 Okay, so just a couple quick admin remarks before we get started and the very first thing I'm going to tell you because I was just reminded by the photographer for the students to not have their badges visible when he takes photos. So if you'll make sure of that. So I'd ask you to check your electronic devices and make sure you have them in silent mode. Unlike most of your seminars for the students, almost like, unlike most of your seminars and lectures, their Chatham House rules for today were on the record and the event is being recorded. So everyone should have picked up a little pamphlet with the schedule on it. In there, there's a QR code. It's intended for you to be able to scan that QR code to access the full program, which will include the bios. The first break will be a 0945. It's a long break. It's intended that way. But I'd ask everyone to be back in your seats in plenty of time by 1015 for the CNO who will be joining us online. During the Q&A, if you're selected for to ask a question, I'll be walking through the aisles there to select the students or anyone else. I just ask that you pick up the microphone and make sure you press and hold the button, stand up, identify yourself, and then just take your time asking your question. A quick shout out. We do have an online audience today as well, and we welcome them and hope they enjoy the event. So now it is to get us started today. It is an honor for me to introduce the president, the 57th president of the Naval War College, Rhea Rammel Shoshana Chapfield. Good morning. It is great to be here, to have the current strategy forum in a hybrid mode. Welcome to this 2023 current strategy forum. I am delighted to see all of you here in the room and to welcome those online. I want to thank the many guests and distinguished visitors joining us, particularly our keynote speakers, Hal Brands, Admiral Mike Gilday, who will join us virtually later, Mary Serotti, and General David Berger. I'm also very grateful for the panelists that have agreed to participate in and moderate our panels. John Maurer, William Inbudin, Audrey Kurth Cronin, Keir Lieber, Corey Schaake, Jessica Blankton, Sarah Kreps, Nadej Rolan, Nadia Shadlow, and Toshi Yoshihara. Really, really warm welcome to you all. I want to thank the Naval War College Foundation and representing them here today, Chief Executive Officer, Mr. George Lang, all of the trustees of the foundation, and these wonderful foundation members. Your generous support has provided critical funding that has enriched and enhanced the programs, maintained the margin of excellence we can provide to our students, staff, and faculty, and made this particular conference possible. Of course, the efforts of our events, our audiovisual, our public affairs, and our graphics teams, as well as our events teams are crucial to making these events successful. And I want to thank Professor Mike Sherlock, who has coordinated this event and has really done an excellent job personally to make sure that we have such a wonderful group of speakers and panelists. Thank you, Mike. Welcome to the 72nd Current Strategy Forum. I'm honored and excited to kick off this forum because of the importance of this discussion about the future strategy of the United States. For the past 72 years, the Current Strategy Forum has allowed our nations, public servants, scholars, and senior military officers to join the college faculty and students in a discussion that encourages a wide-ranging debate on national and international security. We gather here for the 72nd annual Current Strategy Forum at the Naval War College in Newport hosted on behalf of our Secretary of the Navy. This esteemed event traces back to the 9th of May, 1949, which commenced as the Round Table Talks. Its purpose is to provide a platform for the nation's public servants, scholars, senior military officers, and gives them a venue to engage with the college's faculty and students in discussions about the future strategy of the United States. Over the years, the Current Strategy Forum has expanded its reach, encompassing a diverse group of America's civilian and military leaders, fostering an inclusive and comprehensive national and international security debate. This year, we convene under the theme Preserving America's Leadership Role, a central focus within the 2022 National Security Strategy. The National Security Strategy underscores the imperative for the United States to maintain its leadership position within the global system, safeguarding our vital interests and charting a path toward a brighter future. The emergence of China and Russia as contenders, seeking to supplant the United States in shaping the future world order, had become evident. Accordingly, Secretary Austin's National Defense Strategy emphasizes the vital importance of an integrated approach by the Department of Defense to preserve America's leadership role. This approach protects the American people, promotes global security, and defends our democratic values. During this year's forum, we aim to explore the intricate relationship between U.S. leadership on the world stage and American prosperity. Additionally, we will delve into the nature and intentions of the People's Republic of China as it endeavors to replace the United States internationally. Furthermore, we will examine the Department of Defense's integrated approach to deterring China and other international challenges. As our nation faces new challenges, our students will shoulder greater responsibility as the world changes. The United States and our allies continue to be confronted by threats from Russia, Iran, China, and North Korea. Meanwhile, violent extremist non-state actors continue to threaten our security. Our current students will soon answer the call to lead organizations, discover opportunities, and solve problems to overcome these challenges. Our role at the Naval War College is to inform today's decision makers and educate tomorrow's leaders and prepare our students to overcome these challenges. The Joint Chiefs of Staff have clarified that numerical and technological superiority are no longer enough in today's dynamic security environment. The stress is on developing a cognitive advantage. We need to outthink as well as outperform our adversaries. At the Naval War College, we strive to expand the intellectual capacity of naval, joint, interagency, and international leaders to achieve that cognitive advantage. Our objective here in Newport and around the globe is to deliver excellence in education, research, and outreach, and to build enduring relationships with our alumni and our partners. As a result, we produce graduates who can think and creatively apply the full spectrum of joint and combined military power. My challenge to all of you today is to listen attentively and open your minds to think outside of your own area of specialty or scholarship. Listen and think critically about these important topics and provide feedback to one another to make this discussion as meaningful as possible as we drive toward a more effective maritime strategy and national defense. To our students, for most of you, this will be your last discussion here in Newport before moving on. So we encourage you to take this relevant discussion with you as you go and to expand that dialogue with those who you encounter. Thank you all for joining us this week, and I look forward to hearing the discussions over the next two days. It is now my pleasure to introduce our first keynote speaker. Hal Brands is the distinguished Henry A. Kissinger Professor of Global Affairs at Johns Hopkins SAIS and a scholar at the American Enterprise Institute. He is also a columnist for Bloomberg Opinion and the author or editor of multiple influential books, most recently the Makers of Modern Strategy, which features many of our faculty. In addition, Hal's expertise extends to government service as a former special assistant to the Secretary of Defense for Strategic Planning and lead writer for the Commission on the National Defense Strategy. Please welcome Hal Brands, a renowned scholar and strategist in the field of global affairs. Thank you very much, Admiral Chapfield, for that introduction, and thank you for having me for this event. I'm sorry I can't be there in person. I usually never miss a chance to get to Newport, particularly at this time of year, but I'm afraid I had a pre-existing commitment to be overseas today, so thank you for letting me join virtually at the very least. It really is a pleasure to be here, and I mean that sincerely, because when I was thinking about what I should talk about today, I realized that I actually owe an enormous debt, and really everybody who works in this field owes an enormous debt to the Naval War College. So I'm a scholar of strategy by trade, and the Naval War College really cultivated the study of strategy and the study of military and diplomatic history at a time when the rest of academia had more or less forsaken it, and so the War College has produced some of the leading scholars of strategy over the past few generations, and as Admiral Chapfield mentioned, I was actually extremely fortunate to be able to draw on some of that expertise in recent projects, and so when I was going over the table of contents of the Newmakers of Modern Strategy, the edited collection that the Admiral mentioned, I realized that I think about 20% of the contributors, so nine out of 45, are either now affiliated with the War College, particularly the Strategy and Policy Department, or were affiliated with it in the past, and that's everybody from John Maurer and Sally Payne to Toshi Oshihara and Tom Makin, and even John Gatis, who's really the Dean of Cold War History and perhaps diplomatic history at large, who recently reminded me that he first got the idea for his classic book, Strategies of Containment, when he was visiting faculty at the Strategy and Policy Department in the 1970s, so it's all a long way of saying that I'm really grateful for the invitation to speak at a remarkable conference that's been put on by a remarkable institution that's really played the preeminent role in shaping the field as it exists today. So the subject to this conference is preserving America's leadership role. There's a lot one can say under that conceptual umbrella. What I'm going to try to do is to offer a talk that takes seriously the approach that's used by S&P, which is to use the study of history to inform strategy, and it's a topic I think that's appropriate for a conference that was first held in 1949, just a few weeks after the North Atlantic Treaty was signed, because I am going to talk about how an understanding of the Cold War between the U.S. and the Soviet Union and the post-war can help Americans grapple with the major challenges they face their leadership role today. In other words, what can one twilight struggle teach us about another? And that metaphor, the idea of a twilight struggle is actually a good place to start, and so people of a certain age may remember that this was a phrase really coined by John F. Kennedy in a speech he gave in 1961, and most Americans of his generation would have understood intuitively what he was talking about. Twilight, of course, is neither dark nor light. It's neither peace nor war. It's kind of the murky state in between, and that was a good description of the Cold War. The Cold War obviously wasn't a global hot war, like the one that the United States had just waged about 20 years earlier in World War II, but it certainly wasn't peace as Americans had understood it either. It required the United States to do all sorts of things, whether developing a large standing military or manning a global network of alliances that really had no peacetime precedent in its history. And so the twilight struggle was this in-between state that really captured the reality of the world in which Americans had to operate during the Cold War. And of course, the reality that we face now is somewhat similar. I think it's no exaggeration to say that the United States is facing new twilight struggles against Russia and China, two countries that are very much seeking to change the world in which we live. China is trying to become the primary power in Asia and around the world eventually. It seeks a large sphere of influence encompassing much of the Western Pacific and perhaps much of Eurasia as well. It's seeking to physically dominate Taiwan, the South China Sea, the East China Sea, and other areas around its periphery. It's trying to create a world that revolves economically, technologically, and ultimately militarily around Beijing in the 21st century. And that of course implies a collision with the United States because it conflicts fundamentally with the world that the United States and its allies have tried to construct with a great deal of success over the last 80 years. Russia, of course, is weaker than China and it's arguably getting weaker still as a result of the conflict in Ukraine. I don't wake up in a cold sweat at night worrying that I'm going to live in a world run from Moscow 30 or 40 years from now. But Russia is trying to violently recreate a sphere of influence in the post-Soviet space. It's trying to roll back NATO's influence to its Cold War borders. It's trying to undermine a Europe whole free and at peace and to fundamentally chip away at the world that has emerged since World War II and the Cold War. And that also implies a degree of tension with the United States. Now for a number of years, the resulting competitions occurred mostly below the threshold of armed conflict. And so when we think about Russia, maybe we think about election meddling in the United States and Europe or cyber attacks and other things of that sort. When we think about the challenges posed by China, perhaps we think about the technological rivalry, the rivalry in semiconductors or perhaps China's creeping expansion in the South China Sea. But of course, all competitions between rivals are carried out in the shadow of war. Russia and China are undertaking or had undertaken in the years after the turn of the millennium major military buildups meant to give them greater leverage vis-à-vis the United States and its allies. And of course, as we meet today, the prospect of a real no-kitting great power war is increasing. Tensions in the Taiwan Strait are as high as they have been in decades. We just saw the most significant show of Chinese force in that region in at least a quarter century last August after House Speaker Nancy Pelosi visited the island. Of course, there's a hot war raging in Ukraine right now. As long as that war continues, there will be some danger of escalation involving the United States and its allies. We've seen Putin make nuclear threats, and so this really qualifies as the first great power nuclear crisis in quite a long time. And of course, Russian and Chinese leaders just aren't really talking like they think that peace is the normal state of international affairs these days. Xi Jinping took the occasion of the 100th birthday party of the Chinese Communist Party in 2021 to warn that anyone who got in China's way would have their heads bashed bloody against a great wall of steel, not exactly the most peaceful metaphor one can think of. Vladimir Putin says that the war in Ukraine is merely part of a larger struggle that Russia has already engaged in against the West. And so the bad news is that there's an ugly stretch of international affairs in front of us. The United States is going to be facing ongoing cold wars with the danger of hot war. The good news is that the United States has seen this sort of thing before. So we often talk about great power competition as though it's something new, but it only seems new because it's actually quite bold. What we're seeing now is normal, protected, dangerous competition between major powers is really the warping woof of international politics. It has been that way since Athens and Sparta locked horns in the 5th century BC. It continued through the Great Game, the Napoleonic War is the Anglo-German rivalry, and of course the US-Soviet rivalry during the Cold War to give you just a few of many, many examples. Some of these competitions went hot, others remained cold, there was really no natural law that determines which does which. All of them though have something to teach us about the dynamics of great power rivalry. And I would say that is especially the case of the US-Soviet Cold War. Now, whenever I make this argument, I have to confront the obvious objection that emerges right away, which is that the US-Soviet Cold War was not the same as either the competitions that the United States is waging against Russia or China today. And that's true enough. If you think about the US-China competition, the geography is different than it was during the Cold War. The primary theater of the US-China competition is Maritime Asia, whereas the primary theater, the US-Soviet competition, was Central Europe. The players are different. Xi Jinping is not Mao Zedong, Vladimir Putin is not Joseph Stalin, although in both cases, perhaps the resemblance grows stronger every day. And of course, the setting is much different. We often talk about a world order that is under strain today, and indeed it is. But of course, during the late 1940s, part of what made the Soviet Union so threatening was that there was no world order. You had instability, chaos, the potential for revolution, convulsing much of the world's central landmass. And of course, there's just a much higher degree of interdependence, both economic and technological, with China than there ever was with the Soviet Union. And so it's a mistake to think that we can just rerun the playbook from the Cold War and hope to succeed. And that's certainly not what I'm arguing here. But nonetheless, I think there are three good reasons to think that the Cold War does have something to teach us about the challenges the US faces today. The first is that the Cold War itself wasn't as unique as we often think. Yes, there were aspects of it that were unique, the nuclear dimension to the rivalry, for instance, or the clash between communism and capitalism. But more broadly, the Cold War was just one manifestation of this larger historical phenomenon of great power rivalry. I think Thucydides would have understood what was going on quite well had he re-emerged in the late 20th century. And so studying the Cold War can teach us something about that phenomenon and what it takes to succeed in it. The second reason is just that there aren't, there isn't an inexhaustible list of cases in America's own history that we can go back to of great power competition. And the Cold War, of course, is the one that happened within the living memory of American policymakers. I guarantee, for instance, that Joe Biden has some understanding of the Cold War that influences the choices he makes on issues related to China or Russia or Afghanistan or anything else. And so American policymakers are going to draw lessons from the Cold War one way or another. My argument is that we should try to draw those lessons as systematically and intelligently as possible. And then the third and final reason is that the Cold War may not be a perfect analog for the rivalries that the U.S. confronts today, but it's not a terrible one either. The Cold War was a struggle to shape the contours of world order. That's true of competitions with Russia and China today. The Cold War was a struggle that blended geopolitics and ideology. It was about the balance of ideas as well as the balance of power. That's true of the competitions with China and Russia today. The Cold War featured challenges shaping a strategy that would endure over decades, even as we face shocks and surprises along the way, managing an unwieldy set of alliances, a blending competition and negotiation. All of these challenges are things that the United States is going to confront in the coming years as well, even if the particular granularities of those challenges shift over time. And in fact, we have to remember that the whole point of studying history, and this is something that's obviously well understood at Newport, is that you can learn lessons. Indeed, you have to learn lessons from a past that never looks exactly like the present. Cold War statesman understood this. George Marshall gave a speech at Princeton in early 1947, where he basically said that you could only understand the emerging Cold War if you had studied the Great Peloponnesian War. That's the sort of sensibility we're going to need today. And so with all that as preface, let me highlight a few key lessons that I think we can take from the Cold War to inform our approach to great power competition today. This isn't an exhaustive list, but I hope it'll be illustrative and I hope it will generate some conversation. And so I'll go through this list relatively quickly so that we can have time for question and answer and discussion. The first lesson is that the history of the Cold War highlights the importance of having a theory of victory. You need to know what you're trying to achieve and how you're trying to do it. And this is a good place, I think, to talk about George Kinn and his contributions to Cold War strategy. You can still profitably read Kinnon's great essays and dispatches on the origins of the Cold War, the Long Telegram from Moscow in 1946, the X article which was published in Foreign Affairs the year after that, not because they contain detailed prescriptions about what the United States should do about Europe or Iran or any other hotspot in the emerging US-Soviet competition. They actually say very little about any of these specific issues. The reason these became seminal state papers is because they contained a really sharp diagnosis of the problem that the United States faced combined with a broad theory of how to deal with it. And so Kinnon's analysis basically held that Russia was not appeasable, that the Soviet Union could not reach a modus vivendi with the United States on any sustainable basis because the combination of Russian history and particularly Russian insecurity, Stalin's personal paranoia, and communist ideology made the Soviet Union essentially immune to reassurance. But he also argued that the Soviet Union, if it was an aggressive power, was a cautious power. It wasn't in a hurry to overthrow the capitalist system. And it understood that it was weaker than the United States and would be for a number of years after World War II. And this led Kinnon to his theory of how the United States could succeed in the Cold War. His argument was basically that if the United States could hold the line against Soviet expansion, if it could push back selectively when it had the opportunity to do so, if it could increase the strains on a Soviet system that was itself riven with potentially fatal weaknesses, ideological weaknesses, economic weaknesses, political weaknesses, and so on. It could also disprove Stalin's theory of history, his view that communism was destined to overtake capitalism because the capitalist countries could never work together. And if the West could do that over a prolonged period of time, Kinnon argued, it would eventually not simply check the thrust of Soviet power but lead to the breakup and mellowing of that power and indeed the breakup and mellowing of the Soviet state. What Kinnon offered basically was a theory of the case, a destination that the United States should try to work toward and a very broad and indeed kind of gauzy description of how the United States and its allies could actually get there. And that was the critical intellectual input he offered into the formation of Cold War strategy. And I highlight this because I think this is an area where today the United States is still lacking a bit. And so we have heard for instance in both of the last two presidential administrations that the United States has moved from an era of engagement into an era of competition with China. That is undoubtedly true. But competition really isn't a strategy. Competition is simply a fact of geopolitical life. And there is much more vagueness if you read the National Security Strategy or the National Defense Strategy or other documents about what the United States seeks in its competition with China and how it attends to get there. Is the United States seeking to develop the leverage that will make possible some grand bargain that will resolve US-Chinese differences? Is it seeking to roll back Chinese power? Is it seeking simply to hold the line and hope that the Chinese get tired of the game at some point? These are all difficult questions I know but I don't think we've had a particularly sharp answer to them yet. And it's important to do so because ultimately the United States is going to need to know the destination of the journey on which it is embarking and on which it is asking its allies to embark as well. So that's one lesson. A second lesson is that the balance of military power shapes risk-taking and decision-making. So during the Cold War there were continual debates over whether the military balance and particularly the nuclear balance mattered or not. One of the greatest international relations scholars we've ever had named Robert Jervis who passed away last year famously wrote an essay basically arguing that nuclear superiority didn't matter but at a certain point it was simply a matter of who could make the rubble bounce higher. But with respect to Dr. Jervis we now know on the basis of what we learned about the Cold War that the military balance didn't matter quite a great deal. The perceptions of military advantage were crucial in shaping diplomatic and strategic decisions at key moments of the Cold War. And so just a few examples of this might include the following. During the late 1940s it was the fact that the United States had an atomic monopoly that only the United States possessed atomic weapons that gave it the confidence to do things like rebuilding Western Europe and forming the North Atlantic Treaty Organization despite the fact that these things were destined to antagonize the Soviet Union and perhaps raise the risk of war. During the late 1950s and early 1960s it was the knowledge that the United States did in fact have strategic superiority in the nuclear competition. It had something like a seven to one advantage in strategic nuclear warheads at the time of the Cuban Missile Crisis that gave two presidents Dwight Eisenhower and then John Kennedy the confidence they needed to stare the Soviets down in confrontations over Berlin and Cuba. And of course if you fast forward to the 1980s it was the military build-up that began under Jimmy Carter and then really reached fruition under Ronald Reagan that provided the diplomatic advantage that the United States would use to negotiate better arms control deals. And it was of course the deployment of the Pershing II Intermediate Range ballistic missiles to Europe in the early 1980s that set the stage for the Intermediate Range Nuclear Forces Treaty. Basically building up allowed the United States ultimately to build down on advantageous terms. In none of these cases that American policymakers want or they hope very much to avoid it but they understood that knowing how the war would go if it broke out would condition the choices that both sides made during peacetime as well. So the military balance shaped the decisions that both sides made and the risks that they were willing to take. This is relevant today because the United States is fast slipping into a very dangerous situation. The military balance in the western Pacific has been eroding over the course of about 25 years. At this point things have gotten to the stage where the United States could plausibly lose a war over Taiwan or perhaps the South China Sea within the next few years. More broadly the U.S. is facing the problem that it simply doesn't have enough military power to go around. It has downshifted to a one-war defense strategy in a world where it conceivably faced major crises and two or perhaps three theaters around the Eurasian periphery at a particular time. I don't mean to criticize the national defense strategy on these grounds. There are good reasons why the United States has had to focus its attention on winning one war against one high intensity war against a major power challenger. But the reality is that the United States is increasingly facing a gap between the commitments it has in the international system and the capabilities with which it can underwrite those commitments. I think there are things that the United States can do to solve this problem without bankrupting itself. I also think that if the United States doesn't do these things in the relatively near future we're going to pay a terrible price for it. A third lesson is that negotiation should be seen as a tool of competition not a replacement for competition. So the Cold War is often portrayed as this period in which diplomacy was sort of dead when the superpowers just really weren't talking to each other and that's not really the case. More often than not the United States and the Soviet Union were negotiating over some issue or another. Every American president of the Cold War era met his Soviet counterpart at the summit at least once. There were in fact a variety of major bilateral multilateral agreements to which the United States and the Soviet Union were parties during the Cold War. And this was the case because American officials understood that diplomacy and arms control this wasn't kind of silly peacenake stuff. These were important tools that the United States could use to prosecute the rivalry with the Soviet Union effectively. These sorts of agreements could be useful in reducing the danger of war at the margin for instance. And so the most successful example of an agreement of this sort was actually an agreement that was never put down on paper. It was an implicit US and Soviet bargain that neither side would shoot down the other's reconnaissance satellites once they came online in the 1960s and 1970s. And the reason for this was that both sides realized that it was actually dangerous to have a world in which your adversary had no clue what you were doing because your adversary might fear that you were getting ready to stage a surprise attack and decide to go first instead. This is what Thomas Schelling famously called the reciprocal fear of surprise attack. And so both countries came to an implicit agreement that was never voiced publicly that they would allow the other side's reconnaissance satellites to fly overhead so that the other side could be satisfied that neither side was preparing for a surprise attack. A diplomacy and negotiation could also be useful in terms of isolating areas of cooperation. One of the most successful international agreements of all time, the Nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty, emerged during the Cold War. And it emerged from a shared understanding between the United States and the Soviet Union that differences of ideology aside, both superpowers had an interest in avoiding a world that was characterized by nuclear anarchy where 10, 20, 30, 40 powers had nuclear weapons by the 1960s or 1970s because that would make the world more dangerous for everyone. And of course, the United States understood that negotiation and diplomacy could be used to moderate the pace of the competition at key moments. They could be used as means of getting a breather at a time when the United States was strategically winded. This was one of the reasons why Henry Kissinger and Richard Nixon pursued the détente strategy vis-à-vis the Soviet Union. They realized that the United States needed a strategic breather after becoming exhausted through the Vietnam War. And so they used diplomacy and arms control as a way of slowing down the competition until the United States was better position to run at full speed once again. I think all of these examples are useful in thinking about the role of diplomacy and competition today. The United States absolutely should not assume that it can transcend its differences with China or Russia simply by talking to the other side. We should not assume that progress in one area will necessarily spill over into others. I don't think it's true for instance that if the United States and China were to come to an agreement on how to combat the effects of climate change that that would create spillover effects in other parts of the relationship. In fact, I think that that's all together unlikely. I think it would also be a mistake for the United States to make concessions on geopolitical issues in order to obtain Russian or Chinese cooperation on issues of transnational significance. The United States shouldn't make a concession on Taiwan or the South China Sea in order to try to lure the Chinese back into a more constructive effort to deal with the effects of climate change. And of course the United States should remember that both Russia and China have a distinguished record of signing solemnly international agreements that they then cheat on rampantly. What the United States should do is patiently explore areas of cooperation with Moscow and Beijing. It should think about areas where unconstrained competition may be dangerous for all sides. It should think of negotiation as a way of inserting pauses into the rivalry at advantageous times. And basically it should think of all of these things as ways of making the competition safe and bearable enough that the United States will stick with it long enough to win it. That's the key takeaway from the Cold War. A fourth lesson is that winning bilaterally means competing multilaterally. Or another way of putting this is that the best outside game is a good inside game. During the Cold War the most effective thing the United States did wasn't something that it did to the Soviet Union. It was something that it did with its friends. And this was building a thriving free world community that was safeguarded by a global network of alliances and four military deployments that assisted in the rehabilitation of America's former enemies in Japan, Italy, and Germany. And that ultimately built a Western community that was so strong and so vibrant that the Soviet Union couldn't intimidate it or outcompete it over time. There was nothing at all easy about this. Dealing with America's allies was only a little bit less difficult than dealing with America's enemies at various points during the Cold War. France of course withdrew from the NATO military command in 1966 because as Charles de Gaulle realized that the United States had no choice but to defend France if it also wished to defend Germany. He told the American Secretary of State Dean Rusk that France could only recover its sovereignty if every American soldier left French soil. This led Rusk to ask if that included the Americans who were buried in the military cemeteries in Normandy. And so alliance relations could be a fairly bare knuckled affair. The United States could play pretty hard as well. We now know that during the 1950s if the Western European countries had been conquered by the Soviet Union the United States actually would have nuked its allies rather than see their industrial capacity harnessed to the Soviet war machine. But all sides stuck with this effort. The United States stuck with this effort because it understood that fighting with allies was far better than fighting without them. And it understood that being relatively generous and relatively tolerant and dealing with less powerful allies would pay off generously for the United States in the end as in fact it did. Today America's alliances are still its asymmetric edge. They're at secret sauce in geopolitical competition. America's alliances in Asia and in Europe if you put them all together those countries still dwarf Russia and China or Russia and China and Iran in terms of shares of global GDP in terms of military power in terms of diplomatic influence in terms of basically every metric of power that matters in international affairs. The fact that the United States has this globe spanning network of alliances allows it to craft trans-regional responses to regional aggression. Look at the way that U.S. allies in the Asia Pacific have joined in the coalition sanctioning Russia and supporting Ukraine today or look at the ways in which the United States have been able to get countries from a variety of regions to help it cut off China from high-end semiconductors over the past year or so. Look at the way that the United States has been involved with the United Kingdom and Australia three countries from three different continents to try to shore up the military balance in the western Pacific and a turn attack on Taiwan. If the United States can hold its alliances together if it can adapt them to new challenges it will win this competition in the end which of course is why Xi Jinping and Vladimir Putin spent so much time trying to wedge the United States and its allies apart. A fifth lesson you can't win a twilight struggle solely on the defensive. Containment was never a purely defensive strategy. Throughout the cold where the United States pursued a variety of initiatives to try to throw the Soviet Union off balance and put Moscow on the defensive for a change. There were information warfare initiatives like Radio Free Europe and Radio Liberty. There were covert destabilization programs. There were the Reagan Doctrine initiatives in the 1980s that supported freedom fighters in countries like Nicaragua and Afghanistan. Some of these initiatives worked very well. Some of them failed miserably. All of them had the purpose of imposing costs on the Soviet Union of making life more difficult, of forcing the Soviets to divert resources from offensive to defensive operations and basically of complementing a strong defense with a selective offense. The United States was never seeking the overthrow of the Soviet regime. I think everyone involved understood that that would be dangerous if it could even be achieved. It was trying to make it harder for the Soviet Union to stay in the competition over time. That's a useful precedent to keep in mind right now. If the United States is thinking about its competitions with Russia and China, I don't think it should be thinking regime change. It should be thinking about how to impose costs on these rivals and to put them on the back foot for a change. The United States is actually doing this in Ukraine right now. One way of looking at that war is that it is a ruthless, brutally effective proxy war being waged by the West, one in which America and its allies are using arms and intelligence and money to allow a committed defender to impose sky-high costs on the Russian aggressor. There are other ways that the United States can do this as well. We've seen that China reacts very irritably, rashly sometimes to challenges to its domestic authority, and this can be turned against the CCP. An example of this, in early 2021, the United States and a few dozen democratic countries got together to impose what were basically fairly meaningless symbolic sanctions on some Chinese officials that were involved in repression in Hong Kong and Xinjiang. The Chinese basically had a wolf warrior meltdown in response to this. They responded by sanctioning a variety of European officials, parliamentarians and think tanks and basically trying to humiliate a number of the countries that had imposed sanctions. The result of this was to blow up the comprehensive agreement on investment that the EU and China had just recently signed. So this is an example of a bait and bleed strategy that can goad the Chinese into an undesirable response. Yes, this is going to be a recipe for heightened tension. I think it's also going to be a recipe for being effective in a long competition. A sixth lesson and a related one is that dividing adversaries may first require pushing them together. So one of the ways that the United States contributed to the Sino-Soviet split in the late 1960s had been by putting China under severe pressure in the 1950s. The theory, which was articulated best by Dwight Eisenhower and John Foster Dulles, was that if the United States put communist China under what we might today call maximum pressure, it would actually drive China closer to the Soviet Union. It would lead China to make demands that Moscow would be reluctant to meet and it would thereby ultimately impose strain on the relationship. And that's kind of what happened by the time you get into the late 1950s and early 1960s. The Chinese were demanding more support than the Russians wanted to give. The Russians were demanding more control than the Chinese wanted to give. The reason this is relevant today is that I'm afraid that in the near term we don't really have any good way of rushing, wedging Russia and China apart. The drivers of that relationship are ideological, they are personal, they are geopolitical, and they are very strong. But the more pressure that the West is able to put Russia under in Ukraine, the more Putin will ask for Chinese support, which Beijing does not want to give him. And the more Russia becomes dependent on China, the more it'll rankle some Russian nationalists, if perhaps not Putin himself. This will not produce a split any time soon, certainly not during the reign of Vladimir Putin and Xi Jinping. It may though introduce strains into the relationship over the longer term. Now, none of this sounds like a whole lot of fun, I know. It's a forecast for high tensions, it's a forecast for dangerous competition. But, and I'll end here, the final lesson is that there are worse things than having to wage a Cold War. So if we look back at the original Cold War, the reality is that no one loved containment at the time. We now look back on this as this gloriously effective strategy. That's not how it was seen in the moment. Containment was plotting and slow, it seemed to combine perpetual danger with perpetual indecision. And so it was hit with critiques from all sides the political spectrum during the 1940s, 1950s, and after it was criticized by the old isolationist right characterized by Robert Taft. It was criticized by the internationalist right led by John Foster Dulles as being feudal and immoral. It was criticized by the progressive left by Henry Wallace during his campaign for the presidency in 1948, and by the moderate left, by someone like Walter Lippmann. And the book he wrote in 1947 that actually gave the name, the Cold War, to the conflict. And of course, the argument that many of these critics made was that the Cold War would exhaust us, it would deplete American resources, it would lead the United States to make terrible mistakes and out of the way places. And of course, they weren't entirely wrong about that. But the United States persevered with containment over a two generation period, not because anybody thought it was a brilliant strategy, but because it was simply the best of the bad alternatives. Containment was seen as an alternative to the appeasement that had brought on World War II. It was seen also as an alternative to the catastrophic escalation that could lead to a nuclear World War III. Containment was really about finding a narrow path between repugnant alternatives, and it succeeded brilliantly in that task over time. Today, I fully understand why nobody wants a new Cold War, why we seem to be somewhat allergic to the language of the Cold War, because everyone remembers how awful, how dangerous, how trying the earlier Cold War was. But we're seeing today that there still is evil in the world. We're seeing that really nasty autocracy have really nasty plans for the world. We're seeing that the alternative to deterring a war may be having to fight a war under worse conditions. And we're seeing that the alternative to successfully waging Cold Wars against Russia and China is probably to see them consign the world order that the United States and its allies achieved through their victory in the original Cold War to history. That would lead the world to a very dark place. And so waging a new Cold War isn't a pretty picture, but I think it's a way of avoiding a future that could be uglier still. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you, Hal. That was a wonderful lecture and certainly stands up to be one of the the finest we've had in this growing auditorium. So thank you. So for the Q&A, we'd ask you to raise your hand. Hi, David Walker from Boston, Massachusetts, a Foundation member. Thanks very much for your remarks. I'm really terrific. Just a question about Taiwan. There's a school of thought, particularly on Wall Street, that thinks that China's timeline with Taiwan is much longer than generally perceived. Just love to hear your thoughts on that. Sure. Well, first, thank you for the question and thank you to you and the Foundation for all you do to support the Naval War College in this event. The Taiwan timeline scenario, I think, has become kind of the hottest question in thinking about U.S.-China relations today. There are kind of two schools of thought on this. One is that the Chinese are willing to be relatively patient on Taiwan, that they don't expect that they will be in a position to force unification with Taiwan for another 10 to 15 years at the earliest, and that the only deadline that the Chinese system really has in mind for bringing Taiwan back into the grasp of the mainland is 2049. So basically the 100th anniversary of the founding of the People's Republic in China in 1949. I think that was probably the conventional wisdom up until a couple of years ago when you had U.S. military officials start publicly warning that China might be thinking of a more abbreviated timeline, perhaps culminating sometime later this decade. I find myself in the school that thinks that a Taiwan crisis, if it comes, is likely to come sooner rather than later for a variety of reasons. But number one reason is that Xi Jinping has increasingly entangled the issue of Taiwan with the issue of his own personal legacy. And so he said things to the effect that the Taiwan question must not be passed down from generation to generation, which has been interpreted by some sinologists as saying that the Taiwan question must not be passed down to the next generation of Chinese leaders. In other words, that this is an issue that Xi Jinping would like to see resolved on his watch. Another reason why I think China is likely to act in a more aggressive fashion sooner rather than later is that the course of events politically and diplomatically with respect to Taiwan must seem pretty problematic from Beijing's perspective. There's really no chance of Taiwan going down the road of peaceful unification with China at this point in part because the Taiwanese people have seen what happened to Hong Kong. They've seen that one country, two systems was a lie and they can't have faith in any promises that the CCP might make. And so with every year that passes, with every generation that passes, you develop more of a distinctive Taiwanese national identity and there's less and less support for the idea of unification with Beijing. And then there's the third reason, which is that China is going to have actually a very attractive window of military opportunity and the latter part of this decade. And so the current round of PLA reforms, it's one of several that they have going, but the one that is most pertinent to a Taiwan contingency because it emphasizes a lot of the joint operations that would be necessary for the PLA to isolate or take Taiwan is scheduled to be completed in 2027. That is when Xi Jinping has told the PLA to be ready for a Taiwan operation, not that he's ordered it, but he's told them to be ready or at least this is what US intelligence officials have told us in public forums. And so the PLA is going to be sort of reaching a climax in terms of the capabilities it might need for a Taiwan contingency. And the reality is that none of the defense programs that what you might think of as the good guys have going, so the United States, Japan, Taiwan, Australia, other countries in the region will be reaching fruition by this period. Our defense modernization program is still targeted mostly at the early 2030s that that's true, albeit to a lesser extent in Japan. The Taiwanese are not going fast enough on their overall defense concept. And so you're going to get to a period in the late 2020s, when it may seem as though Taiwan is sort of slipping away from China politically and diplomatically, but the military window of opportunity is opening wide. And so I don't think that Xi Jinping would just wake up one day and decide to use force against Taiwan. What I worry about is that he will be in an increasingly risk-acceptant mood as we get later into this decade. And that could set the stage for a Taiwan confrontation sooner rather than later. Okay, next question. Am I on? Commander Junior, great, I was there from Latvian Navy. Sir, from your point of view, in present day, is Russia a great power? And if yes, then what are those characteristics which make it a great power, except nuclear weapons? Thank you. So I think Russia is a great power. And it's a great power for a variety of reasons. It's a great power because it is still a nuclear pier to the United States. It's a great power because it commands a very capable military, not that it has displayed that capability in Ukraine, but many of its other capabilities, its undersea capabilities, its nuclear capabilities, remained untouched by the war. It's a great power because it actually does have multiple forms of power despite its economic weakness. It's a very capable actor in the cyber realm and the informational realm and a variety of other areas. It's a great power because it can influence the choices of countries around its periphery and it can project power into regions beyond its periphery, as we see from the continuing Russian presence in places like Syria, Libya, and Sub-Saharan Africa today. The other point I would make about Russian power is that we in the West, particularly in the United States, I imagine this is a mistake that is less likely to be made in Latvia or other countries that have to live in the shadow of Russian power, we have a tendency to think that when Russia is down that it's going to be out for good. And so it was difficult for Americans, I think, to imagine the 1990s that this country that was flat on its back was going to reemerge as a great power challenger, a very aggressive great power challenger in the way that it has. But in fact, there are cycles of this in Russian history. Russia has always been one of the weaker of the great powers and whatever international system it inhabited. And so the Russians have this tendency and Stephen Kotkin, the great historian of Russia and the Soviet Union, has pointed this out of basically straining the system to the utmost to try to develop the power to compete with the big dogs. That ultimately leads Russia to sort of run out of gas or to collapse in the case of the Soviet Union. The outside world then counts Russia out, but of course Russia comes back down the line because it's still a state that commands a large swath of the world's landmass. It's still a state with a lot of resources. And it's been a relatively resilient power over time. So Russia is undoubtedly the weaker of, let's say, the three great powers today, the other two being the United States and China. It's increasingly finding itself in the position of junior partner in the Sino-Russian alliance, but I think it still qualifies as a great power. And I think it would be a mistake for us to assume that Russia is going to fade from the scene even after the war in Ukraine is over. Mr. Lieutenant Colonel Nate Adams, U.S. Army, you talked about how winning in the twilight era requires some more offensive type of capability. In the Cold War, perhaps we were more deliberately used the information tool of national power as an effective competition tool. How do you think in this information age we could do a better job of using information as a tool of national power, especially when truth seems to be on such a sliding scale, especially when it comes to a China and Russia? So I think there are a variety of ways, but let me just mention one that I think is starting to get some attention that is probably important to focus on. And so one of the most dangerous and insidious things that the major autocratic states are doing today, and particularly China, which is really at the forefront of this trend, is trying to sort of bring autocracy into the 21st century to use ubiquitous surveillance, big data, AI, to gain greater control of the population while also reducing the costs of repression. And so if you can repress selectively, if you can identify dissent precisely, then you don't have to do all of kind of the brute force repression that we saw with the gulags in the Soviet state. Now I don't mean to diminish the fact that both China and Russia are doing some things that just look like old school tyranny. That's certainly the case if you look at what China is doing in Xinjiang. But the CCP is basically trying to get all of the benefits of autocracy with fewer of the economic costs that have traditionally been associated with it. And if it succeeds, that would significantly change the balance of forces in the world between democracy and autocracy. So I would like to see that experiment fail. And I think there are ways that the United States can help it fail. And so there's been some discussion of trying to inject adversarial inputs, basically bad data into China's social credit system into its facial recognition system so they can essentially spoof the system. It can make the CCP squander resources and wonder about the reliability of those social control systems. This probably seems fairly edgy given the state of U.S.-China relations today. My general view, though, is that our tolerance for risk in the relationship with Russia and China has gotten significantly greater over the past five years as those relationships have deteriorated and we have seen what the costs of not taking certain actions have been. So the United States is willing to do far more to a trip Russian power in Ukraine today than it was five years ago. The United States is willing to do far more to slow China's military modernization and even its economic modernization today than it was five years ago. And so I think the aperture is going to open wider for these sorts of informational operations. And so it's a good time for us to be thinking about what they might entail since the aperture is going to open up a bit more in the years ahead. Okay, we're going to take one from the online audience. Mr. Brands, a question from Jen Teeter from our virtual audience. The PRC often speaks of finding win-win solutions, but its negotiating style actually seems quite transactional. In what ways do you foresee the U.S. and China finding common ground over Taiwan or over the South China Sea? I don't. So with apologies for the bluntness, I just think it's not going to happen because the interests that the PRC has staked out in these areas are somewhat antithetical to the regional order that the United States has tried to uphold. And so just to be very plain about this, to say that China is expanding in the South China Sea doesn't really do justice to what's going on. The PRC has claimed 90% of the South China Sea as its own sovereign territory, as its own sovereign possession. This is akin to the United States saying that the Caribbean reaching all the way down to Venezuela actually physically belongs to the United States. This is quite an expansive revisionist claim. If Beijing were able to substantiate it, it would have a hammerlock on one of the world's most vital commercial waterways, and it would be able to significantly change the balance of forces throughout Southeast Asia and beyond. In Taiwan, the basic nub of the issue is that the United States would like a democratic, semi-sovereign Taiwan to be able to continue its independence. The PRC does not want that to happen. And so there isn't a huge amount of ground where they can find common solutions. Now that doesn't mean that we are destined for conflict. And so I think one thing that will have to happen is that even as the United States tries to strengthen its position in some place like the Taiwan Strait or the Western Pacific more broadly, it has to find ways of indicating to the Chinese leadership that it's not pursuing changes that would be intolerable from a Chinese perspective. So can China live with a perpetuation of the status quo, an awkward status quo in the Taiwan Strait for another 20, 30, 40 years, whatever the case may be? Yeah, I think they can live with it if they're convinced that the cost of taking action to change it would be too high. Can China live with the situation in which it's convinced that Taiwan is sliding towards a declaration of independence? No, it can't live with that. And Xi Jinping would use force to prevent that if he thought that were in the offing. And so there is going to be a degree of reassurance, a degree of dialogue that's involved here, although I think that the sad fact of the matter is that US and Chinese interests on these issues are fairly sharply opposed. Good morning, sir. Comaner Strauch from the German Navy. Henry Kissinger recently gave an interview to a German newspaper and he compared the situation, the current situation between the US and China to the advent of First World War. The difference he made was that in First World War, advent of First World War, the leaders were not aware of the consequences of that war. So for instance, in Germany, everyone was thinking that they would be in Paris within a couple of weeks. He argues that nowadays, leadership have a pretty good understanding about the consequences. And he explicitly argued because of AI becoming part of modern warfare and other modern weapon system. And this is the reason why he says another war between or a war between China and US would be devastating. So first, do you agree with his compassion to the First World War, advent? And second, do you see any indication in leaderships addressing and tackling that problem? Thank you. So I haven't read the comments that you're referring to. So I'll just answer less with respect to Dr. Kissinger's comments than to sort of the broader analogy that I've sometimes seen drawn between World War One and the current Sino-American tensions. I think that the view that World War One was sort of an accidental war or a war that policymakers stumbled into without understanding the consequences, I actually don't think that's correct. I think if you look at the best scholarship on the origins of World War One, it shows that the German leadership understood that it was running the risk of at very least a continental war with France and Russia. The military understood it was also running the risk of a global war involving the United Kingdom. And there was also an awareness that the the Schlieffen Plan, while it promised a quick victory, was a big gamble that had no assurance of succeeding. And so the lesson that I take away from World War One is also sobering, but in a different way. And that lesson is that sometimes countries, sometimes leaders opt for war even though they know they have a relatively low probability of success. And even though they understand that the consequences can be catastrophic. This was also true, by the way, of Japan's decision for war in 1941. And so when I think about the US-China tensions today, I worry less about a scenario of unintended or accidental war, something stemming from a collision between a US and a Chinese jet, for instance, even though I think that would be bad and dangerous, than I worry about a deliberate decision for war being taken in Beijing. And so I think that most of our efforts should be geared toward trying to deter that, trying to reassure the Chinese in ways that make sense with respect to our own security interests, that we're not trying to change the situation in ways that the government there would find intolerable. I think that that is the scenario that I'm most worried about in the current moment. Okay Hal, pretending virtually it came out great. I think you gave our students a lot more to consider, you know, as they think through the challenges of the future. And thank you again. Hopefully we'll have you back here next year. So thanks. Thanks very much for having me. It's always a pleasure to get to come to New Port, even if I only get to appear as a giant head on the screen in front of you. All right, thanks again. So that's it for now. We're going to take a break. We'll ask you to be back in your seats by 10.15 for the C&O.