Call Me Back - with Dan Senor - Bret Stephens on Geopolitics Post Corona

Episode Date: February 5, 2021

Bret is a Pulitzer Prize winner and an op ed columnist for the Times, where his column appears Thursdays and Saturdays.Bret is the author of "America in Retreat: The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder". He was raised in Mexico City, he has studied at the University of Chicago and  the London School of Economics. In recent years he and his family were splitting their  time living between New York City and Hamburg. 

This has been paralytic for the United States. It's been paralytic for the Western world for excellent reasons, right? We are trying to protect our vulnerable populations. But what it has exposed is there is a very effective way of rapidly bringing the West to its knees through the creation of pathogens like this. You know, for us, half a million fatalities from COVID, it's a calamity. In China, is it a calamity? Welcome to Post-Corona, where we try to understand COVID-19's lasting impact

on the economy, culture, and geopolitics. I'm Dan Senor. It seems like analysts of foreign affairs and superpower politics are always worrying that, quote, the world is a mess. But has the international order, to the extent it existed in recent years, become even more disorderly due to the pandemic? What effect has COVID had on great power politics? Well, as a new president assembles his national security team and hopefully develops a grand strategy, I thought it'd be good to sit down with Brett Stevens of the New York Times to take a quick tour around the world. Brett's a Pulitzer Prize winner. He's an op-ed columnist for the Times, where his column appears on Thursdays and Saturdays.

He came to the Times after a long career with the Wall Street Journal, where he was most recently deputy editorial page editor and for over a decade a foreign affairs columnist. Before that, he was editor-in-chief of the Jerusalem Post, where he was based in Israel. That's when I first got to know him. Prior to moving to Israel, he worked in the Brussels Bureau of the Wall Street Journal. He's literally reported from all over the world and interviewed scores of world leaders. Brett is the author of a terrific book called America in Retreat, The New Isolationism and the Coming Global Disorder. I highly recommend it. He was raised in Mexico City and he studied at the University of Chicago and the London School of Economics. In recent years, he and his family were splitting their time between New York City and Hamburg. So today we'll talk with Brett about China, Russia, Europe,

and the Middle East. What's changed and what's changing as a result of the pandemic? What does it mean for America's foreign policy? This is Post-Corona. And I'm pleased to welcome Brett Stevens to the Post-Corona podcast. Brett, thanks for joining us. I didn't know we were Post-Corona, but thanks all the same. God willing, we will be Post-Corona. You're going to help tell us how we're going to get there. You didn't realize that was part of the deal. So there's a lot we can cover with you.

So we're going to hit a bunch of topics. So we want to talk to you about how America's role in the world may have changed as a result of COVID and what some of those changes may outlast COVID. place to start is China. For the first decade of this century, many analysts believe that the US and China were in a largely symbiotic relationship that was based on each country's economic needs. We can talk about what those needs were and how it worked for China and at least worked for some segments of the US. Meaning if you were at the top of the economic ladder in the U.S., the U.S.-China relationship was probably a good deal. And if you liked buying a lot of cheap stuff from sneakers to televisions, this symbiotic relationship between the U.S. and China was a good deal. But then somewhere around 2015, the leadership of China went in a very ideological direction and almost pursued something akin to a Cold War strategy. And the West was divided. Some in the West wanted to cooperate with China, and some were still resistant to cooperating with China. And we saw this play out

most recently pre-COVID with the debate over 5G and Huawei, where you had American allies like the UK seemingly wanting to do deals with Chinese telecom companies on 5G, despite pressure from the US. And then COVID happened. And COVID seems to change a lot of the calculations of a lot of countries in the West. So first, can you, from your perspective, describe, characterize what was going on before early 2020 as it relates to the U.S.-China relationship? Well, I think that we moved into the third phase of relationships since at least the opening to China back in the early 1970s. We moved from a period of strategic cooperation, especially when the Soviet Union was still an actor on the world stage, but also throughout the Jiang Zemin years,

the 1990s, and the post-Cold War era, to an era that you might describe as strategic competition, as it became increasingly clear that China was going to be the second power in the world, at least in economic terms. And now we're in a strategic contest, a strategic clash. I would say it started even earlier than 2015. If you look at what China was attempting to do, building man-made islands in the South China Sea, some of its behavior dates back further than that. But without a doubt, the ascension of Xi Jinping and his cult of personality style of leadership, his highly nationalistic and militaristic and autocratic instincts as a leader have changed things. And I have to say that in some ways, it was the Trump administration that saw this earlier than most. I think they saw the wrong things. I think they've looked at the relationship in terms of

primarily through an economic lens, not a strategic lens. And I think they did some of the wrong things. For example, withdrawing the United States from the Trans-Pacific Partnership trade deal, which would have been an extraordinary regional economic hedge against China's encroachment in the regions. But they did, and I have to say, as a critic of that administration, they did start to think of China as a long-term enemy, much in the way that Great Britain started to see Germany in a different light in the very early years of the 20th century, even when those two countries, Britain and Germany, were each other's largest trading partners all the way up to the eve of the First World War, until July and August of 1914. So now we're in this new phase,

and you heard Tony Blinken, the new Secretary of State, actually say that China was one of those things that the administration got right, which suggests... That the Trump administration got right. That the Trump administration got right, which suggests that you might have an opportunity for devising something like bipartisan thinking

on this subject. There were last year, a quad of speeches from Christopher Wray, the head of the FBI from Mike Pompeo, a couple of other speeches sort of outlining the breadth of the China threat. But it's going to be a very different challenge, I think, Dan, than what we faced from the Soviet Union for one large reason, which is that the Soviet Union didn't seek to participate in an active way in the economy of the developed world. I mean, it was off on its own path. It was trying to turn countries into communist or socialist regimes. It wasn't trying to outbid the West in terms of its productive capabilities. And they didn't have access to information technology as an industry

that they could market around the world. I mean, the reach of Chinese product and service is just extraordinary. The Soviets never had anything like that. Which is one reason why I think the first way in which we have to start confronting China forcefully isn't so much on trade issues, it's on intellectual property. China has been engaged in probably the largest deliberate heist of foreign technology in human history. There was a case that I wrote about last year in which one single scientist working at a U.S. company stole something like a billion dollars worth of intellectual property. And if the West doesn't start getting a handle on that kind of theft, this is a competition that we're going to lose. We're also going to lose it if we don't

start shoring up and reaffirming our traditional alliances in East Asia and in South Asia. And that means building a much bigger navy than the one we have now. It's something the Trump administration, again, at least had the right instincts. It means resuming military exercises with South Korea in a big way. There they were on the wrong track. And maybe it means completing the pivot to Asia that in some ways Barack Obama was not mistaken about. So, but a number of these trends you're identifying, to your point, we saw the early signs of, you know, several years ago, right? So effectively we had this deal with China, right?

They were, China was effectively financing a big chunk of the U S U S current account deficit. And Americans were using our borrowing facility. Sorry, using their borrowing facility to buy a bunch of stuff from China. So that was like, we were buying stuff from China. Uh, they were financing it. It was a good economic deal,

I think. So what, I mean, something cat, catalyzed the, the appeal of Trump on China. Like, so what, what was the wake up call? Well, I think there were a number of them. But I think a big one was the fact that they were clearly not playing by, by the rules. I mean, I, you can go back, I'm trying to remember the year of the,

uh, report on Huawei and, and, and what is it? ZTE, I think. Yeah. Um, and the, the, that I think was an early sign that this was not a fair economic competition. This was, this was just outright theft more and more, you know, you must have experienced this in your own life, in your own profession, Dan. You know, I used to remember the people in the 1990s and the early noughts, people would go to China and marvel about its productive capacity, about the speed with which they were building buildings, about the way in which people, hundreds of millions of people were being brought out of poverty. You talk to Western businessmen in the last 10 years, and you hear a lot more about theft, practices of just stealing IP, making demands, kidnappings. I think a big wake-up call really came in the last few years with the effective revocation of the Sino-British agreement and the end of Hong Kong as a free city. That was completed last year with the new national security law, but it started back with the umbrella protests. And I think that, you know, Hong Kong always sort of stood as a

symbol of the possibility of what China might be as a free society. And when that went following it, certainly Q1 2020. So describe what COVID changed and how some of those changes may outlast COVID in terms of this relationship. What did we learn? Well, it depends. We don't know. OK, so, I mean, look, there are basically three theories about COVID of different plausibility. One was the original theory that this was just a kind of something that sprang up in a wet market or in nature and was first detected in Wuhan. But no different from avian flu and other sorts of flus that have emerged from East Asia over the centuries.

The second theory was an accidental release from a laboratory in Wuhan. And the third theory, I guess the most lurid of the theories, and I have no reason to believe it, is that it was a deliberate release. I wasn't sympathetic to the idea of calling this the China virus. I thought that was kind of rabble-rousing. But I think we have to ask intelligent questions about, first of all, exactly where this came from, why China, why Beijing, I should be specific, why the regime has been so reluctant to give international inspectors from the WHO and other health agencies access to their facilities, why they simply haven't been forthcoming with information, and what that means about the way we think about China.

But I think the threat that China poses goes really well beyond the fact that COVID came accidentally, deliberately, or coincidentally from someplace in China. And in terms of outside of the United States, so quickly after COVID became a big issue, the UK basically announces they're not going to turn their 5G licensing to Huawei. You see country after country on the West that was open to a softer relationship with China, hardening. Even in the developing world, countries that a softer relationship with China, hardening. Even in the developing world, countries that have been working with China on one belt, one road,

are backing off. There was this Pew poll that came out in the last few months that basically showed that China's reputation had taken a huge hit among a range of developing countries. And it's not only, it was partly because of its handling of the virus, of coronavirus, and concerns about how transparent China had been, but it was also about the way China behaved once it became a pandemic in terms of its sort of what some would argue its manipulative use of cheap ventilators and masks and just all

the sort of games they were playing on the supplies of these, you know, medically critical at the time, medically critical pieces of equipment. So just the, really the standing of China took a big hit. It seems to be everywhere. Yeah, I mean, look, it's true that China, excuse me, that COVID sort of illuminated aspects of Chinese behavior that were obvious to any of us who have been following it closely. The suppression of information being, I think, the most important point. the fact that the Chinese authorities tried to keep COVID under wraps when there was a moment, maybe this would have been in November of 2019 or early December of 2019, when it could have been contained. But it exposed for the world to see that China was a country that simply played by its own rules at the

expense of others. And if that has helped awaken the public to the deeply problematic nature of modern Chinese governance or foreign policy, then that's a silver lining on a very dark cloud. And the administration, when I take your point, is seeming to take, I mean, you think about Joe Biden in the Senate, Joe Biden in the Senate Foreign Relations Committee, where he often fought some of the harder line China hawks over the years, with people like Jesse Helms and other, you know, early hawks on China. Biden was often in opposition to them. If you're right that his administration believes now that Trump was

partially right on China and that they need to be taking a harder line, where does this climate change program fit into the national security strategy? Because it seems that the administration on the one hand wants to take a harder line against China. On the other hand, they're acting like their climate diplomacy can be compartmentalized and they can make progress with China on the climate change agenda and still take a hard line on the sort of security and diplomatic agenda. And just, you know, after this was articulated, this point was articulated,

the Chinese government tweeted out, China is willing to work with the U.S., I quote, China is willing to work with the U.S. on climate change, but such cooperation cannot stand unaffected by overall China-U.S. relations. It is impossible to ask for China's support in global affairs while interfering in its domestic affairs and undermining its interests. Yeah, I mean, and this is something I don't understand about the administration's early

moves, including the extension of the nuclear agreement with the New START treaty with Russia, which is why are you giving these countries leverage up front? Look, there's going to be no solution to the climate change problem unless the world's biggest emitters of CO2, the Chinese and I think followed by the Indians, are serious about it. And that's very difficult to do in China because, I mean, even by the admission of some of their senior leaders, all statistics out of China are basically made up. So, you know, the Chinese have been miraculously achieving exactly the rates of growth that their economists predict year on year because the statistics are made up. I'm not exactly sure how we're going to trust their statistics when it comes to emissions or their genuine willingness to do anything about climate beyond propagandistic exercises in propaganda. The one thing the Chinese actually could do

and lead the way ahead of a very reluctant West is to invest in a big way in nuclear technology, new generations of nuclear technologies, which are much safer, much more reliable, and as everyone knows, don't emit greenhouse gases. And that would be a genuine advance. The Indians could do the same. But right now, these are very coal-intensive economies, and I'm not quite sure where the evidence is that that's changing. For the Biden administration, this basically cripples their climate change agenda right from the start, unless they're much more realistic and decide that fracking is better than coal and nuclear might be better than fracking. But I just don't see the the windshield of great power politics. if it also wants to take a sort of COVID catalyzed hard stance on China or continue a hard stance, continue Trump's hard stance? Presumably the climate issue can be, how shall I put it, put into a parentheses or kept separate from the other issues. The real question to me about the Biden administration

is not really about climate. It's are they going to get serious about great power competition for the first time in 30 years? The Trump administration was moving that way. But the big question about the Biden administration, I think the big question for the United States is, can we be serious about great power competition? We're a very introverted nation these days. You know, I am struck by the extent to which Americans have ceased to just give a damn about, you know, the plight of someone like Alexei Navalny or other sort of large geopolitical questions. They've just sort of fallen off the map. It's a little bit reminiscent of what happened to Europe sometime in the last 50 years in which they ceased to think of themselves as a

necessary actor on the world stage, except when it came to sort of vanity projects in the world. I don't, or maybe not vanity projects, but, you know, humanitarian soft power projects. And the great risk for the United States is that we may be trending in that direction. So let's talk about Alexei Navalny. So just as backdrop, August of last year, he was poisoned by a military-grade nerve agent, which, according to reports, was an assassination attempt ordered by the Kremlin. He went to Germany to recover and then announced that he was going to return to Russia. And obviously, the press, lots of journalists globally made all these analogies with Lenin's return to Petrograd in April of 1917. And obviously, those analogies are

highly imperfect. What's happening now? So Navalny returns. First of all, why did he return? Why did he think, I mean, he knew returning would mean that rather than go the way of Lenin, he would probably be locked up right away by Tsar Putin. So first of all, what was the calculation? Well, excuse my language, but the Kremlin chose the wrong garment to put the poison in because this is a guy with balls of steel. So clearly he was going to survive that kind of attack. So I take it you're a fan. I think he is, to me, at this moment, the most extraordinary leader in the world today because he has

demonstrated how much one man, you know, to borrow the old Jackson line, that one man with courage makes a majority. It is a moment that I think in 20 or 30 years we may regard as one of immense historic significance, if he can survive the next few years, because the possibility of a democratic challenge to Putin that succeeds would have a world historic effect. So yeah, I'm a big fan. And I think it says a lot that he insisted on that he is a Russian citizen, that he is not going to be cowed, and that the key to defeating someone like Putin is demonstrating that you don't have to be afraid in the face of this terror. So he had, you know, the remnant of his aborted presidential campaign in 2018 was these close to 40 regional offices across Russia. So he actually has a real opposition infrastructure that previous leaders who've challenged Putin, like Boris Nemtsov,

who had a real organized movement, but nothing on this scale. I mean, Navalny had a real national presidential effort in major urban areas across Russia. And part of his calculation was that he wanted this movement to protest and fight, but he would be marginalized if he remained in Germany. He needed to get back to Russia and be the guy on the ground to give this movement fuel. Yeah. I mean, none of the dissidents who are outside could lead a movement from Europe. I mean, in Khodorkovsky's case was obviously complicated by the fact that he was a, was or is an oligarch. And so it was not quite as capable of crystallizing the problem with the regime.

You know, when Navalny calls the regime, the regime. When Navalny calls the regime the regime of crooks and thieves, it has an authenticity and a resonance that is difficult for any of the other opposition figures to quite capture. He's not a technocrat. He's not an oligarch. He's not a Soviet-era dissident. I have nothing against any of these people. I admire many of them. But he has the qualities of being an actual Russian politician who has stuck it out in Putin's Russia. And that's, I think, that's immensely important. The speech he gave in court the other day, I think will be remembered as one of the finest courtroom speeches in half a century. So how much do you think the declining living standards and the COVID-related lockdowns, the very draconian COVID lockdowns in Russia, have

exacerbated discontent in the country. I mean, Russian, Russian's real disposable incomes today are approximately 10% lower than just under about a decade ago. Putin's approval rating has dropped, dipped below 60% this year for the first time ever in his presidency. Yeah. Which you have to assume means it's actually lower than that. Exactly. So people, I mean, Neil Ferguson, who we had on at the end of 2020, made this point looking back at the history of pandemics, that you often have civilian, you often have civil unrest during times of pandemic lockdowns throughout history. I mean, he goes back centuries to make this point. And he was particularly focused on the Black Lives Matter protests over the summer. But how much do you think what we're seeing,

and this is not like to say anything negative about these protests, but is an ingredient possibly that just people are just so frustrated with a country that was already in decline. And then the sense that COVID exacerbates that sense of decline. And so they're just storming in the streets in a way that we just haven't seen in Russia. Yeah, it's look, natural disasters are often political disasters when they're mishandled. And people forget, for instance, that the earthquake in

Armenia in the late 1980s, along with obviously the Chernobyl disaster, if you want to call that a natural disaster, were precipitating events in the collapse of the Soviet Union, just as the mishandling of an earthquake in Nicaragua was a precipitating event in the overthrow of the Somoza dictatorship back in the late 1970s, kind of, you know, go through history and you'll often find that there is a connection. But usually for a revolution to succeed, you don't just have to lay out the ingredients for a revolution, which is, you know, declining standards of living, some particular outrage. You need galvanizing forces that can inspire people to act. And sometimes that is in the form of someone like Mohamed Bouazizi setting himself on fire in Tunisia a little over 10 years ago that set off the Arab Spring. It's one thing or another. It's often extraordinarily serendipitous. But now in Russia, you have this interesting combination of factors, which is to say, you know, the effects of the pandemic, declining standards of living, the exposure in the most vivid way of the opulent lifestyle of Putin and

his cronies, but most importantly, a credible opposition leader, which is why Putin is not stupid when it comes to realizing the threat that Navalny poses to his power. So two questions then. For about eight or nine months we've been watching these protests in belarus uh against uh lukashenko's regime and they were also when they got started massive numbers in the streets incredibly moving images to watch and then they've been going on and on for months and months and and they're still impressive. And yet, everyone just kind of starts to lose interest globally. Is there? Yeah, no, look, I mean, one of the things that I think those of us who came of age in, you know, high school and college in the 1980s and 90s, we sort of saw the revolutions of Central Europe and Russia as kind of defining

events and then forgot that repression, if successfully and brutally carried out, can succeed. Revolutions don't kind of work on their own and they require a whole host of factors, including a lot of luck in order to be successful. One of the things that they require is a loss of confidence among the ruling elite. I mean, why has Cuba remained under a castrite regime defying embargo and economic decline and resistance and dissidence all this time, the apparatus of repression is effective. Why is Maduro still in government? Why is Kim Jong-un still in

government? It turns out that autocracy and dictatorship have a lot going for it, not morally, but what they have are guns and fear. So, you know, it's far from clear to me that Navalny is going to succeed or that the, you know, proverbial forces of freedom are going to muster the courage and the means to prevail here. I mean, it's an open question. Let's move to Europe, which seems badly weakened, was weak pre-COVID, and its handling of COVID seems to have made it weaker. There seems to be a consensus that the European Commission has badly blundered. There was talk of a European Health Union, which many people, particularly those I think who supported Brexit, viewed as a power grab by Brussels. So they felt vindicated to not be a part of it.

But the president of France, Macron, who was an ascendance in Europe and internationally is a real player. Germany, under Merkel, was praised as, at least early on, as managing COVID well. And so Macron and Germany's health minister, Spahn, had worked with the European Commission on the vaccine programs and basically deferring to Brussels. And by all accounts, Brussels' management of the vaccine program has been kind of a mess. So the UK and the US are way ahead of Europe on vaccinations, but it's almost like a case study, a window into a Brussels-run, continental-wide program. Do you think Europe was already weak and it like COVID doesn't matter? Or do you see the way Europe and Brussels have navigated through COVID and say, Europe is going

to come out of this much weaker than it already was? Well, Europe was in bad shape going into the crisis and it's going to be in worse shape coming out. I mean, I lived in Brussels a number of years and I know it, I think, pretty well. This is when you were at the Wall Street Journal. At the Wall Street Journal. And, you know, I like the European ideal. I like the idea of a common market. I like the idea of borderless Europe.

But, I mean, Brussels is a technocracy that fails at the functions of technocracy. It is sort of a singularly unwieldy device for effective action. I mean, imagine if the Articles of Confederation had governed the United States for the last 250 odd years or 40 odd years, you'd have something approaching what the European Union is like. And there are a whole host of cultural factors beyond bureaucracy.

There's a culture of risk aversion. There's the unwieldiness of trying to get 27 or 28 countries to agree on anything. But anyone who has followed Europe in the last 20 years in a close way can't at all be surprised by the way that this rollout worked. I remember 30 years ago when the Balkan crisis began, there was a fellow by the name of Puz, I think Jacques Puz, he was from Luxembourg, and he was the European Union's de facto foreign minister. And so you

had this Yugoslav crisis, and he said, the hour of Europe has arrived, or something like that. And I remember thinking, oh, there was this idea that the EU was going to be a real factor in the world. And you saw how they handled the Balkans. Basically, they failed in a catastrophic way until the United States intervened. And it's been a sort of similar story there. You know, people always forget that part of the reason why China now looms much larger than it did on the global economic stage is that Europe has just become an ever smaller factor. And I think this crisis is going to accelerate. You have a political crisis now in which another technocrat, Draghi, has been made prime minister of Italy. I remember how the Mario Monti prime ministership went, which is to say not particularly

well. So you have a succession of countries outside of Germany that are becoming increasingly ungovernable. And in the long range, I think that's going to be a major risk for the world. I want to move to what could argue another dysfunctional part of the world, but maybe changing, which is the Middle East. So you just wrote this fascinating piece for commentary magazine it's the current issue of commentary called uh the piece is titled memo to president biden please don't mess up the abraham accords so first of all what john pot horace wanted to call it don't screw up the uh uh the abraham accords but i i i walked him down from that ledge.

But keep in mind, yeah, all right, you know, he's... I love John. So do I. And we had him on this podcast. He was pretty entertaining. Okay, so first of all, why are you worried? Like, what could the Biden administration do to screw up the Abraham Accords? And why do you think it's so important that they not? I think the Abraham Accords represent the most significant and positive shift in American thinking about the Middle East in, well, in modern history, really, because they have de-centered the Israeli-Palestinian conflict and started to look at gains that can be made, strategic interests that do align,

as opposed to gains that can't be made. And so doing so, taking the question of the Palestinians away from, say, the mantelpiece of American diplomacy in the region has opened up, A, the possibility that the Arab-Israeli conflict may be coming to an end, B, that Israel might find itself in a much better position vis-a-vis more serious common enemies. I call this the alliance of moderates and modernizers, Israel and friends like the United Arab Emirates, that can help transform the region, against the revisionists and the fundamentalists, whether they're the Russians or the Iranians or ISIS or the Chinese or other dangerous actors. It would facilitate, it wouldn't make it totally possible,

but it would facilitate America's ability to sort of recenter itself geopolitically in East Asia as opposed to the Middle East. And it creates a bulwark against the number one geopolitical threat in intelligence sharing, on strategic security issues, as you said, Iran and to leaders in the Gulf, in the Sunni Gulf, it's one of the things they're most attracted to about Israel is that everyone around the world has historically wanted to do business with Silicon Valley. And for much of the Middle East, they recognize they had a Silicon Valley sitting right there in their region, but they, because 21 up to now, 21 of the 23 nations in the Arab League had complied with this economic boycott of Israel, they couldn't cooperate with Israel on the innovation front. There's a whole range of sectors of the economy that they could be working on. So that was part of the attractiveness.

I mean, you know, I've heard this from them over and over and over. I had one leader in Saudi Arabia say to me that, you know, as far as they're concerned, a very senior leader, as far as they were concerned that there was the future and the past in the Middle East, the Palestinians of the past, Israel is the future. They want to be partnering with Israel, meaning the Israeli-Palestinian issue was the past. They didn't want to have the Israeli-Palestinian issue be a straitjacket around their ability to work with Israel when they viewed Israel with all the innovation and all the exciting entrepreneurial, you know, pursuits of problem solving that were happening in Israel. And then you throw in COVID. And then

there's this amazing story coming out of Israel, which we've covered extensively on this podcast, on this podcast series of Israel's, you know, cutting edge world leading vaccination campaign. So do you just think this health crisis is just another moment where the leaders in the Arab world are feeling this sense of FOMO, this sense of like, you know, we don't want to be the last schmuck, pardon the phrase, to not have a deal with Israel. We want to be partnering with these guys. They're smart. Well, one of the most important aspects of the Abraham Accords is that they represent a revolution, I think, of the thinking of some of the Arab states. I mean, what's notable about the Abraham Accords is that there was no obvious gain for Abu Dhabi or for Manama to make a deal with the Israelis.

I mean, the Egyptians got the Sinai back, right? They needed that for reasons of national pride, not to mention a fair bit of lost territory. I think what the UAE was thinking, I mean, they're really the most important player here, is exactly what you're touching on, which is that the kind of knee-jerk hatred and opposition of Israel was beyond the question of what they could gain technologically or militarily or in terms of intelligence by an alliance with Israel. That very hatred was the thing that was holding them back, which was that it was the expression of a civilizational wound that couldn't be easily accounted for in terms of normal expressions of national interest. And I talk about this in my piece, which is that for centuries, the Arab world, which had really once at some point a millennium ago been at the

forefront of the civilized world, had spent centuries being humiliated by outside powers, whether they were Ottomans or Europeans or the Zionists or the Americans. It had been a story of humiliations, which they had accounted for by blaming someone outside of them. And so to say, you know, we want to put this behind us, we want to put this mentality of blaming others and obsessing about the past and sort of seeing conspiracies everywhere we go against us, as opposed to participating in a future-oriented, dynamic alliance of nations. That's the real kind of transformation, mindset transformation, that's so important about the Abraham Accords.

Why can't the Arab world not look more like Dubai than like Sana'a in Yemen or Beirut today in Lebanon? There's no reason. The Arab world should be participating in the modern world fully. They're filled with sort of talented people and more than just natural resources. So to look at Israel not as an adversary, not even as a strategic partner in limited respects, but as a role model for the region, for what they themselves could become by just adopting a different set of policies and attitudes. That's, I think, what's really extraordinary about the accords. And the United States ought to be supporting it instead of trying to go back to some tired

formula of land for peace between Israelis and Palestinians. This same Saudi leader I was referring to, when I asked him, he was talking about how Saudis are going to cooperate with Israel on water tech and all these irrigation solutions and digital healthcare and agri-tech and food security and cybersecurity. And he was rattling all these things off. And I said to him, well, what is the proverbial man on the street think, right? If you asked an average Saudi citizen what they thought of what you're doing what would their reaction be and he says we have to do it in part in response to them they're tired of us putting all our chips on the israeli-palestinian conflict they they're expecting us

to move on there's almost a quiet revolt against the way things have been and i was just struck by it because it's like the inverse of the the the leaders in the Arab world used to say, look, we understand we have to normalize with Israel. We understand it's inevitable, but the street, the Arab street doesn't want us to normalize. So we were captive to the Arab street. And now it was almost flipped.

He was using the Arab street to justify moving on. I think the Arab street is changing too. I really, I think there's, the last 20 years have been bad years for the Arab world in ways that are very difficult to blame on perfidious Zionists. And what the Arab Spring did, to call it the Arab Spring, of course, is kind of a misnomer. But what it did is it crystallized that reality. So that's actually one of the positive things happening today. And I hope that someone like Blinken has the good sense not to look the proverbial gift horse in the mouth and understand that this could be one of the great opportunities for American statecraft. The great prize is a deal between

Riyadh and Jerusalem. If that can happen, it means that something fundamental has changed in the most important country in the Sunni world. Yeah, I think it is going to happen. I mean, do you think, because none of this would have happened, what's happened so far wouldn't have happened without Riyadh's blessing. Well, right. And I think in a way, by having normalization happen at their peripheries, I think it's going to happen with Oman quite soon, for example.

It smooths the way for the Saudis. But there's a rift in the Saudi family too, royal family too, about what to do. Some of them are perfectly happy with sort of a subterranean relationship with the Israelis so long as it's convenient to them. I suspect the crown prince understands the value of surfacing it. We had Scott Gottlieb on last week, and he expressed concern that what our adversaries, what U.S. adversaries may have learned about COVID is that, you know, enemies of America fly a couple of airplanes into the Twin Towers and they shut down the United States briefly. But a respiratory pathogen lands in the United States and it shuts down everything for here we are now, we're going to blink and we're going to be on one year. And it could be longer. Do you worry that the notion of a bioweapon, which was always considered sort of like science fiction, is now something that our adversaries, whether they're nation states or non-state actors, are going to think about, wow, this is pretty interesting?

No, this is something that I really worry about. Look, I often think that when we talk about China, we misapprehend the true source of the regime's strength. A lot of economic statistics coming out of China are contrived. The country has profound problems that are specific to it, but also characteristic of all top-down dictatorships. But what the Chinese have that we don't is a capacity to inflict cruelty on their own people and to absorb pain. And I think that's the insight. If I were Xi Jinping, that's the insight I would glean from the last year. I find the notion that the statistics coming out of China about the severity of the virus don't seem to me right, just because of the way in which this pandemic has functioned across continents.

But from his point of view, that's okay, because he can just pretend that thousands of people haven't died, or that they're dying of normal old age or respiratory ailments, something other than COVID. We can't. And this has been paralytic for the United States. It's been paralytic for the Western world for excellent reasons, right? We are trying to protect our vulnerable populations. But what it has exposed is there is a very effective way of rapidly bringing the West to its knees through the creation of pathogens like this. And it's very difficult to understand or to know what the best responses may be when America, and rightly, for us, half a million fatalities from COVID, it's a calamity. In China, is it a calamity?

It depends on how you view it. And cold-heartedness and ruthlessness are powerful agents in geopolitics. So this may prove to be an Achilles heel. In the long run, I still think, you know, if I had to place a bet, my bet is with the West and the free world. The problems that are undermining the foundations of Chinese power are much deeper and more consequential than the problems that are undermining Western democratic institutions. our inability to, not our inability, but our reluctance to accept this kind of price hinders us in terms of our geopolitical competition with a very ruthless regime. All right. In closing, I just want to spend a moment with you on a recent column you wrote for The Times about the state of

california now where does the state of california fit into a conversation that's largely been about global affairs uh and the change changing u.s geopolitics california has been home to you know one of the great strategic comparative advantages of the u.s which is we had the most and probably still although maybe declining certainly declining uh important uh innovation clusters in the world right if you wanted to solve big problems in the technology or or scientific or medical science or biotech life sciences realms you came to amer America and you came to California and you specifically came to Silicon Valley. And your column a few days ago was basically, I mean, the conceit of the piece was, or the setup of the piece was warning Democrats in this country not to

turn America into California. But what I read in it was a seething indictment of how bad shape California has gotten itself into. Now, on this podcast series, we have a mini-subseries called Is New York Over? We've asked that question. We've looked at a bunch of sectors about public security, about the state of the subways, about state of importance sectors in the New York City economy like Broadway. But I ask you the question after reading this piece and i encourage our readers to go to new yorktimes.com to read brett's column do you think do you think covet has really revealed that california is over well california isn't over new york isn't over i mean new york would have in that case new york would have been over during the the administration, you know, in the early 1970s.

But California is in deep trouble. And what COVID has done is exposed the extent to which the state's economy was kind of, you know, if you forgive the not apt metaphor, but was skating on thin ice up until the pandemic hit. I mean, living in San Francisco was kind of an impossibility, except people were making crazy money and it all somehow seemed to work. But the place was under tremendous strain for a variety of reasons, really bad policies, bad urban policies, one party control of the state, increasingly exorbitant costs of living. And COVID kind of was, you know, now I'm using another metaphor, the straw that broke the camel's back. Now, the best thing that could happen actually is that hopefully this is going to start changing some of

the political dynamics in the state. The realization that kind of progressive shibboleths don't work for urban governance, like decriminalization, you know, people living on the streets and in cities like that. The, you know, some of the urban policies that have led to the squeeze on housing, making it very, very expensive to live there. So I don't like the term, is it over? Of course, it's not over. But the way the California model of governance might be over, and that's not necessarily such a bad thing. My point, the larger point of the column wasn't, you know, just to illustrate that California is uniquely terrible or anything. I mean, lots of bad stuff happens in other states. It's to say that if this is the particular governance vision of the Biden administration or of the national left,

it's a really bad one and it's not going to be a successful model. There are democratic administrations, I've mentioned Colorado, that try to govern from the center and do so much more successfully. I agree with you that it's too early to declare any city as important as New York or any state as important as California is over. I would say, though, unlike other states and cities, these are economies that are very dependent on very highly competitive, high-performing human talent to reside in a cluster that's it's not factories it's not critical infrastructure it's not you know capital investments it's you

need a a high concentration of super talented professionals and if they scatter which they have during covid they have scattered now they may come back but they have during COVID. They have scattered. Now, they may come back, but they have scattered. And so the question- It's a bit like a Ponzi scheme, you know, in a way, or a pyramid scheme, which is that, you know, the economy sustained themselves because they sustained themselves. Like, you know, New York had critical mass and it kept gathering critical mass and it kind of went up and up and up until COVID sort of called bullshit on the whole thing, right? Why are we living in this place? Why do we put up with all of these insane taxes and this bad governance and these mediocre schools? And suddenly it dawns on one person that this is not quite right and they leave. And then the next person, you know,

then it starts- And the next person, you know, then it starts. And the next person also is getting a call from the mayor of Miami, who's saying, or the mayor of Austin. Austin, Miami, all of these cities that are also bidding for talent. And maybe it's just nostalgia or fondness or sentimentality on my part that makes me think that New York will come back. But these cities have also survived previous bouts of terrible misgovernance. They are much more resilient than we sometimes give them credit for. I don't see New York becoming Newark, New Jersey or Detroit. There's a lot that's inherently attractive about the place. And it will come

back. But I think we're in for a really grim decade is my guess. Yeah. So we'll, I mean, we can do a whole conversation on this. I would say, I don't think the risk for New York is New York becoming Detroit. What I worry about is New York becoming Boston. And it's nothing against Boston, by the way. Boston's a great city, but it's not New York pre-COVID. And so the question is, could New York just be an important, interesting city, but not nearly the powerhouse that it was, which was the most important city in the world? Well, I think you have to ask Chuck Schumer that question. Brett, thank you for joining us. Interesting conversation.

Tour de force, taking us around the world. You actually got me kind of upbeat about Russia, cautiously optimistic. Hey, listen, I've been wrong before. One of the big lessons is that nobody knows nothing. I mean, if you think about this pandemic, every single expert, every single pundit was wrong at some point. And if you haven't owned up to being wrong at some point, then you're wrong in an even bigger way. Future's unknowable. And we've all been mistaken, but it's still worth talking about. Right.

And I actually think, I don't believe any of the experts who tell me what's going to happen in five or 10 years, but conversations about what's going to happen in the next six to 12, 18 months, at least those are within the realm of somewhat predictable. I once gave a speech not on how to predict, but on how not to predict. And one day I'll share it with you. Oh, wow. All right. That could be an episode. All right, Brett, we'll bring you back. Thank you for this. Thanks a lot, Dan. Take care. That's our show for today. If you want to follow Brett's work, you can do so at the New York Times and now also at Commentary Magazine, where he'll be appearing from time to time.

He currently has a cover piece that I referred to in this episode. I highly recommend it. Just go to commentarymagazine.org. And if you have questions or ideas for future episodes, tweet at me. Post Corona is produced and edited by Ilan Benatar. Until next time, I'm your host, Dan Senor.