 Now, you're all very welcome here this afternoon. Could I just please, first of all, remind you, as I remind myself, to turn your phone to silent if you haven't done so already. No need to share our ringtones around the room. We'll be finishing up at about 2 o'clock. So if anybody needs to dash out in advance of that, for whatever reason, feel free to do so, if quietly. But can I just say how delighted I am personally and how delighted the Institute is professionally to welcome back Judy Dempsey, Senior Research Fellow at the Carnegie Institute. Judy is a long time friend of the Institute and has been over on a couple of occasions sharing with us her analyses on European Security Defense Policy. As you know, she's a journalist by background and training, is now sort of an analyst and commentator and is the editor of what is without a shred of doubt the very best blog on European Security Foreign Policy and Defense. That's on record. That exists. That's not Chatham House. That is on the record. And so what we've invited Judy to come do for us this afternoon is give us her take on basically Trump and everything related to European Security Defense, particularly Trump and NATO, and perhaps draw out some of the implications of that for the development of European Security Defense Policy, which as you'll know has been undergoing some significant development over the last 12 to 18 months and then is not least in part a function of the rather problematic relationship that the Trump administration has with the North Atlantic Treaty Organization. So without further ado, I'll hand it over to Judy as her remarks will be on the record and then the Q&A will be on Chatham House. Okay, so Judy. Thanks Ben, thank you Ben for this introduction. Thank you for coming. Thank you for inviting me against very nice coming back to Dublin. I'm based in Berlin. So I will slightly have a German perspective as well. I mean this is quite an awesome title because then I have to deal with so many issues but I'm going to go through them in a coherent way as possible and leave plenty of time for questions. So I think we have to start with what has happened over the past couple of days and it's the decision by President Trump to pull out of the INF Treaty. This is very serious for the West. It's very serious for European Security and it's actually in a very short-sighted way placed into the hands of Russia. Russia was playing back and forth with the INF Treaty. This is intermediate nuclear missiles. It's extremely important for the stability of the Alliance and the security of Europe. Without that, we are actually highly vulnerable and we have to be very careful of the implications of this. President Trump intends to meet President Putin in Paris next month where he may try to bully Putin into drawing up a new INF Treaty but these take an awful lot of time and these take a huge amount of confidence-building measures and they are not in place at the moment. So it's not even a footnote. This is a major aspect. It feeds into President Trump's ambivalence towards NATO. NATO is part of the INF. Not as an organisation but in terms of the security umbrella. This is one aspect of Trump's so-called ambivalence. The other aspect of Trump's attitude towards NATO is that he doesn't see its value or its worth because he sees relations in transactional elements. So what he wants from NATO is value for money. He doesn't really see it in a broad security sense because for Trump, NATO is about troublesome countries, well-off countries in Europe that can look after themselves. What Trump has taken to an extreme form is what the Obama administration started doing and the Obama administration and his Secretary of Defense, Robert Gates, were extremely critical of the European Allies in NATO simply because it's not that they weren't spending much. We spend 180 billion euros a year on defence but it's how we spend it, what we do with it and how we see defence and security strategically and we don't see it strategically because we have been dependent on the United States since the post-Cold War period and dependence creates a kind of intellectual laziness. It creates a psychological aspect that there's no need to do anything because the United States will always look after us and I'm actually more and more convinced that the United States will continue to look after us but on very different terms. The playing field is changing as we speak. Trump is only interested in the Middle East through the prism of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and you see what he's doing in Syria, he's given the ground to, I mean, the players in Syria, it's devastating what has happened. Trump's focus is now on China. Russia is a hindrance, it's a problem. He, because of his special advisers in the White House, he knows that Putin is a problem but he's not going to be as critical on Putin as he's on China. China is, the United States, better now at the moment and because of this complete focus on Asia and China, this is actually another reason why the Europeans inside NATO should be worried. The Europeans, so far, the reaction to Trump has been on the one hand differential, especially the Secretary General, I wonder if anybody from Norway here, it's not differential to say the least, Stoltenberg got a second term a couple of days before the NATO summit, but on the one hand, and secondly, one of serious, and this is the good thing about Trump, the Europeans are beginning to think, well, what is security and defense nowadays? I mean, are we going to be always relying on NATO? If so, what does this mean? And the weakness of the European argument is that they don't have a strong, coherent European caucus inside NATO. They have both, the French have their own agenda and a strategic outlook. Britain, leaving aside Brexit, has a completely different outlook, but inside NATO, the Europeans haven't decided where they want to take NATO. And why is this? Leaving aside Trump's criticism of NATO, why doesn't NATO, the Europeans in NATO, A, get a caucus and decide which direction they should take NATO? Okay, I wonder if these two maps are quite important. On the Derea area is the Eastern neighborhood and this one is the Southern neighborhood. Problem with these two areas is that they encapsulate NATO's dilemma. NATO still doesn't have a common threat perception. For the Eastern, for the Baltic states, for Poland, Czech Republic a bit less so, but also watch out for Norway and Sweden and Denmark. Their threat is Russia. The Russia's invasion of Ukraine and Russia's legally annexed the Crimea, this actually changed the fundamental geostrategic dynamics of these countries. And it was the Baltic states supported by Norway and indirectly by neutral Sweden and Finland that pushed and pushed NATO to actually go back to basics, go home, conventional movements and boats to the Eastern defences. It must also be noted that when the Baltic states joined NATO in 2004 and Poland and Hungary and the Czech Republic in 1998, NATO actually never provided air defences for these countries. These countries were actually unprotected. Yes, they did exercises with NATO, but essentially the Baltic states had no air defences whatsoever. And I remember this discussion coming up in 2004, the Estonians were saying, where are our air defences? And these were the good days of Russia. Well, we don't need them, everything's secure, everything's stable. So now, because of the situation in Ukraine, the perception of these Northern countries and the Central and Eastern European countries, that their threat is Russia. Now, if you go down here, sorry, just to slightly go back here, NATO, as you know, they've got 10, five or 6,000 troops now stationed in the Baltic states and in Poland. Frankly, it's peanuts because we're not going to get a conventional war with Russia. We're already getting a very different kind of war, a cyber security war, a misinformation war. We're getting a war, a total disruption. I mean, this is what fake news is about. Total disruption and conventional forces cannot stop that kind of disruption. But from a political and psychological point of view, having NATO so far to that border is extremely important for the Baltic states. It's hard to believe that Russia would actually challenge NATO on this. They don't have to challenge NATO in other ways. So the threat perception is clearly there and NATO is involved there, could do much more, but limited resources. Here, if the threat perception is the Northern countries, the threat perception focused on the southern neighbourhood is held by Spain, Italy, Greece, Turkey particularly, these important members of NATO. But the point is NATO is actually not present there. They're doing some stuff in the Mediterranean. But frankly, it's airspace is already limited by Russia and they don't have the political and military means to stop it. This is the first thing. And secondly, NATO is actually damaged goods because of the botched-up operation in Libya. It changed it from responsibility to protect to actually regime change. And we're paying the price now with huge refugee migration issue. And I cannot see NATO in any way going back in there. There just wouldn't be support for this, especially not from Germany. I'll talk about France later. But NATO is on the sidelines. But this is a major threat. It's a threat about stability. It's completely insecure. And of course, the big issue that dominates all the EU member states, whether you're the north or the south, that brings them together, is the refugee and migration issue. This is not going to go away. And it's not going to go away, even if the numbers are down and even if we get the so-called front-ex beefed up and so on. The area around Niger, Angela Merkel visited that for the first time, Chad, very unstable, Sudan. We know exactly what's happening there. Mali, these areas, Mali is now extremely unstable because of the return of the Turagic communities from Libya, who were treated well under Gaddafi. These were fighters that come back to Mali. And we know that Mali is now being kept stable by French forces. It's very important with intelligence, with Americans. But the key country to watch is Niger, because the speed of climate change is phenomenal. And the climate change is leading to rapid desertification. And people are forcing to leave. This is not economic migration. It's migration of existence. And they're going across Chad. They're trying to go into the north of Sudan. Egypt, it's impossible to get in there now. Libya and try to get... This is a huge crisis, a ration to explode. And so when Merkel and Macron and others and the EU Commission visit or talk about North Africa, this is not going to be solved in two years' time. This is serious climate change catastrophe waiting to happen. It's already happening. And development aid, job opportunities, it's not going to make a difference. This is about seriously tackling the agricultural shortfalls and the universal problem of climate change. I mean, we've seen the summers here in Europe. It's devastating. And in Australia, there hasn't been rain in New South Wales for a year now. It's devastating. But here is the critical point for Europe's future stability. We are no longer having the arc of stability, which was the first European security document which Solana did. We have arcs of instability, and they are there to stay for the foreseeable future. So whatever Trump's ambivalence towards NATO is, NATO is sitting on huge time-sensitive issues, and we really don't have that much time to deal with them. Another aspect which feeds into this is that if NATO is divided over the sense of threats, it's not doing enough, and maybe it's not its job to deal with this whole cybersecurity. This is a civilian issue. NATO's divided. Some say this should be left to the civilian arm. Nothing got to do with the military. But above all, NATO and Trump have started quite an interesting, it's not yet got off the ground, but the debate inside, among the European member states, is what is European defence? Is Europe ready to defend itself? Does it understand what security means? Does it understand the real implications of making strategic decisions? And the answer, unfortunately, is no. There are two major strategic players inside EU and the European Caucus of NATO, and they are Britain and France. And it's very interesting that over the past eight or nine years, Britain and France did these special defence agreements. Why? Because they didn't believe that the EU could do European security and defence. In fact, they were pretty disgusted that little got so done. So they had these very interesting agreements, whether it was the nuclear sharing, certain aspects, and also combat units, they didn't quite get off the ground. And because we had the San Malo between Tony Blair and Jacques Chirac, that went back to 1999, the great ambitions of getting 60,000 troops ready in the space of three months. Well, three months, we can barely get 1,000. We can't even transport 5,000 up to the Baltic states because we don't have a NATO Schengen. We don't have the airports, the little airports, trains, the railways, the infrastructure, the bridges. So that's another issue. But that feeds into European readiness. Is Europe ready to defend itself from the cyber security, from mistakes, from small conventional wars, and, of course, from terrorism, which, don't forget, it's still there. It feeds into the resilience which we still haven't got. So there's been a couple of ideas floating out there. Angela Merkel, no fan of NATO, no fan of hard power, said a year ago, well, Europe now, it's time in the context of Trump, it's time that Europe took matters into its own hands. Well, she never pursued it. And Angela Merkel has never really given a speech on defense. And when she goes to the NATO summit, she really doesn't say much because she feels uncomfortable with it. It's not just about her East German upbringing or anything. It's the militaristic thing she doesn't like, but above all, she doesn't like to address hard power. And there's only two or three or four member states in the EU that address hard power. Britain, France, don't write off the Danes. The Danes are very, very interesting. And the Norwegians are very interesting through their history and tradition. Denmark is a really fascinating case of strategic thinking. But I didn't want to digress. So since the EU is not ready for resilience, and the EU cannot agree on the perception, except perhaps for terrorism now. I think it's hitting home, not on the Visegrad 4, but generally. And above all, since they can't agree on hard power, we have a fragmentation of the EU and which has been developed into coalitions of the willing. And we have the acronym of PESCO, where all the EU member states join. It's quite bureaucratic. It's, I see it's more as a talking shop to try to bring together capabilities. But the most important one is President Macron's European Intervention Initiative. This is a really interesting initiative. Already he's got eight groups around him. And Brexit or not, Britain wants to be part of this and he needs Britain to be part of this. Essentially, it's Europe get ready for an intervention force. This is not about crisis management. It's about preemptives as well. We have to preempt and we have to go in when we feel that our interests and our security has been threatened. And he's trying to give leadership to this. And it's very important to remember that not only is this a coalition of the willing and you can join opt-in, opt-out, it's free of the commission and it's free of the European Council. Now, some countries may say, oh, this is France throwing its weight around. Well, frankly, since the EU isn't going to do any of this serious crisis management on a hard power level, France wants to lead us. The interesting reason France is doing this is not just because of the deficits of European common foreign defense policy. It's because France can no longer do it alone. It's overstretched. It's already heavily involved in Africa. And as a quid pro quo to get other EU member states to join his European intervention force, and he sent up a few troops to Poland. Yeah, just, you know, we're okay. And Germany did France a favor by sending troops down to Mali. But let me tell you that there's a couple of them. Maybe there's maybe a hundred German troops, not one Arabic speaker and not one French speaker. They rely on interpreters and imagine if the interpreters were killed and upset. So it was all about a favor. And so every time you hear the German Bundestag say, what we're helping Macron and Mali, well, you need the proper infrastructure. I mean, it costs a huge amount of these operations, rotation and infrastructure, logistics, and then, but, you know, Merkel gave Macron something, but Macron hopes he'll get this. It would be kind of a mini natal caucus in some ways. That's the interesting thing about it. The other interesting thing about it is that apart from Macron's initiative, what's happening in the north is Finland and Sweden getting much closer to NATO. And these two countries, neutral, just to remind you, it's fascinating that they're heavily involved now in big NATO exercises. And so everything that Putin did to try and weaken NATO, especially weaken the northern flank, has backfired. And one of the positive aspects of Turkey's, of Russia's invasion of Ukraine is the fact that actually the Europeans have been pretty well together on sanctions and on the threat, even though the threat perception is different, but they're all rallying around it. And now even the neutral countries, the very important ones up in the north, are now seriously, not revising, they're seriously moving much closer to NATO, which is very, very interesting. And the other aspect, which it depends on who you talk to, because, you know, NATO has one culture, the EU has a different culture, but the EU and NATO are beginning to work closer together. And this is, it's very important because it could stop this ridiculous duplication and hopefully weaken the competition. I don't know, they think they can compete with each other, but the EU cannot compete with NATO on military issues and NATO cannot compete on the EU on soft power. And marrying hard power and soft power is just would be the ideal, the combination. And it would be ideal because NATO is very bad at soft power and the Americans are very bad at soft power in the day after. And so when the Americans went to Iraq and Afghanistan and when NATO went into Libya, no follow-up, no civilian infrastructure building, no follow-up on how to deal with the day after. And I read somewhere yesterday, the Americans are great at going in, but they're pretty bad at fixing things afterwards. And so we're living with the disaster of Libya. Ukraine so far seems to be managing with the Minsk process, which is led by France and Germany and Russia. And Ukraine has reached a point that it's just hanging in there. I mean, the conflict is not over in Ukraine, but Eastern Ukraine by any stretch of the imagination. And there's one, and my last point, and it's a rather one I've been thinking on for some time, is this idea of not only the ambivalence towards NATO, but NATO. NATO encompasses the transatlantic relationship. NATO is about Atlanticism, at least it used to be. This Atlanticism has, I think, outlived its usefulness because the idea of the West has been challenged now by China and has been challenged by what's happening in the Trump administration. The narratives coming out among commentators is now, oh, NATO and the West in America, this is the end of the old liberal order, it's been old, let's save it. And but we have to have a look at this liberal. Why do we want to save it? Why is everybody wanting to save the liberal order? Because the liberal order, after 1945, was imposed by the United States. It created the new Germany, the Western Germany. It built the democracy there. Can you imagine what it did to Japan? It's extraordinary. And this liberal order was based on the idea of a moral order and an order based on rules and an order based on values and the rule of law. And what we have now is, for many, many reasons, we have the idea of moral politics and the values and the rule of law being threatened from within the EU and, of course, being threatened outside, even from within the United States. This is an enormous responsibility for our friends in the United States, but it's an enormous responsibility for the Europeans. And in order to strengthen this Atlanticism or save it, we should actually stop thinking in America-European terms and think of a new Atlanticism that would include like-minded countries. We need to bring in Australia, New Zealand, Japan. We already have Canada, some of the Latin American countries. We need to broaden it out, either through trade deals but also broaden it out to widen the appeal of the West. And the appeal of the West is wide. Reformers from living in authoritarian countries still look to the West as the protector of the values of the rule of law. You can have no security without the rule of law. Without the rule of law, you won't have stability. You won't have structures. You won't have liberal values. And instead of moaning rightly so about Trump's ambivalence towards NATO, what we now, the Europeans should have a big say in this, again with our constituency friends in the United States, but bringing in other countries, we must create a new, broader, wider architecture because country, to what the populace might believe and the anti-globalizes, the West is bigger, actually. Look at the countries in the Africa Union that want to actually deal with the corruption, build up grassroots civil societies. Maybe this counter-intuitive, but I believe the West is getting bigger, but we should actually capture this moment and build on it through linking trade, security and defence with the values. The 1945 era is closing, there's no doubt about it, but it doesn't mean that the West is over. Thank you. Thank you.