Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Graham Allison: China-Russia Axis is US’ Big Diplomacy Mistake

Episode Date: July 13, 2024

Thank you to The Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School for supporting this episode. Visit the link below to learn more about research, ideas, and leadership programs for a more peaceful world: https://www.belfercenter.org/ -------------------- In the 5th century BC, the Greek historian Thucydides chronicled the Peloponnesian War (431–404 BC), a conflict between Athens, a rising power, and Sparta, the established ruling power. Thucydides famously concluded that "it was the rise of Athens and the fear it instilled in Sparta that made war inevitable." Today, 2,400 years later, we face a similar situation: will a rising China and an uneasy America follow the same path? Can these two nations avoid falling into the 'Thucydides Trap'? #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #GrahamAllison -------------------- About Luminary: Graham Allison, former Director of Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs, is a bestselling author of "Destined for War: America, China, and Thucydides's Trap" (2017). As the founding dean of the Harvard Kennedy School, Dr. Allison served as Assistant Secretary of Defense and advised defense secretaries from Reagan to Obama. He has received the Department of Defense's Distinguished Public Service Medal twice and serves on advisory boards for the Secretary of State and Secretary of Defense. About the Host: Gita Wirjawan is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and Honorary Professor of Politics and International Relations at the School of Politics and International Relations, University of Nottingham. He is also a visiting scholar at The Shorenstein Asia-Pacific Research Center (APARC) at Stanford University (2022—2024) and a fellow at Harvard Kennedy School's Belfer Center for Science and International Affairs. -------------------- Get Prof. Allison’s Books at Periplus Bookstore: https://www.periplus.com/p/9781911617303/?utm_source=EG https://www.periplus.com/p/9780262539500/?utm_source=EG https://www.periplus.com/p/9780805078527/?utm_source=EG -------------------- Earn a Master of Public Policy degree and be Indonesia's future narrator. More info: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Visit and subscribe:  @SGPPIndonesia   @Endgame_Clips 

I don't think it was inevitable that Russia would fall into a junior partnership with China. We're going to live for the foreseeable future with a situation in which the two parties are much tighter with each other than they are with the U.S. Well, if we have the only business as usual, then we should expect history as usual. Graham Allison. Graham Allison. Graham was the founding dean of modern Kennedy school and served for many years as the director of the Belfour He's the author of Destin for War. Can America and China escape Thucydides' trap? Thucydides' trap is a term I coined when a rising power, like Athens or China today, threatens to displace a ruling power like Sparta or the U.S. today. That creates a dangerous

dynamic that frequently ends in war. Real, bloody, devastating. war. Graham was my student, it was my research assistant, been my friend, he's been a loyal supporter, and we've been in contact for 50 plus years. Nuclear War can I be won, because your whole country's been destroyed. So it must therefore never be fought. You know, look, I am in you. I am in you, and you or in me.

What would it take for China and the U.S. to end up peacefully? The differences among the parties were irresolvable. That did not mean they were unmanageable. Moscow and Beijing intend to increase interaction and tighten coordination in order to counter Washington's destructive and hostile course towards the so-called dual containment of our country. If for whatever reason these elephants make a full-scale war, all the grass is really get trampled. Hi, friends. I want to take this opportunity to thank you for being with us ever since we started Endgame some years ago.

The conversations have been invariably elevating and animating. At least from my personal point of view, it's been a tremendously rewarding experience. and I'm hopeful that you could be further supportive of us by way of clicking on the subscribe button, watching every episode as much as possible, if not as fully as possible, and also joining us as a member of the Endgame channel. I can only promise you that whatever we're going to be doing going forward

will try to make Endgame a better experience. for all of you. Thank you. Hi, friends. Today we're honored to have Professor Graham Allison at the Kennedy School of Government, Harvard University. Graham, thank you so much. Thank you so much for having me. Graham, we had that historic meeting between President Xi Jinping and President Biden last November. One would call it perhaps the San Francisco consensus, another one might call it the San Francisco Vision. And I want to put this in a context of the famous decidivist trap that you aptly, you know, wrote about some years ago, what would it take for China and the U.S. to end up peacefully, like four out of the 16 scenarios?

And of course, the second picture would be one where China and the U.S. might end up like 12 out of the 16 scenarios. Please. Well, thank you very much for having me and a big question. So let me make four or five points and then try not to be too long about them. So the first point, and I think you rightly remind us that something pretty significant happened in San Francisco last November. Usually when you have so much of two presidents or such meetings, you know, if you're involved in them, it's a big deal. And you and I both worked very hard to prepare them.

And afterwards, we try to get a press release that says the world changed. I think they actually, this was a really important meeting because they not only put a floor under what was a rapidly deteriorating relationship to the point that they'd become quite dangerous. I think they actually laid a pretty solid foundation on which they and their governments, they can now constructively build a more productive relationship. So that's the big bottom line. And the key elements of this, which both Biden and she each characterizes in his own way, but essentially the same thing, is that there's three elements in the relationship. There's competition, there's communication, and there's cooperation. Now, previously, there's been emphasize one, but then you can't have any other.

or there's been a confusion about this. But I was very impressed when I was in Beijing just a couple of weeks ago. That President Xi Jinping has made the San Francisco spirit or consensus his own, and that he characterizes it as a lucidity and rivalry in the first instance, but one in which therefore communication

and especially between the two leaders, private, candid conversation about the most delicate issues is essential to prevent misunderstandings. And thirdly, that this doesn't preclude cooperation and especially cooperation on issues in which each nation's survival requires a degree of cooperation by both itself and by its partner. He has this interesting statement that he had made when the congressional delegation had gone over to Beijing to see him. Chuck Schumer, the leader of the Senate and a half dozen senators. And in the middle of talking about lucidity's trap and what to do about it, he said at one point, you know, look, I am in you and you were in me. Yeah. Well, for Americans, we don't know what, two of the senators called me up when they got back and said,

what the hell is he talking about? What is this? I said, I don't know. I'll go look to try to see. Well, lo and behold and Chinese tradition in the Qing dynasty, there was such an idea. I am in you and you are in me. And actually, that draws on a lot of Chinese, both history, and Chinese philosophy. So there's a famous story of Wu and U.A. that Sun Su tells about in two tribes, the Wu and the UA,

and these two guys that represent them or a ship in a ship sinks and they're in a rowboat. This is the two of them, but the rowboat is too wide for either of them to hold both oars.

So either they row and they just go round in a circle and never get to the shore and they die, or they find a way to cooperate. So it's interesting. So fierce rivals, what can also be cooperating. So I think to jump to the conclusion here that both President Biden and President Xi Champagne, I'm sure when they talk to each other candidly and privately, nobody knows exactly

what they said, but I'm pretty sure they said to each other, I understand we do know what to have a war with China. you understand you don't have a war with the U.S. If we really had a war, full-scale war, both states have robust nuclear arsenals today that would be as sure as ever in the Cold War to destroy their adversary even after they had been attacked.

Biden understands this in his bones. That's part of why he's been so cautious and careful and thoughtful in the response to Russia's invasion of Ukraine. He says, we're not fighting World War III for Ukraine. Why not? Because World War three, as Reagan taught us, at the end of that war, a nuclear war, nuclear war cannot be won because your whole country has been destroyed. So it must therefore never be fought. So that means I have to constrain myself in ways, and I have to persuade you that we constrain ourselves

mutually and then we cooperate to make sure either some incident or accident or third-party provocation doesn't pull us into a spiral that leads us into a catastrophic outcome. So that's a big kind of fundamental point. I am in you and you are in me. Then claim it. And Xi Jinping talked about this as well. He said, look, he said Obama, this is interesting. He said, Obama had explained to him, you know, the reason.

Hawaii, he said, you know, Chinese cannot become as wealthy as Americans. This is his characterization of the thing. Because if they did and were just like Americans, there would be so much greenhouse gases that nobody could live in the biosphere. So he looked at, you know, kind of a, and so therefore Chinese should remain only a quarter as wealthy as Americans. And I didn't know. He said, we determined that China is going to pursue modernization in a Chinese way, and we're going to grow in a way that's more respectful for the greenhouse gas emissions. But we're not going to be comfortable, we're not going to be comfortable being less than all that we can be. So we want to be all that we can be. Well, this is interesting. So if it certainly is the case that if there were 1.4 billion

people and they had the same per capita income as the U.S. And they each emitted as many greenhouse gases as Americans do, then this story would be over. So both Biden and she, I think, understand they have each to work in their own country to restrain greenhouse gas emissions and to work with each other. And that's part of what's happened in the Paris Accord and then in the subsequent cope. So just to bottom line, I would say, if you were saying, if you were saying, you were saying, simply betting it, unfortunately, the number of reasons structurally why Thucydide and rivalries have traditionally led to war would lead you to believe, well, if we have only

business as usual, then we should expect history as usual. That's on the one hand. But on the other hand, I think there's no reason we should settle for business as usual. And I think Biden and she both have in mind that they could do better than that. They can learn from the lessons and mistakes that were made in the past. They can learn from the cases in which actually Wu and you, or the Song and the Liao or the Heil and you and me. Well, maybe we can have some conceptual frame, some what Henry Kesea would call a strategic concept

that would allow the two parties to be fiercely rivals and seriously communicating to prevent minister and deeply cooperate and do it all this at the same time. So I would say that's the conceptual challenge for all of us. And whenever I give this sort of rap, and I'm sorry for going on so long, but I say, this is not something that I think, I mean, one, I hope the U.S. steps up, and we are trying. and I think the Biden team been trying to do a good job. I hope the she and his team steps up to this,

and they're struggling with this for sure, but trying. But I think it's also for everybody else. I mean, the folks in the region, as you and I were discussing the other day, you have as many stakes than this as we do, because if for whatever reason these elephants make a full-scale war, all the grass is going to get trampled. That's just life. That's just life.

That's just life. So speak, I mean, think of an idea. I don't think there's no monopoly of wisdom in Washington. There's no monopoly of wisdom in Beijing. This is a great opportunity for other thinkers in the region to think about this and say, hey, wait about it. The way this has purely been working has been pretty good for us for 50 years. Now, you guys have to have a responsibility for the next few. 50 years, but here we have a few ideas.

I would say, be bold. Graham, there's an underlying optimism in your tone about the future, right, which I share, which many of us in Southeast Asia share. But, you know, we live in a world that's increasingly multipolar, which inevitably is colored with higher proliferation of risk, call it climate change. cyber, nuclear, what have you, right? Now, how do we make sure that each of the two sides does not continue underestimating each other? Well, it's a good question. So I think there's two points here. One is that the person can be, I think, maybe you're even genetically or culturally

optimistic or pessimistic. So I'm an optimist. I always think that Here's this big pile of manure, there must be a pony in it. If we luck to take out to the famous story. And at least in my life, I've had one piece of good fortune after another. So I'm thankful, grateful. Don't take anything for granted. But I think that as between the story of the optimists and the pessimists, The optimists are the people who make a better world.

And the pessimist, I would say that's sad, but they don't get lost by the wayside. Now, maybe, maybe good fortune runs out. I don't think you take good fortune for granted. I think of it as grace and good fortune, and I think it's something to be thankful for, but then that entails a responsibility on anybody that's playing any role. in this to try to say, okay, so how can we, what can we do to make it more likely that there's more successful outcomes? Well, my God, that gender is just full of things to do. And fortunately, there's a lot of people doing things. Oh, I look and I think, well, here it is. There's 78 years

since the last great power war. What's on 79? They were into the 79th. Now, we're living in the 709. Well, that's all of the life of almost everybody on Earth today. So all of them have lived in a world in which they didn't experience great power war. That's historically unprecedented. Never such a thing in history.

In fact, in the foreign. first piece that Kissinger and I wrote, and that was his last piece, we make a big deal about this saying, this is a fantastic accomplishment. This is not a finished product. This is a work in progress that's fragile and at risk every year and not likely, not likely, to be maintained for the rest of people's, you know, younger people's professional lives. So it is also, this is the 79th year without any use of nuclear weapons in a war. If in 1945 or 50, you would go on and say, I'm making a bet, there's going to be no use of nuclear weapons for 70 years.

People are giving you 1,000 the 1 odds. And then also, there's only nine nuclear weapons states. Again, John Kennedy from the school here was named. he said in the 19 in 1963 he said by the 70s there's will be 25 or 30 nuclear weapon states and the reason why he said that

is because that was the trend line but he didn't say it to be fatalistic he said it to mobilize what ultimately became a big push that created essentially the non-proliferation regime non-properation treaty so I think

there's between the optimists and the pessimists. So a lot of reasons to be thankful that her predecessors who've been working on this problem were optimists. And I think to be optimistic. On this note of overestimating the threat of nuclear early days, you kind of alluded to this in the context of AI in that article with Kissinger, right? You mean, you talked about how people are actually should be thinking about AI the way we thought about nuclear. Yes. Talk about that.

Special thanks to the Belfar Center for Science and International Affairs at Harvard Kennedy School for providing support for this episode. Check out links in a description to know more about research, ideas, and leadership programs for a more peaceful world. Well, this was a topic that Henry had become a C-Stump. So again, maybe a little, I'll try to be brief. But so for all of Kissinger's life, and indeed for almost all of my professional life, the nuclear sort of Democles, as it was thought of, or the nuclear cloud encompassing your country or maybe even the world has been the specter, the dominant specter.

And the reason why is that if you've ever actually looked to see what happens when there's the explosion of a nuclear bomb, but if you haven't, you say whoever is your listeners should go online and watch, see what happens. Basically, this is not like any other bomb or form of destructive power that we've ever seen before. This creates such a release of heat and energy that things simply disappear. Things as big as a whole city. So if we were to have a nuclear war, it could literally be the case at the end of it. There would be no living Americans and no living Chinese, maybe even no living human beings. maybe even no living human beings because it's the after effect of this.

So we look and he say, okay, well, this is, I mean, this is genuinely Armageddon. This is Kekkak, end of the world. Okay. For Henry, who had lived as a kid in Germany, as the Nazis were coming to power, and who escaped with his family, even though other members of his family died in the Holocaust.

He had remember, his family remembered very well World War I, a 25-year intermission and World War II and Naziism. So he had a kind of idea, World War I, World War II. And actually, when I became a graduate student and the student of Kissinger says his 1965, everybody thought there would be World War III. And World War III would be certainly at least on the same exponential path as the difference between World War II and World War I. Maybe even would be a full-scale nuclear war, maybe would even kill hundreds of millions of people. So having that history and then recognizing that even though there were people at the time,

who were quite pessimistic, fatalistic. Because look, there's been great power wars forever. They've been World Wars, One, Two, Three. What can we do about this? There had been nonetheless another group of people who said, well, this is a challenge for statecraft. And Kissinger was among the people who both thought about this and then wrote about it.

So with that backdrop, maybe five, six years ago, Henry, when we were talking about other stuff, he said, you know, Graham, we need to learn about AI. And when I said, he was like he was 95 years old, I said to Henry, thought your topic. You know, you don't have any background in science. I told him that he didn't know the difference between a computer chip and a potato chip.

And he said, I know. But Eric Schmidt said that he'll give us a tutorial. So I said, okay. Well, they wrote a book together, too. Yeah, so EBN trying to learn about it. But what had come into his consciousness was the notion that now you're talking about a creation of machines that may be smarter than human beings, may be a lot smarter, which if connected to, for example, technologies that allow you to create new pathogens could create something a hundred times worse than COVID,

and then if they were to release this, what could happen? So the number of analyses of AI that are basically dystopian. I mean, there's a whole bunch of novels in this space. The machines decide to kill off all the men or the machines decide to make their human beings or slaves or whatever, whatever.

So you don't know what the future are there, But the people who work at the frontier of AI, I think, have been incredible enough about the possibility that there may be genuinely catastrophic applications of AI that we should then think, well, did we learn anything from the nuclear story and from that history that might be relevant in thinking about the AI? So the purpose of that foreign affairs piece was to say, here's nuclear is not AI. They're very different. Nonetheless, from this history, we can learn some clues that may be relevant for dealing with it. And then we were urging the U.S. and China, because they are currently now the two AI superpowers to begin talking about that. Fortunately, Biden and Xi Jinping did talk about that. And now there's an active discussion about having both a track one and a track two conversation

about how constraints could be created. So I think obviously different, but I take both from the nuclear story. First, inspiration was no reason to be fatalistic. And secondly, there's even some. instruction and clues about items. So you would say, well, okay, if the U.S. and China are really rivals in AI, well, then can there be anything about which they can agree? Now, in the nuclear arena, at the time, we were even clearer that both the U.S. and the Soviet Union were trying to bury each other. Nonetheless, it didn't take them very long to figure

out that if the two of us have nuclear weapons, that's not as good as just me, have you, but that's better than having a lot of people have it. So that, they had a common interest in trying to slow the spread of nuclear weapons, and they did. Now, that's an example. Could you imagine in the training of new large language models in the AI space that the two parties at least agree that they're going to have some guidelines and licensing of the process to make sure that if I get one of these, I'm not using it or misusing it. Well, maybe, again, complicated. So I would say it's an analogy that at least stimulates the imagination.

Do you get the sense that the AI narrative is a little too technological? psychologically pushed forth, to the extent that it doesn't get pushed forth in an adequately multidisciplinary manner. So say it again, I may... The AI narrative. It just seems compellingly as a technological narrative. It needs to be somewhat more adequately multidisciplinary pushed. I think that the...

First, it's a bright new shiny eye. object on this has been for four or five years. It's so complicated that most of the people talking about it don't understand very much about it. That's including me. And it's pretty hard to get deep into it. And then furthermore, it's moving at a pace of something never seen before. So whatever you see today may be very different three months from now or six months from now. So I, I basically listen to four or five people who are working at the frontier that include Eric Schmidt, Mustafa Soleiman, a fellow who was part of Deep Mine, and in China, Kaiflui, whom I saw when I was there a couple of weeks ago.

So we have a bunch of people that are actually doing this and thinking about it at the same time. In fact, Mustafa's book, The Next Wave, is a good thought. effort to begin to try to grapple with this. But what he would say, and what he has said, is that he would never have anticipated things would have been at this stage a year or two ago. And what he thinks is that every three or six months, we're going to be surprised again at how, I mean, this has made Moore's Law, which before was mind-blocking.

You know, this is like 10 times that or 20 times. So I think part of what's frightening is that clearly the people who are driving it mostly are persuaded that obviously can have great and potential benefits for Manga, absolutely. But only vaguely sense of what might be the risks and dangers, even though occasionally they give speeches about them. But then since they're racist. against other companies that are trying to press forward. You can see this in the story of Open AI, where it was just waiting around, and then all of a sudden, boom,

and now everybody's seeing how fast they can run. Graham, I want to pick up on Kissinger again. You've worked with him. You've spent time since 1965, and you kind of helped him in crafting this frame as for the United States to be closer to China as to help contain Soviet Union. Now, what we're seeing or what we're witnessing in terms of how Russia is getting closer to China, how do you see that? Is that the counter or the mirror to whatever we've been trying to do

or the United States has been trying to do? That's a great question. There's another famous character in the American strategy story, Spig Bursinski. He was one of Henry's competitors when they were graduate students. And then he was Jimmy Carter's National Security Advisor. And the year before he died, he was watching what was happening in the relationship between China and Russia. And he wrote a very interesting piece and talked to me about it at some link.

what he called the Alliance of the Agreed. That was his title. And he said that because the U.S. had misplayed its hand, both in dealing with Russia and with China, it had failed to recognize one of the fundamental propositions in geopolitics, which is that the enemy of my enemy is a friend. So what was happening was kind of reverse trilateral diplomacy. Kissinger's brilliance had been in the initial trilateral diplomacy

to have a closer relationship with both the Soviet Union and China than either did with the other. So that's trilateral, and that's what you would like. But what had happened was that now the China Russia's relationship was tighter than either of their relationships with the U.S. So I actually wrote several pieces about what I call the most consequential undeclared alliance in the world. And I think that's what she has built with Putin and vice versa. So I think from the American point of view, there's some mistakes in diplomacy.

Now, whether or it's always easy to criticize mistakes after than to figure out what was feasible at the time. But I don't think it was inevitable that Russia would fall into a junior partnership with China, particularly because most of the Putin world and most of the Russians traditionally have been Europeans. I mean, they're part of the Eurasia is really Europe first. And they, so I think, but I think unfortunately that as Putin has felt more and more ostracized and then behaved in ways that makes him even more a pariah, he's not going to get out of that. I think that for Xi Jinping in China, since as China tries to become everything it can be,

it will be inevitably challenging the U.S. predominance in each domain that we're going to live for the foreseeable future with a situation in which the two parties are much tighter with each other than they are with the U.S. and that even they will be able to, when they talk, to each other say, oh, no, we need each other because of the, and I think from Xi Jinping's one of you or the Chinese point of view, I don't think he would necessarily have chosen Russia war with Ukraine, but if you ask, is he strategically happy that the US is focused

on Ukraine and not on China, you bet. And he's fortunate that you're the richest one, the Middle East and not it, you bet. So as you know, better than I do, that our Asian friends always point out that yes, you say you're, to make Asia, you're number one, you know, commitment, but you guys have plenty of other commitments,

and Lee Kwan, you know, you had an nice line about this. He said, he said, you know, he loved Americans, but they had this wonderful capacity for thinking that when you decided that you had to focus elsewhere, like in the Middle East or in Europe, you in Asia, you just simply hit the pause button like it was a TV show, and now you go and do what you're going to do. And when you come back, you push play, and you think it should pick up where you left off. He said, but you know, we live here and things change.

A couple of years later, you'll come back. It's a slightly different scene. Graham, you've known Lee Kwan you since 68. A long time. You've read a book, a beautiful book about him. And, you know, he had told you at some point which I've heard that, you know, if there's no doubt China wants to displace the U.S. in Asia, right? And as an Asian or as a Southeast Asian, the way we see things happening in many parts of the world,

there seems to be some sort of a misallocation of resource by the U.S., right? To the extent that, you know, perhaps when you saw this coming. Yes, I think he did. Yeah. Oh, I think the first, I mean, what an amazing strategic mind. And I think the big lesson for Singapore East, but also for Southeast stations. And indeed, I think for everybody, is that the value of your ideas is not determined by the size of your country. So the fact that he lived in a little city state did not mean that he couldn't have very big ideas.

And obviously, your ability to play on the big board is impacted by your relative power in many different dimensions. But for intellectual power, idea power, it's a free game. And so I would say, when I talk to Singapore, Eve, or others, I say, you know, if Likuan you can do like this, there's nothing prevent, I mean, you may not be as smart as Lequan you are strategic. I think very few people are, but you're not prevented from trying when having big ideas. So I would say, one, take you as an inspiration. But secondly, as he watched what was happening, he saw the Singapore miracle. So lo and behold, people were very poor. And you have a reasonable government, and you encourage people to take advantage of lessons learned in the global economy.

And you look for your opportunities. And lo and all, I mean, today, Singapore is have a higher per capita income. than Americans. Fantastic. How could this happen? The answer is pretty miraculous, I would say. And in ASEAN, you can see other countries growing, and then you can see struggling, but in principle, why shouldn't they be a quarter of wealthiest Americans per capita? Maybe F, maybe 100% plus. Why not? So in the Chinese story, I think Lee Kwan used insight was that China's objective, she's objective, would be for China to be everything Chinese can be. Now, as a ton of Chinese, he believed Chinese were, actually he thought they were superior to other racists, including Caucasians, especially. maybe not specially, but including.

So he had a sense that, you know, that there was something special about the Chinese history, culture, traditions. And he thought that you had in Xi Jinping a leader who absolutely was persuaded that his mission in life would be to make China great again. Great rejuvenation of the way Chinese It sounds very familiar. And that one quarter of the per capita and co-Americans, why Chinese are smart, hardworking?

Why shouldn't they have half? If not, the same time. Maybe equal. And as he said, for Americans to see somebody have the per capita income, I mean, have a GDP equal to theirs, That would be only one quarter of the per capita, twice there.

Three times there. He said, this is going to be the biggest player in the history of the world, and the Americans are going to find this almost impossible to accept. He was right, emphasizing, that the Chinese objective is not to, quote, displace Americans. That's not the, that's the effect to the, or that's a consequence. of China becoming what it can be. So if China came to have a GDP twice that of the U.S., then it would begin to recover its respect in the region that it should have.

That would require that it rather than the U.S. be the arbiter of events in the South China Sea or the East China Sea. So to the question that you referred to, I asked them, are Xi Jinping and his colleagues serious about displacing the U.S. as the predominant power? And his answer was, yes, of course. But not that that's their, their objective is that China should be all it can be. A necessary concomitant of that would be that the U.S. would therefore no longer have a say about, what happens about a territorial dispute with the Taiwan or the second Thomas Scholes or other topics in the in the arena not not that it was I mean I think I this is not about America this is about China but the consequence for America of China being the China Xi Jinping and most

Chinese would aspire to would be that it would be it would be it's a as it has been historically, in their view, the predominant power in its region to which the other powers would be deferential. And since the Americans believe that the American underpinning of the stability of Asia that we've seen for 70 years has been fantastic for everybody, and that the relationships it has in alliances with Japan and South Korea, Australia, even the Philippines, are commitments that have underpinned this security system. The Americas are not likely to go home very soon, so that's the reason where we're back to the Thucydidean dynamic, and that's the reason why it could conceivably turn out badly yet.

Still on Lee Kuan Yew, but I want to go to Japan since you mentioned it. He was able to come from a city-state and put Singapore on the global map. What would it take for that sort of wisdom or leadership to be emulated? In McKinney School, we are proud to have 100 Mason fellows that come from many, many such countries. And when I do my rap at the beginning of the year to say, welcome, we're very glad to have you here. I say, you know, we're hoping that some of you're going to grow up to be likely when you would make your countries. I was a Mason fellow, but then I haven't become one. Make your lead your countries to be all they can be.

So I would say if you look at it, there's any opportunity for the new nation for. Right. Of course, for Rwanda, for, you know, for everywhere. And I think then the question is, well, what does it require in terms of leadership and how determined? When in the Likwad U story, they started off, now they were a little teeny country. I mean, they weren't even a country, a little teeny port. But there was only three guys, you know, that were part of this. Okay.

And Raja. Roger, not to go in Raja. And Liquon. And then they each, you know, had a few more people in it, a few more people and a few more people. So each country has its own culture, history, traditions, things to be navigated. But if I look and see, I don't see any reason in principle why Indonesia, Vietnam, Malaysia, Thailand. Why, I mean, why shouldn't they have half the per capita GDP of the most of all

countries? I mean, why only half? But when we just start with it? And I would say that what that would mean for the well-being of the citizens would be pretty extraordinary. So I think it's, I mean, I find that inspiring that leaders grow, you know, to try to do this. I was actually in a conversation about this last week with Rwanda.

So that's a complicated story. Obviously, they went through this horrible, horrible genocide, and Kagami has his own story, and a lot of his behavior now, many Americans have serious problems with, some of which I think I probably agree with. But I looked at the whole story, and I say, what's happened to Rwanda and the well-being of citizens there? I look at their health, their education, their income, their sense of how their countries doing. You know, compared to most countries, they think they're doing pretty good.

I think they don't pretty good. I've been sort of like thinking or even arguing that Singapore perhaps ought to be considered as a democracy by way of its ability to, I think, give more space to the opposition, give more space to the media, but also they've been very good at distributing public goods. Call it intellects, welfare, health care, you name it, right? Do you mention that the other day when we were talking? I think I agree with you. I think the home, I mean, democracy's become this label for, you know, good, okay, and then there's alternatives are bad.

The democracy defined principally in terms of having elections in which everybody gets the sense to vote and in which the parties have equal access to you know, as a competitive campaign is one dimension of democracy. When Bob Dole, who was the great at 20th century American student of democracy, tried to write about democracy, he concluded like you did, and it's way more complicated than that. So he ended up with one of these terms called polyarchy or something, which nobody was ever going to adopt. It was kind of like a knot.

But I think the notion of thinking of good governance in terms of 10 characteristics of which the open contested elections is only one. And I'm maybe a heretical about this, but I would say, at least among Americans, but I would say that Americans should be looking much more. at our own democracy and how it's working or not working. And it may well be that the idea that more open democracy is better as your primary home guide star may not be correct. I think if you go back to the founding fathers, they didn't believe in And more democracies, they'd better answer to most things. They thought that actually only white male property owners should vote.

They were very afraid of, quote, momocracy, which is what Adams call, you know, completely open democracy because, and I think the, I don't subscribe to that set of views, but I would say that it may be that in a world in which you have no barrier to entry in social media, and therefore so much misinformation and disinformation, and in which you have so much money sloshing through the systems, then you need something more than, you know, what the Americans have now.

And I think the fact that most Americans are very dissatisfied with our choices in the 24 election. And then a remarkable, I mean, I was seeing some polls this weekend, where especially among young people, a majority of American young people, do not believe democracy is the best form of government. And do not, you know, if you say, you have confidence in the government in Washington. It's about 20% have a go in it. So that's not a very healthy democracy. So I think Americans should probably work more on our own problems at home before we go about. I'll pick up on that. What do you think is the antidote to the observation that more and more democracies are not getting good at democratizing talent,

while an autocracy like China, seemingly in the last 30 years, has been really good at democratizing talent. Well, I think how you get a meritocracy for governing and whether you can actually have, you know, Plato had his ideas about, you know, you require guardians because if you don't have some people, who are held to a higher standards and who hold themselves to a higher standard, the system will ultimately become an oligarchy in which basically the corrupt and decadent oligopoly. And so how do you get a more virtuous set of guardians, How do you get people that are public service-minded? Well, Lee Kwan, you thought he would have them, he would try to be an example.

He would have his colleagues be an example. They would then recruit people to that end, and then they would go about having a selection process in which people were tried through different kind of roles. And then when they performed, were ultimately selective, and that's how they've managed their leadership going forward. Turned up, many of them were called Lee. That's a more complicated statement.

I think in the current Prime Minister, they've had a splendid success. But I think that's a way that good corporation promotes people. That's the way good military system promotes. Now, in American-style democracy, we've sort of given up, you know, giving that up all. together and gone to this so-called more direct democracy, the better, which as I say, I have second thoughts about. So I think the asking how a political system can get the kind of meritocratic leadership it requires, it's a big, big question. And I don't know whether, I mean, in the Chinese case, Xi Jinping thinks.

he'll just be leader for a long, long time, and maybe, I don't know how they're managing the process of trying to bring up, you know, the next generation of the one after that. He did, he had concluded that the system that had evolved and had become so corrupt that China would have gone the way of the Soviet Union if it hadn't been for him stepping in and, with the small group of people trying to reverse that trajectory. Whether that's correct or not, I don't know, but that was part of the reasons why he has behaved the way that he had. I want to go back to Japan since you brought it up. It seems like the natural interlocutor between the pre-existing liberal order and this tremendous revisionist, right,

postures coming from, call it the Bricks, the Middle Powers, the Global South that would like to revise the pre-existing liberal order. And at the rate that Japan seems to have a lot of equity, economically, socially, culturally, in many of these countries within the middle powers, within the Global South, within Bricks. Do you see Japan as somebody that could actually play the interlocutor? That's interesting. I mean, you know Japan much better than I do. I've studied then and visited and talked to people and know people there for many years. I think Japan is still having trouble finding its way in the world. And partly it's because it's an aging and and insular society,

in which even, in terms of its population, doesn't really have any immigrants. For the immigrants that it has, doesn't make them very welcome. Therefore, you know, has had a shrinking workforce. And while people live well there, they having their history of World War II and otherwise haven't really defined a role for themselves in the world. Now, under both Abe and now, Kashida, they at least are seeing the Chinese rivalry or the Chinese feared,

and particularly as that relates to the East Tennessee and the various disputed territories has led them to be part of the more vigorous pushback and led them to then be tighter in terms of both the US-Japan alliance of building up their own self-defense forces, their role in the quad. But I think I haven't, I mean, I haven't seen a leader in Japan project what, you know, what role we could play in the world. I think they could.

And maybe, again, their internal politics are pretty complicated right now as well. So they've also had that sort of drag on the, and I think because they had the excitement when they had the bubble, and then the collapse was so, had so much impact, and then they were just such a long period of essentially stagnation, that that's impacted the psychology of the place, so that when Japan, when Japan, and it looked like it was in an inexorable rise. You had a bunch of exciting leaders of companies thinking that, I mean, Sony was going to rule the world. And they did for a while. That was what in Toyota was an amazing company.

So, Atachi, so there's a number of amazing Chinese companies, which are Japanese companies. But then once after the, after the bubble, burst and after the long period of stagnation, I think Dave, they're still struggling. Grant, I want to go back to China. The Silicon Shield in Taiwan, right, that seems to by many people peace for quite some time, right? Would this be enough time for China and the U.S. to figure out what sort of a new equilibrium? that they're going to be able to attain sometime in an near foreseeable future. So we can have long-lasting peace.

So I'll give you the short answer because unfortunately I've got to go shortly here. But I think that 70 or 50 years ago when Kissinger was out there trying to have a discussion that ultimately became the Shanghai communique and the framework for, relations between U.S. and China and Taiwan, the differences among the parties were irresolvable. That did not mean they were unmanageable. So the brilliance in the framework that was created in the Shanghai Communique that has one China, Beijing has the capital of that one China, no independent Taiwan, and no Chinese use of military force to change the status quo in what is essentially a self-governing island,

which the Chinese believe is an errant province. Kind of, it's a little contradictory, it's a little confusing, but it's actually proved quite robust and resilient, and given us 50 years in which in Taiwan, on the mainland, and in the region, people have seen greater improvements in their well-being than in any equivalent period in their whole history. So you'd say, this is kind of miraculous. It is. Now, there are many trend lines that are inevitably changing the status quo. So, Taiwanese are now becoming more and more accustomed to being Taiwanese, not thinking themselves, part of China. And Taiwan no longer is a KMT kind of government, but as a Democratic DPP, it's been reelected and likely to be elected to and forward.

and Taiwan now, I think per capita income is like two or three times out of China. So they think things are working pretty well. Taiwan has some absolutely amazing companies, including TSM, but not only, a number of others. China, on the other hand, is no longer the China of 1972. My God, we look at an amazing different country. And the U.S. is not the U.S. So all of these things changing at the same time. So then your question, which is a great question, is, well, if this has worked so well for 50 years, maybe we should start there.

You know, so if it's not, if it's working, don't fix it. And, well, okay, but we have to take account of the ways in which it's changing. Yep, I got that. But is it possible to imagine finding some description of the situation that will be no more contradictory or ambiguous than the one we had before? That would give us another 10, 20, 30, 40, 50 years? I hope so. And then when I talk to Chinese about this, I say, look, you're persuaded of your grand narrative. grand narrative says China is inexorably rising.

U.S. is irreversibly declining. So that's your big story. Now, if that's true, in 10, 20, 30 years, China will have twice the GDP of the U.S. Maybe three times. In that world, Taiwan is going to be a foot done. It's possible. American story is America will recover from whatever confusion we are today and will remain a system that

better delivers to people what they really want than a party-led autocracy. That's Aramount. And the party-led autocracies will inevitably fall victim to the failures of autocracies historically. So, they'll become more and more paranoid and they'll become more and more controlling, and they'll therefore be less and less able to adapt and adjust and be innovated and inventive. And so, again, maybe that will happen. Maybe that won't happen. If that were to happen, again, Taiwan is not the most important problem. So Taiwan is not the problem. The problem is China. And what it can make of itself and the U.S. and what it can make of itself. So I would say if that were the case, then this is a relatively small problem compared to the

other two, and for dealing with this small problem, maybe, I mean, no longer can you have one nation two systems, but maybe you can have one family and many households or or maybe you can have, again, in Chinese history and philosophy, they have all sorts of, when in the meeting with Xi Jinping, he said there's something about, you know, there were these two provinces on the other side of the lakes, the opposite side of the lake, but they were clearly provinces of one country. I think that sounds fine to me. I think as long as the Taiwanese have an opportunity to demonstrate what their democratic system can do,

and when they insist they want to be independent, I tell them, forget about it. That's a sure way to destroy all that you care about. And for the Chinese, if they really do believe in their narrative, there's no urgency about this. And I think Xi Jinping actually has come around on this to some kind of terrible extent. I certainly didn't come away with any sense of urgency or, you know, impatience. And yes, I think he thinks this should happen. I think he wants this to happen during his reign. but I think he thinks he's going to be there in 2035

and I think he might be. So, well, 2035, that's another decade, let's see. And maybe he shouldn't be there longer. Maybe he was to stay for 2049. Well, 249 to 100, you know, it's the second centennial. He actually told somebody who worked for him a couple of years ago, he said to him, you know, they were making, somebody was looking a little skeptical when they were doing some planning for 2035. And he said, let me remind you, in 2035, I will celebrate the same birthday that Joe Biden will celebrate if he takes the oath of office for the second term.

And he said, and in 2049, I'll be as old as my mom is today. And she's very healthy. She's 91. So this was a few years ago, actually. So, longevity. Thank you.

But is that enough? You've been very kind with your time, Graham. Thank you so much. You're a wonderful interviewer. I could go on for the whole day. I learned a lot. I know you've got to go. Thank you.

That was Professor Graham Allison at Harvard University. Thank you. This is endgame.