Why the World Order Is Collapsing and American Power Is Rising

transcript

Let's just start with the US China rivalry today and one is a landbased continental empire China which believes that it can match the technological and therefore military strength of the other power without all that political liberalism and messy democracy.

America is is doing what we've been doing for a very long time which is dominating the cutting edge. If there are things that keep 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 [music] and so on and markets that economy needs. I don't think China has it in in it to beat us. Walter, I've been [music] looking forward to this for 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. So, I've been 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 just in 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 of [snorts] global affairs and I'd love you to kind of talk about the sweep of that winning and where you how you conceive of us and our

role in the world today. All right. Yeah. I mean it is it's a really interesting time because on the one hand um the Pax Americana that we kind of developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990 at the end of the Cold War is really in crisis.

But if you step back a little bit, American power is not in crisis. It's it's like our the networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe and so on. Those 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 uh raises in productivity that I believe we've we have experienced and are about to experience, I think we're still charging ahead.

So this it's this odd picture of a dynamic country and a collapsing world system. And it um the the Trump presidency has kind of exaggerated a lot of the disruption. I am I'm I'm optimistic about America's position medium to long term. I do think we've got some we're we're in rough waters right now.

What What do you mean by collapsing world system? Well, you think about, you know, the World Trade Organization. We used to have this rulesbased system for trade. Now your tariff is more or less what President Trump wakes up in the morning and thinks it should be and that we tended as a country we exercise more

of our power through institutions the NATO alliance um UN even at times and we are not doing that we believed you know since World War II it's been sort of a principle of 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 relive. We made a commitment in 1955. You know, unless we announce with great fanfare that it's changing, it's still there. So, we're trying to provide this bedrock of solidity uh in the world. And we're obviously not trying to do that anymore. for for President Trump.

I think he believes he maximizes his advantages by being completely unpredictable and also crossing a lot of lines so that past presidents probably would not have said things like, "Okay, if you don't raise your defense budget, we're going to double your tariffs or something of that kind." Um, and try to sort of solve problems through

channels. Trump would make the argument that didn't work. And so he's now he's he's completely trashing the institutional networks that for a very long time were the vessels of American power. And I think he's doing it in a way that's going to be very hard for his successors to rebuild.

How would you teach someone else his method? Like you've written a lot about this. I'm very curious how you framed it. He's a interesting president. No, no doubt whether you're for or against uh what he's been doing. How Yeah. How would you teach his method to somebody that was curious to learn how he operates?

So distinctive. He really is a a genius at 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 in and to do it in ways that that leave him completely free to act.

So you know if you if 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. So all of the normal constraints on on political figures reputation reputation and so on he does not pay.

In some ways, I think President Clinton kind of first discovered that shame only matters if you let it. [laughter] You know, shame is is an emotion that exists in other people's minds. And you know, a 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. And he's, you know, he basically realized, no, if you just keep putting one foot [laughter] in front of the other, you just, you know, you'll you'll pass through and the, you know, the dogs will bark, but the caravan will move on.

Trump has has deployed that concept on an industrial scale. You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can can you say more just about what you mean there? The Donald Trump show is the most compelling entertainment infotainment spec spectacle that 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 you know, it's very hard to think at ever of a single ruler who just dominated everything.

So whether 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. Some 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. He a lot of people thought that when he lost um uh 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.

So at what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did. Now I observe that Napoleon also lost at Waterlue and ended in exile. So this is no guarantee that 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 the disintegration of the postworld war II/postcold war structures. Uh they're not going to be the same. Uh I think he has also chain he 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 that one person rule or a central figure should be downgraded and we should be run by institutions and bureaucrats and committees.

I 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 Abbe in Japan, BB in Israel and Erdogan in Turkey and Trump in the United States.

Trump is sort of the greatest of these the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xiinping. We're back to an era of personal politics. If you think about the broader longer arc of dominance or power leading up to this moment, I I love the historical context. You're an amazing historian.

talk [snorts] about why whether it's maritime dominance or other major reasons that you think the UK and America up up until let's say you know the end of the cold war or something had such an incredible run. Well this is in many ways let's just start with the US China rivalry today and what you see

is the sort of two sides. One is a land-based continental empire, China, which is which 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 I 14th who thought that his technocratic government of the experts in France could beat those pesky English right with all of that ridiculous you know they every 20 years they kill the king or kick him out or what who knows what they

do but it's utterly chaotic and so the French idea was we can we can do that with a strong centralized system um and and really from the time of Louis the 14th 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 um and then it's being contested successively by a series of great power continental states France under Louis the 14th again with Napoleon Germany as 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 was was muddle, lost, crazy. And yet somehow in the end the hobbits keep winning. [laughter] I should say that we stole our our global strategy from the British.

They stole it from the Dutch who had been doing this earlier in the 17th century. So in 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 in it to beat us. Ramp is the only platform built to make your finance team leaner, faster, and better, saving businesses 5% annually on average, so you can stay focused on growth.

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What what what are 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. You know, 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. Be terrible if it fell into the wrong hands. But, you know, step one is have an open society at home.

You know, think of the Dutch in the 17th century that um okay, everybody had these wars of religion. Well, 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 [laughter] and 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.

And if an intellectual, a scientist publishes some kind of scientific paper that 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. And so you they come up with new ideas uh for government finance that we still use the joint stock company new seagoing technology circulation

of the blood. Lock comes to Holland and writes a lot of his best work there. So that's step one. You have this open dynamic society and you've got you know 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 and they're traveling all over the world. And what this does is it makes you stinking rich.

Um I advise my students sometimes to go like go to the Met Museum here or any a number of places to see the Dutch masters not to look for oh like the brush strokes and the composition it's so exquisite all of which is true but uh 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 and he's got a stuffed parrot from Brazil on his mantel piece, right? You know, there there's just this astounding amount of wealth which then allows you to start thinking globally.

18th century the Prussians fight the um you know Frederick the Great fights with Maria Teresa over Silisia the Seven Years War. This is a beautiful I've been there. I've been to Sisia. I love Silicia. It's a it's a kind of sausage shaped province in modern Poland. And 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 to participate in your system. So you don't do say what the Spanish did in in Latin America where you say uh sorry this is 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 can trade and the British Navy keeps piracy down for everybody, not just for the Brits.

Um, and what this does is it it encourages other countries to participate in your system. So, you grow rich like 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.

And we were we were among the greatest beneficiaries of what the British did. Um and the Germans did the same thing. Prussia the German Empire became a great trading power. They had you know um investments in Argentina and Chile and in many places their commerce was driving out the British.

But then uh then the Germans discovered that that we have another little trick up our sleeves. They go to war in in World War I and they suddenly discover that while they were integrating into the world 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 for 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. You know, 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. Actually, we waited till about 47 to do that. But in any case, uh, 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 the Wilhelm II path um than the Conrad Adenau path and this may you know we are now testing what happens there.

It's one of the reasons I'm worried but it's a pattern that that has been recurring and so far whenever it's finally comes to the test our side has been winning. If if I were to imagine an equivalent of me and an equivalent of you sitting somewhere in China today and I asked 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 with scholars and officials and what I can say is they are

very aware of this dynamic. Um, if there are things that keep 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 its economy needs.

I mean, let's imagine China declares a blockade of Taiwan, which could very easily happen. The United States just from a 100 miles further out imposes a counter blockade on China. Nothing is going in or you know no oil is coming in or out. Um no manufactured goods are being sold. What happens to the Chinese economy?

All the soybean contracts they have with farmers in Brazil and Argentina, you know, not getting delivered. So, we've all been surprised with the Iran war to see just how big the Chinese oil stockpiles have have become. A lot of Chinese energy policy can be understood as trying to avoid the trap of dependence on the global

economy. So, you know, they've they're doing the solar, they're doing um as much hydro as they can. and 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. Right?

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 US, they can actually fight for the long term. Do do you think the US runs the risk of trying to do that same thing, become 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-suff like America is an amazing place, a bread basket, a natural resource, rich, you know, 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, you know, a tradition of isolationism that that is 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 um you know, 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 those. And we've seen we saw during the pandemic you know that uh 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 and we can't get all the raw materials that we need right here. But also our uh producers need more than the American market.

Traditionally, the most free market lobby in the United States has been the agricultural lobby because 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. So, they need that market.

The same is true, you know, there's so many economies of scale. You know, 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 and growth that they need even to stay technologically equal, say, to China, much less be ahead and be and

be super profitable. So, 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 and you don't really want to have a gun around all the time.

So, you have to have a trading relationship that that works for both sides. Both sides have to agree to the trade. [snorts] There are ways of doing that. I think we we got very doctrinire in this belief that you know that a simple free trade system uh would work.

We didn't look for sort of 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 that reviving their economies became necessary for for American security otherwise they would have gone communist and we didn't want that.

And so we said, "Okay, fine, Germany. You can have really high tariffs on American goods, but we won't reciprocate because it's in our interest for you to grow." A lot of that stuff got institutionalized. And so there there are many many cases now where you have really nonrescrocal tariffs and our barriers have been lower.

I think the Trump people were not wrong to say, "Okay, this needed to change." And and we're also seeing with the the need for supply chain security and so on, you can't simply take your your economic policy out of a free trade textbook.

On the other hand, you do still need trade and you need to and trade 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 poperri list. Now that same list is literally just American technology companies, like basically one through 20.

There's a couple exceptions um but but it's it's more or less total dominance by American technology companies. And that was true before open AI and Enthropic and SpaceX and and now those are you know yet resurgent even on top of our great technology companies.

And I'd love to just hear you reflect on how tech of course AI you know you have to ask about that as well are changing the global order the nature of global order in such a such a digitally dominant you know set of technologies that were once again the leader in how how do you process

it? I do try to look to historical analogies. There's nothing exactly the same as this. The closest you really can see is is to the actual industrial revolution. And interestingly, the country that that that led the first industrial revolution, Britain, then dominated for 150 years became a a dominant power.

History is moving a lot faster now, but I think we are we absolutely have been in this position of the first to really see and use this potential source of power. I 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 upheavalss that new technology causes. And for a lot of reasons, I think first the British and then we were just better at kind of riding that, you know, wild horse than other people 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. You've got, you know, Troskyites in the DSA thinking that, you know, 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 to pull it off again. So, enormous progress and yet total kind of chaos and dissension. So the relationship between achievement and order right now has kind of 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 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 what's the key to riding the wild horse?

Because I think everyone in America would say, "Yeah, I hope the next 150 years we dominate and it's because but in a nice way." That's the kind of people we are. How [snorts] would you have us do that? Like what are the keys to doing that?

Well, now that we have the horse, America's always been an ownership society. You know, 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 owned nothing and worked

for other people, 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, okay, 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. Okay? You know, I then calculate in a rational way what I would like to happen. And that is the kind of political education that prepares me to to to take a thoughtful role in the councils of the country.

Plus, I'm independent. And then with the industrial revolution, you know, can this continue? We're getting the big cities. We're getting industry. Well, the first stage we actually with the we we do with the railroads and the uh Homestead Act, they kind of come in together.

The government gives a ton of land in often in 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 farmer. You go live on your farm for five years and it's yours. Amazing.

And so for the ordinary person, all right, I'm getting a free farm out of this system and I'm a farmer and yet you're al you're doing this in a way that is simultaneously allowing the infrastructure of a new industrial society to take place. You get in the 20th century.

Uh think about how as the family farm begins to decay economically, it can't compete. you you have to be very well capitalized to farm under modern conditions and so on. Um and where people are starting to work in cities and be employees. Is this going to endanger the republic?

Is this going to you know 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. Fascinating. And again, a lot of government policy was around think about not only building the freeways and the

highways, but subsidies through the tax code so that municipal bonds are tax-free, which means towns can build the infrastructure that you need to attract the the developers and the homeowners who will then raise the value of the property and so you can repay the bonds out of the 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 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 and land close enough to where you work so that the commute isn't killing you,

right? And you look at why are so many young people really unhappy with the way the economy is working. Home ownership is one of the real big problems. Uh well, you know, 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, you know, twice a month or whatever, you can work farther out. If you expand the commuting radius, say from 40 miles to 75 miles, right? 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 or the subsidy of of homes that could drive this expansion? It seems like a really really important thing to get right for for America. I I think so.

I think you can again I think we should be doing things like encouraging remote and hybrid work. Now there problems with it okay you know mentoring there are benefits fine all right there problems with every form of technology how many people has the car killed since you know we we started using cars uh how much

money has it cost for the highway systems and so on. So yeah, a new technology just doesn't appear like an angel and grant wishes everywhere. You have to think really hard about how to make it work. Um I think of this as infosstructure that is not in infrastructure is building the bridges and the physical stuff.

Infosstructure is the institutional legal regulatory framework that can allow AI technology to to develop give better results to patients in a hospital. You see, you know that 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 company says fine, you can stay home 60% 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 actually is is not a net cost for government because in fact you're you're saving on another another part of the budget. Th 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 that seems to be the other great power today that through using our technology that we've invested in they're able to distill would be the term in 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 you know, 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 a as an intro before we talk about the the notion of tech Hamiltonians that I I thought was quite interesting of yours.

One of the interesting things about America is that we've our foreign policy arguments are very repetitive. Basically, if 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. Um and what you see is a strong capitalist economy uh that is trading effectively with the rest of the world provides the sort of money and the technological progress that holds

society together because people are making money at it and they're happy. Um and also gives you the strength so that no other country can can attack you. And so 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.

Uh George HW Bush in some ways. Um then you have uh people who say h money that's just so vulgar. What about human rights? And would argue you know what causes the threats that America faces? Well, it's bad governance. Dictatorships. You democracies don't go to war. Dictatorships do. Generals generals like to fight. Moms don't.

So, American foreign policy should be about promoting democracy globally, promoting international institutions. Let's let's get rid of war by getting rid of the causes of war. And that's a kind of Wilsonian approach which we certainly had actually long before Woodro Wilson. Then 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 from

the American people, runs colossal defense budgets, gets us into endless wars, and that will destroy the liberty. You know, we we can conquer the world and lose our freedom at home. What kind of foreign policy is that? All right. And again, we've been having this since the 1790s.

And then finally, there's the group I call Jonian 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 attack us or impugn our honor. Um, if somebody attacks us, we should just go out and crush them.

and laws of war. That just, you know, no, like rats, you should exterminate them and and you 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 jonians often look like Jeffersonians, the the isolationists in times of peace, but something happens like Pearl Harbor and 911 and suddenly the the Jonians are activated. So I think we've we've been having these things for a very long time. We still have them today.

I say these are like, you know, suits in a deck of cards. And so very few of us have just like all 13 Hamiltonian cards, right? We generally all have a mixed hand, but uh we we tend to have some suits are stronger than others for each.

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 Wilson and Hamilton and to build a global system that advances the country's economic security, um, but also deals, you know, promotes human rights and democracy and that will

both make us rich and build a lasting global peace. That was that's been kind of the predominant establishment idea really since World War II. And when I actually I wrote Special Providence came out right around the time of 911.

And people at that time weren't really aware that there was anything but Hamilton and Wilson and then suddenly discovered, oh wait a minute, there are these Jonians there who want to nuke Afghanistan or whatever whatever came up after that.

So I would say that Trump's coalition is a mix of Jefferson, Jeffersonians and Jonians, isolationists and hawks. You could say Vance as the isolationist champion and R in some ways and Rubio as the hawk. Um, and Rubio is not interested in the United Nations or you know, look at in Venezuela like let's get rid of

our enemy Maduro, but we're not going to 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 the Jeffersonians are saying, "Well, this is not really our fight.

let's stay out of it while the Jonians are just saying Russia's the enemy. Let's let's knock Putin in, punch him in the nose while we can. So, I think yeah, we're they're they're all active today. And and maybe say one word more about this notion of tech Hamiltonians as a as a key faction that's emerged.

Typically, tech and the government were at least in in my career were kind of foreign different concepts. One of the biggest things that happened in America is in modern American history is the mutual discovery of tech and government. I mean, in the 1990s, which was back in the old post 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 boundaries. You know, 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 locust of international great power competition. And China's attempt to build a technosphere that can dominate the American technosphere is, you know, to American tech companies. this is really critical to your business but also to the American state, American government, it's critical to power

and independence. So the they much I think to the surprise of both the tech world and the political world they're they've been driven in on each other and there's a kind of reationalization of tech and of the economy that we see and the tech folks um and you may know better certainly uh Jeremy understands them

a lot better than I do but my sense is that the when the tech folks think about what are their economic interests. They're different from what you might call a legacy multinational, you know, the postw World War II that are f that are basically global trading and manufacturing companies.

I I make cars from 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. All right? I I need financial markets.

I need labor markets and I need mana manufactured goods markets that are seamless and open. As Tom Freriedman put it, I need a flat earth. But if you're a tech company, you don't um you in you're not Google is 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 mo model. Um, if you're Silicon Valley company and suddenly there's no more unskilled labor acrossing from in from Mexico, all right, the cost of your janitorial and gardening services rises 30%.

So what right? You're much more concerned about security of supply chain, security of international pro of intellectual property. And I think increasingly companies are starting to realize that they need their employees to be patriotic. that is that your employees need to think it's an evil sin to sell IP to China and that the your your

co-workers will rat you out in a heartbeat if they think you're doing something like that. And so the the kind of culture both the the economic agenda of the tech sector of the business world and the kind of cultural political se u 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. If 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 that have any real power or are contenders to be the powerful nation of the next I don't know 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 could talk we could 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. Uh, and uh, I've been lucky enough to get to know a number of the folks that are close to the

BJP and and the RSS, which is the kind of Hindu nationalist group that uh, helped to create the BJP. And this is a group of people who a hundred years ago was basically five guys in a house. And they've now built this mass movement that has um kind of cells something like 86,000 small groups around

India that meet weekly. U they're an incredibly dynamic political force. They powered Modi uh and and they have very strong ideas about what India should be, what um what binds a country, what makes a country. India's is, you know, it 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 than people think. Um but it is and it has its own sharply different view of what the world should be like which is what multi-olar but not in the Chinese way.

Jai Shankar who's the foreign minister of 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 4 billion people in nuclear weapons has exactly as many votes in the general assembly as you

know uh um Likenstein or Luxembourg I mean you know one vote and it's ridiculous and 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 you know had much of a standing

So 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 as possible for India or also good for the world. So they're a they're an interesting power with different ideas and I'm uh very much kind of looking to see how that develops.

I think the Islamic world again um we are seeing the world of Islam is you know obviously it ranges from super sophisticated scholars and intellectuals and writers to you know jihadis in in North Africa sort of you know with machetes you know burning torching huts or something uh you know all of this range it's an

immense civilization but as a as a as a force in the world. There's more of it. It's becoming stronger and understanding how it's changing, how uh the culture in the Gulf States and Turkey is changing and developing. I think the in 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's 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 I think ma enables countries to use their own cultures, languages and so on as as platforms and Turkey is more Turkish. It's it's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more I think Japan is becoming more Japanese.

So that in in the industrial revolution there was a tendency toward convergence of the great civilizations. Now I think we're seeing a divergence. Vanta automates security and compliance for over 16,000 fast-moving companies like Ramp Cursor and Harvey keeping them audit [music] ready around the clock.

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Can you explain it a little bit more? MTV when it first went into Latin America, it was producing it was showing American rock videos on there and everybody says, "Oh, this is going, you know, it's the end of indigenous Latin culture and so on." But, you know, before long, they weren't showing many American videos at

all because local artists were able really in a pretty cheap way to, you know, have their own music, their own videos that responded, you know, 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 in that structure. I'm sure AI just pours fuel on that fire. What scares you the most? Like as you think about the global power dynamics and I'm assuming your your vision of the future that's optimistic would be, you know, progress and prosperity or something.

what what most would get in the way of the kind of future that you'd want to see. A lot of things. You know, the industrial revolution was in the long run a pretty good thing. But it had little side effects like the Communist Party, the killing hundred 100 million people, World War I, World War II,

reign of terror, right? So why were those necessarily side effects of the industrial revolution? Because 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 on steroids exactly.

So I definitely see that but then I look at things like you know some ways one of the biggest geopolitical problems of the of the last 60 years has been nuclear proliferation and you know 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 and these are 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 and you can usually 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 boweapons arms control when basically in a basement lab somewhere you can cook up a pathogen that could destroy half the planet?

So the the idea that we're going to have accelerating arms races in a condition with a almost utter lack of strategic trust where you can't appeal to verifiability as a way of ensuring compliance. I 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 the chance both of confrontation and ultimately even of war between great powers.

Speaking of maybe Ukraine is the right, you know, flash point for this or something, but it does seem like there's been quite an evolution of just non non-weapons of mass destruction, just just regular old weapons. And this is a 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 and so on? Well, unfortunately, I've learned a lot because there's been a lot of war.

Um, and you know, the first time I went to Ukraine after the war, I went to this um sort of drone factory and it really was remarkable because in real time they were starting to get results from the battlefield and then they were adapting. Yeah. Yeah. But at that time it was a very simplistic stuff.

They were like getting kids toy trucks and re-engineering them into drones that could, you know, ground drones that could put a landmine on a tank. I was back there a couple of months ago and the the the advances are just unbelievable. The intensity is the same, but the the scope of change is amazing.

I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore because it's drone. It's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer, you know, a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones, you have this sort of gray kill zone, gray zone, where at 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 they're having to build a new kind of ground drone that that can go retrieve a a 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 looking 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.

Okay, this is so unlike what war was even six years ago. And I ask myself too, uh how fast is the Pentagon learning? You know, if if the tank and the rifle are becoming as obsolete as the cavalry charge and the sword, what kind of forces do we have? What kind of forces do you need?

Um, we are and 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 a as as the power that has the most stuff. We're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got more we 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. Um, you 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. Good news for Taiwan actually. But American power traditionally is about sea power to a very large extent. How does that change over time? So we've gone from, you remember in the '9s, you look like you're just old enough to remember the 90s.

They used to talk about the revolution in military affairs. we've shifted now to and so it's like okay 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 is that's something that I've learned about war by watching what do

you think is the most likely thing to happen in Taiwan well the Chinese Xiinping 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 past a certain point because failure would be really catastrophic for for whoever launched it. Um, but there are a lot of steps in between um an invasion and doing nothing.

And we see the Chinese, I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade where like 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, you know, 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 in that that kind of way.

The big new factor is that the Japanese have woken up and the Japanese see 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. Uh, historically, the Japanese have actually been pretty good at at changing direction when they genuinely feel threatened or feel the need to change in some way. Uh, so 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 uh, 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, all 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? Yeah. Well, There were three basic classes in American society during the kind of postworld war II era of stability and and they spread a lot in the rest of the world. One was an industrial working class which was kind of in more or less in stable jobs with blue

collar kind of work. Yeah, exactly. Often organized in unions. Um and they were they had a very pragmatic political attitude and they were e 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 and 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 you know the founders you know the John D. Rockefeller originally or the JP or first JP Morgan. It was grandsons and it was publicly traded companies, professional managers.

And so there was a kind of institutionalization of the of of business. You also that was also the era of these very regulated monopolies and igopolies. So there's one phone company, you know, a limited number of airlines, the three networks, very structured business world.

And then between them of this, you know, organized, rationally focused, working class and sort of organized, regulated, publicly managed business class. You had this this sort of 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 the 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, etc. 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 you know

what do we do about AI just being one of many uh and we're we're not organized to answer these in the old ways so we are really out at sea and because America 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, tremendously heavy responsibility to try to figure out answers and and and and see some path through this

and try to build a new kind of American politics and and social order that can get us can allow us once again to be kind of reasonably stable for ourselves. and then project that globally. What do you think in against that backdrop it's going to mean or does mean to be an American?

Like if if all of that is changing, what does it mean? Americans think about being American in different ways and they they have for a long time. You hear a lot of people talk these days about America as a you know country founded on ideas.

Honestly, I don't I think I was like 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 every 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 Turkish 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 this, you know, it's like this is it.

Um and then but there really are other people who experience who love America and contribute to America who experience yes it's a country of ideas and and so on. So we're we we are a pluralistic country in this way and I don't myself feel more American than somebody that was naturalized last week.

Um, I think for me in some ways it really 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.

And I would say anybody who says that and means it is an American. Pretty remarkable, huh? Well written. It's good. It's good. [laughter] One thing I haven't asked about that I'm 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

with all the other key players where alliances seem to be shifting around for the first time in a long time. H how do you interpret what's happening? What are the deeper currents and messages that that you're focused on? Okay. Well, 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 of kind of Arab identity as an organizing force in the Middle East. In the 1950s, Nasser and Egypt were the great pillars of of Arab identity and panarabism.

um after the ' 67 war they they took a hit but you would still have countries like Syria, Iraq uh even for a while under Gaddafi, Libya aspiring to that mantle. If we look at what happened, you know, Iraq collapsed, certainly America had a lot to do with that.

Syria collapsed without America having a lot to do with it. And so Iran as a nonSni non-Arab power had created what people call that that um uh Shia crescent from Lebanon, Syria, Iraq into Iran. And while that, you know, thanks to sort of Israel primarily in uh since since the uh October 7, uh that's broken

up. But what hasn't broken up is you 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, you know, their oil and their money very effectively, but they still can't defend themselves from Iran.

They still without outside help, they cannot stand and and that leads to the straight of Hormuz in that region which remains incredibly important for the economic stability and health of the world that is in kind of chaos. If the United States or some other power doesn't hold Iran back in some way, it it it has

a hegemony over the oil resources in the Middle East in a way that allows allows them to blackmail a lot of people uh economically. So, and and and provides them with the kinds of resources that would not certainly be used to our benefit.

Israel, I think, may have hoped that it could kind of bear the weight of being a counter hegeimon to Iran. Israel is too small and too alien to the rest of the Middle East to really play that role effectively, I think.

Um, and the United States has been really, I think since Obama, the United States has been fundamentally unwilling to do that itself and is looking, we want to kick the can down the road. We want to find some other some other way other than us really putting down a red line that we enforce with Iran.

And I don't, you know, I think history doesn't give us a choice. we we stop Iran ourselves or Iran asserts and maintains hijgemony over the oil resources in the Middle East. Why haven't we been unaffective? Like like obviously we have vastly superior military capability or whatever.

This is a specific question about Iran and the straight of Hormuz, but also you know people used to call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. Like 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 what we've also seen with Russia is the erosion of deterrence. What 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.

You know that's anything other than deterrence involves like long difficult expensive divisive wars with uncertain outcomes and enormous costs. So the decline of deterrence becomes a massive geopolitical problem overseas and a massive political problem at home. And you know, for example, right now, uh, one of the real facts in the straight is is it's it's

not even as important that Iran can hit a tanker with a drone as it is that Iran could could put some drones on some uh desolinization plants and make the cities of the Gulf essentially uninhabitable. And as long as that's the case, if I'm not g I'm not going to make big investments in the Gulf

if I'm a foreign. It's really really scary. Yeah. Right. And that means that that these whole sort of economic development plans that those countries have for their future political stability, you know, go up in smoke because it just is it doesn't work.

So the only way to kind of preserve that is 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 we're not at the point where 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, okay, this is how the world works.

What Harry Truman did after World War II, for that matter, what Franklin Roosevelt did in the fireside chats. Just take the American people into your confidence. You know, 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, you know, 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? You say I hope we first of all figure out how to keep our balance as we enter the information revolution.

That 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 a a good thing. You have that going then then people will back an American president, American foreign policy in a serious way. And I think if you if you don't have that and if we don't do that, we lose ground in the information revolution to China in the

tech race. So our we get challenged overseas and at home we're just you know we're like raid ferrets fighting with each other um you know in a cage and that's just just not pretty and not fun. So you got to get that and and if we can get that going then I think we act purposefully.

We say our goal is to prevent we 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 and we build the alliances and the relationships that do it.

I don't think that is an unsustainable ask. Um Germany and Japan in particular have a lot of resources and a lot of ability. uh but also if we look at the our problem in Asia is not that China is is so big you know which 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 that gap in a sense is the imbalance of power that sort of tempts China into thinking hegemony in Asia is really possible and also you know makes it ensures that without us putting a really heavy weight on the balance scale it can't be

stopped. So if we can create a world in that 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 we can't Asia's too big for China to eat. Nobody 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 it sort of Russia 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 and from a security point of view, but does not require an ever escalating defense budget,

an ever escalating series of American commitments. Is there anything especially unique? You call it the information revolution. And 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 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. So, is AI more replicable?

You know, are we going to start seeing other countries come up with their equivalent of these technologies? The Chinese have obviously done it with less original 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. The Israelis got their nuclear bomb just a couple of years a few years after China. So look at that.

Um I do think um the whole question of AIS and and national security decision making and um deterrence is interesting because the whole goal of deterrence is you want to make it 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 why and they are willing to do why. Automating your foreign policy decisionmaking process increases deterrence and know we've turned that over to the AI and if the AI thinks you're doing this wham, right?

And anything less than that is no, I'm leaving a human decision point because I might decide not to do it. All right. That's interesting when you think about how that might play out in the world of of deterrence. And are we will really willing to have the doomsday machine decide whether we're going to go to

war or use nuclear weapons or something like that? Very interesting and somewhat perplexing. Maybe to end on a positive note, what are you most excited about in the future? The list is almost endless. uh when I think about um you know what the acceleration of medical research that's going to be coming I let's just look

at what AI and generally advances in tech are doing uh in the in the field of medicine um the the rate at which cures are being found or treatments uh you know my friend Ben Sass who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer I mean he's still in a very bad situation.

But a drug that didn't exist a year ago is keeping him not just breathing but interacting with people and doing things. Now it is, you know, it is a state of execution. But the point is that you know 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. That this tech is going to make it easy. 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 uh 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 to solution and the solutions are appearing at a fast rate. And that our biggest our biggest problem is that this the cornucopia of wealth that the information revolution unlocks is just like fall.

The stuff is coming out of this cornucopia so fast we just don't know how to manage it. Yeah. And so I am fundamentally optimistic that we are on the cusp of of a unique era of human transformation, renewal, and development. And it's really exciting to be able to see it.

Well, 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 um who, you know, when I would do something stupid would help me see it, but also like helped me figure out the next step forward.

Honestly, my life has been so I have had so much undeserved kindness from so many people in so many dimensions of life, younger relatives now who put up with their endlessly boring talkative another one of his old war stories. Um, you know, employers who keep me going, uh, you know, who like put up with me.

the Wall Street Journal Paul you go 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 to say there's one thing kinder than another. I've just been I've been blessed.

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