01x01 - Age of Conflict

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It was a time of
hope and revolution.

In 1989, the wall that
divided Europe was torn down.

Total euphoria.
It was almost out of control.

It was pandemonium, but
it was good pandemonium.

For almost 30 years,

the Berlin Wall had been a brick
and mortar symbol of Cold w*r divide.

Overnight, history
altered course.

I do remember thinking
that there would be trouble.

The remarkable thing is, how long it
took for there to be a Russian backlash.

From bloodshed in central
Europe to turmoil in cyberspace.

How have three decades of w*r
driven the world from hope to uncertainty?

We've lost sight of what
these wars are about.

We've lost sight of
where the end game is.

How did we arrive at
this new age of conflict?

The world has transformed
over the past 30 years.

In the blizzard of
news and events,

it's hard to make sense
of how we arrived here.

But if we stand back, we
can see how things connect.

We can see the road to now.

The fall of the Berlin Wall promised
a new age of peaceful coexistence

between East and West.

One by one, the former satellite states of
the Soviet Union declared independence.

And then the mighty
USSR fell apart.

There was this beautiful
layer of snow on the Kremlin.

So it was just white and
the red bricks of the Kremlin.

And there was a spotlight

that was always focused on
the flag of the hammer and sickle.

And I remember looking
at that and saying to myself,

I wonder
if this is the last time

I'm gonna see that flag
flying over the Kremlin.

With barely a shot
fired, a mighty empire

born of revolution,
met a peaceful end.

I do remember thinking
that there would be trouble

and that there would
be bound to be some

resistance to the disintegration
of the Soviet Union itself.

Fifteen fragile nations were
carved out of the former USSR

and six from the
former Yugoslavia.

The fall of the walls split
Czechoslovakia and united Germany.

It was hailed as
the end of history,

a triumph for Western
democracy and capitalism.

I think there was
a miscalculation

which reflected the
primacy of economics

and perhaps political
science over history.

The American experts from their
ivory towers

took the view that, as long as
there was democracy plus capitalism,

elections plus the stock market,
the job would be done.

And that led to some
terrible missteps.

In 1991, the first
of these missteps

came in Yugoslavia,
as historic fractures

between national
identities and religion,

provoked a decade of w*r crimes.

We couldn't believe that genocide
was happening and the world was failing

its obligation under international
law to step in and stop genocide.

Caught between
warring Serbs and Croats,

Bosnia was torn apart by civil w*r,
while the world sat idle.

The Bosnian capital Sarajevo, a
modern European city,

was held in the grip of a medieval
siege for almost four years.

This event was the biggest event to
erupt

and to engulf all of Europe
and thus the Western alliance

and then the whole
world because...

Remember there were
Muslim states as well

that were looking at what was
happening to the Muslims in Bosnia

and agitating and
getting very very frustrated

that the world seemed to be permitting
a genocide against Muslims in Europe.

Unlike the early years
of conflict in the Balkans,

the West did act decisively

when Iraqi dictator S*ddam
Hussein invaded Kuwait in 1990.

The US won United Nations
support for a massive response.

The object of the exercise was to
redress the wrong that was done to Kuwait.

The object of the exercise was
not necessarily regime change.

The Americans knew then,

that to go down the path
of full scale invasion of Iraq

and trying to manage a
transition was a recipe for disaster.

Operation Desert Storm in 1991
was a political and military triumph.

Softened by weeks
of aerial bombing,

the ground attack was
over in just a hundred hours.

S*ddam was forced to
withdraw from Kuwait.

But faithfully, he was
left in charge of Iraq.

As the 90s came to a close, a
new generation of Western leaders

led by President Bill Clinton and
British Prime Minister Tony Blair,

pushed for more global
humanitarian intervention.

After years of dithering,

NATO jets were finally sent to
end the Balkan Wars in Kosovo,

this time without UN approval.

I think what happened was
that by the end of the 1990s,

politicians on both sides of the Atlantic
and particularly in London and Washington,

had discovered that, gee,
hard power actually works

and we can be liberals and use the
military and help the good guys win.

The bombing of Yugoslavia in 1999,

would prove to be the high watermark
of America's unilateral power.

The idea, that along
with a few close allies,

it could right the
wrongs of the world.

The most important lesson of the
last 30 years,

is that things can look
permanent, until they fall apart.

September 11, 2001.

It is the event that
has defined our age,

unleashing forces that still
drive our age of uncertainty.

I'm a historian by training and I think
sometimes,

has ever a power as strong
as the United States

felt as fearful and weak as the
United States felt after September 11.

The Americans were convinced
there was gonna be another attack.

Indeed, after the one
on the 11th of September,

there was a wide
feeling around the world,

that this might be
the first in a series.

And that caused us to
make a series of bad choices

that we are still dealing with the
aftermath and the consequences of.

Three wars were born
on that one fateful day.

Afghanistan, Iraq and
the global w*r on terror.

The United States was launched into
its longest conflict in modern history.

History is replete with ironies,

but there's surely no
bigger irony than this.

That we ended up inadvertently
wandering into Cold w*r II.

And as so often, we were in it
before we even realized it had begun.

The wounded giant was hungry for
justice,

but the enemy was unlike
any it had encountered before.

Not a nation or an
army, but an idea.

Here was a group who was
saying 'No' to this glorious idea of a

universal cosmopolitan
globalized secular world.

They were saying
that religion mattered.

They were saying
that culture mattered.

They were rejecting
the ideas of the West.

Within a month of the 2001 attacks on
the Twin Towers,

the US and its close allies
Canada, Australia and the UK,

invaded Afghanistan in
search of the perpetrators.

On my orders, the United
States military has begun strikes

against Al Qaeda
t*rror1st training camps

and military installations of the
Taliban regime in Afghanistan.

President George Bush demanded
the Islamic fundamentalist Taliban

hand over the architect
of 9/11, Osama Bin Laden.

Forced out of Kabul, the Taliban
launched a deadly insurgency,

that to this day,
continues to cost lives.

The feeling at the time was,
that this would be

over really quickly. The
Taliban would be crushed.

There'd be a new
government put in power.

Al Qaeda would be routed.
Job done.

And, of course, that's
not what happened.

America had the weapons of w*r,
but was ill-equipped to make peace.

The invasion was a triumph.

What happened subsequently
was the disaster.

We will not waver.
We will not tire.

We will not falter.
And we will not fail.

Culture eats
strategy for breakfast.

And Afghan culture ate
our strategy for breakfast.

To try to modernize a country like
that, to bring it to democratic norms,

to bring equal rights for women

and real power sharing of a
Western nature,

to a country that isolated,
was a fool's errand.

And it remains a fool's errand.

Don't be scared.
Don't be scared.

Afghanistan turned into
the longest w*r in US history.

Yet it did little to secure peace
for the country or its people.

You would have to ask where,

after 18 years of Western intervention
and how many trillions of dollars,

has the money gone,

because nothing
really has changed for

people living on the margins
of society there. It is a tragedy.

The Bush administration viewed
Afghanistan as the beginning of a plan

to reaffirm America's
standing on the world stage.

An American led
coalition of the willing,

invaded Iraq on
faulty intelligence

searching for weapons
of mass destruction.

Famously those
WMDs did not exist.

Now I have to deal with the reality that
there were no stockpiles of weapons.

There was still plenty
of WMD programs

and therefore a
capacity to make them.

I accept that that was the conclusion
of the inquiries, CIA and so forth.

I'm not arguing that.

Otherwise close allies
were divided on the decision.

Australia committed troops.

New Zealand did not.

For me, you know, this was a
situation analogous to Vietnam,

where the intervention
was unwise.

Nothing good could come of it.

And it was not something that
one would lead one's country into.

The government has decided to commit
Australian forces to action to disarm Iraq,

because we believe it is right.

It is lawful and it's in
Australia's national interest.

And I think it's a
matter of deep regret,

that so many of the United
States allies and partners

just followed mechanically, rabbit-like,
the US lead in this respect,

rather than accepting, that this was
not a case for military intervention.

I thought the right
decision had been taken

and I supported
it very strongly.

But military intervention
is only something you do

when you've got the force
of legal right on your side

and when it's prudential
to do so in terms of you

being confident you'll
do more good than harm.

Iraq was a diplomatic puzzle.

But it was a military pushover.

The 2003 invasion began with the
shock and awe bombing campaign.

And just three weeks later, US
troops had captured Baghdad.

In the battle of Iraq, the United
States and our allies have prevailed.

By year's end, S*ddam Hussein
had been hunted down.

There was a lot of jubilation when
they captured S*ddam Hussein.

I was there then.
There was sh**ting in the air.

And there were
triumphant press conferences.

And then we had George
Bush saying it was all over.

But it certainly
wasn't all over.

The transition from dictatorship
to democracy will take time.

But it is worth every effort.

If the Americans
had made a success

of the occupation of Iraq,

then I don't think we would look
back with the same condemnation.

American missteps and S*ddam's
execution unleashed chaos.

Hopes for a democratic
Iraq were blown apart.

Many Iraqis, when we helped
remove the lid of S*ddam,

did wanna be more democratic,

but some wanted to be more Shia,

and others wanted to
be more Sunni Islamists,

and others wanted
to be more corrupt.

It wasn't that there weren't
democratic aspirations, there were,

but unfortunately, there were
other competing ones as well.

Sectarian violence
dashed hopes of unity

as Sunni and Shia factions
battled to fill the power vacuum.

Just like Afghanistan, we did
not fundamentally understand

the place and the type of
people, we were dealing with.

And that by removing
S*ddam, you would

lift the lid on all of the
seething insurgencies

that were gathering
around the region and lead

to the rise of a group
like Islamic State.

America struggled
to find a way forward,

that didn't involve committing
ever greater numbers of troops.

They had lost the hearts and
minds, in no uncertain terms.

They just didn't
realise it at that stage.

Iraq became the w*r that exposed
the limits of America's power.

I think historians will say that the
decision to invade Iraq was the biggest

unforced catastrophe and
error in modern US history.

Boots on the ground,
would not resolve

the ethnic and religious
divisions of the Middle East.

The old lesson, you
break it, you own it.

George W Bush
went in, he broke it,

and we're still struggling

to deal with the
consequences of that today.

But so much of that at the time,

was not factored in, not
considered, and unknown.

History's judgement
has been harsh.

The idea that both in
Iraq and Afghanistan,

the application of
Western armed forces,

could provide the setting in which these political
systems could be reconstructed, reconfigured,

that society itself fundamentally
changed, was an illusion.

The fact is, the myth of counterinsurgency,
the myth that small numbers,

or even not so small numbers,
of Western troops

can move into very
different societies

and fundamentally transform
them politically and socially.

It's a myth and it's a costly myth and
we've found yet again that it's not true.

Since the invasion, some
estimates put the death toll

beyond 600,000 and
the suffering continues.

There is no end to these things.

They just morph
into something else

and eventually we move
away and we forget about them.

But they don't end.

That's been, I think, you know, the lesson
of my time reporting these conflicts.

I was in and out of Iraq and
Afghanistan for a decade and

I'm gone and the w*r's still
being fought. They don't end.

In the wake of S*ddam
Hussein's demise,

corrupt rulers
across the Arab world

were slow to react to bubbling protests
opposing authoritarian oppression.

From 2010, more than 15 regimes
were challenged by the people

as an uprising,
fueled by social media,

swept across North
Africa and the Middle East.

The Arab Spring caught
the whole world by surprise.

From Cairo's Tahrir Square,
to the Gulf state of Bahrain,

a grassroots movement of protesters
called for democracy and social reform.

The people here, they
need a free country.

We are not naive.

We know exactly what we want and
we will stay until we have what we want.

Some governments
responded with violence.

Hopes of democracy were dashed
against the wall of repression.

History does not
progress in a straight line.

It seems to be
constantly circular.

You have something
which creates a backlash

and then something else reacts
to that and on and on and on.

I hope there's incremental
progress but it's not direct.

And that clearly has been
the lesson of the Arab Spring,

whether it's Egypt, whether
it's any of the other countries.

It began as a call to end
corruption and remove the dictators.

But only Tunisia would
eventually transition to democracy.

For the rest, the Arab
Spring turned to winter

and conflict endured
for years to come.

I think we underestimated
the staying power

of authoritarianism
in that region.

I think we underestimated the
deep structural problems in politics

and in society, in the region
and within a lot of those countries.

At the same time, there
are a lot of hopeful efforts.

Whether there'll be enough,
it's too soon to tell.

But there's movement among
the young and the educated.

There's a difference in
the media environment.

There's a difference in the way, that the
people perceive themselves and their rights,

even with the failures of the Arab
Spring that, I think, are significant.

Despite the trillions
spent and lives lost,

intervention in the Middle East
did not discourage terrorism.

Since September 11, t*rror1st
threats continued to surge.

Anyone, anywhere
could be a target.

We just saw a massive expl*si*n
with bodies just going everywhere.

There was people on fire. There
was people with holes in them.

There was dead
bodies just all around us.

In 2002, extremists dedicated to
the establishment of an Islamic state

in Southeast Asia,

detonated bombs around popular nightclubs
in Bali, Indonesia, taking 202 lives.

It was almost like an
attack on an Australian city.

And that was something
that brought home,

very severely, to the
Australian public, that terrorism,

and that was obviously Islamic
terrorism, was very much a threat.

Although Osama Bin Laden
had been k*lled in 2011,

he had been
successful in his goal,

provoking an Islamist
uprising against the West.

Extremism spread.

In Mali, West Africa,
radical Islamic militants

launched an offensive against
government forces in 2012.

They swept across the country,

destroying world heritage
sites, occupying key cities,

and brutally punishing
those disobeying Sharia law.

The attacks were a symbolic
strike against France,

Mali's former colonial ruler.

France intervened, forcing the
Islamists from their strongholds.

It was a rare example
of successful intervention.

However, radical ideals
continued to propagate,

culminating in
the ultimate threat,

a terror state that recognised
no authority but its own.

Born from the chaos
in Iraq and Syria,

a radical force would
seek to impose its will.

In the age of terror, !sis
was something different.

The rise of !sis, I think,
caught not just the Iraqi government,

but all of us by surprise.

And the ferocity of their military
and social media campaigns,

I think, took us a while to
figure out how to handle it.

!sis declared its
own religious state,

a brutal caliphate, where zealots
tracked and terrorised entire cities.

But the horror was not confined to !sis
controlled territory in Iraq and Syria.

Like wildfire,
the embers spread,

reaching the distant city of
Marawi in the Philippines.

Using sophisticated tools of
propaganda and social media,

!sis appealed to radical
Muslims around the globe.

Graphic videos posted online,
inspired attacks across the Middle East,

Asia, Europe and
the United States.

Hate visited our Orlando.

We are mourning
and we are angry.

!sis was finally forced
from its strongholds.

But the danger now
is that the insurgency

has merely retreated underground
and will re-emerge.

Common sense tells you that
such a ruthlessly determined,

insanely cruel organisation like that is
very, very hard to completely eradicate.

Well, they've been
territorially defeated.

I think that's significant
and important.

So I think we should allow
ourselves to have that win.

Have they been defeated as a threat?
Certainly not.

I think they still maintain a presence
and will remain a significant threat

as a t*rror1st
insurgency going forward.

They still have the
capability to commit

global t*rror1st attacks
around the world.

They still retain a significant insurgent
presence within Iraq in particular as well.

So unfortunately, they still remain a significant
threat to the region and to global terrorism.

Lost in the endless
struggle against terror,

the West failed to notice that
the Cold w*r was returning.

In the years that followed the
collapse of the Soviet Union,

Russia suffered the indignity of
its lost status as a superpower.

It took no joy from
a united Germany

or an expanding European Union,
but its concerns were ignored.

The Western Alliance went too far inviting
former Soviet colonies to join NATO.

This was a provocation
Russia would not forgive.

The expansion of the European Union
from Western Europe into Eastern Europe,

was a remarkable achievement

and I don't think there's any reasons
for the West to apologise for that.

I think the decision to mirror
that political and economic step

with the strategic step of incorporating
in NATO, was a huge strategic mistake.

It showed the excessive triumphalism
of the West at that moment.

Understandable perhaps,
but very unwise.

In 2004, Russian neighbours such
as Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia

were welcomed into NATO.

But in doing so, the Alliance had
inadvertently helped consolidate

the autocratic power of
Russian leader Vladimir Putin,

emboldening him to
undermine Western ideals.

I think Russia has found
a successful strategy,

that is a combination of destabilising
countries on its geographic periphery

and attempt to roll back
the liberalising trends

in the Middle East and elsewhere

and to use its military power
as its sole real remaining asset

to try and shape the international
order in a way that pushes back against

the liberalising trends that we in
the West consider universal values.

We might not like Russia, there might
be a lot of things we resent about it,

but the fact that Russia could simply
be compelled to accept the expansion

of Western, American, strategic
primacy to the very borders of Russia,

is, I think, simply
a strategic fantasy.

That's not the way great
powers like Russia behave

and Russia is, for all its weaknesses
and all its follies, a great power still.

Putin's newfound assertiveness
would be unleashed in Ukraine.

In 2013, demonstrations
in the capital Kiev,

began demanding closer
ties with the European Union.

To undermine the protests,

the Kremlin encouraged opposition among
Ukraine's Russian-speaking minority.

The dispute soon spiralled
into violence and a military crisis.

Ultimately, the question of whether Ukraine
could ever be a member of the European Union,

led to one of the biggest disruptive
events of the post 1989 period,

which was the Russian
invasion of Ukraine in 2014.

Ukraine's pro-Russian president, was forced
to flee the capital as protests raged.

In what appeared to be
a well coordinated plan,

Russia seized the
Crimean peninsula.

It was a long delayed reaction
to humiliation Russia suffered

after the fall of
the Berlin Wall.

Russian backed separatists
formed armed militias,

as Europe once again
descended into w*r.

And like Europe's
wars in the past,

very soon, there were
global consequences.

In the summer of 2014,

Malaysian Airlines flight 17 was
cruising high over eastern Ukraine,

when it was shot down
by Russian backed rebels.

All 298 aboard were k*lled.

The passengers and crew
came from 10 different nations.

Those aboard MH17, were like
so many of Ukraine's civilians.

Victims of events
beyond their control,

leaving behind families
in search of justice.

Vladimir Putin's willingness
to test the West's resolve,

found new impetus in a
bloody New Century w*r: Syria.

The conflict began,
like the Arab Spring,

as an uprising against the dictator,
President Bashar Al-Assad.

I remember being up on the
border when we started to see

the beginnings of
the uprising in Syria.

Now remember, we'd had Tunisia,
we'd had Libya, we'd had Egypt.

But everyone I spoke to said,

"Syria will be the big one,
and Assad will not go."

He was prepared and has
shown that he's been prepared

to torch his country to the
ground, to save his power.

The uprising metastasised
into a full-scale civil w*r in 2011

that devastated cities, cost
over half a million lives,

and drew the
superpowers into conflict.

When Syria descended
into civil w*r,

the potential was for
there to be another Iraq,

given the divisions that existed
within Syria along religious lines.

The problem, I think, was that the
West willed the end, but not the means.

Everybody was quite happy to say that
Assad should go, just as Gaddafi should go.

But we'd still not fully
understood the significance of Iraq.

Get rid of the strongman and
beware the anarchy that follows.

One has to look back and say
that a terrible sin of omission

was to encourage the
revolutionaries in the Arab world,

but then just to stand and watch as
Syria and Libya descended into anarchy.

Syria? Syria is over as a country.

It's gonna be very hard
to ever repair that country.

With millions of refugees
flooding into neighbouring nations,

the conflict destabilised
the entire region

and threatened to bring
superpowers into open conflict.

Russian President Vladimir Putin

has been a long-time
supporter of the Assad regime.

Putin showed, he
wasn't encumbered by

the things that the US, the constraints
that the US has to negotiate.

He's been prepared to go in there and
play it as hard and as brutal as anyone.

He had a very clear idea of
what he wanted to achieve.

He wanted to shore
up the Assad regime.

He wanted to eliminate the militant
groups that were opposed to Assad.

And he's done that. Not only has
he been able to shore up Assad,

he has rejuvenated
Russia's place in the world,

because of the influence
he's been able to exert there.

Russia's a big player
there now again.

Putin's belligerence
brings no comfort

to those nations that had previously
chafed under Soviet Russia,

especially the tiny Baltic states
of Latvia, Lithuania and Estonia.

Since the collapse
of the Soviet Union,

these nations have strived to embed
themselves in the Western alliance.

But like Ukraine, they have
sizeable Russian minorities,

giving Putin all the pretext he
needs to meddle in their affairs.

When one looks back on the
events that followed 1989,

the remarkable thing is, how long it
took for there to be a Russian backlash.

The redrawing of
Russia's Western borders,

the fact that Russia didn't
just lose the satellites,

but lost lands which had
been Russian for centuries,

that was always going
to be very hard to sustain.

The speed with which, not only
Europe expanded eastwards,

but NATO expanded eastwards,

when you think about it from a Russian
perspective, was deeply shocking.

And I don't think we should be
surprised that Russia seeks to reclaim

what many Russians must
naturally find part of their country.

Now that's not to
justify or excuse,

but it is to say, we
shouldn't be surprised.

In Estonia, as NATO
troops train on the borders,

they are joined by volunteers
from the Estonian Defence League,

outnumbered 100 to 1 by the force
on the other side of the border.

I remember the Soviet times.

I remember Soviet army
and I don't want that back.

However, Russian
troops may never need

to enter the Estonian capital
of Tallinn to achieve their goals.

In 2007,

Tallinn became the first b*ttlefield for
a new type of warfare - cyber warfare.

Russia launched a
massive online as*ault

for no better reason
than it felt insulted.

The Estonian government
had dared to move a statue

commemorating the Soviet army's
liberation of Tallinn in World w*r II.

Some of Estonia's Russian
minority were outraged.

But the real retaliation came when
Russia hacked Estonia's Internet,

plunging it into
digital darkness.

This was a new and frightening
conflict and a warning to the world.

The failures in Iraq
and Afghanistan

had exposed the limits of
conventional military power.

Boots on the ground
did not ensure victory.

The next conflict may not
involve an obvious army at all.

Wars will be fought
in cyberspace.

Cyber is such a cross-cutting issue.
It's affecting every part of society.

We're really being engaged
from lots of different fronts

and really struggling to
keep up with the workload.

America, Russia and recently China
are locked in a new online arms race

that seeks to destabilise crucial
industrial and military targets,

and even undermine
each other's governments.

In 2016, Russia launched
a secret weapon to

to influence the outcome
of the US election.

Thousands of fake social media accounts
misled, misinformed

and divided the
American electorate,

while hackers infiltrated the
Democratic National Committee.

Russia, if you're listening,

I hope you're able to find the
30,000 emails that are missing.

I think you will probably be
rewarded mightily by our press.

Russia's approach to political
interference is more sort of blunt trauma.

So it's not just propaganda
and disinformation.

It's weaponising the tools of
computers and intelligence

and social media and all the
other things we take for granted,

weaponising them in a quasi-military
way, to get their political ends met.

You've got mass leaks of
political parties' information.

You have Putin sort of engaging
in politicking around this issue

and you've got very sort of
crude methods being used

to sort of bring different
groups together

and try to get them to clash
with each other on the streets.

We should prepare ourselves
for a different kind of w*r.

Cold w*r II is not gonna
be like Cold w*r I.

It's gonna be
profoundly different.

Dump the Trump! Dump the Trump!

The new rules of engagement have not been
lost on another American rival - China.

It is equally prepared for
this 21st-century conflict.

The w*r, when it
comes, will not be a w*r

of aircraft carriers or
amphibious landings on Taiwan.

I don't think that w*r
will ever happen.

I think that China will
fight a new kind of w*r.

And this w*r will
be not very warlike.

Russia is closer to China
than any time in history.

And Russia has shown China how to
wage w*r against the United States.

It's called information warfare.

It's cheap and you can
disrupt an open society

more effectively with
memes than with malware.

The kind of w*r that lies ahead, is
a continuation of the w*r that Russia

waged against the
United States in 2016,

an information w*r
designed to disrupt

as much as possible the
democratic political process.

China's use of
cyber warfare so far,

has been subtler than the
aggressive interventions

of Vladimir Putin's online army.

To me, the really
interesting thing is,

how far China has held back
from following the Russian lead.

But if the trade w*r continues,

if the tech w*r escalates,

if the gloves are off,

I see no reason why
China should restrain itself.

The convulsions of the past three
decades, have torn old empires apart

and shifted the gravity
of global power.

They've redrawn
the map of the world.

But some nations have
struggled to find their stability

in a world that is now vastly different
than the relative calm of the Cold w*r.

Now the 50 years after World w*r II, were
a great time to be a weak little state.

First of all, there are two superpowers
out there, throwing money at you,

foreign aid, military equipment,

building your government
house, educating your kids.

Now, no superpower wants to touch
you, because all they win is a bill.

South Sudan, the
UN's newest member.

The country endured
Africa's longest civil w*r,

famine and corruption
on a grand scale,

before it voted to become
independent in 2011.

It was soon engulfed
in a new civil w*r

that displaced millions,
drove hyperinflation

and left 80% of the
population in extreme poverty.

And yes, the dream of
independence is undiminished.

As it teeters on the brink, the young
people of South Sudan are pushing back,

seeking peace through
music and the power of radio.

Local musicians are calling for a
new future and the message is clear.

We really want our generation
to have a good, better future.

We will stop this fighting and
peace will come in this land.

In a country where few can read

and 60% of the population
is under 24 years old,

music is a powerful
means of promoting unity

in a nation that has
known little but w*r.

I think young people
have a great role to play

in promoting peace
in South Sudan.

And what I've been seeing lately, young
people have shown that they really need peace.

They don't need any other wars or
any violence. They really need peace.

The hopes for global peace
following the fall of the Berlin Wall

never reached South Sudan
or many of the world's poor.

Their fight is among the West's
greatest failures of the past 30 years.

Today, a quarter of the world's
population lives in 58 fragile states.

In 2016, more countries
experienced violent conflict

than at any time in
the past 30 years.

More than half a million
died from violence.

A hundred thousand
perished in armed conflicts.

More people were displaced than at
any time since the end of World w*r II.

We find ourselves facing some much deeper
and more complex and profound challenges

than we expected to,
in the mid 1990s.

So that's a very different world.
And what all those changes mean,

is, all these weak little states,
a lot of them can't make it.

So they're actually hemorrhaging
their people, or they're just collapsing.

Some like Iraq, we tipped over, but
some are going over just on their own.

And so the biggest thing
happening in the world today,

is actually the movement of people trying
to get out of these countries of disorder,

into countries of order.

And what are they doing? Changing
the politics of the world of order.

Creating all these populist
nationalist backlash wall builders,

who don't want these people.

Our collective failures since
the end of the Cold w*r in 1991,

are now coming home.

Around the world, the
walls are going back up.

As we stand back and view
the events that have led to now,

the fault lines are apparent,

but they are no map
for what happens next.

If we've learned anything
from the last 30 years,

it should be that
history is unpredictable.

The next 30 years will
be equally full of surprises

and future historians
will seek to explain them.

The whole thing is to explain
things before they happen.

We have travelled
from a moment of hope,

to an age of endless conflicts.

There is no end to these things

and eventually, we'll move away
and we forget about them,

but they don't end.

From walls coming down
to a call for their return.

And the central geopolitical
challenge of our era today,

is how do we
collaborate globally,

to stabilize the
world of disorder,

so it all doesn't try to
visit the world of order.