Transcription
Facing the fact that the Chinese people, some of them hate them so much that the fear of revenge from the Chinese alarmed a lot of Japanese. But most Japanese actually, after the Second World War, after they were defeated through nuclear weapons by the Americans, had in fact become a very peaceful nation. On the whole, I would say the majority of the Japanese people really don't want war anymore. They have actually taken the road of peace. But the fear of China, the alarm at the possibility of this Chinese superior power, which is still following the one-China policy, but the Chinese are saying, "Well, we are watching your actions, not the words." So I think the two countries do not trust each other. There's a deep mistrust, strategic mistrust, and um, the Taiwan could be a very um um could be a white-heat area.
Good evening, everyone. Welcome to this round table on the idea of peace in Asia. My name is Tim Bunnel. I'm director of the Asia Research Institute, or ARI, of the National University of Singapore. Kishaw has also, true to form, assembled a remarkable line of speakers for the round table this evening here in Singapore. My thanks to all three of them: Professor Wang Vong Wu, Ambassador Chan Henchi, Professor Kanti Bajpai. Thank you, uh, all three of you. I very much look forward to listening to your individual thoughts and collective discussion. And finally, of course, thank you, Kishaw, and members of your Asian Peace Program team. So, with that, Kishaw, I hand over to you as moderator. Thank you.
Uh, thank you very much, Tim, for those very warm words. So, we are happy to join this uh celebration. Uh, at the same time, the topic that we are addressing, the idea of peace in Asia, frankly, could not be more uh timely. Uh, as we know, the 21st century will be marked uh by the return of Asia uh after 200 years of Western domination of world history, and countries like China and India will once again become the world's uh largest economies. So, the economic return of Asia seems to be almost a certainty. But at the same time, there are lots of doubts and rising doubts about whether or not the Asian century will actually be a peaceful century. And clearly, we've got to address the question of how we ensure that the major powers in Asia uh manage their relations well and prevent an escalation of conflicts in the region. And so, clearly, the main goal of this round table tonight uh is to generate ideas for peace within the various regions of Asia. Hence, the title of this round table is called "The Idea of Peace in Asia." So, I'm going to start by welcoming uh Professor Wang Gangu to start our discussions.
Thank you very much, Kishaw. You have given me a a tough subject because this relationship, of course, is a very ancient one, going back at least 2,000 years, and I won't trouble you with that. But underlying that relationship has been a very peaceful relationship from the very beginning. So, peace was there right at the beginning, but for very, very specific reasons. And one of the reasons why peace was maintained between Japan and China, to my mind, is the fact that there was distance, geographical distance, and a cultural distance from the very beginning, and also a particular decision made by the Japanese to keep that distance. In other words, while they had a relationship with China, a quite deep one, intense one, for about 1,500 years, they always kept a distance by choice because they wanted to avoid the question of where they stood where China was concerned. They knew that China believed that it was the center of the world. It used phrases like "Son of Heaven," "All Under Heaven," and assumed that all others were inferior to China. That is the underlying assumption, and the Japanese wanted to avoid that, to avoid being seen in any way unequal to the Chinese, and they kept their distance. The underlying fact that they could do this was a very simple one: the geographical one. They were far apart, and they were separated by the sea. And in the case of Japan, this was, of course, something that they took very seriously as a secret of their particular uniqueness. But for China, the extraordinary thing about China is, from the very beginning, they never had any interest in places overseas. They were fundamentally a continental power and concentrated on the relations over land, and they had enormous problems with their neighbors overland. So, this geographical separation made peace come perhaps naturally, with the help of agency as well, both sides agreeing that they really had nothing much to fight about, and peace was the wisest and most realistic relationship to have. And so, while the Chinese had the tributary system, all its neighbors were supposed to pay tribute to the Chinese, Japan always avoided that. There was never any question of Japan paying tribute or the Japanese emperor paying tribute to the Chinese emperor, and the Chinese didn't pursue that. And so, that was a very fine basis for a more than a thousand years of a peaceful relationship. They had nothing to quarrel about. In fact, the only time when this was challenged was because the Mongols conquered China, and the Mongols, of course, had a very different view of the world. Mongols, almost as a matter of principle, if it is there, they ought to take it, they ought to have it. So, when they discovered that Japan was far away, but the Chinese had a navy, which they never used against anybody, against Japan, or even against Southeast Asia. They used it for defending themselves against the continental powers like the Kitans, Georgians, and Mongols who threatened China many times. But the Mongols took the Chinese navy, used the Chinese navy to try and attack Japan. That was the first time that something, a power coming from the continent, directly tried to take Japan, as it were. But after that, the Mongols failed anyway. The whole attempt collapsed, and after that, there were no further problems between the two. In fact, on the contrary, as the Japanese developed themselves further, it was the Japanese who were more interested in Korea and the relationship with Southeast Asia, trading with Southeast Asia, and so on. They had to develop economic rivalry. What I'm suggesting as a background is that peace was actually the norm between China and Japan. And the small outbreaks of fighting over Korea in the 16th and 17th centuries under Hideyoshi and others, there were brief affairs after which again peace was restored, and again, no talk of fighting each other. They had fights over some local problems, piracy, small groups of adventurers who either threatened Japan in one way or the other. For example, the Portuguese and the Spanish arrived, and the Japanese saw them as a threat. Whereas the Chinese merchants who were trading with Japan, they were never seen as threats. They were seen as people who were, they kept the limit to the number of people to allow. But on the whole, very peaceful. And once the Portuguese and the Spanish adventurers gave up their mission to turn the Japanese into Christians, then when the Dutch came to take over from them, again, the Dutch and the Japanese worked out a very friendly relationship, and that maintained a peace between Japan and China as well. The Dutch were interested in both, wanted to trade with both, and trade was the secret there for ensuring peace. So, what really changed was really the 19th century. It was really the invasion of China, the British in the Opium War, and followed by the Japanese meeting with the American Navy turning up in Yokohama, the black flags as well of the Americans. And from that onwards, the Japanese changed their minds. They learned that naval power, carried by the British and followed by the Americans, was something new. This was something they could actually learn from. And they committed themselves. In fact, they made a 180-degree change over to say, "We've learned enough from China. There's nothing more to learn from China. These are the people we learn from, particularly because they are like us. They are sea people. Britain was an island, just like Japan, off the coast of the big continent, and the Americans came by sea also." So, the Japanese realized this was their real strength, and that to protect themselves against the British and Americans, they would develop their own navy and then use their navy in the same way. That is the beginning of a reinterpretation of peace, a peace now led by Western dominance.
[clears throat] Western dominance ensured a kind of peace because you dominate and you determine the terms of peace, and you introduce new concepts like international law to ensure that at least the imperial powers stop fighting each other and concentrate on taking more territories from Asia and Africa and elsewhere. Now, that change of circumstance has led to the present relationships between Japan. It's a long history. I don't need to go into that. But it's obvious that once the Japanese turned to the West and took that as a model, in fact, decided that shall be their model, and the model is not only just to copy them but to use that model to defend themselves against Western powers, to be independent of the British and American and French navies that were dominating the East China Sea, South China Sea, and so on. And this is the only way they could do that. But in so doing, they also learned to be an empire themselves, and that was a major change. And they learned, in fact, they learned too well from the West. They wanted to be the kind of empire that the British Empire had been, and obviously based on naval power. And that gave the Japanese a particular advantage over the Chinese, who had paid very little attention to maritime affairs before that. And as a result, a long history from the end of the 19th century to 1945, it was the Japanese navy, after defeating the Chinese, defeating the Russians, and then with an Anglo-Japanese alliance, not fighting the British, they were able to be increasingly the great naval power of East Asia. And that, of course, changed the whole story. And then you can see that major restoration. What did it lead to? It led to China changing into a different kind of power, a China that for the first time realized that they have to look at the sea. They cannot afford not to look at the sea. And when you look at the sea, of course, the nearest neighbor and the people who had defeated them, not once but twice, because after the First World War, the Japanese began to invade China bit by bit, through Manchuria, to Shandong, to North China, and eventually to try and take over most of China. And in that Second Sino-Japanese War, it laid down the foundations, as it were, of war in place of peace, replacing the thousand, 500 years of peace with a 100 years of war. War not only against the Japanese but particularly against the Japanese because the Japanese were the only power among the naval powers who actually tried to take territory from the Chinese and in fact nearly succeeded, had it not been because of the Anglo-American fight back, push back, because they went too far. The Japanese didn't know what the limits were. Now, you can see that the basis of this relation, the new relationship between China and Japan, started with that Anglo-American navy that became the model of the Japanese attempt to become a power in the world. But in the end, like the British Empire, the Japanese, a million island empire, in the end, they could not defeat the Americans, who were a continental as well as an island empire. But in so far as China was concerned, China had no navy to speak of. You look at the whole of the 20th century, China had no navy to speak of. It was only in the last 20 odd years that the Chinese have seriously had the resources to build a navy, and this changed the pattern altogether. Up to then, Japanese fears of China have always been theoretical. Deep down, there's a fear because of the fear of the Japanese Chinese wanting to take revenge on them. But recognizing that the Chinese didn't have any naval power, but they, of course, once the Chinese had nuclear weapons, that of course put the Japanese in a very different light. So, this changed the formula again. Then the Japanese have to depend, as it were, on the US nuclear umbrella to protect them against the Chinese nuclear power. Facing the fact that the Chinese people, some of them hate them so much that the fear of revenge from the Chinese alarmed a lot of Japanese. But most Japanese actually, after the Second World War, after they were defeated through nuclear weapons by the Americans, had in fact become a very peaceful nation. On the whole, I would say the majority of the Japanese people really don't want war anymore. They have actually taken the road of peace. But the fear of China, the alarm at the possibility of this Chinese superior power, which is no longer continental because the Chinese have now taken on maritime responsibilities as well for their own neighborhood and building up a navy which is now at least matching them, if not better than their, not as good as the United States, but perhaps better than the Japanese. That, you can see, is the basis of the question of war instead of peace between Japan and China. I think I end on that.
Thank you. Thank you. I must say, you did a brilliant job of going through that long history and explaining uh the deeper structural historical forces that are the roots of the Sino-Japanese relationship. And I'm now going to uh turn the floor over to Ambassador Chan Henchi, who's actually going to address the larger question of regional uh architecture. And so, I'm sure she's going to touch on some quote-unquote naval developments like Augustus and so on and so forth. So, Henchi, over to you. You also have 10 minutes.
Thank you. Let me begin by saying that since the end of the Cold War, the Asia-Pacific, because then it was known as the Asia-Pacific only, the Asia-Pacific region has been very active in creating regional architecture. Underlying these uh actions is in fact the belief that confidence-building measures and creating platforms to bring major players together would engender peace. Some [clears throat] uh initiatives may seem economic in nature in intent, but it is all strategic. The purpose is to keep the US in the region. This is after the Cold War, and China engaged, and to socialize China into the regional system and the rules of the regional order, and also what do you do with new Russia, to bring Russia in. It was also to deal with, accommodate India, and socialize India too as a rising power in the region. So, APEC was there. It was a platform that brought everyone together. India had not joined. Now, ASEAN, at the end of the Cold War, was alive and doing very well. In fact, was very active in creating groupings, forums, platforms to bring in the other powers. And you had ASEAN plus dialogue powers, bringing in all the new powers. ASEAN pushed for the establishment of ARF in 1994, two years after the implosion of uh the Soviet Union. We had ASEAN Plus Three in 1997, and EAS in 2005, ASEAN ADMM later. Well, Kishaw, you were part of the uh foreign diplomats at that time, a Singapore diplomat certainly pushing for some of these uh initiatives, and you were active there. So, these were the security peace initiatives. But there was a trade architecture, regional architecture in trade being built, all the FTAs. ASEAN sort of, there wasn't a FTA that ASEAN didn't like, you know. It was ASEAN plus India, plus Japan, ASEAN plus Korea, plus China, plus Australia, New Zealand, you just name it. And then bilateral free trade agreements as well. But the two key concepts came later, two trade concepts: RCEP, which you all know about, and TPP, which was later converted into CPTPP when the United States pulled out of the Trans-Pacific Partnership. And today, you have trade architecture, you have security architecture. Now, the United Kingdom recently applied to join in 2001, just this year, and China has also applied, and Taiwan. And I think this has become the game-changer. We can discuss this later. But the point I want to make is that for quite a few decades, until the 2010s onwards, this regional architecture worked, worked for peace and worked for the prosperity of the region. Many initiatives of the countries, you know, many of these initiatives reflected countries wanting to come together to work. But in recent years, China has emerged as the risen power and considered by the United States as a peer competitor. And China has the political imagination to propose the BRI, AIB. The United States and the West are trying to match that imagination. China has also been very active in the South China Sea, building and constructing to change facts on the ground. And China is seen to be seeking to spread its influence everywhere in other corners of the globe. That's how the United States sees it. And they see it as a major challenge to their predominance and the international order that was constructed by the United States and Europe. And so, what you see is, in fact, after this period, during the Trump administration and following that, the current Biden administration, new architecture being created, but directed not to integrate so much as to balance and to compete. And that brings us into the present period. Now, as you know, President Trump, in fact, when he came into uh when his administration began, wanted to counter China's BRI with the Free and uh a Free and Open Indo-Pacific. Now, with that, they also picked up the Quad, which was there, created earlier during uh Obama's time, I think, and which was the Quad to conduct maritime exercises between the United States, India, and Japan. Australia didn't go in earlier but went in later. But the Quad during the Trump administration was played around with by uh Secretary Pompeo, who wanted it to become a sort of Asian NATO. And of course, that put every many of the countries in the region, certainly ASEAN, you know, on its uh defense, and certainly they were not too keen to engage with such a grouping. And the regional countries were not comfortable with the idea of containing China. So, ASEAN came up with its own ASEAN Outlook on the Indo-Pacific, which was much more inclusive. It didn't exclude anyone. So, you can see new architecture coming in, slightly different tone, and the regional countries have to decide whether they want to join in or not. President Biden did not change Trump's policies. President Trump's policies, but he became more consultative, brought in allies, and built coalitions to deal with China. He rebooted Quad, and Quad this time was energized under President Trump. Australia and even Japan was a bit more circumspect, and um, I would say India too, about being too exclusive. You know, they were humming and hawing a bit. But during the Biden administration, the Quad was energized. And this is partly because things changed. China and India fought along the Indian border, and Australian-China, Australian relations deteriorated badly because, you know, China wanted to punish Australia for raising the inquiry on the Wuhan virus and taking really much of an American stance. So, I think this has re-energized the Quad. In fact, I think what President Biden seems to be doing in terms of architecture is a Trump plus in many of its policies. And recently, we've heard of the announcement of the formation of AUKUS, Australia, United Kingdom, and United States, which is a security arrangement, but it is a procurement agreement which has become a security arrangement. People point to the fact that it's three Anglosphere countries, and the idea was to enable Australia to buy, build nuclear-powered submarines. But the point is, it signals something, and some analysts will regard this as balance in the region, balance against the rising military, growing military capabilities of China. So, this is balancing, but the lines are hardening, and it is becoming more dangerous, and in fact, the Indo-Pacific is becoming more generalized, militarily generally militarized, generally. And the United States is selling weapons to strengthen states that seem to worry about China's growing strength, you know, and it's encouraged Japan to build hypersonic weapons, and selling missiles to the Philippines. So, in fact, Van, I think someone called Van Jackson wrote an interesting piece in a recent Foreign Affairs issue which said that the whole region has become highly militarized. Now, I see the Taiwan Straits as the most dangerous spot in the Asia-Pacific, Indo-Pacific. The United States and China, you know, confronting each other, in fact, over the Taiwan Straits, and if it is not managed properly, can be an accidental conflict, an accidental war. Well, we know the story of how the United States stepped up relations and actually has been quite provocative, I think, from the Chinese point of view, because they always had this agreement with, they thought they had this agreement with the United States that the US would follow a one-China policy and is guided by the Taiwan Relations Act, the three joint communiqués, and the six assurances. But I think there's an ambiguity that is appearing. And recently, we've seen Secretary Blinken reassuring China that they still follow, the US is still following the one-China policy. But the Chinese are saying, "Well, we are watching your actions, not the words." So, I think the two countries do not trust each other. There's a deep mistrust, strategic mistrust, and um, the Taiwan could be a very um um could be a white-heat area. Now, the thing is, what can be done to avoid conflict? I'm running out of time, so I'm trying to wind up. There are lots of things I could say. You know, during the end days of the Trump administration, President Trump nearly triggered a nuclear war. And in fact, what happened was that General, the chief of the Joint Chiefs, General Mark Milley, was trying his best not to give the wrong signal, and he called up his counterpart, and he has been criticized very clearly. This was not, in fact, an, one could say, a truly established mechanism. Maybe it is, but clearly, in the case of the United States and China, to avoid accidental wars, to avoid accidental wars over the Taiwan Strait, needs to establish a mechanism that can allow both countries to dial back. You know, Henry Kissinger, this great thinker about China and US-China relations, said recently, and he was quite, he is quite alarmed by what is happening in US-China relations. He urged both countries to talk, talk. So, I would say, set up the mechanism, and that is important. This reminds me of the EP-3 incident which occurred in 2001 under George W. Bush's administration. If you recall, there was an American plane, surveillance plane, flying close to the Chinese coast, and a Chinese jet plane, fighter, came and chased the US away, and the result was that the Chinese plane crashed, but the plane was forced to land, the US plane was forced to land in Thailand. It could have been a moment that could have been turned into conflict. The Bush administration had no con talks in the administration, but there was, it wasn't written, but there was a mechanism. George W. Bush was phoned up by his father, Herbert Walker Bush, who spoke to him. Bren Tro called Condi Rice, Colin Powell was there as Secretary of State. So, I think President Bush 43 was advised. If the EP-3 incident were to happen now over Taiwan, is there a mechanism? And we have to set the mechanism. I think the mechanism has to be what will enable the United States and China to talk. How would that happen in this mechanism? But also, who in their own countries would advise President Biden, and who would advise President Xi? You know, so I think that's the kind of mechanism that needs to be set in place. But the dialogues, the forums have been pretty much absent now, if not canceled, between the US and China, and certainly we have to restore, you know, forums for speaking and a mechanism in case of a conflict. Thank you.
Thank you. Thank you. That was fascinating. Again, Gang Wu, you covered a very wide range of topics, pointing out how the regional architecture began, how ASEAN played a role, and so you're right, I was participating in that. But you also raised a very, very important point at the end, which is the tremendous deterioration of trust within China and the US, and the alarm of Kissinger. Which is now, I'm going to turn to Kanti, and Kanti, you also have hopefully eight minutes.
Thank you very much. It's a great privilege to be with Professor Wang and Ambassador Chan. Um, I thought it was interesting that Professor, well, Ambassador Chan ended with some words on a flashpoint. Not so many years ago, it was India-Pakistan, South Asia, that was regarded as the greatest flashpoint, particularly because of the four wars they've fought together, and, you know, the presence of nuclear weapons, and a seemingly protracted conflict which had no end in sight, with a nuclear overlay, and the possibility of escalation into, you know, terrible, terrible conflict. Um, I'm going to make three points to begin with. The first is, like Professor Wang and Ambassador Chan, to talk about cooperation. We don't really think about India-Pakistan cooperation, but I'm going to just recall very briefly the extent to which they've actually cooperated, and I think in the interest of this panel and the idea of peace, I think it's useful to recall it, particularly because Indians and Pakistanis themselves seem to have forgotten that they had a very respectable history of cooperation until very recently. The second broad point I'll make, of course, is to trace through, as instructed by Kishaw, the main areas of conflict. And I'm going to describe these in terms of an alliteration, an alliterative mnemonic of four T's: territory, terrorism, trade, and third-party relationships. And thirdly, I'm going to turn my attention to the last part of what Kishaw asked us to do, which is what kinds of potential solutions are there? And then, in a sense, address his formula of freeze, talks, and trade as a kind of way into peace for unremitting conflict. So, first of all, I mean, I think it's useful to recall that India and Pakistan actually have a very respectable history of cooperation, as much as they have a dark history of war and disagreement. Just to share one factoid, until by 1964, they had solved every single bilateral quarrel peacefully, except for, of course, Kashmir. And as Jawaharlal Nehru, the first Indian Prime Minister, lay dying on his bed, he had actually sent a gentleman called Farooq Abdullah, sorry, Sheikh Abdullah, to Pakistan, who was in Rawalpindi in Pakistan, talking to the Pakistanis about a final solution of Kashmir. If Nehru had not died and the Sheikh had been successful, India and Pakistan would have solved every single bilateral problem in 1964. Sadly, that didn't happen. They have a history of cooperation since then, confidence-building measures, near solutions to territorial and other quarrels, and even some agreements on nuclear weapons. But just to set the scene, there's a respectable history of cooperation which I think both sides can draw on. Having said that, and this is my second point, there are the four T's to worry about, the four areas that really divide them. So, you know, a broad point is that these four are interrelated, but I'm going to discuss them as if they're orthogonal, they're unrelated to each other. Conflict between these two is, as in so many conflicts around the world, overdetermined. Any single one of these four T's could probably have been the cause of their protracted conflict. But I think it's useful to pass them and then perhaps draw the links between them. The first and most foundational, of course, are the territorial quarrels, and above all, Kashmir. I won't rehearse that, but that quarrel goes back to almost the day the subcontinent was partitioned, 1947. And they came close to solving Kashmir but have never quite got there. Related to Kashmir are two smaller quarrels, and these are very important to underline because when I get to possible solutions, I'm going to focus on them. This is the quarrel over Siachen, which is a glacier up in Kashmir. It's been described as the third pole, as one of the largest snow-bound areas in the world, at an impossible height of about 13,000, 14,000 feet, which they're fighting over. And another territorial quarrel related to that is eventually Sir Creek. It's related because it's part of a larger set of riverwater quarrels that they have, which emanate from Kashmir and terminate down in the Arabian Sea. And Sir Creek, as the name suggests, is a creek that has long divided them, and again, I'm going to focus on this one later because I think it's amenable to a solution. River waters have divided them, even though they have a treaty on it, and I won't spend any further time on that, but just to flag it. I think much has been talked about the second T, which is terrorism, which has really been on the agenda since 1989. There have been seasons when terrorism has been much worse, and seasons when it has subsided. We're in a somewhat better phase at the moment between the two countries in the last five or seven years, but the threat of terrorism does substantially remain between the two sides, with India fearing that terrorist groups operating from Pakistan over issues like Kashmir will attack. The third T is trade. Trade might have been something that would have brought the two parties together. They were very intimately connected historically, of course, India and Pakistan, because they were one economy before partition. But by the 1960s, the relationship had sundered almost completely. And the real worry about trade is in Pakistan. India wants trade. The Pakistanis don't, because they think that trade can be weaponized, given India's much greater economic capacities. The fourth T is third-party relationships, and here I refer simply to Pakistan's relationship with China and Afghanistan, which has always worried India, particularly the Pakistan-China relationship today. With the developments in Afghanistan, of course, the Pakistan-Afghanistan relationship, India fears that the Pakistan-Afghanistan space might be an incubation for great extremism and terrorism directed against Indian-held Kashmir. Okay. Um, I won't rehearse some of the near agreements in all these areas. I think, you know, particularly on Kashmir, under Manmohan Singh and General Musharraf, there came a moment in 2007-2008 when they had an agreement basically to partition Kashmir as it has been partitioned today, along the so-called Line of Control. It foundered on the fact that there were domestic developments on both sides that stopped the agreement. Musharraf fell from power suddenly, and Manmohan Singh lost heart. He was criticized even by members of his own cabinet in pushing for the agreement, and both sides then stepped back from it. Let me go then to the issue of what could be done. And I'm going to focus on two quarrels which are relatively tractable, which are relatively small in terms of territorial terms and in terms of their significance, and yet have in fact a history of near success. There were negotiations on the Siachen glacier going back to the early 90s, and in early 1991-92, they had an agreement that both were ready to sign. Again, domestic politics, particularly on the Indian side, intervened, and the Indian side under Narasimha Rao finally were not able to sign the agreement. Likewise, they had an agreement on Sir Creek in '92-'93. And again, the Narasimha Rao government lost heart due to domestic politics. Very briefly, what was the basis for the solutions that they came to? In Siachen, both were going to withdraw their forces from these impossible heights and have a system of remote sensing and monitoring of the glacier to make sure that neither took advantage of the withdrawals to sneak back to the glacier and disadvantage the other side. In the Sir Creek area, the well-known international law principle, the thalweg principle, which is basically to divide a body of water down the middle, had been agreed to. Sadly, the Indian side withdrew from that potential solution. But they're on the table. Those agreements could be dusted off. And so, it seems to me that they're not of enormous significance, they don't call into fundamentally the identity of the two countries, and they could be a very good starting point. Kishaw has suggested in an article, and I'll just end here, that one way to peace is first to freeze a quarrel, then to initiate talks over conflictual areas, and to undergird it further by trade. Does that work, in fact, for these two countries? It seems to me, unfortunately, that the first part certainly doesn't work. And the reason freezing conflict doesn't work is that for the Pakistani side, which is the revisionist power over Kashmir, a freeze means accepting the status quo on Kashmir and related disputes, which frankly is domestically speaking for any Pakistani ruler, including the Pakistani military, not acceptable. So, I think in that sense, the freeze principle is a non-starter. And indeed, the opposite is what we require. We need at least the two most tractable conflicts, Siachen and Sir Creek, to be unfrozen. There are agreements there, and I think they could very quickly, if India came back to the table, go for those two and get us started.
Thank you. Thank you. I must say, the three of you have clearly shown that the idea of peace in Asia is something that's truly important and truly timely. We have to address it because of all the issues that you have raised. On, I must say that all three of you, genuinely, have shared your brilliance and wisdom with this group listening here, and you've also demonstrated that this is why you need institutions like the Asia Research Institute. You need institutions or programs like the Asian Peace Program because there are lots of challenges that we face. You just, in some ways, literally touch a tip of the problems that we have to deal with. But we've started an important journey, and I want to thank each and every one of you, Gang Wu, Henchi, and Kanti, and of course, the brilliant ARI team with Professor Tim Bell, that has done a brilliant job in organizing this series. So, thank you all. Everyone. Good night. See you again soon. High. That's Father Chech. Forch.