Brexit vs the world: Is Britain too self-obsessed?

peter welcome thank you very much indeed for joining us wonderful to have you here um and we're trying to raise our sights this week with your help um and try and work out how big or small in the great sweep of history brexit actually looks if you're writing a history book imagining yourself writing it 40 years from now do you think it'd be a chapter a footnote a title to the book i don't know partly because so much could go wrong um you know i think that the the worst case scenarios historians are quite good at expecting uh the end of times because we write about that a lot and we write about people who expect the end of times and so separating the knee-jerk reaction of doom and gloom from the reality but i i suspect in the bigger picture uh the future of europe and brexit are part of the same wider story which is how do we adapt to a changing world where other people's societies are becoming richer more militarily ambitious following different models to the ones that we i think expect uh states to want to follow we there's a decline in the fall of popularity of democracy not just around the world but in europe as well and i suspect that that while brexit will be a staging post in a sort of move of what it is that europe thinks it is eu and europe itself i think we're living through a time that we shouldn't benchmark from the date of the brexit referendum and look at what happens if it is in fact in the end of this month that brexit happens i think we should look at it over a much wider time span and over let's say the last 30 years there are much wider and more significant global themes that i think are tied into why why we are where we are here as well do you have any sympathy for you've just been talking about the growth in trade outlet growth in economies outside europe do you have any sympathy for that argument the brexiteers make which is we're locked into the wrong market we need to go global as they say tap into these other markets be part of their world more do you think that has something to it is feasible is realistic well geography plays quite an important role in trade and so does what instead of the resources that you have to offer and as far as i'm aware we can see there's not a great deal we possess in this country i mean we don't have any oil really we don't have any gold silver rare earths you're going to need for the battery packs and the power of the future so we have expertise that we can offer but expertise is transferable it gets copied well it's it's you have an advantage if you're copying because you can you can have second party second competitor advantage if the starting point is that clever people will move to where trade happens or where money is then london is in a highly global competitive market where london isn't competing with paris and belgium and lisbon it's competing with new york and shanghai dubai et cetera et cetera so it's it's how do we adapt to to stay relevant on that we have one what two things massively in our advantage first is we have the time zone that we sit right in the middle of the world between east and west so we're quite a convenient way in which um banking and financial services can tie together two different hemispheres but we also have a very good legal system but that also can be replicated you know we're ideal if you have disputes in between rival russian property magnates or or chinese contractors and constructors you know you get justice in london it's expensive but it's fair and it's not tampered with but those things that we're good at in britain we don't have monopoly on them we're not the only clever people in the world we're not the only people who like fairness and justice and they are copyable they're transferable too so i think we we have to be careful to think that just because britain once had an empire where our island status meant we could invest in the navy rather than the army it is quite hard to see what space we have in central asia in china in south asia in south south africa particularly we don't have any obvious language skills historical knowledge and we don't pay much attention to them you you write about the history of china and and the whole eurasian area in the silk roads and now you've updated it with the new silk roads and contemporary china tell me do you have a sense of uh where what china thinks of brexit there's been a number of commentaries that you can read that come out of naturally government synthetic if not government-controlled organs what's your flavor of it they seem to be quite enthusiastic at uh quite a few elements of it but they're not necessarily ones that play well for us well i think the it's depends exactly who you mean in china and i think there's a role as we as we all have to have learned to deal with the last three years it's a running target about how what we think about it here as well i think that the morning after um the brexit vote xinhua the chinese news agency tweeted that's the problem of democracy right so we have we're supposed to be united kingdom it's even in our our branding and yet we have half the population who basically thinks the other half are mad and i think that if you are a disruptive state if you are growing and if you are trying to take market share away from people uh seeing other people go through existential crisis can be very useful and so there are lots of parts of the world that i think are rubbing their hands at the fact that we don't know if we're coming or going and we have european allies who are benefiting from the fact that businesses are moving to amsterdam or frankfurt or whatever but in china they seem to be sometimes saying well even if they think they're going to do a trade agreement with us we now we now are going to be able to beat down the eu and britain because they're competiting with each other competing with each other uh to a better deal for china yes but we have a great deal of cynophobia in this country i think we find it very hard to think about china in a logical way we tend to think that it's a tremendous threat to our national security and and sometimes there are elements of truth in that and sometimes it's just sort of fear that there are a very large number of people on the other side of the world who are better at maths than we are and that seems to drive a lot of assumptions about china i think we need to stop and think about what china's master plan is if there is one why should they have one and exactly what does it mean and does britain really fit in given that we're not a very big population and right on the other side of the world but you know on the other hand we do have a seat on the security council we are internationally important and one of the great tragedies about brexit that we don't speak about a lot is that british administrators within the eu have been very good at keeping the eu together have been very good at calibrating the direction of europe and everybody's benefit not just not just for britain and the chinese i think really recognize that they've invested a lot of time and resource and energy into what they call the 16 plus one focusing on the eastern edge of the eu places like greece places like hungary places like poland where there's a different story and a different voice that china has where you you there is more of an effort to try to consolidate and show what the benefits will be of large-scale chinese investment and to highlight the fact that well europe is not a perfect organ or for for recycling wealth into parts of europe that are perhaps playing catch up with the with the western part so i think that there are lots of different answers one can give but i think with with china as for any other country you could ask about the biggest challenge right now about brexit is is the uncertainty of what actually is going to happen let's come to the strategy uh on china how britain should deal with it and what china's up to we saw a little bit the other day when gavin williamson the defense secretary uh piped up uh quite stridently suggesting that some deployments should happen in the south china seas and in response for hammond the chancellor couldn't go to china it appears on a trade mission that had been planned is that glimpsing the future there and does it play into what you think is the template of britain just being too cynophobic well you know i'm not here to talk part of politics but it seems to me when we don't have enough recruits to join the armed forces where we have a shrinking defense budget where we've got to deal with the realities of new technologies that have a profound effect on on not just on investment in our defence forces but in what defense even means where as general cynic carter put it not every weapon now goes bang it seems the idea of putting a giant aircraft carry off the coast of south china and talking about opening new british army bases in the far east in an unspecified location and in the caribbean an unspecified location i suppose if it does one thing it summons up what what the don quixote stage we're at right now where we are talking about ourselves as a global military power and you know there's a huge amount of sympathy i think everyone in this country and a great debt that we owe to our armed forces for the job they've had to do in the middle east and beyond uh on on on limited resources with difficult political missions and i think that one of the challenges we have is to work out what is our role in this great new order but i suppose as an educator as an academic i'd say that if you don't if you don't learn anything about other people in the world then it becomes very hard to try to assess and understand who they are what they might want what what do they want though you've studied them more than most is it just to make money to grow the economy and do it through international ties or do they actually want to you said about that message after the european referendum democracies doesn't work do they actually want to export a model which isn't democratic and that would make life easier well there's a lot of talk in china about making a new chinese model available to the rest of the world as a kind of chinese gift i think we have to be careful to read sometimes not take everything at face value i think the primary issue in china as in iran as in russia and arguably with theresa may is it's about regime survival it's can you can you keep the people who are in the leave that hold the levers of power in place and on balance if the economy keeps growing you have a different set of questions to if the economy's shrinking or if you're facing um rising levels of inequality you're not building schools and hospitals and so on so the big question with china is can it keep the economic show on the road and there the last six months we've seen much worse economic figures of about the big economy we see a lot of not either unprofitable or not profit not very profitable state-owned and operated businesses and one of the challenges would be does china and just chinese societies it ready to open up to outside markets and if so is now the right moment to do it and a lot of discussion also about what kind of practices should be involved in the banking sector where there's a huge gray market of loans and so on that the ship could come that the cards could all come tumbling down and we've got some experience of that here with the financial crisis of 2008. so i think china's primary concern is about finding stability stability and stable global positions and uh it's been a year where we've had very extensive us trade tariffs we've just gone past the buffers of when that they should have kicked in and deepened on the first of march but i think the the the chinese show is about how to manage growth in a population of 1.5 billion and as it transitions from a manufacturing economy into the services but we hear president xi who's clearly intending to be around for quite a while talking about power wanting more power wanting to redesign the post-second world war global architecture so who knows quite where that would go but they're clearly building up their own sort of imf as it were and world bank which could um step in and be the lender of choice to troubled economies but they could go further presumably in defense and maybe even supplanting the importance of the un or something how far does that go he's talking that talk isn't it he is i think there are two too different i mean competing but but parallel and i suppose complementary ways of answering it first is that i think that in china has a very strong sense that the world is going through a very unstable patch and that as a result uh the hats should be battened down you know we've had that these analogies and comparisons to storms used a lot by the chinese leaderships and you know one can see that that's not without reason you know there are some perfectly good uh reasons i think the economic slowdown uh rising levels of isolationism brexit is a part of that story too of fragilities and people decided to go their own way and you know divorces like this they they can go very badly they can be fine you know we might find a perfectly reasonable relationship with the eu and so on and it may not be as bad as we think but there is there is fragility all around the world and so i think that that's one part of the reason why china is pulling up the drawbridges and talking in terms of stability repeatedly for china both within and outside i suppose the other point is is that uh when looked at historically you know we in the west have have made a lot of mistakes not on purpose in iraq and afghanistan the pressures that we're willing to put on china and to use force effectively economic force to open up markets and i think that the chinese feel as other states do around the world that the west is is quite a bully it's willing to shake hands with north korea when it suits but not with iran it's willing to put sanctions and to ask for regime overthrow in venezuela but not in other parts of the world where human rights and popular votes and popular animosities against the leadership change and i think that there is there is a that falls on very fertile ground in large parts of the world that there must be a way in which um people can work together in a more cooperative way and china offers itself as a as a beacon and that's that's very resonant in places like africa the new u.s africa policy was announced in december and it was very clear that um john bolton uh hadn't consulted a single african leader single ngo single multilateral organization in africa and in the six page document china's mentioned 14 times so china feels that it's under pressure its model and and therefore should be incentivized to try to find different ways of working together and for whatever our assumptions might be about china china does play within the un you know it doesn't hasn't done what what we did in libya uh or in iraq where the u.n is either bypassed or sort of lost over is that for good is that forever well this is the international architecture we look at and in fact the global international global order that we think about where we think about the rule of law and the wto and the un i think it's not unfair to point out that those get bypassed and in fact the wta is shut down at the moment were effectively being run down by the u.s when it suits so these organizations were set up by the by the rich countries or by the western developed countries and have been used to to create a balance that it's quite hard to see the positive fruits of that i suppose what one wonders is at the moment we see the the thin end of the wedge as as perhaps cytophobes or or realists would would see it in that uh no country in europe seems to be throwing open the doors to the dalai lama they used to they now don't they're frightened there's too much at stake could you imagine a few years from now that actually it'll be the equivalent of the crimea operation in taiwan and it'll be that that nobody dares squeak about and that will be one of the ways it might not be taiwan it might be something else that they want on the south china seas but it could it could be something like that that shows us that there is a new superpower that's willing to flex his muscles well you know we learned the lessons exactly as as you asked just now i mean that when the russians sent forces into ukraine we reacted too little too late and it's now fete complete you know and it's hard to conceive how what the will is of the of the us or of europe uh to do more than put sanctions i think it's it looks like that ship has has sailed and that's a product of the fact if you're busy staring your own shoelaces you're not not gathering information in the right place at the right time i think that that reading the tea leaves it doesn't look like china's motivated or that keen on a full-scale military confrontation so a lot does depend particularly on the us to look like it is willing to put its money where its mouth is and to act and um i think that's why there's an escalation of u.s forces in in the asia-pacific region and probably that's quite a good way of keeping stability but the point is i guess the question is if you militarize more islands uh then what what at what point do you then actually take action but the trump's administration gives off very conflicting messages so cancellation of uh troop exercises in korea uh as a sort of sop towards north korea is is read very differently i think in beijing to probably how it's meant to be read in in washington where these north korea and china looked at in a different way do you see at the very time when there's you talk about this in your latest book there's at the very time when there's so much optimism uh uh around in the east uh growth uh and un unbelievable to many generations uh prosperity in famine is relative prosperity do you see that extraordinary contrast between anxiety in the west nobody quite knowing where they're going loss of faith in democracy and this confidence associated with an authoritarian regime um does that tell us where things are perhaps going in the world yeah i think we can be you know we can get over despondent about the state of affairs in europe i mean i think it just there is a crisis of political leadership in almost every country right now and you know i think we're all waiting well hamlet's dead for who's going to walk in off the stage inherit the kingdom but that there will be someone who comes and unites there will be may not be a mackerel type figure whose popularity swings up and down ludicrously now on the way back up um in the last couple of months you know i think it's just to be able to articulate honestly where we are and what we need to do and it is there is a there is this is a moment of profound reflection i think which is not a bad thing to be thinking about how should we educate the next generation of kids what role should we play with technologies uh in terms of our private sector and the kind of defenses we have with our with our 5g systems and so on what's reasonable and what's an overreaction and i think that there are even ways in terms of you know the eu six months ago would say the eu has no geopolitical view we don't take we're only here for trade and that is having to change the realities of the world today are that these trade blocs are likely to become more sharp elbow that it's more likely that we we will get tariffs imposed by trump or by the eu against other states and and that in itself is not necessarily a bad thing you impose pressure to try to even the playing field and one of the challenges will be to work out in whose interest that really is but you know we need to work out how our governments become reduce inequality more i mean there's no question that this has gone gone out of control here in in europe we have we have to work out how do we have a managed growth with with relatively little resources and we need somebody who can articulate that for us i think in other parts of the world which are resource-rich uh which are growing there are all sorts of different challenges it's not all happiness and and everyone uh eating candy floss celebrating what tomorrow will bring but i think there is a much greater sense that uh people are there to do deals to cooperate with each other that these big infrastructure projects do have value as long as they are priced correctly if they're set up rightly and they're they're transparent and that's one of the big challenges i think dealing with china is that transparency isn't either easy or possible the terms that are imposed are not necessarily equitable and you know and there is a kind of fear that this is part of a much bigger process but china doesn't have to be the only show in town and increasingly we see others who offering their own resources and different different perspectives too like saudi arabia the crown prince in pakistan and india and china in the course of the last three weeks uh talking about you know multi-billion pound in multi-million dollar i should say investments into refineries and infrastructure and as that world galvanizes together the big challenge will be will these states cooperate with each other and what one can overdo the happy clappy feel because there are obvious rivalries obvious pressure points but the things that make me worried when i sleep at night are not uh what's gonna happen with uh with a meaningful vote the things that make me can't sleep is what happens between india and pakistan uh there was military confrontation between indian and chinese troops a year ago uh there are any number of flashpoints in the south china sea or between iran and saudi arabia that could escalate afghanistan on a trajectory to goodness knows where so there are a lot of a lot of problems too and all those things that you're talking about happen at a time when going back to the point that the west is a bit anxious it's also a little bit isolationist isn't it it's lost its appetite for er engagement and uh projecting power a bit um but we're not very good at it i mean mike mullen who is the chairman of the joint chiefs he said you know we're 20 years into the 21st century well more or less he said in 2018 20 years in america which has the most um invested in and the best armed forces in the world they've been fighting effectively uh uh continuously for 20 years and don't have a single win to show for it he's the baseball analogy that no one will understand here you yeah i think he said we're we're we're none for many baseball terms we haven't got a single run not even right forget about a home run we didn't make it to first base and we spent a lot of money getting there and huge destabilization in times of the swings of resource allocation so the price of oil directly impacted by presence of american forces into iraq and so on and so forth so we're not very good at it with trump i think one can't argue about the fact that the u.s are perfectly within their rights to think well why should there be american heavy investment in other parts of the world where things don't don't tend to go very well and i that maybe because the americans reached the wrong conclusions or maybe it's time to let somebody else have a go and and you know one the problem again with trump and you know this much better than i is that the twitter feed and the press conferences are so compelling and uh so fun to watch when he calls tim cook this morning trump calls him tim apple uh you know it's it's compulsive it's like watching a car crash happen but it's important to separate that from the reality of that there is a logic behind trade wars between denuclearization between pressure on russia iran and china and one has to separate that from trump the man who becomes the world's policemen or are we unpleased well the french hubert federing who was a french foreign minister in 2001 he said the the entire role basis of french foreign policy was to create a multi-polar world and you know we all feel safer with the americans as the global policemen because you know americans are good people they're not making mistakes on purpose you know they're attempting to try to make the world a better place they just just haven't done that good a job despite the best efforts and that's come at the huge financial course and the cost of so you know many many soldiers who've come back are wounded or worse and um you know one has to give a huge respect i think for what the americans are trying to do but i think that there are ambitions by almost every of these new powers to play wider regional and global roles we see that with turkey and erdogan in the middle east we see that with uh with egypt of course likewise saudi arabia iran likewise the proxy wars russia always willing to try to get the maximum for the minimum input china likewise and then india pakistan too so i think that no one is comfortable about the way in which the world has worked with a single policeman and in these parts of the world the big challenge will be how are they able to allow each other to rise up together or are there rivalries too so russia and china have been pushed into bed um because china's now disproportionately important to the russian economy as both as buyers but also not not putting sanctions like the us and europe plans and one i think challenge will be who plays first and second violin in those and that that's not as easy as perhaps it looks on the outside yes um trying to imagine donald trump playing any sort of delicate well he plays the solo doesn't he stradivarius that's what he wants to do but you know i think that that that trump again it's it's so difficult because the toxicity around the commentariat and the group think around trump is is that there are lots of ways in which trump's foreign policy is a continuation of we forget all that because of all the distractions of course but you know i think that here in in britain our challenge is that uh you know any single day the newspaper is filled with european research group and trump and so on and we don't have any um skill set or really appetite to look at look at these other states rising in these what i'm going to bring back to um how the world looks at brexit britain at this moment because we are incredibly self-absorbed at this moment in our history i remember growing up and looking at american newspapers and how little they talked about the world outside america sometimes and being rather shocked by that um and of course there are foreign pages world pages on our newspapers but we are incredibly self-absorbed at the moment well everyone i mean i think that's you know everybody is are they i don't think we're any worse than any other state you know you you always want to hear about what's going on your own backyard and for us this really does matter our you know this is a culmination of 30-40 years of unhappiness by some about the eu you know it doesn't matter compared to the great trajectory of history the whether china with its mastery of artificial intelligence and other things is going to monster markets whether there's the death of the car it doesn't matter climate change it doesn't matter compared to demographics in west africa where we're at the beginning of obviously a mass movement of people i expect towards europe but but certainly in terms of the the changing population and age profiles in africa is going to have a huge challenge for uh for africa whatever africa as a continent even means you know the disparate regions and countries and peoples but i think it's right that we are we're trapped in the here and now because we we're trying to unravel what's going on but every other state has a big master plan i mean in my in my new book i say you know china has it's current economic cycle running out to 2049 and you know things might go right things if it might go wrong but they're taking the long view as braudel would call it kazakhstan has a current 30-year plan saudi arabia is trying to have a proportion of its defense productivity made in saudi by 2025 and here our only thing that is the kind of big mega project is the northern powerhouse and i've got in my book i said that so far it was announced about the same time as the belt and road initiative of china and the northern powerhouse um its great achievement is the opening of the south front of leeds train station and in fact if you go on to the i feel sorry for people who run the northern powers website but the news the latest news is the fact that there are six new posters up in manchester airport and that's why i swear to god it's true so in these other parts of the world the speed at which things get done you know that china building a 59 storey skyscraper in 30 days we've just spent we've just passed the 5 billion mark on the hs2 project and we haven't made a single meter of track and we have massive amounts that are spent dealing with planning dealing with democratic objections absolutely right regulations does that model look what does it look best to china answer presumably i don't know i don't i don't know who is the answer again who it depends who you mean but i think that we all value the reason that we're protecting the wildlife we're protecting democratic rights that but there is a cost and that is that puts us at a strategic disadvantage when decisions go through committee where there are hundreds of people who allow who should have their voices heard and i'm no problem with that but how do you streamline that with decisions that can be made by one person uh in a boardroom who decides to to plough through it and get things done and um you know you start to find voices even in the press here in britain talking about how attractive the model of autocracy looks like and i think one of the one of the challenges we have to work on is is we've taken as for granted that freedoms of speech the democratic process that the annual the four-year election cycles are something we live and die by and if you don't get the result that you like then campaign and there'll be a change in government next time but you know we are in a divided country right here and the rules of engagement are very clearly up in the air in terms of what the discussions around gender around freedoms of speech on university campuses a lot of discussion about that in the way in which we get on with each other as citizens you know i suspect that that is the beginning again of a very complicated series of arguments where people are very uncomfortable about the fact that they are allowed to shout whatever people have to shout whatever they like from the rooftops and you know i've just come back from the gulf where you know people have a different attitude to these kinds of things where a benign rulership is willing to keep some people quiet because it's for the good of the whole and i think our assumptions that our model of liberal democracy is the best show in town and in fact the only show in turn which is what we thought for the last 30 years i think comes as a real shock to us and how do we adapt do we need to adapt how do we talk about what the benefits are and there are important stories in this i mean so for example in china right now some of the debate is around the fact that there aren't enough ngos there aren't enough think tanks so there's only one way of looking at things and one thing that democracy does it kills off bad ideas although you know you'll know having covered brexit for three years the the amount of discussion around the topic doesn't refine uh topics all sorts of things can pollute the water right but i think i think it's it's there is it's difficult to try to work out what this looks like in 2019 but you can see that there are lots of different pots bubbling and some will will bubble over and will produce difficult i think consequences other parts of europe for example are on a different velocity in terms of what they think freedoms of speech mean in their press is your guess that china might end up just because you need to uh if you want fresh ideas and challenge might pluralize a bit and we might i think i'm going to make up a word autocratize a bit if you were looking into the crystal ball well you know china's future is connected to what happens in india what happens in southeast asia what happens in pakistan what happens in the gulf what happens with fossils what happens with environmental concerns you know so i think it's dangerous to snap one piece of the puzzle and over focus on that i think a lot a lot of this will move and move together and one thing about asia across all these countries is that it's not a free these are not free worlds we're looking at and they're not becoming more free they're becoming significantly less free you know turkey's double more or less doubling the number of prisons it has in the next three years and you know the gulf in iran pakistan and india where journalists you know are beaten up or worse or put in prison you know these are worlds where where there are much more difficult conversations already going on about what it is the future of the state looks like and so china isn't isn't going to grow or rise or fall in isolation it's about regional and global prosperity levels and what role china plays within those what's the best thing britain could do this moment in its history to prepare itself for this very fluid changing world well there's the most boring answer i can give which is you should we should read you know we should study more we should we should learn about study different things well i think we should you know support we know about king henry viii and about trafalgar we need to learn about who we are and our european partners but it seems to me incomprehensible the and and uh not just rash but but reckless to be tone deaf and um to not have any idea about how the rest of the world is configured about what the rivalries are about what the opportunities are about how people have their role in global history and you know that is changing it i'm representing an enormous academic establishment where these arguments aren't new or interesting because we all know this you know we all know we need to work harder and to introduce other parts of the world but it does start i think at primary school level and beyond we're talking about really early so you know there are a few people today studying russian arabic chinese and there were 30 years ago you know and it's true everybody in the world speaks english as their second language but that wasn't always the case you know as katrina seth the professor french at oxford said last week on the radio you know used to be french was the lingua franca you know we don't have a monopoly on our position in the world and britain once upon a time really was an island in the north atlantic that had nothing going for it and and ashes to ash is dust to dust you know you have to be um you have to be able to adapt you need to be able to understand the world around you and if we can do that then there's no reason whether inside the eu or outside we don't continue to flourish but it doesn't look to me plausible what theresa may said that britain's best days lie ahead of us i'd have thought that britain had a pretty good time of it between 1600 and 1900 1950 globally and i think unlikely to come back would be yours so i'd like you to come back partly because the way in which we built these wonderful opera houses and palaces and stately homes and so on was was not just off our own ingenuity it was through slavery through extraction of resources and so on and so forth so our ability to do that again also doesn't look very very likely you know but britain can play a very important role the rise of a sort of smaller centralized city-states that make good decisions you know there's no reason why that that can't be the future but we need to understand technologies and we need to have have some of these discussions i think about what kind of freedoms we're comfortable with we started by talking about how brexiteers had said we need to reach out to these bits of the world that are growing and all the rest of it and stop being locked into europe um but that's it's awkwardly doesn't it with some elements of some brexit rhetoric which are to do with the great power we can be great again uh it's just this starts with humility you think well i think it's never you you cannot have too much i don't thought it's fair fair enough and um you know i i i can't guess what the future has to bring i'd have thought that climate events uh significant military confrontation between any of these regional powers or between some of the really big ones is not out of the blue you know you can read uh intelligence assessments uh declassified in the us preparing modeling what conventional war between the us and china would look like for the global economies in the u.s economies and you know it's only 100 years ago one chap shot on the streets of sarajevo turned britain over the course of four years from the greatest creditor nation in world in the world to the greatest detonation these big swings they do happen and we're not immune from that brexit or no brexit you know if there's an overspill of iranian and saudi rivalries or indian and pakistani rivalries or or things that we don't expect or don't know were going to happen cyber for example destabilization of power grids uh you know in this these fragility points that's going to be much more significant for us and those shocks that come unseen out of the blue they're difficult to prepare for are the ones we should be really scared of because you you have no playlist of what happens next but those are very real and you can see them in every sector you look at from technologies to uh to global global connections at a regional conferences where you know the fate of syria is not going to be decided by britain it's being decided by iran by russia and by by turkey and when you don't have a ticket for the party anymore um you know you get very good at complaining about what it looks like from the outside and forcing your way in and reminding that you used to host terrific parties yourself once upon a time but so yeah i think humility does go some way but it's all about making sure that the next generation understand who we really are how who other people are and and can function in a world which already which has been globalized for centuries you know and uh the way in which people learn travel move around uh is is going to intensify rather than retreats if i if i boiled it down to a a trite much-marketed t-shirt mug sign calm down and carry on thinking about other things is maybe the message for the brexit age yeah and prepare for the worst i think that that's probably not a bad thing to have in mind anything that that goes better than that is is good news peter francopen thank you for raising our sites if not exactly cheering us up thank you thank you very much indeed you

Channel: Channel 4 News

Views: 255,926

Keywords: Channel 4 News, brexit, brexit latest, brexit news, brexit 2019, trump brexit, eu brexit, eu, brexit uk, brexit latest news, what is brexit, brexit today, brexit explained, uk news, brexit trump, brexit breakdown, peter frankopan, new silk roads, the silk roads book, peter frankopan book, peter frankopan oxford

Id: AzBqQueDR64

Length: 34min 11sec (2051 seconds)

Published: Fri Mar 08 2019