 Thank you. Can everyone hear me? Thank you. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to our very first panel for the current strategy forum. I am the panel moderator and each of our esteemed panelists will speak for between 15 to 20 minutes. This will be followed by Q&A from the audience, so I do encourage you to ask some good hard-hitting questions. The full biographies of each panelist are given in the program, so I will not read them extensively. I will just go over the intros very quickly and then the intros after the intros I will start with Dr. Patrick Cronin and then that's followed by Dr. Bernard Hegel and then that's followed by Dr. Nick Gauze. So Dr. Cronin is Senior Advisor and Senior Director of the Asia Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security. Dr. Hegel is a historian of the Arab Arabian Peninsula and a scholar of Islamic law and Islamic political movements. He's also a professor of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University and Dr. Gauze is a professor of National Security Affairs here at the Naval War College. So with that, let me turn it over to Dr. Cronin. Professor Alvi, thank you very much. Good morning ladies and gentlemen. It's a great honor to be back here at the current strategy forum and at the Naval War College, the seat of Strategic thinking that I think Andrew Krepenevich rightly ended his excellent morning keynote speech on by saying that if we're not thinking about innovative strategy for the long term here, then it's not going on in the United States. We face an increasingly contested world and I think you'll find my comments largely consistent if more detailed on Asia than the ones made by Dr. Krepenevich. We recognize, even those of us who are focused so heavily on the Indo-Pacific these days, that this is a global set of challenges and so Desh, for instance, in finding a sustainable counter-terrorism strategy for the United States is no doubt the most urgent security challenge that the United States faces right now. We recognize that. But the urgent must not crowd out the important because if you start to look at the long-term trends and we're going to get a great glimpse into the future when Matt Burroughs speaks after lunch, when you start to think about that half of the population that lives in that circle from India and China to Southeast Asia and how that's going to grow technologically and how the innovation pace will pick up the disruptive technologies, the resource competition, the economic competition, that's where it grows so much over the next 15 to 30 years that the past 15 to 30 years is not necessarily the best barometer and the world changes potentially fundamentally and if the world is splintering and fragmented and is changing from the bottom up as well as the top-down in terms of state competition and competition within states, this is the most dynamic region in the world and so for the long term we better have a strategy focused on it and that's why I'm so concerned about the increasing contestation in maritime Asia and that's really what I want to talk about. In maritime Asia, just to take the last seven years, the contest has heated up yet once again, both especially in the East China Sea and in the South China Sea. In the East China Sea, of course, we have one key ally in Japan that is focused like a laser beam on the problem of the Northwest Island chain, the Ryoku Islands, and that's indeed, as again, Andrew Kruppinovich alluded at the very end in his last answer to a question about the five bases that Japan's building up. There's very little attention being paid to the base buildup, both in China and in Japan and so I just came back from Ishigaki. Ishigaki is actually the island that is responsible nominally for the security of the Senkaku, or the Daiyutai, as the Chinese call them, and they're the ones that are beefing up the Coast Guard presence next to Yanaguni Island, where there's a ground radar, where Miyako Island, Shimoji Island, other build-ups potentially for aircraft and the Chinese now have announced a new Coast Guard base right on the mainland of China opposite in the northern part of Taiwan and they're building up islands as well. There's a slow build-up going on, even though we're in a bit of a checkmate, given the tensions that we've seen in the East China Sea since about 2008. So let me just quickly do the chronology of the last seven years in the East China Sea on the maritime issue. Japan and China sign a historic agreement to explore for energy in the East China Sea in the summer of 2008. Things are looking up, things are looking positive. Old adversaries may be burying the hatchet and thinking about cooperation for all, win-win situations. Six months later, the Chinese conduct a operation to essentially challenge Japan's administrative control over those islands and they send in the first of what is going to be a regular steady stream of flotellas, both naval and law enforcement Coast Guard and other maritime law enforcement vessels, as well as inviting and encouraging fishermen and their so-called maritime militias to constantly, invigilantly contest the areas around those islands. So what has been in Japan's hands ever since the United States reverted Okinawa prefecture and the Senkaku's back to Japan after we had occupied them, after Japan was vanquished, we only reverted them back in 72. They've been uncontested in terms of Japanese administrative control. Now, they're an administration contestation by the Chinese and a contest that the Japanese don't want to acknowledge. You'll remember the Chinese drunken Coast Guard or fishing trawler captain ramming not one but two Japanese Coast Guard ships. That led to his incarceration very briefly before the Chinese used coercive diplomacy and on the Japanese government, the then opposition government of the Democratic Party of Japan, to essentially release the captain right away and that in turn led to domestic pressures in Japan to nationalize three of the five Senkaku islands in 2012, which really ticked off the Chinese and that's what led to up-tempo in the patrols both in and through the territorial waters and airspace over those contested islands and that in turn led to pressure on Japan's ally to reassure Japan and to deter China about assertiveness that could get out of control, especially when the Chinese had instances of locking on a fire control radar, harassing aircraft, patrol aircraft with fighter jets that could lead to something like the EP-3 incident, a lethal incident back in 2001 with the United States. In the United States and did, in reassure Japan, the president himself in Japan about Article 5 of the Security Treaty with Japan did apply to territories administered by Japan and that includes the Senkaku or Dayutai. So that's where we are. The good news is that the United States reaffirmation of the alliance, Japan's steady buildup in serious approach of the Abe administration, has made the cost of action by China fairly high. So China has created a new status quo in the sense that they now can claim internationally and domestically, that they have also a stake at claiming those islands more administrative control because they keep intruding in the waters occasionally, but at the same time the situation is that slow buildup but no interaction of note lately. That could change in an instance of course with an incident, but right now it's steady. The South China Sea has been different because the South China Sea there's been open running room for China. There is no U.S.-Japan alliance. The U.S.-Philippine alliance is a relatively weak new alliance in the sense that this is not the Cold War or even post-Spanish-American war relationship with the Philippines. This is a much more equal relationship that's been built up, driven out of Manila in terms of especially President Aquino's concern about Chinese assertiveness. Assertiveness that flared up especially in the spring of 2012 over Scarborough Shoal Shoal that's closer. It's within the exclusive economic zone of the Philippines. China claims it. It escalated. The United States successfully walked back our ally the Philippines to draw down. China basically took over Scarborough Shoal and they essentially have effective operational control over Scarborough Shoal today. What they're doing now with the reclamation, the land building, the military base building, the forward-staging staging bases that they're creating, they're by building Farry Cross Reef up into a major runway and Mischief Reef, which I remember from the 90s with the Philippines, they're building up these into full-scale potential staging bases that can take aircraft as well as ships, troops and they will move down the effective line of control of China, of the PLA, 140 miles south from where they effectively were operating before because we're talking about moving from 12 degrees north latitude to under 10 degrees north latitude in those two bases. Now, yes, they're vulnerable bases in a lot of ways, but China is salami slicing bit by bit and they're moving ahead incrementally. This is one incremental strategy that may actually work unlike our incremental strategies, which seem to be destined to fail. This is an incremental strategy that has been called an exquisite strategy and here I would submit that an exquisite strategy can defeat exquisite technology and that's one of the challenges that we face right now. So let me just talk about Carl Thayer is going to be on the program later and he's a great expert on the South China Sea and I know he'll have a lot to say and I'm happy to talk in detail in Q&A if there's time. But let me move on with the fact that there's a strategic gap here going on between China in the United States and the rest of the region as well. It's not just about these tactical operations that have flared up in the last seven years. China has long sought control and long claimed control over the South China Sea. So the 11 dash line or the 9 dash line map is not a new claim but what has changed fundamentally of course is China's ability to do something about it and it has become increasingly active as it's become more capable. So we've seen across the entire perimeter of China, its periphery diplomacy if you will, both on the mainland and in the maritime domain, China playing a role to gain greater influence control and you call it finalization, I think that's, there's no other term that quite aptly describes it even though it's a European Cold War concept. It is the control and influence over the neighborhood and that is indeed part of the Chinese strategy. It may be an entirely benign strategy from the Chinese perspective, right? They can arguably justify, this is a defensive strategy. They've suffered in history, they had more than a century of humiliation. They're reclaiming their place. The problem is that it doesn't necessarily recognize the sovereignty of neighbors. It doesn't treat 21st century sovereignty within the ruleset that we would recognize, rules that we've helped to build since the end of World War II. And that's a challenge. So we have to draw the line between what's acceptable and what's not acceptable behavior. The Chinese are seeking position. They're playing wai chi. So when Bob work, undersecretary, would deputy secretary work, my former boss, you know, talks about the United States needs to play free chess. And the problem with that, and again, it's my friend James Holmes, Professor Holmes, wonderful, wonderful strategic thinker on maritime issues. At a conference we were at last week, channeling Carl von Klausowitz was saying there are only two really important things in warfare, concentration and maneuver. Well, that may be true, but the key phrase there is in warfare. It assumes a military-military engagement. If you're not actually trying to get to the military, to military engagement, now the playing field is much bigger. And that's really the challenge that the nation and the region face. They face a much larger comprehensive strategic positioning game that's going on in the long term. So interdependence continues to deter conflict, so there's nuclear weapons, by the way. But while China may not be superior to American military might, they're now arguably superior to every other nation's military in the region, or soon will be if they're not. That is a big strategic challenge. So the United States has to wake up and with the rebalance to Asia Pacific, not at the expense of other regions, but in a way that recognizes that our long-term challenges and interests are going to grow. The competition and contest in Asia Pacific and the Indo-Pacific will grow. So we have to be engaged. We have to be present. We have to be strong. If we're going to cooperate effectively and adapt. Engaging China is a huge part of this aspect. There was a question in the last, in the first session here this morning about trying to look for Chinese cooperation. Certainly we should, wherever our interests converge, build on that cooperation. But as a great, an excellent China analyst, Tom Christensen, in his new book, The China Challenge, has written, the most difficult challenge we may face with China in this century is trying to convince China to contribute to the global order on the lines of what we would like. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't try, especially where there are convergent interests. But we should not fool ourselves, not delude ourselves into thinking that they're going to change their strategy. So when we possess, when we have sanctions, for instance, on PLA officers for hacking into the U.S. websites, we shouldn't think that those sanctions are going to change Chinese behavior. The aim, the main aim, I would argue, of those sanctions, of the cost and position, if you will, is to mobilize the region or the world against bad behavior and around the rules that we want. And meanwhile, we better be investing on our strength, we better be investing on our allies, we better be building partnership capacity building, including creating a common operating picture. The Chinese are objecting to a common operating picture and situational awareness in the South and East China Seas. If the Chinese do not accept shared information, their free flow of information with our allies and partners, then they will not accept any partnership capacity building. That's a red line. That's a line that we better be testing. Because we need to know that right now. Because we think China should be part of that common operating picture, by the way. This information ought to flow more readily so that people can be aware of what's happening. But we need to go beyond that, and I can talk more about that in the Q&A. I think I'm running up against the time. I know that one line here, that Professor Wang Jie, sir, who's an old friend, as the Chinese would say, in a top American watcher at Peking University, advises many governments. He's sometimes credited with building this new concept of a silk belt and road, the idea of a major investment in development and trade set of relations from China to its region and beyond. You know, he quotes Mencius, the famous Chinese philosopher, to say that a state without an enemy or external peril is absolutely doomed. And there's no doubt that the Chinese need in their very trying period of so many domestic challenges an external peril. So I don't want to exaggerate the extent to which China is spoiling for a fight, but China will take a bargain. China will seize an opportunity. China will go and use nationalism to compensate for declining legitimacy of the Communist Party and its potential for providing the economic wherewithal and wheel that it did before, that provided so much legitimacy in the early decades. That's no longer the case as the rate of growth of the Chinese economy slows down. And as we look out, not just the next decade, but beyond, India looms much brighter as an economy in this future. So building India into the Indo-Pacific is hugely strategic. That's why the new strategic technology relationship with India right now, even though it's marginal, I mean, we're doing two small little pathfinder projects, that's just the demonstration projects. In 20 years time, we can be turning into serious carrier air, carrier maritime, other types of military technology. Same thing with Vietnam. That's why it was so important for Secretary of Defense Carter to visit those two countries, Vietnam and India, after the Shangri-La Dialogue this year, because he's signaling that we've got a long game as well. It taps into the third offset strategy or strategies that, again, Andrew Kepinovich alluded to. That's the long-term game. But in the short term, we have to be there every day, engaging and shaping the rules, calling out bad behavior, imposing costs, even if they're mostly diplomatic and legal, and occasionally running freedom of navigation operations and freedom of air operations. So I think I've gone on too long, Professor Aldi, but I'll stop there. Thank you. Thank you very much. Next we have Dr. Haeckel. Thank you very much for this introduction, and I'm honored to be here my first time. So my task is to talk to you about the Middle East, and I chose to use some slides, mostly for show and tell. But let me first begin by some of the distinguishing features of the Middle East. First, you have, can you all hear me? Yes. So we have persistent authoritarianism, which is the form of political culture and the types of states that we have in the Middle East. This is characterized also by bad governance and corruption and rapacious behavior by the elites there, who brutalize their populations. The societies are highly fragmented, and there are persistent cleavages. Cleavages are divisions within societies. These can be sectarian religious cleavages. They can be tribal cleavages or ethnic cleavages. You have forms of crony capitalism and clientelism. Basically, these states don't function like anything we would recognize as normal states, but they are survival machines. And I often tell my students that they should think of the terminator when thinking about these elites and these states because they are very good at surviving and fighting even their own societies in order to do so. You also have in this region of the world the prevalence of militant ideologies and non-state actors. So these are ISIL or Daesh, Al Qaeda, and other types of militant groups. And these groups are often engaged in sectarian warfare, sectarianism, and proxy wars. The regional states are also engaged in using sectarianism against each other. They use third parties in wars. And this is what we're seeing in Syria and in Iraq today. It's also a resource rich country, a resource rich region that's geostrategically central to us and to the world. And you have finally a demographic explosion where something like 60 to 70 percent of the population is under the age of 30. There are also other distinguishing features. This is by no means an exhaustive list, but it is something to keep in mind. These are facts that you should keep in mind when thinking of this region. And it's also a place where a number of states are now fragmenting and you have political vacuum that's being filled in by these non-state actors. One final point also on the features, which I don't have up here, is that the internet and the information revolution has deeply penetrated this region so that in countries like Saudi Arabia, for example, a native population of about 22 to 24 million, 11 million people are on Twitter. That means that virtually every person who's neither too young nor too old is on Twitter. And it has the highest consumption of YouTube videos per capita anywhere in the world. So this is a connected region of the world where people know a lot about what's happening beyond the region, but also are constantly trading all kinds of conspiracy theories and information true and false amongst each other. And the state has lost the monopoly on providing information and supplying information to the population. So let me just show you a map of the world. This is a map that I often use with my students. This is a map that shows countries, the size of a country is in proportion to the proven conventional reserves of oil in the ground. So you can see that this region around the Persian Gulf, or what the Arabs prefer to call the Arabian Gulf, between Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Kuwait, Iraq, and Iran has something like 60 to 65 percent of the proven conventional reserves of oil in the world. And it dwarfs Russia, it dwarfs North America. This map does not take unconventional reserves like shale into account. But this is an important map for you to think about when you think about strategy and when you think about control of hydrocarbon resources. This is a map of the maritime routes and shipping. And you can see the Admiral has already spoken to us about one of the choke points, which is the Strait of Hormuz, where you have about 15 and a half million barrels of oil passing through that strait every day. But you also have Babel Mandib between Yemen and the Horn of Africa. You have the Suez Canal. So you have three major choke points just in and around Arabia. And then north into the Mediterranean, you of course have another one in the Bosphorus in Turkey. So this, making sure that these shipping lanes and these choke points are not blocked is a hugely important strategic interest. It's one that we inherited in this region from the British, and it's a cost that we choose to bear. And much of the oil, again as the Admiral said, much of the oil that leaves the Strait of Hormuz actually doesn't come to the United States, but rather goes to the Far East. Nonetheless, oil is a global and fungible commodity. It's like, think of it as one big bathtub. If there's less of it in any one part of the world, there's less of it everywhere, and prices would spike if ever the oil could not pass through that choke point. It would make the recession of 2007, 2008 a small picnic where this oil to be blocked. The entire global economy would tank because of it. Next, I want to show you a series of, very quickly, a series of slides of what the population pyramid of many countries in the Middle East looks like. And you can see that the base of the pyramid, these are pyramids where you see that the younger population are towards the bottom. And you can see that the bulk of the population is towards the bottom, and that's when you have 60 or 70% of the population extremely young. These are very dynamic people who are frustrated because they can't get jobs, they can't get jobs, means that they can't get married, they can't rent apartments, they can't buy. So incredible personal frustration, which often leads to radicalization. This is the population pyramid of Egypt, a very similar pattern, population pyramid of Libya, again a very similar pattern with the bulk of the people at the base. This is Yemen, which is a kind of a catastrophic situation. It is a failed state today and you can see sort of demographically why that would be the case. And the one country that's most hopeful after the Arab Spring uprisings is Tunisia, and here you can see that the population pyramid looks somewhat different from the others. You have the younger population at the base are actually getting smaller, so you have an economy where most of the working population is towards the middle rather than at the base. And that I think explains in part why Tunisia has probably done better than most of the other Arab Spring uprising nations. Now I want to switch to militant Islamism. This is what our government calls violent extremists. These are groups that use Islam as a political ideology to argue for direct action or for militant action, typically against their own states, but also globally against the United States. So some of the features of militant Islamism is that they focus on purifying, on wanting to purify Muslim communities. They argue that Muslims, most Muslims or even the vast majority of Muslims don't have Islam, don't understand Islam correctly. Their views need to be changed, need to be purified, because most Muslims have taken on ideas that are not intrinsic or inherent to the religion. So these are purification movements. You can think of them as puritans. They also argue that if you follow their teachings, you can return to an idealized past, which is roughly the first three centuries of Islam. They want to recover the lost power of this early period. They have global ambitions in reach, typically using asymmetrical forms of warfare. Their signature tactic is the suicide bombing. But their principal focus is to destroy the local regimes in the Middle East. These are regimes that they call apostate regimes. So these are regimes that have abandoned Islam, have become heretics. And they want to reform Muslim society. And you can think of Islamism as a culture. It's not just a political ideology or a set of tactics. It's not also a mindset that is concerned exclusively with violence or sadism, as we would often think of them when looking at the beheading videos that they put out. But rather, it's a culture. And this culture is one that uses poetry, that uses history, that talks about a new kind of, fashioning a new kind of Muslim. And unless we think of them as a culture, I don't think we can fully understand their appeal and their durability and endurance as a political movement. So now, this is what the Islamic world looks like today. You can see there are national borders everywhere. This is the Westphalian system of nation states that is basically a product of Western history and Western concepts. And it is anathema to the militant Islamists that this should be the case. They want to erase these borders. They think of these borders as symbolizing the weakness and division, the weakness of Muslims and the division of the Muslim community, and that this is a deliberate ploy in policy of the West. What they want to do instead is to recreate something like this. This is what the Arab Empire looked like in the 730s of the Christian era. It is an empire that spanned about 5,000 miles. Nothing, no empire had ever been created, had been created before then, nor since of this size. And if you look at the map of the Islamic State, you can see that it wants to recreate that earlier empire and then add on more to it any territory that had ever been conquered by Muslims. So that's where Europe, for instance, comes in in the Balkans and in Greece. So this is the culture that I am talking about and this is the imagined geography of these militant Islamists. Now this culture is produced largely and exists largely on the web, on the internet. And they have websites, this is one of them, in which you can hear chanting of anthems, you can read manifestos, documents, articles, all kinds of debates. It's a very lively culture. This is yet another of the websites. This is the one that's mostly used by ISIL or by Daesh. And you can see that bin Laden up here in the top right corner or you top left, your top right corner is still a major figure for them in this movement. And then I will end on this slide. So what should U.S. policy be? These are just my recommendations and they're not half-baked, but they're certainly, I think, to be considered, but also elaborated on. So first, I think what the U.S. needs to do and the West more generally is to unambiguously delineate what our strategic, core strategic interests are in this part of the world. A part of the world that is extremely volatile, highly fragmented, out of control. Partly we have contributed to this phenomenon, but not exclusively. There are also indigenous and domestic reasons for this situation. So I think our strategic interests should be to secure maritime commerce and shipping lanes, to prevent interstate warfare. We would not want Iran and Saudi Arabia to start fighting one another, to protect the oil and gas reserves because 65 percent of them, especially the oil conventional reserves are in this region. And then to defend allies, to draw red lines where we make it very clear that countries like Jordan, Israel, Turkey, the Kurdish state or the Kurdish semi-state up in Northern Iraq, Saudi Arabia and the GCC countries, those are red line countries for us that we would not allow the regimes there to topple. We would not allow invasions to happen and we would defend them the way we would defend South Korea today. And to protect these interests unequivocally and make it very clear that we would do so. But also to encourage local actors to fight militant Islamism, not to take on the fight ourselves alone, because that is not a fight that we can win. And finally, to think of militant Islamism as something that can be contained to the Middle East as much as possible and if possible to contain it in the western deserts of Iraq and the eastern deserts of Syria and let the local regional powers deal with it, rather than have to deal with it ourselves. Because I don't think this is a movement that can be defeated by outsiders. It has to be defeated by locals. And on that note, I thank you. Thank you very much. Our next speaker is Dr. Gustav. Thank you. I'll bring the focus now to Europe and Eurasia. And as you'll hear in my own remarks, some of the themes which my panelists have brought up will also apply there. I had the privilege of accompanying Ambassador John Cloud on a study trip to Europe this past month. Ambassador Cloud holds the William Ruger Endowed Chair here for Defense Economics at the War College. And we wanted to travel to Europe and to visit a number of countries and to see and assess the impact of the events in Ukraine over the last year on their approaches towards defense spending, on the types of aid that they're willing to provide to Ukraine, and then larger issues related to Euro-Atlantic security. And so we had an opportunity to travel to Lithuania, to Poland, to Germany, and then to Belgium, to Brussels, to the European institutions. And we had an opportunity to meet with current and former government officials, both in their national governments and also at the European level. Members of the European Parliament, people who work in the European Commission, people associated with the European Council, analysts, academics, members of the business community. We traveled as academics, we didn't travel as representatives of the U.S. government, although in some of our meetings we did have embassy people there as note takers to transmit what they thought might be of interest back to the State Department. What I'm going to do here is to give you some of my impressions. These are my own personal impressions based on who we spoke with and some of the overall feedback that we received on this trip. And the first, of course, is that Europe is back in play, that the hope that Europe was settled, that we could focus on other parts of the world and Europe would take care of itself, and that it would not simply perhaps be a security consumer, but it would be a security provider for other parts of the world. All of those assumptions are now challenged by the events which have been occurring over the last several years. One of the points that was reiterated to us in several of the countries we visited is that Europe is faced with simultaneous crises, and that at several points people said that the crisis in Ukraine and the crisis in Greece are linked together, that these are linked events, not that they're being caused by the same actors, but that they reflect a similar problem. And that is that the Euro-Atlantic world expanded in the 1990s and the early 2000s with a high degree of confidence that expansion could take place with little cost, with little expectation that commitments would be called upon, that we would have to live up to commitments that were being made, a whole series of rules were put in place for how we wanted the Euro-Atlantic world to function, and again the assumption was that these questions were settled, the Cold War is over, we can move forward to the next stage. What we now have is that the Ukraine crisis and the Greece crisis both call into question whether or not you can assume that all the rules are set and everyone is following them, and that there are costs. If you're going to enforce the rules on Ukraine, if you're going to enforce the rules on Greece, they're going to exact a cost, a political cost and an economic cost, particularly for the states of Europe to some extent for the United States as well. And so countries have to then make a choice. If enforcing the rules is going to lead to a cost, do you take the cost of enforcing the rules, or do you say that it's too expensive to enforce the rules, that the Greeks maybe shouldn't have gotten into the Euro area, but they did, but now that they're in, we have to bail them out no matter what because the costs of a Greek exit and the costs of imposing Greek compliance with those rules is too high, or in the case of Russia and Ukraine, that yes, we had hoped that territorial integrity of states was accepted, that we had accepted the Helsinki Accords, that there would be no forcible changes of borders in Europe, but if the costs of enforcing that on Russia are too high, then do we have to accept that Russia has taken Crimea and that that more or less is a fate accompli and that Ukraine needs to be, its status as a state needs to be adjusted, whether it's territorial adjustments in the east or whether or not Ukraine's ability to make sovereign choices for itself in terms of who and what international institutions it wishes to ally with, if those costs are too high, versus of course the other argument, which is that if the costs may be high now, but if you don't enforce the rules, then you create problems down the road, that if the Greeks have problems with the Euro and you let the Greeks slide, then how many other states in Europe that face economic troubles will may want to bend the rules, if you have territorial adjustments in Ukraine today, then what about other territorial adjustments across, certainly across the former Soviet space, and now we've seen in other parts of central Europe, people that have never, political movements that never accepted the boundaries as they were drawn, whether or not we may see separation in Bosnia, we have questions in Hungary with the current leadership raising questions about the durability of some of the territorial settlements. So if you let the current situation continue, are you creating problems down the road? And there's very much the sense that the countries of Europe and the United States have to make a choice about where they're willing to pay the costs, pay for enforcement today, or don't pay for enforcement today, and then run the risk that these are not one-off situations and that you're opening the door to further problems in the European space. The second is that some of the assumptions made, certainly in the early 2000s, about strategies for coping with the expanded European zone of operations are coming under challenge. A number of people said essentially the European neighborhood policy is withering on the vine, the hope that Europe could be surrounded by a belt of states to the south and east that would be friendly and would also help to block problems from further afield, making their way to Europe so that you would have a strong belt of Mediterranean partners that would help to shield Europe from the south and that you would have the European neighborhood in the east that would integrate Russia more closely with Europe and would bring Europe some degree of stability on its eastern frontiers that these assumptions are now under question. The European project itself is wobbling. If the British decide to leave the European Union, which was not something that a few years ago was a fringe position, now it's going to be a referendum. Of course, the British may not leave, but the very fact that we've reached this stage, that you have other people talking about renegotiating their position within the European Union really raises the question of the durability of the European project. And then, of course, the opinion polls released this past week very disturbing about questions of solidarity in Europe when it comes to NATO, of populations saying that they're not in favor of necessarily living up to their Article 5 guarantee to their partners that if a problem happens with Turkey and with its neighbors in the Middle East or the Baltic states have a problem with Russia that you have some European population saying Article 5 maybe isn't as definitive as people have been led to believe and we might not necessarily want to enforce that. So that raises some issues for solidarity and cohesion in the future. The reality that Europe and the European space is faced with a spectrum of simultaneous problems. We do not have the luxury of being able to concentrate on one part of Europe and that the rest of Europe is more or less peaceful and stable. And again, as we traveled through Europe, the sense that there is a spectrum, a sliding spectrum of problems that range from the Arctic to the Baltic to Ukraine itself to the Black Sea to what's happening in the Middle East, particularly with ISIS and then what's happening in Libya, the migrant crisis across the Mediterranean, instability further in Africa that is fueling pressures along Europe's southern borders. And that Europe does not, and the United States do not have the luxury of being able to pick one of these problems to focus on and then putting the others on the back burner. That there has to be a simultaneous response. But the reality is that without sufficient resources, you cannot have solutions for all of these problems. And so there's a certain degree of triage where you're going to hold the line and where you're going to try to solve the problem, which problems take priority. And here you run up against the twin axes in Europe that run along an east-west and a north-south axis, that the further east you go, Russia is the bigger threat. The further west you go, Russia may be a problem, but it's not existential to European security. The further south you go, the Mediterranean problem is paramount. And this is the primary security issue. The further north you go, the Mediterranean is an irritant, but not necessarily a major crisis. And then, of course, the further north you go, it raises questions about the Arctic, the opening of the new sea lanes, competition for energy resources, competing territorial claims. The problem, of course, is that NATO and the European Union are both consensus organizations of their members. You can only get a policy through that all members agree upon. And so one of the things that you have, and this was one of the examples that continuously, particularly when we were in the Commission in Brussels, is you have to have a policy that Spain and Poland can both agree on. And if Spain looks south and says the Mediterranean is the major security threat to Europe and Poland looks east and says the major security threat is Russia, somehow those two countries, both in NATO and in the European Union, have to come to some degree of consensus. Some of it will be satisfying compromises. Some of it will be papering over with diplomatic language in the hope that you can avoid having commitments called upon. And then, of course, Europe's last resort for security provision, which is the United States, which is the hope that the United States will fill in the gaps more. That if Europe has to concentrate its resources in one area, that if the gap opens up, what can the United States do to provide? Which, of course, then runs up against our increasing commitments in Asia and in the Middle East. What do we have available? What is there to spare to Europe? Also the sense of solidarity. What are you prepared to do so that, for example, the Baltic States, which are increasingly very concerned about Russian air and naval incursions in their own waters and airspace, are reluctant to send naval assets to patrol the Mediterranean? But on the other hand, you have people in Italy and Spain and Greece who say an alliance has shared burdens. We support you and your burdens. You have to support us in ours. The question of refugee resettlement is one that is very contentious because you have countries in the North and East saying we don't want to accept our burden, our share of the burden of migrants coming across the Mediterranean. That's Greece's job. That's Italy's job. That's Spain's job. Particularly if you also, if you're in Poland or the Baltic States and you're worried about the possibility of migrants coming from Ukraine, you may have to deal with and put a strain on your economy. So there is a strain now on the cohesiveness of the alliance. And one of the things that we really walked away from is that there is a series of compromises that are going to, that are in play, that will have an impact on policy that may not lead to the optimal strategic outcomes, but which are the ones which are politically the ones that these institutions can support. Finally, we come back to the question and I alluded to it already. What role is the U.S. going to play? This was something that as we went through Europe and we traveled from east to west. What is the U.S. role? How much is the U.S. going to come back to Europe? What's the future of your rebalance? What are you prepared to rebalance back to Europe? What are you doing in the Middle East? What can we, what can we in Europe expect? Some degree of are you going to lead or are you not going to lead? And if you're not going to lead, then do you need to move out of the way and let Europeans handle it? And perhaps, and this is something certainly we heard in Germany, if you want Germany to play more of this role vis-a-vis Russia, the German solution may not be the one that Washington prefers. So is Washington going to outsource more to Berlin and let the Germans take the lead? And the Germans and the French have been doing that in the Minsk Accords. We were there, of course, when Secretary Kerry went to Sochi, and then there was a great deal of disquiet with that, which is you weren't involved, saying to us, you, the United States weren't that involved in this, and now suddenly you're sending an envoy, the Secretary of State is going to Sochi, and are you sending us mixed messages? The Secretary of State did, from what we heard and the feedback we got from people was that his briefing in Antalya to the NATO allies helped to reassure people. But there's a sense of not knowing what the signals are from the United States, what the United States is prepared to do, what Europe has to do on its own, and that will be an issue. And really, this question in the end of what's going to give, the defense strategic guidance from several years ago posited that the United States could rebalance pivot to Asia, draw down in the Middle East, and slow the rate of defense expenditure in the United States based on an assumption that Europe would be quiet. Europe's not quiet anymore. So the Europeans now want to know what's going to give. Are you going to spend more? Are you going to not put as much in Asia? And then, as you've heard from our speakers already this morning, we have growing demands, both from our allies and others to have a more robust presence there. The strategy that we've heard for the Middle East, if that doesn't work, is the U.S. going to be putting more into that region, if the local actors are not able to achieve? And what can Europe depend on? And so I think we have all of our panel today, all of what we've done. We've given you different parts of the world, but all that comes back to these questions of priority and where we're prepared to make the investments and where we're prepared to take the strategic risk. And with that, I'll close my comments. Thank you very much. Now we open the floor to Q&A. Please do use the microphones. Yes, sir. Good morning and thanks for an excellent panel. Paul Daley from Boston. I think that the panel and the earlier speakers have certainly set out a whole series of problems that maybe we should do something about, maybe we shouldn't. But in formulating that kind of a strategy, is there value in looking back at some of the things that we could have done in the last couple of years that would have drawn a line in the sand, set up a marker, or given our allies and our enemies some idea of what our strategy would be. Something like Syria when they used poison gas or when France cancelled the mistrial, you could have bought, I mean you still can, buy those two ships as strike ships for NATO. Or some of the things that we could have done in the Middle East and some of the other countries, for example, provide lethal weapons in the Ukraine. So are there any things that we can learn, things that we should have done that we didn't do that would help in giving some guidance for the future? Let me just offer a couple of ideas. One is that first of all, even though Asia Pacific is a long-term interest and we need to engage comprehensively in the coming decades, Asians and our Asian allies and partners understand that we have global interests and that they also are part of the same interconnected global world. They want to see effectiveness though and when they see ineffectiveness, fecklessness, tepid responses, ineffective responses, then they're worried in Asia too about the United States. So that's on one side of the ledger and I'll let my colleagues here address things like the red line with Syria because one of the flip side of, had we acted in Syria more definitively, we might have inherited Libya where we got rid of Gaddafi but at the same time we've got increasing encroachment on the part of militant Islamists with no solution in sight and that threatens Europe, by the way, increasingly they're going to be focused on that. So that engages all the regions there. Scarborough Shoal though in Asia specifically, had we responded more sort of intelligently in 2012 we would have kept a presence and ensured that China did not directly benefit through tailored coercion because right now they've benefited and they've learned the lesson of what they call extended coercive diplomacy, that they've been able to coerce the ally of our ally. They've been able to coerce us to basically coerce the Philippines to essentially make gains through assertive actions. I think we also have to understand though that their actions here are not just military we need comprehensive power so when I see things like the Trans-Pacific Partnership hanging in the balance right now I don't care if we double the number of ships in Asia-Pacific, if I don't have more trade and business we're not staying around Asia-Pacific in the long term we're going to be pulling back. So in addition to that finally investing in places like the Marianas this is US territory in Guam for instance, prime real estate for amphibious and joint combined operational training throughout the region building partnership capacity. Those are just some of the things that we could have done and should be doing thinking about the future. On the Middle East the problem from the perspective of locals is that we either too engaged or not engaged enough. So we either go to war and smash regimes like the one in Iraq or do nothing in Syria. But the upshot is that we did a lot in Iraq and that's a country that's in ruins or in a serious mess. In Syria we did nothing it's also in a mess and in Libya we kind of went halfway. We did a little bit but not too much and not nothing at all and that's a country also in a mess. So it's hard to draw a policy recommendation given that the whole region is a mess almost regardless of what the US does. And counterfactuals are very difficult. What I would like though the United States to do is A to be clear in its own mind as to what is important what is not and then perhaps take a page from the Chinese and take the kind of salami approach rather than either being too engaged or not engaged at all. Just briefly the one thing I would recommend and this comes out of my own observations of the Eurasian space. You have to take Putin Vladimir Putin seriously you have to take him at his word when he says things. He has been warning for years that Ukraine was a red line for Russia. He told President Bush and Bucharest if you make a move to bring Ukraine into the Western sphere Ukraine will cease to exist as a state. That was that was seven years ago. And we had an approach where we kind of let the Ukrainians kind of took themselves out of out of contention in 2010 when Yanukovych was elected. But you know if with a place like Ukraine you either the West was going to make this commitment and do it or it should have cut the deal with with Putin. But we're again we're in this where we either we're not we're not involved enough to make a difference to the Ukrainians but we're involved enough to make life very difficult for Ukraine. And one of the things again from this trip that was worrying is that there is Ukraine fatigue in Europe. There are no great donors. There's no martial plan. There's no 1989 equivalence of what we did for Poland and the Czech Republic for Ukraine. People are tired. They say we've spent money on Ukraine already. And so my worry is that what we've done now is we've created a situation for a permanent frozen conflict there that this will fester for years to come. Of course the Chinese are very happy. The Chinese are thrilled with what's happened in in Ukraine because it takes away attention from what they do. Let's the Russians test out the Western response about how effective it is. So you know Beijing has been watching this very carefully and is drawing some of its own lessons. But you know we should have had a strategy for Ukraine one way or the other. We didn't. We reacted to it. We're continuing to react to it. And we're paying the price for that now of not having thought through the outcomes that we wanted. And for not frankly in my opinion not having taken Putzin as seriously when he says that he's going to do something whether it's Ukraine or the Eurasian Union or something else. We have to take what he says and react accordingly that he will try to do what he says that he's going to do. Questions. Yes sir. An old fashioned writer. I recently completed a book about a Rhode Island pilot who was captured by the Japanese in 1944 brutalized youth for target practice and beheaded. And during my research I read about 1500 pages of courtroom testimony from both Tokyo and Yokohama. My point is recently the Japanese prime minister declared there were no war criminals Japanese war criminals in World War II. In fact the seven class A war criminals who were executed have all been enshrined. I got hold of a Japanese textbook 10th grade. There's no mention made of the Putin death march. Very little is said about any of the atrocities. Rape of Nanking was the blamed on some reluctant Chinese soldiers to surrender. And the Japanese the Korean comfort ladies were voluntary nymphomaniacs. My point is this Japan killed more than 30 million Chinese in World War II. They have never taken any responsibility. Do you think I mean we are we're capable of pressuring some of our allies to do certain things. We don't seem to have good luck with the Japanese at least as far as acknowledging what they did in World War II. Do you think this may contribute somewhat to the Chinese reluctance to work with the Japanese in any regard. Thank you. Well so thank you very much for your question. Obviously history is extraordinarily important and we forget it at our own peril just as we forget about geography and other facts that really shape the reality of this region. All my uncles have fought in all of our wars but my uncle Bob was part of the invasion force of Okinawa. And when I was visiting recently Okinawa I saw some pictures in fact of the force that he was he was there invading and I was with some Japanese school children who were at a shrine to some of the Japanese school girls who were forced into the military because the Japanese Imperial Army wanted to make sure there's a war of attrition so that we could never get to the home island. This is impossible to overcome. We have to understand it in fact we have to push it out to historians to try to make sense out of it in the civil society politicians should stay clear of of shaping history. They should use history learn history but not shape it. You and I know that Prime Minister Abe his he's got a personal relationship that goes back to that question of who was a war criminal and who wasn't a war criminal. And once the war is over it was still messy. I just hosted Governor Onaga of Okinawa who is the newly elected governor of a place where we have the majority of our military bases bases that are in our strategic interest bases that are in the strategic interest of the stability of Asia Pacific. And he's opposed to our presence frankly. He wants to stop the construction of the new runway at Hanoko. All I'm saying is it gets very complicated when you talk about current politics our national interests and then trying to fix history at the same time. So yes we ought to be reading Professor Payne's history of the Sino-Japanese war in conflict and have a big appreciation. The war didn't just begin with our World War II. It began long before then began with colonization. Those are all part of it but the Japanese have also contributed since the end of that war to an incredible track record of building regional and global order. And I can contrast that to say Mao if you read Tom Christensen's new book and I invite you to read it The China Challenge he's got a very gripping historical review of how Mao Zedong had to face the choice of essentially ratifying Stalin's acceptance of the invasion of Korea which would end up having a million Chinese casualties in that brief period of time those Chinese volunteers and Mao signed on to that never apologized for it there's no even recognition inside China about that not to mention Tiananmen not to mention many other more recent historical episodes I'm not forgiving the Japanese for the historical brutality and I would visit you know the Canberra war memorial perhaps above all a museum perhaps above all the museums in the world looking at Carl Thayer behind is probably the best historical representation in one place of the brutality of that war to remember what happened so very important question yes of course it's part of the Chinese makeup yes reconciliation should be part of it but the Chinese should not be forgiven for bad behavior today just because they were victims yesterday I want to give some students a chance to to ask some questions and I'll come back to non-students in a moment students where are you yes sir gentlemen good morning Captain Doug Howell student the senior course looking at the strategies of each of three contested arenas that you've discussed with us this morning in your opinions from the point of view of Moscow to Iran Beijing what are those strategic one of two items what are those strategic concerns that keep them awake at night looking at our point of view what about theirs concerns that they have to adjust their strategies for that maybe their current strategy for would be concerned about Moscow's got a lot of things that it has to worry about on its plate it is enjoying a resurgence now but all of its long-term indicators are negative it has partnerships of convenience with China with other states but no real strong alliances and of course the great Russian fear what keeps them up and what they actually have conferences that are based on this their great fear is being cut out of the out of the international order they realize that there's a point at which they could fall out of the position of being one of the world's great powers that they would be left behind they were immensely worried when a few years ago Big Brzezinski was talking about the G2 it's the US and China and then maybe the US China and Europe because that really doesn't have a place for for Russia so this idea of Russia being knocked out as one of the great powers and kind of condemned to being on the periphery not able to have a seat at the at the table and again because when you look at what puts and defines an independent country means that you can control your own domestic policy without any interference and you get to help set the agenda you're an agenda setter rather than an agenda taker and so from the what keeps the Russians up at night is that they're going to be forced to become agenda takers rather than agenda setters you know for the Middle East is actually a very easy question to answer it's regime survival and often it's the survival of an individual that gets conflated with the regime as you can see with president Assad in Syria today I don't think these are regimes that are thinking strategically long term about the welfare of their own people well first China is different there's a they're brimming with confidence despite all the challenges so when they think 1949 they don't think first current strategy form that's what we were told this was started in 1949 they think the coming centennial in 2049 of the People's Republic of China the realization of a fully reemerged powerful China reclaiming its place in history that dream is very important because it speaks to the nationalism that will forestall the failure of the Chinese Communist Party or Xi Jinping hopes because the economic growth rate as I mentioned is slowing down the demographics are not favorable in fact the demographic bubble bursts earlier than many thought probably 2020 rather than 2025 and so they have to keep the economy going very important but they have to also feed the nationalism and that nationalism has been fed pretty readily especially since 1995 and I just want to commend another book timing Chung's research Tom Mankin and others have contributed to on the military modernization programs of China we don't really focus on this 1995 key period the Taiwan Strait Crisis the bombing of the Belgrade sort of Chinese Embassy those dates created something called 995 project 955 project rather and I know 995 project which is the beginning of the real strategic science and technology effort that started to bear fruition in the last decade which gave them the greater capability to contest things like the East China Sea the South China Sea cyberspace and anti-satellite weapons as well in outer space and we're going to see more of that growing because that has to feed the nationalism so that balance between the nationalist forces and keeping the economy going fast enough to survive with the Communist Party leadership or transition to something like it that they still retain most control that's what keeps I think Xi Jinping awake questions yes ma'am Dr. Cronin you mentioned in your talk that one of the challenges with China was information flow what kind of information were you referring to yes thank you very much we're doing a great deal of work on creating greater situational awareness in the Asia Pacific maritime domain awareness it might be called MDA it's information sharing it's putting the region on CNN or c-span if you will through leveraging the information age technology that exists we've seen this already by commercially available satellite imagery that has given us tremendous high definition high resolution photographs of the seven reclamation island building projects of China in the South China Sea just in the past 18 months China has more than doubled the land mass of the South China Sea they're terraforming their way to control of the South China Sea as my friend Alan DuPont has said in Australia so they are the world deserves to see that in real time we can share information though as well for dealing with the low common denominator that is the common interests that all countries have in responding to disasters and humanitarian assistance we've been talking about it we've been slowly building up capabilities well we can create both a region wide information sharing network something similar to the unclassified information fusion center at Changi in Singapore for commonly agreed sort of shared information for everybody to use for disaster response but we can also supplement that with allies and partners to focus on higher end capabilities so we have better imagery and better early warning so that the Philippines our ally are not surprised as they were in 2012 when they found that the Chinese armed maritime law enforcement ships able to respond to their the Philippine Navy ships our former rusting thin-hold Coast Guard cutters that we we sold them which are not you know we're not really strong and not really meant to go up against the Chinese and they suddenly found themselves if they'd had better information awareness they could have at least avoided that whole fracas in the first place anyone on this side yes sir in the far back yep push the button sure I'll just so briefly and I hope Carl Thayer will say more about that on his panel tomorrow if he has time the Philippines when they were boosted out of the Scarborough Shoal they were basically looked around and said we've got no recourse now but maybe a legal recourse we don't have even a diplomatic recourse because the association of Southeast Asian nations the 10 Southeast Asian nations are more of a talk shop based on consensus if you think Europe and NATO is based on consensus ASEAN even if they have a consensus that just means they put out a communique there's no action that follows so Philippines can't even get the consensus on that issue so they went to an arbitral panel which takes years to unfold under the United Nations Convention on the Law of the Sea Treaty regime and that will on four points of law including this question of what is the legal basis of the nine-dash line claim you know for China could embarrass the Chinese immensely if they come out in the first part of 2016 next year about the time of say the Taiwan elections and just before the Philippine elections next year that the Chinese not wanting to play that legal game although they use law fair all the time when it suits their interests mostly claiming domestic law over these areas and that giving them the justification to send out their marine law enforcement maritime law enforcement ships in this case the island building can be seen as a preemption of the international legal process so I think that's the short answer to your question is the Chinese are preempting this in part that's not the only reason they're building these islands they've long run wanted the runway and now they're going to have the biggest runway they've long wanted to build up mischief reef as well and now they're going to be building it up so this is part of that part of that positioning game I talked about they're using information law psychology and all we're using is what I mean you know we have to use more tools in the toolkit with that we are out of time please join me to thank the great panelists that we've had in this panel thank you