Boston Global Forum is proudly to host the next online-live conference on U.S. – Japan – China relations, focusing on building a framework for peace and security.
The conference will be live-streamed at www.bostonglobalforum.org
Send your question to office@bostonglobalforum
TIME & VENUE
Time: 5:00 – 6:30 PM EST, Monday, November 10, 2014
Venue: Room 275, 2nd Floor, Taubman Building, Shorenstein Center, Harvard Kennedy School
Connecting with: Boston, Washington, DC, Tokyo, Singapore through Web Video Conference
MODERATORS
Governor Michael Dukakis – Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum
Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. – Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; University Distinguished Service Professor; Former Dean, Harvard Kennedy School
KEY DISCUSSION TOPICS
Threats to peace and security in the Pacific
Principles for creating peace and security in the Pacific
Steps for promoting peace and security in the Pacific
SPEAKERS:
Robert D. Kaplan – Chief Geopolitical Analyst, Stratfor; Non-resident senior fellow, Center for New American Security (CNAS)
Professor Joseph Nye – Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; University Distinguished Service Professor; Former Dean, Harvard Kennedy School
Professor Etel Solingen – Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies; Chancellor’s Professor, University of California Irvine; Lim Chong Yah Chair in Social Sciences, National University of Singapore; Editorial Board Member, Quarterly Journal: International Security, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard University.
Dr. Patrick M. Cronin – Senior Advisor and Senior Director, Asia-Pacific Security Program, Center for a New American Security (CNAS)
Professor Richard Rosecrance – Adjunct Professor of Public Policy, Harvard Kennedy School; Research Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
David E. Sanger – Chief Washington Correspondent, New York Times; Senior Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
DELEGATES AND DISCUSSANTS:
Governor Michael Dukakis – Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum
Kitty Dukakis – Former First Lady of Massachusetts
Professor Thomas E. Patterson – Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School
Professor John Quelch – Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
Nguyen Anh Tuan – Co-Founder, Editor-in-Chief and Chief Executive Officer, Boston Global Forum
Ambassador Ichiro Fujisaki – Former Ambassador of Japan to the United States
Ambassador Seiichi Kondo – Special advisor to the Minister for Foreign Affairs; Specially-appointed professor at the University of Tokyo; Former Commissioner, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan
Professor Kosaku Dairokuno – Dean, School of Political Science and Economics, Meiji University
David Case – Senior Editor, Global Post.
Llewellyn King – Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Co-Host and Executive Producer of PBS “White House Chronicle” program
Linda Gasparello – Co-Host and General Manager of PBS “White House Chronicle” program
Professor Barry Nolan – Member, Boston Global Foum Editorial Board; Professor, Department of Journalism, Boston University
Richard Pirozollo – Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Founder and Managing Director, Pirozzolo Company Public Relations
Professor Suzanne P. Ogden – Professor and Interim Chair of Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science
Ambassador J.D. Bindenagel – Former U.S. Ambassador, Henry Kissinger Professor for International Security and Governverce, Bonn University
Dr. Elliot Salloway – Chief Operation Officer, Boston Global Forum
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GOVERNOR MICHAEL DUKAKIS
Co-Founder; Chairman of The Board of Directors and Board of Thinkers, The Boston Global Forum. Democratic Party Nominee for President of the United States, 1988. Distinguished Professor J.D., Harvard University
Michael Stanley Dukakis was born in Brookline, Massachusetts to Greek immigrant parents. He attended Swarthmore College and Harvard Law School and served in the United States Army from 1955-1957, sixteen months of which was with the support group to the U.S. delegation to the Military Armistice Commission in Korea.
He served eight years as a member of the Massachusetts legislature and was elected governor of Massachusetts three times. He was the Democratic nominee for the presidency in 1988. Since 1991 he has been a distinguished professor of political science at Northeastern University in Boston, and since 1996 visiting professor of public policy during the winter quarter at UCLA in Los Angeles. He is chairman of Boston Global Forum. He is married to the former Kitty Dickson. They have three children—John, Andrea and Kara—and eight grandchildren.
PROFESSOR JOSEPH NYE
Member of Board of Thinkers , Boston Global Forum; University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University; Former Dean, Harvard Kennedy School
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. is University Distinguished Service Professor and former Dean of Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government and a member of the Boston Global Forum’s Board of Thinkers. He received his bachelor’s degree summa cum laude from Princeton University, did postgraduate work at Oxford University on a Rhodes Scholarship, and earned a Ph.D. in political science from Harvard. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and a Deputy Under Secretary of State. His most recent books include Soft Power, The Power Game: A Washington Novel, The Powers to Lead and Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. In a recent survey of international relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy.
ROBERT D. KAPLAN
Chief Geopolitical Analyst for Stratfor; Non-resident senior fellow, Center for New American Security (CNAS).
ROBERT D. KAPLAN is Chief Geopolitical Analyst for Stratfor, a private global intelligence firm. He is the author of 15 books on foreign affairs and travel translated into many languages, including “Asia’s Cauldron: The South China Sea and the End to a Stable Pacific,” “The Revenge of Geography: What the Map Tells Us about Coming Conflicts and the Battle Against Fate,” “Monsoon: The Indian Ocean and the Future of American Power,”“Balkan Ghosts: A Journey through History,” and “Warrior Politics: Why Leadership Demands a Pagan Ethos.” He has been a foreign correspondent for The Atlantic for over a quarter-century. In 2011, and again in 2012, Foreign Policy magazine named Kaplan among the world’s “100 Top Global Thinkers.”
Since 2008, he has been a non-resident senior fellow at the Center for a New American Security in Washington, D.C. From 2009 to 2011, he served under Secretary of Defense Robert Gates as a member of the Pentagon’s Defense Policy Board. From 2006 to 2008, he was the Class of 1960 Distinguished Visiting Professor in National Security at the United States Naval Academy, Annapolis.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman calls Kaplan among the four “most widely read” authors defining the post-Cold War (along with Johns Hopkins Prof. Francis Fukuyama, the late Harvard Prof. Samuel Huntington, and Yale Prof. Paul Kennedy). In the 1980s, Kaplan was the first American writer to warn in print about a future war in the Balkans. Balkan Ghosts was chosen by The New York Times Book Review as one of the “best books” of 1993. The Arabists, The Ends of the Earth, An Empire Wilderness, Eastward to Tartary, and Warrior Politics were all chosen by The New York Times as “notable” books of the year. An Empire Wilderness was chosen by The Washington Post and The Los Angeles Times as one of the best books of 1998. The Wall Street Journal named The Arabists as one of the best five books written about America’s historical involvement in the Middle East.
Kaplan is a provocative essayist. His article, “The Coming Anarchy,” in the February, 1994 Atlantic Monthly, about how population rises, urbanization, and resource depletion is undermining governments, was hotly debated in foreign-language translations around the world. So was his December, 1997 Atlantic cover story, “Was Democracy Just A Moment?” That piece argued that the democracy now spreading around the world would not necessarily lead to more stability. According to U. S. News & World Report, “President Clinton was so impressed with Kaplan, he ordered an interagency study of these issues, and it agreed with Kaplan’s conclusions.”
Besides The Atlantic Monthly, Kaplan’s essays have appeared on the editorial pages of The New York Times, The Washington Post, the Financial Times, The Wall Street Journal,and The Los Angeles Times, as well as in all the major foreign affairs journals. He has been a consultant to the U. S. Army’s Special Forces Regiment, the U. S. Air Force, and the U. S. Marines. He has lectured at military war colleges, the FBI, the National Security Agency, the Pentagon’s Joint Staff, the Defense Intelligence Agency, the CIA, major universities, and global business forums. Kaplan has delivered the Secretary of State’s Open Forum Lecture at the U. S. State Department. He has reported from over 100 countries. Two earlier books of his, Soldiers of God: With Islamic Warriors in Afghanistan and Pakistan, and Surrender or Starve: Travels in Ethiopia, Sudan, Somalia and Eritrea, have been re-issued, so that all this books are in print.
PROFESSOR ETEL SOLINGEN
Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies; Chancellor’s Professor, University of California Irvine; Lim Chong Yah Chair in Social Sciences, National University of Singapore
Etel Solingen is the Thomas T. and Elizabeth C. Tierney Chair in Peace and Conflict Studies and recent Chancellor’s Professor at the University of California Irvine. She currently holds the Lim Chong Yah Chair in Social Sciences at the National University of Singapore. She served as president of the International Studies Association, Chair of the Steering Committee of the University of California’s Institute on Global Conflict and Cooperation, president of ISA’s International Political Economy Section and the American Political Science Association’s International History and Politics Section, and member of the APSA’s presidential Taskforce on U.S. Standing in World Affairs. Her book Nuclear Logics: Contrasting Paths in East Asia and the Middle East(Princeton University Press 2007) received the APSA’s Woodrow Wilson award for the best book published in 2008 on government, politics, or international affairs, and the APSA’s Robert Jervis and Paul Schroeder Award for best book on International History and Politics. She received a MacArthur Foundation Research and Writing Award on Peace and International Cooperation, Social Science Research Council–MacArthur Foundation Fellowship on Peace and Security in a Changing World, Social Science Research Council/Japan Foundation Abe Fellowship, Center for Global Partnership/Japan Foundation fellowship, APSA Excellence in Mentorship Award, and Distinguished Teaching Award from UC Irvine’s Academic Senate, among others.
Solingen also authored Regional Orders at Century’s Dawn: Global and Domestic Influences on Grand Strategy(Princeton U. Press 1998), Industrial Policy, Technology, and International Bargaining (Stanford U. Press 1996), andComparative Regionalism (Routledge 2014); edited Sanctions, Statecraft, and Nuclear Proliferation (Cambridge U. Press 2012), Scientists and the State (U. of Michigan Press 1994) and co-edited the special presidential issue of International Studies Review (2014). Her articles on international relations theory, political economy, international and regional security, international institutions, democratization, and science and technology appeared in International Security, American Political Science Review, International Organization, International Studies Quarterly, Comparative Politics, Journal of Peace Research, Journal of Theoretical Politics, Global Governance, Review of International Studies, Journal of Democracy, International Relations of the Asia-Pacific, and New Political Economy, among others. She serves in various editorial boards and was Review Essay Editor forInternational Organization.
DR. PATRICK M. CRONIN
Senior Advisor and Senior Director, Asia-Pacific Security Program, Center for a New American Security (CNAS).
Patrick M. Cronin is a Senior Advisor and Senior Director of the Asia-Pacific Security Program at the Center for a New American Security (CNAS). Previously, he was the Senior Director of the Institute for National Strategic Studies (INSS) at the National Defense University, where he simultaneously oversaw the Center for the Study of Chinese Military Affairs.
Dr. Cronin has a rich and diverse background in both Asian-Pacific security and U.S. defense, foreign and development policy. Prior to leading INSS, Dr. Cronin served as the Director of Studies at the London-based International Institute for Strategic Studies (IISS). At the IISS, he also served as Editor of the Adelphi Papers and as the Executive Director of the Armed Conflict Database. Before joining IISS, Dr. Cronin was Senior Vice President and Director of Research at the Center for Strategic and International Studies (CSIS).
In 2001, Dr. Cronin was confirmed by the United States Senate to the third-ranking position at the U.S. Agency for International Development (USAID). While serving as Assistant Administrator for Policy and Program Coordination, Dr. Cronin also led the interagency task force that helped design the Millennium Challenge Corporation (MCC).
From 1998 until 2001, Dr. Cronin served as Director of Research at the U.S. Institute of Peace. Prior to that, he spent seven years at the National Defense University, first arriving at INSS in 1990 as a Senior Research Professor covering Asian and long-range security issues. He was the founding Executive Editor of Joint Force Quarterly, and subsequently became both Deputy Director and Director of Research at the Institute. He received the Army’s Meritorious Civilian Service Award upon his departure from NDU in 1997.
He has also been a senior analyst at the Center for Naval Analyses, a U.S. Naval Reserve Intelligence officer, and an analyst with the Congressional Research Service and SRI International. He was Associate Editor of Strategic Review and worked as an undergraduate at the Miami Herald and the Fort Lauderdale News.
Dr. Cronin has taught at Georgetown University’s Security Studies Program, The Johns Hopkins University’s Paul H. Nitze School of Advanced International Studies (SAIS), and the University of Virginia’s Woodrow Wilson Department of Government.
He read International Relations at St Antony’s College, University of Oxford, where he received both his M.Phil. and D.Phil. degrees, and graduated with high honors from the University of Florida. He regularly publishes essays in leading publications and frequently conducts television and radio interviews. In addition to many CNAS reports and numerous articles, his major publications include: Global Strategic Assessment, 2009: America’s Security Role in a Changing World; Civilian Surge: Key to Complex Operations (co-editor); The Impenetrable Fog of War: Reflections on Modern Warfare and Strategic Surprise; The Evolution of Strategic Thought: Adelphi Paper Classics; and Double Trouble: Iran and North Korea as Challenges to International Security.
PROFESSOR RICHARD N. ROSECRANCE
Adjunct Professor, Harvard Kennedy School; Research Professor of Political Science, University of California, Los Angeles
Richard Rosecrance is an Adjunct Professor at Harvard’s John F. Kennedy School of Government, a Research Professor of Political Science at the University of California, Los Angeles. He was formerly a Professor at the University of California, Berkeley, and the Walter S. Carpenter, Jr., Professor of International and Comparative Politics at Cornell University. He served in the Policy Planning Council of the Department of State. He has written or edited more than a dozen books and many scholarly articles. The singly authored works include Action and Reaction in World Politics (1963); Defense of the Realm: British Strategy in the Nuclear Epoch (1968); International Relations: Peace or War? (1973); The Rise of the Trading State: Commerce and Conquest in the Modern World (1986); America’s Economic Resurgence (1990); and The Rise of the Virtual State: Wealth and Power in the Coming Center (1999). The edited volumes include The Dispersion of Nuclear Weapons: Strategy and Politics (1964); The Future of the International Strategic System (1972);America as an Ordinary Country (1976); The Domestic Bases of Grand Strategy(1993); The Costs of Conflict (1999); and The New Coalition of Great Powers(2001). He is the principal investigator of UCLA’s Carnegie Project on “Globalization and Self Determination”. He has received Guggenheim, Rockefeller, Ford, Fulbright, NATO, and many other fellowships. He was President of the International Studies Association and served as Director of UCLA’s Center for International Relations from 1992 to 2000. He has held research and teaching appointments in Florence (the European University Institute); Paris (the Institut de Sciences Politiques), London (Kings College London, the London School of Economics, and the International Institute for Strategic Studies), and Canberra (The Australian National University). He has lectured widely in East Asia and Europe. His recent book on the “virtual state” has been translated into Japanese, Chinese (Taiwan), German and will shortly appear in Ar “Débat sur L’État Virtuel“. Professor Rosecrance is now at work on a book on international mergers which compares U.S. with European political and economic strategies.
DAVID E. SANGER
Chief Washington Correspondent, New York Times; Senior Fellow and Adjunct Lecturer, Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, Harvard Kennedy School
David E. Sanger is chief Washington correspondent of The New York Times. Mr. Sanger has reported from New York, Tokyo and Washington, covering a wide variety of issues surrounding foreign policy, globalization, nuclear proliferation and Asian affairs.
Twice he has been a member of Times reporting teams that won the Pulitzer Prize. In 2011, Mr. Sanger was part of a team that was a Pulitzer Prize finalist for International Reporting for their coverage of the tsunami and nuclear disaster in Japan.
Before covering the White House, Mr. Sanger specialized in the confluence of economic and foreign policy, and wrote extensively on how issues of national wealth and competitiveness have come to redefine the relationships between the United States and its major allies.
As a correspondent and then bureau chief in Tokyo for six years, he covered Japan’s rise as the world’s second largest economic power, and then its humbling recession. He also filed frequently from Southeast Asia, and wrote many of the first stories about North Korea’s secret nuclear weapons program in the 1990’s. He continues to cover proliferation issues from Washington.
Leaving Asia in 1994, Mr. Sanger took up the position of chief Washington economic correspondent, and covered a series of global economic upheavals, from Mexico to the Asian economic crisis. He was named a senior writer in March 1999, and White House correspondent later that year.
Mr. Sanger joined The Times in the Business Day section, specializing in the computer industry and high-technology trade. In 1986 he played a major role in the team that investigated the causes of the space shuttle Challenger disaster, writing the first stories about what the space agency knew about the potential flaws in the shuttle’s design and revealing that engineers had raised objections to launching the shuttle. The team won the 1987 Pulitzer Prize for national reporting. He was a member of another Pulitzer-winner team that wrote about the struggles within the Clinton administration over controlling exports to China.
Mr. Sanger appears regularly on public affairs and news shows. He is a member of the Council on Foreign Relations and the Aspen Strategy Group.
NGUYEN ANH TUAN
Co-Founder, Chief Executive Officer and Editor-in-Chief of The Boston Global Forum.
Nguyen Anh Tuan was the Founder and Chairman of the VietNamNet Media Group and the Founder and Editor-in-Chief of VietNamNet Online Newspaper. Tuan was also the Founder and CEO of the VASC Software and Media Company and VietNet, the first Internet service provider in Vietnam. In 1996, Tuan was named as one of the Top Ten Outstanding Young Talents of Vietnam by the Prime Minister. Under Tuan’s leadership, VietNamNet raised significant political topics for reform in Vietnam. He pioneered an interactive live format called the “VietNamNet Online Roundtable” that enabled readers to participate in interviews of leading political, social and cultural figures. In 2009, Tuan conceived a global initiative called the “World Compassion and Reconciliation Day” on September 9th of each year. In 2007, as the Shorenstein Center’s Fellow, Tuan researched key trends in the development of electronic media in Vietnam. In 2011, Tuan was a part of the Pacific Leadership Fellows Program at the School of International Relations and Pacific Studies at the University of California in San Diego. That year, he was also a speaker at the prestigious annual Club de Madrid Conference on the subject of Democracy and Digital Technology. Since February 2011, Tuan has been an Associate of the Shorenstein Center on the Press, Politics and Public Policy, John F. Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. In April 2012, he founded the Tran Nhan Tong Academy . In December 2012, Tuan co-founded the Boston Global Forum with the Honorable Michael Dukakis who was Massachusetts Governor and U.S. Presidential Nominee, and currently serving as the Boston Global Forum’s Chief Executive Board and Editor-in-Chief . Also in 2012, together with Ambassador Swanee Hunt, Tuan established the Charles Ansbacher Music Club to bring classical music to people who live in remote and distant locations. Tuan has been a member of Harvard Business School Global Advisory Board since 2008. He also serves on the Board of Trustees of the Free for All Concert Fund in Boston.
PROFESSOR THOMAS E. PATTERSON
Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press, Harvard Kennedy School
Thomas E. Patterson is Bradlee Professor of Government and the Press of Harvard Kennedy School and a co-founding member of BGF’s Board of Directors. His book, The Vanishing Voter, looks at the causes and consequences of electoral participation. His earlier book on the media’s political role, Out of Order, received the American Political Science Association’s Graber Award as the best book of the decade in political communication. His first book, The Unseeing Eye, was named by the American Association for Public Opinion Research as one of the 50 most influential books on public opinion in the past half century. He also is author of Mass Media Election and two general American government texts: The American Democracy and We the People. His articles have appeared in Political Communication, Journal of Communication, and other academic journals, as well as in the popular press. His research has been funded by the Ford, Markle, Smith-Richardson, Pew, Knight, Carnegie, and National Science foundation. Patterson received his PhD from the University of Minnesota in 1971.
PROFESSOR JOHN A. QUELCH
Co-Founder, Member of Board of Directors, Boston Global Forum; Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration, Harvard Business School
John A. Quelch is the Charles Edward Wilson Professor of Business Administration at Harvard Business School. He holds a joint appointment at Harvard School of Public Health as Professor in Health Policy and Management. He is also a fellow of the Harvard China Fund, a Member of the Harvard China Advisory Board and Associate in Research at the Fairbank Center for Chinese Studies. Between 2011 and 2013, Professor Quelch was Dean, Vice President and Distinguished Professor of International Management at CEIBS, China’s leading business school. Between 2001 and 2011, he was the Lincoln Filene Professor of Business Administration and Senior Associate Dean at Harvard Business School. He served as Dean of London Business School from 1998 to 2001. Prior to 1998, he was the Sebastian S. Kresge Professor of Marketing and Co-Chair of the Marketing Unit at Harvard Business School. Professor Quelch is known for his teaching materials and innovations in pedagogy. Over the past twenty-five years, his case studies have sold over 4 million copies, third highest in HBS history. In 1995, he developed the first HBS interactive CD-ROM exercise (on Intel’s advertising budgeting process). In 1999, he developed and presented a series of twelve one hour programs on Marketing Management for the Public Broadcasting System. Professor Quelch’s research focus is on global marketing and branding in emerging as well as developed markets. His current research projects address (a) understanding the contributions of marketing to the functioning of democracies and (b) formalizing appropriate marketing and customer metrics for periodic review by boards of directors. Professor Quelch is the author, co-author or editor of twenty-five books, including All Business Is Local (2011), Greater Good: How Good Marketing Makes for Better Democracy (2008), Business Solutions for the Global Poor: Creating Social and EconomicValue (2007), The New Global Brands (2006), Global Marketing Management (5th edition, 2006), The Global Market (2005), Cases inAdvertising and Promotion Management (4th Edition, 1996) and The Marketing Challenge of Europe 1992 (2nd edition, 1991). He has published eighteen articles on marketing strategy issues in the Harvard Business Review,most recently“How To Market In A Downturn” (April 2009), and many more in other leading management journals such as McKinsey Quarterly and Sloan ManagementReview. Professor Quelch has served as an independent director of twelve publicly listed companies in the USA and UK. He is currently a non-executive director of WPP and Alere. He served pro bono for eight years as Chairman of the Port Authority of Massachusetts. He is the Honorary Consul General of Morocco in New England and served previously as Chairman of the British-American Business Council of New England. Professor Quelch has been a consultant, seminar leader and speaker for firms, industry associations and government agencies in more than fifty countries. He is a member of the Trilateral Commission and the Council On Foreign Relations. He received the CBE for services to British business in 2011 and holds an honorary doctorate from Vietnam National University.
AMBASSADOR ICHIRO FUJISAKI
Former Ambassador of Japan to the United States (2008-2012)
Ichiro Fujisaki is currently President of America-Japan Society in Japan. He is also a distinguished professor of Sophia University and Keio University, both in Tokyo. Additionally, he is advisor to the metropolitan city of Tokyo.
Fujisaki served as the Ambassador of Japan to the United States 2008 through October 2012.
During this period, there were frequent changes in Japanese leadership, but he stayed on as a point person between Japan and the United States. Fujisaki was instrumental in bridging Japan and the US following the devastating earthquake and tsunami that occurred in March 2011. He frequently appeared on all forms of media, including national TV news shows. He was engaged in all of Japan’s negotiations with the US on security and trade issues, including Trans Pacific Partnership (TPP) consultations. Fujisaki has visited nearly all the fifty states, has met with local leaders, and has appeared on local media outlets.
Fujisaki is well connected to Japan’s political, bureaucratic, and business circles, having served more than 40 years in the Japanese government. As the Deputy Foreign Minister, he served as Prime Minister Koizumi’s personal representative to the G8 Summit as Sherpa. He was Japan’s chief trade negotiator and headed the teams for Free Trade Area agreement negotiations with the Republic of Korea, Malaysia, the Philippines, and Thailand. He has initiated and headed Deputy Ministerial dialogue with China. He also frequently traveled to India to lay the groundwork for large scale infrastructure projects which are currently underway. Fujisaki joined the Foreign Ministry of Japan in 1969 after passing the High Level Diplomatic Examination. He has served 20 years abroad and 23 years in Tokyo during his career.
Fujisaki is married to Yoriko Kashiwagi, daughter of Kazuko and the late Yusuke Kashiwagi, who was the CEO of The Bank of Tokyo. They have two daughters, Mari and Emi.
AMBASSADOR SEIICHIO KONDO
Special advisor to the Minister for Foreign Affairs; Specially-appointed professor at the University of Tokyo; Former Commissioner, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan
Graduate, Faculty of Education and Graduate Schools for Law and Politics, University of Tokyo. 1972, with Ministry of Foreign Affairs, Japan including: Ambassador, UNESCO; Chief Negotiator for international trade negotiations under the Doha Development Agenda of World Trade Organization and for the Japan-Chile Economic Partnership Agreement; First Director-General, Department of Public Diplomacy; Director-General, Department of Cultural Exchanges; Deputy Secretary-General, Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development, Paris; Deputy Director-General, Economic Affairs Bureau; Counsellor for Public Affairs then Minister, Embassy of Japan in Washington; 2008, Ambassador to Denmark; since July 2010, Commissioner, Agency for Cultural Affairs, Japan.
Professor Kosaku Dairokuno
Dean, School of Political Science and Economics, Meiji University
Currently Dean of the School of Political Science and Economics. After he earned his BA at the School of Law, Meiji University, he has shifted his focus of study from law to political science. He earned his MA in Comparative Politics at the Graduate School of Political Science and Economics at Meiji University. And, immediately after he completed all the necessary course work for Ph,D, he was given a position of lecturer at the School of Political Science and Economics. He has been with the same school ever since. In the meantime, he was a visiting scholar and professor at various institutions such as Asian Pacific Studies Institute of Duke University, the Department of Politics of Northeastern University, the National School of Public Administration of Laos, and the National University of Laos. Currently he has been studying the relationships between “political corruption” and the structure of government.
AMBASSADOR J.D BINDENAGEL
Former U.S. Ambassador; Henry Kissinger Professor for International Security and Governverce, Bonn University
J.D. Bindenagel, the Henry Kissinger Professor for International Security and Governverce in Bonn University, is responsible for deepening connections between DePaul’s Chicago and overseas campuses and communities. These local, global and government relationships support DePaul’s mission to prepare students, not only to better understand, but also to influence and shape the world in which they live. A former ambassador and 28-year veteran of the U.S. diplomatic corps, Bindenagel brings extensive experience in governmental and international affairs to his new post. Prior to joining DePaul, he was vice president for program at the Chicago Council on Foreign Relations. President Bill Clinton appointed him in 1999 as U.S. ambassador and special envoy for Holocaust issues. As ambassador, he provided policy, diplomatic and negotiating advice to the Secretary of State on World War II-era forced labor, insurance, art, property restitution, and Holocaust education and remembrance. He played an instrumental role in the negotiations that led to agreements in 2001 securing $6 billion in payments from Germany, Austria and France for Holocaust and other Nazi victims. A U.S. Army veteran, he served the State Department in Washington, D.C., and Germany in various capacities from 1975 to 2003. He was director for Central European Affairs in the Bureau of European and Canadian Affairs at the State Department from 1992 to 1994 and U.S. charge d’affaires and deputy chief of mission in Bonn, Germany, from 1994 to 1997. He was U.S. deputy chief of mission at the American Embassy in Berlin, East Germany, at the time of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989 and helped negotiate the reunification of Germany. Other Foreign Service assignments included head of the embassy political affairs unit in Bonn in the mid-1980s, when he helped pave the way for the deployment of U.S. Pershing missiles on German soil. Bindenagel was special U.S. negotiator for “Conflict Diamonds,” leading a U.S. government interagency group to create a certification process to prevent proceeds from sales of illicit rough “conflict” diamonds from financing insurrections against legitimate governments in Africa. He also was an American Political Science Association fellow with Congressman Lee H. Hamilton (1987-1988) and was director, Business-Government Programs for Rockwell International (1991-1992). Bindenagel received the State Department’s Distinguished Service Award in 2001, the Commander’s Cross of the Federal Order of Merit from the President of Germany in 2001, and the Presidential Meritorious Service Award from President George W. Bush in 2002. He holds a bachelor’s degree in political science and a master’s degree in public administration from the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign.
PROFESSOR SUZANNE P.OGDEN
Professor and Interim Chair of Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science
Professor Suzanne P. Ogden is a Professor and Interim Chair of Northeastern University’s Department of Political Science. Professor Ogden’s areas of study include comparative politics, Chinese politics, democratization and development in China, international relations, US-China relations, and US policy towards Asia.
During her career, Professor Ogden has written and edited numerous publications, which include Inklings of Democracy in China and China’s Unresolved Issues: Politics, Development and Culture. Professor Ogden has also held positions as: Research Associate at Harvard University’s Fairbank Center for East Asian Research; as a Visiting Fellow at Cambridge University’s Wolfson College; Visiting Scholar at National University of Singapore’s East Asian Research Institute; Visiting Scholar at Cambridge University’s Faculty of Oriental Studies; Fulbright Lecturer at the Foreign Affairs College of the Chinese Foreign Ministry; as a member of the Editorial Board for the Journal of Contemporary China; and, as a member of the National Committee on U.S.-China Relations.
Currently Professor Ogden teaches both graduate and undergraduate level courses on international relations, urban planning in China, Chinese politics, and Chinese foreign policy. Professor Ogden holds a PhD from Brown University.
LLEWELLYN KING
Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Co-Host and Executive Producer of “White House Chronicle” — a weekly news and public affairs program airing on PBS
Llewellyn King is the creator, executive producer and host of “White House Chronicle,” a weekly news and public affairs program,now in its 17th year on PBS. The program also airs on public, educational and government cable access television stations, and on Voice of America Television. Episodes can be viewed on the program’s Web site, whchronicle.com. An audio version of “White House Chronicle” airs weekends on SiriusXM Satellite Radio’s P.O.T.U.S. (Politics of the United States) Channel 124. King is also a regular commentator on P.O.T.U.S.
In addition to broadcasting, King writes a weekly column for the Hearst-New York Times Syndicate and The Huffington Post. In 2006, University Press of America published a collection of his columns,“Washington and The World 2001-2005.” The columns mainly appeared in Knight-Ridder newspapersincluding The Miami Herald, The Sacramento Bee, The St. Paul Pioneer Press, The Kansas City Star, The Charlotte Observer and The Columbus Dispatch. King was the founding editor-in-chief and publisher of The Energy Daily. The energy industry newsletter, created before the energy crisis broke out in 1973, was the flagship of his award-winning King Publishing Group, which he sold in 2006. The group’s other titles included Defense Week, New Technology Week, Navy News & Undersea Technology and White House Weekly. Over the years, King’s insightful reporting and analysis of energy has led to frequent guest spots on TV news shows, including NBC’s “Meet the Press” and PBS’s “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” and CNN. King’s remarkable career in journalism began in Southern Rhodesia, now Zimbabwe, where he was hired,at age 16, as a foreign correspondent for Time magazine. He also reported from Africa for London’s Daily Express and News Chronicle and United Press.
Moving to London in 1959, King worked as an executive for The Daily Mirror Group, a reporter for Associated Newspapers, and a news writer for BBC and ITN.Then moving to the United States in the 1960s, King worked as an editor and reporter for The New York Herald Tribune, The Baltimore News-American, The Washington Daily News and The Washington Post. A stint at McGraw-Hill’s Nucleonics Week led to his founding The Energy Daily. But it wasn’t King’s first trailblazing publication; his first was Women Now, a monthly magazine targeted to emerging professional women in the 1960s. “It didn’t liberate any women, but it liberated all my money,” King quips. Before creating “White House Chronicle,” King and his wife, Linda Gasparello, co-hosted “The Bull and The Bear,” a daily stock market program that aired on the GoodLife and Jones cable television networks in the mid-1990s.
King has given more than 2,000 speeches; he is an erudite commentator on energy, foreign affairs, Congress and the White House, small business, science, technology and journalism. He has organized more than 1,000 conferences on issues ranging from nuclear energy to land mine removal, Social Security and campaign finance. For his longtime contribution to the understanding of science and technology, King received an honorary doctorate in engineering from The Stevens Institute of Technology. He has received hundreds of energy industry awards, and most recently the United States Energy Association’s 2014 Award.
LINDA GASPARELLO
Co-Host and General Manager of “White House Chronicle” — a weekly news and public affairs program airing on PBS
Linda Gasparello began her career in journalism as a reporter for Forbes in New York, and associate editor of Forbes in Arabic, the business magazine’s annual Arabic language edition.
After joining King Publishing Group, Gasparello edited a number of industry newsletters and White House Weekly.
For five years, she and Llewellyn King co-anchored “The Bull &The Bear,” a stock market program that aired on the Jones and GoodLife cable television networks. She has been a commentator for the BBC Radio, RTE, Polish TV and Voice of America.
Gasparello received her bachelor’s degree in Arabic from Georgetown University. She was awarded a graduate fellowship to study Arabic at the American University in Cairo.
BARRY NOLAN
Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Former Host of the shows “Nitebeat”, “Backstage”, and “Backstage with Barry Nolan”, Comcast Cable CN8 channel
Barry Nolan is an American former presenter on Comcast Cable’s CN8 channel, once hosting the shows Nitebeat and Backstage, and Backstage with Barry Nolan. He is a regular panelist on Says You!, a weekend radio word quiz show carried on many public radio stations but produced by Pipit and Finch.
Nolan hosted Boston’s version of Evening Magazine for WBZ-TV (Channel 4) from 1980 until 1989. He left in 1989 and hosted a series of one hour specials for ABC titled “Over the Edge” He served as a correspondent for the Fox Network’s “Beyond Tomorrow” for a season and then for Paramount Television he was the host of Hard Copy from 1990 to 1998. He served as Senior Correspondent for Extra! from 2000 until 2003. He then moved to CN-8 as an Executive Producer and host of “Nitebeat.”
From Jan 2009, until Jan 2011, Nolan served as Communications Director for Joint Economic Committee of Congress. In 2012, Nolan and his wife Garland Waller produced the documentary film, No Way Out But One.
He is the winner of 6 Emmys, including awards for hosting, producing and commentary, a Gabriel Award, an Iris Award and a Los Angeles Press Club award.
RICHARD PIROZZOLO
Member, Boston Global Forum Editorial Board; Founder and Managing Director, Pirozzolo Company Public Relations
Dick Pirozzolo is the founder and managing director of Boston-based Pirozzolo Company Public Relations, whose clients have included the governments of Vietnam, Japan and Canada and corporations in Indonesia, Israel, the United Kingdom, Germany and China.
During the mid-1990’s, Dick figured prominently in fostering reconciliation and trade with Vietnam, building US public support for accepting Vietnam as a Most Favored Nation trading partner and launching trade initiatives in Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City, including the watershed VietnAmerica Expo – Hanoi’s official welcoming of US business. Additionally, he promoted successful trade initiatives with Vietnam on behalf of The State of Hawaii, Smith & Wesson, Syratech, the USA’s largest housewares company, and J/Brice Design International, Inc. the Boston and Dammam, KSA-based hospitality design and development firm.
In addition to establishing profitable relationships with Vietnam business and government entities, Dick arranged for positive media coverage of Vietnam by the world and US press – from Agence France Press and NHK to NBC Nightly News and Time Magazine. Additionally, his bylined articles, photos and op-ed pieces on Vietnam public policy and trade have appeared in the Washington Times, Insight, Transpacific, The Advertiser, Beverage World, Vietnam Business Journal, Destination Vietnam, The Boston Sunday Herald, Trade Show Week and PR News.
Dick brings high-level public relations, issues management and relationship-building skills to every client engagement. His recent work includes fostering carbon-offset trading on behalf of Trayport (GFIG/NYSE) and Foreign Exchange trading in Asia for FCM360, Inc. His earlier work includes public relations management positions with Boston University, where he was on assignment with the US Federal Court-Appointed Experts during Boston’s court-ordered and controversial school desegregation. Dick was a daily newspaper reporter with the Worcester Telegram & Gazette and a freelance writer for national magazines. He is author of four successful nonfiction books on homebuilding and design and of For All the Years, a history of television in New England.
While working as a public relations consultant to WBZ-TV, Dick helped create and fund a million-dollar endowment for the performing arts in Massachusetts. He is a graduate of the University of Connecticut and was awarded the Bronze Star for service as a US Air Force captain in Vietnam where he served as a information (media relations) officer for the 7th Air Force in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City).
Dick is on the Advisory Board of the Association of Southeast Asia CEOs (SEACEO), serves on the Public Relations Committee of the New England Canada Business Council and has been an accredited member of the Public Relations Society of America (PRSA) since 1978. He is also a member of the Society of Professional Journalists (formerly Sigma Delta Chi honorary society), The Foreign Press Association of New York and The New York Deadline Club
DR. ELLIOT SALLOWAY
Chief Operation Officer, Boston Global Forum
Dr. Elliot Salloway trained in Periodontology at Tufts, B.U and University of Pennsylvania graduate medical and dental schools. His residency was at Beth Israel Hospital and University Hospital Boston. He served as a captain in the US Air Force during the Cuba crisis and then became the first periodontist to practice in the City of Worcester where he still sees patients after 50 years.
He was a member of the faculty of Harvard graduate dental school for over 35 years (where the “E.W.Salloway Teaching and Research Fund “was established by his patients and friends).
He has served on several arts boards including Boston Ballet friends, Public Action for the Arts, Photo Resource Center and the Massachusetts Repertory Company which was the first equity repertory company in Boston 1977-78. Mass Rep brought talent such as Helen Hayes, Julie Harris, Rex Harrison, Sylvia Sidney, Brian Bedford, Ben Gazzara, Eva Marie Saint and Harry Chapin to the Boston theater district.
Dr.Salloway is also a member of several professional and arts organizations including Indochina Arts Partnership, Rakushokai(Tokyo),International Association of Dental Research, American Academy of dental research and American Academy of Periodontology.
He has lectured worldwide in his profession and for five years at the Miami Historical Museum on his photographs of the changing Miami River. He is prolific photographer and painter who has shown in galleries in Boston ,Miami ,Berlin ,Krefeld Germany and Hanoi.
He is the Co-founder of Project Exodus which calls on children and teenagers to make art which addresses the question “is genocide and crimes against humanity preventable”? Project Exodus is now active in Boston with a show in mid February 2014 at Leslie college with the organization Violence Transformed.
On September 17, 2014, the former Australia Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, shared his perspective on U.S. – China relations to Boston Global Forum at its conference focusing on building a framework for peace and security in the Pacific.
His talk focused into four key areas. The first is the current state of the U.S. – China relationship. Then he talked briefly about what can we learn in the centenary of World War I from the Europeans of the world about how to avoid unnecessary conflagration and conflict. The third focus of his talk is about where East Asia has got to so far on the creation of regional institutions. And final one is his thought, as going back to his years being the Australian prime minister, on how we begin to change the pattern of thought and how we can construct a common future together.
Watch his talk here.
Former Australian Prime Minister Kevin Rudd is a senior fellow at Harvard Kennedy School’s Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. At the Belfer Center, Rudd will lead a major research effort on possibilities and impacts of a new strategic relationship between China and the United States. Mr. Rudd served as Australia’s 26th Prime Minister from 2007 to 2010, then as Foreign Minister from 2010 to 2012, before returning to the Prime Ministership in 2013. As Prime Minister, Mr. Rudd led Australia’s response during the Global Financial Crisis.
In the Boston Global Forum Conference on “U.S.-Japan-China Relations” on September 17, 2014, which focuses on building a Framework for peace and security in the Pacific, Professor Joseph Nye said: “If you are growing in hard power in a military or economic capacity the way China has you’re likely to frighten your neighbors into coalitions against you. But if you can combine your hard power with soft power of attraction and persuasion you make those coalitions less likely.”
Watch his talk here:
Joseph S. Nye Jr. is the University Distinguished Service Professor, and former Dean of the Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government, and is a member of Boston Global Forum Board of Thinkers. He has served as Assistant Secretary of Defense for International Security Affairs, Chair of the National Intelligence Council, and Deputy Under Secretary of State for Security Assistance, Science and Technology. He is a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, the British Academy, and the American Academy of Diplomacy. In a recent survey of internatinal relations scholars, he was ranked as the most influential scholar on American foreign policy, and in 2011, Foreign Policy named him one of the top 100 Global Thinkers. His most recent books include The Power to Lead, The Future of Power, and Presidential Leadership and the Creation of the American Era.
Robert K. Gardner, the founding member of New World Technology Partners, shared some of insightful facts into prevention of Cyber attacks during the Boston Global Forum conference on Global Media and Cyber-Terrorism. He also mentioned the wrong misunderstanding of people about the Cyber-space. And what’s more?
Llewellyn King, member of the Boston Global Forum Editorial Board delivered his talk during the Forum Conference about Global Media and Cyber-Terrorism on October 3, at Harvard University. This is also the focus of the Forum in 2015.
Llewellyn King is currently the Co-Host and Executive Producer of PBS White House Chronicle, a weekly news and public affairs program.
Governor Michael Dukakis – Co-Founder, Chairman, Boston Global Forum
Joseph S. Nye, Jr. – Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; University Distinguished Service Professor; Former Dean, Harvard Kennedy School
KEYNOTE SPEAKERS:
Michael H. Fuchs – Deputy Assistant Secretary of State for Strategy and Multilateral Affairs, Bureau of East Asian and Pacific Affairs, U.S. Department of State
Bonnie S. Glaser – Senior Adviser for Asia, Freeman Chair in China Studies; Senior Associate, Center for Strategic & International Studies (CSIS) Pacific Forum
Professor Joseph S. Nye, Jr. – Member of Board of Thinkers, Boston Global Forum; University Distinguished Service Professor, Harvard University; Former Dean, Harvard Kennedy School
The Hon. Kevin Rudd – Former Australian Prime Minister
Watch the full conference here:
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GOV. DUKAKIS : The Boston Global Forum is something that was the brainchild of the wonderful Tuan Nguyen founder of the VietNamNet, who now spends a good deal of his time in Boston and in Cambridge he returns to Vietnam for several months every year. And it was his idea to create the Boston Global Forum to tap into the rich intellectual and policy resources that we have here in Boston and at the same time invite people from all over the world to participate in what we were doing, through online conferences and one of those conferences is the one we’re having this evening.
We decided that what we would do was to focus on one important international issue every year and see if we could come up with some constructive solutions for that particular issue for that problem. We began our first year with the issue of occupational safety and health standards around the world after the tragedy in Bangladesh. This year we decided to focus on another very important topic: building a framework for peace and security in the Pacific.
I don’t have to tell any of you that the Pacific area these days is fraught with problems. At least a dozen countries arguing over who owns what island, serious concerns about the ambitions of some of those countries, and in some cases historic rivalries that go back centuries and certainly back to World War Two. And yet in many ways, in our view, the Pacific could be a model of how to create a region of the world in which nations come together, reason together, and create rules and institutions which will make it possible for them to solve their problems without resorting to arms or force.
So tonight with your cooperation and your participation and with the help of a pretty distinguished group of people, some of whom are with us here in Cambridge MA, some who will be talking to us from all over the globe. We’re gonna begin our discussion of this very important topic. How does the international community create a framework for peace and security in the Pacific? We’ll be having two more online conferences, one in November, one in December. We hope by the end of this year to have a series of recommendations which will help to lead in the direction that can help to patent.
And we’re gonna begin tonight with a panel, which will be followed by two other panels in which we will have people both here in Cambridge and around the globe participating though the modern miracle of online conferencing. We welcome you, we welcome your participation, your thoughts, and we hope you will be very much a part of what we think will be a real contribution to peace in the world and peace in the Pacific. We’re gonna begin our panel with an opening statement from the Deputy Assistant Secretary of State Mike Fuchs who was responsible for the US approach to multilateralism and multilateral institutions who speaks to us tonight from Washington and we’re delighted to have him with us, Mike you’re on.
MICHAEL FUCHS: Thank you very much Gov. Dukakis and again let me thank you to start and others as well at Boston Global Forum for organizing this series of conversations which I think is obviously both very important and very timely with events going on in the region in recent months and years.
I wanted to start with the big picture, and again I will not go on too long I know there are a lot of great speakers and I see a lot of friendly faces around the computer screen here and so I know it will be a great discussion tonight with the three panels. So I thought what I would do is to start for a couple of minutes to give our perspective on the big picture in the region and some of the challenges we see the region as facing and what we believe is an essential piece of the framework that I think you’re talking about to ensure that the countries in the region and the US can figure out constructive solutions to problem solving. I think as you put it Gov. Dukakis.
First, we all know why this region is important. We all know why it matters not just what happens in the region but what happens beyond Asia and the Pacific. The economic growth, the dynamism, there are a lot of reasons why our engagement in the Pacific is important not just for the US, not just for the region, but for beyond. At the same time obviously I think that we’re all very clear in the understanding that as the economic dynamism in many ways has taken off in recent decades in the Asia Pacific at the same time we’ve seen a series of real serious challenges, some would say threats, rise as well and become more complex as this economic dynamism has taken off and as interdependence in the region has expanded. I think that the question put to everyone here today by the Boston Global Forum is How do we build, how do we construct (inaudible). How can the countries in the region come together and find an amicable way, a peaceful way to address these disputes.
The first thing that I would put out there and say is that It is that before getting to the framework pieces that, one piece of this framework that we think is absolutely central and our senior leadership in the US government as reiterated this point time again is the importance of US alliances in the region to regional peace, stability, and prosperity. These are long-standing alliances that we’re doing a lot of work right now and have over the last handful of years to strengthen because we believe they’re not just in our interest and not just in the interests of our allies but they’re in the interests of the entire region and for decades they’ve helped underpin regional peace and stability and prosperity and so that is one piece that we again continue to strengthen because we believe it is in everyone’s interest in upholding this framework that I think we all have an interest in constructing. Taking a step back and looking at the bigger picture what a framework might look like the first thing I would say is that international law and norms provide much of the context and substance I think for what we want to see in this region. We don’t have to go very far to look for some of the answers and frankly many of the countries of not all of them have already agreed to trying to figure out how do we resolve certain disputes, how do we address some of our problems they’re there, in international law and commonly accepted norms and standards. So that’s the first thing that I would say important for us to recognize when trying to figure out how do we most constructively address the disputes and the challenges and if they’re legitimate.
The second question I think is, how do you actually enforce and uphold international norms in the Asia-Pacific? Obviously this is a region that has a wide variety of different bilateral trilateral multilateral institutions and arrangements that do a wide variety of different things but does not have quite the same level of institutional maturity and just say some other regions, say Europe does with the EU and other organizations. So the question is what role can these multilateral institutions and arrangements play in upholding and enforcing international laws and norms. And that’s one of the questions I think that we try to think through and try to address our US government working in conjunction with Allies and partners in the region. There are two things I want to focus on very briefly are one the multilateral institutions and what role I think they can play and two the specific types of issues which I think they can help us in the region address our main challenges.
The first is the multilateral institutions and as I said there are a wide variety of institutions out there many of them centered on ASEAN out to the ASEAN Regional Forum, the East Asia Summit and then a wide variety of others. But also including economic institutions like APEC where we’ve invested time and energy trying to build up the capability, not just a leaders and foreign ministers and others to get into rooms together and hash out their problems with one another but again try to find a tangible problem-solving oriented solutions to the main challenges in the region and so I think that One at the first order of business for us at least and what we’ve been trying to do over last handful of years this administrations focus in the region is buildup these institutions. We need to strengthen them and their ability to enforce and uphold international laws and norms. To build up their ability to respond to crises and serious challenges when they arise that I think is our first task. Talk about it a longer term framework for peace and stability in the region I think multilateral institutions are going to play an instrumental role in that framework.
The second point I would make and the last one is giving a specific example of the type of issue that the multilateral institutions should be taking up and I think that the Maritime disputes in the South China Sea in particular I think are ripe for being addressed by these multilateral institutions. This is the sort of situation where you have multiple different claimants going at one another and pursuing their claims, sometimes in not peaceful ways, in ways that are provocative in ways that are concerning to one another and to the broader region as well in which bring with them the potential for destabilization or increasing tensions and incidents and potential conflict and so one of the things that in recent years ASEAN in particular, and we have supported ASEAN in doing this as well is trying to find a multilateral solution to the tensions in the South China Sea and ASEAN’s and China’s discussions that are quite slow I would say but are still ongoing on how to finalize on how to come to a code of conduct for the South China Sea is a good example of the sort contribution that multilateral institutions can make I think to solving real tangible problems that we are faced with in the region.
I think that even though the solutions themselves may not be imminent and we may not be able to find the answer today or tomorrow or even next month these multilateral institutions are the place where these issues and solutions to these challenges need to be put on the table because frankly there are no other venues, there are no other places where you had everyone at the table coming together to address these sorts of issues. So this is the game in town is what I would say these are the places that we should do our best to empower. I know we’ve got a lot of other folks to get to and I’m looking forward to hearing the rest of the discussion so thank you again Gov. Dukakis.
GOV. DUKAKIS: We are now gonna go to Bonnie Glaser who I think, is in some part of Asia. (inaudible) Thank you for joining us, she’s done some interesting writing on the subject- hope you had a chance to listen to Mike Fuchs- so, you’re on.
BONNIE GLASER: Thank you Gov. Dukakis you are fading in and out but hopefully you can all hear me. I would like to thank all the members of the Boston Global Forum for asking me to speak tonight and I will try to add very briefly to Michael Fuch’s remarks. I’ve been asked to assess the risk of (audio cut) for lowering tensions and averting crisis. Clearly we should be looking at the East China Sea and the South China Sea, there are some important differences but when comes to making recommendations of ways to lower tensions, I think that there are some commonalities. If we assess the risk of conflict or accident in the East China Sea we can see that since the government in Tokyo purchased three of the five islands in September of 2012 there’s been a real uptick in China’s patrols within not only the contiguous zone but also within the 12-mile territorial waters around the islands.
The risk of conflict in my view is relatively low between these law enforcement vessel, they’re operating in a relatively predictable, careful manner, although an incident could occur with the introduction of unpredictable factors such as fishing boats or activists trying to land on the islands. An accident I think is more worrisome where China and Japan have declared their overlapping air identification zones, air defense identification zones or ADIZ. A contingency certainly could draw in the United States, whether in the air or at sea, because of our treaty obligations to Japan under article 5 of the US-Japan Mutual Defense Treaty. Escalation is certainly possible even though I think neither Japan nor China nor the US would see benefits accruing from a military conflict.
Recently we’ve seen an increase in the (inaudible) by Japan and China in their ADIZ, sometimes involving fighters against fighters, not just intercepting surveillance planes and this of course in increasing the risk of accident, especially when the rules of engagement are not known and pilots lack experience and training. This is particularly true in the case of China. In the South China Sea the situation is much more complicated with of course six claimants. I see it as somewhat less dangerous except in the case of the direct US-China incident or confrontation. Of course only one of the claimants to the land features is a US treaty ally that is the Philippines. The US has not stated it’s treaty commitments quite as clearly as is the case in Japan but one could envisage a potential escalation, for example (inaudible) that they have on a rusting out ship back on Second Thomas Shoal in which the US has been in fact flying P-8s overhead and probably supplying some intelligence information to the Philippines.
So to turn to the question of what can be done, Michael Fuchs has already talked about the need for a code of conduct in the South China Sea, the discussions of course have been launched, and progress is very slow. I would emphasize that a CoC needs to be legally binding and it should have a dispute settlement mechanism. In the absence of those features I think it will look very much like the 2002 Declaration on the Conduct of Parties, so I think that ASEAN in particular, which engaged in these negotiations with China needs to ensure that this is a much more robust agreement than the original agreement in 2002.
There is also a need for something like a Code of Conduct in the East China Sea and that could be multilateral, it could include South Korea, it could include Taiwan but there is certainly a case agreed upon rules of the road both in the East China Sea and the South China Sea. In terms of very specific risk reduction measures, I’m sure you’re all aware that there was some progress between China and Japan in May of 2012 when they discussed the establishment of crisis communications, including a hotline. I do think the two nations should be encouraged to resume those talks and to expand them to include the establishment of safe intercept procedures, which is also of course an issue between the US and China as we need to establish safe intercept procedures as well. I wanted to mention the need for potential joint exploration schemes where possible, we’ve seen a few of those, most notably between Malaysia and Brunei it’s very difficult for us to engage in any kind of joint resource cooperation and exploration when there were these outstanding sovereignty disputes this is something that should be revisited as well.
Some people say that the resolution of the disputes is too hard and we should only work on managing them but I would like to endorse the need to think harder about resolutions. We’ve seen partial resolutions between China and Vietnam in the Gulf of Tonkin in 2004, Indonesia and the Philippines just a few weeks ago after 20 years of discussions, signed an agreement that delimits their EEZ’s. If all of the Southeast Asian claimants could resolve their maritime and territorial disputes that would put pressure on China to engage in this process.
So I think we should think more about that. In the South China Sea there is a very pressing need to what I call “Map the Area” that is, all claimants in the South China Sea should bring their claim in line with the UN convention on the law of the sea. This means China needs to resolve the ambiguity of its nine dashed line but there are other claimants that don’t have their claims in line with UNCLOS either. And then there needs to be an understanding on the status of every geographic features and the maritime zones to which it is entitled. Is it a rock? Is it an island? Or is it a low tide elevation? This could be done with the aid of an arbitral tribunal or a neutral third party that conducts a study of the various features. And this could help to define the areas that are disputed, areas that constitute high seas where freedom of navigation should be respected. And finally, my last point is, litigation really should not be a dirty word. I think when the Philippines initially took its case in January to the ITLOS tribunal many countries thought that this would be an act that increased tensions. Yet, here we are a year and a half later and many countries think that this is actually a good decision. The arbitral tribunal finds that it has jurisdiction on at least some of the points in some of the cases. We will see a ruling probably in late 2015 or early 2016.
The role of international legal institutions should not be ignored, they could play a very useful role. If the South China Sea claimants do not wish to submit their disputes to an international court of justice. Another option is to establish and impartial, regional tribunal as a neutral forum for deciding island territorial disputes. Of course in the case of Japan and China, the Japanese have said they’ve agreed to take their case to the international court of justice if China would do so as well. I think that there is a role for international arbitration, for litigation in addressing some of these disputes and so I would encourage that to be part of the toolbox that we’re using to do what our deputy assistant secretary talked about in promoting the adherence to and implementation of international law and international norms. Thank you very much Gov. Dukakis.
GOV. DUKAKIS: Thanks Bonnie. Why don’t we turn to Steve Bosworth who recently was the dean of the Fletcher School at Tufts and our ambassador to South Korea with Secretary Clinton and is now at the Belfer Center just around the corner at the Kennedy School? Steve, some thoughts and comments on what you’ve heard so far?
STEVE BOSWORTH: Well first of all this is a very interesting discussion and I commend those here for drawing together such an impressive group of people who actually know something about East Asia. Just a couple of observations:
First for me I think that the central question for the next generation is “How are China and the US going to be able to work out a long term relationship which is good with one another and good within the region? (inaudible) over the next 10 to 20 years. Our difficulty there of course is that we start with very different assumptions, the US and the Chinese. The Chinese for the last 150 years was a brief interruption (inaudible) the power within East Asia. For us as a nation we haven’t dealt with China as a strong power until just recently. So we each have somewhat distorted perceptions of the other and we’re gonna have to work those out. I think many of the issues we are going to be talking about for the next few months are at bottom issues of how the US and China relate to one another. How we are able to provide an atmosphere of political tranquility within which the economic progress which is already underway in East Asia can continue.
I would hope that we both can put more emphasis on the trade and investment aspects of our regional relationship. I think that the TPP as its known is one of the key ingredients for long-term stability in East Asia and for advancing our interests and the interests of other countries in the region. The Transpacific Partnership, excuse my use of a crippling acronym. It’s not really transpacific and it’s not really a partnership but it’s what we’re trying to build and I would hope that we could put in place in the relatively near future a TPP which includes China. At the moment China is not actively involved in the recognition and design of this. As we try to build regional infrastructure, institutional infrastructure, some of which the Dep. Ast. Sec has, outlined earlier all of which I think is very important. I would urge that we not lose sight of the fundamental importance of continued economic cooperation and integration. And in fact the markets of East Asia are already, if you look at it in terms of percentages, more highly integrated, one with the other than are (inaudible) but that’s because the private sectors in those countries have seen it to be in their interests to build these private production networks throughout the region. That’s a fundamental feature of emerging East Asia infrastructure.
So we do have a few other problems we’ll have to be concerned about, one of which is North Korea, we would have to devote a whole evening to that discussion but I think here too this is a very important test of the ability of the US and China to work together. Our interests fun mentally are quite similar. I think we could each learn a bit from each other on how to best handle the fundamental problem that North Korea poses. North Korea is not going to collapse; we can count on that, that’s no longer a reasonable premise for American foreign policy and North Korea is not going to suddenly decide that it doesn’t want nuclear weapons. I don’t think that’s a very realist premise. (inaudible) But remember North Korea is right at the heart of this entire region which is the most vibrant, vigorous, economic region in the world. North Korea is right at the heart, and essentially it’s a failed state. Its capacity to cause damage and instability throughout the region should not be underestimated. Thank you.
GOV. DUKAKIS: Steve let me ask you a question. Recently the Chinese President visited South Korea. There have been some interesting developments in the relationship with North Korea. What do you make of that?
STEVE BOSWORTH: I’m not surprised by it. China made a strategic decision in 1992 when it decided to recognize South Korea and build a relationship with it. China is now South Korea’s most important trade partner and North Korea does not really have statistical significance in China’s view of global and regional trade. But leadership hopes to convince China that its interests are best served witnessing a collapse of North Korea, which is, in a sense an unspoken objective, it has been for the last 25 years, of US policy. So, I think it’s no surprise that Xi Jinping went to Seoul; it’s a strong signal to South Koreans that his view of China’s long term interests is the same as that of his predecessor. But they’re not going to suddenly abandon North Korea and we can’t expect that we will.
AMBASSADOR ICHORO FUJISAKI:Excuse me, can I make a comment on the previous speaker? This is from Tokyo. Can I just make a short comment on what the previous speaker said?
GOV. DUKAKIS: I’d like you to hold it and I want to call in an old friend (inaudible) is with us. Professor Kosaku Dairokuno is with us.
PROF. KOSAKU DAIROKUNO: Thank you very much Gov. It has been a very interesting discussion about how to build in the Pacific an institution to solve the dispute in this region. It is true that we have several international courts and tribunals but actually these organizations really do not solve the problem especially when two sovereign powers do not agree about the administration of the islands. In that sense we have to set up some kind of regional organization or regional institution to talk about, in an amicable way, to solve those disputes. The thing is we can use ASEAN, ASEAN+ and APEC and we can take advantage of every opportunity to get the Chinese government in the discussion. What’s the critical factor, what will attract the Chinese government to participate? That’s my question. So within my time, ambassador Fujisaki has a few comments.
AMBASSADOR ICHORO FUJISAKI:Can I make a comment? Bonnie Glaser said we are ready to go to tribunal, that’s not true. On this island we have been saying it’s not a territorial issue, we don’t have an issue because it’s like some country coming around Hawaii and saying that this is our island. Now two things, we are talking about present and future, present two things are important. Try to be patient, not provocative. And this is based on the conventional wisdom that all the countries would not really like to have a war. The important thing is to avoid accidental war. Some people doubt if this conventional wisdom is right, seeing what’s happening in Ukraine, what’s happening in South (inaudible). It’s not only a Japan issue but it’s more of a global issue, a regional issue. That’s point one. We totally agree with what the previous speaker said that two things are important. One is to keep fortifying what we have already like the Japan-US alliance. This forum is important because we are discussing guidelines. As for the future what’s important is to try to see some international norm as you have rightly been discussing. Rules of order, international regulations and for that, two things are important. As Steve Bosworth said this is very important to come to an agreement on the TPP. Also it’s more important to have more substance in the code of conduct and from that point it’s a very critical time. Now my good colleague Mr. Kundo would like to maybe say a note to everything I’ve said. So can I pass onto him?
AMBASSADOR SEIICHI KONDO: Hi. I’m a retired diplomat and I run an institute in culture and diplomacy. I have two statements to make. One, what is worrisome is two out of five permanent members of the security council are challenging or seem to be challenging the status quo. We have to take a strong stance against those belligerents. Second, as we have said, try to mitigate or contain the military risks around the islands but also we have to continue to enhance the cooperative relationship where it is not in political or economic areas such as the environment, disaster prevention, disaster mitigation, tourism, and by involving experts in various fields to establish a cooperative and forward looking cooperative stance will help develop trust among the countries concerned. Thank you.
GOV. DUKAKIS: Now I want to go to Dr. Patrick M. Cronin who I believe is – Patrick where are you?
DR PATRICK CRONIN: Governor I’ve just returned from Malaysia and Indonesia where I was speaking about some of these issues, especially in the South China Sea. Well, let me add to the many good remarks that have already been made I agree with almost everything that’s been said. Let me give you the good news and bad news: the good news is that the Asia-Pacific region remains the enormous opportunity of the 21st-century. I think Ambassador Bosworth captured it well by talking about growing the American economic and trade expansion through the transpacific partnership in pursuing a deal with 12 countries but then expanding to make it the inclusive rules-based trading system with the Chinese that we all hope it will become.
The good news is that Asia-Pacific is not Ukraine it’s not Syria and Iraq and these tensions in the Maritime regions in the near seas if you will of China in both the East and the South China Seas, as Bonnie Glaser pointed out, except for accidents is not likely to lead to a shooting war but that doesn’t mean they’re not increasingly fraught with peril or they’re not important indeed they are important and Bonnie Glaser I think the read off a really good list of many ideas that can be acted upon so the question really is why haven’t some of these good ideas been seized why is there a political failure to capitalize on some of the thinking that he’s been expressed in many international conferences. That’s a tricky question, that’s a loaded question because everybody has a different perspective.
From my own perspective, we are dealing with an increasingly assertive China around it’s periphery this is to be justified as sensible from China’s perspective it is growing interest in has growing capabilities it has a history of being picked apart from his perspective so so in many ways you can rationalize it from a Chinese perspective but nonetheless I think it goes beyond the idea that Japan and nationalized three islands in 2012 for instance which as Bonnie Glaser pointed out no doubt that was a marker for growing Chinese assertiveness in the East China Sea.
But if you look at the whole periphery around China you can look at even where Xi Jinping as he lands in India they’ve got tents being pitched across the Indian Territory. In the South China Sea you have a deep-sea oil rig that had been unilaterally placed in disputed waters with Vietnam. You have the reclamation of submerged features to try to create artificial islands. You have the harassment of patrol and other aircraft in both the East and the South China Seas. All of these are, from my perspective, an indicator that China wants to have a greater say a greater influence over its near seas including rewriting the rules and this may be really that the problem here China’s not happy with the rules as they are. While that may be a legitimate point from China’s perspective the question for the international community and for the US and allies and friends is what what’s the right way to go about changing rules if you don’t like them and that’s really where the tension is as we don’t like in many ways the manner in which China is going about the rules.
So let’s take the Philippine arbitration case in the South China Sea which essentially is established for the signatories of United Nations convention on the laws of the Sea. That arbitral panel can rule in early 2016 that the UN conventional on the law of the Sean is a essentially at odds with the Chinese declaration of a 9 dashed line because it’s not based on contemporary international law and land features for instance.
Nonetheless we can’t do anything about it, there’s no enforcement mechanism. There’s nothing they could force China to change. So we’re in a quandary about how to persuade the Chinese so do we need to do? We obviously all need better engagement with the Chinese unfortunately that’s not been sufficient to date. Even in the US-China relationship as a senior official told me just a couple weeks ago there’s no touchstone for cooperation in the US-China relationship and we have to find that equilibrium and so far it’s been elusive it’s been difficult. The Japan China relationship showing signs of getting stronger dialogue right now but I fear that it may be very short-lived, that it may have a certain superficial quality to it but it may be something that is fragmented by the spring of next year.
The ASEAN based institutions as deputy assistant Mr. Sec of State Michael Fuchs talked about there’s no doubt that the array of institutions emanating out of the 10 Southeast Asian countries offer of venue, offer legitimacy, but I just found out in Malaysia and Indonesia there’s no courageous perception that they can take on these issues in fact just the opposite they want the United States to lower the tone, lower the idea that well there’s deterrents that there could even be costs or penalties on bad behavior, on coercion they want to focus instead of the cooperation and we do too I think.
I think United States overall strategy has to be one of growing our own presence economically and politically first and foremost in order to help shape this region positively to bring our friends and allies together to deal with these issue but we’re going to have to avoid these dangerous incidents, we’re gonna have to avoid digging ourselves deeper in holes by military buildup on islands that are disputed or by taking actions that are clearly provocative and unilateral change of status quo that’s how I see it it may be a bleaker picture than we’ve heard so far but that’s my assessment.
GOV. DUKAKIS: Thank you. Folks we’re moving along here and I want to make sure that our participants here have an opportunity to be a part of this so I want to turn now to Joseph Nye, old friend and a former dean of the Kennedy School. He has talked a lot about these issues and worked on them over the past few years. Joe, you’ve got a number of people who you’re going to be introducing and leading in this discussion so welcome aboard.
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: Well thanks Mike let me (audio cut) senior officials recently and what strikes me is in principle China has realized that it has an interest in using its soft power. If you are growing in hard power in a military or economic capacity the way China has you’re likely to frighten your neighbors into coalitions against you. But if you can combine your hard power with soft power of attraction and persuasion you make those coalitions less likely.
Hu Jintao said this in 2007 when he addressed the 17th party congress. He said China needs to invest more in its soft power and they have done that. They have spent billions of dollars on Confucian Institutes and turning CCTV into an Al Jazeera of the world and so much more. The trouble is that it is difficult to combine soft and hard power together so they don’t cancel each other out. The United States has made mistakes like this. The invasion of Iraq for example was very successful in hard power terms but very destructive to our soft power. But China faces a similar problem; they’re concerned about America’s containment or America creating alliances against them. But then they’re doing actions with their hard power which are driving all these countries into America’s arms and they don’t quite know how to get out of this. For example if you take the Philippines, you set up a Confucius Institute in Manila to make yourself attractive. Traditional Chinese culture is very attractive, and they you use your hard power to drive Philippine boats out of Scarborough Reef.
And guess what happens, instead of the Confucius Institute making China attractive in the Philippines you get a very strong anti-Chinese sentiment over what is a little bunch of rocks. This is a very counterproductive strategy. If you think of the alternative, especially when I ask my Chinese friends about this they say “Well we have no choice this is sovereign territory we can’t give this up” So what they’re doing is sacrificing their larger influence in the region for a bunch of rocks. And you’d say well if those rocks are sitting on enormous amounts of petroleum or gas maybe it’s worth it but (unintelligible) published that’s not really the case. So think of a better strategy for China. Suppose China were to take the suggestions of Michael Fuchs and Bonnie Glaser and others have made and say yes we’ll go for a binding code of conduct in the South China Sea and we’ll agree that in the East China Sea- this is a proposal that Kevin Rudd and I published in the Washington Post last week-
We’ll agree that the Diaoyu/Senkaku islands should be put off for a future generation in the meantime they should not be militarized or inhabited but turned into a marine ecological preserve. If you had this larger perspective China’s national influence which grows out of its overwhelming economic strength with those trade ties that Steve Bosworth was mentioning earlier will lead into a much better position than its in now. So one of the real puzzles is why does China if it has the wisdom that was expressed by Hu Jintao that was expressed at the 17th party conference, if it has the wisdom to combine soft power with hard power to create a smart power strategy why hasn’t it done it? Instead what it’s doing is a counterproductive strategy which is driving all its neighbors into the arms of the United States in the exact opposite position which it said were its objectives. So I would suggest that the real question that we ought to think of is How could China really implement what Hu Jintao said in 2007 and as Xi Jinping has repeated and develop a smart power strategy. That would be good for China, good for the US, and good for the region as a whole. I hope that’s provocative enough to stir some dialogue.
GOV. DUKAKIS: Joe we have some people who are participating with you and might want to introduce one or two of those folks.
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: Ok well to bring others into this let me suggest that Ambassador Kondo, the special advisor to the minister of foreign affairs, and is in Tokyo might be willing to add his thoughts on this.
AMBASSADOR SEIICHI KONDO: Hi I’m Seiichi Kando and I’m co-author of this book Soft Power, Superpowers. The point I will make is that I don’t think China really understands what soft power means. Soft power is a kind of secret weapon, what they have explicitly been doing is to use their culture and their Confucius institutes to attract others but, it is very clear what is behind this. I don’t like to talk too much about soft power of Japan because as I said it is a secret weapon. I don’t think China is ready to understand the power of soft power. It’s a kind of propaganda still. I hope Prof. Nye will persuade them as to what soft power really is. Thank you.
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: Also were fortunate to have Prof. Suzanne Ogden here. A professor and department chair of political science at Northeastern University, would like to join in?
PROF. SUZANNE OGDEN: Just a brief statement. I think Japan has to think about their soft power too, Japan doesn’t really do enough to project its own soft power. What is the equivalent, to the Confucius institutes throughout the world that China is doing? What is the equivalent, of the millions of Chinese who are going abroad to study? As opposed to very very few Japanese were going abroad. We don’t interact with the Japanese. We have thousands- tens of thousands of Chinese students and scholars in the United States – we meet them were very impressed by them we learn a lot about them. We don’t get that from Japan and I think Japan needs to be out there more. They need to project their own soft power. Japan’s soft power right now comes from their technology, their manga, their anime- but they need more projection.
AMBASSADOR SEIICHI KONDO: May I respond to this? What is even more important is to invite young people – young artists to Japan. The power of soft power in Japan comes from nature, people’s lifestyle, business, clean streets, and so on. Ms. Ogden, very difficult to explain all those words but if you’re here for six months you will really love it and you’ll understand what the real soft power of Japan is. Of course sending more students and more people abroad, but we need more people to come to Japan, to really feel the soft power of Japan. This is a great opportunity for us to do that.
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: If the attractiveness of Japan goes up in Beijing, the attractiveness of China goes up in Tokyo. That’s a win for both countries, and also in our benefit as well. But let’s again a Chinese perspective on some of these questions, and Zengke He is here perhaps we could invite you to give your perspective.
ZENGKE HE(inaudible, poor audio)
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: Well thank you very much, but do you think it would be possible to see China accepting the kind of binding code of conduct for settlement of disputes over islands within the nine dashed line? As Bonnie Glaser mentioned tonight, Could you imagine that being acceptable or not?
ZENGKE HE(inaudible, poor audio)
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: Prof. John Quelch of the business school is – I don’t know whether he’s not with us physically tonight what is the – he is sick so he will not be able to join us. Maybe we can ask Anders?
ANDERS CORR: Thank you. Thanks Joe, six years of grad school here and I remember seminars here and I’m so happy to be back. I have a few points that I’d make, coming off what people have said. The first is that I don’t think ASEAN is really a good location to solve the South China Sea dispute. China is clearly breaking international law, for its own aggrandizement in terms of maritime territory. ASEAN has been blocked by Vietnam and Cambodia, which are near client states of China. Their blocking any real moves by the ASEAN organization. The TPP and APEC are great ideas, I’m not sure how much influence they are going to have positively on the situation. Sometimes Chinese economic access to countries greases the wheels essentially for their influence, and they use that influence to stop any sort of confrontation against the aggrandizement they’re pursuing in the South China Sea. I think that US allies are worried, I think they’re worried about the commitment of the United States if it came to war with China. Look at Scarborough shoal, China has occupied Philippine territory essentially as part of their exclusive economic zone for two years and we really haven’t done much about it all.
We certainly haven’t done anything militarily about it. I think that gives people pause about our commitments, our defense commitments with those countries. What I think we need to do is take a stronger stance in terms of our bilateral treaties, I think we should go beyond a bilateral treaty and have a strong multilateral defense treaty in Asia. I think that we should include Japan, I think we should include South Korea, Australia, New Zealand. I think that’s key and Asia. I think we should also have a partnership for peace program similar to NATO in Europe. I think a lot of the other democracies in the region should be included in that partnership for peace program. I think it will significantly strengthen the multilateral defense organization. US to China defense expenditures, right now, are roughly 4 to 1 – for every dollar China spends, the US and our allies in Asia spend four. We have the military power to stop China’s expansions, but we’re not using it. North Korea of course is another major threat it’s not just China. As the Chinese legitimacy, I think China can gain legitimacy in the international arena by following international law. As long as China continues breaking international law, I think the countries that are being hurt by that we’ll see China as a criminal. In a think other countries will see China as a criminal.
GOV. DUKAKIS: It sounds to me like this is a new Cold War. Or am I exaggerating?
ANDERS CORR: It’s a dangerous situation. You got Russia and China expanding territorially and with military force, China is using its Navy against these low countries and it’s a very dangerous situation.
GOV. DUKAKIS: So we are going to surround them with military alliances?
ANDERS CORR: I think we should have a strong Democratic military alliance just as we do in Europe.
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: Dick Rosecrance you should get in this. But so should probably Lara you written a very good article on this.
PROF. RICHARD ROSECRANCE (DICK): It does seem to me were at a choice point and as many people around the people know, including particularly Joe, we’ve just finished a book on World War I and its implications for future. If something as bad as World War I could occur in 1914, are we sure that something like that could never occur again? Especially since, when we look at the causes of World War I, none of them were inevitable. The things that happened actually had to happen. So we have to worry about something that is also accidental, in causing conflict between ourselves and China over time. We have to take that very seriously.
I would like to move away from international law, I think we will never solve anything in the Pacific through international law. Each of these countries has their own economic zone, which overlaps with China’s nine dashed line. There is inevitably going to be conflict there, there is no international court that will resolve that conflict that simply. So what we should be doing in Asia, is to move from de jure to de facto instead of trying to solve things at the international legal level. We should work together to work practically on solutions, for example, without deciding who owns the Senkaku or the Diayou islands it would be possible for China and Japan to work on developing a latticework for drilling operations in the area nearby. So they can actually share what comes out without having to decide finally who owns it because they will never decide who owns it.
The same thing is probably true in Scarborough shoal, it’s true in terms of Vietnam and so on so I would encourage de facto to supersede de jure. Also, let me make one more comment, China will never be a member of TPP as long as these disputes are going on. They will never be allowed to join the transpacific partnership. Only if these issues are settled, in one way or another, and it need not be legal, it could be settled informally. Will it be at all likely that China could join in the great advantages of the TPP, when you consider that. The main thrust of Chinese trade is not at East Asia (inaudible) the components have been added the final parts of been assembled, they all go out to a worldwide market. In Europe, in the United States, in other countries – those kinds of things are crucial in the long term for China. So joining TPP would be very helpful to China, but that’s not going to happen until there are some concrete agreements that allow other countries to participate with China in TPP.
HOLLY MORROW: Maybe as a counterpoint to what was just said about international law, I know a number of people brought up (inaudible) is that the US has not ratified (inaudible) so if we talk about –
PROF. RICHARD ROSECRANCE (DICK):The World Bank
HOLLY MORROW: That’s different though.
PROF. RICHARD ROSECRANCE :Well still. And de facto not de jure.
HOLLY MORROW: But I think we’re in tenuous ground, we are seen as being on tenuous moral ground when we lecture Asian states, China or anybody else, on the importance of obeying a rules-based status system based on UNCLOS which is a treaty that we ourselves have not signed. So I would just make a push, as I have made in Washington for many years to be a proponent of this we have to ratify.
PROF. JOSEPH NYE: Well we have exhausted our time for this half but Mike to one handed over to Kevin?
GOV. DUKAKIS: I do. We have the former Prime Minister of Australia with us, and were going to turn the rest of our session over to him so, Kevin you’re on.
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD:Thank you very much governor and Joe Nye, and my distinguished colleagues here. I’ve been asked to talk about what we do for the future of the Asian-Pacific region. Specifically to talk about the possible long-term concept of an Asia-Pacific community.
The reason I’m late tonight, is that I’ve just been attending the graduating function for one of the classes sent here by the organization department of the Chinese communist party. They have been here for the last two weeks they saw Joe Nye here this afternoon and told me some good things he had to say to them and some of the bad things as well. Their evaluation of my performance was the same. But the reason I raise that is because the central part of the equation is how China views its own future. That was very much the subject of Joe’s discussion (inaudible) and it’s been a useful thing that Harvard University’s been doing not just with this group but for some years now over 500 people gone through similar training courses at this great university. What I might do is simply talk to four points.
The first is this, concerning what I think is the current state of the US China relationship (inaudible) then I might talk briefly about what can we learn in the centenary of World War I from the Europeans of the world about how to avoid unnecessary conflagration and conflict? And thirdly I might talk about where East Asia has got to so far on the creation of regional institutions. And finally, some thought lines that I’ve had myself on this going back to my years as the Australian prime minister on how we begin to change the pattern of thought about how we can construct a common future together. Let me start with the first which is the current state of US China relations: Joe has been looking at this for many years, I have been looking at this for many years, I’ve been looking at it primarily as either a diplomatic or political practitioner. Himself as a distinguished scholar with a very significant reputation which speaks for itself. My judgment is that the relationship at present it’s probably in its most difficult state that it’s (inaudible) it should not be thus for the simple reason that there are so many things in common between the two countries. But nonetheless it is thus.
When you start to talk to senior Chinese leaders and foreign-policy leaders about the current state of the relationship you can easily put together a list of what might be problematic in the relationship but actually think it’s much more fundamental than that. It goes to both Chinese perceptions about both their own and America’s future in East Asia going out to the midcentury point in America’s perception of China doing the same. And reduced to its absolute essential there is a high profound and I believe dangerous level of strategic mistrust between the two at this point.
Of course this is no one’s fault in particular it is a reality. And as someone from a third country, a friend of China and an ally of the United States, I’ve sought to bring a different perspective on what could be done about it. Which brings me to my second point, China which is a deeply scholarly culture, has spent a lot of time researching the rise and fall Of great powers in history not just in Asia but in Europe. Also patterns which emerge from historical analysis over time. For example over the last 10 years China has produced an extraordinary series on central Chinese television on the rise and fall of great powers. It is either I think in eight or 12 part series but quite a profound level of analysis as to why empires rise and why they fall. Starting with the Greeks and finishing with the British, and then to the present period ending with a huge question mark about themselves and a country well known and loved by many of us around this table, the United States of America. So in the Chinese look at historical evolution (inaudible) what they would call the Thucydides trap whereby when an emerging power begins to challenge and established power it creates a particular set of behaviors which are intrinsically destabilizing. This produces to classical forms, either the emerging power seeking to preempt action against it by the established power or by the established power seeking to delegitimize the emerging by preempting it first. The historical precedence given there Athens and Sparta, and more recently in the First World War Germany and Russia and Germany and Britain.
The interesting conclusion that I draw from the First World War which I think is shared by many Chinese scholars is that how in fact can the Thucydides trap be avoided? Xi Jinping the Chinese president has exclusively referred to (inaudible). That is how to escape necessarily the fault lines and predictabilities and some of the obstacles of history and create a different future? His concepts, which he describes as a new type of great power relationship, is a headline still waiting to be populated. But it is a legitimate attempt to create something different than the predictable great power clashes that we’ve seen littered across history.
The study of World War I is particularly interesting because the conclusions then I draw from that and that a number of Chinese scholars draw from that, though would be not truthful to say that spread across wide numbers of the Chinese Academy, one of the reasons that we had units in 1914, one not all, was the absence of any effective European wide institution at that time. In fact the system of global dispute resolutions had barely begun, through various international associations established the previous year in the Hague. We had not even begun yet to fathom the league of Nations let alone the United Nations. So within Europe itself there they took us into this war Through all the historical factors that we are familiar with, one of the great problems was the faulty nature of diplomatic communication at the time. In the absence of intermediating powers or the type of institutions tasked with ensuring the communications were correct, accurate, and informed.
I don’t wish to misrepresent history, that’s not single cause but the critical events of 1914 in August and into the early days of September I think it was a significant contributing factor. The opinion of Europeans on this question, and I hope I’m not going to offend anyone around the table, but I’m Australian we do that professionally anyways, is their slow learners and we had a second great conflagration as well called the second world war. Eventually the Europeans concluded particularly, France and Germany, that this was a generally dumb idea. Having been to the Franco-Prussian war, the first world war, and the second world war with a combined carnage approaching something like 70 or 50 million – I’m looking at Richard to nod his head indicating whether I got the collective number right over those three conflagrations. So states decided after the First World War that European institutionalism would be a factor that would reduce the risk of such conflict in the future. If you look at the modest beginnings of what we would call the European Union, starting with the coal and steel agreement of 1954, essentially a Franco German agreement to it then became a common market which event became a European Community and then finally became a European Union.
The strategic objective which people like (inaudible) I think was in time realized, in that is enough thought now of France and Germany ever taking up arms against each other Is now so out of the range of conceptual possibility it would be considered ridiculous. If we ask that question in 1945, 1950, or even 1955, I think given we had so many repeat performances, that would not necessarily have been refuted. So I pay tribute to the statesman of that period 1945 – 1955. French and German in particular. (inaudible) which brings us to the question of the Asia-Pacific region in the question of institutionalism, look at what’s evolved in Europe since 1945 which the Europeans call a pan institutionalism, the European Union itself, the CSCE, ultimately kind of the early OSCE and various other Europe wide institutions.
The parallel developments in the Asia-Pacific region have been very thin to non-existent. If you look at Australia’s region, we’ve seen the evolution of ASEAN, the Association of South East Asian Nations, good in itself, and with that particular culture of regional institutionalism, it’s turned former adversaries into colleagues so that the possibility of possible large scale war between them, that is the 10 southeast Asian states, by and large is now much more remote than it ever was. But remember, in 1975, when ASEAN was first conceived, or 1976 if I’m correct, when it first became fully formed, it actually dates from earlier exercises in the late 60’s, it was seen then primarily as an anticommunist block by western leaning military dictatorships against communist Indo-China.
But the development of concepts of community, of even common security commitments, I won’t say common values because that stretches it if you look at communities such as Indonesia, Singapore, Vietnam, and Burma, it has been, I think at the sub regional level, a remarkably successful institution. Since the fall of Saigon, leaving aside the border clash between Cambodia and Vietnam a couple of years later, amongst the southeast Asians it’s been conflict free. However, if we looked at the map more broadly across wider east Asia, institutionalism has been much thinner on the ground. There evolved out of ASEAN something called the ASEAN Regional Forum which is to have a loose dialogue on Pan-regional security questions that was a diplomatic initiative of one of my predecessors Gareth Evans, if you look at the evolution beginning with the Chinese of ASEAN + 3 becoming ASEAN + 6 and in turn becoming the East Asia Summit which now includes the United States, you have the evolution of a thin institution, but nonetheless one that exists on paper. More broadly across the region however, you have at an economic level APEC, again an Australian diplomatic initiative by Bob Hawke and later Paul Keating which has had a huge role in frankly establishing an orthodoxy between binary stages the necessity of having open economies and open markets in the region where that previously not an orthodoxy.
I think APEC has been a very useful catalytic institution in that respect. A political institution which embraces the political (inaudible) namely wider East Asia including India, there isn’t much to speak of. Which brings me to my final point. What then can be done? For some time, a bit like a voice in the wilderness, I have argued a proposition which we should begin thinking about; conceptualizing and then advancing the idea of an Asia-Pacific community. Its first stepping stone has already been established through some regional diplomacy with China, a role in leading up to 2010 which was finally getting the East Asian Summit to the degree of America joining. And that was an administration then to accept that invitation in 2010 given the historical patterns of US behavior in Asia was “We don’t do multilateralism, you guys do that, we just do bilateral alliances.” Some of us with grievance to America thought that this was not entirely mindful of how issues would unfold over time.
I helped in my own way to lead that charge. Anyway getting the 10 southeast Asians, the 3 northeast Asians, China, Korea, and Japan and the three other ones Australia, New Zealand , and Canada to agree to America entering this institution. It was seen as a significant regional breakthrough. The interesting thing about the EAS as it’s called in East Asia (inaudible) two advantages 1) It has an open mandate, if you look at its founding principles in 2005 it stresses political, economic, security, foreign policy, and any other matter which is deemed to be relevant to the region’s future. It’s called the Kuala Lumpur declaration. 2) For the first time we have a nascent institution in Asia which has all the principles round the table. The great danger prior to that was we’d have a bifurcated Pacific of simply the East Asia run institutions and America carved out. But now you have America and now you have the East Asians and of course Russia because they’re there as well. So what I’ve argued since 2008 on is that we should over time evolve a concept of an Asia Pacific community.
I’m very mindful of European precedents here which means taking things slowly, step by step, but the value of a galvanizing vision for the long term, is it actually points political energy in a particular direction. Even if it’s not an immediate material manifestation of (inaudible). The fact that we have through the East Asia Summit process got the participants right now we realize the next step which is turning it into a more robust regional institution and therefore evolving into something I call the Asia Pacific Community.
My final point is this: partly this I wish to be a realist about this and say it doesn’t fundamentally resolve realist strategic concerns on the part of the Americans, the Chinese, and others within the region, in areas where at present there is no constituted agreement, but what it does do is that it begin over time to create the culture of common security dialogue, common foreign policy discourse, common political conversation about the regions common future. That prior to 1954 didn’t really exist in Europe. When I look at that example of what we could do in the Asia Pacific, it’s capable I think of producing some genuine positive outcomes in the future. It is not a panacea, it is one part of a broader fabric in dealing with I think the current fragile and delicate and biased deteriorating state of the US China relationship. If we can have that as a part of our armory and our software for the future.
Developing step by step a culture of strategic cooperation beginning in such practical areas as common preparation and engagement for the next major natural disaster in east Asia as we all know happen at a large scale every year. But all the militaries are working together, the PLA, USAF and the rest, the Royal Australian Air force and the Indonesians and the Japanese Self Defense Force on the next big one. Whether it’s a Fukushima type incident whether it’s an earthquake in Sichuan or whether it’s out of control fires in Australia which could take out a large city. This begins to create the culture, atmosphere, and sprit, of common regional enterprise. Those are the thoughts I’d like to leave you with this evening, Thank you very much.
AMBASSADOR SEIICHI KONDO: Mr. PM can I say a word? It was good to meet you in Tokyo. Just two points: 1) There is attention on the APEC summit as to whether Abe and Xi Jinping will meet or not. I think there’s a bit too much of that because Pres. Obama and Xi Jinping met for 8 hours last August but still not everything was solved. I think we should not try to see if that summit happens between Xi Jinping and Abe , it’s not gonna be a panacea a euphoria and solve everything. I think we have to be very patient. 2) We should always keep the door open such as TPP. Second we should not try to create at this moment an institution like NATO because that would be too antagonistic it’s also not realist in context of Japanese relations as well. We should try to use what is there and try to build up from there. 3) (inaudible) father of soft power Joseph Nye but I think talking about soft power, the essence of that is your founding fathers principles democracy, freedom of speech, the rule of law, it is a contradiction of Chinese policy in soft power because if we think of the essence of soft power it’s not only manga or anime it’s more of that philosophy.
GOV. DUKAKIS: We certainly are gonna have a lot to talk about as we move ahead. I must say however Mr. Ambassador that I’m not sure the remilitarization of Japan will create a culture that PM Rudd is talking about. We have a couple of people who I hope will make a comment or two to wrap things up. Let’s begin with
LING CHEN – (poor quality audio )
LLEWELLYN KING:(poor quality audio)
PRIME MINISTER KEVIN RUDD:60 seconds to respond to my good friend the Japanese ambassador. One is on Xi Jinping and Abe in Beijing my belief is that they will certainly meet, whether they agree on a future summit is a separate question. I think the temperature is, by mutual design, coming down because they realize the risks both economic and political allowing it not to get out of control. My second response is, and where I think we disagree with you ambassador, is not to try a new regional institutional approach. Bilateral mechanisms are failing across Asia. Therefore, the rest of Asia does not want to find its security ultimately exclusively hostage to the dynamics of the Sino-Japanese relationship. As a consequence, you can build other trust mechanisms by having us focus on a common regional future. Some of the building blocks are there. I would certainly welcome Japan becoming engaged with the evolution of such a regional institution.
AMBASSADOR ICHIRO FUJISAKI: Sorry Mr. PM I totally agree with you. I said we should not make an institution which would exclude China, we would have to start thinking about multilateralized institutions with China in the future, not maybe right now. Second Abe and Xi Jinping I think they’ll meet aswell and I think It’s very good, it’s better than not meeting. But we should not have too many expectations that it will solve all issues.
GOV DUKAKIS: Let me wrap up what has been a fascinating evening by simply saying based on my own experience , excluding anybody is usually a mistake if you’re thinking about bringing people together. As John Maynard Keynes once said (inaudible) having celebrated my 80th birthday we should not wait years to bring China into this process. I think we have in fact figured out we have to right now. In any event I think it sets the stage for our next conference in November. I want to say thank you to all of you both here and around the world for participating with us. Kevin thank you for giving us the conceptual framework to dig into and a special thanks to Tuan Nguyen for making all this happen. Thank you all very much.
Anders Corr, the Principal of Corr Analytics Inc., shared his view of Cyber-Terrorism in Boston Global Forum conference focusing on Global Media and Cyber-Terrorism, in Harvard University on October 3. The Conference was moderated by Governor Michael Dukakis.
Madam Vaira Vike-Freiberga, member of Boston Global Forum’s Board of Thinkers, President of World Leadership Alliance Club de Madrid, and former Latvia’s President, made a speech about Cyber-Terrorism in the Boston Global Forum’s October 3 Conference “Global Media and Cyber-Terrorism” at Harvard University. The conference is moderated by Governor Michael Dukakis.
Below is the transcript of her speech of Cyber-Terrorism.
Thank you governor for the introduction, ladies and gentleman and it is a pleasure and honor to join this distinguished group of specialist and I must say on the onset that I am by no means an expert of any sort in all things cybernetic. My husband rather is, he sort of looks after that side of it in our families and in our daily affairs. And I think that in most families today what we frequently find is that the acquaintance with the modern electronic means of communication is highest among some members of a family but particularly the youngest ones. We have a grandson that just turned four a few days ago and i have a feeling that he was practically weened on an iPod and truly his favorite toy is this new medium of communication.
The topic that we will be concerned next year but is already starting to concern you here in the Boston Global Forum of cyber terrorism and cyber crime takes various forms. You open your daily newspapers and this morning, for instance, you would see a headline saying that 75 million peoples accounts have been compromised by a cyber attack. On the files, on the records, of that large institution and it’s clear that if your bank account and access to it comes in the wrong hands, this is very bad news for any individual involved, but when you multiple that by not just the original million that the company admitted but by 75 million, you realize the enormity of the harm that could be done. But we have also had cyber attacks already on countries that have been traced back to other countries that obviously don’t have the friendliest of intentions, to put it mildly. Therefore, security, in a broader sense of the word, for any system of government, data keeping, records, but also for ordinary things and of ordinary life which have part of our society and on which we rely to operate properly, anyone of them be it your airplane reservation or the way your airplane is being piloted, that are potential targets of terrorist attacks.
But I’d like to mention that there’s another aspect of availability of information in cyber space, if you’d like and that is the recruitment of potential terrorist by spreading ideologies that by devious means could attract the attention of young people then slowly suck them in, into activities, groups that are. It’s almost like the brainwashing that one gets in sects. They get a feeling being received in a friendly manner, of being found important, on being supported. I have been told by priest, for instance, in Paris suburbs, in their attempts to get youngster to help the church, they are competing with molars(?), who are offered to every youngster you comes to Friday prayers, and from youngsters from dis-advantaged neighborhoods. This is a very simple and ordinary temptation which eventually leads to recruitment, to belonging in groups that not only have very fanatical convictions and ideologies but that consider violence and random violence, which is what terrorism is, as a tool of preference for advancing their ideological needs.Then, of course, there is a very technical side, if you wish to do harm on a random an massive scale, the technical expertise required to do that varies. It can range from the extreme and simple to the complicated and its a bit alarming to see on the internet for instances that there are recipes freely available for fabricating harmful cocktails, there are recipes available for synthesizing drugs in your basement or in your kitchen. Drugs, which moreover, because of their chemical structure have a few atoms that are not the same as those that are on lists of illegal substances and therefore, for a while, in actually really be put on the market and frequently, because of the way they’re being manufactured or because of their actually physiological effects are extremely dangerous to say teenagers of high school age to whom these are freely distributed at a very low price with a promise of either ecstasy or a unique experience and this in many ways, is the downside, or the flip side if you’d like of having available to us in cyberspace through various means of various dictionaries.
By now, maybe not the complete knowledge of everything humanity has ever acquired but pretty close to it. If an ancient days the library of Alexandria and its scrolls and its template was a repository for all that human kind had achieved up to that point, we must remember the sad lessons of history where the library of Alexandria was attacked and vandalized and their Sara-pean league equally destroyed utterly either one persuasion of fanatics or another. I say this because I have the privilege of being apart of the international advisory board of the library of Alexandria and Alexandria as a city is extremely proud of having, with international collaboration and supporting, reconstructed that historical monument to humanities thirst for knowledge, and made a beautiful center of international intellectual collaboration and activities, but the repository, if you like the digital repository of the worlds knowledge today, is as, in many ways, as vulnerable in any one particular location where it might be deposited, the Library of Congress if unique you may digitalized and that is something that would help, you have a backup but the original documents are irreplaceable. We just completed in Latvia our National Library new building by world famous Latvian architect who has been an American citizen for the last decade Gunārs Birkerts and this library possess irreplaceable incunabula which if they were to perish well we would have their their digital traces but we would not have the originals.
I’d like to address another aspect of the cyberspace and that is the general information that we get available to us no trust say, the words to a song that you particularly liked when you were twenty and you remember how the words to the third verse of the third sum of it and you can instantly look it up on the internet or who was the actor who played the leading role in some movie that you remember, if the movie happens to be Casablanca, you probably don’t need that kind of cyber support for it but otherwise it’s available at the tip of your fingers. But when it comes information that is not simply factual and straightforward but the requires inevitable some aspect of selection and interpretation to it, then I think we come up to potential dangers, but just of terrorism but of extremism fanaticism of racial hatred of general aggressive-ity of one group of individuals against another. mischief, if you’d like, of a very large scale. The propaganda, the political propaganda that we consider as natural as part of the Democratic, multiparty system, can take a nasty turn when it becomes a single source of information political situation in one’s country in the world or on the part of totalitarian systems. Any totalitarian system in the past has always managed to control the flow of information available to its citizens, the flow of information, control of information is one of the means of imposing one’s will and is a sort of terror even if it is committed in the name of the state or of the ruling regime. The ability of citizens to evaluate things for themselves is a dangerous one for totalitarian systems but is also one that free countries and democratic countries or countries in transition should remember puts a heavy burden on the ordinary citizens. I had the pleasure of chairing a committee on the freedom and diversity of the media in the EU, and we produced a report that was deposited a couple years ago, and we discovered that the plurality of media the availability of diverse viewpoints and opinions is not a simple of a matter as it may seem and it’s not necessarily as easily achieved as we assume, that if there are free elections in the country and if it has all the trappings of democracy that there by all it’s citizens are able to function, if you’d like, with the full powers and decision-making authority the democracy on principle affords to each and every citizen. It is very clear media are the way by which the ordinary citizen as a window on the world, nobody can be present everywhere at once. Nobody can witness importance events personally, you’re lucky if you sometimes see them, even at a distance.
The media are truly the deserving of their name that they are the medium by which information flows and the technical infrastructures of media, whether by print medium or the electronic medium, in a way the technicalities become secondary to the fact of the editorial choice, the editorial content of what is presented to the public. This, I believe, is an important issue that has be to addressed equally in all countries regardless of the levels of democratic freedom they enjoy. In those countries that see themselves, as free, open, and democratic, vigilance I think, is the order of the day. One should remain vigilant about maintaining diversity of opinions available, a diversity of sources of information and no human being having the privilege of claiming to have the absolute truth of their deposal and the absolute ultimate verities to present to you, one should to so with all due humility and allow for other viewpoints to be expressed.
But what is truly alarming is that in many countries which are making progress, for instance in economic terms which are like China lifting millions out of dire poverty, the desire to control information about the government remains as strong as ever and we also recently, the Russian president announcing that they are going to take measures, to have special servers, for information the pertains to Russia. The argumentation for it is presented in the name of security, of national security and of course this is to some extent a legitimate concern for any country .
Security of information concerning its own internal affairs but it very quickly become an instrument of political control and an instrument of keeping people in the dark about what is happening. We hear that on mainland China, the media have been completely silent about the demonstrations happening on Hong Kong. Now, you might say the news that the daily news can only report so much information, if you open any channel in America, you may object to the narrowness of the range of topic that it presents to your attention and I suppose the Chinese may make equal claims, well some people gathering on the street is not news worthy enough to deserve a place on our national news, but you can clearly see what the political implications are of these sort of choices.
So, you see we have here a situation where the technical infrastructure of media which in some ways is subsidiary it is secondary to the content, to the editorial approach, to the choice, the view point you are going to present but then we come full circle because if somebody comes up with a new device, someone invents a way of circumventing data firewalls that some country has built around its internet or the controls that it has imposed on its media, I think that there would be a wonderful opportunity not just for somebody to make a future but for the people concerned as its customers to have new opportunities for exercising their God-given right to actually pick and choose what it is they think about certain events on the world and where they, really we consider part of democratic rights that people should have, the right of access to information that is as broad, as diversified and as objective as possible. But I have had journalist, professional journalist from well respected international television companies admit to me that even if you go, for instance on Tahrir Square when there used to be these demonstrations in Cairo, your camera can only point in one direction and that means that even in such a large event where a million people might be present, the scene you choose to focus on, the face you do put on your camera is going to be one that you choose as operator of that camera or later as editor of the news presentation. We have before us ladies and gentlemen, unheard of and unlimited potentials for new access to information or the most unimaginable kind. This is bonanza, it is a, sometimes it seems overwhelming but it is a wonderful privilege to have lived that long and to have experienced this immense explosion of information available to us, but at the same time the challenges that it poses and the misuses, the potential misuses clearly must be kept in mind and so I think I have to conclude again with a second idea that even as we are excited about the possibilities we must remain extremely vigilant and careful about the dangers that said media impose to human rights, to human freedoms, and to civil liberties in the larger sense of the word.
(BGF) – The Boston Global Forum is pleased to have its Distinguished Lecture delivered by Madam Vaira Vike-Freiberga, member of BGF Board of Thinkers, President of Club de Mandrid, former Latvia’s President, in the morning of October 3, 2014. The topic of the talk is the Forum’s focus throughout 2014, which is to build a Framework for peace and security in the Pacific. The issue has been attracting participation and supports of several policymakers, scholars, researchers and business leaders into discussion.
The event is one of the Forum’s Leader Series activities which features talks with the most remarkable figures in their respective fields, and be anchored by Llewellyn King, member of the Forum Editorial Board, executive producer and host of PBS White House Chronicle
