of texas says i want to challenge, i want to change the rule that we don't discriminate in our elementary schools about what the child's status is and i want to change the rule and it really is on immigration enforcement whether states can stand in issue with the federal government. the last they think that people should keep their eyes on if they're not, the use of parole matters and attention. and parole is letting someone into the united states because-- >> we take you live now to the brookings institution where fiona hill, the former national security council director for russia, will join other foreign policy professionals and scholars for the discussion of the geopolitics of the russia-ukraine. this is c-span2. >> good afternoon and evening to those of you who may be joining us from other parts of the country or other parts of the world.

i'm suzanne maloney, i'm vice-president and director of foreign policy here at brookings institution, on behalf of foreign policy and the talbot center for security and technology, i'm truly delight today welcome you to the special event today. our first annual night forum on politics. this forum is named in honor of brookings phillip h knight and made possible through his gift to the foreign policy program. and the overarching goal of the phil knight gift is supporting essential research into international security, grand strategy, military affairs, american alliances, and security partnerships and trans national threats. we're deeply grateful to phil for making this ambitious effort possible and for enabling us to bring together a truly phenomenal group of scholars today to discuss u.s.

grand strategy and u.s. foreign policy at a time of heightened frictions among great powers and tremendous risk within the rules-based international order. it's hardly surprising that we chose to focus on russia's war with ukraine. with the far-reaching global consequences, it's essential for us to take stock of these devastating events and their impact. i'm especially grateful that the knight forum has created an opportunity to hear analysis and insights of several of our top brookings experts. we have three panel discussions focusing on different aspects. war today. the first panel focuses on the trajectory of the war itself in battlefield dynamics. and our second europe's security landscape and the impact and crisis on the transatlantic relationship. our third and final panel, examines the global security architecture and focuses on

asia, south asia and ahead, they've contributed to a series of papers which analyzed the crisis and provide crucial commentary on ways to help end the war and repair its damage, adjust transatlantic and european security architecture and policies to handle the fundamentally transformed strategic landscape that's resulted from the war and to assess the broader implications of the conflict. these papers are named in honor of american statesmen and our former brookings institution president, the talbot papers on implications of russia's invasions on ukraine have offered critical policy options during a time of crisis. played a pivotal role in shaping american foreign policy in the region as deputy secretary of state and ambassador at large and special advisor to the secretary of state for the newly apartment states for the former soviet union during the clinton

administration and in subsequent scholarship during his time as president of brookings. while strobe could not be with us here today, we know he and his wife barbara are watching from afar and we wish them well and look forward to welcoming them back to brookings soon. i'd like to take a moment to one of my colleagues who helped bring this together. my colleague is the phillip h knight and research policy program here and returned from a meeting with president zelenskyy himself. this is one of the many ways in which brookings scholars have drawn on their expertise to meet the demands of this extraordinary moment and to provide insights and analysis of the far reaching consequences of the war. before we get fully underway, a final reminder that we are on the record today and we're also streaming live. so, those who are viewing virtually, please send your questions via e-mail to events

at brookings@edu or on twitter using the #knight forum. for those in the room we'll reserve a few moments at the end of each panel for questions and answers. staff with microphones will come around. now, over to you, mike, to introduce the first panel. >> thank you, greetings, everyone. suzanne, we're lucky to have you running the program and amy lou in at the institution. and thanks to phil knight. you may notice i'm not rachel martin, she was originally to be our moderator for panel one, those of how will listen to morning edition will know why she's not here, she's covering the queen's funeral in london on location and we're congratulate feud as we honor the queen in our own way that you're here with us. and we will have three panels, concentric circles, moving from the immediate conflict to think

about the broader europe future and it will go al 10:00 and we're talking about the war. and let me talk about the war, i don't just mean the battlefield, it's the west trying to apply pressure to vladimir putin including with economic sanctions and the way in which that influences global energy and markets among other things. and two of our four panelists focus on these as well as military matters. we have the whole spectrum as well as broader dynamics covered here and we'll proceed with cat lynn kaitlin talmage speaking first, a fellow at georgetown university. she and melanie, sitting next to her are two of the best. and doug works with brookings nonresident senior fellow one of the world's best economic sanctions and warfare experts

if i could say so myself and i've learned a lot from him the past seven, eight months as well as before and thinking through the ways in which economic pressure can be applied against russia and the ways which we can make ourselves more resilient. and samantha to my immediate left is adept at describing these issues. one of the experts at the energy markets here at brookings and think through who had as got the upper hand, putin or europe on issues of natural gas, as well as the broader question how the world is adapting to this crisis and trying to respond to keep the oil and gas flowing, keep the energy prices reasonable even as we also see how we can try to give vladimir putin greater incentives to end this terrible conflict. i'm going to stay a couple of words as i warm up here and begin, based on my recent trip of last week, to poland and ukraine and starting with questions for our panelists and as suzanne said, have time for

all of your thoughts in the last 20 minutes or so of the hour. let me just make, if i could, maybe four broad observations about the trip and i'm not going to overstate what i accomplished or what i saw. i was only in ukraine for a couple of days, only in kyiv, for a little over a day and with hats off to a polish think tank, called pism, polish institute for international affairs and organized the whole trip and provided security and so forth and set up the meeting with president zelenskyy. so, one observation, and these are not meant to be comprehensive, just a couple of points to help set the context for our conversation. one observation is that ukraine itself, despite the ongoing tragedy, and i didn't get close to the front lines, but the preponderance of the country and certainly the capital looks pretty good and hats off to the ukrainian people for their resilience. you know, when you're looking at the faces of people walking on the sidewalks of kyiv in the

outdoor cafes and the restaurants, where life almost seems half normal, you know, they're all anxious and worried about the future, well aware that the moment now of semi calm in the capital may not last and undoubtedly in most cases or at least in many cases, grieving and mourning the loss of loved ones who have already perished in this terrible conflict, but the appearance and reality of kyiv and even of bucha to the north, with mass killings of ukrainian people, people are walking in the parks and buildings are being repaired, a fair amount of life as far as activity and impressive. the ukrainian people are proving resilient. observation number one and number two, president zelenskyy is more awesome in person than i would have expected. what incredible poise and

courage. certainly, a resolute and focused, you know, concentration on the conflict. constantly on his toes. very aware of the need to maintain security, even within kyiv, knowing the attempts by russia against his life in the past, but still, with a very respectful, affable nature towards other people, very interested in what we had to say. very friendly, very modest, and even with a little bit of a wry sense of humor he was able to maintain in this kind of a tragic time and the reason why i like seeing that, not just that it makes him for charismatic and appearing, but makes him appear as he can handle this indefinitely and i think the war could go on indefinitely and the ukraine is going to need its leadership team and people for the fight if that's what it takes. i don't see signs of exhaustion. i don't see signs of any kind

of loss of balance or composure in the way he conducts himself and it was encouraging. this is the morning after his little car accident, too, so i can happily report, no limp, no measurable impact of any kind on-- and he had been in the day before honoring the liberation of a city by ukrainian forces. and n.a.t.o., and polish efforts for the supply lines into ukraine are impressive. i'm not going to say much about the details, obviously, some of the details are out in the press, but a big part of the effort is, of course, not to give away too many of the details and maintain concealment and resilience in the event that russia tries to interfere more with the flow of supplies going into southeastern poland and from there into ukraine by various means and it's quite well-organized. my hat's off to n.a.t.o. and specifically the poles to do

what with the supply of material into ukraine and fourth point, i'll make this brief and we can come back to it later in discussion, if you wish, probably carefully clear to most, this fight is nowhere near over and the fact that recent momentum has shifted a little bit more in favor of ukrainian armed forces should not make us complacent in any way, shape and form. i'm happy to report ukrainians are not complacent. and some like pundits saying it could be by the end of the year, optimistic interpretation, policies should certainly not be based on that presumption and the ukrainians are not basing that on that presumption. we're asking for help and from the press, asking for more weaponry, and i'm going to quickly mention that my own observation, just this past week, we should indeed continue

to provide more than the 15 billion in u.s. assistance and other allied help that's already come through by way of military aid, but i'm more inclined to think that we should beef up the missile and air of cities and tank force, in western, providing long range attack missiles not because vladimir putin says it's a red line, but when i look at the various target sets and missions that lie above, tanks look moreltively to me. thank you for putting up with my long introduction and i wanted to give you that quick battlefield report and now if i could turn to kaitlin and ask you if there are any comments you've got how you see the battlefield dynamics and you've been thinking about your expertise with nuclear affairs and escalatory dynamics and the role of nuclear threats and deterrents in this conflict and the question whether we could at some tragic point in the

future see an escalation. that's a lot to put on your plate at once, but maybe first you could comment on how you see the battlefield itself and then we can go to the conflict. >> thank you mike and everyone and for being part of this discussion. i would say in response to your prompt that i kind of would begin where you ended which is to note that it's just not over. we're very much in battlefield terms at an early point, a midpoint, we don't really know, but i think we have to pump the brakes on some of the euphoria about recent ukrainian gains. and the reality russia controls significant ukrainian territory, not only crimea, but cities, and we don't want to be overambitious what we can infer from the battlefield dynamics thus far. with that being said, i think there are some preliminary

observations we can make about the battlefield dynamics and portend in ukraine and more broadly. i think this is an opportunity to think hard about modern warfare and what that could look like not only in ukraine, but potentially in other theaters which i know is something melanie will discuss as well. the big take away a 30,000 foot level at battlefield dynamics in this war has to do with the importance of nonmaterial factors in battlefield effectiveness, which i think has surprised a lot of people, and by nonmaterial factors, i mean things besides the number of men you have under arms, hardware, tanks, planes, bombs, bullets, that stuff. that stuff matters clearly, but i think if that were what determined military joult outcomes in the modern era, this war would have been over,

and there is a difference between ukraine and russia, prior to the war and many of us, including them, as guilty of this as anyone, really underestimated how well the ukrainians could use the material capabilities that they had in order to generate military power. and in fact, i think what we've really witnessed over the last six months is both an over performance by the ukrainians relative to what we would have predicted based on material capabilities, as well as, frankly, an underperformance by the russians based on what we would have predicted and that has produced a large delta between, you know, what we would have thought based on prior to the war and what actually unfolded which has been effective and powerful. ukrainian resistance. and of course, some of that is clearly due to the infusion of material support to rescue from the west in terms of weaponry and in terms of training efforts. i'm in no way trying to

downplay those, but i would note that building partner militaries and providing military aid to clients and something that the united states have tried lots of places around the world. and spoiler alert, it doesn't always go the way it does in isaac. if you think about the billions of dollars that the united states spent training the iraqi army, the afghan military forces or even, you know, think about the efforts with the south vietnamese military. just because an outside power pumps a lot of aid into a country doesn't mean they'll do what ukraine has been able to do. i think there's some kind of special sauce with respect to the ukraine military performance and i think they were very effective after the shocking loss of crimea in 2014, for instance, in terms of getting their house in in order militarily, developing more

hormoneious military operations and preparing to mobilize their population and have that population be not only motivated to fight, but trained well it fight and the result they have an army with very high morale and good military skills that are able to actually take advantage of the material support that they have received. and we have seen, i think, lots of impressive innovation by the ukrainians with the military capabilities that they have. i mean, it's interesting to think about himars. the united states has provided these and they're an important capability, but i've been impressed by the fact that the ukrainians have gotten good at making himars decoys and they're like dummy himars and the russians have said they've destroyed more than given by

the united states. and because some are decoys. but my point is that's innovative and something that you do with tactical skills, we're seeing the ukrainians able to watch these high speed anti-radiation missiles that go after russian air defenses from migs, and using a western missile on a soviet era, soviet legacy aircraft, which again, that takes innovation and suggests not only there's innovation in the field by these forces about, but their command and control and structures with that centralized innovation. it's not just what they have, it's what they're doing with what they have. and i think their performance, you know, in this regard goes beyond that sort of tactical and operational level. if you think about kind of the operational strategic level, the way that the ukrainians have pulled off the recent counter offensive, how they chose the specific access of

advance. the way that their information operations, frankly, before the launching of this counter offensive gave the russians, impression that maybe the effort or the only effort will be to the south and allowed them to deploy away from the way that ukrainians are from the east. and that's impressive. and if there's one preliminary conclusion i would draw, there's one war the ukrainians are winning and that's the information war. that's an example of it. i think their ability to spur continued support in the west is another facet of that. and conversely, if i could say a couple of things about the other side of the coin, now, i talked about how i think the ukrainians have overperformed relative to what we would have expect based on their material capabilities. i think the russians, as i've said, have underperformed based on what we would have expected. we've seen a lot of tactical and operational mistakes, where

there's just basic military skill that seems to be lacking from some of their operations that may reflect poor training, certainly poor morale, poor logistics, overly centralized command structure where you're not seeing the innovation in the field that i think has characterized the ukrainian performance and of course, at a higher level, i think it's uncontroversial to say that the decision is it to start the war itself reflects some really serious pathologies in russian civil military restrictions that frankly stem from the fact that, you know, russia is a dictatorship in which vladimir putin probably does not get told a lot of things that he doesn't want to hear from his high command and from his military intelligence and i think that that has set russia on a course where, you know, reality is a colliding with expectations in a way that's leading to underperformance. you know, it's interesting if you think with, what is

russia's next step after this counter offensive and these successes, you would think, based on capabilities, that russia would have a greater ability to mobilize manpower from its society. and this is the bedrock, getting people into uniform yet, we've seen hesitation for putin to pull that lever, to call it a war, to call for general mobilization and we have others who i think will be speaking this morning who know a lot more about russian domestic politics than i do, that it points to something going on in putin's domestic calculations he's not willing to utilize this potential source of russian power. but if he wants to reverse ukraine's recent gains and hold onto what he has, i'd expect him to do that or failing that, i'd worry that he might try to turn to other means of

escalating the conflict as a way of trying to coerce a favorable outcome for russia or an outcome that he could say was a success. and to think about it the big conflict, russian strategic or tactical nuclear weapons and russia has a big arsenal for a reason and they are for some weapons that can break up large concentrations of aversary forces and even weapons would have strategic effects and be a coersive tool and not only on the battlefield, but a message to the west, if this doesn't get solved the way i want this, i have more of these in the

garage and other things in the back yard. all right, and so, it's a potential outcome there that i think could be, you know, really concerning and i think the administration is very aware of that and has done a lot of things to manage that escalation that you referenced, and i think it's partly for that exact reason to respect those red lines, but i think we need to keep in mind that russia is a nuclear power and of course, it's not to say that russia nuclear use would be a good option from putin's perspective, but, you know, we could get into a situation where he'd use it as his lease bad option if he's not willing to do things like mobilize his conventional military power or whatever set of domestic reasons. and states have historically sometimes in situations where the status quo is gambling

would be a better option if you think, for instance, why did japan attack pearl harbor did they think they could defeat the united states? no, in the status quo they knew they would be strangled by the u.s. oil embargo, there was a chance engaging in this attack and wiping out the u.s. fleet in pearl harbor they could get the united states to back down and doe destroy one of the u.s.'s way of enforcing that embargo and we all know how that ended. they didn't go into the attack thinking yes, this is guaranteed success, they went into it thinking the status quo, if this continues, i'm doomed. maybe i'll gamble on this other possibility. so i will just, now, stop there at the moment, but i do think that that's kind of where we see the battlefield dynamics now and some things down the road. >> thank you, caitlin, thank

you. and doug, if i turn to you, how do we see the economic war, i'm intrigued, it's obviously complicated and many types of sanctions probably far and beyond what vladimir putin expected and a lot of inability on his part to bring in high technology goods. we've read a lot about that, a lot of digesting of western firms with the supply chain, you know, operations inside of russia and russia seems to be making as much money on the nat gas and oil as ever. who has the upper hand and where is this headed the next few months? >> that's, first of all, thanks to mike and everyone for joining this morning. it's complicated and let me take a step back and first of all, there are multiple layers to this. first of all, there's the support that we, the u.s., the g7, the eu are providing to ukraine, which is a huge economic financial component and second, the more aggressive

warfare elements that we're using against russia. i'm going to start with the latter ones, that you pointed out and i don't want to forget ukraine support as well,it's not just himars and other military, ukraine needs money and where it's going to get that money is important of the short-term aspect of the war, but the longer term, what happens next and i don't think we can lose sight of that. let' start with the russia side. we collectively and the u.s. made a decision at the earliest stages of the battle that we were not going to engage militarily in direct confrontation with russia. n.a.t.o. was not going to cross the line. we were going to limit our support. that does not mean that we were not going to use tactics. there was not hand-to-hand, there was not an enormous emphasis placed on the economics. i think there was a public misunderstanding or appreciation of the asymmetry

in terms of timing of that. so you've read countless articles about are sanctions against russia working? well, they're not working the same way if you drop a bomb on somebody's house. it is destroyed instantaneously, no, sanctions don't work this way, they're not designed to work this way. so i think that they should first of all, have the idea that sanctions are a direct replacement for military engagement and the timing and effect of the sanctions is going to be symmetric to russians against ukraine militarily, that does not mean that they're not working, but if you highlighted the one that people probably understand the least, but that's the most effective in the long-term and of course, we live in the so tight that nobody cares about long-term. and everyone wants instant frat gratification. and the product rule under the export control act, a lot of words there, what you need to know about that, it means that

the u.s. has said any semiconductor chip that is even remotely high-tech, that's not only what goes into military hardware, but it goes into everything that vladimir putin was contemplating as the core of his post fossil fuel economy. we've put a global stop on the export of those chips into russia. that's huge. but it doesn't mean it's going to impact russia's economy tomorrow. what's interesting is we're six months into this war and it's now actually impacting russia's military capacity on the battlefield. i would argue, if you go back to 2014 and the invasion of crimea that some of the restrictions we put on then is also impacting russia's ability to fight on the battlefield now, but it's hard for the public to actually say what we did in 2015 is impacting the war in 2022 because there's not just a direct line that you can draw, but it's meaningful. so, the sanctions that we put

on are huge, median term and long-term. not leslie necessarily short-term. and the question is if it's already. let's step back and other sanctions, the other sanctions,-- sanctions have three different purposes, to deter, to negotiate their leverage and to punish. president biden said we're not using these sanctions as deterrents. whether it was originally the intention to use them as deterrents is water under the bridge, they didn't deter because there's a big war going on and let's take that and park it. negotiating leverage, it's very, very interesting because a lot of people assumed that we would roll back sanctions as part of some negotiated peace deal. while i think that's still we mostly plausible, i think i would emphasize the word remotely rather than plausible

because it's very hard, even someone like president macron in france, negotiated into a peace outcome, has seen the war crimes that we're all seeing, and has started to exhibit behavior inconsistent with rolling back sanctions against an alleged, but fairly obviously, a leader that's engaging in war crimes, repeated multiple war crimes, it's very hard to say we're going to roll back sanctions against you and your regime because we want to sue for piece. so that leaves punishment and we're doing a pretty good job of punishing if you take what i said before in the medium and longer term. in the storm, russia's economy has been resilient and it's resilient in a way, i would push back on the argument that we're funding russia war machines by providing them dollars in euros, and we've

stripped them, they can build up a huge oment of reserves of dollars and euros and they can't do anything with them. one of the problems as a strategic super power we are creating alternative means by which russia is transacting, trade, finance and commerce, not just russia, we're creating sing nalg to russia and china, not so, i'm not going to say adversaries, but not our friends in today's and tomorrow's worlds. we're creating in which the world is migrating away from a dollar-led, euro-led global enforced financial and trade system. i worry about that and i worry about something that samantha is going to talk about, and the potential oil price cap and i think that has an enormous amount of down side and unintended consequences, while it appears if you look at the ruble's strength that the sanctions are not working,

well, throw that metric out of the window and sanctions are working to just working in a longer term horizon than people are thinking about. let me just move over to ukraine for a moment and then i'll hand off, but on what worked for ukraine, the way you need to look at ukraine from a financial and economic perspective is through three basic phases, one, relief. two, recovery, and three, whatever is next. i would argue that it's the likely outcome in a positive case is eu accession. in terms of relief, we're providing ukraine with money, grants, congress is appropriating it, we are giving it to them, and they are receiving it, and they are living hand to mouth. europe is having a harder time of that because a lot of the way the world is structured, particularly, the eu, is to provide debt, not grants. and the problem with providing ukraine with debt is at some point, that debt needs to be

repaid. so every dollar or euro that we or europe or the imf, or the world bank or others provide to ukraine through debt is actually-- it's a good thing they need the money, but it adds to the debt stock and the debt stock ultimately has to be dealt with, if you believe as i do, and most people do, that the relief phase has to include private sector involvement, well, the private sector has, you know, that they want to be good citizens and i'm sure, they also want to get a return and if you're burdening ukraine with enormous amounts of debt, then it is harder to see how the private sector comes in in that next phase, in the rebuilding phase, to actually figure out when i said relief, i meant reconstruction, in the reconstruction phase how they're actually going to invest. so this is tricky, in any of

the institutions that provides them condition-free, here is the check, go run with it for the next phase and there's jockeying that's going on. so i would say that we're enormously generous in our relief efforts, we're being more circumspect in the recovery efforts and those two are very much linked and as i mentioned in my opening comment, eu succession is the ultimate goal for ukraine and that's a process-laden process which will take a decade, but i think that's the goal and that provides the conditions-based structural reforms for ukraine coming out of this, most of which is really based on economic and financial. >> doug, that's great. samantha, i'll go to you, please, and see how you see the energy situation shaping up. who has the upper hand, how well is europe getting through this winter and if this is potentially a multi-year war, how does it has more

disengagement from dependence on russian gas, and what putin might do next, over to you. >> thank you, i'm here to talk about the energy theater of the war and first asked to speak on-- i don't know a darn i think this about military action, and excuse me, the way that most of us are experiencing and feeling this war is through energy markets, how it's affecting most of the people in ordinary lives. russia is the largest energy exporter on the oil side, along with saudi arabia, if you add in natural gas and coal, russia is the largest provider of exports of energy. naturally we'll feel that and it's important to point out this is different from the oil stocks of the 1970's or more recent things we've seen like sanctions on iran. in the 1970's, that was an oil producer saying we do not want to sell you our oil. this is exact opposite.

these are oil consumers saying we do not want to buy your product because of what you're doing with the revenues, it does point it out and because we're trying to make you an international pariah in the realm of punishment. very different than anything the world has tried to do before. and so i think it's important to think about what it is and what we've experienced before. i also want to point out that sanctions serve all the purposes that doug pointed out, but it's also important to point out that they cause pain on both sides. anything that puts sand into the gears of international trade is sure to cause pain for everyone. the idea is just to cause more pain for the party that we're sanctioning rather than for the sanctioner and in this situation with russia as the world's largest energy exporter, that's not an easy calculation and we're feeling that. the place they're feeling it

the most by far is europe, and that's because of europe's reliance on russia natural gas. before the war, 40% of european natural gas were from russia increased over time and in part because of policy decisions, but in part because europe's own native natural gas production was going down. and rather than work on producing a lot of gas fields in europe, which is not really what they're trying to do with the energy transition, they were looking to russia to get them through the transition and into a renewable future. and turns out that hasn't worked out and where the rubber meets the road is in natural gas in europe on-- it's not just likely that russia will cut off to natural gas in winter, the most likely outcome, if you look at where

russia exports to europe come from, from the peninsula that you can turn on and turn off. i talked a lot about oil exports not being a spigot, but the gas exports largely are. and the oil exports, natural gas, they have the ability to do this. it will not harm their future production, and also, they have every reason to do it. i fully expect gas to be, if not completely largely cut off to europe this winter period, that's a very frightening prap proposition for europe and we think of natural gas and power production in the united states, where we use a lot of it. a lot of parts of europe use it in places that are not easily replaced, namely home heating.

think of replacing boiling systems and heaters in millions of homes and that's not going to happen by november and heavy industry where you need high heat and you need to burn something to produce the heat and they're not set up to use any other fuel, i think you're likely to see extremely high prices. you're already seeing talks of rationing and i think you're going to so important trade-offs for homes in northern europe and in the industrial use of gas and everything from steel to glass, this is going to be a real challenge for industrial europe. it is not going to be a pretty winter. and i realize that that's very much a downer forecast, but i also think it's what we should not just prepare for expect. on the oil side, things are different. doug touched on this and touched on the eu and the g7,

focusing on putting cap on the prices of russian exports. this is a policy that looks elegant on its face. we want to buy your oil. we need your oil. you're one of the world's largest exporters. what we don't want you to do is make money off of it. this is a completely new idea. again, elegant on its face, but i have grave concerns about our ability to implement it. both in terms of putin's ability to retaliate and also in terms of the implementation of it itself. the idea is that this will occur through the prevention of western suppliers of insurance and shipping, not allowing them to ship russian oil unless they're following the sanctions. doug brought up what this does, it pushes business away from these western businesses and this may be ugly in the short-term, but it may actually

change the shape of markets in the long-term. there are a million particulars on this, everything from the ability of tanker capacity to go the distances they need to go and it will be early interesting to hear how this plays out, but i think the details on this are devilish and it will be interesting to see how it happens. the last thing i'd like to talk about, a bit more positive in terms of recent positives in the west. i expect putin to react badly to the oil price cap. and what is he going to do, what he does in response is the question. over the long long-term, russia loses period. a transition away from fossil fuels was going to be hard with russia and doug brought up what russia is thinking of doing in the post-fossil fuel economy. what this conflict has done is

made that change steeper and brought it forward in time. because countries aren't just moving away from fossil fuels now, they're preferentially moving away from russia fossil fuels and changes the game for russia, and makes the problem more difficult. if the oil cap, even oil price cap even partially works, a lot of russia oil fields are old, soviet era fields and you can't turn them off and on by turning a spigot. you'll see real reservoir damage in turning off the fuels if they can't produce because the oil has no buyer. no matter how this goes out we're looking at short-term pain for sure, but over the long-term, this is the pain really falls on putin's russia and i think i'll leave it there and leave it on a slightly more optimistic note after a gloomy five minutes of talking. >> samantha, that was sobering

and helpful. now, melanie, you have the job not only extending this analysis to the globe and perhaps the china-taiwan question and integrating so i have two questions for you, one is indeed about china and taiwan and what china may be learning about this conflict and the chances of war and what war could occur over taiwan, heaven forbid, but as you hear the different analyses and integrate them, who might have the upper hand and where the war could go. you've heard kaitlin and i myself point out what it means for the next few months and russia may have the upper hand on escalation options. doug and samantha have talked about how russia is hurting and over time, that the economy really is going to suffer for a variety of reasons and short to medium term, they could be whether they have the

resoluteness to get through a tough winter and i expect putin not to concede whether he sees whether he can break europe in the next few months. how do you see that question and then again, please extend this problem and analysis to east asia. >> thanks, mike, very much for inviting those questions and i will try to only disappoint you slightly by saying that i'm not in the business of making predictions, but i hope to access a lot of the content that you've identified, along with my colleagues, and thanks very much, i'm really pleased to be here for a wonderful occasion like this. so, what i'd like to do is make a couple of observations from the perspective of somebody who thinks very much about u.s. defense strategy and including the alliance structure, and it will touch on a lot of the elements that have already been raised. when i think about the manner in which the united states chose to engage this conflict both prior and during its emergence, i think one of the real positives for me was that

the biden administration's position really reinforced the meaning of u.s. defense alliances. defense alliances are the most serious business there is and they're very serious because they're high cost and high risk. you have to pay the cost of making them credible in terms of military commitment. and the risk, of course, is that they can fail. a defense alliance is essentially, the most extreme form of military deterrents and when they fail, which they have in the past, that means the united states is at war. that's a nontrvial risk which i'm sure everyone in the audiences understand. and they are measured and few and selected because the issues at stake are vital to the interests of the united states and they're confined to those sets of interest. the united states does not have a defense eye lines with ukraine. now, this didn't mean and doesn't mean that the united

states can't contribute military tearily or they couldn't have decided not to go to war on ukraine. the current posture was not one of purely military deterrence as you'd see in the defense alliance or primarily military deterrence. instead as doug and others have highlighted, the united states and like-minded partners coming to be called the strategy of integrated deterrence, it's not exclusive to military tools, but includes diplomacy and economic tools of influence. so, of course, we know what has occurred since that time and there's a lot of interest in sort of what we can he can traffic -- extrapolate for china and taiwan and there are tactical and operational lessons to be learned and every one of the

negatives that caitlin outlined is not lost on beijing or on the united states for that matter. when it comes to the united states, i want to emphasize that i think the very first question about the implications for taiwan goes back to the first principle of defense alliances. is the status of taiwan of vital, national interest for the united states? does it rise to that level? and that is a question, i think, that's being debated very much around town and last night on 60 minutes as well and it's not clear to me that there's a consensus around that as yet. we'll see. if the answer is that, yes, the united states does have a vital interest in the status of taiwan, then it will have certain policy implications, if the even is no, then there would be policy implications. and one we would pursue robust

strategy china against the island. we'll skip made to say, okay, we're going to choose our strategy to deter either military or integrated. all of the deterrents might fail and the next yes, what is the after strategy. for military alliances, if deterrence fails, the active strategy is a war fighting strategy. the question about integrated deterrence is not so clear-cut. what is the active strategy, one of the things that we're working through right now, it could be in the case of failed intgrated deterrent posture, the united states does choose to engage, it could be decoupling, could be more than one option. in any case, i think the important thing i would emphasize, there needs to be clear objectives of that strategy, if it's a punishment strategy, a decoupling strategy, what are the clear objectives. i have to confess, today, i'm

not sure what strategy we're pursuing, we collectively in terms of russia. we can't-- i don't think anyone believes that we can punish putin into submission and that he'll retrench, ale give up. he'll return territory or tuck his tail between his legs and go home. that's not what anybody expects. so what is our goal with this over time? is the objective to punish very severely into the near to medium term and then expect that rusia in some way, shape or form, returns to approximately similar status or role in theically that it had before or is it to decouple and fundamentally reshape the role in the global economy. it's, again, not clear to me which we're pursuing in earnest and that's in part because i think, you know, the option for how we would pursue either of those strategies or two. there are two ways to decouple, you can decouple fast or slow

and similarly with punishment, two ways to do it, for a short time or a long time. no matter which quadrant you're in, as they're knowing too well. i'm not sure which quadrant we're in right now. i'm going to be watching not just how the conflict itself unfolds and learn from the operational element and strategically how the west is positioning its goals for russia's role in the global economy moving forward and what those policy measures can and can't do. in that regard and including the price cap on oil. so, i hope that's enough interest, you know where to find me, you can always follow up. >> thank you very much, melanie. let's go to the audience. we'll go until 10:00 or a few minutes after with this panel,

have a brief coffee break and resume at 10:15 with our superstar europe panel. so let's talk maybe one round of questions i'll ask each panelist to respond to one of the group and we'll wrap up. if i can start here and then we'll go to the gentleman in the sixth row. >> i'm an intelligence analyst and former diplomate. when we do well to establish the principle right now that all the damage in ukraine will eventually be paid for by russia and we don't want sanctions post-war so detrimental that we end up with a world war i situation, but we can make it clear this will be a generational tax on all natural resource exports from russia to pay for what they are doing right now in ukraine. and this would have the effect to let russians know that every single day they're going greater and greater in debt to

pay for the ukraine. >> thank you for at that question and over here, please. >> coming right up behind you. >> hi, i'm a law student at gw. for mike, two things that you mentioned tied together, there's an element of the war we're not sure how long things are going to last and a material need for things like tanks for maneuver warfare, to what extent can we continue to rely on the kind of trickle down of back filling polish or czech tanks and apc's to give to ukraine and when are we going to have to deal with the logistical problems of training and supply chain for more western like leopard systems? >> excellent. let's see if we have a final question from the audience before we come back to the panel, yes, we'll go here to the gentleman in the second row. >> thank you. i'm a research internet, when

it comes to holding russia accountable for war time war crimes and aprosecutor -- atrocities. how can the europe and united states, such as the wacker group, not beholden to the military apparatus. >> before we start, and one question was for me, i've got the mic. i'll ask a question for the mix for anybody not withstanding melanie's protest not to make prognostications, anyone on the panel, whether the war would be largely over this time next year or extending onward from this point. an unfair question and that these folks specialize in these difficult queries. i guess i would say the likelihood of future supply provisioning of the west, is

that the greater dilemma here is going to be in munitions not in hardware or systems. for example, the united states has plenty of m-1 tanks, if we wanted to use some of our surplus to provide either ukraine directly or countries like poe tend who have provided a lot of the stock from poland, and not worry that we'll be underprepared or defenseless in places and somehow that would threaten n.a.t.o. territory soon. and i'm more concerned about the high-tech systems and munitions, drones, capabilities, it appears we've been drawing down other stock rather quickly to help ukraine. i think we should sort of lean in to do that, ukraine is doing well and you hear that it's everyone's fight and ukraine is sort of carrying this out for us and there's a fair amount of

truth for that. bob kagan is going to speak and he wrote an op-ed, and that russia would potentially take all or much of ukraine and have the pocket and belarus and its own territory dependence astona and latvia, that would have been for forboding and even if russia couldn't take on n.a.t.o., and ukraine has exacted a price on russia, and continue to do so partly for our own well-being. and down the panel and samantha, any questions you'd like for yourself. >> i'll make an attempt although probably to answer the tax on natural resources, the reconstruction of ukraine. it is a very interesting question and a question that comes to mind in response for

me is those are natural resources that the world is wanting to move away from and russian oil is not particularly climate friendly in terms of the way it is produced. russian gas has had a lot of flaring and a lot of methane emissions associated with it, so, ideally we would actually like to phase out russian energy resource production for other reasons as well so i guess my question would be, in the future would russia be seen as a reliable enough supplier and are we going to continue this theme of preferentially phasing out russian natural resources to-- for climate reasons, it's elegant on its face, but those are the questions it raises in my mind. >> thank you, doug. ail he take a different tack on

the same question. i think it's a smart idea, but i don't think that anybody should talk about it. >> because i think at the end of the day, the framing of what will or will not be on the table in any potential cease-fire, peace talks, is so prospective, that first of all, this point, it's premature, those talks are not in the immediate foreseeable future. if you talked-- you raised in your question the world war i scenario, the way you described it is different, but i'm not sure that it's perceived as different for those asking to pay for the sins of their leaders in generations to come. i think the way that reparations are crafted is an open-ended question. one thing i would argue is a bad idea, even though there are a lot of people in congress and others that are talking about it, is to seize and repurpose

russian central bank reserves. it's a very attractive idea and it's also a bad one from my perspective because central bankers play a unique role in the global landscape. they're supposed to be sacrosanct and if you take them even under terrible aggressions of russia under putin right now, telling the chinese and every other central bank their dollars held in u.s. dollars at the fed are subject to seizure depending on what the political winds are at any given time in the future. .... >> i'll just add on to what doug has said with west nuance, which is my question will be to what end would we be be making that

expectation clear for the population of russia? i think there is a real risk of overdoing it, and in a way that can rebound very poorly into the future. and so i would just sort of continue to think about what kind of russia in what way in which to we think we can interact with a future russia are we looking to achieve, ae policies that we establish we don't foreclose any options or push too far in directions where the unintended consequences could be really severe. >> caitlin, still a couple questions on the table. >> i am aware of that, yes. i just want to -- the munitions what is spot on. the munitions, also a very relevant concern to the taiwan scenario and something we should

look at with respect to our defense posture in asia, this war showing as the important munitions and not just platforms. and sure i will take a swing at other question. i mean, i think it was a yogi berra who said prediction is hard especially about the future and and i don't want to overstate predictions but i think your question does make me step back and say where do we think the military situation might be in the year. i will say i wouldn't be surprised if in a year russia still controlled part of ukraine including perhaps some swaths of ukraine the controls right now particularly in south when you think about kherson, crimea, all places particularly donbas where rush is well dug in. my i could better prepared than in recent areas where ukraine has had successes. but i think the critical question at a think this is a good note to kind of, as we wrap

up the military-ish panel when we look at the war and battlefield dynamics is i think whether the war is actually over by this time next year may not just depend on those military questions, what territory has has it been seated but that would be a political question. it gets back to some of these energy questions, like what is europe's will to continue after the get through another winter, what will the ukrainian population be willing to continue fighting for? are they willing to cede some of that territory in ways that frankly today i think they are not and like all eyes what does putin defined as success in this war? he has the ability to define and redefine what his objectives are. i guess i would say on a purely military level i can see the russians still controlling areas they control today. i year from now the question is what does that mean politically for both sides and does that result in an appetite for political settlement between those two sites and also between

the western backers of ukraine and ukraine. i will just stop there. >> thank you very much. thank you all. we will now take a ten minute coffee break and have a panel with three scholars of combined roughly 50 years experience at brookings, constanze stelzenmuller, jim goldgeier, moderated by scholars know about an hour have a brookings experience and we are very happy to welcoming asli aydintasbas inner turkish-american chair studying europe along with the rest of the europe center. so thank you all for being here. again please thank this battle. at a quick cup of coffee and be back at 10:15. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

[inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] >> this brookings institution discussion on the russian-ukraine war taking a break. our live coverage on c-span2 will continue when the event resumes. right now the a look at this morning's discussion. >> comic you got about how you see the battlefield dynamics but i know also you been thinking a lot aced on your expertise with nuclear affairs and other such things about potential as go to

dynamics, about the role of nuclear threats and nuclear deterrence in this whole conflict and the question of whether we could at some tragic point any future see an escalation. if i could just again that's a lot to put on your plate at once but maybe first you could comment on how you see the title field and amateur so and then go to the broader strategic and potential nuclear dynamics of this conflict. >> thank you and could morning to everyone thanks for the opportunity to be part of this discussion. i would say in response to your prompt i kind of would begin where you ended which is to note it's not over. we are very much in battlefield terms at an early point, a midpoint, we don't really know but i do think we have to pump the brakes all of it on some of the euphoria about recent ukrainian gains because the reality is russia does to control significant ukrainian territory not only crimea but major cities, mariupol, , kharkv and so we want cannot be

overambitious and what we can infer from the battlefield dynamics thus far. with that being said i think there are some preliminary observations we can make about this battlefield dynamics and what they might portend both for ukraine but more probably because this is an opportunity to think hard about modern warfare and what that could look like nettled in ukraine potential in other areas which melanie will discuss. the big take away just looking at kind of a 30,000-foot level at battlefield dynamics in this war has to do with the importance of nonmaterial factors in battlefield effectiveness which i think has surprised a lot of people. and by nonmaterial factors i mean things besides the number of men you have under arms, hardware, tanks, planes, bombs, bullets, that stuff matters clearly but i think if that were

what determines military outcomes in the modern era this war what even over long time ago because there was a massive asymmetry in those capabilities, those material capabilities between ukraine and russia prior to the war and many of us including me, i'm as guilty as anyone, really i think underestimated how well the ukrainians could use the material capabilities that they had in order to generate military power. and, in fact, i think what we've really witnessed over the last six month is both an over performance by the ukrainians but all to do what we have predicted based on their material capabilities as well as frankly and underperformance by the russians based on what we would've predicted and that is produced a large delta between what would've thought aced on a being count prior to the way and what is iphone which is very effective and powerful ukrainian resistance. and, of course, some of that is clearly due to the infusion of material support to ukraine from

the west in terms of weaponry and also in terms of training efforts. i am in no way trying to downplay those but i would just note building partner militaries and providing military aid to client, allies is something the trend has tried lots of places around the world. spoiler alert a dozen others go the way it's gone and in uk. if you think about the billions of dollars the united states spent training to a iraqi army, the afghan military forces or even think about the effort to build the south vietnamese military. just because an outside power pumps a lot of eight intercountry doesn't mean they're going to do with the what the greatness of actually been able to do. i think at that point, some kind of special sauce with respect to ukrainian military performance. i think they were very effective after the shocking loss of crimea in 2014, four instance in terms of getting the house in

order militarily, developing more harmonious civil military, military training and really also preparing to mobilize the population and have that population be not only motivator to fight but trained well to fight. and i think the result is they have an army with very high morale and really good military skills that are able to actually take advantage of the material support they have received. we have seen lots of really interesting and impressive innovation by the ukrainians with the military capabilities that they have. it's interesting to think about himars. the united states has provided these and they're theirt capability but i've been really impressed by the fact that the plaintiff also gotten really good at making himars decoys. use like dummy himars like the russians claimed to have

destroyed more himars that have been provided by the united states to ukraine because they're destroyed a lot of decoys. i think as of last week we actually have confirmed they haven't destroyed a real himars yet but my point is is that innovative and that something that you do with tactical skills we are seeing the ukrainians able to launch these high-speed missiles. using an western missile on a soviet era, soviet legacy aircraft which again that takes some innovation and it suggests not only that there's innovation in the field by these sources but that their command-and-control structures enable the sort of decentralized innovation. it's not just what they have, it's what they are doing with what they have. and i think their performance in this regard goes beyond sort of the tactical and operational level. if you think about i kind of

operational strategic level the way the ukrainians have pulled off this recent counteroffensive come how they chose a specific axes of advance, the way that their information operations frankly before the launching of this counteroffensive gave the russians the impression that the major effort or maybe even the only effort would be in the south and got the russians to read up on a lot of the best units away from the areas the ukrainians makings in the east. that's impressive. and if there's one conclusion i would try it is there is one word, they are winning the information war and that's example of it. i think their ability to spur continued support in the west is another facet of it. conversely if i gets a couple things about the other side of the coin i mentioned. i talked about how the ukrainians have over performed relative to what we would expect based on their material

capabilities, i think the russians have really underperformed based on what we would've expected. we have seen a lot of tactical operational mistakes where there's just basic military skill that seems to be lacking from your operations but may reflect poor training, certainly poor morale, poor logistics, overly centralized command structures where you're not seeing this innovation in the field that i think has characterized ukrainian performance. and, of course, at a higher level it's uncontroversial to say that the decisions to start the work itself reflects some really serious pathologies in russian civil-military relations that frankly stem from the fact that russia is a personal estate dictatorship in which vladimir putin probably does that get told a lot of things he doesn't want to hear from his high command and from his military intelligence. i think that has set russia on a

course where reality is colliding with expectations in a way that lead to underperformance. it's interesting if you think about what is russia's next step after this counteroffensive, and the successes, you would think again based on material capabilities that russia would have a greater ability to mobilize manpower from its society. this is kind of the bedrock of military power, getting people in the uniform who can fight. and yet we've seen a lot of hesitation on the part of putin to actually pull that lever to call it a war, to call for a general mobilization, and with other i think we will be speaking this morning to know more about russian domestic politics that i do but i do think it points something going on in putin's on domestic calculation that he is not willing to utilize this significant potential source of russian power. but if he wants to reverse

ukraine's recent gains and hold onto what he has i would expect them to try to do that or failing that, i worry -- >> good morning. welcome to the second panel of this series of this form. my name is asli aydintasbas. many of you don't know me, for a good reason. this is actually my first day at brookings. visiting fellow at the center on the united states and europe. it turns at brookings as of this hazing ritual whereby they make you moderate an all-star cast on your first day. so i have with me james goldgeier who is a visiting fellow at the usc as well as of course a professor at stanford and leading russian expert, fiona hill is longtime scholar at brookings in between various

government jobs, senior national security adviser and the author of very interesting book on putin as well as of course our recent work. and constanze stelzenmuller who is leading expert on transatlantic issues and all things european, as well as being the new director of cusd. some going to start with jim. in the previous panel you've heard about immediate battlefield dynamics as well as some of the critical security and defense issues around the ukraine war come stretching all the way to the pacific. i think we want to take a longer-term view on this panel and think through about the longer-term implications for european security in terms of atlantic issues.

and jim, i want to start with you because since the end of the cold war it's hard to imagine european security as something that is dependent on a stable relationship with russia. that was a core element of our concept of european security. now, what happens now with the ukraine war that is change everything? so how do we establish -- with russia at this point? >> thanks, asli, thanks to brookings for including me in this knight forum and welcome to brookings. actually, we are thrilled to have her here. so that kind of relationship that we had hoped for with russia i just don't think we can have that as long as vladimir putin is in power. this is a regime that study

carried out a genocide against ukraine, trying to wipe out ukraine and people is a call to come as a language, as an idea, as a country. so, and a think it's worth stepping back just for a minute. we cut stroke -- we have strobe talbott its name here come his is on the center, because what you are describing as to what we hope for in a post war world in terms with russia that is what his job was in the eight years of the clinton administration. suzanne mentioned at the outset he started as ambassador for the newly independent states and then a year later became deputy secretary of state and did the job for seven years in the clinton administration. and his job was to bring your policy and russia policy together goes to establish to integrate eastern eastel europeans into europe and to try to greet a partnership with

russia. there were people who wanted to focus name it on central and eastern europe and didn't really want to worry that much about russia. there were others who want to focus on a partnership with russia and didn't care as much about the central and eastern europeans. the clinton administration approach with strobe in the lead was to do both, and there were lots of successes. russia joined the partnership for peace russia participated in the implementation force after the dayton peace accords were signed, the limitation in bosnia -- implementation. the founding act in 1997 to establish any relationship between nato and russia as nato was enlarging and then there was the diplomacy to end the war, the kosovo war which strobe played the critical role working with the russians and the finnish president. so lots of successes come lots

of hope that you could actually have this relationship. there was a belief, the idea of the time was you could have stable european security order without russia. and here we are today, you can have stable european security with russia. russia is up to undermine the european security order. the biden administration policy of punishing russia, with her in a previous panel, , sanctions, isolating russia diplomatically, and weakening russia military through support for ukraine militarily is really the only approach that we can have towards putin and russia but we will not have some kind of motive unless and until there is a different leader in russia. >> i would love to have fiona come in for the question, but before that, doug, -- jim,

sorry. refighting the cold war. >> i mean, you know, what can we do? we have leader, we have an russia. it's worth noting, i i mean, e did invade ukraine in 2014. he did in -- the u.n. system was found to try to prevent big country some just taking territory from their neighbors by sending the forces across the border. and we did still try to pursue cooperative relationship with russia. we were still trying to pursue a cooperative relationship with russia up until this expanded invasion started. but i think, again, the nature of this expanded invasion, the brutality of the attempted genocide i think he has created this reaction where the only thing we can do is to try to

punish, isolate and we can. >> fiona, can you unpack this without russia? >> well, obviously this is a huge question that everybody is trying to figure out. jim has given us the frame of where we started off in the 1990s after the collapse of the soviet union. we have to remember that the soviet union didn't just collapsed. it was picked apart by some of its own elite. there is actually a great book by a russian historian author based in london, which is called collapse but the book is about boris yeltsin, the first president of an independent russia is a person actually pulled the place apart because of power struggle with mikhail gorbachev. that was somewhat unexpected for anybody looking at the history

of the soviet union. the reason i want to talk about this is we are now marking the recent death of mikhail gorbachev, now looking back over the time of the last 40 plus years gorbachev come into power in 19 interesting that when he was trying to do. gorbachev also was setting out to try to stabilize a relationship with europe and western united states. he didn't want to pull his country apart. obviously that's what happened because of the complexity and just the scale of the problem of kind of forgot how to reform the soviet union and put the whole union on a different setting. he actually appeal to all of the constituent parties for a union treated but he was unaware of the people's power that is ultimately what was founded on. >> we might see something, i keep realizing as a movie or my

voice keeps a internet so i'll try to stay over the microphone. we have to watch the dynamics inside of russia very carefully i think in terms of answering this question. because russia remains a very complex place. we think about vladimir putin. we know it was his decision to launch this war. part of it is his thinking about ukraine along the lines jim is suggesting here. there are only handful of people, maybe same number of people sitting on the stage who participate in the decision to invade ukraine. it hadn't gone anywhere he thought it would. the so-called party were that would. others were based inside russia itself. it's also people within russia. we see hundreds of thousands of russians clearly want to be in a more stable relationship. they have left in many of them are in a western many inside turkey, have fled, probably seen an awful lot of quite prominent russian think takers and politicians got on the planes to

come here. many of the people who were instrumental in yeltsin steen back in the 1990s have been resident in turkey now. there are people here. there are people all over in europe who also think to themselves about how does russia restore this relationship. alexei navalny, who is obviously sitting in a penal colony recently in the most bizarre of the recent punishments and fixes against him, his fellow prisoners told not to even look at them because -- [inaudible] just how dangerous somebody like alexei navalny is to putin and power. the grip of vladimir putin has on the system is also -- and in the past in the soviet period we whole succession of geriatric secretary general's who passed on the stage.

putin, bill burns said recently, he put it unfortunate rather healthy at the moment. but not with -- he no longer looks infallible and does all the issues we're talking about today, the less prototype of the various concerns about military, energy and otherwise. of the people around start to question what he's got out of this war, not just the content of bertelli but the fact that ukrainians hate russians there and there were 11 million russians -- millions of others who have some ukrainian heritage in here this got a feeling of being ostracized elsewhere in europe where people have been seen as having this density of relationships, the whole reorientation of the week russia itself is operating. i think this is going to open up and is going to be not just all about us and what we decide of the russians and other russian

troops react as well. i think this could be part of unpacking this discussion. >> but are we there. >> was no, we're not there yet. and i think in talking to many russian colleagues or looking at polling, others are also worried about the future of the country, their view is that there's going to be a lot more of battlefield pushback, disasters on a lot more pressure, getting through the winter as well is going to be pretty critical for people around putin to be able to put some pressure on him and others for changing the situation. jim said here we've got to stop passing things in short, medium and longer-term. the short term we are worthy are. the medium-term aztecs it on the last panel and smith and others were talking about there are going to be some impacts for russia. it's going to make that pain and the consequences of this felt even more so. over the longer term, look, , we

had that experience with germany twice in the previous century. world war i and world war ii. and germany as much driven by germans themselves over time also turned around its relationship and is a we've got a lot of lessons learned from not about how we craft of relationship with russia over the longer term. >> constanze, you just arrived from germany. fact you were there last week. john cena scholz has talked about -- attorney . in in germany. what's the mood like in germany? >> thank you, asli and thank you, everyone for asked me to be on this panel at this time. i do want to add a footnote to the russia turkey business. to anyone of using the wonderful 1939 -- with greta garbo and

douglas, that ends in a happy ending, just so you know, where the frenchman and the soviet woman meet. and that happily ever after. anyway, , sigh, i thought that s important. yeah, i came back from germany on saturday having spent about an exciting week in germany where -- curl in the middle of a tank battle, actually a battle without tanks in which in a larger sense is a battle about indeed what it needs. i do want to say that occasionally read in my twitter feed that germany isn't doing anything to help ukraine. i think that's not quite fair. there is a very long list of stuff on the german government

website that you can check my ukrainians themselves would be the first to say that some have heavy weaponry that germany has given the more recently especially the himars rocket launchers indeed has played a great launch, sorry, a great road in ukraine's recent spectacular successes in pushing back the ukrainians on the battlefield and establishing a much longer front. and to the point about munitions that caitlin also made, and mike, the germans have effect delivered huge quantities of munitions to the ukrainians. and that's not to say obviously that we couldn't do more. it's also true that despite the i think very serious determination of not just the

chancellor but his cabinet to pull through not just on the promises of the february 27 speech, despite the urgency of concern in germany about the impact of what is now and has been for two weeks a complete russian gas cutoff, mitigated only by the fact that we were able to fill a storage capacity to nearly 90%, and the fact with that good weather so far, everybody knows as samantha was saying on the first panel that this was going to be a grim winter for your. the storage capacity of germany does have a larger store chiseled in europe. when they are fully provide, germany is consumer for about two months, that's it. winter is a lot longer than that. also it doesn't account for the fact that we might want, , needo

provide for our neighbors. so i think it's in the state of a combination of determination, but i think we're going to have to keep working because putin is not going to stop, very simple. >> let me ask you about how this is shaping internal european politics. obviously every country expenses it different both elections coming up in italy. we just had elections in sweden with the rise of the far right. there is always of the worried this will really have either a destabilizing impact on european politics, domestic politics, or really lead to the rise of the far right in some countries.

is this exaggerate? >> of course not. i can't dare say that. i do want to before address that just remind us of just how extraordinary and surprisingly cohesive the european reaction has been. and i want to preface that by saying that it might not offend if the biden administration and so extraordinarily decisive and supportive, which wasn't, my french colleague might have said sadly returned to paris. it wasn't evident after the withdrawal from afghanistan that it would go that way. but the truth is that this moment of cooperation and coordination is historical in its depth, its breadth, and yes, it's a generosity towards europe. and i don't know anyone in berlin or at least that any sane person who isn't profoundly grateful for that. so that is my preface. that said, the european union

also has done by its own standards rather unusual things. not only has it been very thoughtful in diplomacy, but it is played an essential role in the sanctions. earlier integrated deterrence while european power assets in sanctions played a great role in that. i think the biden administration has, is fully aware of the degree to which european power are not just sort of boutique add on as he might've been any military operation but, in fact, essential leverage for american power in this conflict. and then the eu even has funded military supplies which again is a historic first. it's offered ukraine and moldova membership effective extorted. if you asked me to bet on that a

couple months ago i would've said not in your wildest dreams. we are seeing a energy market shakeup we are seeing the extraordinary insanity of the european energy market, but things have been done about that. and the germans more specifically at breakneck speed. we had a russian coal, russian oil and of the russians have cut us off from gas slightly earlier than we were planning to which was at the end of 2024, so thank you very much. that also stops the question of our week funding the russian effort? we are not because the russians cut us off. there is a degree of circling the wagons, neutral countries having quite intron conversations about the degree of their own neutrality, which is interesting and i would expect more movement there. the danish referendum from the european defense security, that is a think an interesting phenomenon which i think is

useful and might help with some problems. you see the europeans commission i would say finally cracking down on hungary. you're completely right. and the devices elements didn't stop this election. remember the extraordinary narrow win of macron as a serious presidential candidate. in germany the afd is inching up and the polls from near 10-14%. that a still not a lot but are hoping to make -- political divisions and they are aligned themselves with the conspiracy theories, the pandemic conspiracy there's and so on, all those unpleasant prospects. i suppose we're lucky that germany is not going to have

significant state election any of the places where the afd is particularly strong within the next one and a half years. and then there's of course the question of uk's relationship with the eu i which i think we can say the jury is still out. that is the question of the -- which could become insanely divisive if london does that. you are entirely right, there is still record gas prices. they're still record inflation, and it is entirely possible that that will generate a great deal of political division. that said -- sorry, of course i did that. at least from own country if you look at the polls people are saying i am willing to pay the price for supporting ukraine against russia. now, this may involve a certain degree of what we in germany called whistling in the dark. >> that is before the winter.

>> exactly. but still i'm going to give them brownie points for saying that and for wanting to think they have the coverage to be that strong in the winter. we will see but i do think we should also talk about the current conflict between turkey and greece. things are heating up on our periphery and it's also something we should be concerned about. >> fiona, i want to come to you about the rest. because we are very focused on europe and the trans atlantic relationship, but last week thursday and friday you had a meeting of an organization that was in uzbekistan with xi jinping. putin, erdogan and modi. it was a number of other leaders but we tend to roll our eyes at

this which didn't become the anti-nato quite, but i think together these countries represent 44% of the world's population, and among them that are for nuclear powers. i guess my question would be is there any threat, if any from this organization? and is this something you take into consideration when you think of european security? >> i hope everyone will stick around for the next battle because we'll have actually quite a few of our experts here who can talk very much about these issues as well and it will be interesting, about how they interpret modi comments to putin which i think were quite significant although obviously we don't need to get too carried away about this, this is not a time for war but a time for peace. >> and public comment.

>> and public comment. the fact he said that in public, having india quite rightly from its perspective taking a very cautious approach to the soul conflict, which feels existential threat from china, remember india and china had military exchanges in disputed territory which resulted in several deaths not all that long ago. india having even a mild rebuke of russia that it is often relied on to balance off its relations with china have been very military dependent on it is very significant. the reason why i wanted to challenge the frame it gets to what we always talk about. we look at it from our perspective and we can to look at it from u.s.-russian relations, the history of our bilateral engagement. we look at it from the transatlantic perspective. we look at it from the elite

level. there's a lot of public level support and a lot of people are framing this conflict what differently from us. in europe the popular level, the uk and other places, we panic about all oh, my god we coun world war iii. people are always looking dasha are already looking at it in different because that is what a lot of the putin use. eu's said he's trying to basically rollback history to the end of world war i when the russian empire fell apart and ukraine suddenly became a socialist republic with the kind of independent perspective within the soviet union. he is saying of course that he has invaded ukraine to did not supply and is a continuation of world war ii and the very fact is that all this -- enough to try -- people are taking him at his word and looking out for himself where the homefront support is very important. and then when you look at the shanghai cooperation organization in this context the

recent that was set up was not in opposition to the united states or to nato. it was set up to manage china within a regional context. people said behind the scenes the shanghai cooperation organization was all about china. it was how to manage suddenly this pricing superpower on very sensitive borders with the central asian countries and russia all try to figure out how they're going to navigate a complete new reality. and what we've seen over time the shanghai corporation for example, is china has enabled central asian states not to recognize things that russia has in the neighborhood. so back up to the annexation to crimea, there was a lot of pressure put on the central asian states because not just the shanghai cooperation organization but the cft oh, the cooperative security arrangement

that the russians did try to put in opposition to new, put pressure on them. pressure put on them to recognize dasha and each time they were able not to a behind the scenes it was clear the chinese didn't like that. so here again we see the shanghai cooperation organization that putin will he noted china might have a somewhat different perspective on how things were going. now if russia succeeded and putin has succeeded in forcing the capitulation of the ukraine the first week or so of the innovation we might be in a different place but he hasn't and so we are where we are now. and it's clear that other countries don't like this at all. and, in fact, now the image of putin is fallible and that the russian military not being as powerful as rebutting assume is having consequences in the region.

because russia has pull troops out of all the other border regions including the territories of central asia to go and fight in ukraine, pull them back from the peninsula, the finnish border. it's one of the reasons they decide to join nato. will they invade? they seem to be invading with no precepts. and then the zika stan you now see a fight, were going on over disputed territory but you can imagine happening in the past if russia been much more the arbiter. another outbreak of war between others which has caused, right on turkey's border. the assumption here is this is some kind of conspiracy theory among and between russia, i. >> stan and. but it's more likely that it is because russia is no longer able to force the various parties

into basically negotiating are behaving the way it would like to. just as an aside, i once had the occasion to talk to dimitri who is a spokesperson for putin. immediately after the recognition of our party at a situation what if they recognize our party and also recognizes -- in this context? he said that they won't because we have told them not to. that was a public comment period so that just kind of underscores the way that russia used to operate in the region, and now not operating in the same way. i think that's why when you look at the sco it's going to be very interesting to kind of watch the different dynamics there because there were lots of knock on effects of this conflict. back to the original question about how russia is going to look in the longer term and what

precious there might be on to a post putin russia even a putin russia to rethink some of its relationships. >> so jim, let's come back to the u.s., which has clearly shown leadership in organizing their united and robust response the russian invasion of ukraine. but given what we spoke about in the first panel and given the story that field is laying out in all these other theaters and what's happened in asia in the pacific, is this level of attention to european security sustainable, long-term? >> that's a great question, and this is not what the biden administration came into office thinking they were going -- i mean, they were focused, really focused on we are going to focus

on the competition with china. president biden's first meeting with president putin in june of 2021, first meeting after becoming president, was the meeting in geneva. president biden had been talking about hoping for a stable and predictable relationship with russia. which was never really realistic. i think putin is predictably unpredictable and i don't think he was looking for a stable relationship with the united states. and i was critical of the framing at the time but actually think it helped a lot. because i think the fact that president biden had made an effort help in bringing the allies together and give the united states more credibility because if the united states have made an effort with putin

and, of course, putin blew everything up with the expanded invasion. but you know, again this is not, you know, the fact that the bandwidth of the leading policymakers and the united states, president and advisers and others within the bureaucracy, the resources, you know, none of this was desired at the beginning of this presidency. because really the way they look at russia and europe, it wasn't about russia and europe. it was about how they fit into the broader competition with china. the focus on europe was about okay, europeans, what are you going to be able to do for us, with us in a competition with china? it was about hoping russia could just stay quiet so that the united states could focus on china. of course that didn't happen. as constanze said there were

troubling signs laster with respect to the relationship with the europeans. the complaints about lack of, the afghanistan withdrawal, the chaos of the afghanistan withdrawal, the complaints by the french and how it was handled. but this administration clearly stepped up with the response to the expanded invasion of ukraine. and i, in terms of is a sustainable? the united states has done this with your before and you don't see what the alternative is. and i think the europeans have stepped up as well. i think the fact that finland and sweden is joining nato is a huge opportunity for nato. clearly finland and sweden believe it is essential for their defense but also transforms the map of northern europe. i think that despite the fact

the biden administration didn't want to be spending their time on this, they have shown themselves quite adept and don't have much of a choice but to continue to work with the europeans, again it's about putin's russia and really putin's effort to undermine the west, , undermine the united states, to undermine europe. the united states and its allies have to respond. >> before we turn to questions from the audience, let me also ask you, with the recent battlefield success of ukraine, and the sort of excitement in europe and the united states about that, do you think we've reached the threshold here in this country where it still longer possible to scale back on support for ukraine? >> well, i don't -- >> it's a question about domestic politics basically, u.s. domestic politics. >> our college has been running

a series of public opinion surveys since the spring asking the question sort of about what are you willing to tolerate it the support for ukraine and this war causing problems here at home, you know, samantha making the biggest impact on all of us is energy prices, how much are you willing to tolerate? it was interesting, if the public opinion survey showed strong support, then a little dip and then back up to strong support by may or so. i think we see injure, constanze mentioned this, people are willing dash i think they see what's at stake and i think alisa so far -- at least so far people are willing to accept some amount of personal pain in light of what's happening. i think part of that is also,

when you see, everybody is seeing the photos of what's come at of ukraine. with the russians have done to the ukrainians. so if increased gas prices and certainly there are segments of the population with increased prices are really hitting quite hard. we shouldn't understate that, but people here are not being subjected to genocide, attempted genocide and basic mass murders and crimes against humanity. >> well, thank you, let's get a few questions from the audience. the gentleman here in the fifth row. actually -- [inaudible] >> thank you very much. i am benjamin, retired diplomat. russia attacked ukraine, and there have been a lot of questions about how it is

conducting the war. that said, please comment on the quality of u.s. media coverage of the conflict in terms of objectivity, balance, and completeness, including what -- russia launched the war and couldn't have been avoided? thank you. >> thank you. very good question. let's take two more questions. i see behind you -- yes, the gentleman over there is raising his hand. >> thank you very much. i wanted to, the panel before focus on part of it was like a study, the fact there was no clear strategy what's happening. it seems no one can see the reaction from use generally in describing is both reactive and transaction. that was a key clear doctrine for how nato came to be after the second world war, kind of post collapse of the soviet

union. it was a kind of clear doctrine about what was happening with the kind of expectation perhaps russia was on board with it. what seems lacking if this is going to be cohesive both between the u.s. and its allies in this, , but also keeping countries together in terms of popular, what is the underlying doctrine? is it necessary to have an underlying doctrine and do you have any sense what that might be? that's my question. >> thank you. and the gentleman here had his hand up first. >> thank you. from brazilian embassy. i would like to ask what scenarios do you consider most likely most possible in the coming months in ukraine? and if any of that scenarios there is room for negotiated solution? >> negotiated settlement or a

cease-fire, or peace. let's get these questions. let's get the answers now presidency we can do another round afterwards. shall we go in this order? doug? >> we're going to get to know each other. maybe we'll sit next to each other. [laughing] take -- >> because there's also a doug. >> that's a great -- very good. >> both really nice. >> and he looks much younger than i so i'm not so sure he's pretty happy about that. [laughing] this question, i think this is a broader challenge for us for the united states because we had a frame, we had a strategy for about 25 years. george h. w. bush went to the within westermann in may may of 1989 a talked about a europe poland free. that really was the guiding idea

behind u.s. policy and u.s. policy with our european allies. from 1989 to 2014. they were going to have a europol free and you speculate all sorts of policies as a result, i think, you know. nato enlargement, eu enlargement, the effort the same time to greet a partnership with russia, the effort with turkey, the effort to end what was the brutality by the government of slobodan milosevic in the balkans. all these things went together, part of a broader strategy. and while -- even president biden last year was using that europol peace language and i thought, you know, it's just not, it really hasn't been relevant since 2014. i think we do need to have a new

strategy. as a at the outset, the issues right now in the near term is how to have a strategy to build a stable and secure europe that at least right now tries to keep russia out, whatever the prospects are later for trying to bring russia back in. one word on this, the challenge of negotiated solution, how could you imagine this happening right now, right? the ukrainian government have er decided and wanted a negotiated solution would have to have a diplomatic solution with president putin, who has been leading an effort to eliminate ukraine as as a country and a people. and it would have to have, a would have to believe that whatever solution they agreed to with putin, that he would honor it. and that he wouldn't still

continue to try to undermine ukraine and still try to find ways to regroup and destroy it later. i just don't see how you have a negotiated solution where putin is the other party. >> fiona? >> i completely agree with jim and i think that is really a great question about strategy because it's just, talking about germany. we have benefited from long time. we probably should have just been looking at 2014 but thinking about the invasion of georgia and 2008. in that term also showed as the kind of fallacy of our approach at the time. i spoke before about the push by george in ukraine to get a membership action plan tended and the fact that the bucharest summit in 2008, that didn't

transpire but, in fact, they got then an open door which was the worst because there was no thinking about with the independent nato and comments but there was no kind of strategy or broader thinking around that. michael o'hanlon is now sitting in the back, wrote a book not so long ago about beyond inada tried to unpack the way you might think about all of that security and effect now we get even more nato with finland and sweden joining the alliance. but not joining because they want to go back to a kind of strategy that we had for the last 30 odd years because they just are recognizing its unit mechanism, the only institution that is still functioning to at least have some semblance of trying to address the situation at hand. and again sweden and finland joining as a package, the things that made it very clear why they've done this.

it's because the nature of the crisis, the brutality, the fact this was an unprovoked attack here nato didn't have anything to do with nato per se but was also part of the whole affront that rush and putin felt about ukraine and other countries going in any direction away from russia's political security and economic orbit. also the irresponsibility of flirting with nuclear weapons, which on the last panel, caitlin laid out, finland and sweden are not -- sweden was leading the charge for nuclear zero and all of the movements of the united nations to get rid of nuclear weapons. ..

we forget their relationships with russia and the soviet union going back more than a century latin america andalso with asia and africa . john russia acting intended aswell, we have to have a discussion that we had already . the question is really about a minute we had a segmented media space. part of what you mean about media coverage, you can get one thing on fox news and another online using bbc. we've got all kinds of newspapers from other countries. all access . most people including the younger generation get their news from mine is a nonstandard media . john oliver or kinds of people.

i asked my doctor the other day and she was getting her news from, everyone's getting a different perspective and best part of the thrust of your question is yes, you can get good coverage on what's happening if you're omnivorous and you read over. >> we've long past the day when we been provided with one source ofinformation . the era of radio or the bbc or abc and cbs and nbc for examples of media coverage is like shopping in the supermarket. it's one of the things were going to have to think about as our source of information and how we process all of it and that does raise the question about has been avoided and that's partly the fact that we tend to think of it including for putin.

putin could have avoided it, he could have decided what to do and he made the decision toinvade ukraine it was his decision february 24 because he thought he could get away with it . he thought we were all distracted and weak he thought britain was feckless and he thought that zelensky would flee and ukraine would crumble and the problem was he relied from domestic intelligence. we all saw the pictures of the run-up to the war where the head of foreign intelligence was completely shocked . he was mocked, are we doing this, this is going to be a disaster. lots of people in russia new this was going to be a disaster. putin might have listened to them but he decided to do something else so if putin had a more diverse set of thinking and all kinds of

different perspectives around him maybe we wouldn't be here and that's why making a plea for here. we tried to do our booking by sarah aaron all kinds of different perspectives. the only way we get to resolving these issues is to take a broad look and have valid 80. did have a perspective, it was the wrong one for what you wanted to do. >> in your article and in the current issue i think of foreign affairs you talk about this transformation from non-ideological, slightly opportunistic leaders to someone who is really revisionist in the sense thathe's all about making russia great again . >> is not the only person in the world who thinks like that and he's been at this for 22 years so the fact is we should all be shocked by putin taking this because if

we've been watching very closelywith we would've seen that evolution in his thinking . and it goes back in part to 2007 and the speech he madeat munich where he put everyone on notice no more mister nice guy . where in the full revisionist mode and we don't accept that post cold war strategic perspective on europe from the united states viewpoint. i know he's largely built himself in up about this and i say that, i think it's he's completely rational. he's doing it from his own perspective but we could see this building in 2011 and 2012 onward and part of the problem is we're not always postured to keep an eye on all of this. and now the intelligence services elsewhere does an excellent job of seeing this coming but we don't always put all the dots together and we need to be working closely with our partners as well . if we look back to prior to probably 24, they didn't

believe it for a second and there weremany others . the germans were kind of reluctant toaccept that something was going to happen but hoping it could be stayed off . and across the polls and many others saw this coming as well because they never dropped the ball on this and we have to start thinking , we're trying to find out how to resolve this and obviously in jointnegotiation how do we all pulled together ? >> about us assessment and what it is about the invasion of ukraine but one of the unintended consequences of this whole conflict has been the impact on the global south in the sense that they have not accepted western versions of this conflict. to this day many countries and leaders describe it as

nato provocation. and that battle for the narrative i think is still very much alive. >> it seems to me it looked very much as though that particular group of countries was set on changing their mind and not because there's a genocide in ukraine but it's seen as at least no longer being intractable. >> it's changing because there is now the possibility that putin may not win. >> may i say something about the strategy point and on the borders three weeks ago i was on and the norwegian province thatborders russia . it's a courtesy of the norwegian defense ministry

who showed us the border and the border guards told us that on the other side there had been russian elite regiments who were among the first to be leaving ukraine that were not replenished. so the land border is relatively calm. what's still worrying the norwegians is the fact that on the peninsula there's a large concentration of strategic nuclear weapons and if putin decided to engage in a little bit of summary and diplomacy, arrayed russian submarines up and down the norwegian border that would be the norwegian coastline. so in other words, the borders are not going away, their shifting. on the strategy question i think that it is fair to say not so much that the west america, nato as it were

caused this war. putin decided to go to war and if he was afraid of anything, the democratic transformation as he calls it and particularly the damage craddick transformation of the enormous country of ukraine, that was the change in him but it is also said that he squandered some of the 1989 moment. if we look at history of our engagement, there are some distinct impressions you named ending the genocide but there are also other figures and a lot of double standards and a lot of hypocrisies. and i think i can see how somebody of the mindset of vladimir putin who i saw in munich in 2004 who seemed a rather small and frustrated

back to me but you can see how putin would have come to the idea that maybe this was the time to give us all a gentle push and we would collapse and i think frankly we have all surprised ourselves with the intensity of our reaction and frankly along those lines but on the russia point this is not the cold war. we are not looking at a new ... and i say this because this is something i heard from china . we are not centering entering any third war. where not entering a new era, that's a long way to look at it. what we are looking at is a phase where autocrats are trying to prove the built in vulnerabilities of democracies and democratic alliances . they're trying to see how far they can push us and trying to see where they can leverage to destroy our

cohesion and they have so many opportunities of doing that and that is the challenge right now. we've been successful to our surprise so far but itis by no means over as everybody has said . one thing seems important and that also leans into the next column. i said earlier that at least this administration seems to have discovered europe is a useful asset and the stability of europe is meaningful to it. and let's keep in mind here that what putin is doing is not just about ukraine also about rolling back european to carry not just from 1989 but 1945 which also engulfed the us now. that is what is at stake and the strategy has to be to resist that and my final point is, we are looking potentially at a larger conflict with china in which

i think this administration understands europe is also a crucial asset to have so it's notjust resisting russia , it is also fortifying the alliance that remains in future tensions and conflict. >> let me ask you aversion of the question i asked you earlier . >> were going to be great friends . >> is this how you know in europe about long-term commitment? >> of course they are because they watch american television and american politics and they see what our colleague in his book constitution of knowledge has called this to my logical warfare. of course they see that different media organizations describe completely different truths. that's got to be terrifying to anybody who is a friend of

the united states whether we live here or not and so at the same time what's clear is that we were toast without american support. so the europeans are profoundly aware of the many ways in which they need america and they're also profoundly aware that they're going to have todo more . and that's the big conundrum of the german tongue and of course it's made more complicated by the fact that the major powers in europe, of which germany is one in inherently because of this economic power and their political weight have responsibility for the safety and security. can i just make one quick comment, there was one thing we didn't mention and you

raised the global south and security and i'm predicting that will come up on the next panel but i think picking up on what comes after, you might have to rethink the way we engage with partners outside of europe and the transatlantic space. they've been engaged in this for all kinds of concerns and they're looking at the asian-pacific region but we know with our colleagues from brazil asking questions and others in the middle east and around the world are also wondering what the impacts are going to be and that security is going to be one of them. obviously we're worrying about energy supplies in europe over the winter. people are also worried about food and inflation and were never really factoring in here all of these various fundamental verification issues and knowing now that as everybody knows that ukraine and russia together provides one quarter of global grain exports and if you take a country like ukraine off-line so to speak

you're going to have pretty tremendous consequences and this is also going to have to shift the way we think about this conflict and how we engage moving forward this is becoming an important talking points for putin. i think the last speaker several times but much of the grain exports arenow going to rich countries .thank you all, i'd like to thank our panelists for this conversation and i think we're wrapping up now but we will be in the third immediately after this. [applause]

>>.

>>. [inaudible] >> let me welcome you all to the third and final panel. of the 2022 night for reform on geopolitics. i should begin i guess by introducing myself. i'm bill ralston, senior fellow in government studies. yes, government studies . so i'm having that little stockdale momentfor those of you of a certain age . it's i think a ritual for the moderator of a panel to describe the panel as timely unless it's a velocity conference. but in this case i think that

much overwork adjective is literally true. let's consider what has happened in just the past week. as i think you are aware, indian prime minister modi delivered a rebuke to putin. he said today's erais not an era of war and i have spoken to you on the phone about this . for his part, vladimir putin publicly acknowledged china's concerns and questions about the war in ukraine. the chinese leader delivered a rebuke in his unique chinese way when he talked about the need for russia and

china to work together in an object stability into the turbulent world. at the same time challenging russia's primacy in central asia. in a very direct way. and then just last night, in response to the question so unlike ukraine us men and women would defend taiwan in the event of a chinese invasion,? yes, president biden obliged. as always the right house insisted that this didn't represent beijing policy but at the very least it was a step towards what i can call strategic disambiguation. to help us understand what all this means, the organizers of the conference

have assembled the brookings all-star team. robert kagan, my immediate left, i guess stage right wills stephen and barbara friedman, senior low for policies . at the far end, director of brookings india project and trish kim, the dave rubenstein fellowin foreign policy . here's how will spend this hour. a little roadmap. the first segment of our conversation by prearrangement will address the question of how the war in ukraine has changed the global and regional architectures of security and segment to, will talk about what all this means for us policy. segment three, if time

permits their belt will be follow-up questions on individual panelists either from other panelists for from me as your faithfulmoderator and finally , we will turn to questions from you so bob, get us started please. >> i'm going to talk about topic two in your first session but i'm going to talk a bit about what the american reaction to ukraine says about america's perception of their interests and what i want to say is that what we've seen in terms of that response follows a current pattern in american history in the sense that if you had, well, as you probably all were had been part of the foreign policy discussion prior tothe russian invasion , i think the general tenor

of that discussion was that ukraine was not within the ambit of us vital national security interests. it was not something that we would engage in conflict with russia over which we had yet begun to do but in that in general it was russia's sphere of influence both presidents obama and biden had taken a position that wasn't really an area for us meddling. and of course since the invasion the united states has immediately become deeply involved in supporting ukraine against the russian invasion and i think that raises the interesting question which is how do americans in fact regard their interests and it shows yet again, and i do think

this is not only recurrent but almost constant in american foreign policy that despite our discourse of what our national interests are which are usually framed in classical terms having to do with security as a nation, what americans really think of when they think of their interests when confronted by these kinds of aggression is world order and particularly liberal world order. and if you think about both world war i and world war ii and i could get into this in q and a if you want to, in both those cases long before the united states was directly in any way threatened in terms of its own national security, americans became deeply involved in conflicts in order to vent some dictators aggression against neighboring states. europe in particular but not just in europe but also in

asia. and at a certain point in the 1930s again, before american interests were directly threatened, americans began to see both in europe and in asia a generalized threat to the liberal world order which led to them to take various policy actions in both places that they would not have taken if the question was simply one of america's direct national security interests. and this is what has happened in the case of ukraine as well. you know, when mitch mcconnell says that ukraine is a vital court interest of the united states, what is he really saying, is he saying that if ukraine falls to russia america's immediate security is directly threatened? obviously not. what he's saying is the world

order that the united states has supported is threatened by that kind of action by russia, as i say many people would believe the same would be true if china were to invade taiwan. and i must say there has been i would say this junction between what americans think or are cold or is part of the discourse of interest and what they actually act upon is as their interest is one of the great sources of confusion in american foreign policy. and it would be good if we began to understand that our interests are actually involved in support of a liberal world order and are not about natalie focused on our immediate national security. whether we will learn this lesson or not as a result of ukraine, i would say as a scenario again the answer is no. we will conceivably oscillate

between the sort of very narrow classic realist definition of our interests but when actions are taken out by these aggressive dictatorships, we will act in fact on the basis of a world order concept of our national interests which in my view is the correct understanding of our interests. >> thanks bob. india and anything, any other area want to push. >> out stick to india given there's a lot there and maybe come back in q&a to the others . amy spoke a little bit about the global south and the second round. i do before i start want to get group on it as others have partly because while others have talked about during the course of this phase russia's side i will say both personally but

institutionally our work on india would not have been possible without sir talbot who invested in a study of the region in south asia more broadly alongside the war it was called to do so i wanted to put that out there. i will talk a bit about kind of how india sees in fact the russian invasion of ukraine has had on india broadly and not just in termsof the year . to put us in, the bottom line is several indian interests have had an effect by the russian invasion and in the immediate sense the invasion endangered the lives of 20,000 indian students and others who resided there one of whom was killed in russian shelling. and india had to get those. those were not out but also a political one. secondly and crucially delhi

has been facing a more constrained economic environment thanks to the invasion . this took place just as india was trying to come out of the pandemic and like many other countries economically recover from it but we seem high commodity prices that are significant in terms of what india imports. this multiple problems for the government not just in terms of energy security and food security but also it has fiscal implications and has political implications for the government as well. moreover the impact of the global economy has also been adversely affected economies of several of india's major markets as well as the sources of foreign direct investment so that's something. on the defense side the invasion has affected india's military radiance readiness

by jeopardizing the russian and ukrainian nation india's supply chain on which their forces depend and this is particularly crucial for india at the time to border a standoff between china and india in 2020 still continues and put could potentially escalate down the line strategically , the complications arising through the russian invasion has put pressure on some of india's crucial partners in particularly western indo pacific partners that have become crucial is not essential for indian security and economic objectives. the invasion also complicates what has been a long-standing indian objective and by long-standing i mean since the 1950s of trying to keep russia and china as far away from each other as possible.

india wants to see a russia that helps them balance chinese power and not one that is aligned with china . from delhi's perspective they see questions about what india thinks the invasion will lead to a russian independence for china and this raises questions about what a russia more beholden to china will do if beijing asks moscow to take actions that are against indian interest . such as an international organization that the un security council benefits or perhaps the india china boundary in the event of another crisis. all or will beijing demand that russia take its side more actively in the indio pacific, something it has not done. in response in the short term has not been what we would think which is to say okay, we need to move on but to actually try to keep russia from moving away from neutrality in the case of the china india crisis to move to more china's side and this is

crucial because of the level of india's military dependence on russia most of its equipment is 70 to 80 percent by some calculations is dependent on russian or russian origins and equipment. india has also been using the russia relationship to take some pressure off the indian economy through the purchase of lower price commodities and to keep its ties with russia despite all these concerns i laid out it's also bolstered by legacy ties including indian memories of a russia that was far more reliable as a partner to india in the 1970s and anybody else was. but it's also bolstered by the fact that while there are several divergences in perspective of this russian invasion even before that there's several divergences

in the russia relations and the trajectory of the opposite of that of india's relationship with thewest . despite those divergences and that declining partnership russia's still remains relevant for several indian interests particularly the defense also a multilateral arena where it can either help indian interests or be very harmful and as feel to help you too could even be punitive to india's interest down the line. so i and with just saying what the situation has done for india is as it thinks about sort of various embarrassments the indian government has two balance is a russian invasion highlights some of the contradictions and competing territories in india. you see this on balancing internal imperatives where short-term economic and political objectives are leading the modi government to take advantage of lower commodity prices but it's getting india's ties with

countries that are economically andstrategically more consequential or india . you're also seeing this kind of competing narratives on the strategic side where you see an india that wants to align, is aligning with like-minded workers to balance or even counter china . it's also been aligning in terms of quality which russia has opposed but it doesn't want to align with those countries that isolate russia and trying to do this even as russia and china are aligning with each other so i think a lot of what you've seen india with its balancing imperatives is trying to balance what this tight rope which frankly has got trickier and trickier as time has gone since the original invasion itself. this and reconciling these has been quite high maintenance for india i think this i would say briefly we could come back. to it in the q&a is you saw the results of these kind of

different imperatives in terms of theindian response . and particularly why does modi come out and say what he did which is this is not a time of war. this echoes a remark he made in 2014. alluding to russia and china. he was in japan and in a speech said this is not an era of development, this is an area not an era of expansionism, it should be an era of development. and he criticized countries with 18th-century mindsets that were encroaching onother countries lands . so he's echoing something he said before about the fact that he's gone public is significant. i think india's support for russia has been exaggerated in the past and i think now we're in danger of maybe over reading the rebuke because do not expect india to give up that russia relationship but it is nonetheless significant that india has for modi has

spoken out publicly and expressed those concerns, concerns expressed privately in the past because they recognize the longer this continues the more the damage those interests that i outlined in the beginning as well as the fact that they recognize is not costly strategy to be seen amongst other partners as seeming to only support for kind of not speak out against russia so i stop and can say more about the intuitive attrition. >> thanks very much, it's an honor to be here with my colleagues and to be part of the inaugural flight. i'm going to start with china's response to the russian invasion of the ukraine and try china since the beginning has been to say that a neutral third party to the conflict. it supports peaceful negotiations and it respects territorial integrity. while at the same time amplifying russian narratives at nato enlargement and disregard for russian

security interests. are basically the reasons that the cause to have no choice but to respond. china's insistence of neutrality has been with skepticism because 20 days before the russianinvasion of ukraine , president genting hosted president putin at the opening of the beijing olympics where the two sides were issuing an unprecedented joint statement and is in this statement we affirmed or reaffirmed their so-called no limits partnership and air their grievances vis-cvis the west making the case that western democracy should not have a monopoly over what a democracy is but they shouldn't impose their standards on others and they basically accused the united states and its partners of violating what they call indivisible security and it's pursuing their own security at the expense of russian and chinese security interests.

now there have been various discussions aboutwhether , how much xi you about putin's plants. whether he greenlighted these plans and while we may never know exactly to what extent the chinese new, i suspect that beijing was probably taken aback by what has happened in ukraine.i think they've been taken aback by the global backlash against china and reputational cost it has paid for supporting the russian narratives on ukraine. but beijing has decided essentially to double down at least rhetorically on its alignment with moscow and it has shown that is unwilling to directly condemn russia's war of aggression although it hasraised concerns or questions at the sco as mentioned at the outset . and this, these actions have raised concerns here in washington as well as in europe and asia about china's intention. it's long-term outlook and its front global scrutiny on

the situation in taiwan. which is not in beijing's interest. so this raises the question why has beijing stood by russia? why hasn't it distanced itself more despitethese costs and i think there are several reasons for this . so first i think it's clear that chinese leaders see direct parallels between their situation and russia's predicament. they see nato enlargement as similar to the strengthening of us alliances in asia with the growth of new security packs like the plot and they say this is western and circle meant and western plans to try to contain beijing and moscow. beijing certainly does not want to make an enemy of its nuclear powered neighborhoods and to be bogged down by a rivalry with russia that it was preoccupied with during the second half of the cold war. especially at a time when china really needs as many

strategic partners aspossible as it looks at long-term competition with the united states . so it's china basically sees russia as a great power partner in pushing back or pushing for what he calls multi-polarity that is countering what they see as a western dominated global order. western dominated global financial systems. what they call western long arm jurisdiction with sanctions and the imposition of values. it sees russia as a good partner. and finally i think the fact that xi jinping has invested in his partnership with houston makes it ethical for the chinese political system to declare that xi was wrong. the two leaders have met 39 times since xi came into power which is remarkable. despite the close ties between the two top leaders beijing's behavior since february has shown there are

some limits to this partnership. beijing this time was notably less enthusiastic at the summit between xi and putin in pakistan last week. also china hasn't given direct military aid to russia so this suggests there are indeed some limits and although beijing has stated publicly it opposes also to crawford will continue normal trade relations with russia again, china has supplied weapons. it hasn't extended direct military aid. chinese banks and businesses have been on hold largely complying quietly with international sanctions. and even though we've seen a boost in energy trade and semiconductors, chinese companies have filled the gap that american companies and european companies use to

play in the russian market for exports to semi conductors for instance but otherwise i think we haven't seen as much a flow from china to russia as would expect if it's between two powers with the so-called no limits partnership so these choices suggest to me that while beijing wants to maintain its ties with russia for the reason that i laid out earlier it doesn't intend to undercut its own interests so that weapons where the chinese stand right now we're off to a terrific start. and now i'm going to turn the conversation to something that was i would say questioned ever so delicately in the previous panel as sort of american centric inking. but i think to some extent we have to engage in it.

so here is the question for the second segment. what impact does your analysis of the meaning of ukraine for the united states , for india and for china have on the way the united states should be thinking about its foreign policy conducting its foreign policy. and i think i'm going to reverse the order so i'll go straight to patricia to follow up for her comments i think the russian invasion of ukraine has raised urgent questions about taiwan's faith and of course many parallels have been drawn between ukraine and taiwan predicament. i think for those who work on asia, there have long been

concerns about the shifting military balance in the taiwan strait. there's been a recognition that this balance has shifted largely to china's favor in recent years and of course this has raised questions about what more can the united states do to ensure that taiwan coulddefend itself , to ensure china can stand up to growing chinese aggression which has escalated across all domains, military and economic and diplomatic vis-cvis taiwan. i think for the united states and its allies, this has, the ones in ukraine i think especially for european countries and realized we don't want something similar to happen in asia. there's been an explosion of interest and desire to support taiwan.there have been a number of high-level visits by asian and european officials and of course us officials as well. and i think there are also, there's greater willingness by certain asian allies of

the united states like japan to talk about contingencies in the taiwan straits to make sure we are prepared if there were to be some sort of kinetic action there. but i think it's also important to know that there are different investments for the situation there, different investments on what asian allies or european allies even think or the right balance of us policy should be towards the taiwan strait. i think everyone at the end of the day once to avoid war at all costs. and of course turning to taiwan i think the people of taiwan watching the situation in ukraine this has been very sobering and it's kicked up this desire to be better prepared. there's a lot of enthusiasm for civilians learning about first a for instance. there is growing support for expanding military training for men over the age of 18 which right now is four months but they want to increase it out to a year so i think it's really added energy for this desire to taiwan to beef up its defenses and finally for

china i think it's been really interesting to see how china has been reacting to these comparisons so beijing has been the staunchest voice for making the case ukraine and taiwan are not the same. and they said this is because taiwan is not a sovereign state whereas ukraine is beijing has accused the united states of exploiting the situation in ukraine to try to increase support for taiwan and they blamed washington for allegedly emboldening independent forces or independent forces in taiwan so that's kind of where china is coming from and it says that the united states is asking china to have a double standard. is calling on china to support ukraine's territorial sovereignty and integrity whereas it's undermining china's own sovereignty. that's the argument we've seen over out of beijing this is exactly why china has worked so hard over the last several decades to push it's

one china principle so if and when there is a fight over taiwan they can say this is our territory and everyone recognizes that so that's been there diplomatic strategy for china watching russia's invasion of the ukraine and its isolation has confirmed for beijing that it needs to continue its push towards self efficiency. to reduce its reliance on foreign components, to the risk its own supply chain and its own vulnerability to western sanctions so i think it's enforced this idea that we need to have more decoupling on both sides of china as well as outside china i can't resist breaking ranks just a little bit and asking you to follow up. in the course of what you just said, you remarked that everybody agrees that we must avoid war with china at all

costs. that didn't sound like the policy that president biden articulated last night. what is us policy, what should it be? >> it's not that i don't know if it's at all costs. basically nobody wants war in asia because that would be devastating for everyone involved. whether it's china, the united states, taiwan, everyone. so everyone wants to avoid it, the question is how do you do that and there's debate about whether us long-standing us policy towards taiwan must be to and this is where you get the debate about strategic clarity or strategic maintaining strategic ambiguity. president biden has come out and said multiple times that he would send in us troops to taiwan if china were to invade and china gets upset about this because they see this as undercutting sort of the us recognition of or the united states long-standing one china policy. where i stand on this is we

need to be doing everything we can substantively to strengthen taiwan so it can defend itself. i think there's a lot of good workunderway to do this . but taiwan is certainly not thereyet . i don't think you can necessarily compare taiwan and ukraine in their readiness so we still have a ways to go but it's certainly going in that direction and i think the united states and its allies should be supporting that. while making it clear to the people of china that we are not trying to necessarily prejudice the outcome of the resolution across great differences, that's a question the people of china and people of taiwan must come to an agreement on. peacefully and that's kindof what we stand for, making sure no decisions are made under coercion and that both sides can negotiate peacefully . >> let me just t up the question about us policy towards india with an

observation based on what you said in the first round and you said that india has always been interested in maintaining if i understood you correctly allied separation between russia and china rather than an alignment between them. i suspect that most american foreign policy experts would agree with that overall strategic concept. we don't want a close alignment either. as far as i can tell. so what can american foreign policy in addition to all the other aspects of our relationship with india do to try to further that long-standing indian objective of increasing the distance between russia. >> will come back to that partly because i think it's become much tougher to then it would have even been a year ago. the answer would have been a

year ago that to do what president biden did not this summer but the summer before which is trying to not have necessarily a rehearsal, have some sort of engagement with russia that would give it options that are not striking but i'll come back to that maybe. i think this is all caught up. india's us relations with india as well as how russia china relations actually operate. i think what we've seen in terms of impact on us policy it is it has complicated us ties with the country and complicated ties with a country that now since about 2000 all-american administrations have invested a considerable amount of time and effort and resources. partly on the kind of resumption that india per se

but also india in alignment with the us and its allies and partners would serve as a balance and contrast to china. as several administrations have deepened, this has complicated through some kind of relationship. this is not new. one thing about us india ties for versus european partners is the differences over russia have been known and they've actually created problems even as recently over potential defense systems for india but i do think india's response has raised questions in the administration, but in the establishment more broadly about what india's response means for its view towards the international order more broadly and kind of you seen potentially whether india would be similarly

represented in the event of its contingency in the indo specific. whether it's a crisis over taiwan or the south china sea. it will india? i think at the very least what people in delhi should be concerned about is the impact on not necessarily the trajectory of the relationship that would deepen but that it doesn't in certain domains but doesn't it lower the level of enthusiasm which i think it has amongst certain quarters in the us about the india relationshipand indian investment . and in a time when there are debates about whether to do something with india or not or for india and not within the administration how is this stance impacting the battle between the internal

democratic battles between the transatlantic and india pacific or for instance is it going to as your thinking about limited bandwidth the administration is thinking should we be investing so much versus other relationships and mechanisms so how is this feeling and i think that potentially could have an impact nonetheless i mentioned some of these contradictions inindia's relationship . one thing from the us perspective is also a contradiction in terms of us interest because what bit us wants to do is see india move away from russia but also india's ability to serve as a counterbalance to china. as a net security provider in the indo pacific holding the line at the india china border. depend on the millage equipment it gets, its ability to continue to survive so it's military readiness. it's ability for its navy

depends on that russian navy. so it's a bit of a contradiction. the indian government has managed this differently as well as could be expected. partly by working from the bottom line that they're not going to let russia essentially lead to the beginning of us india ties which could have been possible saying you're not with us, you're against us and we're not doing anything more. that would have been playing into china's hands so i think that the administration has done a good job. i think though there's a thing that the administration and some of these governments could do which is because this raises questions about what a contingency in the india pacific is to have a frank conversation behind closed doors if necessary about indo pacific contingencies, what the expectations of each other are and sharing assessments

as well. i think if that doesn't happen you want to see a situation where there are again different expectations about what india did will do versus what it will actually do . just very quickly i will say i want to say something about kind of the global south as people talk about it and the reason i put it in quotation marks earlier is i think it is a term that hides a lot of diversity and i will say this when people say the global south has not taken a similar stance. what are some of the most kind of incisive comments on what the russians have done and what that meant for territorial integrity and countries like kenya and jean and when you keep the focus on that you do see countries outside the west see what the problem with the russian invasion are but you will not see countries outside the transatlantic domain perhaps and australia included. some on the border see the situation exactly the same

way so for the us looking at a system whether it's about the china challenge or the russia challenge we need to think about how you actually come up with strategic communications and a narrative that is going to be something that they listen to and things that are not going to be attractive to them even though they might be good from a transatlantic or domestic us perspective are a with us or against us approach or an approach that talks about authoritarianism versus democracy or frankly taking the moral high ground because i think we have to recognize that the rest of the world does not necessarily see our moral high ground as of being deserving of it given whether it was all war in iraq or frankly the imperial led colonial legacies of several european countries and a lack of recognition about that stance so thinking about that we need to have an approach that is thinking about not the global south but who can

actually get to rely on certain positions because i don't think it's one big hole and there can be strategies to get them on board or at least keep them from going over to the other side okay. i'd like to invite you to speculate but let me he up sort of ascience-fiction experiment . you've agreed to accept a demotion from your role as a globally recognized foreign policy grow and become the national securityadvisor to the president . >> that would be a demotion in terms of lifestyle. >> in many other ways as well . and here's my question. if you thought that you had for years or eight years in that role, given your analysis that you laid out of

the way americans actually think about the way we should conduct our foreign policy, as the way the standard realist template as opposed to the realist template of a hard account ofinterest , what would you do differently from what's now having. would you talk about it differently? what difference would your analysis make in the conduct of american foreign and defense policy. >> right now, other than more of the same, not very much because the united states it seems to me has already ... you know, if you think about the history of foreign-policy it's sinewave. it's an oscillation between period's of significant overseas involvement, usually inspired by some moral

/security connection followed by disillusionment and a desire for retraction. it is the case the united states is really unique in its relative invulnerability to foreign attack. obviously people can fire missiles at the united states, conduct terrorist attacks against the united states unlike every other country the united states is not get to the prospect of invasion and therefore for americans all foreign-policy is choice . i think if you think in terms of world order, america does have i think has in its own interest acquired a responsibility to maintain that americans don't necessarily feel that way especially when things go bad as they inevitably do . so we were after the iraq war and along trough in this isolation and now as a result

of the conjunction of events both ukraine and the rise of china, americans are once again worked themselves into the mode of thinking globally about their interests. thinking that they actually have a responsibility. >> .. >> we are more in that mode that we were in in the late 1930s heading into, not that we are heading into world war ii, but of that mentality and also we were during certain periods of the cold war. so what i would want to try to do is avoid the inevitable

downturn, or put it off as much as possible. and already we see the seeds of that oscillation in the way certain segment of the republican party are already deciding to position themselves against american policy in ukraine 11 senators voted against the latest aid a bi. and should something go wrong, which by the way something always goes wrong, there will be a significant recurrence of americans saying wait a minute, wait a minute, how did we get into this? this is where our confusion about our interest come in because at that point a lot of people will say as rand paul and a lot of republicans say now what is her interest in ukraine? we have an interest along the southern border against immigrants but what is her interest in ukraine? that you can take cold more rapidly than you might imagine

in the united states. so the real task it seems to me of american leadership now is to try to conduct this policy in a way that you can establish some consistency in american foreign policy. and that does as you suggesting in your question require and educational element. and i think part of that educational element is for the president, as franklin roosevelt did beginning in the mid, begin with i would say is speech in 1937, to begin saying look, we do have an interest in this liberal world order. you can't use the word liberal apparently, but in this world order. and it is time for us to take that interest seriously again. and so i would like to see more of that, rather than treating this as kind of a one off, and

we hope this will end well and we can move on and get back to normal. there is this constant feeling in the united states that we're going to get through this crisis and then get back to normal. and normal means we don't have to pay full attention to what's going on everywhere around the world. while you don't want to tell the americans the truth, i suppose we are in this like for eternity. you do want to make it clear to them that this liberal world order that we support is of great value to us and does require consistent effort on our part to sustain. we did that more recently when communism was the threat. i think we were overblown about the threat of communism but it worked as a domestic strategy. whether we can do the same thing now i think remains to be seen. but, of course,, and i'll end on this, we are only at the

beginning of the series of crises that are going to be erupting. this is an early stage in what's happening in the world, unless we do such a good job of stanching all of these efforts to reshape the international system that russia and china in particular are engaged in. if we are not really quite up to that now we are going to see more crises, and then we were in this for the long term whether we want to be or not. >> perfect. we are right on time, and now it's your turn. there's a sea of hands. i think we will start with the young woman in the back. yes, you. and i should say we have limited time, so no speeches, please. ask questions. >> thank you so much to the panelist. >> stand up so we can hear you better. thank you.

>> i had a question, if you could elaborate on what you're saying on the global south and it connects to the liberal world order comments. so you talked about an information campaign in the global south but when you see current crisis reising, commodity prices, very real implications of the fertilizer and green disruptions. how much of it is an information campaign versus actual investments and made towards our allies and partners in the global south? and how much do you see this as a priority in u.s. foreign policy circles as a something that is marginalized in the conversation? >> okay. i think our best strategy is to take three questions, and then answers and then there will be another round of questions if

time permits. so yes, the young man over -- yes, you. >> thank you. just a guy with an interest in geopolitics. i have a question for patricia. i i was wondering if you could elaborate on the impact of china's domestic economic pressures, especially with the covid lockdowns and the real estate problems and how those have affected how far to support russia and perhaps on how far you might be willing to go with taiwan as well. thank you. >> now for the third question. yes, young man right in the center here. >> i'm a graduate student at johns hopkins. my question is, you mention u.s. leadership -- liberal international order. so in the indo-pacific we see that the u.s. relationship is -- especially when it comes to the

-- [inaudible] so how do you foresee the u.s.-canada becoming more active and more broader as opposed to being specific and showing that leadership in conquering china? >> thanks. okay, panelists, over to you. >> so very quickly, we can talk about this more but i don't think it could just be an information campaign. but i think even on the food, fuel, fertilizer concerns you mentioned, for instance, using several countries not -- this is where kind of russia chinese effort in terms of their information campaign have paid -- i am mixing my metaphors, but have actually paid off, which is you've seen them it's not the russian invasion that is at

fault, it is western sanctions. even though there are not ena sanction on food, fuel and fertilizer. i do think you have seen more effort maybe not at the beginning, i think there was an underestimation of the second and third order effect of the invasion but also kind of the response. i think the administration as well as other countries in the global south by kind of transatlantic space as well pay more attention to this issue. i think the recognition is at the end of the day if you want to get other countries to think about these issues in similar way, focus on that violation of territorial integrity and sovereignty. you have to be responsive to the concerns as well, which is primarily going to be on these concerns. i think it's going to get worse before it gets better. you've seen the impact of in south asia, places like sri lanka and pakistan. we will see more broadly where high commodity prices are going

to lead to -- which frankly might not of been created by the problems china has enabled or exacerbated but they are not doing very much to help support it either. we also to get on board trying to figure out these longer-term concerns. because i don't think they're going to go away anytime soon. >> on the question about china's domestic economic situation and how that impacts its foreign policy behavior. i mean, the slowdown in economic growth in china because of its strict zero covid policy as willis well as problems in the real estate industry and other industries, it has definitely made an impact on china. this is definitely something that keeps xi jinping and the communist party of that night. under the ccp, china has had phenomenal economic growth for the last several decades. i think the reason why many chinese citizens have tolerated their monopoly over power is because they have this implicit

contract. they have made life better, at least materially for many chinese, and so this has worked for now. but there's a slowdown and so i think that makes a lot of chinese leaders nervous. and to deal with this, the ccp and president xi has really sort of double down on state intervention and sort of the state sort of pushing its global, or is common prosperity campaign and send in more oversight. i don't think this fits well necessarily with the people of china and so there's a lot of people who are unhappy with the tightening and the growing ideological turn on the country. so this is a lot for xi to deal with. there have been arguments i've seen recently because china is economically slowing down preps it might strike even faster on taiwan one has the chance to do so. this is a debate that has become popular in washington right now. i don't think we can say definitively that if that is the

case or not. i think president xi has held his own strategic ambiguity about his time went on taiwan. he said he doesn't want the problem to be passed down multiple generations, that it needs to be taken care of in order for china to achieve its full national rejuvenation. by the don't think that means there's a d-day mark somewhere and that the chinese are going to move on a certain date. i think they are preserving their ambiguity. they have a lot to deal with at home. they need to preserve their legitimacy at home, and i think that serves as a source. >> i just, you know, i think it's possible to overstate and i slightly disagree with tanvi on this. how the united states messages itself around the world. i think it's pretty clear that most countries around the world want to know what's in it for

them in any given situation. and tanvi is listed the things that these other countries want, how their interests have been affected by this war. i think the real question is is the united states and the transatlantic world in general capable of meeting some of these needs or not. i think in answer to your question, when the united states is most effective it is thinking globally. it is thinking about exactly the question of what is it that is motivating and the countries and what is it that they need. and to the degree that it is possible to meet those needs, then the united states can try to do that. now, i would say the united states is, , like any other country, tremendously -- not necessarily always attuned to what other countries want and need, and much more attuned to what they want and need but, of

course, that's like all countries. certainly like india. but that is the goal. the goal is dry to meet the various needs. i don't think think it matters very much quite honestly -- to try -- whether the united states has every single country in the world on the right side of the russia question. there really are a limited number of countries whose actions fundamentally matter. most of those in the current situation are basically on the same side as the united states, for their own reasons. you know, i don't think -- some of it is ideological but when you look at countries like japan and other asian countries, they are worried about china taking aggression and what the effect will be on them, and a look to the united states for security. either the united states is offered offering to provide that security or isn't. if it is been there basically on

the united states side. america has been hated around the world much more in the past than it currently is, you know? if you think about the late 1960s or the 1950s, american officials were obsessed with the fact that the world hated them. it's a common fixture of international relations with the united states. and we should try to make, insofar as is possible not have countries hate us. but i think the way to do that is to focus on the very specific usually material and practical means and desires of the countries around the world. >> with that, i wish there were time for more questions, but it's my sad duty to bring both this panel and this over all knight forum to a conclusion i want to thank our panelists very

much for such clarity and offering their views, and to all of you for taking the time and the trouble and the modest covid risk to attend. not you who are watching. [applause] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations] [inaudible conversations]

>> this afternoon representatives mike turner and trent kelly join a discussion on foreign interference and disinformation campaigns. this heritage foundation event starts life at one p.m. eastern on c-span2. you can also want on our oue mobile video at c-span now. -- watch. >> this week on the c-span networks, the senate homeland security committee holds a hearing tuesday on unaccounted deaths in american prisons. on wednesday the same committee considers a nomination to be head of the national archives and records administration. the agency has been in the news lately for parole in the fbi seizure of documents from former president trump. later wednesday federal reserve chair jerome powell holds a press conference. the house and senate are both in session. both chambers are expected to take up a short-term spending bill to avert a government shutdown at the end of the month. the senate will vote on nominations and ratification of changes to the global climate treaty. the houseplants to take up student loan relief legislation.

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