All right, good evening, everyone. My name is liz artlip and i would like to welcome you to the wharf. Pick up those notes, if you havent done so silence your cell phones. Feel free to keep them on, tagus on social media, just do it silently. We have cspan booktv with us and you dont want to be the one whose phone starts ringing on national television. When we get to the q a portion i will be passing around a wireless microphone. If you have a question please raise your hand and wait for us to get you with the microphone and sneak into it so everyone can hear you and everyone who might be watching on tv in the future can hear you as well. If youve not purchased a copy of the book and you would like to they are available at the register up friends. You can buy a copy or two or three or four, however many you decide you need, hopefully more than one. After the events, happy to sign books, now first for why we are here, to listen to george beebe talk about the russia trap how our shadow war with russia could escalate to world war iii. Former director of russia analysis at the cia and white house advisor on russia for Vice President shiny, george beebe is director of Intelligence National security at the center for national interest, draws on 25 years of experience to when the us and russia are on a collision course. Describing a situation more dangerous than the cold war he shows how factors including new strategic weapons, shifts in world power, unsettled regional conflict and the advantages of cyberattacks on cyberdefense are heightening competition between the countries to the point were small and predictable event could set off a deadly conflict. Here to talk about it please help me welcome george beebe. [applause] thank you for that introduction and thank you for coming tonight. I have given a lot of talks over the last few years since leaving government but i think this is the first time i have given a talk with a book, this is the first book that i published in the first time i have ever given a talk where my wife has been in the audience. That is a special occasion and great to see so many colleagues and friends here tonight so thank you. I want to start by giving you a little cia Insider Information and it has to do with john laughlin. John was a career cia analyst who rose through the ranks at langley and became Deputy Director of Central Intelligence and then acting director of Central Intelligence in the early 2000s. One of the interesting things about john which i mentioned in the book, whenever you would go to his office for meetings, he kept on his desk a little placard. And the placard read subvert the dominant paradigm. I always thought this was a funny little saying, a little bit tongueincheek because it contrasted so strongly with John Mclaughlin who is a very establishment kind of guy. He wears conservative suits, suspenders. You look at him and think this is the last guy who would subvert the dominant paradigm and part of the reason he has this on his desk is he enjoyed playing against type, implying he had a hidden subversive side with an establishment veneer. I think there was a serious purpose behind this too. That is because paradigms are really serious things. Paradigms are the conceptual models we all use to make sense of things. We do this sometime consciously, more often unconsciously. We like to think that we believe things when we see them. What psychologists tell us is actually we tend to see things when we believe them. Paradigms are those things that unconsciously help us decide what we believe, what we expect. They shape how we process facts and information and they shape what we think we ought to do about those things. One of the reasons john thought these paradigms were so important and why i agree with him on this is paradigms are often times at the root of intelligence failures. Remember 9 11 in the aftermath of that terrorist attack everybody in washington talked about how cia failed to connect the dots. Those are pieces of information, the lines that connect them is your paradigm. This is something that is a pattern you see in intelligence failures throughout history. Pearl harbor was a paradigm failure. We had excellent intelligence on pearl harbor. We were reading the Japanese Communications codes. We had broken their encryption. But we were not able to grasp that they were going to attack pearl harbor despite excellent intelligence. Why not . Paradigm failure. I want to read to you a little on this to talk about what we knew going into this was a week before the attack on pearl harbor the japanese told us they were going to attack. The japanese ambassador in washington delivered a diplomatic note. Im going to read it to you. The japanese people believe economic measures are much more effective weapon of war then military measures but they are being placed under severe pressure by the United States to yield to the american position and it is preferable to fight rather than yield to pressure. We are about to attack you. So despite that we still couldnt grasp that this was coming. Dean patterson, who was secretary of state and later became secretary of state wrote about what the problem was. He said everyone in the department and in government generally misread japanese intentions. This misreading was not about what the Japanese Military government proposed to do in asia or the hostility but the incredibly high risk they would assume to accomplish their ends. No one in washington realized the regime regarding the conquest of asia not as a compliment of ambition but has the survival of the regime. Paradigm problem. With that as an introduction. What i want to do with you tonight is take John Mclaughlin to heart and subvert the dominant paradigm we have in the United States about russia. What is that paradigm . I shorthanded the paradigm by calling it the world war ii problem. The world war ii problem is when you have an ambitious, aggressive state that pushes as far and as fast as it can and keeps going until it meets determined resistance. A classic example is nazi germany, adolf hitler. The one thing you dont do when dealing with aggressive ambitious state like this is what . Appease it. We learned this lesson very well. New nick is a dirty word in the american diplomatic lexicon. The worst thing you can accuse someone of as a statement in the United States is being an appeaser. What weve got today is a situation where the dominant paradigm about russia is we have an ambitious aggressive state we cant appease. If you have any doubts go on to google, type in putin and hitler and see what you get. One thing you get is a flood of images, pictures of Vladimir Putin with hitler hairdos and mustache superimposed, opeds accusing russia of being a modernday nazi germany, opeds and editorials cautioning about going soft on russia, the thing we are most concerned about with russia right now is we wont be tough enough, the we are going to go wobbly as margaret that are used to say. Why is that a problem . The russians will interpret that softness and lack of resolve is an invitation to be even more aggressive. If we dont stand up to aggression in ukraine and georgia in the cybersphere, we will invite more aggression, the probable compound and get worse. If you want peace with russia prepare for war as the romans used to say. That is our dominant paradigm. Not everybody in washington buys into this. There is another school of thought that says no, no, no, putin is not hitler, russia is not nazi germany, that really obscures the picture rather than a lumens what is going on here. This school of thought you would call defense of russia. There are a few prominent proponents of this, professor emeritus, very prominent advocate of the school of thought, their argument is russia is reacting to natos eastward expansion that steady encroachment by what they perceive as our hostile usled military alliance creeping ever closer to russias borders moving from the warsaw pact to actual former soviet republics and the combination which the russians perceive as a serious threat to National Security and a long history of us meddling in russias own politics is provoking a defensive reaction. According to the school of 5 the real danger here is not that we will appease russia but that we will threaten an already very threatened state and what happens when you threaten someone who is already threatened . You might call this the cornered rat syndrome. What happens when a rat is cornered . It gets very ugly. That rat perceives hes got a choice, i fight or i die, so the choice is simple. According to the school of thought, the worst thing you can do is exactly what the offense of russia paradigm says we ought not do. They say we have got to accommodate, weve got to recognize what are some legitimate security concerns the russians have, and find a way of accommodating those in ways that dont undermine our own interests. These are opposite schools of thought. The offense of paradigm and the defense of paradigm. The diagnosis of the problem is diametrically opposed and their prescriptions are fundamentally incompatible. Where do i come down on this . What is this book about . The thesis of the book is each of these schools of thought, much less Popular Defense of Russia School of thought have asked about their diagnosis which are accurate, telling part of the story accurately but not all of it. What i argue in this book is what we are facing here is not a world war ii problem, but a world war i problem. What caused world war i . It was not an aggressive ambitious state trying to seize territory and push as far and as fast as it could. Or thought it was cornered. It was a systems problem. A whole bunch of factors combined, in tangled alliances, new technologies, the railroad that had profound impacts on how you mobilize for war and prepared to defend your interests. Misperceptions, crumbling empires that worry about threats from within. All of these things mixed together and there were feedback loops, these feedback loops turned was were relatively minor developments, to the archduke ferdinand, it spun this through these reinforcing effects into a european wide war that none of the participants expected and none of them wanted. So what i am arguing in the book, we understand the threat from russia. It is a real threat. This is a genuinely dangerous situation. Not as an offense if russia we need to deter or accommodate but as a complex systems problem that can get out of hand and do that in ways we dont expect and are difficult to anticipate, small events could produce giant problems. Why do i say that q let me describe to you all the complex factors that are interacting in this relationship, i will break it down for analytic purposes. One of the problems we have right now is a structural problem. What happened in europe after the end of the cold war is there was a lot of uncertainty about what the security arrangement was going to be after the warsaw pact collapsed, the soviet union ended. Nato was there with no p or rival, no competitor. A lot of the states in this new band of former warsaw pact states were left untethered. New Security Problems arose that we had to deal with, instability in the balkans, old historical grievances, separatism and the question became how do we handle these things . In part by default and in part by design nato became the primary institution that was addressing these problems. A lot of states facing the situation looks at nato and said it is drafted. The folks in that club are all pretty rich and secure and prosperous and we remember the problems we had with folks running things in moscow and that security blanket is pretty appealing. What happened essentially was that vacuum in the postcold war period, as it did, russias insecurities became exacerbated and we gradually, in part by design and in part the logic of the events nobody planned wound up in a situation there was a new security arrangement in europe, one of the largest powers is not a part of it. Russia is on the outside looking in, incentivized to do what . At this point nato membership is not possible for russia, not sure it ever was very realistic but certainly off the table as a possibility, to undermine the Nato Alliance and the European Union more broadly. That is a fundamentally unstable situation and unresolved. Factor number 2. The United States and russia over the past 25 years of gradually each come to the belief that the other side, not just as a competitor but want to destroy it. In russia they came to this conclusion a long time ago probably 15 years ago and a lot of things led the russians to the belief that the United States was trying to encircle russia with hostile regimes, expand the Nato Alliance up to their borders and ultimately foment regime change inside moscow and break the country apart. We think thats crazy. We look at this and say there go the russians again, they are paranoid. When we talk about russia and its perceptions you hear that word paranoia a lot. What happened in the United States particularly over the past two years, we have come to the conclusion the russians are trying to destroy us not by surrounding us with hostile military bases or public regimes, not by attacking us with nuclear weapons, that would be suicidal, that would be crazy but by using Information Warfare and cybertools to subvert us from within, to divide and conquer us, to cause us to lose faith in who we are, to lose faith in democratic procedures, in the legitimacy of elections. What happens when you destroy country from within . Everything comes crumbling down. You didnt hear about this kind of threat three or four years ago. It is something that came upon us rather suddenly as a reaction to what happened with russian interference in the elections and our own bewilderment to what is happening in our country domestically, these two things regardless of how they came about are fundamentally dangerous things. Why is that . When states believe that their existence is under threat, in a do or die situation they play for keeps, they undertake risks they wouldnt ordinarily undertake. What did japan do when it thought its existence was at stake by this crippling embargo the United States placed japan under . It thought it had a choice. I undertake a high risk war against a country with twice my population and nine times my industrial output which i will probably lose, or i certainly face destruction. What do they do . They do the high risk thing. They know how that turns out and that is not good. The problem with these perceptions of exit stencil threat is that they prime both sides to undertake some pretty high risks. Third thing that is going on, new technology. During the cold war we had a technology problem, nuclear technology. It took us a while to figure out how to deal with it. During the 1950s we realized there were powerful weapons that could do scary things but we couldnt figure out how to marry that to diplomacy and statecraft to contain those dangers to make sure things dont get out of hand. It wasnt until the cuban missile crisis when things got very hairy and we realized there are some real dangers that this could turn into a true disaster, we said to ourselves we have to figure out how to manage and contain this, to put some rules in place, some guardrails on the mountain road, to make sure things dont spin out of control. We are at a similar point with fibertechnology. Weve got a new set of tools and weapons that we realize can to some pretty scary things. The pentagons defense policy board do study of this and they concluded that the exit stencil threat posed by cybertechnology was just as significant as nuclear technology. Think about that. Thats a pretty strong statement by a Serious Group of guys that dont tend to be hyperbolic about this stuff. Why did they say that two reasons. One is cybertechnology has tilted the playing field, with the offense. To defend against a specific cyberoperators to penetrate a system. If you talk to cybersecurity official they would tell you if there is a computer, a network, a system regardless whether they plugged into the internet or not they can be penetrated. You cant stop it. Descenders can complicate the task, make things more difficult. We are Getting Better at detecting intrusions than we used to be, that is what we are improving at. Stopping these intrusions before they attack, very very hard to do. What does that do . That sense of vulnerability has an impact on both sides. They know they are vulnerable and cant stop the other side. What do they do . They are incentivized to play offense. Why . The best way to figure out what the other side is doing to you is to go into their system and to use that to gather information about the operations directed at you. It is a classic intelligence counterintelligence problem. Theres a twist on this. In cybertechnology, understanding the intentions of the other side is really difficult. If i am a systems administrator, there is somebody in the system that should be there, what i know is he is there but what i dont know is why. What is his purpose . Because he can go into my system, collect data, collect information that while he is in their he can corrupt that information, he can destroy that information. And he can sabotage my system. He can go into my network, into my computers and plug in malware code and cause it to do things it shouldnt do. When you do that in critical systems, Water Treatment plants, Power Generation systems, wall street Trading Systems what happens when those breakdown, really bad things. Imagine if you cant get money out of your atm, imagine yourself phones dont work, imagine your electric power doesnt work and imagine this going on for weeks. What do you think happens . Very bad things. This is a real vulnerability, theres not much we can do to prevent this . We have to go to the other side systems. We have to figure out what they are trying to do. We have to figure out their capabilities. We