 It's a real pleasure for me to be able to welcome Jim Steinberg to join us today. We go back a very long way. We've worked together for 25, 26 years. Now he's held up a hell of a lot better than I have, I'll say that. We first started working together up in the Senate and had the great privilege of working opposite him when he was the deputy national security adviser. Real pleasure that he's back in government and serving in such a crucial role over at the State Department these days. I have always felt that Jim is one of the great strategic thinkers and it's been fun to be around him and to be able to see his intellect in action. Took a very early trip in his tenure as deputy secretary of state to Norway. To be a participant in the Arctic conference. And so he's got such a wide range of interests, but ironically this is one of them. And so it's a real privilege that he's willing to share that with us today. Jim, thank you for coming. Let's turn it to you immediately. Thank you, welcome to the start. Well, thank you, John. And thanks for those kind words. I don't need to tell the audience what a great public service servant John Henry is. It has been a great privilege since our days together and minority staff of the Senate Armed Services Committee. The challenges that we've been through and the changes in the world that we've seen. But I've had no better partner and nobody I admired and respect more than John. And CSIS has really been fortunate to have his leadership. It's made a tremendous contribution. So anytime John calls, I'm always happy to say yes. And it's really a great pleasure to be here with so many experts and many good friends as well. There are many reasons why I'm interested in the Arctic and the North. And it is, as I will discuss today, one of the really terrific and challenging policy issues of our time and for us policy won't types. This is a very rewarding set of issues. But far more important than that is I am married to the former director of the Polar Research Board. So this has been a long term family interest. And my wife, who is now one of the associate directors at OSTP, remains very engaged in these issues on behalf of the president. I'm also delighted with our Norwegian colleagues as the co-sponsors here to be here at such an auspicious time. We diplomats rarely get moments in the sun like this where we have an achievement that they've just done and they deserve great congratulations on this. It's an important achievement. These things, they are always harder than they would seem to focus on the outside. But the willingness of the two governments to find common ground here I think is a reflection of a dynamic that's taking place in the Arctic that belies a lot of the doomsayers about the challenges up there. And as well I'll make clear in my remarks today that I don't want to underestimate or sweep under the rod of the difficulties that we face. What I find very remarkable about this is the tremendous sense of goodwill and willingness to try to cooperate to solve these problems among not only the literal states but all the states with an interest in these issues. So it's a timely and signal achievement to which they deserve great credit. And I also want to congratulate the team that put together your excellent report on U.S. strategic interests in the Arctic. It's also a timely and excellent contribution to a very important subject. The fact that you're having this conference of course is a reflection of the fact of the growing interest in the issues surrounding the Arctic and the importance that they hold for all of us in so many different dimensions. Security, economic, environmental, and human. And so it's timely and a great contribution that you should convene this meeting. And as John said, this has been something that I have been involved in but perhaps even more important, the Secretary of State has taken a deep personal interest in and it's something that the administration is very committed to as a whole of government approach to dealing with the challenges of the Arctic. Now in the course of your discussions today, you're drilling down on a lot of the details and a lot of the elements of the policy challenges that we face in the Arctic. But I want to kind of focus on a little bit of a broader perspective on this because what I find so important and interesting about this is not simply the individual issues as important as they are. But the fact that the Arctic is kind of a test case of the ability of the international community to meet the kind of new transnational challenges of the 21st century and how we address this and our successes in addressing this and the mechanisms that we develop to address the issues at stake in the Arctic really are going to foreshadow our ability as an international community to deal with the great transnational issues of our time. Whether it's environment, whether it's resource development, whether it's dealing with the challenges of cooperative science or commerce or security, all these are really, I think, at the heart of what we need to do as an international community to make sure that we address these what I would call multilateral multi-stakeholder problems. And as I said at the outset, I think it's important to see this as putting a lie to the idea that somehow that there are certain kinds of challenges that are inherently sources of conflict and that are inevitably going to produce division between countries. Rather, I think that what we're seeing in the evolution of policy and structures in here, which may look a little messy and not kind of tidy and neat, kind of like that PowerPoint you saw in front of the New York Times yesterday, but nonetheless show that there are creative and adaptive solutions. So what is it that we see taking place in the Arctic that really gives us reason to think that the international community is beginning to evolve to deal with these challenges? And I would say we have to think about this in the way that Secretary Clinton put it in her initial remarks to the Council on Foreign Relations last year, which is how to deal with these problems that involve multiple countries in which no single country can handle alone. So what is our challenge? What's the challenge for the United States in addressing these interests? And I would argue that our challenge is to reinforce and build upon the kind of mechanisms that have been evolving over the last couple of years, beginning with the Arctic Council, unclossed the UN Convention on the Law of the Sea, which you've heard about from Senator Murkowski and which we have made clear is one of our top treaty priorities. But it also includes the evolution of our bilateral relations with our neighbor Canada, with Russia, and so many of the other Arctic states. And these are all reflected in the NSPD, the Arctic Region Policy, which makes clear that we consider ourselves an Arctic nation and that we have important strategic, economic, environmental, and other interests, which will only become more acute, as your report suggests, as climate change transforms the Arctic. I think it's also notable that although the NSPD was adopted in the final days of the Bush administration, it is something that's been carried over into our administration, which reflects, I think, a broad bipartisan consensus on how to approach the issues going forward. It also reflects how Arctic issues transcend the usual categories and bureaucratic divisions of our federal government, which is very typical of the 21st century challenges we face in so many areas. For example, just to take one, when addressing maritime transportation issues in the Arctic, the NSPD notes that we involve the secretaries of state, defense, transportation, commerce, and homeland security all with important roles to play. And that's why, as I said, we need a whole-of-government approach to these challenges. In the NSPD, it recognizes that we need to pay attention to our ability to defend our air, land, and sea borders. And you'll hear today from some of our military colleagues about how we focus on those challenges. But even more important, the NSPD emphasizes that we're working, and I quote, to encourage the peaceful resolution of disputes. And it rightly recognizes a wide variety of mechanisms of cooperation that we have in place today. So what makes this the kind of classic 21st century set of challenges? And as I said, the Secretary has defined those challenges as challenges first that no nation can meet alone and that even though there are inherently common interests, there are also significant operational obstacles to achieving the kind of collective action that's needed to achieve good results. For example, if we think about the Arctic, we all stand to benefit from successfully and safely accessing the energy resources in the Arctic. Yet we can only do so effectively by clearly delineating our continental shelves and addressing the remaining boundary disagreements now that we have one less to deal with. We all stand to benefit from the safe and well-regulated trans-Arctic shipping, yet that requires new cooperation on search and rescue and a clear common understanding of navigation rights. We all stand to lose from a devastating environmental change in the Arctic, but the only way to avoid it is through new kinds of cooperation on a number of fronts. In short, the Arctic is a proving ground for turning commonality of interest into common action. Second, what is characteristic of these issues and so many 21st century issues is that these are not zero-sum games. If we succeed in generating common action, the way forward will benefit all of us far more than any one of us could do acting on our own. And this is also, the converse is also true, which is that if we do not act in common, we will face the classic tragedy of the commons, where the opportunities will become increasingly scarce for all of us. Recognizing both the need for and the opportunities presented by common action is at the heart of what's behind the creation of the Arctic Council and the other multilateral mechanisms that exist in the Arctic. And that's why we place so much emphasis on the functioning of the Arctic Council as an innovative strategy to deal with the challenges of the high north, particularly its ability to adapt, to expand, and to move in new directions as new challenges emerge. If you think about the evolution from its initial mandate, which it's now turned into a platform for much broader cooperation on offshore oil and gas guidelines, on native rights, on shipping, the very issues which, if on address, could prove contentious. And the progress that we made recently on search and rescue is a particularly good demonstration of how we can use these mechanisms to move forward. In the early days of the Council, I ventured to guests that no one would have imagined that search and rescue would be such a salient issue. But as commercial shipping becomes more common, search and rescue is crucial for safe, secure, and sustainable maritime commerce and energy development. In other words, we won't be able to achieve the Arctic's full shipping or energy potential without it. And given that scientists believe that about 20% of undiscovered, technologically recoverable oil and gas resources are in the Arctic, the benefits of achieving that are enormous. Of course, each country could try to establish a search and rescue capability on its own, but at much greater cost and with far less effective results. So it's deeply encouraging that we're proving our ability to cooperate on this, not to mention the fact that the United States and Russia are co-leading the project, giving the lie to speculation about the somehow inherent conflict between our two countries in the Arctic. The search and rescue instrument could well become the first ever legally binding agreement put forward by the Arctic Council, a step that both we and Russia support. And we've also seen that other bilateral avenues can show how we can achieve non-zero-sum solutions. For example, despite our differences over the border, the United States and Canada are working together to map the seabed of the Beaufort Sea and the Arctic Ocean. That data will help both of us delineate our extended continental shelves and hopefully over time help us to resolve the maritime boundary dispute. Third, another character, a third characteristic of these Arctic issues is that they require a multi-stakeholder approach. The complexity of the underlying issues and the diversity of the groups that have a stake in the problems means that a wide variety of actors must play a role if we're going to have effective solutions. This is true with respect to everything for managing the environmental consequences of climate change in the Arctic to safely promoting shipping and energy development. And it's also true of so many other challenges beyond the Arctic. But I think that the multi-stakeholder approach that we've evolved is one of the most important innovations of the Arctic Council. It's proved adaptable and able to add and incorporate a wide variety of new actors, not just national governments and formal international bodies, not even just businesses and NGOs, but also native populations from the Inuit and the Alutes to the Sammy in Scandinavia and a variety of groups from Siberia who as you know participate as permanent participants, which is a truly groundbreaking approach for a body like the Arctic Council. But it also brings in subnational bodies like our own state of Alaska, the only part of the United States, which of course is an Arctic nation. It brings in scientists and businesses where appropriate, and it also includes NGOs as permanent participants as well. The importance of multi-stakeholder approaches is also clear when it comes to scientific advances in the Arctic. Our understanding is very short in a number of areas, and so productive research on climate change, on changing ice patterns, on energy resources, on the effects of pollutants will be crucial to our ability to develop sound policies to safeguard and advance our interests in the region. And to move forward and to achieve these scientific understandings requires cooperation not just among governments, but that's also, that's clearly important so that each country's scientists can have access to research platforms throughout the region and collaborate on projects that advance overall understanding. It also means strengthening our relationships with universities and research institutions in the United States and other affected nations. The Arctic Council's task force on black carbon and other pollutants that are accelerating climate change make it a priority to increase the involvement of the scientific community in our work. And in international polar year, which we just concluded last spring, we focused on generating new cooperation among researchers and scientists on tackling these questions of our knowledge of the Arctic, and these are important models for collaboration going forward. The fourth lesson about transnational issues which is so evident in dealing with the challenges of the Arctic is the need to embrace what some have called variable geometry in addressing policy challenges. That's the idea that different problems may require different groups of actors and that we can be most effective not by having a single solution by having different kinds of cooperation tailored to individual cases. That's why we have worked through the Arctic Council and a variety of other forms and mechanisms, both formal and informal, to address Arctic Oceans. After all, only part of the Arctic Ocean can be said to belong to the five literal Arctic States. The rest is considered international space, which is why we support and encourage collaboration among all states with legitimate Arctic interests, not just those in the Arctic Council. And the ability to bring observer states and organizations into the Council on either a permanent or an ad hoc basis is one way of doing this. In other cases, specific recommendations from the Council call for member states to work together in other multilateral bodies, such as the IMO. Finally, and this is the fifth characteristic, the Arctic also illustrates perhaps one of the most important and enduring lessons, which is that if we're going to solve these problems of collective action, we need to act together, but U.S. leadership remains essential. Well, we are only one of many Arctic nations, and we have to do this in a way that takes into account the broad interest of others. We still recognize that progress and cooperation requires a commitment of the United States to put our energy in our commitment because when we work together with the United States playing a listening but leading role, that is something that is most likely to achieve the results that we seek and that all seek. We're strengthening our leadership in a number of ways, starting with our commitment to seek the ratification of the Law of the Sea Convention, which as I said at the outset is crucial, not only to cooperation in the Arctic, but into U.S. interest more broadly. The Law of the Sea not only is and should continue to be at the center of the extensive international legal framework that applies to the Arctic Ocean. It also protects and advances the broader economic, environmental, and national security interests of the United States by providing the criteria to establish the outer limits of the continental shelf and a procedure for international recognition and international legal certainty regarding those limits, which could help allay long-term concerns about resource competition in the Arctic and elsewhere while giving us clear rights and access to resources. It also provides crucial navigational rights that are vital to our potential security and commercial interests in the Arctic as I's thoughts. In short, the convention is as clear a demonstration as you could ask for of why multilateralism is in our national interest and why our commitment to cooperative approaches can have such a positive effect. We're also showing our leadership on the issue of climate change. Under President Obama, we've made a deep commitment through unprecedented domestic actions and intellectual cooperation to address what I consider to be the signature issue of our time. The negotiations in Copenhagen last year may not have been straightforward as easy as so many of you know, but even with all its difficulties, the international community took an important and meaningful step forward. And I believe we can build on that step this year at Cancun working toward a legally binding regime that involves all the major players in a balanced way. There's already significant new funding for developing countries, especially those most affected by climate change, and new transparency in ensuring that national goals are being met. A key consideration if the aspirations of Copenhagen are going to be achieved in reality. 120 countries have now associated with themselves with the Copenhagen Accord and 76 have made domestic commitments in the context of that agreement. These are important steps forward even while we recognize that more needs to be done. U.S. leadership was a critical component and the involvement of the President and the Secretary demonstrates the importance that we attach to that. And we will need to continue to show that leadership in the months ahead. The world notices when we put forward concrete emissions targets, when we invest $80 billion in building a clean energy economy, and when President Obama voices his personal commitment to getting energy and climate legislation through our Congress. And we've also consistently engaged the world's largest economies through the major economies forum on energy and climate and our partners in the G20. Each of these pieces is only one piece of the puzzle, but together they add up to historic advances that would not have been possible without both U.S. leadership as well as new approaches, new innovative and creative approaches to international cooperation. And we've seen this in the interplay between the various efforts, the major economies forum, the Copenhagen group, and the formal UNFCC. Now many people look at these array of relationships in institutions and mechanisms and see something messy and chaotic. They want a single solution, a single address, a single template to deal with all these challenges. And they conclude from the fact that there is no one single answer that perhaps our solutions are inadequate or that we are not adequately equipped to handle the challenges of the Arctic. But I think that's the wrong paradigm to apply to these kinds of problems. Precisely because the issues in the Arctic are a complex mix of scientific and environmental and security and commercial concerns, they can't be addressed through a single answer and through a single approach. But what we need is the imagination and cooperation and creativity that allows us to achieve the results we achieve undergirded by a strong commitment from all the players both in government and outside of government to work together to the common good. I'm convinced that the tools we're evolving in this context both here in the United States and with our partners are capable of overcoming these important challenges as long as we're committed to investing in them and using them wisely. And with the right leadership and cooperation going forward, this Arctic opportunity can prove to be a powerful example not only for the specific challenges of the Arctic but for global cooperation in the years ahead. So thank you very much. Thank you for the good work that you're doing and I look forward to working with you all together in the future.