Walter Russell Mead - How America Keeps Winning - [Invest Like the Best, EP.490]

Framing the modern world

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1:27Hello and welcome, everyone. I'm Patrick O'Shaughnessy, and this is Invest Like the Best. This show is an open-ended exploration of markets, ideas, stories, and strategies that will help you better invest both your time and your money. If you enjoy these conversations and want to go deeper, check out Colossus, our quarterly publication with in-depth profiles of the people shaping business and investing. You can find Colossus along with all of our podcasts at Colossus.com.

1:51Patrick O'Shaughnessy is the CEO of Positive Sum. All opinions expressed by Patrick and podcast guests are solely their own opinions and do not reflect the opinion of Positive Sum. This podcast is for informational purposes only and should not be relied upon as a basis for investment decisions. Clients of Positive Sum may maintain positions in the securities discussed in this podcast. To learn more, visit psum.vc.

2:18Walter, I've been looking forward to this for many, many months. We were introduced through Jeremy Stern, who runs Colossus, who I know credits you with a lot of his skill in writing and thinking about the world. I've been so excited to do this with you. We've got such a wide range of topics that I thought it would be appropriate to begin by having you frame your view of America in the world today. In very, very broad strokes, you've written a lot about how and why the UK and then sort of us as the successor in America have sort of won the last several hundred years of global affairs.

2:50I'd love you to talk about the sweep of that winning, how you conceive of us and our role in the world today. It's a really interesting time because on the one hand, the Pax Americana that we kind of developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990, the end of the Cold War, is really in crisis. But if you step back a little bit, American power is not in crisis. The networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe and so on,

3:23those are all burning or crumbling. But the United States as a power, it seems to me, is if anything, thanks to the information revolution and sort of this extraordinary raises in productivity that I believe we have experienced and are about to experience, I think we're still charging ahead. It's this odd picture of a dynamic country and a collapsing world system. The Trump presidency has kind of exaggerated a lot of the disruption. I'm optimistic about America's position, medium to long term.

3:56I do think we're in rough waters right now. What do you mean by collapsing world system? Well, you think about the World Trade Organization. We used to have this rules-based system for trade. Now your tariff is more or less what President Trump wakes up in the morning and thinks it should be. As a country, we exercised more of our power through institutions, the NATO alliance, UN even at times. And we're not doing that. Since World War II, it's been sort of a principle

4:28of American foreign policy that we want to be steady, predictable. You want everybody to know where America's red lines are. You want everybody to be able to rely. If we made a commitment in 1955, unless we announce with great fanfare that it's changing, it's still there. So we're trying to provide this bedrock of solidity in the world. And we're obviously not trying to do that anymore. For President Trump, I think he believes he maximizes his advantages by being completely unpredictable

4:59and also crossing a lot of lines so that past presidents probably would not have said things like, OK, if you don't raise your defense budget, we're going to double your tariffs or something of that kind and try to solve problems through channels. Trump would make the argument that didn't work. And so he's now completely trashing the institutional networks that for a very long time were the vessels of American power.

5:30And I think he's doing it in a way that's going to be very hard for his successors to rebuild.

The political method of Donald Trump

5:36How would you teach someone else his method? You've written a lot about this. I'm very curious how you framed it. He's an interesting president, no doubt, whether you're for or against what he's been doing. How would you teach his method to somebody that was curious to learn how he operates so distinctive? He really is a genius. He's discovered, I think, one of the secrets of power in the contemporary world, which is he's managed to turn fame into power, drama into power, and to do it in ways that leave him completely free to act.

6:12If you lie enough, the marginal cost of your 10,000th lie is nothing, while the marginal law of your first, second, or third, the marginal cost is very high. All of the normal constraints on political figures, reputational and so on, he does not pay. In some ways, I think President Clinton first discovered that shame only matters if you let it. Shame is an emotion that exists in other people's minds.

6:44A lot of people thought when the Monica Lewinsky thing came out, he would have no choice but to resign. This was so overwhelming, so dreadful. He basically realized, no, if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you just pass through it. The dogs will bark, but the caravan will move on. Trump has deployed that concept on an industrial scale. You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more just about what you mean there? The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment spectacle

7:16that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied the amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does. And we can say, well, global media and so on, but it's very hard to think ever of a single ruler who just dominated everything. Anywhere you go in the world today, I don't care where it is, what you hear is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump. Some people hate Trump. Some people love Trump. Some people laugh at Trump.

7:47Some people are astonished by Trump. Some people spend their lives thinking about their contempt for Trump, but he remains the center of everything. And he sees that as the key to his unique power. A lot of people thought that when he lost in 2020, it would go away, that that was it. He was just about as dominant out of office as he had been in office. At what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. I observed that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo

8:18and ended in exile. So this is no guarantee that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle. But he is a major historic figure who has developed a new understanding of how power works in an era of mass communications and social media. And the rest of us are just trying to deal with it. How do you think the world is or will be the most different because of his role in it? Well, I think he has vastly accelerated

8:49the disintegration of the post-World War II slash post-Cold War structures. They're not going to be the same. He's not the only one who's done this, but I think we're entering an era of much more personal and much less bureaucratic politics. That is, I think for a long time in the 20th century, people got into the habit of thinking one-person rule or a central figure should be downgraded and we should be run by institutions and bureaucrats and committees.

9:21I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again. So that in India, you see a Modi. We saw Abe in Japan, Bibi in Israel, and Erdogan in Turkey, and Trump in the United States. Trump is sort of the greatest of these, to the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xi Jinping. We're back to an era of personal politics.

The maritime commercial order

9:49If you think about the broader, longer arc of dominance or power leading up to this moment, I love the historical context. You're an amazing historian. Talk about why, whether it's maritime dominance or other major reasons that you think the UK and America up until, let's say, you know, the end of the Cold War or something had such an incredible run. Let's just start with the U.S.-China rivalry today. And what you see is the sort of two sides. One is a land-based continental empire, China,

10:20which believes that it can match the technological and therefore military strength of the other power without all that political liberalism and messy democracy. Okay, great idea. The first, I think, ruler in modern times to really embrace that was Louis XIV, who thought that his technocratic government of the experts in France could beat those pesky English with all of that ridiculous,

10:51you know, every 20 years, they kill the king or kick him out or who knows what they do. But it's utterly chaotic. The French idea was we can do that with a strong centralized system. From the time of Louis XIV right up until now, you could sort of argue the dominant theme of global power politics has been this rise of this English-speaking maritime commercial liberal order. And then it's being contested successively

11:21by a series of great power continental states, France under Louis XIV, again with Napoleon, and Germany, Prussian World War I, and then World War II, the Soviet Union. And that these contests have been incredibly difficult. There have been moments in every case where the technocratic centralized land power looked like it was just walking away and the ridiculous, confused, commercial, English-speaking maritime alliance

11:53was muddled, lost, crazy. And yet somehow in the end, the hobbits keep winning.

12:01I should say that we stole our global strategy from the British. They stole it from the Dutch who had been doing this earlier in the 17th century. In God and Gold, one of my books, I say that you could sum up the last 300 years of modern history in 10 letters, UP, United Provinces, to UK, to US. Now, obviously that raises the question to question mark, question mark, question mark. I don't think China has it in it to beat us. What is that strategy,

12:31the maritime strategy? What are these three entities done that's been so effective to let the hobbits win? I don't know if I can really reveal all this. The secret five-point plan for global dominance, but okay. Why not? Right. I'm just going to ask everyone who hears this to kind of be careful with how they use this information. It'd be terrible if it fell into the wrong hands. Step one is have an open society at home. Think of the Dutch in the 17th century. Okay, everybody had these wars of religion.

13:02Well, the Dutch are pretty Calvinist, but they say, well, you know what? These Lutherans, they're scum. They're going to hell. Everybody knows that. But, you know, until they do, they could kind of pay taxes and contribute to the economy. And even the Catholics, I mean, of course, they can't do their filthy idolatrous rights in the streets or anything, but yeah, live and let live. The Jews live and let live. If an intellectual scientist publishes some kind of scientific paper

13:32that the church doesn't like, well, people will write nasty comments about it in other journals. But when Galileo doesn't go to the prison, there's no inquisition. And also, if you have an idea, you can try it. If you are the son of a peasant and you want to sort of try it as a merchant and you can find some people who let you do it, go right ahead. They come up with new ideas for government finance that we still use, the joint stock company, new seagoing technology,

14:04circulation of the blood. Locke comes to Holland and writes a lot of his best work there. That's step one. You have this open, dynamic society and you've got the intellectuals are flocking there. Your universities are flourishing. Step two is now with all of these products that you've developed and innovative technology, you take the show on the road. You trade globally. So you have, I think, there were 10,000 seagoing ships coming from the Netherlands in the 17th century.

14:36And they're traveling all over the world. And what this does is it makes you stinking rich. I advise my students sometimes to go to the Met Museum here or any number of places to see the Dutch masters, not to look for, oh, like the brush strokes and the composition that's so exquisite, all of which is true, but just look at like all the stuff that these people have in their painting. You know, here's the merchant with his like silk robe from China and he's standing on a rug from Turkey

15:07and he's got a stuffed parrot from Brazil on his mantelpiece. There's just this astounding amount of wealth which then allows you to start thinking globally. 18th century, the Prussians fight, Frederick the Great fights with Maria Teresa over Silesia. The Seven Years War, this is a beautiful, I've been there, I've been to Silesia, I love Silesia. It's a sausage-shaped province in modern Poland.

15:38And seven years, both countries go bankrupt and in the end, Frederick gets it, which means he's Frederick the Great and it's just Maria Teresa who lost. But during that Seven Years War, the British basically kicked the French out of India and Canada and North America and established the foundations of the world order that we still live today. So, you're thinking globally. Once you have built this global system, you then do something extremely treacherous, which is you invite everyone else

16:08to participate in your system. So, you don't do, say, what the Spanish did in Latin America where you say, this is ours, we conquered this, nobody else can trade here, you people stay out, which obviously condemns it to a certain stagnation. The British in the 19th century, they have free trade in the British Empire. Everybody can trade and the British Navy keeps piracy down for everybody, not just for the Brits. And what this does is it encourages other countries

16:39to participate in your system. As we did with Britain, we didn't fight with them after 1812. We came close a couple of times, but at the end of the day, we traded in the British system. We were among the greatest beneficiaries of what the British did. And the Germans did the same thing. Prussia, the German Empire became a great trading power. They had investments in Argentina and Chile and in many places their commerce was driving out the British. Then the Germans discovered that

17:10we have another little trick up our sleeves. They go to war in World War I and they suddenly discover that while they were integrating into the world, that made them very rich, gave them great technology, a lot of military power. But now they're dependent on it. Suddenly they're at war with the UK and they can't get all that grain from Argentina and America that fed their people. They can't get that imported rubber from Malaya that provides the tires that they need

17:40for war. So they've grown dependent on that international system and you're able to cut it off and this is one of the big reasons the English won so many of these wars. So this system exists. I think a lot of Americans really aren't conscious of it, but we sort of revert to these patterns. Things happen and we just behave in these ways. So after the end of the Cold War, what do we say to Russia and China? Come on in and just as we said to Germany and Japan in 1945, benefit from the system.

18:12Actually, we waited to about 47 to do that, but in any case, come on in, benefit. And now both Germany and Japan are principal pillars of the world system. We sort of hoped that Russia and China would do that too. They've taken more of the Wilhelm II path than the Conrad Adenauer path. We are now testing what happens there. It's one of the reasons I'm worried, but it's a pattern that has been recurring. And so far, whenever it finally comes to the test,

18:43our side has been winning.

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Great power rivalries and trade

20:14If I were to imagine an equivalent of me and an equivalent of you sitting somewhere in China today, and I ask you the same question about how power is formed, what do you think they would say there under a very different system? I used to have these conversations in China. Some of my books have been published in Chinese and I've gone to Chinese universities and had these conversations with scholars and officials. And what I can say is they are very aware of this dynamic. If there are things that

20:45keep Xi Jinping awake at night, I think one of them is his awareness that in any kind of conflict with the United States, China would face being cut off from so many of the raw materials and so on and markets that's economy needs. I mean, let's imagine China declares a blockade of Taiwan, which could very easily happen. The United States just from 100 miles further out imposes a counter blockade on China. Nothing is going

21:15in or, you know, no oil is coming in or out, no manufactured goods are being sold. What happens to the Chinese economy? All the soybean contracts they have with farmers in Brazil and Argentina not getting delivered. We've all been surprised with the Iran war to see just how big the Chinese oil stockpiles have become. A lot of Chinese energy policy can be understood as trying to avoid the trap of dependence on the global economy.

21:46they're doing the solar, they're doing as much hydro as they can, and some of our friends in the environmental movement are saying, oh, it's so wonderful, they're so green, let's cooperate with China to build a new world. They're also digging as much coal as they possibly can because what they're trying to do is make themselves less dependent on the outside world so that in a worst-case scenario with the U.S., they can actually fight for the long-term. Do you think the U.S. runs the risk of trying to do that same thing,

22:17become more isolationist? You know, our exports are relatively low as a percent of GDP compared to lots of other countries throughout the world. We are fairly self-sufficient. Like, America is an amazing place, natural resource, rich, two oceans on either side. Like, we have these amazing advantages. Maybe we could do it without this interdependent thing that's created this amazing power structure as you laid out. Does that worry you that we, like, trend more in the direction of being isolationist or something? Well, I think, look, there is obviously in American history, we have a tradition of isolationism that

22:47is stronger at some times than others, and it's definitely coming up now. And it does worry me a good deal because I do think American security and the American economy do ultimately require us to be engaged globally, not necessarily as global social workers or something, but you think about our trade, roughly a third of it is in the hemisphere, a third of it across the Pacific, a third of it across the Atlantic. We couldn't really very easily do without any one of

23:18those. We saw during the pandemic that our dependence on China for all kinds of things was really quite alarming. People look at our supply chains and they can see a lot of vulnerabilities, but we can't make everything that we need right here. We can't get all the raw materials that we need right here, but also our producers need more than the American market. Traditionally, the most free market lobby in the United States has been the agricultural lobby

23:49because America can do a lot more than feed ourselves. Our farmers can feed practically the world, and if they're reduced to only feeding the American market, they can't make money. The prices are so low. They need that market. The same is true, you know, there's so many economies of scale. If our AI companies, if our tech companies can only benefit from the internal American market, that's actually not enough to generate the revenue

24:19and growth that they need, even to stay technologically equal, say, to China, much less be ahead and be super profitable. Our business needs the world, and then there's the question of, okay, well, you can't really make people buy your stuff at the point of a gun, and you don't really want to have a gun around all the time, so you have to have a trading relationship that works for both sides. Both sides have to agree to the trade. There are ways of doing that. We got very doctrinaire in this belief that a simple

24:51free trade system would work. We didn't look for systematic cheating from China, but we also, after World War II particularly, a lot of the European countries were so poor and devastated from the war that reviving their economies became necessary for American security. Otherwise, they would have gone communist, and we didn't want that. So we said, okay, fine, Germany, you can have really high tariffs on American goods, but we won't reciprocate because it's

25:23in our interest for you to grow. A lot of that stuff got institutionalized. There are many, many cases now where you have non-reciprocal tariffs, and our barriers have been lower. I think the Trump people were not wrong to say, okay, this needed to change. We're also seeing with the need for supply chain security and so on, you can't simply take your economic policy out of a free trade textbook. On the other hand, you do still need trade.

25:53Trade needs to be beneficial on both ends. I want to talk about the changing orientation of us versus the world, sort of our foreign policy, but first ask about technology because when I started my career, I'm 41, so 20 years ago, call it. I remember seeing, I've always been an investor, if you looked at the top 10 or 20 market cap companies, it was a total global mix of companies from many different industries. It looked like this kind of potpourri list. Now that same list is literally just American technology companies, basically one through 20. There's a couple exceptions.

26:24It's more or less total dominance by American technology companies, and that was true before OpenAI and Anthropic and SpaceX. Now those are resurgent even on top of our great technology companies. And I'd love to just hear you reflect on how tech, of course AI, and you have to ask about that as well, are changing the nature of global order in such a digitally dominant set of technologies that we're once again the leader in. How do you process it?

Riding the wild horse of technology

26:49I do try to look to historical analogies. There's nothing exactly the same as this. The closest you really can see is to the actual industrial revolution. Interestingly, the country that led the first industrial revolution, Britain, then dominated for 150 years, became a dominant power. History is moving a lot faster now, but I think we absolutely have been in this position of the first to really see and use this potential source of power.

27:19I think since the 17th century, the key to power in the modern world is which countries can be most effective at developing, harnessing, exploiting the power of new technology without blowing up internally because of the social stress and upheavals that new technology causes. And for a lot of reasons, I think first the British and then we were just better at riding that wild horse than other

27:51people were. I think that is still true, but you can look at American society today and see the reaction against tech, this sort of anti-data center thing. And you've got Trotsky-ites in the DSA thinking that the most retrograde forms of Marxism are our only salvation in this terrible situation. It's not a given that we will be able to pull it off again. Enormous progress and yet total chaos and dissension. The relationship between

28:22achievement and order right now has broken down because we need a different kind of order than we've had because our technology has created a new kind of world. It is changing the way power works. It is changing the nature of power. So far, America is doing what we've been doing for a very long time, which is dominating the cutting edge. So we've developed it. We have the horse. What's the key to riding the wild horse? Because I think everyone in America would say, yeah, I hope

28:53the next 150 years we dominate. And it's because... But in a nice way. But in a nice way. Because that's the kind of people we are. How would you have us do that? What are the keys to doing that well now that we have the horse? America's always been an ownership society. Why did a lot of the founders think that the United States could survive as a reasonably democratic republic? And one of the big answers was, instead of being a country of people who lived in cities and basically own nothing and work for other

29:24people, America was by and large a country of independent farmers who were kind of small business people and who owned their own land, had a stake in the system, and their life experience as an owner teaches them citizenship. So, boy, I really would love to see a new bridge over the stream here. On the other hand, if they build that, they're going to have to raise my taxes. You know, I then calculate in a rational way what I would like to happen. And that is the kind of political education that

29:55prepares me to take a thoughtful role in the councils of the country. Plus, I'm independent. And then with the industrial revolution, can this continue? We're getting the big cities. We're getting industry. Well, the first stage we do with the railroads and the Homestead Act, they kind of come in together. The government gives a ton of land in often somewhat corrupt ways to railroads to build transcontinental railroads that turn the country into national market, but then also gives free land to the American

30:26farmer. You go live on your farm for five years and it's yours. Amazing. For the ordinary person, all right, I'm getting a free farm out of the system and I'm a farmer. And yet you're doing this in a way that is simultaneously allowing the infrastructure of a new industrial society to take place. Again, in the 20th century, think about how as the family farm begins to decay economically, it can't compete. You have to be very well capitalized to farm under

30:57modern conditions and so on. And where people are starting to work in cities and be employees, is this going to endanger the republic? Are we still going to be a free society of free people? Essentially, we came up with the idea of the single family home in the suburbs to replace the single family farm. A lot of government policy was around, think about not only building the freeways and the highways, but subsidies to the tax code so that municipal bonds are tax free, which means

31:28towns can build the infrastructure that you need to attract the developers and the homeowners who will then raise the value of the property and so you can repay the bonds out of the higher property values that the infrastructure has created. So this kind of wealth creating machine. Well, right now we seem to be in a place where we're reaching the limits of that wealth creating machine because it's just too expensive for the average person to buy a house and land close enough to where

31:59you work so that the commute isn't killing you. You look at why are so many young people really unhappy with the way the economy is working. Homeownership is one of the real big problems. IT can kind of address this between remote work and hybrid work and self-driving cars. If you only have to go into work once or twice a week or twice a month or whatever, you can work farther out. If you expand the commuting radius, say, from 40 miles to

32:3375 miles, the amount of land that is developable for housing goes up with the square of the radius. It's geometric. So you can open information technology appropriately deployed can open up for another two generations this wealth creating machine. Is there something equivalent to Homestead or the subsidy of homes that could drive this expansion? It seems like a really, really important thing to get right for

33:04America. I think so. I think we should be doing things like encouraging remote and hybrid work. Now, there are problems with it. Mentoring, there are benefits. Fine. All right. There are problems with every form of technology. How many people has the car killed since we started using cars? How much money has it cost for the highway systems and so on? A new technology just doesn't appear like an angel and grant wishes everywhere. You have to think really hard

33:34about how to make it work. I think of this as infrastructure.

33:40Infrastructure is building the bridges and the physicals. Infrastructure is the institutional, legal, regulatory framework that can allow AI technology to develop, give better results to patients in a hospital. That's actually incredibly complicated or that could transform the legal system. Very complex stuff. You need a new kind of social imagination for that, which I think we need to develop. But in this housing example, if a

34:11company says, fine, you can stay home 60 percent of the time, that's less wear and tear on infrastructure, fewer needs for construction, a tax benefit for companies that move toward greater hybrid and remote work is not a net cost for government because, in fact, you're saving on another part of the budget. This technology seems so unique because, and I'm curious what you think about it, in the case of AI, we've seen with China, it seems to be the other great power today, that through using our technology that

34:43we've invested in, they're able to distill would be the term in the AI world and have fairly comparable systems without the capital investment, which is very different than like the highway system or the railroads, like you can't copy those things. You have to do it yourself. And so the economy of scale is easier for me to like get my head around when it's a railroad than when it's, you know, a frontier lab model or something like this, which makes me wonder about the right kind of foreign policy. And it's a good excuse to talk about your four kinds of American foreign policy historically. Maybe you could just quickly tick through them and outline them as

35:15an intro before we talk about the notion of tech Hamiltonians that I thought was quite interesting of

American foreign policy traditions

35:19yours.

American foreign policy traditions

35:20One of the interesting things about America is that our foreign policy arguments are very repetitive. Basically, if something comes up in foreign policy, we'll argue about it in many of the same ways they would have done in George Washington's day. Our views of the country and of foreign policy fairly predictably fall into one of four baskets. One is what I do call Hamiltonian, Alexander Hamilton. What you see is a strong capitalist economy that is trading effectively with the rest

35:50of the world provides the money and the technological progress that holds society together. People are making money at it and they're happy and also gives you the strength so that no other country can attack you. We should have a strong federal government that does things like promote infrastructure at home, that sees itself as trying to help major American companies succeed internationally. George H.W. Bush in some ways.

36:21Then you have people who say, oh, money, that's just so vulgar. What about human rights? And I would argue, you know, what causes the threats that America faces? Well, it's bad governance, dictatorships and democracies don't go to war. Dictatorships do. Generals like to fight. Moms don't. American foreign policy should be about promoting democracy globally, promoting international institutions. Let's get rid of war by getting rid of the causes of war.

36:52And that's a kind of Wilsonian approach, which he certainly had actually long before Woodrow Wilson. Then you've got people who say, wait a minute. The thing that's great about America is personal liberty. The fact that the government doesn't control us all and isn't taxing us to death. If we get involved, whether it's these Wilsonians crusades for human rights or Hamiltonian great power, balance of politics, international finance, what we're going to have is a powerful government that has secrets

37:23from the American people, runs colossal defense budgets, gets us into endless wars, and that will destroy the liberty. We can conquer the world and lose our freedom at home. What kind of foreign policy is that? And again, we've been having this since the 1790s. And then finally, there's the group I call Jacksonian after Andrew Jackson, who sort of say, well, listen, foreigners, they can be democratic. I don't really care what the foreigners do as long as they don't

37:53attack us or impugn our honor. If somebody attacks us, we should just go out and crush them. And laws of war, no, like rats, you should exterminate them. And you beat them and pound them and crush them until they understand that the last thing they should ever do is raise their hand against the United States. And Jacksonians often look like Jeffersonians, the isolationists, in times of peace. But something happens like Pearl Harbor and 9-1-1, and suddenly the Jacksonians are activated.

38:25So I think we've been having these things for a very long time. We still have them today. I say these are like suits in a deck of cards. Very few of us have just like all 13 Hamiltonian cards. We generally all have a mixed hand, but we tend to have some suits are stronger than others for each of us. Which of those suits do you think most defines us today? Well, I think the old Democratic consensus, let's say the Clinton consensus, was very much a coalition of

38:55Wilson and Hamilton. Build a global system that advances the country's economic security, but also promotes human rights and democracy, and that will both make us rich and build a lasting global peace. That's been kind of the predominant establishment idea really since World War II. Special Providence came out right around the time of 9-1-1, and people at that time weren't really aware that there was anything but Hamilton and Wilson, and

39:26then suddenly discovered, oh, wait a minute, there are these Jacksonians there who want to nuke Afghanistan or whatever came up after that. I would say that Trump's coalition is a mix of Jeffersonians and Jacksonians, isolationists and hawks. You could say Vance as the isolationist champion in some ways, and Rubio as the hawk. Rubio is not interested in the United nations, or, you know, look at in

39:56Venezuela, let's get rid of our enemy Maduro, but we're not going to make the restoration of democracy in Venezuela the key of everything, which someone like an Obama, I think, or a Biden would have tried much harder to do. So on Ukraine, you can see the Jeffersonians are saying, well, this is not really our fight. Let's stay out of it. While the Jacksonians are saying, Russia's the enemy, let's knock Putin and punch him in the nose while we can, they're all active today.

40:27Maybe say one word more about this notion of tech Hamiltonians as a key faction that's emerged. Typically, tech and the government were, in my career, different concepts. One of the biggest things that happened in modern American history is the mutual discovery of tech and government. In the 1990s, which was back in the old end of history, end of nations, companies would say, oh, I'm not an American company. I'm a global company, right? And nowhere was that stronger than in the world of tech, where Google has no

40:57boundaries, the cyber world is completely different. All of that stuff is irrelevant to us. Washington, they don't even understand us, and we will just do what we do. Today, tech is actually the locus of international great power competition. And China's attempt to build a technosphere that can dominate the American technosphere to American tech companies. This is really critical to your business, but also to the American state, American

41:28government. It's critical to power and independence. Much, I think, to the surprise of both the tech world and the political world. They've been driven in on each other. And there's a kind of renationalization of tech and of the economy that we see. And the tech folks, and you may know better, certainly Jeremy understands them a lot better than I do. But my sense is that when the tech folks think about what are their economic interests, they're different from what you

42:00might call a legacy multinational, the post-World War II, that are basically global trading and manufacturing companies. I make cars from things I import from all over the world. I have factories all over the world that make cars. So for these companies, free trade is the essence of their business. I need financial markets. I need labor markets. And I need manufactured goods markets that are seamless and open. As Tom Friedman put it, I need a flat earth.

42:31But if you're a tech company, you don't. Alphabet is not importing and exporting a lot of goods. Even something like immigration, which is if you're a hotel company or a construction company, having hardworking, cheap migrant labor is pretty important to your business model. If you're a Silicon Valley company and suddenly there's no more unskilled labor crossing from Mexico, the cost of your janitorial and gardening

43:02services rises 30 percent. So what? You're much more concerned about security of supply chain, security of intellectual property. And I think increasingly companies are starting to realize that they need their employees to be patriotic. That is, your employees need to think it's an evil sin to sell IP to China. Your co-workers will rat you out in a heartbeat if they think you're doing something like that. Both the economic agenda of the tech sector of the

43:37business world and the kind of cultural political attitude is changing. Because again, with the legacy multinationals, I want to have a completely international workforce. I don't want it to matter whether my employees are from Sri Lanka or Taipei or, you know, wherever. I need interchangeable units that I can plug in anywhere.

Emerging centers of global power

43:59If you take a big step back with all of this context and just think about global power, I feel like almost the whole world has decided that it's the Americans and the Chinese that have any real power or are contenders to be the powerful nation of the next period of time. What are the other interesting sources of power that have your interest and curiosity? Like with all the attention on just these two, we'll keep talking plenty more about these two as well, of course. But what other areas of power are most interesting to you right now? Well, I've gotten very interested in India.

44:31I've been lucky enough to get to know a number of the folks that are close to the BJP and the RSS, which is the kind of Hindu nationalist group that helped to create the BJP. And this is a group of people who a hundred years ago, it was basically five guys in a house. And they've now built this mass movement that has something like 86,000 small groups around India that meet weekly. They're incredibly dynamic political force.

45:03They powered Modi and they have very strong ideas about what India should be, what makes a country. India is now the most populous country in the world. India has been pretty successful at developing a tech industry. It's not in the frontier of AI. I think it may get there faster than people think. And it has its own sharply different view of what the world should be like. Which is what?

45:33Multipolar, but not in the Chinese way. Jaishankar, who's the foreign minister of India, once said that China is a revisionist power, India is a reformist power, that India is not really happy with the global status quo. In the United Nations system, India, with 1.4 billion people in nuclear weapons, has exactly as many votes in the General Assembly as Liechtenstein or Luxembourg. One vote. It's ridiculous.

46:04And there's a certain kind of Western domination to the way a lot of international life is organized because it was basically organized by the Europeans and the Americans at a time when nobody else really had much of a standing. There are a lot of changes they want to make, but they really don't see the kind of Chinese autocratic, top-down approach as possible for India or also good for the world. They're an interesting power with different ideas, and I'm very much looking to see how

46:37that develops. I think the Islamic world, again, we are seeing the world of Islam. It ranges from super sophisticated scholars and intellectuals and writers to jihadis in North Africa with machetes torching huts or something. All of this range, it's an immense civilization, but as a force in the world, there's more of it. It's becoming stronger. Understanding how it's changing, how the culture in the Gulf states and Turkey is changing and

47:14developing. I think the Industrial Revolution forced societies to become similar to each other because if you're going to have big manufacturing plants, big infrastructure, trains, highways, airports, all of this, there are certain things you just have to do institutionally and organizationally that tend to kind of force you toward what we would think of as a European Western way of life and politics. The information revolution enables countries to use their own cultures, languages, and so

47:50on as platforms, and Turkey is more Turkish. It's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more Indian. I think Japan is becoming more Japanese so that in the Industrial Revolution, there was a tendency toward convergence of the great civilizations. Now, I think we're seeing a divergence. I'm not sure I fully understand the reason why that is. Can you explain it a little bit more? MTV, when it first went into Latin America, it was showing American rock videos on there

48:24and everybody said, oh, this is going to, you know, it's the end of indigenous Latin culture and so on. But before long, they weren't showing many American videos at all because local artists were able really in a pretty cheap way to have their own music, their own videos that responded to those sensibilities. So I think we're seeing a lot of that now where instead of having to be on the mainline programming of global programming, you're much freer to go off into your own civilization.

48:57In that structure, I'm sure AI just pours fuel on that fire.

Nuclear proliferation and modern warfare

49:00What scares you the most? Like, as you think about the global power dynamics, and I'm assuming your vision of the future that's optimistic would be progress and prosperity or something. What most would get in the way of the kind of future that you'd want to see? A lot of things. The Industrial Revolution was in the long run a pretty good thing, but it had little side effects like the Communist Party, the killing 100 million people. World War I, World War II, Reign of Terror. Why were those necessarily side effects of the Industrial Revolution?

49:32Because I think the social stresses that come with these new technologies, uprooting millions of peasants from the farms where they've lived forever, and now they're in cities and they're getting exploited. Yeah, discontent. And the old social institutions that used to manage discontent, legitimate the state, don't work as well in this new context. Everything is changing. Everyone's heads are scrambled and things happen. So I think the information revolution, which is-

50:02He's fat on steroids. Exactly. So I definitely see that. But then I look at things like, some ways one of the biggest geopolitical problems of the last 60 years has been nuclear proliferation, continues to be, obviously, to this day. But when I think about weapons of mass destruction in the future, obviously, biology, cyber, all kinds of things, while we have not been able to completely stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, you can usually tell when somebody's trying to build them.

50:35Usually, you have enough lead time to try to do something about it. How could you verify whether somebody was abiding by some sort of cyber arms control agreement or bioweapons, arms control, when basically in a basement lab somewhere, you can cook up a pathogen that could destroy half the planet? The idea that we're going to have accelerating arms races in a condition with an almost utter lack of strategic trust, where you can't appeal to verifiability as a way of ensuring compliance,

51:10I think it's a pretty serious problem. So I think the rapid and dynamic technological change across a whole range of disciplines and technologies is destabilizing the balance of power. And this, I think, does significantly increase the chance both of confrontation and ultimately even of war between great powers. Speaking of, maybe Ukraine is the right flashpoint for this, but it does seem like there's been quite an evolution of non-weapons of mass destruction, just regular old weapons.

51:41This is a highly contested topic now because of the conflict in Iran and some reports that we've run out of certain types of munitions, even as the United States of America. What have you learned from the last several years of conflict about the nature of military technology, weapons, their relative importance in the AI world and so on? Unfortunately, I've learned a lot because there's been a lot of war. The first time I went to Ukraine after the war, I went to this drone factory. And it really was remarkable because in real time, they were starting to get results from

52:12the battlefield and then they were adapted. But at that time, it was a very simplistic stuff. They were like getting kids toy trucks and re-engineering them into ground drones that could put a landmine on a tank. I was back there a couple of months ago. The advances are just unbelievable. The intensity is the same, but the scope of change is amazing. I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore. It's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there.

52:45With these drones, you have this sort of gray kill zone, gray zone, where in most you'd have a couple of soldiers together. One of the hardest problems in warfare now, they tell me, is you'll get somebody wounded. How do you evacuate someone who's wounded? They're having to build a new kind of ground drone that can go retrieve a body or a person and then cover them with a kind of metal shield and wheel them out. But even to do this, you need a whole team of drones working with this thing because they're

53:21looking for other drones that would try to attack this. They told me they had one soldier that it took them 63 days to get them evacuated after a wound. This is so unlike what war was even six years ago. And I asked myself, too, how fast is the Pentagon learning if the tank and the rifle are becoming as obsolete as the cavalry charge and the sword?

53:53What kind of forces do we have? What kind of forces do you need? And again, it changes every six months. Right now, the Ukrainians have kind of a battlefield advantage. That could flip. And it's also for us as the power that has the most stuff. We're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got so many tanks that the tank becomes useless. That's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody who's figured out the tank killer or Navy.

54:23You know, the Russian Navy on the Black Sea, the Ukraine doesn't really have a Navy. They got a few little tiny boats. They don't have battleships and stuff. They have kept the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea with drones. It's good news for Taiwan, actually. But American power traditionally is about sea power to a very large extent. How does that change over time? We've gone from, you remember in the 90s, you look like you're just old enough to remember the 90s. They used to talk about the revolution in military affairs.

54:56We've shifted now. OK, there's this one thing happening. And once we've mastered and gotten used to it, then we're good to go. Now it's continuing revolutions in military affairs. That's something that I've learned about war by watching. What do you think is the most likely thing to happen in Taiwan?

The flashpoint of Taiwan

55:16Well, the Chinese Xi Jinping, I think, is committed to trying to get it. I don't think he actually has an alarm clock by his bed that will ring on the day that has to happen. The Chinese, I think, need a very high probability of success to commit themselves best to a certain point, because failure would be catastrophic for whoever launched it. But there are a lot of steps in between an invasion and doing nothing. And we see the Chinese, I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they

55:50could have a soft blockade. They could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty and so on and make it difficult for ships that don't do that. They'll be looking for things that fly just under the radar that don't actually cause us to really respond, but which alter the situation in their favor. So I see them moving in that kind of way.

56:24The big new factor is that the Japanese have woken up and the Japanese would see Chinese control of Taiwan as a direct threat to Japanese independence. I mean, they really see this. And so they are much more engaged. They're only beginning, you know, they're raising their defense spending. They're rethinking their doctrine. They're beginning to kind of reshape their culture around the new strategic environment. Historically, the Japanese have actually been pretty good at changing direction when they

56:57genuinely feel threatened or feel the need to change in some way. How this works out, I don't see. But I think it's one of the things people really need to keep an eye on is how fast do the Japanese come up the learning curve, how serious does it turn out they really are about their own defense, and how does that affect China's calculations in Taiwan if Japan is a new and complicating issue for them? If I combine all these things, the changing forces of power, technology, military technology,

57:29all the things we've talked about, with your observation that politics in the future is going to be more personal, are there any other rates of change, things changing in the world that we haven't talked about yet that you think are especially important for what the future will look like?

The breakdown of social classes

57:45There were three basic classes in American society during the kind of post-World War II era of stability, and they spread a lot in the rest of the world. One was an industrial working class, which is kind of more or less in stable jobs. With a collar kind of work. Yeah, exactly. Often organized in unions. They had a very pragmatic political attitude, and they were economically focused. And political competition between the left and the right was who can figure out how to raise living standards for the workers better.

58:17And that kind of centered politics on a fairly rational basis. Then you had the business class. And by the 1940s and 50s, it was no longer the founders, you know, the John D. Rockefeller originally, or the first J.P. Morgan. It was grandsons, and it was publicly traded companies, professional managers. And so there was a kind of institutionalization of business. That was also the era of these very regulated monopolies and oligopolies.

58:52So there's one phone company, a limited number of airlines, the three networks, very structured business world. And then between them, this organized, rationally focused working class and organized, regulated, publicly managed business class. You had this expert class, the technocrats, the administrators, and so on, who, according to the dictates of the best social science, peer-reviewed social science, were like making

59:23the decisions, regulate the businesses so they don't get too greedy, but also keep the workers from being so demanding that the whole system collapses, et cetera. And they were the balancing group. I would say in American society today, all three of those classes are in total disarray. And yet we are facing a whole series of very serious changes, perplexities. What do we do about AI? Just being one of many, we're not organized to answer these in the old ways.

59:57So we are really out at sea. And because America has been for so long and still, I think, remains the only potential pillar of global stability and organization, the internal incoherence of America faced with all of these changes can't help but undermine any chances of global stability. So I think what that means is for people like you and me and maybe our listeners in the show, a tremendously heavy responsibility to try to figure out answers and see some path

1:00:33through this and try to build a new kind of American politics and social order that can allow us once again to be reasonably stable for ourselves and then project that globally. What do you think, against that backdrop, it's going to mean or does mean to be an American? If all of that is changing, what does it mean? Americans think about being American in different ways. They have for a long time. You hear a lot of people talk these days about America as a country founded on ideas.

1:01:06Honestly, I think I was maybe in college before I met anybody who thought that way. I'm from the South. And down there, you sort of thought, well, I'm an American because everybody I know is American. My family, as long as I have any idea who the heck they were, they're Americans. I'm an American the same way a Frenchman is French or a Turk is Turk. Not because I believe in America, but because... I'm here. I'm here and no one else would have me. And I, you know, it's like, this is it. But there really are other people who love America and contribute to America who experience,

1:01:39yes, it's a country of ideas. And we are a pluralistic country in this way. And I don't myself feel more American than somebody that was naturalized last week. I think for me, in some ways, the sort of meeting ground between identity and ideas, honestly, it's the Pledge of Allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible under God, with liberty and justice for all.

1:02:14And I would say anybody who says that and means it is an American. Pretty remarkable, huh? Well-written. It's good. It's good.

Shifts in the Middle East

1:02:24One thing I haven't asked about that I'm deeply curious about, as I'm sure everyone is, is your interpretation of what's going on in the Middle East, both with Iran, with Israel, with all the other key players where alliances seem to be shifting around for the first time in a long time. How do you interpret what's happening? What are the deeper currents and messages that you're focused on? A lot of things, obviously, going on in the Middle East. One background to a lot of stuff is just the sort of collapse of Arab nationalism and kind of Arab identity as an organizing force in the Middle East.

1:02:58In the 1950s, Nasser and Egypt were the great pillars of Arab identity and pan-Arabism. After the 1967 war, they took a hit, but you would still have countries like Syria, Iraq, even for a while under Gaddafi, Libya, aspiring to that mantle. If we look at what happened, Iraq collapsed. Certainly, America had a lot to do with that. Syria collapsed without America having a lot to do with it. So Iran, as a non-Sunni, non-Arab power, had created what people call that Shia Crescent

1:03:35from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, into Iran. While that, thanks to sort of Israel primarily since October 7, that's broken up. But what hasn't broken up is the underlying weakness of the Arab world is still there. And you have the Gulf states that are very effective in many ways and are using their oil and their money very effectively, but they still can't defend themselves from Iran. They still, without outside help, they cannot stand.

1:04:09And that leads to the Strait of Hormuz in that region, which remains incredibly important for the economic stability and health of the world. That is in chaos. If the United States or some other power doesn't hold Iran back in some way, it has a hegemony over the oil resources in the Middle East in a way that allows them to blackmail a lot of people economically and provides them with the kinds of resources that would not certainly

1:04:41be used to our benefit. Israel, I think, may have hoped that it could kind of bear the weight of being a counter-hegemon to Iran. Israel is too small and too alien to the rest of the Middle East to really play that role effectively, I think. Since Obama, the United States has been fundamentally unwilling to do that itself. And we want to kick the can down the road. We want to find some other way other than us putting down a red line that we enforce with

1:05:13Iran. History doesn't give us a choice. We stop Iran ourselves or Iran asserts and maintains hegemony over the oil resources in the Middle East. Why have we been unaffected? Obviously, we have vastly superior military capability or whatever. This is a specific question about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, but also people used to call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. Why do world powers seem to have such a difficult time being effective at all in the Middle East? Well, I think some of it is, which we've also seen with Russia, is the erosion of deterrence.

1:05:49What you don't want to do is help Ukraine win a war with Russia. What you want is for Russia to feel that if they attack Ukraine, the consequences would be so terrible that it's just not worth doing it. Anything other than deterrence involves long, difficult, expensive, divisive wars with uncertain outcomes and enormous costs. The decline of deterrence becomes a massive geopolitical problem overseas and a massive political problem at home.

1:06:19For example, right now, one of the real facts in the Strait is it's not even as important that Iran can hit a tanker with a drone as it is that Iran could put some drones on some desalinization plants and make the cities of the Gulf essentially uninhabitable. As long as that's the case, I'm not going to make big investments in the Gulf if I'm a foreign country. It's really, really scary. And that means that these whole sort of economic development plans that those countries have

1:06:54for their future political stability go up in smoke because it doesn't work. The only way to preserve that is in some ways what we were doing in the Cold War in Europe, just saying to Russia, you cross that line, you invade West Berlin and holy hell breaks out. But I think as a country, we're not at the point where a president of the United States can say it and mean it and have the public back him up. For that, we need presidents who can explain to people, OK, this is how the world works.

1:07:28What Harry Truman did after World War II, for that matter, what Franklin Roosevelt did in the fireside chats. Take the American people into your confidence. Have a clear vision of what you're doing, why you're doing it. Be enough of a communicator to be able to put it across. We haven't really had anybody do that in a very long time. What do you hope we do? What do you hope America's role is in the next 20 years? I hope we, first of all, figure out how to keep our balance as we enter the information revolution.

1:08:04That we figure out how to use the wealth and the resources the information revolution creates to deal with the stresses and problems that it inevitably causes and also draw from it the abundance that will keep the American people feeling like America's working, it's working for them. The way things are going is basically a good thing. If you have that going, then people will back an American president, American foreign policy in a serious way.

1:08:37And I think if you don't have that, if we don't do that, we lose ground in the information revolution to China in the tech race. We get challenged overseas and at home, we're just rabid ferrets fighting with each other in a cage. And that's just not pretty and not fun. And if we can get that going, then I think we act purposefully. We say we don't want any great power dominating Europe. We don't want any great power dominating Asia. And we don't want any power able to interrupt the flow of oil in and out of the Middle East on commercial terms.

1:09:14And we build the alliances and the relationships that do it. I don't think that is an unsustainable ask. Germany and Japan in particular have a lot of resources and a lot of ability. But also, our problem in Asia is not that China is so big and the rest of Asia has fallen behind. In 1980, India's GDP was something like 60%, 65% of China's. Today, it's about 17% of China's.

1:09:44That gap, in a sense, is the imbalance of power that sort of tempts China into thinking hegemony in Asia is really possible and also ensures that without us putting a really heavy weight on the balance scale, it can't be stopped. If we can create a world that there's room for others to prosper, that not only India, but Indonesia and Vietnam are growing, I think what we're going to see is China will kind of reach this point of understanding that Asia is too big for China to eat.

1:10:18Nobody can eat it. And so we need to learn to live with folks, which Germany has done in Europe. It's possible. And in the same way, if Russia is stopped in Ukraine and Ukraine goes like Poland and becomes a prosperous country and all of this, that door is closed without American soldiers fighting and dying to keep it closed. So there is, I think, the potential for the kind of natural balance of power in these key theaters to emerge in a way that we can have the sort of world that is good for us economically and from a security point of view, but does not require an ever escalating defense budget, an ever escalating series of American commitments.

1:11:05Is there anything especially unique, you call it the information revolution, I would think about it maybe as the intelligence revolution, like to make it very specific to AI. Is there anything that you're thinking about that excites you most or worries you most about this very unique brand of technology in global affairs? Well, it is interesting how it seems, at least for now, to have simplified the international playing field so that people, as you were saying earlier, just, they say there's America and there's China and there's no one else in the room. First of all, I wonder how long that will last, because originally there were two nuclear powers, America and Soviet Union, and nobody else was in the room, but then a bunch of other people started getting into the room.

1:11:47Is AI more replicable? Are we going to start seeing other countries come up with their equivalent of these technologies? The Chinese have obviously done it with less need for original skull sweat than we did. Can third parties look comparing the US and China do more? So I'd be definitely watching that one. And there, I think, you know, the Indians and the Europeans and the Israelis are all very interesting in that respect.

1:12:19The Israelis got their nuclear bomb just a couple of years, a few years after China. So look at that. I do think the whole question of AIs and national security decision-making and deterrence is interesting, because the whole goal of deterrence is you want to make the adversary believe that there's no question. If I do X, they will do Y. They will be able to do Y, and they are willing to do Y.

1:12:50Automating your foreign policy decision-making process increases deterrence. And so we've turned that over to the AI, and if the AI thinks you're doing this, wham. And anything less than that is, no, I'm leaving a human decision point because I might decide not to do it. That's interesting when you think about how that might play out in the world of deterrence. And are we really willing to have the doomsday machine decide whether we're going to go to war

1:13:20or use nuclear weapons or something like that? Very interesting and somewhat perplexing.

Medicine and future optimism

1:13:26Maybe to end on a positive note, what are you most excited about in the future? The list is almost endless. When I think about the acceleration of medical research that's going to be coming, let's just look at what AI and generally advances in tech are doing in the field of medicine. The rate at which cures are being found or treatments. My friend Ben Sass, who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer, I mean, he's still in a very bad situation.

1:13:57But a drug that didn't exist a year ago is keeping him not just breathing, but interacting with people and doing things. It is a stay of execution. But the point is, I can look back at people in my own family who died of various conditions, which would now, if they had them, be treatable. And that's in one lifetime. And I also believe that we're going to be seeing a cost revolution in health care,

1:14:27that people will have 50 years from now, better health care and cheaper health care than anybody has today. I think this means that things like the federal deficit due to entitlement programs are actually solvable, that we're going to have Medicare is going to be less of a drag and the seniors are going to get better care. So I think many of the problems that are driving us really crazy right now are actually amenable

1:15:00to solution and the solutions are appearing at a fast rate. And that our biggest problem is that this cornucopia of wealth that the information revolution unlocks, the stuff is coming out of this cornucopia so fast, we just don't know how to manage it. I am fundamentally optimistic that we are on the cusp of a unique era of human transformation, renewal and development.

1:15:30And it's really exciting to be able to see it. I've been reading your books and your thinking and your writing for so long. It's such a thrill to do this together in person. When I do these, I ask everyone the same final question. What is the kindest thing that anyone's ever done for you? I think of Les Gell, but the Council on Foreign Relations was just a magnificent mentor who, when I would do something stupid, would help me see it, but also help me figure out the next step forward. I have had so much undeserved kindness from so many people in so many dimensions of life.

1:16:05Younger relatives now who put up with their endlessly boring, talkative, another one of those old war stories. Employers who keep me going, put up with me. The Wall Street Journal, Paul Gigo, letting me be the Global View columnist at the Journal. I float on a sea of kindness, and I don't know that it's easy to say there's one thing kinder than another. I've just been blessed. It's a beautiful visual to close on, floating on a sea of kindness.

1:16:37Thanks so much for your time.

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