The 2020 Holberg Debate with John Bolton & Yanis Varoufakis: “Is Global Stability A Pipe Dream?”

dead okay okay i'll be back we are ready to go [Music] welcome to the holberg debate the holberg debate is an annual event that is inspired by ludwig holberg's enlightenment ideas and aims to explore pressing issues of our time the holberg debate is organized by the holberg prize which is one of the largest international research prizes in the humanities social sciences law and theology i'm scott gates professor at the university of oslo and research professor at the peace research institute or prio i'm currently the president of the peace science society and i'm the editor of two academic journals the international area studies review and the journal of peace research my background is in economics and political science i've written 12 books and published dozens of peer-reviewed academic articles my most recent books include the forthcoming fragile bargains civil conflict and power sharing in africa co-authored with core storm published by cambridge university press and limited war in south asia 1947 to 2014 co-authored with kaushik roy and published in 2018 by routledge my research interests topics such as trends in armed conflict peace building bureaucratic politics applied game theory and democracy i will moderate today's debate let me now introduce our two honorable and distinguished guests ambassador john bolton is an american attorney diplomat republican consultant and political commentator who served as the 25th united states ambassador to the united nations from 2005 to 2006 and the 27th united states national security adviser from 2018 to 2019. he's also served in various positions in the u.s administrations under presidents george w bush george h.w bush and ronald reagan ambassador bolton is the author of three books surrender is not an option defending america at the united nations and abroad from 2007. how barack obama is endangering our national sovereignty and from 2010 and the room where it happened a white house memoir from 2020 where he describes his time as national security advisor for u.s president donald trump from april 2018 to september 2019. professor yanus varafakas is the member of greece's parliament and parliamentary leader of the may ra 25 the greek political party belonging to the democracy in europe movement 2025 europe's first transnational pan-european movement previously he served as greece's finance minister during the first six months of 2015 as a member of syriza and he led negotiations with greece's creditors during the government debt crisis verofocus has taught economics at the universities of east anglia cambridge sydney glasgow texas and athens where he still holds a chair in political economy and economic theory he also holds several honorary professorships he's an author of a number of best-selling books including adults in the room my battle with europe's deep establishment from 2017 talking to my daughter about the economy a brief history of capitalism also published in english in 2017 and the week suffer what they must europe austerity and the threat to global stability from 2016. his latest book is another now dispatches from an alternative present written in 2020. professor verofakis and professor ambassador bolton share many experiences for one they both became globally renowned for standing up against large powerful international organizations of course those being the eu and the un respectively they both fought fiercely to protect what they regarded to be in their own countries and the world's best interest they're both dedicated public servants they're both articulate and intelligent advocates of their respective world views this is where their differences become evident which we shall see in today's debate the topic of our debate is is global stability a pipe dream global stability certainly is not the way one would describe 2020 the pandemic rages the online nature of this debate stands in testimony to that in addition to the pandemic armed conflict persists or has begun anew in different parts of the world international tensions are growing the threat of economic instability and insecurity is palpable is there a path towards regional and global stability we look forward to hearing ambassador bolton and professor varoufakis discuss challenges the holberg debate is an open forum and you in the online audience are welcome to tweet questions by using the hashtag holberg2020 please ambassador bolton the floor is yours well thank you very much and i appreciate the opportunity to be with all of you today even if only uh virtually uh and it's a great pleasure and a great honor to to be a participant i thought from my perspective although i think the answer to the debate question is uh quite easy it is a pipe global stability is a pipe dream uh that that the the most uh interesting thing to do first would be to talk about some of the threats to that stability at least as i see it from the perspective of the united states and i'd like to distinguish between threats at the strategic level which are long-term and necessarily complex and threats at the more immediate level which uh are uh more imminent uh some would say more dangerous in the short term no less complex in their origins or their uh their effects but which tend to crowd out the more strategic questions which i think is always dangerous but at the strategic level i think there are two principal global threats to the united states and and therefore to global security uh the first is china and the second is russia china i think is the existential question for the west for the industrial democracies as a whole during the 21st century it is pursuing domestic and international policies that i think are wholly antithetical to our interests and values just looking at china domestically i don't i wouldn't describe it as a communist country anymore i think it's just a good old-fashioned thoroughly authoritarian country for its people it's created social metrics so that the state can rate each of its citizens it has pursued policies of cultural genocide against the uyghurs in xinjiang province and its repressed religious freedom throughout china as we speak it is violating the joint sino united kingdom agreement concerning the handover of hong kong which committed beijing to a 50-year obligation to maintain a one-country two-systems policy just yesterday it jailed four of the most significant leaders of the democratic movement in hong kong it's clear clearly moving to suppress any incipient freedom of thought outside the communist party and that's just what it does on an average day domestically internationally it's engaged in hostile near belligerent activity in the east china sea particularly aimed at taiwan a thriving democracy just off its coast uh it is in the process of trying to make the south china sea a province of china it's actually declared a provincial capital uh it is building air and naval bases uh that is constructed on islands and rocks and reefs that on a good day are only a few inches above the water line attempting to turn what are now international waterways into a chinese lake it has attempted to intimidate countries with which it shares a land border in southeast asia and most recently just in the past few months along the line of actual control with india in military clashes it is currently building its first blue water navy in 500 years it has one of the world's largest and most sophisticated cyber warfare programs it is building area denial and anti-access weaponry to keep navy's well away from its coastline it is has a active anti-satellite program intended to blind satellites in earth orbit and it has engaged in a uh substantial buildup of its nuclear and ballistic missile capabilities uh it has attempted to use the rules of uh liberal international system uh entirely to its own advantage pursuing a mercantilist trade policy within the world trade organization it has weaponized what are apparently commercial companies like huawei and zte in an effort essentially to take over the fifth generation telecommunications systems being constructed all over the world this is not a china that as some of its advocates have said is engaged in a peaceful rise to become a responsible stakeholder in world affairs the predictions that were made about china after deng xiaoping began his significant reforms in the mid 1980s have not come true in the international sphere as i've described or in the domestic sphere quite the contrary china has not moved in anything like a more democratic direction xi jinping is the most authoritarian leader of china since mao zeitung that's what we confront and to ignore this reality i think is to invite further challenges from china and further threats to international peace and security russia on the other hand is a declining country it's one horse economy oil and natural gas but since it has thousands perhaps tens of thousands of nuclear weapons it's a country that has to be taken quite seriously and i think we do it is under the rule of another authoritarian leader vladimir putin who i think is playing unfortunately playing a weak hand very well he has made it clear he thinks that the collapse of the soviet union was what he called about 15 years ago the greatest geopolitical catastrophe of the 20th century now i think it was one of the best ways you could imagine to end the 20th century putin obviously has a different view and he's tried to reestablish russian hegemony in much of the space of the former soviet union as well as trying to re-establish moscow's influence in throughout the throughout the middle east i think how the west handles russia over the next few years is going to be extraordinarily important particularly in europe and the middle east but obviously uh globally as well and we've just seen in in in in recent months with the turmoil in belarus and with russia's active role first in helping to stoke and then helping to get a ceasefire of the conflict in between armenia and azerbaijan russia and china have their own complex dynamic perhaps we can explore that in the questions but these are i think at the strategic level for a long long time ahead the major threats that we face and the major threats to global stability now at the more imminent level i think the two greatest [Music] categories of threats are those caused by the proliferation of weapons of mass destruction nuclear chemical and biological and the uh sometimes related threat of international terrorism uh with respect to the biological and chemical weapons threat it's often not discussed it's worth considering and remembering that those weapons are often called the poor man's nuclear weapon we have seen in the united states and europe really around the world something not dissimilar to what a biological weapons attack could look like in our experience with the coronavirus pandemic it has demonstrated that we are not prepared uh we have not responded well we can debate uh who's responded worse or who's responded better but at least as the united states approaches 300 000 deaths estimated from the coronavirus by whatever standard it's utterly unacceptable but i think unfortunately the rogue states of the world the troublemakers have seen our reaction to it and the pursuit of biological weapons i'm afraid has become much more something that that terrorist groups and rogue states alike would be interested in the nuclear proliferation threat continues in north korea and iran especially both of these states remain strategically committed to pursuing deliverable nuclear weapons and as we wrap up another presidential term in the united states we can report four more years of failure to stop either north korea or iran from achieving the objective that they've been after for so long uh this is the kind of uh of uh depressing uh development that uh once led winston churchill in the 1930s to talk about what he labeled the confirmed unteachability of mankind faced with incipient threats countries decide not to take significant action they watch the threats grow they tell themselves they can handle the threats they keep telling themselves that right up until the threats become palpable and then it becomes too late and the trouble particularly in the field of nuclear proliferation of course is that as each new rogue state gets a nuclear weapons capability uh or sought is seen to be pursuing it actively it inspires others to do the same i would argue that the 2015 nuclear deal with iran which allowed that regime to continue to pursue uranium enrichment and plutonium reprocessing so-called for peaceful purposes inspired others in the region to pursue their own quote-unquote peaceful nuclear programs against the day when they would face a nuclear iran so proliferation i think remains one of the gravest threats that we face and especially when you consider the possibility of combining it with international terrorism uh that this is something that uh that we must continue to be worried about the wave of radical islamism that swept over the middle east beginning with the islamic revolution in iran in 1979 has not receded we see today in afghanistan the taliban continuing to make gains possibly opening that country back up to become a haven for isis al qaeda or other terrorist groups across the middle east we see iran supporting terrorist groups like hezbollah hamas the houthi terrorists in yemen and engaged in conventional military activity in iraq and syria uh that supports these terrorist activities we see libya still engulfed in uh internecine conflict nearly a decade after the overthrow of moammar gaddafi and the the in on the streets of europe uh and in america we still see terrorist activity being undertaken that last thing any of us want to see is another 911 but i am worried that as these conditions continued uh in in the middle east unaddressed unanswered uh that we're laying the groundwork for more to come and just one last point before i conclude in in the western hemisphere something obviously of particular interest to the united states i am unhappy to have to report that the authoritarian regimes in venezuela nicaragua and cuba remain in place what i once called the troika of tyranny supported by outside forces like russia china and iran oppressing their people in the case of venezuela driving them to the level where the president of the international committee of the red cross told me last year that having visited venezuela and visited its hospitals he said he hadn't seen worse facilities since his last visit to north korea this is a great tragedy for the western hemisphere may not be a threat to global peace and security but it's certainly a dismal picture here in the western hemisphere i am not as pessimistic actually as i sound in the assessment i think that ultimately uh if the industrial democracies retain their cohesion and their will to survive that all of these threats can be overcome but i think anybody who thinks it will be done easily and quickly is unfortunately badly mistaken but thank you very much again for the opportunity to be with you i look forward to the discussion and to responding to your questions and observation thanks again thank you ambassador bolton um professor verofocus can uh you come in hello the floor is yours i certainly can if you can hear me yes thank you well let me begin with a huge thanks to you scott as well as to the organizers of the holberg debates i hope that uh with my contribution i can stay close to the spirit of ludwig holberg and from what i've read his uh determination to ensure that each one of us are reminded that within ourselves we do carry an inner light of reasons that can become when we put all those lights together uh a potential uh bullwork against um yeah collective obfuscation and indeed strategic hysteria which is unfortunately these days very much in the offing the ambassador bolton made a distinction to begin with between strategic and short-term sources of instability or types of instability he will allow me to make a different distinction that will inform my contribution today or tonight it's the distinction between primitive instability on the one hand and systematic instability on the other hand let me explain what i mean by primitive instability any rivalry between superpowers or regional powers that involves conflict regarding influence regarding resources this preceded capitalism it continued later it even survived after the second world war with a rivalry between the two major blocks the western bloc and the soviet bloc those types of instabilities will probably always be with us and can flourish into something truly evil i grew up in the 1960s and early 70s in a fascist regime here in greece which cannot really be explained as a result of systematic instability and it was a result of a coup d'etat sponsored by the united states which was utterly unnecessary even from the perspective of the interests of the united states if anything in the end it damaged the interests of the united states the language that we hear we heard it just now um regarding particular countries that a superpower defines as a rogue state i'm not sure personally you'll allow me to say that saudi arabia is less of a threat to stability less of a rogue state than cuba but this kind of uh you know our sobs versus others sops this is part of the milieu which i refer to as primitive instability then there is the systematic instability which for me is a much greater source of concern of nightmares of personal nightmares and um and of and kind of instability that can act as dynamite in the foundations of our liberal democracies it's endogenous and stability that i'm referring to the kind of instability visited upon the west after the 1929 wall street collapse which we know very well how it percolated into a great depression on both sides of the atlantic that in europe in particular bread fascism and nazism within endogenously within the system the climate emergency we're facing is another example of what i refer to as systemic or mainly systematic instability now if you look at the tendencies of the global capitalist economy from the beginning of or actually the the middle of the second industrial revolution the beginning of the 20th century what we will find for instance in the 1910s and the 1920s is something similar to what we saw in the 1990s a tendency during periods of growth during periods of increasing prosperity during periods of increasing hope and optimism a tendency for existing divisions global divisions between countries that have a trade surplus and countries that are in a trade deficit surplus countries and deficit countries we see that during the good times the periods of increasing prosperity and growth the surpluses and the deficits get larger while gdp grows but then at some point courtesy of this global imbalance which is building up something happens like wall street in 1929 like wall street again in 2008 and the bubbles burst and the moments the moment the bubbles burst what we have is this phenomenon whereby the burden of adjustment falls disproportionately on the shoulders of the deficit parts of our countries as well as the deficit nations and that causes raptures greater if you want divergences because the deficit counters which usually are the ones that lack investment and capital goods are the ones that suffer a disproportionate diminution in investment and therefore capital accumulation and then when you get out of this crisis of any crisis the deficit countries become even more embedded in a deficit-generating dynamic and the surplus countries in other words the global imbalances that beget instability uh widen and they get worse it was exactly that fear that led the new dealers having had their experience of 1929 and the experience of the new deal in the 1930s in 1944 the new dealers in power in washington dc convened the bretton woods conference with one purpose to create global stability to annul this tendency of systemic instability of the kind that i have been discussing through effectively a unification of the capitalist west of the global economy with a common monetary system effectively a common currency which was the dollar that was the whole point of the fixed exchange rate regime which they understood unlike those who supported the gold standard the night and the 1920s that to stabilize fixed exchange rates in a world where some are in deficit others are in surplus and usually these surpluses and deficits have a tendency as i said before to um balloon this whole system in order to become a source of stability needs to be founded to be anchored on a surplus recycling mechanism on a mechanism which federations understand very well but you need to expand it globally if stability is going to come out of this system and the linchpin of the global stability of the first two decades after the second world war of the bretton woods system was the american surpluses american was the only creditor country the only country that was in surplus in 1944 45 and later and it was the intention and practice of those who were in command of policy in washington dc effectively intentionally not philanthropically but rationally to recycle some of the american surpluses to europe and to japan in order to stabilize the dolarized global system and therefore to allow it to be a source of stability and it worked very well but of course it was doomed to fail because at some point by the end of the 1960s america was no longer in surplus it had slipped into a deficit and then within a few years by the 15th of august 1971 when richard nixon famously blew up the breton rule system we moved into a second period which is effectively exactly the opposite of the first to two decades of the bretton woods era american hegemony continues to grow and grow even faster than it was growing in the 1950s and 60s but the fundamental difference and i believe this is a point that needs to be made when we're looking at international stability the fundamental difference was that whereas during the peritoneus era it was american surpluses that were stabilizing global capitalism after the 1970s and in particular after paul walker's policies at the fed the federal reserve and the policies pursued by a sequence of governments beginning with president reagan onwards what we had was the united states effectively put its collective foot on the accelerator and magnified the deficit both deficits the twin deficits the trade deficit and the budget office and that was unintentional that was not a failure and those deficits played a monumental role in expanding american game which is the first time in history in human history when an empire a superpower gets stronger as a result of going deeper into the deficit this has never happened before i don't know whether it will happen again but it was a remarkable historical phenomenon so the american trade deficit operated from 1980 onwards still does to a large extent as a huge vacuum cleaner that sucks into the territory of the united states the net surpluses the net exports of countries like germany holland japan and of course later china without the trade deficit of the united states there would be no chinese industrial revolution i would i shall put it very bluntly and how did the united states pay for this ballooning deficit very simple that's the recycling mechanism that was reversed 70 of the profits of european exporters of japanese exporters of saudi exporters and indeed of chinese exporters later on 70 of that profit was recycled through wall street effectively it was a tsunami of capital that ended up in wall street why voluntarily because wall street was offering higher uh rewards higher returns and the walls did that because of two things firstly american capitalism uh essentially be maintained lower rates of inflation and higher and lower levels of cost by suppressing average earnings in the blue collar areas of the american labor market and through financialization making it more profitable for capital to flow into wall street now why am i saying this because this period between 1980 and 2008 was a period during which following the end of bretton woods i can connect this but i'm not going to waste time on this specific point even though it's an interesting one that period was also instrumental in bringing down the soviet union and adding another billion workers to the capitalist labor market that period was highly unstable in a way in in macroeconomic terms because what was happening was the american trade deficit was getting larger and larger the american budget deficit and the the federal debt was getting greater and greater so a mainstream economist could see this as a kind of disequilibrium as an instability but at the same time it was stabilizing the world it was providing german factories dutch factories italian factories japanese factories and of course chinese factories with the demand that was necessary to keep capital accumulation going and create effectively what we now know as globalization but on the back of this tsunami of capital that was going into the city of london and of course wall street to finance and to close this loop financialization was building houses of cards which crashed and burned in 2008. since then we've moved into the third post-war phase which is an ominous one because while the federal reserve in particular and china by cranking up their rate of investment stabilized global capitalism the fed and china did it let's be clear about this who saves capitalism the fed and china i'll say it once more nevertheless the mountain ranges of money that was printed by the central banks of the world especially of the west and refloated the stock exchanges the financial markets on the one hand created immense wealth for those dealing in paper money in paper titles while austerity for the many even in the united states because let's face it the obama stimulus package was countered by austerity at the level of the states that created huge inequalities which are ripping apart our societies in the united states in europe we have a north-south divide in europe which is getting bigger and bigger we have an east-west divide we have a divide within our communities and to put it bluntly i shall use a very simplistic term but not an unuseful term we have socialism for the very few and austerity for the many that depresses aggregate demand which keeps levels of investment very low at the time when liquidity is huge this discontinuity this disparity between having the highest level of savings and liquidity in the history of humanity and the lowest in comparison to liquidity in savings level of investment especially things we need like green investments like good quality green jobs creates a humongous source of stability for the world for the world now china has been mentioned by ambassador bolton in a very different context to how i'm mentioning it let me put it bluntly i've said this before i'll say it once again without china there is no possibility of a reproducible sustainable european union economy or united states economy what we now have is a situation where 12 years of stagnation following the 2008 crisis which saw massive liquidity in financial sectors and very low level of investment that creates stagnation a kind of perpetual secular stagnation larissa called it even though i disagree on a lot of things with larry summers on this i think he's right covet 19 comes in and what it does it it gives another impetus to money printing by central banks so stock exchanges you know effectively leave planet earth and move into you know in with stratospheric speeds into the cosmos while the real capitalist economy is going from bad to worse for me as citizens of the world as citizens of europe that is the source of greatest worry about the systemic instability which then of course feeds into primitive instability the way i mentioned it before now what do we do about that that is a very i mean it is a crucial question it's the 10 trillion dollar question if you want to put a sum to it we can speed up the clash between china and the west as ambassador bolton clearly intends to convince us is necessary we can have a new cold war which is already in the offing or we can find some way of creating new britain woods that will will bring together the united states the european union and china in order to plan together for the kind of you know period that follows the great stagnation the secular stagnation of the 2008 2020 period with something more palatable with something that does not waste humanity's capacity to end the greatest source of instability which is outside our immediate remit but at the same time it is undoing our capacity to sustain ourselves as a species and that is climate change now what is the greatest impediment to such a new bretton woods where china united states and the european union can get together i believe that unfortunately and i'm saying this with desperation the european union is the the patient the global patient at the moment we don't have a capacity to get together and to plan ahead we do not have a capacity to effectively become sovereign as a european union europe has never been less sovereign than today we rely on china for digital technologies particularly 5g and for batteries and we rely on the united states for our financial stability as well as for defense we are headless the henry kissinger line who do i call if i want to speak to europe remains even more powerful than ever i'm looking forward to the discussion we're going to have but let me finish with a hope that we do not make a desert and call it stability thank you thank you professor very focused uh so uh i think what i'm going to do i have a number of particular questions regarding your opening statements but rather than confining the debate i thought i would start and allow you to choose and be a little more free form to begin so what central idea that professor verofocus verifakas has made and [Music] create a counter argument to that one and then all turn to professor verafocus to respond in kind with a central element of yours or to respond to your comments and then what i'll do after that is i'll go into some particular questions that i think are left unstated and i want to pursue further does that sound okay well i i'd be happy to respond i must say you you cut out in the middle of what you were asking for but i'll i'll assume that what you were saying is uh to to respond to something uh uh central to what the professor varafak has said and and and give my answer to it and if i have understood you correctly i will try and do that briefly um thanks yes okay well it's uh i i will i will make an effort here then to do that uh look i i it was a fascinating marxist description of the past uh hundred years or so of history and uh i recognize it well i don't i don't recognize it happening in the united states i don't recognize uh much of the analysis i do think there are a lot of negative economic circumstances that the united states faces today caused by erroneous policies we've we've pursued for for a long time in in this country i consider myself a deficit hawk i don't like federal government deficits i don't like the size of the natural debt uh i think that uh we've been we've been going down the wrong road there for a long time uh but it's a very difficult one to come back on i i think the uh the the importance of economics and international affairs can't be can't be doubted but i'm not a marxist myself and i don't buy the argument that everything is based on economics and as mark said that the superstructure that we look at of politics religion society uh is all based on economic factors i think uh it's a it's a much more complex uh analysis that's required i don't think historical materialism of the marxist kind really brings you very far but i do think that where economics plays a critical role is is demonstrated by china which uh owes much of its uh prosperity to uh four decades of theft of intellectual property from the west as a whole this is a view shared not just by a majority in the united states but i think across europe japan australia singapore pretty much most of the rest of the world and i think that uh that's not that's not something that we dreamed up the chinese have been doing this with incredible success i mean you have to admire them they steal intellectual property they don't have to spend money on research and development they they recreate the product sell it back into the markets of the producers they stole it from and undercut them with state subsidies and uh and insurance that uh that allow them to come to dominate the market uh i i think we should all press china to give up its policy of stealing intellectual property but i'm not optimistic they're going to do it why should they uh it's a uh it's proven a very successful business model for them so while they're not marxist anymore like professor veraphanakis they are authoritarians and and they constitute a threat and that that's uh i'll just leave it at that i guess for the moment all right thank you so professor verofocus uh why don't you respond to that and then um i'll also give you a chance to go after a central theme of ambassador bolton's and then what i'm going to do after you're finished is i'm going to go into some particular questions that i'd like to ask so the floor is yours scott scott i'm prepared to make a deal with ambassador bolton um let's uh play the ball not not the man shall we because um it's very easy to descend into um characterizations i came out with a particular analysis i'm very happy i'm i would be ecstatic to hear why my analysis is wrong now you want to call it marxist it would be a great surprise to most marxists i know and indeed it would be a great surprise to the good american friends i have who are certainly not marxist who are actually quite anti-marxist and who are very proud of the new deal tradition they're very proud of bretton woods because it was a time when american leadership led to a global stability that was indeed particularly beneficial we had you know the longest period of steady growth of low inflation of low unemployment in the united states and everywhere else and that was a result of the policies that came out of the analysis that i outlined now we can disagree on the analysis but let's all call each other um names like you know marxist hawk dove and so on shall we because that will make for a much more interesting conversation on the substance of what ambassador bolton said i came out with a particular proposal for a new bretton woods that will bring together the united states the european union and china in order to agree new rules on finance on technological transfers if you wish but primarily on how to keep a balance between investment and liquidity provision which at the moment is completely out of kilter and therefore as far as i'm concerned a threat for global stability now maybe this is not a good idea but i would like to hear from ambassador bolton exactly what kind of alternative he has in mind except confrontation with china i believe that in 2015 um he wrote an article about the need to bomb iran in order to end the iranian bomb in the new york times do you believe ambassador bolton that some kind of new cold war that may lead to a hot war is the way to go forward do you really believe that china can be put back into its span through confrontation not through a new bretton woods is there an alternative to a new bretton woods that would not blow up what little global stability we've got left thank you so i um i'll i'm going to let you uh come back a little bit later and you can choose ambassador bolton how you want to respond to his response but i want to move the debate into some particulars i'm going to change the direction a little bit and push things a bit um so i guess what i would like to do is i'd like to focus on the notion of stability to some degree uh you're both naturally focusing on two dimensions ambassador bolton naturally is focusing on insecurity and gl and focusing on the security sector and professor vara focus verifakas is focused on the economics um and that's to be expected i knew that that was going to be happening all along um but what i'd like to focus on is is is there a role in the system for instability is there some ways that instability can create good um out of competition and a notion of periods of great instability sometimes lead to great levels of innovation is stability instability necessarily a bad thing i'll turn that question to ambassador bolton first well i don't i don't think it's a question whether instability is good or bad instability is inevitable uh the the the periods of stability we've seen in the world come through throughout history have come in a variety of different ways sometimes uh because of an effective uh uh balance of power uh and sometimes because of um of dominance of one power another but but it's uh there's there's been no example where uh the stability is permanent and it's uh uh it's a it's a problem that uh evolves and changes to be sure uh we've been in the 20th century through three great uh uh confrontations uh two hot world wars one cold one cold world war uh that fortunately the uh partisans of freedom have prevailed in uh each time uh but but there's no guarantee it's not that anybody's seeking confrontation it's the fact that others seek confrontation with us and uh it can come in a variety of forms uh 911 certainly took the united [Music] it and it can st again i so i don't i don't regard stability or instability is inherently uh having positive or negative moral values what i'm concerned about and what i think uh is the legitimate focus of decision making in the united states is how to protect american interests and values in the world together with those of our allies against external forces that that don't wish us well of which unfortunately throughout history there have been a fair number uh it was it was a privilege for the united states in its early days to avoid external confrontation uh largely to to seek stability in the western hemisphere although i think it's a mistake to call that isolationism because while we were doing that we are we were creating what is today the united states uh as a country today and for the last hundred plus years that's had global interest it's been our fate to en engage with the entire world and and to provide in my judgment uh as much stability as we could through networks of alliances and institutions some of which have been more successful than others but which have have at least given those who want to join in the common approach that that we and many others hold to see a stability or at least to create structures of deterrence against those who would rather structure the world in a different way and that may last it may not last it won't last by creating a bretton woods with china we we created we created one of the bretton woods institutions replacing gat with the wto and the chinese are busy perverting it so i think they've given their evidence of what they're up to thank you uh professor varoufakis um i'll pose the question but what i really meant and probably imprecise on my part but i meant the outcome or the result of instability could be bad or good uh not in the stability or instability in their own manner being good or bad and one thing i'm thinking about is the prospects of her innovation occurring due to competition due to things like that what what's your take on that question well my take i suppose similar to euros a healthy degree of uncertainty is the elixir of life it's the salt of the earth it's what keeps us creative and productive uh but that's not necessarily the same thing as instability uncertainty right what i fear regarding instability uh are moments of catastrophic uh degeneration and of crisis that leave us all diminished as a species so i'll give you three examples 1929 or i could have used 2008 but 1929 is a more poignant example where suddenly you have the a cascade of of insolvencies beginning in the united states ending up in europe in japan and effectively pushing humanity into a warfare against all and you know tens of millions of dead people that is the kind of instability that is that does not have beneficial effects the as the second example i shall give is for instance the invasion of iraq the invasion of iraq was a murderous error which in the end order did was it helped it was a magnificent boost for islamic fundamentalism for isis for misanthropy for um you know mass death and no serious uh not no serious zero benefit to anyone in the united states in europe in the middle east anywhere and the third of course is climate change um we are moving now already well past the the point of discontinuity the turning point the point of inflection if you want whereby we are jeopardizing the future of the next generation and that cannot be a good thing um so uh we're now at uh defining or maybe redefining what constitutes instability so we have maybe gradations if i may uh allow me to kind of paraphrase what you're saying there's catastrophic instability then there's kind of systemic notions of instability and or instability and then there may be periods by which there's a global some aspect of stability for the global system one could describe is that a fair enough characterization of your thoughts that's more or less it um there is uncertainty there is a kind of disequilibrium which begets creativity and that is always a positive force a force for good but that has to be managed at the macro level whether you are talking about the nation state or indeed globally and the whole point of the bretton woods institutions was to do that the emergence of uh new forces like china uh can either be seen as an opportunity to effectively go to war whether it's a cold war or a hot war or as an opportunity to create a global agreement that will restrain the extent of the catastrophic instability okay thank you professor ambassador bolton um what does that i mean you opened and talking about short-term and then more systemic problems in the international system strategic uh strategic threats uh which result in insecurity and instability would you make differentiation between potential catastrophic uh and then a more of a garden variety of instability and then periods where or regional patterns of stability are evident in the globe is that a fair characterization that you could agree to well i'd have to say just for myself i'm i'm not much into taxonomy i don't i don't uh the distinguishing between strategic and tactical is about about as taxonomic as i think you can get because i think there's so much variability in the uh in the issues obviously some threats are significantly greater than others russia as an economy doesn't really have a lot to concern us i've heard by different measures and i'm not sure we have good statistics from russia or china but the russian economy right right now is roughly the size of the netherlands uh or maybe italy that's another another comparison i've heard that that would not amount to a strategic threat under under anybody's definition but when they have 10 000 or more uh uh nuclear weapons on hand that that by definition makes it serious but i i'm uh i'm an admirer of edmund burke i'm not not much of a follower of abstractions i think i think you have to try and characterize the uh the circumstances as you see them in the real world okay fair enough um i'm going to change direction maybe pursuing it a little bit over the past 20 years we've seen amazing improvements in life quality i mean i began opening with covet and we're seeing a disaster but if we're taking a big big picture perspective and in terms of global development infant mortality rates have declined precipitously malnutrition is disappearing more and more it's going lower and lower every year we see unambiguous trends in poverty rates improving that these things are actually bright lights occurring that tend to be blinded because the news of bad news crowds out good news and gradual change in uh the ability to get a bicycle instead of having to walk somewhere things like that don't make the news um to what degree i mean so the international system over the period that professor verofocus has been talking about at a global level especially in the poorest parts of the world not the very very poor but vast amount numbers of people have been elevated out of abject poverty into middle lower middle class from a global perspective is this a sign of possibilities of of where the world works together or is that coming out of nowhere or where are those good things occurring um out of bad i'll let ambassador bolton or no i'll go for uh professor vera focus first well thank you scott there's no doubt that um the globalization phenomenon which i alluded to in my introduction um is uh at the heart of the process that you described the incorporation of more than one billion workers one and a half billion workers maybe two billion workers into capitalist labor markets has created the the you know this um magnification of incomes globally but two points if i may firstly if you take china out of this equation most of those you know positive and welcoming and particularly joyous statistics disappear it is china that has lifted the largest number of people to the greatest degree out of poverty over the last 30 years we need to recognize that as i said if you take the the chinese statistics out of the the global picture the rest of the world is not looking as good have made great progress i mean not as significant as china not really not really tiny tiny you would not be making this uh you know boisterous claim if it wasn't for china and one might even add that the degree of development in places like pakistan and like india indeed in the european union itself the way in which a country like germany the middle stand middle sized companies in germany managed to weather the storm after 2009 2010 owes a great deal to chinese growth whatever you may think about china this is a fact we cannot ignore it and the second point i want to make is that you know economists and you are an economist as well we tend to overestimate these things that can be measured and to completely underestimate or neglect values that are not measured which i can be even more important than the ones that can let me give you an example take the aborigines in australia it's a it's it's an extreme example but to make the point in a short space of time you know when captain cook arrived in botany bay they didn't have a single pound or or euro or a cent or whatever and they lived very happy and fulfilling lives without commodification without markets look at their religions today today you can see because there is a welfare system in australia they have a very high income compared to what they had 200 years ago when were they happier today it is a community in dire straits the same thing can be found in communities in india since you mentioned india look at the number of suicides amongst indian farmers whose income in monetary terms is going up but whose lives is diminishing sharply look at the deaths of despair in the united states itself the number of people who die unnecessarily from depression from obesity from diabetes from from ill health that is a result of poverty within wealth that is the worst way of being poor by being surrounded by wealth same in the european union we have so much unnecessary suffering which is the result of a failure to take the tools that capitalism has created for us you know the wonderful machinery the the robots the the new technologies the new commodities and press them into the service of human happiness thank you um ambassador bolton i'm going to push you a little bit uh to move in the economic sphere uh i know that you began your career at uscid uh working with mcpherson i actually had the pleasure of teaching a class with him together uh when he was the president of michigan state university um but what i want to do is push you i know that you have a law background not an economics background but having been at uscid a little bit more on your perspective on the question i asked and maybe a response to professor verofocus well i think i think the record is pretty clear and and if it's not i'm sure the professor will correct me but but 35 years ago deng xiao pem began an incredible transformation inside china abandoning marxist i guess i shouldn't use that word but that's what he would that's what he would say he abandoned marx's principles he said it doesn't matter whether the cat is black or white but whether it catches mice he said to be rich is good and and he stripped away policies that had uh that had been implemented since 1949 to cause enormous destruction uh the decentralizing control of the economy abandoning the mindset that it led to the great leap forward in the 1950s which caused more human devastation than any other act in known human history beyond war beyond actual hostilities he tried to claw china back from the catastrophe of the proletarian revolution and and he had achieved substantial success across the board and so the phenomenal economic growth in china which obviously contributed to averages and levels worldwide uh was something that i think you can trace almost like a laboratory experiment what's fascinating now about china is that beginning with hujian town now continuing with xi jinping all the evidence that i think uh we can see is that they are abandoning the reforms that deng xiaoping brought into place they're re-centralizing control their re-er imposing constraints and and limits on what chinese and foreign businesses can do i i think that that will inevitably add to the social strains in china that we still see flowing from the one child per family policy i don't know how you measure one child per family in economic terms but it was a disastrous uh uh concept and its full social effects are still being felt so so it's the the idea that uh that somehow we we that what we owe what we owe to china is deng xiaoping recognizing that marxism was failing and i think uh and and i will speak as an alumnus of usaid we've seen economic growth in so many of the countries that aid was present in in the western hemisphere in south asia and and to africa and a lot to a lesser extent uh unfortunately uh that much of the world that professor varafakis has described i i don't i just don't recognize it you want to respond to that professor verofocus verofocus sorry do you you can't hear me yes i'm quite happy to respond to all of them i shall attempt to agree largely with ambassador bolton thenxialping brought about the revolution that led to chinese economic success no doubt about that and it was the jet i agree with you um ambassador bolton too that it was the jettisoning of the failed centrally planned system call it communist you can't call it maxis because max never wrote about those things but let's agree that he jettisoned the collectivist centrally planned communist system of production in that sense he brought in a kind of you know liberal free market ethos into china that worked very well but there were three things that he did also that made it work the first thing he did was he did not allow for the liberalization of finance and that was crucial in helping china succeed i remember franklin roosevelt i will take you back to bretton woods when he convened the bretton woods conference he made sure he he actually stated one term for sponsoring that global remarkable conference that yielded 22 decades of wonderful capitalist growth and that was no banker no finances should be allowed into the mount washington hotel remember that that's also what deng xiaoping did he said if we want free markets we cannot have financial markets running havoc and running amok and that really helped the moment china liberalizes this financial system that isn't the moment when i believe the chinese capitalist economy or call it whatever you want is going to go into serious spasms the second thing he did was or he the government did and after dense helping as well is to control tightly aggregate investment the way in which they increase the boost aggregate investment especially after the 2008 crisis stabilized china and the world economy and then deflated it a bit then again in 2014 when there was another tendency for the economy to stall increase it a bit so this is macroeconomic management that they did which the united states courtesy of the way in which congress and the white house often do not see eye to eye has not had a capacity and certainly not the intention since franklin roosevelt of doing or maybe lbj and the third thing he did was um he linked fenced big tech china is the only country that features companies that can compete with amazon they can compete with google europe cannot do that we do not have such large corporations and one of the reasons why various administrations the united states including the new one of president biden president-elect biden are confrontation with china is because it's very difficult to accept that there is you know an amazon um competitor in china that the united states policy makers cannot find ways of incorporating in the silicon valley based big tech another kind of primitive accumulation rivalry between two superpowers that doesn't benefit the world good thank you um what i'm going to do now is going to turn to politics i mean we've been talking about politics at some degree but i want to get into more domestic politics ambassador bolton's raised a number of issues regarding human rights abuses and other aspects uh i'm going to return to that thought but what i want to do is turn to the illiberal turn uh of the world democratic backsliding that's occurred uh more extreme cases are russia with increasing centralization of power since uh putin took power we've seen increasing authoritarian tendencies in turkey in india a number of countries hungary poland where we see growth of illiberal democracies if you will a retreat from civil liberties and human rights basically they're what some political scientists refer to as electoral democracies only the elected leader but there's no uh guard rails that would characterize a liberal democracy um what i want to ask about is to what degree does this illiberal turn uh in these regimes how does that threaten global stability and uh what's the future i mean is that a long time future or are those regimes basically so uh based on strongmen that when that strong man is gone they'll be inherently unstable and will have a new possibility for a new regime or not i'll turn now to ambassador bolton to address that issue well i guess i'd say a couple things the first is i i think there has been uh retrogression on the point of the uh societies that have emerged from from totalitarian past the former soviet union former yugoslavia uh among others uh and so i think the the lesson to the first lesson to draw there is that uh this is at least a partial refutation of the whig theory of history there's not an inevitable upward progression it just doesn't go on in in in sequence you can have as in the case of russia emerging from a totalitarian society having a brief experience with democracy and then receding back into authoritarianism and i think that's important to understand so that the idea that that you can create uh what is goes under the term of a rules-based international society uh inevitably moves from sunlight to sunlight higher and higher it doesn't it doesn't work like that internationally it doesn't work like that domestically now in terms of what uh whether or not there's a trend you know i i'm i'm reluctant to draw sweeping conclusions from circumstances in different countries that uh that that really are quite varied and which may reflect uh political configurations within those countries at a given time but which 10 years from now may be very different i i think there's considerable discontent in europe discontent in the united states that has been reflected in in in politics in different ways but i do think that um that this variation is does not strike me at the moment as being outside uh the range within which democratic change occurs in in in our societies so i don't uh i don't really worry about it um from a strategic point of view and if i may say so uh with all due respect i think this is more of a european concern and it's more of a european concern because of the strains on the european union uh more than strains britain is withdrawn from the european union uh and uh and and so i think that the the the issues uh within countries that are members of the european union uh reflect in the larger debate uh going on within the union itself and i understand of course that this is incredibly significant for europeans and ultimately it will be for the united states but it's a debate because of the circumstances and structures of the european union that i don't see replicated elsewhere in the world aren't they somewhat though a threat with especially turkey for nato which is definitely related to us well i think we're in the in the in the course of trying to figure out whether turkey wants to be part of the west or not i mean i think erdogan has taken turkey in a direction completely contrary to the ataturk reformation post-ottoman empire i think he is fully prepared to abandon the secular nature of the constitution that ataturk wrote and i think he has hard as this may be to believe neo-ottoman aspirations in the middle east his decision to purchase the russian s 400 air defense system is utterly unjustifiable contrary to his obligations in nato but here again i don't necessarily want to draw an ultimate conclusion from that turkey has another presidential election in 2023 if it's free and fair underlying if underline free and underlying fare maybe the turks will vote in a different direction certainly in last year's provincial and municipal elections they did so that's i mean turkey is actually a good example why i worry about drawing overly broad conclusions from insufficient facts thank you i'll turn the question to you professor verofakis uh about the rise of illiberalism in the globe i think it directly relates to what you're talking about internal uh inequalities uh those who are the those who feel like they're left out during periods of growth things like that do you want to expand on that yes gladly scott on a personal note because you mentioned that you know your research interests include game theory as well as economics i was a game theorist minding my own business doing rather esoteric things not working substantially macroeconomics on political economy except as an active citizen it was around 2001 with the bursting of the dot-com bubble in the united states that i started wearing and i started wearing somebody i mentioned that before i mentioned once again who grew up in a fascist dictatorship and the reason why i was worrying was because i started feeling that the way in which financial markets were being refloated by central banks especially by the fed after 2001 2002 and the manner in which financialization was just going crazy uh i was heading was leading us down the path towards a new 1929 which unfortunately happened in 2008. the response of the central banks was different in 2008 compared to 1929 but the essence of the post-2008 period was not that different to the essence of the post-1929 period we had a massive collapse of the capacity of the little people to imagine a future where their kids would be having you know as good a life as they did these periods of cascading insolvencies of home repositions of you know bankrupt banks bankrupt labor markets bankrupt households and bankrupt small businesses which we experienced here in greece people experienced across the united states after 2008 for a while across the european union um the russians experienced it massively due to their own separate catastrophe these are periods when humiliation austerity and lack of prospects and precarity combined forces to give rise to a political dynamic that boosts magnificently strong men those who you know stand on a soapbox and look at the little people in the eyes the people who are suffering the people who've lost hope and they say to them i'll make you proud again i will look after you i'll give you a little bit more money you know a welfare payment here a welfare payment there okay but i'll make you proud again to be american to be italian to be greek to be british to be german to do whatever to be chinese to be russian that is when democracy suffers and we've seen this worldwide last time misunderstood let me be clear of this vladimir putin is a war criminal i stood up and said so at the university of hatton senate meeting in the early 2000s because of what he did in chechnya presidency of china is increasingly despotic and the violation of human rights in china even though i do not want to see us in the west foster a new cold war with china i am never going to stop from campaigning for more human rights in hong kong i might the illegals the muslim minorities the chinese people chinese workers and so on and so forth so this arise of despotism of dictatorial leaders of strongmen is the repercussion of the fact that we are living in a post-modern 1930s our generation 2008 has been condemned to be relieving those uh political forces leading to the um strengthening and reinforcement of political monsters i'm not going to mince my words about it and you see this is why i'm interested in economics it's not because of some kind of ideological commitment it is not because i'm an economist it's because i fear for a world in which young people are going to be facing the double whammy on the one hand of climate catastrophe and on the other of precarity and democracy democracies in which the stronger increasingly the stronger players are those who harvest the seeds of of wrath and of anger that they plant well let me take that last statement and push back a little bit so how would you say to respond to the development of a surveillance state where the every i mean and the largest incarceration of people's in known in history with the ouija population basically being in giant prison camps the surveillance technology being developed these are some of the things that ambassador bolton raised how how does the west respond to that make any kind of accommodation of china the new bretton woods process that i am proposing conditional on human rights the old-fashioned approach engagement not confrontation but you see there is an issue here and that is my great concern i'm not so sure that the ones who wax lyrical in the united states or indeed in europe about human rights in china are that concerned about human rights they are far more interested in alibaba and other large big tech chinese corporations as well as the financial system in china that would that wall street and the city of london would love to get their hands on i'm interested in human rights and i would make it a condition for any kind of new bretton woods style arrangements that would benefit china and the chinese government wants remember it was the governor of the central bank of china which in april 2009 in the g20 meeting convened by gordon brown was the one who suggested the international clearing union arrangements that john maynard keynes had proposed at the bretton woods agreement they want that kind of not marxist ambassador bolton but new deal keynesian accommodation what we should say to them is if you are interested in that here are the conditions human rights across china and hong kong as well as no more lignite-powered or fired power stations thank you ambassador bolton you want to respond and i guess more particularly what i'd like to ask is i think you lay out i think quite clearly the human right foibles of china and a need to react to in a certain level of assertiveness on the part of china in east asia and broader than that to africa it's not mentioned by you but of course we know about that um short of uh i mean in conjunction i would guess with a response at a security level are there other ways that you would or you disagree or do you support what professor verofakis is saying well if you wanted to have an experiment let's take the wto i mean it was in the post-world war ii universe of organizations you had the un the imf and what was supposed to be the ito the international trade organization that uh was never born we had the gat instead we've uh we've outlived the gap now we have the wto china was admitted in uh 2000 2001. i remember well it was the universal cry at the time that this will help the reformers inside china china will conform to international norms in the financial and economic world it will make them more responsible they'll be a responsible stakeholder they'll engage in a peaceful rise and i think what we've seen is that over the 20 years of chinese membership they've systematically manipulated this theoretically pro free trade organization by pursuing with enormous success from china's point of view of mercantilist foreign policy mercantilist economic policy so okay here they are deeply embedded in the wto um so how exactly now that they're in uh do do we use the leverage that we may have because of human rights violations or however you want to characterize it you can you can do it on the basis of climate change and tell them they can abandon all their coal-fired plants that'd be interesting to see and when they tell us to stuff it what do we do then you want to respond to that uh professor verofocus yes i'd like to i'd like to and i shall respond with two points the first one is there is no such thing as china in the same way there is no such thing as the united states we have such complicated complex uh economic political system societies that you know many there are many americans there are many chinas there is you know the amazing building you mentioned the reformers the reformers are still there they're in china and many of them are putting up a wonderful struggle for creating you know more democratic rights for um pushing china in the direction of a greater accommodation with the rest of the world for liberating chinese workers from the shackles of the communist party apparatchiks there is even a boisterous democratic movement within the different prefectures that even managed to unseat chinese communist party officials it is true that in beijing the central authority is becoming increasingly authoritarian but we need to engage with the democrats within china and i would say the same thing and i shall say this a bit later if i'm allowed regarding turkey we need to engage with the democrats when the forces that are there and who are you know really jeopardized and undermined by the cries in favor of a new cold war against china the second dimension that i think is important and that's a more direct answer to ambassador bolton's point uh how to engage with them and what do we say uh amazon bolton the world trade organization is a place that everybody manipulates the united states manipulates the european union has repeatedly failed to subscribe to agreements at the wto everybody doesn't but there are other levers that we can use with china the chinese political economy is facing a major crisis it hasn't come yet but it will come they cannot simultaneously grow the way they need to grow to maintain political stability and redistribute income money from investment which is unproductive to internal consumption for that they need uh an international project and an international agreement with the european union and with uh the united states in particular that will allow them to rebalance the chinese economy that means fewer exports compared to imports it means a number of uh moves in the in the direction of liberalizing the the chinese economy without losing aggregate demand at the moment the european union is exporting deflation to to china because we are constantly cranking up exports to the chinese economy undermining them they understand that they understand that the crisis is coming and can only be prevented if there is an agreement with the united states and the european union that i think is the way in which to manage um a china that returns from the brink towards which the central government of beijing is pushing the country by means of the increasing concentration of power in the hands of one man thank you you actually took the question i was going to follow up with but i'll turn that question to ambassador bolton how sustainable is growing centralization of authority in china is it sustainable and is levels of growth the i mean normal kind of assumptions are that at some point levels of income and there's too much invested in the system that people will demand more liberal rights in accordance with growing material wealth do you think that there's a sustainability or is it inherently insta staple there well look it was the basic theory from henry kissinger to bob zellick to the present that increased economic growth in china brought about by deng xiaoping's reforms would lead to more responsible behavior by china internationally which has proven false and would lead to increased democracy domestically which is also false so you know authoritarian societies can last a very long time that's not necessarily as they say in financial statements past performance is no indication of future results you can't extrapolate but i i would respectfully disagree with professor berafakis when he says that democracy advocates are still flourishing in china two days ago my very good friend jimmy lye was put in jail in hong kong again and the authorities themselves say they're not going to let him out until his trial in april i'm very worried jimmy lies never coming out of jail hong kong for china is one of the gravest threats that they face probably the gravest threat that they face is taiwan and so when i hear suggestions that we engage with china and try and work with them ask the people on taiwan what their view is they just had another free and fair election where they said we in effect we are not going to accept uh the beijing view of how relations between china and taiwan are going to play out because among other things we've seen what you're doing in hong kong and i think the world has also seen how china behaved with the coronavirus pandemic it is beyond dispute i think that china covered up what happened in wuhan covered up the extent of the epidemiological consequences of the disease in china covered up the extent of the economic influences and by so doing impeded the ability of the rest of the world to deal effectively with the disease there's so much we don't know uh now that i'm afraid we're never going to get to the bottom of it this is not a government that i'm prepared to trust with very much and when when when i say that often it's met by reminding me of ronald reagan's use of the russian proverb trust but verify precisely the coronavirus experience shows the chinese aren't going to let us verify so you can't trust and you can't verify i would rather take back the reins of our dependency on china and i think in effect that's happening without conscious policy i think people now see the political risk of doing business in china is much higher than they realized they should have probably realized it before but on their own without government direction we're seeing an unwinding a a diminution at the margin of uh increased investment a an unwinding of some of the existing investment because people will price in the political risk of dealing with the kind of government that we see in beijing now i'm going to change the subject and move away from china now i'm going to actually maybe i'm just curious on my own part so losers consent is an essential aspect of democracy um so to what extent is uh donald trump's refusal to concede the election problematic and is there a long-term consequence in your opinion or do you think this is a minor another month and it'll go away kind of thing well i think i think trump is an anomaly and an aberration uh but that doesn't mean that he's not dangerous uh it's uh the reason that i resigned from uh being the national security advisor one reason why i wrote my book and the principal reason why for the first time in my adult life i didn't vote for the republican nominee for president i think the damage that he's done to the united states internationally and domestically can be repaired i'm actually optimistic it can be repaired quickly but i feared that if he had been elected for a second term some of that damage might have been irreparable and we're going to have to face the consequences of trump for a long time but i do think that the experience is a is a warning it's not a tendency and i think that trump himself uh will go down in history as uh as the worst president that we've ever had because of this overall reaction every day that goes on uh diminishes his reputation and slowly more slowly than i would like within the republican party leaders are beginning to say that as well is there a real threat to the republican party no i don't think so i think this is a question of uh what's happening now more and more people standing up and acknowledging that that trump is conducting one of his worst offenses is a con on the republican party itself i'm not defending this in any way it's a it's a tragedy that trump was ever nominated for president or that he won again i think the circumstances are uh unique the democrats nominated probably the worst candidate they could in 2016 uh and uh and and so we we have the past four years to deal with uh there's there's damage to repair i make i make no secret of it but i don't think that he challenged the fundamental institutions uh in a way that gives me pause look at the record in court uh the the judicial branch and and not just at the federal level but in the states as well the record roughly as of today i think is in his litigation challenging the election he's had one victory in 46 defeats thanks uh i'll let you join in professor vera verofakis if you want to make a comment on this on trump and what non-concession loser the lack of losers consent if you will sorry did you well very briefly um donald trump is a symptom and he is a symptom of the obama's obama administration's failure to live up to the expectations of those who after 2008 expected a new deal from the democrats didn't get it instead you had lots of left behind people you had lots of health behind people you had a lot of hunger and a lot of discontent and when you have this kind of discontent and anger people will vote for whoever they think is going to annoy the well-off the ones who have a good job and a cushy place in society and this is what donald trump did he is weaponizing this discontent he will continue to do so unfortunately he has created a bubble of people who are convinced that he was wronged and you know with every court case that he loses those people are even more convinced that the system is against them and the system has robbed them of their democratic rights and my great fear as a as a left-winger now i'm going to characterize myself ambassador bolton my fear as a left-winger is that the next couple of years will be a period of slump for the american economy because of uh covet 19 after effects and this is going to solidify the trumpist base within the republican party while splitting up the democrats because biden one due to the bernie sanders [Music] aoc elizabeth warren supporters at this time unlike 2016 came out in force and um to vote for biden biden now is liberated from the new deal from a green new deal he never wanted it now he doesn't have to do it because he does control the senate and i don't think he will in any meaningful way and the next couple of years my that's but this is my fear i truly hope i'm wrong that the trump has lost but trumpism is going to take over the republican party even more powerfully and we are going to have very negative repercussions for liberal democracy across the world ambassador bolton um you want to make a comment about prospects for a biden presidency along the lines that well let me yeah i mean in in part i think professor varafakis has has a point about the the travails of the democratic party but but let me say first with respect to the republican party which is my natural home there is no trumpism because trump doesn't have a philosophy doesn't indulge in grand strategy doesn't really even do policy as we normally understand that it is all about donald trump and i think uh what he has been able to do and it's disturbing i i don't uh i don't deny it is that he has uh persuaded a number of people he's intimidated a lot of other people but he's persuaded a lot of people that that as he said in the 2016 republican convention only i can fix it now this is a dangerous statement to make and it's especially dangerous for republicans our our party has always been one of policy over personality uh and that's why we're gonna have to have a huge conversation uh once trump leaves the oval office which he will at noon on the 20th of january and once that happens the political dynamic in the united states changes dramatically for biden i don't envy him his task i didn't vote for him either by the way i wrote in somebody else's name because i i was not going to be happy with the biden presidency for very different reasons i i think professor varifakas is right i think the democratic party is in grave danger of splitting as it attempts to govern and i'm much more optimistic that the trump influence can be removed from the republican party if we win the two senate seats in georgia we'll maintain control of the senate definitely not predicted before the election and we've come within five or six seats of gaining majority in the house of representatives and absolutely stunning results so i think uh the return of the republican party to a reagan-esque uh approach uh is is something that with work we can accomplish uh and thanks to the blue-collar workers that trump did bring into the party uh and the uh and the more educated more affluent voters that he pushed out which we can bring back i think and given the travails in the democratic party uh i think i think there's a period of uh substantial possibility ahead for the republicans i think biden will be a one-term president all right thank you thank you very much uh i'm going to turn and i'm going to um kind of take a point raised by professor verofakis and it kind of goes back to his initial statement about growing up in the the in greece uh and the period of uh the dictatorship uh to what extent so your career has been a very consistent one uh advocating and supporting u.s sovereignty uh ex expounding for u.s national interests to what extent is there an inherent uh maybe there's going to be at some level winners and losers in the globe and to what extent does that focus on is there a way to square that circle whereas sovereignty doesn't necessarily create losers or disorder in the global system is there a happy ordered focus which would still preserve u.s sovereignty with with greece i the professor if i heard him correctly said that he lived in the in greece at the time of uh following the fascist coup which had been uh inspired by the united states i have to say uh that's the first time i've heard that i didn't i didn't know that was another one we should take credit for um i i'm not i'm not aware that we ever inspired a coup of any kind in greece but uh the the concern that i have for sovereignty is uh is is not abstract it's a it's a question about uh who governs uh and for the american people sovereignty sovereignty has never resided in the government uh you know the very term sovereignty comes from the sovereign the monarch uh in that sense is a is a european creation for us sovereignty is uh is expressly stated uh in the first three words of the constitution we the people that's where sovereignty lies that's where legitimacy lies and and frankly that's where i'd prefer to keep it i think our governmental institutions are problematic enough we struggle in our domestic politics we have our arguments about the proper balance of power the proper role and size of government uh and uh and uh it's hard enough for us to uh to govern ourselves uh in in that sense the united states remains a developing nation and always will be and i'm actually quite proud of that but what i don't think necessarily follows is that because of increasingly common problems around the world that the solution lies in ceding sovereignty to uh to international institutions and again i think this is largely a european debate uh europeans have gotten very used to ceding sovereignty to brussels that they're also very happy to try and get others to see their sovereignty to something else i don't see it that way i understand some of the origins of the desire for european union uh with the the rise of uh fascism and uh in germany and italy uh in in the pre-war uh period but other other sovereign powers in europe didn't fail britain didn't fail uh so i i don't i don't uh i i don't uh i don't buy the argument that sovereignty is part of the problem i don't think it gives winners or losers i think a sovereign nation like the united states uh through protection of its sovereignty uh has given its citizens a measure of liberty and economic security never before seen what why would i want to change that professor verofakis you want to respond to that the nature of sovereignty before i before i speak to to to the question about the greek coup data let me say that i see eye-to-eye with uh ambassador bolton on the question of sovereignty sovereignty is crucial and it must be the sovereignty of we the people whether we're talking about you know the other side of the atlantic in the united states or europe uh there has been a tendency he's quite right in europe over the last 50 years of european integration to diminish the importance of sovereignty to say silly things like um you know we are pulling a sovereignty together because these days um it's really not important because we live in an era of globalization where you know nobody's sovereign and therefore let's at least agglomerate you know stick together in order to be more powerful in this world and that is a major major source of confusion between sovereignty and power they are not the same thing you have a tiny little nation like iceland which is sovereign it's a country of 300 350 000 people they're not powerful but the sovereignty that they have has proven crucial for instance after 2008 in saying no we are not going to shift the losses of the icelandic banks onto the shoulders of you know small businessmen women households and so on and they managed to avoid the awful fate of the greek people who having ceded their sovereignty in the european union at least the monetary union the eurozone could not do that so i am a strong supporter even i would go as far as to say i'm quite bulkier when it comes to the importance of sovereignty the question is how do sovereign nations how do sovereign governments collaborate with one another and what kind of rules of the game do we want to institute so as to live in a good global society as opposed to a dystopia and here i'm going to end with a bit of news for ambassador bolton on the 21st of april 1967 a cia-sponsored coup took place in greece and then another one in the november of 1973 and you don't have to even believe me president bill clinton when he visited athens i believe at some point even apologized for this there is no doubt about it ambassador baldwin it was a very silly coup d'etat it was a very silly thing to have done because it didn't serve american interests even mutual respect of sovereignty and finding mutual agreements that are mutually beneficial amongst sovereign countries is the way to go the brethren would story which i keep repeating not because i'm a marxist irrespectively of whether i have a marxist or not because those who created britain would remember were american patriots mostly and they would really bulk if somebody called them marxists the beauty of the american of the bretonwood system was that sovereign nations came together and decided not to seek sovereignty but to come to an agreement that would be mutually beneficial regarding capital controls exchange rates and recycling of surpluses and deficits and i think this is what we need to do and that doesn't require any seeding of sovereignty thank you very much both of you um that was the end of the debate section so uh you in the audience the online audience we've got a number of questions already you're invited to write and submit questions hashtag holberg prize and uh you can submit the questions so i'm going to turn to some questions that have been brought by the online audience i guess under normal conditions you would have had a dinner last night with us and there would be a live audience and people would be clamoring for a microphone i suppose uh but we'll take do it what we can here um the first question i have here is for both of you and it says both bolton and verofocus at times have played roles of outsiders not always deciders but building new ideas breaking old ones creating space for change is that correct did you regard yourselves as outsiders in your careers and was that a time of reflection and development and forcing you in new directions or not and do you recognize that in each other i'll turn to you first ambassador bolton uh well thank you well sure uh you know look uh my first uh uh political campaign uh uh as a 15 year old high school student was for barry goldwater for president 1964 and he got whomped in one of the the worst landslides uh in american history uh but didn't uh didn't change my view that uh that he had been correct uh philosophically and uh uh i continued along that road i went to i'm a child of the sixties i'm a baby boomer and i got my undergraduate uh education at yale if if you want to consider being an outsider consider being a conservative at yale in the in the late 1960s but you know as the saying grows i think it it builds your character and and gets you ready for the larger debate thank you professor verofakis well i am i'm an accidental politician i never wanted to be one um the only reason why you're looking at me as a politician today is because greece went bankrupt in 2010 the state and the banks and the whole country and unfortunately we had governments and the european union bureaucracy an oligarchy that insisted of giving our country one a country our government one credit card after the next pretending that we are repaying our debts other conditions that were catastrophic for the private sector the public sector everyone and you know at some point after having written a lot and spoken a lot against that inanity that both leftists and rightists could agree was a crime against logic not just against our society at some point i was invited to join the government as a minister of finance and i got elected with a very large percentage of the vote in my constituency and the rest is history but because i was an accidental politician um i wasn't really interested in being a minister i was interested in getting a job done that is restructure the debt to get the people out here um out of debtors prison at the moment uh my prime minister went away another way and signed on the dotted line of another credit card application i was out yeah thank you um another question it's a question for you both um and it's as follows is turkey a source of regional instability and why should turkey remain in nato you started to answer this ambassador bolton about a decision on the part of aragon you want to follow up on as a source of regional instability you kind of alluded to that with creating neo ottoman empire and things but i'll ask the question yeah i mean turkey's a source of enormous instability erdogan is a follower of the muslim brotherhood he is he's provoking splits within the muslim world he's come very close to uh uh open warfare with uh with the syrians uh he's one of the key factors in the ongoing struggle in libya it's a i i don't i don't yet believe that erdogan really represents where the turkish population wants to go as i said earlier that's why i'm looking forward to the 2023 presidential election but if he continues down this path including purchasing advanced weapon systems from from russia he will de facto if not explicitly have separated himself from nato from europe from the west as a whole i as i say i don't think that's where the turks themselves want to go but we hope that they'll have a chance to make that decision uh in in the next national election professor verifakas uh at the risk of asking a greek about turkish uh instability but uh you already made a comment about you could take up the theme later so this is your chance to take it up about uh where to move on i mean right now france has become involved in conflict involving greece and turkey long-term prospects in turkey could you address those issues please well i thank you for the opportunity to do so turkey has been an unstable regime for a very long time they have a history of kudatas one after the other and every time a regime in turkey feels uh insecure the up the ante the increase the tensions in the aegean sea with us here in greece we are in other words as as a greek i have to say that turkey presents a clear and present danger for peace in the region in a way that greece doesn't our position has always been defensive maybe because we are the much smaller country the much smaller population uh and the country that has a far less need to export instability through aggression having said that erdogan remember has been ruling for a long time now i agree with ambassador bolton that now he's in the manoa minority thankfully the majority of turks have turned against him and the more they turn against him the more paranoid he he becomes the more the tensions that he builds up across the region but at the same time one has to say that he's a great beneficiary of united states policy it was the invasion of iraq that effectively destroyed almost every original power including egypt and left only two countries standing as potential representatives of the the muslim world iran on the one hand and turkey on the other and turkey has used that under erdogan the erdogan regime not turkey but the erdogan regime has used this in order to project power beyond the borders of turkey in a very efficient way this is not a compliment this is just a realization a recognition of a fact he is winning skirmishes or wars or conflicts in azerbaijan in nagorno-karabakh in libya in iraq in syria and that is allowing him to stabilize the inherently unstable regime within turkey speaking as a greek politician it is essential that the rest of us reinforce to the extent that we can our turkish democrat friends they are the ones that will have to overthrow erdogan they are the ones who will have to turn turkey into a source of stability in the neighborhood uh the european union is a source of instability you mentioned france look at what is happening in libya you have france supporting one of the warlords and you have the european union nominally at least on the side of the recognized government in tripoli you have you know german business uh actively involved in the turkish economy therefore the german chancellor will never contemplate sanctions against turkey whatever turkey does in the aegean and at the same time you have italian and french interests moving in the opposite direction the european union um you know if you put the words european foreign and policy together you end up with a very sad joke unfortunately so what i think we should be doing and this is what our party merit25 is proposing in the greek parliament is that the greek government should call for an eastern mediterranean conference call the leaders including erdogan to sit around the table not in order to agree but at least to sketch on the same map their demands regarding exclusive economic zones regarding the manner in which the eastern mediterranean must be divided up and then take this agree that we're going to take this to the international court of the hague and i'm not saying that this process would lead to peace but what i'm saying is that instead of siding with france versus turkey um creating these debates within the european union which are divisive and effectively aid and the bet erdogan we should call for a diplomatic solution that involves all member states of the eastern mediterranean and let erdogan say no to this this is going to diminish him in the eyes of turkish democrats in the eyes of the turkish people who are in the long run our best allies in turning turkey from a source of instability to a source of democracy and stability in the region thank you thank you thank you um this is a question uh asking just for ambassador bolton so i'll ask it use this is quoting from the online questioner you said in january 2019 that quote it will make a big difference to the u.s economically if we can have american oil companies really invest in and produce the oil capabilities in venezuela to what extent do the interests of u.s oil companies determine u.s policy on regime change uh they didn't determine policy the the oil company we were most concerned about and remain most concerned about in venezuela is citgo where there where the maduro regime continues to hold uh a number of citgo representatives and and the damage they might have done to citgo in the united states uh as a result of uh of u.s recognition of juan guido as the interim president what i was referring to there was the was the clear opportunity if the maduro regime were were forced to recede for american and other companies there would be an enormous opportunity to refurbish the incredibly devastated venezuelan oil infrastructure under 20 years of of socialist rule by chavez and maduro venezuelan oil production went down to a level that today is below the level venezuela produced in 1946 i just think about that for a minute here's one of the potentially richest countries in the hemisphere uh because of corruption because of the uh the mismanagement of venezuela's oil infrastructure is just crumbling in front of the people they they could see it that's one reason that their standard of living has declined so significantly so a venezuela that could elect its own government a freer venezuela had the possibility of bringing in not just american oil companies but whoever whoever was interested in bidding to rebuild that infrastructure and re-commence production of venezuelan oral oil which would have a tremendous positive benefit for the people of venezuela and i'm sad to say and i i regret to this day that we weren't able to overthrow the maduro government because he's a authoritarian and the people of venezuela have suffered suffered badly for the last 20 years professor vera fakas you want to respond to that the question was for the ambassador but i'm going to let you address the question too well firstly let me say from a climate change perspective that the optimal oil production level is zero we are past the times when oil was a source of wealth for humanity now is scourge it is jeopardizing the future of this planet and the species on it regarding venezuela ambassador bolton i wish that i lived in a world where we could all unite to allow the venezuelan people to decide their fate not to have this discussion as to whether you know one power or the other should overthrow a regime because as i said at the beginning i live in the country where we have had regimes being overthrown and there's actually democratic regimes that were overthrown i do not believe that it occurs well for global stability to be using the language of the coup d'etat as a means of introducing liberalism thank you thank you very much i'm i'm going to move on to another question and this is for you professor some of the greatest existential threats to humanity depend on the innovation and technological advancement that follow from capitalism including the climate crisis by opposing capitalism are you not also making it harder to come up with solutions well i'm not opposing capitalism capitalism is opposing capitalism the greatest enemy of capitalism is not the left it's not left-wingers like myself we are a pathetic lot we have never managed really to undermine capitalism capitalism is doing really very well despite our best efforts undermine it from the political left right but it is capitalism that generates the technologies that undermine itself it is capitalism that is generating the huge cartels that destroy competition the amazons of the world today the standard oils of the 1920s the techno feudalism that we now have consider this code now we have a situation where you know we have had a massive hit both on demand and supply internationally the financial markets are doing really very well why because they are completely and utterly dependent on public money printed by the central banks so you've got a financial sector that is doing very well thank you courtesy of the state that's not exactly a liberal capitalist situation right it's a kind of usurpational capitalism while uh you know small business medium-sized business people actually doing stuff out there are having a horrible time so this disconnection between financial markets and small businesses the way in which you know the american dream that we all had once upon a time that you know our kids would be better off than we are and that we were better off than our parents and grandparents that has gone for the vast majority of people in the west this is no longer the case hard work has been decoupled with poverty alleviation and therefore you see that capitalism is already morphing into something else something that bears no relationship to the writings without adam smith the idea of the baker the the brewer and the butcher you know who on the basis of competitive markets are producing are and supplying us with our daily bread meat and lager instead we have platform companies that resemble many soviet unions like google facebook and amazon to save democracy to save markets and competition we need to oppose that more more morphed version of capitalism that which is the evolution of a capitalism now doesn't even resemble the vision that pro capitalist great thinkers put forward okay thank you ambassador bolton you want to comment about the role of capitalism and technological development look 1776 was a very good year adam smith published the wealth of nations the united states declared independence the two have gone hand in hand together let me just say about capitalism and and i don't i don't want to make an extended debate capitalism is about freedom capitalism isn't some philosophy that's imposed from outside capitalism is what aboriginal peoples all around the world did some grew food some did other things they exchanged products this is this is uh this this is the way people live and uh and and the idea that uh that that somehow uh the the these fundamental human urges uh are gonna be transformed by governmental action into something else whether it's for climate change or or any other objective i just think is uh is fantasy i have another question for uh professor varufakis what is the relevance of marx's analysis the way governments across the world handle the covid19 crisis not much but not even neoliberal analysis because you see the problem with these grand systems of thinking is that they are particular formulations for particular uses what was the relationship within the thought of karl marx and the soviet union zero zilch if marx was alive in the 1970s he would have probably been a gulag what is the relationship between adam smith's wealth of nation that ambassador bolton mentioned and the capitalism we have today zero if you work as a warehouse worker in a roboticized process of production of distribution to be more precise you're not free you're a slave of precarity you live and work under awful unhygienic conditions that you accept because you don't have an alternative and by the way ambassador bolden i find your definition of capital is very interesting aboriginal societies did things together there was division of labor to some extent but it was exactly the opposite of capitalism it was based on common ownership it was based on common ownership of the land it was based on gift exchange it was precisely the opposite of the private concentration of wealth of ownership of means of production that we have under capitalism uh but what the the the the main lesson that i would like to draw attention to regarding kobe 19 is the way in which i mentioned that before i'll say this once more look something remarkable happened on the 12th of august last august in london at 9 05 in the morning there was the announcement that the british economy had tanked absolutely tanked because of kobe 19 you know more than 20 percent loss of gdp that had never happened in the history of britain and what happens 11 minutes later the stock exchange goes up by two two and a half percent why because we don't really live in a kind of free market capitalism of the kind that adam smith and ambassador bolton are referring to we are living in a state capitalism where the bank of england was immediately assumed to be printing lots of money to give to the finances while the little people out there continue either to uh not be able to to make ends meet or to worry about where their jobs are going to be going the next day professor ambassador bolton um i'm not gonna ask you about a marxian interpretation and uh i think actually the answer kind of ends that one um but i am going to ask you about um the response to you made you did explicitly mention failures with the response to covet 19. um what what would you i mean if you could rewind the clock or take a time machine back to january uh 2020 uh what policies should the u.s or other countries imposed what can we learn from countries that have handled the pandemic well say new zealand i mean it's an island and there's the abilities there but what lessons can we learn from the south koreas the taiwans the new zealands other things what could the us done differently well south korea is experiencing a substantial spike now i mean i think the real lesson derived from taiwan and new zealand is be on an island and be able to seal yourself off in the united states the the failure initially was was donald trump's uh unwillingness to listen to what he was being told as early as january uh and this has been reported in the new york times and plenty of other uh liberal media sources uh he was told in early january that the the risk was very significant that coronavirus would come out of china and have a very uh deadly effect on the united states certainly medically and quite possibly economically and he simply would not hear it he wouldn't hear it because he didn't want to hear bad news about his friend xi jinping he didn't want to hear bad news about the effect on the chinese economy at the same time he was trying to sign a significant trade deal which he did later in january and most of all he didn't want to hear bad news about an impact on the u.s economy which he at that time saw as his ticket to reelection so despite some relatively minor steps uh roughly three months went by before the united states took it seriously and then the response was essentially a shutdown which which tanked the economy almost immediately uh trump during this entire period and we're now almost 12 months into it has not yet he's obviously not going to develop the strategy he has never thought comprehensively about what to do when he created the potential mechanism within the u.s government to do that the coronavirus task force chaired by the vice president he made sure it didn't work by attending its briefings in the white house press briefing room because it was great air time for him until until what was left was pieces of the u.s government doing what their normal mission would be and the states and local governments trying to do the same so uh you know the answer is uh you you need to start back at the very beginning i i think the the steps to sometimes contradictory steps that the united states took show there was no comprehensive thinking about it and i think some of the steps were over inclusive like the continued effective lockdown of the economy and some steps were under inclusive with public health officials at the beginning saying there's no need to wear masks incredibly as we look back on it so there there was failure in many respects i think the main failure starts with the president you know you all know i'm sure harry truman's famous sign on his desk in the oval office the buck stops here trump would never think of putting a sign like that on the desk because it's always somebody else's fault uh but but i think uh if you if you have to look for root causes not not taking it seriously at the beginning and not thinking through uh the necessary steps uh uh i would put right at the top hopefully the vaccines that have begun to come online will will be the solution to the problem but but that's still six to nine months away when at least within the united states they would take their full effect so we have we have a long way to go and i think a lot more pain to experience thank you very much i'm we're now running close to the end of our time so i'm going to say how about two minutes each for closing comments and then i think we'll be pretty much out of time after that so i'll turn first to you ambassador bolton uh if you could final remarks for about two minutes please well i think it's uh it's very important as we come out of the coronavirus experience uh in the u.s and europe really around the world uh that uh that that we re-examine uh what went wrong and and try and do some preparation in advance for it it's a it's an experience that i think we didn't have to go through with the severity that we did but i will tell you that every terrorist group and rogue state that that watched what we did is thinking about why they want biological weapons we have files from al-qaeda in afghanistan after the overthrow of the taliban that show they were thinking about nuclear chemical and biological weapons then that's why the proliferation of these weapons of mass destruction has always been a priority of mine and i think now along with the nuclear threat the biological weapons threat is very imminent the world will be a dangerous place in the 21st century the world's probably always going to be a dangerous place but the way that you deal with the threat is not to ignore it and not to say that we can find mutually beneficial ways of overcoming these differences the way to deal with it is to have adequate structures of deterrence to deal with the threat until it disappears thank you very much uh professor verofocus two minutes please well in the spirit of um your choice of uh debaters today i suspect the reason you chose a european uh maybe a southern european and an american speaker is because you want from norway where you are to bring together the two continents to have a discussion about the future of the world so in my closing statement what i'm going to do is i'm going to bring out climate change which hasn't featured much but bring it out as an example of the kind of pedal that we face because just like climate change global security global poverty financial stability public health especially during a pandemic these are collective problems are humanity-wide problems that require collective decisions and collect collective action the united states after 1944 1945 has played a very significant role and often a very positive role in helping bring together the nations of the world in a degree of harmony and with some efficiency especially in the 1950s and 60s with brethren woods i do believe that europeans have two duties one is to unite within the european union properly to unite to create a proper political union so the americans can actually you know call someone with authority and secondly to elicit from the united states a new readiness to come to terms with a new multilateralism a new internationalism a new international solidarity that deals with these global threats as a common enemy if we don't if we fail to come together as europeans and globally international i very much fear that we are going to be on a perilous road to a parent future thank you thank you very much to both of you very much appreciate it and you're right there are so many themes we didn't touch upon climate change being a very important one that we really didn't adequately touch there's many many topics of course that we couldn't deal with i want to thank you thank you very much for watching and thanks for the questions appreciate it welcome and thank you from holberg prize debate thank you [Music] you

Channel: Holberg Prize

Views: 310,323

Rating: 4.6769018 out of 5

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Id: yyXIOBIOTCE

Length: 143min 20sec (8600 seconds)

Published: Sat Dec 05 2020

Reddit Comments

[u/SentientSeaweed]

Very little mention was made of Iran.

I’m posting here because any pro-Iranian will get a kick out of watching Bolton be so thoroughly outclassed.

[u/dennis_de_la_gras]

My position towards neocons is the same as Galloway's towards South African apartheid shills. That's all I can say without getting in trouble.

[u/AmerifatCheeseFart]

Dr. Varoufakis skillfully explains how authoritarian governments emerge following economic trends like we’re experiencing. Makes the connection to the pre-WWII period and today.

Bolton: idk about marxism, but uh, we gonna bomb China or what?..