 Mae'r bwysig o'r strategaeth yn ymddangos, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gwybod, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio. Mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n amddangos. A dyna'n meddwl ar gyfer strategaeth miliwn, strategaeth cyfnodol, strategaeth busnes, cyfnodol, ac mae'n fathio'n fathio'n fathio'n gweithio. Mae'n ddweud yn y fathio'n fathio'n gweithio. Mae'n hawdd â'r fathio'n deud yn gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio. O adnoddwch i fod yn dbyryd bwysig iechyd a phoblol yn effeithio'r Unedau fadedogi. Mae'n rheswer i'r dyfodol, mae'n gweithio'n gweithio'n ddaeth gostodol ag y trof довghyn yn strategaeth. One of the reasons I wrote the book of thecoon is you get not only the proliferation of the use of the word the strategies for everything now so that everybody has to have a strategy but the belief that somehow it's a magic ingredient that if policy-makers are missing then they're going to be less coherent and less than if they have got a strategy. A ond ddifu llandd mwy o'r Ffwrdd o'r Wyrdd, a ond ddifu llandd mwy o'r Ffwrdd o'r ddifu llandd i'w'n gwybod. A ganddo ddelwedd y gafel o partysolau bobl arferwadettol ac ydych chi'n gallu flwyddyn o'r strategiaeth. Dwi'n ddweud ychydig o fy ysdoedd, mae'n ddwy'n ddiddorol mwy o'r ffordd o hyd i osud, ac mae'r gŷn ar y cyfrifau'r gwahanol yw yma i ddweud yma. Byddwch gyda'r cyfrifau sydd ymgyrchau o'i strategiaeth a dweud yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch i'ch ddylwhaith. Ond ydy, o'ch dweud yma, mae'n dweud yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Felly gallwch i'n ddwy'n ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch yn ymgyrch. Mae'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw'n ddyn nhw. First point to make is that people tend to think of strategy as a plan, as a sequence of moves that get you to a very defined objective. And often when people are saying we need a strategy, the first place they'll start is by saying, well what are you trying to achieve? What's your objective? And then when we've agreed that we'll work backwards. But actually strategy doesn't work very well like that. The reason is very simple. Ond, ydych chi'n golygu'r cyfrifedd o'r cyfrifedd fath gennych anodol, ychydig wedi gwneud bach hwnnw, ychydig wedi gwneud yn amlwg hwnnw, lle y maes yma, mae'r gweithio, cîm ddriogu er mwynhau, fyddwch eich hynny, y��w yna, a yn cefnodd tudwymy'ch cyfrifeddol i'r ddasodig cael ei plwydoedd, yn ymddangos, anghyddyn nhw'n cael eu gwirio. felly mae'r ddweud yn fflaenio'r ddweud o'r newydd oedd, oedd mae'n gobeithio'r ddweud o'r newydd, ac mae'n gweithio'r ddweud o'r ddweud. Mae'r gwneud ymlaen ymlaen chi'n gweithio'r ddweud yma, mae gweithio'r ddweud o'r gwneud o'r llunio'r llunio, yn y rhaid, mae'n ddweud, mae'r pethau'r ddweud yn maeth, a'r ddweud yn cael ei chyfyddoch yn y rhaid, mae'n gweithio'r ddweud. Y idea of strategy is a plan is problematic because in practice you rarely can follow a sequence of moves, unless you're very powerful or very lucky. Secondly, I'm not convinced in any way that it's about setting clear objectives. Obviously you've got to have a sense of what you're trying to achieve and where you would like to get to. Ond mae'n gweithio i'n edrych sy'n ddigwyddio. Mae'n dwi'n tredu ymddangos. Mae'n gweithio'r ddechrau. Mae'n ddau os ymddangos, mae'n ddau, mae'n ddau'r ddechrau sy'n ddegwyl. Mae'n ddegwyl o ddegwyl ar ddegwyl ar ddegwyl. Mae'n dd條fynu cyffredin ni fel y gallu viwio a ddegwyl ar y ddegwynt sy'n gweithredu meddwl, mae'r seul ar datblygu, dyne anchinad yn ysgrif. Felly, mae'r strategi o'r byd o'r rhaglen o'n ymdeithasangedd ar y dyfodol hefyd. A mae'n gwelio atio'r rhaglen o'r rhaglen i'w charnes. Mae'n gweld y cwrnod yn gwybod heb a sut mae'n gweithio pethau hefyd. Mae'n gweld olsau ymdeithaseneddau o'r rhaglen o'r rhaglen. Os ymddarton, maen nhw'n gweithio bwysig o'i ddweud. Ond mae'n cael ei gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio eu bod, fynd i'r Rhysiannid am yr Uned, mae'n gweithio'n ei gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gweithio'n gyfan, felly mae'n cael ei gweld i'r mae opiarr ar y dyfodol gwilio. Mae'n sy'n dda'r ddwynt genno yn siarad y policy fydd yn y ddofnod ateb ac build. gan y gallu cyd-fyniad yma when you will have to reappraise. Felly, mae'r hynny'r strategiaid, di'n clyw, er fydd ymgylch yn bain o ei hwyddaf, ymgylch yn ei cyd-fyniad. Felly mae'r cyd-dwylliannau i'r byd o'r pwyloedd yr wych ynaydig, ymgylch yn gyfysig strategiawn i'r cyd-dwylliannau i'r cyd-dwych bydd yr othwyng yn cyfrifol wrth oedd y tîm yrets yn ei thylo. A byddwch yn ystyried, mae'n rhan o'n rhan o'r ddweud o'r strategie. First we like to think about it as the end of a long process of deliberation. Well that's fine if you have a long time to deliberate, but as often as not, in a crisis or a fast moving situation you don't. You thought you had a view about how the world was and all of a sudden you find the world isn't like that and you have to form a judgement quite quickly about what to do and how to respond and these judgement are critical. And one of the things I do in the book is look as many people do these days at the cognitive psychology and the way it affects behavioural economics. I think it's just Daniel Kahneman and all that is very interesting in terms of the importance of intuitive responses to events and why these are often as valid and as effective as the more deliberative parent analysing of all possibilities and so on. One of the best essays that Isaiah Berlin wrote just not long before he died was on political judgement which is essentially this quality that can be developed over time and experience of even subconsciously analysing a situation seeing the possibilities and knowing quite apparently instinctively which way to go. Men of course you may do the deliberative stuff, often the deliberative stuff rationalises intuition. Another reason why strategy is often like that is because you're not taking the initiative, lots of books about strategy assumes you're the one who's going to launch the new initiative. Often you're responding to somebody else's initiative and you may be in a very defensive mode, much strategy is exactly of that nature. The first task is to survive, is to cope but only then after that can you start to think about imposing your will, getting some control of the situation. So for all these reasons I think strategic thinking is extremely important but it's also very difficult. It's very difficult for western countries in addition because by and large we're about the status quo. Now we can all think of examples recently where attempts have been made to change the status quo by western countries and that to some extent reflects the nature of the world after the end of the cold. By and large what we really want is open political and economic systems, trading and so on and we don't see ourselves as the countries that are interested in changing borders by force and so on. Now if you're a status quo power, strategy actually in principle is pretty boring and not very difficult because your basic objective is that nothing should happen. Nothing's happened today, strategy's succeeding. You're not after trying to change that. I think this is one of the reasons why governments told that they needed a new grand strategy often seem to lack one because what's the problem they're trying to solve in the grand strategy? What is it that's failing? Often what you're bothered about is other countries, let's say Russia, let's say China coming up with much more radical ideas about the international system. Should be organised and challenging the status quo. That's what you're worried about but there may not be doing it at the moment and the circumstances in which they may do it in the future can be hard to imagine. So often when governments have to come up with these grand strategies the results are inevitably a disappointment and anybody within government, only with any organisation, whether it's a corporation or even a university where I had to do it, will know just how difficult it is to produce these documents. I'll just give you something from a university. In the UK we've got this issue about student fees which came in a few years ago. Quite major changes so we have to come up with a strategy for how we deal with it. There's a genuine problem to be solved and we come up with some ideas and they're quite bold. So you start to write these bold ideas down. A man, the person who's dealing with apparently marginal aspect of this strategy, worries that her particular area is not being given enough prominence in this statement of where we're going, we'll put that in and then somebody points out that when you present this to all the university departments think about how they're going to read that sentence. We better calm that sentence down, mitigate the effects a little bit. But it's going to appear in the Guardian tomorrow anyway. So by the time the document is produced it's bland, totally uninteresting and very safe. Meanwhile you've still got your strategy in your heads and you're trying to make the decisions but you've probably failed completely in explaining or capturing anybody's interest. Or one particular sentence will come through that the cognosenti will realise is actually what it's all about. So the half lives of these documents are really very short. So all that, these are all reasons why I think strategy is difficult and why we shouldn't be so surprised was when people keep on demanding of governments that they produce better strategies and the results are so disappointing. To show what I mean, I'll take the, just also to give us something to talk about in the Q&A, just to take the example of Ukraine which I've been following pretty closely. And in particular Putin, because one of the features of a lot of commentary, bit less now than there was a couple of months ago, is Putin's a sort of strategic genius. He's bold, he's decisive, he makes moves and everybody else is left flat footed. They're constantly trying to catch up and what they produce in response to this bold and decisive move is weak and feeble, some piddling economic sanctions that they can brush away. Yet if you actually look at what's happened, you'd be hard put to say that this has been a resounding success for Putin. And why is that? Because I don't think in practice he was, he was doing what most people do when they form strategies under pressure, which is they were making certain assumptions about the people with whom they were dealing and how they would respond. And some of these he gets right and some of these he gets wrong. So very briefly, my interpretation of what's been going on, which is not necessarily the others, is that Putin has long been irritated with NATO and the West and the EU believes that promises that were made, which questions about exactly how much these promises were made, but believes that promises that were made in the 90s, early 90s were not kept, that it's expanded more than should have been done. And that he'd seen this idea of a Eurasian union as a proper response which brings certainly Belarus and Kazakhstan into the story, but was also intended to bring Armenia and Moldova and Ukraine into the picture. Because then, you know, you're almost starting quite to reconstruct the old Soviet Union, but you're having a space, a Russian space that goes beyond Russian borders with which gives them some sort of cloud. And though I think generally most people think this idea of a Eurasian union was always a little bit unrealistic given the rather unpromising countries with which you'd have to put it together, input in rhetoric from about 2011 on, it became almost counter to the European Union. And I think it's important to keep in mind that I think to him it was far more important to counter the European Union than it was to counter NATO because the EU was going to be the advanced guard if Ukraine and Moldova and so on did make a decisive turn to the West. And in the middle of last year, real pressure was put first on Armenia, which crumbled immediately, then on Moldova and on Ukraine. Moldova held out. Ukraine changed its mind, this is before the Vilnius Summit of the European Partnership of the European Union, changed its mind about moving to an association agreement with the EU and instead moved in Russia's direction under Yanukovych and critically accepted a $15 billion loan and generous terms and generous terms of energy. And it's probably the case that Yanukovych didn't have very many options at that time. I don't think because there's no way the EU would have offered that sort of money because it would have been irresponsible to do so. Either you have to reform the country which Yanukovych didn't want to do or address issues of corruption and subsidies and so on or you went to the Russians. This produced a reaction as we know and by the end of February Yanukovych had fled and Putin was faced with a real problem that the policy he had followed which was not cheap to draw Ukraine into the Russian sphere, had failed, had been rejected decisively, at least on the western part of Ukraine. And so he had to do something. That was the problem he was trying to solve. I don't think this was a long plotted idea of seizing Crimea. The problem was what do we do about Ukraine? And I think the decision he took which was bold was to destabilise Ukraine. This is why it's necessary to look quite closely at the particular almost day by day because if you recall when the crisis broke there was as much activity in eastern Ukraine as there was in Crimea. My view and also that Putin was saying initially he didn't know interest in taking Crimea in annexing Crimea. I think what happened was that the first move failed because actually it was only in Crimea that the Russians had a pretty obvious foothold because of the Sevastopol base but it never really consolidated elsewhere. So the next stage was to take Crimea. And then the stage after that was to try to revive the pressure in eastern Ukraine because otherwise he'd lost Crimea. He gained Crimea but lost the rest of Ukraine and the original aim was to have Ukraine looking eastward rather than westward. Now we can go through day by day on that but it doesn't seem to me that's worked and now he's created a problem for us, for Ukraine, for himself in encouraging the separatists in one big important bit of eastern Ukraine, not all of eastern Ukraine, to establish well defended redoubts but they're not really in control of the area. There's no evidence of mass political support for these groups. There's evidence of some sympathy for more autonomy, rights of Russian speakers and so on but there's a problem there. And I'm not sure how this will end up although I think now that Poroshenko is there one can at least see the basis of an outline political settlement but it'll be very difficult to tidy up the situation in eastern Ukraine. Now as this happened you see something that I find quite interesting generally in these sorts of cases which is the pressure put by the west on Russia in itself doesn't amount to very much but the consequences of that are much more profound because what you've seen within Russia itself is an increasing reluctance by foreigners to invest, already declining projections for GDP going down even further, an enormous capital flight. Lots and lots of money is leaving to get reports now of Putin putting pressure on his favourite oligarchs to keep their money in Russia. Plus of course NATO and the EU and the US are looking at energy supplies, energy security and so on. Over time that will affect Gazprom's position in Europe. Putin therefore tries to do something with the Chinese, the Chinese who are no fools on these issues get a very good deal and it doesn't make a lot of difference in the short term anyway. So all this is to say I don't think Putin has been strategically brilliant. He's acted decisively but doesn't necessarily got him to the place he wanted to go. To conclude I mean I want to just use that example to just to underline some of the points I was making before. I don't think Putin had a plan. I don't think when he made his first move he was clear what his second move or third move or fourth move was going to be. I think he had assumptions that the people in Eastern Ukraine were probably far more pro-Russian than it turned out to be the case and if there had been then maybe he would have had more options than he thought. But it's a good example of trying to solve a particular problem by taking a move and then finding yourself in a different place to the one you expected to be and then having to take another move which probably takes you even further away from the place that you wanted to be and expected to be. And that the unintended consequences of these actions are really very important. That you think you're taking, you have an idea of what you're going to achieve, what you might achieve but other things go on in consequence that you don't quite anticipate. And I think again what was one of the salutary lessons about military strategy or international politics in general is unintended consequences. They're often as important if not more so than the consequences that are intended even if you reach them. So I think there are obviously other things we can talk about on this particular case or on strategy generally. My basic argument is it's very difficult just because somebody is being bold doesn't mean to say they've got it right and that there is a need to think strategically but if you are thinking strategically don't think too far ahead but do think about the consequences of unintended as well as intended of the actions that you wish to take. Thank you very much.