Munk Dialogues - Fareed Zakaria

[Music] [Music] so [Music] hello and welcome to the monk dialogues i'm rudyard griffis i'm usually the moderator of the monk debates but uh tonight and for the next few weeks i'm going to be acting as the convener of the monk dialogues the purpose of this exercise is to encourage all of us to start thinking about the world after covid19 how will this pandemic have changed how we work uh how our societies function how international affairs and geopolitics plays out you know this we know at some point there will be effective therapies there will be let's hope a working vaccine for covid19 and we will move from the crisis that we're in now into a postcovid world i think it it's important for all of us we believe this at the monk dialogues to to get together to convene on evenings like this for live conversations to encourage us to stretch our minds to think about that future world the word world after covet 19 and how this virus will have affected uh so much of what we previously understood about how society how our collective values could and should function this on our second weekly dialogue we had the opportunity to spend an hour with one of the world's brightest thinkers on geopolitics and international affairs he's someone that i've had the privilege of moderating on four occasions at the monk debates where he's really distinguished himself i think as one of the world's most versatile and capable debaters and public communicators he is also the host of a internationally acclaimed and renowned show on cnn called gps he's a washington post columnist he's the author of numerous books including the must read book the post-american world he's the former editor of newsweek international so i'd like to welcome to the monk dialogues for the next hour our friend uh fareed zakaria freed great to have you with us today always a pleasure to be with you right thank you we'll again we'll continue to work on the audio and we just uh appreciate our listeners having a little forbearance uh with uh internet connections and and live programming like this so fareed i want to jump in and talk to you uh about your thoughts on what is the the single issue event feature in uh geopolitics that you think will change as a result of covid19 gosh it's difficult to uh to point to a single event because you know this is such a broad uh capacious uh problem it sort of pervades all kinds of different areas you know from health to economics to of course nationalism but i think when you look at a crisis like this they tend to accelerate existing trends more than to completely upend them or transform them if you think about world war one or world war ii you know they accelerated trends that were already taking place the rise of the united states the decline of the british empire things like that so i think if you had to pick one thing it would i would probably say it is continue it accelerates us into a post-american world and what i mean by that is a world in which the united states no longer is the lodestar the definer the the symbol of the entire international system as it has been since 1989 since the collapse of communism you can look at it at several levels right first one of the things that this crisis has laid bare is that the united states is not number one in a very crucial dimension of keeping uh its citizens safe and secure right this is an area where the united states has founded other countries have done better we are not looking at the united states with all uh at its power its purpose its resolution uh we're looking at south korea we're looking at germany uh you know i mean canada has done pretty well uh but certainly in that that soft power the power of its example the united states has not that and the second area is of course in the the raw geopolitics of it the united states doesn't want to be number one the trump administration has shown no interest in being the convener and being the organization being the agenda setter look after this crisis took place rudyard it was france that called for a g7 meeting to uh to deal with the covet crisis it was saudi arabia of all places that called for a g20 meeting uh to deal with the kobe crisis the united states actually acted as the spoiler in both those cases refusing to sign a joint communique because the rest of the g7 wouldn't call it the wuhan virus these these are the kind of acts of the spoiler not the organizer so if you think about it in those terms what you are seeing is that we are entering into a world you know what i was trying to describe in 2007 was a world in which it's not that we're entering a chinese world it's not that we're entering you know nobody else is stepping in and that's why i came up with this this phrase the post-american world because it's not american dominance in the way that we have known it but it's not anybody else's dominance there's this vague slightly chaotic rudderless world uh in which everyone is sort of jostling for advantage and no one is organizing us toward a common end or a common purpose so farid let's talk about the big geopolitical rivalry that we went into this crisis uh the world facing and canada like many countries kind of in the middle of it torn between these two superpowers and that was china and the united states who comes out with uh the advantage from this crisis well uh neither really in the sense that it accentuates the that reality that there's no one in charge china clearly comes out of it at some level looking bad it it clearly was deceptive uh and non-transparent and opaque about this crisis it could be signal a signal that one level the weakness of the chinese system a repressive dictatorship in which bad news is covered up in which information doesn't travel to the places it needs to this is after all the kind of work uh we know this phenomenon this is what marty has said uh in other words in some ways won his nobel prize in economics for pointing out that dictatorships actually do very badly at handling things like famine because the information never comes up uh and there you know there is this much tighter system uh once they handled once they decided they were going to deal with it they did deal with it aggressively and frankly impressively but that initial uh that initial malfunction is not a bug it's part of the the feature of communist dictatorship that that you know does run china on the other hand the united states has not covered itself with glory it comes out of it inept it comes out with a bureaucracy that is not not well functioning and a country that doesn't want to strive for international pollution we haven't still gotten to the kind of international competition yet the chinese are trying a little bit in terms of providing aid to some countries but it strikes me as fairly feeble and some of the stuff they're sending is second tier it's not it doesn't seem like a a concerted effort to win hearts and minds so i think we're we're in limbo neither of them come out particularly well but what what has happened is you have had an acceleration of the of the existing trend as you said we went into it with the chinese american rivalry and i would say it was a kind of soft rivalry we're coming out of it with that rivalry having hardened on both sides you now have senior officials of the united states government blatantly you know openly blaming china president wants to withdraw whf funding because of china and you have in china don't forget the rise of officials now who are speaking their official capacity who are blaming this on america who are claiming this was concocted in in an american military laboratory obviously nonsense but you see therefore in china also the rise of a kind of hard-line attitude towards this rivalry freed who who could be the winners uh you know we've seen a very effective response to this crisis for instance in countries like taiwan uh south korea you know what does that suggest to you one that there are models that work there are states that have the capacity to react and to react quickly are those benefits that these types of countries will carry with them after this crisis yes i think that one of the things this crisis has laid there is that the old debates are are over our anachronisms that is to say it is no longer the quantity of government or the ideological orientation of government it is the quality of government that matters the debate about big government or small government or left versus right more state in the economy left state is largely irrelevant the question people are asking is is the government competent does it have the ability to act with speed with intelligence is the bureaucracy high functioning does the system have resilience and if you look at the places that have done well by the way most of them are not dictatorships south korea comes out really probably at the top germany probably comes out second singapore hong kong do very well which are unusual uh cases taiwan does very well china does well but not as well as some of those democracies so what you notice is what is happening is there is a there is a kind of um there there is a there is a race now for the degree to which you can have uh bureaucracies that are trusted that are competent that know how to act quickly uh you know one of the things people have spent time talking about is the contact tracing that the south koreans and the singaporeans and the and the hong kong government have done is you know the kind of intrusive government that uh that america wouldn't stand for because they have technological surveillance and such well when you we peel back and you study they didn't do things that were somehow orwellian mostly what they did was very good detective work the kind of thing that frankly in any way any democratic government could do it just takes time and effort and intelligence and energy they would sit and interview these people who had gotten uh coronavir who had gotten covered 19 and i who have you met where do you know they would go through and piece through exactly where these people were but it's intensive work so i think we're you know we're entering a new age if you will where that has become much more important think about it this way uh right yet the united states spends 700 billion dollars on its military and yet it is not able to secure these you know the safety and security of its citizens in a very fundamental sense from a very fundamental threat because its healthcare system has no research capable capacities hospitals have no surge capacity lacks medical supplies lacks pandemic preparation all of which would cost you know 10 5 10 15 billion the most the united states has ever spent on this kind of preparedness in a single year with seven billion dollars wow one percent one percent of the defense department's budget yeah freed uh the purpose of these dialogues is to take questions from the audience so i just want to remind those of you watching on facebook that uh please submit your questions we'll get to those we've also had uh literally hundreds of questions emailed uh to us for the last 48 hours for you so i'm going to get to those in a moment but i just want to ask you about canada because you're someone who spends time in canada you follow canada let's reflect a little bit on how canada comes out of covid19 because on one hand you could say we don't have the culture wars that you're facing in the united states that have permeated this crisis now uh we don't have uh you know the the problems of uh political leadership that you're you're facing with the current incumbent in the white house but you know we do also have some challenges for it some real ones uh you know we're not a reserve currency we're a small country of 30 million people uh we're not part of the european union or some larger federation of states where we could band together with them and you know uh seek strength through numbers so what's your advice for canada and what's your thought in terms of canada's place after this crisis is it diminished is it enhanced uh is it a draw well first of all you're absolutely right i come to canada often i love canada i love canadians um i think look on the on the dimension that i was talking about canada comes out very well which is the quality of canadian government has shown itself to be very high and the quality of your health care system has shown itself to be very high but it's not just the healthcare system canadians started receiving their government checks for what is essentially disaster relief within two days or three days of parliament passing it the united states people still haven't gotten it it's now held up because trump wants his name on the on the checks but even without that it wasn't it was going to take you know maybe a month before it could get there that just shows you one of the ways in which uh your government is is more responsive uh the bureaucracy is working better and part of it is these partisan devices look the united states has gone through 30 or 40 years of the deep funding of its basic governmental operations because of a philosophy that said in ronald reagan's words the nine most scary words in the english languages i'm from the government and i'm here to help so the idea was again in reagan's words government is not the solution government is the problem so because of that uh we have we have fallen behind and in many ways you have gone ahead the problem you face is exactly what you described and it's actually the same problem that south korea faces which is you may do well in the limited sense of being able to manage your affairs well but there is a broader context in which you have to operate and if that broader context is the return of nationalism the return of a 19th century kind of real politic where countries are pitted against each other where there isn't a common international agenda where there is aren't common international institutions where it isn't an age of multilateralism but an age of bilateralism rivalries nationalism protectionism canada doesn't ev nobody does well but the big large behemoths like the united states and china can at least handle that um it's much harder for you so i would argue that it's it still means that for canada to achieve its pr its potential in the world you have to be a good influence on you have to press the united states to be more multilateral more global to take up the agenda um to at least think about the north american economy and the north american system and not just the united states because that broadens the uh the prism and it broadens our horizons uh and and to think even more broadly look the extraordinary thing about this this uh crisis is it is almost biblical it is truly a global challenge and yet the response almost everywhere has been to pull countries to uh to a narrower perspective right this is almost by definition a problem can only be dealt with at the global level uh because this thing is out in the and about and it's going to it's going to spread no matter what you do unless everyone coordinates unless everyone pulls their resources and information so that we have common standards for travel and trade and things like that but it's pulled us you know into a narrow perspective i think canada can help enormously because americans trust canadians even even you know people like donald trump at some level recognize that canadians are are friendly neighbors and if you can use that uh leverage to help the united states understand the the global dimensions and the and the opportunity here to really knit together a global response and knit together a global community in response to this canada does much better the united states does much better everybody does better look we all end up in a sub-optimal world if we're all being jealous parochial narrow and competing when we could much more easily be broad-minded cooperating uh and and solving this together wise words let's uh go to some questions because that's what the monk dialogues is about it's about giving you the opportunity our viewers our audience to put questions to some of the world's brightest minds and sharpest thinkers fareed zakaria is on deck for you tonight so we'll look for those questions we're going to take a mix of questions that come from both email and from facebook so uh alex king here asking are there any governments around the world that stand out to you as particularly vulnerable to political and social instability created by the the pandemic so freed um i've seen in some of our other questions uh you know concerns about could there be another arab spring is there the potential in africa for large-scale uh social unrest and collapse as this virus works its way through some of the world's most vulnerable countries and economies well it's a fascinating question because on the one hand what you are seeing is uh the beginnings of a very devastating effect that this crisis is going to have in poorer countries because remember poorer countries the united states and germany and canada and countries like this can borrow their way out of this i mean after what the united states is doing what canada is doing is telling people stay at home and we're going to compensate you we are going to fill in at some level not completely for a lot of the the income you lose over the next weeks maybe months very few countries in the world can do that there are probably 20 countries in the world maybe 25 that can do that they can borrow easily because they have responsible governments they have a track record for whatever reason the market trusts them but that is not the ex the case for the majority of the world and certainly not the case for poor currencies are you already seeing massive capital flight out of the emerging markets of the world so these countries face weak healthcare systems you know governments that are not that competent and not that trusted and they don't have much cash and they can't raise much cash and so you you i think we are in for a very tough time uh in many of these countries and you ask where i mean it's really all the obvious places you can imagine it's the places that have uh the social and economic tensions to begin with sub-saharan africa uh places like bangladesh pakistan india india is trying this extraordinary experiment in order to stave off that crisis by having a essentially a five-week lockdown where they literally freeze everyone in place which is going to be an extraordinarily um costly process i don't mean just economically i mean you're gonna have people who are gonna die of heat strokes and starvation of pre-existing conditions because they can't you know they're most about 60 of india i think our daily wage earners now in terms of where it causes social and political problems the the irony here is because everyone is locked down no one is protest the hong kong protests have stopped you know there's a there's a strange sense in which the normal pathologies of a society in turmoil have been have been depressed i mean one of the extraordinary things to notice by the way in the united states is you don't have any mass shootings uh in the last month uh which is because you don't have schools open you don't have you know so there is a kind of weird thing going on here there's a lot of pain and a lot of misery that is unfolding in the developing world but when you ask about the political crisis so far because of the because of social distancing you are you are not seeing it which doesn't mean it isn't there it is probably you know under the surface bubbling away and the question is where does it erupt great answer and great questions let's keep them going so we'll look for another question from either our facebook audience or the various people that have been emailing us uh over the last 48 hours with questions for for read so here's one from mark as debt burdens from the lockdown weigh on our economies can and already fractured european union survive and uh freed i i think that's an onpoint question we've seen some real tensions here emerge between italy germany around uh you know how these bailouts are going to function what different european countries in fact owe each other in this moment of crisis and a return resurgence of internal borders in europe do you think this is an existential threat this uh pandemic to the ideals of the european union it certainly raises the issue of europe in a kind of existential way could they muddle along as the way they have often done possibly um perhaps even probably but i wonder because the question a question i asked the question exactly right as you as you elaborated it exactly right see what's happened is europe's bluff has been called europe has so far tried to have it both ways it wants to think of itself as a union it wants to think of itself as a place that has pooled sovereignty achieved this kind of completely historic thing which is uh all these countries that were once jealous neighbors you know the past 400 years they fought wars unendingly they've come together they've abolished the idea of war among themselves they've pulled sovereignty they've they've gotten rid of borders and they speak as one and it sounds great but the reality is the european union is actually very weak it does not have a fiscal union if if the countries in the south are a week and then in recession the european union doesn't have the cash to to uh to provide them with what would happen in canada or the united states which is they get unemployment insurance which is essentially federal transfers the budget of the european union as a percentage of the european union's gdp is tiny the bureaucracy even though people talk about it is tiny so in a way they have wanted to talk big about the european union but not actually give up sovereignty where do you really give up sovereignty you give it up if you're talking about common taxation policy or common or or a large common budget uh you give it up in you know in terms of the direction of your foreign policy so there is a european foreign high commissioner for foreign policy but i you know i'm sure most of your viewers and listeners haven't don't know who it is because foreign policy is actually mostly made by angela merkel and boris johnson and uh and uh emmanuel macron they haven't seeded their power so europe in a sense has to figure this out the way you can save the the union is more europe is a deeper union is actual fiscal transfers because italy is teetering on the edge italy is too large to bail out in the conventional way you really have to do something dramatic and reform the whole system and make it a genuine union or you recognize that it's not and you come to come to grips with the fact that really what the european union is it's a it's a kind of alliance of common common-minded nations it's sort of like a a commonwealth that works um rather than than you know this grand dream of a united continent um i i have a feeling that in the next five to seven years that decision is going to be made and uh covered in a way called the bluff because the crisis is now deep enough the debts are large enough that europe either has to you know it has to either go for more europe or less europe right now it's it's the proverb you know it's the proverbial bicycle where you know you can think of if i can mix the metaphor a little bit the bicycle can move forward or backwards but it can't just stay where it is good point okay let's take uh another question from our online audience who again has been emailing us uh over the last while here's chris harris saying uh do you think the u.s will change its views on health care after this crisis i mean it's been one of the defining differences for aid between our two countries we have a universal single-payer system here in canada uh you know it's had some challenges certainly with this pandemic but in some ways i i think compared to what seems to be a u.s system with all kinds of disparities that really affect the poor and disadvantaged in american society the most as this pandemic rolls across the u.s could this cause the united states to finally wrap its head around the idea of some kind of public funded system that was universally available i hope so because i think what it shows is this is no longer a matter of again as i say left versus right and a bigger government smaller government this is simply a matter of health security for everyone and it is what we have is a very bad system that provides very perverse incentives for people simple ones if you don't have health insurance you are not going to go and get tested because you don't want to pay for the test um if you are um an undocumented worker you are not going to get tested because you're going to worry about it so the lack of universality the lack of viewing this as a basic right is producing a circumstance that is endangering the health of everybody and so that's one simple one and then you think about the multiple layers of the kind of great inequalities of treatment and response that are going to take place because of your wealth and it feels as though it isn't right but it's also something else it's wildly inefficient remember we spend 18 percent of gdp uh on health care we spend an additional trillion dollars of health care compared to any other advanced country and we have lower life expectancy than any other advanced country and at this point where you know there's a five-year gap between the best european countries life expectancies and the united states so clearly whatever we are doing is not working i think the the way to think about this is the key is exactly what you said graduated which is universality how you achieve it there's an open debate uh the canadians you know the we have now the the spectacle of boris johnson a conservative uh british prime minister singing the praises of the nhs which is of course a government-owned operated healthcare system that is even more you know big government than canada canada has what we would call medicare for all as does taiwan but there are other systems the germans have a kind of a mis a mishmash um the the swiss have what would essentially be obamacare with a uh with a real mandate where everyone has to buy a insurance so it's a so it's a system where you have insurers you have private providers but but everyone is covered by mandate so there are many different alternatives and i would say the key has to be to think about it this way it should be universal it should not be something tied to employment and people should be assured a basic level of care and those provide for a decent society but also as importantly now what we are realizing this is a core issue of health security you know if other beef if a prison population is infected it affects all of us it infects all of us yeah good point let's uh let's go to some more questions both from our facebook audience and those of you who have been uh emailing in this is from uh kem teo will the kovid 19 pandemic exacerbate the tendency of many countries to head towards autocracy or do you believe that it will have the opposite effect so an interesting question therefore because we're seeing even in our liberal democratic societies uh you know actions on the part of government restricting civil and individual liberties in ways that we never would have expected in our own lifetime so does this uh encourage uh maybe both peripheral states you think of hungary that kind of is heatering on liberal democracy drifting into autocracy you look at countries like turkey that are more firmly in that direction what's your feeling does covet 19 help the autocrats yes um there's a famous historian charles tilley who once had a great phrase he said war makes the state and the state then makes war and this point being that every anytime you have a war the powers of the state grow now if you think about war in a more broader sense than or kind of great national emergency uh in which the government is given license uh that allows the government to take on powers it allows it to make the citizens do what it tells it uh and in that sense this war against this this virus is exactly that kind of a war where the government is given more leeway the government has more power so you see it with orban in hungary most clearly is essentially dissolved power parliament and said he's going to rule by decree you're seeing it a little bit in india where the government has taken on greater and greater powers the central government for example has overruled state governments india usually has a vigorous degree of of federalism uh you also see it with regard to the press modi has taken the opportunity to clamp down on some uh some parts of the media the few parts of the media that have not been intimidated by him um so i think i think you are seeing disturbing tendencies one thing one has to point out is uh you have not seen it in the western world including the united states uh trump may talk about having total powers but the the beauty of the american system was within 12 hours you know 10 governors uh criticized him for it and pointed out that whatever he may say they were not going to close or open their states based on his dicta that they had independent constitutional authority in fact the the the head of the national governors association association who's a republican said that as well so what you see is in these societies the uh the institutions are fighting back uh but i think this is the great tension and this is the great danger i worry much less about the things that you all sometimes hear about which is are we going to have a surveillance system which gives up our privacy uh look i give up my privacy when i'm shopping on amazon you know amazon knows what i'm buying it knows what websites i'm going to not just amazon google facebook all these people i'm if i'm willing to give that privacy up to to google or facebook or amazon i'm i'm perfectly happy giving up uh some privacy in order to have a system of pandemic preparedness or epidemic preparedness where we have the ability to pool and analyze and and assess information as long as we live in a democratic society in which there are controls where this data is maintained anonymously where it cannot be used or misused i i maybe i'm too trusting but i believe that that is the key you cannot take an absolute disposition and say you will never be able to look at my data i mean that's absurd you're letting amazon look at your data and you don't want the federal government to look at it to prevent a you know a pandemic or to prevent the acceleration of an epidemic no what you want is to have this democratically controlled with constitutional rights liberty you know checks and balances courts and things like that so i i am willing to deal with to to do that what i'm wary of and what you're seeing as you pointed out in some of the countries you're seeing is the government using this to uh to deprive us of our liberties some of that happened after 9 11 in the united states the patriot act needs to be re-scaled back government has too many powers homeland security is a vague concept under which the fbi and the cia have too many powers all that is real uh but so far the greatest danger we're seeing is in countries like uh like like uh hungary as i said to a certain extent i mean you philippines duterte said to his police if anyone violates the if you just shoot you know i worry about turkey where everyone has always had a tendency to accumulate power so again it's one of those things where it accelerates trends that were already underway already hungary was losing uh its democracy already modi had become more and more autocratic already everyone had been depriving people of liberty and that process is accelerating great uh let's go on to uh our next question uh we'll see what was coming from our friends on facebook and here it is from danny williams question are we seeing a positive effect on the environment will there be change to try to reduce these negative effects on our planet i guess he's referring to climate environmental threats it has been quite remarkable for aid to to see how in the face of this crisis we have had definitive urgent sweeping action but in the face of the challenge of climate that type of action has been missing do you think that that remains the status quo or in this response to covid will there be a new renewed energy around trying to tackle climate or does climate now get put off because economic growth is going to be just about every single focus for every single government out there as always uh reggie you have you have all the issues passed exactly right so first at one level you say to yourself okay uh you know you remember michael gove the british minister who during the brexit campaign said i think britain has had enough with experts and the idea of this kind of these populist movements are we've had enough of these smarty pants experts who tell us you know that they have special expertise and they don't they know what we should do and they don't know they know how they should order the government and how we should live our lives well it turns out when you have a pandemic it's very useful to have experts and i i hope that there is some recognition that in societies uh where you're going through this populist wave you really do want uh to have good government you do want to have experts that the deep state is actually the smart state uh and that whatever you want to control and of course nobody wants an independent bureaucracy that is not democratically accountable you do need experts and you particularly need science now if we're not willing to listen to the scientists on on infectious diseases now which they've been warning about for a while will we be willing to listen to the scientists about the other thing they've been warning about for a while which is global warming um i i think that fortunately the difference is this the the scientists talking about pandemic are telling you how to save your life scientists telling you about climate change you're telling you how to save your grandchildren's lives unfortunately it you know the evidence suggests that we are willing to to do things change our behavior pay a price to save our lives but we're not willing to do very much to save our grandchildren's life i mean it's sad but uh but that does seem to be where the evidence points um i hope it changes that i mean right now actually you're in a situation where there are very government emissions are down and every country is probably going to meet its paris goals but you don't want to reach them this way through mass unemployment and you know having industry at a standstill you'd much rather have it through industries that are sustainable now there's one final point i'd make the this is the pope you know said maybe this is nature's revenge uh at the way we have been treating the the climate and the earth of course it's metaphoric and it's not meant literally but there is a scientific reality here which is the human development and the nature and base and and and rather brutal way has gone has been encroaching more and more on nature and on nature's preserves and on the places in the in the world where animals live freely and one of these areas one of these uh species have been bats um you know they are we are in a sense getting coming into closer and closer contact uh humans with these kinds of animals and that means that they for example start feeding on fruit farms which is what bats have tended to do and the closer and closer you get the more possibility there is for transmission of diseases uh from bats to other animals to humans and so on so there is a non-metaphorical sense in way in a way that the nature of our development the nature of human development so fast so rapid so industrial and so unconcerned with these second and third order effects is producing a kind of you know it's having unintended consequences i wouldn't call it a revenge or a backlash uh except in a metaphorical sense but uh it should alert us to the fact that we just can't go on like this and we certainly can't go on like this if the idea is that every country is going to grow the way the the west grew rightly or wrongly it's just the earth will not be able to sustain it fred your answer brings up a you know fundamental question i've been thinking about for the last couple weeks and it's about complexity that we have benefited as a global civilization from complexity and we have uh become in our our economies function how our society's functions infinitely more complex than a generation ago what happens after covet is you know will we be smart enough to understand that with that complexity we have to have robustness we have to have redundancy we have to invest in the systems that allow this this complexity to flourish or do we just go back to doing what we did before which is kind of roll the dice and hope that we can operate even at higher levels of complexity without assuming the the structural costs uh to our economies to maybe individual choice to all kinds of different things that we we don't want to accept those costs uh which where do you come down on that on the future of complexity in a post-covet world you know the the message is clear i i entirely agree with you um the best way to think about this is you know when people told us after 9 11 uh here's you know here's what we need to do we need to build the largest homeland security uh you know enterprise and you know have everybody take their shoes off and go through uh those x-ray barriers at airports and things like that that's fighting the last war uh after nine after 2008-2009 people have put in place a whole bunch of checks and balances the reality is you're never going to be able to anticipate the next crisis what you can do is build a system that is resilient and you put it exactly right what we need to do is to recognize the issue is not you will never be able to predict the next the exact next crisis precisely because of the complexity you described what we can say is because our world is so complex what we need to do is to build in resilience surplus capacity reservoirs things like that you know so that now the problem is that goes bang up against a kind of market fundamentalism that says one of the reasons the u.s is in such bad shape in healthcare our opera hospitals operate very efficiently they operate at 90 capacity because they run like hotels and that is you know the boards and everybody tells them that is a good thing the german hospitals don't run like that i don't know enough about canada in this particular area but in germany hospitals are you know the healthcare system is designed with surge capacity with surplus capacity because the market is not the only determinant of how you build a good healthcare system so similarly it seems to me we need to think about what is it that we need to do precisely because we can't predict the next crisis how do we build a system that has the resilience to deal with the complexity of the world we live in and the velocity with which change takes place and those two vectors tell you that you need to you know overspend in some areas um you need to build greater capacity you need to slow certain things down deliberately um you know do we need high-speed algorithmic trading where people you know have nanosecond differentials which allow them to make gazillions of dollars what what what greater purpose is served by that are we better off putting in place circuit breakers so that something like that doesn't take down the whole world economy again you know those are the kind of questions i think we should be asking great uh that is a key point let's uh go to another question here from our audience members we'll get that up for you in a moment so from matt it seems that the future of global affairs after this pandemic hinges largely on the winner of this year's u.s presidential election uh to paraphrase matt what what do you think is likely to be the major geopolitical differences between a an america in the future led by donald trump versus joe biden do you see a significant difference a significant impact on how geopolitics generally plays out depending on who's in the white house once this pandemic hopefully begins to finally play itself out at one level of course there's a there'd be a big difference trump is donald trump is the first president we've had really since franklin roosevelt who has not believed in roosevelt's vision for american foreign policy franklin roosevelt really has defined american foreign policy since the mid 1940s and for 75 years every president republican or democrat in some way was uh fulfilling that vision and that vision was essentially that the united states came out of world war ii saying we don't want the the problems we've had for the previous hundred years 200 years 300 years of this intimacy and rivalry war to drag us down again so we're going to try and build a system that is more open that has some rules of the road in which the great bars try to do some management of it and implicitly the united states would be the agenda setter and essentially the kind of guarantor of last resort lender of last resort trump doesn't like this idea he thinks it means that everyone rips america off that america gets taken for granted he wants to retreat in a sense to a kind of jacksonian vision where america can bomb people and then retreat into its fortress and be unconcerned with providing the common good agenda setting and things like that so it's a it's actually a kind of a profound uh difference uh and a profound shift that trump has represented now biden clearly comes out of the older tradition but the world has changed i mean implicit in the rooseveltian vision was always the idea that the united states was the unquestioned leader of the world and as i mean that really just we're not we're not we can't go back to that to that reality you know to that world uh 25 years ago china was one or two percent of global gdp it's now 15 16 of global gdp will still keep going up the one the shift that has already been taking place in the world the the shift towards asia has been accelerated by these changes uh by this by this crisis um you know things like uh the multilateral institutions of the world bank imf nato the whole bretton woods system is creaking and it has to figure out what does it do with countries like china does it let them in and give them equal status in that case you have the problems of the who right the chinese do have undue influence as a result but what is the alternative do you want to then you know trump's answer is withdrawal defund let the institution collapse well that's just going to mean the chinese will build their institutions we will presumably have ours uh you know you you lose any sense of global cooperation you lose any sense of international structure so there's going to have to be a real rethink no matter who comes in for trump maybe it's easier because what he wants to do is to destroy the old system but even for a buy if he were to take it seriously it can't just be saying oh we're just going to go back to the old days and everyone's going to salute and say america lead the way that's not what's going to happen it's a very different world the chinese are real players but it's not just the chinese you know one of the things i wrote about in the post-american world is as countries like india and brazil and turkey grow in in economic terms they become politically more confident they become culturally more proud and they become less willing to jump what the united states tells them to so it's a task of kind of managing a close coalition of countries towards some common purpose but that's very different from the old american world in which the united states could define what the institutions were the ideals were the the rules were and everybody felt like you know what this this this sounds like a good deal and we will go along with it makes a lot of sense okay let's uh get some more questions in we're getting up to the the top of the hour we'll go a little bit over just to make up for the time that we missed off the top and again we just uh thank our viewers for their forbearance we got a lot of different pieces of technology here and uh obviously an internet that is under a lot of pressure to deliver all of this uh to us and then on on to you so thanks for your patience so this is from uh claudia he said beside uh besides the post american world 2.0 i guess referencing the second edition of your book what else should we be reading to prepare us for the post uh postcovid19 world so a great question there free books maybe that come to mind from the past that could provide an an analogy to understand the future or what are you reading right now to try to figure this all out um gosh some of the books that i think would be would be helpful uh harare's sapiens uh is the most recent example but some of those books that give you a broad sweep of history to recognize you know that what was going on today is truly historic because we're really going through one of these uh these kind of historical changes of phase where one era ends and a new era begins uh and so i think some you know harare sapiens really goes back to the beginning of recorded history and tries to tell in 600 or so pages uh this the story of humankind um guns germs and steel by jared diamond i love those kind of big sweep books that give you uh i think a good sense of this if you're particularly interested in the issue of of epidemics william mcneil one of the great historians one of this this whole field is called big history uh and one of the great big historians wrote a book called plagues and people uh which is a wonderful it's a little dense it's not it's not a beach reading but it goes through you know things like the black plague and uh makes you understand you know exactly how how they how they reshaped europe for example killed about a third of europe and so then you ask yourself what did what what were the effects well it had the effect of forcing people to be more industrious and in in britain it actually laid the groundwork for the industrial revolution because with so few people each one had to figure out a way to be more productive so there you know there are these kind of bizarre things that happened or another piece of mcniel's book that i love where he points out there's a kind of puzzle about the uh the the conquerors of the new world uh columbus cortez montezuma people like that they came in with very small armies bands of of soldiers how did they convert all of latin america to christianity so quickly well one piece of it and just one piece of it obviously is that they came bringing these diseases but they were immune from them and so the natives the locals would look at this and say why are these guys not getting sick when we get sick maybe their gods are better than our gods now it's speculation but there is a kind of fascinating puzzle as to why with so few troops who of course pillaged and pun plundered and raped and such but why would so few troops were able to get so much conversion and one of his arguments is the differential effect of the of these infectious diseases whether they the europeans were immune to them uh the natives were not of course we didn't understand the science at the time so people just looked at it and said my god this is this isn't some kind of magic right so those kind of books i think always uh excite me one of the things i've been doing is just to drown myself in something else i've been trying to also read great works of fiction and the one that i read recently that i thoroughly recommend is john steinbeck's east of eden which is a great it's many of us the grey american story because it's the story of a family in connecticut and a family in california and the connecticut family moves to california in the late 19th early 20th century so it's a story of the rise of america and the westward westward movement of the american spirit if you will great ideas great uh reading list for everyone to uh to click through to indigo or i guess amazon's not quite delivering books yet here in ontario they're prioritizing other things but indigo here you can order all those books online let's support our publishers uh at this moment freed a couple more questions and then i'm going to let you go we got a lot of people here queued up so i want to just get squeeze in a couple more sure i'm sure that we have i appreciate it uh let's go to our next question uh we'll see if it's coming from our our emails sent to us yes it is it's from andrew and is it safe to say that 2020 represents the start of the post-american world that you predicted over a decade ago i think you you kind of alluded to that uh freed off the the top of the show but maybe you could go just a little bit deeper and say you know what are one or two of the key kind of salient features of that world that we should understand as individuals right now that will have a big impact uh let's say not on geopolitics but on our day-to-day lives and how how we live will we be more free or less free will we be more prosperous or less prosperous in this post-american world that you see coming out of this crisis well it's it's a good question actually kind of when did when does it begin i mean obviously when we're now using this metaphorically but the way i think about it is um i wrote the book 8007. what happens then is a president is elected who is actually very attuned to these strengths i mean if i may say so he read the book he was photographed with the book i know he read the book and was aware of the complexity of asserting american leadership in the context of a changing world and if you remember obama reached out to the chinese tried to get them to you know to try to agree to have a greater role in kind of the the the international system the chinese at that point were not willing they were not they they thought it was mean they'd have to pay a lot of money and they would have to you know start uh funding all kinds of u.n operations and so they they retreated back and said no we're still a developing country meanwhile you had the reality that you know whatever obama was trying to do was being undercut at home all the time he inherited these big wars so it wasn't clear exactly what was happening and so he was trying very much to to maintain american leadership in a very different world and trying to therefore use different skills use persuasion one of his aides once famously said in a new new york article we think it's better for us to lead from behind meaning we don't want to be seen to be you know the the america of old we want to be seen to be gathering these coalitions but letting other people take take the lead and all of that was working pretty well the problem was that in america i think you had lost the domestic consensus that the united states should play that leadership role we wanted to get out of the middle east we want to do you know and and what trump recognized was there was a much greater souring on that international leadership position so trump comes in and says i hate trade i hate immigrants i hate international organizations i hate multilateralism i hate nato i'm obviously exaggerating but not by much um and what trump represents in a sense is in america that says we don't want to take part in any of this and for the rest of the world it took somebody like trump to recognize okay we really are in a post-american world so i think it's really the beginning of the trump administration where you see the the actual beginnings only because obama was trying to paper them over and was very very skillfully because of his personal commitment uh had been able to kind of fudge the issue but with trump you see it you know plain as day he'd he would draw the rest of the world start saying to themselves okay we have to freelance i mean this is the europeans have said this explicitly we are going to have to manage our affairs ourselves merkel has said this macro has said this the chinese view that this as an open invitation for them to try to extend their influence in in in into uh into asia in various ways so i would argue that it's pretty much the start of the trump administration but like all great historical crises this will accelerate those trends because rather than if you think about the last crisis of 809 obama used it as a way to try to convene the world the g20 coordinate with other countries solve these problems together this crisis trump is using it as a way to say we're good the chinese are bad i don't you know he didn't even want to have a g7 meeting and then when the french forced him to it's the americans who essentially broke the meeting up they couldn't come to a joint statement because all the americans cared about was blame it on the chinese call it the wuhan virus uh that you know in some ways that is a metaphor for a post-american world a world which america not only doesn't doesn't lead but doesn't want to lead okay let's look for our last question of the evening now we'll put that up here for you and i'll read it so the question is could you please give us a perspective on how the post covid 19 world will look like as opposed to the world in the aftermath of uh the spanish flu and world war one i mean you just made the point uh free that the you know the industrial revolution in the united kingdom could in part have been the result of the the pandemics of um of centuries ago do you think that there could be some kind of sweeping change i mean after world war one in the united states you had the roaring 20s there was this incredible period of uh exuberance reacting to the uh the horrors of that of that war do you see us coming out of this and opening up or are we instead maybe in a i don't know a holding pattern in some kind of hiatus as we work through the the deep costs economic and social and personal that this uh crisis has brought about you know a lot uh i hate to end the uh the conversation with by hedging but a lot depends on the nature of the pandemic and frankly we don't really understand it uh and let's be honest about that we all need more information we all you know even the scientists the best scientists will tell you they don't completely understand it swine flu for example which started out very menacingly just disappeared after a while could that happen with this in that case the effects will be much more muted or are we living in a pandemic pandemic era where this is you know there are going to be waves of this and it's going to come back in the fall uh it may come back next year uh we you know we will have to vaccinate 7 billion people around the world if those things happen then it's you know then it's a very different outcome but but i think what we can say generally is the one thing that's different about the the spanish influenza compared to now is we have much more knowledge uh we have much you know science is much better we have a much greater ability to ask ourselves uh who is infected who is not what are the mechanisms of infection what do we do about it we started this out handling this pandemic you know essentially in a kind of medieval fashion what we're doing social distancing is what the venetians did during the plague it's what people in london did during the play you know this idea of just stay away from everybody so that you don't transmit the plague and that's fine and that's necessary but we now have to bring in to bear the enormous knowledge we have about this disease and the ability to track that with testing with contact tracing with serology you know immunosterology where you can figure out whether somebody has the antibodies or not and you know we're all we're getting there because this is all new but i think we will be in a very different place than in previous pandemics because we will have that knowledge we will have that ability and so you may see a kind of a peculiar return of normalcy you know the wearing of mass the taking of temperatures uh the you know we may have to go back to using health documents i grew up in india i had to use these documents to travel when i was when i was young anyway because you know coming from india people wanted to know have you had a typhoid child have you ever had a cholera shot so maybe we'll all have to have health papers and maybe you will have to use them when you enter a sports stadium when you end you know so it's possible we're very adaptable and i think that we are ultimately social animals aristotle said that i think it's the first line of the of the uh of the politics and he's right we want to live together we want to eat pray love you know mourn celebrate together we are not going to give that up we are going to find in inventive ways to do it so i don't think that we are you know life is going to go on and human life is social by its very nature but we have intelligence now and we will know how to do it in a small in a smart way and we will be able to do it in a way that allows us to affirm that core element of humanity and that core element of civic life but in a way that is smart and careful and sensible so i i i i am at the end of the day an optimist about that i don't think that some sometimes people believe everything everything will change well the desire for human beings to to gather uh in in celebration love you know sadness uh and and camaraderie uh that won't change free did we learn our lesson do you do you really think that we've learned this lesson about the need for preparedness and the need for uh you know really probably costly and extensive and difficult investments in societal capacity to deal with these unexpected threats and as we discussed a civilization of increasing complexity and therefore vulnerability no look there's something about the human condition that you know you'd never say you've learned for lesson but i would say this i think we're learning the lesson i think we are understanding that we are in a different world and i think that people are going to pay more attention to those who talk about preparedness to those who talk about science to those who talk about resiliency unfortunately it tends to always happen that you build that particular element of resiliency into the system but you neglect the others you know so after 0809 we built a lot of financial resiliency in our system and you notice our banks are in very good shape but the problem is not a banking crisis right you ended up with another kind of crisis um after 9 11 you built up the security and safety of the travel architecture you know you bolted the cockpit doors and you put uh uh you know the the scanners in every at every airport and you you have people take their shoes off but you haven't dealt with you know the the way we should be thinking about this is a more systemic way that everything should have some layer of resilience some layer of of a buffer placed within it uh and our tendency is to fix the one that that that breaks and as i said the biggest one that we face that is ultimately existential is climate um and we do have to you know that that is a that is the perfect uh place for us to look when asking ourselves what other kind of resilience do we need what are what what other safety shock absorbers do we need to build in because if that one you know if we have a real crisis on that one uh it's not going to be as easy uh you know as racing toward a vaccine and doing a little social distancing that could be the big one well thank you for that is a i think a super smart insight to end on that uh there will be other crises there will be other existential threats we face and climate certainly could be one of them and we need to seriously think about how to build in redundancy resiliency all these things we've talked about freed uh you've been very generous with your time it's always uh an honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity uh to speak with you to benefit from your wisdom and insights when this is all over let's find a way as we uh have done many times before to get you back to toronto for a month debate on roy thompson hall stage in front of an audience of uh of 3 500 people that's what we love to do you're terrific at it so let's convene that debate uh when this passes i will get my health papers in order thank you uh ladies and gentlemen that was uh freed zakaria that's our second uh weekly dialogue as i mentioned uh at the top of the show we're going to continue these dialogues for the next number of weeks to come we're gonna explore a whole range of issues from uh international institutions to how we work to uh the collective values that we share and how those will change through uh this pandemic and what will come out the other side again this series is all about encouraging us to stretch our minds and think about how this pandemic is changing us as individuals changing our societies and changing the world next week we have a really special dialogue participants set up the 23rd of april at 8 pm uh his name is mohamed ellerian if you haven't caught him already please do so at our dialogue next week he's a former chief economist of pimco the world's largest bond fund he's now the chief economic advisor at allianz which is one of the world's largest money managers and he's the author of one of the smartest books out there right now on central banks which is a huge piece of the initial response to this pandemic called the only game in town so we're going to talk economics we're going to talk the effects of these extraordinary interventions by government in response to covet what does that mean for us it's a great opportunity for you to send in your questions via our website or facebook you've got any uh ideas issues debates that you want us to air around the world after covet 19 as it pertains to the global economy and just generally the economic response to this crisis muhammad allerian will answer those questions with me next week at the same time eight to nine pm well now we're going to go to the second half hour portion of tonight's dialogue where we're going to focus exclusively on canada's global role after this pandemic what are the challenges and opportunities that canada will face after uh kovid 19 the immediate crisis has passed as our guide to this we're speaking with janice gross stein she's a professor of conflict management the university of toronto she's a founding director of the monk school of global affairs and she was a massey lecturer and one of canada's smartest and most insightful uh commentators on global affairs so janice stein uh welcome to the monk dialogues it's great to have you as part of the program it's a pleasure to be with you hey um well let me uh just begin by having you react to what you heard from uh freed in our conversation and maybe just put a canadian spin on that what do you take away from that conversation in terms of what a canadian audience should pay attention to in order to understand the unique set of challenges we're going to face as a country internationally as this crisis moves out of an acute phase uh into something else you know i thought that was just to treat richard and free got it exactly right that kovid has accentuated um trends and changes that have been building for quite a while i couldn't agree with him more and of course these trends are not trends that work to canada's advantage he talked about the deepening rivalry between the united states and china which kova has made worse he talked about really the weakening of international institutions as the two of them compete we saw what president trump did today to the who the world health organization that should be at the center of managing this crisis but in fact is on the sidelines for many complicated reasons the growing crisis within europe as it tries to figure out who it is the importance of asia all of these are going to make the world more difficult for canada because in a competition among the big ones in an era of rising nationalism canada will have a harder time than in a world organized by the united states that work through multilateral institutions these are going to be very challenging years ahead for canada janice you know one of canada's um i guess questions going forward is where should we put our emphasis you know over many decades we've made different bets we've made big bets on international peacekeeping we've made big bets on international aid we have fought a war in afghanistan we uh in a sense made a major international contribution through our armed forces coming under this crisis we know that canada is going to have the canadian government is going to have significantly reduced fiscal capacity because we are borrowing and spending in a way that we really haven't since the second world war so where can or should canada be making that bet with limited resources a much harder kind of choice in front of it we can't do everything no we absolutely cannot return and you're right that pocketbooks are going to be a lot less full than they have been and as you know canadian spending on 8 has actually not been very robust over the last 20 years so where's the big bet for canada the big bet for canada has to be in this tough world where it's always been for us the united states we are going to have to invest more effort than we have in the past um in consulates in the united states and deepening our relationships between premiers and governors in building support our economic future which is going to be a challenge over these next years as we come out of this is going to be ever more dependent on the us economy and on keeping that border open because we're just too small so we are going to skew our diplomatic resources away from the rest of the world and even in this post-american world that free talked about we live next door to the united states we are increasingly regional in our economy we saw how tough it was rudyard when president trump said no exported masks to count up by american manufacturer our supply chains are so integrated every prime minister it doesn't matter from which political party they come over this next decade is going to be focused on that issue and every scarce resource is going to go into deepening that relationship well janice i always like speaking with you because you're frank in a way that sometimes our political leaders are not i mean that is going to be a deeply unpopular message to communicate to canadians because we have felt for a long time janice you've been part of this articulating canada's foreign policy that we should lead through our values not through our interests and that that's part of what distinguishes us as canadians versus other countries on the world stage were value driven not national interest driven you know you could hear the nostalgia um in parede's voice as he did his really hard hitting analysis uh talked about how rough and tough the world is going to be as china and the united states frankly duke it out uh with putin in the background um and then just this is kind of canada your role he said is to persuade the united states to be more international uh you know we need a multilateral world he said but it was nostalgic i don't think he really believes that that is a very likely outcome he thinks the post-american world's going to be very rough and so i think you're absolutely right canadians are um not going to like this they're they want their government to play a role as a humanitarian leader as a value-driven country uh to rise above the kind of nasty nationalism that we see in the united states and china and russia and even in parts of europe that's why i understand that but as an analyst i believe that our foreign policy is going to look very different over this next decade to come it's going to be much more realistic it's going to be more hard-headed it's going to require a focus with the limited resources that we have and it's going to be focused on economic regeneration for this country in a very unfriendly world okay let's look uh for some questions so this is an opportunity for the audience watching on facebook those have been emailing us to put some questions uh let's try to again we can talk about what free shared with us we can also go deeper on the issue of canada and its kind of global role so doreen has a question here for you janice uh doesn't that mean we need to trade more globally and not rely as much on trade with the united states thank you dorian for that you know durian that's a great question it really is um we've made an enormous effort over the last 15 years and we've reduced the share of our exports from 85 to 75 percent to the u.s market we still after all this effort sell three quarters of everything we export to the united states and before the current crisis with china we were working strategically to grow our trade as you suggest four percent that's all it is very hard for a small country of 35 million people located in north america to resist the lure of that big sucking market to the south of us that speaks the same language as most of us do it's much harder to trade and to penetrate chinese markets or to do business in india and we've taken um the easy path all these years i think generically what we're seeing in the world and for re writes about this too we are seeing the growth of regional economies the north american economy canada the united states mexico the european union which is looking inward asia which is rising and growing in importance and for canada geography is destiny north america is our region so yes we can do our best but the difference will only be unfortunately at the margins okay let's uh look for some more questions either by email or facebook again this portion of our dialogue tonight focusing on canada's international role in stance what are the challenges and opportunities coming up after the coveted 19 pandemic just before we do that just to add um an into a story which all canadians should be celebrating of course uh a canadian company has designed and is about to manufacture a test in a box uh and in an interview today in the global mail he said he's bombarded by orders from around the world but he has made a determination that he's going to satisfy the canadian demand for a really efficient test for coven and he's turning down all the international orders in order to do that that's the world of nationalism out of borders that fareed was talking about which lives in our country as well as in many others yeah that's a good point um okay let's go to matthew's question was uh basically the risk of uh of what's going to happen to just debts and deficits over the next five years and our he's actually particularly about the united states but we could ask this about canada too janice i mean what is the consequences of these extraordinary interventions by the central banks how do these play out maybe not just in terms of the economy but in terms of again our our international standing i mean we're not a reserve currency in canada no one needs to hold the canadian dollar no international uh bond issue needs to be denominated in canadian currency so what is the effect again of this of on our international standing of this extraordinary central bank intervention that we're seeing you know matthew you could probably tell by the way rudyard asked that question that he shares your concerns i'm more optimistic [Music] interest rates as a result of this were low before this started they've been low for a decade and i think that they will stay low for a considerable amount of time going forward as a result of the suppression of demand that we've seen because of the high unemployment so if the the sums that the canadian government particularly the federal government because provinces can't really borrow uh in international markets in the same way so the sums that the canadian government will have to borrow are seem almost unimaginable but the interest rates are so low that the cost of this borrowing is something really that the canadian government can well afford frankly better than many governments that were are more indebted than canada so i'm confident that the canadian dollar will remain a reasonable currency it never does as well uh in times of uncertainty as the u.s dollar does there's always a flight to safety in u.s dollars but i do not think that the heavy borrowing um will be a long lasting problem i think the the other the greater mistake would have been for the federal government not to borrow and not to provide support to individuals and small and medium-sized businesses in the context of this crisis that would have done lasting damage to our economy yeah we'll certainly pick up on these questions with muhammad allerian next week the global economist what does this mean when in a sense governments are no longer selling their debt on the international market to buyers who are motivated or not by an interest rate but in fact they're just selling it to their own central banks or then putting that debt on their balance sheets so let's go to uh another question here from our online audience again this portion of our discussion focusing on canada's uh impact internationally vis-a-vis cobit uh so nancy is asking you janice can you give examples of what some european countries do to keep their kind of economies and let's add to that their let's say hopefully their ability to punch above their weight internationally how do they sustain that through this crisis do you think europe is doing that um do you think there are some examples that we might be able to lessons from europe that canada could apply you know so europe is of course of many parts and borders have sprung up again in europe after 50 years of integration france italy britain um are not punching above their weight for different sets of reasons germany has for many many years but germany has punched above its weight because the rest of europe bought its products uh with a currency that actually subsidized german manufacturing so that's not an option for us look outside those big powers in europe and we can find countries like norway for instance that has traditionally punched above its weight it's continued to spend at a far higher proportion than we have on international aid it's focused its energies on on diplomacy and mediation and it's developed a very credible reputation and the other one of course is finland which has a very innovative economy it's invested it has an industrial strategy it's it's got a leading telecom a global champion uh along with a very robust system of social supports for its population so i think the nordics which are uh you know we're 35 million they're nine seven million far smaller than we are but what they have they are strategic they they stay the course uh there is a much broader bipartisan consensus in those countries about what priorities are and that's i think why they punch above their weight good good examples for us to uh look look to let's take a a couple more questions uh again from our online audience suzanne uh is there any reason to be hopeful or to have optimism for uh you know our greening of our economy coming out of this crisis janice i think that's one of the things we touched on a little bit about foreign you know a lot of people are having this conversation what happens to climate change it was such an urgent issue it seemed as if there was a growing national and global consensus around war substantive action and now i guess people are wondering if if a certain view of the economy will be that we have to set climate aside in order to restart growth and then deal with climate later down the road you know i think there are huge risks here and i think you're absolutely right to ask that question to focus on it if the priority coming out of this is to restart the economy we have unprecedented levels of unemployment uh and you know unemployment disruption can inflict very large and serious health consequences on people way beyond kovac so if governments become single-minded and focusing on this there really is the risk that investment in the greening of the economy will diminish because you pay a premium when you invest let me give you another example which people are talking about right now in canada cities and particularly new york is probably the strongest example of this people living clustered together in very dense pockets especially people who are poor are breeding grounds for the coronavirus and if there is and as we've seen uh people who have the means many of them are leaving the city and going to the surrounding countryside if we revert to urban sprawl for example if there's a flight to the suburbs if people move out of the big cities i decide they're going to work from home [Music] we run the risk that we will increase our carbon footprint coming out of this crisis so the challenges to a greener economy can come from very unexpected places as a result of covert okay great let's take just a couple more questions i'm conscious of our time and again we're focusing on this part of our discussion with janice gross stein the former founder and director of the monk school of global affairs and also a professor at the university of toronto in conflict management so fran's question for you is can manufacturing be renationalized brought back from the developing world and china to create a stronger canadian economy so again you know this was a i don't know it's seen as a as a trend that was building especially in the united states under the trump administration does that janus get kicked into high gear not only in the united states but potentially here in canada too you know trump campaigned on that in 2016. actually and you know this grudge when you look at the data there was not really a lot of onshoring there was a lot of hype uh but there wasn't a lot of onshoring there wasn't a lot of bringing back factories to the united states i think colvin will change that game you know one of the things that i don't think canadians are fully aware is that every single antibiotic has a chinese component in it in other words a component that's manufactured in china in the culvert crisis we have not needed antibiotics because it's viral but if you're thinking about a strategy for the future as fareed was talking about which was resilient where you can surge your healthcare capacity we are going to have to develop the capacity in this country not only to manufacture masks and surgical gowns and all the protective equipment but across the spectrum to look at the drugs that we will need pharmaceutical drugs that we will need in emergencies we're going to have to grow that capacity in this country and as farid said that's fighting the last war what do we need to think about in the future how do we come become resilient for example if weather extremes become more important as the climate changes how do we become resilient with respect to floods and tornadoes and bad weather that's going to lead i think to a willingness by governments but more important by the public to invest in those companies that can grow our capacity to provide for ourselves in the event of an emergency great answer okay let's go to our final question of this the second portion of our discussion tonight focusing on canada after covet 19 in particular the international dimension the challenges and opportunities canada will face globally so the question is for brenda how do you see the this is a great question to end on the china canada relationship in the coming period of time because janus says we know this was a relationship that was once in a sense highly prized there was even talk possibly of a canada-china free trade agreement um yet you know that relationship soured in the context of uh china-u.s rivalries uh uh the whole new generation of wireless technologies is thrown in there where does this all go from here um the canada child relationship is a really complex relationship right now um as you know two canadians um michael cover and michael spivak are still being held in china and the canadian public has become much less supportive of deepening ties with china that having been said china is among the fastest growing econ large economies in the world um it will continue to grow it will become the largest economy over the next 20 or 30 years we have two million canadian chinese citizens close to that in this country who are great bridges to china and so hopefully again if we can be if we can lead partisan politics at the water here uh we need to recognize that it is in our interest to maintain positive relationships with china at the same time as we are realistic about the risks we understand the challenges of using chinese technology in matters that are fundamental to our international security so we need to think about the next decade with china in with that same realistic um grounded approach um understanding and recognizing that china will probably be the most important economy and government in the world for the next 20 or 30 years so janice just to end other kind of moderator's privilege here let me try to connect two important thoughts that you've shared with us tonight one this idea that uh in a way that will be at times uh disquieting to canadians we will need to refocus our foreign policy around the united states and influencing the united states in ways that are beneficial to canada internationally in terms of not just our values but our national interests right at the same time you're rightly pointing out that china is the world's fastest ultimately the world's fastest growing economy it will be the world's largest economy so how do we reconcile those two different ideas that the world's future growth is in asia it's driven by china it will be largely controlled by china yet we are tied to the united states by geography and by national interest i think that is exactly our challenge is to is to reconcile those um and you're right it's not only china it's all of asia which it will become the epicenter um of the international economy out of international politics over the next 30 40 years and we're fortunate in this country that we have a very large canadian asian population that can act as a bridge how do we reconcile this we invest overwhelmingly in the united states at every level in states and cities and politics and economics so that the kind of overwhelming support that canada has in the united states right now regardless of who's president and we call on that and we use it in a very strategic way and we have to continue to do that but i believe this country can do more than one thing at a time we're going to be caught in the crosshairs occasionally when u.s presidents put a lot of pressure on us to pull back from china and different parts of asia that is not a new story for canada u.s presidents have often pressed prime ministers and our best prime ministers have always known how much room they had to stay what their margin for maneuver was and how to maintain good relationships with the united states while they exercise that margin of maneuver to the fullest degree that's what any canadian prime minister will have to do well janice grosstine thank you for coming on the most dialogues to uh provide us with this uh great capstone conversation to uh to dialogue with doing these dialogues richard i think having the opportunity for these conversations under the present circumstances is just terrific thank you for your time and uh as always your uh thoughtful perspective uh with you know uh some real dose of uh of straight talk i i appreciate it i know the audience does too well that was janice gross stein she joined us for this the the second part of our covid uh 19 dialogue on global affairs as i mentioned we're going to continue these dialogues uh for the next while to come once a week up next we have uh mohamed ellerian who is dialogues on next week wednesday april the 23rd for an hour starting at 8 p.m uh join me join muhammad for that conversation you can send us questions in advance via our website www.monkdebates.com go to the dialog tab on the website you'll see links to send questions for muhammad muhammad allerian on the global economy you can also get us through our facebook page the monk debates facebook page so again i want to just finally thank you our listeners for tuning in for the second dialogue and i also want to thank the great group of partners that have come together to support this initiative so facebook canada has been instrumental in helping us get these dialogues out to a canadian audience our friends at the globe and mail who are supporting uh these dialogues in the paper and on their website uh also wned in buffalo and it's affiliated pbs stations who are taking these dialogues across the united states through the pbs and mpr networks and finally of course to the monk family foundation the oria foundation who are funding these dialogues these are a hundred percent charitable initiative underwritten by the same foundations that support uh the monk debates so again i'm rudyard griffis thanks for watching i've really enjoyed this time with you and we'll do it all again next week next wednesday at 8 pm eastern with muhammad allarion be well be safe and good night [Music] [Music] [Music] do [Music] you

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Length: 98min 23sec (5903 seconds)

Published: Wed Jul 22 2020