From our studios in new york city, this is charlie rose. I would never have come out here four or five weeks ago and i made a joke about these lane closures. I never had an inkling that anyone on my staff would have been so stupid as to be involved and then so deceitful as to not disclose the information that they were involved in it to me when directly asked by their superior washington is already buzzing over a pair of new political stories. President obamas position on the wars in iraq and afghanistan is being questioned by a former defense secretary. Newly released emails seem to show that Chris Christies staff shut down access to the George Washington bridge as political retribution. Mike allen is here to talk about those stories and more. He is a correspondent for politico. Welcome. Lets go to Chris Christie first. There was a press conference on thursday. Did he put to rest the question that might have been raised by the damage to his Political Campaign . Of course not. You saw all week that this was going to be something that was really going to last. He said all the right things. He said he was embarrassed and humiliated. He said several times it was stupid. He had been blindsided. That is what people wanted to hear. They wanted him to apologize. He had been very smart to make the move of going to fort lee, new jersey, the town that was bedeviled by this traffic and apologized to the mayor and 50 citizens who were there in person. This does not go behind him for a couple reasons. For many people across the country, this is the first and only thing they know about Chris Christie. He wanted to get to know them under very different circumstances. This breaks through to the people. They understand traffic jams. Traffic jams define so much of the workaday life in america. The idea of creating one on purpose is crazy. What it says about the governors leadership and management this is like the problem with healthcare. Gov. They need to have somebody in the organization who can tell you bad news. There has to be a way to explain bad news in your organization. It did not occur here. What people like about governor christie is the toughness, deep bluntness, the plainspokenness. That is looked at through the prism of being a bully. All those other qualities are looked at differently. Reporters, national reporters, are looking into a lot of incidents where they believe the governor may have been involved in some sort of retribution. There are a lot of threads in this sweater. Was there a culture around the governor that could make this happen . Was there a culture around the Governors Office . That is exactly right. One criticism that you heard was that the governor was thinking about himself. He was saying that what was wrong was that he was lied to. He did not address the question of, how did he allow this to happen . How do you create an environment where people will do this . People are saying that the governor was saying that the problem was he was being lied to. The problem was all the citizens who are inconvenienced. Why didnt he know that this was going on . Why didnt he act on it at the time the traffic jams were occurring . That is unanswered. Lets look at this new book by bob gates called duty. We have both read it and we both agree that it is different than how it has been described. He is critical of the president and recalls a moment in which secretary clinton described her vote on the iraq war when she was a senator. If you take those isolated passages and pull back the camera, it is a very different book. You have a very honest book talking about how miserable the job was and how much he really did not like it. He told you this at the time. He told us this at the time. We are inclined not to believe people when they say that a high office job is a burden. But it really was. He fantasized about answering what he really wanted to. He wanted to make fun of the banal questions that he was asked. The difficulty of working with an administration, a west wing this is where you get the criticism of the president. They were very involved in operational matters. This is a west wing that is very controlling. They did not just point the secretary of defense in the direction they wanted him to go. That is some of the frustration revealed in this book. That is the part that is more honest. They would not have predicted that secretary gates, such a company man, would talk so openly about his experience. What i thought was interesting about this book with the conversation about the president and afghanistan. It suggested that the president did not have great confidence in the mission, did not feel that good about his command with david petraeus. He believed that they ought to get out of there. But nevertheless, he went forward. The president is pursuing a war that he had doubts about. That is not the first time in history that has happened. But you see a president at contravening ends. That is a fascinating point. Secretary gates said that he agreed with the president s decisions. But there was so much he did not really believe in. That filters down into the organization. They felt it was certain to fail before they even went ahead. He said that on the positive side, the president was the most deliberative president he had ever met. He said very complimentary things about clinton. But about joe biden, he said that on every major Foreign Policy decision in the last 40 years, he had been on the wrong side. That was one of the little shocks of the book. And the one practice that the white house really questioned him on. The white house has been very lowkey in reacting to this. Secretary gates overnighted some books to the white house so that they would happen to respond to them. This is the one comment that came out. They defended President Biden the next day. They did not say much about anything else that was in there. These views are no surprise to them. There is good documentation. This is a book that was written with a lot of notes. Secretary gatess home in Washington State they even set up a secure facility for him where he could use classified documents as he was preparing this book. This is a very serious book. There is lots of documentation. It is not a rant or a screed. Mike allen, thank you. Back in a moment. I have seen two significant changes in the risk profile around the world that are linked to questions of the United States. The first is that everyone is talking about president rouhani and iran. The likelihood of an actual breakthrough deal on their Nuclear Program is significantly greater today than it was three months ago. Ian bremmer is here again. He is the founder and president of eurasia group. They produce a report on the top risks of the year ahead. This years list includes americas relationship with china and al qaeda 2. 0. Bremmer places syria and european politics at the forefront. Happy new year. Happy new year. What is it you do . I am a political scientist who tries to look at how politics affect markets all over the world. Usually if you are a political scientist, you become an academic or you go into policy. You do not go into the private sector. My conceit is that Political Science matters for the global marketplace. What is it that you and your team do to understand and evaluate risk . Some of it is quantitative. We assess country risk and we develop programs. We work on the ground. When i started the firm back in 1998, i was an expert on the former soviet union. There was a time when i was probably one of the worlds best experts. I could have told you who the people were on the ground who knew the country and traveled there and lived there and understood the place. I could have given you a good sense back then. I cannot do that anymore. We have people covering those countries all over the world. You have a collection of experts whose business it is to learn about what is going on. It took a long time to build very gradually. We are at the point where we can do this stuff now. How is information successful for the kind of decisionmaking that must be made . We must get the ideology out. It is easy to get access to someone who will talk you about a decision. It is not so easy to get access to putin. It is interesting that you mentioned putin. He is a unique challenge. Even if you get near the people who are close to him, you do not know about his abilities to make decisions as an individual. There have not been any checks or balances on him. You suggest that he is weaker than he was. Yes, and that makes him somewhat unpredictable. His popularity has decreased. It is the lowest it has been since 2000. The economy is doing worse. While he has done well on the international stage, he is clearly concerned about the way that sochi will go in a few weeks time. Does that explain khodorkovsky and pussy riot . He wants to show that he can be magnanimous. It is not a threat to him to have khodorkovsky out of jail. He is taking 20 billion out of the russian Pension Funds and giving it to the ukrainians. He made that decision by himself. Where else in the world do we have individuals making those kinds of decisions . Was it worth it . It was too putin. I do not think it helps the russian people at all. You look at russia, what putin has done over the course of the last few years he has gotten assad, yanukovych, snowden, god bless him. That is not a portfolio i would want. He has gotten himself he is president of the g8. He will use that. He wants to matter on the international stage. How will policymakers find the role that the u. S. Should play . That is a big question. American policymakers. That is the 64,000 question. They are not doing it. The United States, obama came over and said that the u. S. Ended the war in iraq. What he meant is that the u. S. Ended the war in iraq for the americans. The war is still going on. It is not quite mission accomplished. Gates was upset about obamas lack of commitment to the mission in afghanistan. President obama has been trying to minimize the risk of u. S. Exposure internationally. We have seen him do that with the balancing between china and japan. It does not mean he will not succeed. What bob gates wrote is that with respect to that, he was not committed to the mission in afghanistan. He engaged it, and he said it was the most questions asked of any president he had worked with. He debated and analyzed more than anyone who had been in the oval office. He thought that he did not believe in the mission. There was a surge. And then there wasnt. They did not know very well. He was probably right to question the mission. A large percentage of americans oppose the war in afghanistan. According to that poll, that will be the highest opposition related to a war that we have seen in u. S. History. Conventional wisdom has expressed recently in the paper about the United States and what it can and cannot do in the middle east. Our role is not consequential. True. We do not want to be consequential. If we did, it would be more challenging for our ability to promote democracy. We saw what that got us in egypt. We saw what that got us in tunisia. We see what that will not get in places like saudi arabia. Our interest in energy is decreasing every day. There is a lot to play for on iran. I am skeptical of israel. The likelihood that kerry will get something done is virtually zero. I do not understand why he is devoting that much shoe leather to that part of the world. With iran, there is a better than 5050 chance that the u. S. Gets a nuclear deal with iran. But what will that look like . The iranians will limit enrichment, apply caps, renounce their ability to be a breakout nuclear power. We will do things to ensure that they are not . We will destroy centrifuges, perhaps make sure they bring down the level of their enrichment . There is no deal going to happen without that. They will do that because . They will do that because the Supreme Leader came out in the last 24 hours and said that it is not because of international sanctions, but the reality is what did he say . They were doing it for the cause of peace in the world. In reality, is it that the Bush Administration and the Obama Administration have led carefully constructed International Coalitions to put sanctions on this country . Who deserves more credit for this . My impression is that the Obama Administration tripled the number of sanctions. Congress deserves credit too. It is not just the americans, we asked the japanese who came to the table. We asked the europeans. You could give credit to the collapse of the iran sanctions to the eurozone. The eurozone crisis i thought it was still intact. The economic collapse. The germans pushed everyone to the brink. We could not get the italians to support sanctions. We could not do it. They had too much interest in Getting Energy from iran. Then they lost their government. The new government was put in place by effectively by the germans. Immediately, overnight, those new governments said that they would join the sanctions. Frankly, i do not think you would have gotten that effect. We can give bush some credit, we can give congress some credit, we can give obama some credit, we can give the europeans some credit. The russians and chinese came to the table. The fact is that on iran, we had international leadership. This is one place in the International Community where the u. S. And others made a difference. Theres a good chance that we will get a deal. That will help salvage the u. S. Position. What you mean by americas troubled alliance . It means snowden, syria, government shutdown, second term Foreign Policy, and lots of other things that have led American Allies to question the commitment of the u. S. To them. There are some countries in the world that do not have many choices about the u. S. Japan, israel, britain have no strategic alternative. Canada and mexico have no economic alternative. You get right under that, and suddenly you have countries and governments that are actually really rethinking how they want their relationship with the u. S. To go. Are they moving toward somebody else . Or are they simply looking to reevaluate the nature of their relationship . Are the germans for example going to say, my alliance will not be with the United States, it will be with china . Will we double our relationship with china and keep our relationship with the u. S. Stable . No one is replacing the u. S. But if you are Saudi Arabian and you used to buy all of your arms from the United States, now you may buy a lot of them from the french. If you are germany, you may coordinate Economic Policy more closely with china than you were. If you are brazil, you are putting regulations in place that will make it much harder for americans to invest. All of these things have happened. Make a point about diverging markets. It means risk. When you look at emerging markets that have elections, over 50 of the population in that category, 50 of the economies, are actually having election issues. They have a new middle class to deal with. It is demanding. You can sell more to them, but they also demand more. If you put those things together, you get policies that do not move political reform coming out of those elections. Some of these economies will do reasonably well, some of them will do very poorly. In the last 10 years, as an emerging market, you need to grow. It was riskier, but the potential is there. The environment has gotten challenging. Emerging markets, 2014, columbia performs quite well. Turkey does not perform quite so much. India is disappointing. South africa has not performed well. All of these countries are moving in different directions. Are people as critical of the United States as they have been in the past . You have seen that. The response to this diplomat really surprising how the National Indian government came down hard on the u. S. As a consequence of that. The indians used to be much more willing to hedge between china and the United States. If you talk to any indian businessman now, he will tell you that we are making tons of cash in china. Indian development has been so slow that the indian and chinese economies are much more complementary than they used to be. They need each other. India provide a market for china. India provides cheaper labor for manufacturing. Indian entrepreneurship goes to china. They make a lot of money. We have skipped the petrol states. Energy crisis is a risk. Risks are on the downside, not the upside, in 2014. Despite iraqi violence, the iraqis are producing much more oil this year. The libyans are producing much more this year. The americans are producing much more. You also have mexican reform which is starting to excite people about more energy coming from mexico. The saudis are probably going to have to reduce reduction at the end of the First Quarter just to defend the price. If we get an iranian deal, the downward pressure on prices of oil will be significant. Multinational corporations will be much more interested in investing in places like the u. S. And mexico than in places like venezuela or nigeria. The pressure on those countries that are fairly badly run to basically have oil and gas to play for is going to be much more significant than it has been. That is a real risk. What do you mean by strategic data as a risk . The internet was really a product of the information age. It empowered individuals. Now we are focusing on the data revolution, which empowers corporations and then the state. The combination of china, the worlds secondlargest economy, with things like data as an area where chinese corporations must be dominant and the Chinese State must have influenced because of the threat to stability and the United States is a free market, but they used data as part of the militaryindustrial technological complex. You had a very large sector of the Global Economy that we used to think of as truly free market. Now the states are playing a big role. That is fragmenting the way we think about that market. It is making it less efficient. It is creating more regulatory hurdles. It is making it more expensive and harder for individual corporations to go global. That means credit card companies, telecommunications companies. It is a very big change. Oil Companies Find politics very valuable. Exxon mobil has known this for a long time. But the Telecom Companies did not care about this stuff. But 2014, you increasingly have to. The middle east is expanding. We just saw falluja, ramadi, cities in iraq. They are fighting among themselves . Al qaeda 2. 0 is not fighting against the u. S. They have declared war against the saudis. They are franchises. It is no longer a big threat to the United States. What are they fighting over . They are fighting over, i assume, who will get the spoils of victory if there is victory. That is right. If there isnt, they are trying to ensure that they have the ability to gain cash and recruits and have power in those localities. Al qaeda is absolutely getting stronger as a brand. And it has a new name. We talked about turkey. What is going on . This movement has gone after erdogans son. They will come after and imprison all sorts of members of the police forces. In the military . Of course. The sad thing is that turkey and russia were very different in the sense that the turkish Political Institutions were stronger than russias. You had these decades of benefits to turkish members of the European Union. Now you see those institutions, the legitimacy is off. The rule of law in turkey is eroding. Their involvement in the European Union is over. It is clearly over. That was always a nonstarter. More disturbingly, turkeys place as the one developed great passion, great idea, Great Mission was to turn turkey i do not know how successful that will be. The red herring, these things are less of a threat then we might otherwise have thought. U. S. Domestic politics we will not be panicked every other month. The eurozone. The eurozone survives. All of the concerns that populism is growing and you have european parliamentary elections and extremist xenophobes who will win. They are xenophobes against other countries in europe. Look at football matches. Their slow growth, but there is not much to do there. And syria . It is not already hurting for the syrians, but it is for everybody else. Violence is going down a bit. The rebels understand that they are not Getting International support. They are cutting deals with the outside military. In iraq, a lot of the sunni tribal leaders are cutting deals with maliki. In egypt, a number of extremists are moving away from the muslim brotherhood. Syria, over 100,000 dead, it is the devastating conflict. But we will not pay much attention to it. Are you optimistic . I think for the last 5 years, the big risks have been economic risks. It has been the u. S. Debt limit crisis, the china hard landing. It has been european crises. All of those risks have been placed on the table in 2014. It is a new kind of risk. It is a political risk. It is a changing world. I am always optimistic. We are here, how can you not be optimistic . Ian bremmer, of the eurasia group. Back in a moment. Stay with us. We expanded the definition to be able to get trading, to give the regime something they wanted. He was a bad guy, but maybe not a bad guy in terms of how the original legal justification defined it. A senior fellow at the Brookings Institution is here. He is the author of a new book. The authors explain why cyber issues matter and what needs to be done. Eric schmidt has called the book an essential read. I am pleased to have my guest at this table. But start where the book breaks down in terms of what you are talking about. Explain what you are talking about what we talk about the world of cyber. The challenge is that it is this world that we incredibly depend on. Everything from the 98 of the u. S. Military communications that go over the internet, to 800,000 hours of cute cat videos that are uploaded every day, to the infrastructure that runs our commerce communications. We depend on this online world, but we live in an era of cyber insecurity. We are seeing huge amount of threats. The number of attacks that are out there. Malware is found every single second. We have organizations, and states are engaged in various activities, intellectual property. There are a lot of things going on in this space. The book argues that there is no issue that is more important but less understood when we talk about cyber issues. You say that corporations fall into two categories, those who know that they have been hacked, and those who find out they have been hacked. All corporations have been attacked. If you are online in any way shape or form, you have experienced some type of cyber attack. The point you are making is that 97 of fortune 500 companies have been hacked. The other 3 probably have been too. It is everything from people trying to embarrass you to people trying to steal information. We are probably living through one of the biggest thefts in all of human history. It is a massive intellectual property Theft Campaign coming from china. I saw a number like 200 billion. Is it bigger than that . It depends on the measure. A trillion dollars worth of business may be lost. It depends on what is being taken. What is being taken is everything from sophisticated jet fighter designs to small Furniture Companies in new england whose designs for a chair were taken to negotiating strategies. Coca cola was going to be negotiating with the chinese government. They apparently lost when it was reported what they would be bidding. How do you measure those things . The bottom line is that they are experiencing these kind of thefts. When you talk about hacked, attacked, we have these nsa issues. Who was doing the taking . In terms of intellectual property theft, people going after your credit card information, theyre happening on a network. If were talking about identity theft, china is at the center of this. Lots of states play into it. Particularly is it a case of government serving business, in chinas case, state capitalism . It is interesting, because while we frame it as an economic issue, for them it is a morphing of an economic and a National Security issue. You can think about it a couple of ways. The chinese factory that built the first iphones. They cost about 600. They want to move up the profit cycle. To keep their economy humming, they need to gain more diversity in innovations. They need to keep their economy humming to have a little stability. That is when it becomes more of a political issue. You also have competition that is going on between the u. S. And china in terms of National Security. We are looking at jet fighter designs and it is all morphing together. What did they do that we do not do . To me, we are all engaged in this. The disclosures of snowden reveal that we also carry out some of these efforts. There is a difference of the quantity versus quality. When youre talking about the Chinese Program and this effort, there is a translation for one of their activities called the human flesh search engine. It is a massive scale of people and action. When we are talking with china, is not just theft of intellectual property, you are also seeing this in terms of what they call the patriotic Hacker Community. If you are saying something negative, they will go after you. A lot of it is selfpolicing within china. This is all linked. You have a Hacker Community that you could think of as a militia. In the book, we make different parallels. We go back to an age of sailing and understanding the difference between pirates and privateers. Privateers give you an ability to say, that is not us, but you still gain from the fruit of it. How do you see this, as a whistleblower or worse . The challenges with snowden that we talk about is that he discloses so much i categorize it three different ways. He revealed that the nsa engages in espionage against american enemies. Theres a surprise. It should not be a surprise. That is one category of what was revealed. The second category we can describe as questions. Activities that involve american citizens through some way, shape, or form legal fudging, backdoors, etc. The third category could be described as unstrategic, or stupid. Going after American Allies and american tech companies. You mean tapping the phone of angela merkel. When people talk about snowden and his impact, whether it was right or wrong, they usually talk about one category. Did he damage National Security . Does that define him as a traitor . Did he provide information that simply gives citizens of the country the opportunity to make decisions about what they want their government to do . You both revealed information about National Security . He drove this conversation that would not have happened if those disclosures had not been made. Was there enough or not . For me, the reality is that he was not the one engaging in the broader programs and activities we are talking about. He disclosed activity did we know all this information, so therefore clearly the government has had recommendations for a committee. Clearly the president is considering making changes to our National Security policies. It is a net plus for us having a conversation about this that we would not have had. I hope we get the reforms that we should have had. Has this had a negative impact on america . It has caused over 180 billion worth of revenue loss. Is snowden is at fault for that, or is it the underlying programs . To me, it is the underlying programs. They were focused on collecting a certain kind of information, driven towards counterterrorism. But they had these massive ripple effects into all of these other areas. It gives you a good illustration of why you should not simplify issues. Tell us about the extensive espionage. There was obviously some damage to the iranian centrifuges. Is that simply the tip of an iceberg of the kind of things that are happening on the part of governments against governments . When we are talking about espionage, stuxnet was one of the first. They are the first true cyber weapon. It is unlike any other weapon in history. It caused physical damage. It did that. It is unlike any other weapon in history. It was both here, there, everywhere, and nowhere. It is interesting it was probably the first ethical weapon. It only caused harm to the thing it was intended to. One of the guys who discovered it said, it is like opening pandoras box. There will be far more of this to come. We will clearly see greater activity and covert action and sabotage. The real next step in this is integrating those kinds of weapons together within the broader nature of war. You can think of it as parallel to world war i. Did a strategic actions taken by most nations today consider cyber warfare as an element of their military strategy, in the case of either defending or initiating steps that they think advance National Security . You have hit on one of the big problems in terms of the assumptions that are out there. There is a huge assumption that cyber offense will be more effective or easier than Cyber Defense for the perceivable future. There is a problem with that kind of thinking. The first is, it is actually really difficult to pull off an effective cyber offense. Stuxnet is an effective example of that. We sometimes see defense officials saying one of them was quoted as saying it is a couple of teenagers in their basement who could create a weapon of mass destruction. That is not true. It is actually more difficult. History has a wonderful way every time someone thinks the offenses dominic, that turns out not to be the case. World war i is an excellent example of that. They assume that new technologies would be dominant. You had to go to war quickly. That turned out to be wrong. Where that assumption takes you, the u. S. Is spending depending on which measure you are using 2. 5 times as much on Cyber Research as we are on Cyber Defense research. My joke about that is it is a lot like standing in your glass house and seeing the best way to deal with teens who have a stone sharpening kit. What do strategic planners in beijing or moscow or whoever is now al qaeda they have a different level of sophistication, are they thinking about how they can best damage the United States . Would it be an attack somehow . Would it be on the electrical grid . Would it be an attack on Something Else . That is a great way of illustrating this balance of threats and how we react to them. It may be interesting and stupid too. There have been over a half a million media to cyber 9 11, cyber pearl harbor. That was made in testimony before the senate committee. There are 31,000 articles about cyber terrorism, even though there has been no one hurt or killed by cyber terrorism. The power grid scenario, squirrels have taken out the power grid more times than hackers have. I am not saying that there are not threats out there, but you asked that people are viewing it. If we are looking at direct threats right now, the beijing scenario is death by a thousand cuts. Is potentially 1 trillion that we ought to be paying more attention to. We must turn the volume up to 11 and worry about the cyber pearl harbor. You have to be bouncing your approaches. One of the things that and balanced in your approaches. One of the things that matters is how you respond to it, your psychological response to it. What we have talked about is how resilient is the key. Resilience on the technology side, but also psychological resilience to this. It, and carry on. Will kind of legislation do we need . We need to raise standards and drive them toward good cybersecurity. Like we were chatting about before, it has the impact of how finance Companies Deal with this, versus power companies. This is not rocket science. A study found that the top 20 measures, fairly simple measures to take, what stall or prevent 94 of attacks. They would stop 94 of all attacks. People think they are special, they are in the 6 . How much would the damage be in that percent . Bingo. Go talk to your i. T. Guys. If you did not have to spend so much time on the lowlevel stuff, you could focus on the highlevel stuff. They could let you know that the very advanced stuff actually gets in through the lowlevel things. The best example would be the most important penetration of security u. S. Military networks. That happens because a soldier picked up a memory stick that they found in the dirt of a parking lot, to get into the base, and plugged it into their computer. What happened . We had a Foreign Intelligence Agency penetrate u. S. Military networks. The soldier did not follow basic cyber hygiene. Look at the most popular password out there right now is password. [laughter] the second most popular is 123456. People say that they will assign a temporary password and it is always password. This is not just an awareness, there is an attitude. Senior leaders matter believe the former secretary of Homeland Security she said she did not use email and had not used social media in over a decade. She did not think it was useful. The Supreme Court have, in their words, not yet gotten around to email. We continue to see things in business, Business Executives have made a Cyber Security decision of some kind. No mba Program Teaches it as a regular part of their curriculum. So what we have to do is understand cybersecurity and cyber warfare. We have to understand the threat, understand how it works and what the threat is so we can take the wisest steps. This is a wrong that matters for everything, from your privacy, your bank account, to the future of world politics. We are not wellequipped on it. As long as we use the internet, we will have cybersecurity and cyber war issues. We better get smarter on it so that we can deal with it in an effective way, instead of handing the problem off to someone else. Or we move around in a space of ignorance. We treat this as too complex, but there is very basic stuff. My hope is, i mentioned that idea of hygiene. Rather than those cold war parallels, to be frank, people make those parallels to the cold war and you see generals do this. They do not get that if theres any parallel to the cold war, it is those early days when we took dr. Strangelove seriously. It is an issue of public health. You can look at the history of public health. It is also the idea of basic hygiene that gets you a long way. We teach our kids to cover their mouths when a cop, not just to protect themselves, but to give them an ethical responsibility to others. It is like washing your hands. You should change your password, not just to protect you, but all the people you connect to online. Thank you. Great to have you here. Thank you for joining us. See you next time. Advertising cannot [beep] anyone anymore. There is too much information about brands, about experiences. You cannot pull the wool over someones eyes. Traditional advertising is finished. Being a Great Company is the new strength. There will be not anything between the consumer and the company. The essence of every great brand is trust