Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - 2021: Times Are A-Changin' | New Year's Special with Ian Bremmer

Episode Date: December 30, 2020

2020 has been a year like no other. To close out the year, Endgame invites political scientist and founder of Eurasia Group and GZERO Media Ian Bremmer to talk about the vaccines, US-China dynamics under the Biden administration, the next evolution of democracy and globalization, and the urgency to rewrite our 'social contract'.

But I'm talking about something fundamental and poor to what makes us human. And you cannot tell me that it is okay to let your kids be on this damn thing for 12 hours a day. I mean, people, executives in social media companies won't let their kids do this, but they have no problem with your kids doing it. And that is absolutely not the future that we want society to have it. Hi, listeners on Gita, where are you? and welcome to the Endgame podcast. In today's episode, I'm talking to Ian Bremmer about his perspectives on the U.S. China decoupling

and the next evolution of democracy related to AI, genomics, and climate developments. Ian, for those of you who haven't heard about him, is a political scientist and founder of the Eurasia Group, NGZero Media. He's been a very outspoken voice on critical issues worldwide through his other interviews and writings. He's written 10 books, including the New York Times, bestseller, Us versus Them, the failure of globalism. He teaches at Columbia University School of International and Public Affairs. Also, for those of you listening to this podcast for the first time, Endgame is an Indonesia-based podcast presented by the School of Government and Public Policy, Indonesia, and produced by Vecinima, an award-winning content and entertainment company based in Jakarta, Indonesia.

We've interviewed dozens of leaders and opinion makers as we unpack their hopes and imagination for the future of Indonesia and the world in 2045. Enjoy this special episode. Hi, Ian. Thank you so much for coming on to my show. My pleasure, man. Great to see you. Good, good.

Hey, how about if you spent a couple of minutes talking a little bit about your early life, you know, where you grew up, where you went to schools, and how you got interested in geopolitics and all that good stuff? I mean, I got a weird background. My dad died when I was four. So I was raised by my mom. She didn't finish high school. It was we grew up in the projects, me and my brother, just outside Boston, a place called Chelsea Mass, which people wouldn't have known before, but has become a little famous in the last year because they had the highest per capita coronavirus in the country at the beginning of the outbreak.

A lot of immigrants, Southeast Asia, actually, and Central America and living in very large numbers per apartment, jobs that couldn't socially distance, that kind of stuff. I went to public grammar school. I went to a Catholic high school. I went to a private middle school for two years. I was bounced around because they didn't really know what to do with me. Went to Tulane undergrad, in part because it was free. they gave me a scholarship. This was down in New Orleans.

And also I was really young. I was pushed ahead in school. I skipped some grades. So I was 15 years old when I started college. Wow. And then I went directly from college to get a PhD because I loved political science. And had traveled a little bit.

I'd never been outside the country before college. And so when I went to college, there were opportunities to travel. I took them all. And in fact, my first ever trip outside the United States was to the former Soviet Union in 1986. So which, I mean, Gorbachev had just come into power a few months before. And you can imagine for this kid that had no exposure, an American, suddenly to see what the inside of the evil empire was like, as Ronald Reagan used to call it, and realize that these young kids were a lot like me.

And, you know, I mean, that just, I really got the bug. I started reading The Economist every week and just fancied myself wanting to understand about the rest of the world, which is about as far from the projects in Chelsea as you could possibly get. So then I went to grad school because I was too young to know what I wanted to do for a real job, got my master's, my PhD, at Stanford taught for a couple of years and then moved to New York and started this firm. And that's since then. I mean, I've never really worked for anyone.

I've always built the stuff myself. But the background, you know, it's sort of interesting. It's pretty unusual. If you think about foreign policy in the U.S. as pretty rarefied environment, very establishment, a lot of old white men that come from well-known families who, you know, get them their road scholarship and all of that nonsense. I mean, I was the opposite. I am a white man, but that's about all I had in common with those people.

I had no network. I had no people that were making the phone calls. It took me, I think, eight years of applying to get into the council on foreign relations. I mean, all of this crap. So I look back very fondly on my weird upbringing being raised by wolves and, you know, now actually doing the kind of stuff that you do for a living, which is quite something. Hey, I one more question on your earlier childhood. Your mom was a big fan of the National Inquirer. And that's how you discovered the first time about fake news, right?

Well, I'm not sure that I knew it was fake news. It is how I learned to read. Okay. I mean, she used to, we have a supermarket down the street from where I grew up called the Stop and Shop. And with the Boston accents, the Stop and Shop. They actually would call it the Stop and Shop. And you know, you've spent some time outside Boston, I know. And so anyway, this was one of these tabloid magazines that you would buy as you were waiting in the line for the checkout register.

And it was probably 25 cents or 10 cents, whatever it was back then. And, you know, this was a horrible tabloid with a lot of crazy stories about, you know, my mom was abducted by aliens and, you know, a lot of Hollywood stuff. And it was insane, but my mother liked it. And, you know, the reason it's interesting is because I look back on those days and realize that the same people today that don't trust the establishment in the United States, that believe that they've been lied to by all of these fancy people with their degrees and their money and their political connections and that would never vote for a member. of the establishment. They either wouldn't vote at all, or they'd vote for Trump or they'd vote for Bernie Sanders, someone like that. That was my mother, right? That was how I was raised. And I have a deep, deep empathy for the anti-establishment sentiment of people that believe that the system is rigged against them. I mean, we have right now a president of the United States that goes around saying

that the election was rigged. And of course, he's lying. There was no election fraud. But on a deeper level, he's telling the truth. On a deeper level, the system is rigged, including by him, against a lot of people like my mom. And I think that most people that work in the field that you and I are in, most people that live in these wonderful first-tier cities and go to Davos and are in first-class, on airplanes and all of that, they really don't get it. They don't get that it's not fundamental. about racism. There might be a lot of racism there, but it's much deeper than that.

It is a political system that has not in any way served them. It is a representative democracy that has not been representative for them. And it's not new. It didn't start under Trump. It started actually in the 70s when I was growing up.

So that to me is really interesting. And I hadn't appreciated it as such when I was a kid because I was really, you know, my mom, she spent, she was a housewife, right? She didn't work, quote, work for a living, but she worked really hard, taking care of me and my brother. She, she kept us protected from all of that, right? We didn't know, but now we do. Now, now we understand what she had to sacrifice, and now we understand how angry she was

at the way that the system worked. To what extent, I've been talking about this in classrooms, to what extent would you attribute that, you know, the existence of the two eco-chambers that can't talk to each other to the degree of inequality or the rising inequality in recent years? I think it is absolutely that, but that inequality is not just economic inequality. That inequality is also inequality of opportunity, fundamentally. I mean, the opportunity to avoid military service as Donald Trump did. Right. So that you don't have to worry about being sent off to wars, whether it's Vietnam or Iraq or Afghanistan. And the danger that comes of that, the emotional trauma, being sent back to the United States with a veterans administration that doesn't take care of you and not being treated as a hero, right?

The opportunity that comes from having connections in high places, gatekeepers that can get you an internship or your first job, that make you not have to worry about working two jobs and taking care of your kids. And then you've got coronavirus and the school shuts down and something's got to give, right? So, I mean, yes, it is about the fact that half of America has had flat wages for the last 40 freaking years. while the top 10%, 1%, 0.1% has exploded in wealth. But it's much deeper than that. And it's much broader than that. And of course, all of that gets amplified, first by talk radio, then by cable news, and now by social media, all of which ensures that people that are angry are existing almost completely in information ecosystems that magnify. that anger, that focus on the peace of the community that is not communal and is becoming much greater.

Got it, got it. Hey, I want to talk, I want to ask you about what people in Southeast Asia can expect from a Joe Biden presidency. You want to talk about the degree to which or the pace at which we can expect normalization, geopolitically, or you think that's a little too much to ask? Oh, that's far too much to ask. And it's far too much to ask because the reason that we don't have normalization is only in a very small degree about Trump. In fact, it's in a limited degree even about the United States. So, I mean, if we start, you know, with the aperture narrow and then widen it out, first you'd say it's about all of these divisions in the U.S. that make Americans say they don't want to be the leader of the world. You know, when you have political institutions that have eroded for decades, when you have people that feel disenfranchised, they will say, we don't want the U.S. to be the global sheriff.

We don't want the U.S. to be the architect of global trade or the trans-Pacific partnership or stuff like that. We don't want to promote democracy all over the world. We're not even sure what democracy is here in our own country, right? So you've got that happening inside my country. Then outside my country, you have Europe going through the same thing and the Brexit process. You have the Russians in decline, blaming the United States and the West and trying hard to delegitimize us. You've seen that most recently with the spectacular cyber attacks.

Then you have China rising quite a bit, not just in your part of the world, but globally and not in any way aligned with free markets and representative democracy. Now you want to widen the aperture even more and focus on the fact that the underlying architecture geopolitically that we have in the world, the United Nations, NATO, the IMF, the World Trade Organization, all of this that was set up at a time when the United States was the global leader and was aligned with its allies. Increasingly, they do not reflect that geopolitical balance, nor do they reflect the crises and the themes that exercise us today. I mean, capitalism is changing. Trade is increasingly about data and services, not what the WTO was focused on when it created it or NAFTA. National security is more

about cyber and outer space and critical infrastructure, not what NATO was focused on when you created it, but the institutions do not adapt very much. So when you recognize just how little of the absence of normalization of the G-Zero world, as I call it, not the G7, not the G20, how little of it has to do with the American president and how much of it has to do with U.S., geopolitics, and architecture, then you realize that even though Biden, by nature, is a much more inclusive, centrist, multilateral, strategic, don't break things, be cautious. I mean, all of those things apply to him, and he will have a much more inclusive, centrist, multilateral, strategic, honeymoon but he's not he can't bring us back to the status quo ante no one could do

that right do you do you smell a further decay of multilateralism or you see hope for a resuscitation of multilateralism in a near foreseeable future by way of what you've just described i think i think that's a very complicated question uh there is certainly The United States will immediately rejoin a number of institutions that Trump left. That will help the intermediate nuclear forces agreement with the Russians, the Paris Climate Accord, the World Health Organization. He'll join covacs for distribution of vaccines to low and medium income countries. These things are not irrelevant. They matter.

But when we talk about whether that means we're going to be more multilateral, we have to also think about how pieces of globalization are unwinding. The technology, Cold War between the U.S. and China, 5G digital currency, financial tech, right? And financial versus that's growing and importance. That's expanding dramatically. And also the thing that really integrated the global economy had to do with cheap labor being found in countries like China and Indonesia. And the American and Western multinational corporations supporting that, even though it meant we'd lose labor, we knew we'd make a lot of money. Now, today, labor is much less important to the capital equation. We just don't need the labor for the manufacturing and services.

And that is accelerating dramatically. What we need is data. We need a lot of data. And the Chinese and the Americans dominate in data. But unlike in labor, the Americans do not intend to facilitate China's dominance in data. And so you have those two drivers that are very important, very important, that are actually an unwind. There are change in trajectory of globalization. They will make multilateralism much more difficult.

Okay. You wrote a piece on the geopolitics of vaccines just a little bit ago. Talk about that. And how do you think that would impact the livelihoods and the lives of people in Southeast Asia? Well, I mean, the one thing that is less problematic about vaccines than the stuff I've just been talking about is it's not permanent. People are going to get vaccines, and after we have them, there will be enough for everyone going forward. have to produce them now. But, you know, this is a two to three year window of a real race. And the countries that are behind the curve are going to get hurt economically in a significant

way because of that. But once we get through it, those advantages are not likely to continue to persist for very long. Having said that for the next one to two years, the Chinese government will have a real advantage in the ability to export lots of vaccine to the developing world. They will have extra, both because they'll manufacture a lot, but also because they've already been able to contain the human to human transmission inside China through quarantine, through contact tracing, in a way the Americans, the Europeans have not. So they don't need to get vaccines into every arm inside China before they start exporting. They can do both simultaneously, where in the United States, you really can't think about exporting these vaccines until later.

And also the first vaccines, Moderna and Pfizer that the Americans will be using, are very highly effective, but they also require much better infrastructure for coal chain, for dilution on-site, all of this stuff that, frankly, I mean, Indonesia would just not be capable of doing. Right. And so I do think when you think about Belt and Road and all of these countries around the world that have been much more dominated by Chinese investment, infrastructure build, capital transfers, and the like, you're going to see that play out in vaccines in the next two years as well. Wow. Okay. Okay, let's talk about this potential continuation of the decoupling between the U.S.

and China, right? How do you think this will play out in the next few years? I think that two things will happen simultaneously. First, the United States and China are not in a Cold War. I recently had a big debate with Neil Ferguson about this. I love Neil. He's wrong. We are not in a Cold War. There's a massive amount of economic interdependence

dependence between the United States and China, and it will persist. And the reason it will persist is because there are very deep entrenched interests in both countries that have a lot at stake to ensure it persists. In other words, the emergence of a cold war between the U.S. and China would be a strategic failure of the highest magnitude in both countries, and the foreign policy establishments know that. So in five years' time, you're still going to see Chinese students coming to U.S. universities paying full tuition. In five years, time, you're still going to go to a Walmart, you're going to buy goods, most of them made in China. Five years' time, you're still going to see tourists from China all over the place.

So that stuff persists. But then you have all of these areas of technology, which are becoming so much more important to the global economy. And where the Americans and Chinese not only don't trust each other, but increasingly have no access to each other's markets, and we'll fight to ensure that allies are aligned with us as opposed to them. And that is the fight with Huawei and ZTE, but you're not just talking about smartphones. You're talking about anything with a chip in it. You know, this is the Internet of Things.

It's smart cars. It's autonomous driving. It is smart cities and infrastructure. It might be smart, smart grids for the post-carbon energy environment. It's not at all clear that climate change is the U.S. and China, working together. In lots of ways, climate change is the U.S. and China competing in new strategic industries to dominate the post-carbon atoms of the future.

Do you see China or the U.S. being more proactive in being the agent of development in the context of climate change? I mean, I've seen proclamations in China, right, which are very, very aggressive in the context of how they're going to reach carbon neutrality and all that good stuff. Do you see that as... The Chinese are earlier. The Chinese are faster because they understand it's not about saving the whales. It's not about cutting down trees.

It's about China trying to dominate what happens after fossil fuels. So it's electric vehicles and supply chain. It's nuclear. It's wind. It's solar. And they've invested a ton of money strategically in the... those areas. Now, historically for the United States, climate has been anti-capitalist. Climate has been people trying to go after rapacious, exploitative corporations and saying you're destroying

the environment. Now that you have a president coming in with a lot of support, and some of that is truly bipartisan. Young people are much more oriented towards climate change, addressing climate change, Democrats and Republicans, you're going to see this administration overwhelmingly focus on dealing, on what happens after fossil fuels. And this is coming from the country that is the world's leading producer of oil and gas. Correct. And when the U.S. does that, it will no longer be about saving the whales. It will be about, okay, we want to dominate these technologies ourselves. And, uh-oh, the Chinese are already out in front. We're not going to like that. So in other words, suddenly Realpolitik is going to insert itself into the climate

conversation. I think that is an incredible change for the world's largest economy. By far the most important, the most significant shift that is occurring between Trump and Biden. There's no question about that. Wow. So we're probably likely to see massive growth in marginal productivity, efficiency, effectiveness in the area of climate change. You think that's likely to happen in those two countries, the United States and China? And frankly, not just in the U.S. and China. I mean, the Europeans know that they lost the 5G battle,

know they've lost the AI battle, and they do not want to lose the climate battle. So they're taking that seriously too. And when you talk about climate, there's a lot more going on than sort of the massive AI companies when we talk about big tech. And so I think there is space as well

for the Japanese, for the Indians, for the South Koreans, for the Canadians. I wouldn't say it's going to be much more multilateral because that implies coordination. But I think there'll be a lot more players in the space. Where when you talk about big tech, there's America, there's China, there ain't nobody else. Yeah. Right? There's nobody else in space.

That's true. That's true. Well, I can see that as an episode where Southeast Asia is going to be a beneficiary, right? of whatever good things that are going to be happening in the tech space, right? And also in climate change. I've been a witness to this. There is not a whole lot of conversations in Southeast Asia that want to embrace climate change. But as soon as China gets going on this, we're just going to have to inevitably embrace it.

And I think that's going to be good for humanity, right? Yeah, and the pandemic. I mean, think about how many more people in Southeast Asia have gotten online, how much more quickly in the digital economy, because of the pandemic. I mean, there are clear opportunities that come from the most innovative sectors of society being turbocharged for two to three years. Right.

Right. I mean, there's a lot of pain on people whose jobs are just getting destroyed. But if you ask, would you rather have this kind of a crisis or not, leaving aside the obvious health care damage that comes from it, this is a better kind of crisis. in terms of what it does for the opportunities to take advantage of it, than what you've had in 2008. Yeah. Hey, I was listening to what Kevin Rudd was saying at the Asia Society talk

just a few days ago with Hank Paulson. He was making reference to this, you know, the Chinese saying about the dual circulation economy, right? On the basis of a... Correct. On the basis of how they're going to basically further domestic... the economy, how they're going to basically still focus on getting foreign direct investments for purposes of getting goods and services produced to basically fulfill the demands

internally or domestically. Don't you think that's going to be both good and bad for Southeast Asia in the sense that the hope for the relocation of the supply chain from China to Southeast Asia is probably short lift. But at the same time, it kind of incentivizes Southeast Asian nations to get their act together so that we can make sure we have our own goods and services to the extent that we can't get those from China. What's your view on that? Yeah, I think you're exactly right. And there's no question that much of what China is doing right now, both economically and from a national security perspective, should be an incentive for Southeast

Asian countries to develop more capacity themselves. A hundred percent. But I also think, I mean, no matter what happens, China is the principal driver of outcomes for Southeast Asia. We all know that. That's only going to get more important. Even Australia is learning that right now to their great dismay. And the problem I have is that what got China here in the last 50s,

years, we'll not get them there in the next 10. I mean, for the last 50 years, China has been driven by the largest amount of low cost and productive labor in the world, which is awesome. But when I look at the next 10 years, it's not that. It's having the largest data market in the world. And they have to reformulate, redirect their economy in that way. And they have to redirect it in a way that's actually much more confrontational. And that might succeed, but it might not. In other words, I think the level of uncertainty around China's economic model in the next 10 years is kind of unprecedented. Wow. Wow. Okay. Talk about South China Sea. Do you think the hope for a code of conduct is real or realistic, or you see some other form or fashion of resolving the issue in the next,

I don't know, five to ten years? Well, I mean, I think it is getting resolved. Every month it's getting resolved, just slightly more in China's favor. It reminds me, I love Star Wars. You may remember in the Empire Strikes Back when Lando Calrissian in Cloud City was giving over Han Solo and invited Darth Vader in. And then Darth Vader said, well, actually, I'm going to leave a garrison here too. And Landau said, wait, that wasn't a part of the deal.

And Darth Vader said, pray that I do not change the deal any further, right? So this is what all the Southeast Asian countries are doing. They're looking at China. They're saying, okay, we got to give them a little bit more. and then the Chinese keep changing the rules, but, you know, they can. And of course, you're seeing, I mean, it seems to me that what we're seeing play out right now in Hong Kong is the future of what you're going to see play out in Southeast Asia. And we all, now we can forestall it. We can hedge against it, but we can't actually stop it, right?

I think we all know that. Right. And unless the Chinese model implodes or fundamental. changes direction. But, you know, when you ask me about might Biden be a return to normal, the change in China's leadership is vastly more impactful in the last five years than the change of America's leadership. I mean, Xi Jinping, anti-corruption, consolidation of power, Belt and Road, AIB, dominating AI by 2035, China vaccines, end-of-term limit. it's president for life.

I mean, these are things that will determine the future of your country and your neighborhood in a way that Trump to Biden is marginal, marginal. So that's, I mean, it's funny that because the United States has been the dominant country in power for so long, there's this presumption that what happens in Washington somehow like other countries are holding their breath until the new president comes in when I don't see anyone holding their breath. I mean, even in Europe, I mean, I see the Turks, whether it's with Greece or Armenia, Azerbaijan, or Libya, or Syria, they're just plowing ahead. And the United States is marginal in the impact on all of these things.

Now, I mean, we are much more engaged in Asia as the United States, and we will continue to be. But still, the outcomes will be more predominantly determined by China than they will by the Americans. and that determination in China's favor is increasing over time, not less. So that's not about rules of conduct. That's about how much can China get away with and how quickly. Okay. I mean, anyone that looks at the 9-dash line, if you were an alien and you came down and someone explained to you countries and territoriality

and then showed you the 9-dash line, you go, I don't understand what this is. like how would how who was who what drunk guy came up with that and it turns out they weren't drunk yeah they were just early we just got to deal with it look i think china china has been influential to our life for the last few thousand years so we're just going to have to deal with this yeah yeah but the size size matters and the china doesn't need to be bigger than the u.s economy it can be smaller because it is so much more aligned because the government has the the leverage. And that, I mean, I look at a country like Peru, which I know pretty well, I go there a lot. And Peru has about one third of their trade with China, one third with Europe, one third with the U.S.

So you would think they'd be equivalently impacted by all three regions. Not at all. Because if they irritate the Americans, they still get U.S. tourists. They still get U.S. investment. You irritate the Chinese. They cut all of that off, right? So, you know, it's not just size that matters, but also alignment, consolidation matters. I want to push on this. You know, we were talking with Kishore just a couple of weeks ago. He was making this point. Yeah, he has a different view than I do on much of this stuff.

Which is why I want to push the envelope a little bit. He was making the distinction between China being much more of a meritocracy, as opposed to the United States being much more of a plutocracy, right? And that kind of like relates to a little bit to what you were saying earlier in that, you know, size doesn't matter, but the system matters, right? To some extent. And how do you see this supposedly, you know, true theory of China being much more of a meritocracy and the United States being much more of a plutocracy affecting the shape of democracy going forward?

Well, first of all, there is some truth in that, right? And again, I love Keeshoor. He's an incredibly smart fellow. We've known each other for 20 years. Very well. I mean, heck, I think I've even blurbed his books. Right. So, I mean, truly, there's a transactional relationship there, right? So we love Keyshore. And it is true that if you look at the ranks of the Communist Party to get into the upper ranks, you actually have to be truly accomplished. I mean, if you look at Trump's cabinet, that is clearly less true, right? I think we can say that. And it is also true that there is a middle class that is rising in China and has been for four. 40 years, while the United States it's been hollowing out, that the China dream today is actually

believed by more Chinese than the American dream is by Americans. And it's very painful for me to say that. It's very painful for me to admit that because it means that things in my system are not working well. But Kishore, partially for diplomatic reasons and partially because he's decided he's on this side, is not willing to really criticize. the Chinese government. And I don't, I think that's a problem. I mean, I criticize the American government when appropriate. I criticize the Chinese government when appropriate.

I think it's really important to have intellectual honesty around all of this when you're having a conversation like this. Okay. And China is enormously problematic and anti-meritocratic with large swats of its own country and with large swats of the world. I mean, if you think about the treatment of Uyghurs, if you think about the treatment of dissidents, if you think about the treatment of people that are not aligned to the behaviors that the Chinese government and Communist Party prescribes, it is not a meritocracy. It is a freaking prison. It is a concentration camp. And Kishore won't say that.

And I think that matters. Now, again, I look at my own country. And they're his hypocrisy. I look at my own president today who is unwilling to admit that he has lost the election, while our own secretary of state is criticizing Myanmar for irregularities in their election. That's not reasonable. That's hypocrisy. Canada can do that. We can't do that.

We've lost the right to criticize other countries' elections. But there is no moral equivalence between the United States and China. It's not close. Right. And these human rights violations, not just domestically, but what they do to other countries that do not play ball by China's rule needs to stop. And we need a multilateral effort to push back against that. And I think that, especially because Kishore is one of the most important geopolitical voices in all of Asia, I think it is doing damage for him not to say that. I am so impressed by everything China has accomplished,

but I will not wear rose-colored glasses about what their government represents for society. And you can't just say it's meritocratic and stop there. That is wrong. Okay. Okay, let me push this a little bit. Do you see... But do you accept that, Gita, my friend.

Do you accept that? I accept both your views. But I do believe that there needs to be changes on both sides, right? And I see a need for, you know, the system that's prevailing in China and that in the U.S. to change for the better for all of us in the world, right? Let me pause right there. Let me ask you another question. Is there hope, though, for democracy to change form by way of some of the flaws that we might be seeing as of late? Of course there is. And the best example of that is Europe.

The European Union has responded in extraordinary fashion. It's the greatest show of leadership in the coronavirus. a massive redistribution of wealth from Germany and France and the north and the west to the south and the east that needs it. Exactly the opposite of what they did after the 2008 crisis in the Eurozone crisis when they said these lazy Greeks, Spaniards, Italians, we're not going to help them. They can leave if they don't play by our rules, if they don't engage in austerity. No, they're treating the Europeans as one continent. and they're trying to bring them closer together. They're providing a Marshall plan for countries and people that need it.

And that is reducing Euroscepticism. It's strengthening a supranational organization, and it is allowing people to believe more in common standards, in rule of law, an independent judiciary. Now, is that happening in my country? No. No, it's not. And it's a problem that the largest economy in the world

is moving in the wrong direction. Biden certainly has the temperament to reach across the aisle, both to the Republicans and also to the progressives in his own Democratic Party. But the ability to do that, given how polarized and divided my country is right now, it's not propitious. The efforts that are being made in the United States right now

to try to fix democracy are learned, largely being done at the local level, by mayors, by governors, by some CEOs, by Bill Gates, by Mike Bloomberg. And so it is happening. There are experiments. They do matter, but the federal government is failing. And as a consequence, inequality in the United States is growing. And today, you and I can honestly say that the United States is the most unequal and politically divided of all of the advanced industrial democracies. And that is a very serious problem. because we're also by far the most powerful country in the world. Wow. Interesting.

All right, let's try to shift gear here. You wrote about, you know, this recent normalization between Israel and a number of, you know, Middle Eastern countries. You want to talk about that, you know, with Morocco, Sudan, and the UAE and all that? And Bahrain. Yeah. Four so far. and others are coming.

Oman looks close. Saudi Arabia looks close. You know, this was one of the biggest wins that Trump has had in foreign policy. It was one that Secretary of State Kerry back in the Obama administration said could not happen. It would never happen unless there was Israeli-Palestinian peace. There's no Israeli-Palestinian peace.

We've moved farther away from that. And yet we're seeing normalization between these Arab states and Israel. And there are many reasons for it. One is the common enemy of Iran. The second is the energy, the fossil fuel energy model is going away. These governments are more vulnerable. The third is the Palestinians don't really matter much to them anymore. The fourth is the Israelis dominate a lot of important technologies for national security like surveillance and big data that the Gulf states would like help on. I mean,

all of those things, plus the Trump administration that was very transactional. The first trip the Trump made as president outside the United States was to Israel and Saudi Arabia. And his relations with those countries, frankly, has been very, very positive. And he's used U.S. power to get that over the line. So I think that's a legitimate win for the United States. And frankly, the Iranian government, looking at that, realizes that they're probably going to need to try to play ball. They don't have the leverage. I mean, the Obama administration, I got to tell you, I mean, Obama, he's a contemporary,

of mine, right? He's incredibly smart. He's urbane. He looks at the world similarly to I do, right? I mean, there are many things I get and find appealing about someone like Barack Obama. But he was very cautious in temperament. He was very unwilling to use U.S. power. And that got him into a lot of trouble where Trump, I mean, his worldview is radically different from my personal worldview. And he's completely unfit for office. But he was very willing to use U.S. power. And, you know, you get, when you're the president of the most powerful country in the world, it turns out you get luckier.

You get a lot luckier. You know, you try stuff and it works. Why? Because other countries need to make the way for you. And so the fact that Trump recognized an opportunity in the Middle East and leaned into it, that opportunity was there for Obama. They could have done that. They didn't pick it up.

They just didn't pick it up. They didn't want to take the risk. They were stuck in an old worldview, what have you. I asked this because, you know, I come from the largest Muslim country in the world, right? You see this as more of a positive legacy of the Donald Trump presidency in the context of normalization between Israel and, you know, increasingly more and more Middle Eastern countries? Yeah. Yeah, because Israel is not going in.

anywhere. It's wealthy. It's stable. It's powerful. And the Gulf states are both less stable, economically in more trouble, are aligned with the United States and Europe in a way that Iran is not. And we'd also like to compel better Iranian behavior and one way to get them there for a more sustainable Iranian deal that also includes ballistic missiles and funding for Hamas and Hezbollah. and all of that is the fact that you have more alignment between these countries. Now, look, I am not going to sit here and tell you that I think that these moves are perfect. The Palestinians are completely screwed. And I am deeply concerned about that.

What happens to them? Because if you're Israel, you no longer need to worry about the Palestinian issue. You don't need Palestinian labor. They're drones. You shoot down. with Iron Dome, there are tunnels, you've got sensors on your borders. You know, I mean, that 50% unemployment in Gaza is an obscenity living right next to Israel, and there ain't nothing that Israel needs to do about it.

We've got an election coming up right now in Israel, and the Palestinian peace process will not be an issue, not for the right, not for the left. It's irrelevant. So when that is a reality, but I mean, to be fair, it's no more of an obsceny. than the fact that the Maldives are losing their country because we don't care enough about dealing with climate change until it starts affecting wealthy countries. I mean, it's the same problem. One has to do with the Palestinians who have been more celebrated in the Muslim world for a long time.

The other is a tiny little group of islands that nobody really cares about. But they're both people. Right. I mean, one of them doesn't have more worth than the other. Right. All right. Let's move east a little bit. from the Middle East, India, right?

India was the only guy that didn't sign up on RSEP, the regional comprehensive economic partnership. And I want to put this in the context of China and India, right? At the rate that RSEP seems to look like something that was a victory for Southeast Asia and China and to the extent that India didn't sign on. And at the same time, we're all of the view that Biden is not likely to try to reactivate the TPP discussion because he's just going to be preoccupied with the vaccines and all.

Correct. What do you think is likely to happen with India? Well, first of all, RSEF is three miles wide and two inches deep. So, I mean, I don't see it as a game changer. It's like one more thing where the Chinese are planted flags and they're having some success. On balance, I support our sap because if the U.S. can't do big trade deals, I would rather have more economic growth. I'd rather have low tariffs because the world benefits from more economic growth. So it's not like Chinese 5G, where if you pick that, you can't work with the United States.

This is ultimately more win-win. It's more Belt and Road like, though there are problems with it, right? The bigger problem I see with India is that Modi's just not very pro-trade. He doesn't trust free trade. He is much more in line with maintaining significant tariffs and domestic subsidies. It's not an efficient way to run the economy. So he's quite pro-business. He's quite pro-industry, but he's not pro-free trade.

And that is going to hurt India. I mean, I think it's a mistake for India not to join RSF. I think it's a mistake for India not to be Belt and Road. I think it's a mistake for India to take a lot of men. which have slowed foreign investment into India, both from China, but also from the United States. And look, there are things about Modi that are good. He's very anti-corruption. I think that's important.

He has a very strong work ethic. He's tried to have competent people around him. He's also very charismatic, and he's used Hindu nationalism to drive a lot of his popularity. But, you know, there's a lot of big negatives with Modi, too, and trade is one. anti-Muslim sentiment is a second. And I worry about what that means for the future of India. So assuming that they're probably not likely to sign on, we've given them an option, right?

An open window for them to sign on without the 18-month limitation and all that. Doesn't that seem like something that's going to reduce the competitiveness of India vis-a-vis China? or they're just not likely to be as competitive or more competitive. I mean, I don't see China and India as remotely in the same league. I mean, when's the last time you heard someone talk about the bricks? Right? I mean, because we used to talk about the bricks.

And it used to be like, you know, all these books written on India and China, Rising Dragons, economists did covers. By the way, I was against that notion because Indonesia was not included in it. I had a couple of debates with Jim O'Neill. Wrong eye. You know, come on. You need two eyes in there. Right.

But now China is going to be the world's largest economy and India is still India. I mean, the Chinese invest 10 times as much in domestic infrastructure as the Indians. Every year, India gets farther behind. They're not catching up. They're not, I mean, look at artificial intelligence. Look at, again, the future of the global and the future. economy. Look at the future of energy after fossil fuels. India is nowhere in these conversations. So, I mean, look, at 1.4 billion people and a lot of human capital, that's awesome. If you're a

global corporation, you should be doing more in India. Of course you should. I like going there, all of the rest. But let's not pretend that they're competing with China in any meaningful way. They're not. Okay. All right. Let me spend the last few minutes on fossil fuel and AI and genome sequencing, right? From what you've said, it sounds like climate change is really going to happen in a good way in the next few years or decades, right? And that means the decline of fossil fuel, right? How would that imply in terms of the relevance of the Middle East to the rest of the world? In the next few decades? I would say less. Okay. Okay. Okay. Okay, okay. Can we get an amen? Amen. And you know, I've been reading and I've been watching these things on AI and genome sequencing that are just so able and capable of hacking humanity for the better, supposedly, right? How would that impact the geopolitics of the world in the next few years or decades?

I am deeply concerned, first because of the fight between the U.S. and China, because if I have an information, we already know how divided the U.S. is because one group watches Fox, one group watches CNN. Now imagine that your entire information ecosystem, all of your algorithms that filter your behavior and what you see, is either aligned with an American set of companies or a Chinese set of companies, we are going to divide. the world into two people, we're going to engage in behavioral modification that is going to dehumanize the other side. I mean, that's how you end up hating people. We all know when we get behind the wheel of a car, we treat pedestrians like idiots. If you're walking, you treat other pedestrians like members of a community. That becomes exponentially greater when you're completely in your data ecosystem. And these algorithms, which are largely written by program by coded by young men, right i mean we're rolling them out into humanity there's no phase three vaccine tests for a social

media algorithm we just give it to people including young children and we say here put it in your brain for eight hours a day or 12 or 16 and let's see what happens to you that's not okay there is no ethics of artificial intelligence that's governing the way these the way that people are becoming product types and and i'm I think that geopolitically, that is dangerous. And I think in terms of the future of humanity, it is not progress. There are many other things that are progress, distance learning and distance medicine and AI efficiencies for agriculture

and be the ability to make climate change, you know, sort of to combat it more effectively. Those are wonderful advances. But the effect on our brain, the engineering of our brain without having any idea what we're doing, the deep learning into pattern recognition and efficiency and not understanding even what's driving the algorithm. We now have algorithms that can identify whether or not someone is a homosexual

with incredible certainty on the basis of facial recognition. We don't actually know what it is that does that. And by the way, a lot of those people may not be out. They may not even be completely out to themselves. What is that going to do to society? I think we need more ethicists. We need more anthropologists. We need more people from the social sciences that are getting involved early on,

as opposed to just the private equity people and the technology people and the business people in an unholy trinity that are trying to figure out how to make. mass market and squeeze and maximize efficiency and productivity because that makes a lot of money, but it destroys civil society. Wow. I was kind of hopeful that it's going to do more good for humanity than bad because, you know, coming from a developing country, you know, there's a need, right, to get smarter. There is a need to get more marginally productive, more marginally efficient.

And it will do those things. Yeah. It will do those things. The productivity is incredible. The lifespan expectancy will increase. Well, the diseases, you've got M RNA vaccine right now for coronavirus. Within a few years, you're going to have MRNA vaccines for all sorts of diseases. These are amazing things.

But I'm talking about something fundamental and poor to what makes us human. And you cannot tell me that it is okay to let your kids be on this damn thing for 12 hours a day. I mean, people, executives in social media, companies won't let their kids do this, but they have no problem with your kids doing it. Sure. And that is absolutely not the future that we want society to have it. See, that's really scary, right? We've seen so many examples where technology has been so good at manipulating the psychology

of people, that they get farther apart. They get farther polarized. And you've alluded to this a few times, to the extent that multilateral instance, institutions are becoming so much less effective in basically codifying behavior or making sure that, you know, we're well behaved. And you've alluded to the fact that, you know, even the G20s, the G7s, the G8s of the world are not as effective as they used to be in coordinating policy postures and all that. So isn't it kind of scary if you put all these, you know, chaotic possibilities of AI and G2? genome sequencing without being regulated to the extent they should be or without being coordinated the way they should be. I mean, scary, that question has more to do with your personal temperament than it does

with the answer to the question. I think the level of uncertainty in the future of geopolitics and humanity in the next literally 20 years is vastly greater than at any time in our lifetimes with the possible brief exception of the Cuban missile crisis. Right. And you can say that's scary, but it's also a time that is completely ripe with potential and opportunity. We don't get the best from humanity when you're not in what you would call flow state.

You know, when things are easy, you don't try very hard. And you mail it in. And when things are too daunting, you give up. You know, you're just like, oh, I can't make this happen. But when you're exactly in an environment where the challenges are hard, they're daunting. But if you grow and if you give it, you're all, you can really make a difference. You can change the trajectory of humanity on this planet. I think that's what we're facing in the next 20 years.

you know, if that doesn't fill you with a little bit of fear, you're probably not a human being. But I don't think that you become paralyzed with that. I think you become empowered by that. I mean, I know that I am operating on a higher level, more energized, more engaged now than I was 15 years ago for precisely that reason. And most of the people that I really respect out there, right? You, Kevin Rudd, Keyshore, I mean, friends that we've been talking about today and so many more, I think are all feeling the same way. No one, you can't mail it in in this environment. And, you know, if you look at what humanity has managed to accomplish in response to coronavirus, where, I mean, I know some of the world's best epidemiologists, and I've been talking to last year, none of them believed. None of them thought we would be at the end of this year with six working vaccines going off all around the world at the level of,

efficacy that they have, incredible, right? And so now apply that to the biggest questions of the future sustainability of us on this planet, which is what you're asking about. Yeah. And that should kind of fill you with the hope of possibility. Yeah. Wow. Hey, okay, we've talked about AI. We've talked about tech. We've talked about, to some extent, genome sequencing. I want to, I want to I want to ask you what areas out there are needing to be disrupted in a big way? I mean, you know, we could use disruptions, right, in our part of the world. I mean, we've seen disruptions in your part of the world in a big way. But let me ask you, what do you think should be or could be disrupted in a big way?

We've talked about fossil fuels, right, and that's happening. We've talked obliquely about our existing institutions. So I'll give you an example. The two countries in the world of scale that are most aligned to multilateralism and rule of law are Germany and Japan. Right. Right. They know they benefit from it. They don't spend much on defense.

And they're worried about where it's going. These are the two countries that cannot be allowed as permanent members in the Security Council. And the reason for that is because they lost World War II, which is a very stupid reason, right? So you really need, I mean, that's one obvious example of a very broad problem, which is sclerosis of entrenched institutions that all need to be disrupted. They all need much more dramatic reform than they can have. I mean, NATO cannot just be focused on the North Atlantic, right? Needs to be disrupted. The WTO has to focus more on data and services.

It needs to be disrupted. And then you've got the biggest disruption of them all, which is the way that capitalism runs, which, you know, well-regulated capitalism makes a lot of sense, in my view, when labor matters. But we are now very rapidly heading into an environment where labor does not matter. And this is not the fourth industrial revolution. this is the post-industrial shock. And now, post-industrial shock doesn't sell many books, right? I mean, it's not super sexy to support the globalists, but it is what most of the world is going to experience.

And so unless you dramatically change the social contract and how you engage with citizens, you've got a very serious problem that we're experiencing right now on a much more direct way in my country than we are in Europe and Japan, but it's coming soon to a theater or you. So these are the things that really need to be disrupted.

There are a lot of things. There are a lot of things. I'm going to ask you one thing. Education. Don't you think that needs to be disrupted? Yeah, that's part of, that would be part of the social contract. How can you possibly,

in an environment that is changing this radically, where, first of all, if you don't have a universe, if you're not part of the knowledge economy, you're increasingly irrelevant. So you have to make everyone a part of the knowledge economy. Our educational system in the U.S. and globally is not remotely capable of that right now. Right. I just think it's gotten too way expensive for the kind of return you're going to be able to get from your education.

You know, at the time you went to school, the time I went to school, it was a lot cheaper to go to school compared to now. Yeah, and I almost made a big mistake. I mean, I went to Tulane because it was free and they gave me a sky. And not realizing that not being in a top-tier university meant that the job fare would suck. There were no professors that had connections to Ivy League schools. There were no Rhodes Scholars, all of that. Now, I mean, so I applied to all of the top schools. I was in political science.

I was by far the best student that my props had seen. And they did everything they could. I mean, they were calling every professor they knew said second, second, or, border relations with to try to get me in. They got me in on the waiting list of Stanford, and then by the grace of God, I got in. And if I wasn't such a good student, if I hadn't been so annoying, if my professors hadn't been, you know, if I hadn't been raised by my mother, if my professors hadn't been so willing to support me, there's no chance I would be sitting here right now having this conversation with you. No chance. And I know that I graduated in

1989. So in the 30 years since I graduated, the gap between who has that network and who doesn't has grown tremendously. In other words, put me in the same situation from the projects in that university, I don't make it. I don't make it. And that is not okay. Right. Right. It's because I had, I mean, I'm a white man that was raised by my mother to believe in myself and it felt like I had every opportunity, even though I was poor. And I mean, damn it, if I could make it, what the hell does that mean for the average American? It means they've got no shot. So it goes back to the beginning of the conversation. We do not have a quality of opportunity in capitalism as it exists today in the post-industrial shock.

We don't. And so we have to change a lot. I don't know, man. If they didn't let you in, it would have been a huge mistake. And even if you had gone somewhere else, you would be sitting here, probably higher. I got to tell you, I got to tell you, I mean, I really, you know, I meet. So you look at these students that, you know, in India, I remember when the Stanford, Stanford professor opened up his computer science 101 course of what it was, to instead of the people that got in Stanford

opened it up distance learning to kids from all over the world and was just wondering what kind of quality he'd get in the students and he found like the top Stanford student was not even in the top 500 of performers on the top test takers. It was all like India and Cameroon and whatnot. I mean, there are a lot of incredibly brilliant people out there vastly smarter than you and me

who just did not have the right people opening doors for them. And I just do not. I just do not accept that you can have great content and that gets you where you need to go. I wish that were true. And I do have great content and so do you. And I even have great communication skills, but that's not enough. Right. And we need to understand that that's not enough.

We can't have empathy unless we have a system of policies in our governments that truly reflect that those things are not enough. Wow. Hey, it's been fascinating, man. I know you got to go. Great to see you truly thriving and doing something important. I'm looking forward to this. I thank you, and I look forward to playing ping pong with you again. We can do that.

Are you getting better? No, no, I have not played since I played with you. And as I told you, I didn't play since high school until I played with you. Yeah, okay. And I want to wish you happy new year. Merry Christmas and stay healthy. Okay, I'll see you someplace. All right. Thank you, Ian.

Take care. Bye-bye. All right, listeners. That was Ian Bremmer. Thanks for listening. This is Endgame.