How to Survive a Chaotic World

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0:30Hi, I'm Ravi Agrawal, Foreign Policy's Editor-in-Chief. This is FP Live.

0:39So, I'm on leave this week, but I recorded an interview I really think you're going to like. This one's a big step back from the drumbeat of news. We often talk about world order on this program. Discussions around it center on two things. Why the rules-based order, largely built by the United States, is breaking down. And second, what might come next? Well, my guest this week says we should stop thinking that China wants the responsibility of running a new order.

1:12In his new book, Surviving Chaos, Geopolitics When the Rules Fail, Mark Leonard argues we are already in what he calls un-order. Not disorder, but un-order. A chaotic era where the very definitions of rules and order are contested. And in this contest, you have two basic types of actors, he says. Architects, who are invested in the old system. And artisans, who accept that the world is changing dramatically

1:45and invest their efforts in adapting to this change and taking advantage of new opportunities. The book's prescription, then, is to be a successful artisan. The question is how. So, let's hear more from the author of Surviving Chaos. Mark Leonard is also the co-founder and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. Let's dive in.

2:12Mark, welcome and congratulations on the new book. Thanks so much. I'm really thrilled to be with you. So, you begin the book by looking at how China gets all this attention as a big convener. Trump was just there. Putin goes regularly. Modi goes. The members of the Shanghai Cooperation Summit now account for 40% of the world's GDP. China hosted their last summit. And yet, the opening contention of your book is that China does not want to rule the world.

2:43Explain that. So, China is becoming one of the most powerful countries in the world. And as you say, it's convening all these different institutions. But I think we often make the mistake of imagining that they want to create a Sinocentric system like the U.S. world order, which has dominated the last eight decades. But I think if you listen more carefully to what President Xi Jinping and other people in the Chinese leadership are saying, they're definitely trying to push back on U.S. leadership.

3:14They're trying to build alliances. Well, not alliances, but links to other parts of the world. But their starting point is very, very different. Whereas in the West, people talk endlessly about preserving order, about the rules-based order, the liberal international order. The key phrase that Xi Jinping uses more than almost anything else when he talks about global situation is, great changes unseen in a century. And by that, what he means is that the world is going to go through convulsive, disruptive changes.

3:45And from his perspective, the goal is to put China in a place where it can both survive those changes and benefit from them. And a lot of what China has been doing has been building its self-reliance, building its resilience, building the sorts of relationships that it needs in order to be secure in a world of chaos, rather than trying to construct an order with rules and institutions and an architecture like the U.S. did after World War II and which was expanded after the Cold War.

4:16And just to build on that for a second, Mark, I mean, part of this feeling you're describing, I imagine as someone like Xi Jinping looks at U.S. attempts to run the world, to be responsible for world order, or, for example, to be responsible for Iran not getting a nuclear weapon, Beijing probably looks at all of that and thinks, why do we need this hassle? It's definitely true that they have looked at what happened to other great powers with enormous care over the last few decades as they reach the global prime time.

4:50And there are various things they want to avoid. On the one hand, they're desperate to avoid the fate of the Soviet Union and what happened with Gorbachev. And one of the enduring fears of Xi Jinping is to go the way that Gorbachev went. So they want to make sure that they don't go down that path. And then they also look at what happened to other empires that overextend themselves. And they are very clear that they don't necessarily want to take on the burdens of acting as the upholder of a global system.

5:23And they also, I think, assume that we're going to see some quite big changes, which are going to make any institutions that get built quite fragile, big kind of structural forces, you know, changes in the nature of capitalism, changes in our technology with AI and other things like that, climate change, but also demographic change. And those are things which they see as disruptive technologies. So this idea of great changes sounds a bit clunky to English ears.

5:55But in China, it echoes the language which people used in the late 19th century when China found itself on the wrong side of great changes, when it encountered Western modernity and it began the century of humiliation which China went through. So as a result, they're desperate not to miss out the next disruptive changes which blow up all the rules. And they're looking for these things all the time. And that's why they were, I think, quick to spot the changes in our energy systems and to invest in EVs and in new technologies there.

6:27That is why they're quick to invest in quantum computers in a whole series of other technologies because they want to be on the right side of these disruptions. But they see those disruptions going beyond technology. They see it through demography. They see it through changes in the way that capitalism works. And in fact, there's a whole cottage industry in Chinese think tanks or Communist Party bodies trying to work out what these great changes might be that Xi Jinping talks about. Fascinating. So I think we've set the stage now for a world in which the order, as we knew it, is in trouble, collapsing even.

7:04And we've established here that China isn't so interested in supplanting the United States as some sort of a leader or upholder of the rules and norms and the system as we've known it. And then we come to what you are calling un-order. How do you define it? How is it different from disorder? And can you give us an example of what that looks like? Sure. So for me, disorder is a bit like, you know, when people say that hypocrisy is the tribute that vice pays to virtue.

7:41If you say that there's a disorder, it implies people are breaking the rules, which means that there is an agreement on what the rules are and what an order might look like. Un-order for me is what happens when there is no agreement on what is right or what's wrong or what the rules are. And they've just been supplanted and people have moved on beyond them. It's a kind of pre-order situation where ideas of order don't really mean anything. Sounds a bit abstract, but one way of thinking about it is the difference between the Iraq war in 2003 and the war in Iran at the moment.

8:16If you go back to 2003, there were disagreements about both whether Iraq posed an imminent threat to the world through its weapons of mass destruction and then how to deal with it. But the Bush administration went about putting together a legal case. They went to the United Nations. They prosecuted their case. And it's true that they did launch the war anyway, even when they didn't get a resolution from the United Nations and broke the rule. So it was kind of disorder. But then they tried to compartmentalize it.

8:48And when the war ended, they went back to the United Nations and got them to help reconstructing Iraq. And they maintained relationships with all the powers that they were disagreeing with on counterterrorism and on other issues. If you look at the war on Iran, it's not that Israel and the US were breaking the rules. The idea that there were international rules didn't really occur to them. It wasn't an important part in the decision-making process in the Pentagon and in Tel Aviv. It was, you know, quite incidental.

9:19When people made those sorts of arguments, they couldn't have been less relevant to the decisions that were actually made. And then when Iran was attacked, it also didn't really distinguish between countries that were attacking it. It went after Israel, but also went after countries which were maybe co-belligerent in their minds, like UAE. But they also went after countries that had nothing to do with the attacks, like Oman and Qatar. And in fact, what seemed to matter more than the international law was how far their drones and their missiles could reach.

9:52And they just went after anyone that they could. And then they tried to spread it immediately by closing the Straits of Hormuz. So you get this kind of spiraling of one crisis to another. And the whole point about, you know, an order is that you try and put constraints on what form competition makes and you take things off the table. But it's interesting here that the only things that are off the table are things that countries don't think that they can do. That's the limit of what's happening. So I think in that way, that's what an order means.

10:25It's a situation where there is no common frame within which to talk about what's going on. Some countries do what they like. You have immediate contagion from one sphere to another. And people don't really have any common reference points to adjudicate what's happening. It's quite a different situation from simply disorder, where you have people who are transgressing. But people understand both the transgressors and the people who disagree with them, what the rules should be.

10:55Mark, and I know I asked you for an example. And so I think you've very successfully provided these two instances, two decades apart. But it seems to me, of course, that this didn't happen all at once. I mean, it's been a slippery slope for some time where rules could be broken before, but there was still this sort of rhetorical acknowledgement of the importance of rules. And in recent years, the rhetoric has declined. The breaking of rules is more common. And especially bigger countries can act with more impunity than they did before.

11:29Is that right? Absolutely. Yeah. So there is not a single event that created an order. I think it's a number of different trends. One is basically the fact that the US, as the upholder of that order, has seen its relative power in the world shrink. So it's still the most powerful country in the world by far in many domains. But it runs up against the opposition, both from other great powers like China and Russia, but also it struggles to keep the Red Sea open when the Houthis try and close it.

12:00And so you have a kind of erosion of America's ability to act as an enforcer. Secondly, the collapse of the social consensus in America to play that sort of role, which makes America much less predictable. So you don't have other people thinking that they can rely on the US as a custodian of that order. And then as a result of that, they start hedging against an America that's less reliable and America becomes less indispensable and you get alternative arrangements taking place

12:34and a lot of hedging leads to self-reliance and you kind of get a breakdown of a single framework which governs how the world works. And then the final thing is, I think, some of these structural changes that I talked about before when I was talking about China, which I think also messes up the power dynamics in the world and makes it much harder to see a stable set of power relations emerging between great powers because we know that AI is going to be very, very disruptive to power relations.

13:05We know that the energy transition is going to create new winners and losers. We know that there are big demographic shifts. And we also can see how we have this sort of hyper-connected world of capitalism, but which is being weaponized in new ways, which also creates different power dynamics in the world. So all of those things coming together make it much harder to have a settled state of power relations, which I think are one of the core components of an order.

13:33So I guess the big question on our listeners' minds right now must be, how do we navigate this un-order in the coming decades? And you have this neat way of explaining two camps in the world, not East or West, not North or South, but architects and artisans. Explain that. Who are architects? Who are artisans? Architects are people who have grand designs for how the world should work. And they come up with an attempt to create a rule book and a set of norms.

14:05And then you try and anchor those norms in a set of institutions and laws and practices which govern the world. And the model for that is Dean Aitreson and John Maynard Keynes after World War II that create the Bretton Woods system. And that then gets expanded off to the end of the Cold War with a whole series of new global institutions. And so Europeans and Americans are very much the kind of model for the architect. And it's something which has served us very, very well for decades. But it tends to work well in a sort of world where you have quite a lot of control over what's

14:41going on and there's greater predictability. It's a kind of modernist conception of how things work. Artisans, on the other hand, are actors that don't try and impose a structure on the world, but try and work out where the world is going anyway and how they can best respond to those changes. And rather than building new things from scratch, they improvise, they reuse old materials, they see if they can adapt things which already exist to new purposes.

15:13And in many ways, China is the model for that. It came to global prominence as a great power, as a superpower within a global system that it didn't create, which it inherited. And it's been trying to find a space within that and to modernize its economy, to build different relationships within a system over which it had limited control. And it did it not by blowing up the system, but by improvising, by testing things out, by seeing whether it could change things at the margins, whether it could create new structures.

15:46And you mentioned some of them earlier, you know, the Shanghai Corporation Organization, the BRICS, the Belt and Road Initiative. They're all things that have taken place within an existing system, but they've adapted and have been much more experimental. And they've tried to work out where the world was going anyway, rather than bending it to a Chinese vision. So, you know, we can go through some of the different areas of policy where they've done that. But I think it's very true, for example, of their economic policy, where China has been

16:16de-risking in a big way. It's true of their technology policies made in China 2025. It's true also of their foreign policies. If you look at the way that they've built relationships with the big markets of the future, the Global South, through the Belt and Road Initiative and through other areas, what they seem to be doing is trying to understand where the world was going anyway and to put themselves in a position that they could deal with that. And sometimes that looks quite defensive because, you know, a lot of what China's been doing has been preparing for chaos, stockpiling chips, stockpiling energy, stockpiling food to prepare

16:53for a rainy day so that it doesn't get in trouble in the world of unorder.

16:59We're going to spend much of the rest of this discussion trying to figure out how to be a good artisan. But before we get to that, I just want to linger a little bit on why we're abandoning the idea of being a good architect. And I'm wondering, is it no longer advisable to try either to preserve the system as it was because it's not recoverable? Or is it just that the moment at which the system, as we know it, was built and created

17:30was just a very particular post-colonial moment in the world after World War II as well, where we were looking for a system and we needed a system. And there was a moment where countries were willing to consider one. What is it about this moment that makes you feel, Mark, that we need to abandon any attempts at being an architect again? So I love the system. Don't get me wrong. I'm a European. I'd love to live in a world of rules and multilateralism. Me too.

18:00But my feeling is that it was a system that grew out of a particular set of relations which were quite stable in their own way. You first had a lot of these things came of age during the Cold War where you had some really scary geopolitical dynamics. But there was a degree of stability with two great powers that controlled the majority of the global economy and military force and other indicators of power. And then after that, in the post-Cold War era, the US was preeminent and was able to expand

18:39a lot of the institutions in its order to the rest of the world and to invite other countries in on its own terms. But those power relations have disappeared. You know, the US is still extraordinarily powerful, but it doesn't have the same primacy that it had in the years after the end of the Cold War. And other countries are bristling at being constrained by an order which they didn't create. A lot of people also say that, you know, this golden period of order that you're describing

19:12was at best partial. It might have been a white peace in Europe and in North America, but actually, you know, there were thousands of people dying every day in most of the rest of the world during the Cold War. And people had to deal with a lot of instability, economic instability, geopolitical chaos, and they were at the sharp end of disorder during that period of time. There is also, you know, now a competition between different ideas of the future. People talk about multiple modernities.

19:43But anyway, they're different ideas which are being put forward. We're seeing a lot of countries going back and looking at pre-Western civilizations, whether it's the Hindutva in India or Ottoman ideas in Turkey or the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation. So this idea of having a sort of single rule book, which was designed in the West and which covers everybody at all times and which can be underpinned by American power, that is running

20:13into quite a lot of opposition in other parts of the world. And then I think secondly, as we sort of discussed earlier, you know, at least 40% of American citizens now think that they were the biggest victims of the American lead water and they don't want to carry on with it. They are pushing back on American economic policy and trade policies. They're pushing back on the free movement of people, which was part of the American dream. And they're also pushing back on the idea that America stands for something bigger than its

20:47own national interests. And so you've got a kind of revolt from the outside and a revolt from the inside. And then these big structural changes, which mean that we're going to have chaos anyway, which was going to put a lot of pressure on these institutions and create new winners and losers and incentives for people to test their chances to look for arbitrage within a system. So I think it's pretty difficult to see how you can sustain this system, particularly if the US

21:18is exiting from it. And it's great to hear people like Mark Carney and others talk about a middle power strategy. But, you know, Mark Carney can't get together with Emmanuel Macron and, you know, the Japanese prime minister and stop the war in Iran and reopen the Straits of Hormuz. He can't stop the war between Russia and Ukraine at the moment and close that down overnight. You know, we can have partial things which you can do together. You can have plurilateral, mini-lateral solutions.

21:50And I think in different regions of the world, you can have a rule-based order. Certainly the European Union is trying to do that in at least the western and central parts of Europe, even if it's not going to extend all the way to Vladivostok. So you can have order in different parts of the world. But I don't think you can have a sort of global order and a global rules-based system without having a degree of stability in terms of power relations and a degree of consent for those rules. And I think both of those things have disappeared and are unlikely to come back, at least within

22:24my lifetime.

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25:20I guess the question in this world of unorder and chaos, how do we survive the chaos? And maybe I can ask you to refer specifically to Europe here, which you spend a lot of time in the book looking at what Europe needs to do. And, you know, it struck me that one of the things you say right at the start is that Europe is at risk of repeating China's historical mistakes. What did you mean by that?

25:50And how does Europe avoid that? So it's interesting that this phrase, which Xi Jinping uses, great changes unseen in a century, comes from statesmen and intellectuals in China who are trying to understand how China goes from being the center of the world to becoming, you know, semi-colonized, finding that it's fallen behind France and the UK and then eventually gets dismembered as a country. And, you know, so how did that happen?

26:21And it was quite a puzzling period of time. And I think that what they did was they then went out and tried to understand the rest of the world and bring other ideas in and lots of new words were brought into the Chinese language at the beginning of the 20th century that didn't exist there before, like science and democracy and the idea of progress, because they thought history was cyclical before. The idea that it might have some sort of direction didn't make any sense. And I think that the danger now is that Europeans and people in the West have the same

26:53reactions to China's in the late 19th century. So being quite consumed by their own problems rather than curious about what was going on in the world, thinking that they had all the answers and that their institutions and that their rules should prevail, that they would protect them and not really adapting to quite big fundamental shifts in technology, in demography, which really changed everything for China. And so I think in that sense, the Chinese now think that they're on the right side of

27:26these great changes. And this might be the beginning of the West century of humiliation, that we find ourselves on the wrong side of it. And I think the only way of avoiding that is rather than trying to preserve an order that is dead anyway and is quite difficult to defend, for us to try and work out how to get on the right side of these changes. And I look at five key dimensions where the Chinese are thinking about things in a different way, which is quite challenging to us. And they're particularly challenging to Europeans.

27:59What are the five? OK, so the first is really about whether your goal is preserving order and expecting things to stay the same or whether you're leaning into these kind of changes that are happening. And I started working on this book just before the war in Ukraine started. And that, you know, you couldn't listen to Western policymakers who weren't talking about preserving order and the rules-based order. And that was very, very different to the way that Chinese people were thinking about it. The second dimension, I think, is about whether you think that we have a single rule book

28:32or whether you have a more plural world where you have a coexistence of different sets of rules. And the Chinese are very much, strangely, for a centralized, semi-totalitarian regime. They talk a lot about the democratization of international relations, and they have this idea that you should have different civilizations living side by side and defining the rules, which is very different from kind of Western universalism. The third dimension is about how we think about connectivity and connections. I think we've been so used, particularly in the US and Europe,

29:05to seeing globalization as something that we did to the world, that we haven't really thought about what it means to be on the other end of interdependence when it gets used against you. And so with China, it's always treated globalization and connectivity a bit like fire. You know, it's a superpower. It can allow you to do great things. But at the same time, they're terrified about it destroying Chinese culture, undermining the grip of the Communist Party. So they have this very careful calibration of trying to work out where you let in foreign capital

29:38and where you don't and, you know, how you engage with the world. And I think that's something that's happening much more for Europeans now. We're kind of thinking about de-risking and diversification and how you make sure that you don't put yourself in a position of weakness. The fourth change is about how we think about our security. So in the West, we tend to externalize our security for institutions, whether it's NATO or the World Trade Organization, whereas the Chinese idea is to turn things around. So rather than thinking about security as something you defend from the outside in,

30:10you start from the inside out. You make yourself resilient. You make yourself a kind of tough target. And Xi Jinping's got this holistic conception of national security. So he's essentially arguing that almost everything is a security threat. He's got 18 different dimensions that he worries about from information and culture through to classical things like, you know, nuclear policy and outer space and deep seas and other things like that. But the basic idea is that you treat everything as a potential security threat and that you therefore have to make sure that you're fully de-risked

30:44from your food policy to your energy policy to, you know, the kind of data that you allow in and out of your country. And that's a very different way of doing it. And then the kind of final difference is about whether you think you can control things or whether you respond to forces which are already out there. And a very kind of good example of that for me is like climate change and the climate debate. So in the West, what we tended to do is to think that we can deal with climate change

31:15by creating a kind of big system which changes the choices that companies and countries make. So the whole COP system and you come up with cap and trade in rules and things like that. Whereas the Chinese, I think, sort of accepted that climate and the energy transition is going to be a competitive space. And they linked it up with their national models of development. And they came up with a way of trying to conquer lots of different parts of the system. But it's meant that instead of it being an international cooperative thing,

31:50it's much more a national competitive thing where it's connected with your development model and with your wider goals of security and other sorts of things in China. But that in a way is kind of adapting to what is happening in the world anyway, rather than thinking that you can create a structure which changes the way that everybody else acts.

32:10In this world you're describing, Mark, and all these ways of not repeating China's mistakes from the 19th century and before, but copying some of what China's done quite successfully as a leading artisan in the last three or four decades. I can see how a lot of that works for Europe. Would this also work for smaller countries that are not part of a bigger union? In other words, is there a template for, you know, a Kenya or an Indonesia as an artisan that won't have the same industrial policy muscle

32:47that you're recommending a Europe should try to build up? I think in many ways the artisan instinct comes much more easily to small countries because they're not used to creating the weather conditions. They have to adapt to what decisions get made in great powers and find a way of doing well within systems which they don't totally control. So those sorts of instincts, I think, are, you know, much more prevalent. And a lot of the countries that have done really well in the past, as you say, are quite small states like Singapore or Nordic countries.

33:22Finland has got their version of the great changes. They have this thing called the driftwood theory of history where they basically think that Finland's like a piece of driftwood in, you know, kind of great tides which they can't control. And you can only make a few changes at the margins, you know, where you can put an oar in on one side or the other side to make sure that you don't hit the banks of the river as you kind of get powered down it. But it's a different way of thinking about what you're doing from a great power. So I think in some ways, the biggest challenge is for the big blocks.

33:55It's for the United States. It's for Europeans that have been architects for the last few centuries and are now having to accept that they're living in a world which they can't control in the way that they have historically. Let me try and insert one wrinkle into proceedings here. I mean, I feel like much of the structure we're discussing is just built on the assumption that China doesn't want to be an actively malign influence. And so if you have a world in which China changes its designs, you know, it wants to be more ambitious.

34:29It wants to maybe be more involved in running the world. Added to that, the United States, as Stephen Walt puts it, is looking like a predatory hegemon right now or a rogue state. And if that accelerates and becomes a bigger malign force, how does this thesis hold of recommending countries to play this artisanal kind of role? I'm not saying that China isn't going to be a malign force in the world.

35:04I think it is already quite predatory in a lot of different areas. I think its economic model is very, very threatening to many parts of the world. And there are lots of countries that are being de-industrialized by China's economic choices at the moment. And I think that's going to get a lot worse. And they are obviously, you know, acting in a malign way towards a lot of their neighbors. They're trying to change the balance of power in different places. What I don't think they're trying to do is to create global public goods in the way that the U.S. did after World War II and to have a system like the U.S. was creating.

35:36That's my kind of argument. It's not that China is going to be a benign country. It's just that it's not going to be a kind of global architect. It's going to probably be more predatory. I think this is, in many ways, the hour of the predators. You're seeing all sorts of uncontrolled behavior from lots of different countries. And in that age where no one has enough control to impose order on the whole system and where power balances are changing all the time,

36:06which makes it attractive and interesting for everybody to see what they can get away with, you just don't have any choice but to be artisanal. You can bemoan the old order as much as you like, but it's not going to bring it back. And you can hope that there'll be a new order created. But the act of hoping doesn't create that order. So in the absence of the old order, and if a new order can't be formed, you just have to try and understand what's going on in the present. And that's basically what my book's about.

36:37The first thing we need to do is to really accept that the liberal order isn't dying. It's well and truly dead. There's no point in performing CPR on it. So therefore, you've got to come up with other strategies. And your strategies might be going for kind of partial order. There are things that you can do in different regions. So I think the European Union is in a very positive position because you've got almost half a billion people who live in it. You can try and create a set of rules and institutions which work for that part of the world. You can see to what extent middle powers can work together in limited areas.

37:11But as I said earlier, it's not going to be a global order that comes out of that. But you can impose costs on people who do things that you don't like in your part of the world. We've seen that when Russia invaded Ukraine, Europeans have introduced 20 packages of sanctions against them. They're spending hundreds of billions of euros backing the Ukrainians and trying to help them fight Russia to a standstill, even if they can't repel the Russian invasion. And, you know, that's a way of saying, OK, in our part of the world, this is something we can do.

37:44We'll stop you from doing that. And I think that it's those sorts of artisanal things that are increasingly going to have to happen if you want to make sure that you don't get overwhelmed by predatory behavior. But I think that's different from having a global rule book with a global policeman that can enforce it.

38:02Mark, I think all of this is realistic, even though it's grim. And the book has so many recommendations for how leaders should think about problems they're confronted with right now. I want to ask you how you've grappled with values in all of this, because as we think of un-order and a world in which there isn't one body or a superpower that is backstopping or forcing countries to behave or adhere to an ideal of values or norms or human rights,

38:36what would you recommend for how leaders should think about that question? And, for example, you discussed migration a fair bit. And your recommendation, I guess, is that countries just be a lot more realistic about the trade-offs, right? Yeah, look, I, you know, I studied philosophy and spent a lot of time thinking about ethics and ethical systems. And so I'm not somebody who thinks that we live in a values-free world and that foreign policy, you shouldn't have any values in it.

39:07But at the same time, my starting point is that we're entering a more plural world where a lot of the battles about values are being conducted within particular polities. And what's often happened in the West is that we had kind of titanic struggles within our own societies, which advanced values, you know, the French Revolution, the fight for the franchise, for women's rights, for sexual liberation, for other types of things in our different societies. And once you win the battle in your society, then within two minutes, you then universalise it and try and say this right, which was born out of a very particular set of power relations in a particular social and historical context, should somehow be universal.

39:53Now, I don't think we should run away from those rights. I really love a lot of the rights that have been hard won in our societies. But I do think that there's something slightly ahistorical about the way that we try and project it on everyone else. And one of the moments that was a big shock to me was during the World Cup in Qatar, where people in the West were attacking the Qataris for not defending the rights of sexual minorities that were not present in our own societies, even as recently as 10 or 15 years ago.

40:27And then suddenly, this is a sign that Qatar is this kind of evil country, rather than recognising that, you know, you have struggles in all sorts of different societies, people come up with different social settlements. But the hubris with which we spoke to the Qataris, I think, was extremely off-putting for many people in different areas. Doesn't mean that we should give up on that right that we kind of believe in and that we've won. But I think we should be a bit more conscious of the fact that it's come out of a particular set of circumstances and less arrogant about how we talk to other players.

40:58You know, different societies are going to have their struggles. They're going to try and weigh different values against each other. Some societies will tend more towards individual freedom. Other societies think about freedom in more collective terms, and they think about the trade-offs in different areas. And, you know, there are some things that I hope we can take off the table. And if we're thinking about international rights, what we should do is try and re-establish those very basic norms and then, you know, fight quite hard in our own societies to keep the more advanced rights.

41:31But I think we're going back to the drawing board now in terms of working out at least kind of basic rules which everyone adheres to, such as not committing genocide, not changing borders by force, not attacking civilians. Sounds like chaos, and good job, Mark, that your book is titled Surviving Chaos, Geopolitics, When the Rules Fail. I highly recommend it to everyone. Mark Leonard, thanks so much for joining us. Thank you.

41:58And that was Mark Leonard, author of Surviving Chaos and director of the European Council on Foreign Relations. FPLive, the podcast, is produced by Rosie Chulin. The executive producer of the show is Donna Schoen. And I'm Ravi Agrawal. I'll see you next time. We'll see you next time.

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