Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - David Carden: On Regional Leadership and Multilateralism

Episode Date: May 5, 2021

Former US Ambassador to ASEAN David Carden shares stories from his years trying to convince leaders in the region about issues worth fighting for (like climate crisis and pandemic prevention) and what he thinks the next few decades will bring for our increasingly interconnected world.

And so we're going to have all kinds of knock-on effects. But here's one that people don't ever talk about. For every one degree centigrade increase in temperature, the nutritional value of food goes down 10%. Similarly, with regard to oxygen in the air, the amount of oxygen that's predicted to be, that's not less oxygen, it has more carbon dioxide. The carbon dioxide levels, if they reach 1,000 parts per million, I think that's the number.

Some people believe that it will reduce the cognitive capacities of human beings dramatically. I just think that at the end of the day, these are things that we should be planning for. We've talked a lot about Southeast Asia on Endgame. We've invited people on the show who care a lot about this region. We've had Tony Fernandez and Nazirazuk from the private sector. sector, UN UN-UEN-Aung and Don Emerson from the academic sector, Kishore Mabubani, Bilharikosikan, and our own Marti Natalagawa from the public sector and policy-making site. And I thought, what better way to complete this deep dive on ASEAN by chatting with one of my good friends, David Cardam.

Appointed by President Barack Obama in 2010, he was the first ever American ambassador to ASEAN and one of the critical figures overseeing Obama's Pivot to Asia strategy. Under his leadership, he helped ASEAN take center stage on issues like trade, rule of law, pandemic prevention, and climate change. This was about 10 years ago. He also hired the first ever science advisor to be posted in American Embassy and created the ASEAN US Science and Technology Fellows program. I'm excited to know what his retirement days looked like. His thoughts now about what's happening in the world and whether he misses this neck of the woods. Enjoy this episode.

This is Endgame. Hello, Taman, today we're coming to my friend of my Godin, David Carden, a manan dutte-Besar America-Sericat for Asian. Hi, David, how are you? Salabat, Pagga, Gita. I'm fine, thank you. Thank you.

Thank you. Good, good that you could make it on to our podcast. I want to ask you. I want to ask you lots of questions today, but first and foremost, I want to ask you about how you grew up in Indiana, particularly in a town called Indianapolis, and how you just got so much more globalized, you know, from that little town in the Midwest. Well, it was a little place. Actually, it was Speedway, Indiana, which is even smaller than Indianapolis. And it is true that very few people tend to leave it. I was fortunate in having had. parents that had a vision of the world that did at one point in their lives go beyond it, primarily because of World War II. My father had fought in the war and he'd come back. And of course, his scalding as all that was, he wasn't interested in going back out. So the town was

a little bit insular. All the streets were named after American generals and battles and automobiles. And it was a peculiar little place. But it was a time in the 20th century when things were beginning to happen in the world in a larger way. Sputnik, for example, in October of 1957, as I recall, come upon the world. And I was six years old at that time, how old I am. And I remember rather distinctly at that point, thinking that, looking out, trying to understand what was going on was something that was going to be important to me. I'm not sure exactly how it manifests itself. I do remember one story on, you know, our memories sometimes are a little fragile when it comes to this, but it used to be in those days that people would go door to door

selling books. And one of the books they would sell was the encyclopedia. And these were not encyclopedias like they are today. They were a little bit more simple. And an encyclopedia salesman came to the door one day and interested in that. And it turns out that my father saw her in it, and he bought it and used to buy one volume a month. We couldn't afford the books more than that. So we bought letter A for one month. And by the time the second month came around, I had read most of letter A. And so my father accelerated the purchase of encyclopedias

and come to find out over the course of the next year or so. You know, he'd gotten them all. And all I was doing was reading encyclopedia. And the one thing about that, which is interesting, if you sit read all these subjects together, not only do you learn about all these other places out world, which I did. And of course, they all went by different names then, or many of them did, but particularly in your part of the world, they, what I think of is still my part of the world

in many ways, there's some different names applied in the two years. But this was a time I learned about the larger world. And I also learned something else, which turned out to be, I think, as important as anything. I began to see the connections that existed between and among various topics. You know, an article on cities, for example, would include some reference to a point in history where people moved from the country, countryside, who were, they'd been farmers. They'd moved to the cities. And, you know, I never would have thought at age eight, nine, that the cities had filled up with people who moved there from the farms. I mean, I didn't know anything about that. And so I began to see how the, how time flowed and how people flowed and

how topics were related. And I think in many respects, that created a perspective, if you will, for me to look out into the larger world. It looks like you still have those encyclopedias behind you. Are those the same that you were reading in the 60s or late 50s? You know, it's interesting. You asked that, I asked my brother this question about two months ago, and I said, whatever happened, it was Compton's pictured encyclopedia. And he still has them. He has them because they're kind of family air rooms. Of course, none of them are current anymore, and there would be no point or little point. But, you know, I learned such things as how fast it has run and how long tortoises live and, you know, all these patterns that I alluded to in the past.

And, you know, the encyclopedia was a wonderful thing for me to spend my time with when I was very, very young and created the perspective. And I learned all these places out in the world and including, you know, Indonesia. Good, good. Hey, you studied philosophy during your undergraduate years and then you studied a law and you became a successful lawyer. What got you interested in international affairs? Why did you decide to leave the legal profession? Well, you know, they say if you're a lawyer, you're always a lawyer. So I suppose in some respects, I'm not sure I've completely escaped. There are many things that I learned during my time as a lawyer that had application, not only in terms of negotiations, but in terms of understanding people's motivations and the life that were important in terms of trying to reach agreements with people that didn't always agree.

But I was fortunate in having a friend who became President of the United States and with whom I had a close relationship. and we had had many, many conversations on a wide variety of topics, some of which were really very important to him and some of the things that he was thinking about in terms of his presidency. And he asked for my help. And so when somebody like that asked you for you to help them, then you tend to do that because it's the right thing to do. So I didn't know that I could be helpful, but in many ways I think he knew he could, he could come. count on me to do my best at being helpful. And so that's how it came to pass that I left the law and became a diplomat. Did he ask you specifically to focus on ASEAN or was it, you probably had a few choices, right? And I'm just curious as to whether or not you were the one that had the position

of strength in choosing where to go. And if you did so, why ASEAN? Well, he was the president. He was the president of the United States. I think he had the, he had strength, not me. But you're quite right. I did have choices. And it was actually kind of an interesting story. And without going into what the choices were, they were individual countries. And several of them were in the region. But Eve, and this is a little known story, which I think is quite interesting. And I think it was 2005 or six that then Senator Obama, Senator Biden, Senator Kerry, and Senator Lugar decided that there ought to be an ambassador to ASEAN. Wow, that early. Okay.

2005. It didn't get signed until 2010, right? No, wow. Stay with the story. It's a more interesting story even than that. So in 2005, none of the ASEAN countries had ambassadors to the association. And so when they imagined an ambassador, they had in the bill. It was a bill in the Senate.

You can look it up. I can't remember the number of the bill. And it set forth some of the problems and some of the challenges and some of the opportunities that existed in the region. And there were things that caused them to believe that the United States should have an ambassador to ASEAN because it was in the best interests of the United States to have such an ambassador. and also because the challenges that the region faced would be challenges that would have impact upon the United States.

That bill in 2005 did not get through the House of Representatives for reasons that I don't remember right now. And then in the following year, 2006, there was something called the Sense of the Senate, which created the position of an ambassador to Asseum. At that time, it was not a resident ambassadorship. It was going to be an ambassadorship to the association, based in Washington, D.C. And my friend, and later the ambassador to Indonesia, Scott Marceal, had that position. So he was the ambassador to ASEAN in Washington, not in Washington.

He lived in Washington, and he traveled, of course, to the region, as case it may be. And then in 2010, thereabouts, when I was going through the process of 2009, 2010, going through the process of an possible ambassadorship to a country, the president decided that it was critical that the ambassador to ASEAN become a resident ambassador. And at that point in time, some of the ASEAN countries, I believe, I know they had, had named their own ambassadors,

some of whom I think, in fact, maybe all of them were resident in Jakarta. But in 2010, the president decided that a resident ambassador was critical to a status. and he asked if I would fill that position. I had been slated to go to another place. And so when he asked that, I said, yes. And I couldn't be happier that I did because ultimately it really very much, I think, spoke to things I cared about. And I think it was in many ways a much more, how would you call it?

I say interesting, but critical opportunity, I think, because of the number of countries and because of the number of issues. You then, you know, we've known each other for a long time. We've had so many fascinating conversations. And a lot of the stuff that we've talked about was manifested in a real good way in your book, Mapping ASEAN. And I know you've written articles also on ASEAN. But it's interesting how you started the book with a description of your little pond outside your little place in Rhode Island, right? And nobody would have thought that you actually were trying to make a point about how we should care about, you know, the planet. And let's dig into this, right?

Talk a little bit about your views on the distinction between nature and nurture and how you think we could be better humanity. by taking care a little bit better of our planet. You know, it's a really fascinating question you've just asked. And if you'll bear with me just a moment, I'm going to speak just a moment about biology because I think it really will inform a lot about what it needs to happen politically as well. So in the conversation between nature and nurture, of course, what people try to get to is, are we born with what we have

are we going to become what we're going to become? Or can the way we take care of people, love them, support them, you know, what effect does that have? That's usually the way that conversation goes. But not that long ago, the biologists really began to understand that the genome doesn't change. The nucleotides don't change in your body, the however many cells you have in our bodies, and the number is anywhere from 30 to 750 trillion.

They all have the same DNA. Why doesn't a brain cell, why does it do something different than a cell in your kidney? It's the same DNA. And there are, of course, answers to that. And people began to investigate why is it that identical twins, for example, don't always come out quite so identically the older they become? And the answer is epigenetics. And what that really means simply is that there are proteins, repressor proteins and other things, that cause cells, cause genes to turn on and turn off.

So I'll give you a very specific example. And if you stay with me for just a moment, this does relate to my pond and does relate to what ASEAN is all about. There are people who don't drink alcohol. And when they do, they have a bad reaction. There are people who drink a lot of alcohol, and they seem not to have a reaction. And one of the reasons for that is that this process I've just described actually can the genes that affect the absorption or the metabolism of alcohol can be turned on and off.

And the more genes you turn on, the faster you metabolize alcohol. That means you don't have the same effects. But if you don't ever drink alcohol, then those genes don't ever get turned on. and you don't metabolize alcohol. As a consequence, it has a bigger effect. The turning on and off of genes in your body is many respects identical to the kinds of things we reinforce and neglect in society. So one of the things that affects genes and whether they turn on or off is stress.

and stress can be in the nature of war. It can be in the nature of malnutrition. It can just be poverty. These things have genetic impact. The genes don't change. The DNA doesn't change. The changes as the epigenetics turns genes on and off in response to the stress. And so, too, when it comes to the way we deal with issues in society.

So we allow these stresses to affect our institutions and to affect the way in which we engage one another. And so the real question is, you know, how do you understand what the stresses are? How do you understand what you should turn on and turn off, if you will, if you have the choice to do so? And if you turn on and turn off certain kinds of stresses, for example, staying with stress for the moment, you can get different outcomes. Now, you know, this is not deep thinking, but nevertheless, it seems to be beyond some people. And as a consequence, it's important to understand just what impacts are going to be caused by certain kinds of events, whether they be stresses or even opportunities, some good things as well. So what we did when I was the ambassador to ASEAN is look at the systems in the region. and not just the specific issues, but we wanted to understand, you know, how everything was related to everything else, going back to my encyclopedia days, you know, trying to understand, you know, what would it mean if human migration became the issue that I think it's going to become in Southeast Asia where you have large numbers of people both moving from the country side to the cities, but also across borders because of climate change and because of other stresses, for example, you know,

conflict in Myanmar right now. You know, there's, there's, these things are going to affect the entire region. And the thing that was so, uh, important, I thought, as a messaging aspect of Assyana, the narrative that we tried to provide or not provide, but to help shape was, you're all in this together. You can pretend that the ocean is going to be deep enough and the walls are going to be high enough or that you're not one country and they've got a problem and you don't. But when drug resistant malaria or human migration,

or pandemics or climate change or forest fires or whatever it may be affect one country, chances are they going to affect at least more than another, one other. And those things particularly were in such proximity were what we looked at. And that was why, first off, why coming to ASEAN was in many respects a much more, I want to even say important opportunity for me personally to kind of deploy or use some of the things I thought I'd learned, but also to try to be helpful because that's the way I saw the world. And the book is an effort to try to understand what those things are. So the title, Mapping ASEAN, is an effort, just an effort to map what those issues are in the region,

not only that some of which are very familiar, some of which aren't so familiar, that relate not only to each segment of society, but to one, another. These issues always, they affect one another. They change one another. They change the severity of one another. And they affect our ability to manage these kinds of stress, which is why for, you know, and this has very practical applications. Let's just take, you know, without going in any great detept, one of the current situation at Myanmar, to the extent that there's anybody who believes in the region that this is somehow doesn't affect that. That's just foolish. I mean, forget the human suffering for a moment, which is hard for me personally to forget or anyone else that's, I think, right thinking.

But the fact is that everybody is going to be affected by this situation, not just Thailand that's next door or Bangladesh, but everyone is going to be affected by this. So to water, so to the water supply in the region, so to pandemic exposure, so to drug-resistant malaria, so to the recurrence of cholera, which will come with higher temperatures. because it's atophanous in the water column, so to all of these things. And so the solutions that we need have to be multilateral. It is foolish to think otherwise. David, it's a bit ironic if we take a look at ASE and Southeast Asia in the last couple of thousand years, right? We've gone through enough episodes of stresses and traumas. but yet we've been able to stay peaceful and stable.

We've been able to stay cohesive compared to a number of other regional groupings across the globe, right? One would think within logic, right, that it's got the wherewithal to metabolize any potential future traumas, which could include what's happening in Myanmar, which could include what's happening

in the last, what's been happening in the last 13 months by the way of COVID-19, right? Yes. Why is it that in your observation and also my observation that we're not having the necessary, you've used this phrase, longitudinal conversations to basically be able to deal with collective issues in a collective manner? What is it that we're not doing enough of to basically take ownership of each other problems that would matter for the future. It is the question. Why do we have such difficulty being more than transactional, more than responding in the moment and immediately? Part of the

answer, it's a complicated answer. Part of the answer are electoral cycles in those countries where they matter, where people are, quite frankly, pandering to certain constituencies. Happens clearly in my country. Happens in democracies across the world. Part of it is, I just know what I say it is ignorance, not understanding what the issues really are in difference to what those issues. I think, quite frankly, we saw that in our last president, lack of curiosity. about issues of great consequence, and it is disabling when that lack of curiosity is in a leadership position.

Part of it is that part of its capital, the money that it takes in order to constitute those kinds of conversations and responses. I think there are people that believe that even if they did have a better handle on what was going to happen, there's not much they could do by way of affording a response to it. I think the list goes on and on, but the most disabling aspect of all is lack of leadership. And by that, I mean lack of regional leadership. No, I'm an ASEAN fan. I'm a huge ASEAN fan. What it took to create it, the vision that it, and yes, it came about because of the conflict in Southeast Asia.

and yes, it was a response to that, and yes, it didn't do much for the first 10 years, and yes, all those things. But the fact was there was a vision of a relationship in the region that was something really quite profound. And by the way, you saw this around the world in a variety of settings, you know, the non-aligned league, a line line nations. You saw what incredible leadership in Africa at the time, Julius Nauri and people such as that that were just extraordinarily, for insightful and trying to do the right thing. Of course, the leadership in Southeast Asia at the time, and you know all those legendary names. And it has gradually gotten stronger and stronger and

stronger. But one thing has been happening side by side with it, which went on, I would say, unperceived or not perceived completely. And that was the nature of the problems were changing. and the challenges that that has presented to the leadership makes it calls for a different kind of leadership. You know, in the past, all that was necessary perhaps was the kinds of cooperation across borders that related to trade or related to, you know, keeping, you know, the peace, which was, of course,

incredibly important. But now, I mean, what is Indonesia going to do with drug-resistant malaria that's emerging on the border of Thailand and Myanmar comes to Indonesia. I mean, that's something you right now, you'd say, is that your problem? Well, of course it's your problem. But right now, when's the last time you heard anybody in Southeast Asia mentioned

drug-resistant malaria on the border of Thailand and Myanmar? I'd be stunned if you've heard it. And whether your audience has heard it. Maybe one of the biggest, you know, health problems on the planet right now. And it's being contained by some brave doctors. I don't know what COVID has done to that. You know, there's been people that have been fighting that bravely on the border. So you have these challenges that call for a different leadership.

And one of the problems, and I'll be frank, I mean, you know me, I'm a truth teller on these things. One of the problems is that the sovereignty anxieties in us, which have been made so acute because of colonialism, understandably so, are themselves impediments to the kind of collective, cooperative action that's necessary. necessary in moments of real crisis. There's cajoling. There's there there's people that are trying to come to some agreement. But quite frankly, you know, sometimes it's going to be required that there'll be more action taken. That just is critical that people act together to because it's your problem as much as it is anyone else's and and you can't stand by and say, gee, would you please take care of this for us? Because right now it's in your country. And so that kind of leadership is a new kind of leadership. It requires an understanding of the multiple issues, their relationships to one another, the ability to build the allegiances and the coalitions required to address them.

And it needs to figure out how to deal with those people or those countries from the outside that are impediments to that process, because there are countries on the outside that really do not want to see ASEAN acting in that way. Interesting. Let me dig deeper here into the COVID-19, right? And what is your view in terms of how soon we're going to be facing a new variation that could be as deadly or even more deadly? I you know we can go back to the myth of this hundred-year cycles right but I'm not a believer of maintaining that you know cyclicality I'm of the view that I think it's going to get accelerated right in the context of this getting accelerated what what do we have to anticipate going forward you're I'm not a scientist I'm not neither mind. But you read lots of books, and I try to read as many books as you do. Yeah, it's not just the books, it's just stepping back from it and trying to see the field. Right. I don't know what the, what in Bahasa that would be, but seeing the field means seeing the landscape ahead of you and seeing all the various issues. You're quite right about the cyclical issue, because the fact is the reason that these viruses are emerging right now is in many respects a function of things like

deforestation and animal trafficking, which were not problems in 1917 and 18 when the Spanish flu hit the world and killed many more people as a percentage than this flu has caused. This pandemic and COVID has caused. And so you have new conditions that are creating new viruses to emerge. When we were in Southeast Asia and the mission, we were looking at NEPA, and Hendra, which your audience probably hasn't even heard of, understandably so, and Ebola and Lhasa as well, even though they weren't in the region. And we were looking at them because they were emerging

from, we thought, anyway, and I had the science advisors, as you know, I was the first US ambassador in American history to have a science advisor. Everybody ought to, every leader ought to have a science advisor who is a scientist on their short shoulder. And I was the only one, I think I still am the only one that ever had one as an American diplomat. But I digress. The reason that we were concerned about it is that we thought it related to the deforestation and animal trafficking issues in the region. And that related to law enforcement.

It related to health challenges that were emerging. And the same patterns of criminal activity in animal trafficking world were the identical avenues for arms shipments and for drugs shipments and the like. So there was a relationship between animal trafficking and the criminality of that and the like. And so the United States was actually funding the ASEAN Wildlife Enforcement Network at the time. And one of the things we were trying to do is get ASEAN to take over ownership of that process. It was only at that point of $50,000 per country to basically, we thought it was critical they take ownership of that issue because of its relationship to all these terrorism and the line. And so we were looking at these viruses and their lethality, that is,

the rates of killing people were off the charts. I mean, recollection is that both NEPA and Hendra are over 50% of the people that contract the virus die. In contrast to COVID, which my own calculation is some like one quarter of 1%, 50 plus percent, in case of Ebola and Lassa, I think it was 90%. Now, we've gotten some approaches to that to lower those numbers. So right now, in the world, there are thousands of, well, the estimate is we've discovered 1% of the animal viruses that could cross over and affect human populations, 1%. Meanwhile, deforestation is happening all over Kalimantan. It's happening all over Africa. It's happening all over the Amazon. One of the reasons we were trying very hard, apart from climate change, but very hard to address

that issue not only in Southeast Asia, but trying to collaborate with people across the world, was because of the health consequences of deforestation, not only oxygen content in the air, which is hugely important. And of course, methane release. and all the peat bogs and like. So we were focused on that. And going to your question, we have an environment that is extraordinarily conducive to the emergence of additional animal viruses, zoonotic diseases, zoonoses, they're called, to cause zoonotic diseases and things like the pandemic that we've just experienced.

I know this is heresy to say this, but, you know, this could have been much, worse. I mean, we have a virus here that's totally turned the world upside down that, by the way, the World Bank thought that a pandemic could cost the world economy $6 trillion. I think it's even in my book. I quoted it before this happened. My book has a pandemic chapter or pandemic section, and that talks about what it would cost to have created an early detection network, three to four billion dollars a year. That's all it would have cost across the world. And the World Bank, I think, estimated that a pandemic would cost the world economy $7 trillion. Well, that's a drop in the bucket of what it's going to cost. At the time, I thought that number was silly. And that's where the virus

it killed one quarter of 1%. Now, now, now, the question is, are those conditions we describe deforestation, animal trafficking, human migration, populations moving freely and the like, You know, are we more exposed now? And the answer, of course, we are. It's not 19, 17, 19, 80. This is not a 100-year cycle kind of thing in my view. The good news is, and it goes, it's gone mostly unobserved by many people, for Pfizer and Moderna to have come up with a vaccine using the RNA Messenger platform in less than a year is not only unprecedented,

unthinkable in terms of how. And so are we, and they are working on a universal vaccine for all coronaviruses. Now, that's coronavirus. That's not, MIT's been working on a vaccine for all viruses going back for as long as I can remember. Will someone come up with that? I think there's a chance they will.

But if they don't, then, you know, it could be a real hard time for us. Well, as much as we can be optimistic about remedial, medicinal processes, I think we've got to focus on the prevention, right? And I think you've raised these issues. And let's go into the book. You've made a point, the point very clearly that, yes, I think we ought to talk about the South China Sea issues, but I think it's a lot more important to talk about some of the other issues, you know,

the natural disaster preparedness, the pandemic preparedness, climate change and all that. I want to talk to you about climate change, right? You've said many times your views, express your views many times about climate change. Tell us your views about climate change. Well, again, I'm not a scientist. You know, I read a lot. I thought about asking you some legal questions. No, no.

I thank you for that. I'm not a lawyer now anymore. I'm not much of anything, actually. It's where to begin. Will we hold it to two degrees? No. That's not going to happen. Will we hold it to three?

My own personal view is, no. Can we hold it down? If we come up with carbon capture technology, if we radically change human habits, you know, maybe. I think we are in a modality, I'll call it, or a space where we have to anticipate that there'll be major portions of the planet that will be largely uninhabitable in the course of what will be your lifetime, although not mine. Clearly, my grandmother's lifetime.

I think this will happen much faster than people recognize. And once it begins to happen, it will happen ever more rapidly for a variety of reasons. You know, once the snow cap is and the glaciers are less in the north and they reflect less light. And so the planet absorbs more. That has an effect as a name begins with A. I don't remember it anymore. And so we have those, I'll call them, immediate consequential results of climate change. And people focus on them, you know, it's the inundation of the Red River Valley and the

Macon Delta. It's the water flow down the Macong. 75% of the water that comes down the Macong in the winter months or the low season is, is from, you know, the lake in Cambodia, releasing the water that is held during the rainy season, and that will stop, and the dams aren't going to help. And so we're going to have all kinds of knock-on effects, but here's one that people don't ever talk about.

For every one-degree centigrade increase in temperature, the nutritional value of food goes down 10%. And I think it's 10, maybe 15%. So the broccoli that I eat, you don't eat broccoli and I never found much broccoli and found broccoli raw, but no broccoli in Indonesia. But the broccoli I eat right now has 50% fewer nutrients than it had when I was a kid. Now, so we might have the quantities we need, but we don't have the nutritional value that we need to have. And of course, that has developmental consequences, right? Similarly, with regard to oxygen in the air, the amount of oxygen that's predicted to be, that's not less oxygen, and it's more carbon dioxide.

The carbon dioxide levels, if they reach 1,000 parts per million, I think that's the number. Some people believe that it will reduce the cognitive capacities of human beings dramatically. I've seen some figures or some references that we'll all be walking around as fourth graders. I once knew somebody that was a Himalayan guide, and he told me, he used to do Everest all the time. He said, you know, you have to make your plan out ahead of the time because once you're on the mountain, there's so little oxygen you can't think. And if you deviate from the plan, you're in real trouble. So these are, people think these are catastrophic or, you know, hair on fire or, you know, strange, weird worries. But they thought that about the pandemic 10 years ago, too. And I just think that

at the end of the day, these are things that we should be planning for. There's a man named Camilla Mora, who was at the University of Hawaii. I never met him. And I haven't looked closely recently at his research, but he was talking about something he called climate departure. And whether he's right or wrong in terms of his conclusions with regard to it, he's right in terms of basically where it's going. Climate departure provides the following. Let's just assume, let's take New York, let's take it out of your region. Let's assume that you add up all the high temperatures in New York for a year. What's the average? 62 degrees, we'll call it, Fahrenheit. Right. I can't translate that right away into centigrade. What's the average low temperature? Call it 43. About a 20 degree gap. It's,

it's tighter in the tropics, right? High and lows. What Morris says is that at a certain point in time, the average low temperature today, or for a period of 1995 through 2005, the average low temperature in New York will exceed the average high temperature. So the average low temperature in New York will be 65. Now, now, he says that climate departure is going to happen. He said the first place it was going to happen was on Cali Montaam. And I think it was, I think, yeah, I think it was in Pontiac. But, of course, there are the, Pontiana. They're the, they're the spread between high and low is quite tight, right? It's not that great. The average might be four or five degrees difference. And I don't know whether or not he was right about it. We could find out. But he said that climate

departure will come to Jakarta in 2029 and be in Singapore about the same time. So we're not talking about time periods that go out that far. Now, it may not be that big a difference in Jakarta because it's already hot all the time and it may be just a little bit hotter. But boy, you start talking about the average low temperature in New York being 65, not 43. You don't have winter anymore. It changes the water flows. It changes the Gulf Stream. It changes food sources.

It changes nutritional value. This begins to have all kinds of impacts. And it's very hard to be optimistic about those things at this juncture. And there are many, many, many more. I'm going back to my encyclopedia days now, where you just begin to see that a lot of these things that you didn't expect were connected are, in fact, very connected.

And that's one reason why you need the leadership to address them and need a plan. I want to push on this. I'm trying to insert or infuse some optimism into the conversation. I'm very optimistic, by the way. We'll come to that later. Based on what I'm seeing in terms of, you know,

how people have come up with technological innovations on solar capabilities, right? It seems to have gotten a lot more efficient and effective. And a lot of people don't know that, you know, we get solar energy amounting to about 8,000 times the amount that we use on a day-to-day basis. It's just such a big waste to the extent that we can come up with a tool that can absorb and store in a much more efficient manner, we're probably not going to be affecting the climate as adversely as we might have been in the last 50 years. Number one.

Number two, the other source of optimism could be big countries that are actually propagating the views and the values that it's good to be much more environmentally friendly, right? Let's take China and the US and Germany. Could those be pioneers of technological innovations and technological usage, but also in a big conversational manner so that the Gen Z members can start talking about climate change in a much bigger way than whatever we might be seeing them conversing nowadays? Yeah. You know, I met it when I said I'm optimistic, and I am optimistic because of young people.

And you know, you've talked to me many times about that. And as I've told you and told you here just recently, that my book is dedicated to the young people, the region, because they are the hope. And so nothing I'm saying is anything more than to set the table for the hard work they have ahead of them. I don't remember seeing a solar cell on top of a house in rural Indonesia, heating water for people. When I was in the Caribbean There is now, by the way. There is. Good.

Yeah. I just came back from one village. Okay, good. I mean, I say that, not as a criticism, but to say when I was spending so much time in the Caribbean back in the 1990s, they were all over the place. I think China made them all. I can't remember, but they were really simple. They didn't cost all that much. You know, same thing with the electric motorcycle.

I tried to meet with Alon Musk back in 2010 to talk to him about building the electric. electric motorcycle for Southeast Asia because I wanted to deal with a pollution issue and the like. I was unsuccessful at the time he was doing other things. But there are all kinds of issues if we can position the conversation properly where the parties you just mentioned could be enormously powerful and impactful and important. But they need to see that they have a stake in the broader global game, you know, And part of the problem is, and it goes back to the South China Sea issue, you know, are we really fighting over hydrocarbons in the South China Sea in the 19, in the 2021 at this point?

I mean, I don't want to laugh out loud at that because I know hydrocarbons are what they are, but is something else really going on. And the answer is, in my view, something else is really going on. It's a narrative. It's a need that China has to have a story about Rader China and its history in the Han Dynasty and the like for his demand. domestic political audience. And so, you know, that causes nothing but mischief and potential harm as a consequence of the need for that domestic story. Well, why not make the story a global

story? Why do our myths have to be domestic myths? Why can't our myths be global myths? And that's one reason I'm a great believer in mythology. And I spend a lot of time reading it and trying to understand there were times when mythologies had broader in a broader geographical scope and and and if people hear mythology they think fiction but no no I mean these are stories that basically unite us and so we can get people to act together if we can think of narratives that are in fact international narratives and it seems that even the crisis of climate change and the crisis of COVID and the crisis of human migration which is one of the biggest challenges yet to come I will say, none of those things have created an international mythology yet. But the young people

who travel the world and who don't have the same kind of historic antipathies for one another are not as deeply invested in some of the nonsense that's existed in the past, the lies and the nonsense and the desire for just power for its own sake. Those people are the only hope we had. Right now we're faced with a collection of countries where the leadership, and some come immediately to mind, where the leadership doesn't seem to care one width about what the people are doing, whether they're, how they're getting on, all they care about is holding power. And as long as those people are tolerated, so as long as those people aren't called out, as long as people don't unite against them, they will be able to destroy any kind of international

mythology that we need to have in order to try to change the issues that you've just addressed, just to mention. Interesting. Okay, I want to, before I, I touch on some of these philosophical stuff that you've just brought up. Let's talk about Myanmar. You've expressed your views about Myanmar. What do you think could be the resolution on the Myanmar issue? Well, I have some ideas on that subject that I'm going, I'm fermenting at the moment, but let me say this much about it. I do. I do. not agree with some of my dear friends in the region that think it has to be left to its own accord for a while.

Quiet diplomacy is fine. But the fact is that there's a real politic approach to this, that there's just not anything that can be done at the time. It's just going to have to wait it out. And going back to the mythology conversation, I have to I sometimes say this to my son-in-law. I've said it to my son the past. Sometimes it isn't about what you, it's not a question of anything more than the kind of person you want to be. And doing what you do because of the kind of person you want to be. You may not like the result. It may not end up being where you want,

something may not end up going where you want it to go. But who do you want to be? We've got to care more. We've got to care more about who we want to be. And I know I can hear some of my friends in the region saying, well, you know, that's just not realistic and that's naive and they're like. And yes, I understand that it won't accomplish maybe some of the things that I might hope that it would. But at the end of the day, it's how we've moved forward. It really is how we've moved forward. Every time we've made a move as a world or as a people, it's because there has been some modest movement in that direction. Now we're losing a lot of ground. We're losing some really significant ground that we had picked up in the past. In some places in the region, we've lost a lot of ground really fast, and it's tragic. I just don't think that you can not try to address it and pressure as much as you can.

I have some ideas how to do that, but I can't, you know, I'm not a diplomat anymore, so I'm going to hold them for myself. I'll push it a little bit more. What words wisdom do you think could be said or should? should be said to the military junta or junta to bring about peace. Sometimes I was asked the following question, and often I was asked, actually, the question about ASEAN when I was in the region or in my position. I was asked whether I was optimistic about the region and ASEAN, accomplishing some of the things we talked about.

And I had different responses, but there's one thing I almost always said, give me a time frame. Give me a time frame. So often we lose sight that progress sometimes has a longer time frame attached to it than we might like. Now, this seems inconsistent with what I'm just saying about real politics. It's not meant to be, and it isn't, I don't think. So it's critical that we understand that timeframes matter. So one thing I would clearly say to anyone concerned with regard to this, if you think the timeframe is one year, two years, three years, four years, you are wrong.

The timeframe is ultimately what you are doing now, this is kind of the opposite of the time frame of the solution. It's the timeframe of the problem you're creating for the future. So for every year you let something happen, how many years of pain and sorrow and setback are you going to experience? Are you prepared at the end of the day for the benefit of one year to create something that's going to be unmanageable in 10? And that's something that I think is a lens people rarely apply to problems such as this. See, I think a lot of that correlates with what you've raised earlier in that a lot of the problems are actually long-term in nature, but the guys that are supposed to be solving the problems are actually shackled by the five-year cycles of politics. And that, I think, is a problem.

And how do you get people to take ownership of what matters 20, 30, 40, 50 years from today? when they're actually a lot more worried about what happens in the next two, three, four, five years. I love this subject. And let me just offer the following thought on that. And sometimes I've heard my friends talk about in the COVID-19 pandemic area. Boy, wouldn't it be nice to just have the kind of system control that China has in order to deal with this? Look, they shut everything down. None of this nonsense.

And I say, well, yeah, how do you explain New Zealand? Yeah. And so it isn't the form of the government that necessarily causes the disabled. And Taiwan. And I could go on, by the way. And they're led by women too. Yes, exactly. So I mean, the problem is correlations versus causation.

We've got to be careful as to what really was possible. I mean, they are in Ireland. They were able to manage things they did that they don't have open border. There are all kinds of issues here, but it is a very, very questionable conclusion to draw. that, boy, the top-down control is really the way to go. My own view is that's not going to work. And it's not going to work. Just go to the streets of Moscow, okay?

People don't, people say, people don't care much about democracy. Well, try taking it away from them and find out what they think. I mean, just go look at what's happening in Yangon right now. And in Moscow and other places, just take it away. It's like, well, how much, you don't be much water. Well, just take it away and see how you feel about it. So I think at the end of the day, that tells us. something about what kind of approach we need to take. We have to empower people. We have to

make them part of not only the solution, to be part of the solution, they've got to be part of the society. They have to have the same benefits that ultimately come to some of the rest of us. And this goes back to the meritocracy issues. Right. I agree. See as a way to go. I think it's not. I think it's foolish because it's impressive. We lost you for about 20 seconds. Oh, well, probably

was a good thing. Can you start over from the word meritocracy? I was mentioning Michael Sandell's new book, The Tyranny of Maritocracy, which is a very important read

when it comes to how do you fashion a society that has the kinds of equality that is stabilizing, that ultimately the idea that you simply provide everybody the same tools, the same level of education and the like, doesn't get it done

because not everybody's of the same capacity. And we value certain work more than we value other work, even though the work has all that work has dignity to it. So in terms of trying to fashion a society that has some level of equality in it, I would suggest a society that hopefully has people invested in the solutions that are going to be necessary for problems that have no borders, that is going to require us to come up with new approaches that, in my view, I'm not seeing anywhere right now. Look, I think I can try to build on this or expand on this. Whether you're looking at an autocracy or a democracy, I think what matters is the real democratization of talent within each, right? And if you have been able to prove that you have been able to democratize talent, in each case, you have real institutional building.

And if you have real institutional building, I think what you have alluded to earlier in the sense that people take ownership of what matters in a long term, happened. And I've seen cases of democratic countries where there hasn't been real democratization of. talent to the extent that there is no institutional building where they just keep focusing on what matters in the next year or two as opposed to what matters in the next 20 to 30 or 40 years. And conversely, in an autocratic situation where the system of patronage is much more thick than the system of meritocracy in selecting talent, that also dilutes the value proposition. in handling anything, be it the COVID-19 or anything that matters in the long term. Well, the landscape of the future is going to be one where the clocks run faster than they do presently.

The change is going to come on unexpectedly. There are going to be people being left behind, untrained next thing. There's going to be people that ultimately are going to be unimportant. and perceived as being unimportant in terms of the economic engine of countries. We need to come up with a way of understanding how we need to see what we do, what everyone does contribute. We saw that in the pandemic. People would just look right past a lot of the service people in hospitals that clean bedpans and did simple task and not give them a second thought. And the dignity of that work and the importance of that work went undervalued and underappreciated.

We can't afford to do that. We can't afford to think about the meritocracies as only being, you know, the, I mean, I would suggest to you, they contributed a whole lot more to society in the last year, if not before, than hedge fund managers did. And at the end of the day, we make them heroes and with the hedge fund managers, and we give them all kinds of value and perks. I mean, and even give them tax benefits in this country. So, I mean, I think we need to answer those kinds of questions.

And we're not doing a very good job of even posing the question. questions, let alone answering. I agree. I agree. All right. And so huge issue for Indonesia, huge issue for Indonesia, because you've got a really substantial rural population looking for some sort of motion from movement out of those spaces and the like, what's going to happen? And that's going to be one of the biggest issues in my view in Indonesia. See, we've talked about this, not just about Indonesia, but if you take a look at the overall landscape, the fiscal landscape of Southeast Asia, right? We're all running at a tax ratio of between 10 to 15 percent, right? We can identify the problems that matter in the long run,

but it's going to cost us, right? And how the hell are we going to be able to fund the solutions? Right. So without nipping it in a bud in getting our tax ratios to the necessary level so that we can have enough fiscal space, it's just going to get even worse, our ability to deal with the long-term issues of Southeast Asia, much less Indonesia. So I think conversationally, I think we've got to get people excited about,

hey, what do we have to do in getting our tax ratios up from the current, what, 10 or 11%? And the pandemic hasn't really helped. has actually diluted our tax ratio because of people's less ability to pay taxes. And I don't think it's a matter of increasing tax rates, but I think it's a lot more about getting more and more people to pay taxes and companies to pay taxes. I know this is a topic that you're passionate about to. Yeah, well, you know, I started my book with this issue.

I started my book with capital. And many, many times, I still give talks and the like. I say, you know, it's fine to say you want to solve these problems, even you can identify them, but you don't have any money. And I remember having a conversation with one of your former finance ministers, a wonderful guy, and he was in this country. And I can't remember we're on the same event. And I said, you know, you've got to do something. Your tax collections 11%. And he was amazed that I knew what it was.

He said, why do you know what that is? I said, because it's hugely important to the work that I was doing in Southeast States. He said, why, you were the U.S. ambassador to ASEAN. And I said, well, at the end of the day, we can't do anything with regard to the kind of coalitions and the like we need to build for all these trans-border challenges if, at the end of the day, you don't have any capital. You don't have any money. And so that's led me into an exploration of tax havens. And, you know, I did a recent article in the Guardian, on FP, rather, foreign policy on tax havens. The numbers of tax havens are heartbreaking.

in terms of the money that's being secreted away by individuals and not taxed. Even the taxes on the money in tax havens right now would equally estimate a half a trillion dollars a year. And not all that's in Europe. And there's a lot of it in Southeast Asia, as you well know. And so I think we need to do something about that. But it's not, there's two pieces of it. One, it's the taxes being avoided by individuals and by corporations. But there is a lot of, I'll call it, legal tax avoidance, that it's ultimately a question of what the laws are.

I mean, Southeast Asia doesn't have extradition treaties for tax fraud focus. You don't have any ability to see into the bank accounts of people that have basically taken money they should have paid taxes on. I mean, at the end of the day, you can't begin to address your challenges unless you deal with corruption, unless you deal with the use of tax tape. and tax avoidance, not only by people in Southeast Asia, but also by multinationals that use transfer pricing and other things to avoid taxes. And that's going to take a lot of courage. And, of course, everybody says, well, let us go elsewhere. And that's, you know, that's a conundrum.

It's a hard nut to crack. But there's, I don't know, 70, 80 tax havens around the world. And some of them have changed. Switzerland's gotten different, you know. Luxembourg has gotten different. So too have some others. There are some that are still, you know, basically 19th century, you know, hole in the walls where people just don't have to, they can go hide their money.

I think it's going to take a while for us to increase our tax ratio from the current 10 to 11% to, you know, 20%, much less the OECD levels of 33%. And until such time, we're just going to be limited in resources in terms of our ability to deal with the medium-term and long-term issues. And I think what hurts a little bit more is that the pandemic has actually caused a deceleration of economic growth. And any time when your economic growth rate decelerates, it actually makes it more difficult to redistribute welfare to the people at the bottom of the parents. And this is a much worse, you know, reverse Robin Hood type of scenario where the poor are struggling actually more now to rise up to the occasion. So that makes inequality even more punctuated. And as a result of, you know, the genie coefficient ratio is going up, it just further polarizes conversations.

You know, you and I had a conversation once about protein waferes for school kids in Indonesia. And, you know, I was concerned then and I am concerned now about absence of protein and a lot of diets and young kids in Indonesia, which causes developmental issues. And what I suggested at the time, which is a stand-in for taxation. is develop partners with your investors. You know, and I think I used at the time a specific American beverage and food company that ultimately is looking for ways to build and expand its markets. And I said, why don't you working with them to make a protein wafer? They've got charitable dollars to give away.

You can build coalitions with your American and Chinese and European companies that are trying to business in Indonesia because it's such a large market and say, we need your help. You know, would you, let's all of us, let's operate a factory that's making, you're going to make a protein waiver for school kids in Southeast Asia and Indonesia. Now, it may not be feasible economically. I obviously haven't done a business plan on this. But if you can't collect the taxes in order to build that plan, then you sure can, it seems to me, look for your partners that are trying to use your markets to build that

plant and give them, you know, give them some percentage of whatever the, give them the free electricity or whatever they need to do it. I mean, so I, and it can be a long-term program and maybe at the end it starts small, but I don't, instead we get charitable dollars, you know, corporate social responsibility dollars getting spent to, you know, in the craziest of ways in my view, you know, like the Korean ferry disaster, you know, I mean, it's just, it's that it's, it's public relation stuff. Well, given the public relations story, just a. announce that the major car manufacturers in the world that want to sell cars in Indonesia

are have bound have banded together to make a protein waiver for school kids in Indonesia. You know, maybe it costs a $50 million a year. Okay. You know, I mean, I just, I think there are ways while you try to work on the tax challenge to try to come up with other forms of contributions and revenue that might actually move the needle a little bit on some things. in a targeted way. Yeah.

Look, we've talked about a lot of stuff here, but as of late, I've been discussing with some people about how the democratization of the pipes of information has not really led to the democratization of ideas. And truly, globally speaking, regionally speaking, We're lacking idea leadership. And I'm off the view, I'm sort of hypothesizing that the lack of idea leadership, I think, has to do with how technologies have caused dissemination of information to be so unique in such

a way that ideas do not get democratized. So we have seen the creation of these two eco-chambers. right, people going to the far left and to the far right. And we're only seeing two ideas out of the thousand ideas that should have been heard. And I think it's more because of the technology providers or owners as opposed to policymakers and the people themselves. What is your view about this, this lack of democratization of ideas? I think it has several elements.

And first and foremost, it is inheritance or the consequence of a society that has exalted or called for specialization. It's a society that rewards people who do narrow things very well. I go back to my encyclopedia experience. You know, this is not. something that you get paid much money to have done or to know things that, you know, other people don't know. I mean, people say, well, why does it matter? I can't make a living with that. I can't tell you the number of times that it has benefited me to know things that otherwise people would have thought worthless. One of which, by the way, if somebody ever asked me, why did the

President of the United States think that you were a good choice? It probably right, you know, I don't know. I never asked him this question because we've had a lot of conversations. But, you know, one thing that would at least be on the list was that one day when we're walking down the fairway of a golf course, he said, tell me everything you know about Reinhold Niebuhr. And of course, if I hadn't known who Reinhold Niebuhr was and hadn't had something to say about the subject, then I don't know what his reaction would have been. I actually knew a fair amount about Reinhold neighbor, a Midwestern boy like myself, Midwestern United States. And, you know, so the more you know about things, not casually, not just showing off about things, these things matter. Reinhold Niebuhr wrote a book, you know, Moral Man and Immoral Society in which he says that individuals are more moral than groups of people. People actually do bad things in groups that they would never do as individuals.

And so the groups cause this kind of behavior. This goes to your question, right? If you have people that have very narrow experiences and learning, and they get banded together in a chat room or in Fox News or wherever it may be, they get spun up together and they do things that ultimately I think they would not otherwise do. You know, if you sat down with them privately and had dinner with them, they might have a very different experience. And so we've gotten away from the kind of longitudinal approach to knowledge and what matters and understanding things. That has contributed to the problem you've just suggested.

And then we have these pipelines that basically use that narrowness, that people that we call it sometimes simply single issue people, right? You've heard that phrase. These are just single issue people. Well, nobody ought to be a single issue person. You understood enough about the world. It's very regrettable to be a single issue. There's too many issues that ultimately matter. And yet that gets reinforced in the ways that you've described. But I think it goes back before the pipelines. It goes back to the society having rewarded and compensated people for narrow approaches to things. And then, of course, there's fear, the greatest amperator of all the thing that is the thing that's hardest to overcome. And we have a world in which people are being left behind and people are being harmed and people are frightful or fearful. And that also narrows their perspective. And once you narrow someone's perspective, you no longer find them to be, they're no longer

empathetic. They don't, and they longer care about somebody else or something else or the environment or whatever. And so perspective really matters a lot. And so all of these things go back to what we as the society are prepared to reward, which actually goes to the issue of meritocracy that I mentioned in Sandell's book. why should we why should we not value you know certain kinds of work and think that it isn't deserving of being compensated i mean what's that come from we'll pay a nurse 70 25 000 us and we pay a hedge fund manager 25 million what's wrong with this picture

in an era where people prefer to look at tick to instagram or whatever it there in 280 characters, you know, there's more and more people wanting to use those media as opposed to reading the Foreign Affairs magazine, right? And I think it is upon some members, if not many members of the private sector, to do something about that, right? Yes, they make a lot money doing that, right? Getting people using machine learning to get people to read whatever, you know, shows up on TikTok, Instagram and all that good stuff. But but I think it's upon them to to make sure that, you know, there is this continuing creation of idea leadership. And I just, I'm just of the view that we're lacking in idea leaderships in many places, not to mention

this place here, you know, in South Asia. There's a little book that is a big idea that was written long ago, I think 1985 or so, which I recommend to your attention, because it goes, because it was written before all of the way we get our news today. It was written in 1985. The name of the book is amusing ourselves to death. And what the book really covers is how we've moved away from content to just entertainment. and how the news cycles, you know, you'd have the news cycles say some terrible event, terrible event in Myanmar, now this, and they'd go to something, you know, light, some other story, you know, after three minutes. And even the structure, even the architecture of the way that we

were getting our news back in the day when we saw it on television was dismissive of the real importance of some of the issues that were out there. And so it isn't just, though, the the tech companies and the way we get our information through them, you see it all the time in terms of the way news gets presented. And that is something that could be addressed, where you have people stepping back, Fox News, whoever may be, and saying, well, let's look at this subject more in depth, right, with different views and all this. But there's no money in that. So it's a, what we'd call in the United States, it's a chicken and an egg question. How do you start this conversation? And I go back to young people, right? You've got to go early on this. You're not going to capture my generation

of people in this run. They already think they know everything. I don't think I know anything. And at the end of the day, you know, that really makes me curious because I want to know things. But everybody, so many people think that they already know things. And so they watch things to reinforce what it is they know already. We need to get to the young people and give them different mechanisms like you're doing right here. This is extraordinarily important what you're doing. doing and I'm staying up late here even though I'm an old guy sitting in my library and to talk to you because it's because of what you're doing, you know, which is very important. It's an educational mission.

But let me push on this a little bit more. How is there hope that we can see a betterment in the way that governments in many countries are not becoming co-conspirators to the interest of the private sector. Yeah. Well... We've seen that in a tech space, right? How they have somewhat co-opted policymaking space

at the expense of, I think, the society that's unable to democratize ideas. to think much more clearly, much more objectively. How do we remedy that? Or is there a hope for remedying that? Well, as chance we have it, I just submitted an article yesterday to somebody for publication. We'll see whether anybody wants it.

It's always a hard road to follow because it's always a mystery to the way they want things. It really is about geography and how entering into the lives of other people is what creates not only empathy, but the kind of unified action that you need to accomplish something in a society. And so I was proposing that policy ought to be evaluated

in terms of the geographical impact that it had. For example, much of Indonesia doesn't have electricity. And so that was a problem in the United States. the 1930s. I think some fantastic percentage of the country, way over 50% of the country, didn't have electricity until FDR, 1930s. And so he said, well, we're going to fix this. And that's a, that's a geographic, that's a policy that has a geographic impact. And so the evaluating policy in terms of geography is of critical importance. Now, geography isn't just landscapes. It isn't this, you know, physical distances. It's also the geography of people's

lives and how they interact with one another and how they create conversations with one another. And, you know, the energy that exists amongst young people, the ways in which they try to engage, I remember all the young bloggers that I used to meet with. I was the ambassador. You know, just the incredible level of excitement about engaging. Now, of course, a lot of the things they were, you know, the actual length of their pieces and the depth of their pieces and all that was often wanting. And to care about other countries is something that really mattered a lot to them. And it's something we don't do enough about. One reason why we were proposing at the time that I was the ambassador about all kinds of youth engagement across the region.

There was no more sport through sports or whatever it may be. We used to do the human trafficking concerts. I don't know if you remember those or not. But for two or three days before the concerts, we would have various programs and educational opportunities and like. So it might be a combination where you take things like concerts, venues where people will be there and you bring them together and you have conversations. You're trying to capitalize on the energy they have and they're just where they have the curiosity.

do they have. But other, I mean, there's, I'm not sure I'm answering the question, but I do think that we need to think about it in terms of changing the geography of our conversations, policies, which is why the region needs to care about what's happening right now across the region, even if it doesn't seem like it applies to you. Why Cambodia, for example, should care what's going on in the South China Sea and Indonesia should care what the water problem is in Cambodia, because Cambodia is going to have a big water problem. And I used to say, you know, today's, South China Sea is tomorrow's water problem in the mainland. Right. You're in it together. I agree. Hey, David, you're friends with

quite a number of people in the current government in the United States. Can you give us some ideas or views on what to expect in the context of the United States foreign policy or even economic policy? Yeah, I'm seeing what you're seeing in the news and the start they've made, which, you know, they've got a lot of rehabilitation of our relationships to do. I think they're putting the right people in place to do that. They understand that issue. They're professional.

They have great experience, and they understand the benefits of all lenses and multilateral and how these challenges are, in fact, borderless. and so many of them that we have. So I think what you're seeing in the news now is a reflection just of who they are. And they will stay the course. And hopefully the American people will see the benefits that come from that.

You know, the turnaround, if you will, in terms of what's going on COVID in US is a function of ill professionalism with regard to the response. It's really quite heartening. What? Yeah, I'm actually quite optimistic in that you're all going to get vaccinated, you know, sometime soon, with the exception of a few who have chosen not to get vaccinated. And that, I think, is going to correlate with, you know, pretty speedy economic recovery. But I want to ask you about what happened in Anchorage, you know, between the Chinese delegation and the United States delegation, it wasn't that rosy, right?

Is that the beginning of what's to come, or is that sort of like the storm before the calm? I don't know. I think that there's an understanding that with power comes responsibility for more than yourself. And I was going to say with regard to our COVID response to underscore this point, The conversations that I'm hearing as much of anything else is not just the percentage of Americans that are vaccinated, but how do we get the vaccines pushed out to the rest of the world? The Johnson & Johnson vaccine is so critical to that. We don't need the Johnson Johnson vaccine really in the United States. We've got plenty of the rest of the vaccines. But the anxiety is we need to get the vaccine, make sure that it's safe so that we can get it dispensed to the rest of the world that desperately needs it and the like. And so that's we understand that that that's our own interests for the world to be safe. But it's also a return to American leadership on something that really matters. I know, for example, that the Chinese have put the sign of vaccine out, but they didn't release the data. And now, of course, the Chinese scientists are

coming out and saying that it's, well, it doesn't really work as well as, it doesn't work all that well. I mean, they've been pretty frank about it. We don't even know how well it works. Well, that's not, That's not global citizenship. I mean, that's not the transparency that the world should expect and need from a major power. And so I think that we have a long way to go in terms of how we're going to build the kind of alliance that you suggested we need with China and Germany and others to actually do the things that need to be done. And like all countries, my country has made mistakes in the past, but we're out front for those mistakes. You see them in real time. And, you know, we talk about, well, that was a mistake.

You know, the thing about mistakes is you don't always know if you've made them until after the fact, but although we might have predicted a few in the last administration that were going to be mistakes. But never. So I think that that's part of it. And that's a learning situation. It's a growing situation. And hopefully, hopefully we will have with our Chinese friends and others that kind of approach to the shared problems. you know, these problems are going to become more and more acute.

Yeah. You know, one of my favorite CEOs of, man, I'm very fond of, said to me, I don't know what it is about these walls. For every 30-foot wall, there's a 32-foot ladder. You know, and, you know, otherwise anybody think that you can hide behind things. This is that won't happen. It just can't happen. Not even in Indonesia with all your islands.

Do you believe that, you know, with your optimism with respect to this potential massive vaccine diplomacy that's going to be undertaken by the United States. Do you think that will not only bring about calm but remedy, a lot of the damage that would have been done in the last administration with respect to the rest of the world? Well, we can but hope, but let me say that problems don't stop coming. And, you know, it's not a static situation. So, you know, who would have, we would have had some of the challenges that have emerged just in the last month or two. So these are going to keep coming at us.

The challenge on the southern border in the United States, the climate change impacts in Central America and what that does to population that have problems growing the food that they need. You know, the continued efforts by some people to simply hold power as opposed to rule or to govern, rather. You know, Gerdas said something once, you know, divide and conquer a good motto, unite and lead a better one. And where are those people that are uniting and leading right now? Yeah. And it stands to reason that if we have all of these challenges that go beyond the borders that we have had since 1648, not all of them, but that's where we came up with the idea. if these borders matter less and less, then we ought to be treating them with less sanctity

than we treated them in the past. David, I'm going to ask you the final question. I know it's late. You know, this podcast is really about what to expect in 2045 for many of us, not only in Indonesia, but in the region. Paint us a picture of what's to come in 2045. or what to expect for 2045, by which time you and I are going to be slightly older? Well, like I just said, there's going to be all kinds of things that are going to happen that we hadn't anticipated,

no matter how prescient or foresightful or smart we think we are. We're going to be surprised. And it's hard to know what those surprises are going to be. Like I said, I'm not a futurist. I would say this. I think that the tensions that are going to exist in society are going to increase. I think that without much doubt, there will not be any technological breakthroughs of sufficient size and scale and across the globe that will minimize conflict. And so for that reason, we need to become better at how to manage it than we presently are.

Our tools for managing conflict have been allowed to atrophy. In the past, in the 20th century, we used warfare more often than not to manage those conflicts. And we saw the horrific results. Happily, there's not been anything of that magnitude since 1945. But there have been, of course, increasing number of smaller conflicts. But the conflicts are going to be not just armed conflicts. They're going to be conflicts in society. They're going to be tensions between those that have and those that do not.

Those that have that want to keep what they have, those that want to defend what they have. And we need to improve our ways of managing those conflicts. That's one reason why I have now in my retirement as a diplomat become a mediator. And I think of mediation as being an incredibly important element to what needs to happen. And I believe that there will be increasing use of mediation going forward. I mean, I'm part of an organization that has a hundred and thirty or 40 mediators, 74 countries around the world that we've trained. And I need one from Indonesia.

I'm a call to somebody. There are any young person that's a lawyer or a judge, although you don't have, there's been one person in the whole history of our program that hasn't been a lawyer or a judge. And he was police chief in Pakistan. But police chiefs could apply to because they're going to be on the front lines

of these kinds of mediators. I do believe that whatever happens, we're going to be faced with increasing tensions caused by climate change, caused by human migration, caused by the separations in society, the inequality and the like. And we're going to have to manage that. There's no reason to believe that anything that's going to happen between now and then it's going to make that less. I don't think. It doesn't mean things are going to go terribly. It just means we're going to have to have new tools to manage them. One reason I'm a great believer in multilateralism.

And if you have a multilateral organization such as ASEAN, use it. That's so incredible. We will. We will. On that note, we will. Hey, thank you. Always a pleasure talking. Thank you so much, David. Thank you. You take care, stay healthy.

I will. All right, you take care of it. And I'll see you soon. Take care. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Bye-bye. Teman, that's David Cardin. Thank you very. Endgame is a podcast by the School of Government

and Public Policy Indonesia. The first Indonesian policy school to offer a full-time master's program in English. And it's a production of the cinema, Indonesia's award-winning entertainment and technology company. Oni Jamhari and Angad Wima Sasonko are our executive producers. Ahmad Zaki Habibi and Jimmy Kuntoro are our supervising producers. Hannah Humaira and Farah Abida are producers.

Bobby Zarqasi is our director. Aditya Dema Pratama is our director of photography. Video editing by Felicia Wiradia. Alvin Pradana Susanto is our sound engineer. Ratri Pratiwi and Vera Rachmawati are research assistants. Aulia Septiadi and Ferdisal Optama are our graphic designers. Transcriptions and translations by Isfi Afiani. The song you're hearing is by Neil Giuliarso,

Ferdinan Chandra and Philippus Chahadi, mixed and produced by Gibran Wiriwaiiwai. The production of this episode adheres close. closely to the local authorities' health and safety protocols.