Defense and Security

Panelists discuss the impact, benefits, and challenges of how artificial intelligence technologies are being adopted across sectors. PLEASE NOTE: This meeting is part of the Twenty-Eighth Annual Term Member Conference. All CFR members are invited to attend this session virtually. 

Panelists discuss how the recent attacks by Hamas and ongoing conflict between the group and Israel continue to affect security in the Middle East and influence regional dynamics, as well as the future of U.S. policy towards the region.  This discussion has been added to the agenda for the Twenty-Eighth Annual Term Member Conference.

Stephen Biddle, adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at CFR and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University, leads the conversation on military strategy in the contemporary world. FASKIANOS: Welcome to today’s session of the fall 2023 CFR Academic Webinar Series. I’m Irina Faskianos, vice president of the National Program and Outreach here at CFR. Today’s discussion is on the record, and the video and transcript will be available on our website, CFR.org/academic, if you would like to share them with your colleagues or classmates. As always, CFR takes no institutional positions on matters of policy. We’re delighted to have Stephen Biddle with us to discuss military strategy in the contemporary world. Dr. Biddle is an adjunct senior fellow for defense policy at CFR and professor of international and public affairs at Columbia University. Before joining Columbia he was professor of political science and international affairs at George Washington University. He regularly lectures at the U.S. Army War College and other military schools and has served on a variety of government advisory panels and analytical teams, testified before congressional committees on issues relating to the wars in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Syria; force planning; conventional net assessment; and European arms control, just to name a few. And, finally, Dr. Biddle is the author of numerous scholarly publications and several books, including his most recent, Nonstate Warfare, published by Princeton University in 2021 and he just recently authored a piece in CFR’s magazine Foreign Affairs in the September/October 2023 issue entitled “Back in the Trenches: Why New Technology Hasn’t Revolutionized Warfare in Ukraine,” and we shared that out in the background readings for this conversation. So, Steve, thank you for being with us. I thought you could give us an overview of the changes you’ve seen in military operations as a result of technological innovation and say a few words about wartime military behavior especially as you’ve studied it over the years and what we’re seeing now in Ukraine and now with the Israel-Hamas war. BIDDLE: Yeah, I’d be happy to. There’s a lot going on in the world of military affairs and strategy at the moment between Gaza, Taiwan Straits, and, of course, Ukraine. Maybe as a conversation starter I’ll start with Ukraine but we can go in whatever direction the group wants to go in, and the spoiler alert is in the headline of the article from Foreign Affairs that you’ve already assigned. There’s a big debate over what Ukraine means for the future of warfare and what Ukraine means for the way the United States should organize its military, modernize its equipment, write its doctrine and so on. One of the most common interpretations of what Ukraine means for all this is that it’s harboring—it’s a harbinger of a revolutionary transformation. The new technology, drones, space-based surveillance, precision-guided weapons, hypersonics, networked information, artificial intelligence, this whole panoply of things in this argument is making the modern battlefield so lethal, so radically more lethal than the past is that in the present and in the future offensive maneuver will become impossible and we’ll get the dawn of some new age of defense dominance in conventional warfare, which, if true, would then have all sorts of implications for how the United States should make all these kinds of defense policy decisions. As those of you who read the Foreign Affairs article know I don’t buy it because I don’t think the evidence is consistent with that supposition. You’ll be happy to hear that I’m not planning to do a dramatic reading of the Foreign Affairs essay, entertaining as I’m sure that would be, but I did think it might be useful for me to briefly outline the argument as a way of teeing up the subsequent conversation. And the basic argument in the article is that whereas there are, indeed, all sorts of very new technologies in use in this war, when you actually look carefully at the results they’re producing, at the attrition rates that they’re actually causing, at the ability of the two sides to gain ground and to suffer the loss of ground, the actual results being produced by all this very new technology are surprisingly less new than is assumed and supposed in the argument that we’re looking at some transformational discontinuous moment in which a new age of defense dominance is dawning. This doesn’t mean that nothing’s changing or that the United States military should do in the future exactly what it’s done in the past. But the nature of the change that I think we’re seeing is evolutionary and incremental as it has been for the last hundred years, and if you think what’s going on is incremental evolutionary change rather than discontinuous transformation that then has very different implications for what the U.S. should do militarily. So just to unpack a little bit of that by way of pump priming let me just cite some of the examples of what one actually observes and the outcomes of the use of all these new technologies as we’ve seen in Ukraine. So let’s start with casualty rates and attrition. At the heart of this argument that new technology is creating a new era of defense dominance is the argument that fires have made the battlefield so lethal now that the kind of offensive maneuver you saw in World War II or in 1967 or in 1991 is now impossible. And, yet, the actual attrition rates of, for example, tanks, right—tanks tend to be the weapon system that gets the most attention in this context—are remarkably similar to what we saw in the world wars. So in the first twelve months of the fighting in Ukraine, depending on whose estimates you look at the Russians lost somewhere between about half and about 96 percent of their prewar tank fleet in twelve months of fighting. The Ukrainians lost somewhat in excess of 50 percent of their prewar tank fleet, and intuitively that looks like a heavy loss rate, right? Fifty (percent) to 96 percent of what you opened the war with, that seems pretty—you know, pretty dangerous. But in historical context it’s actually lower than it frequently was in World War II. In 1943, the German army suffered an attrition rate to the tanks it owned at the beginning of the year of 113 percent. They lost more tanks in 1943 than they owned in January 1943. Their casualty rate went up in 1944. They lost 122 percent of all the tanks they owned in January of 1944. So these attrition rates while high aren’t unusually high by historical standards. What about artillery, right? Artillery is the single largest casualty inflicter on the modern battlefield defined as since the turn of the twentieth century, 1900. As far as we can tell the attrition rate from Ukrainian artillery fire of Russian forces in this war looks to be on the order of about eight casualties inflicted per hundred rounds of artillery fired and that’s higher than in World War II but not discontinuously radically higher. In World War II that figure would have been about three casualties per hundred rounds fired. In World War I that figure would have been about two casualties per hundred rounds fired. If you chart that over time what you see is an essentially linear straight line incremental increase over a hundred years of about an additional .05 casualties per hundred rounds fired per year over a century of combat experience. There’s no sudden discontinuous increase as a result of drones or networked information or space-based surveillance at the end of the period. What about ground gain and ground loss? The purpose of attrition on a modern battlefield is to change who controls how much territory and the whole transformation argument is that all this putatively much more lethal technology is making ground gain much, much harder than in the past, and yet the Russia offensive that opened the war, mishandled as it was in so many ways, took over 42,000 square miles of Ukraine in the first couple of months of the war. The Ukrainian Kyiv counteroffensive retook more than 19,000 square miles. Their Kharkiv counteroffensive retook 2,300 square miles. The Kharkiv counteroffensive took back more than 200 square miles. There’s been plenty of defensive stalemate in the war, right? The Russian offensive on Bakhmut took ten months to take the city. Cost them probably sixty (thousand) to a hundred thousand casualties to do it. The Mariupol offensive took three months to take the city. But this war has not been a simple story of technologically determined offensive frustration. There have been offensives that have succeeded and offensives that have failed with essentially the same equipment. Drones didn’t get introduced into the war in the last six months. Drones were in heavy use from the very outset of the fighting and this kind of pattern of some offensives that succeed, some offensives that don’t, like the attrition rate is not particularly new. I mean, the popular imagination tends to see World War I as a trench stalemate created by the new technology of artillery and machine guns and barbed wire and World War II as a world offensive maneuver created by the new technologies of the tank, the airplane, the radio. Neither World War I nor World War II were homogeneous experiences where everything was defensive frustration of World War I and everything was offensive success in World War II. That wasn’t the case in either of the two world wars. The Germans advanced almost to the doorsteps of Paris in the initial war opening offensive in 1914. In 1918, the German spring offenses broke clean through Allied lines three times in a row and produced a general advance by the Allies and the subsequent counteroffensive on a hundred-eighty-mile front. There was a lot of ground that changed hands in World War I as a result of offensives in addition to the great defensive trench stalemate of 1915 to mid-1917. In World War II some of the most famous offensive failures in military history were tank-heavy attacks in 1943 and 1944. The Battle of Kursk on the Russian front cost the German attackers more than a hundred and sixty thousand casualties and more than seven hundred lost tanks. The most tank-intensive offensive in the history of war, the British attack at Operation Goodwood in 1944, cost the British a third of all the British armor on the continent of Europe in just three days of fighting. So what we’ve seen in observed military experience over a hundred years of frequent observational opportunity is a mix of offensive success and defensive success with technologies that are sometimes described as defense dominant and, yet, nonetheless, see breakthroughs and technologies that are sometimes seen as offense dominant and, yet, sometimes produce defensive stalemates and what really varies is not so much driven by the equipment, it’s driven by the way people use it. And the central problem in all of this is that military outcomes are not technologically determined. The effects of technology in war are powerfully mediated by how human organizations use them and there are big variations in the way human organizations use equipment. And if you just look at the equipment alone and expect that that’s going to tell you what the result of combat is going to be and you don’t systematically account for how the human organizations involved adapt to what the technology might do on the proving ground to reduce what it can do on the battlefield then you get radically wrong answers and I would argue that’s what’s going on in Ukraine. Both sides are adapting rapidly and the nature of the adaptations that we’re seeing in Ukraine are very similar to the nature of the adaptations we’ve seen in previous great power warfare. Again, incremental lineal extensions of emphases on cover, emphases on concealment, combined arms, defensive depth, mobile reserve withholds—these are the ways that all great power militaries have responded to increasingly lethal equipment over time to reduce their exposure to the nominal proving ground lethality of weapons in actual practice. The problem is this collection of techniques—and in other work I’ve referred to them as the modern system, this kind of transnational epistemic community of practice and the conduct of conventional warfare—to do all these things right and minimize your exposure is technically very challenging. Some military organizations can manage this very complex way of fighting; others cannot. Some can do it on one front and not on another front, and the result is we get a lot of variance in the degree to which any given military at any given moment embraces the entirety of this doctrinal program. Where they do, defenses have been very hard to break through for a hundred years. This isn’t something that came about in February of 2022 because of drones and networked information. This has been the case repeatedly for a century of actual combat. But where they don’t, where defenses are shallow, where reserve withholds are too small, where combined arms aren’t exploited, where cover and concealment isn’t exploited, then casualty rates go way, way up. Then breakthrough becomes possible. Then attackers can gain a lot of ground with tanks or without tanks. The German offensives that broke clean through Allied defensive lines in 1918 had almost no tanks. The first of them, Operation Michael, was a one-million soldier offensive that had exactly nine tanks in support of it. So the differences that have mattered are the interaction of increasingly lethal technology with these variations and the ability of real human organizations to master the complexity needed to fight in a way that reduces exposure to this and that’s the same thing we’ve seen in Ukraine. Where defenses have been shallow and haven’t had enough reserves behind them you’ve gotten breakthroughs. Where they’ve been deep, adequately backed by reserves, as we’ve seen in this summer counteroffensive over the last three or four months, for example, they’ve not been able to break through and this isn’t a new story. This is just a recapitulation of a hundred years’ worth of military experience. If that’s so then what difference does it make to the U.S.? So, again, as I suggested earlier, that doesn’t mean don’t change anything, right? A 1916 tank on a modern battlefield would not fare well. Part of the stability in these kinds of outcomes is because people change the way they do business. They change the way they fight. They update their equipment. They execute measure/countermeasure races and so we need to continue to do that. Depth is probably going to increase. Reserve withhold requirements are going to go up. Demands for cover and concealment are going to increase. There will be technological implications stemming from the particular measure/countermeasure races that are emerging now especially with respect to drones. Almost certainly the U.S. Army is going to have an incentive, for example, to deploy counter drone escort vehicles as part of the combined arms mix, moving forward. But the principle of combined arms that’s behind so much of the way the U.S. Army fights is very unlikely to change very much. What’s going to happen is a new element will be added to the combined arms mix, and escort jammers and anti-aircraft artillery and other air defense systems that are optimized for drones will become part of the mix of tanks and infantry and engineers and signals and air defense and all the rest, moving forward. The whole revolution argument, though, is not that, right? The reason people refer to this as a revolution, as transformation, is they’re using language that’s designed to tee up the idea that ordinary orthodox incremental updating business as usual isn’t enough in this new era because of drones, because of hypersonics, or space-based surveillance or whatever. We need something more than that, and I think if we look closely at what’s going on in Ukraine what we see is not an argument that we need to transform the way the U.S. military does business. What we see is an argument for incremental change that implies incremental adaptation is appropriate, that it’s not the wrong thing to do. I think it’s possible to over-innovate. I think there are ample historical examples of militaries that have gone wrong not by being resistant to innovation—there are plenty of those, too—but by doing too much innovation. In the 1950s and 1960s U.S. Air Force transformed itself around an idea that conventional warfare is a thing of the past, all wars of the future will be nuclear, and they designed airplanes for nuclear weapon delivery that were horribly ill-suited to the conventional war in Vietnam that they then found themselves in. The U.S. Army transformed its doctrine following a particular understanding of the lethality of precision-guided anti-tank weapons in the 1973 Arab-Israeli war, adopted a concept called active defense that relied on static defense in a shallow disposition from fixed positions, emphasizing the ostensible new firepower of anti-tank weapons. Found that that was very innovative but very ineffective and abandoned it in favor of the airline battle doctrine that’s a lineal descendant of the doctrine we use now, which was much more orthodox and conventional. There are plenty of examples of militaries that have over-innovated. This language of revolution and transformation is designed to promote what I’m concerned could be over-innovation again. I think we could talk more about the particulars of what incremental adaptation should comprise but I think that’s the right way forward in light of what we actually observe about what’s going on in Ukraine. FASKIANOS: Fantastic. Thank you for that, Steve. That was great. Let’s go now to all of you for your questions. (Gives queuing instructions.) And so don’t be shy. This is your time. We have our first question from Terrence Kleven. Q: Hello. Can you hear me? FASKIANOS: We can. If you could tell us your affiliation that would be great. Q: Yes, very good. Terrence Kleven. I’m at Central College in Pella, Iowa, and I teach in a philosophy and religious studies department and I teach quite a lot of Middle Eastern studies. Thank you very much for your presentation because so much of this we don’t talk about enough and we don’t understand, and I appreciate the opportunity to hear what you have to say and look forward to reading your—some of your material. Just kind of a practical question, why aren’t the Russians using more planes in this war or are they and we just don’t have a report of that? I assume that the Russian air force is much superior to what the Ukrainians have but it doesn’t seem to give them a great advantage. What’s missing? What’s going on? BIDDLE: Yeah. You’re raising a question that has bedeviled military analysts in this war since its beginning. Part of the issue is the definition of what plane is, right? If we define a plane as something that uses aerodynamic lift to fly through the air and perform military missions the Russians are using lots of planes; they just don’t have pilots. We call them drones. But a drone, to a first approximation, is just a particular inexpensive, low-performance airplane that is relatively expendable because it’s inexpensive. But because it’s inexpensive it’s also low performance. If by airplanes one includes drones, then there’s lots of airplane use going on. What you had in mind with the question, I’m sure, is the airplanes that have people in them—why aren’t they more salient in the military conduct of the war, and the Russians have tried to use piloted aircraft. The trouble is the loss rates have kept them, largely, out of the sky. So this again gets back to the question of human adaptation to new technology. Air forces—and navies, by the way, but that’s a different conversation—are much more exposed to more technology increases—the technology changes that produce increasing lethality than ground armies are. Ground armies have much easier access to cover and concealment. It’s hard to find much cover and concealment up there in the sky, right? You’re highlighted against a largely featureless background. There are things you can do as an air force to try and reduce your exposure to precision-guided anti-aircraft weapons and the U.S. Air Force, for example, practices those extensively. But the complexity of operating an air force to be effective at the mission called SEAD—suppression of enemy air defenses—is very high and it requires a lot of practice and it requires a lot of flight hours and it requires you to burn a lot of fuel in training, and the U.S. Air Force is willing to do that. The Russians historically have not. Therefore, they’re not very good at it. Therefore, they’re very—they have been very exposed to the lethality precision-guided Ukrainian anti-aircraft defenses and, therefore, they’ve mostly decided not to expose themselves to this fire. They fly mostly over friendly terrain, especially in metropolitan Russia, and they fly at low altitudes that keep them under the radar, which is a cliché that’s leached into public conversation because of the actual physics of the way radar works and responds to the curvature of the earth. If the Russians operate over Russian territory at low altitude and launch cruise missiles at huge distances then their airplanes don’t get shot down as much. But then the airplanes are a lot less effective and contribute a lot less and that’s the tradeoff that the Russians have accepted with respect to the use of airplanes. The airplanes they use a lot are unpiloted cheap low-performance drones which they are willing to get shot down in huge numbers and they do get shot down in huge numbers. But piloted aircraft have played a limited role because the air defense environment is too lethal for an air force with skills no better than the Russians are to survive in it. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to take the next question from Mike Nelson. Q: Thanks for a very interesting overview. I work at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and also have taught at Georgetown on internet policy and the impacts of digital technologies. Seems to me that one of the big changes with this war has been the incredible transparency, more information on what’s actually going on on the ground from social media, satellite photos, drone photos. I saw a tweet today about how they’re able to infer how many Russian soldiers have mutinied by counting these soldiers marching back from the front, presumably under armed guard. It just seems that there’s a lot more information on what’s going on hour by hour. I wonder if that is causing some changes on both the Russian and the Ukrainian side and whether the insertion of disinformation to make it appear that things are going differently than it seems is also something that’s getting better and better. Thank you. BIDDLE: Yeah. I mean, the information environment in Ukraine is complicated in ways that the debate often doesn’t deal with very well, in my view. So starting at the superficial level, public perceptions of what the lethality of first-person view kamikaze drones has been against tanks and artillery are wildly exaggerated and the reason why the public impression is wildly exaggerated is because the medium formerly known as Twitter puts up endless videos of successful attacks. But nobody posts a video of their failed attack so we only see the subset of all drone missions that succeeded. The ones that don’t are invisible. Therefore, the public gets this impression that all—that there are successful drone missions by the millions all the time and that that’s—there are serious selection effects with the way the public understands drone success rates in light of that. So one point is that the apparent transparency is subject to a variety of selection biases that lead to misunderstandings of the transparency on the battlefield as a whole. Similarly, there are lots of videos of images of Russian soldiers in a trench and especially videos of Russian soldiers in a trench before a quadcopter drone drops a grenade on them and then kills them. You don’t see any video feeds of a drone flying over a camouflaged position where you can’t see anything because nobody’s going to post that, right? It’s not interesting enough. But, therefore, again, we get the selection effect. People believe that everything is visible and everything is transparent because every video feed they see, and they see a lot of them, shows a visible target. The trouble is you’re not seeing the failed drone missions that didn’t produce a visible target and those are the vast majority as far as we can tell from more careful analyses that try to look at the totality of drone missions rather than just the selected subset that appear on now X, formerly Twitter. Now, that leads to the general issue of how transparent is the modern battlefield and I would argue that the modern battlefield is a lot less transparent than people popularly imagine that it is. The cover and concealment available in the earth’s surface to a military that’s capable of exploiting it is still sufficient to keep a sizeable fraction of both militaries’ targets invisible to the other side most of the time and that’s why the artillery casualty rate hasn’t gone up dramatically as a result of all this. It’s because cover and concealment is still keeping most of the targets out of the way. So I would argue the battlefield is less transparent than we often assume that it is and in part that’s because the systems that would generate information are countered by the other side so that they generate less information. Again, take drones, which have been the thing that everybody’s been focusing on. There have been multiple waves of measure/countermeasure races just on the technical side, setting aside technical adaptation, with respect to drones already. When the war opened the primary drone in use, especially on the Ukrainian side, was the Bayraktar TB2, Turkish-built large, you know, capable, fairly expensive drone which was very lethal against exposed Russian armored columns. Then several things happened. One is the armored columns decided to get less exposed. Smart move on the Russians’ part. The other thing is the air defense system under the Russians adapted and started shooting down Bayraktar TB2s at a huge rate to the point where the Ukrainians stopped flying them because they were so vulnerable and, instead, drones shifted from big expensive higher performance drones to smaller, cheaper, lower performance drones, which were so cheap that it didn’t make sense to fire expensive guided anti-aircraft missiles at them anymore and then the air defense environment shifted to emphasize jamming, which is even cheaper than the drones, and anti-aircraft artillery firing bullets that are cheaper than drones. So the systems that would create this transparency and that would give you this information don’t get a free ride. The opponent systematically attacks them and systematically changes the behavior of the target so that the surviving seekers have less to find, and in addition to cover and concealment and complementary to it is dispersion and what dispersion of ground targets does is even if you find a target it may very well not be worth the expenditure of an expensive precision munition to kill. A guided 155-millimeter artillery shell costs on the order of a hundred thousand dollars a shell. If you’re shooting it at a concentrated platoon of enemy infantry that’s a good expenditure. If you’re shooting it at a dispersed target where they’re in one- or two-soldier foxholes now even if you know where all the foxholes are—even if your drones have survived, the concealment has failed and the drone has accurately located where every single two-soldier foxhole is does it make sense to fire a $100,000 guided artillery shell at each of them or are you going to run out of guided artillery shells before they run out of foxholes, right? So the net of all of this—the technical measure/countermeasure race and the tactical adaptation is that I would argue that the battlefield is actually not as transparent as people commonly assume. If it were we’d be seeing much higher casualty rates than what we’re actually seeing. There’s incremental change, right? The battlefield is more transparent now, heaven knows, than it was in 1943. But the magnitude of the difference and the presence of technical measures and countermeasures is incremental rather than transformational and that’s a large part of the reason why the change in results has been incremental rather than transformational. FASKIANOS: So we have a lot of questions but I do want to just ask you, Steve, to comment on Elon Musk’s—you know, he shut down his Starlink satellite communications so that the Ukrainians could not do their assault on the—on Russia. I think it was the submersible—they were going to strike the Russian naval vessels off of Crimea. So that, obviously—the technology did affect how the war was—the battlefield. BIDDLE: It did, but you’ll notice that Crimea has been attacked multiple times since then and metropolitan Russia has been attacked multiple times since then. So there are technical workarounds. On the technical side rather than the tactical side there are multiple ways to skin a cat. One of these has been that the U.S. has tried to make Ukraine less dependent on private satellite communication networks by providing alternatives that are less subject to the whims of a single billionaire. But tactical communications of the kind that Starlink has enabled the Ukrainians are very useful, right? No doubt about it, and that’s why the U.S. government is working so hard to provide alternatives to commercial Starlink access. But even there, even if you didn’t have them at all the Ukrainian military wouldn’t collapse. I mean, in fact, most military formations were taught how to function in a communications-constrained environment because of the danger that modern militaries will jam their available communication systems or destroy communication nodes or attack the satellites that are providing the relays. Certainly, the U.S. military today is not prepared to assume that satellite communications are always going to be available. We train our soldiers how to operate in an environment in which those systems are denied you because they might be. So, again, I mean, tactical adaptation doesn’t eliminate the effects of technological change—having Starlink, being denied Starlink, right, this Musk-owned communication satellite constellation that was the source of all the kerfuffle. It’s not irrelevant whether you have it or not but it’s less decisive than you might imagine if you didn’t take into account the way that militaries adapt to the concern that they might be denied them or that the enemy might have them and they might not, which are serious concerns. Certainly, if the U.S. and Russia were true belligerents both the danger of anti-satellite warfare destroying significant fractions of those constellations is serious, or jamming or otherwise making them unavailable is a serious problem so militaries try to adapt to deal with it—with their absence if they have to. FASKIANOS: Great. We have a question—a written question from Monica Byrne at—a student at Bard College: Can you share thoughts and strategy for Israel and Gaza, given the conditions in Gaza? BIDDLE: Yeah. So shifting gears now from Ukraine to the Middle East, given Israel’s declared war aim, right—if Israel’s aim is to topple the Hamas regime and then hopefully replace it with something that’s another conversation. But let’s for the moment just talk about the military dynamics of realizing their stated war aim of toppling the Hamas regime. That will certainly require a ground invasion that reoccupies at least temporarily the entirety of Gaza, right? Airstrikes aren’t going to accomplish that war aim. Special forces raids aren’t going to accomplish that war aim. The Hamas administrative apparatus is, A, too large and, B, too easily concealed, especially underground, for those kinds of techniques to be sufficient. So if the Israelis really are going to topple Hamas a large-scale ground invasion is needed. That has obvious horrible implications for collateral damage and civilian fatalities in Gaza—urban warfare is infamously destructive of capital and of civilian human life—but also for military casualties to the Israelis. Urban warfare is a radically advantageous military environment for defenders and so Israel inevitably will take serious losses if they really expect to completely reoccupy Gaza as would be needed to depose Hamas. Now, there are ways that conventional militaries can try and reduce either the loss of innocent civilian life or casualty rates to their own forces but none of these things are perfect and the techniques militaries use to reduce civilian fatalities can be exploited by defenders who want to take advantage of them to increase Israeli military casualties and limit the Israelis’ ability to limit collateral damage. You can fire only at identified targets and not at entire buildings. You can use small-caliber weapons rather than large-caliber artillery and missiles. You can warn the civilian occupants of a building either with leaflets or text messages or the Israeli technique that’s called knocking on the roof where they drop a nonexplosive weapon on the ceiling to create a sound that tells the occupants they are about to be attacked so they leave. There are a variety of things like that that you can do and that the U.S. should hope that the Israelis are going to do. But the whole problem here is that the Hamas political and military infrastructure is deeply intermingled with the civilian population in Gaza, and so even if you’re going to be as discriminating as modern technology and military skill potentially could make you, you’re still going to kill a lot of civilians and Hamas is not going to conveniently remove the military infrastructure from the civilian population to make it easier for the Israelis to kill the fighters and not kill the civilians. They’re going to keep them tightly intermingled. Now, the Israelis can reduce their losses by being slower and more deliberate and methodical in the way they enter Gaza. There’s been a discussion in recent weeks about the difference between Mosul and Fallujah and the U.S. experience of urban warfare in Iraq. In Fallujah, we entered quickly with a large ground force that was fairly dependent on small arms direct fire and relatively less reliant on artillery and airstrikes. In Mosul with Iraqi allies on the ground, we did the opposite. Very slow entry. The campaign took months. Limited exposure, small-caliber weapons, heavy emphasis on airstrikes and artillery to reduce the ground—even so, thousands of civilians were killed in Mosul. Even so, our Iraqi allies took serious casualties. There’s no way for the Israelis to do this Gaza offensive if they’re going to realize their war aim that won’t destroy Gaza, kill a lot of civilians, and suffer a lot of casualties themselves. All these things are marginal differences at the most. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going to go next to Dan Caldwell. Q: Oh, Steve, thanks very much for a very interesting overview. I’d like to raise another subject that is, obviously, very broad but I would really appreciate your comments on it and that’s the question of intelligence and its relationship to military operations that you’ve described. Broadly speaking, we can separate out tactical intelligence from strategic intelligence, and in the case of tactical intelligence the use of breaking down terrorists’ cell phones’ records and things like contributed to military successes in Iraq and Afghanistan. In a strategic sense, the breaking of the Japanese codes, Purple, and the Ultra Enigma secret in World War II contributed to the Allies’ success, and in terms of the Middle East the strategic failures of Israeli intelligence in 1973 and, I would argue, in the recent Hamas attacks contributed to the losses that Israel has suffered. So how do you think about the relationship of intelligence to military strategy? BIDDLE: Yeah. I mean, intelligence is central to everything in security policy, right? It’s central to forcible diplomacy. It’s central to preparation for war. It’s central to the conduct of military. So intelligence underlies everything. All good decision making requires information about the other side. The intelligence system has to provide that. The ability of the intelligence system to create transformational change is limited. Let’s take the national level strategic intelligence question first and then we’ll move to things like Ultra and battlefield uses. As you know, the problem of military surprise has been extensively studied, at least since the 1973 war in which Israel was famously surprised by the Egyptian attack in the Sinai. There’s been an extensive scholarly focus on this problem of intelligence failure and surprise—how can this possibly happen. And the central thrust of that literature, I would argue, has been that almost always after a surprise you discover later that the surprised intelligence system had information that should have told them an attack was coming. They almost always receive indicators. They almost always get photographic intelligence. All sorts of pieces of information find their way into the owning intelligence system. And yet, they got surprised anyway. How could this happen? And the answer is that the information has to be processed by human organizations, and the organizational challenges and the cognitive biases that individuals have when they’re dealing with this information combine in such a way to frequently cause indicators not to be understood and used and exploited to avoid surprise and part of the reason for that—the details, of course, are extensive and complex. But part of the reason for that is you get indicators of an attack that didn’t—that then didn’t happen way more often than you get the indicators of the attack that does happen. You get indicators all the time but usually there’s no attack and the trick then is how do you distinguish the indicator that isn’t going to become an attack from the indicator that is going to become the attack when you’ve always got both. And if you—especially in a country like Israel where mobilizing the reserves has huge economic consequences, if you mobilize the reserves every time you get indicators of an attack you exhaust the country and the country stops responding to the indicators anymore. It’s the cry wolf problem. I mean, the first couple of times you cry wolf people take it seriously. The eighth, ninth, tenth, twelfth time they don’t. So because of this the ability to change, to do away with surprise, with, for example, new technology, all right, a more transparent world in which we have a better ability to tap people’s cell phones and tap undersea cables to find out what governments are saying to themselves we have better ability to collect information. But there are still organizational biases, cognitive problems, and just the basic signal-to-noise, wheat-to-chaff ratio issue of lots and lots of information, most of which is about an attack that isn’t going to happen. And distinguishing that from the ones that are going to happen is an ongoing problem that I doubt is going to be solved because it isn’t a technological issue. It resides in the structure of human organizations and the way the human mind operates to filter out extraneous and focus on important sensory information, and human cognitive processes aren’t changing radically and human organizations aren’t either. So at the strategic level I don’t see transformation coming soon. Then we’ve got the battlefield problem of what about intercepted communications, for example, which have changed the historiography of World War II in an important way. We’ll note that that didn’t cause the Allies to defeat the Germans in 1944, right? I mean, the Allies cracked the German and the Japanese codes long before the war ended and, yet, the war continued, and this gets back to this question of how militaries adapt to the availability of information about them on the other side. At sea where there’s not a lot of terrain for cover and concealment, right, then these kinds of communications intercepts were more important and as a result the Japanese navy was, largely, swept from the Pacific long before the war ended in 1945. But wars are ultimately usually about what goes on on land, and on land even if you intercept people’s communications if they’re covered, concealed, dispersed, and in depth being able to read German communications, which we could do in 1944, didn’t enable us to quickly break through, rapidly drive to Berlin and end the war three months after the Normandy invasions. In spite of the fact that we could read the communications traffic we couldn’t do those things because the communications traffic is only part of success and failure on the battlefield. So if that was the case in World War II where we had, you know, unusually good comment and usually good ability to break the enemy’s codes and read their message traffic, again, I would argue that improvements in intelligence technology today were certainly helpful, and they’re worth having and we should pursue them and use them, but it’s not likely to transform combat outcomes in a theater of war any more than—to a radically greater degree than it did when we had that kind of information in 1944. FASKIANOS: So I’m going to combine the next two questions because they’re about innovation from the Marine Corps University and Rutgers University: You mentioned over innovation. Can you explain what that is and how it can be detrimental? And then are you concerned that the Department of Defense R&D program could be at risk of being out of balance by over emphasizing advanced technology versus getting useful technology deployed and into the field? BIDDLE: I think that’s one of the most important implications of this war is that the United States has historically chosen to get way out on the envelope of what technology makes possible for weapon acquisition, creating extremely expensive weapons that we can buy in very small numbers that we evaluate and we decide to buy because of their proving ground potential because what they can do against targets that haven’t adapted to them yet. What the record of adaptation in Ukraine, I think, shows is that the actual lethality of very sophisticated weapons is not as high as it looks on a proving ground because the targets are going to be noncooperative and the real-world performance of extremely expensive sophisticated technologies is normally less than it looks, and if that’s the case we are probably overspending on very sophisticated, very expensive weapons which we can only buy in very small numbers and which if they don’t produce this radical lethality wouldn’t be worth the expenditure that they cost. And if the adaptation of the target is going to reduce their lethality and increase their vulnerability, which is certainly what we’re observing in Ukraine, then we’re going to have a dickens of a time replacing them when they get lost, right, because very sophisticated high technology weapons, among other things, require a supply chain of materials that are often quite scarce—rare earths, cobalt, lithium. One of the reasons why the American Defense Industrial Base has had a hard time responding rapidly to the demands that the expenditure rate of things in Ukraine has created is because of these complicated supply chains that we can manage when we’re building things in small numbers, which we think is sufficient because we’re expecting that each one of them is going to be tremendously lethal. If we now realize that they’re less lethal in practice than we expect them to be and therefore we need larger numbers of them, how are we going to get the materials we need to do that? And the experience in Ukraine has been that the kind of revolution in military affairs expectation for the lethality of high technology just hasn’t been realized. Yes, weapons are very lethal in Ukraine, but not orders of magnitude differently than they were in 1944, right, and so I think this ought to suggest to us that the historical post-World War II U.S. strategy emphasizing very high technology at very high cost in very small numbers to compensate for small numbers with radical lethality may very well be misguided. It works well when you’re fighting an opponent like the Iraqis who can’t handle the complexity of cover and concealment, combined arms, and all the rest. They’re exposed and the weapons have the kind of proving ground effect that you expect because the targets are not undercover. Not clear that it has been producing that kind of results in Ukraine and it’s not clear that it would produce those kinds of results for the United States in a coming great power conflict. FASKIANOS: Thank you. I’m going take the next question from Genevieve Connell at the Fordham graduate program in international political economy and development. How much does successful military strategy rely on stable domestic economic systems to fund it or is this less of an issue when one or both sides have strong geopolitical support and aid? BIDDLE: War is very expensive, as the Ukraine war is reminding us, right? This isn’t news. The expenditure rates in modern industrial age warfare are massively expensive to maintain and that in turn means that the strength of the national economy is a fundamental foundational requirement for success in modern great power warfare. This, of course, leads to the set of tradeoffs that are fundamental in grand strategy, right? Grand strategy, as opposed to operational art, military strategy, or tactics, integrates military and nonmilitary means in pursuit of the ultimate security objectives of the state and one of the more important of the nonmilitary means is the economy. So you need a large GDP to support a large expensive war effort. The way you maximize GDP is with international trade. International trade makes you vulnerable to cutoff in time of war through blockade. Therefore, if we just maximize GDP in the short run we run the risk—we increase our vulnerability in time of war or blockades. We say: Oh, no, we don’t want to do that. Let’s reduce the amount of international trade we do, make ourselves more self-sufficient. Now GDP growth rates go down and now the size of the military you can support in steady state goes down. There’s a fundamental tradeoff involving the interaction between classically guns and butter in the way you design the economy in support of the grand strategy you have in mind for how you’re going to pursue your security interest in the international system at any given time. So, yeah, a productive expanding economy is essential if you plan to be able to afford the cost of modern warfare. The implications for what that means for things like international trade, though, are complicated. FASKIANOS: Great. I’ll try to sneak in one last question from David Nachman. Q: Thank you. Thank you for this really interesting presentation. I teach at the Yale Law School, nothing related to the topic of today’s submission and discussion. I’m just wondering, and you captured it towards the end here where you said something about wars are won and lost on land. With the advent of cyber and all the technological development that we’re seeing in our armed forces is that still true as a matter, you know, and are we—is the Ukraine and even Gaza experience sort of nonrepresentative of the true strategic threats that the United States as opposed to its allies really faces at sea and in the air? BIDDLE: Yeah. Let me briefly address cyber but then extend it into the sea and the air. One of the interesting features of cyber is it’s mostly been a dog that hasn’t barked, at least it hasn’t barked very loudly. There were widespread expectations as Russia was invading that cyberattacks would shut down the Ukrainian economy, would shut down the Ukrainian military effort, or vice versa, and neither of those things have happened. So I don’t—there have been plenty of cyberattacks, right, and there have been plenty of efforts at break in and surveillance and manipulation. So far none of them have been militarily decisive and it’s an interesting and I think still open question for the cyber community about why that has been so and what, if anything, does that tell us about the future of cyber threats to national military projects. But so far it hasn’t radically—it hasn’t produced a result that would have been different in the pre-cyber era. Now, when I say wars are won on land what I mean by that is that people live on the land, right? People don’t live in the air and people don’t live on the surface of the water. People live on land. Economies are on land. Populations are on land. That means that usually the stakes that people fight wars over are things having to do with the land. That doesn’t mean that navies and air forces are irrelevant. We own a large one. I’m in favor of owning a large one. The Navy—my friends in the Navy would be very upset if I said otherwise. But the purpose of the Navy is to affect people who live on the land, right? In classic Mahanian naval strategy the purpose of the Navy is destroy the opposing fleet, blockade the enemy’s ports, destroy the enemy’s commerce, and ruin the land-based economy and it’s the effect of the land-based economy that causes surrender or compromise or concession to the opponent or whatever else ends the war in ways that you hope are favorable to you. What this means then is that especially where we’re dealing with large continental powers like Russia, classically—China’s an interesting sub case but let’s talk about Russia—the ability to influence the Russian decision-making calculus that leads to an end to a war or the beginning of a war without affecting the life of people on land is very limited. Cyber has not proven able to do that. Air attack historically has not been a good tool for doing that. Navies do that by affecting the land-based economy and I don’t see that changing rapidly anytime soon. FASKIANOS: Well, Steve, thank you very much for this really insightful hour. I’m sorry to all of you we couldn’t get to the questions, raised hands, so we’ll just have to have you back. And thanks to all those of you who did ask questions. I commend to you, again, Steve Biddle’s Foreign Affairs piece, “Back in the Trenches,” and hope you will read that. Our next Academic Webinar will be on Wednesday, November 8, at 1:00 p.m. (EST) with José Miguel Vivanco, who is an adjunct senior fellow here for human rights, to talk about human rights in Latin America. So, Steve, thank you again. BIDDLE: Thanks for having me. FASKIANOS: And I—yes. And I’d just encourage you all to learn about CFR paid internships for students and fellowships for professors at CFR.org/careers. Our tenured professor and our fellowship deadlines is at the end of October. I believe it’s October 31, so there’s still time. And you can follow us on X at CFR_Academic. Visit CFR.org, ForeignAffairs.com, and ThinkGlobalHealth.org for research and analysis on global issues. Thank you all again for being with us today. (END)

On August 18, 2023, U.S. President Joe Biden, South Korean President Yoon Suk Yeol, and Japanese Prime Minister Kishida Fumio met at Camp David for the first stand-alone trilateral U.S.-South Korea-Japan summit. The Camp David Summit represented the start of a new era of trilateral partnership for the three countries and resulted in The Spirit of Camp David: Joint Statement of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States, which outlined an enhanced and forward-looking vision for trilateral cooperation. This workshop, held in cooperation with the Sejong Institute, brought together prominent U.S. and South Korean specialists to discuss the future of U.S.-South Korea-Japan trilateralism.  TRANSCRIPT SMITH: Good morning, everyone. I know you’re a little surprised to see me at the head of the table. I’m Sheila Smith. I am the John E. Merow senior fellow for Asia-Pacific studies here at the Council on Foreign Relations, and I am pinch-hitting for a few minutes for Scott Snyder, our Korea fellow here, who had the wonderful opportunity of flying to Saudi Arabia to interview—to introduce and interview President Yoon for a large investment conference there. So when Scott comes back, we’re going to pepper him with questions about how that went and what he asked the president of South Korea. So he is on his way from Dulles as we speak, so I’m just going to get us started this morning. I wanted to welcome everyone. This is the third or fourth of these regular CFR-Sejong Institute dialogues/workshops, and I’ve had the pleasure of attending at least three of them, maybe not all of them. But it’s been a terrific moment for me always to catch up with what’s happening not only in the trilateral relationship, but also what’s happening in South Korea. So we’re delighted to welcome you back. I would—I’m going to read some opening remarks from Scott because he has an assignment for this day for all of you, so I don’t want to lose focus on that assignment. But I just wanted to note that, you know, when we were here last year, we were really talking about the Phnom Penh statement, the Indo-Pacific framing of the trilateral, and how important that was, how different that was, and in some ways how ambitious that was. Well, a lot has happened over the course of the year. We have had—obviously, in the U.S.-ROK relationship, we’ve had a summit meeting. We’ve had the Washington Declaration on extended deterrence. We’ve had incredible progress, I would say, in the Japan-ROK relationship, that bilateral, with—because of the heavy lifting, I think, especially by President Yoon but also Prime Minister Kishida. We’ve had progress that I wouldn’t have anticipated when we met here last year. But we’ve also had events around the globe that also frame the way this trilateral is considered and the kinds of conversations that President Biden, President Yoon, and Prime Minister Kishida had at Camp David this last August. And that is, of course, now we have one war in Europe and we are on the verge of—hopefully not, but we are on the verge of intense conflict in the Middle East. And so we cannot anymore see what happens in Northeast Asia as being regional or local. The connections around the globe are immensely visible today in ways I think they weren’t quite so visible last year. And I’m thinking here, obviously, of President Putin’s visit—not President Putin’s visit; I’m sorry—Kim Jong-un’s visit to Moscow to see President Putin. So the Moscow-DPRK axis is incredibly important in our conversations today as well. So let me start, then, by laying out the framework. I’m just going to read Scott’s remarks because they’re quite—they’re quite carefully framed and I want to make sure that we’re true to his wishes for how to think about today. Again, he wanted to share his welcome to all of you, especially President Lee and your colleagues, and he wanted to focus on prospects for trilateral relations following the landmark Camp David summit. That summit emphasized institutionalization of cooperation, and many of you probably read Scott’s writing at the time, so much that my first question to the Korea Desk director at State following the summit was whether or not the three sides are coordinating their out-of-office messages with each other. In any event, Scott says, we have a compelling agenda consisting of three panels, each of which are about a particular dimension of the trilateral relationship. We have a real organizing theme regarding the value of and prospects for trilateral cooperation among the United States, Japan, and South Korea. And we must talk about it, he believes, while it lasts, not least because it provides a benchmark for assessment as well as creating an infrastructure that ultimately should resist de-institutionalization in facing our common threats. And I really wanted to include that language because Scott feels very strongly that the need for assessing how this institutionalization is going to take place, whether it is resilient, and what its prospects for expansion in terms of an agenda could look like. So, he goes on, we will examine the trilateral relationship’s main subjects: the prospects and constraints around trilateral cooperation; the implications of trilateral cooperation for the regional dynamics, especially in the Indo-Pacific; and the trilateral cooperation’s impact on security and political issues. He wants to make sure that we look at the opportunities for and benefits of trilateral cooperation now and in the future, and how we can find practical suggestions for strengthening the U.S.-ROK-Japan relationship. So those are—those are Scott’s—that’s his guidance for our conversation this morning. Let me turn the mic over now to my colleague, President Lee, for his remarks. President Lee? LEE: Well, thank you, Sheila, for a very nice introduction. Well, I’m happy to be back to a CFR meeting. The last one was June, I think, you remember, last year. Well, Sejong has operated the so-called Seoul-Washington Forum for quite a long time, and recently we are working with CFR more frequently than any other institution in Washington, DC. And of course, thanks for Scott and Sheila for your cooperation to hosting today’s meeting. Well, this year’s meeting is quite unique, I think. As the title says, this is the—the whole focus is trilateral security cooperation between United States, Japan, and South Korea. So, as the title says, “Beyond the Camp David Summit.” So how can we make that spirit of Camp David sustainable and more solid—stand on a more solid basis in the future? The reason why I’m saying is quite obvious. If you look at domestic politics of the three nations, for example, South Korea has a general election next year, early next year; the United States will have a presidential election in next year, too; and we don’t know what would happen after Prime Minister Kishida. So we count on—heavily on three big leaders’ decision and initiative to make Camp David, but what would happen if we go beyond that three personal chemistry in this trilateral security cooperation? As Sheila mentioned about, the key may be the institutionalization. But again, we are facing a lot of challenges. After I decided the topic with Scott, unfortunately, Israel-Hamas conflict began. And because of that, many experts’ attentions are fully absorbed in that incident. And also, not just the Israel-Hamas conflict; already, we see that one big flashpoint is in Ukraine and European continent and European theater. And that will have some connections with Taiwan/South China Sea issue. And that, again, will eventually lead to some contingency in Korean Peninsula. So, we see increasingly integrated single theater all over the world. That’s why we are looking at how can we contribute to stabilize and maintain, expand our cooperation in this critically turbulent era in global issues. So this year, because of that, I and Scott decided to put—to frame this conference as a trilateral as much as we can. So that’s why we are—we tried to put many Japan experts in this room, and thanks for that—(laughs)—Sheila and many other Japan experts who are joining today. And also, I don’t know how much we can make some consolidated advice to either Korean government or U.S. government or Japan government, but nevertheless let’s try our best. So, we need to show that this is the way that trilateral security cooperation should go in the future. And also, I hope to—indeed, hope to see that three nations come up with some more firm foundation to maintain and sustain this trilateral security cooperation. And thank you once again to joining today’s event. I know that all of you are very busy, but thank you very much for joining today’s meeting. Thank you. SMITH: Thank you very much, President Lee. Before I turn the microphone over to our presider for panel one, I wanted to alert you that this session—this opening session, as well as the next session, will be covered by the press. You’ll see many of members of the press in the back row. So it will be on the record. And following this workshop, a transcript of the discussions will be available on CFR.org’s website. So, without further ado, I think we should move into the conversation on the security relationship between—or the strategic relationship between the United States, the ROK, and Japan. And for that, Dr. Kim, I’m going to turn the gavel over to you as presider. Thank you very much. KIM: Am I the presider? LEE: (Laughs.) Oh. Oh, I’m the presider. KIM: I think I am one of the—(laughs)— SMITH: Oh, you’re the presider? I am so sorry. I turned to my left. I just assumed you’re speaking. I apologize. Back to President Lee. LEE: OK. No problem. (Laughter.) The first session will directly talk about trilateral security cooperation. How can we implement the spirit of Camp David? As you all know, at Camp David summit, three important document were signed. And one is the “Camp David Principles,” and the other one is “The Spirit of Camp David,” and the last one is the “Commitment to Consult.” So, I think that this Camp David summit really laid down some good foundation for institutionalizing trilateral security cooperation. But is it guaranteed? I’m not sure. That depends on how much three nations work together to push this idea forward. So that’s the key topic of this session. And for that purpose, we invite four speakers from both Korea and the United States. And I would like to urge each panelist to limit initial remark over five or seven minutes and to allow more time for a free discussion. So, Dr. Kim, you are the first. KIM: OK. Thank you. Thank you very much. SMITH: I think you can just leave it—it’s OK. KIM: Oh, OK. All right. Thank you, Sejong and CFR, for putting this all together here today. And I feel very honored to be a part of this important venue at this critical juncture in the future of international order. Speaking of critical juncture, I think Camp David summit was very timely at this juncture in the future of rule-based international order. So now it’s the matter of how we can implement Camp David spirit. And seems to me that there is an agreement here. Experts all seem to agree that key to success is to secure durability, or sustainability if you will, and key to secure durability is none other than institutionalization. So, if you read Camp David spirit carefully—I read Camp David spirit very carefully—and three countries really went great length—great length—to institutionalize the security cooperation. I think the underlying rationale there is that if we can somehow institutionalize cooperation, you know, three-country cooperation can be relatively, relatively insulated changes—you know, from changes in domestic politics. But I’m not really sure whether institutionalization is a sufficient condition for durability, because if a populist politician becomes a top leader in three countries it’s quite possible for this, you know, populist top leader to nullify even highly-institutionalized, you know, security agreement. I mean, isn’t that exactly what happened to South Korea? You know, back in, you know—you know, when former President Moon Jae-in came into the office, he immediately nullified that comfort women agreement that former President Park Geun-hye entered into with, you know, former Prime Minister Shinzo Abe. That was possible because there wasn’t really overwhelming popular support for that agreement in South Korea. In the United States, you know, I remember President Donald Trump walking out from these highly institutionalized international agreements. That Paris Climate Agreement, you know, readily enters my mind. And I think that was possible because there wasn’t really a(n) overwhelming popular support for that climate deal in the United States. So, the point I’d like to drive home here today is that even highly institutionalized agreements can fall victim to domestic political changes. So, sure, institutionalization is a necessary condition for durability, but not a sufficient condition. So, in my personal opinion, I think it is very important for each country to mobilize strong and lasting popular support for trilateral cooperation. I mean, if there is popular support, enough popular support, even populist leaders will have hard time to nullify these security cooperative measures. I mean, I think populist leaders would go along with these popular sentiments. Isn’t that what populist leaders do, I mean, going along with popular sentiment? So I’ll just talk about what Yoon Suk Yeol government will have to do more to garner stronger popular support in South Korea. I don’t know, you know, situations in the United States or in Japan, but I know one or two things about South Korean politics these days. To me, you know, Yoon Suk Yeol government has been doing very well in terms of mobilizing popular support, but I think, you know, Yoon government will have to do more because Yoon government tends to emphasize that this trilateral cooperation was created, was formed to protect freedom and human rights, you know, these universalized values. You know, the government tends to portray trilateral cooperation as an extension of President Yoon’s value diplomacy. But Yoon government, I think, will have to do more to convince South Korean people that trilateral cooperation is more than about values and ideology. You know, he’ll have to emphasize that this trilateral cooperation is directly linked to South Korea’s core national interests. To me, trilateral cooperation is really all about safeguarding rule-based liberal international order that is in jeopardy right now because revisionist countries are trying to rewrite this order to their liking. And I think South Korea’s interests really depend on the future of rule-based international order because rules-based international order operated as favorable environment—international environment—for South Korea’s prosperity. Sure, South Korea prospered because South Korean people are diligent, we had some good political leaders and business leaders as well. But in my personal opinion, rule-based international order was really a(n) international environment that was favorable for South Korea’s unprecedented prosperity. So for South Korea to prosper continuously, it is very important for South Korea to do more and do more proactively to protect and promote rules-based international order. So, to me, I think trilateral cooperation is not just about value and ideology. Not that I’m saying that these values are unimportant; they are very important. But to South Korea, it should be more than about value and ideology because South Koreans are getting a little tired of listening to value and ideology. So it should come as—to them as more tangible or palpable benefits to more South Korean people. That way, we can mobilize some kind of lasting, you know, popular support in South Korea. Otherwise, you know, many South Koreans would continuously wonder, “what really is in it for us?” I mean, the trilateral cooperation, it’s good, but what is in it for us in this trilateral cooperation? What is in it for us in this Indo-Pacific? What is in it for us in Taiwan Strait? And what is in it for us in South China Sea disputes? So I think, other than institutionalization, it’s very important for each country to mobilize some kind of lasting popular support. I’ll probably have to pause here. I got one more point— LEE: Yeah. You have already spent seven minutes, so. (Laughter.) KIM: OK. I’ll just right there pause. LEE: So thank you. (Laughs.) Sorry for not giving you enough time. (Laughs.) KIM: That’s all right. LEE: OK. Next speaker is Komei Isozaki from—who is Japan Chair fellow, Hudson Institute. Please go ahead. ISOZAKI: Good morning, everyone. Can you hear? SMITH: Yeah. These, just to remind everybody, just leave them where they are on the table. They will pick up, so you don’t have to turn them on or off or move them. We have a technical expert in the back who will keep us—keep us straight. ISOZAKI: OK. Thank you. It is a great honor and privilege to attend this panel with great scholars. Thank you for inviting me to this occasion. And also, this is—I think it’s a pleasure for me to discuss so important issues with experts from the Americans and Korean colleagues. Thank you. I agree—totally agree with Professor Kim’s statement. I just gathered some words from his initial statements, the sustainability and the durability of the trilateral cooperation and, hopefully, bilateral cooperation between Japan and the Republic of Korea. I also heard the same sense from the—in the Camp David summit’s documents/agreements about the three leaders’ recognized importance of institutionalized cooperations and consultations. And then I felt there had been a lot of necessity and needs of cooperation in these three Asian allies and partners, and there are so many accumulations. And then, from my background in the government as a practitioner, there are so many necessities and needs and discussions in the past. Sometimes the politics prevented us to go further, but there are so many momentum right now. So I think we should capture this opportunity to institutionalize and deepen the cooperations. So from the agreements and discussion in the Camp David and other meetings over this summer, I got the sense they had, I think, common understanding of importance of—strategic importance of the trilateral cooperations and their position to oppose unilateral change of the status quo by force. And this is—I think relates to the issues in the Indo-Pacific. Also, Russian invasion of Ukraine had a(n) impact. And also realized, both in Asia and Europe, the commonality of the safeguarding the rule-based international order. And then it’s not very easy, and so we need to push and push to keep this order, because international architecture is now kind of very on the shaky ground. They also discussed about the free and open Indo-Pacific. I believe this is a very rare idea from the Japanese side that lasted and also expanded to the—incorporated into the Americans’ and other countries’ broader agendas. So, every measures Japan takes in the defense and security policies, that is reflected in the three strategic documents released last December of every—almost every—measures is kind of explained and talked on the context of free and open Indo-Pacific. We call it FOIP. So, the three leaders discussed how they cooperate and coordinate their policies on Pacific Islands and ASEAN countries on this—on the FOIP context. I thought it’s important they discuss critical technologies cooperations, supply—how to strengthen supply chains in the economic field. So I think this will be further discussed this afternoon here. Also, using the Camp David gathering, Japan and South Korea had held bilateral meetings and then agreed on some financial/energy cooperations and also some strategic-level dialogues, including high-level economic consultations. So, they also welcome the, of course, trilateral agreement to bring those cooperation to a higher level and upgrading the cooperations. I found in the U.S.-Japan bilateral context they—it was interesting to see they agreed to cooperate and exchange information on the security of Taiwan Strait. Also, they agreed on glide-phase interceptor—GPI—so joint development in the future. So they welcomed this new motivations. So, what are important in these meetings—importance and significance of these meetings? In East Asia, North Korea remains and continues to be challenges. And they develop missiles and nuclear weapons. The People’s Republic of China is escalating an attempt to unilaterally change the status quo by force in the East and South China Seas, and probably elsewhere as well, which have significant implications for the security of Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States. Despite these circumstances, it had been difficult to hold a Japan-ROK summit meeting in the past—Japan-U.S.-ROK summit meeting—mainly due to the estrangement between Japan and ROK. However, that changed under the change of the South Korean presidency, and also the—probably leadership and courage of President Yoon. So, in the NATO summit July this year, in Vilnius, Lithuania, the prime minister of Japan and the president of South Korea, as well as the Australia and New Zealand prime ministers, attended the NATO summit. And they each agreed on an individually tailored partnership program with NATO. So these are very common and similar. So, this reflects, as I mentioned, some commonality and realization of challenges in the European/Atlantic theater and Asia-Pacific. The recent consecutive agreements and readings to strengthen the strategic coordination of the U.S.-Japan alliance and U.S.-ROK alliance, and take the U.S.-Japan-ROK trilateral security cooperation to new heights, is a major strategic step forward. I took three issues from them—among them. The first is a commitment to consult among Japan, the Republic of Korea, and the United States. The fact that the three leaders took the trouble of drafting the document called the “Commitment to Consult” is, I think, a reflection of the awareness of the major problems with the past inability to hold even consultations. It is also noteworthy that joint statement specifically mentions regular consultation between the ministers of defense and the director-generals of the national security staff, in addition to the ministers of foreign affairs. Second point is the trilateral exercise plan. The United States, Japan, and the Republic of Korea decided on a multi-year trilateral framework that includes annual named and multidomain trilateral exercises, building upon the understanding reached by the defense ministers meeting in July 2023 and Shangri-La dialogue, and as well as recent successful trilateral ballistic missile defense and anti-submarine warfare exercises. So, although it appears too little and too late, considering the common strategic and tactical challenges they have faced in the past, but it is an absolutely important effort for the enhancement of the integrated deterrence among the three countries. A third point is they agreed on the countermeasures against disinformation, cybersecurity, and even the sharing data of missile warning. Recently, the spread of information has become more rapid and easier with the development of the internet and social media. Against this backdrop, the proliferation of disinformation has become a more serious problem, partly due to advances in photo editing and deep-fake technologies. It has been mentioned in the recent UN documents and NATO statements as well. And it is very natural that the United States, Japan, and South Korea should discuss information-sharing and countermeasures on these issues. Finally, I want to touch upon some challenges and expectations from my personal point of view. Strengthening security relations between Japan and South Korea, particularly both allies of the United States and geographically so close to each other, these are the most important initiative for the stability of the Asia-Pacific region. Although disagreements remain over issues such as history and territorial issues, I believe the strengthening security relations between Japan and South Korea, from a broader and long-term perspective rather than as a tool for domestic political struggle, is essential for the peace and prosperity of the Indo-Pacific region. I hope the agreement reached at Camp David will be the foundation for further discussions at coming summits and working levels to promote the concrete cooperation agenda without interruption. I’ll stop here. Thank you. LEE: Thank you. Well, Sheila, you’re the next one. SMITH: I’m the next. Great, thank you. So I—you know, since I am the next one, I have listened to Professor Kim, and Isozaki-san. And lots of what they’ve said will be reiterated. So I’ll try and be very brief on some of the places. We agree on a lot. Scott gave us some questions to answer, some of which were about what actually happened at Camp David. And I think that the two previous speakers have covered that very extensively. I would just say here, and what I said in my opening remarks, I think the commitment of all three leaders to a strategic relationship that is far grander than any of the ambitions that you’ve heard out of these—of previous leaders of these three countries in the past is important to recognize. We are no longer in the space of building trust or restoring relations. We are actually now in a much, much different place for this trilateral. I also think it reiterates what we talked about last year, which is that this is—this relationship is not just about peninsular security. It is also largely about this broader fundamental axis of leverage in the Indo-Pacific, as well as now a catalytic partnership globally for support of the status quo or the rules-based order, whichever language you prefer. It’s ambitious, what came out of Camp David. And I think that’s good. Maybe because I’m the American on the panel, or one of the Americans on the panel, I like the ambition. But there’s several things here too that are new. And we’re going to talk a little bit more about that this afternoon. One of it is the emerging goals among the United States and its allies on economic security cooperation, which is a new dimension, I think, of this partnership that wasn’t developed before. And, again, it runs from global supply chains to new technologies, but also how to address potential economic coercion, which wasn’t officially in the statement but has very much been on the minds of the three countries over the last year. Again, heeding Scott’s advice that we think about what institutionalization actually looks like, how do we develop metrics for evaluating whether the Camp David ambitions are successful, I just wanted to be slightly political science-y—not fully—and put forward a couple of ways we could think about this word “institutionalization.” One is what we’ve referenced, and I think all of us appreciate, are these new frameworks, the leaders meetings themselves annually, right? The regularization of the national security advisors meetings, our joint chief meetings, intel meetings, right? But also something that I think both Professor Kim and Isozaki-san mentioned, which is the Indo-Pacific voice in the NATO conversation as well. That linkage between U.S. allies in the Indo-Pacific and European allies in NATO is also, I believe, one of the focal points that will be important as a new framework of coordination. So, it’s a three plus three. I mean, this is new, but it’s at a much higher level and much more of a regional and global level than it’s ever been in the past. The second way, and the second set of metrics, of course, are fuzzier. And this is—you know, it’s hard to be specific about, but it is norms. And this is where the ideology and the emphasis, I think, particularly President Yoon but also Prime Minister Kishida and clearly President Biden, on values. We won’t say democracy as a word out loud, but clearly the values-based collaboration here is very important to the success of this trilateral. So as we look forward to evaluate it, how much are these norms continuing to be embedded in the way in which the trilateral sees its future, not only in the region but globally and beyond? And then finally, political scientists like to talk about institutionalization as behavior, patterns—regularized patterns of behavior. And this, in the military security dimension, of course, as Isozaki-san just mentioned, will be traditional exercises. We just a couple of days ago had the first trilateral in-region aerial exercise. It included U.S. strategic forces supported by our two allies. There was a maritime debate—maritime exercise conversation led by the Seventh Fleet commander in the Indo-Pacific not that long ago. Cyber will be another area. But behaviorally, the security angle will be very important to keep an eye on. But so too will be what Professor Kim emphasized. And that is the focus on economic mechanisms for collaboration and cooperation. And I think we have to continue to look behaviorally at just how regularized these consultations will be and how much agreement there will be on specific courses of action together on some of these very critical pieces of the puzzle. So again, just to answer Scott’s assignment that we think about how are we going to judge this in hindsight not just what the document said, but as we look forward what are we looking for? I think these three different ways of thinking about institutionalization might help us begin that conversation. One of the big pieces of Scott’s assignment to this panel in particular was this leadership transition. Will this trilateral and the enthusiasm that we saw at Camp David—will it continue beyond the three people who were attending Camp David? And, of course, you know, our election looms large, so let me start there. If the incumbent wins, if President Biden is elected to a second term, I think we can be fairly confident that this model for upping the game of the trilateral, but also giving it an agenda for collaboration—I think this approach will continue. The momentum could be bigger or smaller, or lesser or greater, but it will clearly be the piece of homework that the president has already set out for himself and his team. If a challenger wins, I would say—and I’ll just—you know, these are personal opinions. These do not reflect anything more than that. I’m not a specialist in American politics, and who knows—(laughs)—really what’s going to happen. But I think you can already see that there’s different strands within the Republican Party on thinking about our foreign policy that have emerged in the debates, and in some of the comments by some of the individuals. I would suggest that former President Trump and Mr. Ramaswamy are, by their very nature, anti-institutionalists. They don’t want institutionalized cooperation. And that’s at home and abroad. So I wouldn’t expect if either of those two candidates look like they are about to take office—do not expect this to be the model for them to think about the relationships. Not specific to the trilateral, but just generally. The other is—the other strain of thinking, and this is something to watch as we approach the general election on the Republican side, is how the Republican nominee feels about our alliances. Are they transactional relationships? Are they—do they need to be defined in terms of what Americans get out of them, and that be in the security realm or the trade realm? Or do they see them larger as an expression of American power and coalition—by extension, coalition power abroad? That is not a language you might hear from the candidates, but I suspect that among the candidates that we’re all seeing on the debate stage, there is different pieces of that puzzle. And I don’t think everybody sees our alliances as transactional. And I would expect that that was a—that’s another theme to listen to going forward. I will not presume to talk about South Korean politics, so I’m going to leave that to our South Korean colleagues. I will say a word about Japanese politics. Prime Minister Kishida will need to call an election. And there’s some Japan experts in the room who can contribute to this conversation. It’s still not off the table that he calls the election this year, in my view. He just said—the LDP just had a mixed result in a couple of by-elections in the country, which will probably dissuade the party from wanting to rush into a general election. But nonetheless, you will have to see an election in Japan at some point or the other. I don’t think an election in Japan will be necessarily bad for the trilateral. And that’s based on two assumptions on my part. One is Japan now has a fairly ambitious national defense policy and security agenda of its own that the trilateral will factor into. The other is that the Japanese public is watching the region and the world very closely, and are far more worried about who’s going to be there to partner with Japan than they might have been in the past. So I think there’s a deeper engagement, even if it’s not visibly demonstrated politically. But there’s a deeper engagement in Japan on the on the possibility of stronger trilateral cooperation, at least on the security side of the equation. So that’s what my assumptions are for the Japan piece. One last piece on the leadership transitions, and then I believe my time will be up. And that is that the Chinese government has been fairly active in trying to influence elections. There’s another election that’s going to happen that is not this—all three of the members of this trilateral, but is the Taiwan election in January. We should watch that carefully. It’s not unimportant for the kinds of issues and the agendas we’re trying to build in the trilateral. But we should also watch—and, again, I invite my South Korean colleagues to help us understand this over here—the Chinese are also fairly interested in affecting South Korean public opinion as well, prior to your election in April. So I don’t know if that’s a huge factor as you look at your own South Korean politics, but it’s something I think collectively we should keep an eye on as well. Let me just conclude with something that I hope we’ll talk more about on the security side, which is Scott’s reference to competing trilaterals. And that would be China-Russia-DPRK versus U.S.-Japan-Korea. You know, peninsular security always brings us back to the position where we need more and deeper intelligence sharing. China and Russia are also no longer active supporters of the nonproliferation agenda of the UN Security Council, which gives us pause, obviously. But I think also, I’d love to hear from our South Korea experts, what you think about the Russia-DPRK deal that was made when Kim went to Moscow, and the evidence at the cross-border that there’s a lot more cross-border activity between North Korea and Russia as a result. So any information that you can share with us on your assessment of that, it obviously affects deterrence. It affects deterrence rather critically for the peninsula, but also, obviously, for Japan as well. So let me stop there. Thank you very much. LEE: OK, thank you. Our last speaker is Andrew Yeo. YEO: Thanks, Dr. Lee. Thank you to you and your organization for bringing together a great team to discuss with us the trilateral. And also thank you to Scott and Sheila and CFR for organizing this session. So I, like Sheila, did—I felt like I did a good job in the homework that we were tasked to do from Scott. But because I don’t want to repeat everything that was said, I’m going to just throw that out the door. And then Shelia got me all excited. She triggered the professor side of me when she talked about political science and institutionalization. So let me just start there, because we all agree that institutionalization is what the trilateral needs at the moment. I think, Sheila, you did a fantastic job drilling down what we mean by institutionalization. It means having more frameworks or working groups—so that’s the structural institutional aspect. There is the normative cultural part, what you refer to as behavioral. But once you keep meeting, it becomes routine. I would say that—I would add one more thing to that, and that’s really the agency or sort of the people-to-people interactions. Of course, that goes across all these things, but I think that’s also an important element of institutionalization, making sure that people are engaging and interacting frequently. That comes along with having new frameworks, but I think that’s important because one of the fears is that when you do institutionalize, sometimes you run into institutional inertia. You just kind of move without thinking. And I do think because the geostrategic environment is changing quite rapidly, that you do have to think about the people-to-people element. Not only at the level of governments, not only the leaders, but also civil society, students, youth, you know, different sectors of society. So I agree with the institutionalization. I think what I wanted to address, you know, the first part I was going to talk a lot about just what had happened at the summit. But I think we all know what happened. Here in the United States, of course, everyone was ecstatic. We saw the images from Camp David. And so it was certainly an event to be celebrated. Let me just say a few positive signs that came out after the Camp David meeting in the two months, I think, since that historic meeting. And then I’ll address a few concerns that I have about trilateral relations moving forward. And then offer some prescriptions or some, you know, things that I think we—either in the think tank community and also our governments—can do to strengthen the spirit of Camp David. In terms of positive signs, so there’s this huge meeting. There’s lots of—there’s a long to-do list that was offered there. There’s, like, more than a dozen things that I think they mentioned the United States, Japan, and Korea could do on defense, on economic security, on science and technology cooperation, clean energy, climate, and so forth. But, of course, you can’t move that fast. A lot of this is still aspirational. But some of the things that did happen—one is that we are continuing to see deepening military cooperation. As Sheila pointed out, South Korea, the United States, and Japan a few days ago conducted their first ever trilateral aerial exercise in response to North Korea’s evolving nuclear threats. Another positive sign is that I think domestically, at least, there’s pretty strong support for trilateral cooperation in all three countries. That doesn’t mean that the leadership has a lot of domestic support, but at least – and I’ll get to that piece in a second—but at least for now the publics in Korea, Japan, and the United States look at cooperation with the United States or the trilateral in a favorable light. And then lastly, there was some fear about irritants getting in the way of further cooperation. So the Fukushima nuclear wastewater that was released, I know that there was a lot of concerns even in the steps leading up to the Camp David meeting. But that seems to have managed—been managed so far. There were some issues about territorial disputes with Dodko/Takeshima, but those have not really erupted to the surface to derail trilateral cooperation. So things seem to be moving ahead. But in terms of some of the concerns I have, and I think pretty much everyone in this room is familiar with the domestic politics particularly in South Korea. And I know Sheila didn’t touch on that, and I’d love to hear more from our South Korean colleagues. But Yoon’s public opinion polls are way down again in the last week or so. It’s, like, at 25 percent. And I think something is definitely going on with his party, with the conservative PPP, People’s Power Party. And because of these local elections that took place in a Seoul district, the PPP got trounced. A lot of Koreans are taking that as a litmus test for what’s going to happen in the midterm elections. And already, you know, the opposition has never really given a whole lot of support to Yoon for trilateral cooperation. So this doesn’t bode well for, I think, South Korea or the Yoon administration’s agenda. So, again, I think the domestic politics piece hasn’t been addressed. And here in the United States, I think, we’re so focused on, I guess, foreign policy/foreign relations that I think in DC, at least, we need to pay more attention to what’s happening on the ground. And I think there is some more attention, because there’s these nuggets of—you know, we’re hearing from our South Korean counterparts that there’s trouble within the Yoon government. And so I think that’s something that needs to be watched. Sheila had talked about the U.S. elections with Trump. I guess my own take as well as is that, you know, if Trump were elected, that does not bode well also for trilateral cooperation because we know his attitudes about alliances. I would say, you know, Shelia was mentioning that you have to look at how Republican candidates talk about alliances, how they’re framing the alliance. There’s that dimension. And the other dimension also is how Republican candidates look at spending on things like defense, their spending on issues related to foreign policy. You know, there’s a correlation perhaps between those that are more aligned in the Trump camp and how they think about spending. But that has implications because a lot of the trilateral cooperation revolves around exercises, like, things like joint exercises. And that costs money. And Trump thinks that these things are too expensive. Why are we paying for them? Or why are we—you know, why are we doing this? Why do we need to do this? I think that could spell trouble for trilateral cooperation. So, yeah, it’s not—I think we recognize here that the domestic politics need—that that can be a problem or a concern for the trilateral cooperation moving forward. I also think the other global events, the Israel-Hamas situation, of course, it doesn’t directly relate to Northeast Asia or trilateral cooperation. But it is taking up a lot of the bandwidth of the Biden administration. It’s sucking a lot of air. Now, the folks who work on Asia, they’re going to continue to work on trilateral cooperation. They’re going to continue working with their Korean and Japanese counterparts. But it does mean that Biden—the administration can’t really give a lot of political cover or a big boost if there are any issues that erupt on U.S.-Japan-Korea relations. OK, in terms of prescriptions then. So, we already mentioned, what can we do to further enhance and implement the spirit of Camp David—points that were that were raised? So we already mentioned institutionalization. And this comes—and we’re already seeing this continue on the defense, the military front. The economic security issues, which we’ll cover later in the afternoon, I mean, that’s where there’s a lot of room for growth. There’s these working groups for supply chain resilience. There’s ongoing conversation about building early warning systems to global supply chain disruptions. I think those are things that can go forward. Coordination on AI governance, you know, collaboration on science technology, including cooperation across national labs, these were things that were in the joint statement at Camp David. And I think those are all areas where we are going to see further implementation. So institutionalization is one. The second—and this is more a suggestion for those here in the United States—I think we have to have more discussions with the opposition or the progressive side of, you know, the Democratic Party in Korea just to understand what they’re thinking but also to build constructive views about the U.S.-Japan-Korea alliance and also to talk to them about North Korea-Russia relations. But beyond just talking to the Democratic Party, I think South Korea needs to build more of a consensus on these issues related to China, related to the U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral cooperation. So, if there are ways where we can be helpful, especially in the think tank community, to engage with a variety of thought leaders in Korea—I think that would be helpful. The third thing, I think, we can think about in terms of implementation is the regional cooperation aspect. I think China and Russia are really good at kind of giving their partners, you know, what they want without a lot of—necessarily a lot of strings attached. I don’t know if it’s really about listening but they’re good at just giving countries what they want. That’s not the way the United States operates, of course, but I do think that we have to frame this as some—in a way where the U.S.-Japan-Korea is providing public goods or collective goods for the region. And so that’s where things like development finance or infrastructure investment come into handy, whether it’s in Southeast Asia or in the Pacific Islands. I think those things really need to be emphasized to counter China and Russia’s narrative within the region. And as we know a lot of countries, especially in Southeast Asia, they like to think of it as, you know, having to choose between China or the United States and its allies. I think that’s a false dichotomy but I think the United States and its allies can do a better job on that front by actually talking much more about the different areas of—the different types of cooperation they’re doing within the region. And that leads to my last point, and it might go a little bit against what Dr. Kim was saying about the values and the principles. I do get it that at some point values and principles, they sound hollow and that also ties in with, I think, President Yoon’s own kind of narrative and pushback and opposition that he has domestically. And people want to hear about interests. Why is the trilateral cooperation good? What does Korea get out of it? I think that’s important. But I do think that what makes this trilateral really unique is kind of the shared principles and values. So if there’s a way to talk more about interests, but without dismissing the values and principles front, I think that would be—that would be helpful. So I’ll hand it back to you, Dr. Lee. LEE: Well, thank you. So while we are talking, finally, Scott joined us. Welcome back from Saudi Arabia. YEO: Oh, hi, Scott. (Laughter.) LEE: Well, I think we had very excellent presentations from four people. I feel at least one consensus in this room is like this: Camp David summit surely laid out some foundation to upgrade trilateral relationship one level up, but maybe we will have some challenges as well as some opportunities on how much can we implement this idea, the so-called institutionalization issue. So from now on I’ll open the floor. And if you want to speak, please put your nametag upright and I will—OK, Jim, you are the first. Q: Thank you, Dr. Lee. Speaking about challenges, Sheila touched on a question that I wanted to raise was how this—we’re dealing with now, perhaps, a new emerging form of trilateral cooperation in Northeast Asia among Russia, North Korea, and China and how might this affect U.S.-Japan-Korea trilateral cooperation. So, I’d appreciate from our panelists their views on this subject. LEE: OK. I will collect a few questions and we’ll continue discussion. Toby, you are the next. Q: Great. I really appreciated the opportunity to learn. This is all sort of additive to my understanding of these issues. I guess the question that I had is how can we think about opportunities ahead for furthering objectives that might seem a little bit out of reach right now. So, for instance, we can imagine a seventh North Korean nuclear test; what kind of opportunity might that present to solidify some of the things that we would like to do. So what’s the agenda look like and how can we be opportunistic going forward and advancing it? LEE: OK. Gilbert? Q: I have two questions. One is a follow-up on the China-Russia-North Korea side, and I’d like to know more about the South Korean reaction because we know that in Japan and the United States there has been a pretty strong reaction that this cements what we’ve been thinking and worrying about. Does this change South Korean thinking, progressive thinking in particular, in any substantial way? And the other question is what is actually happening on the ground between South Korea and Japan over the last six to eight months? Is there a transformation? I know that tourism has picked up enormously. The South Koreans are going to Japan in very large numbers. Of course, the cheap yen makes that ever more valuable. But what about some of the other kinds of exchanges? There’s a lot of talk about Japanese companies hiring South Korean workers because there’s so much of a surplus in one country and a deficit in the other. So can we get a breakdown of what’s that doing to the feeling in South Korea particularly about the bilateral relationship? LEE: OK. Mark? Q: Thanks. I’m not sure how to formulate a question around this, but it’s basically just asking how sustainable this all is without really grappling with what Andrew described as the irritants in the South Korea-Japan relationship—without really trying to resolve some of the history issues, let alone the territorial issues. You know, I mean, the whole theory of this is that, you know, we can sort of focus on these bigger picture things and treat those issues as irritants. But, you know, that could blow up, as we’ve seen in the Middle East now where the theory was, OK, we have the Abraham Accords, right? That’s going to ignore the Palestinian issue and that clearly hasn’t worked out that well, at least in the near term. So I’m not suggesting that we’re going to have a similar type of incident, of course, in Northeast Asia but still this is a theory and it could get put to the test. So how sustainable is it without dealing frontally with particularly some of the history issues between Japan and South Korea? LEE: OK. Michael? Q: I was delighted with the outcome of Camp David having worked in the vineyards of trilateral cooperation since the mid-nineties when I was at Pacific Command. Your comments today about institutionalization reminded me of Victor Cha’s memorable comment about the demons of history have so far over the last thirty years frustrated attempts at institutionalization with regard to trilateral cooperation. So, could we talk a little bit about—are those demons in the bottle right now or are they liable to leap right out again on us here with elections and what have you? LEE: Thank you. Takayuki? OK. After Takayuki we will give us some time for panel—to panelists to respond. OK. Q: Thank you very much. Very important panel. And I have a question to Dr. Kim, actually, because this kind of very memorial agreement is that, to me, the strong leadership by President Yoon is the most important. So that’s why I would like to understand what is the general public in South Korea’s accept(ance)—this kind of perception. And also, you mentioned about how to make more popular in South Korea that were tangible achievement or tangible things is required. So what kind of tangible things that you—are in your mind? Thank you. LEE: Well, thank you. I also have some question to panelists as well because we are already discussing about some negative influence from domestic politics. So I’m really concerned. The trilateral, what we agreed on Camp David—many documents were signed and at least there is some consensus about trilateral security cooperation. But how much is in the national agenda rather than presidential agenda? So can this issue survive more than three leaders? So if we can make that live longer than a leadership term, so how can we make that happen in this issue? So, now I’ll give you some time for each panelist to respond in the backward order, I think. So, Andrew, you first. YEO: Sure. I’m going to group the questions from Mark, Admiral McDevitt, and you, Dr. Lee, because it’s really about the ability to sustain trilateral cooperation. Are the demons of cooperation in a box or can they be unleashed? They can definitely be unleashed. There’s no doubt about it, and I think that’s why in some ways the three leaders wanted to have this meeting at Camp David, to your question, Dr. Lee, because it would help quicken the pace and provide more political momentum for institutionalization. But institutionalization can only get you so far. I think when you have militaries, when you have diplomats, when you have, you know, people at the NSC working together constantly on a regular basis it does create these connections and synergies. And so at least on the U.S. side if—and I mentioned if Trump is president it would spell some concerns for trilateral cooperation. I don’t think it would fall completely apart, but it wouldn’t have the momentum or the backing that I think the Biden administration has give—it doesn’t fall apart because at the working levels there is some continuity. Of course, the bigger concerns is the South Korea-Japan leg of this relationship and to your question, Mark, I do think at some point the historical issues have to be addressed. I think the hope is that you could at least have a—create a floor on the alliance and have people, Koreans and Japanese, working together to build something forward before you go back and try to relitigate some of these past historical issues. And that’s why I think a lot of the cooperation that takes place at the civil society level is super important with, you know, the students and with youth. I mean, we keep hearing—and I’d like to ask my Korean colleagues, you know—do Korean youth really have a different attitude or different thinking toward Japan because the assumption in the United States is, yes, the next generation or the current generation of young Koreans don’t have the same kind of attitudes toward Japanese as the elders. And I’m looking at Professor Sheen because he teaches and so he has access to many opinions of college students. So if you can enlighten us. But I do think we have to get back to some of those historical issues and that there has to be more cooperation across civil society. The problem is we need more time. Two or three years is not enough and that’s the election cycle. So we need successive leaders to be able to work on trilateral cooperation and I don’t—there’s no magic number. But let’s say, like, a decade—if there’s a decade of close cooperation between Japan and Korea on the security, on the military, on the economic front, and also people-to-people ties, then I think you might be able to address some of these historical issues. I mean, a friend was reminding me that France and Germany, like, hated each other. You know, they were at war all the time. But forming a military alliance, it wasn’t just about the EU but it was really being part of a same alliance that was really—I don’t know if that’s the case or not but she was just mentioning that there are these cases where you had these enemies, you know, come together and actually respect one another and have a healthy relationship. And so the hope is that Korea and Japan can address some of these historical grievances. But we need—we definitely need more time and I don’t know if we’re going to get it because of these, you know, finicky domestic politics that get in the way. LEE: OK. Thank you. Sheila, do you have some response? SMITH: You know, I can’t actually answer any of the questions that you want me to answer so I’m in the same kind of ruminative framework here. Like, I don’t know. I mean, can the demons of—are the demons of history gone? No, of course not, and I do feel—I’m going to defer to the South Korean political experts here rather than me talk about South Korean politics. But a couple of notes on the Japanese side. I hear often from Korean colleagues that Japan needs to be a little bit more forthright and more demonstrative in its embrace of President Yoon’s overtures. I think a lot of us may feel that way. I believe that there is not—and I’m not sure that Prime Minister Kishida has a weak political foundation but he doesn’t necessarily have a strong one as you look ahead in Japanese politics, and within the Liberal Democratic Party there is a variety of views as you know—as this audience knows well. So I think the—and I think when Prime Minister Kishida went to Seoul prior to the May G7 meeting that was, I thought, a little overdue but I was glad to see it happen. I think now that the Camp David summit has happened there will be a—it will be with more ease that he’s able to embrace some of these goals. I think the resistance that was in Japan was a, OK, here we go again; is this going to change later. So you’re going to hear this kind of skepticism, I believe, from the professionals, the diplomats, as well as from politicians in Tokyo. So to a certain degree getting over that skepticism is still part of the homework of the trilateral. Doesn’t mean that the trilateral can solve the specific issues and I’ll leave it to our Korean colleagues to talk about the Supreme Court decision and how they are going to get to a point where the Supreme Court makes a choice about the Yoon administration’s approach to resolving the forced labor dispute. So I’d like to hear that. But I believe that domestic politics all around matter, not just the South Korean domestic politics. On the new frameworks I am actually a little bit more hopeful maybe about the Indo-Pacific allies and NATO and not just in the context of the Russian invasion of Ukraine. But this is a bridging of common democracies, if you will, allies that has a lot of latitude, I think, to embed the Japan-South Korea relationship in a broader framing and I think those are the kinds of multilateral frameworks that could also be helpful for us to explore. Let me stop there. LEE: OK. Let me see. Komei? ISOZAKI: OK. Thank you. I’m not an expert on the Japanese politics itself like Sheila so I have to defer her. But in Japan, my sense is that there’s no strong opposition to trilateral cooperations or even the Korea-Japan bilateral cooperation. So I don’t think any change of the prime ministers in the Japanese side wouldn’t affect the—this continuing the current institutionalization and the regularization of the meetings. And also I would suggest personally that South Korea and Japan cooperate and discuss quietly but, like, cybersecurities and then space cooperations or possibly maritime domain awareness—those areas that we can continue to discuss regardless of the political changes. So maybe South Korean politics is maybe more complex but in the Japanese side there’s no big challenges to this practical cooperation like missile defense, data sharings. Of course, there are some technical changes or legal measures how to share, how to protect information. They exist, even between the United States and Japan. But in the practical areas I think we can go forward. Not—maybe quietly and gradually rather than making politics will interfere these cooperations. About the territorial issues, I feel that through the Dokdo/Takeshima issue is not very popular topic among Japanese politicians compared to the Senkaku Islands issues where China challenges all the time and in the northern territories issue with Russians. Those are, I think, much bigger security challenges. And Dokdo/Takeshima issues is not from Japanese side, we can leave it quiet because we have—of course, Japan has Japan’s positions, but we don’t have to raise the issue very much. So this is maybe challenging the—Mark’s proposal of the Abraham Accords type solutions. I don’t think history and territory issue is easily solved. So we—I think we need to put them aside and then focus on practical cooperation. That’s my view. LEE: Thank you. Jaechun? KIM: One thing about President Yoon Suk Yeol is that he’s immensely popular abroad. When he goes on, you know, business trip overseas, you know, he’s very much welcomed. But when he comes back to South Korea his approval rate plummets. So, the prospect for next year’s general election, which is scheduled in April, is pretty gloomy. That special election was considered a referendum for President Yoon; the ruling party lost the special election big time by—what was the—lost big time by some 18 percentage points. So it doesn’t really bode well for the future of Yoon Suk Yeol government. His approval rate on a good day it goes up to 35 percent. On a bad day it goes down, really, below 30 percent. And I think it’s very important for Yoon Suk Yeol government to succeed. If the opposition leader—this should go to your report actually—the opposition leader Lee Jae-myung comes into power, I think everything will go down in drains. He’s a(n) extreme populist. He’s been riding on that anti-Japan sentiment. Yeah, it won’t come as a big surprise to me if he withdraws from all these treaties—I mean, agreements—that we entered into with each other. So, you don’t have to like President Yoon Suk Yeol but you’ll have to help President Yoon Suk Yeol to succeed because it’s important for the future of trilateral cooperation. Sure, Lee Jae-myung might be able to recuperate or rescue the cooperation in the future but once you lose momentum I think it’s very difficult for us to, you know, keep that momentum going—I mean, revive that momentum and keep it going. So I think it’s very important for Yoon Suk Yeol government to succeed for the future of trilateral cooperation. Whether there is a fundamental transformation has been taking place between South Korea and Japan I don’t know. It seems to me it’s more of a, you know, temporary rapprochement at best. So there I think it’s very important for two countries not to lose the momentum once again because once you lose the momentum it’s really difficult to rekindle that momentum and keep it going. China—I mean, one way you can help President Yoon Suk Yeol is not to go too hard on China policy or, you know, Taiwan Strait policy. I think it’d be better for the United States and Japan, for that matter, to let South Korea go at its own pace with regard to China policy and Taiwan Strait policy. Taiwan it’s still a hard sell—politically hard sell in South Korean domestic politics. So, yeah, Yoon Suk Yeol, I think, has thrown enough of rhetorical support to Taiwan Strait issue and I believe that there is a very close dialogue that is taking place between the two countries at official level with regard to what South Korea can contribute to if contingent situations arise over the Taiwan Strait. Yeah, China—I mean, I think anti-China sentiment is record high in South Korea. It’s higher amongst younger generations so that’s something noteworthy, while younger generation in South Korea—their perception toward Japan is improving. So that bodes pretty well for the future of trilateral cooperation. Just stick to my original position that institutionalization is not really sufficient. It is a necessary condition and I think it’s very important for Yoon Suk Yeol government to translate it. I’m not really saying that value and ideology aren’t important. I mean, they are very important. They’re something that three countries have in common, that’s for sure. That said, I think it’s very important for President Yoon to translate the language of value into more substantial interests-based language because many South Koreans still wonder what really is in it for us in this trilateral cooperation in the Indo-Pacific and on. So, I think there’s something that Yoon Suk Yeol government will have to do more to sustain lasting, popular support for trilateral cooperation, which is very, very important for the sustainability of trilateral cooperation. Thank you. LEE: OK. Michael, you have two fingers. Q: Professor Kim, just if I may, what is the feeling in South Korea toward Russia? You just mentioned attitudes toward China. How—what is the perception today? KIM: I think many South Koreans do believe that this what I would call—how can I say—bloc-ization of the order is taking place in Northeast Asia. Russia is a(n) important stakeholder—used to be an important stakeholder country—you know, a permanent member of National Security Council. But Russia is actually violating that UN resolution that they signed up for. So, I mean, it’s like Russia is an outcast—I mean, is totally ostracized because of their misbehavior. So, yeah, I mean, the images is not good really. I mean, the image that we have is that—I mean, at least China is still—is a revisionist country for sure but they are fighting this, you know, fight in the ring and they’re saying that, well, you know, Biden here is in violation. You know, hitting, you know, under the belt is in violation. But, you know, the perception in South Korea is that Russia got out of the ring, is about to burn the ring right now with another outcast—you know, with Kim Jong Un here. So, yeah, it’s been downgrading and it’s— Q: Yeah. I was waiting for Yoon to play the fear card. That’s what I was—China, Russia, North Korea. I mean— KIM: Axis of evil, yeah. Q: —there’s a fear card there that makes trilateral cooperation very important. LEE: Yeah. Well, there’s a joke in Korea that we always—most people describe Russia as some sort of grizzly bear looking behind the tree—(laughs)—so we don’t want to make him angry. But, nevertheless, we want to make a good relationship because South Korea has a very, very wide variety of embedded interest—business interest in Russia. So you understand why that is the case. OK. Sheila, you have something to say? Yeah. SMITH: Actually, I think you both just commented on the Russia piece, which is helpful to me. So thank you. I don’t need to say anything. Thank you. LEE: And also about Korea’s domestic politics—I tend to be increasingly cautious when I talk about Korean politics because as you understand in Korea discussion about domestic politics is extremely polarized. So Dr. Kim’s opinion is not Korean delegation opinion, so his personal opinion. I’m also—I have my personal opinion as well. So perhaps for President Yoon the next big test will be general election coming next year, April. But as you know, currently his popularity is quite low and the ruling party does not have enough support from the people and already National Assembly is dominated by the opposition party—opposition party has the majority. And if next year’s election—if opposition party still maintains the majority, what does that mean? It will be a real red light for President Yoon because it is directly connected to the next presidential election. So if that’s the scenario, maybe a liberal or Lee Jae-myung have more chance to be elected as president next—as the next South Korea’s president. So, again, that scenario comes back to our discussion about trilateral security cooperation. As you know, in Korea liberals usually take the very harsh stance against Japan. So we all know that liberals always heavily criticize Japan for past historical issues, everything, even doing the comfort-women issue and forced-labor issue, and even South Korea’s Supreme Court decision. All those are connected, OK? So that’s why I’m concerned. That’s why I’m saying that domestic politics may be most challenging issue in implementing trilateral security cooperation in the coming years. So I remember, Robert, you’re the first. And I—there are so many plates here. Audience: On this side of the room, too. YEO: Maybe just go down the line. Q: Just three quick points. One, the domestic factor, I think, looms—I think just from what we’ve heard so far looms very large. I think you’re underestimating. If Trump got elected, not only would trilateral cooperation be gone but I think there’s a serious risk of him pulling troops out of South Korea. I think that’s in the fifty-fifty category if he can be talked out of it, if not. So that’s one. One, I had a question. You just talked about domestic politics. Suppose in the April elections the opposition gets two hundred votes. I’ve heard rumblings that they want to go and impeach Yoon and that sort of thing. I’m just wondering how that would impinge on his foreign, economic, and security policies. And then just a word on the trilateral. The Russia—what I see as kind of a loose transactional Eurasian entente forming and I would throw Iran in that basket as well, and I just see kind of a growing security dilemma behavior on both trilaterals and I wonder where—you know, the point was raised if North Korea does a seventh nuclear test, you know, how far we’ve moved from 2007 when China and Russia both went along with and China actually enforced for a while the sanctions. If there was a seventh nuclear test, the most likely probability I see is both Russia and China would blame the United States and block any resolution. So, our ability to work the North Korea issue has really changed as this global polarization has deepened. That’s a factor and I’m just wondering if anyone had any ideas how do we—is the security dilemma problem something we can mitigate or is it—or are we—you know, if the United States improves relations with China, for example, that might be—I’m not putting the mortgage on it but I think that’s a real possibility. LEE: Do you have two fingers—(inaudible)? Q: I do. LEE: Yeah. Q: And I just wanted to add on because you were—we’re thinking along the same lines. Are there security events that are—would be so requiring a coordinated response that irrespective of whether or not the institutionalization or the trilateral exists it can actually be an underpinning and are those being prioritized and are those sufficient to actually—of a framework and an institutional focus? I think one of them is—the test is definitely one of them. If there were to be a wider conflagration in the Middle East could be another. But there are a number of things. Are those being—so that as the Department of Defense often does—you sort of get that to lead the way around which we can gel around other issues. LEE: OK. I couldn’t see the order, but anyhow, Glen, Kenneth, and Alex. Hanbyeol, Seong-Ho, and Evan. Q: So I’d be curious to know a bit more about South Korea’s, especially government, assessment of the U.S. future politics. What I mean—to elaborate a bit, I visit Japan about five or six times a year and each time I go I’m impressed by just how much concern there is in Japan about the future of American politics—domestic politics, the gridlock in Washington, inability to choose the Speaker of the House, and other things. And so my own interpretation is that the decision by Japan over the last year to significantly increase defense expenditures are partly because of North Korea, partly because of China, partly because of Ukraine, but fundamentally concern that the United States is not as reliable or as predictable as it used to be. And I’m curious to know, I mean, there is, in my view, a hedging going on in Japan because they were so surprised by 2016 and they don’t want to be surprised again. So I’m curious to know in South Korea what kind of hedging is there going on and if, for instance as Bob Manning mentioned, if Trump were to return how would that significantly change South Korea’s foreign policy? Thanks. LEE: OK. Thank you. Kenneth? Q: To get back to—on the issue of North Korea, to what extent might greater attempts at rapprochement with North Korea rather than more aggressive threats or deterrence be a reasonable effect of Camp David? LEE: OK. Alex? Q: Thanks. I want to—I don’t know how all of you are going to manage this panel discussion with all these questions going in such different directions. But as someone who’s not a country expert on any of the countries, I did want to really press on perceptions about China among the three and how similar they actually are. When you drill down beyond general words like institutionalization, like cooperation, it starts to get harder to see whether concerns run in parallel or whether they actually are very similar. I mean, it seems to me that one of the drivers of greater trilateral cooperation can be put into at least three baskets, right. One is the domestic politics. So you have a window of opportunity with the current domestic politics in each country that would allow further progress and you want to get that locked in as quickly as possible because the alternatives, whether it be Trump or someone—you know, somebody else—those opportunities may not be there. The second is there’s similar interests, right. Whatever—free and open Indo-Pacific, and I want to just draw on Sheila not to criticize but she’s already twice made references to let’s call it democracy for now, right. What we mean by getting down beyond those words about what open—free and open actually mean to each country are a bit different. To what extent are the perceptions of China actually similar? Are the concerns actually similar? Our South Korean friends have talked about economic deterrence and I have submissions in our journal about integrating economic deterrence into trilateral deterrence. The U.S. concern may be more Taiwan focused. Jaechun, I want to draw you out a little bit because not only did you say don’t push too hard on Taiwan but you said don’t push too hard on China policy, and that draws on what Mike was saying is is the perception about China? Is it about this larger entente that Bob was talking about? If it is about China, is it Taiwan? Is it the South China Sea? Is it the northern territories? Is it domestic politics? How similar are the concerns about China among the three countries? Because they seem quite different and if they are that’s going to be a problem to institutionalize. LEE: OK. Hanbyeol, Seong-Ho, and Evan. Q: I think I hear from—oh, sorry. I will hear from Komei or the other U.S. colleague in this room. Yeah, the three is more powerful than two, but it is not always true, you know. After the Camp David, is any discrepancy in operational level, which is already agreeing and in this—the ROK-U.S. summit in April—for example, a Nuclear Consultative Group or the military technology cooperation? And is there any change that can be happen—the ongoing consultation between the ROK-U.S., for example, the transfer of the wartime OPCON control. Thank you. LEE: OK. Seong-Ho? Q: Previously, some of you asked a question about, you know, the people-to-people exchange between Korea and Japan and the future prospect. And it is one thing that, obviously, different government, different president has a different agenda, and at this moment thanks to this three leadership we have this trilateral partnership, et cetera. But yet still one of the weakest link to remain is Korea-Japan. And especially Andrew also specifically asked about my own observation about this young generation from both Korea and Japan—how do they see it. As far as I’m concerned, that’s one of the most, I think, impressive and substantial area of Korea-Japan relationship over the past maybe decade. It has been moving towards—in the very positive dimension. The people-to-people exchange, as you know, I just checked data so far this year. When it comes to tourism between the two country, Korea is the number one, obviously, going into Japan today for the past six months, reaching about 2.6 million Koreans are going into Japan. That makes Korea the highest—the most country that visit Japan so far this year. And vice versa, the Japanese came to Korea they say is 660,000, which also makes the number-one tourist from Japan coming into Korea—outranking Chinese, obviously. So then counts like 20 percent of foreign tourists coming into Korea so far. By the way, the Koreans counts 30 percent of foreign tourists going into Japan this year and, obviously, those numbers are pretty much occupied by the young generation—younger population from both sides. And not only that, the second—I see these days in YouTube lots of popular—one of the items is that the Koreans and Japanese, the married couple, they talk about the difference or similarity between these two young generation and how they see each other, how they adapt in living in Seoul or in Tokyo. That has been a very popular, you know, video. But at the same time also I see there’s lots of young Japanese, especially the ladies, coming into Seoul, going around many different restaurants and all these cafes and places like that and they talk about how interesting and, you know, nice to be in Seoul. So that’s just kind of one reflection of—and as far as I’m concerned when I have this exchange program with Tokyo University between SNU. And, of course, lots of our students goes to Tokyo. But at the same time, there’s increasing numbers of foreign students coming into our school and they get along so well in my class. But the only thing is that still kind of missing link is that Korean students, still the young generation, doesn’t have such a kind of grievance about the colonialism as they see Korea-Japan as more on the equal footing—the young Koreans’ generation. But they do know what happened. They are very well aware of the history, event, and background, whereas the Japanese simply—they didn’t know much about those. So I think that’s still the area where maybe that need to be worked on from both sides. And once they learn about those history in my class, the Japanese also really very much appreciate. Oh, I didn’t know about such a thing, that I now understand why we do have that kind of—Korea—history issue between. So that’s one thing. And, finally, the young generation’s approach—Koreans, as they are very well aware of those history issue. But their approach to those history issue is a little different from the older generation. Whereas the older generation’s perspective is Korea becoming a victim of Japanese colonialism or imperialism. These Korean young people tend to approach this—for example, the comfort lady issues as more of woman’s rights. Rather than it’s between Korea and Japan, it’s more like woman’s rights being violated, and that is not very well recognized. The second—the forced labor issue as well, that is being more approached from a kind of individual right to try to take this to the Korean court looking for their own justice. And our—this dialogue/discussion has been whether the government or their concern about this bilateral relations with Japan can trespass those kind of individual right. That has been a kind of different framework rather than simply Korea-Japan—the victim and victimhood framework. So that’s just my one comment. LEE: OK. Let me add a few things to what Seong-Ho said. Sejong hosted another meeting with Japan Institute of International Affairs in Tokyo last week. And there was a lot of indication that particularly South Korean people, we feel like a little more disappointed about Japan’s very slow and lukewarm reaction to President Yoon’s very bold initiative. And also Gil mentioned—asked about—how after Camp David, how much actual implementation is occurring between Korea and Japan? Mostly we all know that Camp David was a very important milestone, but on the working level we didn’t see much movement between two nations, meaning that it may take some time to actually see some significant change in working-level collaboration between Korea and Japan. And yeah, that’s my add-on. And Evan? Q: Regarding institutionalization, what do you think we can expect in terms of collaboration across the three countries’ defense industrial bases? We’ve seen this Mitsubishi Electric deal with the Australian government and Korea’s defense industrial base has been growing rapidly. So what can we expect there? And then is there anything that the governments can do to foster those connections to support the trilateral from that level? LEE: Dr. Sheen, maybe you’re the person to answer that question, right? (Laughter.) OK. Well, we have about six minutes left so I’ll give final—a few minutes for each panelist to respond whatever they can. Each person can respond. OK. First, Jaechun. KIM: South Korea’s assessment of future politics of the United States—I guess South Korean government is increasingly worrying about the possibility for Mr. Trump to go back to the White House. But Yoon Suk Yeol government is on such good terms with the Biden administration so they are a little bit cautious about approaching, you know, Trump foreign policy team if there is any. I don’t know. If you have any idea please let me know. I think every country is doing hedging. I do know Japan is doing hedging. I thought Japan placed all your eggs in American basket. So it was a quite surprise to hear that Japan is splitting differences between the United States and China. I mean, this government is anti-China, that’s for sure. I mean, strategically Yoon Suk Yeol government made it very clear that South Korea is with the United States and Japan at strategy level but still, yeah, because we are located in this geopolitical spot where we’ll have to maintain better relations both with Americans and Chinese. I mean, our geopolitical, you know, situation is a little bit different from Japan. You know, China is still a geopolitical reality to South Korea, China is still a geoeconomic reality to Korea. At least I think the government is thinking that we will have to salvage economic relations with China while other key allies of the United States are in good terms with China—I mean, at least in terms of economic relations. You know, we pretty much severed our diplomatic—I mean, economic relations with China and I think the government is thinking that we’ll have to do something about it so we can have more of a wiggle room, if you will—I mean in terms of making more, like, proactive economic policy toward China so that we can have some good economic relations with, like, other key allies of the United States. I don’t know. Opportunity—I don’t know who that was but the seventh nuclear weapons test on the part of North Koreans that will certainly, you know, bring three countries closer, that’s for sure. But I think if North Koreans test nuclear weapons for seventh time I think, you know, now that South Korea, that self-nuclearization—the public opinion for South Korea going nuclear is a little bit subsides—I mean, is in dormant stage. But if North Korea tests nuclear weapons for seventh time I think public opinion calling for self-nuclearization will resurface and that’ll—going to put a strain on ROK-U.S. alliance and on this trilateral cooperation. So I don’t think it’ll operate as an opportunity. I jotted some—so many points but I can’t really put them in order so I better stop here. Thank you. LEE: OK. Komei? ISOZAKI: OK. So I will touch on several points, not all. About the education—I agree that Japanese people including myself are not really serious student of history. I’m trying to be but we don’t know much about Japan’s modern history in the modern times. So I’m unsure why Japanese minister of education doesn’t focus or emphasize those importance of history education. Of course, there’s divided views in Japan but we shouldn’t avoid the history issues and, of course, divided issues of it. We can teach or learn various ways to look at the history in the modern times. I agree with that. Regarding the defense industrial bases, I attended several space and defense industries’ symposiums/conventions in Washington area and also the West Coast as well, and I felt that South Korean defense industry really eager to export. They have good exhibitors always and the big exhibitors and then very passionate people who explain the good things and then also strength of the South Korean defense and space industries. And then some of them explained that they’re using Japanese parts and the materials produced by not big companies, but I—which I don’t remember the names, but they’re South Korean. They’re really seriously taking good parts and materials and Japanese companies produce. So those are the areas I think Japan can learn and cooperate with South Koreans. Japan recently modified their principles on weapons-related export policies. So the government is now pushing or promoting the Japanese companies to export and find opportunity to export their materials. And now South Koreans—I think I heard after the beginning of the Ukraine war, South Korea became the fourth largest weapons exporters and Japan is much, much smaller in that sense. And then both U.S. allies. So like AUKUS agreement between the United States, UK, and Australia, so Japan, South Korea, and maybe Australia. So those countries can cooperate in the productions or uses of materials, parts, in the defense areas. Thank you. LEE: Thank you. Sheila? SMITH: Thank you. So much on the table. I’ve got a couple of points. I wanted to just draw our attention back to a comment that Marybeth made earlier about a Middle Eastern conflict because I think, again, we don’t need to speculate into how that might unfold. But if it is a larger conflagration in the Middle East then, of course, some of these relationships that we’re talking about could evolve in response to that. And I am not a Russia or a China expert but I imagine in Moscow and Beijing there may be different views on what that impact would be on their own interests and particularly resource interests. But, again, there’s a connection with Iran and I think Bob also mentioned it. The Iran-North Korea connection is another piece that we shouldn’t ignore either. I also—one piece that I wanted to add to that is the—watch the American public’s response to what the Biden administration is able to or not able to do in the Middle East. And I think this is not specific to the trilateral again but it will feed into—as we approach our presidential election, I think it’s going to feed into this question about the United States as global policeman, the U.S. role in getting involved in conflicts abroad, especially if it’s a broader conflagration. So there’s many aspects of that that are worth teasing out a little bit. I’m going to spend a minute or two trying to answer Alex’s question about perceptions of China and, again, others here can certainly jump in. But I would say, Alex, I would frame the questions both about perceptions and about the ability of each, whether it’s Seoul, Tokyo, or Washington, to respond to Chinese behavior. So it’s not just a perceptual issue in my sense of it. Couple of areas where I think—and, again, please correct me from our guests from South Korea if you think I’m wrong—all of our economies are dependent on this relationship with China. Ao that’s a first statement but it’s worth pointing out and I think Professor Kim’s admonition to us to pay attention to economic interests as we move the trilateral forward is well placed. Private sector-state interests may not always align in all three of those countries. I’m not sure, Glen, if I agree with you on Japan hedging but I certainly see divisions between Japanese private sector interest and the government’s policy—strategic policy vis-à-vis China that I think is sometimes underappreciated here in Washington. The military power of China and the assertion of that military power, clearly, the Japanese have a point of view. It’s very consistent with the U.S. Indo-Pacific reading of what Chinese intentions and capabilities are. I don’t think there’s a lot of dissonance. But, Mike, you can jump in if you think I’m wrong. So that is a focal point that I’m not sure the South Korean government shares entirely, right, and for obvious reasons, right. Where I think that Seoul and Tokyo have come closer is on how they see Chinese behavior toward a broader global order or behavior. And I think, again, this creation of that Chinese-Russian access at least in the Japanese case—and I’d certainly like to hear our colleagues from South Korea comment on this—that there is a challenge afoot—a revisionist challenge, I think, is Dr. Lee’s language earlier in the conversation. And I think this is something that’s new or I’m sensing that’s new. If it’s shared by the Korean public then that would also be new. But I do think we have to parse out responses to specific behaviors by China and then what resources can be brought to bear. I would not argue to anybody who asked me to use the trilateral as a response to Chinese power all by itself. I think what we’ve got is the reference to Taiwan is fine. I wouldn’t push it beyond that unless our militaries are doing exercises and things like that. But at the political level I think that’s enough for now, right, until we get further down the road and it becomes much, much more critical that we think about the alliances differently. The last point I’d say is that the addition of the DPRK to that China-Russia axis for me is so important to how we think about the trilateral, and I don’t know really how the South Korean public see that piece. We here—and, Gil, you asked the question—I didn’t hear a response yet—how that could change the trilateral agenda, whether it’s, you know, ICBM technology. I don’t know the deal. But if it’s ICBM technology, if it’s new satellite technology, if it’s submarines, right, there’s a lot that could be going on there. That will have an immense impact, I believe, on the Seoul-Tokyo-Washington sense of what the three allies need to do together. So let me stop there. LEE: OK. Andrew? YEO: Sure. Just picking up from Sheila, I think if you asked me a year or even two years ago I would be a little bit more concerned about the gaps and perceptions of China. I do think South Korea has moved a little bit closer—the needle closer toward maybe Japan and the United States as it’ll probably never get to the same point in part because of the economic piece—the economic relationship—and also as what Sheila mentioned because even if they do see China as a threat because of that geographic proximity because of the North Korea puzzle they may not want to respond. But I do think that we’re in a better place than we were a year ago. Glen, on, you know, what Korea or the Yoon government might do on hedging, I mean, I agree with Dr. Kim that President Yoon has put all his chips in the U.S.-South Korea alliance. But what he has done also is to expand or deepen relations with other countries. This is the whole global pivotal state and reaching out to other countries, other U.S. allies in the region and elsewhere and so that might be one way of, I think, diversifying South Korea’s partnerships and interests. And then I’ll just address Bob on the security element. That’s the thing that worries me a lot because you have these different blocs and you see right now the only thing United States, Japan, and Korea can really do is, you know, more—you know, more defense, more deterrence, more readiness. And I don’t suggest not doing those things by any stretch of the means. But it is a security dilemma that’s building up. I do think that the Biden administration is trying hard to find pathways to reach out to China. We’ve seen this with the diplomatic engagement over the last few months. There’s going to be the APEC summit so maybe they can defuse some of those tensions. I’m a little bit skeptical. Certainly, though, without any kind of engagement you’re just going to continue to see that security dilemma. And, lastly, it’s more of a question for you, Seong-Ho. I mean, so it’s great to hear that Koreans and even Japanese have a more—a better—their thinking is not as adversarial towards the other. But does that then take the wind out of the Democratic Party if they try to kind of mobilize anti-Japan sentiment for political purposes? If younger Koreans see that, you know, this is not really a Japan thing will they not really buy into that narrative at this point? Let’s just say in practical terms, like, there’s a protest. Let’s all protest Uniqlo. Are the young people going to come out and protest Uniqlo shops like they did in 2017 or ’18 or are they now kind of past that point? So that’s my question in terms of politics. If the younger generation doesn’t buy into the anti-Japanese narrative that someone like Lee Jae-myung may use does that suck the wind or does that take the wind out of what—that potential for galvanizing, you know, anti-government protests. So I’ll stop there. LEE: OK. Thank you. I think we have a really good start for the day and, well, I will not summarize the whole session but at least we have some consensus that trilateral cooperation will be important but also we face a lot of challenges. It seems to me the biggest challenge are maybe the domestic politics—Korea, United States, Japan. But also China factor. That will be an important point that we have to look at in the future. So, anyway, let’s try hard to make some good policy suggestions to the three government(s) and I think that’s the responsibility of people in this room. So let me conclude the session and please join me in thanking our excellent four panelists. (Applause.) (END) This is an uncorrected transcript.

Deputy National Security Advisor Anne Neuberger discusses international cyber cooperation initiatives to improve resilience to ransomware, efforts to disrupt ransomware and pursue those responsible for its proliferation, and countering illicit finance that underpins the ransomware ecosystem. 

Human rights lawyer Oleksandra Matviichuk discusses her vision for ensuring international justice and accountability for Russian war crimes in Ukraine. Matviichuk accepted the 2022 Nobel Peace Prize on behalf of Ukrainian human rights organization Center for Civil Liberties (CCL). Since its founding in 2007, CCL has monitored political persecutions, documented war crimes and crimes against humanity, and advocated for victims of war crimes in Ukraine.  

Bipartisan leadership of the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, Chairman Mike Turner (R) and Ranking Member Jim Himes (D), discuss the work of the committee in maintaining U.S. strategic advantage in intelligence, as well as ensuring adherence to the democratic values of accountability and transparency.

FROMAN: Good afternoon. Welcome to today’s Public Forum hosted by the Council on Foreign Relations. My name is Mike Froman. I am president of the Council, and I’ll be presiding over today’s discussion. The Council on Foreign Relations is an independent think tank, publisher, educational institution, and membership organization committed to providing nonpartisan facts-based information and analysis. We all woke up Saturday morning to the shock of another war in the Middle East and the horrific terrorist attack by Hamas on Israel. We are still only now fully coming to terms with its severity and its scale. It will have devastating consequences, both human and humanitarian. And it will be certainly—terrible ramifications for the weeks and months, perhaps years, to come. We at the Council are committed very much to following it and providing analysis and context as the situation on the ground develops. Today’s conversation will—is part of that effort. And I want to introduce our three speakers. Dr. Steven Cook is the Eni Enrico Mattei senior fellow in Middle East and Africa at the Council. He’s an expert on Arab and Turkish politics as well as U.S.-Middle East policy. Dr. Ray Takeyh is the Hasib J. Sabbagh senior fellow in Middle East studies at the Council. He specializes in Iran, U.S. foreign policy, and the modern Middle East. And Farah Pandith is an adjunct senior fellow at the Council. She is an expert and pioneer in countering violent extremism. Today’s discussion is on the record. As has been said, it will be posted on the Council’s website afterwards. Let me start, Steven, if I can, with you. Israel appears to be amassing forces on the border with Gaza. What are their military and strategic objectives for Gaza going forward? And are they achievable? And what are the risks that they face in going after those objectives? COOK: Thanks very much, Mike. And thanks, everybody else, for joining us this afternoon. These are the major questions. The war cabinet—the Israeli war cabinet, which now includes the opposition party led by Benny Gantz, has given the IDF the instructions to destroy Hamas, to make it so that Hamas cannot threaten Israel. This is likely to be a very significant undertaking, which will include ground forces. I think that the IDF has been careful thus far in saying that they haven’t been ordered—they haven’t gotten the order to undertake what they’re euphemistically calling a ground maneuver. But the mobilization of three hundred thousand soldiers and the movement of tons of equipment, including tanks and armored personnel carriers and artillery, indicates that after this very intense period of air barrages, that the IDF is poised to move into the Gaza Strip. Then then we get to the hardest questions of all, Mike. I think the Israelis can bring a lot of power to bear to kill a lot of Hamas people, as well as, unfortunately, Palestinian civilians caught in the crossfire, which is something I know very many people are concerned about. But then they end up back where they were almost twenty years ago—occupying parts of or if not all of the Gaza Strip, something that the Israelis certainly don’t want to do. So perhaps the Israelis can win the battle against Hamas, but if they’re drawn into a grinding conflict in the Gaza Strip, Hamas and its patrons may actually score a victory in terms of distracting Israel, weakening the IDF, with a long, drawn-out occupation and guerrilla warfare in a very dense place. FROMAN: Do you think, Steven, that that has been, in fact, part of their objective, in terms of the nature of the attack on Israel, the scope, the brutality is, indeed, to make it impossible for Israel to do nothing but go into Gaza and get drawn into a quagmire there? COOK: As the days have gone on, and the Israelis have been very clear that they would like to clear Gaza, it strikes me that this is perhaps a strategic goal of Hamas, is to draw the Israelis in. The complex nature, the number of casualties associated with attack—Israelis really are faced with a number of unenviable choices. And their public is demanding a major operation to finally bring an end to the threat that is Hamas. So, yes, there is a real risk that the Israelis get caught. And there is a real possibility that that is precisely what Hamas intended. FROMAN: Farah, let me go to you next. The Israelis have stated that one of their objectives is to, as Steven said, eliminate Hamas. Which is a difficult objective because if even one Hamas member is left holding up a flag at the end of this conflict, it appears that that objective hasn’t been met. This falls in a long line of efforts by the U.S. and others to eradicate al-Qaida, the Taliban, ISIS, et cetera. What does it mean to eliminate a group like Hamas? You study violent extremism. You study Hamas. What does it mean? And what would be an appropriate objective for this exercise? PANDITH: Mike, one of the things that we have to be very clear about is Hamas is a terrorist organization. It requires ideological soldiers to be part of their efforts. They cannot do what they’re doing unless they have soldiers. So one of the things that we tried to do certainly in the last twenty years, since 9/11—twenty-plus years since 9/11, is go after terrorist organizations around the world with exclusively—mostly, I should say, hard power. And one of the things we ought to be thinking about in this latest horrific attack is how we can think differently about how to decimate the appeal of an ideology like Hamas’s. Let’s remember that Hamas’s—I mean, their manifesto, what they want to do, is to eradicate Jews, and they want to eradicate Israel. That is what they have explicitly laid out. They are manipulating the religion of Islam to be able to bring people into the fold. So when we think about what you mentioned, the United States, other countries—not just Israel, but other countries around the world need to do is, first and foremost, condemn a terrorist groups like Hamas. We had more than a hundred countries respond to what happened over the weekend with statements. And only forty-four of those countries actually explicitly condemned the terrorist organization first. Secondly, in terms of the ideology, how we think about what we need to do to shrink the pool of those people who find this ideology appealing, is we have to go all in. And we haven’t done that, Mike. We’ve put trillions of dollars into the hard power war and, like, pennies to the dollar on how we think about what it takes to, over generations, change the narrative, change the appeal. And then finally, there’s a role for technology companies, Mike. And ideology does not exist in a vacuum. They’re not just putting posters up on a board and having people walk by them. They are going after potential recruits. So for us to be able to shrink the pool of people who are hearing their message, who are being lured into their ideology. We’ve got to make sure that what’s happening in the online space is controlled in a very different kind of way. And that responsibility comes both from the technology companies but also regular citizens like you and me, who have to demand different kinds of red lines in the online space. FROMAN: When you say, “go all in,” and I understand, beyond the hard power, what does going “all in” mean, in terms of providing an alternative vision of Islam and reducing the appeal of Hamas? PANDITH: The ideology is based on—any of these groups have different manifestos. But in order for them to go after somebody, they’re going after an emotional thing, Mike. They are speaking to the inside of somebody. They’re making them feel like they can belong to something. It’s how, in fact, domestic extremists also utilize that idea of identity and belonging. So when we talk about going “all in,” it means not just today looking up and saying we have a problem with Hezbollah, or Hamas, or the Taliban, or Shabaab. It is to say, globally, what is happening to Millennials, to Gen Z, and eventually Gen Alpha, who are hearing the messages of these groups, who are influenced by these groups? How do we disrupt the way in which they understand what’s taking place, the lies and the fake information that has been put out there, and how can we come together as society so there are many touch points within a community to push people away? I want to say one last thing, Mike. And that is, you talked to Steven about sort of what the point was in some of the brutality of what Hamas did. And let us not make the mistake of not recognizing that Hamas has learned from ISIS. That, in fact, the tools in their toolbox today are very different because of what they’ve seen works in other parts of the world, and in other contexts. So, in order to decrease the appeal of this ideology, we’ve got to learn lessons from the past. And we have to apply everything that we know in money, and resources, and sophistication in diminishing that appeal. FROMAN: Do you think it’s possible for Israel to eliminate Hamas, as it says, through a military action? PANDITH: I think it is possible globally for many countries to build a coalition that works on eradicating us-versus-them ideologies generally. And it is not something that happens in the course of a presidential cycle. It’s something that happens over generations. And if we look at what we know neo-Nazis are saying and have explicitly said that they’re trying to do—i.e., recruit seven-year-olds. Or we look at a group like the Taliban in terms of what they’ve said that they want to do, we’ve got to look at the scope in a in a bigger way, Mike. And we’ve got to understand that this is not just Israel’s problem. That these ideologies that exist are connected. And I think if we look to the future of what could be happening in that region, I would not be surprised if this ideology finds appeal in other parts of the world that bring ideological soldiers to bear. FROMAN: Thank you. Ray, Iran has been supportive of Hamas for a long time. Obviously has clients also north of Israel in Hezbollah. But there seems to be some debate now, at least in the press, about to what degree Iran knew about the attacks that happened on Saturday, let alone whether they were directing it. What’s your perspective on the degree of Iranian involvement? And what are they hoping to achieve through their support of this conflict? TAKEYH: Well, this is an issue that’s being debated, of course, as you mentioned. What did the Iranians know and when did they know? I think it’s a sort of a narrow question. What we can say is Iran certainly enabled Hamas to do what it did. And over the past year, over the past several months, in particular, we have seen a considerable amount of traffic between the Iranian officials and the Hamas officials, their military planners and operatives on both sides, as well as Hezbollah. So in that sense, there’s a considerable degree of Iranian operational capability and operational participation beyond the usual provision of assistance. Were they in the room when they said, okay, attack Saturday at 7:30? Probably not. Were they in the building? Yes, in a sense that they will always give themselves some measure of distance from the actual operational decision to execute because then the question will be did they actually ordered the attack, and so forth. And if they didn’t specifically order attack, and they were not on an intercept ordering the attack, then, of course, they have some measure of immunity from this. What is the overall Iranian strategy that includes Hamas and includes this particular attack? Well, for the past number of years they have been trying to put together what they call the Axis of Resistance, which involves their many militias, and terrorist allies, and so on. These are—this is a multinational coalition. It involves Pakistanis, Afghanis, Iraqis. It’s not a sectarian coalition. It is not narrowly drawn from the Shia community, as was the Hezbollah previously. It involves Sunnis. It involves Shi’ites. It involves other sects, and so forth. So they have actually put together, strangely enough, a sort of a multinational coalition. And the purpose of that is, of course, to weaken the regional adversaries, particularly Israel. And so this attack kind of fits into that pattern. The objectives would be to weaken Israel, as Steven mentioned, to get Israel into a quagmire. And the more humanitarian aspects of this come about, the more difficult it will be for Israel’s regional standing to be undisturbed. So there is that aspect of it. Israelis are now too preoccupied with Iran—with the Palestinian front to do anything else. It scuttles the alignment that Israelis were trying to craft with Sunni states, particularly Saudi Arabia, that could have aligned the region to some extent against Iran. So it kind of meets all their objectives. It mires Israel in a conflict, which is at some point—is going to actually cause considerable degree of international outcry because all the humanitarian issue. It demonstrates the power of Iran to inflict punishment in a cheap and easy way. So anybody considering any attack on Iranian territory, this will be another lesson. And it, of course, as I mentioned, disturbs some of the diplomatic moves that were being done. And it’s cheap, easy, and Iranians have immunity. No one’s talking really about attacking them. And I think we talked about this in another forum. There is a considerable degree of genius to the Iranian proxy war strategy, because what is often said, when they’re behind the attack similar to this, the country that is targeted—in this particular case, Israel—is too busy dealing with the flames to focus on the source of the fire. And what often happens is—it happened to the Americans in Iraq; it’s happening to the Israelis today. What often happens is they say, well, we can’t expand the zone of conflict by essentially dealing with Iran. So we have to essentially pacify Iraq. We have to pacify Gaza, and so forth. So the Iranians get all the things they wanted out of this, and still have some degree of immunity in terms of their territory. And in terms of the loss of Arab life, they have no problem with Arabs dying in this particular conflict, because they’re martyrs. And the reward for martyrdom is celestial, as Farah was saying. So, you know, all these people are being martyred for the cause of God. So it meets all their strategic objectives at a reasonable cost, and essentially immunizes them from any form of attack. Now, we’re in a situation where things can get out of hand. You know, best laid plans go astray. So if this thing gets—seriously gets out of hand, they could essentially be more involved in a direct way that they don’t wish to be. But at this point, is a conflict that’s manageable. It is a conflict that achieved its strategic objectives. It demonstrated the power of the resistance front. It has essentially caused Israel to be mired in a conflict that’s going to be very prolonged. It’ll eventually draw some degree of international criticism, and certainly regional criticism of Israel. This is all good news, from their perspective. FROMAN: If the conflict were to expand significantly to the north, with Hezbollah getting involved—another close Iranian proxy—how would you see that playing out? And does that risk a much greater widening involving Syria, involving Iran ultimately, of the conflict? TAKEYH: Well, the Hezbollah angle is a very interesting one. Steven and I were just talking about this. What will Hezbollah do is a question that’s on everybody’s mind. By the way, if Hezbollah becomes involved in this political conflict, the logic of Iranian proxy war strategy still holds. Because then say, well, Israel is busy on all its frontiers, so it cannot possibly extend into the Persian Gulf. The core logic holds. But it doesn’t serve Iranian interests, because Hezbollah’s a trump card they hold in case of some other conflict with the United States or Israel that involves attack on Iran in terms of its atomic facilities and so forth. And essentially, bringing Hezbollah into this conflict in a meaningful, measurable way doesn’t serve their interests. It doesn’t serve Hezbollah’s interests, but we are in uncharted territory because Hezbollah’s learned some lessons from 2006 about the damage that it can suffer in this—in waging war against Israel. What they can do—what Hezbollah is doing—is having limited skirmishes. And, by the way, they can do it through Syria with Hamas operatives, and so forth. These limited skirmishes have to bring in some Israeli forces to the north in order to deal with the potential contingency of a Hezbollah attack, which detracts from Israeli strength in the south. But without necessarily provoking a larger conflict that could seriously jeopardize Hezbollah as a terrorist organization, and Iranian proxy of consequence. Hezbollah is different here because if Hezbollah is involved in this particular conflict, nobody will doubt that Iranians ordered them to do so. Because what we have learned about Hezbollah in the Syrian civil war is that they are willing to engage in conflict that doesn’t necessarily serve their interests, political interests in Lebanon, if ordered to do so by Iran. So Hezbollah is no longer a proxy of some sort; it’s actually an aspect of the Iranian military security services. It is deployed across the region. It is deployed in many places where Lebanese have no business being deployed. So Hezbollah will actually open Iran to certain vulnerabilities that, at this point, it’s not facing. And this is why I’m hesitant to suggest that the Hezbollah front is going to blow up in a serious way. But if you keep having these skirmishes, and enhancing them, and increasing them, then essentially you can draw some Israeli forces to that front and further drain Israeli sources and stress the resources. FROMAN: Steven, let’s talk a little bit about great-power politics. We’ve got the U.S. moving carrier fleets off the coast. Obviously, there are Americans involved, Americans who have died, and Americans who are being held hostage, as well as citizens from other countries as well. Russia and Iran have become very close. China has been involved in the normalization of relations between Saudi Arabia and Iran in an effort to maintain access to the oil in the region. What role do you expect—let’s start with Russia and China—what role do you expect either one of them to play in this conflict? And then on the U.S., beyond a show of force—a symbolic show of force offshore, what is the potential role of the United States in this conflict? COOK: It’s a great question, Mike. Let’s start with the United States, because it is becoming physically present in the region in way that it had not been by moving an aircraft carrier battle group into the Eastern Mediterranean. It is clearly a signal to Hezbollah and the Iranians not to widen the conflict, although in conversations with Lebanese yesterday, they wonder whether Hezbollah will actually get that message and believe that message. And Ray just articulated that he doesn’t think that there is likely to be a northern front or that Hezbollah wants in northern front. But, again, with the United States moving in and these skirmishes going on with Israel and Hezbollah, those two actors could walk into something that might draw the United States in because of our essentially declared goal to prevent a widening of the regional conflict. Beyond this, however, President Biden has put himself in the position of essentially holding Israel’s hand through this. Now, as Ray points out, as the Israelis prosecute this war and as we start seeing a—the likely humanitarian disaster unfold in the Gaza Strip, there probably will be pressure from many quarters for Israel to exercise some restraint. And that’ll be the role of the president of the United States to see how he can encourage restraint on the part of the Israelis. But of course, Israelis are bloodied. They’re angry. They’re vengeful. So I wonder how much advice they are actually taking, even from someone who has positioned himself as such a strong friend of the State of Israel. As far as the Russians and the Chinese go, the Russians have—let me just say that the Israeli ambiguous position with regard to Ukraine and Russia did not really buy them much. The Russians have moved closer to the Iranians. The Russians have essentially blamed the Israelis for what has happened and has called for a new peace process, which is sort of empty rhetoric but the sort of kind of trolling that we expect to come from the Russian Foreign Ministry. As far as the Chinese go, I think there’s a much more interesting dynamic that is happening in how this conflict does accrue to their benefit. What was going on in the region, what we were all talking about last week, was Saudi-Israel normalization. And Saudi-Israel normalization was essentially the sugar to get Congress to swallow a Saudi-U.S. defense pact. And that Saudi-U.S. defense pact was, from the perspective of the Biden administration, and effort to knit the United States and its gulf partners, in this case Saudi Arabia but there would be follow on agreements, closer together in a way that blunted China’s influence in the region. We can well imagine that, as the Israelis prosecute this war, that the Saudis will want to not move forward with normalization, which then makes it an even harder thing for the Biden administration to push a defense pact with Saudi Arabia through the Congress, which is already hostile to Saudi Arabia. And there is—the Chinese don’t have to contend with this and can continue as this conflict goes on seeking to advance their influence in a variety of ways in the region. But I should point out that and looking at this over a period of time, it doesn’t strike me that the Chinese want to replace the United States in the region. I think they’ve looked at what we have done and how we have gotten bogged down in this region for decades now, and don’t want to repeat the mistakes that the United States has made. Certainly, they want to push the United States out of East Asia. But would they like the United States to be engaged in the Levant, in the Eastern Mediterranean, as well as in the Persian Gulf? Certainly. TAKEYH: Can I just pick up briefly on the important point that Steven made about what Hezbollah is going to do is very much speculative. We’re in a situation where we don’t know the decision making of the other protagonists. And when you’re speculating on their decision making, you tend to be reasonable. Except nobody’s acting reasonably today. If we were sitting here about a week ago and we said Hamas would attack Israel in such ferocity, we would assume that that’s not reasonable. And is not reasonable, but they still did it. Hezbollah, it would be reasonable for Hezbollah not to attack. But whether they attack? I want to pick up one small point on the Chinese-Iranian agreement, because at the time of China’s Iran-Saudi agreement. At the time, it was thought that China had the ability to talk to both antagonists, because it has relationship with both of them. But that particular normalization agreement had a very limited perspective. All the Chinese wanted from the Iranians is not to attack Saudi oil facilities. And to be fair, they have not. They just undermined the Saudi regional position. They never stopped trying to assist the Houthis. The United States Navy has interdicted a variety of their—so they have not, essentially, as we see, stopped the Axis of Resistance from engaging in mischief. It was a very narrowly crafted agreement. And the Chinese—Ali Khamenei and Chairman Xi—seemed to understand each other, that just don’t disrupt the oil facilities which could destabilize the energy market and the global markets accordingly. And to be fair, the Iranians have done so. And, by the way, the normalization agreement between Iran and Saudi Arabia is still going on. President Raisi is in touch with Prince Salman. The Iranian foreign minister is doing a tour of the region. He’s in Baghdad. He’ll go to Beirut. I’m sure at some point he’ll stop by. So that process is actually unfolding at the time when the Iranians have been very aggressive in undermining Saudi regional potential, at least momentarily. FROMAN: We haven’t talked at all about the West Bank, the Palestinians there. And that was also supposed to be part of the Saudi-Israel normalization discussion, that there would be some compromise and some delivery of benefits for the Palestinians. How does Hamas’s victory here—maybe I’ll go to Farah, if you don’t mind—how does the Hamas’s victory here position it as the now leading defender and spokesman for Palestinian issues? And where does that leave the Palestinian Authority and, really, any hope of making progress on the issues of the West Bank? PANDITH: Well our analysis up to this point has not been great in terms of what it is we think Hamas is about and what they’re willing to do. One thing we can definitely see in terms of the last few days in terms of a global response and in the way in which you’re seeing the manipulation of narratives, is that they are taking this pseudo-role, as you outlined, Mike—that they are taking the mantle, speaking for the Palestinians. And I want to be clear on a couple of things. The first is, they don’t speak for all Palestinians. And the way the media has been leveraging the story has really been a one-sided kind of conversation. And I think it’s important that we remember that the brutality and the terrorist tactics that Hamas deployed doesn’t mean that every Palestinian believes that that is the right thing to do. And so I want to really put that out there because it’s not fair to think otherwise. But in terms of who is in a winning posture, Hamas has the microphone. They have a microphone, not just in that part of the world. And certainly, they have the momentum. But they have the capacity today to say that they are winning. They did something unexpected. They went beyond the imagination of anyone. And so therefore, they are ascendant. And what’s worrisome is that no other group, no other authority, can—how do you catch up with that, Mike? How do you begin to put your opinion and your counternarrative forward when they have the airways, they have the power right now? So I think it’s very important. Certainly, the Council is very level-headed in how we are talking about things, but I also know that we have a couple thousand people who are listening to the conversation today. And as they interpret the news, and as they understand things, please don’t make the same mistakes we made after 9/11, which is to put everybody in these gigantic buckets and think that everything is a monolith. There’s a lot of nuance out there. And what really concerns me, to be honest with you, on the domestic side is that because of the way in which we believe that—or rather, the way the news has been reported, that in fact Hamas is speaking for all Palestinians, that is going to have repercussions in our own country in the way in which we treat each other, in the way our fellow Americans who are Jewish, are safe. We already have DHS, who is out there talking about protecting Jewish life in America. We already have seen evidence of spikes of backlash, both in 2014 when Hamas attacked in Europe, also in 2021 here in the United States, in Times Square and West Hollywood. So you can imagine that things will be happening in a really terrible way in our country too, if we do not take more care in understanding that we cannot give them the microphone the way they want it. That’s what they want, Mike. That’s what they would like to do. They want to put a wedge not only in that part of the world, but in the way in which people are talking about different faith communities, different ethnic communities, and the right and wrong of what they’re doing. They are brutal terrorists. They have used outrageous terrorist tactics. And they do not represent every voice that is part of that part of the world. COOK: Mike, can I just jump in here one quick second? I know we want to open this to questions, but I just want to speak to a little bit on the issue of the political dynamics on the West Bank. Hamas has outstripped the Palestinian Authority for many years now. Remember in the 2006 elections Hamas won, then beat the Palestinian Authority on the battlefield. But there is this question of resistance. Mahmoud Abbas, the leader of the Palestinian Authority, is compromised by the fact that the Palestinian Authority has become corrupt, unable to make life better for Palestinians, and unable to take any steps—because of the extreme compulsion under which he is forced to rule the Palestinian parts of the West Bank that he rules—unable to relieve Palestinians of their suffering. That is to say, no steps towards a resolution of the conflict. No steps towards justice. That provides an opportunity for Hamas to reinforce the idea that resistance is important. They are the leaders of resistance. And that Mahmoud Abbas is fatally compromised by his willingness—alleged willingness—to compromise with the Israelis, who have been unwilling really to give an inch. And that has provided Hamas a certain political buoyancy outside Gaza. And, quite frankly, if we’re talking about the widening of the conflict, that has to be something that the Israelis are worried about, given the support for Hamas also in the West Bank. FROMAN: All right, let’s open it up. We have, as Farah said, about three thousand participants. We will try to get to as many questions as possible. Please keep them—please keep them short and make them questions. And, Sarah, perhaps you can walk through what the process is for people who want to ask questions. OPERATOR: (Gives queuing instructions.) Our first question will come from Zach Greenberg. Zach, please accept the unmute prompt. Q: I don’t believe that I raised my hand. OPERATOR: We will take our next question from a written question from Sarah Danzman, who asks: Is there any possible pathway toward a humanitarian evacuation of Gaza? At least a voluntary one focused on women and children? What kind of diplomacy is needed to organize this, if it is even a remote possibility? Relatedly, can you imagine any situation in which the Israeli government would lift a siege on Gaza so long as Hamas continues to control it? FROMAN: Farah, do you want to try to take that one first? PANDITH: Sure. I think that there is a current effort underway from the United States to try to work on that corridor. And I know that it’s complicated because we have a political will in Israel, as such, at the moment that things are complicated along the Egyptian gateway for that corridor. So it’s being worked on at the moment. I will say, I know Steven will want to jump in on this. But I will say that every effort has to be made, even though things may be slow in coming. And I know everybody wants to see that open up immediately. But I—but I have to—I have to say that there’s a worrisome—as every hour goes by we’re hearing the really incredibly difficult dimensions of life in that part of the world. Gaza has almost two million people in in there, as you’re well aware in terms of your question. And reporting is suggesting that they are really desperate for clean water and food. So I don’t know, Steven, if you want to jump in. I saw your— COOK: Sure. The United States is working with the Egyptian government in trying to convince the Egyptians to open a humanitarian corridor to allow Palestinians who would like to escape the violence. The Egyptian government has so far said that it would not. The Egyptians are, of course, a full partner with the Israelis in the blockade of the Gaza Strip. I think the Egyptians’ concerns are along a number of dimensions. The first is, Egypt is a very poor country that is confronting major economic problems on its own and does not know how it would care for what could potentially be huge, huge numbers of Palestinians. The Egyptians are already confronting a refugee crisis from the civil war in Sudan. They also don’t want there to be yet another Palestinian refugee crisis that is literally within their borders. The Egyptians have taken a principled position that the resolution to the conflict between Israelis and Palestinians lies with Israel, and that they do not want to be forced to take responsibility in that way. And then finally, related to that, the Egyptians are quite worried that if they open up a humanitarian corridor, it will be permanent once this conflict comes to an end and Gaza has essentially been razed. And it seems to be what the Israelis are saying. That the Israelis would then turn around and say: Well, now this is an Arab responsibility. And when they say “Arab responsibility,” they mean an Egyptian responsibility. Again, keeping with the Egyptian position that the resolution to this problem is really an Israeli one. So that is why the Egyptians have been resistant. I suspect that there are ways to move the Egyptians. They are in need of economic assistance, debt relief. There are things that we can do. But whatever we do to force them, or compel them, or encourage them to open up that corridor, it will likely be subject to very significant restrictions. That means that probably men will not be permitted through, but at least women and children who remain in Gaza right now with no place to go will at least have some semblance of safety. FROMAN: Sarah, let’s go to another question. OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Luciano Moro. Q: Thank you for the opportunity. My question is about the prospects of peace. What I see in the discussions is talk only about war, but I have yet to hear anything about the prospects of peace. And given the current lull in any meaningful peace talks for decades now, what are the possibilities that there is such even a desire at all to find some lasting solution to the current crisis? Thank you. FROMAN: Steven, you want to say that one? COOK: Yeah. I think the prospects for a peace process, as we have come to know it in recent decades, are near zero. Obviously, at this moment, the Israelis have no appetite for this, and have said that they will resist international pressure. Now, of course, wars open up new pathways and new possibilities. There’s been a lot of talk about this as—because the attack came on the fiftieth year and one day anniversary of the October 1973 war, there have been some talk about the analogies to this. Certainly there are some. The extraordinary surprise of the attack being one of them. But I think the difference is that Anwar Sadat sent the Egyptian army into battle in order to open up new diplomatic opportunities that ultimately led to Egypt-Israel peace. Hamas, if you look at its charter, went to war with Israel to suck Israel into a war and to kill as many people as possible. But, again, I think the chances are near zero right now for a peace process. But who knows what will happen in the coming months. One can hope. And, like I said, wars do tend to open up new opportunities for diplomats to explore and perhaps advance something that will bring a little more stability to the area. TAKEYH: Can I just say one thing about this? Excuse me, Farah. There will be multilateral diplomacy involved in this. As Israelis move in, and who rules Gaza? What kind of aid provisions are given to it? What role does EU aid have? What role does the United Nations have? What role do the regional actors have? What role does the Islamic Conference have? There will be multilateral diplomacy. This war requires that almost. And those processes will be going on. And as derivative of that process, you may see at some point some kind of a peace process. If you kind of keep the 1973 analogy, you first have these armistice agreements, and then you try to build upon that. So, there’s a whole question of—oh, please go ahead. COOK: No, Ray, I take the point. But, of course, the Israelis were dealing with another state. TAKEYH: No, I understand that. COOK: And dealing with a leader who sought some sort of change in the status. TAKEYH: No, no, I understand that. But that there’s going to be a huge question about who rules Gaza, because nobody wants to. (Laughs.) COOK: Right. PANDITH: Can I just make a point on the issue of peace? And, Luciano, thank you very much for including that in this conversation because I think it is important. But I want to say a couple of things. The first is, you cannot have success if during the times of noncrisis you are not communicating and you’re not building to the best of your capacity on sort of diplomatic connections. And toward that end, this is a really terrible way to learn, once again, a lesson about the fact that our world is really small. And that we cannot look only in one part of the world and ignore another. So I think that what we ought to be doing is, as we try to achieve peace, is to look at all the levers that we have at our disposal to be able to do exactly what Ray said, on the different tiers of conversations that are taking place. And then the second thing is, United States, by the way, does not have ambassadors in many of the countries in this part of the world. And I will bring us back to the United States for a moment, because I think that the political gridlock in our nation on that piece, where we normally move forward with diplomacy without these kinds of stumbles, is a real problem for us. And then thirdly, and importantly, is the imagination question. And that is, we have not done well in imagining what could be. We, unlike many other disciplines, those people in foreign policy tend to keep in our little silos and just think about what happened in the past and must be, you know, what’s going to happen in the future. We’re in a very different posture today. We’re dealing with a world that is mostly digital—I mean, really young people thinking differently about how to disrupt because they’re digital natives. We’re thinking about nodes of influence that are very different. We’re thinking about how culture affects how narratives are formed. Toward that end, it would behoove diplomats to think creatively and imagine differently what peace could be and how to get there. And I think it is really important as we have the conversation about innovation in foreign policy, which we’re doing in other places, that we also think about that in terms of places in the world that need new solutions. And this is a really good time for some strategists to take a good look at what we’ve gotten wrong and what we can improve upon. FROMAN: Sarah. OPERATOR: Our next question is a written submission from Azzedine Iayachi: Farah, how can ideology be targeted while ignoring what brought it about, the Israeli occupation and the living conditions of the Palestinians? The internet will not affect these objective, tangible conditions. PANDITH: OK. I think I understood. I’m sorry, I thought I was waiting for another part of the question. OK, let me just go on the two things. One is the first thing I said when I commented today was that Hamas is a terrorist organization. And violence in the name of a political cause or a religious cause is not acceptable, period, whether it is al-Qaida, whether it is ISIS, whether it is the Taliban, whether it is any form of terrorism. We have red lines on that. I know what you’re saying about the conditions on the ground and the really difficult situation that has gone on for decades. But there is no excuse for terror. There is no excuse for a terrorist organization to be able to do this. I would—the second point I want to make is your point about the internet. I’m going to push back slightly. I think I understood what you were getting at, but I want to say this to you: Without the capacity of social media to push out fake accounts, fake news, manipulate videos, turbocharge narratives, you would not have the kind of global responses that we’re having in the world today on multiple fronts. So there is a deep connection between how the internet is being used by terrorist organizations and those that absorb messages that are coming in, how they organize, how they raise money. So I don’t know if I know the other piece of what you were trying to get at, but I hope that that answered your question. FROMAN: Next. OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Jim Tisch. Please accept the unmute prompt. Q: Do you think that the Hamas attack on Israel exceeded Hamas’s expectations? And did Hamas expected that the—expect the scope of the reprisal from Israel? And, finally, if so, what’s Hamas’s long term goal if they’ve been kicked out of Gaza, and if every member of Hamas leadership now has a target on their back? FROMAN: Steven. COOK: I think, given the way in which the Israelis have been able to bottle up Hamas over many years and, from time to time, employ violence to establish deterrence with them, I think Hamas can only come to the conclusion that they exceeded expectations on Saturday and are continuing to exceed expectations in terms of the number of casualties and damage they have done—they have done to Israel. They have had to have known that this would invite a massive response from Israel. Which leads us to infer that this is part of their goal, is to draw Israel into a grinding conflict in in the Gaza Strip that they can hold on, do damage to those invading forces, and hold out long enough until the international community expresses its outrage, forces the Israelis to pull back before their goals are achieved, and that Hamas will live another day. As far as their leadership on the outside, I would expect that the Israelis are going to be seeking to hunt them down. But certainly, within the Gaza Strip, clearly a goal is to grind the Israelis down and ensure—and under the belief that the international community will force the Israelis to stop. The difference is, given the number of killed, the number of wounded, the Israelis—at least in the first week—have indicated that they will resist all such outside pressure until their goals are met. TAKEYH: Can I just make a brief addendum to Steven’s point? If you look at the strategy of war here, it’s actually—the Iranians first developed this on the battlefields of Iraq. Namely, you compensate for technological superiority of your enemy by moral virtue, by being even more zealous. That actually was transported to Hezbollah, and to—namely, even when Israelis were attacking Lebanon very, very significantly in 2006, Hezbollah’s idea was you keep resisting, you keep shooting off rockets, you resist even when that resistance seems quite, quite extraordinary. So this is essentially you display your virtue and your morality, irrespective of the odds, irrespective of the technological superiority of your enemy. Your resistance continues, maybe not the same level, but at some level. The methods of Hamas are very close to ISIS, but in some way this is Hezbollah’s playbook. You go across this border. You take hostages. And you keep resisting even when there’s an onslaught coming. So to some extent, I think Hamas may have that strategy. Which reinforces Steven’s point that if they just keep resisting, resisting, resisting, then eventually the international community will come in with some sort of an armistice and some kind of an agreement about how to move forward that we’ll try to impose on Israel. Although, as Steve was mentioning, Israelis are not in a compromising sort of a mood today. FROMAN: Sarah. OPERATOR: Our next question is a written submission by Patrick Duddy: What role can and/or will Egypt play and the weeks and months ahead? FROMAN: Steven, that is definitely you. COOK: Yeah, it’s definitely up my alley. The Egyptians have long played an important role in Gaza in brokering ceasefires and sort of knocking heads when Hamas threatened to go too far. The Egyptians have a real security concern in Gaza. They, themselves, are fighting extremists in the northern Sinai. They have detected cooperation between Hamas and those extremists. Of course, Hamas is a creation of the Palestine branch of the Muslim Brotherhood. Egypt is at war, literally and both politically, with the—with the Muslim Brotherhood, which is sort of the granddaddy of all Muslim Brotherhood organizations. But at the moment, it strikes me that the Egyptian role is really going to be one where if the United States prevails upon them, providing humanitarian corridors for the Palestinians, as we discussed before. There is no mediating role right now. It’s probably not terribly distressing to the Egyptian leadership that the Israelis take down Hamas. In 2014, during the conflict between Israel and Hamas, the Egyptians were counseling the Israelis to destroy Hamas. The Israelis resisted Egyptian entreaties because they were concerned about a power vacuum in Gaza and who would rule it. Those views have now flipped, and the Israelis seem intent on bringing an end to Hamas, whereas everybody’s wondering what would come next. But specific to the question, the Egyptian role in mediation is inoperable right now, and it’s going to be a humanitarian issue going forward. OPERATOR: Our next question is a written submission from Dorothy Jean Weaver: Are the words “impending genocide,” used recently by Jewish Voice for Peace, appropriate words to describe what is about to unfold in Gaza? What will be left of Gaza after any major incursion by the IDF? FROMAN: Farah, you want to take that one? PANDITH: I don’t know how to answer that question. FROMAN: Yeah. PANDITH: I really don’t. COOK: Let me just offer a thought about this. I think the word “genocide” gets thrown around a lot these days, in an inaccurate way. I think we can say that, unfortunately, Palestinian civilians are going to suffer, and are already suffering tremendously as a result. And therefore, as each one of us had pointed out, there is a humanitarian emergency here. And part of American, and European, and Arab diplomacy has to be focused on convincing the Egyptians that opening this corridor is important. And that whatever we need to do, there is a real fear that the Israelis in their fury will do so much damage to the Gaza Strip that it becomes a place that people can’t inhabit, at least for the short and medium term. And that’s why it is so incredibly important. But I do caution people on this issue of genocide. It’s extraordinarily loaded. And it’s extraordinarily loaded also when it comes to when you’re talking about the Jewish state, and Jewish people. FROMAN: I agree with that. OPERATOR: We will take the next question from Linda Ketterer. Q: Yes. This is Linda Ketterer. I live in Traverse City, Michigan. I’m on the board of a local organization called the International Affairs Forum. I have a simple question: What can ordinary U.S. citizens do in light of this horrific situation? Is there something that normal people could be doing that might be helpful? FROMAN: Well, maybe I would just start off by saying, as many of my colleagues have said, there are devastating consequences in Israel and there’s going to be humanitarian crisis in Gaza. And I know we are identifying organizations to whom to make contributions and donations to deal with those issues. And certainly, encourage others to do that as well. But if anybody else has others they think of. Yeah, Farah. PANDITH: So, Linda, thank you for that. And I have three things that a regular person can do. First of all, our country needs to put Jack Lew in place in Israel. And so they should talk to their congresspeople and urge them to make that process happen faster. Secondly— FROMAN: Just to say, just so everyone knows, Jack Lew is the person who’s been nominated to be U.S. ambassador to Israel. Right now we have no ambassador there. And he’s pending confirmation. PANDITH: Yeah. And there are other Arab states that also do not have ambassadors. So, there’s that. Secondly, I made reference to the fact that I was very worried about what’s going to happen here in the United States around the rise of antisemitism. And I think it is really, really important that regular citizens are attuned to this, and that we are thinking about how to build capacity to be kind to each other, but also to be alert, and to help people of different faiths and backgrounds around us. There will be extremists, domestic extremists, that exploit this moment. That are going to use this moment to actually make other Americans unsafe, whether they’re Jewish or Muslim or looking Arab, whatever that might mean. So we have to be alert, and we have to do more. And then thirdly, and this is extremely important, and that is to understand how vital it is that the language that we use in everyday life, the lexicon, does not set up—don’t use lexicon that sets up an us-versus-them mindset, because it actually makes an impact. And you will notice that the things that are being stated by our folks in the administration are very carefully worded. For a reason, because we know that words carry power. And that is true in schools. It is true in parent-teacher conversations. It is true in your local cafe. So as you think about things that you can do in daily life, it is really important that you understand that what I would call a nano intervention can make a difference. FROMAN: Sarah, let’s try and take one more, if we can. OPERATOR: We will take the last question from Antonio Fins. Q: Yeah. Thank you for taking my question. Along those lines about antisemitism, we have the AJC, the Anti-Defamation League have both issued statements in the last couple of years noting a rise of antisemitism. How concerned are you that at some point,  we’ll see the sort of the united front that we’re seeing in Congress right now in the political leadership—that united front behind Israel, that will see a breakdown similar to what we’ve seen in Ukraine, where a year and a half ago they were in the Congress waving flags and now you have major divisions within the Republican party about supporting Ukraine? And I don’t know if you saw—anyone heard Mr. Trump’s speech from last night, but he talked about Netanyahu pulling out of the Soleimani drone attack back in early 2020, and how it was a disappointment to the U.S. And sort of making the argument that Netanyahu kind of lacks resolve. And I just wonder how helpful that would be at this time, when the Israeli leadership is under such pressure, to have someone questioning it like that, and someone who is leading—if the polls are right—the leading presidential candidate. And, again, thank you for taking my question. FROMAN: I won’t comment on the particular candidate’s comments that you raise, only to say that this is a time when even in Israel where there’s been quite divisive politics over the last couple of years, people are pulling together to deal with this tragedy. And I think, here in the United States we need to pull together both in support of Israel and in support of Ukraine. And this is about rules—international rules, and enforcing them, and standing up for decency. And the role of the United States in defending the the rules-based international system. And so I would hope that we would be able to maintain bipartisan consensus in support of both countries, and in the context of both of these conflicts. I’m afraid we’re going to have to stop it there. First, I want to thank Farah, Ray, and Steven for taking the time to do this public forum. I want to thank everybody who has participated. The Council is committed to providing information, as I said, on a nonpartisan basis, facts-based basis, in support of broad public education on the issues facing the country and American foreign policy. We are honored to be able to provide information like this during this crisis. Stay tuned; we’ll be continuing to. And look for our publications, CFR.org, Foreign Affairs, our other major publications, our podcasts, to stay up to date on what’s going on and to provide some helpful historical and geopolitical context. Thanks very much.