 Well, thank you so much for that truly lovely introduction. It means a lot to me. And it's great to be back here at the Naval War College, where I've been coming periodically over the last 10 or 15 years or so. So I really feel that I'm among friends. And I hope to repay it today with some honest talk where what I'm going to do is I'm going to rove around the world, but then I'm going to emphasize in the last third or so of my talk this map of the South China Sea. But first, I'll get into a lot of other places as well. If you read the newspapers, the Wall Street Journal with its conservative point of view on the editorial page, the New York Times with its liberal point of view on the editorial page, the various journals of opinion, you may think you're getting different points of view, that all these people disagree. They fight with each other. In a sense, though, you're getting the same point of view. The point of view you're getting is that we can do anything. It's just a matter of the right policy, the right approach, putting in the right number of forces. We can remake societies if only we had done this and that in Syria or if only we had done Iraq differently. If only we had done Libya a little differently. We can get all of this right and we can be everywhere. It's just a matter of human agency because there are no constraints in a sense. I'm not so much disagreeing with that is I'm going to talk about the other 50% of reality. The reality that's about constraints, about tragic limitations, things that we have to work inside of rather than make an end run around that we have to deal with admit to. And when you talk about constraints, constraints upon policymakers primarily, you have to go back to geography. And by geography, I don't just mean a map. I mean the map as the starting point for a discussion for an understanding of trade routes, of natural resources, of economics, of all kinds of things essentially. The map is the starting point for understanding different cultures because after all, what is a culture? A culture is the shared experience of a very large group of people in a particular territorial setting over hundreds of thousands of years that lead to commonalities, commonalities of music, of art, of points of view, of fears, of biases, et cetera. Now these cultural traits are less important and less real than individual traits because primarily where more concrete is individuals, but it doesn't mean that the other things don't matter. And all of this starts with an understanding of the map. And it's my view that the map and geography still matter greatly. And you often hear that, well, geography no longer matters because of technology. And my answer to that is technology has shrunk the map. It's made it smaller, but that also means it's made it more precious. Geography is more precious and more claustrophobic than it's ever been because every place interacts with every other place in a way that it didn't before. You can't discuss East Asia and Southeast Asia without taking into account the Middle East. The Chinese and East Asia, the Indians in South Asia compete for natural gas fields in Iran in the Middle East, for instance. The North Koreans can give military or technology to the Syrians that leads to an Israeli military strike. Regions are coalescing and forming into each other is never before. So instead of separate regions that have nothing to do with each other, you have a more of a fluid organic continuum. But nevertheless, this may be a shrunken geography, but it's a more critical and claustrophobic geography at the same time. Remember, we live in an age where even though the rate of human population growth is going down, in terms of absolute numbers, we're putting more people on the globe than ever before. And the greatest population growth is among young people in already the 30 or 35 most unstable places of the world to begin with. And as we all know, political insurrection starts with young males between the ages of 15 and 30. So we're entering an age of vast urban conurbations where fighting over territory, where territory is more precious than it's ever been. So I would say that geography still matters greatly. Let me talk about the Middle East for a minute or two. Then I'm gonna go to Europe. I'm gonna go to China. I'm gonna go to Russia. I'll go to China, and then I'll end up with most of my time in the South China Sea, if that's okay. How do we understand the Arab Spring? Here's how I would define it. You have countries such as Tunisia and Egypt, which are age old clusters of civilization, greater Carthage than Nile Valley. The Arab Spring began in Tunisia. What is Tunisia? It's the closest place on the map to the heart of Europe. It's also, it's only four hours by ferry boat from Tunis to Trapani in Western Sicily. It's very close. Tunisia has no sectarian or ethnic divides mainly. Tunisia was a real state since antiquity. Since after the Romans you had the Byzantines, you had the Vandals, but after the Romans rather you had the Carthaginians, the Byzantines, the Vandals, the Turks, the French. If you drive on a road in the northern half of Tunisia, chances are you're on a road that was originally built by the Romans. So it has a real state mentality that totally subsumes a religious mentality in a way. It has real identity. And with no sectarian or ethnic divide so close to Europe, it's natural that the Arab Spring would begin there, but there's a but. In 202 BC when the Roman general Scipio Africanus defeated the Carthaginians, he dug a demarcation dish, a Fossa Regia, which went south from the Mediterranean a few hundred miles, then east back to the Mediterranean on Tunisia's east coast. And the Romans slated every place within that ditch to be slated for development. And guess what, the ditch still operates. If you're inside the ditch, chances are you're in a place of much higher development, good roads, less unemployment and where did the Arab Spring begin? With a fruit and vegetable vendor who set himself alight to protest high unemployment and lack of development in a town way outside that ditch. So this doesn't all explain the Arab Spring. Maybe it only explains 10 or 20% of it in Tunisia, but it adds a deeper level of understanding to why the Arab Spring began in Tunisia and why it began where it did in Tunisia. And you can go to every country in the Middle East and use geography in this way, not to give a quick and easy and clever answers, but to just have a deeper understanding of things. Tunisia and Egypt have great, have long standing state identities going back to antiquity. So when authoritarian regimes were toppled, what something replaced them, whether it was a very weak and somewhat chaotic democracy in the case of Tunisia, whether it was first Muslim brotherhood then military rule in Egypt, these may not be good forms of government by any means, but the states themselves held together because they were always states in the past with state identities. That's not the case with Libya or Syria and Iraq and partially with Yemen as well, which are not so much states in history as vague geographical expressions. Libya, Western Libya was the triple Etania was always oriented towards greater Carthage and Tunisia, Eastern Libya, Cyrenaica, Benghazi was always oriented towards Alexandria and Egypt. And Libya was never a state that the Italians provided some cohesion but very weak by European colonial standards. And because it was never a state, it could only be held together by the most suffocating form of autocracy. Whatever one might think of Zine el-Abdin Ben Ali's rule in Tunisia or Hosni Mubarak's rule in Egypt, they were far, far more enlightened than Qaddafi's rule in Libya. And once the Qaddafi rule collapsed, rather than have different badly run, badly administered states like in Tunisia and Egypt, you had a crumbling of the state almost in its entirety. So that Tripoli is no longer the capital of the state, it's the central dispatch point for negotiations among tribes, gangs and militias. Syria and Iraq, the way I would put it, it's been in the news, I don't want to belabor it too much, is that whatever mistakes that President Bush made in Iraq or President Obama may have made in Syria, the fact is that these were two suffocating autocracies, two suffocating secular autocracies, governing places that were vague geographical expressions, composed of regionally based sectarian or ethnic groups. That were, as I say, it was tyranny, it was anarchy masquerading as tyranny under Hafez al-Assad and Saddam Hussein. I reported often from Syria under the elder Assad and Iraq under Saddam Hussein in the 1980s at the high point of his rule, and these countries were like prison yards lit by high wattage lamps. And when these states collapsed, whether by American intent, by their own intent or whatever, the result was just a total implosion of all forms of authority. And that's what we have now. Yemen's a bit different. Yemen actually is an age old cluster of civilization and antiquity, but it wasn't one civilization, it was five or six ancient kingdoms because Yemen is so infernally divided by high and rugged mountains. Under Ali Abdullah Saleh, Yemen was about 80%, 70% of Yemen was governable on any given day. He ruled for 30 years. After he was overthrown in the Arab Spring, the new government of Yemen at its best can maybe govern 30 or 40% of the territory. And that's the way it will probably be for years to come. So history, geography, the dispersal and the configuration of ethnic and sectarian groups go a long way to explain why Tunisia developed as it did after 2011, and why Syria developed as it did after 2011. Let me go to Europe, which is, well you say, well Europe's united, it's one place. It had the European Union, it has the European Union, but if you look closely at Europe, you have Carolinian Europe, ninth century Charlemagne's kingdom with rich lost soils, openness to the Atlantic and the Baltic Sea, shattered array of coastlines that with good natural deep water harbors, this was always the heart and the wealth of Europe. If you look at the cities of Maastricht, the Hague, Strasburg and on and on Brussels, the primary cities of the European Union, this was the spinal cord of the Carolinian Empire in the ninth century, and it's not an accident that it developed that way. In addition to Charlemagne's Europe, you had Prussian Europe, you had Habsburg Europe, which was a bit of an unwieldy, less developed configuration that went all the way from Eastern Switzerland to the Romanian Carpathians, and then of course, you had the Byzantines and the Turks in Southeast Europe with a much lower standard of institutionalization and development over the centuries. So what has happened in the last few years? What places are the worst political and economic catastrophes in Europe? I would say Greece, within the EU, Bulgaria, which is on the brink of chaos on any given day, and more or less hovers between being nice to the EU and being nice to Putin's Russia. This is part of Turkish Byzantine Europe. It's not completely an accident that the country in the European Union that's had suffered the worst economic distress is also in the Southeast corner that developed from Turkey and Byzantium rather than from Prussia and Charlemagne and et cetera. You have the countries in the North more or less doing well. You have the countries in the South doing very bad with intolerable levels of unemployment and you had economic depression and level collapses in Greece, so to speak. And now in the middle, the pivot state of Europe that could really determine which way the European Union goes is France. Because France has elements of both Mediterranean Southern Europe and Northern Europe. France is the country to watch in the news over the coming weeks and months. Its economic and political crisis is intensifying and if France goes in the direction of Southern Europe that could spell real pivotal trouble for the European Union. If it goes, if it recovers somewhat in the direction of Northern Europe it could help the European Union. I'm generalizing, of course, but my point is the European Union as a concept is a very ambitious one. Because it unites far-flung places with different kinds of histories and different patterns of imperial development that are in turn originally based on geography. Then there's Russia. Let's say you govern Russia, you're Vladimir Putin, what do you know? You know that you govern half the longitudes of the earth, but you have less people than Bangladesh. And your population is declining. You also know that you have more or less no real strong and fast land borders except in the Caucasus in the south. And your rivers run in the wrong direction rather than east-west in order to unite this longitudinal immensity. They run north to south further dividing them. So you're the classic insecure land power which means you require buffer zones in Central and Eastern Europe, in the Caucasus. And this would be the case even if you were a democratic, forwardly thinking leader of Russia though you would go about things differently. You don't wanna recreate the Soviet Union, you don't want a new Warsaw Pact because that was too expensive. That's why the empire collapsed in the first place. What you want is a traditional kind of belt of buffer states that are finlandized if you wanna pick a cliche that may have their independent far domestic and economic policies and they may have elections and be democratic but their foreign policies are circumscribed according to your wishes. This is what I think Putin intends. And Ukraine of course is the ultimate buffer state between Europe and Russia. It's self divided in the middle. But again, here is where geography still matters even if it is not determinative and even if ultimately individual men and women will make choices. But it is a starting point for an understanding of the orientation of greater Europe. Let me look at China. What are the basic facts about China? I mean the real, real basic facts about China. Well, Russia by comparison lies, all of Russia is north of 50 degrees north latitude with the exception of parts of the Caucasus, parts of the Russian Far East around Vladivostok. But it's cold, it's a cold country. That's why the Russians were always romantically driven to the Caucasus, to Georgia because it's semi tropical, it's warm. It's why the Russians love to come to Moldova because it's comparatively warm. But China is different. If the northernmost part of China, Harbin, Manchuria, that's about the same latitude as Maine in the United States. And the southernmost part of China, Hainan Island in the South China Sea, that's about the same latitude as the Florida Keys in the United States. So China is a temperate zone continental landmass with 9,000 kilometers or so of temperate and subtropical coastline by the main sea lines of communication. So that China is blessed geographically after a fact. It has real possibilities. When the Grand Canal was built linking the Yangtze and Yellow Rivers in the early, I think, seventh or eighth century, that was a rough equivalent of the United States building the transcontinental railroad in the 19th century. China is a continental landmass. And in the West, it goes all the way out to the, it's got its coastline in the East, far to the West. It gets into mineral rich, hydrocarbon rich areas fronting the former Soviet Central Asia. Now, there are two ways to look at Chinese geography because geography tells different stories. It's not all the same. And they contradict often. The positive story if you're in the Chinese leadership is that China is much bigger than it looks on the map. That China can project power outwards. There are only seven million people in the Russian Far East and that population's dropping. But there are a hundred million people in Chinese Manchuria. And the Russian Far East is filled with timber, diamonds, gold, iron ore, et cetera. And one could speculate that as we go deeper into the 21st century that the Chinese might colonize, move into this vast underpopulated area just on the other side of their border. In the West, you have China abuts the former republics of Soviet Central Asia. And China is building roads, rail lines, pipelines in order to gain the natural resources of those countries. It's helped finance a pipeline to bring oil from Kazakhstan into Western China, a pipeline bringing natural gas from Turkmenistan into Western China, roads, Central Asian markets are filled with Chinese goods. So China is bigger in the West than it seems. It projects power outwards. In Southeast Asia, it's got a divide and conquer strategy. And that strategy is about dealing with the Southeast Asian countries individually for economic advantage rather than allowing them to get together as a group through ASEAN to deal with China. So China looks bigger in all ways on this map. But on the other hand, there's another way to look at China. There's a more paranoid pessimistic way to look at China if you're a Chinese leader. That is that China is much smaller than it appears on the map. That the ethnic Han arable cradle of China in the center and the Pacific coast is surrounded. And it's not surrounded by enemies outside its borders. It's surrounded by potential enemies inside its borders. It's got Inner Mongolians in the North. It's got Muslim Turkic Uyghurs in the West. It's got Tibetans in the Southwest. And guess what? All these people occupy dry plateau uplands, which in the case of Tibet hold enormous water resources. In the case of Xinjiang and Inner Mongolia hold enormous resources of strategic minerals and metals. So that China is surrounded by potentially hostile ethnic minorities within its border, the Han Chinese, that is. And they hold the keys to the natural resources upon which the Han majority depends. So that when Chinese leaders hear about lectures about liberalization from the West, political liberalization, let's say. Economic liberalization, they know they have to do, but political liberalization, when they get lectures in this type, they have to be very wary because from their point of view, any sort of political liberalization could lead to the explosion of minority unrest. Because it's not just a matter of individual rights. It's also a matter of individuals expressing themselves through their group, through their ethnic or sectarian solidarity group. So China's ultimate question is, it's geographical. China has to liberalize at some point. And when it liberalizes, can it hold together these outlying ethnic borderlands? This is a real challenge for China. And China also looks at something else that's particularly important. Both as a way to stir up nationalism but also to rightfully expand what it sees as its area of influence. That's the South China Sea on that map and the East China Sea just north of Taiwan, which is off the map. We look at China the way it operates in the East and South China Sea and we say they're being aggressive. They're being belligerent. They're being unreasonable. They're stirring up trouble. Let me try as a thought experiment to look at these seas from the way that China sees them. Once had a very angry Chinese student say to me, these are just natural extensions of our continental landmass. There are natural areas of influence. Therefore, we're only being benign in trying to consolidate our influence there. But because you Americans are coming from half a world away with your Navy, you're being hegemonic. So it's not we who are hegemonic in trying to just fill our natural basin of influence. It's you being hegemonic by demanding that you stay in the region. A Chinese senior colonel once said to me, he said, we wanna do nothing in the South or East China Sea different than you Americans did in the Caribbean. That what we're doing in the 21st century is what you did in the 19th and early 20th. So why should we play by any different rules than you play by? This is an interesting comparison. Like the Caribbean, the South and East China Seas are blue water extensions of China's continental landmass. The South China Sea is about the same size as the greater Caribbean, meaning the Gulf of Mexico plus the Caribbean Sea proper. The United States interestingly, after the last battle of the Indian Wars in 1890, built a great Navy and dug the Panama Canal and consolidated its hold on the Caribbean that had been building since the early mid 19th century. In other words, having settled the dry land continent, it then moved on to its adjacent seas. And it's interesting to see what happened to the United States once it consolidated its hold on the Caribbean. Remember, the Western hemisphere is not divided between North and South America as a great geopolitician from the 1940s, Nicholas Spikeman of Yale had written. Spikeman said that actually the Western hemisphere is divided between the area North of the Amazonian jungle and the area South of the Amazonian jungle. That it's the Amazon river basin and jungle that's the real dividing point of the Western hemisphere. And that's because Columbia, Venezuela, the Guyana's, they may all technically be in South America. But if you look at a demographic map where all these people actually live in Columbia, Venezuela and the Guyana's, they all hug the coast, the Caribbean coast. So they're really Caribbean countries in a sense. And so once the United States got control of the greater Caribbean, it essentially got control of the hemisphere minus the Southern cone way to the South. And once it rested general strategic control of the hemisphere, it had power to spare to affect the balance of power in the Eastern hemisphere. And that's what the history of the 20th century was all about. The United States being the pivot power in two world wars and in the Cold War afterwards. This is how China looks at the South China Sea. Imagine a world in which the Chinese dominate the South China Sea. What does domination mean in this sense? It doesn't mean the absence of the US Navy necessarily. It doesn't mean that there is no Vietnamese or Filipino Navy. What it means is that the US Navy cannot go where it wants, when it wants, because of fear that there may be an incident with a Chinese warship. Anti-access area denial can be extremely subtle. It could be about affecting the decisions of the opposing side, of the admirals of the opposing side, affecting the deployment decisions of where they send their ships and when. It could mean a balance of power that's in your favor rather than a balance of naval power in the favor of the United States. It could be something that could be achieved gradually without firing a shot over 10 or 20 years. To a point where you pass that red line where the United States is no longer capable or is perceived no longer to be capable of defending Taiwan, for instance, once you pass that invisible line, suddenly the whole nature of alliances shift or start to shift in the Western Pacific. So this is what China intends. Now let's imagine a situation where China in this subtle way comes to dominate the South China Sea and the East China Sea is, well, then what happens? Well, then from a geographical point of view, the Chinese Navy is open to expand much more fully into the Indian Ocean and into the larger Pacific. For this will be a time when the Chinese Navy will be significant and Air Force will be significantly larger. And if China is a two ocean Navy, rather than just a one, a Western Pacific Navy, suddenly it's a world power Navy. Suddenly it is a predominant power in the navigable Southern Rimland of the Eastern Hemisphere from Africa all the way around, you know, skirting around the Indonesian archipelago north to Japan. And this would all be gradual. It could all be very subtle. It could happen in our sleep in other words over the course of coming years and decades. They could also move out into the Western Pacific. Now of course there are a lot of problems with this. One thing I learned is an embedded reporter on a nuclear attack submarine for a month and is an embedded reporter on a guided missile destroyer for a month is that it's not just about buying equipment and platforms, it's about getting 330 young people in the case of a destroyer or 185 young people in the case of an attack submarine to work in unison doing the most complex tasks and coordinate everything they're doing with hundreds and thousands of other young people on other destroyers and even up to an aircraft carrier and a carrier strike group. And it's called seamanship in the 21st century form of seamanship could take a generation or two to really build. So it's not just about buying platforms, it's what you can do with it. The Chinese are aware of this. You know, they're probably far more aware of their limitations than we are. But again, they go back to tell me, why should you people have the Monroe Doctrine and not us? And their understanding of the Monroe Doctrine is subtle as well because they know the Monroe Doctrine wasn't just about kicking the Europeans out. The Europeans had already left. It was about freezing a favorable status quo while at the same time working with the British Royal Navy in the Caribbean to combat the slave trade. And at the same time using new U.S. dominance in the Caribbean to then move closer to Europe diplomatically in Europe itself. The Chinese may imagine something similar. Dominate, virtual domination in the South China Sea but at the same time cooperation with the United States in every other sphere of activity. And at the same time becoming more and more area experts in all the countries that they dominate. Because, and when I say dominate, I mean, it's only the United States, particularly the Air Force and Navy that prevents countries like Malaysia, the Philippines, Vietnam from being finlandized by China in a sense. It's, you know, that's all there is in the way. And if you look in the annals of Chinese imperial history, they had strong positions in what is today Indonesia, what is now the Bay of Bengal coast of India. This is their home turf from their point of view. All they are doing is reasserting power in what historically has been their home turf after 150 years or so of humiliation at the, you know, at the mercy of Western powers. I know that my comparison with the Caribbean has holes in it but we learn by comparison. And while the differences may be there, the similarities I think are striking. And it's interesting that the Chinese use them in my discussions with them. You know, in comparing our position in the Caribbean historically and what they are trying to do in the South China Sea. Let me go around the countries a bit here. Japan, we have Japan to Indonesia and Australia. Japan, South Korea and the Philippines are treaty allies of the United States. That's the highest form of ally. We have real interest in protecting them. But let's be honest here, they're not all equal. Japan is not equal with the Philippines. Japan is where we have, I think it's 40, 50,000 US troops stationed. It services our nuclear powered, it will service a nuclear power aircraft carrier strike group. It's a serious country. It's the world's third largest economy after being for decades the world's second largest economy. It's a first class military power despite the semi-fiction of their constitution. They could on any given day have three or four times as many major warships on the high seas as the British Royal Navy. So Japan's a serious ally. The Philippines much less so. The Philippines is probably the weakest, most poorly institutionalized, most corrupt country in East Asia with the possible exception in certain spheres of Indonesia. But it's close. It ranks very low on the scale of transparency international for corruption, for red tape, for all of this. The pride of its Navy is a 1960 former Coast Guard cutter. A Chinese threat to the Philippines. A Chinese, an incident between the Chinese Navy and the Philippine Navy that was far more severe than any current or recent past incident is probably less likely to get the United States into a conflict with China than a similar such incident with Japan, I would say. So while the South China Sea is fascinated me very much because of the book, that's why I wanted to write a book on it, the East China Sea is probably at this moment more dangerous in terms of a conflict between the US and China driven by an incident between China and Japan that could get out of hand. Vietnam's a very interesting country. It's probably our newest and best de facto ally in the Pacific and arguably even in the world. The Vietnamese never tire of telling me that we fought one war with you Americans and we fought about 17 with China. And we've gotten over our war with you much better than you got over your war with us. And by the way, we have no chips on our shoulder or access to grind with you because we won that war. So we're in a psychologically superior position which enables us to have a de facto alliance with you without making apologies to anyone or having any explanations because it's not based on any historical weakness, it's from historical strength at the same point. And the more warships, the more air platforms we have near Vietnam, the easier it is for Vietnam to balance against China. So we're very convenient for the Vietnamese in that sense. I would say that the goal of US policy has to be how to steer between two extremes. One extreme being avoid at all costs the shooting war with China. The US-Chinese bilateral relationship is the most important bilateral relationship in the 21st century. And it's important for the peace of the world. And to do that, we have to avoid letting, we have to avoid allowing combustible Vietnamese and Filipino nationalisms from driving us into that war or conflict or incident with China. The other extreme is allowing China over the years to gradually Finlandize all these countries. In other words, to allow the balance of power to shift too markedly in China's favor. Let me go over some, just some points, a bunch of points towards the end. Everything I've said today, whether it's about the Middle East or it's about the South China Seas, remember what I said at the beginning. The op-ed pages left, right are all about ideas. It's all about democracy, development, freedom, avoiding appeasement, don't be an appeaser. It's all about ideas. But I haven't talked about ideas at all. I've spoken about geography and to the extent that I've spoken about any ideas, I've alluded to nationalism. Because nationalism is alive and well in Asia and in other parts of the world. It's not passé, we're not in a post-national phase in Asia, the way we have been in Europe for decades, though maybe less so now, given the recent European election. So it isn't only ideas that matter, but constraints and opportunities based on geography, natural resources, oil, natural gas, et cetera. Another idea, and this was pointed out by Professor Bracken in a book he wrote in 1999, is that capitalist success, sustained capitalist success leads to military acquisitions. Because as a state becomes more economically powerful, more economically prosperous, it suddenly finds itself, it has interests in the outside world that it didn't have before. And one of the ways to protect those interests is to build an army in an air force. The United States went through this between the end of the Civil War and the outbreak of World War I. In the second half or the last third of the 19th century into the 20th century, the United States had a bunch of forgettable one-term presidents who essentially made the United States a world power. Because they successfully, with no charisma whatsoever, managed a growing economy that with some exceptions, grew at six, seven percent annual growth rates from the late 1860s to the outbreak of World War I. It was in those quiet century, it was quiet decades when the United States became a great power. And in the course of becoming a great power, it built a navy. It built up its military. It developed army doctrine at Fort Leavenworth at Kansas. It did all this as a natural consequence of its developing economy. And in that sense, China has done something very similar or is doing something very similar. The pivot to Asia, a word on that. The pivot, I think, was actually supposed to happen in 1989 after the Berlin Wall fell. But some things intervened. Saddam Hussein invaded Kuwait. We liberated Kuwait from Iraq. Then the army and air force became significantly deployed, managing a no-fly zone in Iraq for 12 long years. Then came 9-11. Then came the invasion of Afghanistan. Then came the invasion of Iraq. We're out of Iraq or maybe we're getting back in, I don't know. But we're getting out of Afghanistan and we're back to Asia, so to speak. So the Asian pivot should have been a natural organic consequence of the end of the Cold War. It also was not about so much, it wasn't just about favoring Asia, it was about avoiding isolationism. Because at the end of wars in the nation's past, the United States often retreated into a partially isolationist position which had terrible results. So this was a way for the administration to signal, we're not gonna do that this time. Rather than withdraw back, we're gonna pivot to another part of the world which, by the way, to the degree that the world economy has a geographical center, it's Asia. It's where we have treaty allies, where we have a rising power, China. It just all makes sense. I'm not in any way here talking about a new war that's going to happen. I don't know. What I am talking about for sure is a more crowded, nervous, complicated world, particularly on the high seas. Because globalization means more merchant sea traffic. So the seas become more crowded, shipping lanes become more important. Without the US Navy giving some semblance of order to the global shipping lanes, globalization, as we know it, would have a much tougher time to succeed. Another thing, don't take Asian security for granted. This is a problem for the media, not for this audience. But for too many decades, the media thought of, well, if you're a war correspondent and you're dressed in khakis and a flak jacket, you go to the Middle East or Afghanistan or Sub-Saharan Africa. Asia's for people in business suits, flying business class. Asia's all about business. Well, Asia's still about business, but it's also about military now, more and more. With a very dramatic arms built up, at least measured over where we were in 1980 and where we are now in terms of submarines, cyber warfare, capacity, et cetera. Two more points, very quickly. Sure, there were these conflicts in the South China Sea back in the 60s, 70s. Sure, people knew there might be oil or natural gas there. Why wasn't all this stuff happening in 1960s or 1970s? It's a good question. The answer is that for decades, Asian countries were internally focused. You had China with the great leap forward, the great cultural revolution, which was negative, then you had Deng Xiaoping's new economic mechanism, which was positive, but it was all internally focused. You had Vietnam, which as we all know, was in a state of irregular warfare for decades in the 50s, 60s, and early 70s. Malaysia, or what was then Malaya, had its own communist insurgency for years. Japan may have been at peace and growing and prosperous, but for the early mid post-cold, early mid, for most of the Cold War, Japan was in a state of semi-pacifism because China had not yet built up its navy and hadn't itself become an existential threat to Japan. And only after that happened did Japan suddenly emerge out of its pacifistic cocoon. But now you have, all these countries have consolidated to a significant degree their internal power, and lo and behold, they're pressing outward with new military capabilities that they didn't have before. So it's natural that they come into conflict over who owns what or what the territorial dividing line is in the South China Sea. Again, this is all about territory and geography. It's not about ideas per se. And finally, my last point, if you were to ask me, what's the most intriguing single question facing the world today, geopolitics? I would not say, will Iran get a nuclear weapon? I will not say, will Putin be able at some point to consolidate his hold on the Eastern Ukraine? I would say the direction of the Chinese economy. China is in a state of a massive credit bubble, a massive housing bubble. There are increasing number of economists who are predicting like a major crash. I don't know if it's true, I'm not an economist. All I know is I ask every economist that I do me, what do you think of the future of the Chinese economy? And most don't have a really coherent, well thought out point of view. There's an assumption that it will muddle through, that yes, the magic may be off the Chinese economic miracle, but it'll muddle through. Well, that's an easy default opinion to have. Just predict more of the same. All right, it's growth rate is down to 7.5% now, it'll go down to maybe 6.8%, then it'll level off for a few years. I don't know. I do know that Chinese statistics lie. I know that growth, 7.5% growth rate means a growth rate maybe of only about 6% on the coast, because the inland is growing, the interior is growing at a much higher rate. At what point does high male youth unemployment kick in? I assume that China will muddle through, and all it has to do is muddle through to keep this linear projection of growing Chinese naval and military power to keep going and going. But what happens if it doesn't muddle through? What happens if there is a fundamental social, political upheaval caused originally by economic reasons? What happens then to Chinese military power going forward? I don't have the answer. It may be that you could have social upheaval inside China, but an even more aggressive nationalism on the high seas. You could have both at the same time, or maybe you can't. I don't know, but I'll leave you with a question to which I have no answer to, what is going to happen to the Chinese economy over the next 10 years, say? Thank you very much. Yes, two questions or so. Someone in uniform? I'm having trouble seeing here. Can someone, what? Yes? Sir, Lieutenant Commander Alex Lane. For the past several thousand years, borders have always sort of been flexible as nations have expanded and contracted. In the last 100 years, it seems borders have become these absolute rigid lines. Do you think that's going to continue to hold, or will we see a return to shifting borders and geographies? I think in terms of borders, borders have shifted to a significant degree over the course of history. And they've even shifted to a significant degree within our lifetimes. I know if you look at the former Yugoslavia, what you see going on on the news pages in Iraq today is a de facto shifting of borders, I think. The same in Libya, the same to Syria. They haven't all agreed at a Paris peace conference that from to this day forward, Libya will be divided into three parts, or that Iraq is now three parts. But in terms of people control, monopolizing the use of force in different parts of these former countries, borders really have shifted, even if it may take us some time to recognize them. Remember, China's border in the far west has been very malleable over the course of history. It's only in the borders of the far, China's far west have only been with us since the mid-19th century. And the same in China's northeast. So even though China has always been China and more or less in the same place on the map, going back to antiquity, that doesn't mean it's been in exactly the same place on the map. So I think we're gonna see a continual shifting of political borders. It's part of international relations. I mean, to say that all borders will always stay the same is like saying there will be no more major interstate conflicts. There may, there may not. Some, yes. Do you think that there are two counter trends here? One is nationalism and countries like China trying to achieve what they want to achieve. But at the same time, there seems to be a trend towards much more interdependence, much more weaving together of countries, destinies, the US owns this and China owns our debt. And as that interdependence grows, doesn't it feel like that a country's ability to control their own destiny by themselves, lessons and lessons and lessons, China needs customers, China needs resources. We need each other. How does that counter trend affect all of this? It affects it significantly because it's sort of, it's a cushion against an interstate conflict with the US and China because our two economies are deeply interwoven and the same is true of other parts of the world. I mean, this may be a negative or a pessimistic analysis I'm gonna give, but it's true at the same time that when the old Soviet Union was in power, Western Europe had no practical reason to compromise with it because the Soviet Union had no economy. So they weren't entrapped in trading relations. They weren't commercially intertwined, but now with Russia exporting natural gas and as weak as its economy is maybe by Asian standards, it's still much stronger than it was during the Cold War and it's still a country of 140 million people so that you have countries like Germany and France who are deeply entwined in the Russian economy and that leads to a certain kind of benignness in their foreign policy to Russia. This may not be a good thing, but it's an example, nevertheless, of how Russia is more connected with the world than it was during the Cold War. Maybe one more question? Yeah, so, yes. I'm under the magazine from Yemen Navy. When you talk about the Middle East, I think there is something wrong with the history because in the Middle East, I know there is three strong civilizations had been there. One in Yemen, one in Iraq, and the third one in Egypt. When you talk about Iraq, Iraq is the fairest civilization, low-embeared in the history. Everyone knows about Hammurabi Law. That's the fairest low-controlled country in the history. I don't know how to compare it, it is like North States. And Syria, before the Islam, it was the center of interest between the Persian Embear and the Romanian Embears. After the Islam, it's become the center of the ruler, of the Islamic Khalifats, or what you won't say. I don't know how do you look at the history at this country. I don't think there is some things, effects on what is going on there based on the history. The problem there, these countries, there is different interests all over because in their locations, maybe, because other many countries as from the east or from the west want to govern these places through these countries because they are the center of the gravity. Yes, what I would say is yes, these are centers of great civilization going back deep into the past. But great civilizations do not necessarily cohere with specific borders. And if you have a political entity that's trying to govern over where civilizations and sectarian and ethnic interests overlap, you have more of a challenge to be able to govern. And if you govern over that area in a place that does not convert subjects into citizens, well then when your rule weakens or collapses, there'll be a void of civil society in order to fill what it's replacing. So that's what's happened in Syria and Egypt, in Syria, Iraq, and in Libya. Thank you very much.