 Welcome to day three of the Future Security Forum for 2020. We're going to begin today with some welcome remarks from Dr. Carol Evans, who is the Director of Strategic Studies Institute at the U.S. Army War College, which is the premier institute within the Army of the Global Strategic and National Security Research and Analysis. She's got over three decades of experience in national security, including serving as the advisor to the Director of Central Intelligence, a technical advisor to the National Ground Intelligence Center, and an advisor to the Defense Science Board. We extend a special thank you to Dr. Evans and the SSI for being co-sponsors of the Future Security. Thank you, Dan, for that great welcome and introduction. It is our great pleasure here at SSI to co-host the Future Security Forum. I'm going to keep my remarks very, very brief because we want to get direct into this afternoon's panel discussion. I want to provide just a very brief introduction to Sir Lawrence Freeman, who for many of you I know is a household name. Sir Lawrence is the emeritus professor at King's College and he was professor of war studies from 1982 to 2014 and vice principal from 2003 to 2013. And before joining him, Sir Lawrence has had research positions both at Nuffield College at Oxford University, the IISI and at the Royal Institute of International Affairs. Sir Lawrence was educated at the Universities of Manchester, which was my father's alma mater, York and Oxford. Sir Lawrence, as we well know, is probably the world's foremost authority on war, strategy and international politics. For most of you, important classics must be read. Those include his book on the future of war. And another one of his classic strategy, a history, was named a best book in 2013 by the Financial Times and one of the very prestigious W.J. McKenzie Prize. Sir Lawrence is very well known in the UK government circles. He is the official historian of the Falklands War and he was appointed to serve on the Iraq War, also known as the Chilcot Inquiry. And he's received many, many honors and hence, was knighted in 2003. So Sir Lawrence contributes or continues to contribute a lot to contemporary security issues, including today's discussion which focuses on strategy and the impacts of global impacts. Of the COVID pandemic. So with that, please let me turn it over to Sir Lawrence for remarks, a quick footnote if I may, for those participants that would like to offer some questions of Sir Lawrence, please submit them in the Q&A box that you will find online. Thank you, Sir Lawrence. Thank you very much indeed and thanks to the organisers for the opportunity. Let me just give some headline points because we haven't got a lot of time. The impact of COVID depends on things that are very specific to the pandemic and its effect with developments that were in train anyway, anyway. And these obviously include the question of who you elect as president in the United States, which probably is more important than almost anything else we're going to talk about. How it fits in with whatever China is up to and the extent to which Z is asserting Chinese power, as well as other questions like the development of the European project and the number of issues around the EU. Just a couple of points on things that were consequential on the pandemic. First, most important is it's not over. There was a sort of a sense a couple of months ago that somehow we might have suppressed it sufficiently to manage it by very localised specific measures. But we're clearly now, at least in Europe and I think elsewhere, back in a second wave. It may not be as bad as the first wave but it's looking pretty demanding at the moment. And we have to assume that this is with us at least for another six months. And that obviously depends to a degree on a vaccine. Now, that's a statement that's made without thinking through the political implications of vaccination. There's obviously a race on countries, pharma firms to develop a vaccine. A lot of these look quite promising but you've got to get public acceptance for this. And as we know, there are many anti-vaccine movements around and how these interact will be important. And a lot then depends on how the vaccine is introduced, how good it looks if there are side effects and if there are suddenly bad results even with just one of these vaccines in one of these countries other than that could have a knock-on effect. Also, this is a major industrial undertaking to produce enough vaccines. So there's going to be lags as there already are in the impact of COVID on particular countries, particular regions so that India, for example, which came rather late in some ways to severe infections is going possibly to be later still in being able to manage the whole thing via a vaccination program. Secondly, the economic consequences. Our government seems to have discovered debt in an embrace of modern monetary theory which means that as long as people are prepared to hand over money at limited interest rates you can go into as much debt as you like. How long this will last? I've no idea. One of the reasons for this is to try to keep unemployment down but unemployment is going to go up and that is going to start to have major political consequences. Lots of people will be out of work, some will be quite desperate and again if you look beyond the Atlantic area and go into a lot of third world countries or Middle East and so on we're going to see some major consequences of that and indeed we already are. So desperation produces political instability. It's hard to say where that will come what it will look like which is just something to expect. Lastly, because I know this is something that people talk about a lot is China. So China looked like being a Chinese crisis all by itself to start with then China by methods that most of us couldn't emulate managed to suppress it and started to boast how well it had been done and started to move around helping others to show that having succeeded in suppressing the virus it would now be in a position to lead the way out. I don't think that worked as well as many people thought it might partly because some of the stuff they sent around certainly to the UK turned out to be rather dodgy in terms of the tests for example and people didn't forget that if they'd been a bit quicker in acknowledging and dealing with this then it might not have spread so disastrously and so quickly. So a bit of a China doesn't seem to be suffering now as badly as others. So that raises a question of whether this somehow shows that authoritarian systems, a Chinese model is works better than others. I'd argue that if you look at South Korea and Taiwan you could argue more that there's an East Asian model I think born of the SARS experience that is actually more impressive. A lot of authoritarians they haven't done particularly well with this. Also you can see a determination not to be so dependent upon China in the future for example on supply chains. So I think that's an open question. But finally and hopefully we can have a discussion there's the interaction between China's belief that I think somehow the Western world is distracted and the rest of the world is distracted by COVID and the belief maybe that this is a time to push on other issues. And I think there is a danger here not particularly with the United States maybe or not directly with the United States but certainly we're seeing rumblings with India, with Taiwan. And that again something to keep in mind these events is looking forward. None of us looking forward in December last year imagined where we'd be this time this year. Events get you by surprise and this has been a big one. There are events that are gonna come up whether it's a result of the assertiveness of China or political instability produced by COVID that we can't anticipate. We don't know exactly where they'll be but that is going to be what will mark the consequences of this as we move into the next year. I'll stop there Carol I think and hopefully we've got a chance for some conversation. Great. I am waiting for some questions to come in but while I have you I thought I may use my role as facilitator and ask maybe the first question. And that is I'm very interested in your thoughts on the economic consequences. I mean already I'm looking at our defense budgets in the US I know we're pretty well secure for the next year but we look into the 2022 timeframe and outwards and we know for defense spending that's absolutely coming down. There are mutterings from the Pentagon that we're going to have look at reduced budgets. I would imagine the same of course in the UK and elsewhere. I'm interested in your thoughts there on the impact of those cuts. And particularly when I look across potentially at the role of the Quad where you mentioned India being a very important partner particularly for the US and UK as a counterbalance in the Indian Ocean region that she's been on a buying spree of quite a few major weapons systems particularly from the United States. But are we going to be able to continue to bolster those kinds of defense spending and acquisition purchases and what might be those impacts? I think it will vary. I mean I believe in the UK we're just completing a major review. My expectation was that will be the defense spending will go up. I think that's part because as a result of Brexit the government wants to demonstrate that it hasn't just withdrawn into itself. So defense spending may go up. I think there's, but in other countries I would expect many others in Europe probably not France, but I don't think we're going to see the rise in German expenditure that the Americans have been demanding. Defense will continue to suffer. I think there's another slightly worrying question too as to the readiness of the European countries to assert themselves internationally. We've seen this in the Eastern Mediterranean at the moment or with Belarus where the EU's own divisions may have meant that it's been very hard to get it to sort of think of itself as an international actor. So I think when you look at the various problems around the periphery of the EU whether it's in the former Soviet Union or in the Middle East, North Africa there's an awful lot of difficult issues to come and it's not quite clear how it deals with that. Just perhaps a final note. I think although the UK is leaving the EU I think what you will tend to see is Britain, France and Germany trying to work together precisely because of this limitation of the EU on issues like Iran and so on. But by and large COVID has been so absorbing so demanding of the bandwidth of governments that they have not been good at finding time for what's been going on in the rest of the world. It's going to be very, very interesting. This is a very tough arena right now. I'm again looking at some of the questions coming in. One of the aspects that you also touched upon obviously is China and there are many ways we can think about the pandemic and from a strategic point of view the role of China. I am a little bit in a sort of following on with economics perhaps. You mentioned the push on the part of the Chinese to use their response to COVID as a means of public diplomacy and raising their stature and image which as you pointed out has been so much problematic. But I think the real point that I was taking away was the necessity for many countries and companies specifically to disentangle their supply chains. And here in the States we've seen that a lot obviously on the part of this administration for example, Huawei and trying to beef up our own domestic 5G capability. The other aspect would be from countries. And I'm curious what your feel perhaps is the impact of COVID with those countries as part of the Belt and Road Initiative. Are we likely to see countries be more circumspectual over their BRI relationships or are we going to see those perhaps continue? I have interesting things about Belt and Road for the Chinese is they have been inherited an awful lot of debt. A lot of the countries that have signed up essentially did so on debts from the child owed to the Chinese which they now will be unable to repay. And the Chinese have got some pretty interesting decisions to make about whether they call in those debts which were pretty futile, whether they reschedule them which creates its own precedent or whether they start seizing assets which is the sort of thing they've done in the past. I think for those in Beijing who were wary about the liabilities being accepted under Belt and Road this is a sort of indication and I'm not convinced that it's going to have quite as much energy in the future as it had pre-COVID. I think there's another issue that stems from the economics which is the others who know more about this than I do but the Chinese seem to have been getting everybody back to work by many people as possible by getting the factories going to produce goods that Chinese consumers won't consume and the market isn't big enough and is that going to lead to dumping? Is that going to lead to other sorts of economic irritations? And lastly, you've mentioned the Hawaii issue. I mean, it is quite striking the change in mood with regard to China over the last couple of years in Europe from seeing it largely in purely economic terms and in good economic terms it's now seen as being much more threatening. I think the Chinese have got themselves to blame a lot this sort of wolf warrior diplomacy has rebounded it doesn't go down very well people don't like to be told they can't criticize China's human rights records unless they lose contracts and so on. So, whether or not this will lead to a rethinking in Beijing about where it's going and what it wants to do, I don't know and I tend to doubt but I don't think you can argue that this has been a great couple of years for the Chinese foreign policy. Lovely. We have a couple of questions coming in on the Google chat. First one, if I may, your comments about the importance of the presidential election suggest you see the strategic consequences as more an outcome of personal leadership than structural factors. What changes to the security environment will endure regardless? Well, a lot in New York and there's always much more continuity than commentators allow and we always tend to see the long-term consequences from quite short-term events. But I think this is different. I mean, again, I'll speak from a European perspective. I think there are real questions as to whether or not the alliance could survive a Trump second term. It really is touch and go at the moment and this is not just because the president doesn't like allies very much and because of the trade issues. There's a whole, there's almost an ideological element to this now. So whereas I don't, I mean, I think that a lot of the issues in terms of European contributions are we doing enough would remain even with the Biden administration and the focus will still be on China in different ways but it'll still be on China. So I don't think that the massive changes in that direction, but if you look at the polling that's just come out, the view of the Trump administration is very negative in Europe compared to the Obama administration some of the other direction. So these things can change, but it'd be wrong, I think, to underestimate the difference to the personalities in this sense too much. So it's the flavor of a whole administration, not just the president himself. The question is for you. Sir Lawrence, do you feel that the recent rise in misinformation and disinformation operations represents a significant shift in a character of war moving forward? And if so, what can be done? Excellent question. Yes, of course, misinformation is not at all new. Deception operations are not at all new in the historian of war and think of plenty in the past and propaganda and so on. It's just, there are different ways of doing it and social media allows it to pass very quickly. And the answer is, I think we're much more savvy about this than we were. I think 2016 was a shock here, not just to the UK and the US, but in other countries as well when it became apparent how much of the stuff was being pushed around. You can see it at work. I mean, anybody who's on social media can pick it out quite easily. And I think going back to something I spoke about right at the start, the vaccination issue is one where it wouldn't surprise me to start seeing lots of stuff going around, partly maybe just to discredit somebody else's vaccine in order to promote one's own. But you can already see quite a lot of that going on. I think if we can get through your election without too much mishap, then that will give us a bit of a breathing space on these things. Or one could say, is it ubiquitous? It's there all the time, it's routine, but we are much more sensitive to it than we were a few years ago. And that maybe is a more hopeful sign. Right, right. I'm waiting for other questions to come in, but I want to go circle back to political instability. We already talked about the rise of economic nationalism within individual countries, whether parts of Europe, certainly here in the United States elsewhere, and the division between the have and have nots. And particularly when you think about how this vaccine, if and when, gets distributed, are we going to, are those fissures going to be even stronger? And I'm curious where you see that instability perhaps being the most grave from an international security perspective. The answer to some things I don't know, I mean, I think these things can come up in unexpected places. I mean, we know that there are some countries, say Pakistan, where attempts at vaccination have met violence in the past from Islamist groups and that could be a risk. We know that there are strong anti-vaccination movements and, you know, you need a certain level, even in Western Europe and the United States, you need a certain level of vaccination for it to work. Otherwise, people keep on coming back to hospital. So I think that's one level of concern. But I think that much larger is just unemployment, indebtedness, stress governments. And I think, you know, in some ways, I'm surprised that there hasn't been more reaction in the sort of Iraq, Iran, Lebanon access, access to what has happened than there has been. I think we were predicting six months ago, you might have expected it to get much more difficult there when especially given what Lebanon's been through. So you wonder whether that's just the dog that she had to bark that at some point, all the tensions, especially within Lebanon, will burst open. And when that happened, the knock-on effects in around the Middle East could be substantial. So another question for you coming in. What is the single most difficult and dangerous strategic problem that our world faces today? Well, you know, over the long term, I think climate change is looming large. It's not a future problem, it's a current problem. And we've lost time in terms of international cooperation to deal with that. And it's, I think the mischaracterization of the issue, arguably by both sides in it, but I think particularly by those who denied the human role has lost us a lot of time. I think in old-fashioned strategic terms, how to accommodate China, how to cope with China is as big as any. But the thing that any student of strategy knows is it's not the big ones that catch you out, it's the things that are below the radar that people sort of knew was a problem that weren't paying proper attention, that have a horrible habit of catching you out. And I think just on the China question, I think there is an issue that this is often characterized as a U.S.-Chinese strategic problem. China has got argument with lots of countries. And it's an issue that needs to be looked at in the round than just as a specific problem for the United States. Well, we have four more minutes remaining, so I want to try and squeeze in a couple more questions for you that have come up. This one. The world has avoided a nuclear conflict since 1945. What is the likelihood that this record holds up for the next 75 years? It's a great question because it's like an airline that's got a perfect safety record. You go on that one because of its perfect safety record, or do you reckon that we just can't last? I mean, it's too good to be true. I think my view is that we ought to be able to avoid a great power nuclear conflict. I can't think ahead 75 years, but certainly in the coming years. But the risks of a smaller scale one, India, Pakistan, being an obvious example, are very real. The next administration, whoever's heading it, is still going to have a North Korean problem. So World War Three, hopefully we can still avoid, but nuclear detonation, that's going to be harder. And I think we've got time for one more. Let's see. Sir Lawrence, does the West need a unifying grand strategy? Is this possible today in such a fractured, multi-polar world? It's probably not possible. It's too complicated. I think there are certain themes that would be good if we could start to agree on, even if it's in some sort of G7 communique, but strategy is an active thing. It's about interaction with others who've got their own strategies. And I think it comes back to the question of American leadership. If the United States is providing leadership up to recent times, others would be inclined to follow and try to fit in at least. You know, one of the striking things over the last few years, over the last year or even, is the extent to which the seat on Iran in the US, the US takes a position and nobody follows. Now, I mean, that is quite a change. So if we're going to get the grand strategy one way or the other, the United States has got to find a way of re-engaging with its allies. And then maybe we can recover some lost ground. I'll squeeze another one in then, and that is with the question, what is the most effective means of preventing the rise of autocratic nationalist regimes within democracies? Are there any lessons for us today? I think that probably are a concluding question. Listen, listen to what people are saying, don't pay attention, don't dismiss concerns, don't patronize, but you know, but if we don't get our economics right, even if we do all the right things, then there'll be a lot of angry people around. Very good. And I think, I don't know if we're on time, if we're segueing into the next session, but if not, I will, if I'll continue then. The one, another further question was, should we redefine our definition of national security when you have 200,000 dead in the U.S.? Do we need to rethink what national security means? Are we losing? I think most countries, pandemics have been part of national security strategy, but I think they've been a bit marginal in national security. We haven't prepared for them taken them seriously enough, but they've been there. If you look at the documents, you'll find pandemics mentioned, but sadly, in both our countries, the capacity to deal with that has been run down. So it's been in the documents, but not in the budgets and when suffering accordingly. Well, it's the one o'clock hour, and I want to again thank you so much for presenting some important and very thoughtful discussion for us to take away. Good afternoon to everyone and thanks again. Thank you.