Welcome to ‘The Strategist Six’, a feature that provides a glimpse into the thinking of prominent academics, government officials, military officers, reporters and interesting individuals from around the world.

1. As an American and German in London, what surprised you the most about Brexit?

Well, I was surprised that Brexit happened in the first place! But I was also surprised by the election of Donald Trump—I think many of us who follow these events missed, or at least underestimated, the populist movements. We’re now trying to interpret them and understand where things might go, but I’m not sure the received wisdom about populism is correct. Unfortunately, we’re still going in the wrong direction in terms of resolving the enormous divisions in societies; people aren’t talking to each other.

2. How healthy is the special relationship between the US and the UK today?

There are different layers of the US–UK relationship: there’s the relationship between President Trump and Prime Minister Theresa May, which is not great. At the working level, though, there are strong, committed relationships, whether it’s in intelligence sharing or between parliamentarians and congressional members or between officials in the Foreign Office or the State Department. Those relationships are very strong, but the senior level is fraying and fragmented. It’s worrying.

Trump isn’t treating traditional US partners such as the UK well, in the same way that he also isn’t supporting NATO appropriately in his public pronouncements. I recently attended the Munich Security Conference, where a number of NATO countries were concerned about rumours that the US was going to put unhelpful pressure on them to reach their 2% commitments. That can only serve the interests of Russia, and won’t help to preserve and strengthen NATO. But the other thing that was interesting about Munich was that over 60 congressional members were there to emphasise bipartisan support for the Atlantic alliance and the European Union, while Vice President Mike Pence and Trump were sending very different messages. This was the largest US congressional delegation in the 55-year history of the Munich Security Conference

3. In light of the Shamima Begum case, what should the UK do about Britons who now seek to return home after fighting for or supporting ISIL?

There are laws governing what the country needs to do and the ways it should manage these cases. For dual nationals the government can—in exceptional circumstances—revoke their British passport, though at the same time, they can’t be left stateless. If they return on their own accord, the government will have to figure out whether it prosecutes or whether to enlist them in one of the programs to try to deradicalise them. But they’re not going to go out of their way to facilitate their return—as we’ve heard from senior government officials, they are not going to put lives at risk by sending anyone to Syria to collect people like Shamima Begum. However, once ISIL is defeated in that last remaining enclave in Syria, you will have hundreds of family members or ISIL fighters who are going to try to return to the UK or want to return to Europe, so it’s an emerging challenge and it could be a significant challenge for law enforcement here and in other countries.

4. Looking around the globe at various hot spots, pressure points and leadership styles, what is most concerning to you?

I don’t think today’s challenges are that different in scope and scale from past challenges, but it’s a far more dangerous world because the US is not providing the leadership it used to provide. You see some world leaders talking publicly about not relying on America anymore, and asserting they will do more on their own—Angela Merkel has probably been the most vocal, but the Canadians have also made similar comments. You’re seeing this fragmentation because the US is no longer the global standard-bearer of the rules-based international order. There are a number of challenges, whether it’s Russian interference in US and European elections, the attempted murder of Sergei Skripal, Chinese hacking, the catastrophic Syrian civil war or the conflict in Yemen. All need committed leadership, and the US is not leading in the way that it has traditionally done. So, it’s now about what like-minded countries or multilaterals like the UN or the EU can do to provide that leadership.

5. What are the major challenges or opportunities facing think tanks like RUSI [the Royal United Services Institute] today?

With all of the security challenges we’re facing right now I think it’s important to have fresh ideas and to convene smart, creative people—those with very different perspectives, from the public sector, private sector and scholarly worlds—to consider a range of practical responses. Sometimes we host such meetings privately and other times we do them as public events. It’s important to provide evidence-based research and practical suggestions for dealing with today’s challenges, and then disseminate the ideas through the variety of means that are available, be it via social media or in newspapers or on our website. But I think it’s incumbent upon all of us to provide workable, practical ideas, not pie-in-the-sky proposals.

6. In RUSI’s In Context podcast, you conclude by asking your guests what they would say to young people who aspire to work in international affairs. What advice would you give?

People tend to have two different approaches to their career. Some know from day one what they want to be when they grow up and they chart their path very carefully. Most of the rest of us don’t really have that kind of foresight or we don’t necessarily know what we want to do. Careers are changing so much now that it’s potentially smarter to not have such a clear idea because maybe that career might not exist by the time you get to the right age.

My advice is that you should find good mentors and work for those you really respect and think you can learn from. It’s also about trying to figure out what you’re good at and getting better at things you’re not good at. But I believe in playing to your strengths, as ideally the teams you work in have a mixture of people with different strengths, all bringing something unique to the table.

It was at the 2007 Munich Security Conference that Russian President Vladimir Putin first signalled a cooling of Russian–Western relations. Soon thereafter, Russia invaded Georgia; and in the years since, it has annexed Crimea, launched incursions into Eastern Ukraine, and carried out cyberattacks against Western democracies. Today, Russian–Western relations are in a downward spiral.

The annual Munich Security Conference is to geopolitics what the World Economic Forum’s meetings in Davos are to business. The gathering has evolved from its Cold War–era focus primarily on German–American military cooperation to viewing global issues through a much wider lens. Participants now discuss topics ranging from foreign policy and international security to climate change.

This year’s three-day conference, which had record-high attendance, will most likely be remembered for years to come. The speeches delivered by US Vice President Mike Pence and German Chancellor Angela Merkel could not have been more different, in terms of both style and substance. At a gathering originally designed to facilitate German–American cooperation, Germany’s and America’s foreign-policy positions have rarely been so far apart.

Pence delivered a hardline ‘America first’ message and celebrated the Trump administration’s adamant refusal to accept longstanding rules and international agreements. Europeans, he declared, have no choice but to follow America’s lead, even—indeed, especially—if it means renouncing the 2015 Iran nuclear agreement that European diplomats did so much to bring about. As with his previous appearance at the conference, Pence refused to take any questions after his speech. Many of his ‘applause lines’ were met with stony silence.

Prior to Pence’s appearance, Merkel had delivered a speech that might well go down as one of the best of her career. With energy and aplomb, she mounted a vigorous defence of multilateral efforts to confront climate change, Russian aggression, development in Africa and a range of other challenges that lie ahead. The overall thrust of Merkel’s remarks was obvious to everyone. She delivered a pointed rebuke of ‘America first’ unilateralism.

Merkel’s speech received a standing ovation, which is unusual for the Munich Security Conference. She also took questions, which she answered with confidence and a hint of humour, winning herself another standing ovation.

Like Putin’s aggressive remarks in 2007, Pence’s and Merkel’s speeches will be remembered for what they augur for the future. Taken together, they confirm that Donald Trump’s presidency has ushered in a period of escalating transatlantic tensions that show no signs of abating. It was only a year ago that Europeans were told to ignore Trump’s tweets and focus on the substance of US policies, which were being overseen by the ‘adults in the room’. But with the departure of Secretary of Defense Jim Mattis and others, the adults are now gone, and there is ever-less daylight between the policies and the tweets.

Nowhere is the disconnect between US and European priorities more obvious than in the Middle East. When Pence browbeats European countries to abandon their efforts to save the 2015 Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action—which imposes clear, verifiable restrictions on Iran’s nuclear program—one can only wonder about the Trump administration’s endgame. If and when Iran restarts its nuclear-weapons program, US–Iranian tensions will almost certainly escalate to the point of crisis. The question is whether that is the outcome Trump and his advisers have sought all along.

The tensions on trade issues are also acute. The Trump administration has already designated European steel and aluminium exports a threat to US national security, and now it may be preparing to add European cars to that list. If it does, the transatlantic trade conflict will enter dangerous territory.

Trump seems to have a particular aversion to German cars, which account for only 8% of US auto sales (though they do command a much greater share of the luxury/premium market). Moreover, as Merkel pointed out in her speech, the world’s largest BMW plant is not in Germany, but in South Carolina, where a substantial share of production is exported to China. By pursuing dramatically higher auto tariffs, the Trump administration is threatening jobs not only in Europe, but also in the US; both would suffer from a disruption to global value chains.

A year from now, many of the same leaders and policymakers will gather in Munich once again. If the worst-case scenario suggested by this year’s gathering comes to pass, we might be heading for open war in the Middle East and a devastating trade war across the Atlantic.

Or perhaps this year’s conference will have set off the alarm bells needed to prevent the worst from happening. The transatlantic relationship is complicated enough as it is. No one should place it at risk of unraveling further.

In early 2017, with the world still reeling from the unexpected election of Donald Trump as US president, China’s President Xi Jinping appeared before a World Economic Forum audience so disoriented that it was wondering whether the People’s Republic could become a counterweight to the emerging chaos. Xi spoke well. He supported the process of globalisation. He stood up for free trade. He was powerful and convincing on the need for openness. The speech got wide coverage and good press. It was one of his most impressive PR coups.

Two years later, every shred of reputational capital China gained that day has long since dissipated. Trump’s disruption of international trade and other arrangements has had one very striking, if unwitting, side effect. It forced a reluctant China into a spotlight that it was probably not prepared to occupy for another decade, and highlighted a host of awkward issues, including its internal security measures, the behaviour of its high-tech firms, and the purpose of the Belt and Road Initiative. As a result, China seems more isolated and more at odds with much of the world than ever before.

This is not a good situation to be in. The world’s second-largest economy has shown itself to be defensive, incapable of taking criticism, and often opaque and secretive in its diplomacy. During Hu Jintao’s presidency (2003–2013), billions were spent on promoting China’s soft power and conveying a new image to the outside world. Today, that money seems to have been wasted. Never has the world been more in need of a constructive and positive China, and an open-minded attitude towards it. Even for those who have invested time and effort for many years in trying to explain the nuances and subtleties of its position, the past 12 months have been a searing experience.

The worsening crackdown in Xinjiang is among the most serious expressions of the problem. The government’s use of almost ubiquitous security measures to eradicate not just any political opposition, but also, much more worryingly, any expression of religious identity that troubles the leadership (and that seems to cover most varieties) has been both a human and a PR catastrophe. Even the most hawkish China-watchers would have found it hard to devise this dystopian scenario. As a response to security issues—some of which have validity (sporadic attacks linked with radical Islam have been taking place in China since 2013)—these measures will almost certainly create decades of resentment and fuel the very disharmony and radicalisation they are meant to damp down.

Compounding China’s problems are its response to the US pushback and the escalating disquiet over Huawei and other technology companies. Increasingly international in their operations, these companies are key targets for US displeasure about intellectual property theft and cyber espionage. Canada’s recent detention of Huawei’s chief finance officer, Meng Wanzhou, at the request of the United States—which alleges she arranged breaches of sanctions on Iran—appears to have led to the arrests of at least two Canadian nationals in China. On the face of it, the legal process in Canada seems transparent, whereas China has imposed a near-complete blackout on its arrests: no bail, no proper indictment, and an almost comically defensive and confusing response to Western journalists’ questions.

All of this has been supplemented by crude and bullying diplomatic behaviour. During last year’s Pacific Islands Forum, at which China is merely an observer, the country’s representatives were accused of shouting down delegates in an open session, and then trying to gain access, uninvited, to the host’s office in order to change the final communiqué. Then, on New Year’s Day, Xi issued a declaration on Taiwan that restated standard policy positions in such a threatening tone that the approval rating of Taiwan’s president, Tsai Ing-wen, rose by over 10% following her measured response. The Belt and Road Initiative, meanwhile, continues to attract intensive press interest, partly because Beijing stipulates that some of its most prominent projects must be built by Chinese rather than local labour, and partly because some projects are believed to be generating unsustainable host-country debt.

Under Xi, China had an opportunity to reach out and explain what the world would look like if it played a bigger role. After a decade of the travails associated with the Brexit vote, the election of Trump and the rise of populism, more people than ever were willing to listen to anything fresh that China could contribute. While there are plenty in Beijing who seem to believe that the spate of bad news stories about the country is part of a conspiracy to contain and humiliate it, that is unfair and disingenuous. Some commentators might want to see nothing but bad in China’s behaviour, but the majority are neutral, and there are also many who see positive relations and good-quality cooperation as key. China is making that constructive and moderate position increasingly difficult to advance.

It is a tragedy that China is in this position, not just for China itself but also for the rest of the world. Things need to change radically, and quickly, before the country settles into the role of outsider and becomes an object of constant suspicion and criticism—and before we all have to contemplate a future in which one of the world’s most important powers exercises influence through force and fear.

After the attacks of 11 September 2001, the United States invaded Afghanistan and removed the Taliban from power, thereby eliminating a key nexus of international terrorism. But now, a war-weary US, with a president seeking to cut and run, has reached a tentative deal largely on the Taliban’s terms. The extremist militia that once harbored al-Qaeda and now carries out the world’s deadliest terrorist attacks has secured not just the promise of a US military exit within 18 months, but also a pathway to power in Kabul.

History is repeating itself. The US is once again abandoning war-ravaged Afghanistan, just as it did three decades ago following a successful covert operation by the CIA to force the Soviets out of the country. The US, desperate to end its longest-ever war, appears to have forgotten a key lesson of that earlier abandonment: it turned Afghanistan into a citadel of transnational terrorism, leading to civil war and eventually bloodshed in the West.

The accord reached between the Taliban and the US Special Representative for Afghanistan Reconciliation, Zalmay Khalilzad, reads like a wholesale capitulation on the part of the Trump administration. In 2014, the US signed a security pact with the Afghan government that granted the Americans access to nine military bases at least until 2024. But the US has now agreed to withdraw all of its forces in exchange for a mere promise from a terrorist militia that it will deny other terrorist networks a foothold on Afghan territory. Never mind that Islamic State is already operational in Afghanistan and poses a challenge to the Taliban itself.

Though the agreement has been dubbed a ‘peace’ deal, it will almost certainly lead to even more Islamist violence, not least against Afghanistan’s women. The Taliban are determined to re-impose the medieval practices they enforced during their harsh rule from 1996 to 2001. Whatever gains Afghanistan has made in terms of women’s and civil rights may soon be reversed.

Make no mistake: the Taliban are brutal and indiscriminate in their use of violence, and they refuse even to recognise the country’s legitimate government, which will make fleshing out the new ‘framework’ accord exceedingly difficult. A number of key issues must be spelled out unambiguously, including when the ceasefire between the Taliban and US-backed Afghan forces will take effect. And even then, it’s highly doubtful that the Taliban will agree to a power-sharing arrangement with Afghan President Ashraf Ghani’s government.

In fact, having been emboldened by a series of US concessions over the past six years, the Taliban have escalated their terrorist attacks and made significant battlefield gains against Afghan forces. So, if anything, they will see the new agreement as an implicit validation of their impending victory. They know that time is on their side, and that most Americans favour a US exit. That means they will probably play hardball when negotiating the details of a final deal.

In addition to representing a major victory for the Taliban, the accord is also a win for Pakistan, which harbors the militia’s leadership and provides cross-border sanctuaries for its fighters. Just last year, Donald Trump cut US security assistance to Pakistan, tweeting, ‘they have given us nothing but lies & deceit, thinking of our leaders as fools. They give safe haven to the terrorists we hunt in Afghanistan, with little help’.

It is worth remembering that when Trump took office, he promised to reverse the deteriorating situation in Afghanistan by ‘winning again’. But just two years later, he has apparently decided that it is the extremists who will be winning again.

Far from breaking with former president Barack Obama’s failed approach, as he promised, Trump has now fulfilled his predecessor’s quest for a deal with the Taliban. Having also recently announced a military drawdown in Syria, Trump has made it clear that the US will readily throw its Kurdish and Afghan allies under the bus in order to extricate itself from foreign entanglements of its own making.

To be sure, America’s Faustian bargain with the Taliban has been in the making for years, which explains why the group is conspicuously absent from the US Department of State’s annual list of foreign terrorist organisations, despite having killed more civilians in the past year alone than any other outfit. To facilitate talks with the Taliban, Obama allowed the militia to establish a de facto diplomatic mission in Qatar’s capital, Doha, in 2013. And a year later, he traded five senior Taliban leaders for a US Army sergeant (who was later charged with desertion).

Moreover, to lay the groundwork for a deal, US war planners have long refrained from targeting the Taliban’s command-and-control base in Pakistan, thereby effectively undercutting its own military mission in Afghanistan. As the top US military commander in Afghanistan admitted in 2017, ‘It is very difficult to succeed on the battlefield when your enemy enjoys external support and safe haven.’

The US has come full circle. The Taliban, like al-Qaeda, evolved from the violent jihadist groups that the CIA trained in Pakistan to wage war against the Soviets in the 1980s. After suffering the worst terrorist attack in modern world history, the US turned against the Taliban, driving their leaders out of Afghanistan.

But now, in search of a face-saving exit from the Afghan quagmire, America is implicitly preparing to hand the country back to the same thuggish group that it removed from power 17 years ago. Sadly, once American troops leave Afghan soil, the ability of the US to influence events there, or to prevent a new terrorist attack on the US homeland, will be severely limited.

No suspense this year. The winner is obvious: a masterpiece by the German official photographer, Jesco Denzel, wins the 10th Madeleine Award for the use of symbol, stunt, prop, gesture or jest.

The annual prize is inspired by former US secretary of state Madeleine Albright, who sent diplomatic messages via the brooches worn on her lapel. Albright’s messaging wasn’t about ‘read my lips’, it was ‘read my pins’: her favourite mistake was wearing a trio of monkey brooches to meet Vladimir Putin, causing the Russian to go ape.

In the Madeleine spirit, the judges were enchanted by claims the Queen trolled US President Donald Trump with her brooches. It’d be a wonderful bit of modern Elizabethan business from the monarch who ascended the throne when Winston Churchill was prime minister. The eloquence of the Queen’s brooches matches the ‘power and seduction’ of her hats.

The Denzel G7 photo, though, couldn’t be denied, an ‘instant classic, a picture of political drama that captures the power struggle of an age in a single image’.

As the University of Melbourne’s Kyla McFarlane commented, it’s a compelling image of ‘sleeves rolled-up, high-stakes political history being made in a room, in real time’.

Its powerful subjects are captured in a tense moment that not only encapsulates a political mood but also reveals something of the character of its subjects, as human beings as well as world leaders.

Trump, arms folded and jaw set, locks eyes with Merkel from across the table. Merkel, hands placed firmly on the table, stands up and leans in to his gaze. (It was in this extraordinary encounter that the memes saw school ma’am and truculent child, the stuff of an editorial cartoonist’s dreams.)

Around them, another narrative plays out. Macron engages animatedly with an open-mouthed John Bolton, Trump’s National Security Advisor, while Abe folds his arms and looks to Macron. The result is theatrical in its storytelling possibilities.

Trump flew direct from stare-off to Singapore (tweeting insults at Canada as he left) to do salute-and-handshake with North Korea’s Kim Jong-un. Along to report that wild ride, ABC correspondent Zoe Daniel marvelled: ‘Kim Jong-un is “talented”. Justin Trudeau is “dishonest and weak”. Friends are enemies. Enemies are friends. I’ve flown around the world and back this week and, man, oh man, is the water going backwards down the drain or what?’

Maybe Trump’s foreign-policy game theory is from the board game Dungeons and Dragons. He’s playing as a ‘chaotic neutral’, ‘an individualist, neither good nor evil, who cares little for rules or precedence and thrives in spontaneity. Chaotic Neutrals are motivated by promoting freedom, but can sometimes confuse freedom with selfishness’.

Ah, chaotic neutrality. Obvious …

Beyond The Donald, others put in strong Madeleine efforts. One image lingering from Malaysia’s extraordinary election—which ended 61 years of coalition rule by the United Malays National Organisation—is that a week after the vote, millions of Malaysians still displayed the purple ink on their index finger to show they’d voted.

When locations linked to defeated prime minister Najib Razak were raided, authorities needed six counting machines to tot up mountains of hoarded cash. They seized 12,000 pieces of jewellery and 567 handbags. Minor details tell so much: 567 handbags!

As Hong Kong had its umbrella revolution in 2014 (winner of the 6th Madeleine), so France has experienced its hi-vis mouvement des gilets jaunes. Yellow jackets, roundabouts and angry crowds make for powerful messaging.

In the minor awards, competition for the annual OOPS! Award for blooper and blunder was typically hectic. The OOPS! is known as a Boris, in honour of that wonderful former UK foreign secretary Boris Johnson. When sacked from shadow cabinet, many moons ago, Johnson commented: ‘There are no disasters, only opportunities. And, indeed, opportunities for fresh disasters.’ Masterful.

This year’s OOPS! goes to the hip chef in Israel who put shoes on the table for a dinner the country’s prime minister, Benjamin Netanyahu, gave for his Japanese counterpart, Shinzo Abe. Dessert was chocolate pralines served in two pairs of men’s black brogues. Puzzling for the leader of a country where you take your shoes off at the door, not on the table.

Another award is the Diana on ‘the utility and force of photographs ’, named for Diana, Princess of Wales, drawing on Tony Blair’s account of how the princess understood pix: ‘As Diana used to say, the picture is what counts.’

Because the G7 glare-and-stare photo gets the top Madeleine, the Diana can go elsewhere. Segue from a powerful woman staring down a powerful man to another steady gaze—not a photograph, but the official portrait of Australia’s first female prime minister, Julia Gillard.

While all the previous portraits were blokes in suits, Gillard took the wardrobe out of the picture. She ordered a portrait from the neck up, telling the ABC’s Annabel Crabb:

[O]ne of the things that I think is frustrating for women in leadership roles at the moment, still, is that there is endless commentary about what they’re wearing. For me, being the first female prime minister, there were times when it was just truly absurd. You’d be going in and out of a NATO meeting in Brussels to talk about our strategy for fighting a war in Afghanistan and people would be commenting on what jacket you were wearing. And so I did, in this, want to entirely take clothes out of the equation.

The final word from this year’s award goes to Madeleine Albright, still showing a policy brain as sharp as her humour. The first female US secretary of state—a child of war-torn Europe—has written another fine book, Fascism: a warning.

Musing on fascism in the time of Trump, Albright delivers a motto for the award that carries her name: ‘I am an optimist who worries a lot.’