of the Department of History and Political Science here at Norwich University, and it is my pleasure to welcome you to our last panel of the day, but not the last panel of the 2022 Peace and War Summit. I'll just announce right up the front, as you are off the bat, as you all know, that tomorrow morning we will have two more panels specifically dealing with Russian internal domestic politics at 9.25 a.m. in Mac Auditorium, and a panel on U.S. policy towards Russia at 10.50 in Mac Auditorium right here. So as we wrap the first day, I think we're off to a great start. I wanted to extend my thanks to all of the wonderful people involved in this summit who have helped to make it, I think, a great success. Each panel, starting with the keynotes this morning, has been very well attended. So I certainly want to extend my thanks to Professor Yang Mokou for just doing all of the hard work to put something like this together. Professor Travis Morris, Megan Liptak, thank you for all the hard work you've done to make this happen. I also wanted to extend my thanks to all the panelists and visitors to campus today for coming here, devoting your time to share with our students and with the public some vital information that is certainly directly relevant to the state of affairs the world finds itself in. And my last but certainly not least, I want to thank the Norwich faculty, staff, and students who've participated and attended all of the events both today and hopefully tomorrow. This is all for you. And we're glad that you could be here and help make this a success. As I turn now, I turn to introducing the panel that is before you. This panel is actually a bit different from some of the other panels you've seen today, in that this is made up of, as was referenced this morning, some of the most important people in the room, which is the future leaders, military and civilian and political, who are going to have to be wrestling with the decisions that are being made as we speak. This is the student panel. Last fall, as the peace and war summit was being planned, we sent out an invitation, not just to Norwich students, but to students at various other universities in the region, inviting them to submit proposals, not necessarily on the Russian issue, but on any issues related to history, political science, international affairs, basically anything within the scope of the Journal of Peace and War Studies. We received a fascinating variety of papers and members of the editorial board of the Peace and War Center, of the Peace and War, excuse me, Journal of Peace and War Studies reviewed those papers and selected three that we think are a very interesting and certainly timely window into some important subjects. Once again, these are not necessarily directly relevant to the topic of the summit, which is Russia and the Russian question and Russia and Ukraine, but I think you're going to find the topics addressed in the student papers today do have relevance. Do have relevance, not just maybe not necessarily for the strategy and the political questions involving Russia, but certainly questions that the world is facing and perhaps specifically the United States is facing at the dawn of the 21st century. So, as we move forward, my goal here for our panel is we have three student presenters, they will each be given 15 minutes to give a summation of the papers that they submitted for this panel. At the end, I will invite our two discussants, Professor Mary Kim and Professor Michael Funberg to offer about five minutes each, some discussion, some comments on the student papers, maybe ask them some questions. I'll then give maybe five to ten minutes for the students to respond to some of those comments if they wish. And after that, I really hope think we'll have good 10, 15 minutes to open up for Q&A from the audience. I think these are, as once again, as up-and-coming scholars, these are students who can certainly use some guidance moving forward and get some feedback on their work. So, I will introduce the panel from my left to the end, beginning with our first student panelist, Ethan Owens. Ethan is a Norwich University fourth year cadet and a member of the Norwich Army ROTC. He is a double major in history and political science and will commission as a second lieutenant in the United States Army upon his graduation in May, a branched armor, by correct, yes. To his left is our, is Caleb Riley, who comes to us today from the University of Vermont where he is pursuing a master of arts in history. Caleb is a special forces captain who graduated with a BS in American history from the United States Military Academy and commissioned as an infantry officer in 2011. His academic interests include the history of allied special operations during World War II and 20th century American foreign policy. He has publications in, such as an article in Special Warfare detailing his experiences as a special forces detachment commander and a publication in history review comparing the Circassian and Armenian genocides. And finally, John Walsh is another Norwich University student, a sophomore majoring in criminal justice who's looking to add a Spanish minor to his studies. He is Navy ROTC. He's a Navy ROTC midshipman who is contracted with the United States Marine Corps. His presentation at this conference reflects his diverse interests in world cultures, literature, art, politics, and violence. Our two discussants today are both my colleagues in Department of History and Political Science, representing both history and political science respectively. Associate professor of history, Mary Kim, has been at Norwich since 2014. She is currently served as the director of the department program coordinator for the studies and war and peace degree program in our department. She has a BA in history from Reed College and a doctorate in history from the University of California, Irvine. Her research focuses on the military and institutional history of northeast China during the Republican period. And her course work here at Norwich offers a variety of courses relating particularly to world history, East Asian history, and certainly courses on both modern China and modern Japan. She's also the faculty advisor for our MOLUEN chapter here on campus and recently led that group to the annual National Harvard MOLUEN conference down in Massachusetts. Finally, assistant professor of political science, Michael Funberg has been on the Norwich faculty since 2017. He has a BS in political science from Northern Illinois University and both an MA and doctorate in political science from West Virginia. His research focuses primarily on the American presidency, particularly how the president shapes policy through executive orders. He gives a variety of courses on the American political system and issues in public policy, and he's also recently returned from a trip having taken the annual DC policy week group down to Washington DC where a group of about a dozen Norwich students headed down to DC over spring break and attended meetings and visits with various agencies involved in the American national security establishment. Professor Thunberg is also the current director of the Norwich University Honors Program. Before we begin, please join me in giving a round of applause for our panelists. Once again, we have three student panelists for you today. I'm going to, having introduced them all, I'm going to invite them to come up in sequence and just address you directly, and then at the end we'll turn to the comments from our discussants. First up is Ethan Owens with evaluating the value of U.S. diplomacy through strategic ambiguity. Ethan. All right. Hello everyone, my name is Ethan Owens, and like you said, I'll be going over the evaluating value of U.S. diplomacy through strategic ambiguity.  First is my research question about what this paper was all about, my introduction to ambiguity, what that means in the scope of my project, the two pieces of literature that were crucial to strengthening my argument, which is Wilsonian Open Door Internationalism and deterrence arms race. Then I'll go over my main argument, which I call tension and ambiguity argument, and then the three focal points of my discussion, which are these three time periods and how the tension plays into that. I'll explain that a little bit more later. And then the policy implications that could potentially come out of this project and we'll conclude there. So my research question is why has the U.S. policy of strategic ambiguity been utilized to balance Taiwan-China relations since 1979, and to what extent is it still a viable option? So essentially what I'm looking at is strategic ambiguity and using ambiguous language in U.S. policy and seeing how that balances the tension between China and Taiwan and how the United States can play a role in that through strategic ambiguity and through that scope, whether strategic ambiguity is still a viable option to use today. So my introduction to ambiguity. This first part right here is the definition that I gave strategic ambiguity in my paper. So when discussing strategic ambiguity, I'm talking about any policy created by the United States towards China and Taiwan that is purposefully ambiguous and its true intention of support or opposition to either Chinese or Taiwanese agenda. So essentially I can break that into three main aspects, right? You've got the purpose towards China. So if the United States creates ambiguous language in its policy that doesn't necessarily side with China or Taiwan directly, China doesn't know if the United States would support or deny an invasion of Taiwan. So China is fearful that the United States could side with Taiwan in a devastating war between the two. So it keeps China on its toes to not invade. Conversely, ambiguous language proves to Taiwan that if Taiwan is to declare independence that would also start a war, and the United States would potentially not support Taiwan, and Taiwan would be crushed by the Chinese. So both sides are split in this balancing act of being fearful and paranoid about whether or not the United States is going to support them or not, and that's essentially strategic ambiguity in nutshell. So the policy that's utilized that has this ambiguous language in US policy, there are three main communiques that were done, Shanghai communique, normalization communique, and communique on United States arms sale to Taiwan. The most important of these, however, in my personal opinion, is the Taiwan Relations Act of 1979. This set the whole framework of how the United States is going to handle Taiwan going forward. So some examples of ambiguous language. These are all taken from the communiques and the Taiwan Relations Act. You can see how they kind of tactically dance around the fact about whether we're going to call Taiwan independent state or not. For example, you notice that they call it a peaceful settlement of the Taiwan question by the Chinese themselves. So because Taiwan is ethnically and culturally Chinese, the United States kind of adopts a sort of one China policy where they call the Taiwanese Chinese, but they also, as you can see, the United States recognizes the PRC as the sole China, but the United States supports Taiwan with unofficial relations, which is largely arms sales, and I'll get into that in a little bit. So these are some examples of that weird, ambiguous language that they use that keeps people from recognizing which side the United States supports. So I'll get into the literature real quick. Wilsonian Open Door Internationalism. This was spearheaded by Dr. Dean Chen in this book here. The biggest piece of takeaway that I got from this is in President Woodrow Wilson's presidency in the 1950s, he was a very idealistic president, and one of the things that he pushed was the concept of democratic peace theory, which is essentially that democratic nations will not go to war with one another because they share similar values. So because of this, the United States kind of started to grow this sense of we need to spread democracy and we need to make the world a democratic and thus peaceful place, and this kind of planted the seeds of this very emotional and passionate driven policy making from the United States that we need to preserve and spread democracy. This plays a huge role in dealing with Taiwan because there were numerous instances in the 60s and 70s where it would have been politically easier to give up Taiwan to China, but the United States took a more passionate and emotional driven, we need to preserve democracy in the world as a foothold for that ideological stand. So because of that, we've held on to Taiwan. One of the flaws in this argument is it focuses on the 1950s, so it doesn't really have a lot to do with strategic ambiguity because of the 1950s our stance on Taiwan was pretty firmly supportive versus today, it's a little bit more difficult if China decided they were going to invade Taiwan, we don't necessarily know which side we would take. It remains ambiguous to this day. Deterrence and arms race, this is from Dr. Pang Zongqi in this book here. This is important because it talks about how strategic ambiguity creates deterrence, deterrence creates stagnation, and then stagnation in turn creates an arms race. So basically the way this works is Taiwan requests arms from the United States, the United States gives Taiwan arms, China feels threatened that Taiwan now has more arms than them, so then they build up their military, they buy more arms, and then Taiwan in turn feels threatened again, and both sides build arms and it creates a leveling tension that continues to grow that could reach a breaking point that would cause an incredibly costly war. So because of this, strategic ambiguity can be viewed as something that creates a stagnation that can be really devastating because it doesn't focus on the central problem that is China and Taiwan cooperation. It just kind of kicks the can further along and in turn creates very, very high tension. So we'll get into the main argument that I proposed in this paper. I call it the tension and ambiguity argument. Essentially ambiguity in terms of 1976 when it was created with the Taiwan Relations Act was essentially to prevent a war. So in terms of that the strategic ambiguity has been very successful because there obviously hasn't been a war between China and Taiwan. However, a war could still happen in the future. We don't know about that. So I'm trying to evaluate strategic ambiguity in terms of tension, whether tension has been rising, whether that tension could reach a breaking point that could create a war. I view that as a little bit more important. So in terms of tension, we'll be looking at 1979 to the 1990s. This is my dependent variable. I see this as a successful use of strategic ambiguity because tensions are low. And then we get into the two-time period post-1996, which is the third Taiwan straight crisis. I'll mention that in a bit. I see this as an unsuccessful use of strategic ambiguity. That is my independent variable. So I'll be examining the levels of tension in 1996 to 2013 and then 2013 to present. And I define tension in three aspects, which is military testing, military spending, and then government communication and cooperation between Taiwan and China. So we'll use those three factors to determine the relationship between the two in tension. So we start with our dependent variable 1979 to 1995. Military spending from 85 to 91, you can see that China increases by 60 percent and Taiwan increases by 34 percent. That's a pretty large margin of increase in military spending. However, you have to take into consideration that there is a large economic growth in that region. The example seen in Japan, South Korea, and Indonesia, they were overall increasing their economic growth. And it's healthy for a country's economic growth to coincide with their military growth. That's just a natural repercussion. So it wasn't necessarily tension-based as much as it was economic growth-based. For military testing, there was only one really significant example of military testing that I found, which was in 1980, which is when China was doing ballistic missile testing in the South Pacific. It got some backlash from the United States and Taiwan, obviously, but it didn't solidify into anything serious, not like it would today. And then government communication, there was kind of a global, like a cultural trend going on in China that was called mainland fever, where essentially a lot of Taiwanese people started to try to open up to China. And China, in turn, was fostering a more positive environment to open up to Taiwan. In January 1st of 1979, they created a message to compatriots in Taiwan, which was a message that was sent to civilians in Taiwan that was very poetic, and it basically talked about a cultural unification rather than a political unification and how they are all one Chinese people, ethnically and culturally. And so that was kind of the biggest example that people see when they point to a peaceful cooperation between China and Taiwan. So things were relatively easing at this time. There was open trade. Things were going relatively well, all things considered. Now we get into 1995 to 2013. So in 96, there's the Third Taiwan Strait Crisis. Basically, in this situation, there's a tension break between China and Taiwan. China sends Navy ships into the Taiwan Strait. The United States, in turn, brings their ships into the Taiwan Strait. China backs down, and China is very humiliated by this incident. So because China's humiliated, they decided they're going to build up their military spending again. $2,530 billion budget, 12.6% increase. That's pretty big. And you can see from this table that they've been modernizing their military significantly as well, particularly on the Navy aspect. So as China's been modernizing, they've had to test their new equipment. And that's where you see more tension on the military testing aspect of things. A result of this is the United States actually started using U.S. Marines to train Taiwanese soldiers for a potential invasion starting in 2008. I believe this information was leaked last year, and the Chinese government was not happy about it. And then government communication and cooperation. 1996, Taiwan had its first democratically elected presidential election. This is dangerous for China because they're an authoritarian state. Democracies can be a little bit unstable in this aspect with a free thought and free speech during this. Parties like the DPP, Democratic Progressive Party, of 2008, they start to push things like a pro-independence movement. And even if it's not going to happen, just that discussion on the floor makes China very paranoid, and tensions rise as a result of this. 2013 to present, what we start to see, military spending. China has, numerically, the largest Navy in the world right now. That's just a number of boats that's not necessarily power. But numerically, they have the largest Navy. By 2030, they're projected to have 549 ships, while the United States currently has 283. So because of this, it's clear that China is going to continue to increase their military spending and they're increasing their military budget to have that naval power and the ability that they could invade Taiwan if they needed to. 2021, I don't know if some of you may have heard about this. There was 149 Chinese aircraft that deployed, that's supposed to say South with Taiwan, that was a mistake. Southwest Taiwan, it caused a massive scramble. A lot of military people in Taiwan thought that they were being invaded and it caused massive hysteria. So China's been upping their game and doing these military tests on a scale such as this to keep Taiwan on their toes and show them that they're capable of invading at any time. Again, increasing that tension drastically. And then the cooperation between Taiwan and China is also at an all-time low because of the growth of political parties, such as the DPP, which I mentioned before, and then the Kuomintang, the KMT. While statistically, the majority of Taiwanese people understand that independence means war and illegal independence can't happen right now, every year it's discussed at political elections. So because the discussion of independence, whether de Ure or de facto, it's inferior in practice, that's still on the table and every time it's brought up, China gets very paranoid. So that tension is just continuing to rise and the disagreements are continuing to rise. So the policy implications that come out of this. Strategic ambiguity, as we saw, was largely a success in the 1970s and 80s because it was able to foster a little bit more cooperation with the United States having a more hands-off approach. But since China has grown in strength and since the third Taiwan Strait crisis, things have reached such a breaking point that strategic ambiguity is causing more harm than good because both countries are incredibly paranoid of one another and they're both willing to go to war at any time. So because of this policy consideration that I thought would be applicable to the situation, we need to push for cultural reunification while maintaining Taiwan as a politically autonomous state. So as I mentioned before, when strategic ambiguity was successful in the 70s and 80s, they were able to foster a relationship where they could see themselves as one China but they were politically different. Things have not been that cool ever since in my opinion. So if we can try to push for a more positive outcome from that where they can see themselves as culturally Chinese but politically different, that would be huge. And then decreasing U.S. arms sale to Taiwan, that would allow the United States to remain more neutral instead of adding to that tension that I mentioned of that arms recycle. Pulling the United States out of that might help ease tensions as well showing China that they are more neutral than in favor of Taiwan. And then setting concrete boundaries, making the United States like a referee. So basically saying if you cross this line, then the United States is going to militarily interfere on whichever country is involved. So saying missile testing in this location is too close in Taiwan, the China will be attacked by the United States or vice versa. That would allow for a peaceful cooperation between the two countries and that would start to lower that tension that I mentioned before. So my conclusion, strategic ambiguity was overall an initial success but as we started to see that arms race cycle that started to create as China gained more prominence and more power has done more harm than good. And so strategic ambiguity is more of a focal point of disagreement rather than successful easing of tension. The United States still maintains an idealistic view of democracy so we need to make sure that Taiwan remains politically independent. However we can't allow for any large-scale conflict to be a result of this. So in order to do that we need to push for political autonomy but cultural reunification and we need to remove conflict friction points in the Taiwan Strait and create specific policy that prevents both nations from doing military testing or anything, conflict brewing in the Taiwan Strait. So that concludes my presentation. Thank you very much. Good afternoon everyone. My name is Caleb Riley. Thank you all for letting me come here as a West Pointer and talk to the oldest private military college in the United States. It's truly my honor to be here. Briefly what I'm going to talk today about is the Yugoslavia Civil War and the Allies between 1941 and 1945. As you may or may not know a civil war raged alongside the conventional war during World War II inside of Yugoslavia and this resulted in massive violence and destruction within the country of Yugoslavia resulting in upwards of 1.75 million deaths which is one of the highest per capita casualty rates of any nation during World War II. To talk about this we're going to look at the background of Yugoslavia briefly as well as what the beginning of the war looked like and then we're going to examine the competing factions within Yugoslavia and how the civil war and the misunderstanding of it led to the changing Allied support that waxed and waned and evolved throughout the war. Finally we'll look at the outcome of the war before I conclude. So Yugoslavia was formed following World War I as the Kingdom of Serbs, Croats and Slovenes. Interestingly those nations although they had always been under some sort of empirical power they had never been united under one flag prior to the Treaty of Versailles established it in 1918-1919. What we saw is that it was established under an under an organization that was highly favorable towards the ethnic majority which were the Serbs. The Serbs were riding a wave of high esteem following their performance during the Balkans War in 1913 as well as Serb perceived military preeminence during World War I. This establishment of the government that was favorable towards Serbia may have been beneficial to the Serbs in the short run but in the long run and especially by the time we got to World War II it was highly detrimental to the Kingdom of Yugoslavia. During the 1920s and the 1930s ethnic relations between the majority Serbs and the next highest ethnic minority Croats continually deteriorated. This included leaders of political parties being assassinated on the steps of parliament. It included Croatian political representative refusal to participate within the Yugoslav Parliament which only led to more problems between the Croats and Serbs and all of this was occurring during the Great Depression. It was occurring while war clouds were on the horizon. Yugoslavia desperately clung to its neutral status but they were seeking help from the Allies. Unfortunately for them the British and the French specifically were in no position to offer extra support to Yugoslavia. Germany on the other hand had great strategic interests down in the Balkans regions especially the oil fields of Romania, the minerals within Yugoslavia itself as well as the the large workforce potential that was located within Yugoslavia. In 1939 and late 1940 Germany made some strong pushes to force Yugoslavia to join the tripartite pack but the Yugoslav region continually demurred. However that changed on 25 March 1941. Yugoslavia assented to the tripartite pack but they actually secured some pretty important provisos in there for themselves including no need for them to provide soldiers to support the Axis war machine. No need to allow Germany to station their troops inside Yugoslavia although that's questionable and then it also had some post-war guarantees on behalf of the Axis for Yugoslavia. However the previous 20 years of discontentment finally boiled over two days later and on 27 March there was a coup that rapidly overthrew the government. When Hitler heard of this coup he was thrown into a rage and he immediately said we will crush Yugoslavia and the exact quote is with merciless brutality and that they did. On 6 April the Axis invaded Yugoslavia and a mere 12 days later Yugoslavia was completely under Axis control. This is truly a fascinating military accomplishment but the reason that they were so successful partly is because they negotiated a separate peace with the independent nation of Croatia and the independent nation of Croatia was led by an individual named Antipavlich and Antipavlich was actually a member of a terribly brutal fascist party called the Ustaja and the Ustaja promised to be able to control Croatia and provide a good level of security which is exactly what Hitler needed at that point in time. As you may or may not know Operation Barbarossa was supposed to start on 12 May which is just a mere month later so he needed to make sure that his southern flank was secured, that he had Axis unfettered to those oil fields in the Balkans and that Yugoslavia was not a problem. Unfortunately for him by placing the Ustaja in charge they were actually not widely regarded by the Croats themselves so the leaders of the independent nation of Croatia were actually ill prepared to govern a state that did not actually want them in charge. Germany for its part in the areas that it did personally control used the same brutal tactics their same brutal occupation tactics that they had throughout Europe and for every German soldier that was wounded 50 Yugoslav civilians would be killed and for every Yugoslav excuse me for every German soldier that was killed 100 Yugoslav city citizens would be killed and this played a major role in how these competing factions ended up using the Axis for their own advantage. So if we look at the Ustaja which I've briefly touched on it was led by Antipavich they were ardently Croat they were a fascist organization and they relied heavily on Catholicism. They co-opted Catholic priests to help them with their mission the Ustaja ruled brutally. They have the unfortunate misnomer of being the only individuals outside of Germany's sphere to to enact their own concentration camp and at the Yasanovic concentration camp upwards of 400,000 Serbs and Jews were brutally murdered by the Ustaja. If we look at the other two competing factions within the Yugoslav civil war we have the Chetniks and the Partisans. The Chetniks were actually not one main group of organized resistance and that led to a lot of the missteps and miscues by the allies over the course of the war but the main Chetnik band that was recognized by the allies was led by an individual named Dražir Mahilovic. Mahilovic was not actually some sort of guerrilla warfare genius in fact he was a moderately performing staff officer at outset of the war and he just refused to to give in but being that he was loyal to the monarch that was at this time in exile in London and that he was willing to carry the flag so to speak within Yugoslavia the allies initially put all of their support behind him and finally the the last competing faction within Yugoslavia was called the Partisans it was the National Army of Liberation and they were led by a little-known communist named Josep Broz Tito and Tito was ardently communist however at the behest of the Soviet Union they did not emphasize their communism so much as they did their Pan-Yugoslavism so in other words their nationalism and their pride in being Yugoslavian vice being Croatian or Montenegro or Serbian or Orthodox or Catholic they just emphasized that they needed to be a national unit that resisted the Axis invaders the problem is as you can tell from my very clear chart is that it's confusing and this is on paper so imagine if you are on the ground and you are trying to decide who is friend or foe and if you are not even speaking your own native language and they themselves are speaking a mixture of different languages it's very difficult to figure out who to support and the other problem is that the moniker Chetnik was used to describe Croatian ustaja who believed that they were performing the work of the the the greatness of the Balkan nations it was also used by the term partisan as you probably know is is often just applied to any guerrilla band so whenever you read Axis reports of guerrilla activity they often mention the partisans well you don't know if they were talking about Tito's partisans or if they were talking about the Chetniks because they simply used the term partisan so when the allies tried to figure out who they were going to support they they waxed and waned and frankly got it right and sometimes they got it wrong and this this really fueled the civil war as you can imagine guns and ammo and food and medical supplies were hard to come by within Yugoslavia and initially supporting Draža Mihailovic in 1941 and 1942 Mihailovic didn't really want to conduct very many kinetic operations and this was actually in line with allied policy and the reason it was in line with allied policy is because they had their hands full in North Africa and and they were in no position to provide real really any large support so Mihailovic took a step back because he didn't want to suffer the consequences by the hands of the Germans on the other hand the partisans who also weren't really receiving any allied support at this time used the German reprisals as a recruiting method they said if you're with us we will protect you we will take it to the fight of these evil Germans if you are against us we will also crush you as we cross the Germans the problem is is that Churchill was a very pragmatic individual and when he was asked how how are you going to support this communist band he said first off he said that well i'm not going to be governed by them following the war so it shows a very pragmatic um whoever's killing Germans was was his friend and that was ultimately what led the the big shift in 1943 to to move allied support from from primarily being the Chetniks to being primarily behind the partisans we still saw a confused policy though because there was a lot of politics and distrust between the US and the UK both supporting various factions within Yugoslavia and ultimately what we end up seeing is that a lot of the guns that were provided by the British or the Americans were used respectively by the partisans and by the Chetniks not to fight the Germans or the Italians but instead to fight each other and so this brutal civil war was waged and it was fueled by allied guns and war material there were some really compelling missions that took place that used the support of both the Chetniks and the partisans most notably Operation Halyard so between August and December of 1944 Operation Halyard rescued about 800 allied airmen who had been downed throughout Yugoslavia this is really an incredible story because they rescued all of those people 12 12 people at a time per plane load so 800 divided by 12 publicly educated in Alaska I'm not going to do the math up here it was a lot of airplanes and single runs the Soviets didn't ever actually really support the partisans as much as you would expect until they showed up in October of 1944 and then it was really in a paternalistic manner and this this set excuse me this set Tito off as you can see in this quote Tito was going to be no one's little brother Tito viewed himself as the leader of a great power nation and did not think that he owed the Soviets anything and in fact he wanted to seat at the table as equals so as we look at if you've been here throughout the conference today one of the one of the goals of Russia for eons has been to establish buffer states of friendly organizations Tito although he was communist wasn't exactly friendly towards the Soviets and that actually led eventually to the split in 1948 and this split is remarkable because Tito then led what was called the non-aligned movement for the next for the remainder of his life which was an organization of communist nations third world communist nations that he encouraged to not bow to Russian pressure it's really a fascinating thing war continued in in Yugoslavia though seven days after Europe after it ended in the rest of Europe Draza Mihailovich was tried in June of 1946 I'm sure it was a fair trial after which he was he was immediately shot and anti-pavlich fled to Argentina where he was shot in 1957 and he died a slow and painful death two years later finally I'm as I sum it up I love this picture of Sipon Fulopovich because it's it's so powerful it shows you the emotion behind a civil war so Fulopovich was a partisan leader who was captured in 1942 and as he's here about to be hung his final words were death to fascism freedom to the people and if you look really close at the picture you see that he's being hung not by Germans or Italians but he's being hung by um ustaja militants he's being hung by his own people um and that truly is is the travesty of the Yugoslavia civil war during World War so thank you for your time today that concludes my brief how you all doing my name is John Walsh I'm here to present about my paper a continuation of a dictatorship how U.S. policy and practice led to the continuation of Saddam's regime in the eyes of the Iraqi people so before we start I want to go over some key terms that I believe are necessary to understand from our first two terms come from mc rp05 tac 12 alpha operational terms and graphics so that is what the U.S. military officially how the U.S. military officially defines these terms control a tactical mission task that requires the commander to maintain physical influence over a specified area to prevent its use by an enemy occupy a tactical mission task that involves a force moving into an area so that can control the entire area both the forces movement to the occupation of the area occur without enemy opposition and finally insurgency insurgency is an uprising organized uprising that uses violent and nonviolent means to overthrow an existing government or to rest away control either de jure or de facto over part of their territory when I say insurgency I do not mean terrorist okay there are very two very different things and if you like to talk about that I'll talk about that during question and answer period so my key tax and thesis in my paper I primarily use literature specifically theater from Iraq I use the plays ishtar and Baghdad by rasha fadhil a strange bird on a roof published in contemporary plays from Iraq by Amir al-Azraqi and finally the book night draws near Anthony shed by Anthony Shadeed these works demonstrate how the occupation of Iraq by the U.S. in 2003 was not an end to Saddam's regime but rather a desperate attempt by the U.S. government to build back up a broken nation that instead led to a continuation of the dictatorship so before we talk about how this affected the nation I want to talk about each text in specific so ishtar and Baghdad I want a quick poll who here's heard of the Abu Ghraib prison scandal raise your hands okay that's more than I thought and I'm glad to see so for those who haven't the Abu Ghraib prison scandal Abu Ghraib prison is a prison in Abu Ghraib about 30 miles from Baghdad it was originally Saddam Hussein's prison that he used for his political prisoners after we took the prison the prison we started using it ourselves the U.S. in the prison United States Army and members of the CIA committed many documented human rights violations and war crimes against detainees in Abu Ghraib including physical mental and sexual abuse we can see some pictures I have up there there's many more on the internet if you want to do your own research as a result the United States Department of Defense removed 17 soldiers and officers from duty 11 soldiers were prosecuted with dereliction of duty maltreatment aggravated assault and battery the people in this prison were not just insurgents as we say they were also common criminals there were those who did commit crimes against occupational U.S. and then just normal people who got caught up in this unfortunately the play Ishtar and Baghdad by Rasha Fahdheel uses fictional characters Ishtar and Tammuz who are two Mesopotamian gods to tell a very real story of the events of Abu Ghraib they are first detained in Iraq when coming down to visit the world and then they are brought to Abu Ghraib where they experience many of the scandals that happened in the prison in particular the two I have up there right now it discussed the atrocities committed by the U.S. military now here we can see where Iraq culture and U.S. culture kind of clash so in Iraq culture way back when when we first took when we first took Baghdad we're using the rules Abu Bakr's rules of warfare Abu Bakr was the first Caliph which is the first leader of the Muslim people directly following Muhammad I'm not talking about the famous ISIS terrorist and his rules of warfare include do not commit treachery or deviate from the right path you must not mutilate dead bodies and do not kill children nor women or aged men all of these happened in the Abu Ghraib prison scandal Rasha Fahdheel says that she believes this play has not been produced in Iraq because of the fact the Iraqi people do not want to admit to the shame and that this incident brought upon their culture it also talks specifically about the plight of Iraqi women in the prison which she said is not talked about at all in the country the play ends with an insurgent rocket attack on the prison which is a real event that killed many prisoners including in the story Ishtar and Tammuz we can really see some cultural clash throughout the play with certain quotes in particular Ishtar says when she is first detained and she's being tortured I know this land the history of every grain of sand is in my blood she states I almost hear its sands boiling with hatred and desire for revenge on you now Ishtar and culture is a is a figure representing a very high quality of love and peace Ishtar in this story is meant to be a metaphor for the Iraqi people who were caught up in this invasion and unfortunately many lost their lives the next text that uses night draws near night draws near is a first hand is a collection of first-hand accounts and interviews from Iraqi civilians compiled by Anthony Shahdeed while he was in Iraq during the invasion it focuses on the before after and during the invasion and also talks greatly about the rise of insurgency we see throughout the region the final text I use is a strange bird on our roof I was not able to find the author of the play however it was produced in Anthony no sorry as you were Amir al-Israqi's book a contemporary prelays from Iraq the strange bird on a roof follows a true story according to Anthony Shahdeed who I got the chance to interview about a family who had it whose house was invaded by the US military in itself it's a whole metaphor for the war the place starts with the US military coming in force taking the house and then eventually leaving behind one soldier to watch over the place and quickly we see distrust established with the mother and the daughter who live in the house their son who is a terrorist well no sorry insurgent who is off who is not in the house the play goes to great length to show the cultural distance and distrust with the mother and daughter in Iraqi culture birdkeepers are often kept are often considered to be thieves as the bird cage is on the roof of the house throughout the play they make references to the fact that the soldier is on top of the house in the position of the birdkeeper there are birds in cages on the house it's supposed to allude to the fact that the people in the story consider him to be a thief eventually after much time trust starts to develop between the Iraqi family and the individual soldier which is a good point of how Iraqis did not hate Americans while the US was invading in reality they just hated the practice and the policy the US government was using they did not hate individuals and finally the play ends with the American receiving word that the building that he is occupying is about to be attacked by the insurgents and evacuating himself and the family and unfortunately the family gets left in a much in a poor financial state living in a tent on US on US controlled area much how like we left the nation after after the end of after the end of Operation Iraqi Freedom so the long-term effects of the invasion obviously we see a breakdown of trust between America and the people of Iraq and a mistrust of the US across the entire mid-east this this figure is from the the Arab center in Washington DC in addition we see a large amount of foreign influence come into the country of Iraq particularly from Iran we see this is where the start of Iranian militias who currently reside in Iraq this is the start of it Iraq's politics according to Amir al-Azraqi are riddled with foreign influence from Iran and I got they also had the opportunity to talk to a sergeant major of the Marine Corps so now as you were a sergeant major of Marines very different who was a battalion sergeant major for three different battalions throughout the operation he had three tour three tours of duty two was with the infantry infantry battalions and the one was with combat engineers he said that you could tell the difference of between people you fight there's a difference between how an Iraqi would fight who picked up a rifle about a month ago to fight back for himself for for his home versus how a freedom fighter from Russia or Iran have been fighting their entire lives it's noticeable so at the end of the day why does this all matter well the answer is pretty simple honestly even though this ended in 2011 officially first of all we still see great influence that these foreign fat foreign influencers have in Iraq and also this is a lesson about invasions and how we conduct them in the future David John Kilcullen is a member of the U.S. State Department who kind of wrote the book on counterinsurgency David Kilcullen believed that returning the nation to a state of normalcy in order was more important than killing every insurgent in in the region and the violence at the end of the day killing people is not going to is not going to make a nation better at the end of the day we got to rebuild a nation that we destroy if we really want to improve it the U.S. needs to understand the culture of the nation that we invade and occupy or better just don't get involved there are some nations that we have sought conflict with that at the end of the day Iraq included we've definitely put them in a worse situation as soon as you use terms like liberation and winning the hearts and minds of a population in a military operation where you intend to destroy the country's infrastructure you've already failed you cannot win the hearts and minds of a population whose home you've just destroyed as we currently see in Ukraine with Russia and their invasion and Putin spouting these ideas of liberation and freeing them from the neo-nazi government that he says in his speech exists we see this uprising of people in Ukraine fighting back much like how we saw in Iraq you will never you will never edit insurgency just by fighting these people will never give in and more and the more insurgents you kill the more you will create that is it all i have thank you all for your time all right good after uh good afternoon everybody can you all hear me okay all right i'll thank you all for being out here today and listening to our uh papers and the commentary i'd like to keep this brief as possible but uh these papers gave me a lot of food for thought because even though they're on topics that are not directly related to uh the what's going on just a few thousand miles away i felt that they actually have a lot to offer in terms of connections so i'll start with um john walsh's paper Ethan Owens and then Caleb Riley so i think john's paper asks us to really remember and reconsider and reflect on um us violence um and the terrible results that um poor understanding of a different culture wrought um on the lives of everyone who was involved but really very critically for the people of the of the countries uh iraq and then later afghanistan then later iraq um and i think um sort of something for maybe john to consider or and think about um is um you know i think one question that in the previous uh panel uh dr tedley's i think brought up is there room for nation building in us foreign policy and perhaps uh recent examples show that no there shouldn't be right um and so uh i think in um your thinking is there still room for nation building of some kind or this is an option that should be taken off right because um recent examples have uh they've been the result or failed results from you know violence and invasion um Ethan Owens Ethan's papers um is a really interesting i think because i study modern chinese history uh looking at a very present but ongoing kind of um issue right that involves three distinct and autonomous um political entities the us china and taiwan of course everyone else in the region is very closely monitoring this uh even now and i think this uh in the topic of strategic ambiguity thing that you bring up is really interesting because it's something that frustrates our allies as much as maybe they frustrate our adversaries and in the themes of some of the panels today and i think of course tomorrow we seem to be in this present moment in this room right now we seem to be living in a moment where some long-held conceptions long-held assumptions about the international rules rules of order seems to be really sort of shifting underneath us right it's really scary and and and what have you so um in such a situation um having people play a game where no one knows the rules seems to be quite unfortunate and dangerous right so i was wondering what your your thoughts about that might be um and then this sort of you know question about culturally acknowledging sort of connections but politically being separate well i think you know we can argue that politics is culture right it is the way that people engage with and think about power and how to sort of run their lives and there's a cultural component to that right the the act of voting the act of challenging your representative or what have you so um when we so so i i think i'm sort of interested in your definition of culture and what you think about that um and then finally uh uh keila riley's paper is a really thoughtful look at a very confusing episode right of the mid 20th century that unfortunately has a lot of bodies in its wake but i i found it really interesting that you know yugoslavia or the former yugoslavia is a case where it didn't work out where people who lived in an area that was very multi-ethnic multi-religious multi-linguistic weren't able to kind of keep it together for various reasons as you laid out in your paper so as we look at what's going on in ukraine and i think dr pesano and the earlier panel mentioned that the ukrainian leadership right now seems to be pretty successful in shifting the needle in trying to identify national identity as something based on diversity more civic rather than on these sort of older ethnic religious ties from what you've learned about sort of the mid 20th century what you know about these countries and the way things turned out what do you think the view is from the other side where where it didn't stay together and does ukraine and its present moment offer something of an alternative what are your thoughts on that so those are my comments and i look forward to hearing everything from the panel and questions and what have you now turn it over to professor thunberg all right thanks everybody so first and foremost these are awesome papers to read so it's really good to see that you all are thinking about these things and taking a more scholar look into these into these different topics i was really impressed with the quality of work from from you all at this level so first and foremost really impressed by what you all came up with so i'll go over kind of my comments and then hopefully we'll get some good discussion going from the audience i'll start with the owens piece and i think that the first the first comment that i have is that one of the concerns is that you kind of take a monolithic look of each of these countries so right it's the u.s it's china and it's taiwan and and yes there's a lot of approaches and international relations that allow us to look at states as unitary actors but i think the the riley paper showed us there's a lot going on within the states right so there's a lot that i think you can look beyond just kind of these individual unilateral actors to kind of give yourself a little bit more a little bit more leverage one of the things that i questioned in thinking of that is how you picked the documents that you were looking at right so you said that there were some correspondence that you looked at and then this taiwanese act and that might be the official kind of u.s statement and approach but at the same time you know i i can see the official approach and then the way that the state department defines it and the way that the state the defense department defines it that all of them are going to be a little bit different and that can add to the complexity of the ambiguity uh that you might that you might be thinking about so you can look into some different uh documents uh some different documents as well on that point you you also kind of want to look at the flip side so not just the way that the u.s is defining these things but how is taiwan receiving this kind of strategic ambiguity and how does that shape their actions um in some in some different ways you have a really good definition given that though you still have a really good definition of strategic ambiguity i think one thing that i would like to see is a little bit better definition of tension um so you know does increased military spending necessarily equal tension uh there's a lot of different types of tension that are out there uh and i think that that could be defined a little bit better uh as you kind of go through these case studies you also say that china's tension is increasing and therefore its military spending is really increasing well you know in this kind of realist world there's a lot of threats out there so china's military spending might be increasing for things completely unrelated to taiwan right and there's a lot of challenges and especially on the world stage a stronger military a stronger force gives powers a bigger voice and china wants to have a bigger voice on the world stage so they might just be bolstering up their military for completely unrelated reasons to taiwan and that's something that can be really difficult to entangle but something to disentangle but something to to potentially think think about one of the last things that you said in your policy implications talked about kind of a us red line right so if if uh china or taiwan crosses this red line the us is going to get involved um and i would challenge you to maybe think about that because lines by their nature are tested right and china will want to test that line uh and that can that can raise credibility issues for the united states um but on that point at what point does strategic ambiguity really start to fail and the united states does have to step in and we do have to say okay we're going to do something what does that look like and when does that happen and is kind of a red line the way that we want to go or are there some different uh are there some different approaches um on the riley piece uh so in in the sense that that oans can take kind of a lesson from the riley piece and look deeper into the into the state i think that the riley piece can can kind of generalize a little bit more so in reading the paper you do a really excellent job in kind of developing this timeline and this narrative and you introduce the characters and you introduce the complexities of it but i think that it needs to be broadened and you need to step outside of ukoslavia a little bit to try to give us some broader generalizations so really good details of events and actors but what does this tell us a little bit more broadly about things like ethnic conflict ethnic conflict um how can we apply this to other international cases right are there other case studies that we could apply this to there's a lot of different ethnic conflicts going in going on within afghanistan right now how can we apply this to that how can we how can we look at kind of spillover effects from major conflicts into some of these kind of secondary or or tertiary areas and how that might have an impact um and how do we determine when outside actors are actually getting involved right so you gave an example of how different outside actors ended up getting involved in this but trying to generalize and understand what's drawing them in in a broader picture i think could be really beneficial so i think kind of taking a taking a step back and kind of looking at the bigger picture would really help uh ground your paper a little bit more uh the walsh uh the walsh paper i really thought was super interesting right so you're you're looking at the the role of of art and understanding one of the worst things in humanity right of conflict and war and i i would encourage you as you continue to develop this paper to think about how the the humanity of these individuals are reflected in the art that they're producing when it's a group of people that can't can't do anything else right they they don't have any other outlets so they're kind of leaning on this idea of art and the impact of art and i think that that's really valuable in a lot of ways and something that you can develop more um as i started to read the paper and even as you were kind of going through it in the in the presentation one thing that i i think you can work on is how you approach this this art right so i think there's two ways you can do it one is you can look at the real world events uh that are happening in iraq and then you can say all right well here's how it's been portrayed in art by these individuals on the ground right um and another way that you could potentially do it is really flesh out what these different artistic pieces are who are the characters what are the events and then relate it back to the to the real world events right but either way i think you want to make sure that you're really focusing on the art and kind of uh building up uh building up that conversation you're focusing on on things that were created by the iraqi people uh and one of the things you said in your presentation was that there's this us iraq culture clash it would also be really interesting to compare how us folks have covered these things right because i'm guessing it's going to be fundamentally different um or how europeans have covered these things and kind of showcase you know how different cultural approaches have looked at these um have looked at these these very difficult very difficult issues um the last thing i would say is you you mentioned a couple interviews that you that you did you should really build that up right talk about the interviews that you're doing that's a lot of work and that's something that you should uh that you should really be focusing on incorporating into your paper um because that gives a lot of life to the things that you're doing and that gives kind of a primary uh a primary connection to the to the work that you're putting together uh so really good papers everybody i really i really enjoyed reading them uh and i'll turn it back over to our moderator for some for some questions thank you uh at this time i'd like to invite any members of the audience to come down we have two microphones down here you can ask some questions of our panelists here while you guys think that over maybe come up with some queries for our student presenters i think i'll give them an opportunity to maybe weigh in on some of the comments that were made by the discussants any thoughts any reactions uh anything like that feel free to jump in so that's a great point about looking at what external factors led to allied an an influx of allied support so between 1941 and 1942 the allies provided very little support very little in the way of material support to to anyone in Yugoslavia and if we think about what what wartime events were happening in world war two at that time the allies were frankly on their heels um and and weren't too concerned with what was going on in the Balkans but at the end of 1942 the british and the and the americans had seen some pretty good success in north africa they turned around rommel's army um and that allowed them to to see a broader view the other um the other impetus that led to additional allied material support into Yugoslavia is their unwillingness to open up a second front already um and so the way that they saw they could do that is by sending guns and war material to Yugoslav uh partisans i i use the term partisans being partisans and the and the Chetniks um to appease Stalin so that he the the allies could say see we are supporting you without actually having to get skin in the game any other comments from panelists or should we open it up to questions okay i believe this gentleman over here was first uh please identify yourself and offer your query hello all right my name is august grary and uh i wanted to go off of walsh paper walsh's paper uh given that our topic discussions today they covered a lot of how uh nation building and the spreading of democracy shouldn't be part of us foreign policy i wanted to ask is it realistic that this that uh nation building will ever not be part of us foreign policy considering the influence of politicians such as uh john mccain john carrey the bush and clinton families uh dick chaney and others who may have economic interest in keeping the military industrial complex afloat thank you so i think from what i know i think it's unrealistic to say that the us will reach a point where we are not involved in nation building of other countries just because of the amount we have meddled in other nations as it is already and we've kind of established this role as the protector of democracy across the world which i think is an unrealistic goal of the us in general uh i guess the second part to that answer would be should we be involved in nation building and spreading democracy my answer to that is really no um i think we when we spread democracy in general we use the military and as i spoke about greatly when you destroy someone's home they're not going to want to hear what you're going to say so i think that that did i get to your your question there okay okay thank you okay thank you uh yes sir yes uh lau goldstein i'm at i'm at brown university and with defense priorities as well and i i just want to really commend a fantastic panel i mean i learned something from all the papers and all the comments as well and uh so congrats to all their um and and i would say you know i think we have to reflect how great a university is in our country too where we you know are so honest about our own mistakes and we don't just sort of pass on to the next crisis but we actually sit and think very hard about the meaning of this after all we we did that we were responsible for that um but i would like to as a mostly china specialist let me address strategic ambiguity because it's critically important after all the economists last year i think rightly said that taiwan straight is the most dangerous place in the world and i would submit that that is still true even after what we saw in ukraine um and uh i think you did an outstanding job dealing with a such a complicated issue but i would just uh let me also add on to the the good commentary about the paper you know i'm curious what is you know in your mind what is cultural reunification i mean that that's a pretty novel concept so maybe you can unpack that a little for us but let me also make a quick comment on the arm sales because you're you're onto something and by the way your recommendation extremely brave right because the conventional wisdom is oh let's just you know how about how about another 20 billion in arm sales and won't that be great and by the way a lot of americans getting fabulously rich off this so you know what's wrong with that well you rightly point out there is something wrong with that because it is fueling a cycle so what to do and here i would just say maybe there's a lesson maybe you have a thought on this maybe there's a lesson from ukraine right in ukraine turns out some some pretty simple weaponry actually you know javelins and stingers infantry weapons turn out to be absolutely critical and maybe it's not the fighter aircraft which many of us who study the issue honestly we don't think those will get off the ground because they'll all be destroyed in initial missile strikes so maybe what the answer is to kind of go to these uh less high tech weaponry that don't inflame the situation and yet we've seen that they can be very effective so i just throw that out as an idea to reflect on but but i commend your uh you know you took some brave positions in those conclusions thank you thank you very much sir that was very flattering um the policy implication part was the biggest thing i struggled with in this paper uh because i can identify all the problems i can't identify all the solutions very well and the cultural reunification is very difficult to put into policy um because it's it how do you make a policy about a culture um the biggest draw i got from that was like i mentioned uh you started to see an ease of tension in the 1970s and 80s and i think that was because there was a larger laissez faire stance from the united states there was less influence with the united states um so that's why i was thinking my my policy implication was to try to create that again where the united states is not so heavily involved in taiwan and china and that they can kind of peacefully duke it out themselves without the united states looming over as that sort of uh nuclear button i i guess i would say thank you very much for the comments thank you sir yes as soon as that uh that war broke out i was immediately thinking taiwan um because it it's it's like a textbook like apply this to that sort of thing and they're two very very different situations but in terms of us support of an invasion in a complicated situation like that i think there's strong parallels i think it was last week in the news there was a discussion about a chinese whistleblower that had leaked information that there was going to be some sort of invasion in the fall and that that that was pushed back i don't know how accurate that information is there's a lot of misinformation with russia right now um but that that that would make sense to me that china from a chinese perspective like we were going to have an invasion and now we're seeing the failures of russia's invasion maybe we want to rethink this i see china culturally as more of a long-term planner with their with their decisions their decisions so i i can assume reasonably that they would look at the issue of russia and think we need to rethink this in terms of the united states i mean i haven't seen them really we're still ambiguous as hell we haven't changed that but thank you okay i think we got time for the two remaining questions yes hello my name is ching shu and i'm an international student from taiwan and i'm also have some questions about the taiwan and china issue and first of all i want to actually express my agreement with you about this kind of like this kind of leaning towards strategic from strategic ambiguity to clarity kind of like situation since you know from uh the u.s. perspective we really want to push that elasticity of taiwan relation act to a more to to a more you know pro kind of like taiwan kind of stance especially when you talk about like last year american taiwan institute actually confirmed there are some first groups of a first special operation group in operating the area but uh you know but my question for you is how it's kind of like beating on the death horse but how feasible do you think that culture uh cultural revolution not sorry culture reunification is to the boats party especially when professor kim actually actually talk about politics is really tied to the culture and since both both sides like you know a communist and democratic stance so i think that's my question about uh culture reunification thank you i guess part of my answer to that is um it's getting harder as time goes on because there's generations of of people that are born in taiwan and they see themselves more as taiwan than chinese chinese and i don't think that the cultures necessarily need to see themselves as chinese but you've you've got language and cultural similarities that government should not inhibit and i think that that like i mentioned that had started to happen and then we got all up in the politics issue and it crushed it and i think i do blame china for that i'm a little biased but i don't know how policy is going to work with that i'm still wrestling with that i'm still trying to find a good way to put it into words about how something like that could be fostered and when you get into legal jargon it's difficult to impose things like that on sovereign nations and then the obvious complexity of considering taiwan a sovereign nation or not it gets very sticky but i i agree and i think that the cultural issue is the most important and it's also the most difficult and it gets harder every day i think professor kim had something to add just to add on to that you know from the perspective of russia or china why is ukraine or taiwan important right or why are they dangerous i think you know your you know idea about culture it's because ukraine's not a place right it's an idea taiwan's not really a place it's an idea of what chineseness could be or russianness could be and that alternative is dangerous absolutely thank you uh yes last question my name is max weber i am a high school junior at st johnsbury academy and as you accurately pointed out the war in iraq was a fairly major failure in terms of democratizing and libera liberating and they a people oppressed by a dictator i have noticed that as a recently the united states has become much more hesitant when it comes to where it's using military force in order to protect and secure democracy abroad let's take the withdrawal from afghanistan as an example and my question to you would be where is that red line that you talked about where the united states would consider the use of active military force in the defense of taiwan are you asking me or him me okay because he's the one who talked about the red line so i was a bit confused but uh so first of all one thing i didn't say that i really think is true and people are going to disagree with me but i think the war on terror in general is the greatest military failure the us has ever had and i think that we see this decrease in trying to send military places trying to influence other countries with these ideas of democracy because of that failure i don't i personally don't believe there is a line where we should be using military might to influence a nation towards democracy i think that the idea of that is ludicrous if i'm to use a strong word because i think again like i've spoken about if we invade a nation and we destroy it with military might people aren't going to be all for democracy they're going to seek something else or maybe if they do seek democracy it's not going to be with us and i think we're just plowing we're pushing money into these conflicts that uh at the end of the day aren't going to bear fruit for us so i hope i answer your question there you were very specific thank you thank you max and thanks to all of you uh it's my pleasure to really wrap up our first day of events at the peace and war summit i want to thank you for all being here i want to thank you for the tremendous support from the audiences from norge university once again but uh best way to end would be to thank our panelists one more time please


Alright, so executive decision time. So I've realized that I've become two, three days behind on my daily vlogs. It is Monday now, it's the first day of peak week. Peak week is the five days preceding the competition. It's like that's when the most strategy goes into place and the most manipulation of diet and water and supplements and all of that to culminate into this. You want to time it perfectly so that it culminates to this moment while you're on stage at the competition and looking your absolute best. So this is Monday, first day of peak week and I feel as though for those, especially for those of you who are watching in real time wanting to know the updates, it's going to be more interesting to you and bring more value to you if you can see the vlog from the day before so that tomorrow you can watch today's activities and so on and so forth and not have to wait two or three days lagging behind. So I've decided to scrap the last two or so days of vlogging that I did. There wasn't a whole lot that happened anyway. So I just think this will be a lot more immediate and more interesting to those of you who are actually following in real time and I think most of you who are watching this are watching as I post them and I know a lot of you have been like, Rafe, it's okay if you miss a day of vlogging, don't worry about it, blah, blah, blah. So I'm hitting your advice and taking your advice and yeah, so that'll take some of this strain and stress off my shoulders as I go into this week. I already have a lot of stuff that's projects that I have to work on and stuff like that in addition to the competition, but yeah. So that will help me kind of refocus and start fresh. So today I'm going to work on this cocktail video for this week for Plus Life. I need to go get some ingredients for the cocktail and then head over to the restaurant where hopefully it'll be open so I can use it as a location for the shoot and then aside from that, getting my workout in and my cardio in, my eating of course. Just finished creating this cocktail video, at least I got the footage, so I'm going to go home and edit that out. It should be pretty good. I wish I could drink this because it honestly sounds pretty good to me. This is it right here, cocktail, it's going to be like a twist on an old dash but I made it more fall with a little bit of orange and fig, so that should work out nicely for the video.  My workout realized what a nice day it is today and that I should take some time to go by the pool.  This is exactly what I need right now. It's like, it's making me feel relaxed and kind of getting rid of a lot of anxiety that I had going into this week, so I'm going to try to do this as much as I can this week before Saturday. Look at how nice this looks. Okay guys, so I have to be quiet because I'm not supposed to be in here, so there was a sign posted on the gym door saying that it's closed for renovation and I'm like hail to the now because I need to get my cardio in and right now the gyms are closed near me, so I got to get my cardio on right, so I walk in and this is what I see. But you'll notice how much better the lighting is if you saw my last videos with video of the gym. This is good lighting. I wish this was here the whole time. Anyway, it's good that they're renovating. However, the treadmills are still plugged in, so I'm going to take the plastic off and just do my thing and then I'll put it back after I'm done.


Oh, hey there beautiful I didn't see you there. No, I see you. You look great. You always look great We're actually gonna go over one of my worst fears people going from Why do I dig my grave deeper and deeper and deeper every time I talk about brown hair Here's the thing. I do not have anything against brown hair. I joke. I kid I push it too far sometimes and you know what you brunettes out there. I'm sorry I love you more than you will ever understand and thank you for being here. Let's see how many brunettes are in the world 75 to 85 percent of the world actually has brown hair I should probably try and win my love back from the brunette fam squad out there because guess what? Probably 75 percent or 85 percent of you watching have brown hair.  I hope that makes you feel more special And I hope you'd find it in your heart to forgive me for all my brunette comments that I've made over the years I joke I swear it's a joke man So today we're watching a bunch of people go from blonde to brunette and very dark brunette and some people don't do it Right and everybody uses box side to do it which is Don't do that. We'll get into it later. You guys know how I feel about these things I shouldn't repeat myself a million times like I already do also I have a giveaway going on I'm giving me a bunch of awesome makeup and hair stuff hair tools everything You can see it in my previous video from Thursday what the giveaway has in it All you're gonna do is follow me on Instagram at grab onto my see and X model hair and show your love to be entered into a new Giveaway the giveaway winner will be announced on October 31st on my Instagram story So you don't hear from me. You probably didn't win moving on. Let's watch these videos. Let's do it All right, so our first video is by Sarah Gingo and this is I did my hair from bleach blonde to black. Ah She is really She is using nice and easy Natural looking color in 5m. I don't know what the M stands for but the five is like a dark brown probably in clear all and she has very Very very light hair to start with the textbook way from blonde to brunette You should always fill their hair and if you don't know what filling hair means well I'm about to tell you filling hair refers to adding back the tone in your hair that you're missing her hair is blonde She's trying to go very dark brown So she needs to probably put orange and red back in her hair before doing the darker color over that However, the rules are meant to be broken and you don't always need to do that It's not that important in a lot of cases just the correct formulation Make sure you always have a lot of gold in your dark brown color That way it kind of adds a filler in and the reason we do fillers is big cuts If you don't fill the hair you get a very hollow sort of brown in order to make a very dark brown Usually you need a little bit of red orange and yellow in that color in your hair fiber in order to make a very deep beautiful rich brown appear on top of your hair not filling it you might get more of a hollow brown because you don't have all of the Necessary elements in order to create a beautiful shimmering deep Brown I don't know what's in this nice and easy and probably neither does she and her hair is probably very porous Okay, the odds are against her you cannot say she doesn't look go with this blonde hair tell me somebody out there Tell me I mean I would probably go a little bit lighter with the brows on her or do they go more cool tone brown on her eyebrows? But love the blonde it looks beautiful. It's very pure toned very even all the way through and I think it looks great So we'll see what happens with the brown. I'm not judging yet Okay, we're starting on the roots I guess it's fine in this case because she needs to lighten those roots because they are the darkest part of her hair Oh, I'm really worried about this though that band is probably gonna lighten and then she's gonna end up with the same brown all the way through Oh, it is already so dark Oh Wow, so it looks like she was using a more red toned brown Which is probably good because she needed to replace that red in her hair that was lacking I'm not sure how to feel about it. It's probably not gonna turn out red. I think she wants it My hand might have been calmed down I'm nervous I believe just filled her hair I believe with red color like I was talking about and now she's going over with a dark brown black color So look Sarah is doing it right, but Sarah why are we using box dye? You just don't need it that much ammonia on your blonde hair. It is going to ruin it for no Reason you don't need that much. This would have been a fine process. She would have done it completely, right? If she just didn't use box dye and that is because there's so much ammonia in it You don't even know what the developer is. Is it 10 is it 20s 30 40? We don't know you did not need to use that So she is going back on her roots and honestly, I feel like this might look oh Oh A different eyebrow color. I'm forming my thoughts here. Hold on So I'm still filming my thoughts. I'll be right there Okay, I'm about to Dig my hole deeper and deeper. Do I think she looks bad? Hell No, do I think she looks better as a brunette? She looks really good both ways Listen, I would have just changed the eyebrow color before but I had to each their own Okay, it's just my opinion. However her eyebrow color looks way better here. I don't get it I would have like this brown color with the blonde, but I do like the brown. I think it's just the one Dimensional box dye brown that I have a problem with I actually really do it the brown on her It's beautiful with her skin tone and makes look very glowy and healthy definitely gives her a different vibe But she looks a really like intelligent and like studios with brown hair where she looks like more of a fun girl With the blonde hair and like ooh like let's go out Kind of girl. It's whatever you're into. I mean whatever I would add just some highlights to make it less one-dimensional, you know It doesn't need to be blonde highlights It can be like a lighter brown just something to add a little bit of extraness into it and make it look more professionally done Otherwise, it just kind of looks like yeah, it's box dye at home. That is what it looks like Another I Guess you liked it. All right Moving on this next video is by oh, hey Jenny My prediction is that her hair is gonna look really good brown right now She has this kind of ombre moment going on and listen Asian hair is so tough to lift. It's never Pure blonde it always has a bunch of yellow and silver mixing through it And it's always kind of a little different tones. Okay, and oftentimes it's never perfect. All right. It's tough to lift It's like very straight course thick hair, which is pretty much the hardest thing to lift So you get a lot of these variations of color all over the place and that's what we're seeing now It doesn't look bad.  We're number one like we are the best We are the best diner in the world number one You know, you can just put that on packaging and there is no actual Legalities behind that you can literally put on your package. We are number one haircare brand or anything What is number one even mean? You're one in what number one red So she is filling the hair Which is what I definitely have Not much sectioning going on You could honestly do this at home you really want to just don't use bog style It's literally like go to Sally's and buy the proper things needed now every color line is different when filling hair So I can't really say exactly what you need just your research But typically, you know, you can fill with 10 volume or doing permanent color and you can fill with red Demi permanent color that we're not using any developer anything That's gonna lift your hair or damage it at all You're staying away from that and then you can deposit the permanent color over it Whether that be 10 volume again or 20 volume depends on the color line, but it's the same thing It's just that you know what you're getting in the tube instead of being like, oh, this is box Yeah, but what's in the damn box die also you can pick the exact tone you want say you want dark hair You want a very cool tone? You can do that say you want dark hair We want a very red tone you can do that blue tone black hair You can get that you can get specific colors and specific ingredients when you're using professional color when using box I you can't not so she's avoiding her roots also. It's interesting Okay, we're getting there That's not how it works The reason why the package says to leave it on for 45 minutes because that's the exact time it takes to color the hair It takes time to swell the hair swells the hair for the first Oh God, I can forget a little bit but like 15 20 minutes I think or 10 whatever you get the point portion of the time swells the hair portion of the time color Molecules go in distribute into the hair and that is the process that it is and it takes a certain amount of time For that to happen. So if you wash it out too early, there's not gonna be enough time for the color molecules to actually go in The hair and fully set in there So I wouldn't wash out color any earlier or later later. It also doesn't matter You can leave color in for two days or 45 minutes like it recommends and nothing's gonna change.  Here's the thing I like the dark hair on her a lot better than the blonde But also it would look better. It was professionally done or with the right products. You can tell it's box color I'm sorry in salons. We pretty much like never really do one overall color And that's what makes it different than an at-home color job It's because we've put variations of tones in your hair so it looks more natural looking It doesn't look like you just threw box dye on your head and made it all on color Um, so that's the difference you're getting with salon color versus your home color But if you're not too picky, you can do this at home. I do notice a difference However, a lot of people will be like, oh, this looks awesome and not notice the difference So I'm just being picky and crazy, but she looks great. I do really like the dark hair on her However, I wish it was more of her natural tone instead of this like bluish black going on It's kind of like bordering on too dark for her skin and too cool for her skin tone But looks nice. I'm not saying she looks bad I'm just saying there's a more optimal result for her. Her hair does look healthier though It was still I guess that's all that really matters Exactly That is all that matters is that she is happy. Let's watch one last video. It's by Madeline Pompeii Dying my hair at home. She goes from blonde to black.  I can't say how much you look at your eyes or your eyebrows like your eyes your eyebrows Don't ever come to me When clients say that to me like I'm very picky I want like this and like this like this which is how I am too, but I'm like See my friend I don't think we're gonna work out. I like to do people's hair the way I want to do people's hair And now she's gonna ruin it Why this has happened all of the time Nutriese and we're not filling apparently. We're not gonna fill the hair It's funny because pretty much nobody can use one of these box ties to go through a whole head Which is so smart with these box tie brands because they just Purposely make them small so you have to buy more of them. See it looks really cool with her makeup, too Like she looks very artsy and cool.  It's I really do generally like this Good idea Because everybody else ended up with mad staining dude And also though you gotta be really careful because I can see in the front of your hair that you have some conditioner on your hair Which might not allow the Color to set in as much as it should. We wouldn't want that because that'd be tragic and that would make me want to Die. She is just going in Dude Half that was your roots I'm worried. I'm a little teapot. That's all that matters, right?  Hmm. There is no sectioning. There's why section when you could Not section it's my question for you today. I'll come nervous Oh Shoot Really like it. I thought I was gonna actually not like this one the most it honestly looks really good However, I can see a bit of spotting going on. She should probably just do the die again She kind of looks good. What do you think? Yeah, you think she looks good? Okay. There's nobody there. Um, she looks great Let's see what she thinks. It looks so shiny Yeah, that's true. Wow. It looks really shiny Oh my what is this day? What is somebody marking in the calendar as brad likes brunette's day? Just kidding. I always like brunette. Stop coming for me. I swear. I love you I love each and every one of you no matter what your hair color is. Whoa Big girl, those were some belong to brunette transformations. I'm so surprised This is the first time I made this if they're just reacts video before in this category You would think this would be the one of the first things I would do it was blonde and brown It's pretty like, you know, obvious kind of fun video to watch But there you go. I gave it to you belong to brunette. I was shook. I hope you were too And I actually like the transformations pretty much all of them. Maybe I'll be going brunette soon Oh girl No, thank you I think the most I would do is my natural color, which is like dark blonde, but no, thank you. No, thank you brown I'm good. He don't forget to follow me on instagram bramonoysi and follow my haircare brand xmodo hair Also new products being released soon. So save your coin if you want to get in on the Hat let you know more about that soon. Um, we make sure you follow the instagram to get updates on that Enter my giveaway ending on october 31st and that is all for today. Thank you so much for watching. Don't forget to live your extra And I'll see you next time. All right. Bye


Greetings folks, Dave from Mac Geekab here in Las Vegas for CES 2024. And last night I met with the folks from Shargi, S-H-A-R-G-E. Like Charge with an S. Cool stuff. Not inexpensive, but very cool. So we will start with some of their fun little chargers built for people like us. The back one that's plugged in now with the Matrix thing, that's the Retro 67. It's got a couple of ports on the top. It can do 67 watts. That's $69. There's the Retro 35 right in front of it with the little Mac logo. That's 35. And then this is the Shargi 170. I plugged my phone. Countdown time, how much power is being slurped out by my phone. It can do a full 170 watts. It is a 24,000 milliamp hour capacity on the battery that's in there. Nice big display. Love that, right? Then, oh yeah, it's still cooking. I guess I gotta unplug. Okay, that's fine. I like to get charged. It's nice to have a little sip. They've got the little space elevator, but one of the cool things I like is the Ice Mag, which they're going to show us here. This is a MagSafe. It's cheap, seven and a half watt wireless. It's got a fan in it. So watch when it kicks on, not only does the fan kick up, but the LEDs come on to show you that the fan's there. It cools itself. That keeps charging better. We've all had the hot phone phenomenon, right? It's not really a phenomenon.  And so the Ice Mag takes care of that. Fun stuff. Then we can move on to the Shargeek 100. 25,600 milliamp hour capacity, 100 watts in and out. It's got multiple outputs, including an adjustable DC output. You can see next to the thing that she's plugging into there. This thing is great, but because it's 100 watts, Airline Safe still shows you all the stuff, how much is being slurped out. It shows you the temperature of the battery. It shows you the capacity of the internal battery, and it got a little blurry there, but you can see this is not, like I said, not inexpensive. This is 219 bucks. This is the Shargeek 100, but very cool stuff. I love this. Love finding those fun things, especially that matrix thing. Stay subscribed. Make sure you thank our sponsors, CCC Backup, Collide, MacUpdater. They are our CES 2024 coverage sponsors, and we couldn't be doing this without them, and we couldn't be doing it without you. So thank you for watching. Stay subscribed. Subscribe to the show, and don't get caught.


Now the National Chairman of the Labour Party, Julius Abrey, says that no newly elected National Assembly member under the party will defect to others. Speaking in a voucher after meeting with members of the National Assembly elect, the chairman noted that the party would make a difference in deepening the nation's democracy. Now the Labour Party Chairman said they want 8 Senate seats and 34 seats in the lower chamber. Those who are elected on this platform, we know the enormous responsibilities will carry on behalf of the Nigerian people. I'm speaking for other Labour Party members, I know for certain I'm not defecting anywhere. I see Labour as a platform that we have started to build, we haven't gotten it to where we wanted to go, but we're just starting so we can use Labour to show that leadership can be different, parties can be different, where there's equity, people are egalitarian, those sorts of things. So I'm definitely not. And from the meetings we've been having, I think the other Labour Party people too, especially National Assembly members, they are the ones I've been interacting with the most are not defecting either. To whom much is given, much is expected. For us in Labour Party, we are where we are today because of the people. I don't think we will shift, we will remain where we are, we will remain in Labour Party. Today we remain Labour and Labour shall remain. Hello, hope you enjoyed the news. Please do subscribe to our YouTube channel and don't forget to hit the notification button so you get notified about fresh news updates.