 Good morning, everyone. Welcome to Norwich University. Thank you so much for attending Norwich's Fourth Peace and War Summit in person or virtually. My name is Yang Moku. I am Associate Professor of Political Science and Associate Director of the Peace and War Center in Norwich University. I am truly honored to serve as Executive Director for 2023 Summit on the Middle East. Since 2018, our center have addressed most significant global challenges, including North Korea's nuclear missile challenges in 2017 and 2018. And then 2020 and 21, we focused on the topics of US-China strategic rivalry. And then last year, as we know, just one month after Russia's invasion of Ukraine, we talked about Russia-Ukraine, the war in this summit. So this year, we are gonna talk about the lot of problems surrounding the Middle East region. So the one thing I wanna tell you is that about six to seven years ago, our Peace and War Center Director, Travis Morris and I had a vision to have this kind of summit as well as a publication of Peace and War journals so that just from the scratch, we had this kind of envisioned summit so that we were able to hold this kind of important event and summit which addressed many different significant challenges we are facing in this global society. I really express our thanks to the former president, Richard Snyder, and current Norwich president, Mark Anarumo. Also, I think the former associate provost for academic research, Dr. Karen Hinkle, and current associate provost, Dr. Tara Kulkani as well. Thank you so much for your support and with all other people's support. So, I hope this year's Middle East Summit provides current national and international leaders with a precious insight for their policy making. For the future leaders and global citizens, I believe this summit can broaden and deepen their perspectives and understandings of the complexities in the Middle East region. So this helped them to grow as peacemakers and reconcilers as well as strategic thinkers. At this today's summit, two keynote speakers and nine scholars and policy experts and four students, two Norwich students, two Dartmouth College students will present their unique insights on Middle East related topics. Thank you again for participating in this Middle East Summit. At this time, I introduce Norwich University's provost, Dr. Karen Gaines for her welcome remarks. Dr. Karen Gaines has made a lot of significant accomplishment in her academic and policy related arenas, but due to time constraints, I will make a brief introduction. She has served as a provost and dean of the faculty at Norwich University since 2022. She oversees academic affairs and internal operations at Norwich. Dr. Gaines PhD is in environmental toxicology from the University of South Carolina's Arnold School of Public Health. She is internationally recognized for her expertise in environmental and human toxicological risk assessment and worked for the Department of Energy prior to entering academia. Dr. Gaines is also certified wildlife biologist and has consulted for governmental institutions like NASA and US Department of Defense. She continues to serve these agencies in various capacities. Now, I turn it over to provost Dr. Karen Hinkels. Let's give a round of applause. Actually, it's Karen Gaines. There's a lot of Karen's here, so that's okay. Any point where you don't make a Karen joke is actually okay. By me, so, but thank you everyone for being here. I am the provost and it's my distinct pleasure to open this Peace and More Summit. This significant academic event is organized and hosted by our John and Mary Frances Patent, Peace and More Center. It is our honor to welcome our distinguished guests who will advance our understanding of the Middle East over the next couple of days. Our current global community is confronted with complex challenges. Some of these include the Russo-Ukrainian War, the intensifying great power rivalry between the US and China, North Korea's nuclear and missile provocations, climate change, natural disasters, economic instability, cyber warfare, rampant crime, civil wars and refugee crisis across many nations. We know that that is every single day in the news that we look at. In a world defined by complexity, it's imperative that we pause to advance our understanding of the current situation in the Middle East. The focus of this two-day summit is to better understand how historical president shapes the current landscape. This understanding is critical if we are to explore what the future holds and how to move forward towards peace. Our nation's institutions of higher learning must support critical thinking across disciplines in order to prepare our students, our nation's future leaders to successfully navigate 21st century challenges. This two-day Peace and War Middle East Summit does just that end. It is not an esoteric exercise of information. This summit takes place amidst real conflict where each day we read headlines of lives lost and hopes of peace. The 2023 summit will play an important role in fulfilling our educational mission while stimulating scholarly and policy debates. Distinguished guests, we appreciate your time and thank you in advance for the contribution that you will make to the summit. Enjoy Vermont's natural beauty and please let us know if there's anything we can do to make your time at Norwich more fruitful. And as we always say here, Norwich together, Norwich forever. All right, thank you so much. Wow, I made a big mistake. Thank you so much for your recommended remarks, for both Karen Gaines. Now I am so pleased to introduce two keynote speakers for this summit. United Emirates Ambassador to the United States, Yusef Aotaiba and Colonel David Walker at US Central Command. Colonel Walker will first deliver his speech since UAE Ambassador Aotaiba will speak virtually. According to the ambassador's request, only in person summit attendees will be able to watch his speech. So we will stop live streaming around 9.35 right after Colonel Walker's keynote. Then the live streaming will resume at 10 a.m. At this time, let me briefly introduce our first keynote speaker, Colonel David Walker. His full bio will be found at the summit website. Colonel Walker currently serves as a chief of strategy and policy division at US Central Command in Tampa, Florida. He enlisted in Marine Corps in 1993 and commissioned in 1998 after graduating from Texas A&M University. He played many significant roles in Marine Corps, including strategic analyst for the commandant of the Marine Corps, special assistant to the chief of naval operations in the strategic actions group and inspector, instructor of fourth combat engineer battalion. Colonel Walker's combat deployments include Mogadishu Somalia for Operation Restore Hope in 1994, providing security for US State Department Liaison Office. And in Baghdad, Iraq for Operation Iraqi Freedom in 2006 as the assistant team chief for national police transition team. Now I turn it over to Colonel Walker as a keynote for this year's summit. Let us give a round of applause. Good morning, can everybody hear me okay? Great. So I'd like this to begin by saying thank you to Dr. Gaines, Norwich University, Peace and War Center and distinguished panelists and presenters here for the 2023 Peace and War Summit. As the birthplace of Reserve Officer Training Corps, Norwich University continues to produce military, political and community leaders who have a powerful impact on the world around them. I come from another small ROTC program at Texas A&M University. So aside from the weather, I'm pretty comfortable here. It's a distinct pleasure to stand here before you today. As I reflected on the subject of this conference, I was struck by how much my life and career has been shaped by the Middle East. Even before becoming a Marine as I neared high school graduation, I contemplated enlisting in the Marine Corps to serve in the Gulf War, which to my mother's satisfaction ended well before graduation. After a few years later, a serving in Mogadishu Somalia, I saw firsthand the tragedy of civil war and state failure, a theme that unhappily exists in the Middle East today. After the tragedy of 9-11, I prepared recruits for service in Afghanistan and Iraq, later preparing my engineer company to run an airfield in Al-Thakadam, Iraq, and then deploying to advise the Iraqi National Police in Baghdad and Balad. When I returned from that deployment, I served as a congressional fellow and legislative liaison officer on Capitol Hill during the many debates on U.S. strategy and policy in the Middle East. After that assignment, I prepared Marine reservists for service in Afghanistan and Iraq. Then to the Pentagon advising the commandant and chief of naval operations on the tug of war between designing and developing capabilities for small wars and those for great power competition and conflict. Then back to training reservists to deploy to Afghanistan and Iraq. Finally landing in Tampa at Central Command, leading a team advising the commander, the combatant commander and his leadership team on strategy and policy for the Central region. My career in service has been shaped by the Middle East and I believe its promise or peril will shape all of yours. 10 years before my service began in 1983, the United States Central Command was formed to serve American interests in the Middle East, Levant and Central Asia amid strategic competition with the Soviet Union and the expansionist goals of Iran. Casper Weinberger, the 15th Secretary of Defense and the official who oversaw the creation of U.S. Central Command, said the Central region is among the most important regions in the world as far as we're concerned and as far as the free world is concerned. The Senate Armed Services Committee's legislation authorizing the new command explained that U.S. Central Command alongside local and regional forces will be America's security guarantor in the world's central region. Now, 40 years later, even though much of the geopolitics and policy have transformed the security landscape of this part of the world remains largely unchanged and the region's most vexing problems have grown even more complex. Through it all, the Central region retains its place as one of the most important regions in the world. Today, the region is home to almost 50% of the world's known oil reserves and more than 40% of the world's natural gas. In addition, more than a quarter of global oil transits the Strait of Hormuz while over a third of global container traffic transits through the Suez Canal. A disruption in any of the three maritime chokepoints flowing through the Middle East or the spread of instability throughout the region could threaten vital national interests and hold the global economy at risk. In 1979, revolutionary students overran the American embassy in Iran. Four decades later, Iran poses the largest and most diverse missile arsenal in the Middle East, possesses, excuse me, with thousands of ballistic and cruise missiles, some capable of striking the entire Middle East and Levant. In addition, the Iran regime holds the largest and most capable unmanned area of vehicle inventory in the region. The advancement of Iranian military capabilities over the past 40 years is unparalleled in the Middle East. Even more concerning, Iran has advanced its nuclear program to the point that Tehran can now produce sufficient fissile material for a nuclear weapon in less than 14 days. The region regime also invests heavily in information operations including broadcasting, coordinated inauthentic behavior, and cyber attacks. Alongside the state threat posed by Iran, violent extremist groups continue to threaten the security and stability of the region. For example, ISIS long past 2014 pinnacle of capability remains able to conduct operations within the region with a desire to strike beyond the Middle East. Though degraded, the group's vile ideology continues unconstrained. Meanwhile, strategic competition in the central region has grown more urgent over the past 40 years. The Soviet Union has been replaced by the Russian Federation and the People's Republic of China, both of whom seek to undermine American interest in the region. Russia looks to aggressively expand its foothold of influence in the US Central Command region area of responsibility, even as it conducts its war in Ukraine. Moscow leverages its military presence by propping up Syria to garner influence in the Middle East. Simultaneously, the People's Republic of China aggressively expands its diplomatic, informational, economic, and military outreach in this part of the world. They both seek a revision to the rules-based order, which though not perfect, has been the basis for prosperity and stability for billions of people. These challenges and complexities combined with the opportunities offered by our partnerships in the region form the basis of US Central Command's three strategic priorities. The first is to deter Iran. Deterring Iran is arguably more urgent than at any time in US Central Command's history, due to Iran's cutting-edge missile and UAV capability, as well as its uranium enrichment program. Iran remains the stabilizing actor in the region and is undeterred from its malign activities, which include conventional threats to its neighbors, support to violent proxy groups that spread chaos and instability as well as support to Russia's war in Ukraine. Looking back to the early stages of the Iran-Iraq war, the regime realized its armed forces could never fully recover from the crippling losses suffered during that renaissance conflict. As a result, the regime invested in precision missiles with extended reach to develop an asymmetric advantage. It now commands an imposing measure of missile capability, which it uses to coerce, intimidate, and bully its neighbors. The Iran has also manufactured increasingly sophisticated unmanned aerial vehicles. Unmanned aerial vehicles. The regime commands an arsenal of drone systems ranging from small, short-range systems to modern, intelligent surveillance and reconnaissance systems to long-range, one-way attack platforms. They are building larger drones that can fly further with increasingly deadly payloads. Until the United States helped secure the Yemen truce, Iran was regularly using Yemen as a testing ground for these weapons, threatening both U.S. partners and tens of thousands of Americans in the region. Meanwhile, Tehran continues to furnish weapons support and direction to proxies across the region who engage in acts of terror and undermine local governments. The proxy forces are more emboldened and dangerous through the increased proliferation of these unmanned aerial vehicles, which allow them to target U.S. and partner interests with increased speed, range, accuracy, and explosive capacity. Taking a step further, Iran's advanced weapons have recently been seen on the battlefield of Ukraine alongside their Russian partners. U.S. Central Command's second strategic priority is to counter violent extremist organizations. While Iran poses the most ominous threat to the central region, violent extremist organizations operating in the Middle East, Levant, and Central Asian states also represent a danger to security and stability. The Central Command area of responsibility serves as the epicenter of violent extremism. 19 of 21 top-tier terrorist groups operating across the region. ISIS and Al Qaeda are the principal Sunni violent extremist organizations in the Middle East and Levant. Both groups maintain numerous affiliates pursuing local, regional, and global objectives. We see ISIS in Iraq and Syria in three groups. The first is ISIS at large. This is the current generation of ISIS leaders and fighters found in Iraq and Syria today. While this group's capability has been significantly degraded, it retains the ability to inspire, direct, organize, and lead attacks in the region and abroad. This group offers the most straightforward solution for U.S. Central Command. Partner with Syrian Democratic Forces and advise, enable, and assist Iraqi security forces until ISIS at large is defeated. The two other groups represent far more complex problems. ISIS in detention. These are the roughly 10,000 ISIS fighters in detention facilities throughout Syria and approximately 20,000 in detention facilities in Iraq. We rely on the Syrian Democratic Forces and our Iraqi partners to secure these sites and keep the population off the battlefield. At present, the government of Iraq has sufficient infrastructure to keep the fighters in detention. The only long-term solution in Syria, however, is to transfer these detainees to the custody of their countries of origin. The third group is the potential next generation of ISIS. This is the most concerning group and includes the more than 30,000 children in the Al-Hul camp for internally displaced persons and the more than 1,000 children in the Al-Raj camp, who are in danger of ISIS indoctrination on a daily basis. The Al-Hul camp is a flashpoint of human suffering. With more than 51,000 residents, more than 90% of them women and children. Living in tents, these children have little meaningful education, no access to the outside world and few constructive outlets to develop their potential. They are at risk of becoming casualties to an ideological war within the camps. As with the second category of ISIS, there is no military solution for this group. The long-term goal must be the successful repatriation, rehabilitation, and reintegration of the camp residents back into their countries of origin. US Central Command's third priority is to compete strategically with China and Russia. China's goal to serve as the world's leading superpower by 2049 puts the central region squarely in its crosshairs. The People's Republic of China is aggressively expanding its diplomatic economic outreach across the region to secure energy resources, facilitate power projection, and gain support for a vision of the rules-based order. The recent PRC-brokered re-establishment of relations between Iran and the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia underscores the emergence of China's diplomatic role in the region. While China currently imports more than half of its oil and over a third of its natural gas requirements from the region, it is also moving beyond energy-based investments to encompass physical and telecommunications infrastructure. Further, Beijing is encouraging greater military cooperation in the Middle East and Central Asia with the aim to challenge our standing and recognition as the partner of choice. The Belt and Road Initiative remains a strategic lever to supplant US leadership in the region under the guise of benign economic initiatives and broadening security relationships. Of the 21 countries comprising US Central Command area of responsibility, 19 have Belt and Road Initiative agreements with China. China's economic interest, transactional deals, and no-strings approach to internal and regional affairs will continue to provide the PRC with inroads in the region. On its current trajectory, the increased economic, technological, and military presence serves as a growing strategic challenge to our partnerships, access, force presence, and security in the region. Strategic competition with Russia 32 years after the fall of the Soviet Union, Russia's objectives are to weaken Western security structures in the Middle East and Central Asia to challenge US security interests and critical relationships in the region. Putin's interest in the Middle East includes energy transit, security relationships, and military sales. His overall strategy in the region remains largely unaffected by the war in Ukraine. Despite the recent damage to its reputation and influence, Russia continues apace on several fronts to preserve its influence and access to the Middle East. This includes sustaining military support in Syria that is indispensable to the Assad regime and influential with Syria's neighbors. Russia has more than 2,500 Russian troops in Syria, which Putin views as a base from which to project power and influence throughout the region and into Europe and Africa. Just as Centcom was formed to serve as a security guarantor of the world's central region, Russia views itself as a security guarantor of the Central Asian states, also part of the US Central Command area of responsibility. However, as a result of the invasion of Ukraine, Central Asian states increasingly view Russia as a threat to their sovereignty. In support of these three priorities, deterring Iran, countering violent extremist organizations, and competing strategically with China and Russia, the commander of US Central Command developed a strategic approach to guide the operations, activities, investments, and initiatives against the complex and confounding challenges in the Central region. This approach is best defined by three words, people, partners, and innovation. Throughout US Central Command's lifespan, its people have professionally served the region, our nation, and the command. Since its 1983 inception, US Central Command's people in uniform, in civilian service, across the US government inter-agency team, regional and global partners, industry and academia, they have fought for and assisted the people, the nations of the world's central region. Our people serve as a bedrock of everything we do and how we succeed against these strategic priorities. They underpin all aspects of how we stand up to the challenges and create opportunities. Partners. Partnerships are our nation's comparative advantage. As our partners continue to face existential threats from Iran and violent extremist organizations and suffer under transactional and predatory activities by the PRC and Russia, we cultivate deep abiding relationships with forces in the region so that we can stand together against regional threats, which include deterring Iran from its worst, most destabilizing activities. For China and Russia, partnerships are transactional relationships. For US.com, our partnerships are based in our shared interests and commitment to the region. China views regional countries as possible customers and clients. We see partners and allies. Our values and commitments make us the partner of choice in the region and our efforts will demonstrate our focus on enabling our partners to meet the challenges they face. We are in a race to integrate our partners' capabilities before China and Russia can further penetrate the region. While US Central Command was originally established as a security guarantor of American interests in the world's central region, today we uphold that responsibility by serving as a security integrator. Integrating our partners into a framework of operations, activities, investments, and initiatives that will ensure sufficient regional security to protect our mutual national interests. A prime example is the recent realignment of Israel from US European Command to US Central Command, which has immediately and profoundly enhanced the nature and texture of many US.com partnerships. When the original boundaries for US.com were drawn, there were concerns that US Central Command leaders would be challenged to build enduring trust-paced relationships with Arab military leaders while also partnering with the Israeli Defense Force. While that concern was well-founded at the time, US Central Command readily partners with Arab militaries and the Israeli Defense Force alike today. In fact, the inclusion of Israel presents many collaborative and constructive security opportunities. Our partners of four decades largely see the same threats and have common cause with Israel in defending against Iran's destabilizing activities. Innovation. Through innovation, we multiply the capability of our partners and strengthen our partnerships to deter Iran, counter-VOs, and compete with China and Russia. Innovation will strengthen our partnerships, assist our operations, and allow us to increase progress across all efforts. In doing so, it will allow us to better serve as that security integrator on behalf of regional security and stability. Innovation is not just about technology. Technology plays a large role. It is also about innovation of thought, innovation of concept, and innovation of process. We are building a culture of innovation, and our partners are with us on this journey. For example, across all domains, through the employment of systems on hand, along with newly acquired systems, we are building an interconnected mesh of sensors that transmit real-time data. When viewed together through data integration and artificial intelligence platforms, this real-time data builds a clearer picture of the operating environment. Across US Central Command, our formation used unmanned systems paired with artificial intelligence to give us better information faster. This allows us to employ our manned systems more efficiently and effectively, achieving the ability to decide and act before our adversaries. The use of innovative technologies, concepts, and processes is as singularly focused on providing our people with the best tools, the most comprehensive, rapid situational awareness, and the fastest and most accurate decision-making capability. This in turn serves a great benefit to our partners and to the security and stability of the region. Innovation is about linking our people and our partners with ideas and capabilities that enhance all efforts to deter Iran, counter-violent extremist organizations, and compete strategically with China and Russia. By empowering our people, building out abiding partnerships and embracing innovation, US Central Command enables the national defense strategy to manifest across the joint force. A flashpoint with Iran, a crisis in the region, a successful large-scale attack on a partner country, or an attack on the homeland by a violent extremist organization, all will likely require a response, drawing resources away from our national defense priorities. But frankly, success in Central Command is a joint force to focus on competition with China and Russia wherever that competition occurs. People, partners, and innovation is how we will deter Iran, counter-violent extremist organizations, and compete strategically. Empowering us to meet the challenges posed by these threats, complexities, adversaries, and adversaries, and seize opportunities to ensure regional security and stability. We employ the strategic approach along a foundation of mutual understanding achieved through the efforts of American service members and our partners over the course of four decades. From the tanker war to the Gulf War to the global war on terrorism and many contingency and humanitarian assistance operations in between, US Central Command has fulfilled its original mission. US Central Command, alongside its local and regional forces, will be America's security guarantor in the world's central region. Today we have evolved that mission to be America's security integrator, a partner to regional forces against the threats we face together. Many thanks once again to Dr. Gaines, to Norwich University and the Peace and War Center for allowing me to speak before you today. I look forward to the discussions today and tomorrow from the panelists and presenters as we grapple with the challenges and opportunities in the Middle East. As one among many here who have been and will be shaped by the complex modern history and current events of the Middle East, I think we should all embrace the Norwich University motto, I will try. Together we will try to better understand, to create effective solutions and enable the people of the region to accomplish what has been impossible to date. Peace in the Middle East. Thank you. Colonel Walker, thank you so much for your insightful, cannot. Now I will briefly introduce UAE Ambassador to U.S. Yusef R. Otaiba. First appointed to the position in 2008, Ambassador Otaiba has focused his diplomatic career on furthering UAE, U.S. collaboration and partnerships. Thanks to his effort, he was later promoted to Minister of State in 2017. Ambassador Otaiba's leadership has been the inspiration behind launching several programs at the UAE Embassy in D.C. such as UAE, USA, United. A campaign designed to celebrate and strengthen the relationship between the two countries. He has also been thoroughly involved in philanthropic initiative as both Ambassador of UAE and the private citizens. The Ambassador facilitated bringing the Special Olympics World Games to the UAE capital in 2019, the first to be held in the Middle East and North Africa region, and has since joined the Special Olympics Board of Directors. Additionally, Ambassador Otaiba has supported disaster recovery and humanitarian relief efforts, such as after Hurricanes, Katrina, and Sandy, as well as international public health initiatives. So, right now, I will run the video, recorded video at this point. So, live streaming, right? Stopped again. Thank you so much for attending the keynote session for the 2023 Peace and World Summit. So, in 10 minutes at 10 a.m., we will just invite the Prime Minister scholars to address the Middle Eastern topics in more detail. So, once again, Colonel Walker, thank you so much for your insightful comment and keynote. So, see you in 10 minutes. Thank you. It makes sense that you put it at the first panel, because it's talkable. That's right. I think we'll just get started. And then, so I'll just introduce our panel and then I'm sure I'll just introduce when you do your discussion. Great. Wonderful, thank you. All right, good morning everybody. It's great to see you all here. I think we're going to get started with our first formal panel presentation today. My name is Miri Kim. I am an associate professor here in the history and political science department. I'm very happy to be able to be part of this great event. So, let me get started with introducing our panel. Our first panelist is Dr. Said Gokhar, who is UC Foundation assistant professor at the Department of Political Science in the University of Tennessee, Chattanooga. His work at the Chicago Council on Global Affairs and Tony Blair Institute for Global Change in the United Kingdom also focuses on Middle East policy with a policy focused approach centered on Iran. He's the author of a book on the Basij, the paramilitary militia of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps which was awarded the Washington Institute Silver Medal Prize and today he'll be speaking to us about the personalization of power in Iran and we're looking forward to his talk. Our second panelist, Dr. Valentin Mogadam, is professor of international affairs and sociology and the director of the international affairs program at Northeastern University in Boston. She's also modernizing women, gender and social change in the Middle East. Her research focuses on globalization and development, revolutions and citizenship. Unfortunately, Dr. Mogadam could not join us today but we'll be able to learn more about her work, her paper a bit on women, peace and security in the Middle East later in the panel. So that's just a brief introduction of our panelists. I'm just going to turn it over to Dr. Gokar. I'll ask that you keep your presentation to under 20 minutes. We'll have a few minutes for our discussion and then hopefully we'll have a good amount of time for a Q&A at the end of the formal presentation period, too. So without further ado, please join me in welcoming our panel. Thank you very much Mary and thank you very much for inviting the pleasure to be here. You know, to be honest being the first presenter is not an easy job and I was thinking by myself why we have to start with Iran. Colonel Walker actually is much more easier than why we are starting with Iran. Iran is in the center of attention for many you know policymakers in the West like it or not, many believe that Iran is the biggest tribal maker in the region. Recently I was playing with the chat, with the IE, chats, or you know playing just with the artificial intelligence and asked this website that what are the main concern or political instability caused in the region and in any question I ask artificial intelligence to answer one of the answer was Iran. And we know artificial intelligence don't lie, so that's why we start from Iran. You know the Islamic Republic since 1979 that the revolution always had been a challenge especially for the American after taking over the embassy and taking the hostage the American diplomat and recently if you read the news if you watch the website based on your political leaning from the Fox News to CNN every day there is news about Iran there is something happening even in the Middle East if it's not related to Iran directly in the new. So you want to understand it you want to understand why Iran are engaged in the region why they are in Syria in Iraq why for example they are supporting the Shia Malaysia in the region. What about Iran nuclear program? What about Iran regional involvement? What about Iran missile program? There are a lot of question right now especially we are talking and you have to think about it so how can I understand these issues? In my opinion as a political scientist without understanding the Islamic Republic of Iran and the political system you are not be able to understand its domestic and regional policies. The regime types matter in comparative politics if you don't know what kind of regime you are talking to you cannot understand the policy and you cannot respond to that policy. So if you think about the regime type of the Islamic Republic you know if you talk to the Iranian who are supporting the regime most of them will tell you that the Islamic Republic is a religious democracy or Islamic democracy but as a political scientist if you talk with or read or listen to the political scientists usually they will tell you Islamic Republic is authoritarian regime is a dictatorship but what kind of a dictatorship we are talking about? We talk about Russia, China, the UAE, Saudi Arabia and there are all dictatorships but there are a lot of differences between UAE for example and the relationship they have with America and the Iranian and with Russia My argument in this paper is Islamic Republic since 2021 has shifted completely to a personalistic regime and I'm going to talk about it, why does it mean and why it is important to understand that Islamic Republic is a dictatorship but is a specific form of dictatorship is form of the dictatorship we call it the personalistic regime if you think about the Russia they have the same regime right now China is moving toward the personalistic regime they had a one-party hegemonic political system but they are after President Xi the third time election they are moving to this fall So let's dive a little bit about Iran and I will talk about why it is important in terms of the regional activities the issue of the taxation and the process that is going on in Islamic Republic Islamic Republic came to the power in 1979 replaced the monarchy regime with the theocratic regime under the Ayatollah Khomeini as the supreme leader they created Islamic countries based on the idea of the guardianship of the juries so if you think about the political system you have a democracy and the people are choosing the leader in Islamic Republic the political system is different the leader should be a Shia clergy or the jurist the jurist should rule the country the first supreme leader Ayatollah Khomeini and under his leadership he created three pillars for the regime the IRGC you are very familiar with clergy who provide AC for the for the system and the bureaucracy fast forward to Ayatollah Khomeini the new leader who came to the power in 1989 after Khomeini passed away Ayatollah Khomeini came to the power as a middle-rank clergy without any charisma and for 33 years he was he still is the Iran supreme leader you have to remember that Ayatollah Khomeini was one of the radical Islamist one of the follower of the Syeda Ghout if you are familiar with the Middle East and with the Islamist extremism Syeda Ghout was the father of the Islamic jihadism and Ayatollah Khomeini was somebody who translated his book so he came to the power as a radical clergy with this idea that I'm going to talk about it and became the supreme leader for 33 years and under his rulership we have five administrations my argument is he started the process of personalization of power from 1989 but he finished the whole project in 2021 since 2021 we are dealing with another animal we are dealing with another political system and that change will bring a lot of consequences the first one IRGC Islamic Revolutionary Guard when Ayatollah Khomeini came to the power the first institution he tried to personalize and slash ideologicalize why? because he was ideological clergy he was part of the Islamic radical clergy he came to the idea he came to the power and he tried to control the Revolutionary Guard and give them some of the space some of his idea tried to ideologically the IRGC have been purged three times we are right now we are working with a different IRGC that we see during Iran-Iraq war there are the fifth generation who have been recruited in the Guard to make it more personal security force and military force not only they purged the IRGC the IRGC went through a massive indoctrination process 50% of the IRGC military training are related to the political and ideological so 50% of their course is related to indoctrination they changed the recruitment of the Guard nobody can apply for the Guard unlike the US military if you decide to go you can go here you have to be picked up after 2009 they gradually trying to indoctrinate personalize a security force and then they expand their power through all aspects of Iranian politics and society and culture and economy they are everywhere some scholar believe that the Islamic Republic is a military regime I disagree I think the IRGC still as long as Ayatollah Khamenei is alive personal force of Ayatollah Khamenei is not a military regime is a personalistic regime and these two different view will come with the different consequences we have studied the IRGC indoctrination for several years and there are very dominated with the idea of ruling of the clergy the guardianship of the jurists the idea of the creation of the Islamic Ummah the idea of of the jihad and martyrdom you cannot find any nationalistic or even any civil you know education or content in this education the second pillar that Ayatollah Khamenei saw to personalize it was a clerical or seminary school you know if you remember one of the pillar of the regime is a clerical establishment trying to legitimize 1979 Islamic Revolution was a cultural revolution as a political revolution the clergy have been used to legitimize the ruling of the clergy or the guardianship of the jurists so if you want to personalize the power this is the second pillar you have to get rid of all of the critical clergy or independent clergy trying to bring all of the seminary school under your own control and then picking a new generation of clergy among of your personal students this is a case from 2009 almost in every position for the head of any organization that is related to Ayatollah Khamenei is not under control of the state bureaucracy we see the personal student of Ayatollah Khamenei including Al-Jama'at al-Masrafah a university related to the IRGC God's force that is very active in the region including the Islamic ideological propaganda all of the the seminary school etc etc the last pillar that Ayatollah Khamenei tried to control and personalize is bureaucracy he started personalize bureaucracy under the Ahmadinejad our beloved president in 2005 but because of the problem, because of the personality of Ahmadinejad as a populist and this split between the president and the leader the project was not finished under his administration after 2021 when Raisi became the president in a very manipulative election he find this time and this opportunities to bring a new generation of indoctrinated technocrats replace them with western educated technocrats under the Rohani for example between 2013 to 2020 the Rohani administration has more PhD graduate from American university compared to the Obama administration but by the time Raisi completed this story has changed all of these new technocrats are ideological technocrats who have been groomed, trained by the hardliner and came to the power to understand a personalistic regime you have to understand the personality of the dictator or the ruler you know this is a manifesto of Ayatollah Khamenei he in the first time we talk about it in 1989 when he came to the power and gradually developed if you think about it we talk about the continuous revolution that our work has not been done we created the revolution in 1979 we create and consolidate the power in 1982 but we still are working on creation of Islamic administration government and Islamic society and later on Islamic utopia government for 13 years this was the idea of that Ayatollah Khamenei has pushed, talk about it but in the West we usually don't hear this kind of stuff we try to ignore that we believe this is for domestic group domestic youth they don't mean it if you think about the Putin for example in 2021 if you read the Putin writing you know listen to his speech he talk about the Ukraine issue and there was a few people who actually believe that he is going to invade Ukraine again we didn't listen to Putin so we have to listen to what these people said and he is talking about creation of Islamic administration creation of Islamic society and then creation of Islamic Ummah or Islamic civilization unfortunately since 1989 when the Soviet Union collapsed the personalistic power are in the rise among of the monarchy among of the military regime military regime is in decline the monarchy is in decline the only form of the political regime authoritarian regime not hybrid regime that isn't rise is personalistic regime compared to the 1989 that 23% of the regime was ruled right now there are 40% of the countries from Venezuela under the modern to China to to Russia in the Middle East you have a very different form of the personalistic rule you are familiar with the idea of the sheikh or sultan or king king Abdullah or king Salman in Saudi Arabia the sheikh in Kuwait in Qatar and you have sultan in Sultanate of Oman and recently Rajatayub Ardovan tried to be a new sultan among the Iranian version of it or the Islamic Republic version of it is part of this idea of the personalistic rule but in this case is a little bit more ideologic you know sheikh, sultan or king are political rulers they respect the religion but they don't get into it but the Imam is a guy is a guardianship of the jurist is a Islamic scholar who not only has a religious superiority has a political superiority what does it mean as I told you unfortunately the personalistic rule is a false autocracy form among of the hegemonic political parties or monarchy regime or military regime is most corrupted they are going to devour more offensively compared to other political system process of democratization is much difficult in personalistic rule they are all based on the academic research for years so if regime is moving toward the personalistic regime even China think about what are the consequences of this transformation it's not only domestic in terms of the corruption in terms of the appointing of your loyalties to the political position they have regional and international consequences I will talk later on but I really believe to understand why Russia invades Ukraine or the possibility of China invades Taiwan this framework will help us to calculate the possibilities of in terms of domestic politics as I told you a personalistic rule or divorce case because they are very corrupt why they are corrupt because as a ruler you need to bring the people who believe and royal to you regardless of their expertise there is no meritocracy you have to fill out all of the position even in the security and military and economy it will lead to the massive corruption and cryptocracy and the massive corruption is one of the reasons that the Iranians came to this several times the last round is right now the 2022-2023 Mahzoh protest who started six months ago because one Iranian Kurdish daughter have been killed under the police custody and it continued they killed more than 530 people as we know it 2000 people blinded because they shoot directly to the eyes 23,000 people have been arrested again this is a facial statistic if you think about this protest this is not a unique protest in 2019 Iranian revolt and Islamic Republic killed 1,502 days in 2017-18 they revolt in 2009 in 1999 in 1991-1992-1993 but year by year the scope of the protest has increased why because of the corruption one of the reason, economic reason massive inflation more than 50% inflation compared to the last year economic stagnation environmental degradation pollution, air pollution water scarcity Islamic Republic is a pro-totalitarian regime in terms that they want to control even your private life if you go to China or Russia what you are eating, what you are wearing doesn't really care the dictator doesn't care about Islamic Republic has concern and that's fine he has been arrested and killed because of the hijab so the life in Islamic Republic under the Islamic Republic is much difficult, more difficult compared to living in Russia or China I don't know about the North Korea I've never been there but I think that's the most worst case scenario you can imagine so there are a lot of reasons and most of these reasons come from the globalization of power gradually marginalizing elite or expert bringing all of these loyalties to the power trying to stay in the power you created a very incompetent political system that is not able to deliver any goods if you think about Emirat Emirat is an authoritarian regime and some scholar believe has moved to a personal system or in the Saudi by MBS but at least in both cases they are able to provide to create the societies that the people want to live and stay and even immigrate and work there they close the political space by the liberal socially and economically in Islamic Republic they close all aspects of your life they try to control all aspects of the life and that's why people are losing their hope that's why they are revolting revolting against Ayatollah Khamenei and his regime you know they ask me to talk about this event because it's ongoing and it's very important to understand if this revolt that I will call it the revolution and I will tell you I will use that it's successful we will see a very different scenario the next Iran if the Islamic Republic collapse I'm not sure if it will be a liberal democracy but I'm sure it will be a secular you know political system and very pro-Western pro-American allies that I'm sure for that so a lot of problem that you are working it's completely vanished in a few days if the regime collapse and that's a big if but this protest is a very clear manifestation what Iranian wants to do the Iranian girls are the main engine of this protest for the first time we saw the higher school female student at the street protesting we saw the social media playing very important rule unlike 2009 that some people call it the twitter revolution this is really a twitter social media revolution for somebody who is talking on the you know social media and new technologies to what extent the possibility of the regime collapse I don't know still we don't see too much you know a gap among of the elite and so far we know that the IRGC is repressing and the Basij and I work on both of this repressing the protest very brutally but what I can tell you that 2023 is a defeat of the Islamism in Iran 1979 Islamist came to the power replace the monarchy with the political Islamist sister Islamism is not a new phenomenon it was from 1928 that Hassan al-Bannock created even earlier by Jamaluddin al-Afqani but the modern Islamism is a product of 1917 after the defeat of the Arab countries from the Israel and the establishment of Israel in 1948 but Iranian was the only Islamists who were able to create a country a regime in 1979 43 years later nobody believed the idea anymore in Iran Islamism was based on three pillars anti-Semitism anti-Americanism and morality control or hijab the Iranian society is the most I know among the Middle Eastern countries and the Islamic world and it is surprising for many of you even there is not too much enmity towards Israel from 2009 we are listening to this slogan that no Gaza, no Lebanon just focus on us and nobody believed the idea of hijab or Islamic rule Islamism has been defeated Islamic republic is only pure pure force the last discussion what does it mean in terms of the taxation unfortunately unfortunately I don't know based on what you are thinking the personal regime has always a problem of the taxation because the ruler the dictator usually undermines the political institution and then it is very unpredictable who will be the next supreme leader some countries have been managed to fix the problem like North Korea they have so far till the taxation and they are grooming another one for the fourth and they didn't have any problem but as we know in compared to politics the personalistic regime are the most prone to the crisis during the taxation Artur Lahamani is 83 years old and the next supreme leader can actually change the Iran to the different direction in theory in reality we know that gradually Artur Lahamani the next supreme leader is appointed or selected by the assembly of expert consisted of 88 collergy and gradually Artur Lahamani has personalised this institution the next election 2017 completely dominated by the heartliner by the Artur Lahamani close allies and the students the next election will be next year and we can assume that this process will continue so even from the taxation of the supreme leader if you are waiting for the supreme leader to die and something happen I'm not very optimistic to be honest I think the next supreme leader of the state the Artur Lahamani son as here sitting here both have the same view of Artur Lahamani both belong to the radical political Islam but the taxation is a moment that the regime the personalistic regime are usually on the weakest moment of their role this moment continue or coincide with the mass protests we will see another Iran we will see the possibilities of the Iranian people who are able to change the Islamic Republic thank you very much for your listening Dr. Gokar, thank you so much for your presentation we'll now turn it over to Mr. Sherman Patrick as our discussant he'll have about 8 minutes or so he is the Vice President of Energy at NUARA which is the Norwich University of Applied Research Institute and over his career he's worked with 5 U.S. Senators including Patrick Lahey and now President Joe Biden he was serving as chairman of the Foreign Relations Council National Security Issues and he brings a range of expertise that covers AI machine learning, industrial policy, advanced development and really sort of focus on that techie, right technology sort of side of our current lives and the future and I think given that a lot of the things that have been going on going on in Iran in the past few months have been so focused around this new aspect of our lives around technology he'll have a lot of really interesting comments and insights to provide for us so let me just take it turn it over to Mr. Patrick and please welcome him to the front. Thank you, it's a pleasure to be here this morning and it's a great topic I agree with you for the first panel here to begin discussing this. Iran as we heard from SENTCOM is one of the major destabilizing factors in the regime or in the region and your analysis of the regime I believe is one that we need to ask ourselves at the very beginning when as you say when we want to relate to them and figure out how we're going to respond we need to know what sort of regime we're dealing with and international theory we build these models we build analytical frameworks to understand what's going on and the ones we pick oftentimes do influence policy makers having advised policy makers for many years none of them think that they're using analytical frameworks developed in academia none of them think that they're going back to their theory but they are in fact those assumptions are always there and you can sit in the room and you can hear people discuss what's going on and you can pick out the strains of realist theory or you can hear Graham Allison coming through in the way they're discussing it and I think it's important to understand that and what you've put forward in this paper I think fairly convincingly points out that transition from Iran as a cultural theoretical model thinking of it as a theocracy to the personalization of Khamenei and the way he has built the state around him you lay out steps very well for how he did that and how he controlled the key institutions if I ever want to take over a nuwari I've got a good model here for how to build up things don't tell Phil Seussman but also you used a phrase in the paper that you didn't use this morning that I liked in particular the dumbification of the state and I think it's a very apt description of the trade-off that has been made in this personalization of the need to undermine the efficacy and use it particularly towards the bureaucracy to undermine their efficacy in delivering goods in order to ensure commitment to him. I believe that it could also be applied to the IRGC as well and we have not yet I can't point myself to a concrete example but I think the idea of the dumbification for achieving personalized control is one that can be applied to all institutions and makes regimes like Vladimir Putin's in Russia makes them ineffective or North Korea briefly mention North Korea that's another model that I think or another example that should loom large here as we think about this. Now I do want to caveat that that has an assumption that both you and I share I can tell is that people do want goods and services declared to them or delivered to them more than they want the loyalty to their supreme leader. I think that's accurate but that is something that we have to keep in mind. It's possible that there are motivations other than receiving effective government aid for example at a certain point you run into a hierarchy of needs issue and I firmly believe that there is a point where services could become so bad or the basic security could become so bad that and we may be there already that the people of Iran will be opposed to the personalization of this regime but we've been saying the same thing about North Korea for a very long time and we have yet to see any real crack there. So as a policy maker advisor I was advising senators in 2009 2019-2022 all of the big uprisings and each time we always said this is the time. This is the time when we're really going to see a crack here. I worked on a bill with the McCain staff. I was working for Chris Coons at the time and worked with the McCain staff. It was called the Victims of Iranians Censorship Act the voice act. We put it together in order to provide the ability U.S. funds and support to try to give Iranians access to outside news so they could organize and understand and the idea was with just a little more information with just a little more connection like this will be it. This will finally happen. It didn't happen back then. We did not have that breakthrough and I noticed that one of the things that your paper points out here is that was right before the last final stage of this transition you talk about it being completed in 2021 so at the time we passed that bill at the time we were pushing that additional connection within Iran how many was personalizing the regime and so I would hope at some point here if I shut up and give you a chance to talk again you can talk about the dynamic aspect of that and the way efforts changed through the personalization that undermined some of those things we had done and that would give us I hope some insight going forward into how we can be hopeful that we are seeing something in Iran now that might be a value and we're not just seeing the next transition to when Iran becomes DPRK and does get in there or whether there's structurally something about Iran that would prevent it from ever becoming DPRK and I ask this because one of the tests of theory is not only can it make predictions but in the case of political science theory can it provide predictions that guide policy makers to make wise decisions and it's extremely difficult to find a theory that can help with that. There are so many variables involved when you're making decisions not to mention ones that are entirely outside the scope of best practice such as what will your constituents support you doing and I wondered if you could also speak in terms of what we might do in keeping with the information domain nor which and work a lot on information dominance we spend a lot of time thinking through ways that we can understand the world around us, understand information and also provide advice to policy makers on what they would do and are there specific I.O. or information policies that a government that would like to see greater participation in Iran for its people which would like to see a regime with a friendlier, more stable or sort of friendly attitude towards stability in the region if there are things that we might do or might pursue in order to either undermine this personalization or shift the personalization in such a way that it increases regional stability. So I'm going to stop here because I've been talking for a while and take the privilege of the first question here and then I really look forward to hearing all the questions from out there. So thank you so much for your commentary and the feedback Dr. Gokar if you could maybe respond to some of those points just for maybe a couple minutes because we do want to have some time for maybe questions. And it's one day. And then maybe while those comments are being aired, any students who want to have questions, if you would like to line up, we'll just go first come first served. Please feel free to do so. Absolutely. You know, in terms of the demification of a state, the whole idea is the personalist ruler because they are very unsecure about their position. Usually they pick up most loyalties people or the people who can't pretend their loyalties. And they marginalize the elite or the expert gradually leaving the countries. Iran is one of the countries with the highest brain drain ratio in terms of the population. You asked about the demification of IRGC and I give you one example. In 2020 when the corona hit Iran, the IRGC revealed equipment called the corona finder. And the corona finder was only a small piece without any function. They revealed in a TV show that we discovered the corona finder. In 200 meters we can find any corona viruses. And after one day they realized it was, you know, not true, so they took it down the whole propaganda. When you put the IRGC commander General Salami for example, that replaced General Azizy in 2018 is much more big mouse and less strategic, you know, designer. You replace General Salami the IRGC who were assassinated with the General that is less capable to mobilize and, you know, unified the militia in the Middle East. So even in the IRGC you will see this process of demification. In some area they are doing very well like in terms of the missile and drones with the help of other countries, North Korea, China, Russia. And some people ask me if they are so dumb why they are developing a very good drone or missile program. You know, imagine you are bodybuilders and you inject all of the oil on your missile. You have a very beautiful front missile, but your knee are very skinny and you see it among of the people who are doing bodybuilding through destroyed and all of this. IRGC is very similar to that. So if you look at the missiles are very strong, very beautiful but look at this, you know, the skinny feet. I'll never think of IRGC the same. Yeah, that, you know you talk about the protests and the possibilities of the success to be honest to a protest will be a revolt will be a revolution in political science if you have a successful revolt you will call it the revolution. If it's not successful you will call it the revolt. There are a lot of conditions should be at the same time available. Even in terms of they have to have leaders the mass of protest doesn't have right now one leaders. In terms of the gap among the elite we don't see too much split among the Iranian elite because all of this elite are all their position to the supreme leader. The security forces are still loyal to the Islamic Republic to the Ayatollah Khomeini and even in terms of the international context you have to have a suitable international atmosphere. We don't have it. China, Russia they are supporting the Islamic Republic. Just think about the Syria in 2011 the Syria witnessed a very massive revolution the only thing that stopped the Syria to collapse was the support of Iran and Russia from the Assad in 2012-2013 and gradually they took back all of the land. Part of the military was because where the Shia supported the Assad but more importantly was Iran and the Russia supporting the Assad. So for a revolution to be successful and that's why the revolution is very, very unique. You don't see too much revolution. The big revolution the last one was 1979 Iranian revolution from America, France, China, Kubaian revolution and that's the main reason very difficult to do that. What's the rule of the social media? When I moved to the U.S. I got fired from Iranian university in 2009 and then I found a job here at the Stanford working a project called liberation technologies. The cyber utopian is that everybody was so fascinated by the information that the information is coming and liberating of all of us. But gradually we realized that the dictator has upper hand in controlling the information, in controlling the social media. Right now social media is actually helping them to gain power. I'm not very optimistic about the rule of the social media. I think yes they have to have information, yes they have to pass the internet, filtering the internet but more importantly is we're focusing on weakening the security forces and creating the gap among the elite trying to co-opt some of the elite buying off the royalties. That's the most important one. If you do it the society is revolting. You don't need to do too much over there. You just need to think about how you can make sure next time that happen they are not going to repress brutally. I told you in 2019 it's only in two days 1,500 people have been killed. So you are talking about one of the most repressive authoritarian regime. Thank you so much. I think we have time for a question or two. Student if you want to come up and ask your question. I can hear you. I am afraid you are going to ask a question. That was the sanction. The sanction. Without any doubt sanction is morally wrong and hurt more vulnerable people in the target society. There is no doubt about it. The Iranian oligarch are safe from the sanction impact compared to the Iranian lower class or Iranian poor. This is no doubt. But let's put yourself in the position of policy makers. I am always asking my students to think twice and put them in a different shoes. As a policy maker what kind of tools state craft tools do you have to impact the other countries' behavior? Think about Russia. It is much easier for me to talk about Russia. You have three tools. Diplomacy, public diplomacy, official diplomacy. You have economic state craft, reward them or sanction them and you have using force. That is enough. If they don't listen to your diplomacy if you are asking them to withdraw or don't attack, they are coming after you. You are going toward economic state craft before going to the military state craft because that is the worst case scenario. In economic state craft you have two tools. Try to reward them. Please don't attack and we will give you this benefit. President Obama did the same. In 2015 they signed the Iran-Nuklaar deal and the whole idea was we coming and signing this deal and hopefully we will build a foundation and based on this foundation we will work out. Immediately after signing the deal Ayatollah Khamenei stopped Iranian to talk to the American. Iranian president talked with Obama by phone 15 minutes and then Ayatollah Khamenei humiliated him. So the reward didn't work for the Islamic Republic in terms of changing the behavior. And then you have the military force. From the policy making that is the only option you have but you have to remember that option is going to hurt people most than the political elite. So what are other options? Some people believe a smart sanction targeting individual and institution. This is good. In reality it's difficult to implement it. Why? Because for example think about the Iranian economy. The IRGC almost penetrated the Iranian economy. Iranian economy 80% is a state-owned or semi-estate owned. And then you cannot separate it. If you sanction this institution ultimately you are sanctioning other institution as well. So I really don't know what is it. I can tell you that this hurting Iranian people and the lower class Iranian economy are very bad right now. The inflation for the last year was 50% in the basic good more than 70%. And day and day more Iranian are moving from the middle class to the lower class. And this will bring another problem. If you don't want to get into politics because we believe for democratization you need the middle class to push the democratization. If you make people pull you are undermining your efforts. This is kind of the environment you are working. There are a lot of paradox. It's not easy pick this one or pick that one. You have to think critically about all of the options that you have. So only one of those is available to Congress. So when Congress wants to get involved when you ask your representatives to do something they go for sanctions. That's the only thing in their toolbox that they can add. Thank you very much. Good morning and welcome to the 2023 North University peace and war Middle East summit. Thank you very much for your attendance and for those joining virtually we welcome you and glad you are able to join us from all over the United States and the world. So welcome. So it is my pleasure to introduce the third session. My name is Dr. Travis Morris. I'm an associate professor here at North University and I'm the director for the peace and war center. We've had two fantastic sessions and the insights that our distinguished guests and our faculty members will bring to this particular session. So the way the session will run, I'll just do a quick interview. I'll introduce our panelists and then the format will be our two distinguished scholars will give about a 15 minute presentation and then we'll have an 8 minute discussing comments and then we're going to open it for a question from you in the audience. So you see these two mics and when we get to the end of the discussants comments please feel free to move forward and ask your questions. This is a unique opportunity for those of you that are in the room. So it is my distinct honor and pleasure just to introduce our panelists. So Dr. Guy Zeeve, he's an associate professor at American University School of International Service where he teaches courses on US foreign policy, international negotiations, US-Israel relations and Israeli-Palestinian peacemaking. He has received multiple outstanding teaching awards and his current research project focuses on civil military relations in Israel. He has a background in policy and has worked on Capitol Hill and for Israel Policy Forum which is a non-for-profit, non-partisan organization that promotes American efforts aimed at resolving the conflict between Israel and its Arab neighbors. His articles have been published in peer review academic journals, blogs and major newspapers and news sites. He's also appears regularly as a commentator in leading media outlets. Welcome. Our next distinguished panelist Dr. Jeremy Pressman studies international relations, protests, the Arab-Israeli conflict and US foreign policy in the Middle East. He's co-founded and co-directs the Crowd Counting Consortium an event counting project that has tallied and made publicly available data on all manner of protests in the United States since 2017. He's published several books and I'll read several titles. The Sword is Not Enough, Arabs, Israelis and the limits of military force, security, point of no return to deadly struggle for Middle East peace and warring friends, alliance restraint and international politics. He's also published journal articles in cooperation and conflict, diplomatic history, international security, perspectives on politics, science advances, social movement studies and many other publication venues. Dr. Nicholas Roberts is a historian of the modern Middle East and the Islamic world. He's a professor at Norwich University. And for this academic year, 2022 through 2023, the inaugural W. Nathaniel Howell Post-Archival Fellow in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf Studies at the University of Virginia. He's the recipient of that prestigious fellowship. His current book project, A Sea of Wealth, Said Said bin Sultan, his Omani Empire and the making of an oceanic marketplace draws lives across four continents. This book uses the reign of Oman's longest serving ruler as a lens for highlighting the Omani Empire's formative role in uniting the Atlantic and Indian oceans into a shared oceanic marketplace. And this is a crucial step in modern global capitalism's rise. Let's give them all a round of applause. And I welcome Dr. Zeev to the podium. Thank you, Travis, for the nice introduction. Thank you, Professor Akou and the organizers of this wonderful summit. I have my phone with me here, so I'm going to try to stick within the 15-minute allotment of time I was given. I've been asked to talk about the Israeli Palestinian peacemaking. And since there hasn't been any peacemaking in many, many years, I'm going to talk about the ideas that are out there, which are not really new, but nevertheless continue to stir debate, especially among academics and policy analysts as to how is this conflict, is this conflict ever going to be resolved and so how? And traditionally the two-state solution has been seen as kind of the paradigm for resolving this conflict. And we've seen one U.S. president after another from Clinton through President Biden endorsing this sort of solution as have most Israeli Prime Ministers and Palestinian President Mahmoud Abbas. However, the peace process has really not materialized since April 2014, which is when it last collapsed. And so with more and more settlements, Jewish settlements spreading in the West Bank and with all around pessimism among both Israelis and Palestinians there has increasingly been this kind of notion out there that the two-state solution is quote-unquote dead or dying and increasingly people have spoken about the one-state, the so-called one-state solution. So that's the focus of my talk this morning and the paper I wrote that coincides with this talk. Today there are over 500,000 Israeli settlers in the West Bank that's a 16% increase over the last five years and that has led many to conclude that a contiguous Palestinian state in the West Bank is no longer an option and that therefore the one-state solution, a state that is equal to all is kind of the way to go. And what I argue is that given the disparate versions of this so-called one-state solution and the fact that it is very unpopular among both Palestinian and Israelis, it's basically a non-solution. That's kind of my main argument here. What we are seeing is a binational state in the making and so even though it is not a solution we are seeing Israel becoming de facto a sort of binational state. Geographer, I'm known so far as a very prominent Israeli geographer just last August said that there are now 7.53 million Arab Israelis and Palestinians and only 7.45 million Jews which is less than 47% of the population in the area between the Mediterranean Sea and the Jordan River. So we are talking about Israel essentially heading inexorably toward this kind of binational reality which would be a blow to the Zionist project. The idea that Israel was meant to be both a Jewish and a democratic state and that is increasingly coming under attack for multiple reasons that are beyond the scope of this presentation although I'd be happy to address questions about the current legal overhaul in Israel which is contributing to this kind of threat that democracy, Israeli democracy is facing. Now the idea of a Jewish Arab binational state is not new. We have seen its origins dating back to 1915 with the HaShomer HaTze'ir movement a movement that was comprised primarily of Polish Jews in exile to realize a binational socialist society in Palestine was their dream. In the 1920s there was a small organization called British Alom which was composed of primarily Jewish intellectuals that created, that aimed to create a state for two nations and there was even a political party in the 1940s called Ehud that advocated a binational state. The problem with all these kind of binational or one state solution advocates at the time was they never really had any Arab takers and even among Jews in Palestine it was a very unpopular position and so organizations like Breach Alom for example never really numbered more than 100 despite the fact that as I mentioned some of its advocates were actually well-known figures in Jewish society. So one of my main arguments here about this the kind of modern rendition of the one state solution is that given the disparate ideas of what that means it is not really much of a solution. So one model that I look at is the model that I call political inclusion with equality and we have seen a number of Arab as well as Jewish intellectuals embracing this idea given that the two state solution does not appear to be very viable and we've seen Sareen and Saiba a long time Palestinian intellectual who used to advocate a two state solution give up on that idea and instead support this idea of a binational state. The late Edward Said in 1999 said that a separate Palestinian state was simply unworkable and instead both Jews and Arabs would need to learn how to share the land in a truly democratic way with equal rights for each citizen. Jewish intellectuals as well Tony Jut the late Tony Jut and Ian Lustig currently an academic who's been writing a lot about the kind of death of the two state solution and also advocates the one state solution. One of the problems with this kind of idea of an inclusive state with equality for everyone is that very few Palestinians support it about 26% of Palestinians today favor the solution and even fewer Israeli Jews support it only 14% Jewish Israelis favor of it. Even as their support for a two state solution has dwindled and it is specifically a highly systematic concept for Israeli Jews one of my colleagues here who's going to speak after me Jeremy Pressman noted as well in one of his writings why would Jewish Israelis willingly forfeit the advantages they enjoy in a system that privilege them and there is a Fatah activist Ahmed Naim who once pointed out that in one state Palestinians will feel the need to dominate the other and I think this is one of the kind of driving forces behind the opposition in Israeli society to this sort of solution. There is also a different model out there in Israel among the more religious or conservative Israeli Jews and that is this idea of political inclusion with a Jewish identity. In other words at annexation of the West Bank or at least parts of the West Bank and full rights for both nations. This is something we saw for example several of the Likud, the dominant Likud parties, Knesset members have embraced this idea the former president of Israel Ruby Rivlin also embraced this idea it would be a fully democratic state as far as they're concerned but they want to make it clear that it would be a Jewish state as well. And finally you have a model of political exclusion so this would be a Jewish state with no pretense to having any sort of equality for Arabs in this kind of new state if such a new state were created or the existing state of Israel plus the West Bank equality would simply not be something that they would be interested in. Here we see in this kind of most extreme solution actually some of the current far-right ministers in the new Netanyahu government embrace this vision and that includes Finance Minister Bezalel Smotrich who said if we have to choose between democratic and Jewish I have no doubt what I would choose others such as Itamar Benkvir who's a national security minister think likewise. And as I mentioned at the start the idea is very very unpopular none of these visions none of these models of a one state solution are popular with either population and so this last model that I mentioned has only 22% of Israelis favoring it even though that has gone up from 15% in 2017 alarming to some advocates of democracy of course but still we're talking about a relatively small population in Israel who embrace it so to conclude several kind of takeaway points here one is that the visions of the one state solution that the various visions that are out there are simply not compatible with one another they're irreconcilable there is no one there is no widespread support for a one state solution regardless of the political model that is envisioned here and no agreement means no solution so even though Israel as I mentioned is moving inexorably towards this kind of binational one state reality by no means should we call it a solution this is a recipe for just more strife and we've seen quite a bit of it taking place not just between Palestinians in the West Bank and in the Gaza Strip but also within Israeli society itself including Arab citizens of Israel and the Arab residents the Palestinian residents of East Jerusalem and so if the one state solution is not a solution and is not viable and is not likely to take place what about the two state solution is it really dead and here the jury is still out the journal foreign affairs had a little symposium recently that pointed to major disagreements over this question scholars and other intellectuals who were invited to participate were pretty much split on this question and what I can tell you is that the Israeli security establishment and I'm referring specifically to the Israeli security community of former senior members of the IDF former generals, former heads of the Mossad intelligence agency and former heads of the Shin Bet domestic security agency are basically the agreement that a two state solution may not be in the cards right now but that the idea for the two state solution can be kept alive by steps that they would like to see their government take that their government has not yet taken that may be unilateral at first before there is a resumption of peace talks with the Palestinians but steps that would prevent Israel from turning into a binational state that can keep the two state solution alive and even today where trust is at an all time low and there is plenty of pessimism on both sides the idea of a two state solution is still the most accepted solution even if it's not embraced by a majority on either side for resolving the conflict. Thank you very much Dr. Pressman the floor is yours First I just want to thank the center and Norwich University for a warm welcome and a kind introduction it's really a pleasure to be with you today. I'll take a quick drink of water and get this frog out of my throat here. I'm going to move to kind of the big picture of US foreign policy one critique that we could think about would be the kinds of questions about the ethics of meddling in other countries and that's important but I want to in the just the next few minutes I have focus on a different type of question which is a practical question which is about does US military intervention in the region even work or is it possible that US intervention over the history of US foreign intervention has actually just continued a cycle of instability and insecurity and I personally I tend to lean towards the idea that it has although I have to say at least today want to think about some of the plausible pathways and leave this question with each of you to think about because I think it's one of the central questions we need to always be thinking about in terms of US foreign policy the practicality of it. I specifically address this question in terms of the US invasion of Iraq in 2003. I selected this case and there's other cases that we could talk about but I selected this case because I think it helps tease out the particular aspect that I'm interested in and that aspect is thinking about if it's true or if it's plausible that US policy sometimes leads to greater insecurity what are the specific reasons that that's the case. I mean even if we make some broad contention that it worsens the situation what might the specific pathways be that do that and I consider this question against the backdrop of a number of scholars over the years who have thought about this not just in the Middle East but thought in general about the way in which the use of military force can backfire and I wanted to mention just a few things quickly. First of course I want to mention the late scholar Robert Jervis one of the foremost US international relations scholars of the late 20th and early 21st century who passed away relatively recently and I often gravitate towards Robert Jervis' work on the spiral model and the deterrence model if you haven't read it I'd be happy to share the PDF with you or the citation. It's a little bit of a dense reading but I think it suggests two basic ways of thinking about international politics and the one I want to focus on today is Jervis' spiral model and if you've studied the security dilemma there's a lot of overlap here between Jervis' understanding of the spiral model and the security dilemma. The idea that the effort that one makes to improve one's security situation can often end up in an outcome that leads to greater insecurity that the counter moves and counter mobilizations that one's rivals and adversaries take may make the situation worse not better. Now Jervis also posits a different model with different understandings but the deterrence model but in the interest of time I'll move on to a second scholar that I just want to mention briefly which is a book that got a lot of attention about 20 well time flies doesn't it about 20 maybe even 23 years ago by Chalmers Johnson which was about called blowback and you've probably heard that term blowback Johnson was particularly focused on CIA activity and the possibility that sometimes U.S. CIA activity negatively affected U.S. outcomes. I've also written about this in the context not of U.S. foreign policy but connecting with Professor Ziv's wonderful presentation writing about it in the context of Israeli, Egyptian and Palestinian decisions that sometimes decisions they've made that are meant to make the situation more secure have actually worsened the situation. So getting back particularly to the case of Iraq I want to think about it in terms of what might be learned from that case to think about how we could end up with a worse situation rather than a better security situation and I'd want to suggest four I'll give you the list first and then I'll talk about each of them in a little more depth. The first possibility is that military intervention creates new enemies and new rivals. The second possibility is that military intervention reshapes the balance of power in unfavorable ways potentially strengthening and emboldening U.S. rivals. The third is that U.S. military intervention becomes fuel for hostile fundraising and membership recruitment by other organizations and the fourth is to think about opportunity costs the possibility that one intervention uses up resources that could be used for other domestic international endeavors and I want to stress the domestic I think the international is kind of straightforward I want to stress the domestic a little bit too because one of the things I think about not as an expert more as a lay person my expertise there is an expert here about the political economy of this but to think about the ways in which some of the resources that are used in other places might lead to neglect of some of the pillars of what it takes to be a great power in the international system to have a system of higher education that you're experiencing to have advanced scientific endeavors going on and we could go on but let me just take a couple minutes to go into each of these that I've mentioned in terms of thinking about the creation of new rivals I think the Iraq 2003 case may steers us directly towards the Islamic State and the fact that within a few years the United States was fighting a new rival and I don't just generally connect this because of the geography I think the geography is important but there's two points I wanted to highlight in particular about the Islamic State one is the emphasis that some have pointed to of the role of disaffected ex-bathist soldiers and military personnel largely Sunni soldiers who had been a key part of the regime of Saddam Hussein and were let's just say left out in the cold after the US invasion some of whom maybe didn't provide the ideological fuel for the Islamic State but provided some of the expertise and technical know how and the other piece is that toppling a regime generally creates a vacuum and while the toppling of the Iraqi regime in 2003 I wouldn't argue caused the Syrian Civil War I think there's many other causes that we would point to in a separate discussion when there was a vacuum nearby in Syria the fact that we had disaffected and others contributed to the development of a new US rival the second idea I mentioned was the idea that it changes the balance of power when you pursue military intervention and I think as we've talked about a lot today we've talked about the country of Iran and I don't think there's just a simple story about how the US invasion of Iraq in 2003 either helped or hurt the Iranian strategic position I do just for the sake of argument and because I'm just trying to sketch out something plausible want to note two points that the United States knocked out Iran's primary rival remember as many of you know and may have studied that Iran and Iraq fought an eight year war from 1980 to 1988 and that the United States was not disappointed that two of the key challenges potential challengers in the Gulf were engaged in fighting each other so we could think about the way in which the United States helped Iran in terms of knocking off Saddam Hussein but also and others here have much more expertise on this than I do thinking about the rise of pro-Iranian influence inside Iraq after the toppling of Saddam Hussein whether we're talking about Iranian influence in the Iraqi political system or potentially Iranian contribution to training to training certain militias inside Iraq the third point that I suggested was about fueling, hostile fundraising and membership recruitment I think this one is really difficult to judge because it's very difficult to isolate it's first it's difficult to isolate just the effect of U.S. foreign policy on organizations and then it's difficult to isolate the effect of U.S. policy towards Iraq from U.S. policy towards other states and other participants in the region there is maybe some tentative evidence that I won't go into now that this helps but again I think it's difficult to isolate just the U.S. invasion of Iraq excuse me and then lastly as I said the idea of opportunity cost and thinking about what are you foregoing by pursuing military intervention I've seen estimates ranging from billion dollars in terms of what the U.S. intervention in Iraq will ultimately cost the United States if we think about all the continuing costs of care for the military personnel and others who served in Iraq but if we think about the lives that were lost the lives, the Iraqi lives the American lives, the British lives and the lives of other countries that participated in the conflict if we think about the trauma that was inflicted and the continuation of people living with that and so my point isn't to there's nothing unique about the Iraq intervention in the fact that there are human and financial costs when we go to war but we should be thinking about potentially what choices we're making to devote resources to one situation as opposed to any others so just to think about wrapping up I do want to offer a couple of clarifications or caveats maybe about the particular case that I briefly sketched for you. One is that one could certainly go further back just in Iraq Dr. Roberts who will be presenting his paper in a panel this afternoon in his paper talks about interactions with Iraq going back to the 1950s and 1960s so there is a risk or a utility depending on how you look at it about going into a deeper history in some of these relationships and I think the other thing I want to say was there's different arguments for why you might look at other cases as well the US relationship with Afghanistan since the Soviet invasion in the 1980s or maybe even looking sorry 1979 and the 1980s or even looking earlier the US relationship with Iran of course we've heard a lot about that going back to the Shah of Iran and the dramatic shift before and after the 1979 revolution so I do want to suggest that there's many other places we could certainly look to think about US foreign policy in the region and the extent to which it's been helpful or hurtful for US national security I just wanted to close by saying that I think this should lead or remind us to have a healthy skepticism about assessing contentions by the US government or by any government if we owe allegiance to another country and we have a lot of claims about leaders talking about war excuse me that we should just remind ourselves and I trust that those of you in the room the students here you are not only going to be leaders of tomorrow but you're going to be leaders who have some of the highest level of knowledge and skills that you've acquired here and in your subsequent career but remember that that's not all of the public all of the public isn't as interested as we are and so I would just remind you that maybe the default public position should be one of healthy skepticism to assume that or remember that war results in high costs that war can have long duration and multiple spillover effects and that that's something we should be asking as an informed citizen be very conscious of so thank you very much for your time I look forward to your questions Thank you very much Dr. Pressman we're going to have Dr. Roberts is going to come to the podium and to offer his remarks and reflections and then again students after Dr. Roberts is our guests students are guests welcome to ask questions during the remainder of our time so please prepare your questions so Dr. Roberts over to you Thank you Professor Morris and thank you to Professor Ziv and Professor Pressman for their papers and presentations and for their work and it's a privilege to comment on it especially given that I am their junior in his paper Professor Ziv provides an overview of different positions regarding the idea of a single multinational state in the land of Israel and Palestine he does an admirable job of showing the different complicated positions very complicated positions so admirably in fact that if I did have a criticism of the paper was that it was too short one of the things he raises is something that I think we can discuss more in the question and answer period this state right now of the Israeli government when we think of the Middle East extremism often comes to mind synonymous with how Americans understand the Middle East and Islam but the Israeli government as we speak is dominated by self-described far right extremists as someone at the DC based Israel policy forum recently said to me they never thought in a million years that they would say that Bibi Netanyahu represents the left of the Israeli government another thing I think we could talk about more is kind of the elephant in the room which is Christian Zionism the role of Christian Zionists in the United States in shaping the conflict but I'm going to backtrack a bit now before I get to the crux of my big question for Professor Ziv I can say that I have sympathy actually for those who work on Israel or Palestine in scholarly and professional terms I remain purposefully detached it's so polarizing that I like to genuinely respond when someone asks me about it with I don't know I studied the Arabian Peninsula hundreds of years ago it is as a historian though I would say very unfortunate that I can say that I think it's a myth that history is used in the United States to shape present and future policy I'll never forget when I graduated Georgetown for the first part of my graduate training I was in DC having lunch with a very prominent former government official and I told him why I thought my training as a historian equipped me for a career in public service he responded Nick no one in this town cares what you learned about history in school the history of US foreign policy proves him correct the reason government officials and many others might not really like having historians in the room is that we're really good at saying not so fast we by default probe assumptions and ask really difficult questions but since Professor Ziv is not only a distinguished scholar of policy but also a practitioner of policy in a very friendly way I'm not going to let him be so easy I'm going to set up a thought experiment to ask him to share more of his ideas with us especially because this hypothetical thought experiment might not really be so far fetched so for this thought experiment I want this to be crystal clear let us assume that we are departing from a position of wanting a vibrant healthy strong Israel and a flourishing life for Israeli citizens I want that to be crystal clear departing from that assumption then let us also assume for our thought experiment that the two state solution is dead so for the thought experiment there is now one state Israel so now what what steps does Israel take to continue to flourish do Israeli government officials dispense with the idea of being a liberal democracy or do they embrace the idea of being a two tiered state we can talk about this in hard concrete policy terms like how do you ensure equity in public schools how do you ensure equity in healthcare or infrastructure but I'll end here on an admittedly thorny philosophical question and I'm prompted to raise this question because it is one that I listen to my Jewish friends and colleagues around the world debating amongst themselves and for themselves if there is one state Israel what might it come to mean from the pens of historians centuries from now that Israel came to exist born from the oppression of Jewish peoples in European history by means of eliding the existence of another political human community it's a tremendously difficult question of course but as I said it's one that I listen to my Jewish friends around the world always having I'll turn now to professor Pressman's paper which is very timely of course given that it is the 20th anniversary of the American invasion of Iraq professor Pressman uses the 2003 invasion in suing occupation of Iraq as a policy case study and alluding to as far broader body of scholarship but also alluding to an overwhelming number of examples from world history he argues that military intervention usually does not make a state more secure I admire the human element of his argument that while the American invasion harmed the United States in terms of deaths and casualties of its own service members, its own economy and its own reputation it overwhelmingly harmed the Iraqi people citizens of a sovereign state that was invaded on a preemptive case rooted as we now irrefutably know in myths and disinformation today's interventions as he says often create tomorrow's security threats or as he says if they solve one thing they might also create other problems a string of many headed hydras perpetuating a persistent demand for military intervention this has been something of a categorical problem for any military throughout world history but there's also distinctly American elements to it the United States is in fact a global empire today no informed person on the right or the left whether they think it's a good thing or a not so good thing denies that the United States controls one third of the world's wealth it has 750 military bases in three quarters of the world's countries in 2021 the United States spent 801 billion dollars on defense more than the next nine countries combined with seven of those nine countries falling firmly within the us defense orbit now let's be blunt about what that means the militaries of states such as South Korea Japan Saudi Arabia or the United Kingdom are essentially extensions of our own the idea then that the United States could have easily toppled Saddam Hussein in 2003 and then reconstructed Iraq to look like an American style liberal democracy might easily have not seem far-fetched to the officials in the Pentagon planning it all the power and the wealth and the capabilities of the United States military is overwhelming it's difficult actually to comprehend but those Pentagon officials and the ones in that building right now I would submit could have used a dose of education from the theorist Michelle Foucault perhaps the most important modern or contemporary intellectual for understanding the nature of power in a sobering thought and hang with me here in a sobering thought Foucault instructed that human beings are aware of what they do unlike other species then human beings have self awareness human beings are aware of what they do and humans are aware of why they do what they do but as Foucault said human beings are not aware of what what they do might do in other words we have no way of knowing the future and its unintended consequences when ISIS came about there was a debate amongst historians regarding using the adjective Islamic to describe it sure we can call it Islamic but we can also call it a lot more as professor Pressman might argue the immediate conditions for allowing ISIS to come about in the first instance were because of US actions in the Middle East to be certain given the staunchly aggressively secular autocracies of Syria and Iraq before 2003 it would take a wild act of imagination to imagine how a group like ISIS would come about to the extent it did with unless the United States had created the conditions for anarchy in the region so I'll end with a real soft ball of a question like I did with Professor Ziv if we know that military intervention usually does not lead to greater security and in fact a protracted military intervention like the 20 year global war on terror actually harms and weakens our military why then does the United States continue to approach every global issue through a military lens has the history of militarily intervening in the world beginning with the expansion of the United States across this continent becomes so fundamental to the function and economy of our state that to not militarily intervene would mean the dissolution or degradation of the engine of its economy to such an extent that the United States might not continue to exist at the level of flourishing we have grown so accustomed to thank you so Dr. Roberts thank you for your reflections your insight and I would also say just your powerful questions that could take the rest of the summit to answer in depth but there are people in the room that could address those so we do want to turn it over to just Q&A for just a little bit and so if any students are interested in asking a question please go ahead and move forward to the microphone and and looks like we have students so Jacob go ahead please and the mics should be on just go ahead testing okay so we hear a lot about the one state solution between two states Israel and Palestine but I recently got into contact with a different group which sees that state being actually belonging to Syria and being a province of Syria and the same could be said with like Lebanon and Jordan what do you think about the solution to prevent one Arab one Muslim control and one Jewish control instead of being a secularized province of Syria what do you think about that am I supposed to answer also the discussants question or is that for how would you like me to proceed let's if you address this and then if we don't have any student questions then we'll go to the discussion questions so I think in order for any solution to take place it has to capture the imagination of the public and it has to be accepted by at least a plurality if not a majority of the public otherwise the solution is not viable so this is something that I don't think is a prominent solution it's not one I've heard of it's an interesting one and I'm intrigued by it but I think at this point we're talking about one of the longest most intractable conflicts in history and so we don't need to necessarily reinvent the wheel I think that the contours of a solution are out there and I think what we are lacking is leadership that is world leadership that's willing to take political risks to create a peaceful solution for everyone thank you very much for your question August so first I wanted to say thank you to all three of you for making my job presenting later easier your comments played directly into the paper that I'll be presenting on so thank you for that I wanted to ask a question about the one state solution has it been considered to sort of model after the model of Bosnia and Herzegovina or would that sort of be out of the question no I think the people bringing up the Bosnia situation are the opponents a lot of the opponents of a one state solution who warned that this that was a preview the bloodshed you saw in the former Yugoslavia is a preview of what would happen if Israel is going to become a binational state it is usually not held up as a success a successful model for a political solution to this conflict and I just to build on that one thing I might add is and I think you bring this out nicely in your paper theoretically people often talk about either more of a kind of communal solution so it's one state but each community has some prerogatives that they reserve whether that's about holidays and language or education or those kind of things and you might contrast that with a one state solution that's more individually based more about you and I regardless of our ethnic and religious identity each have the same political rights so those are at least two of the kinds of frameworks that people talk about thank you thank you for your question Sean please good morning gentlemen thank you first Professor Ziv, Pressman and Robert for presenting today I wanted to direct this question to Professor Ziv regarding the one state and two state solution related to the United States and this kind of harks upon the information given by Professor Pressman during your presentation you talked heavily about the internal perception of the one state versus in its multiple forms and the two state solution for the Israeli and Palestinian perception but what role does the U.S. have to play when it comes to perhaps killing the two state solution or efficating any variant of the one state solution and as future leaders and military political governance what mine field should we avoid given the fact that as Professor Pressman pointed out clearly our intervention may have unintended consequences excellent question I think the U.S. has an essential role to play in the conflict, in mediating the conflict and the U.S. is the only actor that can serve that role as an honest broker and by honest broker I'm not referring to neutrality because the United States has never exactly been neutral to the Arab-Israeli or Israeli-Palestinian conflict but honest broker in the sense that we have successfully mediated several of the disputes in the region had it not been for the United States Israel and Egypt would not have a peace treaty Israel and Jordan would not have a peace treaty and more recently the Abraham Accords would not have been signed so I think the U.S. has an interest in a promoting stability and so bringing about a peaceful agreement would absolutely be in America's best interest but in addition we often focus on the common interest that Israel and the United States have we don't always focus as much on the common values and that's becoming more prominent today because of the internal debates and deliberations in Israeli society about the future of Israeli democracy and the legal system and the courts that the current government is trying to gut and we were just talking on the way over here about the phone call that President Biden had in the last 24 hours with Prime Minister Netanyahu where he reminded him about the importance of democracy and how that is something that we have in common and so I don't think we can divorce domestic politics from the from the Israeli-Palestinian dispute and so there's a very important role, leadership role that the U.S. has played in the past and will need to play in the future if there is going to be any sort of solution which is why we saw this with the Clinton parameters President Bush had the roadmap for Middle East peace Obama tried his hand and I think President Biden is on the same page but obviously President Biden has other priorities right now and so this is not necessarily a high priority given the other challenges of U.S. foreign policy. Thank you. Just one quick addition that the United States has tremendous leverage with Israel and the United States as it is done with most excuse me most of its allies has usually chosen not to use that leverage and that's a decision to make but it has consequences in terms of the ability to influence the direction of the Israeli-Palestinian future. Thank you so much. Thank you for your question, Annalise. Mike should be on. Thank you. My question is for Dr. Pressman. You kind of went over four reasons why military intervention may cause more tensions in national security. My question is primarily focused on opportunity cost and I just wanted to ask at what point do you believe that the cost of military intervention outweigh the results that we're looking for, kind of going off of what your topic was about and what Professor Robert said we sent troops into Iraq based off of a preemptive case that we eventually found out was false and it cost thousands of Iraqi lives, U.S. forces lives and British lives. At what point do you believe that cost kind of outweighed the result we were looking for and at that point did you believe that we couldn't or didn't stop? Well I think it required in this particular case it required recognition on the part of U.S. leadership that there were initial mistakes and that there were factors that the United States took into account such as the possibility of some kind of existing nuclear program or nuclear weapons program that didn't pan out but I wouldn't just want to say to the case of military intervention in Iraq I would say it in general about politicians that it's very hard to decommit from a policy especially one like that that was the core of President Bush's foreign policy. So I don't think we should be surprised or that there's anything unique about that president or that administration that they were unwilling and some of them to this day and some of them to their death like if I think about the passing of former Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld that they never saw the downside the costs, the missed opportunities that resulted from that. I think it requires a certain kind of ability to self-reflect and public politics being in the public spotlight doesn't lend itself to that. We as a public often are very harsh on politicians who admit that they made some kind of major mistake and especially one that has the kinds of human consequences that decisions to go to war have. Thank you. Thank you very much for your question and anytime we talk about the Middle East particularly Israel and American foreign policy and the relationship between Israelis and Palestinians we are often left with more questions. Dr. Roberts I have two very important questions on the table and as I mentioned we could spend the rest of the summit discussing those and we want to leave this session with a final question from Professor Martin and whatever the question may be we just have about 30 seconds or left so just a quick sound bite so we'll leave this particular session to your question please. I appreciate that and I defer to students for theirs first I happen to be an English professor here and I want to just maybe won't respond to these questions or the primary question. I'd like to just synthesize the two talks and I appreciate how much you packed into these very articulately. I'd like to synthesize two questions one is American foreign policy and one is the situation in Israel, Palestine specifically and this is a sort of a complicating gesture the US is the chief provider of military arms to the state of Israel and so I think that complicates the notion of its neutral broker ship and I guess the question that I think would be worth thinking about for this audience is what is the state within that context for efforts to reach a piece what is the status, the legal status of Israel's settlement building and acquisition of territories that were conceived to be part of that second state because my understanding is that they're in violation of international law so those are just some thoughts but I will not expect too much from you today in terms of time, thank you. Like I said we'll end with a question and our guests will be around for further discussion for the rest of the day and so thank you so much for your insights in your paper and Dr. Roberts thank you so much for your excellent response and also powerful questions. Let's give everybody a round of applause please. Good afternoon ladies and gentlemen, welcome back to this session of our summit on the Middle East my name is Lasha Jantoridze I'm professor here at the College of Graduate and Continuing Studies it is my pleasure to introduce to you three distinguished speakers in this panel Professor Ali Disboni is hails from the Royal Military College of Canada in Kingston, Ontario he will present his paper about religious extremism and political violence in the Middle East Professor Diane Zory is from National Defence College of the United Arab Emirates based in Abu Dhabi she will speak about Saudi Arabia and Iran in the era of great power competition scenarios for the future of the Middle East and our discussion today is Professor Peter Henney who hails from the University of Vermont these three participants are very knowledgeable and experienced experts in the region they have both professional and academic experience working dealing with the region so I'm pleased to have them here talking to us about the region so the order of presentations will be like Professor Disboni will go first followed by Professor Zory and then Professor Henney is going to summarize the points and after that we open the floor for questions so 15 minutes each and followed by summary comments by Professor Henney and then the floor will be yours so Professor Disboni please thank you for the introduction so as Lasha said 15 minutes so I'm going to condense the presentation timeframe religious extremism and political violence in Middle East the starting point is about the significance of the topic it is a very sensitive controversy both in academia and in the public policy arena place of Islam not only in Middle East which is my topic but also in the globally in India, in China Myanmar which makes the news and in the western world in terms of Islamophobia racism, orientalism on one neocolonialism on one side and the labels on the other side apologetics or apologists appeasers Islamofascism and all that so it is a very heated topic especially for students I wanted to kind of situate you in the greater scheme of things root cause or culture is another thing that comes up in the public commentary secretization framework of Islam and Muslims so depend how you work how do you look at the question of religious extremism your secretization policy and your public safety measures will depend on your perspective on the relation between religion and religious extremism and political violence so it has very important CVE implication and also in terms of peacebuilding not to mention that two more take away from this is the terminology extremism political violence actually political violence is probably the easiest one the other one are not very easy to grasp and we have a huge definitional problem what is extremism what is terrorism and what is Islam and actually Muslims struggle to have a consensus on what constitutes Islam framing the question also is important how you how you phrase and structure your question gonna impact the conduct of your thinking and also your output let's go a bit faster I'm gonna have a critical review of scholarly literature and the relationship between the two concepts Islam and political violence the first is causality thesis the second is non-relevance of the religion as an explanatory factor and the last one is religion as a factor is not an explanatory factor but it matters to understand how political violence actors frame and inform their actions in terms of first thesis there are so many different phrasing on it theology, culture, identity, history but bottom line is that religion is the driver of political violence Bernard Lewis Samuel Huntington and I gave a quotation of Lorne Dawson that you see there as an example even he's talking about the foreign fighters in the western world however the quotation shows you that even most these causality people they do not believe that Islam is the key cause or the sole cause but however they put Islam in the causality a bracket the problem with this epistemology is the first one I'm not gonna explain them we don't have time, methodology is the second ontology definitional issue as I explained in the previous slide what do we mean by those topic and also a specificity problem if Islam is the key driver why not are Muslims terrorists so if Islam per nature is an issue so it must lead to some specific form of action but it's not happening irrelevant thesis is that is an epiphenomenon it doesn't matter political violence is something else probably so far the presentations we had most of them when they touched on political violence falls in this without saying that religion is not relevant but they mostly focus our colleagues in these two days on other contextual structural issues Robert Pape, Mia Bloom are two examples of this group problem with irrelevant thesis is that they totally brush aside ignore religion as to understand the narrative of the the narrative of political violence actors so it is important to see not only in terms of motivation of terrorists or extremists but also in terms of how their their understanding of the religion informs their action so it matters but not in terms of causality as we see here alternative Islam matters but how not in terms of cause but again for a third time I'm repeating myself in terms of informing the actions what I'm searching here for is not explanation because explanation as you know somebody mentioned this morning the panel that explanation theorization in social sciences is a distant goal we must strive for it but is a distant goal interpretation is a more within the grasp option the construct of meaning is really one of the key take away my presentation the text, context, structure and individual agency Nick mentioned also Roberts mentioned Michel Foucault we are aware of what we're doing but we're not aware what's going to happen after is a bit like that because Michel Foucault is part of in this family of constructivism of meaning and in this frame of in this thesis essentialism does not work there is no such a thing as core Islam sui generis as concept as practice as history so again I'm not talking that political violence actors instrumentalize religion that's not my point my point is that even if they are true believers in the religion religion is not you cannot put it on the back of religion A or B as a cause is there reconstitution of that reservoir of meaning I hope I'm clear here case in point Al Qaeda construct of jihad I know I'm not being too fair here to Al Qaeda but anyway that's a kind of a simplification and generalization of its ideology Islam equal jihad jihad equal violent action violent action equal terror by every Muslim and enemy is the far and closer end you heard that category before a binary perception of the world ISIS even pushes this further in terms of simplistic generalization concept of caliphate territorial territorialization apostate and all that absolute violence in a claus witzian term and beyond it's going to go easier from here is a kind of extra case for that we cannot make Islam as the cause of political violence one demonstration for this is the civil war between ISIS and Al Qaeda the civil war between Taliban and ISIS in Afghanistan that shows you that it is about even if we assume that there is a civil belief system it is about of their reconstitution of Islamic war of meaning, themes, slogans values, history practice into a context of political action second here we are not talking about political violence another example of that political actors in Middle East reconstitute Islam for their variety of purposes even sincerely if we grant that Sunni and Shia version of political Islam is one demonstration for that varieties of Muslim brotherhood Indonesia, Turkey, Egypt maybe Dayan going to talk about it a bit more in terms of different nonviolent political Islamist version and they do not agree on the social protest in the region as Saeed talked about Dr. Gulkar is that even a step further beyond political nonviolent political Islam which is about the separation of Islam and politics I'm not assuming that these people are Muslims by faith or practice, social protestors or Arab Springers but they are living in a Muslim context and children are Muslim parents and they believe in the association of Islam and politics which is one of the basic understanding of Islam in the scholarly literature at least part of it peace building to finish on the note of peace building and Islam in the Middle East so if you believe in the Muslim agency which is a natural thing and as a note for the students if you're trying to understand what I mean by agency just remember just remember that you have around you as many Islam as possible in the western context or in the Muslim world you have Sufi Islam different version of mystical Islam, philosophical Islam with different traditions different schools of Sunni thought different people of Shia thoughts so if you're grappling with the concept of agency just look at what it is there so Islam is plural by the fact of Muslim agency in understanding the reservoir of scriptures so I conclude on the point of the liberal peace building based on this assumption there is a possibility of dialogue of pushing aside Islamist or Muslim NGOs and all that there is a possibility of establishing a dialogue between mitigated record of secular peace building in the region we talked about it this morning and the religious NGOs partnership is possible and dialogue meaning give and take between the actors I give you that Islamic Muslim actors do not have exactly the same understanding of human rights and universal record universal human rights is disputed even in the western context to some extent however I see that there is a significant possibility of give and take between two sets of actors and I finish by the sentence that in reality we negotiated not with non-violent Islamist we negotiated with violent terrorist organization we negotiated with Taliban right I'm not criticizing it it's a statement of the fact and sometime reality imposes itself negotiation with the Iranian regime after couple decades of saying that this is a irrational a sponsor a state of terrorism we sat down and concluded a treaty with that regime so in reality this kind of stuff happens I think I am on time yeah thank you hello everyone it's a pleasure to be here my name is Dr. Diane Zory and I am an associate professor at the national defense college of the United Arab Emirates so I wasn't always there before that I was teaching in Florida and before that I was in the defense industry where I did integrated systems and foreign military sales prior to that I was a US Air Force officer so today I'm going to be talking a little bit about Iran and Saudi Arabia so before I get to that boy oh boy everywhere I go today I can't get away from this notion that we're moving away from the US led international system to something that's been called multi polarity but meanwhile the United States has the largest economy by GDP in the world 23 trillion dollars we are the security guarantor for so many countries around the world a formal alliance structure that is rival it doesn't even come close to anyone else's we have the largest expeditionary military in the world we have 11 aircraft carriers we are the reserve currency for most central banks around the world so why is the notion out there that we're moving to a multi polar system and who are these other poles that argue that China is obviously going to be one of these poles at some point and perhaps Russia okay so what is this new multi polar world look like and how do we know that it's actually multi polar indeed when all of the data suggests otherwise so I will say this you are fundamentally inheriting a very complicated world as future diplomats and future military officers you will inherit a very complicated Middle East and you will have to deal with that situation and you might not know the entire history of it but you will inherit it just like the children on Game of Thrones inherited what their parents did in terms of mistakes okay there's this great song by a guy named Billy Joel and it's called we didn't start the fire okay and I think about that a lot when I think about the Middle East we didn't start the fire but we're the ones that have to live with the repercussions of what's already been happening so when you look at Iran and you look at Saudi Arabia what has been happening and I don't have the time to give you the brief even the last 70 years I can't even tell you everything but I'll give you a snippet like a Billy Joel song alright so 1953 there's a coup d'etat in Iran okay who leads that coup d'etat of the U.S. and the British we're trying to put back the Shah 1979 there's a revolution to overthrow that Shah there's then a hostage crisis our people are held hostage for 444 days okay the day that president Reagan took office those guys come home then there's the Iran Iraq war okay Iran and Iraq go to war they're at war for 8 years in between there there's the there's the Iran Contra scandal so the U.S. was in a very complicated way aiding both sides of that conflict you have the fall of the Soviet Union and that doesn't take place overnight it actually takes place over a period of a couple years and during those couple years you can see the decline in Russia's influence or the Soviets influence and then Russia's influence all over the world including in the Middle East then the 1990 Gulf war where the U.S. comes out looking very good as the leader of the new world order and the enforcer of sovereignty and the enforcer of Kuwait's sovereignty the protector of the sovereign nation state and protecting the flow of oil out of the Middle East okay their sanctions on Iraq and that takes us all the way up to the 2003 U.S.-led invasion of Iraq so I'm not going to talk about Iraq so much but it's very important to understand that conflict within the context of the Saudi Arabian-Iran conflict so look at Saudi Arabia and look at Iran okay just on this graphic you can tell that they are the biggest players here and what's in between is Iraq now Iraq up until 1990 had the fourth largest military in the world they had 56 divisions on the border with Iran okay think about a division think about the 82nd Airborne Division the 101st Airborne Division they had 56 divisions between them and Iran so Saddam Hussein obviously saw that as a threat think about the fall of Iraq I like to think of it as removing an I-beam from the Middle East and we remove that I-beam and worlds collide and the two worlds that are colliding are the ones that are more Saudi influenced Sunni Islam and the world of Iran which is Shia Islam now I hate to do that, I hate to have a sectarian vision of this because it's more than Sunni Shia much more what is really fundamentally different about Iran is their regime okay so what does this regime look like under the Shah they were still Shia but they were very friendly to the United States we had a great relationship with the Shah in fact they even had a relationship with Israel it's the current regime which is also Shia that is fundamentally different than the regime of the Shah so what does this regime want they want to export an Islamic Revolution to the entire region they see themselves as the guardian of the face and they also believe in a curious methodology for implementing governance and that is called it's a top down governance so the idea is that the state makes people good versus good people make the state good okay so it's very top down very autocratic very theocratic and it's not that everybody there wants it either a lot of people there are protesting against it but this is the state okay the strategy after the fall of Saddam Hussein was quite interesting so Iran was coming at this not from a position of great power so how did they embed themselves across the region and gain a lot of influence they did this in a very methodical way and you can't blame them for this Iran is under very heavy sanctions and those sanctions have ebbed and flowed over the past 40 years right now they're very tight but the state has to survive so how do they survive well they tend to survive with networks that are gonna bring them the most money for the effort that they have to put into it and unfortunately that is gonna be black market goods so weapons, drugs body parts, people that's gonna bring you the most money for the amount of effort that you have to put into it and how do you get those goods out into the international system you get them out through supply lines and those supply lines run right north of Iraq into Syria and into Lebanon where they have a proxy organization called Hezbollah okay they've also worked on crafting supply lines through the Arabian Gulf around the Straits around Oman around Yemen which is not on the map and then up through the Red Sea okay and they crafted their policy as what I would like to call kind of imperialism 101 it's a dividing conquer strategy what you do in imperialism if you want to control people control a state control a weak area you go in and the last thing you want to do is empower a majority faction you purposefully look for cleavages in the organization or cleavages in the society look for minority factions empower those minority factions and get them to be dependent on you so in Iraq for instance the minority faction were the Shia they were able to successfully integrate themselves into the Shia communities empower Shia militia leaders and then create lots of descent even amongst the organizations that they are creating and purposefully divide those groups empower them to be more powerful but always dependent on them they've done this all throughout the region okay it's a divide and conquer strategy so what does that mean in terms of the Saudi Iran relationship well Saudi over the past 20 years or so has grown quite a bit they've grown their military capacity they've increased their economic capacity they're looking to what happens after their oil economy they're developing resorts they're becoming more entrenched in the global community they're giving women more rights now these sorts of things don't happen overnight they take a long time and even if the person at the top really wants this to happen quickly it's a huge constituency so but you still see this gradual shift towards something that's a little bit more what I would say western friendly globally friendly, globalized and a lot of what they're doing is in direct contention with Iranian goals so there's a lot of friction there and a lot of that friction has played out across the region no more so in Yemen Yemen is the hotbed of that friction now there's a lot of sunk cost there for the Saudis and they don't want to leave that situation with an Iranian victory right now they are working very hard to dampen some of the heat in the region it doesn't mean that they exactly want to have with the Iranians but I will say this the future of that relationship can really go one of three ways one, there's a major conflict two you have what you have right now which is sort of this it's a cold war we're fighting on the fringes it's not a direct conflict but I'm sure you've heard it it's a gray zone conflict lots of activity in the gray zone but rapprochement now there's been some signaling across the region that they're trending towards rapprochement which is great what we saw just a few days ago was an agreement to have embassies back in both countries and who negotiates this agreement is China China's foray into Middle Eastern diplomacy is negotiating that conflict which is quite interesting and it sends a few signals and you can read these signals many different ways what's Saudi Arabia doing are they abandoning the US are they not aligned with us anymore I would say no, I would say it's a signal a strong signal that they're very unhappy with the Biden administration they're looking for an alternative to the US driven order and it is a signal to Israel I would also say they're hedging hedging is a very interesting position hedging happened a lot during the Cold War where you have countries they don't really want to be on one side or another so they hedge their bets so to speak not to be fully aligned because they don't know which way it's going to go alright what's the signaling from China that China is saying hey look we can lead diplomacy and it's interesting just 30 years ago Mihail Gorbachev was really trying to negotiate this hopefully that the US would not actually go into Iraq to save Kuwait he was trying to negotiate this in a big way he was calling up everybody on the planet please don't let the US do this this is wrong and China wouldn't even pick up the phone so China didn't really want to have anything to do with this they're here in a big way China is also signaling that they're willing to fill the power vacuum but not necessarily militarily but perhaps economically and now diplomatically finally it could be a signal to the United States don't abandon the Middle East yet okay I'll leave it at that good afternoon everybody thanks for the invitation to come down here it's nice to engage with other Vermont universities my brother was an army officer ROTC graduate so I'm happy to support the work you do here and I'm also happy to talk about these two great papers very interesting, slightly different topics so I'm going to go one by one first, Dr. Disboni this is a great overview of this debate on Islam, violent extremism and a nice attempt to find a middle ground in this approach I also appreciated is in the paper more than the presentation the various political terms that get thrown out when you try to work on this issue I've been called many of these things like imperialist, colonialist, whatever so if you want to study this it's worth reading the paper and seeing what you're in for as I said thoughts and your three different approaches the first that sort of Islam causing terrorism good critique of that you also talked about scholars like Juergensmeier who see the problem in religion more generally and actually try to make the case that Christianity, Judaism, Hinduism all have these elements I wonder if you think those two should be combined similar with Jules Capel focusing on Salafism rather than Islam is that the same as saying Islam is causing it or are there certain strains we can focus on the second element the idea that you said the irrelevancy thesis here you talked about the idea that it's material factors driving violent extremism but also people arguing that Islam itself is a force for good I think both are valid but in the paper at least I got a lot of the sense of you engage more with the Islam as a force for good and why that might not always work and I like to hear more empirical evidence with the issues behind people like Pape and Bloom I think there are some issues with them that finally in the constructivist part I think that's great I've been called a constructivist one of the nicer things I've been called when I work on this issue so I like that and maybe we can expand that and engage a little bit more with some of the international relations work a lot of good work in my area on this with religion as a way to frame your struggle religion interacting with institutions someone like Ron Hasner has done great work on sacred spaces and how religious discourse can both make religion a conflict inevitable over these spaces but also allow for dialogue and might be a useful interlocutor so overall a very good attempt to sort of figure out how we can confront violent Islamic extremism without demonizing Islam or Muslims which is important Dr. Zuri this is also a really great paper really good overview of the tensions we had in the region between Arabia and Iran the history the scenarios were really interesting to think through and it's a good sort of perspective analysis what I'd ask for is maybe a little more formality in the theory this is more the paper than the presentation but you framed it as a realist argument talking in terms of power being most important but as we know realist that's not all there is to realism and others like constructivist we also think power matters so realists see material power being primarily important and then certain dynamics flowing from that like balancing dynamics and I think expanding that in the cases and then the scenarios could give you a little more analytical tools to move forward but one question I had here is if you really think that material power is what's driving it and you seem to and that's okay but if we're really going to go with a realist route the religious, the ideology elements don't matter at all and then we can take Saudi Arabia and Iran remove all of these cultural symbolic elements and we'll see the same exact outcome and that's a valid argument I don't agree personally but that's a valid argument people make that but if that's what you think maybe expand that the other issue with a realist take is that realists, at least academic realists don't think sub-state or non-state actors matter they're frustrating for someone like me who studies terrorism obviously they matter, you have good examples of Iran's connection to these non-state networks and so how would we reconcile that? Can we expand realism or maybe look elsewhere but overall it's this great idea in terms of the shifting polarity possibly affecting conflict in the Middle East and I think it's all there just kind of firming up some of the theory is great so overall two really interesting good papers and I appreciate the chance to comment on them Alright, so now we open the floor for your questions please we have two microphones go ahead Can you hear me okay? This question was mostly for Dr. Zora talking about the Saudi Iran deal so as you talked about kind of the widespread kind of talk of the US pulling out withdrawing, losing interest in the Middle East I'm curious to know your thoughts on if especially as a professor in the UA if the US kind of has to be hostile towards China's role in mediating this deal or if Middle East might be a place that the US and China could work together in the future over mediating and diplomatic efforts in the Middle East and maybe your take from a non-US setting about really what the US's role with China could be in the future in this region Thank you That is a great question so the US has a very big problem with China and I think that some of the countries in the Middle East don't appreciate the depth of our issues and a lot of our issues are revolving around China's compliance to norms that we have developed and theft of intellectual property things like Taiwan, the Uyghur issue so we fundamentally have a lot of trouble with China and we're colliding in places like the Middle East I think working with China is quite difficult and we've seen that play out in numerous contexts like 5G Network the UAE has a deal to get the five and that's been put on hold for now mainly due to issues with compliance and use of Chinese technology amongst other things so I think that we're sort of putting different countries in the Middle East in this position to pick one or the other and because of the complexity of the region I don't think they necessarily want to so it's forced them into this sort of hedging sort of strategy where they're not really picking one or the other but I think it's difficult for the US to work in that environment and cooperate with China because of the issues that we have in all these other areas. So you said that Saudi Arabia has been a hobby state and continues to be a Wahhabi state I'm under the view that Saudi Arabia has been cracking down on Wahhabism ever since the Ikhwan revolt and even now with Muhammad bin Salman's reforms with towards him arresting his family members and his liberal economic reforms currently. Diane did you talk about the Wahhabi ideology I didn't mention that did I I saw it on your page on the speaker panel you're right Saudis do not want to be called Wahhabis is a pejorative terminology in Saudi Arabia but one would say maybe the main problem is not Wahhabism it goes back further the Salafism and to make it more tangible for us is textual approach to Islam like you go to the Quran the Muslim Bible and you take stuff textually as it is and you apply it to today like for example a bit of some version of Christianity I'm not going to name the denominations is not my field right so that textualism is the basic problem either you call it Wahhabism Salafism Hambalism Hello my question is for all the panelists I couldn't help think throughout the whole presentation that we focus on theoretical aspects and very much an American perspective about this issue which makes sense we're in the United States but I feel like we lacked a little bit of advocacy about the humanitarian side of this issue when you're discussing peace in the Middle East so my question is how do we bring the voice of the people that actually live in the region the people that actually suffer from the consequences of the conflict and US China Russian influence there how do we bring their voices into this conversation and referring to what you said Muslim agency because this is a conversation about how to bring peace to the Middle East we need to bring their voices out because the issues in the area so external influences is not just focusing that does not solve the problem entirely so how would you say we bring those voices up say one sentence on it and then the deliberation and emancipation comes from texts excuse me you emancipate yourself from texts from power and text has a power so based on the assumption in my paper that if you believe in Muslim agency is a bit like Lutheranism and Calvinism in the European sense that they from the Bible they created new movement for the liberation of Europe I think this is important to acknowledge that Muslims can understand legitimately their scriptures and foundational texts in different ways and I'm not prescribing it is happening however for a variety of reasons they did not become the mainstream and the primary reason in my view is kind of a Caesar that is state formation in the region and also intervention external intervention had a part in it but I think as Diane said there is already a problem there to start with so you cannot put everything on the back of foreign intervention yep I agree completely thank you good afternoon thank you again for presenting your research and bindings this question is mainly directed to Mr. Disboni and I apologize for I messed up your name at all however I found your work to be especially limiting given we fail and many people fail to account that language and how we utilize it does have an implication in terms of policy outcomes how we approach any problems I wanted to ask given as we see in your presentation some of the prices that we pay in terms of how we approach policy as a result of how we approach policy where does the ball start in terms of addressing and I won't say simplifying but at least reaching a point of understanding where we utilize language in a way that we can more better address issues is this a fundamental thing with education is this a fundamental thing in terms of youth and culture is this the thing where it starts with the media or perhaps the government in your opinion with the ball start populism within the region or elsewhere look at for example Brazilian president how he or the left one is not only right problem the left two is the simplification of a complex topic is what sells right so that's what people the branding is important in the international politics everywhere so I think that's part of the problem and politicians kind of lost the leadership quality and they became rather what Plato was afraid of the follower of the people rather than interacting with people and leading them and also being led by them you know what I mean so populism I see it as a big problem thank you so much sir part of the Islamophobia is come forward please part of the Islamophobia is the policy agenda and part of the anti-Westernism and anti-Americanism is a policy agenda issue too as Said said this morning good afternoon Dr. Zori this question is for you during the course of your presentation you covered the history of the Shah's regime how it came to power with the 1953 coup d'etat and then you jumped to how it was deposed in the 79 revolution which put in the Islamic Republic we have today you touched on the repressiveness that the Islamic Republic sees but you didn't really cover on the Shah regime's repressiveness and corruption you sort of left that out it seemed like I don't know if you covered that in your paper and you had to cut it out due to your presentation but would it be unfair to say the Islamic Republic is due to the US backing another repressive foreign back regime so let me see if I understand this right the repressiveness of the Islamic Republic is due to the US backing the Shah's repressiveness like is it sort of like a radical reaction to that um maybe I don't think the two are correlated I think that I think the intention in the beginning was to not be repressive but in order to maintain control it's become increasingly repressive over time so I don't think that the two are necessarily correlated but there's probably scholars out there who would beg to differ okay thank you alright one more question please my name is I'm an international student from Afghanistan here at Norwich first of all I think I would like to point out the fact that this peace and war summit the question the way it kind of sets up the mood for disappointment it's like peace in the Middle East an impossible mission so that kind of it's just already okay let's not have any hope for that part of the world so I would like to point that out and my question is for you ma'am at some point in your presentation you said that the United States possibly like they did not start some of the issues in that part of the world I honestly think in some cases probably they were insinuators as someone who has read one of the work of journalism by Wesley Morgan the hardest place and it's a work of journalism that focuses specifically on the military aspect of how it first functioned in a specific mission in a specific part of Afghanistan and how some of the failures of people who went there and came with different agendas and then there was no follow up for the second person who came in command so those are some very much realistic approaches and some of the realistic evidences that we have there in that book mentioned and as the United States you in the earlier in your presentation you mentioned that it actually is the reason for worlds and some parts of the world it's the reason for the security and the reason United States is the superpower it's not because only because it has resources but it's also a power of times that it can influence other regions and other regions prefer or either agree to be influenced by the United States so it's a bridge on both sides so do you believe that even though in your the way you ended your presentation it was like okay should we basically stop any kind of relationship with them and you didn't answer it but at the same time should United States first of all reflect on some of the responsibilities that they have now after everything that has happened specifically in my country right now the rhetoric for the United States military when they went into Afghanistan one of the very strong points was women's education and they kept going on about it but right now women in Afghanistan they don't have the right for going to school or university or work and United States as you may know they completely ignore the matter so what is your stand on how United States should move forward and actually maybe reflect on some of the responsibilities that they have because as much as United States doesn't want to deal with it I think in some cases they should I know it was a lot but thank you so much for your time thank you so when I say we didn't start the fire I don't mean the United States didn't start the fire I meant we as in like this room we this generation or the next generation so you inherit the fire that started by your father or your grandfather or people before you that you didn't even know just by function of being American you're going to inherit something that maybe you don't know a whole lot about but somebody else from another place knows a lot about so I think as the U.S. moves forward you know it's a big world and it's obviously complicated in our country who's making these decisions how do we set our foreign policy how do we reflect on what's happened in the past you know I would say this room is the future of the United States just right here there's probably people that are going to be in this sort of decision making capacity in the future where they're reflecting upon the past and how do we respond responsibly but you do inherit the mistakes of the people before you and sometimes they don't seem like mistakes at the time maybe it takes 20 years to realize that was not a good foreign policy decision so how do we move forward I would say things like this you know education and talking about the issues and coming forward and having people from places like Afghanistan give us their perspectives so we can make better informed decisions in the future and on that note let us conclude this session and please join me in thanking our panel members today for interesting presentations we are going to have a short break now and resume in about five to seven minutes thank you so yeah would you prefer that I introduce all four people to start or do each one as they're about to speak because I can do it either way yeah I think just up to you yeah but in Middle East an impossible problem I think that that title was already criticized but we're going to keep it for a little while we have three panelists today they're all going to speak for 15 minutes each we also have one discussant after they are done I'm going to introduce them individually our first panelist is Mr. Dan Suriak Mr. Suriak has written extensively on international trade and finance innovation and industrial policy and economic development with particular focus on the digital transformation and the economic and technological roots of great power conflicts thank you very much and it's a great pleasure to be here I lived in Ottawa for the longest time and this Montpellier Montpellier as you say is only four hours away and I don't know how come I never visited but I'm very very pleased to be here for this conference and as was mentioned I had a long career with the Government of Canada as a trade economist and you wonder what is a trade economist doing at a conference on international relations and so I shall do start with a bow to that this point by paraphrasing Klausowitz and saying that war seems through an economic lens is an extension of economic rivalry and that then tees up nicely the topic that I've been tasked with discussing which is the implications of U.S. China economic rivalry for peace in the Middle East so just very very briefly China and the United States are in opposite sides of the world and from an economic point of view they are neither natural enemies nor natural partners and for most of the U.S. history it was really a minor part of the picture for the United States modern history starts with Deng Xiaoping's visit to the United States to Washington in 1979 which then sets up China's opening up and China then launches into its era of industrialization when it opened up to the world the nascent industrial structure that China had was basically became defunct it was not operational and not effective for the integrated global system of training production so it was industrializing de novo at the same time and for completely different reasons the United States was entering the new era it was on its heels to some extent because of the challenge from Japan the red sun rising era and it was doubling down on innovation as its strength so this was the Beidou Act of 1980 passed by the Carter administration and then fortuitously IBM released its personal computer in 1981 and 1982 there was computer aided design CAD CAM software was released for the personal computer putting powerful industrial design tools on every desk in America's universities with the impetus given to the universities to commercialize their their knowledge development through the Beidou Act and in retrospect as we look back this launched the United States onto a magnificent run they disposed of the you disposed of the Japanese challenge like that defeated the Soviet Union in the Cold War saw a magnificent technological rise that made the Nasdaq household name rising to the unipolar moment you enrolled your former rivals the Soviet Union in China into the system that you had created which is the WTO led rules-based order and you were there on top of the world in this period what was happening America's patenting was soaring and you were developing a knowledge-based economy and you were naturally placed to profit or to capitalize on this economy because of the system of universities which you had across the country and this was a broad spread prosperity for the United States it did shift prosperity from the industrial centers like Cleveland and other places to the university towns so there was an internal strike but America rode that moment and China of course had 30 years of developing its industrial skills so both economies benefited immensely from this essentially symbiotic relationship and there was no conflict in the final year of his administration George Bush delivers State of the Union address he mentions China only once in the same breath with India as a large emerging market that's going to be important for it to deal with issues like climate change so then what happens and there are other issues which I think my fellow panelists will comment on but we then have the Obama pivot to Asia and that pivot to Asia takes two specific forms one is the launch of the Trans-Pacific Partnership which was explicitly couched as a contest between who is going to write the rules of the road in the Asia Pacific, China or the United States the second component was the Air Sea Battle Doctrine which is basically formulated and you guys know much better than this but it was formulated to counter the fact that China was developing a modern navy at great speed so this now China and the United States are on a course from the enemy to at least frenemy now what's happening in the economy in the late 2000s there are several new technological developments which are going to launch a new kind of economy one of them was the development of neural nets by Jeffrey Hinton at the University of Toronto in 2006 one of them was the development or the application of GPUs to neural nets by Stanley Inge and his team at Stanford in 2009 and then the critical one was the release of the iPhone by Apple in 2007 the iPhone then launched the mobile age and the mobile age said enormous amounts of data flowing into the cloud neural nets drive off data and so the combination of these three developments enabled a new kind of economy the data driven economy and it also opened up a whole new kind of sphere of social media while Facebook had been around since 2004 many of the major social media companies were formed in 2010 coming out of the great financial crisis and where data is the new oil for the economy for society and politics it's being called the new plutonium it's very destructive very damaging so just kind of hold that thought in mind so now we're moving into this new economy at the same time as the US is now trying to exploit its new technological developments and it is doing so with companies like Google and Facebook dominating the globe operating at a global level I mean at one point Facebook had more clients than the populations of the United States China and the European Union put together that's the scale of these companies so as the United States is exploiting its first move advantage China is actually moving into the knowledge-based economy 30 years behind the United States but it is starting its patent activity it's training legions of patent examiners it establishes new specific intellectual property courts and it starts litigating internally ferociously it's learning the patent game and one factor that was driving this was the fact that one of the first things Obama did was to actually lodge a section 301 investigation of China two massive reports were released which showed that if China observed the same IP laws as the United States it would mean a very significant benefit to the United States I've written on this and I've put figures of $500 to $900 billion for the value of US IP we're talking serious money so China is adapting and is now moving into the knowledge-based economy and doing so very very successfully but as I said in the 30 year gap it's international economic receipts even in 2021 are a fraction of what the US has about 6 billion the US has got about 128 billion to give you a sense of the gap but it has moved into the game and in 2021 China passed the United States as the largest buyer of technology okay so people talk about China stealing they were actually buying the technology in great amounts that's what's happening in the KBE or the knowledge-based economy at the same time China is also moving into the data-driven economy it had been perfecting its system of censorship and whatnot for the internet behind the Golden Shield project the so-called Great Firewall and it was developing companies behind that firewall that would then become giants paralleling the Microsofts and the the Googles and the Facebooks in China Alibaba and Tencent for example and because of again a curious coincidence that there was a strife between the Uyghurs and Han Chinese they shut down Facebook and Google in China to control the information flow and very shortly thereafter they basically booted Google out of China completely so they then developed their entire ecosystem of data-driven firms behind the Great Firewall and they were in direct competition now with the United States to capture the value of this economy by 2018 the combination of China's technological sort of developments had allowed Huawei to steal a march on the other companies working in 5G China was now the world leader in 5G technology that was the Sputnik moment for the United States and that's when the United States went into overdrive in the technological war to slow down China and actually to catch up in 5G so that meant that China was now moving from to now actually a significant technological rivalry there are a lot of other things that happened around that time under the Trump Administration that made absolutely no sense to trade economists certainly the trade war that was launched on China with tariffs was damaging to the United States and did not damage China in particular it was just bad for the world and then there was the the atmospherics with the China virus the China Steals, China Cheats they simply put the two countries into a rhetorical contest that spiraled down so that's what's happening with China and the US in the industrial sphere they're cooperative in the knowledge-based sphere China is joining the US in the data sphere China and the US arrivals what does this mean for the Middle East so we go to the Middle East and we talk about again the strife comes out of the economics of the situation in the 1970s as has already been mentioned there were two major oil price shocks the US was a net importer of oil and it moved into the Middle East to a secure supply oil drove the United States into the Middle East China was not there at hearty at all through the entire period of the last two centuries with the possible exception I don't know too much about this in the Mao years of exporting ideology you guys know that better than I do but basically China was not in the Middle East the US went in big time and in competition with the Soviet Union to ensure that it could control its supply of oil and not be held hostage as it was during the oil price shocks so now we fast forward to the current period the United States is no longer a net importer it is a net exporter of oil and gas the fracking revolution had meant that its reserves on both accounts are at all-time highs it is no longer dependent on Middle East oil in that same fashion China is now dependent upon Middle East oil and of course it's also got Russia which is being blocked from the European market so China has actually got lots of oil to deal with and the Americans have got their own so oil has ceased to be a major issue for the United States in the Middle East and the logic says China will lose interest in the Middle East for that reason not entirely and not immediately but certainly it will be in a phase of withdrawal meanwhile the US containment of China which was extraordinarily beneficial for China just to give you a figure to carry around in your mind China became a 75 million 75 trillion net worth economy under containment from the United States its foreign policy elites might have hated it but it was the best thing possible China could not do anything stupid on the international stage because of that containment which is very very effective now China however wanted to break out from that and its method of breaking out was the Belt and Road Initiative and that took it to places where it could go it could not go into the United States it had trouble in western Europe which was allied with the United States but it could get into eastern Europe it certainly got into the Middle East and got into Africa so the Chinese breakout strategy brought it to the Middle East in what fashion building infrastructure which then used up its excess capacity that it had developed to build its own cities and its own infrastructure in the 2000s and to spend some of the money that they had accumulated in foreign exchange reserves and so China is moving into the Middle East in what fashion it's partly about oil but it's largely now about industrializing the Middle East what does the Middle East want as ambassador said this morning they're trying to diversify away from oil as much as they can they're looking to develop green energy sources Saudi Arabia is looking to build green energy they would probably love to export hydrogen to Europe probably electricity and they've got lots and lots of sun power and who provides the solar panels China there's a natural partnership there which is on that score a very hopeful point for the Middle East the Middle East suffered from the natural resource curse which basically says if you've got a natural resource that people fight over that will lead to internal strife and divisiveness and external interference that's exactly what happened the natural resource curse is lifted in the twilight of the oil age the Middle East may be left to its own devices to sort out the various political problems that we've heard about so much and to close up the major fighting point of the modern economy data the Middle East doesn't have it's a small population economy only the Gulf States and Israel are actually in that game so no one's going to go fight over its data so I'm hopeful on both scores and I will wrap this up by basically saying that in terms of the hegemon games maybe the Middle East has seen its fill I don't think that there will be a PAC Seneca per se and if it does it will come with some unsavory elements but basically the industrial economy is a cooperative one it's not one that's divisive so I'll leave it there Thank you Mr. Sariak please try to jot them down and hold on to them so at the conclusion of all of our presenters you'll have an opportunity to come down to the microphones and ask any questions that you have our next presenter is Dr. Richard Morris an associate professor in the Russian Maritime Studies Institute at the U.S. Naval War Colleges Center for Naval Warfare Studies his current research projects focus on the maritime dimension of Russia's Syria intervention which specializes in U.S.-Soviet relationships during the Cold War First, thank you to Yang Mo for inviting me and organizing a wonderful wonderful conference it's a tough act following Dan Sariak over there but you did provide a good introduction with the Belt and Road Initiative with what China has been doing in the Middle East specifically since 2013 but if you take a if you wind the clock back to 2004 Analyst at Booz Allen Hamilton working for the Defense Department did a study on global energy futures and they saw what China was doing even before they announced the Belt and Road Initiative and they called it something called a string of pearls that they believe that China was establishing ports and facilities primarily for economic purposes but also to make enrads that could then be used for naval bases logistics support facilities and intelligence collection facilities as well so we've seen some elements of that develop in different places across the Indian Ocean and whatnot for China but looking forward after 2015 Russia as a result of its intervention in the Syrian Civil War has pursued a similar strategy and they've actually been somewhat more overt trying to set up what they call material logistics points or logistics centers the only one they have right now is in Syria it's important to kind of contextualize this Syrian ties with Russia deep back decades and the wake of the Second World War the Soviet Union, Russia's forebear helped the Syrians establish their military after they broke away from being a French protectorate they've had relations with the Assad family Hafez al-Assad the father of the current autocrat Bashar al-Assad they had close ties with him in the 1960's and 1970's and actually started their presence there ties expanded especially after Egypt kicked the Soviet Union out of its bases on the Red Sea and it was kind of a heyday in the 1980's US-Russian relations or US-Soviet relations in this time period so 1991 changed everything with the dissolution of the Soviet Union Syria kind of went on the back burner and the Soviet Union which had material logistics points or PMTOs not just in Syria and having had them in Egypt but they actually had them on the Red Sea and what was then Ethiopia they also had them in Comron Bay from 1979 to 2002 these support facilities they went by the wayside the Comron Bay facility like I said closed in 2002 the Syrian facility stayed open but there was very little activity that was going on after the dissolution of the Soviet Union until really the Syrian Civil War started after a group of teenagers wrote anti-regime graffiti on the wall of their school in Dara a city in southern Syria and they were arrested and then unwisely the police tortured them and then released them so it got kind of widespread notice at the time and resulted in nationwide protests and the Assad regime clamped down in that period Russia actually was kind of keeping everything at arms length Russia was very clear that it was going to continue to honor contracts for weapons deliveries it was the primary supplier of weapons to Syria and it wasn't going to get more involved in that so that's what another few years the Syrian conflict has gotten very bad by 2013 for the Assad regime the regime had lost most of control of most of its territories to different groups Syrian Democratic forces also the rise of ISIS which we talked about in earlier panels they come streaming across the desert in 2013 and 2014 to take large parts of Syria and Iraq so the Assad regime is kind of on the ropes and starts to use chemical weapons and the Obama administration draws a red line which it then kind of ignores as the Syrians continue to use and expand their use of chemical weapons until an attack in 2013 in Damascus in the eastern suburbs of the city which anywhere from we don't know the exact numbers but anywhere from 500 to several thousand people died in the attacks on the Assad regime used nerve agent so the Obama administration comes out and says it's going to punish Assad and is poised to strike and in comes Vladimir Putin to various diplomatic channels with Secretary of State Kerry at the time to kind of save Assad in exchange for to avoid a US strike or Allied strike because the French and the British are kind of on board the British actually back down but the Assad regime sorry the Putin government made it a deal with the US to kind of avoid a US strike on Syria in exchange for Syria giving up its chemical weapons that's 2013 Russia tends to honor this agreement and the chemical weapons were removed there have been additional chemical weapons attacks in Syria and we saw US retaliatory strikes for this but they were nowhere near the scale of what happened in 2013 and they weren't with sophisticated nerve agents but Russia doesn't intervene for two years after this it's 2015 before they intervene and they intervene in 2015 because the Assad regime was kind of again on the ropes they gained back some areas but were still lacking control of one of the most populous cities the oldest continuously inhabited place Aleppo and northern Syria and the story is that the Iranians actually approached the Russians to try to have the Syrians ask for Russian assistance in fighting this asking for intervention so Russia comes in kind of as a white knight and agrees that they're going to conduct a campaign against the armed groups that are illegal in Russia such as ISIS really just any Syrian opposition group and that is what they do you can judge the motivations in different ways ostensibly Russia went into Syria to fight terrorists and to support the legitimate what they view as the legitimate government of Bashar al-Assad reality is probably very different it was a place for them to test weapons it was a place for them to gain influence it was also a way for Russia to increase its foothold in the eastern Mediterranean within firing range of the Suez canal the northern entrance and exit and kind of reestablish what had been missing since Soviet times so the Russian Federation introduced a maritime doctrine in 2015 there was no mention of Syria there was no mention of material logistics points but as a result of what is viewed in Moscow is a successful intervention on behalf of the Assad regime the maritime doctrine was revised and expanded in 2292 in July and it is very explicit about maintaining that presence in Syria and eastern Mediterranean and not just that but actually expanding it trying to establish additional material logistics points in places like the Red Sea and the Indian Ocean Dahuk is no longer in Ethiopia it's now Eritrea but there's there have been press reports about Sergei Lavrov the Russian Foreign Minister visiting Eritrea to try to set it up there was an agreement that was actually signed and ratified by the Russian Duma or parliament with Sudan to establish a PMTO the Sudanese have actually not ratified it yet and the government right now and the military has said they approve of the document but it needs to be ratified by a civilian legislature which doesn't actually exist yet because of Sudanese problems internally but Russia does have its site on strategic locations the Red Sea, Horn of Africa also all the way across into the Indian Ocean South Asia, etc it's aspirational at this moment but it is indicative that the way that Russia views its intervention in Syria and its kind of role in trying to establish a multi-polar world system Vladimir Putin has been very explicit about trying to establish multi-polarity and saying that hegemony U.S. dominated world order is not appropriate for the world and has been kind of a champion of that but alas with Russia's disastrous war in Ukraine the means and the ability for Russia to actually expand these materialistic points is somewhat questionable and looking at traffic flows of military cargoes from the Black Sea the Syrian Express through the Mediterranean to the port of Tartus you see that there was a peak really in 2016-2017 and it has been kind of on the decline since then with the Turks closing the Turkish Straits last year as a result of Russia's attack on Ukraine there are no more visible military traffic shifts and it's primarily gone to it's primarily gone to commercial carriers which we saw that shift kind of began a few years ago when Russia started its intervention including timber carriers for Arctic timber carriers were used to transport military cargoes now again Russia has these aspirations the means are somewhat questionable but it does suggest that maybe there is a Russian string of pearls out of the Syrian Express thanks thank you Dr. Moss next and final presenter is Dr. Nicholas Roberts historian of the modern Islamic world he's an assistant professor of history at Norwich University and for the academic year of 2223 the inaugural W Nathaniel Howell post-doctoral fellow in Arabian Peninsula and Gulf studies at the University of Virginia so thank you to everyone for being here especially all my students in the room I fully expect each of you to be down here ready to roast me as soon as I finish and happy now ruse to everyone in the room celebrating I'm going to begin as historians often do with an anecdote a few months ago my landlord was at my house we were in a room where I keep all of my books he was looking through all of them and he said geez you must really like reading about the Middle East I shrugged and said you could say it's something of a pastime then he got very serious and he looked at me and he said you know they've been fighting each other over there forever you know they're Sunni and Shia over there he seemed puzzled when I responded wow how very European of them my landlord's comment was unsurprising I've heard it a thousand times his comment reveals a distinctly American ontology a structure of knowledge about the United States and the rest of the world and that comment no matter how seemingly benign is one small manifestation of empire throughout the United States in the 19th century the United States emerged as a new form of empire on the world stage many scholars have shown how intervening in the broader Middle East has become fundamental in implicit and explicit ways to everyday American life part of this includes a pernicious history of countless academic forums just like this one questioning whether peace will ever be possible in the Middle East so how that peace might be brought about with the United States as the analytical point of departure there are many reasons offered for why peace might be impossible they typically include the ostensible lack of a European style reformation age old religious feuds lack of separation of religion and politics, sectarianism, tribalism or inherent inclinations toward violence each of those is historically illiterate I'd be happy to bust all those myths in the discussion period but what the American reflex for debating peace in the Middle East usually fails to account for is that by all accounts the US government and military actions in the Middle East to include the actions of local rulers supported financed and armed by the United States have been the most significant causes of death and destruction in that region's post World War II history in my paper I argued or suggest really that the United States has manifest a particular form of power that allows it to attempt however successfully to act by means of absolving itself of its own history creating fortifying and sustaining that which it later tries to expunge historian Arif Derlich once said that to define as to name is to conquer I would take that a step further and suggest one way American Empire has manifest is not just by defining but by defining a present by means of eliding entire histories beginning with human beings we can begin by going back in time then to Baghdad Iraq in 1979 when Saddam Hussein seized power his seizure of power would have neither surprised nor worried American or allied officials in fact he had been an American asset already for decades recall that as Saddam seized power Iran was undergoing its own revolution itself the direct result of an American coup aimed at ridding Iran of its democracy Saddam immediately set about planning an invasion of Iran and American support for that war was neither tacit nor entirely covert in what is now known as the green light memo then Secretary of State Alexander Haig in 1980 to US President Ronald Reagan that the year prior President Carter gave the Iraqis a green light to launch the war against Iran the Iran-Iraq war came at an astonishing human cost there were millions of casualties especially from Saddam's almost daily use of chemical and biological weapons the US was aware of the use of those weapons but it was also aware of more in November 1983 the State Department admitted that the Iraqi government had purchased the infrastructure for their chemical weapons program primarily from western firms including possibly a US foreign subsidiary the full scale of American support for Saddam's war in Iran came to light in the 1990s including several court cases which are now mostly declassified and public in 1994 investigation by the US Senate revealed dozens of biological agents shipped to Iraq including anthrax and insecticides with the crop spraying helicopters for dispensing those insecticides in December 1988 for one example Dow chemical sold one and a half million dollars worth of pesticides to Iraq a US export import bank official reported in a memorandum that he could find quote no reason to stop the sale at the center of American policy was Donald Rumsfeld after several meetings with the Iraqis the United States was buying Iraq with more weapons more technologies and more money but also publicly condemned Iraq and Saddam for the use of chemical weapons that was a public statement that surprised the Iraqis the Iraqis were so caught off guard by the public condemnation because the weapons they were using had come from the Americans and their western allies to be sure Saddam's blunders in the war devastated his country a situation that made far worse when he invaded Kuwait in 1990 in that war the American military trounced Saddam's forces international sanctions squeezed the life out of Iraq no fly zones monitored the country and thousands of international weapons inspectors confirmed that though Saddam wanted his neighbors to believe he was still powerful there were no more weapons programs and barely even a military at all the Iraqi people could live nothing but the most meager in September 1995 the United Nations World Food Program announced that more than 4 million Iraqi civilians a fifth of Iraq's population was dying of malnutrition because of the sanctions that number included 2.5 million children and 600,000 pregnant or nursing mothers the report warned in a hauntingly prescient statement quote 70% of the population has little or no access to food the official fabric of the nation is disintegrating people have exhausted their ability to cope beginning almost immediately after 9-11 the Bush administration began planning a war with Iraq the US military's most senior commanders were caught off guard some voiced their opposition to the detriment of their careers according to the eminent journalist Mark Perry in November 2001 after a White House meeting President Bush pulled aside Donald Rumsfeld once again at the helm of American policy and ordered him to begin preparing war plans for an invasion of Iraq to get Tommy Franks looking at what it would take to protect America by removing Saddam Hussein as Perry described Rumsfeld sent orders to General Franks at his SENTCOM headquarters where Air Force then Major General Victor Renuart received them and their responses to those orders are on the slide in front of you nevertheless, and despite these objections the war played on upwards of half a million Iraqi civilians died from direct US military actions in Iraq the war took an already devastated Iraq and buried it the paradox of the war was not just a scholarly abstraction and I will add here that it's something the United States Army concluded in its official two-volume self-study of the war in Iraq Operation Iraqi freedom was begun by means of shock and awe one American official in Baghdad described the strategy as such quote, the only way we can win is to go unconventional terrorism versus terrorism as we've got to scare the Iraqis into submission, he said most of Iraq's infrastructure was destroyed and as civilian deaths mounted in November 2003 Donald Rumsfeld's Secretary of Defense was asked if he had an idea how many civilians had died he responded, we don't do body counts on other people Rumsfeld's statement reveals a broader historical phenomenon of the United States in the Middle East in which it has sought to create a unidirectional narrative that elides the voices, the lives and the histories of the subjects of its empire it reveals the American imperial reflex of absolving itself of its own history divorced from the functions of the present it illuminates how the United States has the power to act as if the rest of the world its peoples and their histories are somehow separate from itself it is an imperial world in which the United States can act and can impose but cannot be held responsible I'll end here then on a part of this interconnected history that I'm certain will be unknown to most of those in the room we'll turn to Afghanistan in the idea of militant jihad Usama bin Laden graduated college in 1979 and went directly to Afghanistan he was part of a wide movement of Arabs going there to fight alongside the Afghanis in expelling the Soviets who had invaded that same year only two days after the invasion national security advisers Abigny of Brzezinski to President Carter he noted that Muslim countries would be concerned with the invasion noting also that it was something quote we might be in a position to exploit he continued to add we should concert with Islamic countries both in a propaganda campaign and in a covert action campaign to help the rebels the covert action campaign operation cyclone is now well known but the propaganda campaign has been recently being unearthed by 1987 the United States was annually sending through Pakistan 630 million dollars to the Mujahideen Arabs and Afghans fighting the Soviets this money was used to train, pay and arm nearly 20,000 Mujahideen fighters every year but as Brzezinski called for the US supplied them with more than guns and money in 1986 the US government teamed with the University of Nebraska to create the quote education program for Afghanistan this program created and printed millions of textbooks that were disseminated throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan from a headquarters they built in Peshawar these textbooks were for ages K through 12 they magnified an understanding of Jihad as a violent mandated individual and collective duty for fighting non-Muslims namely the Soviets with titles such as the alphabet of Jihad literacy these textbooks were part of an American strategy of indoctrinating young Muslims in the region to fight at any cost against the Soviets in a first grade language arts textbook for example the entry for the equivalent letter D taught del is for deen or religion our religion is Islam the Russians are the enemies of Islam it also taught zeal is for dome or oppression oppression is forbidden the Russians are oppressors we perform jihad against the oppressors in another textbook the entry for the equivalent letter K taught Kabul is the capital of our dear country no one can invade our country only Muslim Afghans can rule over our country another grade mathematics textbook taught the following problem the speed of a Kalashnikov bullet travels at 800 meters per second if a Russian is at a distance of 3200 meters from the Mujahid and the Mujahid aims at the Russians head calculate how many seconds it will take to strike the Russian in the forehead as recently as 2013 leading scholars purchased copies of these textbooks throughout Afghanistan and Pakistan in 2011 distinguished political scientist professor Dana Byrd purchased a copy of a first grade Pashto language textbook which taught that T was for topak or gun my uncle has a gun he does jihad with the gun M the textbook taught was for Mujahid or a person who does jihad Afghan Muslims are Mujahideen it teaches I do jihad together with them doing jihad against infidels this is our duty as professor Dana Byrd noted the only differences in the 2011 copies of the textbooks that she purchased and the originals from the 1980s were that the images on the cover showed allegiance to the Taliban and references to the Soviets had been replaced with references to the Americans in fact when the Taliban were created and came to power in 1996 they ruled that these textbooks would be used as their official curriculum so forums asking whether peace is possible in the Middle East can aptly use things like the atrocities of the Taliban the atrocities of Bashar al-Assad and the Syrians of a war Saddam's gassing of his own people as evidence for the importance of these forums yet they almost never reconciled the extent to which the United States has been tied up with creating and sustaining the very things it later tries to expunge that as history shows us is almost always the problem of any empire events at countless universities and think tanks just like this one have a pernicious history behind them they reflect a very long history of how the idea of the Middle East in the American imagination has been crafted to attain an ontological disposition divorced from America's own history a disposition rooted in violence fabricated narratives that largely elides American violence against others as Rumsfeld's statement and the recent statement of President Joe Biden reflect violence so this historical narrative goes and so Donald Rumsfeld and Joe Biden might readily agree only counts as violence when it's their violence not American violence Rumsfeld's statement that the United States does not count the deaths of others reflects the core of empire definition by elision the ability of the United States to debate whether peace is possible in the Middle East on terms that do not account for its own role since 2001 in the deaths of more than one million civilians and the displacement of millions more reflects a particular kind of American empire the power to define whose life matters to radically alter the lives of others and to disrupt the entire historical arcs of human communities by the means of absolving itself of its own history thank you thank you Dr. Roberts so our discussant up next to potentially synthesize some of the information or stimulate further conversation is Dr. Mokhtari he served as a professor of political science at the National Defense University's Near East South Asia Center for Strategic Studies in Washington DC and at Norwich University for nearly three decades his fields of expertise and interests include comparative government and politics international relations and diplomacy political economy and political philosophy thank you very much it is back it's nice to be back on campus I was on this campus teaching for about 20 years my office was in Ainsworth next building here for 20 years well let me start with three announcements very brief today is the first day of spring and at exactly five 23 and 28 seconds spring starts that also is the moment that the Iranian new year begins so happy new year to you the second announcement is that it is an Iranian tradition for a speaker to apologize to his audience for addressing a group more knowledgeable than he so on that note I apologize to you and finally I have been asked to discuss three papers in ten minutes each one of those papers has taken at least several weeks to prepare to devote three minutes to each is neither just nor proper I apologize to you guys for that now to discuss any issue of international relations there are really two ways to do it one is the time slice method you take a slice of time a period and you study it the second version of studying international relations or second method is a chain link a manner of studying which means you look at what you're interested and you try to see what has led to or influence that event in my personal view the second one is more likely to give you an accurate conclusion and the reason for it is very simple humans have a tendency to use their historical experiences to interpret things we create a lens through which we see things we interpret things and historical events affect that a country that has been mistreated by a neighbor even ten years or a hundred years later would have reservations dealing with that neighbor therefore that chain link speaking is really more gives you a better understanding of what it is you're trying to study now ignoring historical experiences really could be very costly and of course when I say that I also mean acknowledging what each nation has done in the past sanitizing the history really creates misunderstandings and mistrust therefore it is to advantage of all concerns to really study history and present history and acknowledge it as it really is now turning to the individual papers again I have to be very brief and deal with generalities the first paper China's economic rivalry Professor three reacts is a timely analysis and it is well done and it is strong on elegant theory my personal concern is that implementation is seldom as elegant as theory things get sort of messy when you implement policies theories etc for instance the economic theory that war is a continuation of economic rivalry does not really explain economic policies with the aim an intention of controlling another country's politics or political decisions the Chinese Belt and Road initiative which has been mentioned illustrates that one wonders if the Chinese initiative really is a political policy for political reasons or it is for something other than economics so that is a concern I have about economic theory I also everybody is talking about China as concerned about China but I also think that China might have its own prestroka moment before very long you remember how the Soviet Union for the part when I was a student the Soviet Union was increasing its GDP and so on at the rate of 6% United States 3% and people were projecting that this is before long they are going to surpass us well that didn't happen when I was in Washington I was talking to an old hand an old China hand who had spent years in China and studied China spoke Chinese several dialects of Chinese and I told him what do you think he just returned he said well China today resembles an elephant riding a bicycle down in a downward and juggling things and as it picks up speed it has to juggle more things it's handed more things to juggle so that is the image of China that he had and I think this is actually not far from being true so we should take things with a grain of salt when we look at China and project things year ahead the second paper by Professor Moss again I commend him for the systematic study of Russian naval supply capabilities to Syria and also the problems of logistics I would draw attention however to the general mood of Russia and Russians in 1976 I was invited to go to the Soviet Union remember that was the height of the Soviet Union Brezhnev was the fellow in charge I went there as a journalist and I saw the infrastructure of the country in Moscow was really in bad shape they had had a bumper crop that year and they didn't have storage for them so dump trucks would come and dump the grain on the highway and by the way when I say highway is two lane highway not four lane or six lane and therefore if you wanted to go from one place to another place you had to go zigzag on the highway to avoid piles of grain there were other problems and I would talk to them for such a great country these problems are and the response was but we are a superpower that image of being a superpower somehow compensated for everything else that was wrong now imagine the disintegration of Soviet Union imagine what that has done to their psychology they were very proud of being a superpower all of a sudden that has melted away and there is a psychological problem that I don't think we appreciate now Mr. President Putin is reacting to that great loss of prestige that great loss of all the things that made him proud of themselves without that he is looking for opportunities to reassert to regain that prestige now he has been successful in a number of measures he has taken but he has blundered into the most recent attempt of show of force in Ukraine but nevertheless we should pay attention to that psychological problem that they are dealing with the Russian foray into Syria and the Syrian conflict was a response to an opportunity and the opportunity was on the one hand the Arab Spring and on the other hand the assumption that the Assad regime would fall it would push it would fall apart that was the wrong assumption and that gave the Russians to in fact get involved there was an opening for them to assert the prestige and the power it is really very hard for them to come to grips with not being a superpower anymore now the paper clearly points out that the Russian naval lift capability is limited and it really cannot do very much beyond the Russian territory but Russia's weakness again I emphasize that very weakness of Russia is the reason that they are looking for opportunity any opportunity they can seize to deal with that psychological hurt that they feel the third paper by Professor Roberts on question of peace in the Middle East I must say it's a thoughtful and thought provoking analysis it brings to mind the very classic contrasting views of colonizers and colonies now the very term that we use very often without really thinking about it Middle East that illustrates this point Middle East compared to what you know after all we live on Earth is round if there is an east there must be a west there must be a center you know think about that center is London and that implies something that just should not be dismissed easily the imagining of the Middle Eastern as a backward violent unruly group of people who threaten the United States interests and they have to frankly they have to be whipped into shape and forced into stability is one of those misperceptions that has that colonial tint to it that of course ignores the reality that it was the west that cut and pasted the map of the Middle East and chopped up its historical socio-political communities and of course now we have to deal with that I give you an example much of the crisis in the Middle East in the past 40 years or so could be traced to the Iranian revolution very few people have paid attention to the crucial decision made at Doha this is in the OPEC conference in Doha in 1976 at which the Saudis were persuaded through the efforts of two gentlemen Mr. Rumsfeld Donald Rumsfeld and William Simon of the United States to pump up more oil than there was a need for it to reduce the price of oil and that resulted in basically forcing the Iranian government into bankruptcy now the intention was to clip the wings of the Shah of Iran because he was being too powerful the result was a revolution that didn't help the United States didn't help the oil prices didn't help anyone I was attending a track 2 conference some years ago in Jordan this was about 2 decades ago one of the people who was with me actually was my boss was Ambassador Roger Harrison Ambassador Harrison in fact had been ambassador to Jordan for a number of years now during one of the sessions of this track 2 conference there was a country the representative of a country who talked about history and so on during the break we came out Ambassador Harrison in jest took me to the side and he said I quote here the nations who insist on carrying the heavy burden of history on their backs paralyze themselves one of the secrets of US success is our short memory we forget and move on now he said this in jest but it so happens that almost in every one of these statements there is a grain of truth and the grain of truth here is in fact that some countries rely and depend and attach themselves to the history so much that changing becomes almost impossible because they lose their identity if they do that but we should take into account that some of these nations seem obsessed with their histories because that is all they have left now such attachments may be a source of pride aspiration and identity but it also colors that vision that lens that filter through which they interpret things and therefore knowing their history and their background and what we have done in dealing with them really is important to prevent misunderstandings mistrust and misperceptions thank you thank you Dr. Maktari now we have a few minutes for questions from the audience have a question you would like to ask to any of the presenters please come down to one of the mics in the front first served okay so what do you guys think about Turkey's main involvement in Syria and other areas and more specifically during the period when Trump removed forces from Rojava and Syria the Turkish intervened after the Russians intervened in Syria and they still control a large part of the North essentially because of their Turkish problem that they have with the various groups and being concerned at least that's the reason they put forward the attacks that originate from Kurdish groups so they haven't left though and there's questions about Assad there was talk of Assad meeting with Erdogan but Assad apparently refused as long as there were Turkish troops in Syrian territory so impasse for the foreseeable future until some mean changes in terms of controlling the Turkish straits I think that the Turks are being an honest custodian of the Montreux Convention of 1936 which is what regulates it they made the correct call a state of war does exist within the Black Sea regardless of what the Russians are calling it the special military operation it's another name for a war so they rightly closed down the Turkish straits but not just to Russian and Ukrainian military traffic but to all military traffic so as to try to I don't know tamp the level of violence try to prevent it from expanding so good on the Turks would it restrict Romanian like Romanian commercial trafficking there due to the closing the Romanians because they're a Perian state they their navy is not particularly large so they really just focus on the Black Sea they don't have the interest outside of that and say with Bulgaria the Russians are the the dominant force if you want to call it the naval force in the Black Sea although after their cruiser was sunk in April of last year they basically have been sidelined for the most part they're conducting precision strike against targets in Ukraine using something called the caliber cruise missile but other than that the Turks actually have the next largest naval force but it's divided between the Black Sea and the AGM thank you over to my left hello my name is Maddie I'm sophomore at Dartmouth College my question is mostly for Dr. Roberts and so in your presentation which was really fantastic and enlightening you talked a lot about how the U.S. has a very selective view of its past Dr. Makhtar you also mentioned this and saying that the U.S. has a short-term memory which is true and so something I came across in my own research is in past years several Middle Eastern leaders have referred to the U.S.'s own violent history and have absolved themselves of their own crimes and so I'm interested to know in your research in your opinion Dr. Roberts what you would say about how our recognition or our lack thereof of our own violent history in the United States from Native American removal to slavery and the legacy of that how that plays into current international affairs and just a little anecdote at Dartmouth we had a speaker a few weeks ago that came and said that essentially talking about slavery or teaching children about the 1619 project how that was kind of being disunified in international affairs so I'm curious to know how you would respond to that and what your take on how our domestic history plays into our international presence sorry that's a long winter thank you there Thank you Maddie for the great question and thank you to both Dartmouth students for being here thank you for asking that because it allows me the space to make a point that I want to make and I'm going to make that point by coming at you guys right now which is I love Notre Dame football I criticize the hell out of their coaching staff and all of their players I don't criticize Oklahoma football Michigan football, Texas football because I don't love Oklahoma or Texas or Michigan football I love Notre Dame football so I'm cognizant of the fact that we are at a military school there are active duty military officers in the room and I just criticize the US military on the one hand that's what makes us American on the other hand it raises a bigger point I think about humans and what we do with knowledge which is we criticize that which we love it's the only way to make something better so that's kind of a long way a long winded way of saying I think it's tremendously unfortunate how politicized scholarship is in the country right now like slavery is terrible this country was the last of the western democratic countries to abolish slavery and so on and so forth it's mind boggling to think how could that ever become something controversial to talk about in a scholarly setting that this country was a slave holding country I do think though that the thing about history is you really can't control it the sources are out there and people think for themselves I mean this is entirely my opinion but if I were to advise any of the politicians running on these things I would say you're never going to beat knowledge and the only way anything is ever improved is by talking about it and debating it so I think the more discussions we have whether we agree with them or not the better as a another historian history is full of contradictions the same people who wrote about freedom and liberty and are defining documents in the United States close to half of them were safe holders how do you reconcile this it's the contradictions that make history interesting but it's also an understanding of that that allows you as Nick was saying to figure out ways forward so as Professor Mosch just said you know one of the unfortunate things too is and I wanted to begin actually my remarks I didn't because of time with an apology to the students in the room and that every single one of you without exception has come of age in a time of this unprecedented polarity and superficial thinking where you are inundated with either X or Y and almost nothing in history is either X or Y I have a student who was a combat medic in both Iraq and Afghanistan he saved the lives of countless Iraqis and Afghanis he was in Syria as well that's true it's also true that the United States military did things that led to the deaths of civilians so nothing is ever X or Y good afternoon thank you for your wonderful presentation by the way this question is for all the presenters for Professor Mosch I found your work to be especially interesting given the naval focus which I have a personal interest in regarding the Russian string of pearls as it were and its relation to utilizing Syria as a means to reclaim lost logistical avenues economic infranchisement and of course a callback to perhaps a grandiose image of what Russia may have been how now is the conflict in Ukraine affecting this Russian string of pearls and will this concept perhaps be diminished by the fact of Russia's own internal destabilization economically socially our view frame it as well as in Syria for their benefactor as their benefacti actually that is a shift because of that perceived success I think that perceived success in Syria also led them to have overconfidence in Ukraine you see these these successes often lead to bad thinking down the line because you've learned the wrong lesson now the Russian ability to actually have more than a string of pearl and such a one-time artist but to actually expand it is highly questionable especially with Turkish straights closed but again they came out here with their a verified marker Vladimir Putin has come out and said that the demise of the Soviet Union was the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century that's a very loaded statement considering that the 20th century also got kind of in the role of the two and the Soviet Union is in five and perspective and it's again about prestige they might desire to kind of regain that glory the practical limitations on it and then just the resources that they have are highly, highly questionable one of the one of the military bloggers I follow a Russian guy named Alexander Shishkin the defense budget is not paid in public it's not just going to like bounce back and then the money's going to have to come from somewhere and the ships are very expensive to build Russia's going to have to reorient its priorities Thank you Hi, my name is Brian Connolly I'm a student in the strategic studies and analysis program here what got me into this program was my 18 year old self asking me why I'm standing in Marjah, Afghanistan as a marine fighting the very first battle there in a city that we built back in the 60s and I've been confused as to the spiral of events what strategic studies even is you mentioned Soviet invasion and I'm wondering decades predating that Afghanistan had a very bright future ahead of it we went there as I'm sure you know to build a dam to start the agro economy build a few cities for them what we thought was a benevolent civil augmentation for them that very quickly spiraled after coup into insurgency into the Taliban Soviet invasion etc how do we think of the world as young leaders when it seems sometimes two truths are true at once where often people think of us as trying to establish an empire and revolting violently when we think that we're helping and then we end up fighting there and dying again we seem to ripple over and over it's been confusing myself and my marines for years is there any kind of quick answer to that thank you for the question my answer would be to ask you to turn your question into a statement and hear what you think which we could do afterwards but one thing I'll say I just said you can't control knowledge one of the things I think we have seen come about from the 20 years of war is a tremendous amount of whatever you want to call it trauma, pressure, second guessing of our own service members you know being told that you're going to liberate a country and bring freedom to a country and then saying no no no it's shock and awe raises fundamental questions and our service members think for themselves and they've written about it since then and created movies and that paradox of mission was very apparent I'd say to the people who were there and they began to question Professor Mokhtari talked about the borders one of my very best friends was in Iraq and he was accompanying a patrol that was out and of course they saw it was a no go zone no one was supposed to be there and they saw a shepherd an old man with his sheep they stopped him they had a translator they said hey don't you know no one we have to arrest you we have to be here right now you're too close to the border it was with the border with Iran the shepherd responded through the translator why did you guys put the border between me and my sheep so these sorts of what the heck am I doing here were evident to the service members that's why I said in my presentation this is not a scholarly abstract I'm not making this stuff up but I'd love to talk with you more after sorry for my one more succinct question my question is primarily for Dr. Roberts but if anyone would like to also add to it you mentioned the importance of recognizing the role that America has played acknowledging both the good and the evil in Middle Eastern affairs and as it was mentioned before in panels there is a need for accountability because the United States cannot erase its role in the Middle East but everything is very theoretical and how do we give practical advice to those making those decisions in how to actually turn this accountability into actions and not merely saying yes we are responsible yeah the short answer is just read books Professor Michael Thunberg and I were just in DC we take students to DC every year where he does I just go along to help and all the government people we were talking to they said hey you know no we don't have time to read long things you guys got to learn how to you know take your stuff and put it into one paragraph well hey I'm the taxpayer I want you to read long things you know because when you don't we do things like Invady Rock so read books or Afghanistan so read books that's my answer thank you for the questions that concludes this session can we get another round of applause for our presenters there will be an intermission and the next session starts at four o'clock thank you for coming out if everybody will take their seats we'll get started here in a moment good afternoon I am Professor Steve Sodergren chair of the department of history and political science here at Norwich University and I will be overseeing the last panel discussion of the day our student panel here at the piece and more summit from its very inception a student panel has been part of the summit in order to allow students the opportunity to offer their views on the many significant themes and issues that come before us each year in the summit and this year is no different one point I wanted to make before I introduce our participants is that the student panel is not directly on point the papers you're about to hear may be tangentially connected to the summit theme of peace in the Middle East but students were invited to submit papers related in any way shape or form to the issue of international relations, foreign policy, military history, modern issues facing the world at large so what we have before us today is a rather variegated collection of papers touching upon certainly the Middle East but also Russia China the United States and all points in between my goal here is to really get out of the way of our students the students here are who we want to highlight and their work and I think you're going to find that the work before you today is some rather amazing stuff given that all the students sitting before you are undergraduates the format will be as follows I will introduce each of the students all at once now at the beginning and then we will go through with each student presenting quickly their presentation in about 10 minutes this is to save time for you the audience at the end to offer some Q&A and to maybe help these students students who are perhaps these are these projects perhaps works in progress who could use your assistance and your advice and your questions after each student presents we will turn to our discussants who will offer a few comments of their own having read all of the student papers and then we will open it up for Q&A but first of all I wanted to thank you as we close out the first day of Norwich's peace and war summit of 2023 thank you for attending thank you for those who are watching online and for those of you who are in person this is as effort as ever a significant event for Norwich every spring and we are glad that you chose to be part of it by participating but allow me to first introduce the students sitting before you we have two of Norwich's and we have two visitors from Dartmouth College here to offer their views on a variety of international affairs immediately starting to my left we have Sean Bassey who is a senior at Norwich University class of 23 majoring in political science and minoring in history and communications he is from Springfield Virginia and he is a pending member of Norwich's chapters of the National Society of Leadership Studies a pending member of the Political Science Honor Society, Pi Sigma Alpha and a pending member of the History Honor Society, Pi Alpha Theta he is also the 2021-22 Gary Lord paper award recipient he's a Norwich University scholar a participant in the 2021 EU Shuman Challenge and a Norwich Delegate to the 2022-2023 student conference on US Affairs at West Point his future career goals are to pursue a career in maritime security intelligence either as a Navy officer or as a civilian contractor to his office is August, to his left is August G. Guerrari who is an undergraduate majoring in political science at Norwich he is a member of the school's core cadets and Army ROTC program his academic interests have steered him towards analyzing modern conflicts and strategy through the lens of historical culture clashes and the dissonance between populist and elite sentiments when not at school he resides in media Pennsylvania with his family to his left is Maddie Shaw a second year student at Dartmouth College studying government, Russian and Middle Eastern studies her interests are in conflict resolution human rights and Eastern European and Middle Eastern affairs and she plans to pursue a career in diplomacy or intelligence at Dartmouth Madeline is a war and peace fellow and research assistant for Dartmouth's political violence field lab she also competes in Model UN and serves as undersecretary general for Dartmouth's Model UN conference helping to publish she helps publish and host podcasts for the World Outlook International Affairs Journal and she engages with the Polis Pre-Professional Government Society as a fellow she has previous experience interning with the UG Resettlement Agency and is thrilled to be working for the State Department's Near East Bureau this spring in her free time Maddie competes with Dartmouth's figure skating team, leads admissions tours and can often be found reading history novels at local cafes finally to her left is John V. Soty a junior at Dartmouth College studying government and economics she is currently doing research on rebel governance in Africa, Latin America and Asia her previous publication experience includes a paper she wrote for the Observer Research Foundation in India on the international response to the amendments to article 370 of the Indian Constitution pertaining to Jammu and Kashmir after graduation she plans to pursue a career in research in matters of foreign policy and security first of all please welcome all of our student panelists today we will now get to our presentations and we will begin from my left here with Sean Bassie give me one second so I can set up my phone for a timer first I would like to thank everyone for being here today and taking your time out of the day to hear our research particularly after months worth of effort today I'll be speaking on a paper I developed amidst the U.S. pullout in Afghanistan we all know what happened here so I will not belabor the tragedy of the two decade conflict I rather will highlight the implications I believe the U.S. and EU should have done at the time based upon my research conducted in the immediate aftermath of the fall as well as upon lessons to be taken for future crises this plan was created in the spring of 2022 with the world's tension on Afghanistan given the pullout however we failed to account for those Afghans who collaborated with the U.S.-led coalition during the two decade conflict and were left behind under Taliban rule the U.S.-led coalition proposed on the metaphorical evacuation railroad was an attempt to create a joint U.S. EU-led effort under unique political circumstances, will, and interest whose goal is to evacuate our faithful allies who face daily persecution by the new Taliban regime to accomplish this task my research determined five key factors required to facilitate this evacuation first our asylum system of asylum and visas needed to be retooled to prepare for mass aid second even with political will we should need a hosting country as a staging area to host individuals for screening and care third we would need to develop a means to engage with a regime which at the time could be decentralized and unwilling to cooperate and whose policy was to harm those who collaborated fourth we would need a third party to actively be in country to excretate individuals and ensure we facilitate the resettlement of evacuees these five factors would provide a mechanism to facilitate the scale needed to evacuate allies who otherwise would be persecuted by the Taliban first of the system of asylum and visas we already had pre-existing frameworks designed specifically for collaborators in the U.S. special immigrant visa and the EU with the common European asylum system these systems were never designed to take an influx of applicants who were at immediate risk in the area where services were not available for them to be processed with and it was a consequence of the deception during the coalition era the plan called for the retool of the system to increase the scale of processing through the relaxing of screening metrics off area processing and coordinated the fusel across both programs and joint efforts not unlike the past historical precedent of the UN orderly departure program with the fall of Saigon in South Vietnam second even with retooling we need temporary housing in areas where we could ensure proper treatment, safety and access to facilities where they can be processed for the U.S. special immigrant visa and the EU common European asylum system as a result of the unprecedented volume and political will in hosting thousands of individuals to accomplish this we would expand with collaborating governments who had existing refugee systems and frameworks such as Turkey to temporarily house individuals alongside U.S. and EU efforts we would engage these countries with preferential treatment of pre-existing financial assistance programs and packages during the duration of the crisis in order to ensure the participation third we must keep open we must open and keep open the door into Afghanistan through engagement with the Taliban regime their participation cooperation would be necessary to schedule flights out of Kabul as well as to ensure the safety of individuals being attracted through this program it is important to remember at the time that this was a new regime seeking international recognition by foreign powers financial assistance and foreign aid for the economy relaxing of sanctions and the release of frozen economic reserves held by the U.S. and EU upon the fall of the Afghan republican government this plan called for a hard power approach and engaging with the Taliban offering small releases of frozen economic reserves between the U.S. and EU in exchange for their cooperation leading to the confirmed extraction for these allies fourth provide all other tenants of the plan were accomplished how do we physically extract individuals from a country whose policy is to limit international interference the means to accomplish this in application would come from the engagement and utilization of pre-existing NGOs would operate during and after the fall of Afghanistan these NGOs will be legitimized and facilitating on-ground evacuation ensuring compliance with the Taliban as representatives under this framework and finding and escorting individuals to be evacuated finally fifth once we evacuate our allies what next to address the fifth issue and resettlement the plan called for financial assistance towards the expansion of pre-existing national state and NGO efforts to facilitate the evacuees transfer and resettlement in both the U.S. and EU much like those who were able to stay Kabul in the fall of 2021 and those who have had at that point resettled obviously the circumstances and factors were created in the immediate fall of Afghanistan in the spring of 2022 and unfortunately much has changed since then and as part of this paper the features of an early crisis and that of opportunities have long since passed the Taliban are getting goals have shifted they have sought alternative means for recognition through foreign power competition they remain comfortable with non-engagement with the West and as a result this framework is not as applicable as before some of the framework has been implemented but not to the scale which can address the totality of the crisis but the beauty of knowledge and history is that even when it's direct application is not possible the information gathered can always remain applicable for future crises in creating a policy across international boundaries and national bureaucracies there are four lessons which can be gleaned from this incident leading this crisis with criticism one, have an exit strategy as the future business government and military leaders we must remember to have a strategy for exit in any scenario which we must intervene influence and enter into hostilities at the beginning of the century as many panelists have pointed out during this symposium if you will we entered we find evidence of a political thinking of a short war and a quick transition to democracy and stability the outcome of two decades of conflict have not only disproved this mass calculation but the severity of its downfall was a result of a lacking of strategy of exfiltration oversight over features of moral and responsible planning in the case of my research and policy proposal well in advance before we decided to exit Afghanistan we should have considered how we should facilitate both the evacuation of our personnel but that of faithful allies and supporters during a time there in orderly fashion we should have considered in the instance of my policy proposal that the U.S. Special Immigrant Visa was designed in an era where the U.S. remains stable in Afghanistan or at least relatively stable and where the process by which the visa operates is not designed for a scenario of a quick pullout two, we must consider populations at risk or affected when considering to pull out we left upwards of 100 to 300,000 individuals according to the Association of War-Time Allies, NGO in conjunction with the Department of Defense who had assisted the coalition during the two-decade conflict our evacuation was to the extent of trying to exfiltrate as many military personnel and equipment as well as what individuals who were conveniently in the vicinity of Kabul Airport rather than all of our supporters, allies and key individuals who were at their own peril decided to assist our efforts the cost of leaving these individuals behind are more than we can imagine with future conflicts whether in Afghanistan or abroad future allies will ask whether the U.S. and coalition leaving behind those who supported them, if it will happen to them thus in the second lesson, creating policy think through the problem in its entirety of all populations at stake or at risk of the cost of our actions third, joint efforts move mountains this policy proposal has utilized separate frameworks that exist across the European Union and the United States in the form of foreign humanitarian aid frozen economic assets international recognition and engagement with the Taliban regime through more neutral European states the impotence of this research with the result of a policy challenge to blend the European Union and unites its efforts into a cohesive and effective system combining the massive finances and the political will of the western world with these combined resources both hard and soft power at hand even engaging with the Taliban isn't too unimaginable and finally, fourth the fourth lesson is that the policy is not just governmental it's non-governmental by research found that the bulk of the efforts after the fall of 2021 came from non-governmental organizations in the evacuation, negotiation and resettlement of refugees and collaborators both during the fall and after only limited by the lack of resources these individuals managed to resettle tens of thousands of individuals across the U.S. and EU enabling more change and effect that one would otherwise assume a government would accomplish rather than advocating policy from position of using purely government a simpler, cheaper and equally effective mechanism is to combine both government and non-government organizations to pick up the slack of the inabilities of the other in this example, how can we physically find escort and evacuate individuals whose regime which they oversee or oversees them refuses to allow international governments to operate within its boundaries the answer was to use NGO and solve the research problem the resource problem many NGOs face through lack of government support and back in conclusion, this work was based upon the symptoms of an early crisis of utilizing joint frameworks of government and non-government government to facilitate a evacuation of at risk peoples since the time of its inception the environment and thus symptoms of the crisis have changed yet there are lessons to be learned have an exit strategy consider the populations who are affected are at risk use joint efforts to move mountains and policy is not just governmental, it's non-governmental as a student of history and political science the lessons of the class can shape the present and the future of the world I can only hope that my research is just one study towards preventing or leaving future crisis disease so that we may not see these incidents again thank you good afternoon, thank you all for coming and thank you especially to Professor Koo without him this paper would not exist I had the opportunity to take his nuclear deterrence and disarmament class last semester and this is an expansion on the final paper that I wrote for that class if you get the chance I highly suggest you take the class so my paper covers the perceived strategic nightmare the US is undergoing with the attempted nuclear proliferation by China Iran and North Korea in my paper I identify North Korea as the most likely of the three to utilize nuclear weapons offensively but I make the case that peace with all three nations is possible I reject the notion that any of these nations present a true nuclear threat to the US my paper is split into eight sections the introduction where I lay out historical context, current nuclear powers and touch on why these three nations want to proliferate next I cover the relative stability of the Iranian regime in spite of increasing social turmoil and provide more context about why the theocratic government is so opposed to the US I move on to discussing a hardliner opposition to the Iran nuclear deal as hardliners on both sides present an obstacle to peace I then make the argument for a new nuclear deal based on evidence of Iran's compliance and signals from their own government next I discuss how Xi Jinping is not the crazy unpredictable totalitarian US politicians hope he is and how there is rationality in the Chinese Communist Party's nationalism North Korea follows with a discussion on their strained history with China and how they do not have the luxury of allies other rogue states do I end with a discussion on what a future peace with North Korea could look like and then discuss current events in my conclusion the Cold War arms race between the US and the Soviet Union has culminated in today's situation with nine nations confirmed to possess nuclear weapons the deterrence gained by nuclear weapons has caused additional states to pursue proliferation especially Libya and Iraq in the past and Iran and North Korea today the US and its allies deposed Moe Margadofi and Saddam Hussein to prevent Libya and Iraq from proliferating leading to extreme instability in those nations Islamic militants gained a foothold in Libya a large refugee crisis began leading to a culture clash in Europe and Libya is still embroiled in a civil war in Iraq ISIS was formed out of the persecution of the Sunni minority following the Shia takeover which we instigated and Iran stepped in to back the Shia majority knowing what happened to these nations when they surrendered nuclear weapons and ceased their programs Iran and North Korea have no reason to follow suit they would lose a key deterrence measure and become a target for US backed regime change with the rising face with the rising threat in China US foreign policy makers are experiencing a strategic nightmare this flies in the face of the doctrine of neutral assured destruction which is what the cold war was defined by Iran, China and North Korea do not present nuclear threats on their own we suffer from a plague of governments whose immediate reactions to foreign policy issues are to threaten violence and stoke fears in their populations to justify their oppressive actions in the name of security jingoism from all governments creates crises the theocratic government of Iran has survived a string of pro-western resistance over the past few years the Ayatollah Orients himself has the only legitimate anti-western force in the country thus delegitimizing all opposition in the eyes of many of the Iranian people religious clerics in Iran also back the government our posture toward Iran today has been largely dictated by Israel and pro-Israel politicians they view Iran as Israel's greatest military threat which is justified as they have threatened to wipe Israel off the map and they continue to fund anti-Israel forces throughout the Middle East as Dr. Zori covered earlier our history with Iran inclines us to oppose them anyway we backed the 1953 coup d'etat which overthrew a nationalist government and reinstated Mohammed Reza Pallavi as the Shah his regime was repressive and plagued with corruption he turned Iran into a renter state on oil revenues for national income the revolution of 1979 followed and the country shifted to an Islamic Republic the hostage crisis led to the complete severance of American-Iranian relations until the joint comprehensive plan of action which you might know better as the Iran nuclear deal was passed in 2015 despite Republican opposition to Iranian proliferation as as Waltz argues but unfortunately you can't see the color of the text and a nuclear Iran would probably be the best possible result the one most likely to restore stability in the Middle East the possession of nuclear weapons would prop up any security weaknesses they have and would cause them to behave more prudently hardline our opposition to the Iran nuclear deal in America opposition was based on perceived appeasement and unverified rumors the deal included the sunset clause which would end restrictions on Iran by 2031 the rumors of non-compliance were unfounded with the international atomic energy agency and other international inspectors verifying Iran in compliance with the deal they dismantled thousands of centrifuges used to enrich uranium they kept under the allowed amount of enriched uranium and they welcomed increased surveillance by agency inspectors despite this verified compliance by the international community President Trump withdrew the US from the deal in 2018 at which point Iran returned to their pre-deal activities Iranian opponents to the deal raised concerns over the loss of sovereignty due to the presence of international inspectors as well as the desire to grow an arsenal unrestricted by the West despite this I propose a new nuclear deal with Iran the international community verified that the Iran nuclear deal worked it proved that moderates in both nations could overcome radicals and push for peace if the US wants to pursue a new deal they have three options one they could re-institute the original joint comprehensive plan which would be difficult now as Iran has grown well past the original restrictions in place and they develop advanced centrifuge models secondly we could utilize the framework of the Iran nuclear deal but reduce the limitations of the deal as a compromise with Tehran a compromise would make it easier to observe commitments of the deal and signal to the current president our willingness to come to the table the last option would be to recognize Iran as a nuclear power this would make Iran feel more secure in its position but it would also put them in a position that they would be subject to even more international scrutiny to keep them in check by allowing the program to advance to weapons capable levels it would also give us the opportunity to encourage more of their program to be used for energy purposes moving on from Iran to China the Chinese Communist Party has taken major steps to exert control over their claims they are now Africa's number one trade partner they're bolstering their Belt and Road initiative as well they are expanding their nuclear arsenal having successfully tested a hypersonic glide missile a glide vehicle that evaded American detection and are also constructing new missile silos in Xinjiang the DOD projects China to have 1,000 warheads by 2030 American strategists predict that China would be willing to exercise nuclear might in a war over Taiwan but I say the CCP is not as trigger happy as we have made them out to be it was predicted that they would shoot down Nancy Pelosi's plane when she visited Taiwan they did not they merely conducted a military exercise to flex their might we have done this plenty of times with NATO allies in Eastern Europe with the goal of intimidating Russia China also sees the struggles within the American military working to their favor we are a mid-recruiting crisis our laws and policies shift dramatically every four years as a result of our Republican model we failed to nation build in the Middle East meanwhile China is rising to overtake American hegemony in economic, cultural, and conventional might as for North Korea the lonely nation whereas Iran has strong allies in Russia and China to back them up as well as regional allies in Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon North Korea does not enjoy this surplus of allies to come to their aid China has helped them in the past but since then they have clashed politically economically, and even militarily throughout history there were armed clashes in 1969 China turned away from North Korea to increase trade with South Korea in the 80s and there have been multiple attempts by China to foster a coup within North Korea China has even attempted to distance itself from the North Korean nuclear program the Democratic People's Republic of Korea sees nukes as the key to preserve their existence seeing themselves as having the same legal status as the United States and other states possessing nuclear deterrent forces ramped up rhetoric by the Biden administration has not assisted in deterring this point of view I believe a peaceful resolution with North Korea is possible President Trump's summits with Kim Jong-un proved that headway could be made towards a diplomatic peaceful existence with North Korea just as the Obama administration proved that negotiating with Iran is possible the 2018 Singapore summit led to a joint declaration which included recovery of soldiers remains, peaceful relations and even an agreement to denuclearize unfortunately the US Senate passed a military bill in August of 2018 that blocked President Trump's efforts at peace as it forbid the reduction of US forces on the Korean Peninsula the 2019 Hanoi Summit did not have formal agreement reached but in June of that year Trump became the first US president to step foot in North Korea at the invitation of Kim Jong-un this show of peace was supported by the South Korean political world, the late Japanese Prime Minister Shinzo Abe, Pope Francis and even Al Jazeera detractors decried the summit as appeasement of a dictator and indicated support for regime change which has failed time and time again the DPRK's main goal is to feel secure on the Korean Peninsula it is unlikely that we could convince them to surrender their whole arsenal as they still look to the Iraq and Libya examples and nuclear North Korea is simply a fact of life unless the US wants to conduct another regime change operation today our new cycles are dominated by events like the invasion of Ukraine, continuing ineffective civil unrest in Iran and the commander of the US air mobility command predicting war with China by 2025 in 2022 we saw the most active year yet of North Korean missile tests we stand at a precarious fragile position but we do not need to fear nuclear war the nuclear powers of the Cold War have used sharp economic sanctions and extreme violence to punish nations who attempted to attain nuclear deterrence they justify these actions by selling us on the potential of a nuclear holocaust and sacrifice truth to this end peace is possible so long as we are willing to help reason and unity prevail thank you my name is Madhu Shah I'm a sophomore at Dartmouth and today I'll be presenting my research paper entitled Legacy of Lost, the Armenian Genocide in the Nagorno-Karabakh Conflict so to begin a little bit of background what is Nagorno-Karabakh Nagorno-Karabakh is an ethnically Armenian region located in the Caucasus region south of Russia it was placed under Azerbaijan control in the Soviet Union as part of Stalin's divided role policy to split up national groups and while nationalist sentiment was suppressed during the Soviet Union it reemerged in the 1980s when tens of thousands of Armenians took to the streets demanding that Nagorno-Karabakh or Artsakh as it is called an Armenian would be reincorporated into Armenia that resulted in a series of pogroms by Azerbaijani troops who killed over 20,000 Armenians and those events together emerged into the first Nagorno-Karabakh conflict of 1991 as the Republic of Artsakh officially declared its independence in the bloody three-year conflict Armenia eventually retook control of the region resulting in 30,000 civilian casualties and over a million displaced Russia eventually broke out a ceasefire in 1994 that officially held until 2020 although numerous border incursions and violent flare-ups happened specifically in 2016 in late 2020 and the peak of COVID Azerbaijan which was likely reinvigorated with new technology from Turkey struck back Armenia in the second Nagorno-Karabakh conflict and completely destroyed Armenian forces in just 44 days eventually taking control of about 75% of the region that is the status quo today there are still border incursions and violent flare-ups especially since Russia has been unable to secure its ceasefire given the recent war in Ukraine a little bit more background what is the Armenian genocide and why does it matter today so Armenia, an ancient Christian kingdom had been part of the Ottoman Empire since the 15th century the Ottoman-Armenian minority had thrived in the empire and were often the most well-off and best educated leading to some resentment and tension with the majority in 1914 the Ottoman Empire entered World War I on the side of the central power so Germany and Austria-Hungary a nationalist contingent of Ottoman politicians that set out to Turkify the Ottoman Empire so once the Ottoman Empire began incurring losses in World War I the young Turks began blaming the treachery and disloyalty of the empire's Armenian populations and in the spring of 1915 they rounded up and executed Armenian intellectuals and leaders throughout the empire that was followed by a systematic and widespread deportation and death marching of Armenian villages into the Syrian desert Experts today estimate that more than 1.5 million Armenians more than 90% of the empire's pre-war Armenian population was killed in just one year in the Armenian genocide Today, Turkey and Azerbaijan deny that the genocide happened and that they hold some responsibility for it Turkish criminal code continues to ban any recognition of the genocide with numerous journalists including this is a plaque for the Armenian-Turkish journalist Rant Dink who was murdered in 2007 by Turkish nationalists after writing about the genocide in a Turkish publication and so it's completely banned in Turkey and Turkish lobbyists even face off with the Armenian-American community here in the U.S. Raksan Masjidad who is the director of the Genocide Education Project told me in an interview that the reason why we don't really teach our high school students about the Armenian genocide in U.S. history textbooks because of Turkish lobbying so getting on to more of the content of my paper what connects Turkey and Azerbaijan why is this connection relevant in 2020 during Azerbaijan's renewed attack on Nagorno-Karabakh Turkish President Erdogan claimed that Azerbaijan and Turkey were one nation, two states and subsequently announced that it would help aid Azerbaijan tremendously in the second Nagorno-Karabakh war Turkey trained Azerbaijani troops in joint military exercises and they supplied weapons including advanced drones and F-16 fighter jets Turkey even reportedly sent up to 1000 Syrian mercenaries to aid Azerbaijani fighters in the conflict so why does this connection exist well first strong ethnic and cultural ties both states are majority Muslim second Azerbaijan is a leading energy consumer and investor and partner for Turkey so economic ties third many sites Turkey's desire to gain territory and influence some say that it requires to restore the Ottoman Empire just one claim definitely to grow their influence in the Caucasus region over the Russia dominated OSCE and some especially Armenian scholars would say that Turkey and Azerbaijan are united in their joint denial of the Armenian genocide and their desire to delegitimize Armenian territory so bearing in mind this background my research on this topic led me to this thesis the Armenian genocide of 1915 continues to have profound impacts on Turkish foreign policy and Armenian self-identity in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict this manifests itself in three ways the first is the continued Turkish hostility towards Armenia the second is extreme ethnic hatred of Armenians within Azerbaijan and third is Armenian fear of the continuation of genocide so to my first point the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict has proliferated hostility towards Armenians within Turkey also disclaimer when I talk about views or actions I don't intend to generalize to entire populations that's my disclaimer but at the start of the 2020 war anti-Armenian demonstrations did spread throughout Turkey and they were heightened by Biden's recognition of the Armenian genocide in 2021 which was looked unfavorably by many Turks parades of cars waving Azerbaijani flags drove through the Armenian patriarch in Istanbul which was where a lot of Armenians were first executed in the Armenian genocide and some signs from this Turkish protest that I found say you're all Armenians you're all filthy we will descend upon you in the night death to Armenians and so as these protests spread so too did a rise in anti-Armenian hate crimes within Turkey particularly by the Grey Wolves which is a Turkish nationalist organization that has claimed responsibility for several of these anti-Armenian demonstrations as well as an official hunt for Armenians in 2015 in France Roxanne Mazdouda also told me that Grey Wolves organizers lit a flame in the San Francisco Armenian Cultural Center and day school where she works in San Francisco and aside from those there's also evidence that Turkey has attempted to indoctrinate Armenians within Nagorno-Karabakh the Grey Wolves have opened several schools in the region they've also renamed Armenian buildings and streets to Turkish names and they've even reportedly paid Syrians to resettle into the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict zone following the recapture of the region by Azerbaijani forces and all of this is really encapsulated in anti-Armenian rhetoric within Turkey in the past two years in July 2020 for example President Erdogan said that we will continue to fulfill the mission our grandfathers have carried out for centuries in the caucuses alluding obviously to the orchestration of crimes such as the Armenian Genocide and a former Prime Minister called for the deportation of Armenians from Turkey obviously stroking Armenian fears to genocide rhetoric is back really on that same note I found that in the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict extreme ethnic hatred of Armenians has proliferated through Azerbaijan the first way that has manifested is in a state policy of cultural erasure not unlike ISIS's cultural destruction that we've seen in Syria this includes the intentional destruction during the 2020 war of Armenian churches monuments cultural heritage sites villages have called this the greatest cultural genocide of the 21st century and my second point is that Azerbaijan has also known to glorify the violence against Armenians throughout the conflict this is a theme park called spoils of war that is in Baku and one can see firsthand the dehumanization of Armenians as it features kind of grotesquely exaggerated wax models of Armenian soldiers as you can see in the picture as well as the displays of helmets of dead or captured Armenian soldiers advertisements of this theme park are specifically for children and so I think it just goes to show the dehumanization of Armenians in Azerbaijan and my last point is that throughout the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict the legacy of Armenian genocide can be seen really through Armenia's narrative of victimization going from 1915 to the present day one can find numerous examples of Armenian officials using Armenian genocide rallying cry to Armenians throughout the Nagorno-Karabakh conflict in 2016 President Sargasyan said Azerbaijan's dream is to ethnically cleanse Artsakh from Armenians we will not tolerate another Armenian genocide for the sake of time I'll skip this one in 2020 President Sargasyan said Turkey wants to repeat what happened 105 years ago ethnic cleansing of Armenians from their homeland and create another genocide and just two days ago I found a statement from Armenia's Ministry of Foreign Affairs that says with its aggressive discourse and actions Azerbaijan makes preparations for subjecting the Armenians of Nagorno-Karabakh to genocide so clearly genocide and its denial are very much still alive and have huge impacts on this modern conflict and as a result of this widespread narrative as you can see Armenia views Turkey and Azerbaijan really as existential enemies that are kind of bent against the existence of the Armenian state and in my paper I argue that this makes Armenia too blind to its own injustices Azerbaijanis point out to a massacre of 600 Azerbaijanis in 1992 that Armenia has failed to take responsibility for and second it also leads to an inability to trust any settlement attempt and that has really stalled conflict resolution in Nagorno-Karabakh and so just for a few concluding words about the impact of my research and what I found really without the recognition of this historical genocide or grievance the overcoming of this ingrained animosity the legacy of genocide really never ends and peace resolution especially in this case can be near impossible interestingly in a speech given shortly before the Nazis invaded Poland Hitler told his generals after all who today remembers the annihilation of the Armenians as an Armenian student at Dartmouth told me those who erase history are bound to repeat it and so I hope that my research here goes to show that well history may not necessarily be a roadmap for the future it can be a training manual that is important that we study if we want to understand the current moment so thank you very much for your time and listening to me today I will be presenting my paper on the Obama administration's response to Russia's interference in the 2016 US presidential elections I'll briefly give you an outline of how I would be going about this I'll speak about my motivation behind writing this topic and then talk about what exactly Russia did and how the US responded followed by an in-depth analysis of the administration's response that was included by looking at the implications of the user's subversion as a tool of statecraft and US Russia rivalry today great powers have been engaging in subversive activities like electoral interference for years now but 2016 was markedly different in the words of the intelligence community's assessment in 2017 Russia's efforts to influence the 2016 US presidential election represented a significant escalation in A, the directness to be the level of activity and see the scope of effort compared to previous operations against the United States what intrigued me then was how Russia was able to do what it did in 2016 that is effectively paralyze the Obama administration without facing any serious consequences the central questions I sought to answer in my research were what made subversion effective in this case how to analyze the Obama administration's response and what are the implications of this case for the US Russia rivalry at large this led me to develop my main argument mainly that the effectiveness of Russia's actions in 2016 as measured by the erosion of the Obama administration's power ought to be attributed primarily to the flawed assessment of the situation and the narrow goals that the administration set for itself to begin with so very briefly what did Russia do in 2016 it hacked and dumped Hillary Clinton's emails at crucial moments in the election campaign in the manner that was prejudicial to those aspects they established ties with the Trump campaign and also engaged in social media misinformation all in all they violated America's sovereignty what was the motive behind Russia's actions the intelligence community assessed that Russia sought to help win the elections and damage Clinton's chances at a victory however the focus of my paper is more of Russia's goals to sow chaos and undermine American and more consistent with Russia's subversive activities against the United States over the years although the administration knew as early as 2015 that Russia was engaging in such activities they did not set up a committee to deliberate countermeasures as late as 2016 when they did a range of options were deliberated however there was disagreement about how and when to act by late September they had ruled out taking any action before the elections had concluded the administration took over actions like expelling Russian diplomats and imposing sanctions as well as covert actions such as planting cyber weapons in Russia's critical infrastructure as a means of preventing future escalation between the two powers however the response was heavily criticized with many saying that not enough was done and whatever little was done was done too late so why did the Obama administration struggle to mount a strong response to Russia I argued that it was because of their floor movements and narrow goals Obama had been a very deliberate and cautious president he was generally averse to overreacting to Russia and viewed it as a weak power, a regional spoiler and hence maintained a policy of strategic patience towards Russia it is likely that the same tendencies guided his decision making during 2016 the administration also believed that the most effective way for the US to stop Russia was through making private direct threats to Putin however this did not work finally the administration believed that Russia possessed escalatory dominance in this situation that is that they were afraid that they had not yet seen the worst of Russia's campaign and if they provoked Russia Russia could possibly edit photo data giving Russia the upper hand in any ensuing escalation however it is not clear why exactly they believed this and I will delve into this in further detail later the Obama administration also set certain goals for itself that highly constrained it for example they did not believe they believed that by exposing Russia's actions they would only be furthering Russia's goals of sowing chaos they did not want to be perceived as being too partisan is that that time Obama had been campaigning on Clinton's behalf and lastly they wanted to protect the integrity of the election thus I argued that the administration tied its own hands however I do recognize that it can be argued that the administration faced significant domestic and systemic constraints for example there was a heightened degree of polarization in America at the time that prevented the administration from getting a consensus for a statement condemning Russia and Congress however I would argue that this was a mere roadblock not an absolute hindrance to taking stronger action moreover some of the domestic strains seem to have been self created for example the administration failed to get the states to agree to federal involvement in state level elections because they didn't inform the states of Russia's activities in the first place the intelligence agencies were also blamed for delaying delaying reaching a consensus as the administration had requested on Russia's motives and Putin's personal involvement in what was happening however I would argue this is again a self created constraint because the administration's heightened focus on achieving a consensus which led to a delay in mounting a response moving on to systemic level factors I recognize that realists would argue that any action the US would have taken would have just exacerbated the security dilemma for Putin however I argued that such fears of escalation were highly exaggerated changing the actual voter registration system to tamper with the actual vote counts however this would have constituted the highest level of electoral interference and would have constituted a clear violation of the United States Westphalian sovereignty Obama himself reportedly told Putin that international law including the laws of armed conflict applied to cyberspace and that the US would hold Russia accountable to these standards essentially applying that the United States would consider the alteration of votes and believe that the United States far superior capabilities economically and militarily would have effectively deterred Russia from taking such an action in the first place however the administration was not just concerned about escalation but they truly believed that Russia had escalated dominance in any situation meaning that Russia was superior across all rounds of the escalation ladder making escalation losing bet in the first place however these fears again seem to have been exaggerated because Obama's because such fears guided Obama's decision making with respect to Ukraine in 2014 as well when he refused to provide lethal weapons to Ukraine however Trump did the same thing and did not face serious escalation from Russia moreover Obama himself gave a press conference where he said that the United States cyber capabilities remain unmasked in the world and finally the administration also expressed in extreme confidence throughout 2016 in the in the effectiveness of making direct and private threats to Russia however the only reason these threats would have worked in the first place would have been if Russia believed that the United States would have an upper hand in any escalation between the two powers hence the administration's messaging on the conflict itself seemed contradictory and lastly the administration could have been deterred with the ambiguity in international law regarding non forcible intervention in countries foreign elections however the United States has never really been constrained by international law but when it comes to taking actions in its own way this was the primary factor in the weak response I argue that this case has strong implications for the user subversion as tool of statecraft in that subversion is a tool of great power rivalries here to stay because it remains cheap it allows for plausible deniability and many of the conditions that made subversion easier to use in 2016 such as the heightened degree of polarization in America and the ease of disinformation that the internet acts gives to the subversion today continue to exist moreover the international the intelligence community has assessed that Russia will continue electoral interference not just in America but in other parts of the world as well however it is important to remember that Russia's actions in 2016 were not just aimed at regime change but more so at undermining democracy as a whole and thus it has ushered in a new era of election meddling I would like to conclude by saying that Russia's actions in 2016 constituted a gross violation of America's Westphalian sovereignty and it is a matter of great concern that Russia was able to intervene in America's elections and paralyze the Obama administration without facing any serious consequences while some may argue that it would be domestic and systemic constraints the administration face that were responsible for the weak response my analysis has shown that it was primarily the administration's flawed assessment of the situation to begin with and the narrow goals that it set for itself moving forward thank you thank you and that concludes four presentations that gave us a lot to think about and to help us think through some of this we have two faculty members here from the department of history and political science who will offer their comments on these papers at the end of the table there we have associate professor of history professor Mary Kim who also serves as the program coordinator for the studies and war and peace degree program here at Norwich and to her left we have assistant professor of political science Michael Funberg who also serves as director of the Norwich honors program each will offer their comments on two of the previously presented papers Professor Kim will be commenting first Professor Sodergren and thank you to all our panelists for their excellent papers I have the privilege of giving some commentary notes for Sean's paper and Maddie's papers I'll start with Sean's first and these are I think sort of questions and notes to help you maybe push your thinking further and really think about maybe the implications of a lot of the things that you raise the paper is really fascinating for being a very cold-hearted, cruel-hearted very clear-eyed I think dissection of the things that really went wrong and still continues to be kind of an issue for folks who are affected by the end of direct U.S. presence in Afghanistan so I think for this paper some of the things that I think really it raises is a lot of folks think of the United States as strength as its military and a lot of people think of the military strength as really logistics right that's really where the United States is unparalleled and here that great power came up very short in many respects despite the heroic efforts of many individuals involved so this actually begs the question I think of what about crises like these where maybe in the future we can see more displacement we're already seeing a lot of this kind of migration, movement, uncertainty and maybe more a frequency of events or maybe situations where we will need to move a lot of people very quickly so I think what are the lessons how much of this kind of effort for evacuation or assisted migration how much of this is really scalable and instead of trying to solve this problem from this tail end is there something more proactive on the other end I think this is something that is really raised by your question or your essay on the conceptual level and Professor Irwin please stop me if I'm going over time the other thing I think your essay really raises is despite the incredible difficulties that those who are both evacuating and people who are being evacuated faces faced and are facing moving to the place you want to go is actually sometimes the easy part believe it or not the hard part is being accepted at the place you end up maintaining your dignity as a human person as a refugee of your stateless I think your paper really I think sort of raises these very deep issues so thank you for your paper Maddie's paper is a really great framing device of a sort of online war over sports athletes using nationalistic music and people sort of getting into playmores over who owns cultural identity and claiming your identity as Azerbaijan or Armenian and sort of the really dark history behind that and so I think Maddie's question of you know what can we learn from these historic attempts to sort of mold history and your paper I think has a lot to offer both for other areas of the world other histories that have sort of similar questions of you know accountability for historical atrocities and attempts of reconciliation or lack thereof in your paper you mention Orhan Pamuk who is a really well regarded noble prize when they're a Turkish writer and others who have raised their voices despite the incredible obstacles put in front of them that deny their truth their attempts to bring light to a lot of these historical episodes of utter darkness and this reminded me that Oye Kenzaburo who is a Japanese writer who recently passed away just a few days ago it would also want a noble prize and he was very well known for trying to bring those questions to light for Korean-Japan relations so I think in terms of what we can try to understand about the Armenian genocide and maybe to sort of despite this being a very grim topic and one that you see is becoming sort of intensifying in really negative ways that's what it takes to keep people hating each other lots of lots of history educational systems constant reinforcement in media and propaganda and that's how we build it up and I think human beings are also, we're pretty good at breaking stuff too and maybe hopefully we can break this kind of stuff not the good type stuff so those are some of my comments I hope that they're useful for thinking about the possible scope of your papers outside of just your particular regions or disciplines and thank you so much thank you first I want to commend first I want to commend all of the students at Row Papers it's really impressive to see this level of research especially at your level and more importantly that you're putting yourselves out there and you're participating in something like this so I think you're on a good path to engage with complex issues as you move forward and you're only going to get better as you go so good job on writing the papers in the first place so I am going to comment on August so I'll start with August you're hitting a good talking about a couple good things these nuclear flash points and these hotspots these are definitely things that we need to care about sorry I'm getting some feedback here definitely things that we need to care about and I think the most important thing that you're tapping into is this idea that global nuclear politics is driven by domestic issues so when we think about global or when we think about nuclear issues we tend to think balancing we tend to think security politics on a global scale and you're showing that domestic factors are really a driving instance for why states want nuclear weapons especially Iran, North Korea and China especially in Iran where you have the most developed case study I think here you're showing that historical context matters a lot and from the panels that I saw those have been reoccurring themes domestic politics matters, historical context matters so you're in good company with some of those things that you're touching on for both papers one thing that I would ask you to think about is where you're making your contribution what contribution are you making to the discipline because you're kind of giving these case studies and you're giving these overviews but you're not really grounding it in kind of the broader disciplinary discussions and you're touching on a lot of different themes and I think if you focused in on a single theme that might give your paper a little bit better structure and help it a little bit so for August you're really connecting domestic politics to international relations and there is a key and large developed literature on this that you can focus on an important thing that you're trying to do here which I encourage you to continue to develop is taking the perspective of other nations so when you talk about Iran you're thinking well why would Iran want a nuclear weapon why would China want a nuclear weapon and you're not just taking this U.S. centric approach you're trying to understand where they're coming from which I think provides a really developed paper so when we think about Iran wanting a nuclear weapon it's for some regional superiority some level of security and you're showing that there's a lot of domestic pressures that the Iranian leadership is facing that's driving that rhetoric you're incorporating some economic issues and other case studies so again focusing on some of those domestic issues so I would encourage you to think more deeply about those perspectives about how domestic pressures are shaping some of those key key leaders I think there's a lot of room to do this because your cases are a little unbalanced you have a lot more on Iran than you do about China and North Korea you show a lot more of the complexities of the nuclear issue in Iran especially with the U.S. approach and that makes sense because we went through the Iran nuclear deal in Obama and then Trump revoked it and now we're trying to figure it out again so there's been a lot of back and forth in the United States so it makes a lot of sense that that's one that's had most of dominates your paper I would encourage you to try to develop that more for the China and North Korea North Korea case you start off the paper and say none of them are really a threat but North Korea might be a threat right and then so I'm like reading Iran and that has the most developed and then I read China and then you're like and then here's North Korea and then you kind of like go over pretty quickly so if that's the one that's going to be a threat talk a little bit more about that and is it that you think that it's a threat because we don't have as much information on it is that the reason why it might be a threat whereas we do have a lot more information about Iran I think developing a clear structure for each of your case studies can help with developing them and connecting them to your broader contribution for example we can look at the Iran case to say here's how Obama and Iran interacted here's how Trump and Iran interacted here's how Biden and Iran interacted and if you replicate that for each of the case studies that could give you a little bit more structure that could help tap into how domestic politics affects global nuclear security decisions one thing you bring up in the conclusion is that there's a lot of cases where countries like the United States are playing politics with nuclear proliferation working to contain rogue states instead of opting for more peaceful methods and your paper is about pursuing more peaceful methods I think you need to work a little more to develop that claim, especially by sowing some of the domestic politics on the other side Iran, North Korea and China clarifying the US clarifying these countries as rogue states I think sends a signal to other countries as well to not give them the green light to further develop nuclear weapons so if we say it's okay for Iran it's okay for North Korea that they're going to see that as a green light to further develop their nuclear capabilities as well so I think there might be something that you can work through to say why is the United States trying to frame these as bad actors and things that we don't want to see proliferate in some way but overall I think you have a start to a really strong paper with these different case studies and if you develop more I think that you have a good paper there John V similarly you have a paper that has a really good timeline of events it's a much more narrow timeline of events because you have a more narrow time frame you're looking at the 2016 election you lay out the Russian tactics in the 2016 election and the Obama Administration's response ultimately arguing that it wasn't enough of a response or it didn't come soon enough so I'll leave it with the same comment that I had for August where are you kind of making your contribution into the broader literature is you tell a compelling story but it's kind of a narrow case study I would like to see it kind of grounded in the broader discipline you cover a few different theoretical angles and I think picking one could give you some clear direction for your paper for instance one thing you bring up is the level of analysis so you say the response is best explained through one level of analysis flawed assessments made, narrow set of goals by the president and his administration so I think that there's a couple levels there so the individual decision maker being Obama, the bureaucratic level being the intelligence community and other bureaucratic agencies the legislative level, legislative executive and then you also bring up the systemic levels international constraints and great power politics so I think if you pick one that could help give a little focus I don't think you have to abandon them you could say alright well here's how Obama is interpreting systemic level constraints and I think that could maybe even be a way to organize the paper I think there's a few major points in your criticisms of the Obama Administration that need to be addressed a little more thoroughly there's a lot of blame on Obama and his administration why not more decisive action, why not more aggressive why not more retaliation this kind of suggests that the president makes decisions in a vacuum and that's not really the case there's competing bureaucratic recommendations some of which you tap into with the intelligence community there's congressional pressures which you mention and broader political implications and electoral integrity so Hamilton argued we need an energetic president but there are still limitations on the president because of the office second the extent to which Russian meddling occurred in 2016 as you noted was unprecedented the misinformation campaigns and social media was incredibly new and the extent of Russian interference wasn't fully known until after the election so it's difficult especially in retrospect with complete information to say well this is how the president should have acted I think especially at the time when the candidate Trump was saying well actually it's not Russia that's doing this it's China or it's North Korea so there's a lot of competing narratives that are flying around that can make it difficult to respond and then the idea of cyber warfare more generally is still pretty new there isn't kind of a clear red line and every time I talk to folks that are in this field I'm like what is the red line how do we respond to something because it isn't that one for one in the same way that kinetic warfare happens in examples like the SolarWinds hack or the colonial pipeline the response has been to shore up cyber defenses not necessarily to go out and attack in a retaliatory way two more comments and then I'm done I promise because I know you all have questions too so two more sets you argue Russia's use of subversion in 2016 was effective as measured by erosion of the Obama Administration's authority so the political scientist in me is like measuring authority because that's a really difficult thing to measure and understand so if you want to make a claim you have to be pretty clear about how you're measuring authority is it public approval rating is that what's influencing it and then make sure your paper continues to connect to that measurement of the concept so did Obama make decisions after the election because of his decrease in authority did Obama make lesser decisions because of a decrease in authority I'm not entirely sure you make two really good points and you hit on this at the very beginning of your presentation but at the very end of your paper and I think it should be front and center one is about the lack of international laws and norms about the type of intervention that Russia engaged in and then secondly and more importantly this has created a new method of election interference with the goal of undermining democracy itself not just picking a winner and if you connect that to the 2020 election I think Russia did a pretty good job if we look at what the 2020 election looked like and how many people thought it was interfered with even though the Department of Homeland Security came out and said it's been the most secure but there's still people that have lost some level of faith in our democratic system so I think you're using this 2016 case as a starting point but I think connecting it to that idea of a Russian approach to undermine democracy more broadly is really important and valuable that you can continue to build on but thank you all for your papers they're all excellent Thank you Professor Thunberg that was loud alright I'll back off the microphones and speak softly but now is your time we had four interesting presenters we have two microphones I invite any or all of you well maybe not all I invite any of you to step forward and offer any questions you have on any of the topics for specific presenters so please please feel free to step forward and offer a question I will start us off here with a question that I have actually for Maddie as somebody who studies historical memory particularly in American history when some of the things you showed regarding the perpetuation of stereotypes and historical fallacies regarding the genocide in Armenia in Azerbaijan and Turkey the theme park was horrifying I see unfortunate parallels to perhaps American history and perhaps its treatment with indigenous peoples but what apart from historical memory what politically is motivating this as we saw in August's presentation domestic politics tends to steer a lot what domestically politically could you maybe comment more on is steering why are they stoking this and continuing to dredge this up and perpetuate these stereotypes and fallacies of course thank you for your question sorry well I think a short answer is mainly sorry the rally around the flag effect like as I said all of the Armenian politicians that have used the Armenian genocide it's not just kind of a personal like reflection maybe grandparents that have died it's a true kind of ethos or I guess in this case pathos to kind of rally Armenians to like go all in on this conflict and really like see Azerbaijan and Turkey as kind of existential enemies that are really bent against Armenia's existence and I think the same applies in the other way by kind of dehumanizing and picturing an enemy as not human it's a lot easier for groups to obviously deal with the war crimes do things that if they truly saw the other side as human they wouldn't do and so I think on both sides efforts to dehumanize or victimize oneself has kind of just played out into furthering the conflict it's a tool really used by politicians and people who have interest in promoting the conflict so I hope that answers your question thank you thank you very much all right and I think you can microphone on or it can be activated it is all right so one of my main things is in the Armenian genocide are you familiar with someone by the name of Enver Basha yes okay do you think there is trying to be a new not really from like Erdogan because I know Erdogan is trying to be like a neo-automans in his foreign policy but do you think that in like Azerbaijan or the other areas they're still trying to make like a new Enver Basha figure and for the Armenians there is this ideology this fascist ideology called Segekanism which is basically a reimagining of the Armenian people into this spiritual force against Turkification I was wondering if you've read that as well I haven't specifically studied the figures that you talked about but thank you very much for bringing them up because I think they're great additions as we've seen in other states and throughout history both Armenian Azerbaijan and Turkey frankly have been looking to the past as kind of like a Jeremiah to resurrect what they see as the future so for example I mentioned Turkey running to kind of reenact the Ottoman Empire in gaining influence in the Caucasus region so I think latching on to those figures whether or not they intend to touch on those connections with the Armenian genocide innately are kind of evoking a desire to bring back that time, that leadership, that legitimacy that they once had and I would say the same goes for Armenia there's a great Armenian nationalist push as I said before and after the Armenian genocide and at the end of the Soviet Union and so I think that by tapping into those figures it's just as I said for the previous question like a way to kind of tug on those that pathos of the Armenian population and kind of recruit and spread national sentiment in the conflict. Does that answer your question okay? Yeah, yeah. Perfect. Thank you for bringing those up. Thank you. Thank you very much. Yes sir, another question. Hi, also for Maddie, sorry. I'm a researcher at the Peace and War Center here focusing on information warfare and you mentioned culture engineering via physical resettlement and education policy and I wonder, based on your last couple responses I figured this is a yes to what extent are these engineering efforts supported by a concerted information policy and was it in the scope of your research did you see any evidence of a proactive state sponsored efforts through traditional or social media maybe to promote Turkish versions of events or denigrate Armenian versions of events or as most of the informational policy case focused on censoring and removing content rather than actively putting out persuasive content? Yeah, that's a great question and a great tip for the future so thank you. I definitely will look into more information. I did gain some sources that I didn't mention in my presentation from social media. There are a lot of journalists that cover this that have for example posted photos of kids that are in these like gray wolf schools that I talked about in the region so that's part of the kind of cultural indoctrination and then education and even cultural re-engineering and so through gray wolves that organization that I mentioned propaganda is spread about what there's definitely disinformation about you know the group doesn't claim that it's like a nationalist anti-Aremian group it claims to be like an educational organization and so by using photos of children and other kind of harmless things like that I think maybe that's what your question is looking for but I will look into that in the future and I think it's interesting. I will say actually with the the offering of Syrians to move to Nagorno-Karabakh there were online posts like offering I think rewards for Syrians to move to Nagorno-Karabakh so I think if you're interested in looking into that or maybe I will It could be fascinating if you looked at the narrative tactics or strategies there it could be quite interesting. Yeah definitely thank you. Thank you. I think yes next question please. So three quick questions Sean you emphasize the material side of preparation what about the conceptual side because in particular I was wondering if the concept of being highly prepared might conflict with the concept of presenting to the world that the the Afghan government was very strong right if you're emphasizing your exit strategy does that make people suspect when you try and say that the government that you're leaving behind is also strong. So I wonder if there's a conceptual side to it that you thought about. August it seems like the U.S. JCPO I'm sorry there's someone behind me so I'll say this last question and stop. It seems like the JCPO negotiations have either slowed or died right now so I wonder if you see any other kind of diplomatic opportunities for the United States. Thank you for your question. So regarding the difference between having a prepared plan and then also maintaining at least a presence of stability for Afghanistan I don't think they're necessarily mutually exclusive in the same way how you know you don't expect your house to burn down but you still have a plan to get your family out in the event it burns down. So when creating this type of framework of in the event of how we plan a pull out from Afghanistan we have if we began planning perhaps in like when for the most part the African Republic was relatively stable as whatever that word means we could still plan for worst case scenarios. I don't think that's a mutually exclusive concept but when it comes to the issue of leaving the process and knowledge that the conflict was drawing down happened well I would argue a year two years into before the full on pull out in 2021 so at least from what I can look for in terms of like the discursive news reports articles and so on so forth and so at that point we knew relatively speaking the US wanted to get out Trump administration at the point had an idea that they wanted to get out as quickly as humanly possible but a more responsible action in terms of getting out was not to say we will get out as soon as possible negotiate with the Taliban just get us out of there boom and then now in August we over a week or two period we magically pulled everything we had out as best we could versus we have a rough idea that we don't want to continue the conflict of two decades let us begin negotiations and talk with both the Taliban and the African Republic to begin to transition a power to the Taliban I think that is fundamentally the true disconnect in terms of why we saw what happened versus what with the power of hindsight should have happened Is this working? Yes, okay so regarding the JCPOA and the slowdown negotiations I think we can obviously assume that that's as a result of the Biden administration having to focus the defense and foreign policy efforts elsewhere especially because of if you didn't know there's an invasion in Ukraine so focusing there has sort of detracted from the Biden administration's efforts to address foreign policy in other regions I think we are able to focus a bit less on Ukraine so that we can we have the resources to focus on other areas at the same time that's why we have such a massive bureaucracy that's why we have different commands of the Department of Defense it allows us to divide and conquer regarding our options if the Biden administration does not want to pick up negotiations again the option is to either let them have their nuclear program or move on and attempt another regime change that we did with Iraq and Libya which again I don't believe went well the occupations failed so okay thank you August time for one more quick question yes I thought your presentation was really good August you made a lot of good points but I did want to ask you there's been a growing movement I've noticed in the last few years among citizen groups around the world not necessarily governments to abolish nuclear weapons and I was wondering do you think since the United States was the first to invent nuclear weapons and the only government to use them so the United States lead the way in the abolition of nuclear weapons I think that would be a fantastic thing for the US government to do as Professor Thunberg covered the American government who they green light and red light that determines how the rest of the international community feels towards that nation if we decide to green light the scaling back of nuclear weapons or even total abolition that would most likely cause a cascading effect across the international community so if the US government decides to get off their high horse regarding nuclear weapons and finally admit that they would be safer without them that would I believe cause a cascading effect across the globe do you know what's holding that up sorry do you know what's holding that up by the US government not specifics within the US government but I think just governments as a whole there's always administration after administration across the entire world as we've all covered there's a certain level of jingoism that prevents peace from being possible if we take a moment if everyone takes a moment to look at the perspective from the other side and figure out why the opposing nation feels the way they do if we're willing to put aside our preconceived notions that I think that's what's standing in the way thank you and thanks to all of you thank you all for attending the final of Norwich's peace and war summit 2023 I hope you have a wonderful evening but just before you go one last round of applause for our excellent student presenters thank you and good night well I'm glad it didn't go off glad mine didn't go off I'm not sure I sound