Walter Russell Mead - How America Keeps Winning - [Invest Like the Best, EP.490]

Walter, I've been looking forward to this for many, many months. We were introduced through Jeremy Stern, who runs Colossus, and who I know credits you with a lot of his skill in writing and thinking about the world. I've been so excited to do this with you.

We've got such a wide range of topics that I thought it would be appropriate to begin by having you frame your view of America in the world today. In very broad strokes, you've written a lot about how and why the UK, and then us as its successor in America, have won the last several hundred years of global affairs. I'd love you to talk about the sweep of that winning and how you conceive of us and our role in the world today.

1. America’s Power in Crisis

It's a really interesting time because, on the one hand, the Pax Americana that we developed after 1945 and then refurbished in 1990, at the end of the Cold War, is really in crisis. But if you step back a little bit, American power is not in crisis. The networks that we built up, the way of dealing with the world, the institutionalized relations with Europe, and so on, those are all burning or crumbling.

But the United States as a power, it seems to me, is, if anything, charging ahead, thanks to the information revolution and these extraordinary rises in productivity that I believe we have experienced and are about to experience. It's this odd picture of a dynamic country and a collapsing world system. The Trump presidency has exaggerated a lot of the disruption. I'm optimistic about America's position in the medium to long term. I do think we're in rough waters right now.

What do you mean by a collapsing world system?

Well, you think about the World Trade Organization. We used to have this rules-based system for trade. Now your tariff is more or less what President Trump wakes up in the morning and thinks it should be.

As a country, we exercised more of our power through institutions—the NATO alliance, the UN even at times—and we're not doing that. Since World War II, it's been a principle of American foreign policy that we want to be steady and predictable. You want everybody to know where America's red lines are. You want everybody to be able to rely. If we made a commitment in 1955, unless we announce with great fanfare that it's changing, it's still there.

So we're trying to provide this bedrock of solidity in the world, and we're obviously not trying to do that anymore. For President Trump, I think he believes he maximizes his advantages by being completely unpredictable and also crossing a lot of lines. Past presidents probably would not have said things like, "Okay, if you don't raise your defense budget, we're going to double your tariffs," or something of that kind, and try to solve problems through channels.

Trump would make the argument that didn't work, and so he's now completely trashing the institutional networks that, for a very long time, were the vessels of American power. I think he's doing it in a way that's going to be very hard for his successors to rebuild.

How would you teach someone else his method? You've written a lot about this, and I'm very curious how you framed it. He's an interesting president, no doubt, whether you're for or against what he's been doing. How would you teach his method to somebody who was curious to learn how he operates so distinctively?

2. Trump’s Spectacle of Power

He really is a genius. He's discovered, I think, one of the secrets of power in the contemporary world, which is that he's managed to turn fame into power and drama into power, and to do it in ways that leave him completely free to act.

If you lie enough, the marginal cost of your 10,000th lie is nothing. While the marginal cost of your first, second, or third lie is very high. All of the normal constraints on political figures, reputational and so on, he does not pay.

In some ways, I think President Clinton first discovered that shame only matters if you let it. Shame is an emotion that exists in other people's minds. A lot of people thought when the Monica Lewinsky thing came out that he would have no choice but to resign. This was so overwhelming, so dreadful. He basically realized, no, if you just keep putting one foot in front of the other, you just pass through it.

He was thrilled.

The dogs will bark, but the caravan will move on. Trump has deployed that concept on an industrial scale.

You talk about this notion of speech and spectacle. Can you say more about what you mean there?

The Donald Trump Show is the most compelling entertainment, infotainment spectacle that humanity has ever seen. Since the dawn of time, no living human being has occupied the amount of bandwidth of the human race that Donald Trump does.

Now we say, well, global media and so on, but it's very hard to think ever of a single ruler who just dominated everything. Anywhere you go in the world today, I don't care where it is, what you hear is Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump, Trump.

Some people hate Trump. Some people love Trump. Some people laugh at Trump. Some people are astonished by Trump. Some people spend their lives thinking about their contempt for Trump, but he remains the center of everything, and he sees that as the key to his unique power.

A lot of people thought that when he lost in 2020 it would go away, that that was it. He was just about as dominant out of office as he had been in office. At what he does, he is as good as Napoleon was at what he did.

I observe that Napoleon also lost at Waterloo and ended in exile, so this is no guarantee that it will be what Trump would consider a happy ending to the whole spectacle. But he is a major historic figure who has developed a new understanding of how power works in an era of mass communications and social media, and the rest of us are just trying to deal with it.

How do you think the world is, or will be, most different because of his role in it?

Well, I think he has vastly accelerated the disintegration of the post–World War II/post–Cold War structures. They're not going to be the same. He's not the only one who's done this, but I think we're entering an era of much more personal and much less bureaucratic politics.

For a long time in the 20th century, people got into the habit of thinking that one-person rule, or a central figure, should be downgraded, and that we should be run by institutions, bureaucrats, or committees. I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again.

So in India you see Modi. We saw Abe in Japan, Bibi in Israel, Erdogan in Turkey, and Trump in the United States. Trump is sort of the greatest of these, the most globally impactful of this new wave. Putin, Xi Jinping. We're back to an era of personal politics.

If you think about the broader, longer arc of dominance or power leading up to this moment, I love the historical context. You're an amazing historian. Talk about why, whether it's maritime dominance or other major reasons, you think the UK and America, up until, let's say, the end of the Cold War or something, had such an incredible run.

3. The Maritime Power Strategy

Let's just start with the US–China rivalry today, and what you see is the two sides. One is a land-based continental empire, China, which believes that it can match the technological and therefore military strength of the other power without all that political liberalism and messy democracy. Okay, great idea.

The first ruler in modern times, I think, to really embrace that was Louis XIV, who thought that his technocratic government of experts in France could beat those pesky English, with all of that ridiculousness. Every 20 years they kill the king or kick him out, or who knows what they do. But it's utterly chaotic.

The French idea was, we can do that with a strong, centralized system. From the time of Louis XIV right up until now, you could argue that the dominant theme of global power politics has been the rise of this English-speaking, maritime, commercial, liberal order, and then its successive contestation by a series of great-power continental states.

France under Louis XIV, again with Napoleon; Germany and Prussia in World War I and then World War II; and the Soviet Union. These contests have been incredibly difficult. There have been moments in every case where the technocratic, centralized land power looked like it was just walking away, and the ridiculous, confused, commercial, English-speaking maritime alliance was muddled, lost, and crazy.

And yet somehow, in the end, the hobbits keep winning. I should say that we stole our global strategy from the British. They stole it from the Dutch, who had been doing this earlier in the 17th century. In God and Gold, one of my books, I say that you could sum up the last 300 years of modern history in 10 letters: UP, United Provinces, to UK, to US.

Mm.

Now, obviously, that raises the question. I don't think China has it in it to beat us.

What is that strategy—the maritime strategy? What have these 3 entities done that's been so effective to let the hobbits win?

I don't know if I can really reveal all this—the secret 5-point plan for global dominance. But okay. Why not? I'm just going to ask everyone who hears this to be careful with how they use this information. It'd be terrible if it fell into the wrong hands.

Step 1 is to have an open society at home. Think of the Dutch in the 17th century. Everybody had these wars of religion. The Dutch are pretty Calvinist, but they say, “Well, you know what? These Lutherans, they're scum. They're going to hell. Everybody knows that. But until they do, they could pay taxes and contribute to the economy.” Even the Catholics—of course, they can't do their filthy idolatrous rites in the streets or anything, but live and let live. The Jews: live and let live.

If an intellectual or a scientist publishes some kind of scientific paper that the church doesn't like, people will write nasty comments about it in other journals. But when Galileo doesn't go to prison, there's no Inquisition. If you have an idea, you can try it. If you are the son of a peasant and want to try it as a merchant, and you can find some people who will let you do it, go right ahead.

They come up with new ideas for government finance that we still use, the joint-stock company, new seagoing technology, and the circulation of the blood. Locke comes to Holland and writes a lot of his best work there. That's step 1. You have this open, dynamic society, the intellectuals are flocking there, and your universities are flourishing.

Step 2 is, with all of these products that you've developed and innovative technology, you take the show on the road. You trade globally. I think there were 10,000 seagoing ships coming from the Netherlands in the 17th century.

Wow.

They're traveling all over the world. What this does is make you stinking rich. I advise my students sometimes to go to The Met museum here, or any number of places, to see the Dutch masters—not to look for the brushstrokes and the composition, which are exquisite, all of which is true, but just to look at all the stuff that these people have in their paintings. Here's the merchant with his silk robe from China, standing on a rug from Turkey, with a stuffed parrot from Brazil on his mantelpiece. There's just this astounding amount of wealth, which then allows you to start thinking globally.

18th century, the Prussians fight, Frederick the Great fights with Maria Theresa over Silesia, the Seven Years' War. This is a beautiful... I've been there. I've been to Silesia. I love Silesia. It's a sausage-shaped province in modern Poland. In the Seven Years' War, both countries go bankrupt, and in the end, Frederick gets it, which means he's Frederick the Great, and it's just Maria Theresa who lost. During that Seven Years' War, the British basically kicked the French out of India, Canada, and North America, and established the foundations of the world order that we still live in today.

You're thinking globally. Once you have built this global system, you then do something extremely treacherous, which is invite everyone else to participate in your system. You don't do what the Spanish did in Latin America, where you say, “This is ours. We conquered this. Nobody else can trade here. You people stay out,” which obviously condemns it to a certain stagnation.

The British in the 19th century had free trade in the British Empire. Everybody could trade, and the British Navy kept piracy down for everybody, not just for the Brits. What this does is encourage other countries to participate in your system. As we did with Britain, we didn't fight with them after 1812. We came close a couple of times, but at the end of the day, we traded in the British system. We were among the greatest beneficiaries of what the British did, and the Germans did the same thing.

Prussia, the German Empire, became a great trading power. They had investments in Argentina and Chile, and in many places their commerce was driving out the British. Then the Germans discovered that we have another little trick up our sleeves. They go to war in World War I, and they suddenly discover that while they were integrating into the world, that made them very rich, gave them great technology and a lot of military power, but now they're dependent on it.

Suddenly, they're at war with the UK, and they can't get all that grain from Argentina and America that fed their people. They can't get that imported rubber from Malaya that provides the tires they need for war. They've grown dependent on that international system, and you're able to cut it off. This is one of the big reasons the English won so many of these wars.

The system exists. I think a lot of Americans really aren't conscious of it, but we sort of revert to these patterns. Things happen, and we just behave in these ways. After the end of the Cold War, what do we say to Russia and China? “Come on in,” just as we said to Germany and Japan in 1945: “Benefit from the system.” Actually, we waited until about 1947 to do that, but in any case, “Come on in, benefit.”

Now both Germany and Japan are principal pillars of the world system. We sort of hoped that Russia and China would do that too. They've taken more of the Wilhelm II path than the Konrad Adenauer path. We are now testing what happens there. It's one of the reasons I'm worried. But it's a pattern that has been recurring, and so far, whenever it finally comes to the test, our side has been winning.

If I were to imagine an equivalent of me and an equivalent of you sitting somewhere in China today, and I asked you the same question about how power is formed, what do you think they would say there under a very different system?

I used to have these conversations in China. Some of my books have been published in Chinese, and I've gone to Chinese universities and had these conversations with scholars and officials. What I can say is that they are very aware of this dynamic.

If there are things that keep Xi Jinping awake at night, I think one of them is his awareness that in any kind of conflict with the United States, China would face being cut off from so many of the raw materials and markets that its economy needs. Let's imagine China declares a blockade of Taiwan, which could very easily happen, and the United States, just from 100 miles farther out, imposes a counter-blockade on China. Nothing is going in or out—no oil is coming in or out, and no manufactured goods are being sold. What happens to the Chinese economy?

All the soybean contracts they have with farmers in Brazil and Argentina aren't getting delivered. We've all been surprised with the Iran war to see just how big the Chinese oil stockpiles have become. A lot of Chinese energy policy can be understood as trying to avoid the trap of dependence on the global economy. They're doing solar, they're doing as much hydro as they can, and some of our friends in the environmental movement are saying, “Oh, it's so wonderful. They're so green. Let's cooperate with China to build a new world.”

They're also digging as much coal as they possibly can, because what they're trying to do is make themselves less dependent on the outside world so that, in a worst-case scenario with the U.S., they can actually fight for the long term.

Do you think the U.S. runs the risk of trying to do that same thing—become more isolationist? Our exports are relatively low as a percentage of GDP compared to lots of other countries throughout the world. We are fairly self-sufficient. America's an amazing place: natural-resource-rich, with 2 oceans on either side. We have these amazing advantages. Maybe we could do it without this interdependent thing that's created this amazing power structure as you laid it out. Does it worry you that we trend more in the direction of being isolationist or something?

I think, look, there is obviously in American history a tradition of isolationism that is stronger at some times than others, and it's definitely coming up now. It does worry me a good deal, because I do think American security and the American economy ultimately require us to be engaged globally—not necessarily as global social workers or something.

You think about our trade: roughly a third of it is in the hemisphere, a third of it across the Pacific, and a third of it across the Atlantic. We couldn't very easily do without any one of those. We saw during the pandemic that our dependence on China for all kinds of things was really quite alarming. People look at our supply chains, and they can see a lot of vulnerabilities.

But we can't make everything that we need right here. We can't get all the raw materials that we need right here. Our producers also need more than the American market. Traditionally, the freest-market lobby in the United States has been the agricultural lobby, because America can do a lot more than feed ourselves. Our farmers can feed practically the world, and if they're reduced to only feeding the American market, they can't make money. The prices are so low. They need that market.

The same is true—there are so many economies of scale. If our AI companies and our tech companies can only benefit from the internal American market, that's actually not enough to generate the revenue and growth they need even to stay technologically equal, say, to China, much less be ahead and be super profitable. Our business needs the world.

Then there's the question of, okay, you can't really make people buy your stuff at the point of a gun, and you don't really want to have a gun around all the time.

So you have to have a trading relationship that works for both sides. Both sides have to agree to the trade. There are ways of doing that. We got very doctrinaire in this belief that a simple free trade system would work. We didn't look for systematic cheating from China.

But after World War II in particular, a lot of the European countries were so poor and devastated from the war that reviving their economies became necessary for American security. Otherwise, they would have gone communist, and we didn't want that. So we said, “Okay, fine, Germany, you can have really high tariffs on American goods, but we won't reciprocate because it's in our interest for you to grow.” A lot of that stuff got institutionalized.

There are many cases now where you have nonreciprocal tariffs, and our barriers have been lower. I think the Trump people were not wrong to say, “Okay, this needed to change.” We're also seeing, with the need for supply chain security and so on, that you can't simply take your economic policy out of a free-trade textbook. On the other hand, you do still need trade. Trade needs to be beneficial on both ends.

I want to talk about the changing orientation of U.S. versus the world—sort of our foreign policy—but first ask about technology. When I started my career, I'm 41, so 20 years ago, call it, I remember seeing—I've always been an investor—if you looked at the top 10 or 20 market-cap companies, it was a total global mix of companies from many different industries. It looked like this kind of potpourri list. Now, that same list is literally just American technology companies, basically 1 through 20. There are a couple of exceptions. It's more or less total dominance by American technology companies.

And that was true before OpenAI, Anthropic, and SpaceX. Now those are resurgent even on top of our great technology companies. I'd love to just hear you reflect on how tech, and of course AI—you have to ask about that as well—are changing the nature of global order in such a digitally dominant set of technologies that we're once again the leader in. How do you process it?

4. Riding the Technology Wild Horse

I do try to look to historical analogies. There's nothing exactly the same as this. The closest you really can see is the actual Industrial Revolution. Interestingly, the country that led the first Industrial Revolution, Britain, then dominated for 150 years and became a dominant power. History is moving a lot faster now, but I think we absolutely have been in this position of being the first to really see and use this potential source of power.

I think since the 17th century, the key to power in the modern world is which countries can be most effective at developing, harnessing, and exploiting the power of new technology without blowing up internally because of the social stresses and upheavals that new technology causes. For a lot of reasons, I think first the British and then we were just better at riding that wild horse than other people were. I think that is still true, but you can look at American society today and see the reaction against tech, this sort of anti-data-center thing, and you've got Trotskyists in the DSA thinking that the most retrograde forms of Marxism are our only salvation in this terrible situation.

It's not a given that we will be able to pull it off again. There is enormous progress and yet total chaos and dissension. The relationship between achievement and order right now has broken down because we need a different kind of order than we've had, because our technology has created a new kind of world. It is changing the way power works. It is changing the nature of power. So far, America is doing what we've been doing for a very long time, which is dominating the cutting edge.

So we've developed it. We have the horse. What's the key to riding the wild horse? Because I think everyone in America would say, “Yeah, I hope the next 150 years we dominate,” and it's because—

But in a nice way.

But in a nice way.

Because that's the kind of people we are.

How would you have us do that? What are the keys to doing that well now that we have the horse?

America's always been an ownership society. Why did a lot of the founders think that the United States could survive as a reasonably democratic republic? One of the big answers was that instead of being a country of people who lived in cities and basically owned nothing and worked for other people, America was, by and large, a country of independent farmers who were kind of small-business people and who owned their own land, had a stake in the system, and whose life experience as owners taught them citizenship.

“Boy, I really would love to see a new bridge over the stream here. On the other hand, if they build that, they're going to have to raise my taxes.” I then calculate in a rational way what I would like to happen, and that is the kind of political education that prepares me to take a thoughtful role in the councils of the country. Plus, I'm independent.

Then with the Industrial Revolution, can this continue? We're getting the big cities, we're getting industry. Well, the first stage is the railroads and the Homestead Act; they kind of come in together. The government gives a ton of land, in often somewhat corrupt ways, to railroads to build transcontinental railroads that turn the country into a national market, but then also gives free land to the American farmer. You go live on your farm for 5 years, and it's yours. Amazing.

For the ordinary person, all right, I'm getting a free farm out of the system, and I'm a farmer, and yet you're doing this in a way that is simultaneously allowing the infrastructure of a new industrial society to take place. To get into the 20th century, think about how, as the family farm begins to decay economically, it can't compete. You have to be very well capitalized to farm under modern conditions and so on.

As people are starting to work in cities and be employees, is this going to endanger the republic? Are we still going to be a free society of free people? Essentially, we came up with the idea of the single-family home in the suburbs to replace the single-family farm.

A lot of government policy was around not only building the freeways and the highways, but also subsidies through the tax code so that municipal bonds are tax-free. That means towns can build the infrastructure that you need to attract the developers and the homeowners who will then raise the value of the property, and so you can repay the bonds out of the higher property values that the infrastructure has created. So this is a kind of wealth-creating machine.

Right now, we seem to be in a place where we're reaching the limits of that wealth-creating machine because it's just too expensive for the average person to buy a house and land close enough to where you work so that the commute isn't killing you. You look at why so many young people are really unhappy with the way the economy is working. Home ownership is one of the real big problems.

Information technology can kind of address this between remote work, hybrid work, and self-driving cars. If you only have to go into work once or twice a week or twice a month or whatever, you can work farther out. If you expand the commuting radius, say from 40 miles to 75 miles, the amount of land that is developable for housing goes up with the square of the radius. It's geometric. So, appropriately deployed, information technology can open up this wealth-creating machine for another 2 generations.

Is there something equivalent to the Homestead Act or the subsidy of homes that could drive this expansion? It seems like a really important thing to get right for America.

I think so. I think we should be doing things like encouraging remote and hybrid work. Now, there are problems with it. Mentoring—there are benefits. Fine. All right? There are problems with every form of technology. How many people has the car killed since we started using cars? How much money has it cost for the highway systems and so on? A new technology just doesn't appear like an angel and grant wishes everywhere. You have to think really hard about how to make it work.

I think of this as infostructure. Infrastructure is building the bridges and the physical structures. Infostructure is the institutional, legal, and regulatory framework that can allow AI technology to develop and give better results to patients in a hospital. That's actually incredibly complicated. Or it could transform the legal system. It's very complex stuff. You need a new kind of social imagination for that, which I think we need to develop.

But in this housing example, if a company says, “Fine, you can stay home 60% of the time,” that's less wear and tear on infrastructure and fewer construction needs. A tax benefit for companies that move toward greater hybrid and remote work is not a net cost for government because, in fact, you're saving on another part of the budget.

This technology seems so unique, and I'm curious what you think about it. In the case of AI, we've seen with China—which seems to be the other great power today—that, by using the technology we've invested in, they're able to distill—that would be the term in the AI world—and have fairly comparable systems without the capital investment, which is very different from the highway system or the railroads. You can't copy those things. You have to do it yourself.

The economy of scale is easier for me to get my head around when it's a railroad than when it's a frontier lab model or something like this, which makes me wonder about the right kind of foreign policy. It's a good excuse to talk about your 4 kinds of American foreign policy historically. Maybe you could just quickly tick through them and outline them as an intro before we talk about the notion of tech Hamiltonians that I thought was quite interesting of yours.

5. Four Schools of Foreign Policy

One of the interesting things about America is that our foreign policy arguments are very repetitive. Basically, if something comes up in foreign policy, we'll argue about it in many of the same ways they would have done in George Washington's day. Our views of the country and of foreign policy fairly predictably fall into 1 of 4 baskets.

One is what I do call Hamiltonian—Alexander Hamilton. What you see is a strong capitalist economy that is trading effectively with the rest of the world, provides the money and the technological progress that holds society together because people are making money at it and they're happy, and also gives you the strength so that no other country can attack you. We should have a strong federal government that does things like promote infrastructure at home and sees itself as trying to help major American companies succeed internationally. George H.W. Bush, in some ways.

Then you have people who say, “Ugh, money, that's just so vulgar. What about human rights?” They would argue, “You know what causes the threats that America faces? Well, it's bad governance—dictatorships. And democracies don't go to war; dictatorships do. Generals like to fight, moms don't.” American foreign policy should be about promoting democracy globally and promoting international institutions. Let's get rid of war by getting rid of the causes of war. That's a kind of Wilsonian approach, which we certainly had actually long before Woodrow Wilson.

Then you've got people who say, “Wait a minute, the thing that's great about America is personal liberty, the fact that the government doesn't control us all and isn't taxing us to death. If we get involved, whether it's these Wilsonian crusades for human rights or Hamiltonian great-power balance-of-power politics and international finance, what we're going to have is a powerful government that has secrets from the American people, runs colossal defense budgets, gets us into endless wars, and that will destroy our liberty. We can conquer the world and lose our freedom at home. What kind of foreign policy is that?” Again, we've been having this since the 1790s.

And then finally, there's the group I call Jacksonian, after Andrew Jackson, who sort of say, “Well, listen, foreigners, they can be democratic. I don't really care what the foreigners do as long as they don't attack us or impugn our honor. If somebody attacks us, we should just go out and crush them. And laws of war? No. Like rats, you should exterminate them, and you beat them and pound them and crush them until they understand that the last thing they should ever do is raise their hand against the United States.” Jacksonians often look like Jeffersonians, the isolationists, in times of peace, but something happens like Pearl Harbor and 9/11, and suddenly the Jacksonians are activated.

So I think we've been having these things for a very long time. We still have them today. I say these are like suits in a deck of cards. Very few of us have just all 13 Hamiltonian cards. We generally all have a mixed hand, but some suits tend to be stronger than others for each of us.

Which of those suits do you think most defines us today?

Well, I think the old Democratic consensus—let's say the Clinton consensus—was very much a coalition of Wilson and Hamilton. Build a global system that advances the country's economic security but also promotes human rights and democracy, and that will both make us rich and build a lasting global peace. That's been kind of the predominant establishment idea really since World War II.

Special Providence came out right around the time of 9/11, and people at that time weren't really aware that there was anything but Hamilton and Wilson. Then they suddenly discovered, “Oh, wait a minute, there are these Jacksonians,” who wanted to nuke Afghanistan or whatever came up after that.

I would say that Trump's coalition is a mix of Jeffersonians and Jacksonians— isolationists and hawks. You could say Vance is the isolationist champion in some ways, and Rubio is the hawk. Rubio is not interested in the United Nations. Look, in Venezuela, let's get rid of our enemy Maduro, but we're not going to make the restoration of democracy in Venezuela the key to everything, which someone like Obama or Biden, I think, would have tried much harder to do.

So on Ukraine, you can see the Jeffersonians saying, “Well, this is not really our fight. Let's stay out of it.” Meanwhile, the Jacksonians are just saying, “Russia's the enemy. Let's knock Putin and punch him in the nose while we can.” They're all active today.

Maybe say 1 word more about this notion of tech Hamiltonian as a key faction that's emerged. Typically, tech and the government were, in my career, different concepts.

One of the biggest things that happened in modern American history is the mutual discovery of tech and government. In the 1990s, which was back in the old end-of-history, end-of-nations period, companies would say, “Oh, I'm not an American company. I'm a global company,” right? Nowhere was that stronger than in the world of tech, where Google has no boundaries. The cyber world is completely different. All of that stuff is irrelevant to us. Washington, they don't even understand us, and we will just do what we do.

Today, tech is actually the locus of international great-power competition, and China's attempt to build a technosphere that can dominate the American technosphere is really critical to your business, but also to the American state. For the American government, it's critical to power and independence. Much, I think, to the surprise of both the tech world and the political world, they've been driven into each other, and there's a kind of re-nationalization of tech and of the economy that we see.

The tech folks—and you may know better; certainly Jeremy understands them a lot better than I do—but my sense is that when the tech folks think about what their economic interests are, they're different from what you might call a legacy multinational: the post–World War II companies that are basically global trading and manufacturing companies. I make cars from things I import from all over the world. I have factories all over the world that make cars. So for these companies, free trade is the essence of their business. I need financial markets, I need labor markets, and I need manufactured-goods markets that are seamless and open. As Tom Friedman put it, I need a flat world.

But if you're a tech company, you don't. Alphabet is not importing and exporting a lot of goods. Even something like immigration—which, if you're a hotel company or a construction company, means having hardworking, cheap migrant labor is pretty important to your business model—if you're a Silicon Valley company and suddenly there's no more unskilled labor crossing from Mexico, the cost of your janitorial and gardening services rises 30%. So what?

You're much more concerned about security of supply chain and security of intellectual property. I think increasingly companies are starting to realize that they need their employees to be patriotic. That is, your employees need to think it's an evil sin to sell IP to China. Your coworkers will rat you out in a heartbeat if they think you're doing something like that.

Both the economic agenda of the tech sector of the business world and the kind of cultural and political attitude are changing. Because again, with the legacy multinationals, I want to have a completely international workforce. I don't want it to matter whether my employees are from Sri Lanka or Taipei or wherever. I need interchangeable units that I can plug in anywhere.

If you take a big step back with all of this context and just think about global power, I feel like almost the whole world has decided that it's the Americans and the Chinese that have any real power or are contenders to be the powerful nation of the next period of time. What are the other interesting sources of power that have your interest and curiosity, with all the attention on just these 2? We'll keep talking plenty more about these 2 as well, of course, but what other areas of power are most interesting to you right now?

6. India’s Multipolar Vision

Well, I've gotten very interested in India. I've been lucky enough to get to know a number of the folks who are close to the BJP and the RSS, which is the kind of Hindu nationalist group that helped to create the BJP. This is a group of people who 100 years ago was basically 5 guys in a house, and they've now built this mass movement that has something like 86,000 small groups around India that meet weekly. They're an incredibly dynamic political force. They powered Modi, and they have very strong ideas about what India should be and what makes a country.

India is now the most populous country in the world. India has been pretty successful at developing a tech industry. It's not at the frontier of AI. I think it may get there faster than people think. And it has its own sharply different view of what the world should be like.

Which is what?

Multipolar, but not in the Chinese way. Jaishankar, who is the foreign minister of India, once said that China is a revisionist power, while India is a reformist power.

India's not really happy with the global status quo. In the United Nations system, India, with 1.4 billion people and nuclear weapons, has exactly as many votes in the General Assembly as Liechtenstein or Luxembourg: 1 vote. It's ridiculous, and there's a certain kind of Western domination to the way a lot of international life is organized because it was basically organized by the Europeans and the Americans at a time when nobody else really had much of a standing.

There are a lot of changes they want to make, but they really don't see the kind of Chinese autocratic, top-down approach as possible for India or as good for the world.

They're an interesting power with different ideas, and I'm very much looking to see how that develops. I think the Islamic world—again, we are seeing the world of Islam—ranges from sophisticated scholars, intellectuals, and writers to jihadis in North Africa with machetes torching huts or something. All of this range is an immense civilization, but as a force in the world, there's more of it. It's becoming stronger.

Understanding how it's changing, how the culture in the Gulf states and Turkey is changing and developing, is important. I think the Industrial Revolution forced societies to become similar to each other because if you're going to have big manufacturing plants, big infrastructure, trains, highways, airports—all of this—there are certain things you just have to do institutionally and organizationally that tend to force you toward what we would think of as a European or Western way of life and politics.

The information revolution enables countries to use their own cultures, languages, and so on as platforms. Turkey is more Turkish. It's less like Europe now than it was 25 years ago. India is becoming more Indian. I think Japan is becoming more Japanese. In the Industrial Revolution, there was a tendency toward convergence among the great civilizations. Now, I think we're seeing a divergence.

I'm not sure I fully understand the reason why that is. Can you explain it a little bit more?

MTV, when it first went into Latin America, was showing American rock videos, and everybody said, “Oh, this is going to be the end of indigenous Latin culture,” and so on. But before long, they weren't showing many American videos at all because local artists were able, in a pretty cheap way, to have their own music and their own videos that responded to those sensibilities. So I think we're seeing a lot of that now. Instead of having to be on the mainline programming of global programming, you're much freer to go off into your own civilization.

In that structure, I'm sure AI just pours fuel on that fire. What scares you the most? As you think about the global power dynamics—and I'm assuming your vision of the future that's optimistic would be progress and prosperity or something—what would most get in the way of the kind of future that you'd want to see?

7. The New Face of War

Oh, a lot of things. The Industrial Revolution was, in the long run, a pretty good thing, but it had little side effects, like the Communist Party, the killing of 100 million people, World War I, World War II, and the Reign of Terror.

Why were those necessarily side effects of the Industrial Revolution?

Because I think the social stresses that come with these new technologies uproot millions of peasants from the farms where they've lived forever. Now they're in cities, and they're getting exploited.

Discontent, yeah.

Yeah, discontent. The old social institutions that used to manage discontent and legitimate the state don't work as well in this new context. Everything is changing. Everyone's heads are scrambled, and things happen. So I think the information revolution, which is like—

That on steroids.

Exactly. So I definitely see that. But then I look at things like—somehow, one of the biggest geopolitical problems of the last 60 years has been nuclear proliferation. It continues to be, obviously, to this day. But when I think about weapons of mass destruction in the future, obviously biology, cyber, and all kinds of things come to mind.

While we have not been able to completely stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, you can usually tell when somebody's trying to build them. Usually, you have enough lead time to try to do something about it. How could you verify whether somebody was abiding by some sort of cyber arms-control agreement or bioweapons arms-control agreement when, basically, in a basement lab somewhere, you can cook up a pathogen that could destroy half the planet?

The idea that we're going to have accelerating arms races in a condition of almost utter lack of strategic trust, where you can't appeal to verifiability as a way of ensuring compliance, I think is a pretty serious problem. So I think the rapid and dynamic technological change across a whole range of disciplines and technologies is destabilizing the balance of power. This, I think, does significantly increase the chance both of confrontation and, ultimately, even of war between great powers.

Speaking of that, maybe Ukraine is the right flashpoint for this, but it does seem like there's been quite an evolution of non-weapons of mass destruction—just regular old weapons. This is a highly contested topic now because of the conflict in Iran and some reports that we've run out of certain types of munitions, even as the United States of America. What have you learned from the last several years of conflict about the nature of military technology and weapons, their relative importance in the AI world, and so on?

Unfortunately, I've learned a lot because there's been a lot of war. The first time I went to Ukraine after the war, I went to this drone factory, and it really was remarkable because, in real time, they were starting to get results from the battlefield, and then they were adapting.

Iterating, yeah.

But at that time, it was very simplistic stuff. They were getting kids' toy trucks and reengineering them into ground drones that could put a land mine on a tank. I was back there a couple of months ago, and the advances are just unbelievable. The intensity is the same, but the scope of change is amazing.

I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore. It's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones, you have this sort of gray zone where, at most, you'd have a couple of soldiers together.

One of the hardest problems in warfare now, they tell me, is that you'll get somebody wounded. How do you evacuate someone who's wounded? They're having to build a new kind of ground drone that can go retrieve a body or a person, cover them with a kind of metal shield, and wheel them out. But even to do this, you need a whole team of drones working with this thing because they're looking for other drones that would try to attack it.

They told me about one soldier whom it took them 63 days to evacuate after he was wounded. This is so unlike what war was even 6 years ago. I ask myself, too, how fast is the Pentagon learning if the tank and the rifle are becoming as obsolete as the cavalry charge and the sword? What kind of forces do we have? What kind of forces do you need? And again, it changes every 6 months.

Right now, the Ukrainians have kind of a battlefield advantage. That could flip. And for us, as the power that has the most stuff, we're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got so many tanks. If the tank becomes useless, that's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody who's figured out the tank killer.

Or the navy—the Russian Navy on the Black Sea. Ukraine doesn't really have a navy. They have a few little tiny boats. They don't have battleships and stuff. They have kept the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea with drones. Good news for Taiwan, actually.

But American power traditionally is about sea power to a very large extent. How does that change over time? We've gone from—you remember, in the '90s, and you look like you're just old enough to remember the '90s—they used to talk about the revolution in military affairs. The idea was that there was one thing happening, and once we'd mastered and gotten used to it, then we were good to go. Now it's continuing revolutions in military affairs. That's something that I've learned about war by watching.

What do you think is the most likely thing to happen in Taiwan?

Well, the Chinese—Xi Jinping, I think—is committed to trying to get it. I don't think he actually has an alarm clock by his bed that will ring on the day that it has to happen. The Chinese, I think, need a very high probability of success to commit themselves past a certain point because failure would be catastrophic for whoever launched it.

But there are a lot of steps in between an invasion and doing nothing. We see the Chinese, I think, trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade. They could give the order that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs-clearance process, to assert sovereignty and so on, and make it difficult for ships that don't do that.

They'll be looking for things that fly just under the radar, that don't actually cause us to really respond, but that alter the situation in their favor. So I see them moving in that kind of way.

The big new factor is that the Japanese have woken up, and the Japanese would see Chinese control of Taiwan as a direct threat to Japanese independence. They really see this, and so they are much more engaged. They're only beginning. They're raising their defense spending, rethinking their doctrine, and beginning to reshape their culture around the new strategic environment.

Historically, the Japanese have actually been pretty good at changing direction when they genuinely feel threatened or feel the need to change in some way. How this works out, I don't see, but I think it's one of the things people really need to keep an eye on. How fast do the Japanese come up the learning curve? How serious does it turn out they really are about their own defense? And how does that affect China's calculations in Taiwan if Japan is a new and complicating issue for them?

If I combine all these things—the changing forces of power, technology, military technology, and all the things we've talked about—with your observation that politics in the future is going to be more personal, are there any other rates of change, things changing in the world that we haven't talked about yet, that you think are especially important for what the future will look like?

There were 3 basic classes in American society during the kind of post-World War II era of stability, and they spread a lot in the rest of the world.

One was an industrial working class, which was more or less in stable jobs with—

Blue-collar kind of work.

Yeah, exactly. Often organized in unions. They had a very pragmatic political attitude, and they were economically focused. Political competition between the left and the right was about who could figure out how to raise living standards for the workers better, and that kind of competition centered politics on a fairly rational basis.

Then you had the business class. By the 1940s and 1950s, it was no longer the founders, like John D. Rockefeller or the first J.P. Morgan. It was grandsons and publicly traded companies, professional managers, and so there was a kind of institutionalization of business. That was also the era of these very regulated monopolies and oligopolies, so there was one phone company, a limited number of airlines, the 3 networks—a very structured business world.

Between this organized, rationally focused working class and organized, regulated, publicly managed business class, you had this expert class—the technocrats, the administrators, and so on—who, according to the dictates of the best peer-reviewed social science, were making the decisions: regulating the businesses so they didn't get too greedy, but also keeping the workers from being so demanding that the whole system collapsed, et cetera. They were the balancing group.

I would say that in American society today, all 3 of those classes are in total disarray, and yet we are facing a whole series of very serious changes and perplexities. What do we do about AI, just being one of many? We're not organized to answer these questions in the old ways, so we are really out at sea.

Because America has been for so long, and still, I think, remains the only potential pillar of global stability and organization, the internal incoherence of America faced with all of these changes can't help but undermine any chances of global stability. So I think what that means is that people like you and me, and maybe our listeners to the show, have a tremendously heavy responsibility to try to figure out answers, see some path through this, and try to build a new kind of American politics and social order that can allow us once again to be reasonably stable for ourselves and then project that globally.

What do you think, against that backdrop, it's going to mean—or does mean—to be an American? If all of that is changing, what does it mean?

Americans think about being American in different ways, and they have for a long time. You hear a lot of people talk these days about America as a country founded on ideas. Honestly, I think I was maybe in college before I met anybody who thought that way. I'm from the South, and down there you thought, “Well, I'm an American because everybody I know is American. My family, as long as I have any idea who the heck they were, they're Americans. I'm an American the same way a Frenchman is French or a Turk is Turk, not because I believe in America, but because—”

I'm here.

I'm here, and no one else would have me. This is it. But there really are other people who love America and contribute to America who experience it as a country of ideas, and we are a pluralistic country in this way. I don't myself feel more American than somebody who was naturalized last week.

For me, in some ways, the meeting ground between identity and ideas is, honestly, the Pledge of Allegiance: “I pledge allegiance to the flag of the United States of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation under God, indivisible, with liberty and justice for all.” I would say anybody who says that and means it is an American.

Pretty remarkable, huh? Well written.

It's good.

One thing I haven't asked about that I'm deeply curious about, as I'm sure everyone is, is your interpretation of what's going on in the Middle East—both with Iran, with Israel, and with all the other key players, where alliances seem to be shifting around for the first time in a long time. How do you interpret what's happening? What are the deeper currents and messages that you're focused on?

8. The Middle East Balance

A lot of things are obviously going on in the Middle East. One background to a lot of it is just the collapse of Arab nationalism and a kind of Arab identity as an organizing force in the Middle East. In the 1950s, Nasser and Egypt were the great pillars of Arab identity and Pan-Arabism. After the 1967 war, they took a hit, but you would still have countries like Syria and Iraq, and even, for a while under Gaddafi, Libya, aspiring to that mantle.

If we look at what happened, Iraq collapsed. Certainly, America had a lot to do with that. Syria collapsed without America having a lot to do with it. So Iran, as a non-Sunni, non-Arab power, had created what people call the Shia crescent from Lebanon through Syria and Iraq into Iran. That has broken up, thanks primarily to Israel since October 7, but what hasn't broken up is that the underlying weakness of the Arab world is still there.

You have the Gulf states, which are very effective in many ways and are using their oil and money very effectively, but they still can't defend themselves from Iran. Without outside help, they cannot stand. That leads to the Strait of Hormuz and that region, which remains incredibly important for the economic stability and health of the world. That is in chaos.

If the United States or some other power doesn't hold Iran back in some way, Iran has a hegemony over the oil resources in the Middle East in a way that allows it to blackmail a lot of people economically and provides it with the kinds of resources that would certainly not be used to our benefit. Israel, I think, may have hoped that it could bear the weight of being a counter-hegemon to Iran. Israel is too small and too alien to the rest of the Middle East to really play that role effectively, I think.

Since Obama, the United States has been fundamentally unwilling to do that itself, and we want to kick the can down the road. We want to find some other way other than putting down a red line that we enforce with Iran. History doesn't give us a choice. We stop Iran ourselves, or Iran asserts and maintains hegemony over the oil resources in the Middle East.

Why have we been ineffective? Obviously, we have vastly superior military capability. This is a specific question about Iran and the Strait of Hormuz, but people also used to call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. Why do world powers seem to have such a difficult time being effective at all in the Middle East?

I think some of it is, as we've also seen with Russia, the erosion of deterrence. What you don't want to do is help Ukraine win a war with Russia. What you want is for Russia to feel that if it attacks Ukraine, the consequences would be so terrible that it's just not worth doing it. Anything other than deterrence involves long, difficult, expensive, divisive wars with uncertain outcomes and enormous costs.

The decline of deterrence becomes a massive geopolitical problem overseas and a massive political problem at home. For example, right now, one of the real facts about the Strait is that it's not even as important that Iran can hit a tanker with a drone as it is that Iran could put some drones on desalination plants and make the cities of the Gulf essentially uninhabitable. As long as that's the case, I'm not going to make big investments in the Gulf if I'm a foreign country.

Yeah.

It's really scary. And that means that these entire economic development plans those countries have for their future political stability go up in smoke because it doesn't work. The only way to preserve that is, in some ways, to do what we were doing in the Cold War in Europe: just saying to Russia, “You cross that line, you invade West Berlin, and holy hell breaks out.”

But I think as a country, we're not at the point where a president of the United States can say it and mean it and have the public back him up. For that, we need presidents who can explain to people, “Okay, this is how the world works.” We need to do what Harry Truman did after World War II and, for that matter, what Franklin Roosevelt did in the fireside chats: take the American people into your confidence, have a clear vision of what you're doing and why you're doing it, and be enough of a communicator to be able to put it across. We haven't really had anybody do that in a very long time.

What do you hope we do? What do you hope America's role is in the next 20 years?

I hope we first of all figure out how to keep our balance as we enter the information revolution, that we figure out how to use the wealth and the resources the information revolution creates to deal with the stresses and problems that it inevitably causes, and also draw from it the abundance that will keep the American people feeling like America is working, that it's working for them, and that the way things are going is basically a good thing.

If you have that going, then people will back an American president and American foreign policy in a serious way. I think if you don't have that, and if we don't do that, we lose ground in the information revolution to China in the tech race. We get challenged overseas and at home, and we're just rabid ferrets fighting with each other in a cage. That's just not pretty and not fun.

If we can get that going, then I think we act purposefully. We say, “We don't want any great power dominating Europe. We don't want any great power dominating Asia, and we don't want any power able to interrupt the flow of oil in and out of the Middle East on commercial terms.” We build the alliances and the relationships that do it. I don't think that is an unsustainable ask.

Germany and Japan in particular have a lot of resources and a lot of ability. But our problem in Asia is not that China is so big. In a way, it’s that the rest of Asia has fallen behind. In 1980, India’s GDP was something like 60% or 65% of China’s. Today, it’s about 17% of China’s. That gap, in a sense, is the imbalance of power that tempts China into thinking hegemony in Asia is really possible. It also ensures that without us putting a really heavy weight on the balance scale, it can’t be stopped.

If we can create a world where there’s room for others to prosper, so that not only India but Indonesia and Vietnam are growing, I think what we’re going to see is China reaching this point of understanding that Asia’s too big for China to eat. Nobody can eat it, and so we need to learn to live with folks, which Germany has done in Europe. It’s possible. In the same way, if Russia is stopped in Ukraine and Ukraine goes like Poland and becomes a prosperous country in all of this, that door is closed without American soldiers fighting and dying to keep it closed.

So there is, I think, the potential for the kind of natural balance of power in these key theaters to emerge in a way that we can have the sort of world that is good for us economically and from a security point of view, but does not require an ever-escalating defense budget or an ever-escalating series of American commitments.

Is there anything especially unique—you call it the information revolution. I would think about it maybe as the intelligence revolution—to make it very specific to AI. Is there anything that you’re thinking about that excites you most or worries you most about this very unique brand of technology in global affairs?

Well, it is interesting how it seems, at least for now, to have simplified the international playing field so that people, as you were saying earlier, just say there’s America and there’s China, and there’s no one else in the room. First of all, I wonder how long that will last, because originally there were 2 nuclear powers, America and the Soviet Union, and nobody else was in the room. But then a bunch of other people started getting into the room.

Is AI more replicable? Are we going to start seeing other countries come up with their equivalents of these technologies? The Chinese have obviously done it with less need for original skull sweat than we did. Can third parties, looking at and comparing the U.S. and China, do more? So I’d definitely be watching that one.

The Indians, the Europeans, and the Israelis are all very interesting in that respect. The Israelis got their nuclear bomb just a few years after China, so look at that. I do think the whole question of AI and national security decision-making and deterrence is interesting, because the whole goal of deterrence is you want to make the adversary believe that there’s no question: if I do X, they will do Y; they will be able to do Y; and they are willing to do Y.

Automating your foreign-policy decision-making process increases deterrence. We’ve turned that over to the AI, and if the AI thinks you’re doing this, wham. Anything less than that is, “No, I’m leaving this human decision point because I might decide not to do it.” That’s interesting when you think about how that might play out in the world of deterrence. Are we really willing to have the doomsday machine decide whether we’re going to go to war or use nuclear weapons or something like that? Very interesting and somewhat perplexing.

Maybe to end on a positive note, what are you most excited about in the future?

The list is almost endless. When I think about the acceleration of medical research that’s going to be coming, let’s just look at what AI and, generally, advances in technology are doing in the field of medicine. The rate at which cures are being found or treatments. My friend Ben Sasse, who was diagnosed with terminal pancreatic cancer—I mean, he’s still in a very bad situation—but a drug that didn’t exist a year ago is keeping him not just breathing but interacting with people and doing things. It is a stay of execution.

But the point is, I can look back at people in my own family who died of various conditions that would now, if they had them, be treatable. And that’s in 1 lifetime. I also believe that we’re going to be seeing a cost revolution in health care, that people will have, 50 years from now, better and cheaper health care than anybody has today.

I think this means that things like the federal deficit due to entitlement programs are actually solvable. Medicare is going to be less of a drag, and seniors are going to get better care. So I think many of the problems that are driving us really crazy right now are actually amenable to solution, and the solutions are appearing at a fast rate.

Our biggest problem is that this cornucopia of wealth that the information revolution unlocks—the stuff is coming out of this cornucopia so fast that we just don’t know how to manage it. I am fundamentally optimistic that we are on the cusp of a unique era of human transformation, renewal, and development, and it’s really exciting to be able to see it.

I’ve been reading your books and your thinking and your writing for so long. It’s such a thrill to do this together in person. When I do these, I ask everyone the same final question: what is the kindest thing that anyone’s ever done for you?

I think of Les Gelb at the Council on Foreign Relations, who was just a magnificent mentor. When I would do something stupid, he would help me see it, but also help me figure out the next step forward.

I have had so much undeserved kindness from so many people in so many dimensions of life. Younger relatives now put up with me being endlessly boring and talkative—“Oh, another one of his old war stories.” Employers who keep me going and put up with me. The Wall Street Journal, and Paul Gigot letting me be the Global View columnist at the Journal.

I float on a sea of kindness, and I don’t know that it’s easy to say there’s 1 thing kinder than another. I’ve just been blessed.

It’s a beautiful visual to close on, floating on a sea of kindness. Thanks so much for your time.