 Welcome Richard Haas, President of the Council on Foreign Relations and founder of the Council of Councils. Welcome to Sydney and welcome to the Lowy Institute. Great to be here. Richard, you're here for a meeting of the Council of Councils. Tell us a little bit about what the Council of Councils is and what your hopes are for it in the future. What the Council of Councils is, is a network of research organizations, think tanks, if you will, from around the world, roughly about two dozen, somewhat mirroring the G20 countries, the major countries of the world and essentially we bring together experts several times a year physically and however often we can manage it virtually to look at issues of regional and above all global governance. One of the defining challenges of this year of history are these global challenges, whether it's proliferation or climate change or financial issues or how to deal with cyber security and this enormous gap between these challenges and the arrangements in place to deal with them and this is a group that's meant to discuss them, to further the debate and hopefully produce some really good ideas that can then be fed into their own respective governments or the larger policy debates within their societies. Let me take you through three of those challenges starting with the G20. This past weekend Sydney has hosted the summit meeting of the G20 Finance Ministers and Central Bankers. Last night they issued a communique calling for an additional 2% of global growth over a number of years. What did you make of that communique? Well, at the risk of being ungracious towards the host country here, not a whole lot, to simply commit yourselves to a greater rate of growth without specifying what countries are going to do to get there didn't seem to me a whole lot, it was arbitrary, could have been 1.5%, could have been 2.5%, it doesn't matter. So what, to be perfectly blunt, what I believe a group like this would be much wiser to do is focus on one area, see if you can get a common agreement or consensus, for example, on how to tax across national boundaries or what should be IMF policy in terms of giving towards this or that situation, say Ukraine for example, which is happening, but to simply have a kind of goal of greater growth, we call it motherhood. If you are in favour of that, the real question is what are you going to do to bring it about? And I don't think the G20, if you will, increased the odds of higher economic growth anywhere. Let me ask you now about a global security challenge and that is the challenge posed by Iran's nuclear program. President Obama recently said that the chance of a comprehensive timely agreement with Iran is less than 50%. How do you quantify the chances of such an agreement and what happens if we don't get one? I would say it's well sub 50%. If you mean a comprehensive agreement within six months, it's simply, I think, about one in ten likelihood. The real question then is why doesn't it happen and what do the Iranians do? It's a very different situation if negotiations are going on in good faith and the Iranians, for example, are not accelerating or continuing some of the controversial aspects of their nuclear program. If on the other hand negotiations aren't going anywhere and on the ground, if you will, the Iranians are going ahead with this or that program to modernize their centrifuges or are producing more low enriched uranium or are creating a second path to nuclear weapons, then people will say quite rightly these negotiations are nothing more than an attempt to buy time to provide a cover and then I think you'll see tremendous pressure conceivably to even use military force. Finally, let me ask you about some of the events in the last couple of days. I guess for Mr Putin, it's the best of times and the worst of times. On the one hand, he's carried off a terrorism-free Olympics in Sochi. On the other hand, his ally in Kiev has departed the scene. There's been regime change, if you like, in Ukraine. What do you make of events in Ukraine in the last few weeks and what does this mean for Mr Putin's own position in that part of Europe and indeed in the world? I think you've got it exactly right. Two weeks ago we would have thought a terrorist-free Olympics would have been a great feather in Mr Putin's cap. It is, but it's been totally overwhelmed by the situation in Ukraine that's strategically central to his position. I think there's virtually no chance of now installing a government that's to Moscow's likely. The real question, I think, for the outside world, for the United States, the G20 and others is whether they can come forward with a generous but conditional financial package that would stabilize the situation in Ukraine and hopefully get things going in the right direction. For Mr Putin, what worries me is the possibility that he might be tempted to do something quite dangerous. In the part of Ukraine that's closest to Russia, in the Crimea, around places like Yalta, where you have a heavy ethnic Russian population, where historically Russia also has had access to the seaport there, and whether Mr Putin basically says, look, I can't control all of Ukraine, maybe though I can control part of it, and if you will, make it look like a divided outcome. Literally, in this case, potentially going in militarily to do something there. I think that's the most dangerous possibility. The good news, I would say, is that so far at least the overthrow of the ASEAN regime has not led to widespread instability or mayhem. It's quite interesting. The difference between, say, scenes in Iraq when you ousted Saddam Hussein, you got into the palaces, there was chaos. Nothing that wasn't nailed down remained. Here in Ukraine it was quite orderly. It was a very European demonstration. Richard, thanks for joining us at the Lowy Institute. My pleasure.