 Welcome, everyone. I'm Anna Grzma-Abusse, the director of the Wiser Center for Emerging Democracies and the Wiser Center for Europe and Eurasia. And along with the International Policy Center at the Ford School, we are delighted to welcome Ambassador Christopher Hill to the University of Michigan and to Ann Arbor. Ambassador Hill is currently the dean of the Yosef Korbel School of International Studies at the University of Denver. He's an incredibly experienced and accomplished diplomat, having served as the American ambassador to Macedonia, Poland, South Korea, and Iraq, which is an incredible panoply of assignments. And in a career that has spanned over three decades in the foreign service, Ambassador Hill has also been a trenchant player in some of the biggest conflicts worldwide, such as the fallout from the wars of Yugoslav succession and the Dayton Peace Accords, the six-party talks with North Korea designed to resolve the concerns with the North Korean nuclear weapons program, and the formation of a new government in Iraq. And frankly, given this affinity for difficult, if not heartbreaking, challenges, it is perhaps not surprising that he's also a Red Sox fan. And tonight, Ambassador Hill will speak on the central issues facing American policy today in a speech entitled, Managing a 21st Century Agenda, US Foreign Policy Beyond Iraq and Afghanistan. So please join me in welcoming Ambassador Christopher Hill. Well, thank you very much, Anna, and thank you for that gratuitous comment about the Red Sox. But isn't this like Detroit Lions territory here? So I think these teams are there often to try our souls. And you just have to learn from it and be a better person as a result of it. So the fact that we're up against a team that has one-eighth of our payroll, that can't even half fill its stadium in Tampa Bay, is pretty hard to take. But anyway, it is great to be here at the University of Michigan school that has just extraordinary success across the spectrum. I know many people know about your sports teams, but many more people know about your simply fabulous education that you provide here. The graduate schools are invariably, you're listed in the top 10 in our country. You've produced some of the greatest leaders of our country. And I can just tell you what a great honor it is to be here and have this opportunity to talk with you. It's also wonderful to be here with Ambassador and Mrs. Weiser, who Ambassador Weiser and I were together. And I guess we call it Central Europe, Poland and Slovakia. And we had a group of us who were in this Central European areas, Slovakia, Czech Republic. I think we added Romania and, let me see, Poland, Hungary. And we used to get together every few months and sort of exchange thoughts on what was going on. And Ambassador Weiser was very much focused on a country that hadn't always had success, Slovakia. And there are many doubters. When the Czechoslovak divorce took place, there was an expectation that somehow the Czech Republic would do very well. Slovakia would somehow slip into Central Asia or something. But in fact, in the fullness of time, Slovakia, I think, did very well, got its economy together, went through the difficult phase that many of these countries have gone through, where first you have democracy, then you have sort of a pushback from the former communist regimes, and then you have sometimes kind of virulent nationalists come in. And yet Slovakia went through all of these phases and emerged, I think, as a very strong economy. It's manufacturing center, manufacturing sector. Frankly, when you look at all the countries in the region, I think it was really one of the strongest. And Ron, I know you worked very hard to kind of keep people on task there. And I think you're really in a great tradition of American diplomats who sort of worked with the country, not stand back and lecture the country, but rather stand up close and work very well with it. And I know you're very fondly remembered in Slovakia. I'd like to just mention another person here that I served with. Actually, Les and Judy High are sitting over here. Les High was in Kraków when I was in Warsaw. And so I haven't seen Les since we were together in Poland. So it was great to see you here in Ann Arbor and see Les and Judy here. I can't think of a better place to move to, except maybe Denver. Our football team in Denver isn't much better than the Lions either. But anyway, I wanted to talk to you about this 21st century agenda in our foreign policy, because I think we have gone through a very tough period in our history. And I think it kind of behooves us maybe to learn from some of the mistakes and try against all hope not to repeat those mistakes. I think, let me just begin by saying that for anyone watching the American political scene these days, I think it's fairly clear that our country is living through a very kind of ideological time. And without getting too political myself, I mean, we see our two political parties in the Congress taking kind of very positions where I think it has been very difficult to bring to bear or kind of center position. I mean, the view that somehow all problems can be solved by tax cuts versus the view that all problems can be solved by government programs really, I think, lends itself to kind of an ideological perspective. And I think ideology has an important role to play. I mean, after all, we also live in a time where we're subjected to billions of factoids every day and you need some sort of navigation system to get through those factoids. But I think when we see ideology becoming a kind of substitute for the mastery of facts, it's clearly gone too far. Facts in and of themselves, of course, are not knowledge and knowledge is not wisdom, but I think in excess of ideology is neither facts, knowledge, or wisdom. And in short, I think our country needs, to some extent, in our domestic policies, and I'm gonna get to our foreign policies especially, we need to kind of return to policies that are based much more on the sort of our heritage of being very practical and being very pragmatic. So I think we need to endeavor to find policies that really whose purpose is to find ways of solving problems and allow us to achieve the goals that we need to achieve. And so as we look at the world, I'll start with a mention of about a year and a half ago, I was in Oman, Muscat Oman. Probably most people I haven't really thought about Muscat Oman until maybe just a few days ago when they are two hikers who had hiked over the straight over the border from Iraq and held by the Iranians for some two years, they were returned to Muscat, which is just a short plane ride from Tehran. And I met there with the leader of that country, Sultan Qaboos, and I asked him what accounts for the sort of ideological fervor that we could see going on in the Arab world, and of course, what we're talking about was this fundamentalism, this sort of extreme religious ideology. And I said after all, the Arabs are known for being a very practical people when you look at Arab business community, they usually try to meet the customer in the middle with some kind of bargain, so how did all this happen? And the Sultan's answer to me, as he sat there, he had a dagger, this beautiful jeweled dagger in his large belt in the middle and this fantastic headgear, then I just sat there sort of looking like I do now with a suit and a tie, and the Sultan said to me, don't always look for political reasons for everything because sometimes it has to do with a cycle of history. And cycles too will change. And so I always thought about that because basically he was saying, you know, don't you Americans, don't just think in terms of you got a problem, have to find a solution. So you need to really step back from it and understand the flow, the ebb and flow really of history. So I believe that we have come to a point now 10 years after 9-11 where I can feel that cycle of U.S. history beginning to shift. And I can see that our country today is probably not the same country it was 10 years ago, but how it does, and how it manages its way through the next 10 years, I think will be extremely, extremely crucial. So I think it's important to see what is happened, even if we can't entirely explain what had happened. And in the past 10 years, our country, I think kind of lost some of our pragmatic roots and embraced a view of a mission in the world that was completely unsustainable, and I hope will not be repeated. The Iraq War, and it was a war that when I was in Poland, oh my God, I can't believe I did that, you know. You didn't say it's your wife. It's an 800 number, whatever. The Iraq War was very broadly supported in our country and was broadly supported for a lot of different reasons, and some of them good, and some of them turned out to be not so good. But I think in a way we ended up looking at the Iraq War as somehow a struggle between forces of dictatorship and democracy, and to be sure that fault line was there. But in our desire to see it as a struggle between dictatorship and democracy, and of course we had one of the most brutal, hideous dictators the world has seen since World War II that is Saddam Hussein, we failed to see I think another very important fault line in Iraq, and that fault line was really coming to bear or having an enormous effect on the country internally, and that was the struggle between the Shia and the Sunni political identity. And so talking about Shia and Sunni seemed so old fashioned, seemed so last century. I mean, after all, we'd like to see it as a struggle between democracy and dictatorship as we had seen in many other countries. But in fact, the Shia and Sunni identity, though that was the fault line that really drove the crisis in Iraq, and what we did, and what we didn't really understand we had done is we took a minority led country, a country that had been since the British marched in in March of 1917 and looked at the kind of havoc that they had helped create as they brought all those Indian troops in up the Euphrates Valley, and they looked at the situation in Baghdad, and they said, how are we ever gonna run this place? And as the Brits often did in these colonial situations, they looked around and found, who's the toughest tribe around here? Who are the people who really look like they know how to keep the others in tow? And that turned out to be the Sunnis. So the British, as the Sunni Ottomans had done for centuries before, essentially left the country in charge, run by the Sunnis. We came in, and with a view that Saddam was not necessarily a Sunni, but was rather just a dictatorship, we got rid of him, but lo and behold in the process, we introduced majority rule in Iraq, and we had a Shia government there. Well, the problem was, it was certainly the right thing to do, but the problem was the rest of the Sunni Arab world saw that we had flipped a country from the Sunni world into the Shia world. We hardly seemed to know we had actually done that. And this was considered quite threatening to many other countries in the region. So for example, the Saudis, knowing sort of how we think, they said to us, look, by making that country Shia, you have created a situation where the Iranians are gonna have a free run of Iraq. You have created a security situation where the Iranians are gonna take over, and in so doing, you have worsened the situation or made the situation dangerous for the rest of us. The argument made some sense. The only trouble is the Shia of Iraq are not the Shia of Iran. And the Shia of Iraq, if you start looking into the history, and I mean, with due respect to other people who look at political problems differently, I do believe that history matters. And when you start looking at where the Shia of Iraq came from, you will find that organically, they were probably more related to Saudi Arabia than they were to Iran. So the Saudis tell us a story about how we have endangered the country by making it, giving an opening to the Iranians. But really, what we had done was in putting Shia, in allowing the Shia majority to take over in that country, we created a situation in the Saudi mind where other Shia communities, and there are Shia communities all over the Arab world, that we have somehow given political expression in a way that it hadn't been done before to the Shia communities in the Arab world. And the Saudis in particular, worried about a province called the East Province, where most of the Saudi oil is produced, were worried that what kind of signal, what possible signal this could have given to their own Shia minority. Similarly, the Saudis worried about Shia in places like Kuwait. Shia are not quite 50%, but they're very, it's a substantial community. The Saudis were very worried about what the Shia in Bahrain would do. And in fact, several years later, we could see what they would do, because the Shia in Bahrain are some 70% of the population. So we saw from the Arab, the Sunni Arab world, where with the possible exception of Syria, I say possible exception because the complexities of that place are far more than just talking about Shia and Sunni, every single country in the Arab world was Sunni run, and here we had taken a major Arab country and flipped it and made it Shia. So it is truly an example of the law of unintended consequences. Most people engaged in this didn't know about it, and if they did know about it, they didn't want to know about it. And so we entered, so we stayed, we realized that the one option that was not available to us was simply to walk away from the problem of the Sunni Shia problem. We have worked very hard to try to ensure that Sunnis were part of the governing structures with the understanding that frankly, at the end of the day, it's going to be run by the Shia community. It is we have brought in hundreds of thousands, indeed tens of millions of dollars worth of technical assistance to ensure that Iraq has the proper institutions of governance, where we help build their capacities, we help strengthen their institutions, we worked on independent judiciary, we worked on all kinds of things to the tune that if you stand back and look at the overall investment in Iraq, it reaches over $1 trillion. Whether we have been successful with what we've tried to do and kind of imparting to Iraq is the things they need to do is hard to say. I talked to an American colonel one day who had just come from a meeting in which the Iraqis were allocating bandwidth on their radio systems. And the American colonel told me he sat there giving his advice and finally an Iraqi official said, Colonel, you need to understand one thing. We were allocating bandwidth before you came and we will allocate bandwidth after you leave. This has nothing to do with how you're gonna tell us how to allocate bandwidth. So I think it was kind of a sober reminder to the US not just in allocating bandwidth but in doing everything else that there are certain limits to how much, how effectively we can convince countries to behave better and indeed to be more like us. It is not to say that you cannot give advice and you can advise I think it can be very well taken but it is to say that if you try to stand back and wag your finger, shake your finger or shake your fist at a country and tell them to be more like us, chances are they're going to be less like us. And so I think the lessons of this are first of all to know what you're doing when you enter the country. And secondly, if you haven't learned every lesson and you probably haven't, you have to start adjusting with the thought in mind that you are really at the end of the day not going to stay there for the rest of time and that they have to, the people there have to make their own decisions. I found in time and time in my life and diplomacy there was the issue of how do you convince someone else to do something that that person doesn't wanna do. And I think just like in one's personal life as well as in the life of a nation, you can't necessarily count on them to listen to you when you're shouting at them. You've got to somehow work as closely with them as you can to get them to trust you. And I think trust does have a lot to do a big role to play in diplomacy. So I think it's been very important that when Americans are overseas that they conduct themselves with a sense of modesty with a sense of not just telling people what to do but most importantly, with a sense of sort of sharing an example, an American example that I think has worked very well. I think one of the reasons why someone like Ambassador Weiser was successful in Slovakia is I think people realized he was sharing an example. He knew what he was talking about. He was not pushing them in a way to suggest that he was in any way scolding them. He was working with them and he had the same goals in mind. So I think we need to be very careful when we go into these countries and think that we can somehow remake them into our image or to try to make ideological arguments. I think we need to look for problems that they are having and problems and ways that we can help them overcome their problems. I am pretty, at the end of the day, I'm pretty optimistic about Iraq. Ironically, the one reason I'm optimistic is the reason that I know was not the reason that we entered the country and that has to do with the oil sector. Iraq now has 11 major international oil companies with contracts not to take Iraqi oil but to have service contracts to help the Iraqi people develop their own oil. Iraq when I was there had slipped down to something like 1.7 million barrels a day. Today, Iraq is something on the order of 2.6 million barrels a day expected to go to some 3 million barrels a day. Within about two years, it should be eclipsing Iran in terms of barrels per day. That is, it should be over four million barrels a day and probably in about 10 years, depending on international conditions, Iraq will have something on the order of 10 million barrels a day, which is the output that Saudi Arabia has. All of this is to say that, and by the way, of all these 11 major oil companies, only one was an American company. So this hardly passed the test of invading Iraq for the purpose of taking their oil. And so I think the Iraqis will have the wherewithal to build infrastructure, to provide services to their citizens, to improve the hospital care, to provide for electricity. One of the kind of shocking things I discovered on my first day there is that no Iraqi is, no self-respecting Iraqi is ever gonna pay for his own electricity. That is something the government pays for. You don't pay for it yourself. I looked at that and I said, well, gee, can't we just put meters on people's apartments? And, you know, because the demand was skyrocketing while the supply was going up, but not exponentially. And I was told you can certainly put meters on people's houses, but it'll take a battalion of troops to do that and a firefight to follow. So I think Iraq, the Iraqi authorities understood that a whole heck of a lot better than I did and understood the point is that for certainly the time being, and I would put that in the next century or so, the Iraqi government is going to pay people's electricity bills, not the consumers of the electricity. Again, wrong policy move, but it's the policy move that they have thought about and they know what their people can sustain. So I think one has to live with some of these issues and I think what is impressive in the case of Iraq is I think they will have the wherewithal to deal with some of these things. They will pay for services and alas, because they do it in many other parts of the world, they'll pay off insurgents. Again, it's not a pretty picture, it's not a beautiful picture, it falls short of what we would see as democracy, but nonetheless, I think it has, the country at least has a future and one of the reasons is that I think the security situation has continued to improve, notwithstanding what we read in the newspapers every day. We have a Kurdish part of Iraq that is feeling a part of Iraq because when they see the potential of 10 million barrels a day and they know that they are entitled to some 17% of central revenue, central government revenue, they know that 17% of 10 million barrels is a lot more than 100% of 100,000 barrels. The Kurds have figured that out. So I think we'll be okay with the Kurds. I think the Sunnis have been invited to have some key ministries with the understanding that the Sunnis in Iraq need to come to grips with the fact that the country is going to be run by the Shia. But as we move a little to Afghanistan, we also see a place that I think the US allowed our sort of ideological side to get out of whack with our practical side because we came into a country that if you study the history and you don't even need to study it, you just need to look at a couple of pages of it. This is not going to be an easy country to turn into Switzerland. And yet that was clearly the effort of the United States. And worse yet, worse yet in Afghanistan, we took a, we looked at that situation and did what one really should have, we fell into a trap that is as old as man himself. When we tried to fight the last war in Iraq. So there was an effort in the last couple of years of the Obama administration to have a surge. And the concept of a surge, which of course had been used in Iraq, was to flood US troops in there so that we could seize territories so that we could hold the territories so we could build on the territory and then finally transfer the territory back to the local authorities. Well that works in a country that's 70% urban as Iraq is. And why is Iraq urban has to do with water resources, but it's 70% urban, all the people live in the cities. Afghanistan, it's some 70, even 80% rural. So if you try to increase the number of troops by some 20%, you are really not going to get at what the military talks about troop to task ratios. You would have to double, triple, quadruple the force in order to manage the rural environment of Afghanistan. The other sort of backseat driving I would do in Afghanistan is I would be very careful about the notion that you can bring in additional lethality as we've done in Afghanistan in the last year, where we bring in additional capacity to kill bad guys and think that by killing more of them you'll bring them to the table. The way it works is not that someone gets killed and the rest of the family sits together and says, you know, the Americans really had a point about our cousin there. He was not a very nice guy. That's not how it works. The family sits down and they say, the Americans have killed our cousin. We didn't like our cousin, but they've killed our cousin and he's our cousin and therefore we need to pick up arms against the Americans for that. That is a basic cultural fact that proved to be an elusive concept with many of us because we looked at it, and not even in terms of the mirror imaging of cultures, because I don't know about you, but when someone comes after my family, I don't care what my cousin is like. I wanna go after them and lo and behold, the Afghans have been like that and in spades. So I think we've made a lot of mistakes there and I think the one thing we've done that's right is to say we're getting out of there. It doesn't mean that we have quote unquote lost the war. It doesn't mean that somehow the Taliban are necessarily coming back and I think Karzai for all the criticism of this guy understands that he needs to figure out how to work reconciliation with what are sometimes unreconcilable elements. So I think we have made a decision to try to make sure the Afghans start to deal with these issues. Whether it turns out well, whether it turns out so so, it's hard to say, but I think it is time for us to start getting out of the business of blowing up mud huts and back into the business of what the 21st century security agenda should really be for our country. I think we need to take a much more strategic view of the issues we face in the world. I think the issue, the number one issue in my view is the issue of dealing with nuclear, with aspirations of countries like Iran, countries like North Koreans to develop their own nuclear capabilities. These two countries are very much engaged in this. It is because of the technology and the fact that the technology is becoming more and more known to different people, to different countries. I think we have a very serious problem because if Iran is allowed to get away with this, you can be sure that what they call in Sunni Arab world, the Shia bomb, there will soon have to be a Sunni bomb. And while Pakistan has a Sunni bomb, it doesn't count in the case of Sunni Arab states. And so I think it is pretty inevitable that if the Iranians are allowed to get away with this, we can look for a Saudi effort soon to come. Similarly in East Asia, I think we have to stay on the situation of North Korea because if North Korea is able to develop, to take this nuclear device that they've been able to get to explode underground and put it on one of their missiles that they have been testing, I think we will have a very serious problem in terms of proliferation. I used to say that Japan's, the chance of Japan ever going nuclear was about zero. Now I'd put it north of zero. The chance of, I used to think that the chance of South Korea ever developing nuclear weapons was at zero. I would not be comfortable with predicting that either for the rest of time. So I think we need to deal with the North Korean danger. One of the reasons I think the Bush administration did absolutely the right thing on North Korea in terms of our policy and this comes very close to home here. In fact, if you want to hear a counter version of this, someone opposed to the Bush policies read the Dick Cheney book. But I feel it was very important when President Bush met with the Chinese president, junks and men in Crawford, Texas and said to the Chinese this is not an American problem. This is a problem involving world leaders and in particular this is a problem involving the region. And I think the decision to get China directly involved, to get Russia involved, to get South Korea and Japan involved as well as the United States was absolutely the right decision. In addition, if you go back to 2004, 2005 when this policy of trying to engage the North Koreans was first started by President Bush, we had a situation where many people in Asia, many people in the world really were blaming the North Korean nuclear issue somehow on American intransigence. Well, if you have turned North Koreans into sympathetic characters out there, you are clearly doing something wrong and we were doing something wrong. When you looked at polling data in South Korea, there was some 50% of South Koreans were blaming the US for the crisis as well as the North Koreans. So I think President's decision to get the US involved in a negotiation was very important. We did make some progress. We worked with the Chinese, which I think was an important thing to do, but we got the North Koreans to disable, to shut down and then disable their plutonium plant. We have known about their efforts in uranium enrichment, but first things first, we had a plutonium plant that was actually producing fissile material, whereas the issue of uranium enrichment is still a future issue, albeit a great threat. But most importantly, we established some patterns of relationships. We showed that we can work with China. We showed to the South Korean people that we were not opposed to negotiation, that we would treat the South Koreans not as a sort of little brother, but rather as a partner in this very important endeavor. And so soon we saw that that polling data that I described a couple of minutes ago shifted as it should shift, that is to South Korean public putting the blame where the blame belonged, and that is on North Korea. So the mechanism was right, the approach was right. What has not yet succeeded is getting the North Koreans to cease and desist on this nuclear program. I think the key missing ingredient here has been China. And I think we need to, with respect to the North Korean nuclear issue, with respect to some of the other international issues that we have, whether it's human rights in Sudan or violating sanctions in Iran and things like that, we need to have a much more comprehensive and successful relationship with China. I think one of the problems we have had with China is that the United States has looked, we have so often looked at the Chinese in too much of a transactional mode. That is, we will send senior officials out to China maybe once every six months, we will try to have a discussion with the Chinese, aimed at some deal, and then after three days, lo and behold, we have some deal, which frankly doesn't really amount to something to that much. I think we have to shift from a transactional-based policy with the Chinese to a much more relationship-based policy. And I think the United States needs to make China a much better, or put China in a position of being where we understand that this is probably the key relationship that we have to face in the world today. You know, if you look at the American public and how they regard the Chinese, there are some people who look at China as somehow the Soviet Union, again, it is not the Soviet Union. There are some people who look at China as somehow just the benign place where you go to this sort of giant Disneyland. It's not that either. China is a challenge to us, but it is also an opportunity, and it is a country where I think we, together, if we can work with China, and we need to do this by deep-seated relationships, I think we can do more. I think the, I would like to see, in any new administration, whether it's the Obama second term or the Michelle Bachman first term, I think there needs to be, that was a joke. I didn't mean to, but there needs to be much more effort early on to establish patterns of relationships with the Chinese so that we can work together. We should not be going to China when we need their help on something. We should not be going to China when somehow, we're worried that they won't buy our T-bills. They will buy our T-bills. That's not why we should be going there. We need to be going there to get them to know us better and for us to know them better, and in so doing, we need to be able to create these relationships. China is not a perfect partner by any means. China has some of the most belligerent people in the world living there. China has, like many big countries, including our own, they are beset and consumed by many of their internal problems, but this does not mean that we shouldn't be trying to engage with them as a partner. I think a few years ago was talked about how China needs to be a stakeholder in the current international system, and I think that's a pretty good way to describe it. I think we need to somehow develop this. I think we need to get out of this kind of love-hate relationship with the Chinese, try to take some of these oscillations out of our policy with the Chinese and try to work with them on a more business-like framework where they know us better and we know them better. And I think if we can really focus on that relationship with China, a lot of good things can flow. I think we will have a much better chance of dealing with North Korea than we do now. People often say the reason the Chinese have not been helpful on North Korea is they're worried that North Korea would implode and that somehow you would get 20 million North Koreans moving into China. I submit to you that's about the last of the issues that Chinese are really worried about. I think they're much more concerned about the fact that if you have the last Marxist-Leninist country in the world implode, what would that do? How could that affect China's internal developments? How could that affect the sort of lineup of forces within China, some of whom look to the past for inspirations, others in China look much more to the future? I can assure you the Shanghai business community has no interest in maintaining a close relationship with North Korea. They would throw them under the bus in a Shanghai minute. Yet, if you go up to Beijing and if you talk to the Chinese Communist Party, to the international department of the Chinese Communist Party, you see a lot more enthusiasm sort of maintaining that relationship. If you go to the Chinese foreign ministry, again, no interest in maintaining a relationship with North Korea, they find it an embarrassment. But if you go to the Chinese People's Liberation Army, you see a much more interested in maintaining those relationships. It's especially true in Northeast China where warlords are gone, but warlordism is not necessarily gone. You see relationships between Chinese military and North Korean military. It's very complex and we need to understand the complexity of China's historic and cultural relationships with North Korea. We also need to understand that there is a lot of old think in China and there are people who when they look at the possibility of a North Korean demise, would see, aha, this means we lose the Americans win. So we see in the Chinese a kind of zero-sum view of North Korea and I can assure you there are many Chinese who think win-win is the name of a Burmese dissident rather than a good policy to follow. And so I think for just on North Korean terms, we need to work much more with China. We need to avoid the kind of issues we've had in Southeast Asia and the South China Sea where it is not in our interest to turn to Southeast Asian countries and expect them to choose between us and the Chinese. They don't need a pep talk about the problems of China. They don't need to be told that China could be a threat to them. We don't need to tell them that. What we do need to do is stay present there, is stay engaged, have our, be engaged economically, be engaged in terms of security. When you look at the way our fleet, seven fleet based in Hawaii has been present throughout Southeast Asia, when you look at the fact that every natural disaster, it's U.S. Marines and sailors who tend to get there before even the countries, the country where the disaster took place, even before their troops could get there, you can see that we have generated a lot of goodwill in that part of the world and I think we ought to continue to do that. So I think when the Chinese understand that we're not going to leave, we're not going to be, we're not going to put ourselves in the position of, or put those countries in the position of choosing between us and the Chinese, I think some of this kind of nasty talk that you hear from within China, which sometimes, like our own nasty talk, is as, the purpose of it is internal rather than external. So I think we really need to sort of step up across the board with the Chinese as we go forward. I think turning to other parts of the world, we need to be very, very careful to preserve the North Atlantic relationships and the importance of NATO, the importance of the US and the EU relationship. There are many reasons perhaps why we shouldn't have been involved in Libya, but the one reason where I think we, which overrode all those other reasons was the fact that we needed to stick up for our European allies with respect to Libya. What Sarkozy was thinking is something between Sarkozy and I guess his wife. What David Cameron was thinking at times is hard to understand, but what we were thinking, I think was correct, which was to not open up new gaps, to not open up new tensions with the European leadership. And so I think we did very well to stick in that one until it ended, and I can assure you, based on my experience in Kosovo, it wasn't easy because you had a sort of classic, what I think political scientists would call a sort of strategy policy mismatch. You had a policy of trying to get rid of the guy, you had a strategy of protecting civilians, and it wasn't at all clear how that strategy of protecting civilians was going to support the policy of getting rid of the guy, except insofar as it simply ignored the UN Security Council resolution that set out the kind of narrowness of the overall, of the UN Security Council resolution, which was very narrow compared to what everyone's policy was. So I think we persevered with it, and I think we should be very careful about doing it again, but I think when our European partners are engaged, we need to be able to show that we are a good partner. And I think despite all the derision, the complaints, the attitude to the president's view on that, I think the president was absolutely right. We should be in a supportive mode and not necessarily in a leadership mode there. I think the president really got that right. Finally, I think the United States stands for more than just pragmatism or practicality. We stand for more than just open markets. We stand for democracy. We stand for people who are in the streets, who are trying to get their voices heard and trying to live, if not a better life for themselves and for their, if not for themselves and for their children. And I think the United States does need to be on the right side of history. And there comes, that's when we get to, I think probably the most interesting issue of our time, which is the Arab Spring, or as I like to call it, the Arab thing. To be sure, it is not the first thing in history like that. If you, there have been other such contagions. But I guess what bothers me a little about our reaction is first we sort of look at our kind of international sort of recognized icons of modernity, whether it's Facebook or Twitter or texting. And we conclude, ah, this is some sort of technological revolution that, because Egyptians were able to somehow communicate with each other through Facebook, they're somehow more like us than we think. And therefore we should support them since we all like Facebook. First of all, I know there's some people in this room who don't need to be reminded of what happened in 1989 in Eastern Europe, which was the last time there was one of these extraordinary social, economic political movements that is in, where the yoke of communism, which I never thought in even as late as 1986 would ever be gotten rid of in my lifetime. And it all went away, despite the fact that no one had Facebook. In fact, if you go back to 1848, which was called the European Spring, somehow movements in different countries were connected. And they did that not only without Facebook or without the internet, they didn't even have electricity. So my first point would be to be a little beware of these kind of this sort of echo chamber of these international symbols that we all like because it makes us sort of feel more comfortable when we hear about Egyptians and social media because we understand social media. I think when you start sort of putting aside those issues that make you feel more comfortable, you will start saying that actually the movements in the Arab world were far more heterogeneous than maybe our headline writers suggested they were. In some cases, and I would put Egypt in this case, there was no doubt a legitimate effort to overcome an authoritarian regime that clearly had outlasted its shelf life. I think clearly what was going on and Egypt had to do with sort of civil society rising up and saying we're not gonna take this sort of semi-military regime anymore. But when you start looking at Yemen, when you start looking even at Libya, you can start seeing that the situation is far more complex. And while New York Times editorial writers may wanna stand in the middle of a square in Egypt and talk about this new day, I think it behooves us to have a little more of an analytical framework of what's going on so that we can predict what's going to go on tomorrow and what we need to do to help ensure that what does go on is in our country's interest, that is in the interest of a more peaceful world and an interest of a betterment of people's lives. So I think the Arab Spring is clearly as we move into the autumn continues to be a work in progress, but I think it's something that we need to be very close to the action, we need to understand it, and we need to be able to support it where we can. And that gets to the final point, which is we are going to need to support diplomacy abroad in a way that we have supported military intervention abroad. Now, it is true, it is true that NASCAR is never going to hold a support our diplomats day. And so we need to understand that American diplomats are not going to get quite the cachet that American troops have had. You know, if you think of our country as a giant high school, diplomats are not the football team, that would be someone else. So we do need to convince our country, to convince our people that diplomacy is not somehow the art of telling people things that are not quite true. Diplomacy is the art of getting people to do things that maybe they wouldn't have done if they hadn't had a conversation with you. That diplomacy is the art of getting people to think about their interests, articulate those interests, be supportive. And, you know, there are three ways probably, if you stand back. There are three ways to convince other countries to do things that they wouldn't otherwise do. And one way is just the strength of argument. And sometimes, I suppose, someone will hit the side of his head with a palm of his hand and say, I never thought of that. I never thought of that. That is truly brilliant. Thank you for that piece of advice. We will change our policies immediately. So that's one model. The second model is to say, is to basically give people an offer they cannot refuse. And we've done that and that is where I think our military interventions have come. And I think we need to be very, very judicious in doing that kind of approach in the future. And the third way it's usually done is to say, work with us on this. And if you do, we can promise you a better relationship. We can promise you that we will be able to help work on things together. We can give you some assistance. We can help you with your ministries. We can help you with your roads. We can help you with various things. And that's basically the way diplomacy happens. And what I worry about is if we're not gonna have the budget to do that, if our Congress is not going to be prepared to give the money to do that, well, I think we're going to be kind of out of business because we are going to have a situation where our secretary will go to a country and say, work with us on this or that, et cetera. And I think we could well face the situation where no one listens. They usher him or her outside out the door and bring in the Chinese ambassador. So I think we do need to be prepared. We need to be prepared to fund these things. We need to be prepared to support diplomacy, not just as an element of force. I mean, force should be an element of diplomacy or the threat of force should be the element of diplomacy, not the other way around. And so I think we are coming to a very difficult, difficult time where I think resources are going to be stretched in our country. It is not sustainable for me to suggest that we need to build more schools in Afghanistan. Well, we don't have the schools getting built in Pueblo County in Colorado. As a point at which the people living in Pueblo County are simply not going to support schools in Afghanistan if they don't have schools of their own. So I think we have to be much more mindful of some of these economic issues that we have faced. I am not just an eternal optimist, but I'm certainly an optimist about our country. I do believe that at the end of the day we are going to learn how to reason together. We are all going to learn how to sort of calm down and try to resolve these issues because I think we can see that if we don't resolve these issues, if we don't develop more consensus, if we don't develop a greater respect for the opinions of others, I think we are going to be in a lot of trouble. You know, it is hard to blame as to how this kind of polarization in our country took place. I think my candidate for blame is the internet, or I should say internet shopping because when you buy a book on the internet, the whoever sold you the book, let's say you buy some crazy political book, they'll say if you like that crazy political book, here are four more crazy political books you ought to read. So I really think we could start with internet shopping where if you want to read that crazy political book, let me give you four examples of different kinds of political books that would make you a lot smarter. And so if we can't get amazon.com to change their algorithms, we ought to be changing our algorithms and start having a much greater respect for people who come at issues from a different side. So thank you very much and happy to go to questions. Thank you so much. We have a microphone set up over here for those people who would like to ask questions. If you would just line up in front of the microphone, Ambassador Hill will take your questions. The rhetoric of US foreign policy has been to support self-determination for people throughout the world. And I wonder what your take is on the stance of the US with respect to a two-state solution in the Middle East. I think whether our policy is effective in this regard, my own view is it's the right policy because I think our last three presidents have supported a two-state solution essentially, but they've also supported the fact that if the Palestinians are gonna have a successful state, they need to work things out with their neighbors, namely Israel. And I think the effort of sort of encouraging the Palestinians to do just that, even though the tasks are very difficult, there's been a lot of history there, but I think the US has a correct approach not to be supporting unilateral declarations there. You know, I hate to quote Slobodan Milošević for inspiration here, but he once said, he once made the point, I remember I said something like, I know you think we have a double standard. He said, no, no, no, you don't have a double standard, you have multiple standards. And indeed, I think we do have different standards. I think the result of Kosovo was to go on a sort of unilateral basis or a basis of Kosovo declaring independence with some support, but without regard to the Serb position. And I think that was obviously problematic, but at the same time, I'm not sure what could have been done. So I think these are often just tough decisions. It seems that what we're doing or what the US policy is doing is putting Israel in the position of having a veto over Palestine achieving a state. And if you look historically at the situation, the Israelis did not negotiate with the Palestinians to establish the Israeli state. Again, I understand the point that we don't want a situation where Israel is essentially given a veto over the establishment of a neighboring state. I understand that point. But I think the reality is that what we're asking the Palestinians to do is to stay in a comprehensive negotiation with the Israelis, with the result of the various iterations of such a negotiation with the result that you could get that win-win solution that we've talked about. I think there are things the Israelis have the expectations of achieving through such a process. And I think finally it is a Pyrrhic victory indeed if a Palestinian state is created, which is a mortal enemy of its neighbor. So I think there's a good argument to insist on some sort of negotiation process with the understanding that veto is too much of a static way to look at it. I think it has to be seen in that sort of dynamism of a negotiation. Can you just discuss what you feel the United States role is in the United Nations, particularly the Security Council, both reflecting back on when the Iraq War started and also moving forward? I think the U.S., I mean, I think we have sought to give a much greater scope to the Security Council than sometimes we've done in the past. I think the decision that Colin Powell rather insisted on, which was to have a UN Security Council resolution with respect to Iraq was the right approach. I think the Obama administration has tried mightily to make the UN Security Council very much of a relevant factor in important issues of our day. Ban Ki-moon I think has been the right Secretary-General for his times. I think he understands that he represents 192 different countries and has maintained good relations with us as well as those other 191. I think the issue is we cannot look at the UN Security Council the way some other countries do because we have global responsibilities. And so I don't think we should put ourselves in the position of being sort of, I think we need a little creative ambiguity about our view of some of the Security Council decisions. I don't think we can simply be a sort of policy taker the way some countries are. I think we need to be in on the implementation of these things and to avoid a situation where we are choosing between national policies and Security Council policies. And I think if we can kind of square that circle or avoid those types of zero-sum situations, I think we'll be okay. And I think that's what administrations have tried to do. And even though many American people have great reservations about the UN, others have been very supportive. And I think our administrations have tried to manage this. And I think it was very important to pay our dues. I mean, it's important to pay the dues if you're the chess club member. And it's important to pay dues if you're in the UN Security Council. And I think I'm pleased that even through these difficult budget times, everyone has understood that that is not an issue that should be raised again. Hello, Mr. Ambassador. I do thank you for joining us this afternoon. The lecture was wonderful. I have a question. So it's about the Middle East in terms of security. The Middle East is a volatile region. I don't think I have to convince you or anyone in this room about that. So I think it would be in everyone's best interest if there was a nuclear weapons free zone in the Middle East, but there seems to be a sort of, sorry. So there seems to be a chief roadblock, principal roadblock to that. And that's Israel's substantial nuclear arsenal. We don't know the exact magnitude of it because most of those weapons are undeclared to the best of my knowledge. So I guess my question is, why is Israel allowed to have a substantial nuclear arsenal but a country like Iran isn't allowed to think about one, which is what's currently going on? And why hasn't there been more pressure from the United States to address Israel's nuclear arsenal, which seems to be the worst kept secret? Yeah, I mean, mind you, Israel has never tested and they've kept the kind of strategic ambiguity. They've also made assurances about no first use. I mean, I understand your point, but I'm, you know, I think, you know, just being a lawyer and a diplomat, a lawyer often sort of looks back and, you know, how this happened, you know, and a diplomat sort of looks forward. What can we do about this? I'm not sure ratcheting up some kind of public pressure on Israel over an issue, and I don't disagree with your description of the issue. I'm not sure going forward with a kind of US pressure on Israel in this case is really gonna get us too far. I'm not sure it's really anything that we would have a consensus on within this country, within the United States to pursue. And I think to some extent, you know, your foreign policy does need to have the backing of the American people. I'm not sure we'd have it for that kind of approach. And I mean, more fundamentally, I'm just not sure it would really contribute to what we're seeking in the Middle East. If you look at President Obama's Cairo speech, I mean, this was really an effort to try to get us on a better footing with the Arab world. And of course there are issues that are, you know, like the one you've described, that are not going to be easy to take on. And maybe, as I've suggested, are not possible to take on, but I think there's so much in that speech to build the relationship that we all want with the Arab world, that I would like the Arab world maybe to focus on those elements of the possible rather than the one element that I'm not sure is possible in the current world that we live in. So I take your point, but I think we need to go forward with policies that are ones that can lead to a better situation. And so that is not the first one I'd take up. Good afternoon, Ambassador. With regard to the six-party talks, do you believe it's actually in China's interest to change the status quo in North Korea or that they're actually in a better position, at least in the short term, having them there, making them sort of a focus of US foreign policy? I think it's in China's interest to resolve this issue. I think if this issue is left unresolved, as I suggested, it could have proliferation issues, whether Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, you know, these are all technologically advanced countries. So I think it's in China's interest, but I think to understand China's situation now is to understand how China's decision-making works. And ironically, whenever, when they would have meetings of the, or at least of the five heads of state of the six-party talks, you did get the impression that the weakest, the weakest head of state was Hu Jintao. That is, his ability to get other elements of the Chinese government around him on an issue was weaker than President Bush's or President Obama's. So I think it's, I think China's problem has to do with its internal decision-making. And as I described earlier, there's a lot of old think there. And I think the remediation to this for this is to have much more discussions with the Chinese about what we would all do if North Korea were to go belly up. And you know, I'm not suggesting that North Korea is going to leave the scene in the next few years. I just don't know, but it's certainly within the realm of possible. And I think a more comprehensive discussion with the Chinese, even if the discussion is 99% us talking and 99% them listening, I think would be a useful thing. I think we need to overcome some of the trust factors in China, you know, would they be concerned that we'd put listening posts up on the Yalu River? Would there be concern that we would increase the number of US troops in the Korean Peninsula? I have Koreans, US troops north of 38th parallel. I think we should maybe describe what we would do. In my opinion, we would end up with fewer US troops in the Korean Peninsula than we have now. And I think kind of having extensive talks with the Chinese in this regard would be useful. For example, we've done so-called concept of operation planning, you know, what if North Korea, you know, there's some breakdown of civil authority? How would we handle the nukes? How would we handle the humanitarian situation? I would say share it with the Chinese. Just put it out on the table and show them what we're talking about. And, you know, it won't go well for the first session, the second session, probably won't go well in the 20th session, but anyone who's ever sold soap on TV knows that people don't listen to your soap ads for the first 19 or 119 times. So I think we need to be a little patient with it and understand that sooner or later, the Chinese would get a better window into our thinking than they have now. I think the example of the negotiations with North Korea to lessen the nuclear situation there. I'm sorry? Given the example of North Korea in using successful negotiations to lessen the nuclear crisis there and Ahmadinejad's domestic challenges, as well as his recently expressed desire to revisit the situation in an interview with Nick Kristoff, you mentioned how Iran would be interested in closing its enrichment facilities if the West would sell them already enriched materials. Do you feel like enough has changed for the US to go to the negotiating table with Iran? Is it time to take advantage of this opportunity? We are, you know, we negotiate with Iran through this so-called Quartet process with the UN, with the European Union, Europeans, and we have one of our best diplomats dealing with it, Bill Burns, who's our Deputy Secretary of State. I mean, just a fabulous person on this. You know, so I find it difficult to be critical of what we're doing. I think we have the right people. I think we've got the right people at the table, right, you know, mixture at the table. I don't take everything that Ahmadinejad says at face value and I, you know, I think we have to be, we have to understand that he will say things publicly, which he knows are not true. And, you know, I think our leaders try to avoid putting themselves in that position. I'm not sure he tries quite as hard. So I think what is worrisome is, you know, we collect a lot of information through different channels, so-called national technical means, and I think often the information we collect is very different from what he is saying. So I think it's important to explore those things, but I think you have to kind of be mindful that if you explore those things too publicly, somehow the pressure can be released. I remember a lot of countries don't want to do sanctions. So let's say, you know, the Iranians say something and we sort of publicly say, well, we find that very useful and et cetera. That would be a signal to people who are trying to enforce the sanctions but who have a lot of resistance in their own country to say, okay, we don't need to do this. Looks like they've resolved this issue. So you've got to be very careful about kind of responding publicly. My assumption is that, you know, based on the people I know working on this, that if there was truly something interesting or something possible that Akhmadjinajad is suggesting, I'll bet we're on it, but you've got to be very careful of overreacting, especially in public. What would be your prediction on the status of relationship between China and Taiwan and what should the U.S. stance be in this matter? It's a tough audience. I think in the fullness of time, Taiwan and China will achieve a modus operandi where the issue of Taiwan sovereignty simply doesn't emerge the way it does today. I think one of the reasons that has not happened to date is the fact that domestically in China in this sort of constant tug of war between various elements in China, I think their China's own domestic policies would really not allow some kind of solution short of a complete amalgamation of Taiwan into China. So I don't think the Taiwan's believe that they need to do something like that, that is to sort of take down the flag and join China. So I think for now there's not a big change, but I think what is really holding up the potential of change lies in China's own domestic political stalemate where China really they know, and we see statements about their hints about this from people like Wenjiao Bao. We know that Chinese realize they have a political security system that is not the right system for the rest of the country, for the sort of social and economic system, and that this sort of these internal struggles go on. And so I think until China gets its act together internally, I don't see a real solution on the Taiwan issue. And finally, when they do get their act done together internally, I suspect it'll be something where no one uses the word sovereignty, but Taiwan is allowed to go upon its merry way as a thing out there, and that there will be, it will not pose the kind of problem it has posed to date. One more. Go ahead, go ahead. I'm not gonna go up there, this is a tough one. I'm afraid I have to be top too because as a diplomat, he took some shots at one of the four teams that's undefeated in the national football league, Ryan and some men who also ignored a team that has a better record than Boston, the Detroit Tigers. So. They got, yeah. Welcome, our guests. I'm very pleased that the Tigers have finally started having winning records. You know, that's a good thing. We all support that, you know. I think the field though is much too big, but as long as you have pitchers like Verlander, I guess you'll go with those 600 foot fences there. So, yeah. Does this gentleman just wanna ask one? I did actually. Go ahead. Certainly my generation has grown up within America that believes it sort of has the responsibility and right. To intervene across the world, a right that's been largely unchallenged being how we're the only superpower, but in a world in which China and India are catching up to us economically as they industrialize their much larger population basis, do you see America's view of itself as a country that has the sort of right and responsibility to be the final arbiter or the leader of world intervention changing for America as both China and India try to take on some of that role? I like to think that it is changing. That is, I mean, I think we have seen time where we have sort of the neo-conservatives and the liberal interventionists, both of whom both extremes basically taking the view that we have a right to intervene and that the U.S. military is supposed to do that. I like to think that we are in a new era where deploying our U.S. military all over the place or trying to solve problems militarily is probably less of an option than it's been before. But you mentioned, I think, a very important point, which is I would not like to see China and India to feel that somehow they have some kind of right to intervene with anybody. And so the fact that the Chinese regularly vote against us in the U.N. or whatever is saying it should be, you should allow countries to, that's their internal affairs. We have taken the view that basically there are no internal affairs now. These are issues having to do with the country's status as member states of the U.N. They have to live up to certain standards. And I understand that point. I don't think it's, you know, Momar Gaddafi's sovereign right to eat children for breakfast or do the sort of things he was doing. At the same time, I'm not sure I would want to hear the Chinese and the Indians talking about a right to intervene for whatever reason. I just don't think, you know, we have our problems managing this issue of the use of force and we've had a lot more time to work on it than the Chinese and the Indians have. So I would be very worried if I saw from them what you're suggesting, which is a right to intervene. Thank you. Okay. Thank you very much.