Monday, December 12, 2011
Headlines for Monday, December 12, 2011
Sunday, December 11, 2011
Can the Center Hold?
A majority of Israelis -- around 70 percent, according to a recent poll by the Truman Institute for the Advancement of Peace, in Jerusalem -- support a two-state solution. Yet that same majority is deeply skeptical of Palestinian intentions. To understand this seeming contradiction and the psyche of the Israeli mainstream, one should read the two articles that recently appeared in these pages on the Palestinian question -- "The Problem Is Palestinian Rejectionism," by Yosef Kuperwasser and Shalom Lipner, and "Israel's Bunker Mentality," by Ronald Krebs (November/December 2011) -- not as a debate but as complementary arguments. Centrist Israelis endorse Krebs' argument that the occupation is an existential threat to the Jewish state. They understand that ending it would ease the demographic challenge to Israel's Jewish majority and allow Israel to retain both its Jewish and its democratic identities. A two-state solution would also deflate the growing international movement to delegitimize not only the occupation but also the existence of Israel itself.
Yet centrist Israelis also embrace the contention made by Kuperwasser and Lipner: that the Palestinian national movement, from Hamas to the Palestinian Authority, rejects Jewish sovereignty over any part of the land from the Mediterranean Sea to the Jordan River. Centrist Israelis see PA President Mahmoud Abbas as merely a tactical moderate who opposes terrorism only because it has harmed the Palestinian cause. They base their suspicions on speeches such as his address to the UN General Assembly last September, when Abbas condemned "63 years" of Israeli occupation -- implicating the founding of Israel in 1948, not just the occupation of Gaza and the West Bank, which began in 1967. For centrists, the greatest obstacle to peace is the demand of Palestinian leaders, including Abbas, for the right of return of descendants of Palestinian refugees not just to a Palestinian state but also to Israel proper. These Israelis see Abbas' insistence on this right as proof that the Palestinian leader seeks to destabilize Israel from within and does not accept the right of the Jewish people to their own sovereign nation.
Such fears inhibit centrist Israelis from fully embracing the peace process, since they believe it will lead to an irredentist Palestinian state sitting on Israel's borders. Rocket attacks from the West Bank could make daily life in Israel's main population centers unbearable. If the Israeli army re-invaded to stop the attacks, Israeli officials and soldiers could find themselves charged with war crimes, just as they were after Israel attacked Gaza in 2008. And so although centrists understand how damaging to both sides the occupation has become, they view ending it before the Palestinians accept Israel as a Jewish state as an even greater existential threat. Indeed, according to the Tel Aviv University Peace Index, a monthly public opinion survey, in January 2011, nearly 70 percent of Israelis polled moderately or strongly accepted the claim that even if a peace agreement were signed, the Palestinians would continue their struggle against Israel.
This is but one of the paradoxes with which centrist Israelis grapple. Another is the way they understand their country to be both a David and a Goliath: Goliath toward the Palestinians, but David toward the Arab and Muslim worlds. Israel remains the strongest military power in the Middle East. But in recent years, the balance has begun to shift. Iran, through its terrorist allies -- Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in Gaza -- has established a presence in two enclaves on Israel's borders. These organizations, equipped with tens of thousands of rockets, can now target all of Israel's population centers, many of which are directly threatened for the first time in the history of the Jewish state. And with Iran pursuing nuclear weapons, Israel might soon lose its status as the sole nuclear power in the Middle East, which has been its main strategic advantage for decades. Then there is the emergence of a government in Turkey with Islamist roots and the growing power of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt and Jordan, which are eroding Israel's regional alliances. These factors -- not the occupation, as Krebs writes -- have created Israel's "bunker mentality."
Centrist Israelis realize that the Jewish state cannot indefinitely remain both an occupier and a member in good standing of the Western club of liberal democracies. Yet they are acutely aware that Israel is the only country threatened with destruction by some of its neighbors. And they face a Palestinian national movement whose goal, they believe, is not only the creation of its own state but also the displacement of its occupier's. Arguably, no other occupier has had to worry, as Israel does, that withdrawing will not merely diminish but destroy it.
The international community fails to acknowledge Israel's unique dilemma, reducing its options to a simplistic choice between occupation and peace, as Krebs implicitly does. This failure further undermines Israeli confidence in the peace process. The old slogan of the Israeli left, "Peace is better than the complete land of Israel," has turned out to be a mockery. Neither peace nor the complete land of Israel, centrists suspect, was ever a realistic option.
THE MAKING OF THE ISRAELI CENTER
Until the late 1980s, support for a Palestinian state could be found only on Israel's far-left fringe. Most Israeli Jews saw Palestinian sovereignty as inconceivable, especially after the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO) adopted the "phased plan" in 1974, which stated that it would use any territory evacuated by Israel as a base from which to destabilize and eventually destroy it.
Under these circumstances, the Israeli mainstream argued about not whether to settle in the West Bank but where. Labor Party leaders such as Yitzhak Rabin and Shimon Peres hoped to transfer most of the West Bank to Jordan while supporting Israeli settlement of underpopulated areas. Almost all Israeli Jews agreed that the territories had been acquired legitimately in a war waged to defend themselves against destruction. The convergence of security needs with Israel's historical claims to biblical Judea and Samaria, birthplace of the Jewish people, resonated broadly. And the occupation appeared relatively cost-free. For years after 1967, the territories were mostly quiet, there were no army roadblocks, and most Palestinians had jobs.
The first intifada, the uprising in the territories that began in late 1987 and lasted into the early 1990s, ended the illusion of a benign occupation. Street battles with civilians throwing rocks and Molotov cocktails scarred a generation of Israeli soldiers. Meanwhile, much of the Israeli public came to realize that the occupation meant suppressing a hostile population and was therefore untenable. For the first time, mainstream Israelis began speaking of separating from the Palestinians.
This transformation led to Israel's acceptance of the Oslo peace process. Since the right had failed to bring security through territorial expansion, Israelis reasoned, perhaps the left would succeed in bringing peace through territorial concessions. Through the 1990s, increasing numbers of Israelis, including some on the right, came to accept the inevitability of a two-state solution and its attendant compromises, such as the division of Jerusalem.
But just as the first intifada ended the fantasy of Greater Israel, the second intifada, which began in September 2000, ended the fantasy of land for peace. Krebs notes that the second intifada "left Israelis frustrated and disillusioned." In fact, the Israeli reaction more closely resembled rage and despair. The left had promised that if only Israel would offer the Palestinians statehood based on the 1967 lines, the result would be peace. And Prime Minister Ehud Barak did precisely that when he accepted the "Clinton parameters" of December 2000, which proposed a contiguous Palestinian state on almost all the territories with its capital in East Jerusalem. But the violence escalated into the worst wave of terrorism in Israel's history. For the first time since 1948, the Israeli home front became the main front. The suicide bombings seemed to vindicate those on the right who warned that the phased plan remained the strategy of the Palestinian national movement.
The second intifada shattered the Israeli left at precisely the moment when the government had adopted its policy. Newspapers published interviews with leading left-wing politicians and journalists who, having struggled for decades to convince their skeptical fellow citizens of the need to negotiate with the PLO, confessed their naiveté. The Israeli journalist Amnon Dankner compared the effect of the second intifada on the Israeli left to the impact on the world communist movement of Soviet Premier Nikita Khrushchev's anti-Stalin "secret speech" in 1956. The peace camp had won the ideological war against the settlers only to be discredited by its Palestinian partner. Except for a small group of true believers, most Israelis concluded that their country no longer bore the chief moral responsibility for the occupation. The Palestinian cause lost one of its greatest assets: the guilty Israeli.
HAWKS TO THE MIDDLE
Still, for centrist Israelis, the consequences of the second intifada did not negate what they had learned in the first intifada. Indeed, those two traumatic events came to define the current centrist worldview. As the center saw it, the left had correctly diagnosed the impossibility of long-term occupation and the right had seen the folly of expecting to achieve peace with a group that denies Israel's legitimacy. The result was paralysis.
The most ambitious centrist attempt to break out of that stalemate and reject permanent occupation came in 2005, when Israeli Prime Minister Ariel Sharon unilaterally withdrew from Gaza and uprooted 21 Israeli settlements. Sharon, elected half a year after the outbreak of the second intifada, was the first Israeli public figure to successfully embody the new center. As the father of the settlement enterprise, he made for an unlikely centrist hero. But he understood that Israelis wanted a leader who adopted a hard line on security and a pragmatic line on territory.
The Gaza withdrawal expressed the centrist mood. If Israel could not occupy the Palestinians or make peace with them, then it needed to extricate itself from the territories on its own terms. To the shock of the settlement movement, whose leaders had assumed that the second intifada confirmed the logic of their enterprise, a majority of Israelis supported Sharon's move. His successor, Ehud Olmert, hoped to unilaterally withdraw from most of the West Bank, as well. But Hamas and other militant groups launched thousands of rockets from Gaza into southern Israel immediately after the withdrawal there, forcing many committed unilateralists to acknowledge that continued West Bank occupation was preferable to unchecked missile fire.
The Kadima Party that Sharon founded to implement the withdrawal from Gaza has floundered in his absence. But the center remains a powerful force -- a fact demonstrated by Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu's attempt to assume its mantle. Although Netanyahu received scant credit for it abroad, many Israelis saw his endorsement of a two-state solution in 2009 as a breakthrough, bringing the Likud Party, however fitfully, into the mainstream consensus regarding a Palestinian state. Indeed, there is no longer any major party -- including the hawkish Yisrael Beitenu (Israel Our Home), the party of Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor Lieberman -- that rejects the principle of a two-state solution. And although much of the international community dismissed Netanyahu's unprecedented ten-month settlement freeze as insufficient, centrist Israelis applauded it.
Some centrists have criticized Netanyahu for refusing to endorse the 1967 borders as a starting point for negotiations. But they fault him for tactical reasons, not strategic ones. By accepting the Clinton parameters, of which the 1967 borders are a key principle, centrist commentators have argued, Netanyahu could have exposed Palestinian intransigence. But few Israelis believe that any initiative at this point would be met by the Palestinian concessions necessary for peace. So long as Hamas remains ascendant and Palestinian leaders from all factions insist on the right of return to Israel proper, no Israeli prime minister will sign a peace agreement.
Despite its deep skepticism of Palestinian intentions, the centrist majority continues to support a two-state solution. For the sake of a peace agreement that will grant Israel legitimacy, centrist Israelis are prepared to uproot dozens of West Bank settlements and concentrate the rest in settlement blocs along the 1967 borders. But the experience of two previous failed attempts to end the occupation has convinced centrists that the settlements are not the main obstacles to an agreement. The Clinton parameters, and an even more far-reaching peace plan presented by Olmert to Abbas in 2008, would have resolved the settlement issue. True, Israel constructed settlements throughout the territories to prevent a contiguous Palestinian state. And the infrastructure that sustains these communities, such as roads and military installations, is substantial. But as the Gaza withdrawal demonstrated, settlements can be dismantled and infrastructure left behind.
If a Palestinian leader emerges who is prepared to accept the legitimacy of Jewish nationhood, his most likely peace partner would be another incarnation of Sharon: a onetime hawk who has moved toward the center. It is no coincidence that it took two hawks -- Menachem Begin and Sharon -- to initiate Israel's two substantive territorial withdrawals. Israelis feel most secure with a hawkish leader, especially when embarking on a dovish initiative; although the Labor Party first advocated a unilateral withdrawal from Gaza during the second intifada, Israelis trusted only Sharon to carry it through. The Gaza withdrawal offers a political model for a future West Bank pullout: a formerly right-wing leader galvanizing a centrist majority to implement a left-wing vision.
For that to happen, Israelis will need to see a shift in the mindset of the Palestinian national movement. Centrist Israelis have made the conceptual breakthrough required to heal the conflict, recognizing that it is a struggle between two legitimate national narratives. The Palestinians must demonstrate that they, too, are ready to grapple with the complexity of the struggle. Were Palestinian leaders to accept the right of the Jewish people to national sovereignty and agree to confine the right of return for Palestinian refugees to a Palestinian state, they would open the path to statehood. As Kuperwasser and Lipner imply, the way to convince centrist Israelis to empower the Palestinians is for Palestinian leaders to accept the legitimacy of Jewish empowerment.
Tuesday, December 6, 2011
Background Briefing on Biological and Toxin Weapons Convention Review Conference
MODERATOR: All right, everybody. We are in Geneva, where we just completed a fascinating day. And tomorrow the Secretary will be addressing the Biological Weapons Review Conference, which happens once every five years. To give you a sense of tomorrow’s event, we have two folks with us. We have [Senior State Department Official One], hereafter known as Senior State Department Official Number One. Sorry about that, [Senior State Department Official One.]
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Or make her Number One. She’s going to speak first.
MODERATOR: [Senior State Department Official One] and I have known each other a long time without a consideration. And then we have [Senior State Department Official Two] whose title is [title redacted], another old friend, hereafter Senior State Department Official Number Two. Take it away, [Senior State Department Official One.]
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Actually, I – we’ll let [Senior State Department Official Two] begin.
MODERATOR: Take it away, [Senior State Department Official Two]
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: Okay. Maybe I’ll just start really quickly. Well, in addition to the title that [Moderator] mentioned, last year I was asked to be – take on a different hat, an additional one as [Senior State Department Official]. And this was very much to prepare over the following year for this review conference. And as you know, this Administration has placed a premium on arms control and nonproliferation. The Biological Weapons – its full title is Biological Weapons and Toxin Convention – is one of the three pillars of the global WMD regime. It is the first treaty to ban an entire class of weapons, that is, biological and toxin weapons, entered into force in 1975.
And so again, as you know, this Administration has placed a premium on arms control, nonproliferation, multilateral engagement. In particular, this is an area that this Administration early on took an interest in. The major review that was issued by the Obama Administration was only the second to come out of the White House, which was issued in 2009. So the President specifically asked the Secretary of State to head our delegation out here. She’ll give our national statement tomorrow.
Now, the focus really is that, one, this is a cornerstone, as I said, of the global nonproliferation regime. But we are trying to make sure that this Convention is adaptable and is focused on the 21st century challenges out there. When the treaty came into force, basically we thought in terms of state actors. We all know that that world has changed. As a matter of fact, it’s 10 years since the United States experienced a biological incident. The anthrax letters killed a number of American citizens, caused billions of dollars in damage. So we know, from first hand, the havoc that can be wrought. Japan suffered a terrorist incident with biological weapons. And indeed, you look at al-Qaida. They have put out bulletins. You’ve seen things where they have called for people to work on biological and chem weapons. So it’s a real threat.
But the positive side of that story, in terms of adapting this Convention to 21st century challenges is that when you develop the tools to deal with a biological weapons incident, the result of which is disease, the same tools give you the same benefits for the global health security, because disease is disease, whether it’s the result of a weapons incident, whether it’s manmade, whether it’s the result of, say, a lab accident. So when you build the national capacities around the world to deter, detect, and deal with disease outbreaks, then you build capacity that’s got benefits for global health in general.
As a matter of fact, the Secretary has spoken about health security in speeches in the past, so it’s – again, this is certainly a long term interest approach. So as I say, it’s keeping to reconfigure this treaty to meet those challenges. And so [Senior State Department Official Two], I think, is going to talk about some of the elements that you could – themes that the Secretary may speak about, programmatic aspects we’d like to hear about.
But ultimately, in this brochure you’ve got some reference materials and a description of some of the programmatic elements we’re looking for. It’s not a press – it wasn’t designed as a press kit, but if you find it useful we just brought it along.
Thank you.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: This will be the first time that we’ve asked the Secretary of State to speak at this review conference. This is the seventh held. The themes that you’ll hear her talk about tomorrow are first, to essentially lay out why we think that continued cooperation against biological threats is important, the universality of a threat given travel times and the connectedness of the world today, and also the interconnectedness of the solutions – of the remedies. How building your national capacity to detect and respond to any biological threat enhances the security of the whole world, and that we do this together.
Second, she’ll give a brief recount of the United States’ efforts to comply with the Convention, which of course, includes destroying all of our biological weapons back in the 1970s. But more importantly is a proactive agenda we cooperate with dozens of countries including many in the less-developed world, not only through State and the ISN bureau, but through DHS, AID, CDC, DOD – all of these agencies play a role. We think we have a very positive record of cooperation.
And finally, she’ll lay out three areas in which we propose this review conference consider for further action. I should note that the review conference does not amend the Convention. What we do is we meet and agree on items we want to focus on in the next five-year period. We have found the last two five-year periods, what they call the intercessional period, to be extremely valuable in bringing together not only many different countries, but filling a room not just with arms control specialists and diplomats but with scientists, industry, law enforcement officials, defense officials, for a genuinely multi-sectoral approach to global health security.
So she’ll put out ideas in three areas – first, the interface of health and security, that is what can we do to enhance the surveillance and response capability of all nations? Secondly, a proposal on national implementation – how can we get states to report more regularly more useful information about their compliance with the Convention in a way that promotes transparency and builds confidence among state’s party that the Convention is respected? And third, on science and technology, to have a discussion about measures the scientific community needs to take to build the consciousness of the risks of bio-science research. We know the tremendous benefits. We wish to encourage those. But a good discussion about responsible, ethical behavior by researchers in this intercessional period is what we’re pushing for. So again, none of these proposals change the Convention; they are, rather, ideas for where to focus our work in the next five-year period. Many other countries are making similar ideas.
I’ll close just by highlighting two areas that I think will not be so highlighted in the end. There are a couple of areas where there are disagreements within the Convention state’s party. One is in the area of verification. A number of states look at the BWC as they look at other arms control agreements, the Nuclear Nonpro Treaty or the Chemical Weapons Convention, and ask, why don’t we have a protocol for verification for intrusive inspections? The United States and a number of other countries believe that the very nature of biological research is such. It is so decentralized, it requires relatively simple equipment, fairly simple level of scientific knowledge, that you simply cannot design a verification mechanism that would work in the way that the IAEA works in the nuclear field. So this is one area where there are different views among state’s party.
Second is what we call Article 10. Article 10 of the Convention requires states to exchange information and technology. We believe, as I said, the U.S. has an excellent record, along with many other developed nations, in genuine two-way exchange with countries on scientific knowledge, on technology, on best practices. Some states, particularly in the nonaligned movement, believe there should be a more centralized, regularized mechanism to require and enforce this kind of technology exchange.
Now as I said, these are two longstanding issues in the Convention. I don’t expect either one of them to prevent us from having a successful inclusion – conclusion of a very forward-looking agenda for the next five years. There’s far more consensus than there is discord among the members of the Convention.
And with that, I think we have a few minutes for questions.
QUESTION: Can I ask just one simple one?
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Mm-hmm.
QUESTION: I get that essentially what you do at these revcons is to look at what you’re going to work on for the next five years. Do you believe that the Convention itself does need to be formally adapted, the language changed, presumably re-ratified by everybody, to deal with the 21st century threats that you were talking about, or not?
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: If I might, I would say no, we’re not looking for any amendment because we think it’s flexible enough, and [Senior State Department Official One] mentioned this intercessional process that’s been a huge success of these last five years. What we’d like to do is further enhance and institutionalize that process. So instead of, say, having this group [Senior State Department Official One] was talking about, this huge convening forum here that brings together diplomats, scientists, NGOs, law enforcement, animal and health experts together, instead of, say, just come in, having a meeting and then sort of going away, our idea is to have an institutional process where you have working groups. And I think we sketch out sort of three baskets there where you would develop recommendations then for the state’s parties, that you have a continuing dialogue.
And again, the rapid pace of change in biological sciences is so extraordinary that, for example, science and technology is one of the areas that we’d like to see a working group or an ongoing one established to try and keep up with that. For example, there’s the other non-nuclear (inaudible) of the chemical weapons convention obviously deals with chemical weapons. But what’s fascinating science here is you have a convergence of chemical and biological areas. You could now chemically synthesize biological pathogens. So it’s extraordinary how rapid a change. And we believe that you need to, as I say, institutionalize this dialogue to try and stay ahead of that curve, both for traditional arms control security issues and also because, as we were talking about, this sort of health security and the extraordinary challenges we face in today’s global world where we all know disease knows no borders.
QUESTION: Can you say which countries are pushing for – if any, are pushing for the verification protocol?
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: So far – you’ll see in your packet an example of a summary of a U.S. proposal. We posted on the website of the Convention our specific language for proposals, and a number of other countries have done the same. So far, we have not seen any country that has posted a proposal for a verification mechanism. It’s a common element of rhetoric among a number of non-aligned states and among a number of allied states as well, who simply disagree with us about the impossibility of concluding such a mechanism. So there’s a wide array of states that believe a Convention like this needs a protocol for verification.
QUESTION: There’s not a risk of something like the (inaudible), where there’ll be an in-run around the normal process by some group of like-minded countries?
QUESTION: I’ll take that one as a yes. (Laughter.)
QUESTION: I don’t know the details.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: I think for one, this Convention runs by consensus. And as [Senior State Department Official One] said, that by and large there’s sort of a traditional attachment to the goal of the verification regime. That’s, for example, the position of the neutral/non-aligned movement, which is about a hundred and – it’s a huge chunk of the (inaudible) the international – it’s (inaudible), for example.
But as I say, it’s more sort of a standard thing, but not the big sort of floor piece. I would perhaps identify – I mean, Iran is one country that, for example, the prepcon that we had here last April, which went extraordinarily smoothly, Iran was the one country that was isolated in terms of trying to specify a specific focus on verification at the review conference.
QUESTION: Wouldn’t we like a verification process with Iran, so we can go in there and start poking around?
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: Well, one – this goes back to this notion of the changing nature of the threat out there. In terms of biological terrorism, how do you conceivably verify that?
MODERATOR: I think the point that [Senior State Department Official Two] is trying to make is that false verification is worse than no verification, in the sense that it gives you this sense of security that is not warranted.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: We’ve got no bias against verification. We have a bias in favor of things that work. And we simply don’t believe you can design a verification mechanism in this field that will achieve the goal of giving genuine confidence about other countries’ programs and intentions.
QUESTION: But is that because they – the threat now is really not so much countries as opposed to the non-state actors?
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: It’s not because of that, but I agree with the sentence. We think there is more reason to be concerned about sub-national actors and terrorists than about states. The BWC has been an enormous success in establishing an international norm that really treats biological weapons, as the preambles say, as abhorrent to the conscience of mankind. And even those countries that have not signed the Convention would not dream of making the argument that they have the right to pursue such a program.
MODERATOR: Do you want to go a little deeper on why you can’t verify?
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: Well again, the dual-use nature. Because the same facilities that can produce equipment that would be used as a biological weapons – are the same facilities, the same substances that are vital for our industry, pharmaceuticals, our health, and so on. So it’s how you distinguish between the essential, vital, peaceful uses of the biological field and something that would be a biological agent. And as I say, that’s a huge problem just within, say, State programs. But then when it comes to, say, terrorism – and unlike the nuclear field, where you need massive infrastructure, complex programs, and so on, it’s – especially with the geographic changes in technology, it’s not that difficult to synthesize the materials. I mean, sort of –
MODERATOR: Anybody can do it in their basement.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: In their garage. That A-student in high school biology.
QUESTION: So if I might push just a little bit more on that. So basically, right now, as you go towards this revcon, is this really your main concern about these verification –
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: No.
QUESTION: No.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL TWO: I mean, it’s an issue out there. We’ve tried to sort of reframe the debate as have a lot of countries, in terms of talking about enhancing confidence in our minds.
QUESTION: What about proliferation? What about – I mean, verification obviously, but what about proliferation? I think that’s a much greater concern than verification.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: And our proposals are aimed at that. The programs that we do through State, Defense, DHS, are designed at providing the kind of security at biological research facilities around the world that will prevent the misuse or the diversion of any of these materials. So that’s an active step against proliferation. We also believe that enhancing a country’s ability to detect early a biological outbreak and to respond effectively is, in fact, a deterrent against the development of biological weapons. If all countries are well-prepared to respond, the value, either to a state or to a terrorist organization, of biological weapons will decline. So it’s a – inherently both a health security measure and a deterrent measure.
MODERATOR: Anything else?
All right, guys. Thank you very much.
SENIOR STATE DEPARTMENT OFFICIAL ONE: Thanks.
MODERATOR: Appreciate it.
QUESTION: Thank you.