Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Larry Diamond: Saving Democracy from China, Russia, AI, and Ego

Episode Date: May 26, 2023

Larry Diamond, a senior Fellow at the Hoover Institution, FSI, and professor of political science and sociology at Stanford shares his view on the state of democracy and suggests approaches to sustain and promote democratic values in a changing world. Larry Diamond is known as an American political sociologist and leading contemporary scholar in the field of democracy studies. He has also edited or coedited more than fifty books on democratic development around the world. Mr. Diamond invents the term “Democratic Recession”. The host, Gita Wirjawan, is an Indonesian entrepreneur, educator, and currently a visiting scholar at APARC, Stanford. Recorded on May 11th, 2023 at Stanford University. ----------------- Episode Notes: https://endgame.id/eps142notes ----------------- SGPP Indonesia Master of Public Policy: [e-mail] https://admissions.sgpp.ac.id https://wa.me/628111522504 Other "Endgame" episode playlists: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list... Visit and subscribe: https://youtube.com/@SGPPIndonesia https://www.youtube.com/@VisinemaPict...

Lies are more spectacular. They're more alluring than the good old boring truth often. We know that development is more sustainable, more just, more organic, more broadly distributed if there's a rule of law. Hi, friends and fellows, welcome to this special series of conversations involving personalities coming from a number of campuses, including Stanford University. The purpose of the series is really to unleash thought-provoking ideas that I think would be of tremendous value to you. I want to thank you for your support so far, and welcome to the special series.

Hi, friends. I'm honored to have Professor Larry Diamond, who is a senior fellow at the Freeman Spokely Institute and also at the Hoover Institution at Stanford University. Larry, thank you so much for coming on to our show. It's great to be with you. You've been a big voice on democracy all over the world, as at least many of us in Southeast Asia and U.S. Talk about how you think this democracy being in recession

and how, whether or not you share their view and how we're going to be able to come out of this. Well, I think I'm the one who came up with the term. So I do share the view or I still subscribe to the view, not in any way as a philosophical or normative statement. It's just an empirical observation that democracy is in recession. And it's been in recession for some time. It's been a relatively mild recession. It's not like the 1930s or even really the 1960s.

But it's been very protracted. I think this democratic recession began around 2006, 2007. That's when the number of democracies in the world peaked and began moving a little bit backwards. And it's when the trends more or less began different surveys show different. things in terms of more countries declining in freedom than gaining in freedom. And it's been persistent because it's been uninterrupted since then. And it's been significant because now if you just look at the number of countries with populations above one million, which are a little less democratic,

than if you look at all the countries of the world, we are no longer in the empirical terrain where a majority of those countries are democracies. It's now really well below 50%. If you have a very demanding or reasonably demanding standard of what constitutes democracy, that is that there has to be,

reasonably free and fair elections to determine who rules and not just multiple political parties, but the outcome is heavily weighted toward the ruling party because of massive institutional advantages and abridgments of political pluralism and civil liberties. The other thing that concerns me, I'm sure we'll be talking about this, is that a lot of the motion away from democracy, a lot of the deterioration, has been happening in quite big and strategically important states. We can talk about Indonesia, if you'd like. But in particular, I'd like to stress my alarm about what's been happening in India, where I don't think India really meets the test of electoral democracy anymore under the...

authoritarian musling a side of the opposition and civil society and intellectual pluralism in the universities and so on of the ruling party, the BJP, and the Prime Minister Narendra Modi. This is very serious stuff. They've been engaged in. Mexico, you know, you've got an illiberal populist

as president, Lopez Obrador. Fortunately, he's only got a couple years left in his presidency, you have hungry, you have Turkey. I mean, we have a lot of challenges. So while there's certainly currents of hope, by the time people see this podcast, there will probably have been an election in Turkey and Erdogan may have lost the presidency, but maybe he won't lose it. We thought Orban, Victor Orban, would lose the prime ministership in Hungary. He didn't because of the massive institutional advantages he had built for himself and is far-reaching almost monolithic control of the mass media in Hungary.

So it's a mixed picture. It's very far from a hopeless picture, but we're still in a democratic recession. How do you think we're going to be able to come out of this? Well, I think that we will come out of it in the most literal sense when significant countries move back toward democracy. And when the global zeitgeist, the kind of feeling in the air about which system is best, and where the political and geopolitical momentum lies, when that changes. So if Erdogan were to lose the presidential election in Turkey and you were to have a democratic rotation of power, that would be pretty significant.

We've already had a significant development in Brazil. the authoritarian populist Bolsonaro, the president, lost the election. It wasn't a landslide, but he lost. And I think he was looking around as Trump was for a way to hang on

and maybe kind of surveying opinions in the military and seeing if they would support him or something like that. Anyway, if he wanted to stay on, if he wanted to try and pull a Trump, he failed.

And Trump failed and was compelled by the courts and the Congress to accept reality, not to admit that he had lost the presidential election, but to accept it and move on. Now we'll see what happens to him in this next presidential contest in the U.S. So if we have enough transitional or swing states where the political momentum moves away from illiberal populist and authoritarian trends back to democracy in places like Turkey, like Mexico, like Brazil where I think it's already happened. like potentially Indian and Indonesia, that would pretty much do the trick, I think. But there's something that is more diffuse and difficult to measure.

But I know you feel in Asia, you kind of breathe the air of it. And this is the sense, the more diffuse, and vague sense in a way, of which system has momentum in the world? What kinds of countries have momentum in the world? Who do people look up to and who do people think are in decline? And the zeitgeist, the spirit of the times, that famous German phrase in the last decade, has been leaning toward the superiority, self-confidence, dynamism, and momentum of authoritarian states,

and particularly the most authoritarian major state in the world, namely the People's Republic of China. But, you know, it can by the narrative that the communist leaders of China have them, themselves created. It can get things done. It can make decisions quickly and efficiently. It's got a lot of ability to build infrastructure in the world. It can move swiftly against corruption, even if the charges are largely invented for the benefit of Xi Jinping and his ability to consolidate political power, whatever. Now, it doesn't look so good anymore in the wake of how it has made. managed the COVID challenge and the zero COVID lockdown and the crisis in the real estate sector and so on and so forth. But we have our own problems in the United States. Can we get our act together politically and economically? Will we have a renewed difficulty in our own financial sector? Are we going to inflict on ourselves a massive?

you know, calamity of rejection of our debt by inability to do the ridiculous, repeated task of having to raise the debt limit in the United States. I mean, it's game on in terms of these competing narratives. And I think this will be a very important factor in determining which way the world goes. They're going to look at Europe and, you know, compare it to Russia and Iran and China. They're going to look at the U.S. and compare it to China. They're going to make comparative judgments about regimes.

And this is going, who's got the momentum, who's got the long-term vision, who's got the capacity, who's got the more admirable society, who's got the staying power, who's got the innovation, who's going to win the technological race? for the technologies of the future. It's really game on, and I think it's going to be for some time to come. The long game seems clear, right,

as to which one may seem superior to the other. But for many people in the developing world, they're more worried about putting food on a table. And at the risk of quoting somebody, if you talk to the Chinese, you get an airport. you talk to the Americans, you get a lecture, right? How do you counter this sentiment among so many citizens of the developing world? Well, I think there are two principal ways to do that. One is by delivering the goods more effectively ourselves, getting back in the game of certain

types of development assistance. So it's not quite true that you only get a lecture. If you're knocking on the door of the United States, some people feel that there are regimes in the world, including Narendra Modi's, as we sit here waiting for Narendra Modi to be given the extremely rare honor of a state dinner at the White House and in a different way, the reconciliation effort with Muhammad bin Salman and the Saudi regime and so on. But there's plenty of regimes in the world where we're putting the lecture in the drawer and just seeing what kind of business we can do with them. And there are strategic reasons why we need to have a very pragmatic and hard-headed element to our foreign policy.

So it isn't entirely true that all people get from the United States's lectures or even that we're lecturing very vigorously in a lot of places. I mean, what do you do when you have very credible evidence that a ruler has lured into a foreign embassy detained, killed, and dismembered, a journalist who's resident in the United States. We've given him refuge. We've given him a home. They murder him.

That is the Saudi regime, Mr. Khashoggi, for his courageous and forthright reporting, and then physically dismember the body and do what. whatever with it. I mean, are we supposed to just remain silent and say them's the breaks? And there's so much else that involves the Republic of Fear that the Saudi regime has become even more so. I think we've got to have multiple strands to our relationship with a lot of these countries. there has to be a strand of principle and concern for human rights and human dignity. There has to be a strand of pragmatism. We have differences we did with the Soviet Union as well.

But we have business we have to do together too. And sometimes I think we underestimate the leverage we have with a lot of these countries because, yeah, we need them. We need their oil. We need their markets. We need their minerals. We need their strategic cooperation. But thank you very much.

They need us, too. And you want to make yourselves a vassal state of the People's Republic of China? Well, you risk incurring very big costs and risks in doing so. So there's a certain element of fine-tuning there. All right. So we need to strike a better. balance. That's one thing. The second thing is we do need, I think, to start building infrastructure again in these countries. We can't do it on our own. It's got to be a coalition of Western

states. We've got to think about to what extent can we make this work through the World Bank again. China's building the Asia Infrastructure Investment Bank. Maybe we need, if the World Bank can't carry the load for a new generation of infrastructure development, which is going to be needed anyway, for the massive challenge we're looking at in terms of adaptation to climate change, maybe we need a global infrastructure investment bank that isn't dominated by the People's Republic of China, but they're welcome to come into. and participate in, we do deliver a lot of development. I mean, we spend, you know, $10 to $20 billion a year delivering economic and social development, investments in public health and so on. It's not only airports that people need. People need food.

They need health care. They need a rule of law. They need a lot of the other things that the U.S. agency for international development and a lot of our other European Japanese and other development partners are helping to provide. So that's the second thing. I want to mention one more thing where I think we could do more to compete. And that is on the plane of values. This is a plane which I don't think the People's Republic of China will be very effective at competing. You look at the public opinion survey data, particularly from sub-Saharan Africa.

It's very striking in the Afrobarometer, but also to a considerable extent from the Latino barometer, from the Asian barometer. People do want accountable government. They do want their rights protected. There may be debates in Asia and elsewhere about different models of democracy and different levels of checks and balances on executive power. But they don't want predation. They don't want tyranny. They want their rights respected. They want their property respected.

They want open markets, open societies, and freedom from fear. And I believe that these are not Western values. I think they're universal values, as codified in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and the International Covenant on Political and Civil Rights, which most countries in the world have signed. And I think we need to be more forward-leaning in advancing narratives that affirm these universal principles and supporting authentic indigenous actors in the ground that are trying to apply them, defend them, educate around them, and so on.

You know, you talked about a number of the principles. the principles or values of a liberal democracy, one of which is really rule of law, right? And I want to tie that to the business part of your discussion where we're seeing, you know, capital formation taking place in a much bigger way in places where the rule of law is well-defined as compared to those where it's not well-defined

or well-practiced, there's got to be a way, right, for a chunk of this money or liquidity that's sitting in most of the developed liberal democracies around the world to be funneled for purposes of institutional building so that there could be better enforcement of rules and regulations. Why is that not happening as much as we think it could or it should? because I want to put this in the context of Southeast Asia where I think money is flowing to different countries in Southeast Asia in a very differential manner. One goes to one country in a much bigger way than money goes to the other nine countries. And we all know that most countries in Southeast Asia want to be better liberal democracies and institutional building.

is a much-needed commodity. And putting that in the context of the United States and China, I think China would prefer to deal with perhaps countries where institutional building is not as robust as it would be. Yeah, that's an impressively polite way of putting it, a more candid way of putting it, is that China would prefer to work in context with weak and personal. intermeable institutions where it can use its advantage at corrupting people through its influence

operations to have comparative advantage over democracies that have laws that make it illegal for their companies to offer bribes and where they don't have to suffer the indignity of requirements for transparency, checks and balances, and so on. And they can just make a deal with a minister or president and gain entry into the political economy of a country, lend money at commercial rates to, in theory, help the country, but tied to all sorts of benefits and advantages and privileged access for its firms and workers that China always insists on in these loans that it offers, and then sees the collateral of a country's port or airport or whatever, if the countries that have been saddled with

these debts at commercial rates are unable to pay them. So if you're the People's Republic of China, why would you want to be constrained, tied down, and have one of your major comparative advantages in geo-economics and geopolitics and geopolitics ground down and removed as a result of improvements in the rule of law, transparency, accountability, and all those other nice features of the World Bank governance indicators.

Better to have a poorest country where you can have your way dominate markets, dominate fisheries, dominate infrastructure, gain privileged access to minerals, and extract your geopolitical and geo-economic pound of flesh. So this is not in the interest of the People's Republic of China. I think it is very much in the interest

of the people in these countries because we know that development is more sustainable, more jobs, more just, more organic, more broadly distributed if there's a rule of law and if people have to be accountable and money that is borrowed by a country is applied to improve human and physical capital rather than applied to line the pockets of the ministers and executives and party officials and crony capitalists who are signing these contracts. So we should not think of the rule of law as just some other infrastructural sector that needs investing in.

In one sense, it is. It's a very important dimension of facilitating infrastructure for vigorously. and sustainable development. But unlike roads, unlike airports, unlike seaports, unlike, you know,

maybe hospitals, or other elements of physical infrastructure, the rule of law is a, is not just a legal, it's a political construct.

Absolutely. It's going to change power relations. If you have a rule, of law, then corrupt elites in a country and people with corrupt designs on the country from abroad can't just have their way. People have recourse in independent courts to defend their property rights, to defend their civil liberties. Civil servants have means to enforce competitive bidding.

and to fight back against creeping crony capitalism. And the people have recourse to ensure that resources you're going to spend for the public good rather than private good. So the rule of law is both a very important infrastructural dimension of development, but also pretty darn political in terms of... interfering with a certain set of power relations that either exist in certain countries to the advantage of favored elites who are not accountable, or that aspiring power holders would like to impose to accumulate new advantages. The more reason then, there ought to be a lot more investment for institutional building purposes, right?

For rule of law. Correct. Yeah, I absolutely agree. I can't stress enough how important I think not just an independent judiciary, but an independent system and professional system of prosecution. That's both capable of prosecuting but also protected from effort. to weaponize prosecution politically. And if you're really talking about the rule of law in the most ample sense,

you're talking about an independent counter-corruption commission, something that you, I think, understand the ups and downs of in Indonesia. You're talking about, you know, an independent civil service commission, an independent electoral commission, neutral, transparent, fair, professionally enforced rules that can't be tampered with politically. That's the broader concept of a rule of law. And how do you really have a rule of law? If you don't have some degree of independent media that can expose corruption and wrongdoing

and put defections from the rule of law on. the agenda, on the docket of the judicial system. So once you say rule of law, if you really take it seriously, you've got the independent institutions, you've got the protection for individual rights and property rights, you know, you've got independent media, you start creeping pretty much toward democracy. Right. I want to switch to Ukraine. You've been quite vocal about this. How important is Ukraine for sustained promotion of democracy all across the world? Well, first let's talk about how important

Ukraine is, that is, the defense of its right to exist as an independent state with its territory intact. Let's talk first about how important this is for just, political order, political stability in the world. You have a powerful state that used to be an imperial state that has invaded and is attempting to conquer and swallow and annex in an independent country, one that used to be part of the empire that it had when it was the Soviet Union.

I mean, what other smaller or, you know, more vulnerable states in the world living in the shadow of bigger and more powerful states are going to be secure if Russia can just do this and get away with that. even if it can just hold on to the pieces of Ukraine that it illegally, in violation of international law and norms, conquered and attempted to swallow in 2014 in the Donbass and in Crimea, I mean, you either have international rules and norms that matter or you don't. And if you don't, we're back to a Hobbesian world. We're back to the First and Second World Wars. We're back to a vacuum globally of order and expectations that is very dangerous for everybody, not just dangerous for Europe or for Ukraine. Then there is the democracy element.

I mean, this wasn't just another country. It was an emerging democracy, not a perfect world. one, but actually one that had been getting better in recent years. More public accountability, some improvements in rule of law, some efforts to control corruption, a lot of civil society vigor. And that's a major reason why it was invaded, you know. Putin saw that Ukraine was becoming a more vibrant and authentic democracy. And that meant a few very dangerous things for Vladimir Putin.

Number one, that as a more vibrant, liberal, real, serious democracy, Ukraine would increasingly look in its broader regional neighborhood to association with the other liberal democracies in that area of the world, which are, of course, the countries of the European Union and not Russia or the countries of the former Soviet Union. That was the first thing. The second thing is that if Ukraine was becoming a more genuine, competitive, transparent, and accountable democracy,

then Putin was going to have less means of using covert influence money and intimidation and penetration to try and sway the country into his sphere of influence, or at least pull it toward his interests on specific matters. And the third, if you're Vladimir Putin, and you say that, well, Ukraine, it's not really an independent country. We think of it as part of Russia,

culturally, historically, not the same language, but probably the majority of Ukrainians speak Russian. And then it becomes a liberal democracy. If you're Vladimir Putin, you're worried that the virus might spread across the border. And I think these were three extremely important motives for the invasion, far more so.

than this fiction that Putin was worried that Ukraine was going to become a part of NATO. That was simply not on the table. How do you think this war will? Do you think this will get much more protracted going forward? Well, after a year, I think the word protracted is one that's increasingly difficult to avoid. I think it is now protracted. It's been going on for well over a year, and we don't see an early end on the horizon. The suffering of the Ukrainian people has been enormous, including not just the physical destruction and the loss of untold lives and the separation of families and so. But the psychological traumatic damage of living with war, it's very hard to fully capture.

But Ukrainian people are determined to be free and to have their country be whole. And I think Joe Biden as president of the United States has, not spoken a truer, more compelling, and more valid phrase for world history than, quote, nothing about Ukraine without Ukraine. We're going to stick with them. We, at least the West, Europe, the United States, and so on. We're going to keep trying. I hope at an at an accelerated pace to give them.

them the weapons they need to defend themselves and hopefully ultimately prevail. If they reach a conclusion at some point that they need to begin to look for some kind of compromise that would give Russia maybe a face-saving exit, we're not going to say, no, don't do that. We want you to hold out for total victory. No American president would do that. But if they want their kind of... country back, full and whole, we're not going to say to them, you got to sue for peace.

We're tired of supporting you. Okay. You know, in a world where it's become more multipolar by way of, which has resulted in a more revisionist type of whatever world, how do you think you're going to be be able or we're going to be able to preserve democracy on a sustained basis. Because democracy was, I think, a lot easier to preserve in a more unipolar world. Well, sure. If the only poll in the world is a democratic one in terms of the United States, then it's a European democratic allies, then it becomes easier to do to promote democracy, fostering. or encourage it and create a global normative environment supportive of it.

But, I mean, you know, it should have been apparent to anyone that that was a moment in time. It wasn't going to last. It, I think, could have lasted a little longer if we had not made the catastrophic mistake of invading Iraq. I think it could have lasted a little longer if we had done a better job of managing our financial industry in the United States and not let corruption and weaknesses in oversight and the rule of law undermine the integrity of our financial system in the U.S. in 2008. But it wasn't going to last forever because the rest of the world has many countries that are growing at a much faster rate than the United States and Europe. So power was going to shift.

That was inevitable. So let me give you two answers to the question you've posed. The literal one, how are we going to sustain or renew democratic progress in a multipolar world, is we're going to bet on the people? Because I've seen the public opinion survey data in a lot of these places. I repeat, people want to be free. They want their rights respected. They want to have political voice.

That doesn't always mean, yes, they overwhelmingly endorse electoral democracy. There's a lot of noise in the data, actually more so in Asia than in sub-Saharan Africa. But people don't want dictatorship. It's like you give them a choice. They're not going to opt for dictatorship. They might hear and submit for a time to the siren song of a liberal populism or a strong man leader who will get development for a while. But even Narendra Modi in India, he's not getting an absolute majority of the vote in India,

not to mention anything. close to consensus. So the values of human rights, civil liberties, rule of law, protection of property rights, civil and political freedom, some kind of political choice and accountability, these remain very appealing to ordinary people and to diverse constituencies in the world. And I think our task is to wage, in part our task, is to wage in solidarity with them, not as a gift from the West to the Global South, but as a partnership and a joint enterprise, a much more creative, vigorous, unapologetic, multicultural, multidimensional,

multisivisational campaign for democratic values. And I will even say liberal values. I think it is a great misrepresentation of diverse cultural and civilizational traditions to say that liberal democracy is a Western invention, Maybe people will kind of sort of go in the global south for democracy, but don't shove the liberal element down their throat. Well, take, for example, the data in the Afrobarometer. People want an independent judiciary. People want presidents not to serve more than two terms.

People want media to be able to criticize the government. People want their rights respected. their basic freedom of expression and so on and religion under a constitutional order and rule of law. People want to be secure against arbitrary detention, not to mention torture. This is why, I'm sorry, I'm not going to yield to anybody on this point. The Universal Declaration of Human Rights is a universal document.

And two or the three principal drafters were not Westerners. They were a Chinese philosopher and a Chilean constitutional lawyer along with Eleanor Roosevelt. So we can't concede to this myth that there's Western values and there's other values that are not liberal values. There are some universal values in the world that we have to. stand up for. And if we start speaking in those ways and giving voice to multiple articulators and defenders of these principles adapted to each national culture and history in a variety

of places in the world, then if I may say so, I think we change the global zeitgeist in a very dramatic way. In a situation where they may embrace a system that may seem different from a democracy, but they've been able to basically distribute power and other essential goods to its citizens. How would you rate that? I'm using Singapore here as an example.

Yeah, well, there's a reason why you're using Singapore as an example because you don't have another example. I mean, you know, what are you going to do? trot out the United Arab Emirates where, yeah, they've had pretty good governance, pretty good rule of law, very skillful and professional state. But they didn't really create that wealth. It kind of sprung out of the ground as crude oil. The miracle they performed is not just running the economy into the ground in the process,

but actually creating a sophisticated and. dynamic country as a result. So there are a few examples, but they're not many. And what I would say is, of course, you can't treat Singapore like North Korea. It's an extraordinary achievement. People in the West had better have a lot of humble respect for it, right? And we can raise concerns about the abridgment of political rights. and of freedom of expression.

But we need to engage and recognize the many respects in which there's important elements of solidarity with Singapore in terms of the kind of world we want to see, including a world that is not dominated by a new authoritarian hegemon. So there always has to be a balance between, you know, the idealistic and pure pursuit of solidarity around the most democratic expression of universal values and the geopolitical realities of promoting global security and ensuring that, a new regional or global hegemon doesn't emerge that has totalitarian features internally, which I think China does, and potentially very, very dangerous megalomaniacal geopolitical geopolitical ambitions outside its borders. China seems inevitably hegemonic, at least with respect to Asia, right? Do you share that view?

And to the extent you do share that view, would that qualify Southeast Asia as a new part of your strategic core interest? Well, I personally have no doubt that China is seeking regional hegemony. It's made pretty clear that it wants to force the U.S. out of Asia. that's not kind of something lurking in between the lines. It's pretty openly expressed. It's wolf warrior naval deployments in the South China Sea are certainly trying to achieve that in the near term. They want the U.S. Navy out of there.

They're apoplectic about the return of the United States Navy to Subic Bay in the Philippines. and the other partnerships we're building to try and keep. This is, I think, one of the most important strategic goals, not only for Asia, but the world, a free and open Indo-Pacific. That is not trying to preserve American domination of Asia. Quite honestly, that ended a long time ago. It is to ensure that there is no geopolitical domination of Asia,

China is going to be a major political and geopolitical, economic, and to some extent, military player in the Indo-Pacific region indefinitely. I mean, you just look at the map, you look at the population, you look at the economic growth rate. There's no way to avoid it. But we don't want to see it dominate in a way. that all the other states of the region, of Southeast Asia, of Northeast Asia, and all the way to South Asia, India is worried about those, that all the other states of the region have to, in essence, become vassal states that pay obeisance and deference to Beijing

and essentially yield to its strategic imperatives. that will not be in Asia with 40% and more of the world's population, that will be very conducive to freedom, to open markets, to economic growth, to peace, to social justice, etc. So pluralism. That's what we're seeking, geopolitical pluralism. Which of the two between Taiwan and South China see? do you see as a higher risk scenario for the United States?

And which of the two do you see as a quicker flashpoint? It is possible that the South China Sea could be fairly soon a flashpoint, partly by accident. I mean, they are saying, this is ours, you can't pass here. we're saying no, sorry, under international law, it ain't yours. It's international waters, and we will establish the principle that we and other countries can pass through here without your permission. You don't own this. There are a few other stakeholders in this region, like Indonesia, the Philippines, Malaysia, Vietnam. Nobody owns the South China Sea.

and you can't make it a Chinese lake. It is possible that if you get an aggressive enough or intransigent enough Chinese leadership or simply a pilot or an admiral who pushes the envelope too far and miscalculates, you could have an accident, an unintended confrontation. And that with the Chinese being unwilling at the moment to pick up the phone at the other end of the line

in terms of the strategic hotline to manage these sorts of incidents, that this could spiral out of control very quickly. I worry about this. I think American military planners worry about those. But I don't think the South China Sea is likely to be a feeder of strategic competition leading to war,

because there's not kind of one entry point or flashpoint where it's either going to be all or nothing. Right. And then the U.S. is going to have to decide between war or capitulation. Taiwan is different, and I am far more worried about Taiwan in this sense. We have established a principle collectively in the region. that we recognize, we've said this bilaterally with China. Other countries in the region have said it as well. We recognize that there is only one China. There's not agreement on what that means.

We take a stand. It's been there for 45 years in American policy that this conflict cannot be resolved. 45 years since we established diplomatic relations with the People's Republic of China, that this can't be resolved unilaterally, can't be resolved by force. It's a very important strategic interest of the United States and other democracies that a solution not be imposed by force. And so if China just says, sorry, we're tired of waiting, or just kind of miscalculates the way Putin did,

concludes they perceive weakness in the United States, weakness in the region, they think they can get weakness in Taiwan, they think they can get away with it. There will be a very, very bad military conflict, very bad for Taiwan, I think very bad for China. But most of all, very bad for world peace and the world economy when you look at what could be potentially a catastrophic disruption, both specifically of the global trade and semiconductors and more generally of global trade. And so I think it is an overriding imperative to try and deter and prevent this conflict from happening. Larry, I know you got to go, but I got one more question.

Okay. You know, we've seen the internet being very successful in democratizing information, but it really hasn't led up to the democratization of ideas. We've seen such polarization of ideas. Do you see that as a structural cancer to our ability to become better democracies? Yes. I do think that social media has cancerous properties in probably more respects than I can distill briefly in this conversation we're having. One is it's malign.

That is, there are good properties of it. There's not a good cancer, but there's good social media. There are many positive ways in which social media can convey positive information, connect people, in a very affirmative, productive, economic, social, and political way, enable people to combine for common goods or just be in touch with their family or gain new access to good ideas, positive ideas, and valid information. So there is good and productive social media, but a lot of it is very, very deeply and purposefully malign.

and destructive. And second of all, it's malignant. Oh, my God, it spreads and very rapidly. And, you know, Edward R. Murrow, who's late, great broadcaster, who was John F. Kennedy's founding director of the U.S. Information Agency had a phrase, I think he said something like,

Lies can spread around the world before truth can get its pants on. Lies are more spectacular. They're more alluring than the good old boring truth often. So that's a problem as well, that there's a kind of intrinsic disadvantage between ambiguous, carefully stated, sometimes complex and messy, nuanced, perhaps honestly disputed because open to multiple interpretations, truth

and deliberate, lurid, controversial, outrageous fabrications that state actors like Russia and China and Iran, individual actors, political parties, candidates generate for political or geopolitical advantage or even a wicked sense of entertainment

or whatever it might be. We have a lot of work to do to combat this. We can't put the genie back in the bottle. Social media is there, but I do think we need better democratic, careful, but democratic regulation of social media. And we need, we need. better means to flag and try to remove clearly demonstrated disinformation. And we're going to need a whole new architecture to respond to the levels of malign manipulation that are coming through artificial intelligence, chat GPT, deep fakes, things like that. We're not ready for it, and we'd better get ready if we want to defend freedom in the world. Thank you so much, Larry. Okay. Thank you. It's been great talking to you.

Likewise. That was Professor Larry Diamond at Stanford University. Thank you. judicial system. I mean, you either have international rules and norms that matter or you don't.