Great. Thanks, Ben. So we have a fantastic moderator who knows more about this subject than any of us, so I'm going to try to be brief and let Ben ask us some questions.

Let me start, as I know Ben would like us to, by trying to be provocative, to say, obviously, on the one hand, candidate Trump and then President Trump for the first three months have done a number of extraordinarily alarming and troubling things for those of us who are concerned about international law, but there may be some rays of hope. And the question is, where will those rays of hope go? So let me de-compact that.

I have been, I think as most of you know, very concerned about President Trump as a candidate all along. As Ben knows, I wrote one of the earliest posts on Lawfare in November 2015, not 2016, that said that Donald Trump is a danger to our national security based on statements that he had made about returning to waterboarding, killing the family members of terrorists. It troubled me when he said, “Who were those eggheads who had negotiated the Geneva Conventions?” and I felt that he was really dividing us as a country as a candidate.

As many of you know, that then blossomed into the letter that I wrote on behalf of the fifty national security officials in August last year that said that Donald Trump is not qualified to be president. He lacks the qualifications, experience, and values to be president, and would be reckless and dangerous. And I have remained concerned in the first couple of months of this administration about things that he has done, many things that we're all well aware of, such as the executive order on immigration. Smaller things that you may not have seen, which just struck me as bizarre, his statement that we should have taken the oil in Iraq and maybe we still will. And then when challenged on that, he said, “What, international law experts say that's wrong?” So he continues to say these unusual things.

There were the draft executive orders that came out in the very beginning, which I'd like to talk a little bit about. Some of them didn't come out, like the one on multilateral treaties, the one on defunding the UN, the one on resuming the CIA programs, but it gives you a sense of where President Trump's advisors are. And those are obviously concerning things. We have seen a potential return to some of the troubling counterterrorism policies that I know Elisa will talk about. The attorney general has talked about reopening Guantanamo. So there's a lot to be alarmed and concerned about.

The question will be, is this administration going to begin to settle down when more officials get into place? The one ray of hope that I do see is that I think there are some serious lawyers who are going into positions in this administration—centrist, nonideological lawyers, who I hope once they get into these positions will help to educate the president and some of his advisors on the importance of international law and international institutions.

I have a sense of who the legal advisor may be, and I think it is someone, if we head in this direction, that people will be comfortable with. John Sullivan had been named to be general counsel at DoD. He is a very serious centrist lawyer. They pulled his nomination to make him deputy secretary of state, a somewhat unusual appointment, but he is highly qualified. So my hope is that with some of these serious people in place that the administration may begin to settle down. The National Security Council, in utter disarray in the beginning, is beginning to settle down.

I don't know what direction this is all going to head. It could continue in the first direction of alarm and troubling, but it may—if we get some of these more serious people in place, particularly the lawyers, it may begin to settle down after a while. So I think there honestly is—there is cause for alarm, but it is too early to tell yet.