Our first speaker will be Dr. C Rajamohan. He is the director of Carnegie India, which was launched in April 2016. He's also a contributing editor for the Indian Express and a visiting research professor at the Institute of South Asian Studies at the National University of Singapore. He will be speaking on the 21st century strategic order. Our second speaker is my colleague Dr. Amy King, who is a fellow with the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. Amy specializes in Chinese foreign and security policy, China-Japan relations, and international relations and security of the Asia Pacific region. For those of you and us who were lucky enough to be there, Amy's latest book was launched here yesterday on Japan-China relations in the 20th century. Our third speaker, and Amy will be talking on economics and security. Our third speaker is Major General John Fruin. Major General Fruin is a career infantry officer who has commanded from platoon to brigade level, specializing in rapid response forces. In 2003, he led a multinational military intervention force supporting police to re-establish law and order in Solomon Islands. He's also had deployments with the United Nations in Rwanda and NATO in Afghanistan in 2007. Major General Fruin will be talking on the elements of national power and strategic policy. Our final speaker will be another colleague of mine, Professor Evelyn Go. Evelyn is a professor in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. She's published widely on US-China relations and diplomatic history, regional order in East Asia, Southeast Asian strategies towards great powers and environmental security. She also, along with Amy King, launched her most recent book yesterday here at the ANU. And Evelyn will be talking about great power, grand bargains, myth, or reality. Please join me in welcoming all of our speakers and our first speaker, Rajamohan, to the lectern. Thank you, Michael. Thank you very much. I must say that I'm delighted to be here at this terrific conference. I wanted to thank Brendan for inviting me. But I'm not so delighted at the topic that has been given to me, which is the 21st century strategic order. So take a deep breath. I mean, so it's not going to be possible to deal with such a vast topic in a small presentation or a paper. So I took a escape route out, essentially, by focusing on one theme, which is the question of territorial sovereignty, that the idea that a community of sovereign states is the essence of any order, international order, a strategic order that we have known for the last many centuries. But since the end of the Cold War, the idea that sovereignty can and should be limited and that it can be even dispensed with through transcendental forms has been a very powerful and influential idea over the last 25 years. But at the end of the last 25 years, we find sovereignty is nowhere to disappear, that it's not been easy to dismantle the notion of territorial sovereignty or that the sovereign states will remain the principal unit of international affairs. So I think there is a genuine tension today between the new forces that have emerged, I mean, which challenge the notion of territorial sovereignty and the almost cockroach-like endurance since we talked about nuclear weapons this morning, that the refusal to see, I mean, to wither away the notion of the state and its sovereignty remains intact. So therefore, what I'm going to do is to look at eight sources of challenge to territorial sovereignty that have emerged in the last 25 years. And to conclude with the argument, what do they mean as we look to the future next 10 to 20 years? I think the first source of threat to the traditional notion of sovereignty has been the dramatic expansion of global capitalism. That you call it late capitalism or what you will, the power, the demands of a globalizing capitalism when it runs into locally organized political communities, that tension has been palpable. And I think all of us who are following the US elections are most recently the Brexit. What seemed a cherry, uncritical, welcoming support to globalization that's been part of our story for the last 25 years has met with fierce resistance. We've seen that to the question of open borders, free immigration, and that capital and its locations of production can shift easily across borders. The struggle against it, the reaction against it, the backlash against it is the story today in the United States. It is the story of Britain and I think the story will be there with us. So therefore, however much the capitalists or the international finance would want to remove the internal restrictions of politically organized communities against the efficient functioning of modern industrial production or modern services, but the resistance is going to come. I think the challenge for political classes is going to be how do you reconcile these two elements that you still have people, the communities are still politically organized, locally organized, and the demands of global capitalism are going to put enormous pressure. So that is the first tension that we see. The second one is to put just in one word internet, right? I mean, I think remember back in the 90s, we were all celebrating, here is going to be this great new world thanks to the internet. Borders will disappear, individuals are going to be empowered, all of us are going to be free to engage with each other with no walls being imposed by the terrible states. We've seen that, of course, part of it was the imagination of the new industries that were coming based on the internet, but they did not want the kind of restriction that do. But what we've seen in the last 10 years certainly is the return of the state in a powerful way. We know the Great Wall in China that actually does not believe in opening up, and that it is possible, in fact, we've seen both the Chinese and the Russians construct new forms of regulation, new forms of limiting the access to internet, and some people call it splinter net, we're not still there, but the capacity of the state to limit those activities have been significantly increased. And it's not, I mean, you remember again, Hillary Clinton saying, no, this is about democratic states and trying to think over the closed societies, but the big fights are there between Apple and the government of the United States, between Google and the government of the United States, that actually in the free world, it is not just about free world versus the non-free world, but within the free world, the question of how does state relate to individual privacy, the rights, and between the corporate interest and the state interest, those two have come, so therefore, this idea that you have a digital revolution that's going to fundamentally transform the international order, that has met with some considerable resistance, and we've seen it in relation to the governance of the internet, ICANN, and a whole range of issues that we've seen, but again, this is not going to disappear, this is going to be around for quite some time to come, that the dramatic expansion of the global economy that is going to take place under the influence of the new digital technologies, and how do the state system relate to that? It is going to apply to both on the economic side, domestic side, as well as the military security side, we already see the US government talking about a third offset strategy, the two earlier revolutions, Professor Friedman talked about it earlier, that the third offset of using artificial intelligence, big data, robotics to counter the rival powers, so I think it's going to see quite a bit of geopolitics, the new digital revolution. The third, of course, is the regionalism and state sovereignty. We've seen, well, European project, we don't have to go too deep into that, but the fact, the idea that states will simply pull their sovereignty, unconstruct new forms of regionalism, that I think has run into problems in Europe, which is the exemplar of the kind of regionalism that most of us wanted to build. We don't even have to talk about ASEAN here, but the fact is, the most advanced form of regional organization has run into serious difficulty, both in terms of how do you deal with the major unit trying to leave, and I think the whole problem that what it poses in terms of the British debate on, again, I think on migration on open borders, et cetera. The fourth set of challenges we've seen, that has come at the more global level, globalism, cosmopolitanism, uttered bad words in the US. If you read the Republican manifesto, the use of the word frequently, he's a globalist. This is a globalist agenda. The idea that, just as liberal was a bad word 20 years ago, today globalist is a bad word, but the idea, we see last 25 years, the energy that we've spent on global governance, of governing the world, of transcending sovereignty, of constructing global institutions, and empowering global institutions. Gareth, you see, I don't want to say too much about R2P, but the fact that, whether it is the question of the rights of minorities, the genocidal approach of the states, whether it is the question of non-polyphration, whether it is the question of individual rights, I mean, I think this set of all failed states, all these trends were used to argue the case for a supranational, transnational empowerment that will not pay the kind of basance to state sovereignty of the kind that we've been used to. So therefore, despite the great efforts of the UN, humanitarian intervention, R2P, you have a whole series of initiatives that have emerged in the last 25 years. We've seen, it's not just a problem of resistance from those of champion sovereignty, but it is also the resources, capacities and costs on the supply side. That's why today, when the US says, when globalists becomes a bad word in the United States, you're saying, look, we've had enough of globalism, and that there is not going to be the capacity, there's not going to be the political will to bear the kind of costs that would demand the kind of globalism that was envisaged previous 25 years. And I think that is a big challenge that we have to deal with. Then you have, very interestingly, a threat to sovereignty that comes from religion. All of us have heard of ISIL and its eagerness to build the caliphate. The notion that, look, the state system, not just in the Middle East, but in the greater Middle East, including the subcontinent, some of the ISIL maps include the subcontinent as well. The idea that, look, there is, there's going to be this grand community that is going to transcend the notions of sovereignty. Or if you talk to, if you have any friends in the Taliban, I mean the contempt for the nationalism, the need for transcendental solidarity, this is not very different from maybe the Roman Catholic Church long ago, our communist friends a hundred years ago, that these ideas are new. But today coming from religion lends it a power and we've seen what it can do, what it is doing today right now to challenge the existing sovereign states across the board. The sixth challenge that has come to sovereignty is the American notion of the last 25 years. Of American power can be put to good use in the world. The fight between the liberals and the neocons or whatever it was was not about the basic presumption which was, we have so much power and this can be put to good use. Including use of force to change the rest of the world, to build nations, to eliminate weapons of mass destruction, to create new world out there. And that the means of course, they have a difference, whether it's unilateral, multilateral, under what terms, what is the legality, this whole argument we saw in the Iraq war. But the idea that the power of the dominant, most dominant state can be used to change the internal workings of a large parts of the world. That idea, we saw it rise and it's almost fallen and today you see the debates in the US whether it is Sanders or Trump, the questioning essentially the notion that America must spend its blood and treasure to fix what we think are good things in the world. So therefore, the need to take a more cautious, careful view of the relevance of American power and what are the terms and conditions under which it can be put to use, that debate is now the dominant one and not the question of how to use American power to transform the world. The seventh aspect I think is the notion of spheres of influence. If great power rivalry is going to come back and that's going to be a new feature of international politics, then the idea of spheres of influence. Again, I think many of us have cheerily dismissed this as a 19th century. I mean, it was easy to say always 19th century as if the past is past, as if the past has no relevance to the current and the future, all you had to say was, oh, this is 19th century stuff. But as we've seen, I mean, President Obama, when he says, look, you can't contest Russian primacy in Ukraine. Unless you have a lot of money and a lot of troops to put in on the ground to push the Russians back in central Europe. He's saying it's a fight, not worth fighting. After all, that's what in the 20th century, the Eastern Bloc was ceded to the Russians as part of their sphere of influence. But today I think the idea that you've got to, because if the US power is going to be limited, it's going to be put to limited use, then the question of what happens in these spheres of influence, how much do you see to the other power? Is South China see a part of the Chinese sphere of influence? Or would you see Indochina to be part of the Chinese sphere of influence? Or has the Chinese commander said, East of Hawaii, you take care, West of Hawaii, if you have any problem, give us a call. Now, is that a practical one? But the fact is, the nature of the power distribution is going to force those kind of accommodations, at least some parts. And I think how you do that is going to determine, I think quite a bit of the strategic order that's going to come. And with spheres of influence also comes proxy wars. Through the Cold War, we saw while the Americans and Russians were deterred by each other through the nuclear weapons, the proxy wars that were fought in the rest of the world. After all, in Afghanistan, the proxy war using the jihadists against the Soviet Union are the guys today creating so much grief around the world. After all, bin Laden was part of that struggle against the Soviet Union in Afghanistan. So therefore, what we do in these proxy wars, because wars are not going to come to an end, if nuclear weapons prevent the conflict, how are the new proxy wars going to be played out? Between the Americans and the Chinese, between the Indians and the Chinese, say in Sri Lanka and Nepal, a whole lot of things are going to happen. So the proxy wars question, I think, is going to come back. Let me conclude by just mentioning the last aspect, which is the so-called East failure, right? I mean, East failure is not against West failure, East failure is the Eastern defense of West failure. The idea that, look, that sovereignty is a concern of the weak states, the developing countries or the Eastern states, and the Western countries have transcended sovereignty, and now they're looking at, you know, of, you know, supranational, transnational institutions. But the fact is, what do the Eastern powers do? Are they intervene as much as you guys do? So the argument is essentially saying, don't interfere in my territory. But if I'm going to have a sphere of influence, I'm going to interfere in my neighborhood. I mean, that's exactly the kind of behavior we've saw from other great powers. So this idea that there is a tension, that the argument falsely constructed, West is for transcending sovereignty, East is for defense of sovereignty, actually the Eastern powers too, are going to intervene in the neighbor's affairs. So I don't think sovereignty is going to stop them. What we do in Nepal or what the Chinese are going to do in Laos or Cambodia, wherever you will, in the coming days. So therefore, it is not East versus West argument, but the question is, it is embedded in the notion of sphere of influence and that if accommodations have to be made, if you can't construct a single global order, then I think the whole challenge of, how do you deal with sovereignty issue, I think comes back. Let me then step back and say a few things in conclusion. That the idea of limited sovereignty is not a new one. That we've seen it in the Cold War, elevated to a very high level. We know in the Cold War, dear friend Brezhnev talked about limited sovereignty for socialist countries that itself was rooted in the notion of communist internationalism, that there was a higher cause which needed subordination of sovereignty. It had a religious roots in the past. Many of the NGOs which are supposed to have acquired a life of their own after the Cold War are not very different from the ideas that were espoused before, that sovereignty can be limited, constrained by the higher cause of building a new society, of a new man, of a new international order. What we've seen happen in the last few years is quite clearly that while sovereignty has never been absolute, it's going to be impossible to eliminate it totally. So I think it is finding that right balance between that look sovereignty, we know that weak states could never exercise full sovereignty. It's only the strong states which could fully exercise sovereignty. So therefore, this idea of constructing much of the arguments that we've constructed in the last 25 years, that it is sovereignty versus new order. But the question is, there will be significant amounts of state sovereignty will remain. And we've seen the weaknesses of constructing a single global organization. Therefore, the idea of a world government, of course, has been old one again, I think goes back to the French Revolution. It is 200 years. Those of you who've seen Mark Mazover's history governing the world, that it has gone through many forms. But yet, the idea that you can create a structure that can take care of every problem in the world is a delusion. Therefore, you've got to deal with the world in ways in which political communities will undertake a lot of the activity themselves. And I think that reality is going to be with us. That doesn't, however, take away the logic of climate change and that you need to do something to deal with it or that you need to limit state sovereignty to achieve certain particular ends in certain particular domains, remains out there. So therefore, the challenge then, as we look ahead, is not posing the problem as sovereignty versus a new strategic order, but the question comes back to what is the judgment? Where do you intervene? Where do you use force in the internal situation of another states? Is running after weapons of mass destruction that did not exist in retrospect at least? Is that the kind of intervention you want to do? Or I can save people in another society if you're not willing to commit the kind of resources with limited chance of success. So therefore, I think, well, interventions will continue. The question, finally, it is not a question of academic theory, but it is a question of a political judgment, I think, and statecraft that must be brought back in in some form, at least on the policymaking side. And that is going to be the big challenge for us. So let me finish here by saying sovereignty is not absolute. It is going to be enduring. It is finding that middle ground, how we construct a framework in which, in some areas, we can pool sovereignty for the common good of the rest of the world. Thank you. Well, thank you, and very good to be with you all here today, and thanks to Michael for the warm welcome. What is the relationship between economics and security? I think despite the recognition for many decades, right back to the 1930s and 40s by people like Jacob Weiner and E.H. Carr, that economic and security aspects of policymaking ought to be studied in an integrated way. The economic security nexus has been badly neglected by scholars in our field. Michael Mastanduno wrote that in the early years of the Cold War, strategic studies and international relations scholarship became very narrowly focused on military instruments of security at the expense of economic and other wider areas of policy. Now this was partly due to the absence of economic contact between the United States and Soviet Union, and because arguably the most important aspects of that biopolar system was nuclear deterrence and the potential for nuclear war. So these areas were considered part of the high politics of our field and economic matters were firmly relegated to areas of low politics. And by the 1970s, particularly in the United States, academic scholarship in this area was firmly relegated into two prominent subfields, international political economy and strategic studies or security studies. And academics working in those two fields asked different questions, used different methodological tools, typically published in different journals. They spoke past one another. Outside of the discipline of international relations and strategic studies, international economists were of course very interested in the world economy, but they tended to be far less interested in the political and strategic dimensions of international economic relations. But since the end of the Cold War, I think there has been a renewed interest in the relationship between international trade and peace, security, politics, and the economic and security dimensions of the grand strategies of powerful states. And of course there are a number of possible conceptual linkages that can be drawn between economics and security. My colleague, Brendan Taylor, has worked a great deal in this area and has written about the many myriad ways in which these fields can be linked. Economic growth of course allows governments to devote greater resources to national defense expenditure, so economic wealth is really the foundation of national power. Traditionally, economic factors such as access to raw materials, production of key goods such as steel and iron, manufacturing capacity, and access to technology have therefore all be considered important indices of national power. Economic growth also leads to growing demand for energy resources among states and so it can become an important source of competition as states compete for scarce resources. Economic decline might be also a source of insecurity. States that are perceived to be in a state of decline might be more likely to take preventive military action in order to bolster their power positions. And of course we have that wide area of literature that speaks about the relationship between economic interdependence and security. Liberals on the one hand arguing that interdependence is a force for peace, a state trade and investment ties with one another make states less likely to engage in costly war that could break those ties. On the other hand, realists contend that interdependence is actually a source of insecurity either because states will struggle to avoid the vulnerability brought about by dependence or because closer contact and that greater range of potentially competitive issues brought about by economic interdependence might actually raise the likelihood of conflict. And finally there are areas like economic sanctions and other economic instruments of coercion which can be part of the wider strategic tools used by states in pursuing their policies. And similarly, as someone like Tom Christensen himself has worked on economics and security might be linked in quite interesting ways in Tom's work, in particular on Maoist China, he's shown, for example, how states might use limited forms of military coercion or military conflict to mobilize their domestic populations around grand economic campaigns like the Great Leap Forward. Considerable intellectual effort has now been spent, I think, on trying to determine whether economic interdependence between states is a force for peace or conflict or entirely negligible at all. And two recent edited volumes by U.S. scholars, TJ Pempel and a group of work under the leadership of Avery Goldstein and Edward Mansfield have tried to unpack this nexus between economics and security, particularly in East Asia. And these volumes contain rich new empirical evidence about important cases that we need to understand in the East Asian region, including the economic implications of maritime disputes, the role of energy and security and the relationship between economics, security and technology. But as a recent review of these works where my colleague Evelyn Goh has pointed out, I think these volumes are emblematic of a shortcoming that still pervades a lot of the literature in this field. As Evelyn states, these works tend to treat that liberal assumption that interdependence is a force for security or peace between states as the leading theory to disprove. And so they spend all of their energy trying to determine whether economic or security factors, that is one or the other, is the key force determining the outcome. Ultimately, there's still no consensus on the answers to that question. And so that debate continues to rage between realists and liberals, between pessimists and optimists, between economists who are far more optimistic on the one hand and strategists who tend to be a lot gloomier. And this debate is not only limited to the academic literature. It seems hardly a day goes by, certainly here in Australia, when popular media and the blogosphere radiate with questions about whether Asia's vast economic ties will prevent war from breaking out in our region. Crucially though, I think when we apply these sorts of areas of literature to our region here in Asia, the dominant realist and liberal approach is to studying this relationship between economics and security simply don't capture empirical reality. Here in this region, the nexus between economics and security factors are related in much more interesting and diverse ways. In my first book on the China-Japan relationship, I showed that there is this duality in that bilateral relationship. On the one hand, since the late 19th century, these two countries have been intimately connected through economic ties, but on the other hand, have faced very, very tense political and security relations. My research shows that this duality is not a contradiction, but is instead two sides of the same coin, if you like. In particular, in the period after World War II, Chinese officials saw Japan's industrial capabilities as a sign that Japan was a model of a powerful industrialized Asian country and an important source of industrial goods and expertise that China needed. At the same time, Japan's industrial and technological capability made Japan a latent threat to China. That dual conception of Japan has really shaped Chinese thinking since the late 19th century and continue to shape Chinese thinking after 1949. And the existence of that duality, I think, poses a challenge both to the liberal thesis that economic ties must necessarily breed closer political and security relations with countries and the realist contention that close political and security ties are first needed if we are to have closer economic interdependence between states. Instead, I think the China-Japan relationship demonstrates that insecurity can motivate economic engagement. After 1949, the Chinese Communist Party sought economic engagement with Japan because of a profound sense of insecurity about China's low levels of industrial development and its limited ability to win modern industrialized wars. It was precisely because Japan served as a latent threat to China that Chinese officials had to look to Japan for advice, goods, and technology about how to catch up and become a modern and powerful state. Other important empirical research on this nexus between economics and security is also focusing on the importance of understanding domestic factors in this related field. For example, in his new book on Asian security, Rob Eisen writes about the uneven effects of domestic economic transformation occurring within countries like China and India. In China, for example, coastal fringes are developing much faster, of course, than the inner provinces. And this has a major impact on domestic security, often resulting in high levels of protests by state-owned employees and undermining the legitimacy of the Chinese Communist Party, leading to a deep strengthening of internal state security apparatus. And similarly, in India, that uneven economic development is an important driver of internal violence, something that we in the strategic studies discipline, I think, often to quickly ignore. Christina Davis' work on the relationship between alliances and economics also, I think, highlights the need to better understand the domestic drivers of economic and security policymaking. For many years, a lot of the literature on alliances and economics argued definitively that countries that were military allies were much more likely to have strong trade and investment ties. But Davis' research on the Anglo-Japanese alliance of the 1920s and 1930s demonstrates that alliances may not necessarily lead to larger or more favorable economic relations between two states. Because when a state offers favorable investment rights or unilateral trade liberalization or other preferential economic treatment to an ally, it faces domestic opposition from business groups in its own country, whose interests, of course, may be harmed. In these cases, domestic business groups will place political pressure on their government to impose higher tariffs and export quotas as a way to protect their market share. As a result, a state might actually pursue economic policies that harm the economic interests of its ally in order to meet the demands of domestic business interests. And Christina Davis' findings can be applied very close to home, in fact, in the US-Australia alliance relationship. Since the formation of ANZAS in 1951, the US and Australia, despite being close allies, have at key moments protected the domestic interests and pursued economic policies that actually harmed the other. For example, in the 1960s and 1970s, Australia significantly discriminated against American agriculture and investment here. In the 1980s, the US Reagan administration retreated from the liberalization agenda that was then being pursued by the Hawkeeting government and erected trade barriers and signed preferential trade deals in Asia that were fundamentally harmful to Australia's economic interests in Asia. In the 2000s, Australia and the United States were motivated by common foreign policy and security objectives to sign a bilateral preferential trade agreement, the US-Australia free trade agreement. But the agreement that was ultimately signed was actually highly detrimental to Australian agricultural sector and other important exporting markets here, and detrimental to Australian intellectual property. All of this, I think, is to suggest that there is nothing innate about the relationship between economics and security. And I think it's becoming increasingly clear that scholars in our field need to find ways to deepen our understanding about the nexus between these two areas of policy and research. We need to move beyond traditional, realist and liberal approaches. An important first step, I think, would be to try and understand how states in our region actually conceptualize the relationship between economics and security. One way to do this, for example, might be to look at key critical junctures, historical moments when countries thinking about the relationship between economics and security evolved. For example, in the US, government officials developed an important understanding about the relationship between economics and security derived from their experience in the First and Second World Wars. US officials, I think, became quite preoccupied with the security implications of foreign economic policy in the 1940s because they had seen how economic nationalism closed economic blocks and national depression had led to major conflicts in Europe and Asia and how the use of sanctions, currency manipulation and blockades could be used as weapons of war. So in the late 1940s and into the 1950s, the US Truman administration pursued the goal of economic security as a way to create an open economic world order and prevent that sort of slide into dangerous economic nationalism. In Japan, another example, the concept of economic security also evolved in this similar era in the interwar period. As Japanese military officers and political officials observed the defeat of Germany, superior military power in the First World War. As Michael Barnhard has shown, Japan's search for economic security stemmed from a deep belief that future wars would be fought not only with guns, but with the entire resources of nations, from engineers to doctors, from cotton to iron ore. Without these requisites of economic security, the mightiest army would be paralyzed and without a modern industrial base that could be mobilized in times of need. Even these requisites would prove useful. A nation that could not supply all of its, excuse me, all of its own needs in wartime would be vulnerable to economic pressure from other nations. It would not be truly sovereign. And I think these views about self-sufficiency really drove much of Japanese economic and political and military thinking in that interwar period driving Japan's colonial expansion in the 1930s and 40s. The failure of that period, the failure of that experiment was also important in driving Japan's post-war thinking and the development of the notion of comprehensive economic security, Sōgōan Senhōshō, in the 1970s and 1980s, and an acknowledgement that Japan continued to be highly dependent on the external world for access to resources, to markets, and security. So that idea that security rests not only on military resources continues to be deeply held in Japan. Beyond these critical junctures, we here in the Strategic and Defence Study Centre are building on a long and quite distinguished tradition of research led by people such as Des Ball, Brendan Taylor, Stuart Harris, and others on that intersection between economics and security in Asia. In October last year, Evelyn Goh and I hosted a major workshop under the auspices of the Graduate Research and Development Network in Asian Security, Gradmas, entitled Unpacking the Economic Security Nexus in Asia. We tried to bring together scholars from around Australia who engaged in innovative research and who are using new concepts, methods, and case studies to interrogate that relationship between economics and security. If you're interested in the findings from that research, copies of the workshop report can be found on the book's table outside. Unsurprisingly, China featured very heavily in the workshop. Many were concerned with what China is doing, whether in terms of economic statecraft, connectivity projects, or technological innovation, and the strategic implications of China's economic rise. For example, Darren Lim here at the ANU is investigating the conditions under which China might use economic interdependence as an instrument to coerce other states. And it notes that there is also very strong variation in the times and occasions in which China does use this behavior. Evelyn Goh is examining China's infrastructure building drive across mainland Southeast Asia, South Asia, and Central Asia since the late 1990s. Of course, this has garnered a lot of attention under the One Belt One Road initiative, but she's arguing that this stems from a much larger strategy, a much longer history of China's efforts to deal with its periphery and the outside world and that we really need to understand those deep geographical forces to understand the motivations behind China's new geo-strategy. Another key feature of this workshop was needing to sort of open up that domestic international divide, to sort of open up the black box of the state in order to examine how states link these two areas of inquiry. One scholar doing this is Andy Kennedy, who I know is here with us today, and he is looking at the role of technology and innovation in shaping the relationship between the US and rising powers like India and China. He notes that the United States, the world's most powerful state, is locked in this technological embrace with China and India. And while IR theory would predict that the US should absorb vast amounts of human capital from these countries, the US has not consistently followed this pattern of behavior over time. So his research is importantly unpacking the conditions under which the United States pursues this behavior. These were just some of the many important discussions of areas of inquiry that we are examining in this field. And I think they open up some important sort of final conclusions that I'll leave with you now. I think there are three broad conclusions that we can draw on the links between economics and security. First, I think it's vital that we don't return to the drift of the 1970s when economics and security occupied increasingly separate realms. Historians, strategists, international relations, scholars, area studies scholars must be aware of the myriad ways in which economic factors impact upon our discipline and the real world questions that we study. Second, I think we need to be clear that we can't take an either or approach to studying economics and security. Both sets of factors are shaping Asia's future and the relationships between states and within states in our region. So it's therefore imperative that we find new ways of unpacking those connections between economics and security rather than assuming one or the other will predominate. And finally, recent trends in this research have demonstrated the vital importance of opening up the black box of the state to understand how the domestic process of policymaking and other domestic factors impact on this relationship between economics and security. As Brendan Taylor mentioned to us this morning in 1980, Headley Ball himself observed that traditional areas of strategic studies were giving way to economics. I think it's certainly time that we bring the two back together. Thank you. Well, good morning, everybody. It's my great pleasure to be here and I appreciate the opportunity to speak to you. I, of course, stand before you not as eminent academic theorist or opinion leader but as military practitioner who has worked both as a tactical commander of troops in the field and I now work at the strategic level. In both those roles, I have either struggled to understand what higher direction actually intends or now I work to interpret political guidance and turn it into aims and outcomes that tactical forces can understand and neither of those endeavours always as straightforward as you might expect. As a young tactical officer, an imperative that we are given is a bias for action and we are taught this that in dire circumstances, any action rather than inaction is better and you carry this bias with you as a military officer for some time to varying degrees. But of course, there are also political and public imperatives for action as well. So what I wanna do this morning is just think about how the military exists as an element of national power, how we might best utilize that instrument in pursuing the national interests and just how well a bias for action serves us in that regard. So please forgive me as a practitioner if I do at times as my teenage daughter often implores me to do and keep it real. So the military, we all have conceptions of the military but the Australian Defence Force is a very well resourced force with high end capabilities and we maintain a broad range of capabilities at high readiness with high utility for government. We can operate along a spectrum from humanitarian to high end war fighting and of course we uniquely provide government the opportunity to pursue policy through force or in the less fashionable language through the application of violence and we can be used independently or we can be integrated with other agencies and other effects. But there's a dual nature to the military forces as well so yes we provide all of those capabilities but we also exist both as the ADF and as the services as institutions that are custodians of values and an ethos and a range of skills that take decades to maintain. Plus we also feed into a deterrent effect so we exist not only for what we can do but for what we are and not all of those are both readily apparent for example when a debate about capability procurement is going on. Now we are but one element of national power in the military, we like the dime model of national power, diplomatic, informational military, economic we can expand that very usefully to include financial, intelligence, and law enforcement sort of capacities, the dime fill model but the story then again is we are but one and there is clearly an implied interrelationship but also there is a blurring of exactly how the military interrelates with some of those because as we can act independently we can also generate diplomatic effects we can also generate economic effects. But the important lesson in all of that is that integrated effects are best and rarely does a purely military line of action and almost never does an attempt to use force to achieve an outcome deliver a comprehensive and enduring solution. So if we choose to utilize the instrument of military power there's a couple of considerations that we need to look at. The first is whether the use of the military is discretionary or non-discretionary. Now clearly in some circumstances if there is a dire threat to our sovereignty or independence we could argue that it is not discretionary that we must use force to resolve that situation. But in other circumstances you could imagine it may not necessarily be necessary to use the military but for whatever reason we might choose to use the military. So whether it's discretionary or non-discretionary is important. What also is important is whether the use of force is central to the achievement of that task or not because in humanitarian circumstances typically you don't need use of force. However you may need to use force to deliver some humanitarian effects. At the far end of the spectrum in a non-discretionary use of the military where force is absolutely central to receiving the outcomes clearly you start to see a risk dynamic that starts to take shape. The next one is we need to be clear that we differentiate political effects and tactical effects of the military. We've heard reference to the Klasvitzian model of war delivers policy by other means but you require the tactical effects to achieve that political outcome. But there are increasing circumstances now where the deployment of the military alone can deliver a political effect such as the reinforcement of an alliance commitment. So you have a sliding scale of tactical and political intent for the deployment. The next one is whether you are operating independently is this purely an Australian line of operation and all of my comments are in the Australian context. Or are we perhaps leading an Australian coalition or are we part of some broader coalition where our actions are either restrained or determined by some broader coalition strategy. And the final is just calibrating the degree of the role the military will play. Will the military be the lead? You would anticipate where force is very central to the mission that the military might be the lead or is the military providing a central role or even a transitional role? So that all of those settings need to be taken into account as we consider using the military. Now determining national interest, seeking to fuse the various elements of national power and getting the right settings on the military to achieve national ends, of course requires strategy. Now, you know, strategy started as a military art and we still teach the ends, ways, means model of strategy that seeks to set aims, prioritize resources, but also determine risk tolerances and give parameters for action. Now, in the context we are talking about, we need to talk about national strategies or grant strategies. And this is a specialist endeavor that requires specialist individuals to both develop strategy and then to implement strategy, which is often an iterative and sort of temporal process. But we've also got to be really careful in the practitioner sense that we know what we are talking of when we start to mention strategy because there is the strategic level, there is strategic policy, there is strategy and the area that concerns me most is the strategy. And I think too often in our debate, we are talking about other elements of strategy rather than strategies that are implementable and can be sort of seen to their ends. And it's really important to remember that strategic policy is not strategy. Policy is a set of principles with a view to action. Strategy is what helps drive action. And in the traditional model, you go from policy with strategy as the bridge to the outcomes you need. But this dynamic is also shifting now because as we have already heard, you can actually achieve an outcome by a policy of, for example, committing a force for an alliance reason alone and you have gone straight from policy to outcome and strategy is somewhat redundant. Now, notwithstanding, there are challenges to government to both being strategic, thinking strategically and to having a government deliver strategy. One of those is short-termism. Now, whether it is three-year electoral cycles, 24-hour media cycles or whatever, it is a very real concern that tends to focus decision-makers into the near term. Also, there is a rise of populist politics which again tends to focus you towards shorter-term aims rather than more elaborate long-term planning. Within government, there is no standing institution that delivers strategy and implements strategy across a broad range of national interests. There is a bias for policy delivery within government, strategic policy. And often what is being delivered to government are strategic policy options, which by default become a sort of set-and-forget strategy that doesn't have all of those other settings that we would normally assume are a normal part of strategy. We can still deliver government... We still can deliver strategy within government. We have good mechanisms now, whether they are interdepartmental committees and the like, to bring various agencies together. But you still do have a tendency to stove piping at times that needs to be managed. So in all of that, yes, we can deliver strategy and implement strategy, but it is done in an ad hoc way rather than a formalised way. So in the military sense, a couple of examples of operations that bring this together. The recent operation this year, Operation Fiji Assist. Terrible humanitarian crisis in Fiji. We send ships with helicopters and troops to deliver a fantastic assistance effort on behalf of Fiji. DFAT-led defence supported, you know, I would say, not discretionary, we have to do it. But of course, no requirement for the use of force, so. But also pretty much a definable end state where the forces can go and the forces can return. So strategically sound. The Solomon Islands in 2003, Ramsey. For many years, it was seen as discretionary whether we would engage in the Solomons, but then post-2011, pardon me, the post-911 world, it's determined that intervention in the Solomon Islands is no longer discretionary. Force may be used at a minimum latent force is required to impel the outcomes that we seek. We very effectively bring together many agencies from across government, we integrate them, we fuse all of the elements of national power and we deploy the force. This is a relatively good example, but perhaps we don't set our sites as far out as we might and the mission goes a bit longer and costs a lot more than we initially think, but again, it's within the tolerances of effective strategy. The example of fulsome strategy in government and it's whether you agree with the policy settings or not, the example that I think is most clear is Operation Sovereign Borders. With political will, the government says we will stop illegal maritime arrivals to Australia. The government appoints a military officer to develop strategy that can be implemented and forces government, all of government, to come together to deliver this end. Now, in time, another government department has grown. The ongoing management of this strategy, which has withstood sort of shocks and setbacks along the way, still requires oversight of prime minister and cabinet to carefully manage the strategy which is equally interdependent with all of those lines of national power. And you cannot fiddle with the settings or take one away without the strategy becoming non-effective. Iraq and Afghanistan contributions over recent years. Now, we can have the debate about whether they are discretionary or non-discretionary commitments and you can go either way. But you can make a case for that. They are discretionary in terms of our national interests directly to go into Iraq in 2003. The deployment meets a political objective and any force that might be exercised on the ground is not as when you set the scale as directly important to the achievement of the intended outcomes as the political imperative of deployment. So, you know, there are all manifestations and models of how military force is implied in these things. Now, there's some conundrums in the use of the military. The first is that because we have these sophisticated capabilities on high readiness, there is a convenience factor. And it is very easy in a crisis for government to go, who can go fast, the military. Okay, there is an understandable bias for action. The military get pushed to the fore because we can be. There in a similar circumstance, if there is an imperative for action, be it political or other, and there is a rush to get something done again, it's the military that tends to come to the fore because of our abilities. Now, this can be a bias for action or it can be a bias for perceived action, whereby the appearance of a ship is what is required and it's not necessarily that the whole range of capabilities that ship can deliver is central to the requirement. And we often describe this as where you can get the defense Ferrari being used as a garbage truck in an extreme case. The, what is important in all of this is that we do need to understand the balance between political imperatives and tactical imperatives and understand the limitations of military power, the effects that military power will generate and most importantly, any unintended consequences that military force might deliver. And that is whether it is used independently or whether it is integrated with the other elements of national power. So just in closing, some of the future challenges, I think that we need to consider in employing the military as an element of national power, we need to work to foster a greater understanding of the elements of national power and their interrelationships. We have been on a journey, we have got many good examples of this and more thought about this as we go forward will be important. And we need to bring that into an increased understanding of the nature of military utility and help foster the political civilian military dialogue that builds a greater understanding around this. I think we also, I said that the ADF is very well resourced. From the time I came into the Army and now, it is extraordinary where we have gone from in terms of what is available to both individuals in the forces and the nation as a whole. We are now a middle power with increasingly global reach. And we also need to now think about how we find our sweet spot, whether independently or as part of broader coalitions, as a middle power with increasingly sophisticated and pervasive capabilities. Importantly, I think we need to help the government, we need to help the government to be strategic and we need to help deliver strategy and implement strategy wherever we can. I also think we need to prepare, and this is where the institutions of the military think more about this, I think often than the broader strategic community, but we do need to think harder about how in non-discretionary situations that require the use of force, we will manage that process. Because in an environment where we have less than perfect processes for delivering and maintaining strategy, there will be a time when very hard decisions with very clear political and physical risks come to play that we can do better if we think about that in advance. And finally, above all, the bias, the very conscious bias that we need to have is to always ensure that we do have integrated national strategies. Thank you. That's a long panel. I'll give you a minute to stretch yourselves into change positions. Please allow me to say that what we've had today so far is such a nice illustration of one of the real upsides of working in the Strategic and Defence Studies Centre. The range of practitioners and theorists, scholars and those of us who try and walk between those worlds has really been on display this morning. And I had actually thought that this was a rather random panel. Now I see the wisdom of the organisers in putting this panel together. It's precisely to demonstrate the breadth of the type of research, work and thinking that we try to do in SDSC.  I was given the unenviable task of talking about where the great power bargains are possible. And with the sub-tact of trying to talk about this in the regional context, in our regional context. I'll begin with a short answer. Great power bargains are not a myth. They have been the reality in international history and they continue to be a reality today. One of our speakers, Amitav Acharya, began a session we had with students yesterday afternoon by pointing out the obvious but sometimes not so obvious, that we're all theorists, whether or not we admit to being so. We all carry intellectual and conceptual baggages with which we look through the world and our jobs of interpreting the world. And the grand bargain framework, I think helps us to make explicit some of these assumptions that we may carry about the world and about great power relations in particular. Why would we think about great power bargains at this juncture in time? There's some pretty obvious reasons for this. History's already been talked about both by Laurie and by Raja this morning. And we very often look back at 19th century Europe particularly and think about the concept of powers. And the more idealistic of us, think of it as a successful. Relatively, for some period of time, successful exercise in great power restrained cooperation and ordering of what then was the center of the world apparently Europe. And we less often think about the principles of the concept of powers, which after all resided upon a series of bargains between amongst the major powers in Europe at the time. Be they mutual understandings about where each of their spheres of influence began and ended, be it the understanding that these spheres not only connoted some kind of imaginary line, but actually connoted an implicit agreement or explicit at some points in the concert of non-interference in each other's spheres. Is that principle of non-interference, which is more important than the spheres themselves per se? And what would be these sorts of mutual understandings and agreements on things like non-interference be except built on some kind of a bargain, right? I'll give you something in exchange for you giving me something else that is of greater or at least equal value to what you've just given up, right? It's the idea of a bargain. Laurie again in his keynote this morning dwelt at some length on the Cold War and the development of strategic studies during the Cold War and particularly the nuclear element of this. And again, if we think about nuclear deterrence, mutual assured destruction, the state of the contemporary, what Nicola Leveringhouse, one of our other speakers calls the global nuclear order, right? And that word order fundamentally crucial here. Orders are not based on distributions of power alone. Orders, the ordering of the international system is built on mutual understandings about certain key principles that are shared, they may not be universally light, but they are shared and they're generally adhere to. So that concept of bargains threads through international life. As such it threads through strategy making, strategic thinking, strategic practice. Now in our region today, that idea of trying to forge closer collaboration and joint great power management has seen the resurgence in recent years, partly because of the multiplicity of uncertain strategic trends we face in the region, right? The rise of China, China's intentions with its accompanying growing power. The always debated, you know, continued commitment of the United States to the region in the medium to long term. The sustainability of its preponderance in the military political realms, particularly. Other issues, Japan's abnormal military condition, the divisions between the two careers, that unresolved situation of division between Taiwan and mainland China. All these issues have led to, you know, none of them particularly new concerns in recent decades, but have led to sort of momentum into thinking about things like a G2 between the United States and China. Or according to the Chinese, some sort of new model, new way of thinking about great power relations, by which they really mean a new way of thinking about relations with the United States. These are all pushes, right, for this idea that there needs to be some sort of new mutual agreement between the great powers, at least the two great, key great powers in our region. In closer to home, there's been two good examples of how those of us who tread that gray space between scholarship and policy have tried to sort of inject life and a bit of flesh to that rather esoteric, a bit abstract debate. And of course, as always, leading the charge has been my valued colleague, Hugh White, sitting at the front here. You know, his book, China Choice, of course, has garnered way more attention and debate than I can give full coverage to in this short amount of time I have. But in somewhere buried in the book, I can't remember the page here, I'm sorry about this. The most interesting part for me is where Hugh lists seven essential understandings, right? Which he argues that the US-China must eventually agree upon. And I'm interested in those seven essential understandings because I think those are the things that would give us a clue about what are that sort of, you know, essential baselines for some sort of putative, new grand bargain that can be negotiated between the US and China. I was rather disappointed that this was actually quite a small section. In what was, in an enterprise that had a different fundamental purpose. But Hugh's list of seven essential understandings essentially focuses on this question of mutual legitimacy. It's this idea that the US and China have fundamentally got a finer way to accept each other for what they are, right? Ideological differences, you know, the right to develop sufficient armed forces for defence, committing to resolve differences peacefully agreeing on norms of legitimate conduct, et cetera. Like I said that, you know, Hugh didn't have a chance in that book which had a different purpose to think more, to provide further explanations for what sort of substantive flesh might go into that kind of a great power bargain. Now where Hugh left off, others of us have been sort of, you know, scratching our heads over this as well. And some of you may have come across a really interesting, very controversial article in recent months in international security, the journal, by Charles Glazer, who has now, who has controversially put his head to this issue and come up with a new argument, new suggestion for how the US might strike what he calls, you know, a new grand bargain with China, right? One that would give limited geopolitical accommodation between these two adversaries. Charlie, quite controversially, argues that the US should basically trade its commitment to defend Taiwan in exchange for China's agreement to peacefully settle on fair terms its territorial disputes in the East and South China Seas and China's agreement to accept the US military security role in the region, including its alliances and its forward deployment. You know, that's generated its own maelstrom in its wake. But I think these are, you know, important, serious examples of scholars and policy analysts who sort of said and thought about this critical issue. And I wanted to take the opportunity to introduce that idea of grand bargains here as a way to sort of think about political strategy that has to underpin policy and military strategy as we go forward in the region today. And in that debate, I'd just like to add, I think, two points, right? To flesh it out and give it a bit of context for the region. One of the points, the first point I'd like sort of to add to that debate about putative bargain between the US and China is to add the cautionary note that, you know, strategic bargains, as I've said, form the sinews of international order. This means that anything we may propose now in the contemporary setting would in fact not be something that would, you know, have constructed from scratch, right? But would in fact have to be a new renegotiated grand bargain, right? That has to build upon or revise or overthrow some of the existing bargains, which currently shape the order we have in the region. That may sound counterintuitive. When I say this to my students, I usually get the response of, what do you mean? There is no grand bargain in the region, which is why we're in this situation now. And I only highlight two bargains for you, which are critical to the region as we know, and to some extent the world as we know it today. The first bargain is that post-Cold War economic security bargain. And this is to pick up Amy's point that we can't think about the security separate from the economics. It's the post-Cold War economic security grand bargain that we have between China and the United States. All right, this is the bargain that essentially has China and other key lenders and exporters in the world committed to a policy of accumulating US dollars, buying US debt in exchange for a US commitment to keep consuming foreign goods and services, often beyond its means. This in many ways is the vital bargain that underlies our world order today. Now, as other scholars have examined in greater detail, the problem we have now is that this bargain is in decline. It's shaky. It's never been. A rock solid, beautiful one. And today it's even more problematic because of the aftermath of the global financial crisis and the kinds of economic structural adjustments that have been going on that must go on on both the US and Chinese side. The effect of those adjustments will be to alter the shape of that bargain which I've just sketched out for you. What that will mean is that they affect those special economic relationship between the US and China that has buttressed our world order since the end of the Cold War will no longer be that special. And as that economic relationship becomes less special, less mutually dependent, we would expect that there's security relationship and the security side of the bargain to be more difficult to uphold as well. What this means in that bilateral context is that China's incentives to want to strike a new asymmetrical bargain with the United States are going to be reduced significantly in the years and decades to come. This has implications for people like Charles Glaser who would like to argue now at this point for the US to strike while the iron is hot to try to get that kind of asymmetric strategic bargain out of China. Now on the security side, our current regional order is underpinned by a rapidly disintegrating post-Second World War bargain between the US, China, and Japan. Again, others in this room have written about this far more eloquently than I can. Hughes written about this, Tom Christensen's written about this. Now that bargain is essentially the one that has the United States stepping in between China and Japan after the Second World War and depending on your preference, holding the ring, if you're a boxer between them, or being a cork in the bottle, right, of that longstanding bilaterally difficult security and strategic relationship between China and Japan. Now that cork in the bottle function of the United States has increasingly come under strain after the end of the Cold War, particularly with the repeated rounds of revising the terms of the US-Japan alliance. Also, with the ongoing process of Japan reimagining and re-actioning, it's not just an imagination, it's an action as well, it's security and military role in the region and in the world. In that context, that bargain that we had, which underpinned East Asia's security order after the Second World War, is disintegrating fundamentally because the Chinese no longer see the United States roll, right, as one which stabilizes the bilateral relationship with Japan in terms of keeping Japan down, if I may put it that way. The Chinese now are more inclined to see the US-Japan alliance as one that will facilitate Japanese re-militarization so that ring-holding cork in the bottle function of the United States is in question and therefore that grand bargain that has de facto helped the region in place since the end of the Second World War is also in question. So what we've got is a region today that is both suffering questions about that strategic bargain and suffering the effects and being in the center of that disintegrating grand bargain in the economic realm between the US and China. That's why this question is so vital today about how are we going to repair the bargains that has held our international order together for the last 30, 50, 60 years. Now, the second point I'd like to inject into this is the importance of relationality in thinking about bargains. You know, in strategic studies, we're so much more used to thinking about unilateral concepts like containment, appeasement, right, making strategy after all is about thinking about yourself. The most sophisticated of strategic thinkers of which there are many in this room pay equal attention to the adversary or to your partners, to your allies. That's the relationality issue. Similarly, thinking about strategic bargains and tales that we've got to pay as much attention to what the other side wants, or might find acceptable, right, or might be conned into thinking, right, whichever way you want to put it, as we've got to pay attention to how much we want, what we want, right, because it's strategic bargains are fundamentally about mutually acceptable compromises, trade-offs, right. On that theme, two things to note in the rest of this region and I'll end with that. First thing to note is that there are other countries in East Asia apart from China. I know that's a fairly obvious point, but it's shocking how often I have to say this. And the more important part about this is that these other countries in East Asia either they fall in three categories. The first category sustains national security identities that feed upon, right, the assurance of continued U.S. primacy in the region. We're sitting in one of those countries right now. There are others. Second category of countries in the region, other countries in the region, ground their national security strategies upon at least some degree of U.S.-China rivalry, right. These are usually the smaller, more strategically active countries which see some sort of U.S.-China condominium as being fundamentally detrimental to their interests, right. The third category of countries which basically is every other non-Great Power State in the region is busily trying to seek some degree of strategic autonomy, right, by forestalling Great Power domination of some sort or the other by any side, okay. Now for all three of these reasons and for all three of these categories, any new Great Power bargain based upon a potential U.S.-China condominium is distasteful, right. And so we've got that problem, right. My last point on this issue about relationality is the importance of considering what the other side wants even if we simply stick to the U.S.-China diet, or a dietic relationship. The good news first, the idea of strategic bargains comes very naturally to many Chinese foreign policy makers and interlocutors as well, like bargains are not alien to the adversary. I'll give you some examples. Both China and Japan see the East China Sea dispute that has fled up in recent years since 2010 as resulting from the other side reneging on their 1972 normalization agreement to set aside that dispute, right. Both see that they had a bargain. Both see that the other side reneged on it. We can argue about the details of this. Simply trying to make the point that the idea of bargains is there alive and well, right. Similarly, the Chinese see the South China, flaring up with the South China Sea disputes in recent years since about 2009, 2010 as a number of sides reneging on previous agreements, right of how to manage this conflict. And one of the most major renegas on these bargains from their point of view is the United States which has walked away from its old policy of neutrality on this issue. Now I'm not presenting this as fact or something, a position I necessarily support. Just saying that illustrates to you the idea that central idea of bargains at the heart of these apparently pointless rhetorical battles about who started what first. Now secondly, interestingly, there is also a rising discourse within Chinese policy and policy observing circles about what the terms of a new putative grand bargain would be with the United States just as there is such a parallel debate in the United States. And you would expect that this debate would take very different form and what would be acceptable to Chinese thinkers would be radically different naturally from what would be acceptable to the other side. To me, the most interesting thing about this debate is that there is a huge range within it. We see similarly a range between liberal thinkers and hardline thinkers. The more liberal thinkers concentrate on how to achieve in political terms very often more equal relations with the United States. A lot of this is about political and symbolic recognition, right? On the hardcore end of the spectrum, very interesting flashing out or some ideas of what would be an acceptable trade-off from the Chinese point of view with the United States. I'll just give you one example to end this presentation with. A well-known realist Chinese scholar, Sheen Hong, wrote a few years ago a useful article in Chinese where he proposes that there can be a peaceful final settlement, right? Based on selective preponderance between the US and China. What he proposes is that the US should accept China's leading position in Asia, right? Based on its economic size, trade, regional influence, et cetera. The US and China should accept mutual deterrence in the region based on China having military parity with the US in China's offshore areas, all right? That the US should accept peaceful reunification of Taiwan with the mainland and China maintaining a degree of strategic space, undefined in the Western Pacific. In return, he suggests that China would accept overall US military superiority worldwide at a global level and in the central and Western Pacific and would accept preponderant American influence in other world regions, right? I leave that on the table with you as a way really to trigger questions and debates about this issue, about whether a great power bargain is fundamentally possible between the United States and China. I, for the record, am optimistic. It's not an easy task, but I think it's doable. Thank you. Well, thanks to our panelists for wonderful presentations, hugely thought provoking, a terrific kickstart as the first panel. We now have about 20, 25 minutes for discussions from the floor. This is your turn, audience, to engage with our panelists. Are there questions or comments from the floor? We'll start with Bates Gill, thanks. Thanks to everyone on the panel for an excellent series of insightful discussion on the issue of where strategy is going and how we should think about it going forward. I wanted to ask the panel to spread. I mean, my takeaway from this group is sovereignty is back. The state is back and we need to begin understanding that the world is going to be ordered as such and forcing us to reconceive concepts of bargains, grand concerts, so on. Very interesting. My question, though, to anyone on the panel, maybe particularly Raja or Evelyn, how does that conceptual overlay, if I'm right in describing it, sit with what we heard from Laurie today? I took from Laurie's presentation the notion of diffusion of power, that in fact the empowerment of things that are not states is making states' lives extremely difficult and complicated and therefore making the notion of state-centric order going forward, if not impossible, clearly very, very difficult. So how does, what I've just heard this panel say, then sit with what I interpreted Laurie's general point to be, it'd be interesting to have those two panels, those two concepts discussed. Evelyn, do you want to respond to that? And the next microphone down to Amitabh Chharya, please.  I thought the question was for Raja, actually, but I'll have a first go. I think, I don't think that, you know, I would concentrate on the states for my subject, but you're right, it is, we live in a complex, a newly complex world where challenges and actors, in fact, strategic actors are increasingly non-state-based or sub-state-based or trans-state-based. So we're talking three other categories, right, trans-sub and non-state actors. And of course that's part of the challenge for scholars and others who want to work on this area and I consciously, for myself anyway, find that I've got to learn increasingly new things. I mean, one of my current obsessions is with fishermen in the South China Sea because I think that they're going to be the cold front of armed conflict. It's not, you know, it's not navies. So yeah, that's a good example, I think. Raja, did you want to? Very briefly, I don't see a contradiction. I think the sense is that the states find forces, both the globalizing forces as well as the disruptive forces within the societies, how do you deal with them? But when we say state is back, we're talking about some of the illusions of the last 25 years that somehow you can construct globalist transcendental solutions. Those forces still exist, but I think states remain, I think will remain for a long time. The principle mode of organizing the international order, that what they can voluntarily seed something to their bow, they'll have to do something below, for example, on economic globalization, demands a new compact domestically today. I mean, I think in the US, in Britain, because I think it was an Australian scholar who first studied the study, second thoughts on globalization. I mean, there are losers in globalization, for example, in the West. How do you deal with them? I mean, I think, but that doesn't mean the state is going to go away. Finally, the compact, the new compromises will still have to be developed internally by the state and internationally by inter-national methods and not by transcendental globalist methods. How about you? I want to make a general point about sovereignty. Somebody who is teaching courses on this and thinking about this. I think using sovereignty as a benchmark for understanding global order is very tricky because sovereignty has always been contested and constructed and reconstructed and revised. Nothing new. The idea that Westphalia created a particular form of sovereignty, it diffused and was accepted by the post-colonial states as the English school Bull and Watson teachers presented. So it's always been a bit of a stretch because the European notion of non-intervention was very different from the notion of non-intervention in Latin America or in Asia and also it led to different behavioral implications. I mean, Latin Americans could accept non-intervention but have an alliance with the United States under the inter-American system. Asians accept a non-intervention but rejected the Southeast Asian pretty organization. Even within regions, Africans started by accepting absolute sovereignty and involved the borders but Africans were actually in the leading edge of accepting responsibility to protect. So I always feel that this idea of a Westphalian sovereignty globally stressed has always been bit of a myth and it's contested, always been contested and many of the other challenges are very similar. When we talk about globalization, there's a whole bunch of literature who said the state is going to remain resilient. When internet came up, while some people advocated this is the great liberalizer as Raja pointed out, but other people thought internet will be abused by powerful states on defense and security interests and we found that out in the case of Snowden episode. So I think it's what matters is the construction of sovereignty. In global governance is another thing. It's not fading away, very is so specific. I've just finished editing a book on global governance for Cambridge University Press and we found a nine issue areas. In some cases like trade, the demand for global governance is declining. In other cases and surprisingly on internet, the demand for governance is increasing. So there's always a lot of complexity and uncertainty in this. Similarly, sphere of influence. Yes, China and India want to build a sphere of influence. Let's assume they do, but can they? The constraints on building spheres of influence in 21st century are very different from those constraints in the 19th century, about economic, military and diplomatic and political constraints. So and finally, in defense of our responsibility to protect, I'm not defending Gareth Evans, he can answer for himself. They were very aware of the fact that sovereignty is very important. It's not going to go away. But they were trying to do to formulate certain rules and norms under which it would be permissible to move away from absolute sovereignty. And but this commission debated this and we know a little bit about the history of the commission, but it was not an attempt to abolish state sovereignty. It's to find the, what's the best possible way to achieve a consensus? And I actually, my criticism of the overall doctrine is that they set the bar too high. In fact, because of the need for consensus, that it's very hard to actually justify intervention using the criteria specified. But my overall point is that sovereignty is always been contested, contested and continue to be so, but changes are happening at the same time that creates very powerful constraints on sovereignty which we should keep in mind. Roger, did you want to respond? I think three, three quick points, I mean, I think. I think the main point one was making, when I don't disagree with you, that look the attempt to limit sovereignty and the assertion of sovereignty both have continued. That's the point. I mean that the logic of economic globalization is just not going to disappear because the nature of capitalism, the nature of production, the way things are being organized would require some internal adjustment in the states. Now, but there is going to be backlash, as we've seen in many parts of the world, of how do you politically deal with those who are disaffected, those who lose from the process of globalization. So the tension will be there. I mean, on how you organize that, that is going to be one of the biggest challenges because it's happening in the developed world. The developed world has told you, globalization is great for you, guys, take it. Now, Asia was a good student. They've done a reasonably good job. And now you find it's a problem in the West.  Look, where communities have suffered. So they're going to fight back. Now, the question is how do you get it resolved? All I'm saying is that's going to be a major theme for the next 25 years. Second theme I'm saying, look, there is a legal protocol, there is a geopolitical protocol. The legal protocol is that there is actually sovereign equality of states. We know that's, that's not true, right? I mean, in the real world, there is, but in the legal construct, when you say US cannot intervene in Iraq without legal permission, I mean, there is a legal construct of a legitimacy argument. While at the same time, countries are intervening all the time. Look at Middle East today, after this great argument about American legitimacy to intervene, Britain has this great debate. Saudi Arabia is intervening in every country around. Iran is intervening in every country around. So you could make this argument against imperialist violation of rules and intervention. Today, intervention is the norm in the Middle East. Just between what the Saudis and the Iranians are doing to intervene in the internalized Iraq, Lebanon, Yemen, Syria, there you have. So you have both the features. I mean, the pretence that somehow there is a legality, but the geopolitics of it on the ground, the contestation between Shia Sunni or Saudi and the Iranians plays out directly the developing countries, the great champions of non-intervention are the ones actually doing the intervention. I think in the Indian case, in the case of India and China, I think it's going to be even more severe. That where India thought, it's not India's constructing a sphere of influence, India inherited one from the Raj. Now the Chinese are today knocking at the doors in Nepal or Maldives or Sri Lanka. What way will that lead us to? I'm saying it'll lead to, if there is no fresh understanding, it'll lead to competition, it'll lead to proxy wars, it leads to regime change, all the things that we've denounced about what the Americans have done, because these two rising powers are going to assert their interests and how that plays out. So there again, the false argument that there's sovereignty versus intervention, west versus the east, north versus the south, I'm saying that's going to break down when Chinese and Indians are going to do a lot of this themselves.  Okay, in the interest of time, I'm going to take four questions together. The first one is Alan Dupont. Please keep your questions relatively brief. My question is to Evelyn, but I welcome the panel's contributions. Evelyn, your question is really about whether a grand bargain could be struck between the United States and China and this part of the world. You're optimistic, I'm pessimistic as you would expect being a strategist, right? But I think the, isn't really the more important question is if a grand bargain were to be struck between the US and China, would it be enforceable and would it make any real difference in terms of regional stability? And just to make a quick point about this, there are three reasons I suggest that even if a grand bargain were struck, it would be very difficult to actually have the sort of impact that you're suggesting because you've got other powers, middle powers, other great powers outside the region. The US and China are probably less capable of enforcing a grand bargain than other countries have been historically. And thirdly, you've got a whole range of other stresses in the region, it's got nothing to do with great power politics that are also impacting too, which is the point you raised before about some of these transnational issues. So I'd just want to if you could address that or any other members of the panel, thank you. Thanks, Alan. Can we go to Alan Beam, please? Thank you very much, Michael. I'm Alan Beam. I'm a long-time student of strategic theology, but with a slight preference for heterodoxy over orthodoxy. And for that reason, I very much enjoyed the panel this morning where there was some very polite but subversive, I think, commentary. And I'd like to pick particularly on Dr. Amy King's paper, which I thought was brilliant. There are at least four people in this room who have been principal authors of what have come to be known as defence white papers. And every single one of those is totally silent on the question of the economy. And yet the economy is the wellspring from which national power comes. Earlier this morning, there was a lovely question asked of Professor Friedman and that was around the language that we use in talking about matters of strategy. And I'm wondering whether the problem that we have in trying to bring concepts like the power of the economy into consideration of a national strategic position is the way in which we use the word security. I'm heartened that economists these days can now start talking about human and social capital without blushing. I'm equally heartened that we can now begin to use the word security to cover human and personal security. And it seems to me that much of the problem that we're dealing with across the world at the moment is the inability of the state to guarantee the human and personal security of its people. Security means the security of the nation state and on the 100th anniversary of Frommel and Pozier, it is something that we in Australia should think about very deeply. So, mine is really just a comment, Michael, but of course, Amy is very much entitled to respond to it. But it is very important, I think, that we begin to see that the word security is changing in its denotation and in its connotation. It's broadening in its effect. And perhaps at the heart of some of the problems in Europe at the moment is the consequence of the freemurgation of people, which offends some of the older concepts of the security of the state. And I just simply offer that as a comment on what I thought was an excellent paper from Amy King. Thanks, Alan. Tim Huxley. Thanks very much. My questions for Evelyn, and it's a two-part question that really, I suppose reinforces what Alan Dupont just said. You said that you were optimistic about the prospects for a grand bargain between the US and China. And I think I'd like to know more about the extent to which you see a sphere of influence for China in the Western Pacific as being part of that bargain. And then, more specifically, how do you think medium and small powers in the region would respond to that? Thanks. The last question, Nick Bisley. Can you just put your hand up, Nick? Thanks. Thanks. Nick Bisley from La Trobe University. Just, I'll be quick in time. This is really for Amy and Evelyn. I wonder whether you see the fact that China does not really contest the fundamental structure of the global economy. It doesn't provide an alternative vision for how economic relations should be organised, and that has a deep shared interest in the structure of the world economy with the United States as a possible platform for the kind of bargain security deal, or whatever you want to call it, because I think that's one big difference between now and the Cold War. Okay, sorry, just wondering whether the fact that the United States and China share an interest in the basic structure of the global economy is a platform for cooperation or a bargain in the future, given that during the Cold War, that was a big difference between the US and the Soviet Union. It was a completely alternative in contesting economic world views. Okay, who wants to go first? Amy. Thank you. Thank you very much for that comment. I'm glad you enjoyed the presentation. I would actually slightly disagree with you on the defence white papers. In a book chapter I wrote a couple of years ago, I went back and looked at Australia's defence white papers on this very issue, and for a while they were pretty, well, before they were defence white papers, and there were other things, but by the time of the DIB report, there was a lot of attention paid to economics, and Professor DIB's background in economics may explain part of that, but I was intrigued to see the understanding that Australia is a trading nation as linked to the global economy and the regional economy, very much at the forefront of our thinking about our place in the region in particular. That's waxed and waned over time, and I think there's been shifts under varying governments, particularly under the Hawkeet in government, a real understanding that security was very much defined in economic terms, and I think we're kind of once again sort of at the cusp of sort of rethinking about those relationships between economics and security. That's not just true of Australia and countries like the US as well. Key strategic documents like the NIA report were also really important in thinking about the relationships between economics and security for the US and its alliance system, so I'm optimistic that strategists can bring those two things together if they want to, even if we don't always think they might. On the next question, yes, I think I broadly agree. I think it is a platform for cooperation. I think some important research that I'm hopefully going to be able to do myself is actually looking at China's role in helping to create that international economic order after World War II. China was more important than we realized at that time. Who's next? Roger. I think the deep interdependence between China and the United States on the economic domain is the fundamental difference between the Cold War and the present system that actually Russia opted out of the global economic system, tried to create an alternative second world, whatever you wanted to call it, while China is very much part of it, it's a number two power in the system. But I think Amy addressed this point. I mean, that does not eliminate the tensions between the two. On the economic domain itself, today China is the argument in the United States. How many jobs does it take away? Was it a wise move? You gave away too much to them, but that argument will go on. The second part, the economic interdependence has not made it any easier to actually construct a political accommodation. I think, let's take the case of South China Sea. I think they, so therefore, it's not clear. And I think much of the research in the next 25 years will focus on that in terms of how you find the accommodation. But I can speaking on behalf of India, you can say very much, we're not going to accept any accommodation that's going to be at our expense. Just as India and China did not accept many elements of the US-Soviet accommodation on a range of issues, I don't see why we're merely going to accept just because China and America have done a deal. And we will do anything to undermine it if it is against our interests. And India is only the largest of the countries, and many other countries in the region, from Japan to, you name it, are going to do the same. So it is not automatic, just because these two have done it, they will be automatic the rest of the world is going to accept. And partly, it's in the hedge against a potential harmful US-China deal that there is a dramatic expansion of intra-Asian security cooperation. Rory and I have done some work on this, that actually countries are collaborating with each other to not to leave your fate at the mercy of what happens between US and China for good or bad. I'm from Rajat because it nicely provides a starter for what I was going to say. The reason I'm optimistic in response to the questions is because I think that the likely US-China bargain, and I'm consciously not calling it a grand bar, quite limited in parameters and scope, precisely for these reasons. And I answered the questions together because I think they're connected. It's precisely because both the US and China have constituencies which are way less asymmetrical than these constituencies were in relation to the United States and the Soviet Union during the Cold War. The power and legitimacy asymmetries between them and their partners are a lot smaller now. And for those reasons precisely, the kind of bargain we're going to see between the US and China are going to be quite narrow, quite functional, and not designed around things like sphere of influence, I think. They're going to be designed around things like rules of the road in maritime use, for example. So for those reasons, the optimism that I briefly alluded to, it's for those reasons. And so I hope that's got a sort of quick response. I mean, I'll just add this. Fundamentally, the thing that's got to change between the order we've got now in the region and the one that will come whether we want it or not, in my view, and this is a personal view based on research and ideological inclination, possibly, call it whatever you would, is that we've got a transition out of a regional order that is currently US preponderant. And I choose those words carefully. We are used in the last, we get used to things very fast, don't we? In the last 30 years, this region has become used to the idea that US preponderance is present and good for us. And that's what we'd like to keep all things being equal if we can. I think what the Chinese pushing of the envelope in recent years has shown is a very clear signal that US preponderance is not going to last forever. So we've got to start thinking what we're going to do in its waning days. This is not the same as saying the US is declining, merely the fact that US preponderance cannot continue for much longer because of China's growing role in the region. That's all. And that's the fundamental shift that all other states in the region have to deal with in their strategic thinking, is my view. John, did you want to make any comments? No, just coming back to the issues of sovereignty, and this is just a point for thought, is with dealing with quasi-nation states, a lot of our international rules, norms, and domestic laws about the use of force are problematic because they're based on state-on-state conflict, and we are suddenly not dealing with state entities, and it drives you to a domestic law space, and that's just out there. On the issue of US preponderance, any shifts in US preponderance obviously need to be given careful consideration of assumptions that underpin the US alliance and the security assurances that we draw from that. Thank you.


I came here on the visit with my dad to explore engineering day with women in engineering program and I just love talking to all the students and they were just so kind and welcoming and it really felt like a place that I could call home. We as Purdue engineers want to be the best and we want to help each other succeed and it's not like you're competing for a grade or competing for a job. The community for me here at Purdue engineering has been to help each other grow and lift each other up and help each other thrive because we all want to be engineers and we're all super passionate. Every community I've joined here at Purdue has just been phenomenal and supporting me in so many different ways, unexpected ways and just going above and beyond to just help out a fellow Boyden Laker, help out another student, just be there on a personal level and Purdue is hard and challenging but it's making me grow in so many different ways.