 Hi, my name is Murray Hebert. I'm the deputy director and senior fellow in the Southeast Asia program here at CSIS, and we're delighted to welcome Ambassador Kim Beasley to join us for a conversation today. President Obama will visit Australia in mid-November. Can you talk a little bit about what you see as the significance of the visit and what might come out of it? Well we're not easy to visit, it has to be said at the outset. We're about as far from Washington as you can conceivably be. So whenever an American president turns up he's greeted with a considerable amount of excitement in Australia, and I've got no doubt in my mind at all that President Obama will be as well. This is the 60th anniversary this year of the ANZUS arrangement that featured very prominently in the presentations that the Australian Prime Minister made here in Washington earlier in the year, and I'd expect there'd be a ring to it in President Obama's visit in Australia when he comes in mid-November. And it's an open secret obviously that we've been holding discussions with the Americans associated with the American Force Post Review. I'd imagine he'd have something to say about that, and so would the Australian government. There was also the recent Osmond talks, the ministers, the fence and foreign ministers from the two countries meet, and there was some discussion about basing more American troops in Western Australia. What can you tell us a little bit about that arrangement and how that will affect joint military cooperation? Well actually the most important thing that was discussed at the Osmond meeting in military terms was intensifying the collaboration on cyber, which actually had attached to it an implicit threat, that the way in which developments were occurring in various efforts to exploit cyberspace was beginning to suggest that there was a potential for a threat to both our countries, which would trigger the relevant article of ANZUS, which has us in a situation where we discuss countermeasures. So actually cyber was a very big part of that discussion. There was also a continuing discussion, as I said in answer to the previous question, on the issues of force posture. The Australia is looking at ways in which facilities that it has might be utilized by the forces of the United States, and that's an ongoing consideration. Ambassador, as you already said, this is the 60th anniversary of ANZUS, how do you see that that alliance has evolved since the end of the Cold War, and what do you see some of the key opportunities and challenges that face the alliance? I think the ANZUS alliance, and no doubt somebody would give me an argument on this, but nevertheless I do think it is the case, that the ANZUS alliance is the one structure set up during the course of the Cold War as part of the U.S. extended deterrent system, where the engagement between the United States and the other treaty partner has intensified since the end of the Cold War, as opposed to being wandering around looking for a mission and perhaps falling by the wayside, which has been the fate of so many others of the American agreements. I think that is a direct product of the relevance of the area Australia geographically inhabits to the global political system now as compared to what was the case during the Cold War. So essentially Australia was in a strategic backwater for most of the Cold War, give or take a period in which the U.S. was engaged in Vietnam, but a backwater, now it is the southern tier of the focal point of the global political system. So the relationship between Australia and the United States is now more important to the U.S. than it was previous. The Prime Minister Gallard announced recently that Australia would be drafting a white paper in 2012 entitled Australia Prepares for the Asian Century. How do you think Australia can balance its increasing economic cooperation with Asia, with its continuing security cooperation with the United States? Are there any tensions there? I don't think so. The United States is heavily engaged in the Asian Pacific region and the way in which Australia sees the United States is very much within that zonal context and that's nothing new. We've done that for years and years and it's implicit anyway in the ANZUS Treaty. So I don't actually think it has ramifications in that regard for the Australian relationship with Asia. Americans like to plan things systematically, or at least we like to think we're planning things systematically, so we're constantly defining and revising. Now we look at the way in which Asia is developing economically, the sort of exponential increase in wealth and prosperity, not simply in China but in India, Vietnam, Indonesia and the whole region. And we for once have the advantage of adjacency. We are on the doorstep, if not indeed part of it depending on how you choose to define the region. This is a superb opportunity for Australia economically. It does pose a few challenges strategically because there are many areas of disagreement amongst nations in this region. So it requires a bit of careful thought and that's what's going on with this paper. Great. Ambassador Beasley, thank you very much for talking with us today. Good to be with you.