 Our Chinese colleagues have been dwelling on the contents of a 32,000 character Chinese speech. My president only gives me 144 character tweets. So I'm much freer to embroider my own thoughts into what I'm about to say. I start from an assumption that the, I think widely shared, but I'd be glad to deal with disputes on this, that we're going through a major transition in the role of important powers in the world, that the unipolar post-Cold War era has come to an end, and with the growth and power of China and the more independent courses sought by Russia and with Europe sort of left to its own devices, we are seeing re-emergence of a structure that would lend itself to a balance of power concept going forward, as opposed to the unipolar world we've been living with. That's my hypothesis. And that within that balance of power concept, I think the struggles we face in Iraq and Afghanistan and the problems that we have in the Korean Peninsula I think are all dwarfed by the larger challenge of how to manage the transition of China to a great power status through increased actual power and influence in a part of the world which is still regionally centered, where the US had, since the end of the Second World War, essential predominance at sea and very strong position, and is now in a position to try to protect its alliances and interests in the region while China's influence and capabilities grow. I think this is the most fundamental challenge we face. How do we make this transition occur as a plus-sum game and not turn into a wasting conflict between the US and China? In the process of the transition from the Obama Administration to the Trump Administration, Mr. Obama has always been more persuasive than active, and I think he overfulfilled his quota in talking to Trump on the importance of the North Korean problem. The North Korean problem is very serious and it has an urgency that's been accelerated by the young leaders' determination to rapidly develop military capabilities of a strategic nature. But I think this is a problem that's got a year and a half, two years, two and a half years to play out. And yet in the world of the Trump Administration it's assumed an urgency that transcends managing great power rivalries, managing the US-China long-term friction, dealing with the various hotspots around the world. And there's been a singular focus on it. I think this is misplaced, but that's where it is. And then within that focus on North Korea as the most immediate threat to the US, there's been a further concentration on the Chinese role in dealing with that. I have, if you go to think tanks in Washington or offices in the government, I think 95% of the people there would tell you the answer to North Korea is in China. I think that's fundamentally misunderstands North Korea's relationship with China. That's not to say China is not really important. China is a necessary part of dealing with North Korea, but it is not a sufficient element of a policy to deal with North Korea. So at some point if we're going to reach a posture of containment and deterrence over a long period of time, while entertaining the hope that someday we can talk them out of their weapons or talk them into downgrading what they have or limiting what they have, we've got to have a fairly realistic policy for holding the alliance with South Korea and Japan together, providing adequate protection, signaling the extended deterrence still works. And I think we've got to look at steps that have largely not yet been contemplated. For me there's a five-stage process for dealing with the North Korean problem in the short term, extending in the mid, maybe even the long term. The first is of course to say you're interested in talks because you want to keep a coalition of like-minded countries believing that you are a reasonable leader and you want to have talks if possible, but recognizing that the likelihood of talks and the prospects are not good anytime soon. I say that because I believe on the American side the sanctions that have been imposed by the United Nations and some of the unilateral sanctions that have been additionally imposed have just begun to bite and there's no reason to assume that North Korea at any time in the next few months is going to feel the pain to the point where it wants to come to the table and sue for a kind of peace. And I'm turning that around on the North Korean side. They still have yet to demonstrate a successful reentry vehicle. They've got some airframe issues, propellant and other issues to work through. So I don't think they're ready to say, hey, we've got the system. You come to the table and talk to us now. We want to freeze this as our new nuclear power status. So I think we've got months, six months. Who knows a year where neither side really wants to talk about talks until other than for purposes of diplomatic salesmanship. So what do we need to do? The second step I think we need to do is partly being implemented with some complications in the last week. And that is to ramp up what missile defenses we have. We have point mid-course and national defense capabilities. The point defense in Korea has been partially implemented. The Korean government is now getting a little wobbly on that and we need to look more into it. The United States has got a bill that's been through the Senate that will add 28 launchers to our Fort Greeley capabilities in Alaska which is a significant capability. But missile defense is not even 50% reliable. So that's just a necessary first step. The second step I think is we've got to start dealing with the ramp up of intermediate range missile capabilities in the region which threaten American positions in Kadena and other bases as well as our allies and friends in South Korea, Japan, American bases in Guam. Go down the list. The U.S. is the only country still actively engaged in protecting the INF Treaty. The Russians have been violating it. The Chinese are not a part of it and have been building all sorts of capabilities. And now North Korea is rapidly developing its medium-range capabilities. So I think the U.S. needs to leave the INF Treaty and announce that it's going to be prepared to start putting middle-range missiles into the Northeast Asia. This is based on the model that we experienced in the 1980s when the Soviet Union put SS-20s into East Europe. Reagan, against very strong reactions in the Western European political world, installed Pershing missiles. That worked. It brought to a negotiation the INF Treaty that should be prevailing today but is not. I think it should be the model going forward. In the short term, we probably need capabilities against North Korea that both threaten North Korea in a way that's commensurate with the threat they're posing, sends a signal to China and also reinforces deterrence as an extended deterrence for our allies in Japan and Korea. The fourth area I would look at is reintroduction of tactical nuclear weapons on American vessels in the region. The temptation to go nuclear for Seoul and Tokyo is there. I doubt either government and the full consideration of policy and strategic concerns would go that route. But the ability of the United States to provide that kind of deterrence, I think, would help to tamp down the temptation to go on a nuclear path for those two countries, reassure the deterrence, and help prevent the North Koreans as they develop their long-range capability to threaten the United States from being able to then turn to the South Koreans and say, what have you got? Americans are going to be held at bay because we can put a pistol or a missile to their heads. That's an important part of that. The next component I think that we really need to wrap up is covert action against North Korea. And here we've been spending about $7 million a year on plug-in computer parts and telephones and things. There's been a little bit of additional cyber activity. But again, on the 1980s model, when Ronald Reagan went after Eastern Europe, the resources poured into covert action into Eastern Europe were far more significant as a share of spending. I'm not saying we're going to use the same methods on North Korea. The situations are entirely different. But I think I'm advocating a scale of effort on covert action against North Korea that is commensurate with the challenge that we've faced from them. Now, a lot of this will burn the ears of people who hear it or think the Americans are going to be belligerent. But I think one, the threats we face do require extraordinary measures. And two, if we get to a point, and this is hypothetical, that the North Koreans are willing to talk to us at other parties about capping, downgrading, whatever it is, we need something to bargain with. And certainly the United States is not going to bargain with the North Dakota missile fields against North Korea. So I think we'll be putting chips on the table that may or may not prove useful in a bargaining setting but certainly prove useful in a deterrence and reassurance setting. Now, is this enough? I don't think so. I think these are temporary and short-term kinds of measures dealing with a very contemporary problem. I want to get back to the big challenge, is how do we manage our long-term rivalry with China and keep it from becoming a wasting struggle? Here I think we need to burst out conceptually from where we are. The administration, as far as I can tell, they've been extraordinarily inarticulate, both in describing what they're up to with allies and with people like me who visit with the government in Washington on this new Indo-Pacific strategy, which looks very much like a warmed-over John Howard Koizumi, George W. Bush approach to trying to struggle to have some conceptual counterpart to what China was shaping up to be back in the first decade of the 21st century. I think China's continued to develop influence in the speeches prior to this dealt with some of the ambitions that China has. Some of these ambitions fall into the category that Bob Zelek described 10 years ago as trying to turn China into a responsible stakeholder. I think China is now, for the first time, kind of welcoming that role, but not using those terms. And we want to shape that. We want to try to grab as much of that and diminish as much of the threat side of that as we can. I think conceptually we ought to take a departure from this so-called Indo-Pacific strategy, which is really an effort to put some kind of muscle into Barack Obama's pivot to Asia or rebalance to Asia. For me, that was an example of NATO in the old-fashioned joke term. No action, talk only. The U.S. never really did anything in the pivot. And in fact, the pivot provided pretext for the Chinese to do some things which they thought were countering what the U.S. was doing. And we ended up in a net deficit in our position in the Asia-Pacific region, certainly the South China Sea would be a very good example of that. So just a quick cut to the chase. I think the United States ought to be coming forward with a policy of co-optation of China's new desire to be a more responsible stakeholder in the world. And we ought to be adjusting our positions instead of literally opposing the Belt and Road Initiative as a threat to us or as in the Obama administration opposing the formation of the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Not only would it be cutting our losses since we uniquely opposed the AIIB and I think the count now is 57 countries to one against us on that one. But more importantly, to try to refresh the Bretton Woods instruments and bring them up to date where it was originally based on the victors in World War II and the G7 sort of had a bigger role and the ADB was added over time. I think it's time for another round of re-examination of the Bretton Woods institutions so that they're more representative of the country's shares of GDP around the world. G20 might be the basis for that model of re-examining it. And we want to try to draw China to agree and others to agree that the ADB, the Asia Investment Bank and the Belt and Road Initiative should properly be brought into the values systems that we have under the Bretton Woods system and where we can learn lessons from the mistakes of the past as AIIB has done in breaking away from some of the rigidities of the World Bank loan approval programs and things or board running mechanisms. Take lessons from that, try to update that. We ought to also have concepts of regional security. We've got a place that's ripe for a comprehensive regional security mechanism because of the various characteristics of the states and historical rivalries. But there are constant impulses to try to find regional security mechanisms, regional security values. I think the U.S. really needs to be much more vocal in putting for our values and our allies' values in trying to identify what we want to achieve with regional security proposals and tackle specific problems in North Korea would be one, South China Sea would be another. And then there are subordinate ideas that can be brought in this broad package of initiatives. For example, the South China Sea, the counter claims in the South China Sea have led to excessive fishing there. China has been consuming the fish everywhere that it can because it has a growing middle class with a high appetite for marine proteins. Other countries are pillaging what they can, when they can. We don't even know what the scientific basis for fisheries on the coast of the east of Asia is. And we can put together a multilateral effort to, one, establish a scientific basis and then see where that takes us in terms of how to sustain species and then where that takes us in terms of working out quotas for various countries. And this is a way of taking away the fuel for the disputes on territory that will be almost impossible to resolve in the absence of a conflict. So I think we need ideas at macro level and down to the micro level that are much more positive in addressing the challenge that China presents to the long-term American presence in the region. Thank you.