[Music] good evening ladies and gentlemen and welcome to the first of our trilogy of the IWM lectures many of you who are familiar with both the institution of the IWM lecture and of the Institute itself know very well that this is a series in which we invite guests to come and deliver three lectures which are then published in English in German and in polish as monographs the last one which you may have seen a young man a Miller's lectures on pot ilysm which were delivered here also as IWM lectures the great great pleasure to welcome professor Stephen Cochran who's had harrowing journey to us unfortunately but he's here that's the most important he is the John P Buckland 52 professor in history and international affairs at the Woodrow Wilson School and also a professor of the history department at Princeton University and he's also fellow of the Hoover Institute at Stanford most of you would know his work both on modern authoritarianism and especially his biography of Stalin which is I think one of the most stunning biographies I have ever read for one because Tannen appears so late in the book and what it really deals with rather than just a biography of Stalin is about the paradoxes of our power authoritarian power more generally and also in a sense it is an entire history of the making of the Soviet state one of the things I remember most vividly is your characterization of 90 18 as the year of Lenin and Dada and so if the book has these kinds of juxtapositions unexpected totally unexpected moments and it is looking at of course the role of peasant it is looking at the Great War it is looking at the revolution and basically the making of the Soviet Union but what we are going to hear today is something completely different and that is the first of three lectures titled sphere of influence a history of the present today's lecture is concerned with the gift of geopolitics how worlds are made and unmade it's going to be about the nature of of course in the state rivalry and whether we should be worried about the return of geopolitics but I think the background to the trilogy of lectures is the idea that we need to rethink the nature of the liberal order in the rules based liberal order international order established during the Cold War and you look at it also as a moment which has been the formation and the disciplining of American power and the question is was this a very short conjuncture or are we seeing an alternative to the older idea of spheres of influence the second lecture is on the difference between if there is any if there is one what is the difference between fascism and communism and the third one will deal with populist revolts are more globally so a warm welcome to you again and we're going to hear the first lecture on the gift of geopolitics how words are made and unmade this one and one but scary question it's okay it could be better without the note elegant of things we believe this good evening when I was younger which actually was not that long ago we had Steve Jobs we had Johnny Cash and we had Bob Hope now that's right no jobs no cash no hope I know what you're thinking what's going to happen is Kevin Bacon dies that's it might as well give up completely no bacon first let me say thank you for the honor of the invitation you know yon venom Allah who gave the lectures last year as a distinguished political theorist actually based at Princeton University he's here this year but when he saw that I was giving these lectures he fled the country he's not in Austria right now Yvonne Kraus Jeff who is a permanent member of the Institute who invited me to give the lectures also vanished from the country a days before I arrived Shalini tried to escape and she hurt herself and didn't get out you can see the injury to her leg which is evidence of her attempted escape so what explains why you're here I don't know everyone else it seems understood we do these distinguished lectures at my home institution Princeton University the three the sequence of three distinguished lectures and I have to say it is the principal way that we deflate people's reputations we invite a famous person they come thinking they must say something profound they attempt to say something profound and you can just see the reputation deflating deflating in the room the second lecture has half the number of people as the first and they are even more angry because they came to the second and then the third lecture is a dialogue between the host and the lecturer maybe it works differently here yes we will exactly what I was thinking anyway I my reputation will also deflate but I have the fortune of not having such an inflated reputation to begin with so the deflation can only go so far I also have the advantage that I can avoid the profound and focus only on the banal which is what I'm going to do in the three lectures today so let us recall the fantasy of the CIA the CIA fantasized for decades to bring down the Soviet Union it did all manner of covert operations it funded The Voice of America and Radio Free Europe to try to penetrate into the censored Soviet space it spent a great deal of American tax dollars and achieved almost no effects bringing down the Soviet Union then all of a sudden someone begins to say the system the Soviet system is rotten he decides to relax the censorship he decides to allow information from the West to flood into the country forget about Radio Free Europe how about television channel 1 in the Soviet Union he decides to introduce market mechanisms and unhinges the planned economy he deliberately sabotages the centralized rule of the Communist Party as a result of which the federal states the states in the federal union discover that they are no longer beholden to Moscow he forces the introduction of multi candidate elections with secret ballot competitive multi candidate elections he declares that the satellite states of Eastern Europe can go free not exactly What did he say he said we will not defend them anymore they're on their own in a word what the CIA fantasized about but never made much progress on the General Secretary of the Communist Party of the Soviet Union he did it he did it all and then some things that the CIA was not even bold enough to fantasize about he did still to this day having lived through it and watched it and having been there it shocks me so now we have a new fantasy the new fantasy is not the CIA fantasy is a kind of combination Russia Iran China fantasy what would that fantasy be it would be that someone comes along and discredit and maybe even destroys the American system what would that someone do one would say that the whole system is completely corrupt that there are millions and millions of illegal voters that the elections are rigged that the courts are packed with completely biased judges but the civil servants of saboteurs in a deep state that the US media are quote enemies of the people that the u.s. government quote kills plenty of people just like Russia's government this person would sabotage the State Department eliminate its budget block all its appointments and have his son-in-law run foreign policy he would attack American intelligence as not to them quote he would say that states that sign mutually consensual alliances with us are cheaters but the alliances are unnecessary burdens even swindles that the allies are not part of a larger community of values and interests but freeloaders he would say that the free trade pacts are self sabotage he would give all top government positions to his family members he would promote generals to run all the key civilian posts so that an Egyptian diplomat would say quote you're just like us now reporting to generals and of course he would use his political power to enrich himself his properties and his products yes that was the Russian Iran China fantasy and lo and behold here we are this is the world we live in now the first world the gorbachev world as I said I'm still in a state of shock that the General Secretary of the Communist Party did all of that to the Soviet system and buried it thankfully in many ways because went peacefully as a result of him now Trump obviously is no Gorbachev I think actually this entire room could probably agree on that point and the West is also not collapsing my point is rather that the US and the West more generally can only be undermined from within the threat to the West the threat to the United States is a loss of faith and a loss of will in itself and unfortunately that's where we are now okay let's think a little bit about this I'm not going to talk about as was already mentioned Stalin I have been living with Stalin now for too many years I wake up he's in the bed next to me I turn on the computer it's all about him I go to sleep at night it's all I dream about fortunately I don't live under that system but I have made myself a captive of it in fact Stalin destroyed my eyesight I can no longer see very well but my glasses are not with me they are unfortunately enjoying life back in New York City I'm not going to talk about Trump either even though that's all we talk about now in the United States I don't know how it is here but we talk about Trump and then we stop talking about 12:00 and somebody says what about trouble and it's Trump and it's Trump Trump in Trump Trump and more drama but I swore I wouldn't do that here after all I fled from the US to come here unlike those who are permanently based here or try to get out while I'm here I'm not going to talk about Trump's breakthrough and the continuing stalemate in the US political system I'm not going to talk about how Trump in a single election cycle drove a stake through the hearts of both the bush dynasty and the Clinton dynasty in a single electoral cycle through the bush dynasty and the Clinton dynasty only to create actual family rule himself I'm not going to talk about that I'm not going to talk about the absence of any realignment in the political system about how one party continues to believe deeply and sincerely that a reduction in marginal tax rates is the answer to every single question that party is known as the Republican Party I'm not going to talk about how another party believes that the answer to every single question is identity politics that party is the Democratic Party none of that has changed we have a breakthrough and a complete stalemate just where we were before the difference of course is that Trump revealed the misalignment between the Republican Party voter base and the Republican Party donor and intellectual base and he holds this now and if you think they're going to get rid of him they're going to impeach him they're going to flush him down the bowl at the first opportunity you don't understand that he can fracture that party he can fracture that Republican Party because he's the one who has support in the voter base they have support in the donor base and the intellectual class the rest of them in the Republican Party so it's going to be very interesting but I'm not going to talk about that I'm not going to talk about the nihilism of the Trump administration the failure to appoint people on purpose two positions in the federal bureaucracy the appointment instead of 400 campaign aides the only people he's really appointed 40 or 50 people on the one hand and then several hundred campaign aides loyalists who planted fake stories about how Hillary Clinton was dying and concocted videos falsifying videos to show how sick she was and how she was dying for the New Hampshire election and are now running major departments in the federal government one of them graduated from high school two years ago and is now one of the highest officials in the US bureaucracy these are known as beachhead teams those are the only people that this nihilistic administration trusts and those are the only people with few exceptions that they've appointed I'm not going to talk about any of that I'm not going to talk about populism at least not to the very end somehow populism is a surprise I've been teaching modern authoritarianism for 28 years the combination of democratic deficit Democratic mechanisms and political intrapreneurial ism is an ancient story the formula the will of the people the corruption of the elites the strongman who alone can set things right I know that story I'm writing three volumes about it in any case we often lose sight of the fact that populism brings salutary effects because it brings suppressed issues to the fore it gives voice to people who are otherwise not part of the political system it doesn't bring solutions but it does serve a democratic purpose I'm going to talk about any of that so what am I going to talk about I think we have a little bit more time before questions is that right got to watch the clock what am I going to talk about silly old me I told you it would be banal truth in advertising I'm going to talk about success in fact these three lectures are going to be about success I know think back to the world in the mid 70s four or five of you like me were alive then I can see looking out at the audience think back to the period of the 70s the oil shock remember the oil shock price of oil went up 400% in a few months remember the oil shock I do remember the Vietnam War I remember the Vietnam War remember when North Vietnam seized South Vietnam in 1975 I remember that remember Watergate and Richard Nixon I remember that remember mal and the Cultural Revolution the murderous insane Cultural Revolution of Mao I remember that remember grease had a military hunter remember Franco in the 70s for a time was still alive and still in power remember Japan suffered its first post-world War two recession in the 70s I remember that remember Brezhnev remember Brezhnev drooling on himself I remember that it was on French TV which they couldn't control he was over tossing on sleeping pills because he had insomnia an illness that set in during the Prague Spring events when he ordered the tanks to go in you want to do it felt he had no choice remember the economic reforms announced by Kosygin which vanished without a trace just like Kosygin would do I remember all of that I remember Eastern Europe lived under communism I remember going to Prague and Brno and I remember people thought they would live under communism with no end in sight they couldn't get out and they had no future that they envisioned especially young people I remember all of that I remember the 70s very well if you okay there was some things in the 70s and 73 the European community expanded remember that the original six who'd they add Ireland Denmark and the UK which herb Alta were added in 73 this brought the European community to nine if you projected the world forward from the 70s would you have been optimistic would you have thought that anything good was coming would you have thought that the West was the future rather than the past would you have foreseen the repudiation of Mao and the introduction of markets and massive wealth in the monsoon rice cultivation areas of southern China I didn't foresee any of that would you have foreseen the collapse of the Soviet Union the expansion of the European Union to nearly all of Europe not six or nine the 28th minus one I didn't see that would you have foreseen the life expectancy we now have on a global scale the health the middle-class property ownership the poverty reduction 1.3 billion people lifted out of poverty by official statistics 1.3 billion people lifted out of poverty not just in China I didn't foresee that quote the past 250 years have witnessed the most spectacular increase in human wellbeing in history the economies of China and India accounting for one-third of the world's population have seen growth rates that are unparalleled in any country supporting recent expansions in global living centers life expectancy in most parts of the world has soared on the back of achievements in child mortality a child born in sub-saharan Africa today is more likely to live to the age of 5 than a child born in the UK at the beginning of the 20th century that's my colleague Angus Deaton in his book The Great Escape he won the Nobel Prize for economics strange as it might seem life now is better than at any time in recorded history more people are better off and fewer people live in poverty lives are longer children die at a much lower rate one could also add and I know you don't believe this either that this is the safest period in recorded history as well now as one of today's preeminent philosophers said that's louis c.k louis c.k put it best he said quote right now everything is amazing and nobody is happy unquote so in a way I have many other louis c.k quotes but I'm going to restrain myself in a way that's what we need to talk about we need to remember that we've had success and we need to do something with the success that we've had because we're allowing it to slip from our grasp now you'll tell me that not everything is so great right that there are a lot of people living in poverty still obviously that goes without saying we're not talking about the elimination of poverty we're talking about averages there's a problem with averages right everybody knows there's a problem with oranges you put your head in the oven you put your feet in the fridge and on average you're comfortable right yes well I agree there is that problem with averages the US had 13 billionaires in 1980 it's got 540 billionaire's per day from 13 to 540 in the 1960s the ratio of CEO pay to the pay of the workforce in the leading 350 companies was 20 to 120 CEO pay to one worker pay on average by 2016 that ratio was 300 to 1 one could also note that unions have dwindled they were already only 1/3 of the US workforce in 1960 they are 1/10 of the US workforce in 2016 we could go on with those kind of statistics and they're important and they tell you something CEOs making 300 to 1 pay in their companies is a big change from just a few decades ago now of course where I sit in the university there's a very loud passionate cry for more female and lack CEOs in those 350 companies so that women and blacks also can make 300 times what the workers make and when you point out that that might not have much of an effect on the people known as Americans you are a misogynist so like I say you can look at this any way you want but there is an underlying story which is one of success the problem is we weren't ready for success the g7 at its height accounted for almost 70 percent of GDP it peaked at just under 70 the g7 what is the g7 account for now forty-seven percent of global GDP so the g7 countries have only gotten richer immensely richer than they were but their share of global GDP is dropping dropping like a stone that's called success there's no other word for that somehow however as I said we were not ready for this success now that the most dramatic success of course has been in China China's GDP in 1979 261 million China's GDP today about 12 trillion china per capita income in 1979 270 dollars a year average income for someone an inhabitant of China 1979 nominally today it's 7500 purchasing power priority it's 14,000 China's income overall national income it's total economy in nominal dollar terms is now 60 percent of the u.s. in 1992 China was 6 son of the US economy in 2007 China was 25% of the US economy that's right China is now the world's number one manufacturer number one exporter and number one consumer market for oil vehicles smartphones and down the line meanwhile we can't figure out how to provide economic and social opportunity for the lower middle class in the middle class anymore we can't figure out how to defend democracy we have a problem success came the rest of the world advanced that was the world we were hoping for that was the breakthrough the end of communism China going to a market economy okay it's Leninist market economy but nonetheless the people are certainly better off in a big way I could add stories from the rest of the world in addition Mexico now a middle-income country and a complete success and you out there can name all the others that you know better than I do so how could it be all of this success with the caveats and yet nobody is happy as louis c.k the preeminent philosopher of our day said well over the course of the next couple lectures i'm going to try to explain that the rest of the lecture today I'm going to set some of the building blocks for that explanation I think I'm actually ok with time so far so one of the things I encounter all the time I study geopolitics in power I've written a whole bunch of books and they're always about the same thing geopolitics and power that's what these lectures are going to be about because to the extent they know anything it's only that Americans and especially Europeans have long tended to think of geopolitics as a kind of primitivism to be transcended right escape from geopolitics somehow transcend geopolitics there a right-wing version of this and a left-wing version the right-wing dream is a fantasy of universal democracy right everybody looks like America and supposedly benign us-led hegemony right the left-wing version is very different it's a world order governed by supranational institutions with pooled sovereignty that's how you quote escape geopolitics unquote what both the left wing and the right wing version share is a conviction that the rivalry of states which obviously have conflicting interests and conflicting worldviews produces only conflict insecurity impoverishment hence the return of geopolitics is always to be lamented I don't know how many times I pick up some August Journal in the US and there's some credible deep lament about the return of geopolitics States begin to act according to their interests which don't coincide with the interests of other states sure the return of geopolitics being lamented do we really want to escape from geopolitics in fact there is no return it never went away and there is no escape the West is the greatest sphere of influence that has ever been constituted it's a kind of one I said a banal point I no denying that that's what it is but the West is a sphere of influence and we forgot that we forgot to talk about it that way and to defend it that way and to defend it against others who would undo it interstate rivalry can obviously unleash Cataclysm we know our history but the wealthy democratic west arose not in spite of geopolitics but as a result of geopolitics the question is therefore not whether geopolitics is escapable or bad but obviously the question is how can you harness the interstate frictions to push the major powers not towards war but towards security and towards prosperity let's think about the period both before the 1940s and the period after so Great Britain beat the French in a hundred years war once Napoleon abdicated for the second time it was a decisive victory for the British it was kind of bizarre that a country which was much smaller much smaller population certainly could beat a country like France but that's kind of what happened and then we began to live in a British dominated world the British created a world market economy now did they create a fair world market economy did they create an equal world market economy did they create a world market economy that was friendly towards small and powerless countries no that's not what they did not at all but nonetheless they created a world economy and the British dominated world and it was more and more British dominated world over time had a couple of eruptions one eruption was on the European continent when Bismarck unified Germany that was a big head spinning turn all of a sudden a new dynamic power on the continent another eruption was meiji restoration in japan this was not a new country the way Bismarck's Germany was Japan had existed before but it was reoriented much more dynamic and like Germany it went on to an industrial spurt and what could be called a forward and in some people's eyes aggressive external policy right and I could go on the United States which was already the largest economy world in 1900 and probably in 1880 was not a major part of the international system yet in the British dominated world because trade was only about 5% of u.s. GDP in the u.s. had this gigantic continent itself that it could absorb but nonetheless it was looming over the international system now why do I bring up this well-known history it's because it was the competition among these different states that produce the things that we hold dear for example science and engineering right if you have ships and I don't have ships you're going to show up at my door and you're going to tell me how to live you're going to say you know what I'd like your resources I'd like to enslave your population I'd like everything you have and I'd like to pay as little maybe even nothing in fact maybe you'll pay for it when I take it and so anybody who wanted to survive in the unsentimental brutal international order had a choice it could do like the British for example it could have built ships it could build tanks it could found engineering schools it could expand universities it could integrate the polity so that the population felt part of something larger and do something called a national culture create solidarity all of these attributes we call modern or modernity modern a tribunal political process where you go from tradition to modernity this was a geopolitical process where you need to do it or you become subjugated Germany was able to do it Japan was able to do it and a handful of other countries were able to do it and it produced the modern world it produced also a lot of grief so that was the period before World War one then through World War one the period after 1940s is quite interesting you still have the state to state competition sometimes it doesn't seem that way but you do but you also have the creation of a liberal rules-based international order but that did not take shape because of high mindedness it was a classic sphere of influence moreover it was inspired and sustained by a comprehensive cold war with the Soviet Union or what we used to be called the second world remember the first world and the second world and the third world was sphere of influence thinking the first world against the second world in competition for the third world yes it was now the sphere of influence known as the West played a very significant part in European integration the Europeans did integration the Americans didn't do European integration but there's no question that the idea of the West the idea of a unified sphere of influence the idea of geopolitical competition was a part of that story it gave additional impetus in the United States desegregation to civil rights because you had to live up to the promises of the first world and if you didn't courageous people in the streets reminded you of the need to do that in fact the sphere of influence known as the West even disciplined American power during the Cold War America did many things that I personally am NOT proud of and that I'm sure you have a critique of but nonetheless America understood more or less that it was part of something bigger than itself and that it was necessary to remain part of that because that's where the power came from there was even an American grand strategy which good luck now trying to get a grand strategy in Washington and I'm talking about since 1991 not just since the last couple of months so we have this kind of paradox when geopolitics works the way we kind of like the world to be we deny that it's geopolitics and when geopolitics works in ways that are less benign that's when it's bad it's returning and we don't want to deal with it I would submit to you that we're dealing with some misconceptions and that these misconceptions are non-trivial they help explain part of our predicament our inability to defend who we are and what we are one misconception is that the Cold War was an era of predictability stability and relative peace you know that misconception I can tell you the Cold War was totally unpredictable they were crises all the time there was risk of Armageddon several times and not just during the Cuban Missile Crisis the famous one there were more than a hundred wars around the world during the Cold War many more wars in a since the Cold War ended 1 million Vietnamese died 1 million Afghan EES died that wasn't exactly predictable stable and relative peace was it second misconception I would point to is that the current moment is one of profound instability profound unpredictability and war I got to tell you that's just not true there is a lot less war now than there was during the Cold War and there's a lot more predictability than there was during the Cold War I'd be happy to go into various different examples to illustrate those points third misconception I'll only do three it's a so-called class of civilizations this is my favorite one because this is the panic that sets in when poorer and darker parts of the world begin to gain a little bit of power and say in the International System that's known as a clash of civilizations I just don't think that's true I don't think there's a clash of civilizations what people are saying when they say the contemporary world our world now is quote dangerously unstable what they're saying is that they have now television 24 hours a day seven days a week with 600 channels that's what they're saying we're lucky we didn't have that during the Cold War can you imagine 24/7 600 channel television about the nuclear Armageddon incidence when we almost fired at them and they almost fired at us now having fought and won the very difficult Cold War the West is poised somehow to lose the post Cold War this is absolutely astonishing the Cold War was extremely difficult communism was a menace it was a menace predominantly to its own people the Cold War was necessary it was not a misunderstanding not everything in the Cold War was necessary not everything in the Cold War was beneficent but nonetheless it was difficult and necessary and the Western sphere of influence won that cold war and now we have the post Cold War and we're on the precipice of losing it frankly I'm completely puzzled by this how we could have gotten into this astonishing situation so the topic of my sphere of influence 3 lectures is either having an international order or not having one because that's what we currently face when you have an international order you can criticize it the Americans don't understand Nance the Americans don't and that the Americans shouldn't do this the Americans shouldn't do that that criticism is necessary and important but when you don't have an international order you can't really criticize it that's the past that we're on we were on that path before Trump and we're on that path now I've got a couple of slides I didn't know how big a dud the lecture would be so I've got a couple of slides to talk about sphere of influence if it's okay I still think we're all right on time no I was told all right let's see what I got oh by the way this is a course that I give and this is the exam history and geography I'm sorry you can't see it but it says name the smaller rivers that run into the Nile and the person put the answer the juveniles the second question here named six animals that live specifically in the Arctic and they wrote for the six animals two polar bears and four seals they have $65,000 a year Princeton University that's how we grade in the US a is what you get for showing up because you're paying that kind of money and F is what you get when you can't answer the questions in my class okay so here we've got three current spheres of influence don't we we have Russia in Eurasia god that seems so big we have China in East Asia and we have Iran in the Middle East had I had more time I would have put in India India scrambles it a little bit because India has an elected has a democratic government so their sphere of influence has a is analogous in some way to these three but their political system is different which makes it a more complex lecture maybe we'll get that into the book if this ever becomes a book all right so here's a map of the Middle East you can see Iran and you can see the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia right now the Shia are the darker green and the Sunni are the lighter green and you can see that it lines up pretty well the Shia are on this side in kind of an arc and the Sunni are on the other side in kind of an arc all right so if you are thinking about a sphere of influence the proxy war between Iran and Saudi you would say to yourself there stalemated there stalemated neither one including Iran can possibly dominate the whole region and the reason there stalemated is not because of anything they did or didn't do it's because of the different color circles the light color circles are Sunni the dark color circles is a setter Shia so Iran's influence is inherently limited and so if you understand this what would you do you would make an agreement even not necessarily a very good one to make sure Iran didn't get a nuclear bomb because once you take the nuclear bomb out of Iran's hands then you get the sunni-shia divide right to hold you on down that doesn't mean that Iran can't do many things it can it can finance Hezbollah it can do many many things right but nonetheless the strategic thinking as long as they don't have the bomb well you know they can't dominate that region as much mischief as they might want to cause now this is not to say that Iran is evil and Saudi is do it I take no stance on either one who's good and who's evil Iran is a fantastic incredible civilization if you have been to any art museum but worth the name of an art museum and walk through the whole thing you invariably come to a sec that is absolutely mind-blowing and it's Persian culture right that's not we're talking about we're not talking about who's better or worse as people or whose culture is significant or insignificant it's an incredible civilization we're talking about geopolitics and balance of power now you can say that the nuclear deal was very one-sided and was not well negotiated and all sorts of critiques of the nuclear deal but if you understand geopolitics and the ability to dominate or not dominate a region this map is all you need to see ok here's another important map there are 32 million people as you know live in Kurdistan what Kurdistan doesn't exist and until this question burns itself all the way through that Middle Eastern map you got mayhem as far as the eye can see until there's a resolution of this question you know the Kurds will promise the state in the Versailles Treaty it never happened right so but this question is about Turkey it's about Syria it's about Iraq it's about Iran it's also even about Armenia right so if you're thinking about getting involved in the Middle East this whatever you do is going to burn and burn and burn because should they get to the point where they get their tourists on the Iraqi Kurds and the turkey Kurds they don't agree on what Kurdistan should look like so that's when they get to have a civil war about what Kurdistan should look like so you can project this forward as any person Elementary geopolitics would and you can say to yourself do I want to get anywhere near this do I want to be involved in this or if you are humanitarian and you say you know many people are dying this is a terrible situation how can I get involved and the answer is you can't stop the bleeding no matter how much aid you bring unless you can resolve this political geopolitical question you can only kind of help the people in need but you cannot get to peace and prosperity unless 32 million people are somehow wiped out which I hope is not going to happen so this is sphere of influence thinking right we saw the sunni-shia divide now we see this underlay under the middle-eastern map every one of these states is in play its geography its integrity because of this Kurdistan problem I could list other issues the Kurdistan one is more one of the biggest I'm just pointing out what the Middle East looks like okay now we come to the Russian sphere of influence very very well-known right in our face every day in the news all the time Transnistria which is a Boris Yeltsin era right 1992 confection then of course there's the Abkhazia South Ossetia dismembering of Georgia eastern Ukraine and Crimea you'll notice that there's not a blotch yet over here so this is the one that you will live to see is next yes because if there's a wallet on the table you put your wallet on the table and you leave the room and I'm still in the room and I'm looking at that wallet and it's just open and sitting on the table I might be tempted to take it if however there's a wallet in your pocket and your pocket has a zipper and the name of the zipper is Article five I may or may not think I'm going to get into that pocket to take what's in there you see because I have a wallet that's on the table unguarded and so that other one that's ripped up which says Article five you know NATO Article five and I may take that but I think I may take this one first okay but overall this represents what looks like a lot but is you know in terms of Russia's sphere of influence not very much the crazy thing about Russia sphere of influence is that it doesn't exist it doesn't exist Russia exercises influence only in the territories it directly controls it does not exercise influence in the post-soviet space have you traveled there some of you are from there the influence is declining the Russian influence here's the Eurasian Union they're supposed to answer to the EU right and this is 2014 so before the ruble crash all these economies they have a similar effect when Russia goes down now do you see the Kyrgyzstan economy you don't see it right because there isn't one unfortunately you have more than 33% of the economy is where emittance is from Russia and that's an official GDP who knows what the reality is because it's very hard to measure right all the cash transactions in a way that's honest you see the Armenian economy I can't see it either the Belarus economy sorter registers the Kazakhstan economy has done significantly better and the Russian economy when it was valued at about 2 trillion in nominal dollar terms GDP now you're lucky if you can get one point three trillion evaluation for the Russian economy right 115th the size of the US economy that's the Russian come the Soviet economy at peak was one third the US economy Russia's is one fifteenth US economy right now so it's kind of crazy the Russian sphere of influence yes we know about this and this is not the end of the story as I'm suggesting but then there's this too so they actually don't really have a sphere of influence although they're constantly asking for it and we constantly refuse rightly so to grant it the West cannot prevent Russia from destabilizing its neighbors but it does not exceed two handing over the sovereignty of its neighbors to Russia it's a similar situation like during the Cold War here's a bigger problem though this is the nuke table see Russia 7700 approximately like that includes some and storage so-called stockpile they're not really in storage right okay and then you see you see China's nuclear arsenal yeah so this is the problem right here and you know Russia's military doctrine is that if they're losing a conventional war they will use nuclear weapons to avert defeat so they cannot be defeated in a war because they have the nuclear weapons to use meaning and their nuclear weapons work unlike some of these other nuclear weapon we don't know right this one we don't know this one we're not sure about some of them anyway so that's the problem and this is the problem too this is a picture from the bedroom of a 17 year old Russian who has no shampoo but who can hack into the global network and this is what their computer system looks like managing thousands of computers box in other countries Russian hacking is different from Chinese hacking Chinese hacking is they do a million attacks all at once and if one gets in it gets in the Russians do pinpoint attacks they go exactly where they want they get in and they don't turn the malware on they just stay because they may need it later so they're in JPMorgan and they're in Goldman Sachs just in case they want to show it Wall Street down it's very different kind of hacking from the Chinese hacking it was a very false impression however of course this is a problem okay now let's spend the rest of the time it's been about 10 15 minutes on China and we'll close up I think I'm still okay on time you never know with an audience you know George Bush remember George Bush who could be nostalgic for George Bush right remember George one day he there he is in front of White House and who appears but Moses yep it's Moses and Bush takes a double thing huh could that be Moses and Bush yells out hey Moses Moses turns around and starts running the other way as fast as he can disappears Bush can't understand it because he's a he's religious practicing Christian he goes to church he wanted to meet Moses and he couldn't forget about it about a week later however there is Bush on the White House grounds and there's Moses again and Bush was a bit of an athlete and he decides now he's going to run he says hey Moses Moses starts running and Bush starts running too he runs and runs and runs after Moses and grabs him on the leg and tackles him and he says Moses what's the deal why you running away from me and Moses looks at Bush and says the last time I spoke to a bush forty years in the desert there reaches a point in every lecture where you've lost the audience you're going on about some nonsense like sphere of influence or geopolitics or whatever the latest claptrap is in the American University System and the audience comes eager to learn you're almost 45 minutes in the coffee is worn off everything's worn off and they're just they're not there anymore and you got the punch line coming that's where we are right now I hope so if you look at this map the first thing you see is China has more borders than any other country in the world it's got 20 borders 14 on land and six on sea right it's also got disputes with many of those neighbors over the borders you can also see as I'll discuss in the third lecture that China has no California which is its principal geopolitical lack but today what we want to talk about is here's a different geography right right us you if you're going to be a superpower which geography do you want that one or that one how about Canada Mexico fish and fish you take that one I would take this one this one is a harder one they're completely hemmed in right they're hemmed in by US bases here here here right Taiwan here Paulo on right the base in the Philippines and then they're hemmed in on this side desert which is growing and ethnic unrest which supposedly they're managing all right so the US and China story they're incomparable right US GDP is still significantly high higher than China's GDP purchasing power parity doesn't explain the weight you have in the world the geopolitical weight you have in the world right even a per capita if you use purchasing power parity right the disparity is colossal if you use something called inclusive wealth inclusive wealth is a greater concept than GDP you can see the disparity is greater still inclusive wealth is roads buildings machines human capital natural capital right the wealth of the United States and the wealth of China are incomparable right the u.s. also has the global system of alliances the deep financial markets the dollar reserve currency the English language right the Chinese don't have any of this okay the US also still although it's eroding right has commander the Commons for the most part not the same command they had 15 years ago but they still have command okay this is a map of US military bases in the world it didn't come out that well but it covers that just about the whole thing this is the u.s. ability to project military power to have radar installations listening installations right there's never been a military like this whose footprint is completely global and moreover it's that way on just a few percentage points of GDP the US military is mobile it can go anywhere in a moment's notice the Chinese military is not mobile it's the big hulking Soviet style armor you know ready to crash across somebody's border they're moving now from that kind of heavy armor military to a mobile one which is about aircraft it's about amphibious landings that it's a it's about ships right it's about projection of power over distance u.s. has all that already and more okay but here I realize you can't see this map maybe if there weren't a light directly on the podium we might be able to see it yeah so this is a map you saw this in the Financial Times right these are China's ports where they have a significant ownership stake globally right in other words you saw that the US military bases and you see the Chinese ports and lo and behold they're the same map the difference is is that the Chinese right have trading ports now some are still projected right some are Hong Kong companies many of them are private companies but nonetheless this is the capacity that is already in place for the most part that the Chinese have built globally moreover there's a piece of this which are what we call dual use dual use means you build a shipping port that can handle trade and then it becomes a military port that can handle big ships for example destroyers cruisers right the Chinese built their first overseas military base in Djibouti in Africa they deny that it's a military base they call it a logistical facility where is the main US military base in Africa Djibouti that's right so the map of trading ports where they have a controlling stake is now becoming a map of potential military bases by the way that's completely logical okay here's the share of world trade right this is mile C that is mile and then this is dung and his successors so now China has a greater leverage greater international leverage because as I said they had a number one trading partner of about 43 countries in the u.s. is the number one trading partner about 32 countries okay South China Sea you know that story right they claim 95 percent of the child's South China Sea and they call it a core interest which is the same language used for Taiwan that tells you that they're going to go to the wall for the South China Sea you should have no illusions when they say something is a or interest they mean it absolutely okay President Xi Jingping you remember famously said they don't intend to pursue militarization and here's the American understanding of that right the China seeks hegemony in East Asia simple as that okay so here's that famous South China Sea with a nine - line right and as you can see here's the Philippines right Vietnam and there's China's claiming all of this territory you know the Paracels the Scarborough and the Spratly right that's where they have the coral reefs that are now military bases so the incredible feats of will and engineering in the Spratlys right we now have seven artificial islands several military bases right we have subi reef larger than Pearl Harbor there was nothing there before now it's larger than Pearl Harbor missed your free fiery cross I'm going to show you fiery cross in a second with a 10,000 foot runway and then you know the Power Cells like at the radar stations the surface-to-air missiles there used to be right rocky outcrop Scarborough Shoal they haven't built it yet they just seize it so far but it's coming anybody has any doubts it's coming okay so this Scarborough Shoal which is not built up yet is 140 miles from Manila that just tells you how close this stuff is okay so here is fiery cross reef you see the coral 2014 2015 2016 that's what the Chinese can do they just seized it violate international law and they just militarized it and they built this base and they have a 10,000 foot runway on fiery cross reef two years two years that's where we are that's the world we live in today the Chinese sphere of influence in East Asia is a serious one they're playing for keeps you may say that's fine it's totally okay the Chinese are great people they have an incredible civilization I would agree with all that they are great people they do have an incredible civilization it's just they don't really have a transparent political system okay so enduring shifts in the global balance of power are extremely rare but when they happen they are momentous that's the world we live in now momentous times large-scale Wars they're always predicted the day after on cable television all right they're only obvious post facto right and even business as usual triggers large-scale conflict that's what history shows and we have Chinese opacity we have American whatever you want to call it ignorance and competence that's the world we're in right now and all war is miscalculation by decision-makers wars don't happen unless an order is given buttons are pushed right World War one sleep walk into war there were a thousand orders just to move the horses and the fodder for the horses you can't fight a war right without orders a thousand orders alone just to move the horses in the fodder you can't sleep walk into war you got to give orders to have war happen right but it's often miscalculation all right so there's our world we have some historical cases remember the rise of German power in Europe that's an important historical case remember the rise of Japanese power in East Asia another important historical case remember the rise of u.s. power globally slightly different because the British yielded as it were they surrendered to the rise of US power with that phony nonsense about the special relationship and other ruses right so China we don't know like none of the above it doesn't depend on China alone right okay China's rising in a US dominated world that we do know okay so US remains the key variable errors of omission coal mission domestic politics right this is where we are so we have faithful choices for Washington can't American primacy be preserved or restored should it even be preserved maybe enough is enough should we keep the current alliances should we let them go should there be new structures right should we just accommodate China and East Asia Russia in Eurasia in Iran in the Gulf by granting the spheres of influence that's what they want that's what they're pushing for or should we try to contain them and rebuild a 350 ship American fleet right those are the choices in front of the American people right now is that maybe a new equilibrium in each region or are we actually headed for confrontation in each region can we find containment and cooperation and delicate calibration strength and diplomacy can respect others interests and values while we uphold our own this is what's at stake that's how many people live right now in East Asia and South Asia doesn't look like much if you put it on a regular world map but how about if you put it on a world map like size of the country based on population right that's not what China looks like that's not what Russia looks like that's what they look like if you do territory in terms of people right so that's where all the marbles are as they say right that's where the game is now right there okay now that's the slide I know when the lecture is over when that slide comes up I'm done thank you for your attention sorry I'm terribly handicapped so I'm not going to say much because I need to sit down immediately but thank you for this really sweeping global view of maybe a hundred years of history and with that let me just open the conversation so I am able to sit down turn to Holly who will have wyborn or you who calls on the Panzer get raised you good okay okay I know Holly as well so my question is quite simple at what do you mean by power because at the very end of the lecture you had the slide with 3.7 billion yes earlier on in the lecture you had who has more nuclear weapons yes and earlier on you had who has how many you know what like what percentage of the population is Shia versus what percentage of it is Sunni when it comes to geopolitics how do you measure power yes thank you that excellent question I should have stated that at the beginning or at some point so power is about your ability to mobilize people and resources towards whatever the strategy the grand strategy you have having a grand strategy already is power for example preserving the EU that would be a grand strategy and the ability to mobilize people and resources on behalf of that grand strategy that would be power you can do that in many different ways you can do that with what they call hard power you can do that with what they call soft power right hard power to be things like military assets ships right soft power would be the power of example the power of persuasion the power of alliances so there are a number of ingredients they have to do with the openness and dynamism of your economy how much wealth you're producing you know how many resources you're mobilizing in an economic sense having to do with the strength of your society right the dynamism the openness as well as solidarity or the absence of solidarity in your society the scale of your human capital how much for example you're investing in the education and the health and well-being of your population that one could go on now if you lack any of those or you're low in those various indices you can resort to what's called a symmetry so for example you can't mobilize economic and military resources of the superpower but you can mobilize the resources of seventeen to twenty five-year-olds who can hack that costs you a lot less and you can intercede in world affairs and even in sovereign affairs of other countries using that kind of asymmetric power so there's asymmetric power also asymmetric power can be for positive goals increasing the wealth and prosperity of your own population for example we don't see that we see instead spoil Asian we see spoil Asian meaning putting your stick in somebody else's eye and feeling good about that that's how asymmetric power is currently being used we have this sort of next lecture the second lecture about a story about these exact questions of how the US and East Asian sphere of influence the u.s. VR influence with Europe and with Asia did things to the Soviet Union and China and you had different outcomes right that's the lecture about is there different what is the difference of anything between communism and fascism that's the second lecture so I'll go into greater examples of these kinds of things that I just outlined you know to concretize them a little bit at this point now the combination of attributes you would have have to be as good as the most powerful countries attributes otherwise that most powerful country could have the ability to boss you around unless that most powerful country is somehow disciplined is somehow set in mechanisms institutions in a story called the West in which case they can do harm to the less powerful but not on the scale they could do given their power if they will undisciplined will get to see that a little bit in the third lecture when I talk about the nature of the Russian and Chinese sphere of influence through time but especially today because as you'll know Iran Russia and China are all ancient civilizations they're all spectacular ancient civilizations they all have tremendous sense of historical entitlement and tremendous historical grievances they have what we call in English a chip on their shoulder right this grievance this resentment we have a politics of resentment which takes the form of domestic or national populism and then there's an international politics of resentment and international populism as it were our vocabulary is poor to describe this but I'll describe some of that in the third lecture but anyway just it's an excellent question I could if that's unsatisfactory I could give more right now but I think there's more to come on that and thanks for a wonderful lecture would you be for us in Europe it doesn't feel like we've been doing geopolitics for many decades because basically the Americans did it for us would you agree with that where is Europe in this whole story yeah so there used to be Western and Eastern Europe and Europe's example nothing it did just but except being itself was already the most significant geopolitical factor inside Eastern Europe West Germany East Germany right is the is the strongest example because they could watch on the television and they were nose to nose in Berlin right so Europe just being itself just being free and prosperous being about human rights being about social rights being about democracy being all the things the incredible achievement of Europe especially West Germany's achievement in the post-world War two period all of that is geopolitics would there have been a solidarity in Poland without the achievement of West Germany post-world War two no way never never West Germany was the linchpin absolute linchpin West Germany's own internal development we haven't even gotten to external policies yet its own external development was the single most powerful geopolitical factor you can imagine and thank God can you imagine a post-world War two German power look like Russia today can you imagine if Germany today look like Russia what would be the fate of Eastern Europe you think there's Kachinsky you think there's Autobahn I can tell you that's baby stuff compared to what we would see if Germany looked like Russia Eastern Europe is a strip of land lying between German power and Russian power that's all it is we will Manta size it you know Havel power of the powerlessness so you know The Grocer that great story there's tremendous romanticism about Eastern Europe but all it is is a strip of land between German power and Russian power now Germany then had an external policy the EU had an external policy it was one of exchanges potentially investment all of that was geopolitics absolutely we don't like to call it that because geopolitics for us is pejorative but part of the problem now is we need to have a forward policy we need to have an aggressive policy we need to push who we are our values and what we are against those who would undo those values some of that is internal and a lot of that is external and if you don't recognize that that's what we've been doing all along then you kind of handicap or hold yourself back from doing it right now that's the position we're in we have now expanded Europe the 27 minus one and somehow were paralyzed we have this success that even the dreamers didn't think was going to happen if you are alive in the 70s it was a big deal remember what happened with Norway right it was a big deal to get the Ireland Denmark with Greenland and UK which are brought in in 73 that was no small thing remember what the goal did before with the UK right we all know that history right where Europeans here okay so the idea that we would get to 27 minus one stunning so why is it that we now have this and we're paralyzed and you can say there are many reasons and I would agree that there are many reasons and I would say one of the reasons is because we don't appreciate how we got there and we don't appreciate what we have we somehow were unprepared for our success I know I'm repeating myself but that's the theme of these lectures okay just where do non-state violent actors fit into this story I think about Qaeda and Isis yeah they fit in they cause mischief they feel like there's injustice they have a story to tell that story is [Music] believable or acceptable to those who follow them they think they have a pot that some of them have a positive view about what they're creating like a Caliphate and you know I'm not taking a position right here I don't need to I have a position but I'm not taking a position right here about whether it's only mischief for the Caliphate is a is a positive vision for prosperity and stability right we could argue about that I guess I have my position but that stuff is yes it's there I can tell you all about in fact Holly could tell even more about the secret societies and the underground in the hops Borg Empire you know starting with the one I know well the Carbonari right you can say that's not analogous to the situation we have now well nothing is exactly the same as the situation we have now there was a year in Russia where terrorists killed 3,000 officials in Czarist Russia terrorists killed 3,000 officials and it wasn't even necessarily the best year I mean terrorism was a fact of life in modern Russia it was less of a fact of life in the hops Borg Empire it that that's prior to World War one right we're talking about Russia now well forget about the interwar violence that comes with the war right so the non-state actors we think of them as having somehow miraculously appeared and proliferated recently and the answer to that is once again a television which is on 24 hours a day seven days a week and in 600 channels that's not to say it was always the same scale before was always the same phenomenon before because things mutate and things can rise and fall like a souffle depending on financing right oil revenues diamond revenues can finance a lot of stuff there's a big story of the Congo what's that you know I mean is that a non-state actor or a state actor there of many different groups that have filtered through the Congo over the last several decades and killed five million people and then there's old some of it overlaps with the jihadism in terms of the the morphology of the actors in the picture and some of it looks more like traditional state eight although in its you know sometimes mafia like equality right political mafia like state so it exists it has been there before in different forms I don't think it is what we make it out to be which is to say a new phenomenon nor a globally threatening phenomenon it causes a lot of grief especially for Muslims they're the primary victims of most of these movements right and that grief is very real and very serious and we can see it 24/7 and it's heart-rendering but it when we're talking about the rise of china rise of a new power international system and the ability or inability of the u.s. to accommodate the rise of china in a way that's mutually stable and prosperous we're talking about potentially the end of the world we're not talking about three thousand deaths or ten thousand deaths or two hundred and fifty thousand s we're talking about the incineration of all your portfolios that retirement accounts they're gone they're vaporized right that's what we're talking about we're now in that situation and we don't understand that we're in that situation we're in denial that we're in that situation that situation doesn't have to end badly it can end really well it can be more prosperous and stable than the situation were in now that's up to the people we call leaders who sometimes fail to lead it's up to the pressure groups that push those leaders or define the agenda for those leaders right the societies but that's the world we're in now we're in a world where the iranian problem and the middle eastern problem is terribly bloody and horrific but not of global geopolitical significance we're in a situation where russia has unique capabilities but doesn't even have its own sphere of influence it handicaps itself in many ways as you'll hear in upcoming lectures and then we're also in a world where China and East Asia and then if I had had time bringing the India the South Asia story into the picture - which is crucially important right that's where the game is now and India the South Asia story is not on the level of the China story right then I'll have the port sum of the Navy less than my Chinese have two hundred thousand merchant ships two hundred thousand merchant ships right now we don't understand that because we're preoccupied with some of these other things which take up too much space in in the strategic sense not in the humanistic sense I just want to ask you about your own contention that Russia has no sphere of influence I agree that a lot of the post-soviet countries there's a lot of a deep level understandably deep level of suspicion about Russian intentions but I live in the sort of romantic strip of land that you mentioned yes and in Slovakia which I know quite well there is for a country that was invaded by the Soviet Union only 40 years ago 50 years ago almost there's a surprising degree of sympathy for Russia name yes and that includes among the political leaders in fact especially among the political elite the same is true in Hungary for different reasons and you've seen as I did pictures of marine lepen who's possibly going to become the french president in a few weeks meeting mr. Putin and apparently in the hawk to him financially you have seen Mr Farage in Britain saying very nice things about him and you've seen mr. Trump unable it seems to utter a single word of criticism of Russia so well I agree with you that the resources that you mentioned aren't as effective by Russia they certainly seem to have the Russian government at least they seem to specialize in this asymmetric effect by which they can influence key people in countries they should be far more powerful yes your name once again James Taurus James so James you just made my argument again you just restated my argument so when I said Russia has no sphere of influence I said in the post-soviet space right in the Soviet you'll forgive me for this expression trashcan of stance which is not an ethnic term but is it a political mafia term in the trash can of stands and I would include Russia and Ukraine in that category just to show you it's not an ethnic one you would call them rubbish rather than trash can right the rubbish can but it doesn't quite have the same quality in the higher-level british language as it does in the vernacular colonial language of the US but yeah so Russia doesn't really have the sphere of influence it's planning for in the post-soviet space because it doesn't really have soft power and because those countries are suspicious of Russia and Belarus like Kazakhstan knows that Russia could an exit right Lukashenko has a stroke or a heart attack or he dies peacefully in his sleep from old-age potentially right and then what happens to that territory so yes that's where I meant that Russia has it we're exaggerating Russia's level of influence they have a level of influence but it's a lot of it is negative the problem is that they have influenced way beyond that sphere they have an influence in our sphere that's our sphere of influence that's us right or that's what we used to think is us that's territory we used to defend and try to integrate into who we are and uphold democracy and uphold open competitive economies right and we've stopped successfully competing with the Russians in those areas they're beating us with fewer resources right significantly fewer resources it's astonishing how fewer their resources are and yet their influence is rising in all those places and ours is declining we're not doing something right are we where we have a problem we're falling down on our own sphere of influence it's evaporating right in front of our eyes we didn't do something that we should have done we forgot to provide opportunity for lower class and middle class people didn't we we forgot that institutions which are too technocratic and not kradic enough aren't that popular over time we forgot about that didn't we we have a Democratic deficit we have an opportunity deficit we have some other issues going on and the Russians they have a toolkit right I'll give you one close to home I just want to check the time because you know I bloviate so much I could take up I could take up the whole rest of the time with one answer things go off in my little head I just made a connection it's like the synapses worked so let's take sue Dayton locked let's take the sedate in London Czechoslovakia right 37 30 35 36 37 38 so what the Germans do like Germany was then ruled by Nazis and they had a forward policy of intervention in that country and they used dirty tricks you're not going to believe this but they planted fake news stories they put up candidates to discredit certain parties like they paid people to be bad and discredit certain parties they lied they concealed that they were working behind the scenes and that the intelligence services of Nazi Germany were supporting for example the sir Dayton parties right they didn't tell the truth about that the checks the czechoslovaks in fact Frantisek motorettes who was the head of military intelligence and had an unbelievable career he ended up in London and you probably know this story he knew this because he had some agents on the German side who were leaking important intelligence at a very high level engine a - 54 who was in German intelligence and was giving them these files about what they were up to and so he could prove that the German the Nazi German denials of intervention then denials of the dirty tricks were lies and he had documentation to prove that they were lies but you see he lived in a democratic country he lived in Czechoslovakia and that was a parliamentary republic and so he couldn't just for example shoot people you know they're walking down the street let's assassinate them because they're our enemy and they're doing these dirty tricks and I have documents on them he couldn't do that the Germans could do that they could assassinate somebody and then they could deny that they did it but Ferranti shake motivates couldn't do that he couldn't even try them in a court of law even if he wanted to reveal that he had the spy and but and you know burn his spy by bringing the documents into a court the laws weren't strong enough in Czechoslovakia and to get the laws to be stronger for combating foreign subversion you had get law through the Parliament and parliamentary process and of course the Nazis buying and selling those votes with their bribes and stuff right so here's a guy who knows what the enemy is doing and has documentation about it but he can't fight them the same way it's asymmetrical because the Nazis can do anything there's no line they can't cross all the way up to assassination but more of it he's hamstrung because he's part of a democratic country his system is democratic and if you read the stuff he went through he's constantly frustrated because he cannot resort to the tools that the Nazis are using because that makes him like the Nazis that he's fighting and there's no rest the whole reason he's fighting the Nazis is not to be like the Nazis and it's this paradox right so it's much harder isn't it it's much harder to fight against somebody who is doing a spoil a shin game where they can violate any existing democratic law or even norm or even morality right we could take this analogy much farther and talk about all the contemporary examples we got people from Ukraine here we had a big debate in our country and many of people I respect demanded that we send offensive weapons to Ukraine Ukraine was asking for the offensive weapons and the US Congress certain members very substantial high profile members in the Congress wanted to do this and the Obama administration said no the Obama administration didn't want anything to do with Ukraine and wanted it to go away right but here's the problem the u.s. provides offensive weapons to the courageous Ukrainians who are fighting the Russians and the next day the train station in Kiev blows up it just blows sky-high and you say to yourself the Russians must have done this nobody can use mass transit in Kiev mass transit is now completely paralyzed because people are afraid to get on anything because it might blow up and the Russians they say we didn't do that that wasn't us you're always accusing us of underhanded dirty tricks where's the proof show me the proof right same thing with the SU date in line with the Nazis they kept saying show us the proof that whether we're behind these this is the sentiment of the population this is what the people themselves are doing this is not us show us the proof and motivates couldn't show the proof right so same thing so I'm not saying that it was the wrong idea to not armed the eastern Ukrainians with offensive weapons right that's a policy debate I'm not taking a position on that I'm just suggesting that the Russians can then go to a level of escalation and a type of escalation they can blow up the airport in relief they can blow up you know the university they can bomb a hospital from the inside covertly they can do all this stuff and then they can deny it they can shut down the electric grid and then deny it right now would they have done that I have no idea if they would have done that maybe they wouldn't have done that maybe I have a jaundiced view of the Russians maybe I'm being unfair to them by thinking that they might resort to this type of behavior all I'm saying is that so the problem is such right the problem is such that the magnitude of the problem is very great we'll see again maybe I don't know you go you go so we we need to be to understand that that's the problem and we need to have the will to combat it and we need friends and allies to be involved and we need to create a situation where people look at us again and say that's the way I want to be that's what I want right when we talk about the sphere of influence in the Eastern Bloc in the second lecture right there was a reason that people wanted to be that way and it's because there was something exemplary about it but if you know you're offering them maybe less than that you're offering them a very unequal society or you're offering them lack of social mobility or you're offering them a democratic deficit or you're offering them a currency union without a fiscal union or you know you could go on you could up once again I'm not trying this is a non partisan discussion I'm not a member of any political party and I'm not taking any political positions here I'm just talking about we either defend our values we either go on the offensive we either take them on or we don't and don't tell me it's hard it is hard I know it's hard because they can resort to things that we can't resort to and still be ourselves like so that's the challenge the challenge is you know the Russians are in France who else is in France what are the French doing themselves and what a French allies doing right now this is a collective multi-generational like the cold war mobilization on behalf of a way in life values now every time you do something like you invade Iraq right without proper justification potentially right every time you do something you destroy some more your credibility in a far and like I said with the opening Gorbachev Trump example like that's the war we're living in now so it's sort of doubly triply quadruply you know thousandfold incumbent upon us to defend those values to call out what's happening to say who we are and what we are otherwise you know what we're doing is participating in the self unraveling of the West go ahead did that so few of the American elite seem to be alarmed or surprised about the fact that front for instance has this strange relationship with Russia I mean with the limited exception of people like John McCain and Lindsey Graham very few of spoken out and said isn't this a bit strange that this guy cannot bring himself to criticize our geopolitical adversary whether you believe they have a sphere of influence or not but but the people a country that shares so little of our values you know that's a really long answer potentially part of the answer is that more people are upset than you think part of the answer is that you need alternatives see politics is not about ideal leader and then the leader we have politics is the leader we have and then the alternatives who are real people right so Trump 163 million votes and more than 90% of the registered Republicans who voted so you can say to me oh you know Clinton won more than 65 million etc well so Clinton won four million more than Trump in California and two million more than Trump in New York so you subtract New York in California and Trump won by three million votes Trump beat 16:16 challengers in the Republican primary right and I got to tell you Trump has an electoral base moreover that electoral base is part of a majority in the Congress both in the house and in the Senate and if Trump takes away that electoral base by exiting that party that party doesn't have a majority potentially anymore so there is on the one hand more courageous behavior than you think on the other hand there is also a significant understanding if you've ever been in electoral politics you know what it means when someone commands an electorate potentially greater than yours including within your own party and of course there's a certain amount of opportunism because some of the things Trump is doing are clearly things that members of the Republican Party have long dreamed of deregulation appointment of a literalist conservative Supreme Court justice potentially right those are things that they truly in genuinely believe in they're of high value to them that's not instrumental necessarily they believe those things and then you have to think about the Democratic side right the leader of the House for the minority party where's she from San Francisco California the leader of the Senate from the minority party where is he from Manhattan New York the leading light of opposition to Trump the senator where she from Massachusetts that's right so that's your that's your opposition California New York and Massachusetts you subtract that as I was saying and Trump won the country didn't he and so the alternative party is putting up not anything representative of the nation where the people live which got his votes they're putting up other things and so you know in politics you need viable alternatives I feel that you know Trump represents a significant part of the United States there's no question when I said that populism is not only pejorative it's the same thing with the brexit campaign I'm on record saying that I applauded the referendum and that I accept the vote because it revealed the sentiments of large numbers of people whose voices and views were otherwise invisible and would still be invisible today now you can say the campaign was mendacious yes it was mendacious I've seen a lot of political campaigns I've seen very few that were honest this one was also mendacious right and I saw a lot of people who had no voice get a voice because of that quote mistaken referendum and Trump did the same thing with the American electorate he revealed huge numbers of people large constituencies that were buried by the political system because the political system had failed them and they were right they had nothing to expect a hundred percent failure to vote for anybody else and with Trump likely a hundred percent failure to but possibly not possibly something when you have nothing to risk when your risk is zero meaning it's a hundred percent bad right it's 100% bad with everybody else but it could be a little bit better than that it may be a lot better that with Trump and they're still with him to this day even though there's no functioning administration in Washington right so there's a complexity to the Trump phenomenon that we haven't wrapped our arms around and there's a failure of alternatives that was was there before Trump was elected and is there now right and there are structural processes going on that predate Trump that he is accelerating but didn't create and there is no I mean it's very early in the game and even though there hasn't been in a realignment of the system you as I opened with it Trump could possibly precipitate a realignment his very incompetence and nihilism could potentially precipitate the realignment right so the Trump story early still unfolding not one-sided and scary I think we go questions but maybe the one right now is you've got me thinking but the people who are in Trump's camp they have a lot to lose actually and what amazes me they don't understand what they have to lose tell me what they've got some of this guy well Medicare for one's a health care system grants for communities which are you know okay so let's let's start with the health care thing so some of the health care the 20 million people who have come on to health care are they don't have a high deductible but a very large number of them have a high deductible what's a high deductible a deductible is how much of the costs you pay before the insurance begins to pay for it so if your deductible is five thousand dollars the first five thousand dollars of medical costs you pay yourself before insurance begins to work so a very large number of people with health insurance under Obama care have a deductible in the thousands so they don't actually have any health insurance right now except for catastrophic insurance if they end up in the hospital for a prolonged stay they get over that 5,000 or 6,000 or 4,000 limits and the insurance begins to pay a part of the cost not all of the cost so they can't afford to see a doctor right now with the insurance they have they can't because the deductible is so high so you know what they have to lose you tell me what they've got to lose right now the the opening budget where everything was cut except the military right it's never the case these are notional budgets the president introduces what's called a notional budget which has no resemblance to the final budget that becomes law because all of the horse-trading and the various different congressmen and Senators get into the act and alter the existing budget and they live in those communities so everything that gets cut in the notional budget can potentially be restored and in fact increased during the budgetary process so it's too early to say that those people are going to lose those programs now if they did lose those programs it would be significant but we have to wait and see what the sausage-making of the budgetary process looks like before they lose anything and right now the health care that they have is not that real it's only real in a liberal press right for the liberal press Obamacare is extremely real but for the everyday people in rural communities there are many doctors to go to right the doctor population has been depopulated and it's really far to get anywhere near a doctor if you can afford the day off from work and then you're paying out of pocket you can you can't send your kids to a doctor on that health insurance unless you know they develop cancer unfortunately and have a prolonged stay and then the deductible is reached in the health care kitchen not every policy is like that there are some policies in Obamacare that are much better than that right but it's a picture that you got to be careful in characterizing it I could say a lot more about this question right the problem is is that we we imagine what these people's lives are like we imagine that they were fooled by Trump we imagine that they have all these things to lose right I didn't come here to talk about Trump and I want to defend Trump what I believed integrity has got to be the highest value of any person and we don't have any integrity there right so this is not a defense of him this is a discussion of what it looks like to some of and many of the 63 million people who are out there right it's very different looking to them and the idea that someone came along and spoke to them someone came along and said the whole system in Washington is corrupt the only counties that have gotten richer than Silicon Valley in the last two decades are the ones around Washington DC that's a true statement and he said that nobody else was saying it because they all embodied it you know so the Trump phenomenon there's a complexity there that we have to keep in mind the complexity you have to be a little bit less partisan that doesn't mean we'd be less alarmed I think you understand my level of alarm right and I know many people who voted for Trump many people yeah let me tell you a story once again one question triggers oh my god which I wasn't I swore I wouldn't talk about Trump and I look what happened how stupid am i yeah you know I mean maybe I need to take my passport to the airport and couldn get on the plane that's how stupid I was right so there was this famous film critic for the New Yorker magazine named Pauline Kael and she was beloved by the gigantic subscription class that subscribed to The New Yorker beloved and Pauline Kael when Richard Nixon was elected president you know what she said she said that's impossible I don't know a single person who voted for Nixon he could have never won and that's where we are that's where we are got to talk to those people to those are our people too you know they're British citizens they're American citizens they live in America and we forgot about them we didn't have anything on offer for them the system was not treating them properly and their voice was hurt now the solution is maybe going to be worse than the problem right that's what you were getting at with your question but the problem was there and the voice of the problem was given and now it's kind of incumbent on us to provide an answer and you see what the answers are or the non-answers are right now and my answer to the previous question I said we we put a fork in this as this this meat done we have one more I'll make it it's time for the question but not for the answer okay well I I listen carefully to what you were saying I agreed with most of what you said I was intrigued by some of it I was amused amused by some of it but one thing made me ponder and shudder a little bit and that was in the beginning when you described all of the progress that humanity has made and you you made that whole convincing list and yet you said today we are more unhappy than we've ever been what makes you say that do you think that the Chinese are unhappy do you think without the Russians on the whole on the average are unhappy yes that's an excellent question and the answer to that is a differentiated answer right there are many you know louis c.k when he said everything is amazing and nobody is happy right I think he may have been a little extreme in that statement there are many people who are happy right for example faculty at Princeton University not happy all they do is complain well I have to teach three hours this week how am I going to find three hours in my week to teach some of these students right they're unhappy I have to tell you I know correct in the world correct and they are the better off people they are very well-off people and yet they don't seem to be too happy about yeah I don't begrudge people who success I'm ok with other people's success now I don't want to burn down their house just because it's bigger than mine and it is but you know your point is where does happiness come from right and we have a lot of research unhappiness which is about being part of a community giving something back right having a good marriage and children or a legacy if it's not children's a hand on to the future there are a lot of dimensions to happiness right happiness is not solely or exclusively for example your bank account or whatever it might be so that's a that's too big a question for me to answer but your question was about happiness in the places that are succeeding right for example in China or in India or uni or in Russia which is not succeeding I will get to that in the next lecture and there you also have a differentiated picture right part of the problem with authoritarian regimes is measuring the happiness or popularity under an authoritarian regime I'll close with this right so let's imagine that I'm the father and a family and I say to my children are you happy with this regime are you happy with me as a father am i a good father now if they say no forget about the Wi-Fi password they're never going to get the Wi-Fi password from me and it's not like they have another father to compare it to and it's not like if they say no they can get a better father so with these authoritarian regimes you know Putin is popular Xi Jingping is popular but they're only popular in the absence of alternatives what you discover in an authoritarian regime is when an alternative is introduced they might still be popular or they might not right I might still be the greatest father in my kids you know understanding or if somebody else came in was an alternative and was better it may be that my stock went down so the to understand the opinion the mood the sentiments in the authoritarian regimes is more difficult than in the open societies that doesn't satisfy me because you were comparing it to the past well in the past yeah in the past although we probably didn't call it auto Italian regimes but if you were to go and ask people where are you happy with the king are you happy with the Emperor they wouldn't have been able to give an honest answer either so I was more wondering why you think the situation now is worse than it has been in the past yeah so yeah I'm not sure that there's a general level of unhappiness in China if that's the answer you need for us to conclude the session I can offer you that answer I can offer you that answer and I can do it in a clear conscience because I believe that but I'm not sure what the sentiment in Chinese society really is that's another part of the answer but I don't believe if I gave the false impression that there is a clear general level of unhappiness in that society there is a whole lot of protest which the regime officially records right protests however can be about expectations as much as about unhappiness right so that's a complicated question but if we see you again I'm going to risk to say that I this may be my last chance to persuade you of anything but if we see you again I'll try to do better with more time on that answer thank you [Applause] you
He had alot of great information but it just was presented really really slowly.
The first critique i would give is at around 32:30 he has the left right dream. I hope if he is such a scholar of the Soviet era that he misread and got the left right backwards, he says:
The right has a fantasy of universal democracy
the Left a fantasy of world order governed by super national entity with a pool sovereignty.
From what he stated these are exactly backwards and I hope he just miss-spoke because otherwise that kind discredits everything else.
Second critique is his initial saying that Russia has no sphere of influence, until a questioner made him elaborate on it. Its pretty obvious Russia has a sphere of influence, and its pretty obvious that Russia is alot more skilled at exerting its sphere of influence than most of the West.
Since when has Kotkin turned so surly?