 Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to Bly Street. I'm Michael Fully Love, the director here, and it's my pleasure to welcome you to this evening's event. This is the first speech, first public speech by our 2016 Telstra Distinguished International fellow, David Ignatius. Ladies and gentlemen, this fellowship is one of my babies. We introduced it in 2013, and the idea of the fellowship was that it would not be for just another FIFO speech, another fly-in, fly-out speech where somebody comes, gives the same speech that they gave in Singapore the week beforehand, and then gives the same speech in Melbourne the following week. Rather, we wanted to bring somebody, a global superstar, and bring them to Australia for a couple of weeks to expose them to the work and staff of the Institute and also importantly to expose them to the Australian debate and to allow them to contribute to the debate through media appearances and meetings with our stakeholders and public speeches just like this one. And we hope that our fellows leave not just as ambassadors of the Institute but ambassadors of Australia. We are proud and grateful that for the last three years this program, which is unique in Australia, has been supported by one of the great Australian companies, Telstra. We have had three previous Distinguished International Fellows, prominent American diplomat Kurt Campbell, who was the principal author of the Obama administration's Pivot to Asia. Steve Hadley, who was National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, and Ambassador Shamsurran, who was the head of the Indian Foreign Ministry. This is the first time we have appointed a journalist, not a policymaker. But I'm pleased to say that the 2016 Fellow is an unusual journalist in that he thinks like a policymaker and he is widely read by policymakers. Ladies and gentlemen, we're honoured to have David Ignatius as our Telstra Distinguished International Fellow for this year. David is among the world's most respected foreign policy commentators. There are only a couple of foreign affairs columnists in the world that I take care to read each week for professional reasons. I can't name the entire list, but I can tell you that David is one of them. And the reason that his columns are essential reading is that not only are they always thoughtful and insightful, but more often than not, they also contain a news scoop. David remains a news hound at heart and he still has a nose for a great story. He is one of America's most distinguished journalists having worked at the Washington Monthly, the Wall Street Journal, and now the Washington Post for, I think, three decades. He spent three years as the editor of the International Herald Tribune in Paris, which, and one of my great regrets to do with the demise of the independent IHT, is that that always seemed to me like the perfect job. To edit the IHT in Paris seemed perfect, and David did that. On top of his journalism, he is a fellow at the Kennedy School at Harvard. He's also published nine spy thrillers, ladies and gentlemen. And for many years, the CIA's website listed his book Agents of Innocence as recommended reading for its agents with a note that said, though a novel senior officers say this book is not fiction. On top of that, if that is not intimidating enough, one of an international man of mystery, a spy thriller novelist, he has also written the libretto for an opera titled The New Prince based on the teachings, of course, of Machiavelli, which will debut in Amsterdam next March. So I feel thoroughly intimidated having read that CV, and it's gonna cause me to rethink my own life and career goals. Ladies and gentlemen, every day the liberal international order that has existed for 70 years seems less liberal, less international, and less orderly. The United States has inched back from the world and challenges have stepped into it. The West is drooping in confidence. The historic project to unite the European continent seems shaky. The Middle East is a bloody mess. There are more refugees, asylum seekers, and displaced people than at any time since the end of the Second World War. At the same time, we are watching the weirdest election in American history. It seems unlikely that Donald Trump will be elected president, but of course either horse can win a two horse race. And as many of the people of the guests here this evening know, our polling indicates that nearly half of Australians would want Canberra to distance itself from Washington if Mr. Trump were elected president. This is a striking result given that Australia is the most reliable US ally bar none and that support for the US Alliance is the most consistent result in the history of our polling. Ladies and gentlemen, if it could be said that we are at a point in world history where the events we are witnessing are stranger than fiction. And if that is the case, who better to explain them to us than a distinguished foreign policy journalist and commentator who is also a novelist? Ladies and gentlemen, please welcome David Ignatius. Thank you, Michael. They may be stranger than fiction whether they're stranger than opera. You'll just have to come to Amsterdam and find out. It's a pleasure for me to be here for my first trip to Australia. I'm sorry that you didn't have better weather for me. It's been spectacular. I am struggling to learn the native ways. I've been trying very hard to say good day mate, but I haven't quite got it yet. But it's been marvelous. This is a wonderful opportunity. I thank the Lowy Institute, thank Michael in particular. I am going to offer some thoughts that I've written and tried to think through carefully, but then I'd love to take questions from the audience about whatever interests you the most, including politics, which I'm really not going to speak much about in my remarks. I want to begin these comments. The title is Global Order in the Age of Isis and a Rising Asia. It was something that my father told me in the months after September 11, 2001. You'll hear more about my 95 year old father later, but let me start with his 9-11 advice. Think of the way a top spins upon a table, my father began. You can give that top a pretty good whack, but if it's spinning fast enough, if it has the energy and internal force of a good spin, it will bounce right back to the center point. But if the spin is low, if the energy of the top has diminished, then a good hard knock will make the top wobble more and more until it finally falls over. America and its global leadership have been that spinning top for the last 15 years. We got a sharp knock on 9-11 and it seemed at first that the country had come spinning back to its center point, but the wobbles have been noticeable. In Iraq and Afghanistan, in the financial disaster that followed the collapse of Lehman Brothers in 2008, and now, surely, as Michael suggested in our presidential election, the rest of the world is wobbling too in Brexit, in the South China Sea, in the continuing seemingly insoluble nightmare of Syria, as the energy of the American spin, the American system, has diminished. So I would begin these remarks by saying that the American top needs a new pull of the cord, a new spin. It has lost energy. It's not simply a question of diminished American dominance, but of this lost energy and confidence in the system that America created and led after 1945. I want to share with you some thoughts tonight about what might come next in the global order, but let's start with the ASEAN regime. We all grew up in the shadow of American power during and after World War II. 100 years before the organizing myth would have been the story of the British Empire, of which Australia, like America, is both an example and an exception. By the end of the century, the defining global story may well be China's rise to a super state, but for now, the American story remains the foundation stone. I'm biased, but I think this is generally an admirable story. The epic of America's rise was also the time of decolonization in Asia and Africa, which Franklin Roosevelt insisted on as the price of America's aid to Britain in 1941. It was a time of European integration after two catastrophic wars and a subsequent prosperity and union in Europe. It was the time of resurgence in post-war Japan under benign American tutelage, and it was, of course, the era of a rising China, the event in my lifetime that probably dwarfs all others. This was a period when the extension of U.S. power was irresistible and mostly benign. We sometimes forget that it was accomplished through the intermediation of the institutions that Franklin Roosevelt created in 1944 and 1945, the IMF and World Bank, the United Nations and the Atlantic Charter. American power and self-confidence got a pretty good knock in Vietnam, but after some wobbles, that top came back to its center point and seemed, in fact, to spin faster than ever. Australia, I sense, has a similar founding myth. It's a nation of immigrants. It grew by adapting, by living by its wits, though it had colonial roots like America. It became a force for decolonization. Your top is still spinning fast, but you haven't really gotten knocked yet. When I think of this American story in personal terms, I think inevitably of my own family's experience. And I'll return here to my father, Paul Ignatius, who was born in 1920 and is now nearing his 96th birthday. I was pleased that ambassador, Rodin Dalrymple, who I met as I was arriving, remembered my father and wished him well. What do I see in this American story as seen in the life of my own family? First, I see our national genius, our American genius of assimilation and adaptation. My father was the son of two Armenian immigrants who were born in the Ottoman Empire. It came to America and excelled. He went to college on the scholarship at USC, went to Harvard Business School, founded a great company, went to work for presidents Kennedy and Johnson in Washington, became Secretary of the Navy, and later president of the Washington Post. Perhaps the most important fact about my dad is that as a young man, he went to war in the Pacific. He joined the Navy in 1942 and fought in the Battle of Lady Gulf and many of the other great naval engagements of the second half of the war. He still eats salad every night out of a teak bowl that he won in a tennis tournament when he was on leave in Oahu. He took with him to war the collected works of William Shakespeare and other great books, Arnold Toynbee, the whole library. And I can still read the notations he made in pencil in the margins as he read in his Bunkett See. My father and his generation of government officials, men who had never really failed at anything in their lives, ran headlong into the insoluble problem of Vietnam. But America and the world survived that mistake. There's even a contrarian theory that the spectacular rise of Asia that started in the late 1970s is actually a consequence of the American War in Vietnam. But I'll leave that puzzle to historians. I hope you'll indulge one last mention of my father. Sometime in the next several months, the Navy will launch a guided missile destroyer named after him, the USS Paul R. Ignatius. In our house, we ask Paul Ignatius, the man or the ship. Having offered this portrait of how we began the American-centric world of my father's generation, I'd now like to discuss where we're going. I'd like to make five basic points about the foundations of wise policy and a stable order in a future that will not be post-American exactly, but will look very different from the world in which I was born. First, a stable new order will be one of multilateralism. We Americans like to think of American exceptionalism, but as Iranian Foreign Minister Javad Zarif told me in a conversation in Tehran a few years ago, Iranians think their country is exceptional too. So do Chinese and Indians and perhaps even Australians. The habit of playing well with others is difficult for a country like mine that spent 60 years as the world's only real superpower. We are still culturally the frontier nation with a belief in what we called manifest destiny. Americans know that this is a new century, but it's a tricky transition. Herman Kahn, one of the great nuclear strategists who were collectively known as the Wizards of Armageddon, once observed that a unipolar system or a bipolar system could be stable and a multipolar system could also be stable, but that the transition from one to the other was unstable. And that's part of what we're living through, that unstable transition. President Obama's goal as he sought to restabilize the world after the catastrophic mistake and wobble of the Iraq War was to operate in a consensual multipolar way. Obama, as he often said, wanted to turn a page, to end the chapter where an overextended America was fighting other countries' wars and started chapter where America would work with its allies in collective security. Obama just expressed disdain for free riders, as he put it to Jeffrey Goldberg in the well-known Atlantic article, for countries that in his words wanted to hold America's coat while we fought their wars. He was widely derided, at least in Washington, for the idea of leading from behind in Libya. But I think that phrase actually did summarize Obama's view of multilateralism. Has it worked? Not entirely. In fact, probably not well at all. The rise of ISIS and the disintegration of Syria led me and many others to start arguing back in 2012 that the United States needed to show more muscular leadership. Obama's reticence had moved multilateralism to something closer to dysfunction. His policies were seen abroad as a sign not of American vision, but of weakness. In October 2012, I was smuggled across the Turkish border and traveled with the Free Syrian Army rebels into Aleppo, Syria, which even then was being destroyed by shelling. Of all my travels over nearly 40 years, I think this is my wife's least favorite. But it was valuable. When I left Syria, smuggled back across the Turkish border, thank goodness, I made three observations. First, that President Assad of Syria would never again control all of his country. Second, that the moderate rebels, so-called, of the Free Syrian Army were a mess, even by local standards. And without significant American covert or overt support would fail. And third, that given the weakness of these moderates, the extremists who were even then visible and aggressive would become stronger and stronger. Note that at that time, ISIS did not exist by that name. I'm sorry to say that I wouldn't change a word of what I wrote four years ago. My point is that the catastrophe of ISIS was not inevitable. It was not the result of specific bad decisions. There's nothing in the structure of a multipolar world or the ideas that Obama had about reducing unilateral American action that requires acceptance of a disastrous civil war in Syria. I made this case in a lengthy article in the Atlantic Monthly in October, and I would urge people who want more detail to consult that. To sum up, in my view, Obama over-learned the lesson of Iraq and over-compensated for the wobble of the American top that was that war. If Iraq taught the dangers of US military intervention, Syria has taught the dangers of inaction. What Obama didn't seem to appreciate is that power in the world does not tolerate a vacuum. As we stepped back in the Middle East, others stepped forward. As we stepped back, ISIS stepped forward. As we stepped back, Iran stepped forward. As we stepped back, Russia stepped forward. Perhaps this is finally in the fall of 2016 Obama's season. The polls in the US show his favorability rating well above 50%. In a recent survey by the Pew Research Center of four Asian countries, 10 European countries, Canada and the US, more than half of those polled in 15 of the countries, expressed confidence in Obama as an American leader. When George Bush ended his presidency in 2008, his popularity was below 20%. Below 20% in Germany, France, the UK, and Spain. Immediately on Obama's election, the popularity of the US president shot up 60 points. But what's interesting is that it has remained high and roughly steady over nearly eight years and now stands at 86% in Germany, 84% in France, 79% in the UK, and 75% in Spain. The Pew poll also says interestingly that perceptions of US economic power have been steadily rising for the last four years and that perceptions of China have been steadily falling. So rumors of America's death as a great power are premature, but its failure as a unilateral go-it-alone superpower, vintage 2003, are indeed finished. America's power survives to the extent that we are leaders of a multipolar system. We have more staying power in this role than our enemies or even our friends around the world sometimes think. The second attribute of a stable future order is balance and acceptance of a rules-based system by all players. That's especially true here in your part of the world. In Asia today, it's not the United States that risks being seen as an arrogant power that acts unilaterally, but China. And Beijing is paying the price, as in your government's recent decision to block the sale of your utility, Oscar to China or to a Hong Kong company. Containing China, and I put that in quotation marks, is a recipe for US-Chinese confrontation, as many Australians have told me they fear. But it's really not the US goal, at least under this president. Rather, the US seeks this idea of a rules-based order for the region in which China, in its own interest, will grow to accept limits on its unilateral actions, thus the significance of the stunningly blunt ruling by the international court in the Hague supporting the Philippine claims in the South China Sea, and rejecting China as assertion of a nine-dash line that supposedly marks its sovereignty. The arbitrator's resounding no could surely be heard even in Beijing. Now China is trying to decide whether and how to live in this multilateral rules-based order as enunciated by the arbitrators, but really as enunciated by its neighbors. It's encouraging that so far, rather than doubling down and announcing an air defense identification zone, as had been feared in Washington, the Chinese are pondering their next move. If the Chinese decide to challenge the arbitrators and escalate this dispute, we, but really especially you, are in for a tough ride. But in my view, the likelihood is that the Philippine arbitration will temper Chinese unilateralism. The guiding principle of President Obama's pivot or rebalance to Asia wasn't the idea that American military power would suddenly migrate to this theater and away from Europe and the Middle East. Instead it was the idea that American power will be best deployed in cooperation with regional allies. And here I credit Obama. The US has improved relations with both Japan and South Korea, a neat trick. It has opened new chapters with Vietnam and Myanmar. It has revived its once poisonous relationship with the Philippines, all while retaining constructive dialogue with China. So the secret of a successful rebalance is balance. America shouldn't wanna be China, much less confronted using mercantilist policies of its own in an attempt to enforce consensus. Rather we should help our friends resist China together. A third attribute of global order is a system that can reconcile the interests of rising powers with those of status quo powers that can bridge old and new. And my mentor here is the young Henry Kissinger who wrote in his Harvard doctoral dissertation which was published in 1954 as a world restored about how the disorder of Europe after the Napoleonic Wars was transformed into a rules-based concert of nations as it was called at the Congress of Vienna in 1815, beginning nearly a century of peace in Europe. The heroes of Kissinger's tale not surprisingly were diplomats, Britain's Lord Castle Ray and Austro-Hungary's Count Metternich. Kissinger's great insight was that the task for these diplomats in 1815 was to reconcile the interests of the rising and in some cases revolutionary powers, post-revolutionary France, Prussia to some extent, Russia with those of the status quo powers, Britain and Austro-Hungary. He was only such an accommodation that would bring stability. This is precisely the diplomatic challenge of the next decades. Let's start with the revolutionary regime in Iran which has been sending shock waves of instability across the Middle East since its revolution in 1979. Part of what President Obama accomplished in the nuclear deal with Iran was to force the Islamic Republic and its revolutionary ideology to make an accommodation with the status quo powers, namely the permanent five members of the UN Security Council and Germany and forgo building nuclear weapons for at least 15 years. Longer term stability in the Middle East, this story of tragedy that I've been writing about since 1980 when I first went to Iraq. Stability in this region will be impossible without a broader accommodation. I wanna say a Congress of Riyadh and Tehran between Saudi Arabia and Iran whose proxy war, whose Sunni Shia proxy war has been ripping the fabric of the Middle East apart. The cause of this ruinous process in my view is imbalance. An aggressive Iran has been too strong for a feeble Saudi Arabia and other Sunni states that grew up as clients of an America that no longer wants to fight their wars. It's in this context of a future Saudi Iranian balance that I note the importance of the headstrong, new deputy crown prince in Saudi Arabia, Mohamed bin Salman who I was lucky to spend 90 minutes with recently. He has a vision of transforming Saudi Arabia, believe it or not, into a version of the United Arab Emirates, a more modern, more tolerant, more self-confident country and in all these ways, a country better able to resist Iranian hegemony. MBS, as this Saudi leader is called, may run his country off a cliff. He is a genuinely impulsive young man but if he succeeds, he may be able to move toward the kind of regional accommodation balance that I described, a bargain between status quo and revolution. Fourth attribute of my stable world order is U.S. military force. That can deter great power conflict and suppress terrorism. U.S. military power is obviously a conundrum. The world complains about America being too militaristic but it quakes when America can't deter other nations' unilateral actions such as those of Russia and Ukraine and China in the East and South China Seas. I travel often in my job with military leaders and I'll give you a capsule summary of what I hear from them. The U.S. military never wants to fight another Iraq-style war of occupation or for that matter, another war of regime change. The rise of ISIS has certainly concerned the military but some of the strongest arguments that Obama has received against any large-scale American intervention in Syria and Iraq have come from the generals who don't want to do it again. What the four stars worry about most these days is the return of great power rivalry and the resurgent militaries of China and Russia which have demonstrated the ability to operate complex battle management systems that were until recently the unique province of the United States. Pentagon planners fear a decline of what they call overmatch meaning that the chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is now unable to guarantee the president success and escalation dominance in the early days of a war with a major power, in the early days of conventional force in a future war. The Pentagon has begun to respond in ways that are not widely understood. Our current Defense Secretary Ash Carter and Deputy Secretary Bob Work have taken the unusual step over the last year of announcing publicly some of the most secret high-tech programs that the US is working on for the deterrent effect. Collectively, these programs have the unfortunate and very forgettable name, the third offset strategy but it's worth mentioning to this audience because it's important. In practice, this strategy involves the use of new systems, new super high-tech systems, autonomous vehicles, robotic vehicles in the air on land and undersea, swarming drones that would fight a networked war that would overwhelm Russia and China in battle, space systems that would fight the opening, perhaps decisive hours of war in space, lasers and other directed energy weapons, all of which will enable a new kind of warfare. The aim of all this planning is to complicate the war-planning of Russian or Chinese adversary and thereby to re-establish deterrence. I'm certainly not arguing for a new conventional weapons arms race. I'm just noting the, as I say, not widely understood fact that anyone who assumes that the US military is standing still while Russia and China modernize their militaries is mistaken. Technology will add new weapons to the counter-terrorism arsenal as well. I suspect that one thing that's ahead is a combination of drone technology and pattern recognition machine learning fused into a deadly package. It will soon be possible, in theory, to give armed drones and robots a picture, a photographic image of David Ignatius and the instruction, kill David Ignatius with near certainty that the mission will eventually succeed. The battle against radical extremists is a generational challenge, but in my reporting observation, the initial phase of defeating the caliphate, the Islamic State, increasingly appears to be a soluble military problem. In Iraq, the US and its allies have taken Ramadi, Fallujah, Tikrit, Sinjar, and Qaira on their way to Mosul. In Syria, they have taken Shaddadi, Minbij, nearly, and the Tishreen Dam on their way to Raqqa. President Obama said in September, 2014, that he would seek to degrade and destroy this adversary slowly but inexorably, this is happening. Inevitably, as ISIS has squeezed out of its caliphate, it will inspire or seek to inspire attacks elsewhere in Europe, Asia, and the US. This will be a continuing problem for the US, but I think President Obama is right to say it is not an existential one. A final word about military technology is that it's useless unless you have allies who want to fight. Traveling to Syria in May with General Joseph Hotel, the new SENTCOM commander, I met some of the Syrian Kurdish fighters who have seized most of northeast Syria from ISIS. These are fierce fighters, men and women both. Women from the Syrian Kurdish militia known as the YPJ, who fought in Kobani, wore suicide belts into battle because they knew that if they were captured by ISIS, they would be turned into sex slaves. Suffice it to say that these are motivated fighters. In some, the military loves technology, but it has learned through bitter experience over 15 years that technology cannot make up for weak, unmotivated, or intimidated allies. A fifth and final aspect of a stable world order is government systems that fit a world where individuals are empowered as never before for good and sometimes for bad by technology. At the dawn of the digital revolution, I assumed that the internet would be stabilizing. It shares information, it shares prosperity, it produces a connected world wherein theory, it should be easier to identify and solve problems, but I see increasing evidence that technology has had the opposite effect. The digital revolution empowers the individual and motivated groups, but it does not pull them together. Quite the opposite. As we have seen in the U.S., it offers new platforms for polarization. Rather than creating a common grid, it provides new opportunities for conspiracy theorists. Rather than encouraging consensus, it sharpens divisions, as with competing Fox News and in America, MSNBC, views of the world. Rather than challenging people's prejudices and preconceptions, this specialized, disaggregated media confirms them. It tells you that you're right. The people you like are indeed the good guys and that your enemies are sinister and pervasive. It's telling that Donald Trump is the first Twitter candidate, the medium suits him. This world of empowered citizens should resist demagogues, but the opposite seems to be happening. We are seeing the return of big men, leaders such as Erdogan and Turkey, Putin and Russia, Xi in China, who learn to ride the tiger of the empowered citizens of this digital age. This is a world on steroids. Why does it feel so disordered? I would cite two factors that are inherent in the technology itself. The connected world does not have an ordering mechanism. It's fragmented, disaggregated, blown to bits in the phrase used by the Boston Consulting Group. And the internet itself has been an opinion accelerator. It spins fact, rumor and opinion faster than governments can respond to them. Let me conclude with the same image that I used at the beginning. How can we rewind the string and get more spin for our global top? The US presidential election will be a crucial test. I'll offer detailed views in a speech next week in Melbourne, but suffice it to say that Hillary Clinton would be a good next point in the balancing, rebalancing process of our last two presidents, George W. Bush and Barack Obama. She has learned lessons from both. Hillary Clinton would not be a panacea. American leadership will suffer badly if she sticks to her announced view that she will oppose the Trans-Pacific Partnership. That will seed momentum in the Asia-Pacific region to China. I hope that President Obama carries through on his promise to Prime Minister Lee of Singapore to pass the TPP during the lame duck session of Congress after the election. We will all pay a price if he fails. American power under Hillary Clinton would seek the five basic attributes that I described to you tonight. It would strive to be multilateral and balanced. It would seek a security architecture that reconciles revolution and status quo. It would project military power using new technology and it would seek a fact-based world that can resist polarization, partisanship, and entropy. Will she succeed in these five tasks? Almost certainly not, but she will at least make a good start. And Donald Trump, Americans as a general rule, should not attack their own politicians when they travel overseas. But I owe this audience my opinion. On current evidence, Trump's election would be a demonstration that good countries can make very bad decisions. I fear that Trump wouldn't rewind my father's top. This emblem that I've tried to use tonight to describe the American-led global order. Instead, I fear he would take it off the table and bring it home. Thank you very much. Well, thank you. Thank you, David. Ladies and gentlemen, I think we've received a treat tonight. That is one of the most interesting, one of the broadest and most thought-provoking speeches to the Institute I can recall. And I was particularly struck by the story of your amazing father, because my father also served in the Second World War, landed on Sword Beach about 10 days after D-Day. And I know how precious the connection is to that generation, and I know how special the commissioning of USS Paul R. Ignatius will be. David has agreed to take questions. We have about 15 minutes. I'm gonna keep the questions going quite quickly so that people have an opportunity to ask something. I'm gonna ask one while people are getting their questions ready. There are so many entry points into your speech. It's hard to know. Such a rich presentation at the grandest global stage, the Middle East and the Pivot and ISIS and so on. But let me ask a very parochial question. Let me bring it down really to the Australian level and ask you about how Australia is perceived in Washington. And you mentioned the Goldberg article in The Atlantic. And there was a very intriguing reference in that article where Goldberg asked Obama and people around Obama about different world leaders and what he thought of them. And he asked him about Obama and this is what Goldberg wrote. He said, Obama has apparently formed a good impression of the new Australian Prime Minister. But Turnbull has a structural advantage. American presidents tend to like Australian Prime Ministers. One administration told Goldberg, our allies all give us headaches except for Australia. You can always count on Australia. Now my question to you is, from our point of view, is that a good thing or a bad thing? We pride ourselves on being perhaps the most reliable ally. The only ally to fight beside the United States in every major conflict of the 20th and 21st centuries and supporters of the Alliance like me say that this makes us a credible and reliable ally. But critics on the other side of the argument would say it makes you a slavish partner. Obviously we participate in these conflicts because we think it's in our interests. But we also want to be as influential on these debates in Washington as we can, especially as the locus of power moves towards our part of the world. So from your point of view, does our reliability as an ally add to or detract from our influence? Well, everybody loves a reliable friend. We love our friends, especially when they stick by us when we're down. And in this period of seeming difficulty for American power, the fact that Australia has generally been with us, I think reinforces the sense Americans have that this is a stable, dependable, in truth, a beloved friend. There is an affinity between Americans and Australians that I hope everyone in this audience feels. Whether it's good for Australia to have this affinity with the United States depends on whether the United States proves to be a strong and reliable partner in this region and a wise partner. If you make a bet on the United States, it's important that we deliver, that American outward-leaning, internationalist, engaged policies continue. I think there is a fear in the world, certainly I encounter it in Asia. I heard it from Prime Minister Lee of Singapore when he came to visit us at the Washington Post, a fear that America is in a period of retreat and retrenchment, that Donald Trump is popular with voters because they share his feeling that we have badly overstepped that our elites have led the country into wars that didn't succeed or immensely costly that brought the country nothing but difficulty, that our free trade policies have helped elites but not the ordinary worker. I mean, this is a broadly shared feeling. And I think it's crucial at the next present. I'm gonna assume that that's Hillary Clinton speak to that uneasiness and that anxiety in American, build a base for a different kind of internationalism. If that happens, Australia will be very glad indeed that it continued to be America's reliable partner. If our role in the world diminishes, you'll wish that you'd made a bet on Beijing or a stronger bet. And I think in life, we often tend to think it's wise to hedge our bets. Certainly in our investment lives, we wanna never sure of the precise outcome. Nations do that, but I think they do that only up to a point. One thing that I've learned watching the United States is that countries make a real mistake when they depart sharply from their values as the United States did in this wobbling reaction to 9-11. The United States did the things that we should be deeply ashamed of that betrayed what the world thinks we are and also what we think we are. And so I think Australia should be very careful not to do anything that for the sake of hedging bets, for the sake of short-term calculations takes Australia away, not from America per se, but from what makes this a country that endures. Okay, the first hand I saw was Rob Thomas over here and then the lady behind him. And if you could just wait for a microphone. Thank you. I'd be interested, you talked about multilashism, how America can really implement that successfully without actually being seen to be, for one of a better word, the big brother or the big stick and trying to impose its values in particular on the Middle East, where I think occasionally the Middle East looks at the America going, all you're trying to do is impose your values on our values there. And in particular, and I suppose I would also say the same perhaps with China as well, where it's seeing America acting like a big brother. Well, we are pushy, our soft power is overwhelming. Our culture, I'm always amazed when I travel around the world, every country in the world seems to have its own version of rap music, how unlikely, but you can hear Chinese rappers and Indian rappers and I'm sure Australian rappers. We do need to respect other cultures. It's something I think Americans are getting better at. I have an image of what American power at its best looks like, drawn from my years covering the Middle East. There's an institution some of you may know called the American University of Beirut that was founded by Protestant missionaries in the 1860s and has been an anchor for good, I wanna say American style education now for all these many, many decades. There's an arch on the rubeless that has carved in it, I think since the university was built, the missionary injunction that they may have life and have it more abundantly. And for so many generations that was the American ambition in the Middle East and in other parts of the world that distinguished us from the colonial powers, it's why America really was loved and welcomed in the Middle East in this period of decolonization. We said to the British and the French, that's it. You're not gonna continue the kind of, and it's a tragedy that we fell into a kind of neocolonial role, that neo-imperial role without really meaning to. But I do think one great benefit of this period after Iraq is that Americans in general have come to understand what I was trying to say in my remarks, that unilateral policies that attempt to impose American views and order has been unsuccessful has only brought us unhappiness. So I think any future president, at least for the next while, will refrain from that in its worst form. The lady just behind, Rob? Hello, my name is George Sianovich, member of the public. Thank you so much for a fascinating talk. David, I wonder if you could elaborate on the succession problems in Saudi Arabia given the age of the current brothers. It's a part of Keg and the relationship between Iran and Saudi Arabia is particularly important to stability. You mentioned a particularly interesting person who might be able to succeed, but what are the challenges there? And with respect to artificial intelligence, Toby Walsh, an artificial intelligence expert seconded by dozens of experts from around the world is working with the UN to limit development of artificial intelligence killer robots because currently drone strikes are very, the failure rate is very high. He actually quoted 90%, which could compound the issues that we are facing right now. And the cost of the technology is going to be accessible to everyone in no time. Thank you. Tough questions at the Lowy Institute from the Saudi succession to artificial intelligence. Well, so let's, I'll start with the Saudis and then turn to killer robots. There is unusual turmoil in the Saudi royal family. I wrote about that at length a couple of months ago and I'd be happy if people looked for that. But I've talked to many members of the royal family. We have a deputy crown prince who is 30 years old, who is ambitious, who has his big ideas, but who has sharp elbows. And other members of the family have been unhappy. The nominal superior, the crown prince, Mohammed bin Naif, has been especially put on his heels by the young man. When I met him in Washington two months ago, I didn't know what to expect. And I have to be honest, I was impressed by him. I was impressed by his raw political instinct. I don't know if anyone in this room remembers Rafiq Hariri, the Lebanese leader. He was a big, physically big, larger-than-life figure. Just sucked the air out of the room. Got to grab you by the shoulders and wanted to gossip. This young man is like that. He's physically big, he's self-confident, he's brash. And I think the Sunni world needs a person like this. I don't know if he's the person, but they need a person like this. The Sunni world is in a kind of freefall, lack of confidence, Egypt, Syria, Iraq. Just go across the map and you see this collapse of power and confidence in the Sunni countries. And they need a robust, vigorous Sunni champion. Maybe he'll be it, but that's what interests me about him. On this question of new weapons, we are kind of moving headlong into the future. I mentioned these Pentagon programs because I think it's important that people understand that this threat of a very aggressive modernization program by Russia and China is being met. The weapons that are on the horizon are genuinely scary. Machine learning allows a kind of automation, the ability to populate the undersea space. That's the part of it that really interests me the most with pervasive, stealthy unmanned submarines that just lie in wait for conflict that allow the projection of power in entirely different ways. Advances in drone technology, similarly. I mean, as you say, it's gonna become pervasive. The idea of the United States alone will, you know, the leading maker of drones in the world today, guess what country that is not the United States? I'm told it's China. So, you know, this technology is out of the box. And I think, yes, it's important to research the ways these technologies could be used in conflict, but it's probably even more important to think about ways in which the technologies could be controlled in arms control agreements in the same way that we learned to do during the nuclear, the age when the nuclear threat was overwhelming. I mean, that was a breakthrough. That's part of what made the world liveable. I think it's time to begin thinking about that in terms of these new technologies. Last question in this corner. If you could just wait for a microphone, Rod. Good evening. I was asking myself the question of whether Obama and Netanyahu have got on better of recent times because it didn't look as though there was a great relationship there. And now that the US is so energy-sufficient itself, might the only time that the US go back into the Middle East is if Israel itself was threatened. I assume that commitment is still high on the agenda of the US government? I think that commitment is never wavered. Netanyahu and Obama had a famously bad personal chemistry, but the relationships between the militaries and the intelligence services, it said, were stronger than ever in this period. The US and Israel are just completing a new memorandum of understanding about US military support to maintain Israel's so-called qualitative edge over any Arab adversary, which is a big accomplishment. In a sense, I think Obama and Netanyahu have survived each other and come to the end of the story, at least in terms of Obama intact. I think there's a growing appreciation in Israel, and this would be a final comment because I didn't say much about it, that the nuclear agreement with Iran is broadly speaking in the security interests of every nation in the region and internationally, including Israel. I think more and more Israeli analysts would say, taking this off the table in what appears to be an enforceable, verifiable agreement probably has more good in it than bad. Israel was really anxious about the agreement. I sense much less of that anxiety today. Well, ladies and gentlemen, as I said, I think we've heard a terrific speech today. David, you set out all these global challenges, and I kept getting drawn back to the central role of the United States in dealing with all of them. And when you were describing George W. Bush and then Obama, I couldn't help but think of the story of Goldilocks, who went to the house of the three bears in the woods, and you remember the first bowl of porridge was too hot, and the second bowl of porridge was too cold, and the third bowl was too right. It was just right, I should say. And there you go, I'm injecting a bit of Australianism into my story, but President Bush was too hot in the sense that he was perhaps too unilateral and too promiscuous in the use of force. Perhaps President Obama has been too cautious and too cool a cat. And I think all of us hope that there might be a female Goldilocks candidate who can come up with a US foreign policy that's just right. I think it might be slightly harder than the fairy tale says. We'll either get Goldilocks or we'll get the big bad wolf, I don't know. Ladies and gentlemen, thank you for joining us, and please thank David Ignatius.