Endgame with Gita Wirjawan - Lionel Barber: Managing Through Crises Instead of Fixing Them

Episode Date: August 22, 2022

Lionel Barber is the former editor of the Financial Times. During his tenure, he transformed the 134-year-old Financial Times from a newspaper to a global news brand. He is also one of the few Western journalists to have conducted an in-depth interview with Vladimir Putin. He talks about media, polarization, liberal democracy, pernicious algorithms, China and Ukraine. #Endgame #GitaWirjawan #LionelBarber --------------------------  Pre-Order merchandise resmi Endgame: https://wa.me/628119182045  Berminat menjadi pemimpin visioner berikutnya? Hubungi SGPP Indonesia di: admissions.sgpp.ac.id [e-mail] https://wa.me/628111522504 Playlist episode "Endgame" lainnya: https://endgame.id/season2 https://endgame.id/season1 https://endgame.id/thetake -------------------------

You have a security crisis, you have an energy crisis, and now you have a monetary economic crisis. If you start thinking about that, we're not going to go to sleep tonight. I'm pretty personalistic about fixing it. My way would be to try and manage it. We need some judicious intervention to the biggest successes. I think the media does have a real real. This media does have a role.

This is N-GEN. Hello, we're here we're coming Lionel Barber, the man-tain Pimpinan from publication is financial times. Hi, Lionel.

Thank you so much for coming on to our show. It's a great pleasure to be here, Goodall. It's been a while since we talked about the world, but before, Before we start talking about the world, I'd like to, you know, ask you questions about how you grew up. You were born on the 18th of January, 1955, and tell us, you know, how you grew up and how you got hooked up with journalism. Well, I grew up in South London, in a borough called Battersea. and if you're in London

you drop your T's cut so it's called Batterie and I was the son of I was a twin my twin brother was called Stephen and then a younger brother

Tony came along five years later my father was a journalist he came from the north of England from Leeds in Yorkshire and he left school he was barely 15 years old so he didn't go to university he was totally self-educated

and I think that was an important driving force in my growing up with my brothers because we didn't come from a particularly certainly not a wealthy background certainly not a privileged background you could sort of say aspiring middle class

but most important we wanted to do better so we were scholarship kids at a very good school that we went to and then from there went to Oxford University, all three of us. And when did you exactly join the Financial Times? I know you spent 14, 15 years out there. Yeah, I joined in March 1985, and it's important to say that my father was a journalist as well. He left school, he worked in a solicitor's office, hated it,

and then joined as a, you know, just a paperboy in the, copy boy in the newsroom, age 17. And he stayed in journalism for at least 55 years. I mean, he just loved journalism. And he also worked for a newspaper in Yorkshire, then went down to London and then joined the BBC, the World Service. And although he had a Yorkshire accent, he was quite well known.

And he had a particular interest in British, what had happened to the former British colonists. So he traveled a lot to Africa. He interviewed all the leaders of post-independence, Kenyatta and Krumer and others in the 60s. And he also traveled around the world because he was with the World Service. So I suppose he was a bit of a model for me, although he was a tough taskmaster.

And although I was worried about following him into journalism, because I wouldn't sure whether I could do as well as he did. When I left Oxford and I'd studied German and modern history, I decided that I would go in journalism. So my first job was in Scotland. So I did the right thing and leave England, leave the sort of the capital, go out into the region, a nation, Scotland,

and that was very good for me. Did he ever ask you to study journalism, your father? No, he didn't believe in studying journalism. He thought journalism was something that you actually picked up on. So he hated media studies. And I'm not very keen on them either. I mean, he was a practitioner. He didn't encourage.

He didn't say that I should go into journalism, but I know he was very pleased when I did. And I, you know, because I did quite well, I think he was very proud of as far as I got. It's quite amazing that you and your siblings actually picked up on wanting to be a journalist. I mean, it's quite rare that everybody of the children would like to follow what their parents have been doing. Well, my father was a very strong-willed person, and he always made us read a lot as children. The front room in our house was actually called the library.

because it had so many books. It wasn't called the living room. It was called the library. And there were hundreds of books there alongside all the artifacts and things he brought back from Africa on his travels. So it was a very unusual room. And I just remember, I mean, it was a bit painful sometimes reading these books. But I think he instilled in us a desire for greater knowledge

because that's what had transformed his life. And that was probably one of the reasons that we did follow. My brother, my twin brother did write, and he did contribute some newspaper articles, but in the end he went into the city of London and did rather well. My younger brother actually specialized,

he worked at Reuters, and then he worked as a foreign correspondent in many different countries. So, yeah, I think it's just a tribute to the force of personality of his father. Amazing. Now, if, you know, to anybody out there that aspires to be a good journalist such as yourself.

You've been saying to everybody or many people out there to stay curious. And what else do you want to tell them if they want to be a good journalist? Well, let me stay with curiosity for a moment because one of the problems these days is people aren't curious enough. They just want to offer opinions. They don't want to delve into the first. facts. They don't want to try and try as best you can to establish the truth or the causes of why things happened or what went wrong or what's good about certain things. They're just,

they're not curious enough because they have preconceived views. But the other piece of advice I would give, and I always said this when I was editor of Financial Times, if you want to be a good writer, you have to really work at it. And the notion that people can write a very good piece of say 800 words in an hour, you've got to be outstanding and very experienced to be able to do that. So I'm a great believer in a bit

if you think about sport. That's something you have to really work on your technique. And it takes a lot of time because to change the metaphor, there are very few Mozart. Most of us aren't Mozart. We actually have to just graft. And then the,

The other thing I think about journalism is recognize, again, if you're a writer, everybody can be edited. Everybody. There is nobody that, no piece of work that can't be improved without editing. So if you get 200 words cut off, don't worry about it. Wow. And let's talk about your days at the FT. I mean, you made a lot of great decisions out there. there, one of which was to digitize, right? And now we're living in a highly digital world.

I want to take you to this digital world where I'm seeing a growing impression that people are equating the amplification of algorithm with democracy in the digital age or a digital space, right and this is manifested in the fact that you know social media is unedited on editorialized like the financial times would have been and people are reading I mean more than a billion people you know get to write anything without being editorialized as opposed to the financial times which is a lot less of readership, a lot less of a writership. How do you see this evolving going forward? Well, let me unpack that just a bit. I think there's some important context. When I became

editor and I was 50, I didn't expect to be the editor, but I was working in America. I'd worked in America for more than 10 years. I was a very experienced writer and foreign correspondent. I've been six years in Brussels as well. I'd worked in Washington, the end of Cold War. Then in New York, where I'd worked, you know, running the American operation. And so I came to the job of executive editor with a certain amount of experience,

and that does help a lot. And I came to a newspaper, an operation that was in some trouble. We'd lost a lot of money in 2005. And one of the reasons was that we didn't have a, sustainable business model. We were overly dependent on print advertising. So it was clear to me, and I've been in America, I've gone through the whole internet bubble and stuff, that we needed a new business model that was going to be built

around digital transformation, which would fundamentally change working practices, but also shift the balance and dependence on advertising. So we essentially went for a subscription business. Now, all this is relevant to what you've just been, the question you've asked, which is about algorithms and how they're distorting the way journalism is practiced and what journalism is. So let me try and answer the question. First of all, with newspapers, you had a highly curated process. You had a lot of people in a newsroom when I was at the Washington, Post, for example, in 1985 for a summer, I mean, there were 850 people in the newsroom.

Can you believe that? Wow. When I wrote a piece for the front page on the Washington Post of Ben Bradley of Watergate, Fame was the editor, that piece that I wrote was edited by five people. Can you imagine? I mean, it was so carefully curated. Now, all that, those backstops, insurance policies, they've gone. people just kind of put it out there. Even in news organizations, in the hollowed out news organizations in America, in addition, the whole media ecosystem is fragmented because the barriers to entry have disappeared.

So anybody can set up a media set up. It doesn't matter. So there's no control. And then, last point, you have a situation where. And there's no question that this is true. The distributors, the grand distributors, like Facebook, of information stroke opinion, they're working on algorithms. They're working on algorithms that Twitter reinforce antagonism, adversity, adversarial,

um, information politics. So technology has both liberated. but it's also polarized. And that therefore is a matter for both for the media groups on how they practice journalism, recognizing that journalism has expanded in a way that it's no longer that highly curated, interface between the public, politicians, etc.

Do you see the prospect of... regulatory bodies remedying this going forward or do you see more of a case where the regulatory bodies have gotten too co-opted by the commercial instincts or enterprises rather

to the point where this is probably going to sustain for quite a while before any remedial tendencies can be witnessed Well, I think you're going to see selective intervention. Okay. And what I've been by that is, for example, dealing with hate speech. Certainly the Europeans have done with that. Right.

So you're not having an absolute guarantee of free speech. Second, how the sort of use of media during election, that maybe you need to have a quiet period or something like that where there are some curbs being introduced. I know Facebook is sort of working with regulations looking at how where do you, where may you need some curbs?

I mean, remember, this is an aside, but it's important, particularly if you're thinking of your own region guitar in Southeast States, you think at the Philippines, you think of Myanmar, I mean, frankly, what Facebook was allowing on its, you know, through its channels, yeah. It was a sinkhole.

And while 90% of the debate in America is all about America, nobody thinks about what was happening outside. And it was very, very disturbing, if you think, yeah, I'm thinking of the Philippines in particular, Maria Ressa. courageous journalist so how now I really think I think when we talk about intervention that's more likely to happen in America

I'm not sure that there would be why it's so fussed about what's happening outside they should be and there should be pressure but as you say these bodies have become so powerful so you've

And ubiquitous, gallons and trillions of gallons of information and views and whatever's spewing out. And now you have the richest man in America or the second richest man, Elon Musk, taking control of Twitter. Yeah. So there's some real questions. There have always been questions about ownership of media and the practice of media. But, you know, just winding back, when I was a newspaper editor and I was, I was obviously in charge of the financial times when it went through its digital transformation.

So we went from, you know, newspapers. This gives you a sense of the transformation on what's happened. When I took over, we had 420,000 newspaper circulation and 76,000 digital. By the time I finished, we had almost a million digital subscriptions and 200,000. newspaper. Let me ask you about Elon Musk with respect to his acquisition of Twitter. Is that net good or net not so good for democracy? Well, I think there need to be a number. There need to be some serious questions asked. But we don't know, we won't know until we see how he wants what he wants to change and how he behaves.

The questions, so first of all, to stop the transaction would have been quite difficult. Right. Because he was offering a very generous amount of money to the shareholders. So to then, you don't have a fit and proper test for media ownership in America.

You do have that in Britain. but, you know, he made a cash offer, largely cash offer. I can't actually, I think, yeah, largely. But it was generous, so it was very difficult to stop it. Yeah. Very, very difficult to stop it. Question now is, given he is such a ferocious and prodigious tweeter, and he's definitely got into trouble with his tweets,

which had been seen as market moving. and breaking securities laws he got in trouble. I think he got fine. I'm trying to remember, but certainly he got into trouble for his use of tweets about taking the company Tesla private. If you think that you have somebody who's clearly fluent in the medium,

he's the richest man in America, and he's in charge, God knows, the opportunities for abuse are significant. What happens if he's starting? starts taking down or ordering any tweet that's critical of himself. On the other hand, right? On the other hand, I think it's pretty clear that Twitter did not evolve as, with enough innovation.

It is an underutilized, under-exploited medium. They were very slow, for example, to use moving image. they were just fixated with this 140 character and then oh my goodness it was a big revolution when they moved to 280 characters this is a medium

which can certainly evolve and let's see what he does Is there any credibility in what he's been saying with respect to he's trying to get rid of the bots spams and all those things and trying to bring people more towards the center

as opposed to allowing them to stay on the fringes? I think there could be and there's no question because I'm I do, I'm on Twitter and for my scenes and I enjoy it but suddenly I remember at least two or three times I've been sitting one month waiting for my followers to go up and they've been just constantly being chipped away.

And it's clearly all the blot, all the bots are being flushed down the water closet. Yeah. So clearly there's been a lot of questions about bots. And I think he will deal with that. By the way, there's another border point guitar that is interesting. There's some massive questions. about the legitimacy and credibility of digital advertising. Right.

And the way in which figures and audience figures have been exaggerated around who's watched looking at the ads. Big questions about that. It's a bit of a scan, frankly. So I think that's also part of the box package. Yeah. I wanna ask you a conceptual question

with regards to I've been raising this a few times in the past with regards to the paradox of democratization of information vis-a-vis democratization of ideas. We have tremendously many more pipes of disseminating information, but we can't seem to see the creation of ideas in the number of that we have seen in the number of the dissemination of information.

It seems to be plucked somewhere. And why is it that, you know, the democratization of information has not translated into a proportional, you know, democratization of ideas? We seem to have been seeing polarizing, of ideas in many places around the world. Yeah, well, one of the reasons is that we've stopped listening to each other.

Yeah. And if you talk about the democratization of ideas and liberal democracy with the rule of law, strong institutions, representative government, then this depends in part on, an exchange of ideas, a discourse between others, listening to one another, respecting one of the rights, disagree. All these things are part of the democracy of ideas, so that other ideas can flourish. A, Blune, you know, the theories, both in American literature, the founding fathers, Federalist papers, all this.

But we also know if you read the Federalist Papers, that you can have the mob. Right. You can have excessive factionalism, factioned. This is what, that wonderful document,

which I remember reading first at Oxford, the Federalist's papers written by Madison J. That in these circumstances, circumstances, it's a C-Termon. Now, what we've got to look at is the democratization of information. What we talked about with the digital revolution, is it turbo-charges division. It turbo-charges the mob. You can have, you can spread information and get people acting as a network to just silence people.

I mean, this is what technology has done. And there's no restraint. People are also somewhat, not everyone, obviously, but they're not restrained. If you then add to that this notion of the echo chamber where essentially the same people are talking to each other. They're not reaching out beyond their natural constituencies. They're talking to one another and they're reinforcing their prejudices. You can see where you get to a situation, for example, in America, where, you know, the majority of people who vote Republicans think that the election is stolen from Donald Trump.

Even when you have some of his most senior political allies and legal advisors saying it wasn't stolen, people just don't believe it. So that's a long way of answering your question. But I think that, you know, we've lost sight of the fundamentals built around the democracy of ideas. How do we fix it? well I don't know but I'm pretty personistic

about fixing it we're not going to revert to a totalitarian model where we switch everybody off we're not going to take everybody's mobile phone my way

would be to try and manage it we we need we need some judicious intervention into the biggest successes. I think the media does have a role here, by the way. Okay.

I mean, they can't be having their business model skewed to just the most trouble we cause, the most hysterical we get, then we're rewarded for it. That's a very bad position. And then obviously the politicians have a certain responsibility, but you can never ask too much there. And I think it's about managing it, not fixing it. Yeah. Well, you know, we live in an age where, you know,

the average person looks at his handphone for nine hours a day. You think looking at their handphones for four hours a day would help depolarize conversations? Yes, I do. Right? I mean, that could be a practical... I do. I mean, I look up at my phone.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, I've made it a habit not to look at my handphone any more than an hour and a half a day. Yeah, I mean, I'm, I'll raise my hand here and say, I look at my hand phone too much. It is addictive. I remember being in Silicon Valley and watching, listening to one of the executive there, just explain how they deliberately made it. So it's addictive.

Right. You always want to, you know, you're always on. so that probably that might how you enforce it I don't know whether the phone you know shows a blank screen or something I mean that's a bit just supposing you're in the middle of

some town you've never been to before and you're trying to find your directions Google Maps is pretty good on the other hand I suppose you could always ask an individual where the way is right that might I think that that's quite an interesting

proposition because clearly nine hours is ridiculous. Just do you mind? Anything over four hours a week? Yeah. Well, yeah. By the way, the other point is, I won't say who it is, but I've had two young people, CEOs of tech companies, who've said to me, without missing a beat that they've sent their kids to school,

where most cell phones are allowed. Yep. And these are tech giants. I agree. Because they know how bad it is. You know, what you're looking at in the handphones. Yeah. Yeah.

I want to connect this to some of the points that you've been raising recently. You've been talking about the three, you know, noticeable phenomena. the first one being the rise of populism as a result of a few things, one of which would have been the financial crisis in 2008. And the second being the rise of the east, call it China and India and a few others in Asia. And the rest, the third one being basically how the technological landscape has shifted and somewhat exponentially. Taking on the first point that you've raised, populism,

I do believe this is caused by perhaps some of the polarizing conversations that we've just been talking about. But also, it is probably the reason why we've seen sort of a, big decline in people's ability to multilateralize in the last few years, right? Multilateralism was the hot thing after the early 90s, and it's sort of like dwindled since a few years ago. It's just been a lot more difficult to multilateralize. How do you see this connecting with each other? Well, the connection can be summed up in two words. I talk about

national populism. That's really the phenomenon that we've seen, the America first of Trump, for example. You have the French populist Le Pen, it's very nationalistic, the German too. It's against national cooperation. It's a turning within. And it is secondly linked, as you say,

the financial crisis legacy, global financial crisis had it. It was a profound impact because first of all, again, you've got to be careful about generalising and each country is slightly different, but if you think about America, I think one of the

key factors here was both on the financial crisis the way people lost their homes. You know, they believe their entitled to home. House prices were supposed to continue to go up.

the banks lend on extremely reckless scale through these credit derivatives to supposedly to subprime mortgages, and it exploded. A lot of people left homeless. Now, if you put that next to sort of globalization, liberalization of the last 30 years, and you see the way swathes of blue-collar workers lost their job. largely as a result of, you know, being undercut, particularly China's rise is important here. Then you can see you've got a whole big populism problem. And that's what's happened. I think last point, you're right that multilateralism, this was a feature of partly through the Cold War and then the end of the Cold War.

you had American briefly a gemini, but America was acting in a largely enlightened way, leading coalitions, leading, taking a positive stand in the multilateral trade talk. I mean, we've obviously got

unilateral action like on the invasion of Iraq disaster. I'm not saying, so there were mistakes and sort of aberrant behavior. But largely, America was taking that lead in the multilateral multilateral framework.

And that's broken down. I mean, nobody thinks you can do a global trade agreement anymore, like in Uruguay. It was an attempt at Doha. Now it's regional trade agreements, if that. So all this is breaking down and you have a sort of fragmentation. I don't think this means, this is a long answer, but I don't think this necessarily translates into what we call de-globalization. but it does sort of accentuate the blocks and the end of the high water market multilateralism. I agree. I agree. I think it's kind of ironic that multilateralism seems to work only when the world order is unipolar.

But, you know, when the world order becomes multipolar, multilateralism becomes less easy. to implement as a result of which, you know, regionalization or regionalism kicks in. And that's what we're seeing in, at least my part of the world and some other parts of the world. Indeed. I mean, that links to the rise of the east. I mean, clearly there are some of the multilateral institutions that we've seen the order that was set up largely under American direction and leadership after the end of the Second World War. war, that's having to adapt. Now, some of it is actually getting a new lease of light. So if you think of NATO with the invasion of Russia's invasion of Ukraine,

NATO is now going to expand, going to include formerly neutral, long-time neutral, Sweden and Finland, which is also neutral sort of in practice, if not in, anyway. So those two will come in. So that's that's that. But you're seeing as well other new institutions like the Asian infrastructure, development bank, China making it clear that it's not going to be with just fitting in to an American-led order.

And therefore, new groupings, China playing a greater way. way things are changing. You mentioned a few things there, one of which is the Ukraine invasion. And I want to try to put this in the context of your famous interview of Vladimir Putin, where he told you a lot of things, I'm sure. But one of the things he told you was that you're not going to be able to drink the champagne if you don't take risk. When you heard that from him, did you anticipate

something as dire as we might have seen in Ukraine? I don't think I anticipated it would be wrong to say that I anticipated something as outrageous. Now, such a huge gamble as the invasion of Ukraine, full invasion, I'm not taking a bite more of territory. But I did leave thinking, and that's why we put it at the top of the article after this one hour, 40 minutes. interview, I thought this is a man who definitely is ready to take risk, who wants the top seat at the table and also is incredibly embittered and feeling that Russia hasn't been treated properly and it's time for Russia to come back. And you know, you can see then, maybe I should have

thought more about, well, if you think about what he said about the campaign, you think about the Munich speech in 2007, 2008, sorry, invasion of Georgia, you think about the seizure of Crimea, you think of the intervention in Syria, it's all part of a path. What do you think will happen with what's happening in Ukraine? I mean, I think they're going to fight for quite a long time more. I mean, you know, at least months. They may have a brief pause when the weather gets worse, but right now it's a full-scale battle for territory.

And both sides, Russia desperately trying to take the whole of Donbass and Luhans, the two separate to his breakaway republics, what's so-called breakaway republics, link them to Crimea. I think he's at least put on hold any hope that he originally had. He clearly did have to just topple the regime. And they clearly thought they could knock out Kiev, knock out the leadership, arrest Selensky, put him on trial, whatever. That maximumist goal is that to, and linking it, by the way,

also to Belarus, neighbor and Belarus. I think that's happened. They were defeated in the first three weeks. So this is all about control of territory in the east and linking it for the south. From the Ukrainians' point of view, it's inflict as much many casualties as possible, try and stop that linkage and sort of bleed Russia to the point where they might be prepared to come to the negotiating table. And that's when we have a whole set of other questions. But right now, and I've been told this, both on both sides from the information that I have,

that both Putin and Zelensky has made it clear that they have no intention, that it's all about fighting. Everything is going to fight. And it could go on for a long time. Do you see this potentially escalating to a different nature of war? Well, there is a risk of escalation. We've just seen this week that the escalator, as it's called, because the territory is not within Russia. It's actually called Galingrad, where that's inside Lithuania, adjacent to Lithuania.

And Lithuania is standing between Galingrad, that little area, and Russia. This is where the Arctic Fleet, so the Baltic Fleet of Russia is located, and the Lithuanians impose what they say is in line with the EU sanctions that transit Russian goods to Palindigran via Lithuania. That's including steel, going to, what, 305% or so of Russian exports. Now, if they try and, if it looks like they're trying to starve the Leningra, I mean, this could easily escalate. And I think probably it would be interesting how that plays out.

It's one to really watch. I think on the nuclear side, there's a lot of, say, nuclear rattling, nuclear missile rattling, not the real thing. This was just Putin trying to intimidate. I've just, last comment, I've just come from Riga, Latvia, in the Baltic region. and I spent also four days in Sweden. If you're there, you're less than two hours from Kiev, you feel like you're on the front line. And these countries are extremely nervous about what Russia might do.

They are determined that Russia, as they say, cannot win. What that means in terms of a Ukraine victory, will they say full withdrawal of Russian soldiers? It's going to be hard. Right. But I think you're going to see NATO put more units in the Baltic states. There's plenty of room for escalation. It's a very dangerous situation.

The more of this war gets prolonged, economically speaking, the more countries around the world are going to feel the pinch, as we're already seeing with respect to so many commodities prices and recessionary tendencies and stuff. Where is this going to end? Or what's it going to look? Well, first of all, you've seen what's happened to the oil price. This is leading to very high,

a near double-digit inflation in Europe and Britain. We've got almost 10% inflation. This is the worst inflation we've seen 30 years. America's a slightly different matter because they've got a giant fiscal stimulus that's part of the problem plus COVID shocks as opposed to energy where they've got they've still got a high oil price which is hurting consumers but they've got they've got a sort of slightly different inflation problem but so the the risk of

course is that Europe and America goes into recession because the central banks are now beginning to tighten interest rates raising interest rates, stop the easy money, a commative monetary policy that we've had again for the last 15 years. And as I say, there's a real risk of recession. And that will, if you like, be something of a firebreak. It's going to mean a lot of damage, a lot of people, collateral damage, people are going to suffer. It's an interesting question then.

how does this affect Asia? Does you do have a certain degree of contagion? And I think on this, you know, you've got to look at what happens to the dollar. Does the dollar go up with interest rates going up? If countries, as happened more than 25 years ago in Southeast Asia with those countries that had dollar-denominated borrowings, they were left high and dry. tremendous crash, exactly.

And then on top of that, you've got zero COVID in China and much slower growth in China. So you have a security crisis, you have an energy crisis, and now you have a monetary economic crisis. If you start thinking about that, we're not going to go to sleep tonight. Not a pretty picture. No. So it's simplistically,

It just seems sensible or sensible to try to figure out a way to end this war as quickly as possible, right? Well, I'm nervous about pushing this because we don't want to force President Zelensky to the negotiating table and then sell him out. I mean, we saw this what happened in. now. In with the, they sold the Czechs, the British sold the Czechs and the French down the the river with Hitler in 1938. They essentially gave him to Statenland, right? Which was the German enclave, German speakers in Czechoslovakia. What did he do? Months later, he invaded Poland, Hitler, and then he invaded Russia. So we don't want to be selling Zelensky down the river.

We need to bleed Russia. We need to arm Zelensky. We need to stand firm in united. We need to use proper deterrence against Russia. And then put the pressure on the Russians. We need to also impose fuller sanctions on energy imports. Because right now he's getting billions with the higher energy prices into his coffers to finance the war machine.

And we need to just put, increase the pressure on Putin and make this a bloody and politically expensive war. And the endgame would be a regime change? In Russia. No, I don't think we should be aiming for regime change in Russia. That's for the Russians. Let's see what happens. Put a lot of pressure on him.

If he seemed to be failing, maybe something will happen. I think more important is to, work on possible area where, for example, Ukraine is going to be given candidate membership of the European Union this week at the summit in the EU. That's an important statement about Ukraine's Western tilt. Second, I think probably I would not be putting Ukraine in NATO. I don't think that feasible, not least if the country is territorially divided. I think that they then, we need to work on a process of Russian troop withdrawal from Ukraine. So it's a sovereign state, but it's in the EU.

But Russia doesn't feel threatened. Right now, that's about the best that we can see. We'll have to see what happens in terms of the fighting, the way the fighting goes in the next three or four months. Yeah. You know, you recommended a few books, one of which was the light that failed, right? Yes. Which I think is a really good book. And is what NATO and the EU are doing sort of like an assertion that liberal,

democracy has to stand strong in the context of what? The light that failed is the book by Stephen Holmes and Ivan Kastjev, who's a Bulgarian, which is a kind of critique of how the EU and, to a certain extent, America, tried to export their sort of liberal democratic model across around the world and the natural reaction in certain countries. I mean, it starts Poland, Hungary, then moves to Russia and then China. And it's obviously never going to happen to China. So that's an interesting critique of what happened after the end of the Cold War until, say, 2015.

Now, liberal democracy is under assault, both within and from without, Putin as a menace, and we have to stand strong and united. And that, fortunately, is what people seem to have understood. There needs to be a common result. Right. Let's switch over to China. I want to pick your brains on, hear your views on what's, happening between China and the US and how you think that will affect not only the world,

but the rest of Asia? Well, first of all, we need to understand that we have a different type of leader in Xi Jinping, is if not the emperor in Beijing. He's a strong, assertive leader who doesn't believe in hiding your, time and hiding your strength, in the words of Deng Xiaoping. He wants his third term. That's, again, breaking precedent. And he wants to see himself as a historic figure.

And he certainly has an expansive view of China's role, and starting with the Pacific. And he's been a little bit somewhat more aggressive, sort of assertive on Taiwan. By the way, that's why Ukraine is also important if the West had just folded. I'm sure that because Xi Jinping would have taken note with regards to Taiwan. But if we go back to America, which is where I've watched this evolve, the attitudes evolve. And there's a completely different view of China now. China is the new rival, the new threat, and this is a bipartisan view. It's affected everything, the public debate, and it's seen in terms of China's taking advantage of world trade rules, China's stealing our intellectual property.

China is spending massively on its military. It's challenging our position in the Pacific. There's a technology race between U.S. and China, and it's not entirely. healthy, but the American sort of political establishment is now rallied. Trump, in other words, Trump was probably right that he was right about one or two things, not many, but he was probably right that the American attitude under a bomb was a bit passive. I mean, that doesn't mean we get into a complete confrontation, but it does mean negotiating from a certain degree of strength. So the challenge and this is in the facility's trap by Graham Allison.

You know, is that as the world adjusts to a rising power and a former hegemon but as clearly dominant power, America, how do these two countries, how do they get on without being into a war or conflict? What are the terms of relationship? And then also, how does this, for America, the challenge is to maintain alliances not to encircle China, but certainly to show projected strength beyond just its own economy and its military, that it's got allies. China doesn't in that same fashion. And that would also have some impact, it seems to me, on Chinese behavior.

So I don't think that we're in a period of, you know, it's not, it's a, it's gone beyond where, to kind of hard-edged competition, but we're not in a hot war. We're in a sort of, again, I don't like analogies like Cold War, but it's a sort of, it's in a very tricky, sensitive period, which will require very clever, very astute diplomacy to make sure that we don't slip. into conflict.

Do you see China being able to be revisionist to the global order? Continuously? What do you mean revisionist? Do you mean going backwards to a different age, or do you mean actually trying to overturn it? No, not to the extent of overturning it, but amending it so that it looks like it's going to favor. Yes, I do. Yeah.

Yeah, I think that's right. And I think a wise America would understand that a degree of an amendment and adaptation is probably necessary. But that doesn't mean just say, for example, abandoning half the Pacific or just turning a blind eye to what China is trying to do to co-operate through economic diplomacy. I mean, there has been bullying. If you think of the way China's behave towards Australia, you think of the Philippines, you think of its territorial claims. I mean, all of this is it's quite aggressive behavior. And if you don't, if you do nothing, then, in my experience, the Chinese then tend to just, they just carry on and tilt some. I'm going to ask you the last question.

I know you've got to go. You have told people that you want to be able to ride the bike when you're 85. That to me tells me that you are an optimist, right? And with the kind of optimism that you project, paint the picture of the world in the next five to ten years. Is it going to get worse first before it gets any better? Or you think it's... It's definitely going to get worse before it gets better.

We're in for a very painful, at least a couple of years. adjustment because we've had we've had sort of very easy money everybody's been able to borrow and then you've got this security crisis war I mean this is we're in a very dangerous and we're going to go in through a very painful

period for at least two or three years the question then is what is the world that emerges is there a new generation of leaders that are capable of tackling the inequality that you and I have just discussed and alluded to. Does the West stay united or does it fracture? Does populism continue to take ground in Europe?

And then America. I mean, we have 2024. What's going to happen in that election? I'm just a very old-fashioned person. What happens in America is so important for the rest. the world. I agree. I agree. Can I ask you one more last question? Yeah. As a media or former media guy, do you see the media becoming more of a monopoly or balkanized or democratized? No, it's bulk. It's balkanized. You're going to have a few dominant news brands.

Right. You know what they are Financial Times, Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Washington Post. but you're also going to see a number of new with it's going to be a bit tricky now because the money isn't around the way it was but you're going to have new forces the fragmented media landscape that we talked about gives a lot of opportunities to other players and that's the other side of fragmentation

so I know there's at least two or three media ventures that I'm advising on that are just doing these stuff and it's valuable and I think that's a healthy thing Hey, Lionel, thank you so much. Okay, I'm really pleased to do it. I've just got a rush now. I know, let me just say one word to the audience. Yeah. Teman,

that's Lionel Barber, or manan from Financial Times. Thank you. This is Endgame.