- Good evening, and welcome
to the John. F. Kennedy junior forum. My name is Jackson Grigsby
and I'm a sophomore at the college studying
history, and I'm a member of the JFK junior forum committee here at the Institute of Politics. Before we begin, please
note the exit doors, which are located both
on the park side and the JFK street side of the forum. In the event of an
emergency, walk to the exit closest to you, and
congregate in the JFK park. Please take a moment now to
silence your cell phones. You can join the
conversation tonight online by tweeting with the
hashtag Zakaria forum, which is also listed in your program. Please take your seats now, and welcome me in joining our guest, Fareed
Zakaria, and tonight's moderator, David Gurney. (audience applauds) - Good evening, and
welcome to one and all. We're privileged tonight
to have one of America's most respected journalists. A long time colleague and
friend, Fareed Zakaria, to talk with us about
the title he's chosen, is Globalization 2.0. The Backlash. This is an event sponsored
by the Institute of Politics, and co-sponsored with
the Shorenstein Center and the Center for Public leadership. Some years ago, young
Fareed Zakaria grew up in Bombay, in a middle class family, and there came a time in
life when he was thinking about a university education. And they thought he should
come to the United States. And in the end, it came
down to two choices. One was Princeton, and the other was Yale. So he decided he would flip a coin. He flipped the coin, and
it came out Princeton. His response? Let's make it two out of three. (audience laughs) And that's how he went to Yale. And we're all blessed. He then came here to
Harvard to win a Ph.D. All of that was supported,
would not have been possible had it not been for
scholarship financial aid. It's so important to so
many people, opening up opportunities as we
all have come to learn. After his Ph.D, Fareed
signed up with, I'm not sure which he signed up with
more, it was foreign affairs, where he was managing there
and was rapidly recognized as a star. Or whether he signed up
with Henry Kissinger. Because the two of them became very thick, and Henry has been a mentor,
and I think a long time friend, and has spoken out more
than once that he thought Fareed ought to be the Secretary of State. Fareed stayed there until
he went to the Newsweek, where he was the editor of
the international edition for ten years. Along the way, he also appeared
more and more on television, and today, he is the host, as you know, of Fareed Zakaria GPS, which
appears every Sunday morning. And it's one of the shows
that sweeps the cable. It beats Fox, we're all very proud of that at CNN, but interestingly enough
it's the most (slurs words) show on CNN, for the entire weekend. He has a very strong audience of people, it's like appointment television for many, who want to see ... Tarek Massoud, who is here,
brought Fareed to us, they're dear friends. He was a mentor of yours, in days gone by. And Tarek, as you know, is the director of the Middle East initiative
here at the Belfour Center. (mumbling off-mic) Thank you. But beyond being this very,
very successful television show, something which brings serious television and a serious discussion
of international affairs to us every week, that has
become increasingly rare, I must say, so it's very prized. He's also a columnist
for the Washington Post. He has three books that he has written. And I think the book on
the post-American world was the one that's most
recognized, he also wrote a book on a defense of liberal education, and he wrote one on freedom. So this is a man that brings
to us a deep knowledge, a scholarly background, but
a great concern and caring for the state of affairs in the world. Fareed, we're deeply honored
to have you here tonight, thank you. (audience applauds) - Thank you, David, it's a
huge pleasure to be here, it's a huge pleasure to
be introduced by you. It's an honor, really. A piece of the story you
didn't tell, with regard to that opening, my admission
situation was, of course, you might've noticed there was one college I was not flipping a coin
about, and that was because the Harvard admissions committee
made that decision for me. So having not been able
to get into Harvard, I was choosing between the
two runners up, as it were. I think I did as best
as I could but I managed to get here anyway. I didn't actually have a
chance to get my degree from Harvard because I had started working at foreign affairs, and so
when I was lucky enough, and they made a mistake,
in this case, in 2012 to ask me to give the
commencement address, and they give you an
honorary degree, I was able for the first time to
actually accept a degree from Harvard in person. Look, what I thought I'd do was talk about what's going on in the
world right now, and try to make some sense of it. It is obviously a crazy
time, and we could spend the entire conversation
talking about Donald Trump, which we certainly seem to
do enough of on television. But, God knows it's
historical in its own sense, if you just think about this campaign and the early months of the
presidency, and you compare it, right, to previous ones,
what are the things that people remember in
history about campaigns and the early presidencies? Interestingly, it's what
lives on are the words more than anything else,
right, you still remember Franklin Roosevelt
saying, you have nothing to fear but fear itself,
you still remember John F. Kennedy saying,
ask not what your country can do for you, but what
you can do for your country. So I sometimes have to
think to myself, what will we remember, from this
last year, few years, the campaign and the early presidency? I mean, will we remember that
this was the presidential campaign in which one
candidate, Marco Rubio, accused the other, Donald
Trump, of having a small penis? (audience chuckles) This actually happened, you
can't pretend it didn't, you can't forget it, and
Trump, of course, responded indignantly, not that
this was demeaning to the presidency, or the office, but that it was factually inaccurate. One of Donald Trump's many
statements that is not possible to independently verify. (audience laughs) I'm not saying it's true
or false, I'm just saying, as with much of what he
says, it's very difficult to independently verify these things. But I'm not gonna do that,
instead, I'm gonna talk about, sort of, why we got here. And I wanna talk about
it a little bit, from my perspective, as somebody who grew up in India and came to the United States, and I'll tell you what I mean by that. The India I grew up in, in
the 1960s and early 1970s, was remarkable to me, in this respect, as I travel around the world today. There is almost no country
that was as cut off from the world, as India and
many, many other countries were at the time. What do I mean by that? It was cut off in the sense that India had high tariff barriers, and
so, there were no goods, no services, few ideas,
very little information that came in from the
outside world, and certainly not from the United States. That ability to almost hermetically seal a country off, simply
doesn't exist anymore. And that was the India I
grew up in, I remember, when I was ten years old, in
1974, India got television. One channel, black and white. And they would usually air
documentaries about Indian agriculture, which meant
that nobody watched. And on Sunday nights, you'd
get one Bollywood movie, and before it, there
would be the one piece of important entertainment
that they could afford, which tells you how poor
India was at the time. So this is in the mid
1970s, you would, we watched one episode of I Love Lucy. So that was our information
in a sense, about the United States, a 20
year old, black and white sitcom that was meant to represent life in the United States. And then you begin to
see the world changing. First, you get the
technological revolution that I first remember, was
the betamax revolution, that is video tapes of television shows, you'd get video tapes of
television shows from America, concurrently. And so, that was in a
sense, for the first time, you were getting stuff
that was on American TV, right then, because there
was some Indian family in New Jersey that was
taping their favorite television shows, sending
it back to Bombay, and then in Bombay, with
these tapes, would be passed around the way
that dissident material was passed around in
the Soviet Union, like some is that material,
and you'd go from one, we'd even know which copy
we were getting, 'cause they got progressively worse. And that was the way you
learned about America at the time, and so people
sometimes think about what immigrants think of
America and what attracts them to America. Well, I remember, for
me, the thing I remember more than anything else,
was the opening credits to the CBS miniseries Dallas. You know, which had this
incredible glass and steel office buildings, the big cars,
the men in ten gallon hats, the women, all of it was my
version of the American dream. And that technological
revolution, of course, would turn out to be the
beginning of the information revolution, which was
the fat light revolution, then the Internet, so
that you get to a point where information becomes
absolutely ubiquitous, free, and instantly available. And you get the sense
of the transformation by just fast forwarding to 1990. This is a story that was
told to me at the time, but in journalism, there are some stories we call too good to check,
so I don't know for 100% if this is exactly right,
but 1990 Saddam Hussein invades Kuwait. The country right next to
Kuwait is Saudi Arabia. And the Saudis are trying
to decide what to do about this, there's a huge
problem, if Saddam Hussein has invaded Kuwait for the
oil, Saudi Arabia is where the motherload of oil
is, and the tanks just need to keep driving for a half hour. And so the Saudia are
trying to decide what to do, and they have this conservative
system, conservative country, the king is
80 years old, the king of Saudi Arabia is always 80 years old. (audience laughs) But for a long time,
they had this succession, where you would die, and
then your next oldest brother would become king, and
there were 66 of them, so by the time it got to
be your turn, you could write it into the Constitution,
you were gonna be 80. The current king is 83,
though of course, the next one is going to be very young. So the king decides he
wants to think about this, and he says, just, let's
not tell anyone, I've got to spend a week thinking
about this, and so for several days, maybe a week, there was a blanket ban on any
reference in Saudi Arabia to the fact that Iraq had
invaded their next door neighbor. Now, as I say, whether or not
the story's entirely true, what is striking is that you could imagine the ability to control
information like that at that time, because
information really was a one to many system. If you had control over the
central nodes of information, you could control it. In today's world, it's
impossible to even imagine that. By 1995, it was impossible
to imagine that, because you have satellite
television, you have websites, you have cell phones, you
have Twitter, you have Facebook, you have all
those various examples, and you see a real life version of this. So if you think about how coups worked in the old days, you would take control of the presidential palace,
and you would take control of the radio station,
'cause you wanted control of power and information. In the 60s, you take control
of the presidential palace and the TV station. Same idea. Power and information. Well, in Turkey four years
ago, they tried to do this. There was a coup attempt,
and they first go after the president. But because they were not
very good, they kind of botched it, and the president escaped. But then they go and decide
they're gonna go after information, which
interestingly, they decide meant they were gonna go
after CNN Turk, which is the CNN affiliate in
Turkey, which is a very good station, but is not really the
central font of information in Turkey, not that there is a single one. So they go after it,
they try to shut it down. Meanwhile, the president finds his way to an airport lounge,
and he has an iPhone. And he videotapes a message to the country explaining that there's a coup, and saying people should go out onto
the streets and protest. And that iPhone message
goes viral and essentially undoes the coup. And it's a wonderful
example, it seems to me, of how information has changed
from a one to many system to a many to many system. And that transformation is in some ways, the most important
political consequence of this extraordinary information age. The economic consequences,
you all live with every day, and you know far better
than I can explain, but I thought that that's
one kind of fascinating trend line that we've seen move through. And if you think about it, this world that we've been living
in for the last 25 years, has been characterized by
this one extraordinary trend, which is the information
revolution and everything it has wrought. The second extraordinary
trend, I would say, is globalization. So, the India I grew up
in was closed off from the outside world, because
it didn't want to play by the rules of really,
the American sponsored trading system. It had high tariff barriers, it had walls, goods and services were
not available, currency was not convertible,
all these things meant you had a closed system. By the early 1990s, you had a
completely different reality, which is the walls have
broken down, and countries like India are all trying
to find ways to take part in the same great global economic game. And they're trying to
figure out, how do you sell into the whole world,
how do you get money, how do you get capital from
the whole world, how do you create a circumstance
where you can be part of this great global economic pool? And that transformation,
that is more seismic, I think, than most people realize. The open world trading
system, before 1990, was really, the United
States, Canada, maybe Mexico, though I'm not sure you
would even count that. 12 countries in Europe,
four countries in Asia. That was it. Everybody else was part of
this non-trading system, all of India, all of China, all of Africa, most of Latin America. If you think about the
transformation in Latin America alone, in the early
1980s, Latin America was almost entirely outside
this world, almost all run by military hunters,
almost all, anti-trade, anti-American, and if
you look at it today, the situation is almost entirely reversed. And that massive expansion
of the global economic system that we, in a sense,
now call globalization, has had a huge ripple
effect throughout the world. You can see it in the data very easily. And so, 1979, the number of countries that were growing at 3% a
year, was about 31, 32, depending on how you measure it. The number of countries
growing at 3% a year by 2005, 2006, was 125. So you had had a quadrupling of the number of countries successfully participating in this global system,
even now, after the global financial crisis, that
number is still about 85. And that reality of a massive
expansion and convergence of the economic system,
is the other great trend that we have been watching take place for the last 25 years. And the third one, I
would say, is the kind of, I'm going in a sense, in
reverse order, if you think about it from, in terms of
kind of geological layers, you have the information revolution, which has ridden on
this extraordinary wave of globalization, which
itself, has ridden on an extraordinary edifice
of political stability. So, the world I grew up
in in India in the 1960s and 70s, was deeply divided
geopolitically as well. There was the Soviet Union on
one side, the United States on one side, and every event
that took place in the world was part of this great
geopolitical competition. That took place around
the world, with enormous consequences everywhere. People forget now, but I
think somebody calculated in the early 1980s,
there were 18 civil wars taking place around the world,
and in each one of them, one side was being supported,
armed, trained, funded, by the United States, and
the other side was being supported, armed, trained, and funded, by the Soviet Union. And then the Cold War ends,
and the Soviet Union collapses, and that world disappears,
and what you end up with is a world of much greater
degree of political stability, mainly because you lose this
great engine of instability that is great power, military competition. And another way to describe
that, this error, of course, is American unipolarity. Because the United States
was the last man standing, was the last superpower
standing, and it ended up becoming the organizer of
last resort, the stabilizer of last resort, the
intervener of last resort. American power, in a
sense, in relative terms, grew enormously simply
because of the collapse of any conceivable alternative. So there you have, in a
sense, the three great drivers that were shaping the world we live in. Political stability,
the globalization, and the information revolution. And what is striking about
them, is that they produce enormous extraordinary results. More people have been
lifted out of poverty in the world in the last 25 years than in the preceding century. About 450 million
people, by most accounts. Mostly in China and India,
but elsewhere as well. The extraordinary
transformation that technology and the information
revolution have wrought on all of our lives. The reality that, as I say,
the world is much, much more stable, and even in
terms of political violence, much less violent. I know when you look
at a place like Syria, it's difficult to keep this
in mind, but it is true, that when you look at the number of people who have died as a
result of war, civil war, political violence of any
kind, over the last 30 years, the numbers go down like this,
they've really gone down, since World War II,
they've been going down pretty steadily. But it's particularly
striking in the last 30 years. So, all these extraordinary
benefits are part of the story that I think we live in. But what we have seen
over the last few years is the beginning of
something that can only be described as a
backlash, and it really is a backlash to every
one of these realities. And so, when you look at the
extraordinary technological and economic benefits
that have taken place, one way to look at the
backlash is to consider the statistics about the American economy. So, if you look, Mackenzie did this study. You look at American
recessions and recoveries from 1945 onward, and they follow a very predictable pattern, which
is, from 1945 onwards, the economy would first
recover from the recession. And then the unemployment
rate would recover, in other words, the
economy would get back, GDP would get back to where it was, and the unemployment rate would
get back to where it was, and there would be a lag
between those two numbers, of about six months. Makes sense if you're in
business, where the economy recovers, and then you as a
businessman start to realize it and say, okay, I'll
start hiring people, 'cause we'll make more stuff. And the mean and the
median are very similar, so this is a very robust
correlation between the economy getting better,
and the unemployment rate getting back to its pre-recession level. And then in 1990, something happens. That pattern breaks. In the recession of the
early 1990s, you see the economy comes back,
and the jobs come back not six months later, but 15 months later. The recession of the early 2000. The economy comes back,
and the jobs come back, not six months later, not 15 months later, but 29 months later. The recession of 2008. The economy comes back,
and the jobs come back, not six months later, not 15 months later, not 29 months later, but 64 months later. So something happened in
the early 1990s that broke the connection between the
economy and unemployment, between capital and labor. Right, and that is what
we are all witnessing, and we see now happening,
which is, it is possible for an economy to do very
well without median wages going up, it is possible
for an economy to do well and unemployment to seem
low, but it's disguised because there are lots of
people in part time jobs or in bad jobs, jobs
without benefits, and such. That reality has only
started to happen since the 1990s. So you ask yourself, well,
what happened in the 1990s that would explain this break? I would argue it's exactly the
forces I've been describing. Right, it's globalization, it's
the information revolution, all these things that if you have capital, if you're a big American
company, these are great, great forces. You can surf this wave
of globalization and the information revolution
to enormous advantage, you look for a place that
has cheap cost of capital, and that's where you get your money from. You look for a place that
has cheap labor, and that's where you make your product. You look for a place
that's growing strongly and you sell into that market. And that global arbitrage,
is enormously profitable. But what if you are the
steel worker in Pennsylvania, the coal miner in West
Virginia, the auto parts maker, the mom and pop hardware
store, owner, in one of these places, what happens to you? And that, I think, is
the new realization that we are coming to, the backlash. I think that, with Donald
Trump, I always think that there's a kind of, behind the circus, there is some, I don't
know if it's a method or an instinct, or a genius,
but even with the discussion of Amazon, while it's, you
know, bizarre for the President to go after a particular
company, he's factually wrong on the post office issue,
he understands that there is some discomfort with the
idea of this vast company that has disintermediated
large numbers of mom and pops, you know, every hardware
store in every local town, every book store, that
process is sort of like creative destruction except on steroids. And that process is not going to end. So when we hear about
driverless cars which seems like an amazing new technology,
right, people might wonder 25 years from now, why
human beings were ever entrusted to do something
as risky as drive. Right? Well, because if you think
about it, the difference between a human being and
a machine, the machine is never going to be
drunk, the machine is never gonna get lost, the machine is never gonna find it too rainy or too
snowy, and what is it, 30, 40,000 people die on American highways every year, almost all of
it because of human error, so there's a huge advantage. But three million Americans
drive a car, bus or truck for a living. Three million Americans,
it is the most widely held occupation for a male in America. Almost all these people,
by the way, do not have college degrees, almost all
these people are over 40. What happens to them? That is the beginning of this backlash about technology, I don't
think that for most people, the issue of Facebook and
privacy is a fairly abstract theoretical one, this is a much
more real and visceral one. If you look at globalization,
I think you're beginning to see that backlash in the ... In the conversation about China. I think that again,
Donald Trump has perhaps the wrong solution,
perhaps the wrong tactics, perhaps the wrong method, but in my view, he's sort of fundamentally
right about China, which is to say, that there was a bet that was made about China
in the early 1990s, that if China were to be integrated
more into the world system, that that process of
integration would make it liberalize its economy more and liberalize its politics more. And China has been integrated,
it has gotten richer, it has become more modern
in every sense of the word. But is very difficult to
make the case that it has liberalized its economy
more, certainly in the sense that we would mean it, it
is almost impossible to make the case that it has
liberalized its politics more. And instead, what you
have now, is a very large, the second largest economy in the world, that acts within the global trading system as a largely mercantless
predatory country, that has managed to
extract enormous advantages from the world trading
system, while maintaining a fairly closed market in many ways. Think about the extraordinary
reality about China, the Chinese economy today. It has been able to successfully keep out the world's most advanced
technology companies, from Google to Facebook
to Amazon, it has managed to keep foreign firms at
a substantial structural disadvantage, most foreign
banks that operate in China, for example, have to operate
with a local partner, 49% or 33%, which is essentially a tax on foreign companies. They've been able to force
every foreign manufacturer to come into China and pledge
to do technology transfers, which in fact, mean that
the local partner then legally or illegally, is
able to steal the technology and then reverse engineer
the product, and then sell it and compete against
their purported partners. And it has been able to do it on scale that almost nobody else has
ever been able to do it. China was a unique entrant
into the world trading system just because of its size,
I think that, again, none of us really focused
in on this, and if you think about the integration of
other countries, Japan, six, 70 million people,
South Korea, 50 or 60 million people, the size of
their economy is relative to the size of the global system. Tiny. And they were all dependent
on the United States for security. So the West, in a sense,
had enormous leverage over these countries
to continue the process of liberalization. And then there's China,
which comes in with 1.3 billion people, with
an economy that's already two to three trillion dollars. And the reality of that,
was that once China was in, it was to large for anyone to, for anyone to coerce. That the leverage was
actually on the Chinese side. That too many people wanted
access to that market to be willing to force the
Chinese to do anything, and the Chinese, I
think to a large extent, understood that. But the result of that,
and I focus in on China because it is the largest,
the single most important of these, but India and
Brazil have, in their own way, done similar things. But it what it has done, is it
has undermined the confidence of the West in free trade. The most striking political
shift on policy terms that has taken place in
America in the last 30, 40 years, really that I
can remember, is the shift in the Republican party on free trade. 20 years ago, the
Republican party's support for free trade was something like 65%. I think it's now down
to 35%, there is roughly 30% drop in support for free
trade in the Republican party. And that is partly because
of the changing nature of the composition of
the Republican party, which has become more of
a working-class party, but it also reflects, I
think, the great unease about trade in general, and you
are seeing, as this process takes place, some kind of deglobalization taking on in the economy,
it's difficult to measure this stuff, but if you
were to ask yourself, what is the rate of growth
of trade or capital flows in the global economy,
over the last five years, really, since the recession
of 2008, those numbers have been pointing in the
opposite direction than they were for the preceding 30
years, and in other words, if there was an expansion
of globalization, from roughly 1990 to roughly 2008,
there has been some form of a retreat from globalization
over the last few years. And the final piece of this, is of course, the ... Challenge to American
unipolarity, and I would put it, I'd like to try to put it
cautiously, I'm not suggesting we are witnessing some
great power, rivalry, of the kind you saw in the 20th century. But you are seeing the end
of American unipolarity, and you are seeing the
rise of something else. When I was trying to
describe this in 2006, 2007, when I wrote a book,
I was, then I could sense this was happening, but I couldn't come up with a word to describe it. Because I didn't think we
were entering a multipolar world, because there
weren't countries of roughly equal power. I didn't think we were entering
a Chinese dominated world, but I could see one thing,
that we were the end of the American dominated
era, where the United States literally was the international
system, could define it, could act with almost complete impunity, and so I called it a post-American world. And I still think that's
probably the best description of the world we are entering
into, a world in which the United States is in
some geopolitical retreat, and you are seeing other
countries rise to take advantage of that, so if you think about
this in non-partisan terms, it really begins with the second half of the Bush administration. After the failure of the Iraq
war, the Bush administration starts to draw back in various ways. The Obama administration
continues that, and one could argue, as I basically
would, that in the Middle East, that withdrawal was very wise. But there are other parts
of the world, such as Asia, where people thought there
was too much reticence, and too much of a sense of caution. The Trump administration is
taking that even further, in a sense, by withdrawing from the transpacific
partnership, by signaling in as many ways as he can,
that other than guarding the Mexican border, Donald
Trump really doesn't think that the United States should
be involved in anything abroad. And that reality of
American withdrawal is seen in its attitude towards the
UN and every other agency, in regard to, you know,
its commitment to NATO, you can see it almost across the board. And then, simultaneously, what you see is the rise of regional actors. So if you look at the Middle
East, what is striking about the Middle East today,
is that we've gone from a Middle East that was
almost totally dominated by the United States,
to a Middle East that is being dominated increasingly
by Russia, Iran, Saudi Arabia, to a lesser
extent, Turkey and Israel. Interestingly, what is
interesting about that, new dynamic, is that
at least in that arena, you have some kind of a multipolar system, and as a result, you have,
as multipolar systems often are, a great degree of instability, a lack of surety, and enormous
amounts of miscalculations about who is actually in,
who has the upper hand. You're seeing Russia try to assert itself in various ways, you've
seen a slow and steady rise of China, which is
obviously the single largest challenger in this context. But more than anything
else, what you're seeing is each of these countries
in their own small ways, rising to take some space in this process. I would suspect that the
next 20 years are going to look more like that and
are going to be defined by this backlash to globalization 1.0, and are going to be
less stable, less likely to be conducive to American interests, you already see it, for
example, in the way in which the human rights apparatus
works, the Russians and Chinese are now able to stop the UN
commissioner for human rights from even presenting at
the security council, on issues like human
rights abuses in Syria. Unthinkable 20 years ago,
because the United States would've had enough power to
ensure that that happened, so, and you know, there are
a hundred other examples like that. But I wanna close with just
one final thought about the backlash to globalization,
and the backlash to this broad system, which is
that the most interesting and operative one, right
now, is one that I haven't yet talked about, in the
sense that I've talked about globalization, and we always
think of globalization as being about goods, and
services, and in a sense, it was, globalization really
begins with the invention of the tall ships in the 16th century, and that is about the
globalization of goods, and then in the 19th
century, of the globalization of capital, and then in
the 20th century, you have the globalization of
services, most dramatically, with the Internet. But the fourth globalization,
there's the globalization of people, and in some sense,
the reaction to globalization that is most visceral, has
been to this fourth wave of globalization, the
globalization of people. So if you look at where
right wing populism has grown, it hasn't
grown in Latin America, which by the way, is the
birthplace of populism in some sense, when you think
about those Latin American caudios, who would nationalize everything in Chavez-like characters. That side is actually on the
decline in Latin America. You don't see it in Asia, where
you see business friendly, market friendly, trade
friendly prime ministers and presidents from Abe
to Joko in Indonesia, to Modi in India. You don't see it in
Africa that much either. Where you see it is in
Europe and the United States, and you see it in countries
in Europe that are doing well, like Germany, which has
maintained its manufacturing base, and countries that are doing badly. The one thing they all have
in common are immigrants. And that great wave of globalization, the wave of immigrants, is the ... Is perhaps the most
visceral kind of reaction to globalization you're seeing. The number of people in
the United States who were foreign born in 1970 was
about four and a half percent. It's now about 15%. The shift in Europe is even more dramatic, 'cause I think they started
out smaller, and they never had as many, the United
States has historically gone through this cycle. In the 1880s, it was about 15% as well. But I think that is
the most difficult one, in some sense, for human
beings to deal with. I wouldn't be surprised
if the politics of our age is more defined by that
globalization than any other. Because it's one thing to
understand, everything else I've talked about is at
some level, an abstraction. Shifting balances of power. Information, technology,
globalization of goods and services, but then
you have these actual, living human beings, who
come into your communities, and they look different,
and they sound different, and they worship different gods, and that is going to be the real
test of globalization, is, can we figure out
a way to move forward, not just with all these
forces, these abstractions. But with the reality of
people who look different, sound different, obviously,
I voted with my feet, I very much hope that we
are able to find a way to make all this work. And I tend to think we will. I'm an optimist, I think
when you look at the places in the United States, in
Europe, that have actual living, breathing immigrants,
those places tend to be fine. New York City, L.A.,
Boston, San Francisco, all pretty fine about having immigrants. It's rural West Virginia that is terrified of the immigrants that
don't live in their midst. And it's, the same is true in Brexit, and the same is true in Europe. It's the fear of the unknown that is often far more palpable than
the fear of the known. But in order to meet this
challenge, I think what it will take is something
that we don't, at least, in my training as a political scientist, we often don't talk enough about. Which is human beings, leadership. I think that you look
at Demacre in France, you look at a Merkel in
Germany, and you see that they're all ways to
navigate these strengths, to navigate this backlash,
and still preserve the kind of societies we wanna live in. But it does take
leadership, and it does take the ability to find a way,
not just to be virtuous, but to be skillful and to be strategic. And I hope that even in the United States, we will find that kind of leadership. Thank you all very much. (audience applauds) - Thank you. And without a note. Without a note. We're going to, typically,
these sessions end by seven, we're going to extend
that just a few minutes so we can have time for more questions. But if you wanna ask a
question, there are mics, they're, you know where
they're in the traditional places. We're not gonna be able to
get to all the questions. I'm pretty sure of that. I do wanna start while
people are lining up. Let me ask you this, Fareed. I wanna ask you about the
impact of Trump on the future. We could see what the
impact is today, but what are the lasting impacts? Do you think that, after
Trump, no matter whether it's a Democrat or Republican,
we're gonna continue the American retreat that
started back, as you say, back when Bush, with W, or
do you see a reassertion of American leadership, and
I also wanted to ask you about the rise of authoritarian
states, which extend beyond Europe and the
U.S., and how much that will make a difference
in terms of stability of the world. - On the legacy of Trump,
look, I think that ... In foreign policy, I think
Trump reflects a larger reality. The American public has gotten
tired of being an empire. Of an imperial burden, people forget that if not for the Korean
war, the American public was ready to rapidly and
dramatically demobilize even after World War II. And so, I think this country
has always had within it a, that deep suspicion
of foreign entanglements, to quote Washington in
his farewell address. And I think that reality
persists, I think that it took Herculean realities
and structural issues and threats and leadership,
to get the United States permanently engaged. I think that, you know, the
United States is still very healthily involved in the
world, I think it's important to remember that, we are
still on the banks of the Rhine, we are still
in Osaka, we are still in South Korea. The United States has
maintained commitments in places that many people
thought it would not be able to. But I think that it is
tiring, and wearying of it, and I think that Trump
reflects that reality, I think it's difficult
to imagine a President coming in and saying,
we're gonna massively expand America's political
military diplomatic presence around the world. The question is, is it enough? I mean, one of the great
real life experiments of political science theory
is going to take place now. We've had this theory
about the stability we have and the kind of liberal
open world order we have being a product of these
two great liberal hegemons, and now, liberal in the
small L sense of the word, preserving freedom. Britain and the United States,
Britain in the 19th century, roughly, United States
in the 20th century. As the United States loses
its appetite for that, for example, loses its
appetite to be the funder of last resort for all these
international organizations, which is happening already,
and China steps in, as it is already doing,
China is, in most ways, the second largest funder
of the UN, and peace keeping and such, I think Japan is
still a little bit ahead of it. What happens? Does that world order begin
to atrophy, do you begin to see changes to it? I mean, I'm struck by the way the Chinese think about this, so for
a long time, the Chinese have thought about the problem they faced, in the way that Graham
Allison described it, which was the Thucydides strap,
that how would the world survive the rise of China
with an established power, the United States? Well, when I've been to
China recently, I've heard them talk about something
else, which another distinguished Harvard
professor wrote about recently. The Kindleberger trap, I
heard this term a year ago, for the first time. So, Charlie Kindleberger
was a brilliant economist who served on the policy planning
staff of George Marshall, and wrote a book in which
he basically talked about the tragedy of the 1920s and
30s being the period when Britain could not,
withdrew from its role as the liberal hegemon, and
the United States refused to step in, and the
instability that caused, and so the Chinese are
now less worried about American strength in a
sense, and more worried about American weakness and withdrawal. That tells you something. That even your adversaries
are now more worried that you're weak than you're strong. Sir ... - Hello. Hi, my name is Lamar, I'm one
of the public policy students here at the Kennedy school. Thank you very much for your talk. You mentioned about China
being a mercantilist in terms of its trade, and
I just wanted to ask you about that, actually, I mean,
in terms of the benefits of having China on the world market, in the USA, I think we
benefit from the cheap imports and a lot of U.S. firms benefit
by manufacturing in China. And they can increase the
bottom line, which is, effects for the USA. So, I was wondering whether
you think there might be an issue with the way
the U.S. actually handles its own economy, particularly
with regards to a lack of progressive redistribution of
the income that's generated through globalization, and
secondly, I think there might be a lack of retraining
of people who maybe are in low skilled work, to
maybe more high skilled work. Thank you. - Yeah, I think that's
a perfectly fair point, to say that fundamentally,
the biggest solutions to America's economic problems are not about what China does, but
what the U.S. does at home. I would say that the big
challenge the U.S. economy faces in a more broad sense
is, the American economy is not geared toward investment
anymore, it's essentially geared toward consumption. Frankly, part of the celebration
of free trade to the nth degree is that it provides
consumers with slightly cheaper goods, and that is
seen as an unvarnished good. You know, it's one of the things that has, I think, that is important, but it's not the only thing that's important,
but more fundamentally, we have lost the ability
to invest, we are investing at the lowest levels in
infrastructure, in 50 years, we are investing at the
lowest levels in science and education, in 50 years,
we always have invested very little in training
and retraining, but the old community college system has
essentially been destroyed, so yeah, we have a huge,
I mean, my simple read of the American economy over
the last 30 years, is that you have had a massive under
investment by the public sector and you know, enormous
tax breaks and giveaways to the private sector,
which have mostly gone toward consumption. So, we have lots of very
large and expensive houses all over the United States,
but we have starved, you know, the country's
bridges, tunnels, airports, the community colleges,
the science and technology establishment of the kind
of investment that you need. That doesn't change the
fact that China is also doing all of the things I described. I mean, yes, which would
have a larger effect on the U.S. economy, the
course that I just outlined. But it is still true, and
is poisonous to the world trading system, because the
Indians and the Brazilians then copy the Chinese,
to have these very large internal economies,
that in a sense, refuse to play by the normal
rules, maintain all kinds of informal barriers to
trade, maintain all kinds of mercantless practices,
and then scuttle things like the Doha free trade
round, because you know, they have the power to do
so, so I just feel like this is the greatest danger
to the open trading system, to have this reality of
these very large countries that refuse to play by the rules. So ... I'm hoping there are some
women who are gonna ask questions that I'm just not noticing them. Great. - [Oliver] My name's Oliver,
I'm a student at the college, suppose we adopt Professor
(slurs words) hypothetical and you're now secretary of state. What are your priorities? (audience chuckles) - Under the current
administration, to resign as quickly as I can. (audience laughs and applauds) To spare myself from being
fired by a midnight tweet. (audience laughs) I think that the most
important task right now for the United States, is to ... Is to kind of dedicate
itself to the strengthening of the institutional
structure that has maintained peace, stability, and open world economy. I think that the United
States is doing too little to do that, and some of
that involves, for example, being able to stand up
to what appears to be a Chinese challenge, so
I would be signing up for the transpacific
partnership, and signing up for those kinds of mechanisms,
but I would also try to put an end to the,
America's unilateral flouting of many of these ... These institutions in
practice, and one of the things we don't talk about a
lot in the United States, is the United States
has strived to maintain this structure, but it
has itself not abided by the rules and institutions
very much on the theory that it is the creator,
organizer, and sustainer, so it kind of lives outside the rules. In fact, there was a book by Robert Kagan, in which he described this. He said, you know, the
gardener of the garden of Eden, can't be an inhabitant
of the garden of Eden. He has to have the ability to use muscle. You know, the problem
with that theory, is when the other denizens of the
garden become big enough and powerful enough, they begin to resent that the gardener doesn't
play by the rules. So, you know, I will
point out, for example, that the largest violator,
the largest number of protectionist measures,
placed by any country in the last ten years. Is not China, actually,
but the United States. Now, the United States would
argue that it was doing it in retaliation against
Chinese measures or Russian measures, to protect the
world trading system, but nevertheless, the United
States often acts in this way, and very often, for its
own domestic advantage, it doesn't sign up for
the international court, when it goes to Iraq,
it doesn't bother about international law, and yet
when Russia invades Ukraine, it reels out international
law as an argument, so, I mean, the United
States has to come to grips with the fact that if it believes that its most important legacy is to
try to leave these structures in place, in the hope that they have some, they have some staying
power, even as its own power declines, it has to
actually abide by them, it has to live by them and it has to try and sustain them, rather
than simply narrowly representing or securing American power. Ma'am. - Hello, thank you so much,
my name is Amberine Houda, and I'm a part of the
international education policy program. I wanted to ask you about
your book, in defense of a liberal education,
in which you mention that the point of liberal
education is to prepare us for our sixth job, not
our first one, and so I wanted to ask you in light
of everything you've mentioned this evening, especially
this sort of fourth phase of globalization, what do you
feel like a liberal education now looks like, with the
sort of demise of U.S. unipolarity, and also, the
increase of youth unemployment with this sort of youth bulge. - Look, I am pretty
old-fashioned, I think that the most important thing an
education can teach you to do, is to learn how to read, write, and count. I think that most people
don't know how to do any of those things, I think
particularly, people don't know how to write. I think that writing is
really, in some ways, a proxy for thinking. If you learn how to write,
you are learning how to organize information,
organize your thoughts, organize your ideas, and
that is something we don't stress enough in our system. What the new world means in
terms of what we should be substantively learning more about. You know, I've always thought
we should be doing more genuine multicultural
education, what I was struck by was when I was
in college, what people meant by multiculturalism
was that they wanted to read Western canonical
texts, and then read radical Marxist critiques
of Western canonical texts which were also written by westerners. You know, I mean, after
all, people often forget that Marx is himself a
westerner, he's a German Jew. What I think is more eye
opening is to actually delve into other cultures, so in
one of the things we tried to do when I was on the board at Yale, was set up this college in
Singapore, where you will be reading Confucius and
Aristotle at the same time. So that you try to ask
yourself, why did one society honor these ideas, and why
did another society honor another's and the
interesting, for example, to look at (foreign name), who writing in the fifth or sixth century BC in China, and ask, what was going on in the fifth and sixth
century in Greece and Persia and Rome at that time, and
how are they comparable, and were they using
different mechanisms of power and things like that. I don't think we do
enough of that, we don't, I think it's still astonishing,
after the ten years we've gone through,
with the issue of Islam, there is almost nobody who really has even a passing familiarity
with Islam of the Qu'ran. I remember talking to Stan
McCrystal and Peter Pace about this issue, in Ohio
recently, about the number of people who can speak or read Arabic. In the U.S. government,
being just astonishingly low. Given all these challenges. That kind of awareness, I
mean, language for example, is the simplest way to
get under the skin of another country, and we're
still very bad about that, we're still very parochial,
we really can't understand what the world looks like to
somebody who's not American, and when you're the 800 pound
gorilla, it's a particular problem, because the world
really looks very different to somebody who's not the 800
pound gorilla in that room. Sir. - Thank you so much for being here today. My name is Tad Islam, and
I'm a grad student here. Now that we see China as
making the one belt, one road, and also investing very
risque investment in countries like Syria, Pakistan, and Sri
Lanka, and on the other hand, we also see the rise of
conservatism in different parts of the world, when these
two situations melts, when China is grasping the lands
and expanding their trade, and other hand, countries
with conservatism expanding, the rise of the multipolar
world that you saw, what kind of conflict
and clashes do you see, when this melting happens? And where exactly in what
sector does it get affected in the United States to begin with? - I tend to be fairly
old-fashioned about this, I see Steve Walt here,
so I think this part of, I don't know how much Steve
agrees with what I said, but I think he'll agree with this part. I don't think that the
cultural reality is going to be as important as
the geopolitical reality. I don't think that the fact
that these are conservative, Islamic states, or the
Chinese state is Chinese, is going to in some way
make it more or less likely that there will be a clash. I mean, I think about
my dissertation advisor Sam Huntington, wrote this
great essay, the clash of civilization. Which I published at foreign
affairs, but I didn't agree with, because I
think it misunderstands the way that countries don't
act out of civilizational imperatives, they act out
of national imperatives. So when Saddam Hussein
looked at his fellow Arab, fellow Sunni country Kuwait,
he didn't say, oh my goodness, there's my soul brother,
I'm not gonna invade them, he was like, there's oil,
and I'm gonna get it. And you see now the most
extraordinary, across civilizational alliance,
taking place between Saudi Arabia and Israel. Right, why is that? Because they have a common
geopolitical four way run. So I think those are the dynamics
that are much more likely to play themselves out. And in that respect, by the
way, China will not have an easy time. Because you know, we
forget, but United States, we always think that
everyone's gonna grow like the United States, but
the United States grew in a geopolitical vacuum,
it had two vast oceans and two weak neighbors,
sorry Canadians and Mexicans, if you're offended by that,
but China is not growing like that, China is growing
in the middle of Asia. 'Cause I grew up in India,
I'm often amused when people talk about the rise of Asia. There is no such thing. Asia is a Western concept. There's India, there's
China, there's Japan, they don't much like each other. So the idea that they
will all rise in unison in some kind of tandem,
no, China's gonna rise and that's causing deep
anxiety in Japan and in India. And so, even the belt and road initiative, it's a very clever move
by the Chinese to try and essentially create a kind
of series of dependencies and to create strategic
assets, so if you look at for example, the belt
and road initiative and its similar foreign aid
programs, they're building a port in Burma, in Myanmar,
they're building one in Bangladesh, they're
building one in Sri Lanka, they're building one in Pakistan. Now if you connect the
lines, what country does that encircle? India, the one large land,
you know, Asian land power they have to worry about. That's, why are they so concerned
about the south China seas and the east China seas? Because of Taiwan and
Japan, so these things are very cleverly geopolitically
playing themselves out, but there will be push back. I don't think that ... I think that the reality
of these different cultures just means these countries
are more culturally proud, than they have
been, with success comes cultural pride, if you
have any doubts about that, think about America. I mean, the more successful
America is, the more it is convinced that God
has blessed its worldview, right? Well, guess what, the
Chinese are beginning to think that too. - [Dave] Have time for one more question. - Ma'am. - I, (foreign language
greeting), I'm Clare, with Harvard University
(foreign language term), and I was just wondering what your thoughts are of the possibility of (slurs words) being removed
from office, given Cohen's office was raided by the
FBI, and then, what you think of possibly Pence being our next POTUS. Kind of a loaded question. - So, I mean, at some level,
that's a legal question that's beyond my pay grade,
but what I can tell you is, 'cause I don't know what Muller has, I can tell you that I think
it would be a bad idea. I think that it would be
a very unhealthy thing for Donald Trump to leave
office, under some kind of murky charges, because of impeachment. If there's some clean, clear
cut violation, of course the law should take
the course it will, but impeachment is fundamentally
a political process, not a legal one. And I think the great
danger is that his very ardent and devoted
supporters will regard this as a coup d'etat. They would regard this
as a judicial coup d'etat of a duly elected
president, and it will cause a greater degree of
political instability in the United States than at any point since the 1960s. I don't think that's good,
I think that if you believe that he is fundamentally
antithetical to everything you want for America,
defeat him in the polls. You have to find a way
to defeat this process, because that's how democracy
should work, these forces existed before Donald
trump, he found a way to very cleverly tap into
them and to use them, but you know, he didn't win a landslide, he lost the popular vote by three million, so this is not insurmountable, but I mean, I would think the cleverest
strategy, if I can be totally cynical about
this, would be to use all this stuff, that
Muller's coming up with, as a way to discredit Donald
Trump, to drive down his popularity, to emphasize
the degree to which he is not the savior that
many people thought he was, and to then defeat him
in the polls, to use in other words, to use
that to your advantage, but to begin impeachment
proceedings feels to me like you will end up
with an argument about whether or not it is legitimate to depose a sitting president of the United States, whether or not the Muller
file is gonna be totally, you know, like every, let
me predict to you what will happen. Muller will issue a report,
Donald Trump's supporters will say it exonerates him,
Donald Trump's detractors will say it convicts him. That doesn't get us anywhere,
what I think we have to recognize is, there is
this much larger issue, culturally, and Trump may
be more than anyone else recognized, and I think we
find, it's a little hard for us to understand
that, because we live in a bit of a bubble, but there
is this vast other America, there is a great divide,
and I think we have to find some way to
adjudicate this through a normal Democratic process,
rather than through some extrademocratic one that would be legal, I think that that would be, you know, that story is not likely to
end well, in my view, long term. - We have one last request.
- Sure. - Come back.
(audience laughs) - Thank you very, very much. (audience applauds)
