 Welcome to Think Tech on Spectrum OC16, Hawaii's weekly newscast on things in matter-to-tech and Hawaii. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. In our show this time, we will visit the 2019 meeting of the Board of Governors of Pacific Forum to hear their current thinking about our critical relations with Asia and beyond. The meeting was moderated by the new president of Pacific Forum, retired Rear Admiral Robert Jiriere, with a keynote by retired Admiral James Stavridis. Pacific Forum was organized more than 40 years ago. Since then, Pacific Forum has made huge contributions through its research and reports and articles and programs about relations with Asia and the world. With its remarkable professional staff, fellows, interns, and supporters, its position to make increasingly valuable contributions going forward. For many years, Joseph S. Nye Jr. of the Kennedy School was a regular speaker at the annual Board of Governors program. More recently, former Deputy Secretary of State Richard Armitage played that role. This year, retired Navy Admiral James Stavridis spoke at the program, exploring the events and issues facing the United States in its relations with Asia Pacific and the world today. A word about James Stavridis. He's a retired U.S. Navy Admiral currently in executive with the Carlisle Group and chair of the Board of Counselors at McLarty Associates. In August 2018, he stepped down as Dean of the Fletcher School of Law and Diplomacy. He serves as the Chief International Diplomacy and National Security Analyst for NBC News. He is also chairman of the Board of the U.S. Naval Institute and a senior fellow at the Johns Hopkins Applied Physics Laboratory. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1976. While in the Navy, he served as Commander U.S. Southern Command and Commander U.S. European Command and NATO Supreme Allied Commander Europe, the first Navy officer to have held these positions. He earned a Ph.D. in Law and Diplomacy from the Fletcher School in 1984. In the Navy, he was a surface warfare officer and served on aircraft carriers, cruisers and destroyers. After serving as Operations Officer on the newly commissioned USS Valley Forge, he commanded destroyer USS Barrie from 1993 to 1995, completing deployments to Haiti, Bosnia and the Persian Gulf. He commanded destroyer squadron 21, deployed to the Persian Gulf in 1998. From 2002 to 2004, he commanded Enterprise Carrier Strike Group, conducting combat operations in the Persian Gulf in support of both Operation Iraqi Freedom and Operation Enduring Freedom. As sure, Stavridis served as a strategic and long-range planner on the staffs of the Chief of Naval Operations and the Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff. At the start of the global war on terror, he was selected as the Director of the Navy Operations Group, Deep Blue. He also served as the Executive Assistant to the Secretary of the Navy and the Senior Military Assistant to the Secretary of Defense. In 2006, he became the first Navy officer to command the U.S. Southern Command in Miami. In 2009, he became Supreme Allied Commander Europe. He retired from the Navy in 2013 after 37 years of service and returned to the Fletcher School as its Dean. His book, The Accidental Admiral, describing his naval career, was published in October 2014. His next book, The Leader's Bookshelf, published in 2017 describing the top 50 books that inspire better leadership, was a number one bestseller. He published a second bestseller in 2017 called Sea Power, the History and Geopolitics of the World's Oceans. Stavridis has long advocated the use of smart power, which he defines as the balance of hard and soft power taken together. In numerous articles and speeches, he has advocated creating security in the 21st century by building bridges, not walls. He has stressed the need to connect international, interagency, and public private actors to build security, lining all of them with effective strategic communications. His message was articulated in his book, Partnership for the Americas, which was based on his time as the commander of the U.S. Southern Command. The book was summarized in his 2012 TED Talk, which has been viewed more than 700,000 times. Since leaving active duties, Stavridis has frequently appeared on major broadcasts and cable television networks to comment on national security and foreign policy matters. He has often commented on NBC, CNN, Fox News, BBC, and Bloomberg, and is a frequent op-ed contributor in foreign policy and the Nikkei Asian Review. He has a monthly column in time.com. He has also made multiple appearances at the World Economic Forum in Davos, the Munich Security Conference, and lectures at Harvard, Yale, Georgetown, the University of Texas, and other universities. He has given numerous commencement and graduation addresses around the country. Now this part is very interesting. Stavridis was considered as a potential vice presidential running mate by the Hillary Clinton campaign in the summer of 2016, and as a possible U.S. Secretary of State by President elect Donald Trump in the fall of 2016. He did not take a job with either of them. Now a word about Robert Juryer, the new president of the Pacific Forum and the moderator for the Board of Governors Meeting, succeeding Ralph Kosa, who led the forum and made great contributions to it over many years. Juryer is a retired Navy rear admiral with over 30 years of maritime experience in Indo-Asia Pacific partner relationships. He brings high-level operational, strategic, crisis response, and negotiation skills to Pacific Forum. He graduated from the Naval Academy in 1983. He earned a Master's in International Affairs from American University, a Master's in Marine Affairs from the University of Rhode Island, and a Master's in Public Administration from the Kennedy School at Harvard. A surface warfare officer, he served as deputy commander and chief of staff of the U.S. Pacific Fleet and director for operations in the U.S. Pacific Command. At sea, he commanded the carrier strike group, the USS Ronald Reagan strike group, and the USS Nimitz strike group. He also commanded destroyer squadron 15 out of Yacuzka, where that squadron developed tactics, techniques, and procedures for anti-submarine warfare and ballistic missile defense, while exercising with the navies of various countries in the Seventh Fleet area. He also commanded the USS Roosevelt, deploying in support of Operation Enduring Freedom in the Mediterranean, serving as air defense commander for the Sixth Fleet. And he commanded the USS Guardian, an Avenger-class mine countermeasureship operating from Sassabo. Assured he served as an instructor at the Surface Warfare Officer School in Newport, Rhode Island, a policy planner and representative to NATO on counterproliferation for the Joint Chiefs of Staff, an aide to the Secretary of the Navy, an executive assistant to the Deputy Chief of Naval Operations for plans, policy, and operations, deputy director of the Navy staff, and deputy commander and chief of staff for the U.S. Pacific Fleet. Overseas, he served as executive assistant to Commander U.S. Naval Forces Europe and Commander Allied Joint Force Command Naples. He was director for unmanned warfare systems on the staff of the Chief of Naval Operations and was responsible for the development, prototyping, and demonstration of unmanned warfare systems. He retired from the Navy in 2017. Both of these individuals are military and diplomatic superstars. And you can see from their respective careers how they know each other. It was great to see them at the program and hear what they had to say. Indeed, there were hundreds of supporters and friends that came to hear their remarks. After all, the forum is a Hawaii nonprofit and very popular among the diplomatic, business, military, and intelligence communities in Hawaii. As was evident in the Q&A, the people there were very knowledgeable on the subjects discussed. ThinkTech attended that day to support and tape the program. And here is the footage we took in the first part of the program. Next time, we'll present the rest of the program along with the Q&A. As you'll see, it was highly educational and entirely worthwhile. I think even more important than all of those things, as impressive as they are, he's been a mentor to thousands of people, myself included, as well as a friend. And that means a lot. People often hear that introduction and supreme Allied commander, then they actually see me and they say, you know, don't they have a height requirement to command NATO? The other thing people say a lot is, well, you know, Stavridis, if you're really that cool, why were you not a naval aviator, like the deputy commander of the Pacific Fleet here, like Goose and Maverick and Top Gun? And, you know, truth be told, I desperately wanted to be a naval aviator. But I was held back because of a traumatic incident I had when I was a young boy at an airport that went like this. So I just drove ships around mostly. For many of us, 9-11 changed everything. For me personally, if you look at that photograph, the red circle was my office. So I watched the airplane literally hit the Pentagon. I'm standing here with you because the pilot's wrist broke left at the last minute. I was on the fourth deck. He hit the second deck going down. But at that moment, beyond all the smoke and the fire and the terror, I felt our world was changing. As we look at Iran, we ought to kind of remember this map on the bottom, which is not a contemporaneous map. The one on the bottom is the Persian Empire at its greatest extent. About 2,400 years ago, I'm always proud to point out as a Greek-American, Greece was not part of the Persian Empire. These are the battle flags, upper left, of Darius the Great and Cyrus the Magnificent. We don't look at Iran this way. But I assure you the Iranians look at themselves as an imperial power. You look at their activity through the Middle East. It is part of a challenge there about which I am actually quite pessimistic. Shia, Iranian, Sunni, Arab, an interreligious conflict with a geopolitical overlay. Have we seen that movie before? Yeah, in the Christian faith. It's Protestants and Catholics in Europe with geopolitics across the top. You know, those are two streams in history you never want to allow to cross. Religion and geopolitics. When they do, wars go on a long time. In the Christian faith, we call this the Wars of the Reformation. Protestants, Catholics, they stagger along today in our search for the backstop in Ireland. And they are lethal. Saudi Arabia Crown Prince Mohammed is like a match being thrown into a pool of gasoline in the middle of this. So I am pessimistic about this region. And of course Bashar al-Assad, war criminal, Syria, creating a great power confrontation in the Eastern Mediterranean. And what does it all lead to in the Middle East? Right there, waves of refugees which have roiled the politics of Europe. So we ought to be concerned about terror and al-Qaeda. I think we are dealing with the Islamic State reasonably well. We ought to be concerned about Iran. We ought to be concerned about this impact in Europe. And who is the beneficiary of this? It is Vladimir Putin. And if you look at what Putin has done in Ukraine, you can drop a plum line from the activity and the embellishment of Russian ambition here. And I can show you this map, but let me show you what Ukraine actually looks like. Photographs taken three weeks ago. Boom. It's a war. And our problem in Ukraine is we keep looking for the strategic terrain somewhere on this map, and it's not there. The strategic terrain is right there. It's the mind of Vladimir Putin. As we look at challenges in this 21st century, we ought to be mindful of terror. We ought to be mindful of Iran pushing in the Middle East. We ought to be mindful about Syria and what is happening in Russia. And we also, folks, ought to be pretty concerned about our neighborhood, by the way, not our backyard. The Americas running north to south are an enormous zone of partnership, and we have a problem in the neighborhood in Venezuela that we ought to be very concerned about. But how about the Pacific? Let's talk about the world that the Pacific Forum deals with. I'm a fan of this book by Robert Kaplan, which is very approachable, sort of one-stop shopping to this region. When I think about China, I like to show this photograph, because as those of us of European descent, we tend to think about the Pacific as something that we've kind of moved into and over time explored. Let me give you a photograph of two ships from the 1400s. The bottom one is the Santa Maria, the flagship of Christopher Columbus. He sailed in 1492 and discovered the New World. That behemoth behind it was the flagship contemporaneous admiral of Zheng He of China. At that time, China was building massive aircraft carrier-sized ships, 500 mariners on that massive ship. China has sailed these waters, not for centuries, for millennia. We ought to understand that because they sailed these waters today. These are Chinese ballistic missile submarines. This situation, this established power United States confronted by rising power, China is hardly unique in human history. Graham Allison, Kennedy School, his book, Destined for War, no question mark at the end of that, by the way, Destined for War, US and China, talks about this established power facing rising power. China has a plan, I'm sure Professor Nye talked about it, one belt, one road. It's a sensible strategy and key to it is the South China Sea. Where China, you know, C-paragraph 1, Admiral Zheng He, China makes historical claims under international law to this body of water. This will be a defining challenge of the 21st century. How does it come out? Kind of depends on facts on the ground. China is building artificial islands through this region for the naval officers in the crowd. There's another name for those artificial islands, right? They are unsinkable aircraft carriers. This will be a challenge. Can we negotiate this? Yeah, I think we can. And I think in the end, our interests in this century are going to converge more than they diverge. But as you look at this panoply of challenges in the 21st century for our security, China should not be regarded as a boogeyman that's 20 feet tall, nor should it be underestimated. It is a competitor with whom we will have to deal. We have wonderful friends and neighbors and allies, Australia, New Zealand, Japan. All of us together need to deal with this tactical challenge here. Kim Jong-un, well-named, Kim Jong-un. He's unpredictable. He's not unstable. He's turning out to be a pretty good negotiator, and he's got nuclear weapons. As I always say, Donald Trump, Kim Jong-un, nuclear weapons, what could go wrong? It's important that the people of Hawaii look beyond our shores and see Hawaii not just as an island state, but a multifaceted center of the Pacific, a center of education, diplomacy, and business, as well as a center for hospitality. Hawaii can and should be a magnet and gathering place for international relations in Asia-Pacific. In addition to the economic benefits of that role, this can yield a new global reputation for Hawaii and the family of nations serving national interests and also serving Hawaii's interests. To do this, we need to perpetuate global consciousness in Hawaii. We need to value education and global affairs. We need to incentivize global conferences and programs just like this. We need to support organizations just like Pacific Forum. Thanks for watching our video, the first part of the 2019 Pacific Forum Board of Governors Program. We hope you'll tune in again to watch the second part, including more of the views expressed by James Tevredi's and the Q&A discussion that followed. Want to know more about Pacific Forum? Check it out at pacforum.org and take a look at its publications and Pac-Net newsletter articles. When you do, you'll realize how important it is for us to be part of U.S.-Asia and global relations. Want to know more about James Tevredi's or Robert Jurrier? Google them and you'll find out who they are, what they've done, and what they mean to Pacific Forum and to the country. And now let's check out our ThinkTech schedule of events going forward. ThinkTech broadcasts its talk shows live on the Internet from 10 a.m. to 5 p.m. on weekdays. Then we broadcast our earlier shows all night long and on the weekend. And some people listen to them all night long and on the weekends. If you missed a show or if you want to replay or share any of our shows, they're all archived on demand on thinktecawaii.com and YouTube. For our audio stream, go to thinktecawaii.com slash audio. And we post all our shows as podcasts on iTunes. Visit thinktecawaii.com for our weekly calendar and live stream and YouTube links. Or better yet, sign up on our email list and get our daily email advisories. ThinkTech is a high-tech green screen studio at Pioneer Plaza. If you want to see it or be part of our live audience, or if you want to participate in our shows, contact shows at thinktecawaii.com. If you want to pose a question or make a comment during a show, you can call 808-374-2014 and help us raise public awareness on ThinkTech. Go ahead, give us a thumbs up on YouTube or send us a tweet at thinktechhi. We'd like to know how you feel about the issues and events that affect our lives in these islands and in this country. We want to stay in touch with you, and we'd like you to stay in touch with us. Let's think together. We'll be right back to wrap up this week's edition of ThinkTech. But first, we want to thank our underwriters. That wraps up this week's edition of ThinkTech. Remember, you can watch ThinkTech on Spectrum OC16 several times every week. Can't get enough of it, just like Cynthia does. For additional times, check out oc16.tv. For lots more ThinkTech videos and for underwriting and sponsorship opportunities on ThinkTech, visit thinktecawaii.com. Be a guest or a host, a producer, or an intern, and help us reach and have an impact on Hawaii. Thanks so much for being part of our ThinkTech family and for supporting our open discussion of tech, energy, diversification and global awareness in Hawaii. And of course, the ongoing search for innovation wherever we can find it. You can watch this show throughout the week and tune in next Sunday evening for our next important weekly episode. I'm Jay Fidel. And I'm Cynthia Sinclair. Aloha, everyone.