In every century, there's war. In every century people get married. In every century people make a living. In every century people are surprised
that it still goes on the same way. We keep waiting
for some radical transformation of the human condition, it is not going to come. We will still fight,
we will still love, will still eat. How we do that, that may change, but we must always focus
on what is the permanent. In the 20th century, there was a great war; It began in 1914, it ended in 1945. It transformed the map of the world and transformed
the Arab world in particular. It created borders that may not be there, it created cities that hadn't been there, it was a tremendous change in human history. It has now been 70 years
since the end of that war, and we cannot understand this moment unless we understand the end of the war and what it gave us. At the end of the war,
Europe faced a moral abyss. It had done something unthinkable. Between 1914 and 1945. 100 million people dead,
100 million people dead. And it confronted itself
and asked the question: How could this be? How could we, the most civilized
part of the world, have done this? They thought of themselves that way. And they drew
two conclusions from the war: the first... was that there had to be multinational
organizations, that this war occurred because the League of Nations had failed, because at Munich we had been weak,
it is because we hadn't stuck together. The second conclusion they drew
is that the problem was nationalism. That somehow we must control nationalism, before it destroys us. And for 70 years the primary moral political economic
project of the world has been to create a world
in which the nation-state cannot do what it did from 1914 to 1945. To create a world
in which the nation-state was brought under control. And many of the things we look at:
NATO, the European Union, the various entities that came out
of the Bretton Woods Agreement like the IMF and the World Bank these institutions worked, we know it worked because during that
time there was no Great War, during that time
there was relative prosperity, during that time,
it was not a bad time to live. there are very... not very complicated
measures about such matters. But the problem that it posed is that it
challenged the fundamental moral principle
that had been with us since the French Revolution. The right to national
self-determination. And it challenged it
in an interesting way, it created NATO and it created the EU
and it created everything else but also created a class
we will call technocrats; A group of people whose right to rule derived from some sort of expertise. They were not elected,
they were not answerable in many ways, in some ways they were, but throughout the EU,
throughout NATO, through out the various
multinational entities that it had created, there was this class of expert, and they were supposed
to deliver us from our worst impulses. The problem with this class is there's
only one justification for them: they work. They have no justification
as representing anyone, they have no justification in terms of
moral rights, The only justification for
the technocrats is they do a good job. And the problem that happened began in two weeks,
in seven weeks I should say in 2008. On august eighth, Russia went to war with Georgia. And we suddenly discovered
that all of the assumptions about what the world would look like, what geopolitics would look like
after 1991 were false. Russia was back, it made war, and the entire international community
did nothing to stop them. Could not stop them. The second thing happened
seven weeks later, Lehman Brothers collapsed.
And with this we discovered that for all the technocrats who were overseeing the financial
industry, for all the technocrats that were monitoring,
for all of the financial engineers that were being produced by the Wharton School
or for Harvard Business, they were trading things
they didn't understand. In 1825, there was a great
financial crash in Britain. It occurred because they were buying
bonds from Latin American countries that didn't exist. but it didn't matter because they
traded them back and forth and they were quite happy. Until one day they realized
it wasn't there. This is what happened
with Lehman Brothers, Everyone knew that the price
of real estate could only go up. Just as they knew that the third world
debt crisis could not occur, Or anything else.
And what came out of that crisis was this. The United States on the whole
handled it fairly well. On a Sunday,
the head of the Federal Reserve. Secretary of Treasury, the bankers
went into room, broke several laws I'm sure, And came up with a solution that opened
the banks the the next day. No room was large enough
to hold all the Technocrats of Europe. Eight years after the collapse of Lehman Brothers,
Europe still has not come to terms with a solution to the crisis. Eight years after the Russian attack
on Georgia, the great multinational institution
still have not come to terms with what to do about Russia. But it was more than that, it's really
in Europe that we see this, that when it became important the Germans didn't want
to help the Greeks, The Greeks didn't want
to pay back to the Germans, Why? Because we're Germans,
they're Greeks. And then the great fantasy broke. The idea that a European civilization
was being born, in which borders didn't matter,
suddenly it mattered very much. Whether you were Greek or Spanish,
because in your country the unemployment rate
was above twenty percent. Or if you're a German because in
your country unemployment rates were
well below five percent. Suddenly the statement, it doesn't
matter, we're all Europeans, was falsified. And what happened in Europe, in a slow and unfolding process,
was the emergence of nationalism, out of self-defence. it had never gone away, the European Union had never figured
out a way to actually abolish it,
it was always there. But if you were a citizen of a nation, you understood something,
the fate of Europe is not your fate, in other words,
there is not a European outcome, there is a German outcome,
there is a Greek outcome, there is a Danish outcome. It was not that people decided
to become nationalists, it is that the reality was... there were nations, and where you live
determined what you did. And technocrats said on the whole
we're doing okay. There's an old American story:
if you put a man head in the oven, a man's feet in ice, on average, he's doing okay. But unfortunately, not living very well. But it went deeper than that, because it was not nearly
a difference between countries, it was within countries. The effect of 2008, was not the same for everyone. There was one effect for the technocrats, and now I'll use this badly,
this name badly, to... describe this entire class
who manage things, from finance to governments,
who did fairly well and there were those who absorbed
the twenty percent unemployment. And they saw Europe
in a very different way, and they saw each other
in a very different way. They saw Europe
as you usuping their future. If you're a Greek
and you're 45 years old and you lose your job,
you will never get another one like it. The devastation...
that was drawn in Europe... was stunning. It was stunning
because it was so unequally balanced and it was stunning because
the technocratic elite was oblivious to the price
that was being paid by others. What does that leave you? To demand for the right
for national self-determination. If you live in one of these countries and you realize that your generation
has been destroyed, or a class in a generation
has been destroyed, what is there left to you?
Your nation And what is your Prime Minister
going to? He is going to protect your nation. And what is the elite going to do?
Attack the Prime Ministers who protect their nation. Victor Orban of Hungary, who is disliked deeply
by the aristocrats, or technocrats, I should say, was face with a situation that in the 1990s, mortgages were sold
to Hungarians, denominated in euros, yen, Swiss francs, everything. the Forint, the Hungarian currency,
went down. Orban went to the EU and said:
"Look" "We're going to pay you back in Forints, and we're going to pay you back sixty
percent on the dollar, or will pay you nothing,
go home, think about it let me know in the morning." Orban represented the Hungarian people. He was overwhelmingly elected, And the European Union
tried to delegitimize him. Why? Both because he believed more
in national self-determination than in the liberal ideology
of the country, and because of the Europeans, and because he challenged
the basic assumptions which is that you may not protect
your people at the expense of the Union, but he did. It was a great moment in European
history that will be remembered, for better or worse, what we now have of course
is a tremendous division, not only in Europe
but in the United States and elsewhere between those who have
absorbed the price of national and international policies, and those who've benefited. the level of hatred is profound,
the anger is overwhelming, any attempt to say:
"look, this had to happen, this anger this rage"
is rejected out of hand. But it's there, it is an empirical fact
that we have to deal with. And in terms of thinking
of the next hundred years, think of this, think of a world which is
more like the 19th century than like the 20th century. For 70 years, it was one way. And now it's going in other way and this
will be the rest of the century. In the end, the French Revolution
and the Enlightenment was right. In the end, there has to be
a community that binds us together, in language and religion and history
and this is our nation. And in the end you must be allowed
to control your faith In a democratic way, and in the end
your job is not to satisfy anyone else, but yourself. This is not to say that trade
will not take place, of course a trade will take place. This does not mean that alliances
will not take place, of course they will take place. It does not mean that any of our
basic relations will not take place but they will not be hardwired, they will not be automatically
part of the system. I think the United States
will have a close relationship of the United Arab Emirates. It does not mean that it's eternal, it's permanent or inviolable. we will have leaders who challenge
the basic norms of past 70 years for a very simple reason, what was true 70 years ago
is no longer true. And the pain that trying to live
that way is extreme. During the Brexit crisis, I remember many people saying:
"I don't know who these people are. I've never met
the people who voted for Brexit." And therein lies the problem, there was a time when you would know people
from different classes, it's very difficult to think of a time
like this one. That there's so little interchange
between the two. In the United States
those who hate Donald Trump don't know those who love him. It's like I live in two countries,
since I dislike him and don't hate him. And I travel between the two countries
and it is inappropriate to criticize him in one, that means... or praise in the other, and that means that there will be
substantial internal instability in countries. I think it won't rip the countries apart but it will be substantial instability. Certainly, countries will rise
and countries will fall. The United States' is twenty-five
percent of the world's economy. One dollar in four
is produced by the United States. No matter how stupid we are,
that is a fact. No matter how stupid we are
we control the oceans. No matter how stupid we are,
we can send forces throughout the world. No matter how stupid we are,
we can make mistakes, because we have so much. Some countries that declined, we are seeing the second act
of the collapse of the Soviet Union now. Russia heavily dependent on oil,
can't survive in this price. China is doing what Japan did, Becoming a normal country,
growing at a normal rate, but unlike China, it has a billion
people living an extraordinary poverty. Germany, derives fifty percent
of its GDP from exports. In a world in stagnation, in recession,
I don't know how you keep that up except by cutting prices,
which they did. Countries will emerge. The great power of East Asia for me
is at Japan. The third-largest economy
and those are actually true numbers. The third largest economy socially stable society
and a substantial Navy. Turkey, when I said this 10 years ago, that Turkey would be a great power,
they laughed uncontrollably. now the laughter is controlled. Russia faces Turkey as an equal. Turkey faces Russia as an equal. And tries to decide what it will do, and hopes that it will not have to do
anything, but it will have to do something. And Poland as Russia weakens,
and Germany weakens take a look at the numbers,
what is the fastest growing economy in Europe? Poland. So this is what remains the same,
there will be rising powers, there will be declining powers, there will be powers
that remain in place. They will be different.
But what we have seen I think is the end of the myth of two things: the multilateral institutions will solve
all of our problems. The second myth that is if you get
somebody from Harvard to manage it, it's far more difficult than that. And the second myth is
do not look at the GDP. Look at how the GDP is distributed, because that will tell you
what your future looks like. The world will not change, there will be nations,
there will be wars, there will be money, there will be love,
there will be all these things. The names of the players will be different. They're changing before our eyes. But the thing to understand
is that the period that began in 1945, is coming to an end, and seventy
years is a very long time for any period. The idea that the solution is "let us all
go back to what was" would be nice. But the price has been too high
and the cost unsupportable. So what I would urge you to think about
here in the Emirates, and you are in a unique position, and you have maintained in many ways
your independence, your options, your rights, is how you manage this
in the next 70 years. Because it is an enormously complex issue
to be responsible for your sovereignty. It is far easy to give it to someone, and very difficult to take it back. Let me end here and let me urge you
to consider that I mourn the past 70 years. It was a good time, but no matter how much I would mourn it,
it's done, now we move on. Thank you
