germany, where we have had success, all of us, I don't just mean my own demanding country, where we have had success is actually shaming Germany into upholding the international order. That's a very positive sign that shame from other liberal powers willing to run risks themselves is actually effective. That makes me incredibly hopeful. The downside is that what has pulled the liberal order together, even as my own country still struggles to get our feet under us, is China and Russia are making the case for us. It is the behavior of China and Russia that has done so much to change public attitudes. Most of all here, since Australia is the frontline state in confronting China, it's important to remember that the liberal order wasn't a faculty fantasy of international lawyers with no offense intended to the international law experts present, but it was built by the people who had fought to world wars in their lifetime and were looking to buy a margin of safety, a wider margin of error than they had experienced before. And as tiresome as my own country is, as infrequently as we let ourselves be bound by the rules, no other dominant power has ever voluntarily handed as much decision-making authority to others on the basis of agreed rules as the United States has. And that's what makes the order so strong, so vibrant, and so resilient. And from an American perspective, it's what makes it so cost-effective, right? Because other countries volunteering to help shoulder the burden is what makes the international order constructed after 1945 when Americans are willing to continue shouldering the burden of. So Voltaire famously said he believed in God because he had only ever made one prayer. And that was, God make my enemies ridiculous. And because his enemies were ridiculous, he believed God must exist. And I feel like there's a parallel there in that our adversaries are actually doing a better job of making the case for the rules-based international order than at least we Americans have made, right? We can't even explain what we mean when we talk about the liberal international order. And the joke is that it's like the Holy Roman Empire, right? It's not liberal. It's not international. It's not the order. We play the world series against ourselves. But Russia and China have reminded everybody what an international order that's not rules-based would look like, and what especially it would look like for countries that don't have the capacity to defend themselves by themselves. And so the good news out of Ukraine is that when confronted with a major and potentially ruled destroying aggression in Europe, the part of the world the United States is in many ways most deeply invested in, those strategists who worry that we need to have the power to face China argue that we should let Europe take care of Europe. But the problem with that is that given how invested the United States is in European security, if we were not to come to the aid of Europeans when they are fearful, no other American commitment would be considered reliable, right? So not only do we want to help Ukraine, because this is what the liberal order looks like, brave people fighting for their freedom. They merit our assistance and we should be giving them a lot more assistance than we are. I hope we will talk about that, Michael, in the Q&A. But the fact that the free world has rallied to Ukraine's support ought to send a message to China about what an attack on Taiwan would occasion, a similar breach of the rules-based international order that we are all slow to mobilize for, but enduring in our commitment to. The last couple of things I would say is that I do think one of the things that has come home to Americans in the last several years is we love ourselves in isolation, right? The United States is a natural internationalist. We never liked international institutions and we don't like them now, even though we built them, even though we run them. And we're difficult, demanding and often unreliable allies. But what has come home, I think, to the United States in the last several years about worrying both about the magnitude and the nature of a rising China and also watching Russian revanchism grow more and more bloody and demanding is that we actually cannot succeed but together with our friends and allies. And the national defense strategy, when it comes out, is going to be a repudiation of the longstanding American concern about entangling alliances because, in fact, we do have one example. So it's bad history to suggest that the United States always worried about entangling alliances because we actually have an early example. I promise I'll stop with this. But where during in 1823, when the US and Britain were talking about together policing the Western Hemisphere to prevent continental European influence there, the American president, James Monroe, wrote the three living American presidents, Thomas Jefferson, James Madison, who else? Oh, Adams must still have been alive then. To ask them, should we ally with Britain in order to keep the Western Hemisphere free of continental influence? And all three of them said an alliance with Great Britain in 1823 was so manifestly an American interest, even though Britain was not a democracy. That I think the thing to understand is that George Washington and Thomas Jefferson early on talking about America eschewing entangling alliances, there were no other countries that were like us in a fundamental sense. And now we have the privilege of being surrounded by those kinds of countries and those countries taking a great shoulder of the burden of the risks we all face and none more than your country. So thank you for what you are doing to sustain the rules-based international order that has kept us all safe and prosperous these last several decades. I'm done, Michael. Thank you very much, Corey. So to all the qualities that I listed earlier about Corey, we can also add concise. We love concision at the Institute. So thank you. So I'm going to ask Corey a bunch of questions and then I want to go to the audience. So please start thinking now about what you'd like to ask her. Let me start, Corey, with a couple of your notes of optimism and just challenge you a bit on them. So you told us that the governor of Arkansas has said something about President Trump, which is which is great. But many people in the audience will have read the New York Times article, for example, in the last 24 hours about some of the challenges for President Biden, some of the worries on the part of Democratic activists about whether President Biden should run again. He shouldn't. OK, you can come to that in a second. But but but but there's another person out there who's giving every indication that that he may run. And that's President Trump. Now, if President Trump would have run and be elected in 2024, how would that affect the optimistic note with which you started your speech? How would what would what would that mean for your country and for our world? It would put me back in an even darker, more dismal place than when I wrote America versus the West, because to elect President Trump once, right? Like the American political system is one in which any idiot can get elected president and often does. But that's it's different. You know, we are reckless people and that's who we are. But to knowing what a Trump presidency was and what a second Trump presidency would be, if you choose that, the signals that that would send about American reliability and American willingness to preserve the international order, I think would be so condemnatory that we would test John Eichendary's theory of whether middle power, whether it requires American power to sustain the order. And my guess is middle powers probably still couldn't do it against this China and this Russia. All right, that would present another opportunity for us to get another book out of you, though. So that's that's the silver lining for me. All right, let me ask you, let me test. Well, let me ask you a couple of questions about Ukraine. You mentioned you had been surprised by the strength of the Western response or the the the countries like Japan and Singapore and Australia and so on stepping up. Let me let me ask you to put your defense policy hat on. Have you been surprised by the weakness and ineffectiveness of the Russian military? It's astonishing. It is astonishing how bad they are. I see Nick Ryan back there. And so two thirds of what I know about this, I learn from him. But it's genuinely true. The basic proficiencies the Russian military is lacking. Are I mean, all of us need to rethink why we thought we knew how good the Russian military was. And I hope the lesson the Chinese government is taking is you can never tell how good a military is until you fight them because that ought to make them extremely cautious. Well, on that topic, I mean, you mentioned well on on on that topic. Do you think that the the response to Chinese adventurism across the Taiwan Strait, for example, do you think that that would be anything like the response that we've seen to Russian adventurism on its borders because China is a much stronger, richer power than Russia, isn't it? Do you what would be, you know, what would the order do? Do you think in response to that kind of exercise? Yes, I do think you would see a similar response. It's true that China is a richer, more powerful country than Russia. But it's also much more reliant on economic interdependence than Russia is. And so we have more tools there. I think you're I mean, the NATO strategy that comes out at the summit in the summer is going to have a major section on China. And I do think that's non trivial. I mean, two years ago, Europeans still thought China was an American and a Pacific problem. And now the French continue to sulk that that August didn't include them, right? So Europeans understand that China isn't just rising for the United States and the Asian powers, it's rising for them to. And one of the things we know about why the liberal order was built was because we wanted to have the ability to have an early warning network where countries could band together and take action before problems became so monumental that they were on the scale of World War Two or World War One. And so I do think all of us need to be doing much more in Taiwan. That we wish we had been we wish we had done for Ukraine, right? As late as November, my own government was hesitant to send high powered weapons to Ukraine because we thought they were going to lose so fast they'd be in Russian hands. And then by January, we weren't going to send them offensive weapons. And now we're pouring everything off the rooftops on them because as wars go on, they become clarifying about what it's about. And what it's about is, are we going to allow conquest to be the definition of power in the international order? And free societies have said no. And I believe they would also say no in a Taiwan case. All right, let me ask you about the Biden administration's efforts in defense of Ukraine. And you asked you did ask for this question from the lectern. So I'm sure you're ready for it. You've just said then that in your view, the Biden administration was slow off the blocks, basically. What would you say to a defender of the administration who says, look, that given public opinion in the United States on on entering into new conflicts, given the limits on the administration, the administration has led, by example, providing funds, weapons, targeting information, Intel, they've helped to marshal the response from the rest of the world that you've spoken about. And that actually this is this is a response that is appropriate to America's interests, it's sustainable. And it may well succeed. What would you say to that? I would say all of that is true. And yet the administration has made notable mistakes as well, one of which is telegraphing so clearly that Russia runs no risk of bumping into American soldiers, much less having to fight them in Ukraine, telegraphing all the limits of the risks we are willing to take. I think has to have been encouraging to the Russians. And I think that's a pretty major mistake. The hesitance to arm Ukraine, even now, the administration saying, well, you know, we can't send them everything we have. We are at risk of looking like we are sending them enough assistance to keep them fighting, but not enough assistance to help them win. And our hesitance is measured in dead Ukrainians. And so I think we ought to be very humble about what we are succeeding at given the price they are paying. What if that price the Ukrainians are paying continues to rise? What if, over time, the weight of Russian troops and materials starts to wear? What if things go against Ukraine in the Donbas? You've argued that the response of the the West broadly defined to Russia's transgressions here has strengthened the order. What would be the implications if Russia succeeded in Ukraine for the international order? If a military as bad as the Russian military can intimidate the rest of us into permitting Russian victory, that will encourage other aggressors. And especially in Asia, we should be worried about the message that sends to China that we're too fearful of having to fight a military that's losing to Ukraine, right? That the other that the 30 NATO allies would be unwilling to run the risks of trying to confront that military. That's a terrible signal. And I think we are not worried enough right now that the message that Chinese are taking away from Ukraine is the limits of our willingness to assist, not the expansiveness of the assistance we are sending. So what do you base that on? When you say what lessons you think the Chinese are learning what why do you say you think that are you saying you think the Chinese would be emboldened somewhat by the Western response? I think they could be. I mean, the lessons they should be learning are wow, that the West really can pull together. They really do believe there that liberty deserves defending. They they actually do control the international financial system and can weaponize it in creative, inventive ways. And the power of Western supplies and support and intelligence is incredibly powerful. And that should come to bear for us. What I fear they are learning is the West wouldn't be willing to risk its own troops to keep peace in Europe. It was stingy with the weapons it provided to a country going down in flames and that the way to take Taiwan is to do it fast enough so that the West can't get itself organized. Or what lessons should Taipei be taking from the invasion of Ukraine? That it takes a while for the West to get organized that you can't expect anybody else to fight for your children if you're not going to fight for your children. And the more you do to prepare in advance, the less risk you run of an actual invasion taking place. So the Taiwanese have a lot of work to do to make their military stronger, to make their society more resilient. And I hope that's the lesson they take. What about the role of communications from the leader? I mean, how much I mean, how much I mean, what would have happened do you think in Ukraine if Zelensky hadn't reacted in the way that he did if he hadn't grown as a leader in that period, if someone else had been president? I mean, do you think that his role has played has been the difference possibly? I don't know if it's been the difference. It's been a hugely consequential difference. Political scientists like to pretend that individuals are interchangeable. But historians know that the individual matters hugely. I mean, just watching President Zelensky's speech at the Shangri-La Dialogue, he's wearing a shirt designed by a Singapore artist. He's using examples from Singapore's history to illustrate his case. He's like, I wish I wish we could relax the constitutional constraint on not being an American. I'd vote for him. In fact, he's going to get a lot of right in votes anyway. All right, let me ask you, let me change tack slightly. And I'm going to come to the audience just in a couple of minutes. But I want to this a lot of these conferences about technology and gray zone challenges. And in 2018, you were relatively optimistic, I think, about the role of technology in great power competition. And you wrote in this book, and it was a counterintuitive view, actually, that the technologies that appear now to be assisting authoritarian states are fundamentally democratizing in the long term. Do you do you still hold to that? Absolutely, I do. Whether it is all of us walking around with supercomputers in our pockets, that we can take videos of everything we're seeing, right? It's had a huge effect on policing in America, for example, as a measure of accountability. The creativity with which Hong Kong protesters interfered in the surveillance of their protests. I just think that the I can think of 20 ways you could spoof a Chinese surveillance system. And I'm not even particularly good or creative at that. My idiot nephews are going to run circles around the Chinese sensors. And I bet Chinese, the Chinese versions of my idiot nephews are doing it right now because there is you can corrupt data systems. You can corrupt algorithms. You can the belief that somehow empowering individuals is going to be less consequential than states attempting to control individuals. It just doesn't look that likely to me. I realized that, you know, there was this euphoria at the time up to Rear Square and a belief that, you know, the ability to organize. And then we saw the Empire strike back. But but I think we're seeing the third Star Wars movie now where plucky rebels are figuring out how to make technology advantageous for them. And I think we see it in the war in Ukraine, right? Like cyber was supposed to be the new wave of warfare, right? This was going to be flying sharks with the lasers kind of innovation. And we haven't seen any of that. And we haven't seen it because the hackers group Anonymous has come out on the side of the Ukrainian government. All of our national security agencies helped protect the networks that the Ukrainians have operating. The Ukrainians themselves are mighty doggone good at this. And you see civil society in Ukraine and beyond Ukraine using these tools advantageously. I mean, you guys must have seen the story about that 15 year old kid who used his homemade drone to spot a Russian armor column and the Ukrainians have an app. This kid, his dad called based on the number in the app and the Ukrainians targeted the Russian troops moving. Civil society is going to find a way because that's what free societies do. Let me just say, first of all, someone should speak up for your nephews because I met them and I thought they were very smart, young, educated, educated. Well, I mean, the other thing is I like your Star Wars metaphor, except if we're at Return of the Jedi, that means we still have three prequels to go through, which which sounds pretty dismal. None of us want to do that. No, I want to do that. So we've got about 15 minutes and I want to squeeze as many questions in as I possibly can. So so please stick up your arm. I'd love to see a forest of arms and we have a couple of colleagues who are going to go to the audience. I saw this lady down here at that table. Yes, she's waving a jiggling a hand there. And then I'll go to the gentleman next to her. Yes. And maybe we'll take two questions at a time if that's OK. Hi, my name is Jennifer Hunt. Thank you so much for joining us. My question is back to the start. You noted that the governor of Arkansas sort of disavowed Trumpism. I know that the gubernatorial candidate for Michigan has, of course, just been raided by the FBI for his participation in the insurrection. So I'm wondering what your opinion of the January 6th hearings is in relation to its impact on the party? Great question. And we're going to take the question from the gentleman at the same time and he go to you with both, Kora. Russell Boyce from the UNSW camera. If Trump gets re-elected, it seems to me that that's not a reflection on an intellectual response from the United States population, but rather a reflection of a deeper level of... ...pain, of something going on there. And shouldn't we be paying more attention to that? And if Trump gets re-elected or not, that's not really the issue. There's something deeper to be addressed. So you're certainly right that there is economic alienation, social anxiety, flat-out racism, lots of other things driving Trump voters. And yet it will simply be good enough not to re-elect Trump at this moment, which takes us to your point, Jennifer, which is it's too soon to tell what consequence the January 6th hearings will be. It's too soon to tell whether Liz Cheney can get re-elected. But my guess as to what's happening is that you begin to see the emergence of conservatism after Trump, right? Glenn Yonkin gets elected governor of Virginia by carrying more votes than Trump did in Virginia, but never accepting Trump's endorsement or allowing him to visit the state. And a whole bunch of light bulbs went on over a whole bunch of Republican heads when that happened. And so you're gonna see Yonkin imitators all over the place. And the second thing that makes me reasonably hopeful that the fever's breaking is that you're gonna see... So a lot of Trump's been very involved in recruiting candidates and has had patchy success. And I think the candidacy has recruited for Senate races are likely to prevent Republicans regaining control of the Senate. And that will further alienate Republicans because of course, in this close of a division, it would have made a difference. I think Republicans will probably fail to carry Missouri because of a Trump candidate who's likely to get the Republican nomination and two other states, Pennsylvania, other places that are crucial battleground states. So I think what is likely to happen, you're gonna get a fair number of Trumpists elected in the House and it's gonna prove you can't carry statewide races that way. So it's likely to have less effect on governors and senators. Also, Mitch McConnell, Senator McConnell, the minority leader in the Senate has been running a grassroots campaign to recruit better primary candidates for Republicans in order to try and prevent Trump from having legs. So I think you see the emergence of a post-Trump strategy for Republicans, which is why I'm pretty hopeful that the fever's breaking. All right, yes. Two questions from this table, please. Yes, John, John... Corey John-Blaxson from the Australian National University. Thanks for your really fascinating presentation. Thank you for coming to Canberra, too. You spoke, surprisingly, optimistically about the war in Ukraine. I'm worried that we're facing a meat grinder that is actually able to throw a lot more dumb bombs at Ukraine than we just can't keep up the supply of PGMs, precision-guided munitions. And in fact, we are facing something that, three months in, is actually deceptive in terms of how optimistic we should be about the prospects. So I'm wondering if that is the case, does the United States have the ticker to really double down on ramping up, industrialising to actually build munitions and support to make sure Ukraine doesn't lose? And if I... Indulge me, please. IPF. You talked down Biden over trade. He came up with the Indo-Pacific Economic Framework for somebody constrained by Congress as much as he is. Isn't that a fair start? Thanks. We'll take, yes, the question there from the lady. Thank you. Hi, Johanna Weaver from the Tech Policy Design Centre at the National University. You spoke about how Russia's invasion of Ukraine has strengthened the rules-based international order. It's actually the perfect complement to John's question. My concern is that that strength is a flash in the pan. I've just come from the NATO Cyber Defenders Conference in Estonia in Tallinn, where it's very, very clear that NATO is divided, that you have countries like France and Germany who really are encouraging some kind of appeasement in Ukraine and other European countries taking a very, very different approach and are deeply upset by that. We also have to face the fact that Europe, that liberal democracies are in the minority. We have 21 liberal democracies in the latest economic intelligence unit versus 59 authoritarian regimes and a bunch of countries in the middle. You've also mentioned this reference to China and Russia are making our case for us. So to get to my question, Russia, making the case for us relies on Ukraine winning. So what do we need to be doing more to be supporting Ukraine, but also what do we need to be doing more to sell the merits of the international rules-based order to the 100 countries in the middle? Not the liberal democracies who've already drunk the Kool-Aid because my concern is those countries might be saying, well, might isn't right, but might that will fight for me is all right. And so that middle ground is going to become very important. Okay, so we've got three big issues. Does America have the ticker to help the Ukrainians win? Is an IPEF actually a pretty good effort under the circumstances? And how do we persuade other countries who aren't on board? Yeah, so the Pentagon is right now congratulating itself on the magnificent logistic and supply effort we are giving in Ukraine. And they're getting kicked around by everybody saying, this is a parallel to you talking about what a fabulous airlift we had out of Kabul as we rode off the Afghan war. Like, you gotta do better than this. And President Biden's vacuous language about a foreign policy for the middle class ought to be the perfect moment to triple industrial munitions building. You can't do it as fast as you want to. They're wringing their hands about drawing supplies down. But yeah, Congress just voted a $40 billion aid package to Ukraine. And the great thing about American politics is American politicians are shackled by the ankle to public attitudes because everybody gets elected every two years or so. And so if they thought my mom was gonna balk at giving assistance to Ukraine over Russia's invasion they wouldn't have just dumped that much money off the roof. So yeah, I do think it's sustainable. And we have the delicious example where one of the worst idiots in American public life, J.D. Vance, the Republican nominee for the Senate from Ohio started out with by saying Ukraine has nothing to do with us. This is, the United States shouldn't care. And then he realized there's 60,000 Ukrainian American voters in the state of Ohio and that stopped pretty quickly. So again, we can see the American public is woefully ignorant of a bunch of stuff but their fundamental reflexes, especially on issues of war and peace are pretty doggone good. And so too, the drama of allies trying to work together. You know, that doesn't sound that dissimilar from the war effort in 1943 or right? Like this is what free society is working together looks like. There's a joke Stan Sloan who wrote the best book of NATO history used to say that the oldest refrains in the Western world are deterrence is breaking down, NATO needs new thinking and will the United States show up? And so yeah, it's hard. France and Germany would like Ukraine to stop interrupting their peaceful summer holidays. All the rest of us are shaming them about that disgraceful attitude. The Baltic States are behaving incredibly bravely because they understand what Ukraine feels like and they're gonna push like all of the, this is what it looks like. So yeah, it's hard, but math class isn't newly hard. Math class is always hard. And what about John's supplementary on IPF? It's not half bad. It's also not good, right? It's not clear to most people what's actually in it and it's not a substitute for rejoining TPP or actually believing in trade. Ashley, as you have argued, so well. Is there any prospect of the trade debate in Washington returning to those sorts of days where you could have a president, President Clinton, for example, a Democrat pushing something like APEC through, are we ever going to get back to that? Because without that, how will the US ever have the economy, ever have the sort of magnetic power to compete with the Chinese economy? Yeah, so yes, we're gonna have to get back to that. And the Biden administration is itself having an internal conversation, which is how you get the minor progress that they've already made because they keep hearing consistently from everybody, you gotta have a trade policy in order to be competitive. Like, it's not one or two isolated voices. Everybody says it all of the time. And American public attitudes are actually much more favorable to trade than you would think from listening to either political party. But the great thing about a two-party system where the parties are always in competition is that somebody's gonna turn a key in that lock and realize it's gonna win them votes. And then it'll flip very quickly. It's like going bankrupt. You know, it happens very slowly and then very quickly. In the opposite direction, though, in the bad way. Your reference to public opinion on trade reminds me that Tash Kasam, the head of our public opinion program is here. And in a couple of weeks, we're gonna launch the 2020 Lowy Institute poll. And it has absolutely fascinating results on all of these questions. But the other thing I can say is that one of the things that Tash has shown is that over time, the Australian public is remarkably committed to free trade, globalization, and also immigration, that Australians understand that our future is as a trading country that's exposed to the world. So please, everybody keep your eyes open for that. I'm gonna take one more round of questions before we finish. So I've seen. Sharp shooters in the back. Yeah, I'm gonna take three questions. So the lady here and the two people at the back, I can't quite see you from here. I'm sorry, because of the lights. So please mention your name before you speak if you wouldn't mind. Thank you. Hi, Cassandra Steer from the Australian National University's Institute for Space. Cory, I have a bit more of an abstract question for you. And I hope it's not too abstract, but I attended a conference last year in Canada, the Halifax International Security Conference which is apparently the largest conglomeration of democratic and like-minded states. And over the course of the four days, the biggest themes were China and Afghanistan and also continuing US leadership in the international rules-based order. And at the end of the four days, I asked a question about whether amongst these, because it was very much dominated by North American voices though it was an international gathering. Whether the notion of the Asian century was something that was, I'd never heard the term over those four days. It didn't seem something most people were comfortable with. And the Asian century, of course, includes Japan, South Korea, Indonesia, Singapore, you know, like-minded and middle and smaller nations. I'm just curious about your assessment of the notion of the fact that we are already in the Asian century and what that means for the US's role in that order. Thank you. Gentlemen to the right, Mick Ryan, yes. Hi, Mick Ryan, no fixed address. Just very quickly, two quick lessons, I think stand out from your crane, one, their internal resilience, particularly things like telecommunications networks, kicking them out as allowed citizen reporters, show the world what's actually going on, but also their capacity to generate global influence. And it strikes me that these are two really important national capabilities that we and other like-minded nations probably need to rethink and reinvest in over the next couple of decades. I'll be interested in your thoughts on that. Good question. And final question here. Thank you very much. Leslie Sebeck, like Mick, although currently at large. Thank you very much, Corrie. Initially, take it from your comments that we shouldn't expect a president, Liz Cheney, in the near future, I hope so, but the sounds of that's a very necessary possibility. More generally though, I take it you're the holder of the TR of optimism from Deep State Radio. Yes, I am. Given that your comments about technology I found felt really into that field. Every time we see an advance in technology, we see a counter from authoritarian nations. How best can democratic nations such as Australia and the United States actually support these community, sort of much more open technologies? Oh, I love that challenge. And it connects all three of the questions in a way because we need to figure out how to use the tools of free societies to protect and advance free societies. That is, we don't wanna become what we're trying to protect our societies against. And the superpower of freedom is the vitality of civil society, right? The crazy anonymous hackers throwing in to reveal every Russian FSB agent and their home address. The only reason they did that is they thought the Ukrainians were the good guys, right? They chose a side. And we're actually the good guys in this fight. Frail and failed as we often are. The difference between us and what we are struggling to protect ourselves against is increasingly clear, I think, to Western public and beyond. I didn't answer your earlier question about the 157 non-committed countries. And my answer to it connects to this, which is that we should actually listen to people from those countries. The UN ambassador from Kenya made the most extravagantly beautiful and powerful case about the importance of the rules-based international order responding to Russia's aggression. We should help them make that case and we should make it on the terms that are persuasive to them instead of the terms that are persuasive to us, which should be a pretty fundamental lesson for people who live in free societies. Mick, I think your point about resilience is, and winning the information game, how you generate power out of nothing, which is what Ukraine is doing, is exactly right. That we run the risk of allowing our adversaries to dictate the terms on which the competition is fielded. And that's a grievous strategic error for us. And in free societies, politicians are always being challenged, questioned, undercut, having their bank records revealed. We actually know how to do this. We just need to force our adversaries to play on our terms because that's where the dynamism of our societies, you know, this business about Tecumseh and the Shawnee Confederacy, I got started on because that was a community of people who actually had a whole of society's strategy because they were facing an existential challenge. And our raucous disputatious diverse societies that it's a struggle to govern over are probably never gonna master a whole of society strategies. I disagree with your last tweet storm on that point, Mick. But it doesn't have to be everybody, right? It just has to be enough. And that's why Ukraine is so important because if we allow a country struggling as ardently as they are to preserve their freedom, to sink, it will make it much harder to defend all of the rest of our freedom. And because it will be harder to persuade countries that will do it, it will be harder to persuade our citizens to make the sacrifices necessary to achieve it. And it will be harder to persuade countries that are on the fence, which after all, if I were a country looking down the barrel of Chinese intimidation and the recklessness of American indifference, I wouldn't wanna be caught in the cross airs either. So we actually need to return to that fabulous advice from the best novel ever written about American foreign policy, The Ugly American, in which a character says to the extent that our policies are humane and reasonable, they will be successful. To the extent they are grandiose and ideological, they will fail. Well, I love trying to find the right moment to end Q&A and I think we've found it. Corey, I've really enjoyed listening to you this evening. I think we've seen, Corey mentioned the superpower of the West. I think we've seen Corey's superpower, which is a mix of optimism, Californian optimism and profound insight. I don't think that J.D. Vance should be looking forward to a political donation from Corey, but I think all of us should be looking forward to her continuing to fight the good fight within the Republican Party, within Washington, and more broadly in defensive free society. So please join me in thanking Corey Sharkey. Thank you.