 My name is Mae Bryan and I'm Senior Lecturer in the Department of War Studies and the co-founder and co-director of the Centre for Grand Strategy. It is a great pleasure on behalf of the Centre for Grand Strategy to welcome you all to today's event. The purpose of today's event, of course, is to think about where we are with diplomacy in Britain, with the state of British diplomacy and the fitness for purpose and machinery and British foreign policy too. And this is very much in the spirit of what we do at the Centre for Grand Strategy. We're very interested in this broad kind of mission to inject a greater degree of historical and strategic expertise into British statecraft diplomacy and policymaking. That was our mission statement. And delighted to welcome today three distinguished speakers to help us think about this question about where is British diplomacy today? It's been a year since the integration review has been published, obviously quite a lot of major events in that time, not least the Russian invasion of Ukraine, but many other things too, the withdrawal from Afghanistan, the signing of the AUKUS agreement, a number of different changes, to say the least in the European security architecture since the invasion of Afghanistan, and the merger of, of course, the FCO and DFID, and all of the changes that have happened as a result of that, and many, many more things too, both in the kind of the wider international strategic context but also domestically within Britain as we start to grapple with some of the long-term effects of the COVID crisis and various other things. So, to think about what all this means, we have three members of, three very distinguished speakers, we're going to introduce them in the sequence in which they'll be speaking. We have, first of all, Tom Fletcher who is the principal of Hartford College, Oxford University, and Tom has previously served as foreign policy advisor to several prime ministers, Blair and Brown and Cameron, before becoming ambassador to Lebanon and a visiting professor at NYU. He's written a number of books, including Naked Diplomacy, Power and Statecraft in the Digital Age, and 10 Survival Skills for World and Flux, with a number of other things worth coming into. So, welcome to you, Tom. We also have Lord Peter Ricketts, who is a visiting professor in the Department of War Studies. He's 40 years of experience as a diplomatic service and his final post was as ambassador in Paris from 2012 to 2016. He's also, before that, UK's first national security advisor and the coordinator of the 2010 security strategy and strategic defence and security review. He's permanent undersecretary of the FCO and head of the diplomatic service, and I'm sure we'll have plenty of things to say about many of the things we have today. So, welcome to Peter as well. And finally, we have Suzanne Raine. Sorry, I think I've got the sequence at this point. Suzanne's going to go second, and then Peter will go third. Suzanne served also in the Foreign Office from 1995 to 2019, and this included postings in Poland, Iraq and Pakistan. Her specialism has been counterterrorism, including a number of senior domestic appointments, including head of the Joint Terrorism Analysis Centre from 2015 to 2017, and director of counterterrorism from 2017 to 2019. She's an affiliate lecturer at the Centre for Geopolitics at Cambridge and a trustee of Lucy, the Imperial War Museum and Stop the Traffic. So welcome to you all. We're going to have a fairly traditional format here, about 10 minutes or so each for some remarks from our speakers. And then we'll be opening up to questions. So please do use the question function and as your speakers are offering us their comments and hopefully some provocations. Please do think about your questions and make sure they're nice and difficult. One thing just to flag is that this session will be recorded, so please be mindful of that. And with that, I will say no more and I will pass over to Tom. Tom. Thank you so much, Mabe. And it's great to have the chance to have this conversation. I'm really looking forward to hearing Suzanne and Peter and really getting into the really fun bit, the questions later on. So I'm sure it's going to be a terrific conversation. I thought to be fair to our current diplomat, so often can't be here to speak for themselves. I think we have to recognize the challenging context in which they are operating at the moment. The challenging global context, challenging UK context, and then a very specific challenging context for the organization itself. If you look at the global context and you mentioned a few of these dimensions. If you look at COVID, Kabul, Kiev, we really are experiencing the implications of a driverless world. And we've seen through that period of the pandemic. What happens when countries resort not just to social distancing but national distancing and diplomacy is much, much harder in periods of austerity and introspection periods of nationalism. I think you don't always have enemies that you can find easily on a map or, or kill in a bond film. And I think we've seen that really over the last couple of decades. It's not a particularly political point about this administration. And I go back to the 2008 crash, when I was working with Gordon Brown in in number 10 at the end of that G20 summit when we tried to put the system back together again. I think what Obama relatively knew at the time said that unless we fix the international system, then the next crisis will be much worse. And of course, in the subsequent decade and a half, we failed actually to rebuild that international system. So that's a very challenging global context, even before you throw in the, the trumps and the Putin's effectively Trump offering international system and Putin vandalizing it. There are many contexts and there are particularly challenges there I think for the fcdo as well. We have been in recent years, a little bit too Trumpy in what is now Biden world in the period after Brexit. And this is not just an anti Brexit or an anti remain comment I think we assembled a circular firing squad. And at a time when the rest of the world was looking at us very closely we have real scrutiny in that period. I fear that we lost our travel a rating for competence the rest of the world looked at us and thought, I'm not so impressed by this long anymore. And I think, you know, in the last few years, added to that has been a slightly hubristic mismatch between reality and communication. And so at a time when we're going around saying that we want to be trusted in the world. We're actually threatening to break international law at a time when we say we want to be a soft power superpower. We're trashing institutions such as the BBC which are so essential to that soft power. And at a time when we are claiming to be global Britain we are cutting our aid budget. And I think that makes it very, very difficult for the fc do and then the final set of challenges then really more specifically for the organization itself and it's an organization that I think all three of us have worked with and and admire and are in a very much part of, but they've, they face particular challenges in the recent period they've not been blessed, I don't think, over a number of years with ministers who who really rate the organization or will defend it or will deploy it effectively, they will challenge it in the right ways the front office likes challenge. It likes to be told here's the problem to crack how do we crack it now go off and do it. And I'm not sure that's necessarily happened the extent that it should in recent years. I think the organization has without doubt suffered a period of a low mojo. And we could trace this back to Iraq, maybe we could trace it through Afghanistan through the EU referendum but often decisions taken elsewhere have actually ended up costing the fc do reputation Lee. And there's a cumulative effect to that for the diplomats that we send out into the world. And I think added to that. There's a challenge around public reputation. I think the public and the media can't quite decide whether they dislike the fco because it's full of some free characters wandering around the world eating for a rush a chocolates, or whether they dislike it because they see it as as incompetent out of date, slightly more Mr Bean than Sir Humphrey, but somewhere between that, there's a failure to really connect with people's day to day needs and explain why the fcdo is essential to Britain's security, prosperity, and, and values you know as a result. You'll be unlikely to find anyone marching down Whitehall in support of the foreign office in support of more resource for the fcdo. I might touch later on if it's of interest and on the review that I led in 2016 of the fcdo fco as it was then, which was the first post internet review really of the of the foreign office and we found lots of strengths, the people, the agility, the global network which was genuinely envied by most diplomatic services and a sense of how to use that network and how to deploy soft power alongside hard power. But we also found that the organization was stretched that it was still too male and pale that there were too many diplomats in the UK and too few overseas that it was still struggling to make sure that the technology worked for it and that it didn't work for the, for the technology. We worried that it was still at key moments slightly risk averse, and not always great at executing. It could often have the idea but wasn't always great at seeing through the idea over a period. I think if you look at it now six years on I think you do see much greater agility and they took key decisions to go for agility rather than secrecy, and the way that capitals, the capital communicated with its embassies and ambassadors. I think you've seen a brilliant decade for the promotion of women leaders in the fcdo and you know Peter was very much part of that and subsequent permanent territories as well. So that now I mean I did a map recently of the countries in the world led by one of our brilliant women where the embassy was led by one of our brilliant women diplomats and you know that the map was was dominated and I think that's been a huge step forward. I think if you look at an issue like crisis leadership. I think we can argue about individual crises and the pressures that individual teams were under but you know over two decades three decades crisis leadership consular work has been absolutely transformed in the fcdo. And I think still it is attracting talent and promoting talent and I think you could turn up in any capital in the world and find absolutely brilliant diplomats working there. I mean, you know, is there a really. Is that vital sense of purpose really clearly defined for the organization that was my slight worry with the review in 2016 was that ministers at the time didn't really want to define what the sense of purpose should be for the organization. I'm sure we'll come on to that I think the, the marriage with with diffid creating the fcdo hasn't always been a happy one from both perspectives and there's work to be done still to work that through. I still fear that there is that lack of mojo. You know if you go into a lift in King Charles Street are people talking about their concerns over terms and conditions or the difficulty of getting to work that day or are they talking about what we do next on Putin what we do next I worry it might be still more of the former than the latter. And I still I also worry that the foreign office can do more still to really stake its claim in Whitehall in a, in a post Brexit. Post Trump world so I would love to see the fcdo and I hope this conversation can be part of that really reconnect with that magnetic sense of collective purpose which is what many of us were attracted to when we joined the Foreign Office and what it really represents at its best. I hope it can succeed in helping the country have a world view based on actually having viewed the world, rather than having viewed a small corner of Whitehall and and Westminster, or a constituency. The Foreign Office didn't exist. We would be thinking that how do we invent it. The challenge is really how do we reinvent it. And, and how do we help it to defend its corner more effectively. Thank you. Wonderful. Thank you so much Tom, and seamlessly we'll pass over to Suzanne. Thank you. Thank you. Thank you, Tom. That was a really great start. And I think I thought I was going to say lots of provocative things but maybe they're not going to be as provocative. And may gave us a sort of a set of sub questions and I'm not going to answer all of them but I'm going to answer the ones that that I've been thinking about since, since leaving the civil service and I'll start with the question about the process of making foreign policy so is the foreign policy apparatus capable of securing its priorities is diplomacy sufficiently well coordinated may start an introduction with the integrated review as being a sort of thing which explains that I've written before several times during the last year that for me, the mistake with the integrated review is a mistake that reviews like this often make, which is that they focus on the subject matter, the what, rather than the how, and that means that when the subject matter changes everybody immediately says, Oh, now it's out of date. So the question now is, did it tilt too far to the end of the Pacific, just as the discussion in military circles is. What does Ukraine tell us about what material we need do we need to buy this instead of that and in fact, the debate needs to be about how we get better at anticipation and decision making. And I wish that the integrated review had focused about more on security defense developments and foreign policy how it is made, how the thinking is done. And that point reaches across government as a whole I strongly believe in the importance of investing in analysis and assessment at the expense if necessary of policy stuff although in fact I don't think it is a resource issue I think it's a question of structure and planning. So for me, if you don't like the leadership of foreign office the direction foreign office, one of the first questions the leader of any organization should ask themselves is, how does this organization think. And if you're responsible for foreign policy, then the question is, how do we think about foreign policy, and how does our thinking join up with everybody else in government who's thinking about foreign policy, and where do the actual decisions get taken. And that, I don't think the foreign office really asked itself that question enough or government asked itself that question enough. And so then, if you ask, you have asked me to think whether fcdo is responsive enough, or too responsive. And I think it's both, it can be very slow to shift, and then it can get immediately distracted. And I think it should be asking what investments and reorganization need to take place to ensure that it's more responsive to surprises, or much better. And I believe this is, this is possible to be surprised less often. It is possible to create a system, which is monitoring prioritizing and warning and which which enables an organization to keep its poise and I think the foreign office just keeps losing it poise. And, and it would mean prioritizing thought is steaming the analysis sometimes over policy and coordinating across departments so they don't any longer have a situation where fcdo seniors get one set of briefing and seniors in another department get a completely different story and then they will have an argument somewhere in the cabinet office that it should be better than that. And, and we want to be able to be surprising to take the initiative to take preemptive actions. I've written recently about surprise being seldom valued very much in statecraft often, often we're averse to it, you know when when the orcas deal happened everyone was horrified like how can we have, how can we have done something that surprised the French. But actually, sometimes the answer has to be to have the confidence to identify what we want to pursue it to decide who we want our allies to be and to be constant with them. And in an area in an era of state competition it follows that to gain competitive advantage a state needs to be good at surprising competitive states and managing the risk that it in turn might might be surprised. And I think as well that this requires us to see the world quite starkly. I think history shows a tendency in fcdo to optimism in its judgment of situations which means that we don't often often enough anticipate risks to make sure they don't put materialized so I would be more pessimistic and and be bolder about acting preemptively. And then my second observation I'd be really interested in Tom and Peter's views on this because they were at the heart of this is about what foreign policy is anyway nowadays. I'm going to talk about the effects of the war on terror. Because I was part of that the accusation has been made many times over that we were distracted by the war on terror and that put us off making proper foreign policy. I obviously disagree. Fasley 9 11 and the wars that preceded it and followed it were and continue to be a significant part of global affairs. They called forth, however, a national security response and the shortcoming was that that response became defense and security more than it was diplomatic. And I mean by that and the foreign office was there but but not really there and it styled itself in support of the kinetic effort but didn't really esteem the kinetic effort all the time and because of that it somehow the diplomatic process somehow got divided from the main effort. For me, I couldn't really see the significant diplomatic effort on the Middle East on Kashmir on Afghanistan in and I'll go on. I'll just explain a bit more about why the machinery in hng up to that point had been split between overseas foreign and defense policy and you had this the overseas and defense committee which sort of pulled it all together and the view was generally that overseas meant diplomacy meant the foreign office, and, and then defense was defense. And then 9 11 happened and a number of new and important actors emerged who were acting in this landscape of national security, the agencies that home office, nor enforcement agencies the national crime agency and it was no longer possible to say that this is just defense or just diplomacy. And I, I think that that was when fco now fcdo's problems really started to crystallize when we started to have a national security policy rather than just a foreign policy. And I'm really interested in Peter and Tom's views on that, but that I think really shook up the architecture and the foreign office struggled to hold the center ground because other actors either propelled themselves or were propelled into policy roles. And that was matched by the development of really serious actors in our key ally countries like America, who were essentially counterparts of defense and the agencies. So suddenly, the ambassador no longer owns the critical relationships, for example, in the US. Others were engaged in regional diplomacy. So if you look at Iraq, and it was basically run by Sencon, it was generals who were doing administration on the ground and defense did a huge amount of diplomacy, as did the agencies. And of course, for me, the war on terror was fundamentally about diplomacy, because one of the main protagonists, the US was our closest ally. So at the heart of the 20 years of war on terror has been a really close state on state dynamic. And I don't think we recognize that enough. And so individuals adjusted. There were some incredibly strong and effective senior diplomats who held the ring and some brilliant ambassadors and more junior staff who saw that new reality. But the department as a whole was left out of position and embassy struggled because diplomacy wouldn't and couldn't and didn't solve it on its own. And some embassies define their role as facilitating others. But what the FCO didn't do, didn't put aside the time to say, what is our USP in this new era? And I think that there was a failure to really make the space to imagine or identify the real diplomatic task during those 20 years. And I think if you think, how did all that happen? I think it was easier to treat national security as a military issue, rather than a diplomatic one, because the enemy was a non-state actor. And yet the enemy operated within states and conflicts are driven by beliefs and national identities and local power dynamics. So just as now with Ukraine, states had different interests at play. For example, Pakistan, India, Iran all had significant interest tied up in the face of Afghanistan. And as players, they made a greater contribution to the eventual outcome than our kinder necessarily did. And it's unfortunate because we know this, it's common for states to support terrorist groups as an additional means of achieving their own foreign policy objective, something which Iran has perfected it. So the war on terror was was never as simple as a series of military operations against a non-state actor. And the West's failure was one of diplomacy. It didn't esteem the diplomatic wraparound to the war on terror as it ought to have done as it could have done. And it is, of course, the case that many of the non-states have more consistent long term strategies than the UK, US or Europe. I'll just leave that out there. So for me, the last inconsequence of the war on terror for diplomacy was not that it was a distraction, but that the opportunity wasn't taken during that time to really design a new way of integrating diplomacy into a national security effort. We could have made so much more of it. And I hope it's going to be easier to do this in the case of the war in Ukraine. And clearly, there's a massive effort on that at the moment, which is terrific. But going back to my earlier comments, I hope that we don't make a mistake of thinking that the war in Ukraine is the only issue we need to deal with. And then finally, just one word on aid and foreign policy. I know this is controversial, but I do think we need to be hardheaded about how we build alliances. The war in Ukraine has shown us that assumptions that we make about loyalties can't be relied upon. So the UAE in particular, I think have surprised us with their position. But more broadly, the UK and the US chose not to contest Chinese and Russian influence, particularly in Africa. And we chose instead to have a foreign policy that was that was values based. And we had an extraordinary and laudable development policy, which was about giving to those most in need. And we consciously did not set out to instrumentalize the aid. And this is, of course, morally right. But it is striking how little impact we have had in building enduring alliances with those people and those states that we have helped the most. Our aid has not delivered the kind of influence in swing states which China and Russia have been able to buy. And then I did a little piece of research myself. In 2020, the UK provided 14.5 billion pounds of official development assistance. And if you look at the top 20 countries which received bilateral ODA in 2020, I'll just list them very quickly, Ethiopia, Somalia, Nigeria, Afghanistan, Yemen, Bangladesh, Pakistan, Syria, South Sudan, Sudan, DRC, Lebanon, Myanmar, Zimbabwe, Tanzania, India, Kenya, Uganda, Nepal and Jordan. How many of those supported the vote in the UN to suspend Russia from the Human Rights Council? Six of them voted outright against the motion, i.e. against suspending Russia. 12 abstained, only two of those top 20 that we gave our overseas official development assistance to, only two voted to suspend Russia. And those two that voted against Russia were Myanmar and DRC. So I think we need to have a mature conversation about this, not the kind of polarized conversation that we always end up having about aid and influence. Thank you very much, me. Thank you very much, Suzanne. There's lots in there and very thoughtful working and we'll pass over to Peter now before we get to the discussion. Thank you very much. Well, I will keep it brief because I do want to believe type of questions and it's been too very good and challenging and rather brilliant presentation so far to which I'm not dry can add a great deal. First of all, I agree with Tom that those who are in the public service at the moment deserve real credit for six incredible years really starting with the Brexit vote. I don't believe that they've been particularly well led but I do think they've been heroic in their professionalism and frankly their stamina as well. This is critical of the integrated review, not because it lacked lots and lots of good ideas and creative thoughts about how Britain could be great after leaving the EU, but because it made no choices and it seemed not to recognize that there were real limits as to our resources and our capabilities. And as Tom said a rather hubristic kind of strand of we were going to be a soft power superpower science and technology superpower and lead the world in in all sorts of ways. I don't think it proved all that integrated and development policy, I think is an example of that I think it was very very bad timing to try to fuse the FCO and diffid and at the same time, make a 4 billion pound cut in the aid budget at very short notice. The cut did fall disproportionately on humanitarian aid on health on programs for women and girls and so on. And we've seen a big exodus of development talent from the department as a result of that. We found the international development strategy put out recently frankly rather thin. And while I think Suzanne's challenge is a very good one. I'm not sure that instrumentalizing our aid in the hope that we would buy votes in the UN against Russia was ever going to be a policy that would get us very far. I do think that Britain's part of Britain's soft power in the world was a reputation for being a serious development power that had taught deeply about development and recognize that improving global health and reducing. It's actually in our interest as well in a hard headed way. And I think the pandemic rather brought that home. So I'm not sure I agree with Suzanne entirely. I do think we should have a sensible conversation about how our aid is targeted. But I'm left with the impression now that the purpose of it is to serve short term political goals. We go back to that perhaps in questions and life itself has solved the issue of what really is global Britain all about what really are our priorities, because I think it's now absolutely clear that European security has to be front and centre and number one. And I don't think we've begun yet to understand the whole implications of Putin's barbaric war. We can see obviously strengthening of NATO, even today with Finland and Sweden joining. That is a global strategic benefit for NATO and a setback for Russia. But there are many, many, many more serious questions emerging as well. In case I sound too negative about the foreign office, I think that the whole government response to Ukraine has been very impressive. The intelligence community got it right. The defense reaction has been good all the way through. And I think the FCDO has been impressive in the way that they've organized sanctions coordination, even at a time when we have still a dysfunctional relationship with the EU. I think that that has been a crisis where Britain's strengths in foreign policy have come through. And I think we are now in a new world, frankly, the Madrid summit today is going to introduce a wholly different NATO approach to deterrence of Russia. We are into a period, I think, structurally of more defense spending of a larger role for defense in foreign policy, national security policy, just coming to Suzanne's point about what is it all about. And I think there are some really important longer term questions, which I hope the FCDO is leading Whitehall thinking on. We are not going to manage the outright defeat of Putin. We are going to be left coexisting on the same continent with a hostile Russia that will not settle for a peace settlement that will continue to harbour revenge, and the mission certainly as long as Putin is in power and quite possibly beyond. How are we going to manage that when there are differences of approach in Europe on that. What about the Global South, as Suzanne was saying, many countries chose not to see what Russia has done as a particular threat to their interests, although it is if Russia is undermining the rules based order, creating an energy crisis and a food crisis. There are some serious questions there I think about the dialogue we need to have with countries beyond our region that this is not just back to the same old East West squabbles that they've seen in the past. But have we got the bandwidth in the FCDO to also be thinking about the next crisis and the one after that. China and Taiwan, I mean, there is absolutely no excuse for Western Foreign Ministry is not being prepared for that to turn into a absolutely major crisis, potentially even a military attack on Taiwan. What about what the energy crisis means in the longer term, new partners, a long term policy of trying to deny Russia profiteering from its oil exports with a whole series I think a really important long term issues where the FCDO ought to be and I hope is in the leadership of Whitehall. And so just a word on structure. You would expect me to say this perhaps but I think the National Security Council is the answer to what you were saying Suzanne. Absolutely foreign policy is far beyond what the FCDO can handle. Far beyond government. I mean anyone who has sat in an ambassador anywhere abroad knows that the totality of UK's relations with every country goes far beyond what the government control. Some of the most important and interesting aspects of the relationships are economic, financial, cultural, sporting, and all the rest of it. But for the governmental area, there is a very wide sweep of issues which come under the national security label now, and all of them touch on foreign policy, and the National Security Council should be the right place where Whitehall comes together on that. In the first two or three years it was actively chaired by David Cameron was the place where decisions were taken, where coordination was achieved between the ministries. I think it may have lost a bit of mojo in the years since then. I hope it is being used to look at the kind of issues that are now front and center because of the Ukraine crisis because they are long term structural shifts that we need to address, as well as the constant succession of crises that come along. And on crisis management, I think that it was an exceptionally difficult crisis for the FCDO to manage in Afghanistan in the middle of August. Nonetheless, I think it did show up problems of foresight and of leadership, particularly political leadership, but the FCDO has got to be absolutely at its top game on crisis management given the unpredictability and disruptive nature of what the world is at the moment. So I would like to see the NSC thinking ahead to pick up your point about strategy, Suzanne, I think governments are bad at strategy. Politicians are obsessed with what is happening today, even within the next hour. It's got to be a forum like the NSC that can look ahead, that can look at the analysis, the horizon scanning, the foresight. Absolutely, we should be hard headed. We shouldn't be too polyamorous about what's happening in the world and always hope for the best and assume that the worst won't happen. I think Ukraine has been a very, very sharp reminder of that. And so I think a well coordinated national security strategy is really what we need. It's no longer just a foreign policy. And I think that Ukraine crisis has shown that Britain still has major strengths in that area and that's what we've got to build on. I will stop there to leave as much time as we can for questions. That's great. Thank you very much. So lots and lots of food for thought here. Yeah, so much to get into. I've seen there's some questions coming through in the Q&A, so I will come to those in just a minute. But just to draw it all together a little bit, we've heard a lot of different things. And I think you've all highlighted in different ways some of the stresses that the foreign office and the FCO and the FCDO has been under in the last few decades. This includes changes in that wider strategic context. And as you've all pointed to a series of crises and shocks, kind of body blows really to the department and to its kind of sense of mission and purpose and so on. Peter, you do well to highlight the extraordinary impact, I think, of some of these budget cuts and the timing of the budget cuts with the merger. I mean, obviously it's a permanent feature of governance that you have to deal with the constrained budgets and you can't afford to do everything you want to do all of the time. But I think you're right to point out the extraordinary nature of that, trying to achieve something really quite substantial and structural terms at the same time as major budget cut is something that should be really considered in quite a nuanced way. This is, I appreciated your point about the target reduce of ODN. I'd love to talk a little bit about this, this kind of relationship between the different elements of what the foreign office and the FCDO is for and its role and the strengths and weaknesses of using different arms of foreign policy in different ways and trying to draw together something, certainly more integrated strategic buffering. I think there'll be some questions on that too. I think this question of like, of making foreign policy and the extent of the kind of trade offs and the choices that need to be made. I mean, this is all true at the time of publishing the IR. It's quite clear that the number of trade offs are going to need to be made and you're right to point out that these aren't in the document. And I'm interested in how, in the years since the publication of that and circumstances has changed like a wider operating environment in which we're trying to implement strategy and how the FCDO its role in implementing bits of that strategy is just more sharply important to make some of these choices. But in the context of this deteriorating economic and security context, a global food crisis, energy crisis, and possibly a Taiwan crisis coming down the pipes sooner than we might have expected. I think it's fair to say that the trends identified in the integration review have held up probably, which is that we're seeing acceleration towards those trends. And I think we're also seeing a convergence of the Indo-Pacific and Euro-Atlantic strategic theater. I think they were always very innately tied together. But recent events have made it harder and harder to disentangle those two and to not see them as one strategic theater. And of course overarching all of this and any crisis that we could possibly point to is the common climate crisis. So it seems to me that, you pointed out some real major successes in the last 10 years, Tom. And the ways in which the evolution and the learning from various different reviews has brought some really, really positive changes, positive structural changes and changes in terms of staffing and demographic and some of the skilled capabilities. One question for all of you, before we switch to the questions in the Q&A, is around this strategic theater of the Indo-Pacific and the question of how we both in Britain and in terms of NATO eyes and also how that challenge of China perhaps converging Russia and China access, how that has shifted foreign policy thinking and planning. And so it's a sort of a strategic question around foreign policy and national security strategy. It's also a question around the machinery of making foreign policy and the resources that we have. And the Indo-Pacific is a strategic theater where, fair to say, everybody who thinks about international order thinks that this is where international order of the 21st century will be contested. And Britain is perhaps a little bit late to the table in terms of offering an Indo-Pacific strategy. So this is a space that we're going to be talking about with increasing intensity in the coming years. And I guess the questions and the questions you were asked in the preparation for this conversation was around the fitness for purpose of the machinery of foreign policymaking and strategy making and implementation in the FCDO itself. Specific question, if you really, with all of this in mind, what adjustments would you make to make the FCDO more fit for purpose for operating in this really quite challenging and let's face it very distant strategic theater? What are the specific adjustments that you would make or the specific sort of changes you would make to the kinds of talent or training that we have in place, things that will make us more agile, more resilient to change in that particular challenging context? Any thoughts from anyone? I'll jump in quickly first then. So just three quick thoughts and in a way they pick up on points Suzanne and Peter have made as well. When I worked in number 10, I desperately hoped that the closer I got to the center of power, eventually I would find a basement full of brilliant, cynical, sharp strategists having exactly these sorts of conversations. And thinking about where we move resource. What can we, you know, what assets do we have to deploy in different space, you know, what is the next crisis, what's the next crisis, but one, as we heard earlier, and I fear that actually the lesson of my time in the center was that that doesn't actually exist. Now there are brilliant people in the front office, writing those papers, having those thoughts, but I think it is often disconnected from, you know, to use the phrase of Hamilton, the room where it happens. So how do you connect the sofa where it happens to that conversation? And I think the NSC architecture is probably the place to do it, but retaining in all of that, in that architecture, Suzanne's point about the element of surprise. And as you said that season, I was trying to think in four years in number 10, was I ever surprised by a submission of policy paper from the foreign office. And I'm not sure that I was and I think there's a problem there, if they're not just surprising the world but actually surprising ministers and the Prime Minister with policy advice, and then final thought on this practical sort, getting the ambassador into the room is key to this is untouched on the on the sense that is the ambassador really in control of the overall policy towards a country. I'm not sure, certainly in my, in my working life. The US Ambo is a great example of that because it's a very particular kind of role in Washington, but our ambassadors in the Pacific region could be. They do have the advantage of being able to see around the next corner. And even if they're not getting that much attention today, being prepared to be in the room for that conversation when it comes is really important. And it's just to hear that Maggie that she used to say, I don't, you know, I really don't like the foreign office but I really like the ambassadors, and I've heard subsequent Prime Minister say the same thing. And take not the technology now does allow us to get the Ambo into the National Security Council meeting or into the room, effectively onto the screen with the PM at the key moment so I think for the foreign office to wield influence it can do. That would be a very practical easy thing to get them in the room. Thank you. Obviously if there was an easy answer, we wouldn't be in this mess. So I'm going to have a go and one of the lessons that we have learned consistently actually particularly in Afghanistan and Ukraine is that we, we spend all our time understanding the position, and we don't put the same amount of thought and analysis into understanding ourselves and our allies. And so one thing that I would definitely do on Indo-Pacific matters is not just analyze China, the adversary, analyze all the other nation states who have a part to play in what's going on and really try and understand what their position is and what's going to affect that position. Then, I would think, building on the sort of question of surprise, what you have to do if you're going to, if you're going to, if you want to, if you want to get ahead of your opponent, let's say that it's China. You have to think what actions might we take which would change their risk calculus. What is it that we can do that's going to make them think, oh, I don't want to take another island of the South China Sea, or I don't want to, you know, bully Indonesia anymore. And that's the conversation that needs to be had. And I completely agree with Tom. That conversation needs to happen within the Foreign Office, but actually it would be a terrible mistake to only happen within the Foreign Office. It needs to happen across government. And one of the, I think one pitfall the Foreign Office can fall readily into is to try and think it all through internally before it shares it with another department. I think, I think looking upwards and outwards has to be the way it goes. And, and finally on ambassadors. I think, yes, but they can be over optimistic so that question about understanding your allies and friends the tendency for ambassadors to always see something about the place they've been sent to. And sometimes someone has to really challenge that and say, I know that you want the relationship with X country to be brilliant. But could it just be the case that in fact, you're not right. And we need to think about things completely differently. I'm keen to come to the Q&A. I'll just say, let's be realistic that the UK is never going to itself be able to influence events in the Indo-Pacific very dramatically. China isn't going to take a great deal of notice for this alone. Our expertise is largely in our intelligence relationships and our diplomatic relationships. British ambassadors tend to speak Chinese, Japanese, Korean in a way that most other Western ambassadors don't. We know these countries we can offer the Americans and the wider democratic community, genuine expertise and depth, real intelligence capabilities and some niche defense capabilities as well. But we're only ever going to be a secondary player in the Indo-Pacific area. Let's accept that reality. Great. Thank you. And there is a question in the chat on the end of Pacific, which relates to the possibilities of a future Second Angle Japanese Alliance thoughts on British attitude. I suppose that means public British attitudes towards the Indo-Pacific region and the impact of British participation in the CPTPP this year or next year. Anyone want to comment on any of those questions? A word about Japan perhaps. It's a natural ally for the UK and it's been great to see UK-Japanese relations improving a lot in recent years. Economically, obviously, politically and in defense as well. Now that Japan and the UK both have the F-35 fighter, we're both absolutely in the top league of international air forces. I mean, I think that the most interesting grouping actually in the Indo-Pacific area is this new quartet, the Quad, US, India and Japan and Australia. And through close relationships with most of those players, all of them in a way, the UK ought to be in amongst the quartet discussions about security in Asia. And the fact that Japan has come out of its shell quite distinctively in the last few years, I think it's a good thing. And therefore it is an area we should be building on. Thank you. So we have a question from Louise Kettle about, as she points out, you know, Tom identified the FCDO sense of purpose to the missing. Suzanne identifies how and when that might have occurred and Peter suggests that the NSC is the best place to think about strategy. So Louise's question is, I wonder if any of you have a sense of what Britain and the FCDO's purpose is or should be. Global Britain remains a vacuous phrase in the integrated reviews so broad as to mean nothing. And can that be led to that political will or support? I'd like to start by answering all my questions or saying I don't actually have the answer. But to come back to the point that I was trying to make about overseas development aid. I think what I was trying to get at was we really need to have a conversation about how we build alliances beyond the ones that we sort of take for granted and assume that they're going to be there. And I think that we thought even though we always, we weren't using aid for anything, but I think we did think this is the means by which we make friends with the rest of the world. And for me, the really one of the lessons that we've got to take from Ukraine is that we haven't made the kind of friendships that I think we wanted to have, even with countries like India, where we put quite a lot of effort in the Indo-Pacific to talk about that. So the question has to be, how do we use all the tools that I would suppose to make friends with the countries in the middle so that when they're forced to choose which they have been, they just naturally tend towards siding with us rather than siding somewhere else. And that's going to be the critical thing that we have to work on because as we've all acknowledged, you know, problem in Russia is going to get worse, not better. We should expect China seriously to challenge the global order in different ways. And if we can't win the middle ground, we're lost. Thank you. Just very briefly, because I think there's always a risk with these sorts of efforts that we end up coming up with another soundbite, you know, trying to replace global Britain with a better soundbite. And it can quickly get a little bit vacuous, but I think the question really gets the heart of the challenge here, which is to, in addition to Suzanne's points about the what and the how is the why, you know, why are we doing this? What does the foreign office exist in 2022? And, and actually that was the bit of the review I led that got taken out. I felt that we did need a positive expression of what Britain did in the world. I can't remember what we came up with, but it was something around, you know, a stronger Britain in a better world. There was an idealistic element to it. And I'm very much at the idealistic end of the foreign policy spectrum and that's probably a little bit unfashionable at the moment. I do think there needs to be something, you know, there has to be a shining city on a hill to motivate people when they are doing a crisis evacuation or writing the strategy paper or, or, or dealing with the latest budget cut or merger or difficult, difficult minister so I'd love to see more of that. I also think in the midst of all this, we have to be careful not to lapse back just because we're in a very 20th century crisis, interlapsing back into 20th century mechanisms and alliances and packs, and so on. And actually we're thinking about different ways of forming networks and, and partnerships and moving really from a world that used to be very like a game of Tetris over a top down and easy to understand and structured into a world which is a bit more like Minecraft, which is a bit more chaotic and where you're forming alliances, different kinds of alliances issue by issue. Thank you. There are a few more questions about this question of instrumentalising aid and question from Sam Borny about the limited influence that aid has had and the off given reason that the countries and especially China have, have acquired more influence due to their development assistance funds coming as fewer conditions and questions around whether UK's foreign aid is too conditional. It's also a point from George Prentice asking about, could you speculate on the reasons why aid wasn't effective enough is because the aid wasn't that Russia had perhaps sent more aid of those countries simply didn't feel they needed to repay the aid that the UK provided because it wasn't instrumentalised. With my historians hat on, I guess I wonder to what extent some of our aid is landing in some countries where we have some post-imperial baggage perhaps and whether we fully understand and appreciate how some of these countries we have say further more ground to make up perhaps or in other ways some of these relationships are potential asked to some of these countries might be complicated by domestic politics around and complicated by some of those histories, which are huge questions which we can't possibly get to in the next seven minutes but that's something to park. There are a few other questions in here I'd just like to call attention to and perhaps we'll see what we can cover in the remaining time. Christopher Barton has asked to what extent is the FCDO promoting a diplomatic solution to the conflict in Ukraine and connected to that I suppose, how good is the relationship between the FCDO, the MOD, security services, SIS and number 10, is there any joined up thinking in this area? I think this is a really interesting question because obviously at the heart of the integrated review and using other terminology in previous reviews this question of integration, whole of government approaches and so on and so on is a really kind of central feature to this. How near or far would you say we are from whole of government approaches or integration of average, especially on the more difficult questions of foreign policy? Can I take a quick shot at that? I mean I think the government has been very well integrated in the approach to and in handling of the Ukraine war. The intelligence community along with the Americans got it right with their assessment that Putin would go in and he would try to go in and take the whole country. And there was a very interesting diplomatic use of that by putting out the intelligence judgments in a way that we haven't done before. It didn't stop Putin acting but it may have complicated his run up and it certainly gave people notice of what was going to happen. I think it's been effective from that point of view. I mean I challenge the notion that there will ever be a diplomatic solution in Ukraine. I don't think the Russians are interested in a diplomatic solution. They're interested in generating leverage over the West of creating instability around the edges of NATO frozen conflicts that they can exploit when they want to. I mean I don't believe that there is a negotiated solution that will satisfy Putin or probably any likely Putin successor and that we are in for a longish period now of hostility and having to deter Russia from coming back for more, rather than imagining there will be a diplomatic settlement that takes things back to the 23rd of February. I just don't think that that is available. I think we've got to get ourselves into a mindset where some of these crises do not have solutions. They need to be managed and the threat needs to be contained and I think that's what we're looking at with Russia. It's quite a big mind shift from where we were. I think there's a tendency to hear the word diplomatic solution and think compromise negotiated settlement with Putin and this is kind of what I was getting to you on the war of terror point. There is a diplomatic solution which is through diplomacy, we build a network of alliances, including amongst countries who Putin is relying on to support him. We use that essentially to change the decisions that Putin is making. That's where you start thinking in a different way. Let's be really bold. What would it take to change the calculus of the countries that Putin thinks are his friends? That's where I'd like to see us being really active. In your remarks at the beginning you pointed to the question of whether institutionally, culturally this is happening within the FCDO, whether conversations are in that more technocratic adjustment type space, looking for functional accommodations and getting back to the status quo in some way versus some of those bigger ideas around what actually is the future world order that we're aspiring to and figuring out some of those principles, those kind of big worldview questions of statecraft. So, you know, and I think to your point, Peter, you mentioned that this foreign policy taking place purely within foreign offices, those days are probably gone and it's about the relationship between the NSC and the FCDO. There are some questions about the future of that kind of institutional structure. One about the relationship between that diplomacy and national security strategy I think for the UK. And I suppose there is a question implicit in that about, you know, could you imagine an institutional shift where the NSC and the FCDO have a new relationship with each other or there's some sort of new institutional form that tries to merge that some of that together. And conversely there's a question around, is it likely that the FCDO will unmerge into its predecessor organizations or similar and if you think that's likely how likely. I guess the question is around institution and form, you know, what might be some of the possible changes that would get us to a place where foreign policy making brings back some of these big ideas in house back into the FCDO and has the influence to try to land these into the conversations at the highest levels of national security strategy making. So anybody want to take a pass at that. Shall I just say two words and then leave to Tom to wrap it up. In the National Security Council structure is just a light coordinating structure to help departments get their act together and to put coordinated advice to ministers so it's not in any sense a competitor to the the Foreign Office. It has 100 or 150 staff, it hasn't got the capacity to generate a lot of original ideas to compete in the way that the NSC bureaucracy in America competes with the State Department, the Defense Department. So the NSC is a way of the FCO multiplying and amplifying its good ideas, attracting buy in from other government departments and getting ministerial sign off at the top level. That's what it should be doing. And it should not be seen as a threat in any sense. And it's not I mean merging it with the Foreign Office I think doesn't work out because the idea is it should be the vehicle for the Prime Minister and his cabinet to exercise a coordinated It's a producer coordinated government position. I think in the early days, some in the Foreign Office did see the NSC as a bit of a threat coming between them and ministers. And then they worked out that a good idea originating in the Foreign Office can attract attention resources decision by ministers by using the NSC structure. I think that's the way it should it should go. It's a question for each Prime Minister of how they want to use this structural course, government structures flex with the personal working habits and the priorities of Prime Ministers that I think that in current circumstances the NSC is more important than ever. Thanks. Thank you. As I was talking for the final word. So briefly on that I agree completely with Peter and he's much better placed to look at that that relationship between the FCO and the and the center. I think one thing current Foreign Office would say over the last few years is many, many of the top diplomats have been in those roles including of course Peter. And so there isn't a natural competition or natural tension, although an observation, many of us who then go to other departments then tend to turn on the Foreign Office, more than the Foreign Office would perhaps want. I think in terms of the overall structures, the pendulum swings back and forth doesn't it and you'll have periods when you have a very powerful number 10 periods when you have a very powerful cabinet office in some ways a bit of churn between the between those different areas is not a bad thing. You know a second term Prime Minister takes them probably a more hands on interventionist approach to foreign policy making the first time one. I think it's quite possible to imagine an incoming government looking at the last few years and thinking right we need to grip all this and, and to come to a positive point of the integrated review. I think it was good on the need to really have to really understand the trade offs between values and interests and I suppose what we're really talking about is where do you have that conversation. And I think when the system doesn't work, you're having that conversation on a sofa or in one department or actually just in whiteboard, but where you can have a room that brings together these different voices and actually argues out that conversation is a much more effective national foreign policy so that's the bit of it that I'd like to see us get right in the next phase. Excellent. Thank you very much. That is an excellent note to end on. I realized we are two minutes over and I know people need to to get going so I will not linger on lengthy goodbyes and thank you but thank you so much to our panel. Thank you to Abbey at CGS for setting all this up and thank you to our attendees for some excellent and thought-provoking questions. We look forward to seeing you all next time.