 We officially begin as I mentioned this keynote session will continue up to 10 a.m so please please do not move until that time thank you. Good morning everyone welcome and thank you so much for attending Norwich University's 2022 Peace and World Summit in person or virtually. My name is Yang Mokoo associate professor of political science and associate director of Peace and World Center at Norwich University. I am extremely honored to serve as executive director of this year's summit which addresses such a pressing issue Russia. As we have witnessed on top of global pandemic our global community is currently facing one of the most dangerous moment at the end of World 2. Russian invasion of Ukraine has inflicted serious human and material casualties and we have to be even concerned about the possibility of nuclear war among great powers. Even though I have not directly experienced any war condition as a Korean-American I have often listened to my parent generations about how devastating the Korean war was. As all of us desire I honestly hope that Russia's unprovoked invasion against Ukraine stops as soon as possible and stable peace and justice are fully restored. At this summit two keynote speakers 11 scholars and three students will address many different demands of Russian and international issues. I believe that these summit sessions will deepen our understanding the current world order significantly disrupted by Russia's aggressive act. Also this summit will help current leaders and future leaders here just to be educated and to find peaceful and effective solutions to such challenging global issues. Thank you again for participating in the summit. Please keep in mind that this keynote session will continue up to 10 a.m. so until then please do not move in your seat. Now I would like to introduce Dr. Mark Anarumo, 24th president of Norwich University. For time limit just I cannot share his full bio but briefly speaking Dr. Anarumo assumed the presidency in June 2020 amid the global pandemic and civil unrest. Despite tough challenges he has been successfully leading this historic institution. He retired as a U.S. Air Force Colonel after serving in many different nations including Turkey, Iraq, Afghanistan, Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Kyrgyzstan and South Korea. Before assuming his presidency Dr. Anarumo worked as a director and permanent professor for the Center for Character and Leadership Development at U.S. Air Force Academy. Now I turn it over to 24th president of Norwich University Dr. Mark Anarumo. Thank you. Let's give a round of applause. Can somebody that Yanmoku? We have a few folks getting settled. I'll let them sit before I start the formal comments to kick off the ceremony. Welcome all. So good morning everyone and welcome to the peace and war summit at Norwich University here in the great state of Vermont. I am Dr. Mark Anarumo the 24th president of Norwich University. We are of course the nation's oldest private military college and the birthplace of the Reserve Officer Training Corps or ROTC. We are so pleased to host you here in person in the Mack Hall Auditorium and I also want to offer a very sincere welcome to our virtual audience who is attending from around the world today. So welcome to all. I do want to recognize our keynote speakers for this two-day peace and war summit. First, and you can join me in welcoming each, the governor of the great state of Vermont Phil Scott. Sir, thank you. The next title is fairly long. I will cue applause once I get through the gentleman's complete formal title. The acting ambassador, Mr. Giorgi Siculia, the Charges Affairs Embassy of Georgia to the United States. Sir, welcome. Also in the front row is Brigadier General John Weidner of U.S. Strategic Command. Sir, welcome. And also a special welcome to all of our distinguished panelists and presenters. They are some of the great thinkers in the world on this critical topic. We're honored to have you here. Welcome and thank you to you all as well. So this is our third peace and war summit. It's presented by the John and Mary Frances Patton Peace and War Center, which is one of our centers of excellence here at Norwich University. This year's summit theme is called Deciphering the Russian Riddle National Interest and Geopolitical Competitions. Our keynote presentations, the panel discussions and our workshops will scrutinize the very timely and relevant questions that face the United States and the global community related to Russia. The topics will range from territorial intrusions into Ukraine and to Georgia, intervention in Syria, growing military partnership with China, and of course areas that Norwich has unique expertise, cyber attacks and disinformation. The summit provides an excellent opportunity to dive deeply into these issues that are fueling a reignited rivalry between the United States and Russia. A simple summary list of the issues is extraordinary. It's going to inform our understandings of the events that are literally unfolding today as we stand here. Military security, economic sanctions, cybersecurity threats, disinformation campaigns and Russia's perceptions of and roles in the intensifying great power struggle between the United States and China. I encourage our entire Norwich University community of learning, our wonderful students, faculty, staff, alumni, parents and friends to participate fully in these sessions, whether in person or virtually. We need to discuss and debate these important global topics that are so clearly impacting our world, yes, in the future, but quite literally right in this current moment. The summit is critically important and we believe it is necessary. We are very proud of our ability to host events like this that support the development of a deeper understanding of our shared global community. Our world is increasingly defined by uncertainty and complexity. Responses to challenges are increasingly dependent upon the ability to integrate multiple capabilities, cultural competencies, adaptability to change, mental agility. We hope to develop these skills over the next few days together. The summit especially will explore what the future may hold. We will learn how the nations and the world's colleges and universities are developing critical thinking required of students and scholars to prepare for what lies ahead. The relationship between the United States and Russia is currently significantly strained and for the first time in decades it could very reasonably result in kinetic conflict. This would of course be disastrous for both nations and NATO and other countries in terms of human casualties and additional crises to the world economic system. We are currently experiencing the effects of the conflict in Ukraine. The results of economic and trade sanctions, the witnessing of violence and war, the effects of information warfare, fear and of course all these pale in comparison to the loss of life of combatants and innocent civilians that are caught in the violence. The past several weeks of conflict are affecting the international order in ways that have not been witnessed for two generations. As president of this very fine university I must also share that our student population has been affected very directly. We have today students on our campus from Ukraine and also from Russia in addition to many students from all across the world. We also have many current students and alumni in uniform services in the intelligence community and in other fields related to conflict management and crisis response. These individuals are very literally standing today in harm's way and they deserve our best time and our greatest effort. The current conflict has affected us all in some way. The ways that they will affect us in additional ways in the coming months and years will be another item that we will explore together during the course of this critical event. We will talk how as superpowers the United States, China and Russia all share responsibility for dealing with the countless challenges facing our global community. Our shared fate will be shaped by how the great powers and allies will address current crises, myriad other issues that will persist and new issues that will inevitably emerge. It is our hope that this summit will help deepen our understanding of current US and Russia relations and provide practical policy recommendations to leaders of all nations. These recommendations will be more refined and more effective if our entire community participates fully. I implore all of us take advantage and help make a difference in our present and in our future. All of us here at Norton University thank you for your attendance and for the contributions that all of you will make during this critical summit. It is our privilege and our honor to host you. It is now my distinct honor and privilege to introduce a truly gifted leader and staunch supporter of Norton University, the 82nd governor of the state of Vermont, Governor Phil Scott. Good morning, everyone. And thanks for having me. It's an honor for me to be here today to say a few words, but I'm especially interested in learning from the distinguished speakers who will be speaking in a few minutes. Their insight and expertise are incredibly important right now as we all watch what's going on in Eastern Europe with a great deal of concern. Now, unlike them, I have no background in World Affairs or expertise in foreign policy. I'm here as the governor of a state full of people who like me are looking at this situation in disbelief. For more than three weeks, we've all watched in horror as Putin's Russia was has brutally attacked a neighbor who wanted peace, not war. Ukraine has worked hard to become a democracy and is now working harder than they ever imagined for the future of their people. Because of this unprovoked attack, thousands of Ukrainian and patriots and civilians, including women and children, have already lost their lives. In fact, as we all saw last week, the Russians targeted both a hospital and a theater where hundreds of people, including many children, were sheltering. Millions have had to leave their homes, their belongings and their way of life to protect their families. These are parents and grandparents, college students and schoolchildren who just 30 days ago were going about their daily lives the same way many of us would. Going to work, seeing their friends at school shopping at the grocery store and walking their dogs are riding a bike through the park. And now their world has been turned upside down. Many have been torn from their homes, taking shelter in subway stations fearful for their lives and their future. It's a reminder of how easy it is to take what we have for granted from our democracy as a whole down to our everyday routines. And that's why it's so important for us to continue to keep up with what's going on. Listen to the experts like those we'll hear from today and learn from the courage and resiliency we're seeing in the people of Ukraine. Because while they're going through what is deemed horrific and is horrific, their response has been so inspiring. Acts of courage, selflessness and resolve from average citizens all the way up to the country's leaders. It's truly a David versus Goliath moment with soldiers defending their country against an army five times the size with only a tenth the number of aircraft. Civilians taking up arms for the first time in their lives to slow and hopefully fend off this unprovoked invasion, knowing the life and death consequences. We've all seen the heartbreaking footage of parents leaving their children to fight for freedom. As just one example, I read the story of one dad who left his seven month old daughter behind saying it was a difficult choice, but better than she be without a father and without a future. Think about that for a moment and let it sink in. What all this tells me is that while Putin may have a larger army is clear Ukraine and its people have the courage, heart and will to persevere. And they have the power of the truth and the moral high ground on their side. And that's why the rest of us in the free world need to have their back. As I said earlier, I'm no expert in world affairs. But I feel a responsibility like many of you to be a part of this now. I think about my dad, Howard Scott, a tanker in patents Third Army, who was severely wounded in France shortly after the war in D-Day. When the tank hit a landmine on their way to free St. Low, both of his legs were amputated above the knee and he spent two years in Walter Reed Hospital recovering before returning home to start a family. And unfortunately, he passed away due to those injuries when I was 11. He was no expert either. But he stepped up when it was the right thing to do. Many are doing the same for Ukraine. And while it pales in comparison as governor, I thought it was important for Vermont to do its part as well. That's why I called for and signed a bill last week to contribute $1 for every Vermonner, totally more than $640,000. The appropriation went to save the children for humanitarian efforts in Ukraine. We've also worked to make sure the state of Vermont is not purchasing Russian-sourced goods and services. And through our National Guard and State Police, we're collecting body armor for those on the front lines in Ukraine. These are small steps from a small state that I know will have little impact on what happens 4,000 miles away. But it's what we can do right now. And we have a moral obligation to do whatever we can. The fact is, Ukraine's fight to protect its people, their rights, and their land. And what that means for democracies across the globe is too important for us to sit out. Because, as has been said many times before, a threat to democracies anywhere is a threat to democracy everywhere. Unfortunately, we're seeing democracy threatened far too often right now, including examples right here in the US. These are powerful reminders why we must always guard against authoritarianism and the ilk that comes with it. And why defeating Putin and putting an end to this invasion is so important. Today in this hall, as we're speaking freely, without fear of oppression, the people of Ukraine are fighting for their independence and their fundamental right to decide their own future. It's important they know they're not alone in this fight. The people of Vermont and all around the globe stand united with Ukraine for its freedom and with its people. I thank you and I look forward to learning more from this important and very timely summit. Thank you again. Governor Scott, thank you so much for your attendance in the summit and then your powerful speech. Now, I'm very pleased to introduce two keynote speakers, Georgian Acting Ambassador Gorgi Cicolia and Brigadier General John Weidner at US Strategic Command. In terms of the natural flow of their speech content, General Weidner will deliver his address first. Let me introduce him briefly. US Army Brigadier General John Weidner assumed the duties as deputy director, plans and policy US Strategic Command in May 2020. Weidner most recently served as the director of the US Army nuclear and countering WMD agency at Fort Belvoir, Virginia, where he led the Army's capability to integrate nuclear weapon effects into conventional operations and supported Army service component command with a nuclear and countering WMD expertise. Now, I turn it over to General Weidner. Let us give a round of applause. Governor Scott, Mr. Cicolia, President Anna Rumo and Dr. Koo. Thank you so very much for the kind introduction and for the warm reception here. On behalf of the United States Strategic Command, I'd like to thank Norwich University and the Peace and War Center for the opportunity to speak at this timely and prestigious event. As a product of the Army's ROTC program, I'm particularly excited to be here at the birthplace of the ROTC system that prepared me so well for a military career. And by the way, it's a great honor and pleasure to be in a room of America's future military leaders. Keep that in mind. I'm here today representing U.S. Strategic Command and a team of 150,000 soldiers, sailors, airmen's, Marines, guardians, civilians, and contractors dedicated to the DOD's highest priority, strategic deterrence, a subset of which is nuclear deterrence. That is, all nuclear is strategic, but not all strategic is nuclear. U.S. Radcom is a global combatant command responsible for, among other things, strategic deterrence and nuclear operations, and we take it very seriously. We execute strategic deterrence activities every day and stand ready to deliver a decisive response should strategic deterrence fail. Over the next several minutes, I want to discuss some of the characteristics and challenges for strategic deterrence in the 21st century, highlight some of the concerning aspects of Russia's capability and behavior, and offer some thoughts on the way forward. Before describing how the character of strategic deterrence is changing in the 21st century, however, let me first review some fundamental tenets of deterrence that have not changed. Deterrence is focused on influencing an adversary's perception such that they decide not to take a certain action. The basic pillars of strategic deterrence are focused on imposing costs that exceed any benefit of action, denying the benefit of an action, and encouraging restraint. Another enduring element of strategic deterrence is that it's an active sport. One does not merely deter by possessing a capability. We must train, sustain, maintain, and exercise our strategic capabilities to be proficient on using them on a moment's notice, and an adversary's leaders must see that we expertly train and maintain these capabilities and can bring them to bear whenever needed. This is one reason why U.S. Strategic Command does so many deployments around the globe with our strategic bombers, the most visible leg of our triad of strategic delivery capabilities. In addition to strategic deterrence, in addition strategic deterrence must begin day to day in the gray zone, in the gray zone conflict, because we are in diplomatic, economic, and informational conflict. These gray zone activities are what will lead to crisis, and if crisis is not resolved will lead potentially to conventional conflict, and conventional conflict with a near peer nuclear armed adversary will be overshadowed by the potential for adversary non-nuclear strategic attack in space and cyber domains or nuclear attack. In other words the adversary could view nuclear attack as their least bad option. The nation cannot wait to conduct strategic deterrence activities at the brink of strategic or nuclear deterrence failure. U.S. Stratcom can't be called in at the last minute to do strategic deterrence like a pinch hitter, pinch hitter brought in at the bottom of the ninth inning to win the baseball game. Moreover, should should strategic deterrence fail and we find ourselves in conflict with a near peer nation, strategic deterrent activities must continue in conflict, and in addition they must increase in intensity. We can take more aggressive deterrent actions in conflict because they wouldn't be as destabilizing in conflict as they would be day to day or in crisis. The challenge with this seemingly obvious statement is that these activities will compete for the very limited resources that will be in high demand to prosecute the conventional fight. An example of this is the demand for our heavy bombers, our B-52s and even B-2 bombers and their associated tanker aircraft. Those nuclear weapon delivery platforms and associated tanking aircraft that refuel the bombers in air also have important roles in the theater conventional nuclear war plan. We need to frame those important resource allocation decisions now in our policy documents and supporting strategies and operationalize that understanding through large globally integrated exercises. So let me transition now to how strategic deterrence is changing in the 21st century. Starting with the global view, we must be aware that for the first time in our history the United States faces two near-peer nuclear armed adversaries in Russia and China and they must be deterred differently because they have different national security objectives and different levels of relative national power. So I'll focus my comments on Russia of course today but would caution us not to lose sight of China or North Korea or Iran or any other country that has or is seeking strategic capabilities. US STRATCOM, the United States and our network of allies and partners must deter all of these actors all of the time. We can't forget that. China's explosive growth of nuclear capabilities is absolutely breathtaking and they're voicing similar regional security concerns as Russia and seeking to exert sovereignty over international waters and territories based on historic claims in a manner similar to Russia. These claims threaten the rules-based international order and should be deeply concerning to all nations that seek to uphold that order. China and other actors are watching our approach and response to Russia. How much risk we are willing to take and how much stake we demonstrate and will be influenced by our commitment to uphold the international rules-based order. Adding to the challenge of strategic deterrence in the 21st century is the increased number of domains through which strategic effects can be delivered as opposed to just 30 or 40 years ago. During the Cold War strategic deterrence was synonymous with nuclear deterrence vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. We now have strategic reliance upon the space and cyber domains as you appreciate and our adversaries are developing asymmetric capabilities to threaten our dependence upon them. Now a challenge to these relatively new domains is how to incorporate them into our traditional deterrent and military activities. You have likely heard of the term integrated deterrence used by leaders in the Department of Defense. That is a vision for optimizing the combination of effects across all domains to deter or if necessary defeat an adversary. It's the best way to deter in combining all of our capability and it affords us the best approach to defeat an adversary at the lowest level of damage achievable. The key to success will be reaching the goal of integrated deterrence before our adversaries and they are striving to do just that. And it's not just the increase in a number of domains and determining how to integrate those with our existing other domains. The lack of widely accepted norms in these new domains in the increased risk of miscalculation and escalation that accompanies that lack of norm makes strategic deterrence in the 21st century that much more complex. Now we at Stratcom are working through a logic that underpins all of this as I'll explain in a moment because after all we are US strategic command not US nuclear command and we look forward to enhancing strategic deterrence and planning and theory. Now primary implication of all of this is that we must be very humble about our ability to control escalation. That term gets thrown around a lot control escalation. Well let me be very pointed we cannot control an adversary's escalation. We must recognize that a near peer nuclear armed adversary can escalate to any level of violence anywhere on the globe through any instrument of national power at any time. That's a factor that the United States has not had to consider since the fall of the Soviet Union and it has enormous implications for how we react to the conflict in Ukraine today. This also profound because nearly all strategic deterrence theory was developed as a result of our experience in the Cold War when there were two superpowers a bipolar world each relying very heavily on their nuclear arsenals for deterrence. We must evolve our fundamental understanding of strategic deterrence theory to align with today's strategic environment. In other words we need to enhance and our approach to an all-domain conflict with one near peer adversary while deterring a second near peer adversary and others with strategic capabilities or at worst be prepared to confront two near peer nuclear armed adversaries simultaneously. Now Yostrakham is making a concerted effort to reinvigorate research and strategic deterrence primarily by leveraging our academic alliance of more than 70 academic institutions including Norwich University that are focused on building the next generation of national security professionals but US STRATCOM can't and should not do this alone. We need your help. We need continued debate and discussion on strategic deterrence to evolve our approach and prepare the next generation and national security professionals. So with that let me how let me describe how this applies to Russia today and in the near term. Russia has the largest and most diverse nuclear weapons stockpile on the planet. Its strategic forces are defined by the New Star Treaty as are ours as intercontinental ballistic missiles, ballistic submarines that carry submarine launch ballistic missiles and heavy bombers that's what a strategic nuclear force is and the New Star Treaty limits both sides to 1,550 units. Russia has fielded a tremendous number of nuclear weapons that are not accountable under the New Star Treaty. Open source reporting suggests that that stockpile number somewhere between 1,500 and 2,000 more than the warheads in their strategic forces. These weapons are often referred to as non-strategic or tactical nuclear weapons but I would discourage you from using that term for we at United States strategic command and we in the United States view any use of a nuclear weapon as a strategic act rather I suggest you describe them as non-accountable weapons because that's what they are. Many of Russian's non-accountable weapons are delivered by platforms that can carry conventional warheads such as fighter aircraft, close and short-range ballistic missiles and cruise missiles. Russia is using many if not all of those dual capable delivery platforms with their fight to Ukraine right now. We must be keenly aware that Russia has the choice to use those same delivery platforms to employ nuclear weapons or other weapons of mass destruction if they feel the need to to achieve their objectives. Further, Russia has been modernizing both their nuclear weapons and their delivery platforms for two decades and they're more than 80 percent complete. So let me kind of foot-stomp that. For 20 years Russia has been increasing the role of nuclear weapons in their security strategies and has spent a significant fraction of their very limited military funding on not just replacing their nuclear warheads and delivery platforms but modernizing them to offer new and improved capabilities. Clearly the decision to embark on this three decade long nuclear weapon modernization project was not motivated by geopolitical developments over the last 10 years. It was a purposeful strategy to enhance Russia's position to counter NATO's defensive posture in order to achieve its objectives and as we are seeing today by force if necessary. In contrast the United States has completed one nuclear warhead modernization program and zero delivery nuclear weapon delivery platform programs. More on that in a little bit. Now if that's not concerning enough Russia is developing several exotic nuclear weapons such as a nuclear powered nuclear armed cruise missile known as Skyfall or as we at US Stratom like to call it the flying chair noble. Because of the accident that cruise missile had in August of 2019 that released a significant amount of radiation across north and central Europe when they tried to recover it. It's also developing an autonomous nuclear powered nuclear armed underwater torpedo known as Poseidon likely armed with a very large I think megaton class weapon designed to create extensive zones of radioactive contamination in coastal areas making them unsuitable unsuitable for military economic or other activity for a very long time. These exotic weapons are non-accountable and they are weapons of coercion and revenge by their very nature and reflect a very different value that Russia has on war and its use of nuclear weapons. Let me also comment on Russia's activities in just the past two months which also illuminate their view on nuclear weapon use and violence. In February Russia conducted one of the largest if not the largest nuclear exercise involving its nuclear forces since the end of the Cold War. Conducting such a large exercise of nuclear forces just prior to initiating the largest invasion of a European country since World War II was clearly coordinated till coerced NATO into inaction regarded as an invasion of Ukraine nuclear coercion that is reckless and highly irresponsible. Russia also announced to the world on February 27th that it put its nuclear forces in a heightened state of combat readiness a special regime of combat duty Putin said an overt nuclear threat only days after Russia invaded Ukraine. Such provocative actions in rhetoric regarding nuclear weapons is dangerous adds to the risk of miscalculation and should be avoided. We will not indulge in it. I must emphasize however that U.S. strategic command does not have the luxury of minimizing or dismissing these nuclear threats. We must and are taking Putin at his word and are prepared to provide a range of decisive options to the president and secretary of defense if and when needed. So what do we do about all of this? Well let me close with four things that I think the United States needs to do. These are not particularly original ideas but for the most that I've taken away from many conversations in the global strategic environment. First we have to have a rigorous but succinct national debate on the various nuclear capabilities required to deter both Russia and China simultaneously. The average American cannot articulate an informed argument on that subject and for that matter neither can most leaders in the federal government, the Department of Defense or members of Congress. That's because our existing nuclear forces, the triad of the strategic delivery capabilities that we've operated for many decades, has done such a superb job of deterring strategic attack on our homeland and our allies that we have become absolutely dismissive of any thought on of nuclear attack on the United States. That is all changing. Nothing makes you more concerned about your nuclear capabilities than being threatened by somebody else's and that's exactly what Putin just did. We need the public to not only be involved but committed because our nuclear warhead life extension programs and nuclear weapon delivery platform modernization programs won't be complete for 25 or more years and since all power eventually comes from us the people we need society to prioritize this work to ensure full and consistent funding. Second the DOD nation must again be able to develop and field new cutting edge strategic capabilities at the speed of relevance and let me just give you one example in the course of just eight years in the late 1950s and early 1960s Air Force General Benny Schriever led the conception, design, engineering, production and fielding of four ICBM missile systems in just eight years. The program to replace our current minute man three intercontinental ballistic missile has been under underway for many years and won't be complete for more than a decade just to replace the missile not the silos not the secure communication not the security just the missile if we want our capabilities to provide Russia and China with strategic dilemmas we need to go much much faster. Third our nation needs to form a process for integrating and guiding all instruments of national power as well as private industry and non governmental organizations towards a common purpose. We currently have no national way to do this. Some might point to the national security council but having work there I would offer that the national security council is neither resourced nor intended to lead national operational activities. We're getting a glimpse of the power of integrating economic diplomatic and informational along with military capabilities for a common purpose through the security force assistance and sanctions we've imposed on Russia and the assistance we're providing Ukraine. But can we honestly say that our efforts to get ahead of potential Russian false flag operations were intricately synchronized with Coca-Cola, Facebook and Boeing cutting ties with Russia or with the security force assistance that we provided to Ukraine. From my view it seems we've enjoyed equal benefit from good fortune and good judgment. Lastly we need to restructure the Department of Defense to effectively confront global challenges. The office of the Secretary of Defense and the joint staff and what have up until recently been known as geographic combatant commanders and commands are built on regionally focused organizations by design. But Russia and China are not regional challenges they provide they pose a worldwide threat to the international rules based order. Moreover we must dispel the traditional view of a single supported combatant commander of operations and develop truly integrated not just coordinated war plans that incorporate space and cyber from the outset just like ground air and sea operations are considered from the very beginning. To reiterate a major conflict with Russia and China will be global in nature. To solve that global problem we need a global top-down strategy that prioritizes homeland defense and strategic deterrence ensures multiple simultaneous supported supporting command relationships and enables all domain awareness to achieve decision superiority. With that ladies and gentlemen I'll thank you so much for allowing me to speak with you and take a little bit of your time today and turn the podium back over to Dr. Koo. Thank you. General Weidner thank you so much for your insightful speech. At this time I will briefly introduce Acting Ambassador Golgi Chikolia at the Georgian Embassy to the United States. Previously Mr. Chikolia was appointed Deputy Chief of Mission at the Embassy of Georgia to the U.S. As Deputy Chief of Mission he was responsible for the daily operation of the embassy the largest Georgian diplomatic mission in the world. Prior to his posting he was the CEO of Enterprise Georgia the Georgian Entrepreneurship Development Agency. In this role he was responsible for the establishment of the first major governmental institution mandated to facilitate private sector development through a variety of financial and technical support mechanism. Here is Georgian Acting Ambassador Golgi Chikolia. Let us give a round of applause. Good morning everyone. It's an honor and the pleasure of being here. It's an honor to speak at the America's oldest private military college. I want to thank the leadership of the Peace and Work Center President Anna Muro of course and my compatriot Lasha Jumbuidze who is in this audience as well. It's an honor to share this podium with the Distribution Waste Guest General Brigadier Weiner U.S. Strategy Command and Honorable Government of the State of Vermont Phil Scott. Thank you for being here and thank you for extending this honor to me. I have been fortunate to tour United States and Canada in my academic years but I have never been to Vermont. In fact I went to school not too far from here but somehow never made it to this beautiful state and I know how serious you guys are about your beer and maple syrup. I learned about beer last night and I knew about the maple syrup so I'm glad most people here know about Georgia, the country on Georgia and the confusion of my country with the state of Georgia is less frequent. For those of you who are still confused I'll give you a pass. Today's peace and war summit could not be more timely as we witness a full-scale war the first full-scale war of the 21st century in Europe. I represent the country that has witnessed invasions and occupations by foreign powers for centuries and one that knows too well the destruction of war. Especially today when Russian forces attack Ukraine our hearts ache for the Ukrainian people. Georgia and Ukraine share the same transatlantic valleys and the western democratic goals most notably entry to the European Union and NATO and we have faced tragically the same threats for the past 30 years. The past of Western integration has not been easy to us. In the early 90s as we regained independence from the Soviet Union we witnessed Russian aggression. Conflicts in Georgia's two breakaway regions Abkhazia and Skandalo region where Russia supported separatist movements and continues to do so today. In August 2008 Russia illegally seized those two sovereign parts of Georgia through an act of war and now controls 20 percent of Georgian territory. Just for sheer geographic compression there would be a whole of settlement of United States including Texas. Russia has turned these occupied regions into military bases by deploying modern offensive weapons and stationing troops on the ground. Russian troops stationed in the occupied Skandalo region of Georgia stand 25 miles away from the Georgian capital of Tbilisi. We have lived in this reality since 2008. Russia quickly arranged for a few ideological allies to recognize so-called independence of two occupied regions Abkhazia and Skandalo. Nicaragua, Venezuela and Syria complied. As did the tiny island nation of Nauru. Georgia has worked diligently to find the solution to this infringement on its sovereign territory and has assisted has been assisted by the United States, the European Union and other partners and international institutions. The conflicts in Georgia took a significant toll on the livelihoods of Georgians. Russia's occupation has expelled 10 percent of the Georgian population nearly half a million people internally displaced and refugees from these territories through ethnic cleansing. The population of Abkhazia has been reduced from nearly 450,000 to a mere 100,000 and the other region the Skandalo region from 150,000 to close to 30,000 with grave human rights violations happening in these regions on a daily basis. My family is one of them. As we witness the war in the early 90s we were forced to flee Sakhumi to the capital of Abkhazia. The city wants a prosperous and lovely metropolis now stands as a testament to Russian destruction and stagnation. When I watch scenes of innocent Ukrainians fleeing from Russian terror it reminds me the story of my family. We too, along with thousands of others had to flee from the only place when you're at home. Thirty years have passed and we're still waiting for the moment to reach into the land we call home where ancestors lie. Past tragedies have inspired Georgians to remain firm and vigilant in our choice to integrate into the western institutions and what thankful to our western partners especially the United States for their support. In a few days on March 24th we mark 30 years of diplomatic relations with the United States. I am proud to be the part of this relations for the past six years. I have personally witnessed our strategic partnership and friendship grow over the years. Since day one of regaining independence America's role in shaping Georgian statehood has been vital. US support in fields including security, economy, education, democracy and the rule of law cannot be overstated. In numbers the United States has allocated almost six billion dollars in assistance to Georgia in addition to other forms of support. The Biden administration has elevated support for Georgia to meet today's challenges. Last Tuesday President Biden signed a massive 1.5 trillion omnibus spending bill with 132 million dollars available for assistance for Georgia. The government of Georgia is extremely grateful for the continued assistance of the US as the Russian aggression continues. We are also fortunate to have champions from both sides of the island and congress most notably Senator Gene Shaheen from a neighboring state of New Hampshire and just yesterday learned that there was a time when New Hampshire was considered being a hostile territory right in the history of Vermont so lots to learn. As security partners we have developed a deep, durable and mutually beneficial security and defense relations now codified in multiple agreements. In addition to a commitment to NATO Georgia is an integral part of the American planning from maintaining regional stability in a face of multiple security challenges. These include anti-terrorism strategies related to the Middle East and Northern Caucasus defending US and allies interest in the Black Sea frontier safeguarding Eurasian energy and transport networks and lending strength to support key US allies like Israel. The United States has supported our efforts to modernize and strengthen the military. The American people have invested over 1.5 billion dollars in helping Georgia strengthen its resiliency, defend our borders and support our territorial integrity. Most recently during US during the visit of the US Secretary of Defense Lloyd Austin to Georgia he and our defense minister signed the US-Georgia Defense and Deterrence Enhancement Initiative or as we call it the Jedi. Highlighting the US commitment to bilateral security cooperation and the food integration of Washington and Tbilisi. And we are paying back. Georgia is not only a receiver but also a provider of security in the region and beyond. In the South Caucasus region we act as a beacon of Western ideals and an exporter of stability. This was on full display when our Prime Minister together with the US State Department mediated an exchange of 15 Armenian prisoners for a land mine map between Azerbaijan and Armenia. Once again highlighting the pivotal role that Georgia plays in the region. Whenever possible Georgia proactively seeks to boost the regional peace and security through innovating problem-solving and facilitating unique opportunities for the cooperation leading the way in regional dialogue and joint peace building. The Prime Minister has been actively promoting the Peaceful Neighborhood Initiative with regional actors and providing an alternative to the Russian Iranian platforms. Our deep commitment to bilateral security cooperation grows grows out of shared values and experiences. As we have faced common foes in Iraq and Afghanistan fighting against terrorism and promoting democratic values. When partners need us we send 8,000 soldiers for Operation Iraqi Freedom. In Afghanistan Georgia provided the largest number of soldiers per capita of any non-NATO allied nation including all European states in both ISF and ISM missions. Just as we entered battle together we also played out our park until the very end. During the last weeks of conflict we were crucial to to the evacuation efforts from Afghanistan. In total approximately 35,000 individuals were evacuated through Georgia. And we aid in international NGOs like National Endowment for Democracy, International Republican Institute and an Asian Development Bank and others in the safe transport and temporary accommodation of their staff. While we aspire to become members of NATO we owe the act as a member of the alliance spending more than 2% of our GDP on defense organizing multinational exercises on our soul and committing to every mission that NATO undertakes. And our partnership with the U.S. goes beyond security. U.S. assistance has helped Georgia handle the transition to a market economy with development and economic assistance that helped Georgia establish democratic and free market institutions that are essential to a fully integrated democratic state in the European and Euro-Atlantic family. Transforming and reforming Georgia into a European democracy is the choice of the Georgian society. Georgian people have requested to follow this path. Support for the European Union and NATO membership has been soaring 75 to 80% for the past decade. Same numbers could be attributed when Georgians being asked of the views of the United States. More than 80% of Georgians look favorably to the U.S. throughout the decades. This is why the government of Georgia institutionalized the European and Euro-Atlantic choice of Georgia by making a clear declaration in Georgia's highest law the Constitution. Today we stand as an associated partner of the European Union. We have a free trade agreement so-called deep and comprehensive agreement and a visa-free regime with the European Union. We're in a process of implementing EU association agenda which is the cornerstone of our future to reach European Union membership. We have successfully implemented the vast majority of the obligated reforms and we're on a track to submit our bid to the membership. But the current events expedited their decision and last week the Prime Minister of Georgia announced Georgia's decision to apply for the membership in the European Union in parallel with Ukraine and Moldova. Our vision for the next 30 years and beyond is an optimistic one but the current reality is not promising. While Georgia's economy reached double digit growth last year which along with the island was the highest in Europe we are still in a phase of post pandemic recovery and the war in Ukraine endangers the livelihoods of many. As a brotherly nation we have provided our assistance and support. We have opened our doors to every Ukrainian in need and sent 140 tons of humanitarian aid to Ukraine. In this endeavor Georgian government and people are united. While no one really knows what Putin's ultimate objective is one fact is certain he wants to prevent countries Russia dominated for centuries from developing in the prosperous democracies and keep them trapped in an imposed purgatory where development ends and democracy fades. Accepting Georgia's Ukrainians and Moldova's application for European Union membership will be a strong and unequivocal signal that these countries are part of the West and the all term of the post-Soviet countries will transform into the new Eastern European Union countries. While military support and NATO membership are ultimate tools to help nations at risk from Russian aggression economic tools are also available and should be utilized. As the majority of Georgians support deep integration with the West the U.S. can take a specific concrete action that will help Georgia build a stronger economy established by lateral free trade agreement. This will strengthen Georgia's regional leadership increase competitiveness of our economy and have collateral benefits for all Americans. In closing I would like to quote the famous son of New England Daniel Webster who once said God grants liberty only to those who love it and are always ready to guard and defend it. Thank you for the opportunity to be here with you today it has truly been an honor. And Mr. Chikulia thank you so much for your informative speech. Once again thank you very much for all speakers for the Kino session. Also in person and virtual audience many thanks for your attendant attendance in this Kino session. As seen on the program we will have a series of summit panel discussions and sessions today and tomorrow. So see you at the next session at 11 o'clock. Thank you so much again. Okay good morning everybody we're going to begin in two minutes please make sure your cell phones are off or on vibrate please. And also just a reminder the session goes until 12 15. So if you do have class and you need to leave make sure that you plan accordingly in terms of seating. Just a quick reminder so we're going to begin in a few minutes. So good morning everyone welcome to the first workshop session of the 2022 peace and war summit which focuses on deciphering the Russian riddle national interest and geo-political competitions. My name is Dr. Travis Morris and I have the privilege in honor of being the director for North University's peace and war center. I would like to welcome our distinguished guests both that are on the stage and also in in the audience would like to thank you in advance for your contributions to the summit this year. This event is as you all know incredibly timely. We could not be more fortunate to have a summit at this time and to be able to have our distinguished guests to add to the conversation to enlighten our understanding of what's going on with Russia and the Ukraine. The current war has eclipsed the media it eclipsed government conversations and hearts and minds all over the world. It's important to note that this venue is significant as Norch has produced leaders that have fought and engaged in America's security conflicts for over the past 200 years. Distinguished guests the information from this summit is not static. Many in the room may find themselves using this information strategically and tactically in the near future and in their future careers. I would also like to welcome all of you that are joining us virtually. Thank you so much for attending and also a special welcome to our Canadian colleagues and officer cadets who are visiting from the Canadian Royal Military College St. Jean. Welcome. So before you on stage and we have a author that's joining us online we have a distinguished panel for you and it is my pleasure to introduce them. Thomas Graham Dr. Thomas Graham to the far left is a distinguished fellow at the Council of Foreign Relations. He's currently a senior advisor at Kissinger Associates. He's also a research fellow at the MacMillion Center at Yale where he teaches the course on U.S.-Russian relations. He was a special assistant to the president and senior director for Russia on the National Security Council staff from 2004 to 2007 during which he managed a White House Kremlin strategic dialogue. Welcome Dr. Graham. Dr. Peter Rutland is a professor of government at Wesleyan University and vice president of the Association for the Study of Nationalities. He works on nationalism and political economy in the post Soviet space. His recent articles include understanding Putin's Russia and perspectives on politics in 2021 and nation building in the Baltic States. 30 years of independence in the Journal of Baltic Studies in 2021. Dr. Jessica Pisano who will be joining us online. She's an associate professor of politics at the New School for Social Research in New York City and is associate of the Davis Center for Russian and Eurasian Studies at Harvard University. Her research focuses on how economic change affects people's lives and how those affect translate into changes in local, national and global politics. Dr. Michael Andrew will be our discussant for today's session. He joined the faculty at Norwich University in the Department of History and Political Science in 1993. He was named an associate professor in 2002 and he serves as program chair since 2015. He earned a BA and MA at Desales University and his PhD at State University of New York Binghamton. Just a quick overview of how the session is going to run. Each scholar will give a 15 minute presentation which will be followed by Dr. Andrew's discussant comments. After his comments the floor will be open for a Q&A session and you see we have mics to your left and to the right and we would encourage you to think of questions and we'd love to have you engage our distinguished panel while we're here. Let's give them all a round of applause. And to start us off Dr. Graham the floor is your sir. Thank you very much for that kind introduction and it is indeed a real pleasure to be here today. I want to thank the University for this for the invitation for hosting this very important summit at this time. It is indeed a real pleasure to speak before an audience of future leaders. There are a lot of challenges coming down the road and I think it's a great time to be young. The world is changing in dramatic ways. I think we're at an inflection point in history and yours is a generation that has the opportunity to shape the world in ways that will work to our security and our prosperity for decades into the future. Now at a conference like this I always feel like an interloper of some sort because I'm not an academic. I'm not an academic by training. I'm not an academic by inclination. I've spent most of my professional life in the policy world. And in the policy world more often than not you find yourself acting under time pressure on the basis of incomplete information and you have to live with the consequences and you have to hope that you guess right because the guesses that you make are based on the intellectual capital you've built over the years. Sometimes you're right sometimes you're wrong. You hope that you're right more often than not. But a policy maker and a wise policy maker also reaches out to the academic community because these are the people the individuals that had the chance to study issues in depth to provide a different type of perspective that could help a policy maker think through the challenges that he or she is going to face in the future and helps them make that right hunch when the time to act comes. Now we're all appalled by the recent events by the unprovoked Russian aggression against Ukraine we have seen the wrenching pictures of human death physical destruction and I think we all have a sense of moral outrage at this point but everybody who's worked in the policy community understands that moral outrage is not sufficient for developing a good policy and an effective policy. One of the key challenges for a policy maker is to understand the other side be able to see the world through the eyes of the rival and in this case to be able to see the world through the eyes of Russia more specifically the Kremlin and to the extent possible Putin himself. Now none of this is meant to be a justification for what Russia is doing is an act of strategic empathy and what the goal is is develop a deeper understanding that allows you to develop the types of effective policies that will counter Russia when it acts in ways that are hostile to American interest. So that's what I want to try to do in the next few minutes and I want to start by laying out what I think Russia sees and has historically seen as this great strategic challenge and to put it in a sentence that is how do you defend a multi-ethnic country located on a vast territory with very few formidable physical barriers and a territory that abuts unsettled territory unsettled lands or powerful neighbors. And throughout history for the past three, four, or five centuries the answer that Russia has come up with is strategic depth or building buffer zones pushing the boundaries the borders as far away from the strategic heartland as possible second, strict internal control over the population and three, disruption of hostile alliances along your borders. And it's these three tasks that have guided Russia as it's developed its policies towards Europe towards the West. From the moment Russia entered the European balance of power system in the early early 18th century the great czars of the 18th century Peter and Catherine put a great deal of time and effort into expanding Russia's borders westward into Europe. Catherine was the leader that brought much of the territory of current day Ukraine including Crimea into the Russian Empire at the end of the 18th century. We've also seen that throughout history and certainly after Russia entered Europe that there was an effort to limit the flow of Western ideas into into Russia as a way of controlling the population. The challenge that they faced was to introduce those Western ideas that were critical to developing the type of industrial commercial power that they needed to generate the resources to fuel their grand great power ambitions. But they wanted to limit the political values that came from the West because those are ones that challenge the fundamental structure of the Russian state. And finally, certainly after the humiliating defeat in the middle of the 19th century in the Crimean War when Britain and France floated excuse me fleets through the Turkish straits into the Black Sea and defeated Russia on its own territory. The Russians had a firm principle of trying to disrupt that Crimean coalition and preventing anything like that from re-emerging in a way that would threaten Russia's future. Now, we see that these principles guided Soviet policy probably taken too extreme. The Soviet Union developed probably the Russia's largest buffer zone in Europe, extending it all the way to Eastern Germany during the Cold War. The Soviet Union certainly cracked down on domestic opposition limited to the extent possible any influx of Western values and Western ideas. And it certainly spent a great deal of time trying to disrupt alliances, particularly trying to disrupt the United States, NATO and America's position throughout the world. This only changed for a brief moment in the very late Soviet period and the first decade of the post-Soviet Europe. Gorbachev was a unusual Soviet leader, an unusual Russian leader. He in fact gave up the Soviet buffer zone in Eastern Europe in a space of a couple of years. He welcomed the influx of Western ideas as he sought to reform the Soviet political system. And instead of trying to disrupt the creation of hospital alliances against Russia, he reached out and tried to form a partnership with the United States. President Yeltsin followed that path in the first decade after the breakup of the Soviet Union. And he came upon Putin to restore this traditional approach to Russian security, particularly vis-à-vis the West. And what we've seen over the past 20 years is a concerted effort by Putin to rebuild Russia as a great power to assert its prerogatives on the global stage. And in a sense to transform those three principles that I talked of in the concrete tasks that Russia needs to achieve if it's going to maintain its position well into the future. Now, I would put these tasks the following way. Five that I see that is translating those three principles that I talked into to five for the current period. The first is to prevent the West from undermining Russia from within. And that means putting very strict controls on the flow of Western information. We've seen Putin over the past 15 to 20 years crack down on any way that foreign influence could impact on Russia's domestic politics. Cracking down on non-governmental organizations that received foreign funding. Eventually passing what he calls a foreign agent law a way of labeling those who have contacts with the outside world, particularly the Western world, propagate those types of views as foreign agents which in Russian translates into spies, espionage, traders of some sort. And we've seen certainly over the past three or four weeks in the wake of the conflict in Ukraine a very concerted effort to block out the last independent media in Russia to control the narrative of the war in Ukraine. Second is that Putin has tried to create a buffer zone in the former Soviet space. He has put in place certain institutional practices that he thought would bring these countries together. He launched the so-called European Economic Community Union as a way of bringing Kazakhstan, Belarus, Russia, and hopefully other former Soviet states into some type of economic union that would also have a political dimension and would be dominated by Russia. Now it's quite clear that all of Putin's efforts to rebuild his buffer zone hinge on Ukraine. Ukraine is the crux of the problem. You don't have a buffer zone unless you have Ukraine. Ukraine is that former Soviet state that after Russia itself has the greatest potential both economically and militarily. And we've seen some of that unfold over the past couple of weeks and months. Third task is to impede the consolidation of Europe so that Europe doesn't dwarf Russia in economic, in wealth, in population, and power potential much the way the United States does today. A consolidated European Union would be an entity of over 400 million people an economy of some 15 trillion dollars and technologically advanced economy. That would dwarf Russia which has a population of 140 million, a GDP of about $1.8 trillion and also a country that devotes precious little of its of its economic wealth to the research and development you need to succeed in developing the cutting-edge technologies that are going to dominate the 21st century. So Russia, we've seen, has spent most of the past 15 to 20 years trying to drive wedges between European States, between the United States and Europe. It has funded populist movements on both the left and the right as a way of fostering unrest, discontent within these States. It has used its energy power to try to isolate countries from one another. The fourth task is to compel the United States to act like a normal great power. And what that means in the Russian sense is that the United States would give up what Russia sees as its ambitions to develop a unipolar world, to stop being a hegemonic power but to be a country of a great power that understands that it needs to take into account the interest of other great powers, principally Russia, if it's going to advance its own. And Putin has tried to do this in several ways over the past 20 years. He actually started by trying to build something like a partnership with the United States, trying to create a special relationship akin to the relationship that Great Britain has with the United States on the assumption that if you had that type of relationship you would have some influence over how the United States operated on the global stage. He quickly came to the conclusion that the United States was not interested in that type of arrangement and moved to a posture that was much more controversial and confrontational, trying to build organizations that would challenge the United States in both the security realm, Shanghai Cooperation Organization, for example, with China and a number of Central Asian states and in the economic realm, the BRICS, this union of Brazil, Russia, India, China and later South Africa that would act as a counterweight to the international financial institutions that are dominated by the United States on the global stage. And you've also seen Russia insist that big issues in global politics be discussed in forum in fora where Russia has a veto, the UN Security Council, the primary place where that is done, but also the Organization for Security and Cooperation in Europe, the OSCE, also an organization that operates by consensus. And the final element of this policy, of this posture towards the West has been to build a strategic alignment with China, to build a strategic alignment with China because China is that one country that can act as something of an economic counterweight to Europe, reduce Russia's over reliance on Europe as a trading partner as a source of foreign direct investment and also a country and probably the only other country in the world that can act as something of a strategic counterbalance to the United States, a peer competitor, a country that Russia would want to have very close relationship with. So we have these five tasks that Putin has set out, and he's pursued them, I think, with interlocking policies over the past 15 to 20 years. I think the question that we need to ask at this point is how successful has Putin been and how successful can he be over the next several years if he remains in power that long. And I would argue that this success has been far from complete. We start with the former Soviet space. Ukraine is probably the best example now of how Putin has failed to create a genuine buffer zone. There's tremendous resistance to this in Ukraine and we see Ukrainians prepared to fight to lay down their lives to preserve their independence and their freedoms. But it's not the only place where Russia's influence, I think, has waned or has been challenged in the past couple of years. Think of Belarus, a dictator that survives only at the grace of Putin at this point. Doesn't enjoy much popular support. Think about the recent events in Kazakhstan that suggested elite and some popular resistance to a closer relationship with Russia. Think about the war in the caucuses between Armenia and Azerbaijan a year and a half ago. Also challenging Russian influence in the former Soviet space. Europe, to be sure, had many different difficulties over the past decade. Burying many issues that challenge the unity of Europe in the future. But almost all of those were due to domestic issues, domestic origin. They were not the result of Russian activities and Russian activities and to try to exacerbate those actually didn't have much influence. And what we've seen over the past month is how Putin by launching this aggression against Ukraine has unified the European Union in a way that very few people expected just three or four months ago. I think something similar can be said about the United States. Putin certainly thought that the United States would not be able to rally the West would not be able to lead this very serious sanctions campaign against Russia that we've seen unfold over the past three or four weeks. And finally China. He has built a closer strategic alignment with China. But the problem is that Putin doesn't have an answer for how this relationship is going to develop over the next 10 to 15 years. The asymmetry and growth rates is dramatically in favor of China. To remain historical grievances that will reappear as China goes stronger. And already China is beginning to challenge Russia in a strategic backyard in Central Asia in Ukraine in Central Europe. And finally there's a fundamental in hearing contradiction between what China wants to do on the global stage and what Russia wants to do. China wants to expand its economy and wants to expand into Europe economically and technologically. That requires stability. Capital as we all know is a coward. The Russians to advance their goals at this point need instability and that is going to come to play. I would argue in the next in the not so distant future. So we have a Russia that has an historic challenge. It has had a set of principles that have guided it in trying to secure its country in its future. But as you can see there are real problems with how you're going to implement that in today's world given the values, given the leadership of the United States and Russia still hasn't figured out how it is in fact going to reassert itself and maintain itself as a great power well into the 21st century. So let me end there. Dr. Graham, thank you for your illuminating remarks. So we're going to transition now to Dr. Rutland. Let me just get this power point ready. The floor is yours, sir. Well, it's great honor to be here at Norwich University. It's a great institution and without further ado I will plunge into my power point. Now I agree with most of what Dr. Graham said. I think there are some differences in my approach and so it will be interesting to see the audience questions and comments about our views. But I would take anything that Dr. Graham says very seriously. First came across his name in 1995 when you wrote an article in the Russian press about the clans that were running the Kremlin and that was the first time people talked about clans in the Kremlin what later became known as the oligarchs and it was a wake-up call because we were being told don't take the political institutions seriously the formal elections and formal institutions of power look for the informal networks and that's really been the pattern in Russian politics and domestic politics ever since. So these are two disturbing quotations showing just how bad things are I think in Vladimir Putin's perception of the world his place in it and Russia's place in it and his threats explicit threats to destroy that world if he doesn't get his way. So why did Putin start this war in Ukraine which started of course in 2014 not three weeks ago. I see it my main argument is these two trends heading in opposite directions. Putin's Russia was getting stronger and stronger as Dr Graham has explained over the past 20 years on the international stage and Putin thought that the US was finished as a global power and needed taking down a peg or two. However at the same time at the regional level specifically in the case of Ukraine the trends were going against the Kremlin's interests that the consolidation of national identity in Ukraine and its deepening ties with Europe were pulling Ukraine further away from Russia. So we have these two trends heading in opposite directions. At the macro global scale Russia is getting stronger but locally regionally on its borders it seems to be getting weaker. So Putin decided up to various other strategies it failed to use military intervention to use war to close the gap between the power of Russia as he saw it and the local outcome within Ukraine. And why that effort to close the gap isn't working is because the Ukrainians are fighting back and are not cooperating and have agency of their own and the fatal mistake in Putin's approach was not understanding the character of Ukrainian identity. I give him the benefit of the doubt he probably understands Russian identity pretty well but he does not understand Ukrainian identity and Sun Tzu and other military scholars have always told us know the enemy as well as knowing yourself. Why did Putin think he was in a strong position very quickly? Economics Russia's earning $150 billion a year exporting oil and gas even after the sanctions they're continuing to go to earn that amount of money per year. So they have a flow of income which enables them to do whatever they want on the international stage that's at least Putin's Putin's view of this and Europe in particular with 40% of his natural gas and 25% of his oil coming from Russia Putin assumed Europe can't do anything to stop us from doing what I want to do. On a global scale President Biden was seen as weak I'm not sure what the Russians made of President Trump by the end of his administration but it was clear that the US was pivoting back to domestic politics and if it was going to do anything internationally it would be with China at least that was what Putin thought. Militarily the Russian army was on a roll they won three wars in a row in their view and so they thought that it's a no-brainer that any future military conflict will be in their favor. Finally and this is the kind of joker in the pack is the identity politics Putin complains a lot under Kremlin political analysts talk about identity politics in the West very dismissively but the real driver in Russia is also identity politics and Putin's sense of humiliation and trying to recreate some kind of great Russian identity from the past and part of that narrative we shockingly learned in his July 2021 article is to deny the existence of Ukraine to say the Ukrainian so just Russians who don't realize that they're Russians kind of thing and so if Ukraine doesn't exist as a nation well then there's no problem invading it because you're not invading a nation it's just like motoring from from you know Connecticut to Vermont it's just the same kind of operation except in tanks putting my academic hat on for a while three floors I think and this is obviously premature it's only three weeks into the war but my own interpretations of how the world works and how Russia works have changed radically on February the 24th and I realized a lot of what I thought about Russia was just wrong or inadequate so here are three points for discussion with my fellow academics first of all I think there's been over emphasis on NATO expansion that's dominated a lot of the debate about the strategy and looking at General Wiedner here I would ask why do you need a buffer zone if you got nuclear deterrence I mean we're not living in the 1850s here we're not even living in the 1940s so why does Russia see NATO as a threat under what kind of science fiction scenario would NATO be a military threat to Russia so but academics love to explain why World War One happened the security dilemma we don't spend that much time explaining why World War Two happened it's like that's not a problem because everybody realizes Hitler was insane and he had to be stopped point number two a lot of political scientists study elections in Russia talks about a hybrid regime electoral autocracy and but it wasn't a hybrid regime it was an authoritarian regime under Putin it's now becoming potentially a totalitarian regime and elections and public opinion just don't matter it's very hard to understand what does public opinion mean what kind of telephone polls can you do and you just invaded another country and you're asking people do you approve of this or not what kind of response rate are you getting and what kind of people are responding to those polls so we just don't know what the public opinion really is and it doesn't matter at least in the short run in this kind of regime so I don't buy the diversionary theory argument that Putin went to war because he wanted to boost his opinion rating or to make sure he'd win the next election that was never in doubt the sanctions issue is more complicated and I probably won't have time to go into all of the arguments around the sanctions but briefly the previous smart sanctions were kind of based on a hypothesis that oligarchs run Russia and the rich will go and complain to Putin and get him to change his behavior but in fact Russia is a personalistic dictatorship and not ruled by oligarchs and so the sanctions this time around or hitting the entirety of Russian society and the state not just the oligarchs this is a Chinese cartoon unfortunately this narrative of the wars are caused by native expansion is very widely believed in the global south in China and even in India which is a democracy but it's kind of backing Russia in this one which I think is very unfortunate I'll skip through this material this I've already talked about nuclear powers don't really need physical buffer zones Ukraine was not a member of NATO anyway we can run counter history and think if NATO had pledged never to invite Ukraine to join maybe this war could have been avoided but we'll never know the answer to that question I think the real issue is not NATO expansion it's the resentment of the US as a global power and the economic collapse of the 1990s was blamed on the west although it was a result of the collapse of the Soviet central planning system also pushback against cultural imperialism also resentment at America's military role in Afghanistan Iraq Kosovo and Libya in the 1990s those were all reasons for Russia to become resentful and angry with the US and NATO is just a kind of label for all of that resentment what it is really about I think is more about Europe than about NATO recall that the Maidan revolution began because of the association agreement with the European Union not NATO back in 2013 and why would why on earth would Ukraine want to join the EU well it's all in this table which shows the relative economic performance 1990 to 2020 and you can see that the country's on the left that joined the EU experienced like a doubling of GDP per capita measured relative to the EU average so Poland is now 75 80 percent of the EU up from 35 percent and the country's on the right the country is that did not join the EU and you can see that Ukraine has performed very poorly economically since independence and Russia has kept going by its oil and gas revenues so Ukraine looking at Poland thinks if only we could get close economic ties to the EU we would become more prosperous these these relationships that we have with Russia are just not developing our economy why did Putin oppose Ukraine joining the west Russia had economic interests in Ukraine it feared at the example of a Ukrainian democracy and other color revolutions in Georgia and elsewhere that could spread to Belarus Kazakhstan and Russia itself there's also a change in the political calculation that Putin thought in the 1990s and 2000s that Ukraine was serving as a kind of buffer state because Russia could control a lot of the Ukraine's politics through bribery and favoritism and oligarchs but after the Maidan revolution that calculation shifted and especially under President Zelensky Putin felt that he'd lost those internal levers to control Ukraine and finally this question of identity politics that it's not just about security it's about how people interpret their place in the world and world history I'm running out of time I think I'm not sure how much time I have left one or two minutes so I'll skip through important point about the Crimean precursor or start of the war is that the Nazi narrative was already there in 2014 this was on the day of the referendum and this billboard in Crimea said choose do you want a Nazi Crimea or a Russian Crimea but was also there already in 2014 was this notorious TV statement on the night of the referendum on Russia's state TV Dmitry Kisselov saying America should remember we can reduce you to radioactive dust that's what those words say and a mushroom cloud in the background so a lot of these themes that we're seeing now the denazification narrative the threats of nuclear war they were already there in 2014 I'll skip through to the end these are trends in Russia post the world favoring Russia since 2014 weakening of the US during the Trump presidency weakening of the EU with the transition from Angela Merkel and also the experience of sanctions after Crimea those sanctions were relatively ineffective then we had a series of build-up in 2021 looking back we can see that Putin was preparing for this war for some time with the military exercises and then also with cutting back on natural gas deliveries to Europe so that the storage facilities were only 25% capacity by August so he was going to use the natural gas as a blackmail to get the Germans to approve Nord Stream 2 and this dialing down of the spot deliveries of spot sales of gas led to a price spike in December of 500% higher natural gas prices in the EU than a year earlier so Putin clearly thought that this economic lever is going to force the Europeans to just basically accept whatever plans he had in mind for Ukraine this is discussion of the diversionary politics argument I summarized all this at the beginning because I knew I had run out of time so I got the main points out there first the final slide is what next Putin is trying to roll back history probably to around 1860 or so I don't think this is going to work on he's not able to win the war but it's not clear that he's willing to admit defeat so we may be looking at a continuing stalemate the sanctions are amazingly powerful and effective but the fact that Europe continues to need to buy Russian oil and gas means that Putin will continue to have a cash flow from Europe he'll also be ramping up trade with China and India so economically he will have the resources to continue this stalemated war for as long as he likes or as long as he's in power and this is terrible for Ukraine it's also terrible for Russia and it's it's not great for anybody in fact and so it's amazing how much damage this war has done so I'll finish that thank you so welcome Dr. Bassano you're on the screen and we're ready for your presentation the floor is is yours and welcome to Norwich University this is an imaginary home world accessible in the Russian language and compatible with long-standing philosophical traditions of China that democratic imaginary is appealing from many Russians which is why Vladimir Putin who locates the source of his war not in his own choices but in a new bloody vital accusing Zelensky of Nazism who actually precedes the contemporary Ukraine even under Senator Alexander poses an existential threat to Putin's rule so for two decades before his global fame as a workhand president his bravado enemy for quote Amon that arrived accompanied by actual courage while Zelensky was widely known in the Russian speaking world for his artistry, humor and moral leadership if the Soviet period had been distinguished for some above all by its regalism its ruthlessness, its palesness and in the 1990s by a mercilessness of a different sort as a showman of Vladimir Zelensky Vladimir Zelensky at the time had consistently embodied and articulated humanistic values telling the truth about politics and everyday life even on the states of doing so were quite high so Zelensky will compare it with contemporary so-called populists but although his empathy for people struggles me to sound that way he does not appeal to ethnic constituencies within the Demas instead his imaginary is inclusive civic and defined for by care for and life within the sovereign boundary of the national state it emphasizes not only freedoms but also responsibility so this conceptual foundation of unity and diversity and this agreement distinguishes Zelensky's work from that of his neighbors to the west and north and it's a reason he is a following not cults now in the decades preceding is more on the entirety of Ukraine in 2022 Kremlin and Kremlin adjacent actors rigorously had intervened in Ukrainian elections and Ukrainian public discourse promoting the idea that Ukraine was polarized society Americans may recognize this so on television newspapers and street demonstrations Russian politicians journalists and other public figures repeated this to be talking point that Ukraine was divided between east and west the west like Europe and the east was oriented toward Russia journalists and social scientists in North American Europe also absorbed this idea and regularly published articles that portrayed Ukraine as two societies now over time many Ukrainians internalized this narrative of two Ukrainians and some people saw evidence of division in their daily lives especially in 2004 following the massive demonstrations in response to documented electoral fraud in Ukraine's foreign revolution sometimes even members of the same film couldn't agree about whether protest was the right path to political change so at that time Ukraine seemed to lack a central national idea a shared set of ideas beyond a belief in the constitution politicians initially looked to ethnic identity as a salvo under Viktor Yushchenko but the country's diversity meant that not all Ukrainians could embrace this approach as others have noted the Russian invasion of Crimea support of armed proxies in the Donbas and unsuccessful attempts to foment secession in Kharkiv and Mariupol in 2014 did much to unify Ukrainians turning Russian speakers in Ukraine into Russian-speaking Ukrainian patriots but there remained fracture lines as some people remained in epistemological silos whose boundaries were determined by media consumption or by their beliefs about the legitimacy of street demonstrations as a vehicle of redress amidst documented electoral manipulation so at this point Zelensky's intervention in Ukrainian popular culture as a showman played a key role in Ukrainian public discourse the televised stage performances of Zelensky and his troop of Foptal 95 can be understood as the sort of quote unquote pre-political work that Czech playwright and president Václav Havel called quote the living hummus from which genuine political change usually springs unquote so Zelensky and his troop responded to Kremlin-led societal polarization with a multi-stage artistic operation rather than contributing to polarization by vilifying and pushing back against part of Ukrainian society he and his troop executed two discursive moves that helped shift popular framings of Ukrainian politics so first as a performer and then in the first year of his presidential administration Zelensky worked to disaggregate the dual elements of the seemingly bipolar world of Ukrainian domestic politics so through their lyrics and other elements of performance his troop articulated ideas of Ukrainian identity that focused on a diversity of possible personal and group identities these identities co-heared not around language or region east west Russian speaking Ukrainian speaking but around everyday practices and individual beliefs so I'll give you an example from Zelensky's New Year's Eve presidential ingredient in 2020 which I think sums up this approach so asking who am I Zelensky gave examples of who Ukrainians are which co-heared around things other than ethnicity and language so he says quote I am someone who learned Ukrainian because it's normal to know the state language someone who doesn't want to someone who pays for taxes someone who breaks the traffic laws someone who has a dog a redhead a Muslim someone who is hearing impaired someone who hates olives a liberal an excellent student someone who didn't watch Game of Thrones a vegan a Capricorn Capricorn someone who doesn't offer his seat in the subway a blood donor someone who refuses to use plastic he went on to add this is each of us Ukrainians as we are not ideal not saints because we're just people living people with our flaws and eccentricities so second having broken down the idea of two Ukrainians and too many Ukrainians through individualization and recognition Zelensky and his troop made a second discursive move that used two key focal points to gather individual Ukrainian identities into a coherent home these focal points were interlocking foils the action of Ukraine's own oligarchic political class and Putin's political regime and its war in Ukraine's Donbas so focusing on issues about which all Ukrainians of all political, linguistic and other stripes could agree Zelensky's troop used each theme to create the idea of a united popular front in artistic work that laid the ground for his presidential campaign Zelensky and Kvartal 95 rallied Ukrainians behind Frank's speech about and criticism of the regional kleptocrats whose assets and activities straddle the Ukraine-Russia border this critics suffused their musical numbers and song lyrics describe Ukrainian oligarchs as divided between quote a body in Ukraine and a soul offshore unquote their musical numbers focusing on the war in the Donbas linked Ukraine Ukrainians in a common frame telling of the country's struggle to choose its own way despite Putin's wishes so Zelensky and Kvartal 95 offered an imaginary that broke through long-standing societal politicization and interference from Russia to create a space in which individual Ukrainians could find an idea of community a mirror image to the robust civil society that had developed in Ukraine during the same period parallel with Zelensky's move to institutional politics and a unified opposition to Putinism so eight years before Zelensky's leadership through Putin's current catastrophe in Ukraine his troop had drawn Ukrainians together having quote from one of their songs lit all of the candles in the church save one for the one who made Ukraine go to war for the one about whom they sang in hark of football fan songs for the one who so generously handed out lead to our boys unquote so Zelensky's political imaginary offers a model for reframing politics not only in Ukraine but also elsewhere including in Putin's Russia his work abandoned the analytical categories that social science uses to sort people's identities instead recognizing the possibility of unity by validating a great diversity of possible taxonomies all of which could be used for thinking about belonging is it in Zelensky's imaginary that recognition of diversity also included an embrace of agonism a radical acceptance of messiness and disagreement in democratic society and a willingness to look with humor and understanding upon human frailty notwithstanding the intensification of authoritarian politics within Putin's Russia Russian society has generated just such a cacophony with activists holding diverse points of view on a variety of issues for a parallel think of American society under the previous presidential administration what many Russians may want now in the face of Kremlin attempts to impose a homogeneous unicity in support of a criminal war it's not only dissent but also a competing story a narrative frame that can bring together and validate multiple voices and overlapping identities Zelensky recognized that a social fabric woven of many different visible threads can be more flexible and resilient more resistant to damage than an undifferentiated weft now the forced genicity Russian society nonetheless seems poised to accept may create an impression of homogeneity homogeneity and Russian political viewpoints for a time but in a connected world even one segmented by new limits on free speech online and saturated with deliberate lies about the nature of the Kremlin's quote unquote special operation observations about people's real lives move like water and state constructed dams only temporarily redirect the flow a Russian national idea resilient enough to withstand the centrifugal forces produced by Putin's war on Ukraine and global responses to it needs to be capacious and flexible accommodating of the multiplicity of identities practices and dissenting voices that had developed within Russian society during and despite Putin's rule this is where Zelensky offers a model an alternative a genuine antipode of the fascism with which Zelensky's government has been ligled so decades of decolonization and repression under Putin have made of much much of Russia a desert of political indifference and fear but as the Russian expression goes a desirable place isn't empty for long there is room for a new story in this context the work of Vladimir Zelensky the artist whom Russians have known almost as long as they have known Putin may offer Russians an attractive local ideological alternative if they can break through the society-wide wall of denial about the facts of their country's work against Ukraine without such an approach create a positive narrative that better reflects the diversity of Russian's experiences than the Kremlin version Russians describing their own country may soon find need to resurrect the second half of the saying that a desirable place does not remain empty for long for long long fallen into disuse in contemporary language a pustan yes that never was yet but no one wants an empty place I'll stop there thank you have some time for a question and answer thank you Dr. Morris I'm going to radically edit some of my comments so we have enough time for question and answer especially from from our students I didn't want to say that the value of this kind of exercise is the opportunity to engage with scholars and practitioners and it's also a great opportunity for our students to feel it's happening in the real world take their classroom experiences because I just came from two sections of introduction to international relations and I hope students can see how the ideas that they learned in class are being applied and finally this just reaffirms my faith in the significance and the importance of the social sciences and the humanities now with respect to the different presentations I'm going to start with Professor Graham Russia's grand strategy towards the west and when I when I read this it reminded me of George Cannon's sources of Soviet conduct because essentially what Cannon was arguing in the late 1940s if you want to understand Soviet conduct after the Second World War you need to understand Russian foreign policy Russian attitudes towards security and so what you find are ideas rooted in basic traditional realism for the most part for instance the idea of spheres of influence or a security buffer fragmenting hostile alliances sort of keeping your your adversaries off balance frustrating hegemony preventing one state from dominating a particular region war the world and of course a partnership with with China which is a balancer to US power so the creation of a a multi-polar world one thing that falls outside of traditional realism is the role of identities and in particular a western identity and the desire of Russian leaders and Putin in particular today to limit Western influence in in Russia so in terms of questions that I'm opposed to Professor Graham do you think that John Muir Sharma was right in arguing that NATO Eastward expansion was an unnecessary provocation he's argued this recently in past weeks and then just over the weekend in a commentary in the the economists he reiterated this this idea and where do identities fit into that because I think we can understand why Russia might see Eastward expansion of NATO and the European Union as a provocation but how does the West and how does the United States see Eastward expansion of NATO and and the European Union why is it that another question why is it that the the West is and has been perceived as a threat I think this is why it's important why Professor Graham brought up the Napoleonic experience in the 19th century and how Russia fit into a traditional balance of power before the Napoleonic period and how those attitudes and security concerns changed after the Napoleonic wars and finally in terms of recommendations how should the United States and the West respond to Russian security concerns respect to Professor Rutland I see or I see Professor Graham as putting Russia's security concerns in a context I see Professor Rutland's papers explaining why invade Ukraine now and I think as Professor Rutland laid out there's an opportunity on the one hand from the Russian perspective the Crimean invasion didn't spark the pro-Russian response that it was supposed to have was that was anticipated there was concern that pro-Russian elites in Ukraine have been losing influence the post Crimean invasion encourage Ukraine to begin an arms build up and there was concern that Ukraine might use these weapons and this new military power against Russia or against Russian minorities the Trump administration weakened ties between the United States and its allies and Vladimir Zelinsky even though he's portrayed as a hero now had been losing popularity was considered a relatively unpopular leader in Ukraine and so I think Putin and Professor Rutland laid out Putin saw this as an opportunity now I know that Professor Rutland has rejected the realist explanations in favor of constructivist interpretation and constructivism is an approach which would explain and this sort of fits into Dr. Vizano's work also how do Russians imagine themselves what do they understand to be right and wrong behavior but also how does the United States imagine itself and how does the United States imagine Russia because that helps us understand why or how we would predict the behavior of of another state of other other actors constructivism also here I'm borrowing from Donald Kagan military historian Donald Kagan author of on the origins of war the role of things like honor and prestige and reputation sort of old-fashioned ideas but they still influence behavior beyond just a sort of rational cost-benefit calculation so that would expect to explain why what seems to be irrational behavior is in fact rational understanding behaviors from the perspective of adversaries I also thought about um Stephen Waltz distinction between balance of power and balance of threat and what decision makers do is they respond to what they perceive to be a threat not just changes in balance so why is it that the united states for instance is concerned with students in my IR classes are probably sick of hearing this why is it that the United States is concerned with nuclear weapons in Iran and North Korea but we're not concerned about France and Britain having nuclear weapons so how how is it that Russia perceives its world and and threats not just from a pure power perspective Professor Pizano two most important ideas concepts I took away from this the idea of political imaginaries and agonism because political imaginaries fits into this idea of how we imagine ourselves to be and how we imagine others so how has Vladimir Putin for instance imagined Russia how has he imagined Ukraine and what are the right and wrong behaviors based on those those imaginations and so what Putin has done is he's created an antagonistic imaginary where an antagonistic imaginary is one where you you accept conflict as natural but you treat your opponents as your enemies and so this contributes to a bipolarity and a reluctance to cooperate or make concessions with those who you see as your mortal enemies an agonistic approach which is what Zelinsky has developed is one that treats opponents not as enemies but as adversaries as actors who have legitimate complaints actors who have legitimate interests that you may not agree with but you should tolerate and understand their their perspectives and that is why I think it's important that President Pozzano points out that what Zelinsky did is he used satire as a way of appealing to the Ukrainian public he used satire as a way of pointing out what was ridiculous and absurd in everyday life something that has a very broad appeal something that most people could could identify with and that is why Zelinsky using that that approach is a threat to Putin's regime because he offers a different different narrative and the question that I had was does this explain Putin's hostility to all of Ukraine because I think you make the case that maybe what Putin should have done is hive off the eastern provinces of Ukraine declared victory and go home instead he's launched his full scale invasion of Ukraine and do the business I did different narratives perhaps explain that has Putin perhaps personalized the conflict so it's not just one between Russia and Ukraine but it's between Putin and Vladimir Zelinsky Zelinsky is the is the threat I was also wondering of respect to this approach how would you change the narrative in Russia how's it possible to change narrative in Russia because of course Zelinsky was dealing with a much more permissive environment than currently exists in in Russia so what is the potential for an outsider it's as if Zelinsky was to make inroads into Russian politics and then change that that narrative thank you Dr. Andrew thank you for your insightful remarks and and solid questions and if you just look at the time left we have 10 minutes and the time is going to evaporate quickly I would like to give students the opportunity to ask a couple of questions so if you have a question please go ahead and move to to the microphone and we'd like to fuel questions for you first but certainly the questions that Dr. Andrew posed could fulfill another summit for another week in response very deliberate questions but very timely very tactical very strategic and also very applied questions and from multiple different angles to understand currently what's going on so if you could just state your name and then your question please and who you're directing your question to or the entire panel good afternoon my name is K.F. Barnes and Professor Graham you began your talk Fights to Hangman and I'm paraphrasing here the decisions that we make are built upon our intellectual capital so my question is how do you recommend that we the young can navigate this increasingly complex situation and this miasma of misinformation that we find ourselves in at the deficit of intellectual capital that comes with not having been around for very long absolutely yes please look I mean the way you deal with it the way you deal with it is through your studies you know your studies at this university are a part of develop your intellectual capital if you're thinking about a career in foreign policy you know the recommendation first is history history is critical to understanding where we are but it's also critical because you develop your ability to see situations you go back to the second world war the Napoleonic wars certain revolutions see the types of challenges that statesman based at that time how they thought through the problem how they made the decisions and then what the consequences of those decisions were now anyone will tell you that analogies are in perfect you can't take one situation and apply it word for word today but they help develop a critical process that helps you think through the issues what the what the possibilities are and what the possible consequences are and you develop political capital that way the other thing you study is political philosophy the great ideas that have that have shaped the way the modern world functions the way we think about the relationship between the individual and the state the state and society the way we think about how countries interact and on the basis of what and so forth so your four years here this is where you begin to develop the intellectual capital then you'll have your your own experiences and hopefully during a career whether it's in the military the foreign service you'll have time to spend a year or two to reflect on what you've learned and then apply that when you return to a position of power one of the things that I have done and I've been out of government now since 2007 is try to reflect on what happened during the 20 years I was in government what I got right what I got wrong how I would have dealt with these issues if I knew what I do now back then when I was in the decision making process so again education now and the constant process of education and reflecting on your own experience builds that political capital and intellectual capital that you're going to spend down when you're actually in the heat of battle and have to make decisions press very much for time thank you Dr. Graham let's go to the site please four chairs I was just about to get ready from Seymar Stasia Dr. Rudman I had a question about your safety flaws in the way that we think about Russia so since 2014 you've seen a very expanded NATO involvement in Eastern Europe from China, juncture airborne operations in Ukraine and perhaps four present thousands I was wondering how if you could expand perhaps on how the perceived threat of NATO expansion and operations in Eastern Europe is not particularly a real threat or that that perceived threat is a flaw in the way that we think about it well as I said in my talk I don't understand why Russia sees those NATO presence in Poland or the Baltics as a threat to Russia because even though as you say it's being stepped up it's not like NATO is going to attack Russia from Poland so I think the answer is is in the realm of identity politics rather than military calculation and on the question of NATO expansion I didn't get into it in detail but I think the expansion to Poland and then later to the Baltics was I think legitimate and that did provide security to those countries and got them out of the grip of the Russians permanently but it was kind of too late for Georgia and Ukraine that they were in my position thank you sir thank you very much over to you please so my question is for Professor Paisana so how would you say we should observe social media's influence on the on the way on the way that affects the Russian propaganda machine in relation to the comparison between President Zelensky and can you hear me we can hear you absolutely we can hear you perfect all right thank you for that question about social media I think that that's this is an incredibly important topic and thank you for raising it I think that one way there's a great deal to observe one of the things that is worth remarking upon with respect to Ukrainian's response to the invasion of their country is that there has been really a proliferation of documentation of the facts on the ground but also continuing satire by Ukrainian people about what is happening right now and so it's possible to observe those comments as it's also possible to be exposed to criminal propaganda now how is it possible to distinguish between the two I think that may have been part of the question the first is to come back to come back to the first question to Dr. Graham is that informing yourself about what the Kremlin's stories are can help you be a smart consumer of online social media information the second part is that interestingly and I think this also speaks to the fact that there is still a great deal of heterogeneity in Russian society the Kremlin's sponsored Misesen Sen the dramatizations that are being promulgated by the Kremlin of soldiers going to liberate Ukrainians from there from supposedly Ukrainian oppression these videos are very poorly produced the acting is not in the best traditions of Russian stage practice and they're actually quite easy to identify because frankly they're so bad so that also tells us something about the enthusiasm of those who are participating in them so those are the two elements I would highlight as we sort of try to make our way through this incredibly complex sea of differing narratives and stories about this work thank you very much so we're about out of time but we would certainly just like to hear your questions so if you could just one at a time just repeat your concise question and then we'll end the session and perhaps you can approach the panel and discuss your question with them so go ahead just reach your question and then we'll just go left and right if Ukraine becomes a NATO power will US send military support to this country to promote democratic influence? Next question please My question was mainly on the renewed sense of Ukrainian identity that has come about because of this award and if that is more of a heated moment kind of agreement or some of the divides that we have kind of perceived in the past that were propagated from kind of like an east-west split are going to research as along as this conflict might drag out in two months or years thank you please My question was just in regards to the policies Putin has instituted in order to make Russia more resistant to sanctions and whether or not you believe these policies namely I believe Fortress Russia if you believe they've been effective and if you expect them to be effective going forward Great thank you My question was about how with Russia's aggression expansion how the US and NATO should should go about dealing with the Arctic Thank you Our final two questions One thing that definitely should not be overlooked is the fact that Russia is a petro state gas and oil make up a large part of it of its exports and the invasion of Crimea in 2014 happened just two years after offshore oil was discovered right off the coast of Crimea and in eastern and western Ukraine Do you think that the discovery of these oil resources and the and the refinery treaties that the Ukrainian government signed with the Shell Corporation contributed to the annexation of Crimea Thank you In our final question for the session please Hello This is a question for the entire panel Why do you think western public opinion and media overemphasized the threat of NATO and the possibility of Ukraine joining NATO to explain why the war began Thank you very much Let's give our panel and our students a round of applause Thank all of you so very much for just advancing our understanding on the conflict and if you could grab a program if you have it the next session is at one o'clock and we look forward to seeing you then thank you for being such a great audience and thank you panelist Dr. Pisano, thank you very much Thank you so much We'll give you some more and some more I know, I'll take it It's for dinner Yeah, it's for lunch For lunch I guess it's provided to us here I'm not used to them Hey, Jesse Jesse It's there Jesse This is my big problem Hey Hey, yeah, you're here to go, okay? Well Yeah, I, yeah, I feel like I thought you made a new between Ukraine and Ukraine So you're really not a sort of narrative in the end of all of this in this day and age You're like No, no, no, we're not affected Yeah Maybe even in 1992 Yeah, not now Not now, no And it hasn't for a long time And I think in 1991 when the whole country were moving Yeah, it was Soviet Union You know when the Soviet Union was going down That's some sort of I'm not sure Please, please, first No, no, no, no, wait Water Well, water No, no, no, I just I just didn't see the zero sugar in the complex That's right I eat them first Did you do the campus tour or No, because I've been here before and I've been to like I know Yeah, no, I just I didn't know if they would have a laptop Maybe I don't read my email enough I'm just like I'm no idea what the set up is going to be tomorrow So I went through my paper and like highlighted Your PowerPoint is ready up there I knew it was going to be Am I going to I don't know I don't know I was going to introduce you guys I don't want people to go down the line So, but was the Central Asia and some presentations I'm going to Okay That's fine Good afternoon It's good to see you all There's nowhere else that I'd rather be right now than listening to this panel of experts talk about a problem that is on all of our minds and it's a great honor and privilege to be here listening to their remarks on Russia and Ukraine My name is Dr. Daniel A. Morris and I'll be the moderator for today It's my job right now and my pleasure to introduce our panel and then after the panel we'll have remarks from our respondent and a time for questions and comments from the audience So I will just begin by introducing the individuals that you see on the stage before you starting here to my immediate left with Dr. Nicholas K. Gvostev Dr. Gvostev is Professor of National Security Affairs at the U.S. Naval War College and a senior fellow at the Foreign Policy Research Institute He holds non-residential fellowships with the Carnegie Council for Ethics and International Affairs and he's a member of the Loisach Group which is a collaboration between the Munich Security Conference and the Marshall Center to enhance his security partnership He's a contributing editor for the National Interest and he has taught at Baylor, Georgetown, George Washington Harvard Extension and Brown Universities Next We have Dr. Angela Kaczyewski who is an Associate Professor of Political Science at Arcadia University in suburban Philadelphia Her research falls in the fields of conflict resolution and critical security studies and she focuses on divided societies identity boundaries and Russian speaking minorities in Ukraine the Baltic States and Moldova Next we have Dr. Lasha Chanterise who is a Professor and Director of the Graduate Programs in Diplomacy and International Relations He earned his PhD in International Relations from Queens University of Kingston, Ontario and his research interests are at the University of Tennessee Enforced International Politics and his academic publications are in the areas of Geopolitics, Russian Foreign Policy, Canadian Foreign Policy the Arctic, the Black Sea Basin and International Politics in the Caucasus And finally to introduce our respondent for the afternoon we have Dr. Lisa Chaldeze who has dedicated her work as a lawyer, educator and author and activist to the development of the School of Law as well as the defense of human rights and I'm very eager to hear from all of our presenters and also from our respondent and from you after their presentations have ended so thank you all for coming and I will now turn it over to our first speaker Hello everybody I'm really happy to be here I'm happy to be back at Norwich and delighted to speak with you today My speaker is going to consider this concept of Ukraine as a borderland it's often been considered between East and West and I'm going to present some of my ideas about that I'm going to focus given what's going on with this war and I think most of us are sort of shocked by the scale and the brutality of this conflict that is going on right now a lot has been written about NATO expansion European Union enlargement Ukrainian neutrality I'm not denying at all that these things are important although I don't think that this war is about Ukrainian neutrality or NATO expansion at all and that's something maybe we can discuss later I'm instead going to not deny that those things are important but rather really focus on some of the important identity issues that I think give additional context and perspective as to what's going on I'm going to focus on three main areas very quickly given the constraints of time I'm going to talk a little bit about two core concepts that are within the current Russian national identity building project and that is the concept of the near abroad which is a way to characterize neighboring states and the more recent concept of the Russian world I'm then going to look a little bit at the Eurasian Economic Union project that is led by Russia and the European Union project which obviously is happening in the same space and then finally I'm going to look a little bit at some of the identity dynamics that we have seen particularly since 2014 with the annexation occupation particularly among Russian speaking Ukrainians and I want to say also I think it's a very very important point to underscore when we talk about Russian speaking Ukrainians we're not talking about Russians who happen to be living in Ukraine we're talking about Ukrainians who for various reasons of history have over time Russian has become their native language but they're not Russian and I think that's an important point so let's talk a little bit about how we got from the Soviet Union to the so called Russian world the Soviet Union as Putin has sort of described as this enormous geopolitical catastrophe and tragedy for Russia was actually led by Russia and some of the other states so Boris Yeltsin as president of the Russian Federation together with the presidents of Belarus and Ukraine met together and dissolved the Soviet Union as a way to try to free up their republics to pursue the kinds of reforms that they wanted to pursue and that they felt that the Communist Party of the Soviet Union was holding them back for however the CIS, the Commonwealth of Independent States which they created to sort of replace the Soviet Union was really under specified, very vague when it was agreed to as to how actually all of these things would operate in principle but really in detail practice and so pretty close after the collapse of the Soviet Union in 1991 it became pretty clear that there would be really serious consequences for Russia for a number of reasons, strategic reasons, you've got bases that are now located in different states and you've got different borders you have all kinds of things that are happening and so for this reason I think it's not really surprising that Russia has defined the former Soviet republics as part of their special sphere of influence and there's a good amount of evidence sort of assumed or had a vision that the Commonwealth of Independent States would operate pretty much the same as the Soviet Union, they would just get rid of Communism but that the Commonwealth would be strong, there would be a common market, a common currency, sort of unified military structure but none of the other republics of the Soviet Union were interested in that and so the CIS being under specified just never fulfilled that role so Russia in response has tried to create sort of this sphere of influence within the neighboring states and initially this wasn't such a big problem because Boris Yeltsin did respect the independence of neighboring states and followed a fairly liberal sort of rules based foreign policy but for a number of reasons including perceived discrimination of Russian speakers abroad particularly in the Baltic states perceived sort of dismissal of Russia's national insecurity interest by the west, concerns about Russia being shut out of some kind of a European integration project, put a lot of pressure on Russia to turn to a more kind of nationalist oriented foreign policy and as the economic situation grew worse and the influence of the sort of liberal western oriented economist diminished this pressure to kind of have a more strong focus on Russia's national interest emerged. Therein we get this term called the near abroad which emerged in mainstream discourse in 1993 when then foreign minister Andrey Kozarev laid out the tenets for a new Russian foreign policy concept and the term in Russian has at least to my ear has a sort of a connotation where the word for near kind of connotates a feeling of closeness that in turn gives this sort of distinction between territory that is abroad out there that's a really truly sovereign state and these states that are kind of near us and they aren't therefore fully sovereign. So to be kind of the close abroad means well you're technically kind of a sovereign state but not really right. This is how at least it appears to my ear. So Russian policy has been to sort of assert a special role in this area has sort of asserted the right and the responsibility to exert special influence in these territories and in fact Russian policy has articulated the concept of compatriots as a category of noncitizens living outside of Russia who nonetheless go do under a certain extent fall under Russian responsibility and this is written into Russian law where they assert a special responsibility for these compatriots who are not living in Russian or not Russian citizens. So even though this compatriot status may not be recognized and frankly isn't recognized by other states and is therefore pretty symbolic it's pretty clear that this gives Russia a formal and systematic way to assert and potentially as we see now exert influence beyond its geographic boundaries. The compatriot policy also exists within this context of the Russian world. The Russian world concept which posits Russia as a distinct civilization that transcends Russia's territorial borders. This Russian world asserts that Russian civilization is a naturally existing civilizational community. So Russia is not just Russian culture Russian national identity is not part of European culture it is a naturally separately existing civilizational identity. And it emphasizes the cultural basis of identity which is rooted in Russian language and a shared Orthodox Christian faith. The civilization shares a common past and is currently according to Putin who's been quite explicit about this wrongfully and even perversely divided into separate states which he says has resulted in the greatest divided nation on earth. So in this context Ukraine and Belarus are seen not only as members of Russia's natural zone of special influence but actually as integral pieces and integral parts of the Russian world based upon eastern Slavic civilization and they are not separate nations so let's talk about that in a bit. So this kind of view at this natural special role for Russia is obviously not shared by all states and certainly not by Ukraine who has very consistently been very steadfast regardless of which political party is in power about Ukrainian sovereignty and independence. So let's talk a little bit about the European and Russian projects within this kind of what you might think of as the shared neighborhood. Russia and EU and again I'm focusing on identity issues today this isn't to ignore or discount the other material interest in economic integration I'm going to focus on the identity issues. Russia and the EU have each asserted and defined a special role for themselves in this region that goes beyond their boundaries that is based upon both economic interests and shared cultural values okay so they're both doing sort of the same thing I'm not equating between the two projects obviously but they're motivated by some of the same narratives. Each of these imagines a sort of normative cultural space that unifies populations beyond geographic borders and an economic zone that benefits from deeper economic integration. We have the European neighborhood policy which was brought into place in 2004 because of an expansion of the European Union that required the European Union to start to think about making a formal relationship with states that now became on actual EU borders and the idea behind the European or the European neighborhood policy was to include states from the former Soviet Union and also countries along the Mediterranean basis in a regional engagement and cooperation policy. In 2009 an actual specific policy called the Eastern partnership was brought into place that had even more formal relations with the Eastern European states and were based upon three different objectives. First was to accelerate political association to create more formal and strong political relations. Second was to further economic integration through association memberships and other economic agreements. And third for providing for citizen mobility. This would be in visa free regimes and work permits. And again an idea of creating greater contact between those areas. And I'm sorry I went ahead too fast but that's okay we'll come back to this. The goal of this project was to build greater prosperity through interdependence and the creation of a free trade zone that requires Eastern European participating states to meet EU standards for business, finance, banking and trade. And the idea was that strengthening governance and increasing prosperity in the neighborhood and deepening regional integration would lead to greater stability and prosperity in the region. The problem that we have however is that this comes into conflict with Putin's plans for economic integration in the same exact neighborhood. Given that signing an association agreement with the European Union would preclude membership in the Eurasian Economic Union. And even if this was not the intention of the European Union this was indeed seen by Moscow as a direct effort to try to isolate Russia from its neighbors. Okay, gotta go fast. So we're gonna go beyond European Union and I'll just jump in to talk a little bit about some of the identity issues. We have a lot of discussion about a so-called two Ukraine's narrative where the eastern part of Ukraine is Russian speaking and sort of geopolitically oriented towards Russia. The western part of Ukraine is Ukrainian speaking and sort of geopolitically oriented towards the west. And there are a lot of reasons why this narrative may or may not have been a fruitful or valid way of thinking about Ukraine in the past. But certainly since independence we've seen a very clear movement towards a civic model of national identity and not an ethnic model of national identity. We do have a little bit of a challenge because on the one hand Ukraine has very clearly articulated a national polity that is multi-lingual and multi-ethnic and cultural. It's civic in nature, right? It's inclusive. But on the other hand the nation building project has been based upon promoting the Ukrainian language and Ukrainian culture. So we've got these two things happening at the same time. So we have seen some divisions since independence. But what we have seen since 2014 with the annexation of Crimea and the war in Donbass is an increasing identity that is civic in nature based upon understanding Ukraine as a native language and identifying Ukraine as the homeland and accepting Ukrainian language as the mother tongue even if you don't speak the language. And this is a really important point. People will say Ukraine is my native language whether or not they can speak Ukrainian. And this is because it has become an identity marker. So I'm just going to make three quick observations because it's a bit too early within this war. I'd like to think that the war will be over tomorrow and we can start to draw conclusions. But for now I'd like to make three observations to toss out and maybe there might be an interest in some discussion. The first is that I think that what we see with the incredible resistance that is happening in Ukraine today where Russian speaking cities are being targeted ruthlessly. Kharkiv is a Russian speaking city. Mariupol is a Russian speaking city. Hevson is a Russian speaking city. And they are resisting and they are saying we are Ukrainian. So I think what we can see is that this whole Russian world concept is a complete and abject failure first in soft power and now in hard power because they are not winning the war. And I also observed that the two Ukraine's concept if it ever had any validity is completely dead because obviously we are all one Ukraine. And I suppose that I think we can stop thinking about Ukraine as a borderland. If it ever was one it certainly is not one any longer. So with that I will finish. Thank you. So I'm speaking to you on the lessons that can be learned from Russia's intervention in Syria. No, no PowerPoint. So I can go ahead and blank that one. There we are. Let me first offer the observation that this would be a different presentation or the presentation would be received differently if this was being presented to you prior to February 24th. And so I would echo the caution of Center for Naval Analysis expert Michael Kaufman who says prior to February 24th we had a tendency to really overrate and over exaggerate the Russian military to say that they were 12 feet tall. And now because of the first three weeks of the campaign in Ukraine he says we have a tendency now to go into an opposite direction which is equally unhelpful, which is to think of the Russians as two feet tall. And one of the questions that may come out in our discussion is why some of the lessons that the Russians demonstrated in Syria they did not apply in Ukraine. And is that a policy failure, an intelligence failure? Is this just simply the bureaucratic reaction of most of the Russian military establishment that kind of pushed back against some of the innovative techniques that were being used in Syria and said we don't want to apply them anywhere else I think is something that we're still waiting to get more information on. I'd like to offer what I would call a triple disclaimer in making my remarks. And the first of course since my day job is to work for the U.S. Naval War College I am presenting here in a personal capacity. I'm not speaking in any way on behalf of the U.S. Navy representing a U.S. government position or even for that matter relying on any U.S. government resources for my conclusions. Everything is based upon my own open source analysis. The second disclaimer is when you present on a topic like this and you say the lessons of Syria I'm doing this as an analyst. We have a tendency now in the academic and scholarly worlds to confuse analysis and advocacy or to confuse analysis with approval. That is to say if there are lessons to be learned from Syria then therefore you must be saying well what the Russians did is good or we should be you're advocating for it and instead I simply want to look back, look at what the Russians have been doing since they intervened in Syria in 2015 as a basis for us to understand both is there a new paradigm for Russian intervention are there lessons that the U.S. and allied militaries can learn in some cases we cannot apply those lessons because of our own rules of engagement and traditions of war fighting but there may be lessons that may be applicable to us and the final disclaimer is in presenting this kind of 30 or 60,000 foot view we can lose sight of the fact that in the end we're talking about human beings whether in Syria or in Ukraine particularly who are on the receiving end of violence and so again when we speak very analytically about it we don't want to lose sight of the fact that at the end of the day this affects people directly in terms of being killed being wounded, being driven from their homes having their homes destroyed so I just wanted to put that out there alright basically there are four lessons I think we should pull from the Russian intervention in Syria and I think that they are important particularly for the U.S. national security community because the U.S. national security community for the most part got the Russian intervention into Syria wrong when the Russians announced in September of 2015 that they were going to directly enter into the Syrian civil war the U.S. reaction first was to mirror image and to say well Russia is not going to succeed in Syria because the United States has had problems in Iraq and Afghanistan we assume that the Russian intervention in Syria would mirror the type of interventions that the U.S. had been doing in the Middle East we also mirror-imaged and assumed that a Russian intervention in Syria was more or less going to be a smaller scale repeat of the Soviet intervention in Afghanistan in 1979 so based on that analysis President Obama felt relatively confident in predicting in September of 2015 that the Russian intervention would be a small scale Russia would be bogged down in a quagmire this would strain the Russian military this would strain the Russian economy which already was under minor sanctions and you saw from the first panel perhaps not really impactful sanctions on the Russian economy and instead we look at all the way to 2022 and the picture in Syria looked a lot different than it was being predicted and then there are basically what the four lessons were the first is that the Russians had carefully studied U.S. interventions in Iraq and Afghanistan then Defense Minister Sergei Ivanov who was remarking this in 2006-2007 that they were closely studying the kind of successes and failures of U.S. counterinsurgency in Iraq what the U.S. was doing in Afghanistan trying to get a sense of what things were working and what things were not and the Russians not unlike many American journalists who were observing both the Iraq and Afghan efforts really picked up on the overreach of U.S. efforts that the U.S. had established victory conditions in Afghanistan by the end of December 2001 had effectively established victory conditions in Iraq by the end of 2003 but the mission had expanded the mission grew lots new parameters came in all the way down to the United States military trying to set up a stock exchange in Iraq trying to set up media enterprises teaching Afghans how to use PowerPoint making sure that they were perfect Powerpoint Rangers and all of this kind of overreach developed and then prevented in the Russian view the U.S. from being able to establish conditions of victory on the ground and then to use that to either push forward a political settlement at best or stalemate at worst instead the Russians in Syria have relied on what they call as a strategy of quote limited action that is to not let mission creep come in or to start defining new goals they went into Syria with two very explicit goals one was to prevent Bashar al-Assad from being overthrown making sure that he was not driven out of Damascus and the second was to ensure that he would remain a player in Syrian politics those were the goals the mission was geared to meeting those goals it was geared to ensuring that at the end of the day Assad stayed in Damascus and that he would remain a player in Syrian politics and by extension a player in Middle Eastern politics the idea that the regime would be quote stable enough not perfect not even necessarily having to control all of Syria the extent to which Assad has regained control over Syria was not part of the original Russian mission set it is a byproduct of the Russian intervention but wasn't their initial goal and that meant you needed to secure the capital you needed to secure certain lines of communications you needed to secure strong points across the country but you did not need to have a presence in every village in Hamlet an entity in Syria in order to be able to influence the process second the Russian military in Syria once it intervened focused on destroying capabilities and fighting capacity of the opposition not again to occupy territory occupying territory was secondary to drawing out the opposition without their military capabilities drawing out their supply lines and then using primarily air power with the judicious use of land power and some naval power to bring that about and that again very important not to occupy territory instead to use military force to isolate and diminish points of resistance and the Russians were therefore happy to negotiate lots of local settlements basically along the lines as long as you're not actively opposing us and Assad we're not going to come in and really interfere with what you're doing so ending up empowering a lot of local authorities particularly in Sunni villages and then of course the de facto relationship with the Kurds in Syria where the Kurds effectively have had a for the last six years have operated in a state of de facto truce with the Assad government the third lesson was the Russians avoided the responsibilities of governance this was something that they very much took from the US experience in Iraq and Afghanistan but also from the Soviet experience in Afghanistan that once you begin to assume the responsibilities of governance the mission expands and the ability for you to take on more actions where the probability of failure increases or people perceive that you have failed because you have not delivered on governance instead again the Russians really pushed forward and sometimes even in opposition to people in the Assad government who very much wanted to restore as much Syrian government control over as much of Syria as possible the Russians essentially saying that's not our job here and I'm probably going to mangle the Arabic but the Russians really pushed forward what we're known as the itifakot al musalah these kind of reconciliation agreements these de-confliction agreements you go into a village you meet the real power brokers is something else the Russians learn from our experience in Iraq that the official power holder may not in fact be the person who is really the mover and shaker I think some of the people that I've talked to in the coalition provisional authority realized after some time in Iraq that politicians weren't really the movers if they were Shia politicians it was the Shia clergy and that they were talking to the wrong people they should have been talking to people in Najaf not people who said well I represent this political party and so the Russians went in they would identify and they did have some experience in this obviously in how Chechnya was pacified both by brutal tactics but also by identifying power brokers and deciding how you can leverage them in order to to get them just simply to agree to stop fighting you and again not worrying about governance not worrying about democracy not worrying about can they operate power point or do they meet a whole list of criteria or standards finally the Russians in Syria really focused on a light footprint in the sense of not sending in large amounts of ground forces focusing primarily on air power some maritime power rotating land forces in using Syria and this was one of the things that I think the US side did not pick up on was that essentially saying well instead of spending money from our exercise budget we will use Syria to exercise our forces and so interestingly enough and again what we've seen in Ukraine raises some questions but essentially by 2019 pretty much all of the regional commanders had rotated through Syria a good chunk of the officer corps had rotated through Syria almost all of the Russian Air Force pilots had gone through Syria at one point or another so there was this sense of but light footprint never a large Russian contingent at any one point focusing on as we've seen use of a lot of indiscriminate firepower not putting people on the ground but instead using air and artillery strikes to substitute for people and to use that as a strategy the siege and starve strategy and some of the Russian generals are very explicit we don't want to fight block for block in a place like Aleppo we'd rather create conditions that make Aleppo unlivable so that the opposition leaves and then we can move in after finally and probably most critically what we've seen in Syria is the use of militias and mercenaries which I think is really speaking to some changes that we may be seeing in mid 21st century warfare recruitment particularly from some of Russia's ethnic minorities to go into Syria very effective Chechen and English units again part of the reason that in some cases these Russian Muslim nationality units were better at reaching these deals with Sunni leaders than Alawite army commanders in Syria or Iranian Revolutionary Guard commanders because they could play on a common Sunni heritage but most importantly and critically has been the rise of the private military companies relying on private military companies both as a strategy for keeping down your uniformed casualties for fear that that might create problems at home giving you a degree of plausible deniability to operate and to act as necessary mercenary companies if their actions become problematic they can be abandoned as we saw in 2018 where mercenary companies clashing with the US essentially were left to their own fate so with that we have these lessons prior to the start of the invasion of Ukraine there was a sense both in the Russian and the American strategic community that Syria was paving a way forward for how Russia would intervene what we're now seeing in Ukraine is calling into question whether that is correct or not so I think we'll still be debating the lessons of Syria but also determining whether or not this reflects a fundamental change in how the Russian government plans to use the military instrument of statecraft and how it links with its diplomatic economic efforts good afternoon the the title of this of this presentation was offered to the organizers last fall I think because at that time I was expecting a war between Russia and Ukraine and I was thinking about writing something presenting something to explain why war was likely between Russia and Ukraine I've written about this since Russia's potential conflicts with Georgia and Ukraine since 2007 after Mr Putin made a lengthy presentation at the Munich security conference in February of 2007 in which he pretty much outlined his plan what he intended to do in coming decades was not taking seriously that was an important watershed in Russia's foreign policy towards its neighbors and the next important event was the recognition of Kosovo as an independent state against Russian objections and following up to that in 2008 Georgia and Ukraine were candidates of joining NATO they themselves believed they were candidates but NATO summit in Bucharest refused to grant them accession papers like a plan to become NATO members at some point in the near future specifically because of German and French objections even though the U.S. administration under Mr Bush supported the plan and the U.K. supported it as well after that this is August 2008 and Russia invades Georgia I'm not going to take much of your time I can answer your questions if you have questions about this a paper more extensive than the presentation obviously but the argument is very simple the United States and western allies have been pursuing policies of appeasement to Russia since 2007 and that is a direct cause of the war in Ukraine among other things such as the outdated state of American strategic arsenal and inability of Europeans to find a common ground when it comes to policies to the Russian policies so a general line of reasoning here is that neither Georgia or Ukraine represents a direct threat to Russia they are smaller countries they don't really pose any significant cultural or religious or any other economic or political security threats Russian objective here is to defeat NATO that's Mr Putin's personal objective and the people who are around him helping him in this quest so the final Ukraine is not the final step the final step is attacking a more or less insignificant country I don't want to speak in these kinds of terms but I want to communicate to you Russian thinking about this more marginal NATO member causing significant damage to the country and NATO fails to respond especially the United States fails to respond in a decisive manner and may I also mention that sanctions are not decisive any in any significant way in the Russian thinking sanctions are actually a sign of capitulation sanctions tell them we are not going to fight you can go ahead and do whatever we are not going to use force that's how they hear this in Moscow so once Russia attacks you pick a country the periphery of NATO and NATO fails to respond that's the end of NATO and that's the end of US influence and prestige and power in Europe and that the game is done so on this path and it's coming Ukraine has been significant in this process because Ukraine has managed to make Russia stumble which no one expected including the American administration as we are to believe what they are telling us from the screens of television the Russian government didn't expect it either invading initially they deployed about 68 battalions in to Ukraine and that number increased dramatically after a few days so they had fuel for about three days of operation one battalion Russian battalion needs about two fuel trucks of operation per day and they didn't have enough fuel initially to sustain long-term operation but that now has changed so here I am presenting a map of Georgia Georgia is a small country the population is under 4 million and the size of Georgia it's a smaller than state domain it's not a large country Russia is a northern neighbor Turkey south Azerbaijan and Ukraine southeast in the west what you see is the Black Sea and the Black Sea connects Georgia also with Ukraine and Russia and we are going to come to that I'm showing you a physical physical map of Georgia it's a physical geography especially in warfare and also in diplomacy is very important normally when they present you maps they present you with a flat colored shapes that don't tell you much and then they can attach any information to it they want you to believe for instance the idea that Kiev and the capital city of Ukraine could fall could fall in three days now if you were to imagine Kiev is larger than Chicago and even if no one resists surrounding and taking Chicago in three days it's just unbelievable idea but a city that is well defended like Kiev it's just crazy if you imagine Kiev to be a little spot on the map then you can imagine that but if you realize how large their city is it's quite difficult to understand why would someone tell you that now that's the Caucasus mountains geography you see their elevation and the mountain Mount Kosbegi our Canadian friends will see that's five kilometers that's the border between Georgia and Russia to invade Georgia it had two options to cross the mountains which you understand two mountains are not easy to cross impossible to helicopters to fly over and invade from the sea so the war started on there is a dispute about this August 7 or 8 we are going to come to that why there is a discrepancy but excuse me Russia invaded both from the north and from the sea from the sea was significant because Russia had no coastal defense no none whatsoever United States gave them rubber boats and some rifles to defend the coastline and Georgia had no significant amount of air defenses force artillery no significant amount of anything to defend itself even though as you heard from the ambassador this morning Georgia was probably one of the most pro-American still remains one of the mostly American oriented states in the world there was a lot of talk and there is a lot of talk about strategic partnership between the United States and Georgia but realistically for anyone else didn't arm or help Georgia in any significant way just like they didn't arm or help Ukraine in any significant way before the invasion so there are two roads leading from Russia to Georgia that could be could be taking by any anyone including the invading armed forces and the battle that waged was called Georgia the town is called and the Georgian army resisted the invading Russian force as much as they could coming from the mountains Black Sea Fleet was late joining the war they came three days late and they landed on a post amphibious assault on the Georgian coast and once it is landed it was useless to resist anymore because the Georgian army risked to be surrounded so the strength of the Russian army is on the flat lands once they they are useless in the mountains they have a hard time fighting in the mountains but as you see the green shades those are flat lands those could be transversed very quickly very effectively by mechanized infantry so Georgia asked for peace and peace agreement was signed after five days of fighting the number of factors contributed to that why war ended so quickly number one Russian army wasn't ready and the Russians realized it themselves because a couple of entrepreneurial Georgian artillery commanders engaged the Russian forces and did significant damage to them Russian aircraft were shut down and they realized that the supply lines were not functioning historically Russian army supply lines are in terrible shape anyway so they were not ready and at the same time there was a forceful diplomatic intervention by United States so appeasement is actually a theoretical concept in international relations most people who think about appeasement think about Chamberlain and the Hitler it's not only that but western governments have pursued appeasement policies towards North Korea for instance US policy to Russia appeasement policy actually had a name it was called Reset presented by Secretary Clinton to foreign minister Lavrov on soon after the war was over so this is a wider view of the region the Russian objective here is to control the Black Sea that why had they been obsessed with Crimea and Georgia Sevastopol is the key is the key for Russian control over the Black Sea and the Mediterranean access to Mediterranean Sea one of the key documents that allowed appeasement policy to proceed both by Europe and the United States was this report published by the European Union a year after the war ended and actually blamed Georgia for attacking Russia inside Georgia and Georgia was blamed for opening of this war one of the Russia's objective just like now was demilitarization of Georgia and they have achieved this objective by not allowing or lobbying western powers not to rearm Georgia for self defense and one of the one of the most outrageous steps was Georgia resisted Russian accession to WTO World Trade Organization and the western partners press Georgian government to concede to allow Russia to become a member of the WTO if you imagine that so the idea was that Georgia started a war and the Russian army in about 30,000 of them were passing by and the Caucasus mountains just came across the border is incredible claim but that's what the European Union published in 2009 according to Russian sources they were in Georgia in August the 7th of 2008 and other sources claim that to be in Georgia just after midnight 2008 August 8th 2008 so here are some of the pictures this is a Russian accession to WTO you see this gentleman there holding a shirt mission accomplished George Bush's favorite words here is Mr. Lavrov with Mrs. Clinton holding a reset button which was misnamed in Russian in Russian actually it said overload instead of reset and that's why they're laughing so Lavrov's surprise was what are we overloading and they said well no it's not overload, it's reset okay and this is Mr. Medvedev and that was actually the caption he read successful reset button so in short reset policies started by outgoing Bush administration and continued by Clinton Trump didn't care about either Ukraine or Georgia and here we are so the war with Ukraine what changed what changed was that I think European friends finally realized that Russia is going west you see Georgia and Crimea they're south the west is different west is Europe so I think now they think themselves as the next target which is which is going to happen or sooner or later, thank you hello thank you all for being here I see classes changing right about now so we've heard some fascinating things today I do have a few follow-up questions if I could start please with Dr. Kaczyewski I noticed that in your talk the identity issue was really sort of the core and what I'm wondering is many years ago back in 1979 I was in Kiev and then went outside the city to a rather eerie forest where people had remembered their loved ones roughly 2 million people had died in a famine engineered by Stalin in Ukraine I mean and in this forest even then all those years later you could see these rotting wooden boards nailed to trees with the name of a loved one on it and it was quite ghostly, quite moving what I'm wondering is your view on the extent to which historical memory in Ukraine either impacts or does not impact the question of Ukrainian identity and if so the extent to which that is equally true in the Russian speaking areas can I have one at a time can you guys hear me okay great I'm writing a book on this so I'll have to remember to send you a copy when I finally finish it I think that historical memory is one of those key points kind of identity boundary that I have identified that is a sticking point with regional differences it's very difficult for example and I'm talking before the war I think now this is going to change my hypothesis is but that'll be a different book I think that it is very difficult for anyone who is above see the age of 30 35 to accept that Bandera is a national hero in Harkin this was difficult younger people saying okay you renamed the war it's no longer the great fatherland war it didn't go from 1941 to 1945 it started in 1939 no problem Western Ukraine was part of Poland then this is all a misunderstanding let's be open to some different interpretations but it's very difficult for people who have any historical connection to the war my grandfather fought to liberate and the red army to liberate us from the Nazis and those guys out there were traitors and I can't revisit that so there were certain pieces I think of historical memory that are difficult to get agreement on but that's not unique to Ukraine I mean we have regional differences in how we remember history in the United States as well so I do think that conversations about history are difficult the nation building project that I touched on which has focused very much on official interpretations of history Ukrainian language this this and this has not necessarily fit closely I think with where a lot of people in Odessa and particularly in Harkin where I did my studies fit I think now there might be a willingness to revisit some of those questions but Bandera seems a lot less menacing to the Ukrainian nation but definitely historical memory has been very it hits people in their heart it hits people where that is my family that you're talking about you know if you're old enough to have a grandparent who was alive during the war you still care about it I don't know if that answers your question No it does thank you very much I appreciate it and jumping now to Dr. Chan Toritsa I have actually been to the refugee camp on the supposed new border within Georgia along the military line that is guarded by Russian military and also heavily landmined this is after Russia grabbed Alpazia in South Assyria and I use the word grab as not really a term of art but you know what I mean and again like Ukraine Georgians have a really intense national identity and a culture that is truly ancient so on a sort of similar note I actually have two questions one given the strength of Georgian resolve and yet a sort of lack of western resolve if I might put it that way when it comes to Georgia my two questions are one is how important is the invisible aspect of Georgian resolve and history for example even under Stalin Georgia pushed back to preserve Georgian as the state language of Georgia even when it was a Soviet Republic so I'm wondering about the role of both western and Georgian resolve and also in your remarks if I understood correctly you seemed to be attributing a rather high level of rationality to Putin wanting to defeat NATO and so forth what I'm wondering is to what extent if any do you think that Putin's personality or ego might be playing a role here with the irrational goal of reinstituting the Russian Empire okay so about Georgian resolve Georgians have been around for a long time as you well know at the ballistic capital city Tbilisi was between the 7th and between the 8th and 11th century was held by the Arabs so the Georgians really undermined their rule and finally expelled them in the 11th century so 300 years and that was the 11th century so they can wait and they can they can outlive the Russians there is no question about it they're not going anywhere but in immediate in the immediate future they will likely remain on the Russian hill because Russia is not going anywhere so sorry what was your second the extent to which the personality or ego of Putin to want to reconstitute the Russian Empire no he doesn't want to reconstitute the Russian Empire that's a misconception he wants to get rid of NATO he wants to get rid of the so called unipolar world and Putin's rise to power starts from the war in Kosovo NATO Yugoslavia war when NATO attacked Yugoslavia claimed there was a genocide bombed Belgrade and other cities in Yugoslavia and that's when Stalin excuse me President Yeltsin was given an ultimatum either to resign find a replacement or face a coup by generals specifically General Ivochov and his body who actually organized the special operation to rescue Pristina Kosovo so that's when Mr. Putin was found as a head of the FSB he's one of his goals from the very beginning was to push NATO back to destroy NATO okay thank you for that I appreciate it and finally Dr. Gvozdev a quick question do you see any role for nation building in American foreign policy? I think that it needs to rest first on a strong domestic foundation of support I think that Americans have to be convinced that their own economic technological energy security rests upon the nation building enterprise obviously the United States since the end of the cold war been uninterested in nation building and large chunks of the world particularly sub-Saharan Africa and then in other places I think that in the Middle East there was a sense that this would be done relatively quickly and easily and then Americans soured on that experience and I think that's one reason why up till now this sense that the Russians were quote more successful in Syria was that they were explicitly not engaged in nation building they were engaged in regime survival moving forward your question also hits on something we're talking a lot about Ukraine today and Ukraine resistance and you can't find we had the governor here this morning talking about it and all of that the question is going to be the American domestic will to fund Ukrainian reconstruction with the same degree of fervor as providing military aid to Ukraine because that's going to be the critical question I mean even if the Russians leave tomorrow the damage that's been done in Ukraine the geoeconomic damage alone is pretty considerable and are you going to see Americans saying I'm happy to fund that and you know I mentioned this in a class of mine you know we watched the end of Charlie Wilson's war that really heartbreaking scene and Tom Hanks is playing Wilson and he's in the committee room and he's saying to everyone I want 100 million for schools and the rest of the committee says why do we want to build schools in Afghanistan he said you were willing to do half a billion for military aid but not to put that in and so I think that's going to be the real test because if we don't have that your question will be answered next year when the Ukraine Freedom Reconstruction Act is stalled in committee and doesn't move and Georgia has already experienced this poor Moldova which got stuck under Jackson Vanick for 20 years and couldn't escape it because that bill could never leave committee so I say the jury is out on that thank you very much thank you all for such a rich and thought provoking conversation I would like to now we have about 10 minutes left and I'd like to invite anyone from the audience who'd like to ask a question of the panel please come down to the microphones right here and what we'll do is given the short amount of time I'd like to have maybe the first few people who can ask a question ask a question panelists will think about it we'll field another couple of questions and then we'll let the panelists tackle them all as a concluding comment on this session so please come on down to ask a question of our panelists and as we're waiting for that I also just want to invite other panelists so Professor Chaldise, thank you so much for just starting the conversation and I want to invite our other panelists to answer questions that Professor Chaldise directed to others so if you heard a question that she asked and you really want to take it up please feel free and you can think about that and let's start here and then we'll go here this question is for Dr. Vozdev you said that in Syria the Russians were using a lot of militia but the reason for that was to provide plausible deniability and to distance themselves from the inevitable casualties that did come my question though what did that actually look like in Russia when hundreds of Russian backed militias died it was portrayed as this is the life they've chosen this is the business they've chosen they knew the risks, they took the job it may be regrettable for the mothers and the families but it was not seen as something where Russian honor had to be avenged if they had been with the patch and regular members that pressure might have been greater that has been an important part of others is the public perception is dangerous work heroic perhaps but that's the profession that they've chosen and they knew the risks going in so that's one reason we've seen now in Ukraine the shift now towards moving back towards militias and mercenaries as opposed to certainly to conscripts as a basis for moving forward so because there is that and by the way we see that in the U.S. as well we don't treat the deaths of contractors as the same level as members of the volunteer force and I think the Russians internalize that so can I ask a follow up? could come over here first and then stay right there please, thank you go ahead first of all excuse my English not my mother's language excuse my English if it's wrong with the fall of the USSR we've seen the fall also of the Warsaw Pact and on the other side NATO continued existing not only did it continue existing but it kept expanding as so my question is do you feel like we failed to understand the Russian perception of NATO as a threat or as kind of failed to understand their vital territory that they have to preserve or that NATO is just for them not necessary for the defense or the international I can think of that it's a long complicated answer so I don't need to talk for a long time I think that the problem that we have is that from the western perspective NATO has written into the treaty this concept of an open door which says European countries if you want to join and you meet this criteria this is a possibility and to say that oh European countries you can do that unless somebody else vetoes your sovereign decision is sort of saying not everybody is sovereign and that's against western sort of I think value system and so there's that from the one side I think also from the western perspective we view NATO as a defensive alliance and it's not at all designed or intending to attack Russia and so therefore there's no problem with enlargement from the Russian side however it's quite different and I think that part of the problem is Russians really really believe and this may or may not be true because the Americans have denied it and denied it and denied it but in the end it doesn't matter if it's true or not because everybody in Russia believes everybody in Russia believes that when Gorbachev agreed a reunified Germany could remain in NATO that they were promised NATO would not expand so whether or not we made that promise and the Americans have sworn up and down that that's not true it's not true it's not true the Russians think it's true and the fact that they think it's true is that they believe that they have somehow been tricked or you know they made the mistake to agree about Germany and therefore they've got very strong suspicions about NATO the problem is how do you address Russian suspicions without violating the integrity of the principle of having a defensive alliance and so I think that this is where we find ourselves but certainly from the Russian perspective this is very problematic and the Baltic states more than ever I don't know if you wanted to add just briefly I mean look part of the problem with NATO enlargement back that up not a problem one of the ways it was pitched differently to three different constituencies so it was pitched to Western Europeans as this is no problem because Russia is either finished as a great power or it won't care it was pitched to the American taxpayer as all these new members are going to come in and America will pay less and the countries coming into NATO said we know our history we know that there are cycles of rise and fall in the east and we want to be on the right side of the line because the line will come back again and politically squaring that was the issue by 2002 and this is the road not taken we had both with NATO and the EU mechanisms for relationship with Russia the NATO-Russia Council and then the EU wider neighborhood the four common spaces with Russia for a variety of reasons the Russian in trans-agents in some areas Europeans and Americans not taking it as seriously as they might of those roads for kind of squaring the circle were lost I mean I would argue in 2003 we had opportunities to perhaps move this in a different direction and partly that had to do with the US decision to go into Iraq which created rifts in the trans-Atlantic relationship and distracted the US from European security because we said it's done and we thought it would be a good idea to move the border under the bridge now but for those who say this is inexorable because in the first panel the Meersheimer question came up which leaving that aside the idea that this was inexorable from 1991 we could only get to where we are in 2022 no we had many ways in which this could have handled and some of it is and the blame goes around it's no one Washington is another and Western European kind of indifference to some of these issues is a third I have one tiny thing I know we're really short on time and let's not forget that Kosovo right so we had the NATO Russia Council and then we decided to bomb Serbia without talking to Russia so Russia is like who cares about the NATO Russia Council I mean honestly if you're going to make strategic decisions without discussing it thank you let's come back here on the Russian militia again so how does the relationship look like between the Russian military leaders who are commanding the war and the employment of militias like the Wagner group well in Syria and one reason why the Russian military was willing to let Wagner get whacked the way that they did was that the general staff was really ticked off at some of the things Wagner was doing and we're happy to let the American Air Force teach Wagner a lesson whether you have those rivals what we see today in Ukraine if these reports are correct that the rivalry between the FSB and Kadyrov's people that the employment of the Chechen groups in Ukraine has led to a if we take this report that elements of the FSB tipped off Zelensky through their contacts in the SBU that a Chechen hit squad was coming for Zelensky and enabled that to be ambushed there's tension right because this also reflects we had Tom is the famous author of the clans but within the security and military services there are clans there are rivalries and they're not all necessarily one big happy family so yeah, Wagner and Pudigorshin's people some people in the military said he's getting too big for his britches and he's trying to take control of some Syrian oil assets so we're going to withdraw that protective air cover over him and let him take the 400 guys getting shwhacked there in eastern Syria I wonder if we could official military term we have about a minute left I wonder if Professor Chanderise if you care to comment on any of those questions or conversations thank you I appreciate that my perspective is different than the experts on the panel here I look at things from a human rights point of view and I wonder to what extent the US may again step up and sort of actively candidly profess to morality within its foreign policy this is not really responsive to any particular question but I do think it's relevant to imaging that the US once again take the position of defending the defenders that is those people within countries who are risking death by torture every day for the greater good to defend the rights of others the rights of strangers on a for what it's worth basis I predict that President Biden perhaps quite soon will in fact reincorporate that into American policy which is something we haven't really seen since the 70's on a final note in regard to Ukraine there are also many Russian refugees hundreds of thousands at this point who are fleeing Russia because of the risk they are at by the way if you use the word war in relation to Ukraine within Russia you can get up to a 15 year sentence for calling that nasty little conflict a war so I would hope that people will also be alert to the impact within Russia of its own aggression against Ukraine thank you everyone please join me in thanking our panelists for this wonderful conversation thank you all for coming no right how about now folks great okay so I'm ashamed to admit this given how long it just took me to set up the audio here my name is Dr. Hugh Reed and I'm a professor of digital forensics here at Norwich University so the irony of having someone with computers coming up and sharing sharing things so it is my utmost pleasure to be able to chair this session with you this afternoon with some very exciting papers that transcend not only the geopolitical arena but also a lot of the cyber security space as well so I'm really looking forward to hearing what our presenters have to say so without further ado please allow me to introduce our first presenters we have Dr. Kozirev who is an expert in comparative politics strategic studies and foreign policy in Eurasia his major interest is great power politics east-west relations, international conflict and the political economy of regionalism and regional integration at present he is professor of political science and international studies at Endicott College in Beverly, Massachusetts he is also affiliated with the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies at Harvard University and as associate in research joining him up here is also Dr. Goldstein who is director of Asia Engagement at Defense Priorities formally for 20 years he served as research director at the US Naval War College his expertise includes maritime security and nuclear security issues with major focus also recently including the Arctic and the Korean Peninsula he holds a doctorate from Princeton an MA from Johns Hopkins SAIS and a BA from Harvard and is currently a visiting professor from Brown University so please allow me to join me in giving him a round of applause inviting them up to share their research or so Chinese strategic partnership of a new type of strategic dimension thank you it's a special privilege for us to both Professor Goldstein and myself to present at this amazing forum and we would like to express our gratitude to president Dr. Morris the colleagues at the John and Mary Francis Patons Peace and War Center for this unique opportunity especially given the topic and actually the importance of the questions we are discussing today General Weidner this morning formulated one key task for the current of future strategic planners which he actually stressed as contestation with Russia and China is global both in scope and in character once again one secret contestation with the United States has been for the Russian and Chinese leadership has been already global in scope and nature for a minimum for a decade or so so our paper is devoted to the security partnership and the security dimension of the strategic partnership between Russia and China and it examines the project of the potential Russian Chinese alliance in the security alliance and Professor Graham actually referred to this this morning as well and we have tried to answer the three questions raised in our actually paper so one question is to what extent we may consider the current crisis as a turning point in this important relationship kind of mask off now revealing the real strategic goals and instruments in Russia's and China's contestation with the United States and what is the future direction of this partnership might look like second question is what is the nature of this alliance like relationship that we are seeing having being formed now and third question is the prospect of new Chinese Russian security alliance and would this alliance prompt the United States to prepare for a two front conflict in the future that also some of the panelists this morning also referred to this the paper actually is divided into three parts three sections the first section tries to examine the geopolitical new reality characterized by the US exit from China and the rise of non-western actors the second section is devoted to the character of the Russian-Chinese partnership with no limits or friendship with no limits or friendship or partnership of a new type as they actually characterize this and the third section is devoted to implication to some study of implications the implications for strategic planning and missile defense of like space cyber cooperation and research and development cooperation and also economic industrial integration so our major argument goes to the point that the Russian-Chinese actually partnership has already passed certain you know like kind of a broiling point and now they are at the stage of changing attitudes to a new proactive behavior so if only like four years ago this partnership China and Russia try to actually be active in those areas where actually the United States was trying to withdraw and especially after the US withdrawal from Afghanistan Russian-Chinese partnership found out that it could be probably doing some more and making this semi-aligned quasi-aligned more you know proactive second point is the shift from the global collective partnership mantra which actually Russia and China had been advocating for some time to taming a non-cooperative America by accumulating some critical mass of global systemic influence to leave America no choice but cooperate this enforces straightforward counterbalancing strategy of Russia and China their partnership is gaining a new momentum strategic security issues have moved to the center of this quasi-aligns and we have been talking for a long time pretty long time that actually the relationship between China and Russia had been based for a long time on mostly political kind of mutual understanding rather than economic understanding so now we have the enhanced security aspect of this a new era of counterbalancing against the Western dominance means that from previous practice of delegating responsibilities to each other in their respective regions toward a possibly backing each other in all aspects of security we have described the operational context I just put place the major dimensions of how Russia and China are looking at the situation and the global environment and there are a few points here five points the thesis of destructive America which America is seen as agonizing and declining hegemony acting irrationally and unpredictably the second point is the so called Russia and China's savior nations trying to actually secure global stability third point is that the American demonization thesis of Russia as in China with their political system as actually hurting or threatening the American domestic political institutions political system and values fourth point is so called instrumentalism especially after the Trump U.S. had to address the problem of western solidarity and by demonizing Putin and Xi the United States modified the foreign policy has become instrumental for restoring western unity and securing domestic bipartisan consensus and the fifth point which is seen and actually interpreted by the Russian and Chinese leadership is the problem of crisis management now under the current circumstances in the crumbling world order neither liberal originally cooperative or institutions based means nor classical bipolarity era deterrence mechanisms properly work to manage the crisis we've actually sorted out laid out some pillars of the more than an alliance partnership which in these pillars include the danger of America's desperate attempt to safeguard global supremacy these are kind of drivers which inform the Russian and Chinese actions the so called thesis about the power value dichotomy in U.S. behavior and the need to dismiss America's block mentality logic this power values dichotomy we described in the paper which means that it's actually the Chinese theory that despite actually the increase in power and when a country becomes a great power and it doesn't necessarily must should not necessarily be converted into some sort of aggressive behavior so the values should dictate and inform some restraint of a great power that's what actually China is trying to do the imperative to foster multi-polarity and manage great power relationship under the auspices of the United Nations advocating the international order and the Russian-Chinese campaign again Western rules based order especially the such elements of this rules-based order actually conserved which go to commitment-based order and sovereignty as responsibility of governments before their populations sign a Russian self-perceived role of global peacemakers mentioned this and advocates of economic globalization and strategic complementarity within the framework of loose alignment a couple of quotes just telling us that this the current stage of rapprochement is mostly dreaming by the fear of war one of the presidential advisors and very respectable actually pundit in Russia Sergey Karaganov quoted in 2018 Russia and China need a joint strategy to strengthen peace there is no need to wait for someone's attack the threat of war is in the air and one of just couple of weeks ago just tried to explain the war with Ukraine which was unavoidable conflict with the West is just beginning it's not the end of the conflict right and three aspects, three areas of security challenges we actually were paying attention to and I hope my colleague Professor Galtsin will elaborate more on this the prospect of strategic stability and I just posted the major points there the problem of economic security and these are also the drivers of like joint and enhanced cooperation between the two parties and especially the problem of cultural security and we had some panelists earlier mentioned the actually impact or possible threat of the western political institutions and values to the actually the regimes political regimes which was established in both Russia and China and I'm passing the floor to my colleague, thank you thank you so much it's a real honor to be here I'll be trying to show you some of the evidence that we're seeing including on the the Ukraine conflict this evidence will be adding to the paper it's not, most of it is not in there yet but here you see I watched Chinese military TV basically every night and I can tell you that it's very favorable toward Russia whether talking about this threat from NATO so called or here they're showing kind of Russian weaponry that's been captured in the lower left or precision strikes so called in the lower right and destroyed Ukraine tank but I think it's fortuitous to have had deputy of strategic command here the general this morning I think he gave us a wonderful introduction here because he I think elaborated on the very extensive Chinese nuclear buildup that we're now seeing and we assess that this Chinese buildup may well have Russian characteristics and here are some of the evidence to suggest that Russia has been, sorry China is sort of learning at the knee Russia and just taking in all kinds of information including about very, you know, kind of esoteric doctrinal principles like on the lower right about using the use of interference buoys to egress your so called boomers but look on the upper right that's an Iskander seems to be very, that weapon I think, I fear is probably on the minds of the deputy of Stratcom but if China goes in for that kind of approach to nuclear weapons I think we're all in trouble but, you know, just to outline here what China is doing and how this could be impacted by Russia-China relations you see some discussion of the buildup why they're undertaking this buildup but I want to emphasize and this is the same article from a very prestigious institution in China but you look on the lower on the top left there how it's he's explaining that, you know, China doesn't have the enormous striking nuclear striking power that Russia has so you begin to see that maybe this is what they aspire to and indeed that's what the article kind of lays out and we see that across Chinese sources now but here you can see them drawing on that perspective of the Cold War and also thinking about tactical nuclear weapons as you can see we can talk more about those but what we see is that Russia and China seem to be coalescing not only in their perspective but taking concrete actions on the right you see an article in Skled where they were discussing the implications of early warning cooperation and these Russian strategists are outlining, sorry I don't have the quotes there but I can refer you to them, but they're outlining how useful this actually is for Russia not just for China and then there's talk about working together in the Arctic even going so far say maybe, you know, Chinese submarines could base out of the Arctic so that, you know, I wouldn't say that's going to be a possibility in the future but we can't rule it out but here's some more evidence just how closely their views align here you have Chinese strategists saying gosh we need all of these tactical nuclear weapons that Russia has also and on the right you see a discussion of their very, very closely aligned positions on missile defense I know we've had some discussion of George already today, well here's a Chinese battle map of George and this should, I put this up to remind their hands on these kind of after action assessments, right including in Ukraine, so I think that's going to be a factor going forward, they want to know what's going on so that they can improve their own forces and one more point I want to make, we've talked a lot about NATO here today but not about China and NATO but here, this is, I took this screenshot in 2017, they're talking about the Korean crisis actually but you can already see China not having a very good feeling for NATO and that has only grown worse so that's a factor too but let me summarize here with our kind of final takeaways here we see this as a kind of tacit alliance or quasi-alliance we call it, we think it's both deep and broad we do see a fundamental convergence of world views we kind of think Russia is sort of a corner secondary power but that this could be kind of a turning point in their convergence as well and I would say we think Russia more or less has to accept its junior status and then there's this question, I'll just end on this point because it's quite interesting although I think it's still quite speculative this issue of Russian military of China's potential military assistance to Russia and I would say we've already seen some concrete signs that this probably won't happen that is, you know, the Chinese have denied it pretty forcefully but if it were to come about we might understand why, oh there's my timer here, just one more point I'd say to test equipment to learn those battlefield lessons to gain market share and to earn credit of course for a Taiwan scenario and last but least, you know, to our estimate China is not ready to watch Russia be defeated and we'll try to prevent its collapse, whether it can prevent its collapse is unknown but they will try to our estimate thank you very much incredible food for thought ladies and gentlemen Up next I have the very distinct pleasure of introducing Dr Maninikian who teaches national security and homeland defense as well as graduate level courses in intelligence, disaster assistance management national security affairs and terrorism. Maninikian received her BA in Russian from Wellesley College and a master philosophy from Oxford University in the United Kingdom and holds both an MA and a PhD in political science from the University of Michigan. She is taught at the joint forces staff college in Norfolk and is a former US foreign services officer with service in the Netherlands, Russia and Bulgaria. Let me just switch the paper here for you and we'll be up and running. We're all set. Excellent. Thank you so much for the kind invitation to speak to all of you it's always great to be back at Norwich again. The last time I spoke here I also spoke about disinformation and that was seven years ago in another conference and so when I found myself thinking about this topic I found myself kind of asking that question about continuity and change what has changed in disinformation and what is the same. So what I'd like to do in the paper today is if I don't run out of time do four things just briefly tell you what disinformation is and then I want to talk about some of the technological issues. I want to describe this notion of technological affordances and explain what it is about the internet today, what it is about the environment that makes I think disinformation so much more effective than it's really ever been in the past. We know that the Russians are masters of disinformation and they've used it for years but now they're using it much more effectively and they're using it in a much more targeted way. I'll give you some examples of old disinformation and new information and I'll really compare and contrast the two. I wrote this paper kind of before Ukraine blew up and so I'm not going to be talking about Ukraine I'll give you a little bit of a break I actually what I wanted to do was to think about two different cases where Russia has been involved in basically a medical crisis and the first example is something called Operation Denver which occurred in 1983 back then the Soviet Union Soviet intelligence ceded disinformation mostly through a newspaper in South Africa that they had a relationship with called The Patriot and they ceded this lie that the AIDS virus had been created as a biological weapon at Fort Detrick in Maryland with cooperation with the CIA and that it was a racist bio weapon which was specifically engineered against people in Africa and the developing world and so I wanted to compare that with kind of lies that they're ceding today having to do with COVID is it the same story or is it a different story and what makes it different and I argue that today disinformation is segmented we can actually identify about 16 different kind of themes and variations having to do with COVID and who created it and who's lying and who's telling the truth versus kind of the one sort of big lie that came out in 1983 and the other reason that disinformation is so different today is because back then it was pretty much linear it was you sort of you were an intel guy you kind of wind and dine the editor of this newspaper that you'd basically been supporting for all these years so there was a heavy investment there was a heavy financial investment in creating this kind of seed that was then going to send this disinformation message out and the thing is that I refer to it as dumb information as opposed to smart information that basically it was almost like a psychological operation and you were flying a plane over an area and you were dropping something leaflet out of a plane you don't actually know who's going to pick up that leaflet you don't know whether or not they're going to read it and you don't know so much what they're going to do with that information whereas today we have a lot more analytical tools to see who's actually reading a tweet or an Instagram post or a Facebook post and whether they're liking it or retweeting it and what are their specific characteristics what do we know about the purchase that that idea is actually having so that's kind of what I want to kind of take you through briefly so disinformation is just false information about a country's military strength or plans disseminated by a government or intelligence agency in a hostile act of tactical political subversion so it's information that's deliberately misleading but whether we're talking about 1983 or whether we're talking about today often there's some kind of grain of truth or some form of kind of pre-existing conspiracy, conspiratorial thought that people might have that that disinformation then latches on to so if you were someone in South Africa in 1983 you might know that the United States had a race problem right they'd had race riots so to then say sort of you know the US government created this weapon for racial reasons it wouldn't be totally outside the realm of possibility you know probably 99% it's wrong but there's some grain of truth that they're able to build on so that's the same whether that's 1983 or whether that's today the idea that disinformation is primarily about subversion it's a system of calling the values and principles of a system kind of into questions so that idea that it's about kind of degrading the legitimacy of an adversary sort of the Soviet Union in 1983 wanted to degrade the legitimacy of the United States by saying see they're not really a democracy they're creating a racist bioweapon and furthermore they're lying and that can be very much true today as well so I start with this picture and if anybody's ever worked at the Pentagon they've heard this before they use this expression they use it a lot they say when all you've got is a hammer everything looks like a nail essentially what that means is if you have one type of weapon you're going to be predisposed to do certain things and there are going to be other things that maybe you're not going to do as well with that weapon so when we think about the technological affordances designed today that sort of create disinformation and help us to disseminate it the idea is that certain constraints exist and as I said what you can do is a function of the tools you have available another term that's really important when we think about disinformation today is this idea of emerging technologies and emerging technology is something that's going to have vast political, economic, and social significance and it's often very unpredictable and if you read my whole paper I talk a lot about something called customer relations management software and software is a service that you subscribe to that's created by basically you're outsourcing your customer relations management, your database management your mailing list things like that to someone outside your organization and they often store your data as well and what I argue in this paper is customer relations management software allows you to create a list of users people who have engaged with you and your product you can track their engagement with you and their product and at the end of it you could sell them sneakers or you could sell them a lie about US foreign policy you can use the same software to do both things so it's a dual use technology and when we talk about customer relations software as an emerging technology nobody ever really thought people are going to use this to schedule disinformation posts one thing that's really important is the fact that the people that have created this didn't intend for it to be used as this purpose and as a result as the general talked about this morning he said you know that there are these security risks that are coming about that commercial and private companies need to be drawn into this conversation about security and this is a really good example of the ways in which companies need to be aware and they need to be doing more to kind of fight how this software and things like that are being used last week there was an article about how this company Salesforce was called in by the January 6th commission in Washington and it was because someone had used Salesforce to create a list of people to invite them to the insurrection and one thing is if you do the ethical training on Salesforce there's a lot of stuff about money laundering but there's actually nothing about you know people might attempt to use this software to organize an insurrection because that was really an unintended consequence so the social media environment has easy cost of entry it's really cheap to get an account anyone can play it's non hierarchical we have this thing called the epistemology problem everybody's opinion appears to be equally valid so I have this little cartoon here last week everybody was saying oh so you know you gave up your PhD in epidemiology and now you're a Sovietologist right this idea that everybody's sort of an expert in whatever the topic of the day is this idea of the attribution problem often stuff shows up online we're not really sure where it came from lately a lot of the Russian disinformation appears to be coming from Portugal I have no idea why and finally this idea of the four V's associated with big data velocity how quickly information changes online, veracity, the difficulty of knowing whether or not it's true the great volume and the great variety so in other words there's a huge attack surface today for disinformation back in 1983 it was basically a newspaper and today it can be any number of different types of social media the reason I have a picture here of porch furniture is again I want you to remember just like a lot of this software can be used to sell your piece of porch furniture it can also be used to sell you disinformation today we talk about sort of the democratization of social media as well that has nothing to do with sort of democracy as a form of government really what it means is you no longer need a PhD in computer science to perform a lot of these activities online and one thing that we're starting to see more and more it's not only can you use something like commercial customer relations management software but you can use an add-on that has artificial intelligence added in the artificial intelligence components can run an analysis they can see which of your various messages are the most effective and then they can go on and they can basically boost the most effective messages for you and so we could be moving towards a future where disinformation is happening and there is no human in the loop it's possible that there can be an algorithm that's choosing the most effective messages and it's boosting those the most quickly the other thing about this when I talk about democratization is the idea that adding this AI to your messaging program really can be done by anyone it's not terribly complicated to use a lot of these programs now so when I say that we have smart disinformation today I really mean three things we think about smart weapons they often have these three characteristics they're remote guided you don't need to be in the place where the kinetic activity is taking place and in the same way you don't need to be in the same place where the disinformation is taking place they're precision guided you can choose often a pre-existing group of people who are going to be particularly predisposed to reach your message so for example when we think about COVID one thing that's different about the disinformation there is Russian disinformation merchants trying to sell you that lie they specifically reached out to groups that had already indicated that maybe they were vaccine refusers so they were able to find groups that they could then message in and kind of attach their messages to so in this way we have this sort of kind of symbiotic or parasitical relationship with other groups that might provide particularly fertile soil for that message so you no longer just kind of throw in those seeds into the air you're choosing specific targets and then finally this idea that just like a smart weapon is dynamic it can change its trajectory in mid course as it gets more information that's true as smart disinformation as well what we see and we can track even with the recent Ukraine is ways in which sort of the Russians are changing their messaging they're maybe kind of throwing out a theme it's not working particularly well and so instead they're choosing a different one so here are just some quick slides and I got all of these from a website called socialbearing.com if you'd like to look at this stuff it's fun we can see here a hashtag of hashtags that kind of often appear together and so if you look for sort of who used Biden's war and the way they used it you can see how it was sort of piggybacked on to existing messaging and you can also see that half of these tags were in Castilian Spanish which seems a little unusual so this may have been some form of a buy of bots or something like that occurring this interesting hashtag not in my name which appears to be used by Russia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs they want people to say it's not my war they want Americans to say I don't want to okay I'll finish up contribute to the war in Ukraine the way in which this hashtag has been sort of dumped on to other existing conversations and so as we said it is also dynamic and then finally this idea of sentiment analysis it's possible to look at unstructured data on the web using a variety of programs to figure out whether the tweets are favorable or unfavorable and kind of which way the wind is blowing so this information today it's a lot more dynamic it's a lot more fast moving and it appears often to be a lot more effective so thank you for your time thank you very much for our third presentation in this afternoon's session I have the pleasure of introducing Dr. Shanesh who is a Murray Sklodowsky Accurie Actions Research Fellow the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology Central European University Vienna in Austria she is currently hosted by the Peace and War Center as a visiting scholar and is a senior fellow at the Center for Global Resilience and Security at Norwich University she holds a PhD in systemic functional linguistics from the University of Sydney her most recent work investigates Russian disinformation campaigns on Twitter and the links between climate change and violent extremism joining her is Mr. Perry who is a research associate with the Norwich University Mary Frances Patten Peace and War Center his research interests include Information Warfare, International Migration and Social Cybersecurity Mark Holds a Master of Arts in International Policy and Development from the Middlebury Institute of International Studies in Monterey, California thank you if I could invite you to the podium folks okay first of all I'd like to thank all the organizers of this conference for obviously organizing a very timely conference and for giving us the chance to present our research here today we are both very honored to do so we're one slide ahead here so today we'll be discussing weaponizing the Syrian Civil War, Russia's Twitter war on terror now Dr. Sinesh and I have come to this problem set in part by recognizing a gap in the way many researchers are looking at information warfare on one side we have this rapidly booming number of studies leveraging computational linguistics and data science methodologies to identify the key themes, topics phrases, sentiments and network characteristics of misinformation online however many of these findings are not then connected to how information functions as part of coordinated information operations and their strategic purposes on the other side of this gap we have this established and very robust body of literature discussing Russia's strategic doctrine of information warfare and how it's waged around the world but many of these studies do not then show how the strategy is manifested in real data happening in real time so in order to try to thread this needle we approach the subject to analyze the linguistic anatomy of Russian information warfare on Twitter such that what is being said can be better connected to what's said and what its strategic import could be so first research question here how did Russia frame its own involvement in the Syrian Civil War secondly how did Russia portray the international coalitions involvement as led by the United States and following this we'll have a discussion as to how tactics and strategy in the information space appears to connect to kinetic operations on the ground so the data on the information side we have a corpus of tweets accessed from Twitter's information operations archive in this case we have a hundred accounts comprising of accounts linked reliably to the Russian GRU and internet research agency which were banned that then subsequently released to researchers in this archive something important to say about these is that they are covert and unattributed meaning they're not attributed to the Russian state but rather their troll accounts pretending to be real people on the ground, journalists observers here we see the key statistics of our data we have over 50,000 tweets close to 2 million words and this is all between 2016 and 2020 on the kinetic operation side our data comes from the armed conflict event and location data project it's an open source data source for which we can filter by time period so we're matching up 2017 to 2020 in both of these analyses and we can also filter by actor primary targets and event types such as battles violence against civilians, riots strategic developments etc so with that I'll hand off to Dr. Sinesh to introduce our linguistic methodologies and analysis thank you Mark so professor I'd like to pick up on your comment previously you describe what happened in Syria on the ground so our perspective today is to describe what happened in the information space simultaneously so we'd like to bring a linguistic perspective that often is missing from the study of information warfare maybe except for computational linguistics and sentiment analysis studies and we hope that we can show you how linguistic analysis can offer quite fruitful framework for the study of information operations our methodology is called corpus assisted appraisal and cluster analysis but today we don't have time to introduce you to the entire framework so we only focus on the corpus linguistic methodology which enables automated quantitative analysis of linguistic data to process really large data sets and it also enables qualitative analysis of language in its context so the software that we use is called sketch engine and you see all these different functionalities which I don't have time to explain today we'll focus on what's called word list and concordance analysis so typically the first step in processing a really large data set with corpus linguistic methodology is to search for the top 10 or 20 most frequent words in the corpus the software also gives you a frequency per million count which means that in every one million words a particular expression on word is mentioned that many times so in this in our data set we found basically four semantic categories that concern the United States Russia and then you see references to people and civilians and also to terrorists and militants so we wanted to explore especially these four semantic categories in further detail so the four clusters that we found concern the human collectives of terrorists and civilians and the collective entities of the United States and Russia and now we're going to show you some actual examples from the data set to see how Russia portrays the involvement of the United States in the Syrian conflict and how they portray their own involvement so the next step in corpus linguistic analysis after performing big data searches typically includes concordance analysis which means that we can search for the most frequent words so in this case we perform the wildcard search for the words militant and terrorists that have more than 3000 hits in the data set the asterisk means that we can search for different forms of the same word whether it's singular or plural we can search for references and synonyms so if the data set includes lots of references to different terrorist groups like ISIS for example that can be included in the search we can input a list of search terms into the software and find all the references to them so another function that we typically use when we do concordance analysis is this advanced context filter function which means that we can filter the context for a particular entity in this case we filter the context of the tweets for the United States and that includes several references like you can see highlighted here in these illustrative examples like Russians referring to the United States as the Americans the US military base US military instructors the United States US intelligence agencies and a range of references to the US what we identified when searching for militants and terrorists and their synonyms and references filters for the context of the United States is that the verbs trained and recruit kept coming up over and over again so basically the first message that we identified as an information tactic is that the United States is recruiting and training militants and terrorist groups in Syria imagine this I'm only showing you selected concordance lines but this strategy was recurring in thousands and thousands of tweets in the data set so the second information tactic relates to the United States killing civilians we perform the same kind of analysis searching for wildcard searches including references to civilians population, Syrians people etc etc and filtering the context for the United States we identified that the one verb that kept coming up constantly was killed and again this is based on thousands and thousands of tweets so the second information tactic that Russia deployed in this information war in the context of the Syrian Civil War portrays the United States as a civilian killer the way we do data analysis using corpus linguistics methodology is that we move from the quantitative data to the qualitative data and then back so then after finding these two clusters we reprocess the data set with the word sketch function of sketch engine so you can see that the verb kill had more than 1300 hits in the data set and this verb collocates most frequently oops sorry with the word civilian and people and again filters for the context of the United States these three confirms are finding previously that we found based on the qualitative analysis now quantitatively so then we moved on to looking at tweets that portrayed Russia in a certain light and their involvement in Syria in this case again we searched for the words militant and terrorist but this time we filtered the context for Russia and the old synonyms Russians used to describe themselves you can see here Russian Aerospace Forces Russian Air Force Russian Air Defense Systems so often they talk a lot about their capabilities and then filtering the context for Russia the verb that kept coming up in relation to the keywords militants and terrorists is destroyed and killed and eliminated so you see here examples like Russian Aerospace Forces killed dozens of militants and then they list different geographical locations for example so this was the third information tactic that we identified in Russian Information Warfare in the context of the Syrian Civil War Russia portrays its own involvement as the ones that killed the militants and the terrorists and in fact they entered the Syrian Civil War saying that or claiming that they are fighting international terrorism we rerun the data set using the quantitative analysis again so we found that the verb eliminate for example collocates mostly the words terrorist gunman groups mercenaries etc so these three confirms again how Russia is portraying itself as the killer of terrorists in Syria and the final information tactic that we'd like to show you today is how Russia portrays its involvement when it comes to the local Syrian population so when we performed wildcard searches for civilians and refugees local Syrian population filtering the context again for Russia we found that one word that kept coming up in thousands and thousands of tweets was the word humanitarian so we were interested to see that result like what Russia got to do with anything humanitarian so here you can see examples like the Russian military provided humanitarian aid to the people of Islam in Homs and this was the fourth information tactic that we identified and then when we performed the final quantitative analysis searching for the word humanitarian you can see it most often collocates with the word aid convoy assistance catastrophe corridor crisis intervention etc etc so when trying to summarize our findings we called the information tactics that Russia used to portray the United States as a sort of in a line that shows the moral inferiority of the United States as terrorist recruiters and civilian killers and you see that these information tactics can be realized by recurring linguistic patterns saying the same thing over and over again so terrorist recruiter is realized by direct mentions of the United States recruiting and training militants and terrorists a point I want to make here is that in these information tactics the name of the United States is always put up front there is no doubt about the actor who is named in these information tactics the same strategies used for civilian killer the US is killing X number of civilians this was the same recurring linguistic pattern in the dataset and in contrast Russia is portraying itself as morally superior to the United States and also militarily more capable because they are the ones that destroy and kill militants and terrorists they are the terrorist layers and they are also morally superior because of their humanitarian intervention so we named this fourth information tactic Russia the Humanitarian and now I am handing back over to Mark to sum up thank you Esther now these information tactics continue to possess a bit of strategic ambiguity perhaps when seeing only information space but when we consider what Russia was pursuing on the ground, kinetically at the time clear image emerges the first thing to note here the top chart here shows the main targets of Russian military intervention over time the array indicates terrorist targets blue, civilian and orange other opposition groups and we can see right away that despite the information tactics claiming Russia was in steered to fight terrorism terrorism remained a consistently minimal focus of the operation as opposed to civilians and other armed opposition groups and these first two Russian centric information tactics align with initial ramp up periods in 2017 and later in 2019 and the humanitarian tactic in 2017 even appears to lag slightly behind increases in civilian targeting which would align with what NATO strategic communications would call perhaps Russia's fog of falsehood attempts to obfuscate civilian casualties likewise while one and two appeared as force justifying tactics and ramp up phases three and four America centric tactics continue rather progressively over time and interestingly enough in late 2018 and early 2019 when there's a sustained lull in operations during a sustained demilitarization agreement between Russia and Turkey we see these two information tactics take over and from then on they remain the dominant information tactics I'll try to wrap this up quickly here with this context and minds we consider information tactics to cluster into two strategic narratives that in turn align with established strategic aims of the Kremlin in the international competition space firstly Russia tries to project itself as a global superpower that's Russia's superpower strategic narrative which is realized in our data through tactics one and two and likewise they also seek to undermine the influence of the west in the international competition space realized by tactics three and four and so what are your conclusions what is our research have to do and what can it do in the broader field of information warfare study firstly again as our colleague at the naval war college noticed Russia didn't have to be everywhere physically and I would suggest perhaps at least in part that may have been helped by them being aggressively present in the information space and when they're in the information space constructing these narratives they create these virtual realities that enable the pursuit of kinetic objectives often in direct contrast to how events are framed in the information space secondly we see consistent discrepancies between claims targets and actual targets that's a consistent and complementary relationship there and thirdly if we think about how this has implications for Ukraine we continue to see Russian information warfare make use of these diametrically opposed symbols of innocent civilians and violent extremists be they terrorists or neo-nazis in their narratives and again although it's anecdotal at this point we could even say that the sequence appears similar where troop build up and initial invasion ramp up seems to align with these force justifying tactics that frame the Russian invasion as protecting against protecting innocent civilians against neo-nazis and potential genocide and we again see consistent discrepancies between claims neo-nazi targets and actual often civilian targets lastly future research because our information tactics and strategic narratives are fundamentally made up of recurring linguistic patterns we believe there's strong potential for future research to construct models that can recognize and detect emerging strategies and tactics as they emerge in real time and secondly we hope that our research can contribute to pushing information warfare scholarship closer to social cyber security perspectives meaning the focus is on targets that are human and social rather than strictly informational and infrastructural in the cyberspace so with that we look forward to hearing questions and comments thank you very much ladies and gentlemen at this point I would like to invite our discussant Dr. Mark Parker to come up and share his comments on what he's observed from the three wonderful presentations this afternoon Dr. Parker is an associate dean of continuing studies and associate professor of interdisciplinary studies he received his bachelor's and master's degrees from Florida State University and his PhD from the University of Maryland Baltimore County his area of specialization is technology, mediated communication in education and the workplace thank you Dr. Parker and I would like to express my thanks to all of the scholars who are on our panel today both for the terrific research that they've done and also for joining us today to share some of the results of that research in the context of our conference as I was listening to and absorbing what was being said I noticed an interesting pattern starting here among the various presentations I noticed in particular that Dr. Manjikian's presentation at her research struck me as doing a very good job of setting the stage for what all of the panelists were talking about today she took a look at a disinformation campaign from the 1980s she mentioned specifically the disinformation campaign surrounding AIDS and the African continent and she compared and contrasted that to what was done more recently with the COVID outbreak and she looked at it instead of looking at it from the point of view of rhetoric she was looking at it from the point of view of the impact of the technology which is something that I think although we're all aware of it and there have been there was a large body of literature dealing with the nature of the technology how it's changed, how it's impacting human communication this is actually I think an excellent way of setting the stage Dr. Manjikian for what your fellow panelists were talking about today I would particularly draw your attention and for those of you in the audience among our student body, those of you who are younger you've grown up in this information environment, you've grown up with technology that allows text and allows narrative to be multi-directional to be constantly changed constantly modified to be what I believe Dr. Manjikian referred to at one point as a force multiplier it increases the both the speed and the range of information it's no longer a case of a single document written by a person that is archived that moves forward the changing and dissemination of which is very slow and very painful the information environment that you're used to operating in is multi-directional it is a different type of text than for one of those of us who are older are used to dealing with so the I don't think it could be overemphasized the fact that the technology has changed and it continues to change and it changes the way information or in the case of Dr. Manjikian's work disinformation can be can be put forward and promulgated Dr. Manjikian I can understand over the last couple of weeks you were probably strongly tempted to take a look at Ukraine I imagine that may be outside of the scope of what you have but in any event I imagine you're seeing some things coming through with the work that's being done on disinformation in Ukraine moving then on to Dr. Jenich and to Mr. Perry they took that larger idea of Dr. Manjikian's about the changing nature of the technology the disruptive and the amplifying nature of the technology and they did a very good mixed methods research study into one particular technology social media and one particular platform which is Twitter again deemphasizing rhetoric and looking more at the idea of computational linguistics which I understand has a smaller corpus now and which is probably long overdue in terms of being a way of looking at this it's what really struck me about that is the fact that picking up on Dr. Manjikian's theme the impact of something like Twitter when it comes to taking the high level foreign policy of a nation like Russia trying to come up with this narrative of the decadent west is in general and the decadent United States in particular is falling apart therefore it's causing chaos and disruption throughout the world whereas Russia is a little bit firmer and is able to do both humanitarian and military success that struck me in particular and it's worth keeping that in mind as you reflect on this and then finally Dr. Coldstein and Dr. Kozarev they brought us back up to that sort of high foreign policy level they're talking about foreign policy decisions being articulated particularly as it relates to China and Russia and their evolving relationship and again coming back to this idea of the theme of the technology how these things are communicated right down into disinformation and information warfare we have the phenomenon of the official pronouncements of foreign policy by two nations both individually and together and that is going to have to be translated down through technology through media through other kinds of channels and the other members of the panels I think have shown just how powerful that could be as a disinformation tool perhaps even a disinformation weapon so I was very pleased at how all three sets of viewpoints actually came together on this idea that in Russia and China as over and opposed to the West and to the United States there are two very different narratives about who's good and who's bad and there are great many different ways of trying to push that narrative out as Dr. Manjikian said to increasingly targeted audiences for that information to be absorbed and possibly passed along so I think all of our panelists for doing that for those of you in the audience as you reflect on what you heard today from our various panelists I would ask you to keep that idea of the technology in mind partially because it is a force multiplier for disinformation and for information warfare but also remember the fact that the technology can be helpful for you as well irrespective of whether you're going into the military space the government space the private space whatever it may be just as the technology is increasing the rate and the power of disinformation throughout the world particularly to places where there is already a pre-existing bias to believe certain types of disinformation you've seen that the technology is also emerging as a tool that can be used to augment your own critical thinking your own critical analysis of the information that you're hearing your own attempts to try to sort through this tidal wave of information that you're constantly getting as a result of these new emergent disrupting technologies there are techniques available particularly the big data techniques that that Dr. Zanesh and Mr. Perry talked about the communication environment has changed it is going to continue to change and I think that the type of work that our various panelists have been doing to try to show the ways in which the technology is changing things this is going to be an emerging area for all of you again irrespective of what sector you're going to be operating in so I ask you especially our students in the audience to continue to draw upon your own critical thinking your own critical analysis of what's happening around you but also to invoke the use of tools whether technological or mathematical or both to try to deal with this large amount of information to sort through what is information what is disinformation what is misinformation and with that I think I'm going to cut my remarks short because the questions that our students ask are always more interested than my comments on everything so thank you very much everyone thank you thank you very much Dr. Parker for your comments very much appreciated at this point indeed as Dr. Parker said this is time for for questions so I would certainly invite anyone that has any questions for any of our wonderful authors here today to come to come down to either microphone there's one to one on my left one on my right or again one on your left one on your right as well I suppose so if you'd like to please come along and form an orderly queue I'm happy to take questions and direct them as appropriate while we're while we're waiting for people to to come down I would just like to put one or two questions forward to firstly to Dr. Kozarev and Dr. Goldstein and so a little outside the scope perhaps is this question but Putin achieved what NATO has been trying for many years to increase Germany's expenditure on its military Germany is now third only to the US and China in expenditure so as you've certainly noted the close relations between China and Russia do you feel that there's going to be a shift in the nature of the US and its allies like perhaps working more closely with Germany perhaps and maybe foregoing things like the so-called special relationship with the UK and other existing pieces do you see a change in that or do you think it's just a general strengthening of NATO going forwards? Yeah I mean I think you're exactly right that unquestionably the one of the results of the war thus far is this dramatic strengthening of NATO that would seem to be completely contrary to Putin's objective so I think as was said this morning that seems to be if not a total fail close. As far as the larger dynamics there between China, Russia China and NATO I fear that it is a kind of those of us in the field we call it a dilemma you know which is it's hard to pinpoint who is threatening whom and it is you know there's been I'll just give you an example in the China is very concerned about this Alkis deal you may have heard of that with the Australia UK and the United States working together a nuclear submarine so but what was shocking is that when the Alkis was first rolled out last year the Russians took a very very strong position which was kind of odd because you know Russia has plenty of nuclear submarines and they're not really you know maybe this in a way we could even be good for Russia right more nuclear submarines go toward the Asia Pacific but you know you could see the Russians wanted to make it clear almost to their Chinese friends that they were viewed this as a dramatic threat so you know my impression is this is I mean it's almost a chicken and egg question as to which but we are certainly moving in a way toward a kind of new new enhanced bipolarity or you might call it a new Cold War okay great question we will definitely see the changing role change the role of Germany and the near future it's a matter of big concern in Russia and I believe that now especially after Chancellor Volts said that now we should not blame Germany any longer so we have some other other to blame for war in Europe so and there's a big you know question for Russia and especially given the German policies mostly based on some values rather than geopolitical calculations thank you very much thank you very much for your answer I'll defer to yourself sir cadet Blake my question was for Mr. Goldstein and Mr. Koizyrev so my question was how dedicated is China to a Russian alliance and at what point does Russia become a liability and then furthermore from a global perspective as Russia only as strong as a Sino-Russian alliance or do they warrant a considerable threat on their own for China Russia has been since the early 2000s as a non-Asian ally and non-Asian partner because China honestly has not been gaining lots of many allies both in that northeast Asia and in other parts of the world so I thought probably for the Chinese leadership since the early 2000s the rise of Russia and especially centralized Putin's vertical of power served as a good like a role in example for their own kind of advancement and also modernization of their own institutions so they considered Putin as a aspiring rising statesman concerned about the Russian national interest so in terms of cultural civilizational and probably despite the differences in languages they about the kind of common past in terms of communist past and in terms of the role of sovereignty and their perception of the unique way of democratization they call for example the Russia and China calling themselves as a democratic democratic countries unlike the west what the west actually has been talking about Russian how the west has assessed the Russian and Chinese political system so I think that that alliance is valid not only from the perspective as a potential rear kind of backing strategic rear for the Chinese if they encounter with the United States but also from the political and cultural standpoint as well just quickly comment I mean I think we generally people are in the west seems to us underestimating the nature of this quasi alliance I mean I've been wondering why this occurs part of it clearly is you know our understanding of the sign of Soviet conflict and we've badly misread that and so I think we're kind of over correcting the other way but I think also we look at it kind of with ideological lenses maybe sometimes and that doesn't necessarily help but there's also a lot so much happens in Russia China relations that we don't really see it's not reported on but you know you have to either read Russian or Chinese I think so that's a problem too so but the last part of your question we'll get into this more tomorrow but I mean Russia on its own is it on its own a threat that's a really good question I mean you know part of what we're seeing is just how weak Russia is right I mean you know think about that they spend so much on nuclear weapons and all these kind of high tech weapons you can see their conventional forces seem to be you know getting substantially weaker than maybe we thought so it is an interesting question that Russia on its own maybe not really not that much of a threat Germany can handle it if you will right but in combination with China I think there maybe we do need to be concerned because the two powers I think are quite complimentary in many ways oddly you know we could go into that more but there I do think you know this could be dangerous for US national security this combination thank you thank you very much I believe you next sir would you care to ask thank you Dr. Reed and thank you to everyone for taking the time to deliver your presentations and research today I thoroughly enjoyed them as I'm sure everyone else did and the question that I will pose isn't directed toward anyone specifically rather anyone willing to take it a stab at it so big tech companies have been said to have taken a stance on the Russia-Ukraine conflict by preventing Russian state media on their platforms as a means of preventing the spread of myths or disinformation more recently the same companies have allowed to take a stance on their platforms directed towards Russia while this all may be authorized under section 230 of the communications and decency act do you see big techs involvement as positive negative or quite possibly as virtue signaling thank you I'll happily invite Dr. Shanesh it seems like it's in your and Mr. Perry's wheelhouse if you wouldn't mind taking that one thank you sorry to put you on the spot can you hear me in the back yeah okay great in the last few weeks that Sputnik for example and Russia today have been banned in lots of European countries and on lots of big tech media platforms that was a really interesting development to see how quickly these platforms moved when in the past we had serious problems with hate speech for example being allowed to proliferate so if you think about various armed conflict around the world not just with the current war in Ukraine but also think about for example Myanmar and the Rohingya genocide and how Facebook or Twitter or Instagram allowed hate speech to proliferate and we have seen spikes in incitement to violence on these platforms and then with the current war in Ukraine these companies have moved fairly quickly in comparison to previous armed conflicts what I've seen I've been focusing mostly on Eastern and Central Europe when it comes to spike in hate speech for example in relation to the war in Ukraine and I was born and raised in Hungary which is also it was part of the Russian sphere of influence or the Soviet sphere of influence I should say so we share a history with Ukraine to a certain extent and it seems that Hungarian trolling has led to for example Russian trolling and the IRA or other trolling factories that have spread disinformation on various social media platforms what I know this personally looking at Hungarian trolling is that it seems like the trolling is on steroids at the moment which to me as a Hungarian is very interesting to see because it seems like these trolls have forgotten the historical memory that we have about the Soviet Union for example and previous invasions into our own territories as well so the strategic narratives seem to be the same there is a lot of negative talk about the United States being in decline in Central and Eastern Europe it's also complemented by anti-EU anti-European union discourses so it's almost like the West is composed of the United States the European Union and NATO and then Central and Eastern Europe somewhat seems to be stuck in between Ukraine and Russia and then the West so disinformation has been spreading about so the same Kremlin talking points have been spreading on Eastern European platforms and I feel looking at also hate speech in general and I research violent extremism and I compare the United States to Western Europe and Eastern Europe and then I look at Australia and try to make global comparisons and what I've seen with BigTac and global social media platforms is what I identify as an English language bias so this changed in the last couple of weeks when Sputnik and Russia today have been banned but these BigTac companies have been focusing mostly on tweets or Facebook posts in English and they really lag behind in looking at other languages and how hate speech can spread in other languages and they are not prepared to deal with this issue so that's something that I personally noticed in my own research Thank you Thank you very much I think in the interest of time for at least one more question possibly to Mr. Lozato and Ms. Julian I think we might be able to take your question too Good afternoon Cadet Lozato so my question is for any of those who are presenting on disinformation I understand that in cyber security and cyber warfare different nation states will have different government bodies that conduct their operations different advanced persistent threats and sometimes those aren't always coordinated or they use different tools and methods and I'm curious if the same thing sort of carries over into information warfare how coordinated or integrated are these sorts of information warfare operations in Russia Dr. Manjikian would you care to cover that one? Thank you Do I have to turn this on? What we see is there was a report that came out from the State Department last year and they talked about the disinformation ecosystem and part of the reason they use that term ecosystem is because there are many different actors in the beginning sometimes there would be people in places like China who would kind of volunteer to participate like in a DDoS attack or something like that I'm not completely convinced that anonymous is actually just a random group of individuals I personally wonder if there isn't some kind of covert support by some form of nation state for anonymous because they seem to be awfully good at what they're doing someone must have trained them but furthermore what we've seen with Russia is there were reports last week that if indeed they had been outsourcing a lot of their trolling to troll forms outside of Russia once the currency situation hit the trolling went down significantly and a lot of people said that's because they can't afford to pay the troll farm that's in Istanbul or wherever it is and then finally there was a discussion about the role that public relations firms might be even playing in things like trolling the idea that you could outsource it to a public relations firm and there was an issue with a firm in London that had been doing some work for the Russian government that some people thought wasn't quite ethical so we see public relations firms we see other kind of commercial things like troll farms that are being outsourced we see some degree of people acting as volunteers and so that's why they use the term ecosystem because it really is a whole conglomeration of different types of actors that probably have very different norms governing how they behave and what they do I can just add one thing there that the way the Russia approaches information warfare is highly integrated as you say and that ecosystem you can kind of think of as a spectrum too from attributed sources like from government officials state run news media all the way to kind of black covert unattributed information operations conducted at these troll farms or just domains that spring up and then in the middle you have this gray area of media sources that kind of pick up on the seeds planted at either ends and pass them along so I think in one respect that also points out some of the limitations to the question that was raised before you where while things like deep platforming certainly have some short term effects when this thing is so holistically integrated across multiple sources and multiple types of attribution you know one or even a couple platforms labeling and banning probably isn't enough in that case but thank you very much and we have time for one more question and Miss Judy if you wish to or thank you very much good morning good afternoon as Ukrainian myself I have encountered various Russian propaganda and recently in this month Russia blocked Twitter today the official blocked Instagram and Facebook and recognized Meta Corporation as extremist my question is how do you think will Russian behavior in media space change considering it's the last news and war in Ukraine I'll leave this open to volunteers I wish to take that one excuse me I have a small comment I think that all Russians will continue using those platforms through VPN so it will be no problem I mean my question is not about Russians it's obvious that they are going to continue using the services but do you think Russian government will change their behavior in media space following the blockage of the media sources yes there you are closer to Russia I don't expect they'll change the way they wage information warfare simply based on how it's going right now I think one common misconception that I've had for sure and I think many of us do is to look at the use of disinformation still through this kind of persuasion lens where of course the goal is to persuade an actor to change behavior but that's not really necessarily how Russia goes about using information in the information space the goal isn't always and often isn't persuasion so I don't think they'll be dissuaded just because many of their current narratives are being widely debunked I think they'll continue to try new things out thank you please join me in offering a very warm round of applause to all of our panelists and I'll discuss them to Dr. Parker thank you very much for joining us during this session folks the session is now concluded three students will make presentation about just the US war against Iraq and Taiwan issue as well as Yugoslavian war so please just to come to join the last session today also tomorrow starting from 9.25 to 12.05 we have two round table sessions please come to join tomorrow as well thank you the department of history and political science here at Norwich University and it's my pleasure to welcome you to our last panel of the day but not the last panel of the 2022 peace and war summit I'll just announce right up the front as you are off the bat as you all know that tomorrow morning we will have two more panels specifically dealing with Russian internal domestic politics at 9.25 a.m. in Mac auditorium and a panel on US policy towards Russia at 10.50 in Mac auditorium right here so as we were out the first day I think we're off to a great start I wanted to extend my thanks to all of the wonderful people involved in this summit who helped to make it I think a great success each panel starting with the keynotes this morning has been very well attended so I certainly want to extend my thanks to Professor Yang Mokoo for just doing all of the hard work to put something like this together Professor Travis Morris, Megan Liptak thank you for all the hard work you've done to make this happen I also wanted to extend my thanks to all the panelists and visitors to campus today for coming here devoting your time to share with our students some vital information that is certainly directly relevant to the state of affairs the world finds itself in and my last but certainly not least I want to thank the Norwich faculty staff and students who've participated and attended all of the events both today and hopefully tomorrow this is all for you and we're glad that you could be here and help make this a success as I turn now I turn to introducing the panel that is before you this panel is actually a bit different from some of the other panels you've seen today in that this is made up of as was referenced this morning some of the most important people in the room which is the future leaders military and civilian and political who are going to have to be wrestling with the decisions that are being made as we speak this is the student panel last fall as the peace and war summit was being planned we sent out an invitation not just to Norwich students but to students at various other universities in the region inviting them to submit proposals not necessarily on the Russian issue but on any issues related to history, political science, international affairs basically anything within the scope of the journal of peace and war studies we received a fascinating variety of papers and members of the editorial board of the peace and war center of the peace and war excuse me journal of peace and war studies reviewed those papers and selected three that we think are a very interesting and certainly timely window into some important subjects once again these are not necessarily directly relevant to the topic of the summit which is Russia and the Russian question and Russia and Ukraine but I think you're going to find the topics addressed in the student papers today do have relevance not just maybe not necessarily for the strategy and the political questions involving Russia but certainly questions that the world is facing and perhaps specifically the United States is facing at the dawn of the 21st century so as we move forward my goal here for our panel is we have three student presenters they will each be given 15 minutes to give a summation of the papers that they submitted for this panel at the end I will invite our two discussants Professor Mary Kim and Professor Michael Funberg to offer about five minutes each some discussion some comments on the student papers maybe ask them some questions I'll then give maybe five to ten minutes for the students to respond to some of those comments if they wish and after that I really hope think we'll have good 10-15 minutes to open up for Q&A from the audience I think these are as once again is up and coming scholars these are students who can certainly use some guidance moving forward and get some feedback on their work so I will introduce the panel from my left to the end beginning with our first student panelist Ethan Owens Ethan is a Norwich University fourth year cadet and a member of the Norwich Army ROTC he is a double major in history and political science and will commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Army upon his graduation in May a branched armor I correct to his left is is Caleb Riley who comes to us today from the University of Vermont where he is pursuing a master of arts in history Caleb is a special forces captain who graduated with a B.S. in American history from the United States Military Academy and commissioned as an infantry officer in 2011 his academic interests include the history of allied special operations during World War II and his century American foreign policy he has publications such as an article in special warfare detailing his experiences as a special forces detachment commander and a publication in history review comparing the Circassian and Armenian genocides and finally John Walsh is another Norwich University student a sophomore majoring in criminal justice who is looking to add a Spanish minor to his studies he is Navy ROTC ROTC midshipman who is contracted with the United States Marine Corps his presentation at this conference reflects his diverse interests in world cultures literature, art, politics and violence our two discussants today are both my colleagues in Department of History and Political Science representing both history and political science respectively associate professor of history Mary Kim has been at Norwich since 2014 she is currently serves as the director of the program coordinator for the studies and war and peace degree program in our department she has a BA in history from Reed College and a doctorate in history from the University of California, Irvine her research focuses on the military and institutional history of northeast China during the republican period and her coursework here at Norwich offers a variety of courses relating particularly to world history, east Asian history and certainly courses on both modern China and modern Japan she is also the faculty advisor for our Model UN chapter here on campus and recently led that group to the annual National Harvard Model UN conference down in Massachusetts finally, assistant professor of political science Michael Funberg has been on the Norwich faculty since 2017 he has a BS in political science from Northern Illinois University and both an MA and doctorate in political science from West Virginia his research focuses primarily on American presidency particularly how the president shapes policy through executive orders he gives a variety of courses on the American political system and issues in public policy and he's also recently returned from a trip having taken the annual DC policy week group down to Washington DC where a group of about a dozen Norwich students headed down to DC over spring break and attended meetings and visits with various agencies involved in the American national security establishment Professor Thunberg is also the current director of the Norwich University honors program before we begin please join me in giving a round of applause for our panelists once again we have three student panelists for you today I'm going to have you introduce them all I'm going to invite them to come up in sequence and just address you directly and then at the end we'll turn to the comments from our discussants first up is Ethan Owens with evaluating the value of US through strategic ambiguity Ethan Hello everyone my name is Ethan Owens and like you said I'll be going over the evaluating the value of US diplomacy through strategic ambiguity so my agenda for today the things I'm going to go over first is my research question about what this paper was all about my introduction to ambiguity what that means in the scope of my project the two pieces of literature that were crucial to strengthening my argument which is Wilsonian open door internationalism and deterrence arms race over my main argument which I call tension and ambiguity argument and then the three focal points of my discussion which are these three time periods and how the tension plays into that I'll explain that a little bit more later and then the policy implications that could potentially come out of this project and we'll conclude there so my research question is why has the US policy of strategic ambiguity been utilized to balance Taiwan-China relations since 1979 and to what extent is it still a viable option so essentially what I'm looking at is strategic ambiguity using ambiguous language in US policy and seeing how that balances the tension between China and Taiwan and how the United States can play a role in that through strategic ambiguity and through that scope whether strategic ambiguity is still a viable option to use today so my introduction to ambiguity this first part right here is the definition that I gave strategic ambiguity in my paper so when discussing strategic ambiguity I'm talking about any policy created by the United States towards China and Taiwan that is purposefully ambiguous and it's true intention of support or opposition to either Chinese or Taiwanese agenda so essentially I can break that into three main aspects right you've got the purpose towards China so if the United States creates ambiguous language in its policy that doesn't necessarily side with China or Taiwan directly China doesn't know if the United States would support or deny an invasion of Taiwan so China is fearful that the United States could side with Taiwan in a devastating war between the two so it keeps China on its toes to not invade conversely ambiguous language proves to Taiwan that if Taiwan is to declare independence that would also start a war and the United States would potentially not support Taiwan and Taiwan would be crushed by the Chinese so both sides are split in this balancing act of being fearful and paranoid about whether or not the United States is going to support them or not and that's essentially strategic ambiguity in nutshell so the policy that's utilized that has this ambiguous language in U.S. policy there are three main communiques that were done Shanghai communique, normalization communique and communique on United States arms sale to Taiwan the most important of these however in my personal opinion is the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979 this set the whole framework of how the United States is going to handle Taiwan going forward so some examples of ambiguous language these are all taken from the communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act you can see how they kind of practically dance around the fact about whether we're going to call Taiwan independent state or not for example you notice that they call it a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves so because Taiwan is ethnically and culturally Chinese the United States kind of adopts a sort of one China policy where they call the Taiwanese Chinese but they also as you can see the United States recognizes the PRC as the sole China but the United States Taiwan with unofficial relations which is largely arms sales and I'll get into that in a little bit so these are some examples of that weird ambiguous language that they use that keeps people from recognizing which side the United States supports so I'll get into the literature real quick Wilsonian Open Door Internationalism this was spearheaded by Dr. Dean Chen in this book here the biggest piece of takeaway that I got from this is in President Woodrow Wilson's presidency in the 1950s he was a very idealistic president and one of the things that he pushed was the concept of democratic peace theory which is essentially that democratic nations will not go to war with one another because they share similar values so because of this the United States kind of started to grow this sense of we need to spread democracy and we need to make the world a democratic and thus peaceful place and this kind of planted the seeds of this very emotional and passionate driven policy making from the United States this plays a huge role in dealing with Taiwan because there were numerous instances in the 60s and 70s where it would have been politically easier to give up Taiwan to China but the United States took a more passionate and emotional driven we need to preserve democracy in the world as a foothold for that ideological stand so because of that we've held on to Taiwan one of the flaws in this argument is it focuses on the 1950s so it doesn't really have a lot to do with strategic ambiguity because of the 1950s our stance on Taiwan was pretty firmly supportive versus today it's a little bit more difficult if China decided they were going to invade Taiwan we don't necessarily know which side we would take it remains ambiguous to this day deterrence and arms race this is from Dr. Pang Zhangqi in this book here this is important because it talks about how strategic ambiguity creates deterrence deterrence creates stagnation and then stagnation in turn creates an arms race so the way this works is Taiwan requests arms from the United States the United States gives Taiwan arms China feels threatened that Taiwan now has more arms than them so then they build up their military they buy more arms and then Taiwan in turn feels threatened again and both sides build arms and it creates leveling tension that continues to grow that could reach a breaking point that would cause an incredibly costly war so because of this strategic ambiguity can be viewed as something that creates a stagnation devastating because it doesn't focus on the central problem that is China and Taiwan cooperation it just kind of kicks the can further along and in turn creates very very high tension so we'll get into the main argument that I propose in this paper I call it the tension and ambiguity argument essentially ambiguity in terms of 1976 when it was created with the Taiwan Relations Act was essentially to prevent a war so in terms of that strategic ambiguity has been very successful because there obviously hasn't been a war between China and Taiwan however a war could still happen in the future we don't know about that so I'm trying to evaluate strategic ambiguity in terms of tension whether tension has been rising whether that tension could reach a breaking point that could create a war I view that as a little bit more important so in terms of tension we'll be looking at 1979 to the 1990s this is my dependent variable I see this as a successful use of strategic ambiguity because tensions are low and then we get into the two time periods post 1996 which is the third Taiwan straight crisis I'll mention that in a bit I see this as an unsuccessful use of strategic ambiguity that is my independent variable so I'll be examining the levels of tension in 1996 to 2013 and then 2013 to present and I define tension in three aspects which is military testing military spending and then government communication and cooperation between Taiwan and China so we'll use those three factors to determine the relationship between the two in tension so we start with our dependent variable 1979 to 1995 military spending from 85 to 91 you can see that China increases by 60% and Taiwan increases by 34% that's a pretty large margin of increase in military spending however you have to take into consideration that there is a large economic growth in that region the example seen in Japan Korea and Indonesia they were overall increasing their economic growth and it's healthy for a country's economic growth to coincide with their military growth that's just a natural repercussion so it wasn't necessarily tension based as much as it was an economic growth based for military testing there was only one really significant example of military testing that I found which was in 1980 which is when China was doing ballistic missile testing in the South Pacific it got some backlash from the United States and Taiwan obviously but it didn't solidify into anything serious not like it would today and then government communication there was kind of a global cultural trend going on in China that was called mainland fever where essentially a lot of Taiwanese people started to try to open up to China and China in turn was fostering a more positive environment to open up to Taiwan in January 1st of 1979 they created a message to compatriots in Taiwan which was a message that was sent to civilians in Taiwan that was very poetic and it basically talked about a cultural unification rather than a political unification and how they are all one Chinese people ethnically and culturally and so that was kind of the biggest example that people see when they point to peaceful cooperation between China and Taiwan so things were relatively easing at this time there was open trade things were going relatively well all things considered now we get into 1995 to 2013 so in 96 there is the third Taiwan Strait Crisis basically in this situation there is a tension break between China and Taiwan China sends navy ships into Taiwan Strait the United States in turn brings their ships into the Taiwan Strait China backs down and China is very humiliated by this incident so because China is humiliated they decided they are going to build up their military spending again 2005 $30 billion budget 6% increase that's pretty big and you can see from this table that they've been modernizing their military significantly as well particularly on the navy aspect so as China has been modernizing they've had to test their new equipment and that's where you see more tension on the military testing aspect of things a result of this is the United States actually started using US Marines to train Taiwanese soldiers for a potential invasion starting in 2008 I believe this information was leaked last year and the Chinese government was not happy about it and then government communication cooperation 1996 Taiwan had its first democratically elected presidential election this is dangerous for China because they're an authoritarian state democracies can be a little bit unstable in this aspect with a free thought and free speech during this parties like the DPP Democratic Progressive Party of 2008 they start to push things like a pro-independence movement and even if it's not going to happen just that discussion on the floor makes China very paranoid and the tensions rise as a result of this 2013 to present what we start to see military spending China has numerically the largest navy in the world right now that's just a number of boats that's not necessarily power but numerically they have the largest navy by 2030 they're projected to have 549 ships while the United States currently has 283 so because of this it's clear that China is going to continue to increase their military spending and they're increasing their military budget they're going to increase their naval power and the ability that they could invade Taiwan if they needed to 2021 I don't know if some of you may have heard about this there was 149 Chinese aircraft that deployed that's supposed to say south with Taiwan that was a mistake south with Taiwan it caused a massive scramble a lot of military people in Taiwan thought that they were being invaded and it caused massive hysteria so China's been upping their game and doing these military tests on a scale such as this capable of invading at any time again increasing that tension drastically and then the cooperation between Taiwan and China is also at an all-time low because of the growth of political parties such as the DPP which I mentioned before and then the QMT the KMT while statistically the majority of Taiwanese people understand that independence means war and illegal independence can't happen right now and every year it's discussed at political elections so because the discussion of independence whether de ure or de facto whether it's inferior in practice that's still on the table and every time it's brought up China gets very paranoid so that tension is just continuing to rise and the disagreements are continuing to rise so the policy implications that come out of this strategic ambiguity as we saw was largely a success in the 1970s and 80s because it was able to foster a little bit more cooperation with the United States having a more hands-off approach but since China has grown in strength and since the third Taiwan straight crisis things have reached such a breaking point that strategic ambiguity is causing more harm than good because both countries are incredibly paranoid of one another and they're both willing to go to war at any time so because of this policy consideration that I thought would be applicable to the situation we need to push for cultural reunification while maintaining Taiwan as a politically autonomous state so as I mentioned before when strategic ambiguity was successful in the 70s and 80s they were able to foster a relationship where they could see themselves as one China but they were politically different things have not been that cool ever since in my opinion so if we can try to push for a more positive outcome from that where they can see themselves as culturally Chinese but politically different that would be huge and then decreasing U.S. arms sales to Taiwan that would allow the United States to remain more neutral instead of adding to that tension that I mentioned of that arms recycle pulling the United States out of that might help to ease tensions as well showing China that they are more neutral than in favor of Taiwan and then setting concrete boundaries making the United States like a referee so basically saying if you cross this line then the United States is going to militarily interfere on whichever countries involved so saying missile testing in this location is too close in Taiwan China will be attacked by the United States and that would allow for a peaceful cooperation between the two countries and that would start to lower that tension that I mentioned before so my conclusion strategic ambiguity was overall an initial success but as we started to see that arms recycle that started to create as China gained more prominence and more power has done more harm than good and so strategic ambiguity is more of a focal point of disagreement successful easing of tension the United States still maintains an idealistic view of democracy so we need to make sure that Taiwan remains politically independent however we can't allow for any large scale conflict to be a result of this so in order to do that we need to push for political autonomy but cultural reunification and we need to remove conflict friction points in the Taiwan Strait and create a specific policy that prevents both nations from doing military testing or anything conflict brewing in the Taiwan Strait so that concludes my presentation thank you very much good afternoon everyone my name is Caleb Riley thank you all for letting me come here as a West Pointer and talk to the oldest private military college in the United States it's truly my honor to be here briefly what I'm going to talk today about is the Yugoslavia Civil War and the Allies between 1941 and 1945 as your mayor may not know a civil war raged alongside the conventional war during World War II inside of Yugoslavia and this resulted in massive violence and destruction within the country of Yugoslavia resulting in upwards of 1.75 million deaths which is one of the highest per capita casualty rates of any nation during World War II to talk about this we're going to look at the background of Yugoslavia briefly as well as what the beginning of the war looked like and then we're going to examine the competing factions within Yugoslavia and how the civil war and the misunderstanding of it led to the changing Allied support that waxed and waned and evolved throughout the war finally we'll look at the outcome of the war before I conclude so Yugoslavia was formed following World War I as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes interestingly those nations although they had always been under some sort of empirical power they had never been united under one flag prior to the Treaty of Versailles established it in 1918-1919 what we saw is that it was established under an organization that was highly favorable towards the ethnic majority which were the Serbs. The Serbs were riding a wave of high esteem following their performance during the Balkans war in 1913 as well as Serb perceived military preeminence during World War I this establishment of the government that was favorable towards Serbia may have been beneficial to the Serbs in the short run but in the long run and especially by the time we got to World War II it was highly detrimental to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia during the 1920s and the 1930s ethnic relations between the majority Serbs and the next highest ethnic minority Croats continually deteriorated this included leaders of political parties being assassinated on the steps of parliament it included Croatian political representative refusal to participate within the Yugoslav parliament which only led to more more problems between the Croats and Serbs and all of this was occurring during the Great Depression it was occurring while war clouds were on the horizon Yugoslavia desperately clung to its neutral status but they were seeking help from the allies unfortunately for them the British and the French specifically were in no position to offer extra support to Yugoslavia Germany on the other hand had great strategic interest down in the Balkans regions especially the oil fields of Romania the minerals within Yugoslavia itself as well as the large workforce potential that was located within Yugoslavia in 1939 in late 1940 Germany made some strong pushes to gain Yugoslav to force Yugoslavia to join the tripartite pact but the Yugoslav region continually demurred however that changed on 25 March 1941 Yugoslavia assented to the tripartite pact but they actually secured some pretty important provisos in there for themselves including no need for them to provide soldiers to support the Axis war machine no need to allow Germany to station their troops inside Yugoslavia although that's questionable and then it also had some post war guarantees on behalf of the Axis for Yugoslavia however the previous 20 years of discontentment finally boiled over two days later and on 27 March there was a coup that rapidly overthrew the government when Hitler heard of this coup he was thrown into a rage and he immediately said we will crush Yugoslavia and the exact quote is with merciless brutality and that they did on 6 April the Axis invaded Yugoslavia and a mere 12 days later Yugoslavia was completely under Axis control this is truly a fascinating military accomplishment but the reason that they were so successful partly is because they negotiated a separate peace independent nation of Croatia and the independent nation of Croatia is was led by an individual named Antipavlic and Antipavlic was actually a member of a terribly brutal fascist party called the Ustaja and the Ustaja promised to be able to control Croatia and provide a good level of security which is exactly what Hitler needed at that point in time as you may or may not know was supposed to start on 12 May which is just a mere month later so he needed to make sure that his southern flank was secured that he had Axis unfettered to those oil fields in the Balkans and that Yugoslavia was not a problem unfortunately for him by placing the Ustaja in charge they were actually not widely regarded by the Croats themselves so the leaders of the independent nation of Croatia were actually ill prepared to govern a state that did not actually want them in charge Germany for its part in the areas that it did personally control used the same brutal tactics their same brutal occupation tactics that they had throughout Europe and for every German soldier that was wounded 50 Yugoslav civilians would be killed and for every German soldier that was killed in this grid Yugoslav citizens would be killed and this played a major role in how these competing factions ended up using the Axis for their own advantage so if we look at the Ustaja which I briefly touched on it was led by Antipavich they were ardently Croat they were a fascist organization and they relied heavily on Catholicism they relied heavily on Catholic priests to help them with their mission the Ustaja ruled brutally they have the unfortunate misnomer of being the only individuals outside of Germany's sphere to enact their own concentration camp and at the Yasenovic concentration camp upwards of 400,000 Serbs and Jews were brutally murdered by the Ustaja if we look at the other two competing factions within the Yugoslav Civil War we have the Chetniks and the Partisans the Chetniks were actually not one main group of organized resistance and that led to a lot of the missteps and miscues by the allies over the course of the war but the main Chetnik band that was recognized by the allies was led by an individual named Drager Mihailovich Mihailovich was not some sort of guerrilla warfare genius in fact he was a moderately performing staff officer at outset of the war and he just refused to give in but being that he was loyal to the monarch that was at this time in exile in London and that he was willing to carry the flag so to speak within Yugoslavia the allies initially put all of their support behind him the last competing faction within Yugoslavia was called the Partisans it was the National Army of Liberation and they were led by a little known communist named Josep Broz Tito and Tito was ardently communist however at the behest of the Soviet Union they did not emphasize their communism so much as they did their Pan-Jugoslavism so in other words their nationalism and their pride in being Yugoslavian, vice being Croatian or Montenegro or Serbian or Orthodox or Catholic they just emphasized that they needed to be a national unit that resisted the Axis invaders the problem is as you can tell from my very clear chart is that it's confusing and this is on paper so imagine if you are on the ground and you are trying to decide who is friend or foe and if you are not even speaking the language and they themselves are speaking a mixture of different languages it's very difficult to figure out who to support and the other problem is that the moniker Chetnik was used to describe Croatian Ustazia who believed that they were performing the work of the greatness of the Balkan nations it was also used by Draža Mojilović's the term Partisan is often just applied to any guerrilla band so whenever you read Axis reports of guerrilla activity they often mention the Partisans well you don't know if they were talking about Tito's Partisans or if they were talking about the Chetniks because they simply used the term Partisan so when the allies tried to figure out who they were going to support they waxed and waned and frankly got it right and sometimes they got it wrong and this really fueled the civil war as you can imagine guns and ammo and food and medical supplies were hard to come by within Yugoslavia and initially supporting Draža Mojilović in 1941 and 1942 Mojilović didn't really want to conduct very many kinetic operations and this was actually in line with allied policy and the reason it was in line with allied policy is because they had their hands full in North Africa and they were in a position to provide really any large support so Mojilović took a step back because he didn't want to suffer the consequences by the hands of the Germans on the other hand the Partisans who also weren't really receiving any allied support at this time used the German reprisals as a recruiting method they said if you're with us we will protect you we will take it to the fight of these evil Germans if you are against us we will also crush you we crush the Germans the problem is that Churchill was a very pragmatic individual and when he was asked how are you going to support this communist band he said first off he said that well I'm not going to be governed by them following the war so it shows a very pragmatic whoever is killing Germans was his friend and that was ultimately what led the big shift in 1943 to to move allied support from primarily being the Chetniks to being primarily behind the Partisans we still saw a confused policy though because there was a lot of politics and distrust between the US and the UK both supporting various factions within Yugoslavia and ultimately what we end up seeing is that a lot of the guns that were provided by the British or the Americans were used respectively by the Partisans and by the Chetniks not to fight the Germans or the Italians but instead to fight each other and so this brutal civil war was waged and it was fueled by allied guns and war material there were some really compelling missions that took place that used the support of both the Chetniks and the Partisans most notably Operation Halyard so between August and December of 1944 Operation Halyard rescued about 800 allied airmen who had been downed throughout Yugoslavia this is really an incredible story because they rescued all of those people 12 people at a time per plane load so 800 divided by 12 publicly educated in Alaska I'm not going to do the math up here it was a lot of airplanes in single runs the Soviets didn't ever actually really support the Partisans as much as you would expect until they showed up in October of 1944 and then it was really in a paternalistic manner and this set this set Tito off as you can see in this quote Tito was going to be no one's little brother Tito viewed himself as the leader of a great power nation and did not think that he owed the Soviets anything and in fact he wanted to seat at the table bt the men and the men and so you will see there if you go on for the next 20 years so this is really good and you get to see what Tito did and what he did and what he did and it was a real very successful a real successful and a very well-urned Tito has approached to the movement for the remainder of his life, which was an organization of communist nations, third world communist nations, that he encouraged to not bow to Russian pressure. It's really a fascinating thing. War continued in Yugoslavia, though, seven days after Europe, after it ended in the rest of Europe. Draza Mahalovic was tried in June of 1946. I'm sure it was a fair trial, after which he was immediately shot. An anti-Pavlovic fled to Argentina, where he was shot in 1957, and he died a slow and painful death two years later. Finally, as I sum it up, I love this picture of Sipa and Fulopovich because it's so powerful. It shows you the emotion behind a civil war. So Fulopovich was a partisan leader who was captured in 1942, and as he's here, about to be hung, his final words were death to fascism, freedom to the people. And if you look really close at the picture, you see that he's being hung not by Germans or Italians, but he's being hung by Ustaja militants. He's being hung by his own people. And that truly is the travesty of the Yugoslavia civil war during World War II. So thank you for your time today. That concludes my brief. How y'all doing? My name's John Walsh. I'm here to present about my paper, a continuation of a dictatorship, how U.S. policy and practice led to the continuation of Saddam's regime in the eyes of the Iraqi people. So before we start, I want to go over some key terms that I believe are necessary to understand. From our first two terms come from MCRP05, TAG 12 Alpha, operational terms and graphics. So that is what the U.S. military officially, how the U.S. military officially defines these terms. Control, a tactical mission, task that requires the commander to maintain physical influence over a specified area to prevent its use by an enemy. Occupy, a tactical mission task that involves a force moving into an area so that it can control the entire area. Both the forces' movement to the occupation of the area occur without enemy opposition. And finally, insurgency. Insurgency is an uprising, organized uprising that uses violent and nonviolent means to overthrow an existing government or to arrest away control, either de jure or de facto, over part of their territory. When I say insurgency, I do not mean terrorist, okay? There are very two very different things. And if you like to talk about that, I'll talk about that during question and answer period. So my key tax and thesis. In my paper, I primarily use literature specifically theater from Iraq. I use the plays Ishtar and Baghdad by Rasha Fadhil, A Strange Bird on a Roof, published in Contemporary Plays from Iraq by Amir al-Azraqi. And finally, the book, Night Draws Near by Anthony Shadeed. These works demonstrate how the occupation of Iraq by the U.S. in 2003 was not an end to Saddam's regime, but rather a desperate attempt by the U.S. government to build back up a broken nation that instead led to a continuation of the dictatorship. So before we talk about how this affected the nation, I want to talk about each text in specific. So Ishtar and Baghdad, I want a quick poll. Who here has heard of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal? Raise your hands. Okay, that's more than I thought and I'm glad to see. So for those who haven't, the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Abu Ghraib prison is a prison in Abu Ghraib about 30 miles from Baghdad. It was originally Saddam Hussein's prison that he used for his political prisoners. After we took the prison, we started using it ourselves, the U.S. In the prison, United States Army and members of the CIA committed many documented human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in Abu Ghraib, including physical, mental and sexual abuse. We can see some pictures I have up there. There's many more on the Internet if you want to do your own research. As a result, the United States Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty. 11 soldiers were prosecuted with dereliction of duty, maltreatment, aggravated assault and battery. The people in this prison were not just insurgents, as we say. They were also common criminals. There were those who did commit crimes against occupational U.S. and then just normal people who got caught up in this, unfortunately. The play Ishtar and Baghdad by Rasha Fahdheel uses fictional characters, Ishtar and Tammuz, who are two Mesopotamian gods, to tell a very real story of the events of Abu Ghraib. They are first detainees in Iraq when coming down to visit the world, and then they are brought to Abu Ghraib where they experience many of the scandals that happened in the prison, in particular the two I have up there right now. It disgusts the atrocities committed by the U.S. military. Now here we can see where Iraq culture and U.S. culture kind of clash. So in Iraq culture, way back when we first took Baghdad, we were using the rules Abu Bakr's rules of warfare. Abu Bakr was the first Caliph, which is the first leader of the Muslim people, directly following Muhammad. I'm not talking about the famous ISIS terrorist, and his rules of warfare include, do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path, you must not mutilate dead bodies, and do not kill children nor women or aged men. All of these happened in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal. Rasha Fahdheel says that she believes this play has not been produced in Iraq because of the fact the Iraqi people do not want to admit to the shame and that this incident brought upon their culture. It also talks specifically about the plight of Iraqi women in the prison, which she said is not talked about at all in the country. The play ends with an insurgent rocket attack on the prison, which is a real event that killed many prisoners, including in the story Ishtar and Ta'amuth. We can really see some cultural clash throughout the play with certain quotes. In particular, Ishtar says when she is first detained and she is being tortured, I know this land, the history of every grain of sand is in my blood, she states. I almost hear its sands boiling with hatred and desire for revenge on you. Now Ishtar and culture is a figure representing a very high quality of love and peace. Ishtar in this story is meant to be a metaphor for the Iraqi people who are caught up in this invasion and unfortunately many lost their lives. The next text that he uses is Night Draws Near. Night Draws Near is a collection of first-hand accounts and interviews from Iraqi civilians compiled by Anthony Shadeed while he was in Iraq during the invasion. It focuses on the before, after and during the invasion and also talks greatly about the rise of insurgency we see throughout the region. The final text I use is Strange Bird on our Roof. I was not able to find the author of the play, however it was produced in Anthony Shadeed, no, sorry, as you were. Amir al-Azraqi's book Contemporary Perlays from Iraq. The Strange Bird on our Roof follows a true story according to Anthony Shadeed who I got the chance to interview about a family whose house was invaded by the US military. In itself it's a whole metaphor for the war. The place starts with the US military coming in force, taking the house and then eventually leaving behind one soldier to watch over the place. And quickly we see distrust established with the mother and the daughter who live in the house, their son who is a terrorist, sorry, insurgent who is not in the house. The play goes to great length to show the cultural distance and distrust with the mother and daughter. In Iraqi culture bird keepers are often considered to be thieves as the bird cage is on the roof of the house. Throughout the play they make references to the fact that the soldier is on top of the house in the position of the bird keeper. There are birds in cages on the house. It's supposed to allude to the fact that the people in the story consider him to be a thief. Eventually after much time trust starts to develop between the Iraqi family and the individual soldier, which is a good point of how Iraqis did not hate Americans while the US was invading. In reality they just hated the practice and the policy the US government was using. They did not hate individuals. And finally the play ends with the American receiving word that the building that he is occupying is about to be attacked by the insurgents and evacuating himself and the family. And unfortunately the family gets left in a poor financial state living in a tent on US controlled area. Much how like we left the nation after the end of, after the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom. So the long term effects of the invasion. Obviously we see a breakdown of trust between America and the people of Iraq and a mistrust of the US across the entire Middle East. This figure is from the Arab center in Washington DC. In addition we see a large amount of foreign influence come into the country of Iraq particularly from Iran. We see this is where the start of Iranian militias who currently reside in Iraq. This is the start of it. Iraq's politics according to Amir al-Azraqi are riddled with foreign influence from Iran. And I also had the opportunity to talk to a Sergeant Major of the Marine Corps. Sinal, as you were a Sergeant Major of Marines, very different. Who was a battalion Sergeant Major for three different battalions throughout the operation. He had three tours of duty. Two was with the infantry battalions and the one was with combat engineers. He said that you could tell the difference between people you fight. There's a difference between how an Iraqi would fight who picked up a rifle about a month ago to fight back for himself, for his home, versus how a freedom fighter from Russia or Iran have been fighting their entire lives. It's noticeable. So at the end of the day, why does this all matter? Well the answer is pretty simple honestly. Even though this ended in 2011 officially, first of all we still see great influence that these foreign influences have in Iraq. And also this is a lesson about invasions and how we conduct them in the future. David John Kilcullen is a member of the U.S. State Department who kind of wrote the book on counterinsurgency. David Kilcullen believed that returning the nation to a state of normalcy and order was more important than killing every insurgent in the region and the violence. At the end of the day, killing people is not going to make a nation better. At the end of the day, we've got to rebuild a nation that we destroy if we really want to improve it. The U.S. needs to understand the culture of the nation that we invade and occupy. Or better yet, just don't get involved. There are some nations that we have sought conflict with that at the end of the day, Iraq included, we've definitely put them in a worse situation. As soon as you use terms like liberation and winning the hearts and minds of a population in a military operation where you intend to destroy the country's infrastructure, you've already failed. You cannot win the hearts and minds of a population whose home you've just destroyed as we currently see in Ukraine with Russia and their invasion. And Putin spouting these ideas of liberation and freeing them from the neo-Nazi government that he says in his speech exists. We see this uprising of people in Ukraine fighting back much like how we saw in Iraq. You will never, you will never edit insurgency just by fighting. People will never give in. And the more insurgents you kill, the more you will create. That is all I have. Thank you all for your time. Good afternoon, everybody. Can you all hear me okay? Thank you all for being out here today and listening to our papers and the commentary. I'd like to keep this brief as possible, but these papers gave me a lot of food for thought even though they're on topics that are not directly related to what's going on just a few thousand miles away. I felt that they actually have a lot to offer in terms of connections. So I'll start with John Walsh's paper, Ethan Owens and then Caleb Riley. So I think John's paper asks us to really remember and reconsider and reflect on U.S. violence and the terrible results that poor understanding of a different culture wrought on the lives of everyone who was involved, but really very critically for the people of the countries, Iraq and then later Afghanistan, then later Iraq. And I think sort of something for maybe John to consider or think about is, I think one question that in the previous panel, Dr. Chedley's I think brought up, is there room for nation building in U.S. foreign policy? And perhaps recent examples show that no, there shouldn't be. And so I think in your thinking, is there still room for nation building of some kind? Or is this an option that should be taken off? Because recent examples have been the result or failed results from violence and invasion. Ethan Owens's papers is a really interesting, I think, because I study modern Chinese history, looking at a very present but ongoing kind of issue that involves three distinct and autonomous political entities, the U.S., China and Taiwan. Of course, everyone else in the region is very closely monitoring this even now. And I think this topic of strategic ambiguity thing that you bring up is really interesting because it's something that frustrates our allies as much as maybe they frustrate our adversaries. And in the themes of some of the panels today, and I think of course tomorrow, we seem to be in this present moment, this room right now, we seem to be living in a moment where some long held conceptions, long held assumptions about the international rules, rules of order seems to be really sort of shifting underneath us, right? It's really scary and what have you. So in such a situation, having people play a game where no one knows the rules seems to be quite unfortunate and dangerous, right? So I was wondering what your thoughts about that might be. And then this sort of question about culturally acknowledging sort of connections but politically being separate. Well, I think we can argue that politics is culture, right? It is the way that people engage with and think about power and how to sort of run their lives. And there's a cultural component to that, right? The act of voting, the act of challenging your representative or what have you. So I think I was really interested in your definition of culture and what you think about that. And then finally, Kayla Riley's paper is a really thoughtful look at a very confusing episode of the mid 20th century that unfortunately has a lot of bodies in its wake. But I found it really interesting that Yugoslavia or the former Yugoslavia is a case where it didn't work out, where people who lived in an area that was very multi-ethnic, multi-religious, multi-linguistic, weren't able to kind of keep it together for various reasons as you laid out in your paper. So as we look at what's going on in Ukraine, and I think Dr. Pisano and the earlier panel mentioned that the Ukrainian leadership right now seems to be pretty successful in shifting the needle in trying to identify national identity as something based on diversity, more civic, rather than on these sort of older ethnic religious ties. From what you've learned about sort of the mid 20th century, what you know about these countries and the way things turned out, what do you think the view is from the other side, where it didn't stay together? And does Ukraine in its present moment offer something of an alternative? What are your thoughts on that? So those are my comments and I look forward to hearing everything from the panel and questions and what have you. I'll turn it over to Professor Thunberg. Alright, thanks everybody. So first and foremost, these are awesome papers to read. So it's really good to see that you all are thinking about these things and taking a more scholar look into these different topics. I was really impressed with the quality of work from you all at this level. So first and foremost, really impressed by what you all came up with. So I'll go over kind of my comments and then hopefully we'll get some good discussion going from the audience. So I'll start with the Owens piece and I think that the first comment that I have is that one of the concerns is that you kind of take a monolithic look of each of these countries. So right, it's the U.S., it's China, and it's Taiwan. And yes, there's a lot of approaches in international relations that allow us to look at states as unitary actors. But I think the Riley paper showed us there's a lot going on within the states. So there's a lot that I think you can look beyond just kind of these individual unilateral actors to kind of give yourself a little bit more leverage. One of the things that I questioned in thinking of that is how you picked the documents that you were looking at. So you said that there were some correspondence that you looked at and then this Taiwanese Act. And that might be the official kind of U.S. statement and approach, but at the same time, I can see the official approach and then the way that the State Department defines it and the way that the Defense Department defines it, that all of them are going to be a little bit different and that can add to the complexity of the ambiguity that you might be thinking about. So you can look into some different documents, some different documents as well. On that point, you also kind of want to look at the flip side. So not just the way that the U.S. is defining these things, but how is Taiwan receiving this kind of strategic ambiguity and how does that shape their actions in some different ways? You have a really good definition given that though. You still have a really good definition of strategic ambiguity. I think one thing that I would like to see is a little bit better definition of tension. So does increased military spending necessarily equal tension? There's a lot of different types of tension that are out there, and I think that that could be defined a little bit better. As you kind of go through these case studies, you also say that China's tension is increasing and therefore its military spending is really increasing. Well, in this kind of realist world, there's a lot of threats out there, so China's military spending might be increasing for things completely unrelated to Taiwan. And there's a lot of challenges and especially on the world stage, a stronger military, a stronger force gives powers a bigger voice and China wants to have a bigger voice on the world stage, so they might just be bolstering up their military for completely unrelated reasons to Taiwan. And that's something that can be really difficult to entangle, but something to disentangle, but something to potentially think about. One of the last things that you said in your policy implications talked about kind of a U.S. red line, right? So if China or Taiwan crosses this red line, the U.S. is going to get involved and I would challenge you to maybe think about that because lines by their nature are tested, right? And China will want to test that line and that can raise credibility issues for the United States. But on that point, at what point does strategic ambiguity really start to fail and the United States does have to step in and we do have to say, okay, we're going to do something, what does that look like and when does that happen and is kind of a red line the way that we want to go or are there some different approaches? On the Riley piece, so in the sense that Owens can take kind of a lesson from the Riley piece and look deeper into the state, I think that the Riley piece can kind of generalize a little bit more. So in reading the paper, you do a really excellent job in kind of developing this timeline and this narrative and you introduce the characters and you introduce the complexities of it, and I think that it needs to be broadened and you need to step outside of Yugoslavia a little bit to try to give us some broader generalizations. So really good details of events and actors, but what does this tell us a little bit more broadly about things like ethnic conflict? How can we apply this to other international cases, right? Are there other case studies that we could apply this to? There's a lot of different ethnic conflicts going on within Afghanistan right now. How can we apply this to that? How can we look at kind of spillover effects from major conflicts into some of these kind of secondary or tertiary areas and how that might have an impact? And how do we determine when outside actors are actually getting involved, right? So you gave an example of how different outside actors ended up getting involved in this, but trying to generalize and understand what's drawing them in in a broader picture I think could be really beneficial. So I think kind of taking a step back and kind of looking at the bigger picture would really help ground your paper a little bit more. The Walsh paper I really thought was super interesting, right? So you're looking at the role of art and understanding one of the worst things in humanity, right, of conflict and war. And I would encourage you as you continue to develop this paper to think about how the humanity of these individuals is reflected in the art that they're producing when it's a group of people that can't do anything else, right? They don't have any other outlets, so they're kind of leaning on this idea of art and the impact of art, and I think that that's really valuable in a lot of ways in something that you can develop more. As I started to read the paper, and even as you were kind of going through it in the presentation, one thing that I think you can work on is how you approach this art, right? So I think there's two ways you can do it. One is you can look at the real-world events that are happening in Iraq, and then you can say, all right, well, here's how it's been portrayed in art by these individuals on the ground, right? And another way that you could potentially do it is really flesh out what these different artistic pieces are, who are the characters, what are the events, and then relate it back to the real-world events, right? But either way, I think you want to make sure that you're really focusing on the art and kind of building up that conversation. You're focusing on things that were created by the Iraqi people, and one of the things you said in your presentation was that there's this US-Iraq culture clash. It would also be really interesting to compare how US folks have covered these things, right? Because I'm guessing it's going to be fundamentally different, or how Europeans have covered these things and kind of showcase, you know, how different cultural approaches have looked at these, have looked at these very difficult issues. The last thing I would say is you mentioned a couple interviews that you did. You should really build that up, right? Talk about the interviews that you're doing. That's a lot of work, and that's something that you should really be focusing on and incorporating into your paper, because that gives a lot of life to the things that you're doing, and that gives kind of a primary connection to the work that you're putting together. So really good papers, everybody. I really enjoyed reading them, and I'll turn it back over to our moderator for some questions. Thank you. A round of applause for our presenters. At this time, I'd like to invite any members of the audience to come down. We have two microphones down here. You can ask some questions of our panelists here. While you guys think that over, maybe come up with some queries for our student presenters. I think I'll give them an opportunity to maybe weigh in on some of the comments that were made by the discussants. Any reactions, anything like that? Feel free to jump in. So that's a great point about looking at what external factors led to an influx of allied support. So between 1941 and 1942, the allies provided very little support, very little in the way of material support to anyone in Yugoslavia. And if we think about what war time events were happening in World War II at that time, the allies were, frankly, on their heels and weren't too concerned with what was going on in the Balkans. But at the end of 1942, the British and the Americans had seen some pretty good success in North Africa. They turned around Rommel's army, and that allowed them to see a broader view. The other impetus that led to additional allied material support into Yugoslavia is their unwillingness to open up a second front already. And so the way that they saw they could do that is by sending guns and war material to Yugoslav partisans. I use the term partisans being partisans and the Chetniks to appease Stalin so that he, the allies could say, see, we are supporting you without actually having to get skin in the game. Any other comments from panelists, or should we open it up to questions? Okay. I believe this gentleman over here was first. Please identify yourself and offer your query. Hello. My name is August Grary, and I wanted to go off of Walsh's paper. Given that our topic discussions today, they covered a lot of how nation-building and the spreading of democracy shouldn't be part of U.S. foreign policy. I wanted to ask, is it realistic that nation-building will ever not be part of U.S. foreign policy, including the influence of politicians such as John McCain, John Kerry, the Bush and Clinton families, Dick Cheney, and others who may have economic interest in keeping the military industrial complex afloat? Thank you. So I think from what I know, I think it's unrealistic to say that the U.S. will reach a point where we are not involved in nation-building of other countries just because of the amount we have meddled in other nations as it is already, and we've kind of established this role as the protector of democracy across the world, which I think is an unrealistic goal of the U.S. in general. I guess the second part to that answer would be, should we be involved in nation-building and spreading democracy? My answer to that is really no. I think we, we spread democracy. In general, we use the military. And as I spoke about greatly, when you destroy someone's home, they're not going to want to hear what you're going to say. So I think that did I get to your question there? Okay. Okay, thank you. Okay, thank you. Yes, sir. Yes, Laugh Goldstein. I'm at Brown University and with defense priorities as well, and I just want to really commend a fantastic panel. I mean, I learned something from all the papers and all the comments as well. So congrats to all there. And I would say, you know, I think we have to reflect how great a university is in our country, too, where we, you know, are so honest about our own mistakes, and we don't just sort of pass on to the next crisis, but we actually sit and think hard about the meaning of this. After all, we did that. We were responsible for that. But I would like to, as a mostly China specialist, let me address strategic ambiguity because it's critically important after all the economists last year, I think rightly said that Taiwan Strait is the most dangerous place in the world, and I would submit that that is still true even after what we saw in Ukraine. And I think you did an outstanding job dealing with it. It's a complicated issue, but I would just let me also add on to the good commentary about the paper. You know, I'm curious what is, you know, in your mind what is cultural reunification. I mean, that's a pretty novel concept, so maybe you can unpack that a little for us. But let me also make a quick comment on the arms sales, because you're onto something, and by the way, your recommendation extremely brave, right, because the conventional wisdom is oh, let's just, you know, how about another 20 billion Americans, right? And by the way, a lot of Americans getting fabulously rich off this, so you know, what's wrong with that? Well, you rightly point out there is something wrong with that, because it is fueling a cycle. So what to do, and here I would just say maybe there's a lesson, maybe you have a thought on this, maybe there's a lesson from Ukraine, right? In Ukraine turns out some pretty simple weaponry actually, you know, javelins and stingers, infantry weapons turn out to be absolutely critical. And maybe it's not the fighter aircraft, some of us who study the issue, honestly we don't think those will get off the ground, because they'll all be destroyed in initial missile strikes. So maybe what the answer is to kind of go to these less high-tech weaponry that don't inflame the situation and yet we've seen that they can be very effective. So I just throw that out as an idea to reflect on, but I commend your, you know, you took some brave positions in those conclusions. Thank you. Thank you very much, sir. That was very flattering. The policy implication part was the biggest thing I struggled with in this paper because I can identify all the problems, I can identify all the solutions very well. And the cultural reunification is very difficult to put into policy because it's, how do you make a policy about a culture? The biggest draw I got from that was, like I mentioned you started to see an ease of tension in the 1970s and 80s and I think that was because there was a larger laissez-faire stance from the United States that was less influenced with the United States. So that's why I was thinking my policy implication was to try to create that again where the United States is not so heavily involved in Taiwan and China and that they can kind of peacefully duke it out themselves without the United States looming over as that sort of nuclear button, I guess I would say. Thank you very much for the comments. Thank you. Sir. There was some ambiguous language but the administration said that there would be severe consequences towards Russia if they invaded Ukraine. And since then we've also seen how the U.S. was responding to resending some sort of more infantry-based weaponry to try and hate the Ukrainian people and I was wondering if you saw any policy implications with the U.S. changing policy based off of that, who could this give us insight on what the U.S. might do if war were to break out between China and Taiwan? Yes, it seems that war broke out immediately in Taiwan because it's like a textbook like apply this to that sort of thing and there are two very, very different situations but in terms of U.S. support of an invasion and a complicated situation like that, I think there's strong parallels. I think it was last week in the news there was a discussion about a Chinese whistleblower that had leaked information that there was going to be some sort of invasion in the fall and that that was pushed back. I don't know how accurate that information is there's a lot of misinformation in Russia right now but that would make sense to me from a Chinese perspective like we were going to have an invasion and now we're seeing the failures and we want to rethink this. I see China culturally as more of a long-term planner but there are some decisions so I consumed recently the issue of Russia and I think we need to rethink this in terms of the United States and I haven't seen really, we're still being used to tell a bit and change that but thank you. I think we got time for the two remaining questions. Yes. Hello, my name is Ching Xu and I'm from Taiwan and I also have some questions about Taiwan kind of issue and first of all I want to actually express my agreement with you about this kind of kind of leaning towards strategic from strategic ambiguity to clarity kind of like situation since you know from the US perspective we really want to push the elasticity of Taiwan Relation Act to a more you know pro kind of like Taiwan kind of stands especially when you talk about like last year American and Taiwan issues actually come from there are some first groups first special operation group in operating the area but you know my question for you is how it's kind of like beating on the death horse but how are these producing that cultural revolution no sorry cultural reunification is to the both parties especially when Professor Kim actually talked about politics really tied to the culture and since both sides like you know a communist and democratic stand so I think that's my question about cultural reunification thank you. I guess part of my answer to that is it's getting harder as time goes on because there's generations of people that are born in Taiwan and they see themselves more as Taiwan than Chinese and I don't think that the cultures necessarily need to see themselves as Chinese but you've got language and cultural similarities that government should not inhibit and I think that like I mentioned that had started to happen and then we got all up in the politics issue and it crushed it and I think I do blame China for that I'm a little biased but I don't know how policies going to work with that I'm still wrestling with that I'm still trying to find a good way to put it into words about how something like that could be fostered and when you get into legal jargon it's difficult to impose things like that on sovereign nations and then the obvious complexity of considering Taiwan a sovereign nation or not it gets very sticky but I agree and I think that the cultural issue is the most important and it's also the most difficult and it gets harder every day. I think Professor Kim had something to add to that. Just to add on to that from the perspective of Russia or China why is Ukraine or Taiwan important? or why are they dangerous? I think your idea about culture it's because Ukraine is not a place it's an idea Taiwan is not really a place it's an idea of what Chinese this could be or Russian this could be and that alternative is dangerous. Absolutely thank you My name is Max Weber I am a high school junior at St. John'sbury Academy and as you accurately pointed out the war in Iraq was a fairly major failure in terms of democratizing and liberating and a people oppressed by a dictator I have noticed that as recently the United States has become much more hesitant when it comes to where it's using military force in order to protect and secure democracy abroad. Let's take the withdrawal from Afghanistan as an example. My question to you would be where is that red line that you talked about where the United States would consider the use of active military force in the defense of Taiwan? Are you asking me or him? Because he's the one who talked about the red line so I was a bit confused but so first of all one thing I didn't say that I really think is true and people are going to disagree with me but I think the war on terror in general is the greatest military failure the US has ever had and I think that we see this decrease in trying to send military places, trying to influence other countries with these ideas of democracy because of that failure. I personally don't believe there is a line where we should be using military might to influence a nation towards democracy but I think that the idea of that is ludicrous if I'm to use a strong word because I think again like I've spoken about if we invade a nation and we destroy it with military might people aren't going to be all for democracy they're going to seek something else or maybe if they do seek democracy it's not going to be with us and I think we're just plowing into these conflicts that at the end of the day aren't going to bear fruit for us so I hope I answer your question there you were very specific thank you thank you Max and thanks to all of you it's my pleasure to really wrap up our first day of events at the peace and war summit I want to thank you for all being here I want to thank you for the tremendous support from the audiences from Norwich University once again but the best way to end would be to thank our panelists one more time please thank you very much I hope to see many of you tomorrow at our final presentations in the morning