The Duran Podcast - US efforts to strangle China & reassert hegemony - Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Episode Date: September 16, 2023

US efforts to strangle China & reassert hegemony - Jeffrey Sachs, Alexander Mercouris & Glenn Diesen

Welcome to today's program. My name is Glenn Dyson. I'm a professor of political science. With me is Alexander Mercuris from the excellent Duran. And today we're speaking with Professor Jeffrey Sachs, an economist who advised several countries transitioning to capitalism, including Poland, the Soviet Union, and then Russia. In fact, Jeffrey Sachs was there. If I'm not mistaken, across from the table of Yeltsin, when he announced the dissolution of the Soviet Union. So, yeah, welcome back, Professor Sachs. It's good to see you again. Great to be with you, Glenn, and Alexander. Terrific. So today we want to discuss this economic war between China and the United States,

because a key challenge for the U.S., well, in my opinion, at least, is committed itself to a hegemonic strategy in which stability and peace is believed to necessitate the endurance of hegemony in perpetuity. So this creates certain problems when other centers of power rise has this little scope for accommodating the rise of other countries, at least as equals. So the rise of China is currently, I guess, the most relevant example, as its may arise undermines the US-led order. So we therefore see this very fierce economic war with the explicit goal of slowing down

or even scaling back China's economic development. However, as you have pointed out in an article, this also applies to allies. You wrote this article comparing the U.S. economic war against China with the economic strike, if you will, against Japan in the 1980s. So at that time, as we remember, Japanese were becoming, as you phrased, it too successful and how to be taken down a peg. I was wondering if you could explain or elaborate on your arguments. Thanks a lot.

I think the starting point is an ideology, which is inconsistent with reality, and that is the idea of being a global hegemon. There really have not been global hegemon's in human history, and I don't think there will be, because there will always be multiple power centers and economic centers, and no one country can maintain a dominance at a global scale for very long. Now, the U.S. inherited this ideology from Britain, which did have a kind of global dominance in the 19th century

because it was the first one to get to this dimension. It was the first one to industrialize. And that did give Britain a tremendous advantage over rivals for the 19th century and the early 20th century. But even then, rivals arose, of course, Germany and the United States. And in Asia, the industrialization of Japan. Well, there's a lot of history there. But just to say, after two world wars, and the Great Depression in between, and the fact that the United States was pretty much immune

from the physical war of the Second World War other than one-day attack on Pearl Harbor, the U.S. emerged at the end of 1945 as a remarkably dominant country temporarily. It had the atomic bomb, It had a vast industry. It really was way ahead in technology, in part because so many of Europe's top technologists, scientists, and engineers had fled Hitler and had come to the United States. And so the U.S. really looked at itself and said, well, now we run the world. And that became the core of the U.S. political strategy, statecraft grand strategy, if you want to call it that, and ideology. And we know throughout history, whenever a country finds itself in that situation, which happens occasionally, you believe that that's divine providence. And there was definitely a civic religious and even straightforward evangelical religious impulse to this idea that America is the chosen country to run the world.

And Henry Luce did a trick on the United States, of course, the editor of Time magazine in the 1940s when he proclaimed the American century. That can also go to your head. And that went to the head of America's leaders. This is our century. Of course, soon enough, the United States decided that it was contending with a rival, the Soviet Union, and the Cold War was this grand rivalry in systems, as it was supposed. even that really requires careful historical dissection because the Cold War itself, in my view, could have been ended or avoided entirely had the U.S. chosen a different strategy in Europe,

one based on Germany's neutrality rather than rebuilding Germany's military after World War II, least the Western controlled part of Germany. That's a little bit of a digression, but just to say the United States competed with the Soviet Union and at the end of the Soviet Union and with the dissolution of the Soviet Union in 1991, this seemed to be the moment, the full realization of this dream of deliverance, global peace under the U.S. hegemon, just a little bit of cleaning up to do, but the U.S. would run the show.

And that became, you could say the state religion. It became the foreign policy, firmed up doctrine. We call it the neocons, but it's part of a continuity of kind of, self-glorification of the United States that stretches back earlier. But in 1992, it seemed the United States was without arrival. It just had a cleaning up operation to do. And the cleaning up operation was a rather a self-conscious one, which is there are still remnants of Soviet allies around

Saddam Hussein or Hafaz al-Assad. in Syria and later his son. And there was still the influence of Russia in its near a neighborhood, but that also could be undone. China was hardly on the radar screen. It was still perceived as a as a nation of rice-growing villages. So the idea that China was going to somehow become an industrial, technological, and military power was not imagined by the Americans in 1992. So what I think we are observing is now the 30-year playing out of a U.S. vision, which was extraordinarily naive, obnoxious in many ways. But the idea was now we have reached hegemony. We can put our military bases where we want.

We can expand our military alliances where we want. We can clean up those remnant Soviet or Russian regimes by overthrowing Bashar al-Assad in Syria or getting rid of Saddam Hussein in Iraq or overthrowing Gaddafi in Libya. we can make sure that we have friendly, even suppliant regimes throughout Central and Eastern Europe and the former Soviet Union. And we can just keep encroaching. And it was even a project. It remains to this day a project of some to basically break Russia apart the same way that

the Soviet Union had broken apart. So there is an active project with many. U.S. political leaders to so-called decolonize Russia. And that is not even a hidden agenda. That's actually an explicit agenda of U.S. government-backed agencies. So this kind of arrogance brings us to today. Now, the final point I would make just as an introduction is the United States is 4.1 percent of the world population. It's not very much, actually. We're 335 million people in a 8 billion world economy. There is no monopoly of talent, of scientific knowledge,

of technological expertise at all. And science and technology has now spread throughout the world. And what made the United States unique in 1945 as undamaged domestically by the war and indeed propelled by World War II, to military, industrial, and technological might doesn't apply any longer. So during this period, there has been the spread of knowledge, technology, and remarkably innovation capacity itself from China, which really was a, nation of villages by the time of the founding of the People's Republic of China after a century

of disasters for China. Now China's a superpower, clearly. And all of this idea that the United States stands alone astride the world was always arrogant and naive. But now it's just utterly and painfully anachronistic. But they don't get it in Washington. They don't get it in the think tanks funded by the military industrial complex. They don't get it in the universities where I teach in the east coast of the United States where the idea of U.S. hard and soft power still being dominant is the everyday discussion. Or they know something's not right. It's very worrisome, but we've got to take steps to make sure that that dominance, sometimes called full spectrum dominance, meaning economic, financial, technological, and military is maintained.

It can't be maintained. One has finally to learn to live together with others. And this is the great lesson of socialization that four and five-year-olds go through and that the United States government's going to have to go through. But it's a very painful process. It's like really saying to the child, you know, play together nicely with Johnny. Don't insult Johnny each time. Go make up to him. Share the sandbox. And this is really the stage that we're at.

I do find it almost like watching five-year-olds. And my wife tells me, don't insult five-year-olds. They're better than this. But this is almost what it's like right now. And the U.S. has not quite woken up to this. And the Ukraine war is really a watershed in this way, because it is, even though the United States has repeatedly been defeated in Vietnam, in the debacles in Iraq, in Afghanistan, in the complete mess created in Syria and Libya. None of this has worked. But it's never been because of this very strong opponent that says no. And Russia is saying no right now.

And the rest of the world is saying, yeah, you know, back off because we don't. want a U.S. hegemonic world. We want a multipolar world. And so this really is a different kind of wake-up call in my view. Professor Sachs, just a few things, and I'm going to go over to Glenn, but just a few, two quick observations. I just wanted to mention, because I obviously live in Britain and about the United States inheriting ideas from Britain in the 19th century. Not only is this actually true, but it was actually intended. It was something that actually happened quite consciously at the end of the 19th and early 20th century. The British, this is well-established academic history, I should make clear,

the British from having been very, very wary of the United States in the mid-19th century and even hostile towards it to a great, degree when they began to become conscious that their power was starting to wane, they looked for the other English-speaking country that would take the flame, the weight from them, and would, in effect, continue the project. And in fact, there was a well-known speech that Joseph Chamberlain, who was the colonial secretary at the time, father of Neville, by the way, he. He actually said the weary Titan staggers under the two vast orb of its fate.

And he invited other countries. He meant the Dominions, the British Dominions, but he also, of course, meant the United States to start helping Britain with that particular burden. It is a long topic, a very, very long topic, but it's something that people perhaps are not aware of the extent that they ought to be. And of course, in perhaps Churchill's most famous speech, he says, until the time that the new world comes to rescue the old world in the outbreak of World War II. So looking to the United States as ultimately the military and industrial force that would come to rescue the British Empire. Indeed. And he always spoke about, Churchill always spoke about the English-speaking. people and he even wrote a history about the history of the English-speaking people. So anyway, that's that's I think, by the way, just to say that is so important because the

English-speaking people is now the five eyes. It's now the intelligence system of Britain, the United Kingdom, US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand. So it's formalized into a formal security structure in as the English-speaking peoples, that's what it's become, is a security structure. Absolutely. One shouldn't just blame the British, because of course there was on the other side in the United States, there were all kinds of people who were very interested and receptive in these ideas. But just to say, this isn't just chance that things turned out that way. Now, the other thing that I was thinking, I was listening to all that you were saying, and of course, just before we started this program, I was reading a speech that Secretary Blinken has just

given at John Hopkins University, most interesting speech, because of course he says in some respects, many of the same things that you are saying, though of course from a completely different perspective. He says that we had this wonderful period after the end of the Cold War when everything had become sorted out, the liberal order. seemed secure. Everything was moving forward in a very good way. Of course, there were some, you know, problems. We had a war in Yugoslavia. We had a financial crisis in 2008, but these are just wrinkles in the wonderful situation that we were in. And unfortunately, sadly, tragically, now it's no longer the case any longer. We have this league of autocracy.

who are working together to defy us. And he made it very clear which of those countries is the great adversary. He actually stated, China is the great challenge, because they can compete with us in politics, economics, in every field. And of course, the very interesting thing is the rest of his speech is not about coming to terms with that fact. It is about the United States. working to push this challenge back, to defeat it, to somehow restore that period of unchallenged

dominance which it had just lost. And it was both, someone's a very pessimistic speech because he understands that this unipolar moment has gone. In fact, he's all but saying it. But he's completely unreconsiled to the fact of its passing and is looking for ways to reverse it. And of course, he singles out China. China is now the great adversary. Of course, the Russians are causing all kinds of problems, but they are essentially an auxiliary to the Chinese who are leading the autocracies around the world. And he complains that many countries are hedging that they're no longer

lining up with the West, some of them are hedging, they're thinking about moving to the side of the autocracies and he talks about corporations and NGOs and other things, other people, other entities doing the same thing. So it's exactly in some ways he recognizes the change that you're talking about. But, and this is the dangerous thing, he wants to reverse it. And he wants to reverse it by essentially going after China. It's, of course, very dangerous, and it could mean a war over Taiwan, for example, exactly provoked in the way that the war in Ukraine was provoked. The U.S. political class really believes that pouring in arms to Taiwan somehow protects

Taiwan rather than exactly making it vulnerable to the Ukraine syndrome, which is to get destroyed because of a great power competition. And of course, the Ukrainians have their own responsibility in blundering horribly their way to this. But this is a message I also gave to Taiwan when I was visiting recently, which is no amount of arms flows from the United States could make you safe, only the opposite. They will make you completely endangered

in this fantasy of the U.S. And I think it's actually very interesting to take even a further conceptual step back because the rise of Britain in the 19th century, the dominance of Europe can be seen even in a longer historical wave that I think is just worth mentioning. And that is that if you go back to Adam Smith

and my favorite passage of the wealth of nations written in 1776, he has a paragraph that's remarkably humane and remarkably clever where he says the two most significant events in the history of mankind were the discovery of mankind, were the discovery of the Americas and of the sea route from Europe to Asia. So the first Columbus's voyages and then Vasco da Gama's voyages around the Cape of Good Hope. And he says these have transformed the world.

They've interconnected the world. And then in this actually remarkable paragraph that people can find online, he says that a grave misfortune fell to the native inhabitants of the East and West Indies when these connections were first made because of the predominance of power of the Europeans over the native inhabitants. He doesn't actually recognize the Europeans also brought pathogens, which wiped out most of the indigenous population of the Americas. But he says someday, and by virtue of trade itself and how it will teach and spread technology, those native inhabitants will rise in power until by their equality of force,

they will be able to create a new justice in the world. And what's amazing for me looking back at this, Smith wrote in 1776, he was talking about voyages, of 1492 and 1498, and he said, we're just at the beginning of this, and eventually there's going to be an evening out of economic power. What we're seeing right now is not only the end of the U.S. self-proclaimed hegemony, we're seeing the end of the North Atlantic dominance of the world, which grew slowly after those first voyages with the overseas empires in the 16th and 17th centuries, then picked up speed, especially with the early industrialization and the industrialization of the military in Britain in the 19th century, then the United States in the 20th century.

That now has spread to the world. So what Adam Smith forecast 250 years ago, which is that there will become an equality of force around the world. This is what we're seeing right now. We're seeing actually a world moving from a European-led world or a North Atlantic-led world to a true multipolarity. And that is not understood by Blinken or understood by these neocons or understood by the very shallow political class in Washington. I think it is pretty much understood, actually, in Delhi. It's understood in Beijing. It's understood in Moscow.

It's understood in Brasilia. And it's increasingly understood now in Addis Ababa, home to the African-Urish. Union, though Africa was the most victimized continent on the planet and the one that is farthest behind, Africa's also now seeing a rise of technological capacity, a unity that's coming consciously by recognizing we're the same size as India and China, and we need to start following that model of development as well as China and India have forged. And so this multipolar world is really what's taking shape. And every day we hear about the global south and so forth, an expression I really don't like, but I don't have a better one yet. To say the non-Western

world is really what's the closest description or the non-North Atlantic world. But that's the world that's taking shape right now. But it's dangerous because in history, every major shift of power such as this has been occasioned by war, often massive and pervasive war. None, of course, by definition, has ever occurred during the nuclear age. and with a lot of not very clever people at the helm. And it's an extraordinarily dangerous period, actually. I don't think that there's any denying that. I guess one could almost excuse the powerful ideology, though,

because as you pointed out, the whole interconnectivity of the world, effectively the shaping of a common world order. It all happened under the last 500 years of Western dominance. And I also remember the end of the Cold War when you had, well, in 1989, we had George Bush making the argument that, you know, we shouldn't dance on the Berlin Wall because, you know, this was a common peace. We negotiated together. There's no victor. There's no loser. It's a common peace.

And then two years later, the Soviet Union collapses. And within a month, he was giving the- And the dance begins. Yeah. One month later, he gave the speech, the State of the Union speech, in January of 92 where the rhetoric was very different. Now, the Cold War didn't end, it was one. The leader of the West is now the leader of the world.

And this is kind of, you felt the hubris in the, you know, through the cameras almost then. But even though it was still reasons for optimism, I think, over the next, despite all the wars and the idea that, you know, the world would be more integrated and stable. But over the past few years when suddenly what was prophesies by Adam Smith, the power starts to disperse, which, by the way, George Kennan also said that after World War II, almost exactly like you, he said, you know, with 4% of the world population,

we've got 50% of the GDP, this has got to last. Anyways, over the past few years, the powers began to disperse. And to summarize the idea or the concern, there's a book by one of the main neocons, Robert Kagan, which probably wants related or in family with Victoria Newland. But this is amazing, the husband of Victoria Newland. He's the ideologue, at least the writer of the Screeds on the liberal hegemony, not so liberal, but in any way the desirability of the hegemony. And his wife has been the point person putting this into place step by step in this horribly destructive way.

But the mentality, just of the title of his book, I thought, was very revealing because it's, you know, the jungles growing back. This was the idea where he used to oriental language of the garden versus the jungle because, you know, civility was spreading around the world under US, United States, and suddenly now the jungle is growing back. So and the European Union also used the same language, you know, the garden and the jungle. So the jungle is invading us unless we go out now in the jungle. So by the way, when Joseph Borrell, the high representative of the European Union, used that exact expression, clearly he was quoting either consciously or unconsciously Kagan. And that's horrible.

I mean, he was showing, actually, the insidious depth of this neocon ideology at the core of the European Commission. I was horrified. Of course, he was called for it, but he wasn't called for it by people recognizing that it came from Kagan. He was called for it for its implicit racism and so forth. But it was more than that. It was just the direct link of the Washington and the Brussels neocons with this idea of we control things and we need to control things to keep the barbarians at bay. Yeah, so I wanted to shift more specifically to China because in your article you write about what the US did to Japan in the 80s. And of course, this was different because Japan was, well, was still dependent on security from the United States.

So it was easier to, I guess, strong-arm them to alter their currency, open up their patents of their semiconductors, putting the tariffs against them. But of course, China is a somewhat different animal. It's a huge, the economic technological power is quite immense. and also is not dependent on the United States for security. So it has greater autonomy. I was wondering, how do you see the possible success of the United States to roll back the development of China? Because there has been efforts.

I think that Huawei gave a good answer to this a couple of weeks ago because the idea took hold in Washington in recent years. that the real chokehold for the future world economy is seven nanometer chips or the extreme ultraviolet lithography and that there would be Western dominance because of a technology that China could never, never achieve, that it would always be years behind. Now, as a general proposition, I just recalled as I heard this how wrong such a prediction has repeatedly been because there is no monopoly on scientific skill. There is no monopoly on technology. Technology spreads.

It does get reverse engineered. It does get copied. It does get stolen. By the way, in all directions. So this is not one way or another. And the idea that you keep the technological lead is always a naive idea. At the end of World War II, there was a debate where the scientists that were at Los Alamos and had developed the atomic bomb sensed. We should share this now with the Soviet Union.

We should bring this under international control. and the powers that be in Washington in the early Truman administration decided, no, it's going to take the Soviet Union 30 years to develop an atomic bomb. There's just no way they're going to be able to do it. Of course, a few years later, this was completely disproved. And then with the thermonuclear bomb, the fusion, hydrogen bomb, this was also. almost an immediate replication in the Soviet Union. So the idea that you keep this technological lead, and there are these great chokeholds of technology,

is just at the gut, I doubted it. But then Huawei came along a couple of weeks ago and said, oh, this wonderful chip, this A-100 Nvidia chip, which is the key, graphic processing unit chip for artificial intelligence, large language models, and supposedly military applications and so forth. Well, how we just put it in its new phone. So something, not that chip, but a Chinese made chip that has this tremendous capacity. I think everyone's still scrambling to figure out exactly what is in that phone, but it seems to be holding up to screw

that this has been a rapid advance. And if this is not the definitive proof of that, there will be another one soon and another one after that and another one after that. The idea that the United States is going to stop China's progress this way is hugely doubtful and not only morally wrong and just not only morally wrong and dangerous because it's so directly provocative and so directly in violation of any norm of

interstate relations other than overt conflict. But it's also extremely naive to believe that this secret is held by the U.S. and can never be replicated. And so I think that with Japan, just to go back to the analogy, Japan also made terrific advances in semiconductors, in DRAMs at the time, and memory chips and flash chips and so forth. And the United States said, well, we've got to stop this. Japan was more compliant in the U.S. pressures because Japan is much more vulnerable than China to such pressures. Japan, after all, felt itself, interprets itself as being under the U.S. security umbrella. I think it's a mistake, by the way, the way that Japan views this, because,

well, I'll come to that in just one moment. But in any event, Japan allowed its growth to be basically dialed dramatically down at the end of the 1980. by accepting a vastly overvalued currency as part of a political deal, by accepting voluntary export constraints as a political deal, and by not having any alternatives also because the U.S. was Japan's market. When it comes to China, China doesn't accept, of course, a subservient role to U.S. security. China's not going to agree to such measures. And China's busy forging actively a large part of the world in which the U.S. can't hold sway or can't have a veto.

And that's what the bricks is about. That's what the bricks enlargement is about. That's what this diplomacy is about China saying, no, you know, there's a big world. We've got major trading partners in every region of the world. we have our own domestic technologies. We don't accept being shut down by the United States. Many other things could be said about this. But one small point I would make is that the macroeconomic advice, my profession, that is

given now to China is all wrong, which is the U.S. says stop exporting, stop trying to do all these things, just consume. And China should not follow such advice. China should be exporting and investing and still building its economy and its capacity and not going to a slow growth consumption economy. China still has a lot of development ahead. and it should see if the U.S. market is going to be closed in effect, it should continue to actively export to the rest of the world because it's got world competitive, low-cost, high-quality technologies that the rest of the world needs for its development. So in my view, there are decades ahead of China's growth by being engaged actively in trade

an investment throughout Africa, throughout Latin America, throughout Southeast Asia, and I don't see the U.S. in any position to stop that. I think I just wanted to add to all of that, this idea of trying to restrict technology, and the diffusion of technology is a good thing. It should be seen as a good thing. Of course. bad thing. I mean, trying to prevent other countries from developing their technology, their own, is in effect to sacrifice well-being, not just their well-being, ultimately your well-being also in order to achieve an ephemeral power position, because that's what it amounts to.

And firstly, it is not going to work for precisely the reason that you. you said, you cannot now simply prevent people thinking, which is how technology eventually comes. I mean, if they have to produce a chip, they will sit down and they will think it through. And people can think in China, just as they can think in the United States, and they can think in India, and they can think in every country, you will find people who have the means to do that. and whether the thinking exists, eventually the resources will follow. But what you will actually do is you're not going to prevent technology being developed in other places, but you will interfere with trade flows, with the movement of goods and people and supplies and things like that.

And you will cause political divisions in the world, which will make yourself, the United States, a less prosperous and happy country than it might have been, but it's also going to have a knock-on effect on everyone else too. And we did a program, yourself and us on the Duran, in which Alex and myself on the Duran, which we talked about the fact that the Chinese economy is slowing and it is slowing and it's partly slowing because all of these restrictions are being created. And that is helping the United States. It's making situations in the United States itself bad because the United States benefits from good trade with China and with the rest of the world. This is exactly right.

And it is fascinating for me watching kind of the mindset issue. There are two very different mindsets that are in play. And as an economist and the part of Adam Smith that I love, Adam Smith was a believer that an open world would be a prosperous world. And he described for the first time in scientific terms the idea of a global division of labor, of the innovation that results from this and so forth, not exactly in modern terms, but rather remarkable. insights in the wealth of nations. And the idea is trade is mutually beneficial. That's the,

that's the mother's milk of economics in this way. The trade is not one wins the other loses, but trade is mutually beneficial and an open world is beneficial for the world. Then there's the other mindset is who's number one and who is subordinate. And this is a lot of statecraft. And our dear friend, and I admire him enormously, John Meersheimer, very brilliant and very accurate and very careful, views the world as a tragedy of great powers. This is his greatest book, the tragedy of great power politics. And for him, it's a tragedy because there's a struggle to be number one. And that struggle is inevitable because everybody's fighting for survival. And the fight is because we're in the state of nature at the global level. We're in a war

of all against all. So there's anxiety, uncertainty, and struggle. And the question is who's on top? And as an economist, thinking about people should have a decent life, people should have the material means for their sustenance, for their enjoyments, and so forth, this idea of this endless struggle for whose number one seems so mind-boggling. And I always say to John, who's a close friend, and again, we're all students of John Mearsheimer, John, we got to get beyond the tragedy part. You know, we can't accept the world as a tragedy. We have to understand with all this knowledge and technology, we could actually have a peaceful and prosperous world. Well, maybe this is the old philosophical debates of the last 2,000 years as man falls. or not, is there a way to overcome the worst instincts? But the mindset is that trade is beneficial.

We are not being hurt by China. We are actually being benefited by having a prosperous and dynamic and innovative China. And I firmly believe that to be the case. And, but this, if your issue is not your prosperity and your well-being, but your issue is being number one, then you, you're, you do take a different point of view. And to my mind, it's an incredibly defeating, dangerous, self-defeating point of view to be obsessed with the question of who's number one, when the question should be, how can there be shared prosperity and peace? Can I just make an observation? That's very interesting, by the way, because it's just make an observation about this, which is that I think this idea of,

intense interstate competition with a view to one country becoming ultimately dominant. It derives very much from European history, modern European history. Specifically, the history in Europe from about the start of the 18th century, when you have a small number of European powers, great powers, intense competition with each other. In fact, there was a, I haven't seen it around for ages, but there was a book that, you know, we always, all of us who were students of history in the 1970s used to read at that time, which is actually, its title is my man called James Joel, I seem to remember, called the struggle for mastery in Europe. And I remember that book. Now, I have to say, I think this is, first of all, in the 19th century, there was actually some, kind of an attempt to get away from that. There was an understanding that interstate competition

between the great powers was dangerous and you had this attempt which is not wholly unsuccessful to create the so-called concert of Europe, which did preserve a kind of peace through most of the 19th century. Then in the 20th century, it all broke down. But it's still, I think, primarily a European phenomenon. It's because the European system became so dominant in the world, because the whole world, if you like, was drawn into the competition

between the European powers because Europe became so powerful in the 18th and 19th and 20th century. I think that it's perhaps unwise to think that this is how humanity must always be structured. Alexander, this is completely correct and absolutely fascinating because I've been having very intensive discussions with Chinese colleagues,

counterparts, students, and so forth about this issue. China's idea of statecraft, including international statecraft, really is different from the, Western view. And for China, the idea of this inevitable interstate conflict is not their history. Their history was large dynasties that sometimes fell apart internally, but that was the tragedy that needed to be restored by unity. And the idea, even regionally, of course, was mostly the Kingdom idea, which was we don't need to go to war with our neighbors. We need a system of peace, reciprocity, yes, hierarchy in the heyday of the Ming and the Qing dynasties, but not

this interstate conflict. And I would say it goes back even before the 18th century or the proverbial Westphalia settlement of 1640. which is sometimes the date given for the Western state system. But actually, I'd say all the way back to the Roman Empire and its contemporary Han Empire in China. Both of them broke up. But the Roman Empire was never reconstructed, although there were claimants to try to reconstruct it, often extremely violent. but Europe never established a European hegemon after the fall of the Roman Empire.

Of course, Rome also didn't control north of the Danube and east of the Rhine and Germania. But aside from that, there was a hegemon in Europe. And when the Western Roman Empire fell in 476, it was never reconstructed to this day. So interstate rivalry, kingdoms, dukedoms, and all of the complexities of Europe and competing empires, was this state of affairs. And after the 30 years war and the emergence of international law and Grosius and others, the idea that there would inevitably be interstate rivalries and conflict was taken as normal. In Asia, in China, in particular, this vast civilization, the Han Empire broke up. There were centuries, in fact, of internal struggle among kingdoms and so forth. But then came long-lasting, unified dynasties, the Song, the Tang dynasty, the Song dynasty,

the Yuan dynasty under the Mongols, the Ming and the Qing dynasties, and by and large, summarizing 1,500 years of history in two sentences, there was large aggregates, relatively centralized states that state, that did not see interstate conflict as the definition of reality. And until today, I believe this is China's foreign policy outlook. What are you all fighting about all the time? China has never, to my knowledge, and I stand to be corrected, launched an overseas war. The only two cases I know of are at the end of the 13th century when the Mongols were temporarily ruling China and they tried to invade Japan twice. but the Ming dynasty and the Qing dynasty for 700 years never tried to invade Japan, never once.

Can you imagine China and Japan in a European context that we would have said 500 years of nonstop wars as occurred between Britain and France, for example? Endless war. But there wasn't endless war in East Asia the same way. There was not endless war in East Asia the same way. And at the end of the 19th century, absolutely fascinatingly, Japan industrialized first because of revolutionary changes taken in the so-called Meiji restoration of 1868, it became the early Asian industrializing power in the 1870s, 1880s, and 1890s. And it was trying to tutor China into becoming an industrial nation. China was much more complicated and lagging at the time and under tremendous internal and external and external threat and pressure.

And then Japan attacks China in the Sino-Japanese War of 1894-95. And the Chinese are aghast. What are you doing? We're trying to struggle against the Westerners. Why are you attacking us? We're Asian. And the answer the Japanese give, again, paraphrasing is, oh, sorry, we're now one of them because we've industrialized.

So now if you're industrial, you need empire. So sorry, we apologize to you. You taught us a lot of culture. You gave us our alphabet. You gave us and so forth. But we're part of the Western club. right now. And the Chinese are profoundly culturally taken aback and shocked and disappointed by this, that Japan has become a Western imperialist country. And of course, this drama goes on because

Japan invades in the 1930s and horrific bloodshed and the horrors of the Pacific War in the Second World War, But China's idea of statecraft is not go make colonies around the world, go spread your empire across the oceans. It never was that for 2,000 years. Of course, we in the West, they don't, no, no, they want to take over the whole world. With what evidence? With no evidence. With no discussion, with no understanding, with no appreciation of Chinese history. None of it.

That is, I think, the big problem. And that's a little bit where with John Meersheimer, I'm trying to have this understanding and discussion, because I'm saying that the tragedy of great power politics is a Western concept. It may be a Western reality, self-created, but it doesn't have to be our global reality. We don't have to succumb to tragedy. It's interesting because China, I guess, what makes me? optimistic is its support for multipolarity. Sometimes I think about Friedrich Liszt because he was very enthusiastic about American industrial policy under the American system, simply because excessive dependence on Britain meant

it wouldn't have its political autonomy. But again, he was a bit dismayed when he predicted that the US would not just develop economically autonomy from British, but that it would become the future hegemon in the future. So this was his concern. But it is interesting that China does not really resist or sabotage other efforts by other countries to have their own technological autonomy, their own digital ecosystems. I see, for example, a relationship with China and Russia. Russia is a bit apprehensive about, well, succumbing to a foreign hedgeman. But in any partnership, they are able to always get 51% in joint ventures, so they will have some autonomy, simply to have that dispersal of power. Again, that was Friedrich's argument as well, which was, ideally, peace can be had when you had this dispersal of power, that one hegemony isn't able to create exclusive dependence or excessive dependence to the extent that they can run like an empire.

So I guess that that is an interesting difference with China, that they haven't, at least to date, not pushed for empire. They have consistently called for economic, you know, multipolarity. And even there is a civilizational initiative, suggest that, you know, you will have a diversity of civilization, not structured by hierarchy. So it is, I think it's worth exploring if China is different than the Europeans. We need to explore it. And we need not to succumb to the inevitability of conflict. And again, with our dear friend John Meersheimer, whom we all admire, I said to John, you know, the way we're treating China, we're going to make an enemy out of them.

Absolutely. And he said, yes. And I said, John, why do we have to make an enemy? He said, that's the tragedy that we will make an enemy out of them. So he's predictive. I'm trying to be normative that this is not only not. wise, but also in my view, not inevitable. We should be able to learn something. And since in China, it's not deeply ingrained the inevitability of tragedy of interstate politics. We ought to use that

as a cultural advantage for the world that maybe there is a way to have peaceful multipolarity. I mean, in a way, we're talking about a scale problem. The scale problem in Western Europe, we hope, was solved after World War II, after a thousand years of nonstop interstate conflict. Maybe it would be better if we don't have conflict and we share a common fate. We don't know if this will last, but it's a good idea. Could that same idea apply at the global scale? My argument is yes, it's only really two centuries that we've even thought about the concert of nations at a global scale. Even the word international was invented by Jeremy Bentham only 225 years ago as a word international.

Weird. But the whole idea of global cooperation is therefore, aside from the problem, profits and the visionaries. It's really only two centuries old, and in practical terms, it's one century. The failed League of Nations attempt, the United Nations after World War II, very fragile and obviously at a very fragile moment now, but it's a young idea whose time has come because for all the reasons why we somehow mostly got over fighting within our neighborhoods, not everywhere and not all the time, and even got over fighting with neighbors in a European Union and so forth, this is what has to apply at the global scale, and it is a difficult

making. And the irony is we need global cooperation, but the world has really been forged in the image of European nation states with the power. And so the power rests with nation states, an odd word, from a philosophical point of view, but state level in a global system. And the question is whether these states can actually understand that a global comity of nations that is operating under some, common standards, not regime change operations, not pushing your military alliance, not announcing the world is divided between us and them, which is all the U.S. imperial approach, whether the world

could understand that true multipolarity is within reach and in everybody's common interest. Just a few quick things. Firstly, the struggle for Master in Europe, I remember, is written by AJP Taylor, whom I was once privileged to be lectured by, so I've never forgotten him. But anyway, just to... I remember the title as a classic of reading an undergraduate... I know. Anyway, just to say, I mean, the other thing I would say about my own feeling,

why I am actually, in general, optimisation, is firstly, I don't think that this movement towards multipolarity and at the same time, economic equalization around the world can be changed. I mean, what Smith was talking about, you know, all the way back in the 18th century, that, you know, eventually we will get to a position where there's a just division. I think that's, if you could see it coming then, we can certainly see it coming now. There's going to be a difficult period, but I don't think it can be resisted. And I don't think ultimately we're going to risk, we're going to find ourselves in a great power wall.

The other thing is, if we're talking about the great powers, the problems between them are not so profound that they cannot be managed. I mean, China, India, they're not going to fight over. I'm not going to get a war over a few hills in the Himalayas. I mean, it's not going to happen. The Russians and the Chinese, they sorted out their problems. Things that people were saying were going to explode into war. They didn't. They sorted out their problems and everything settled down and was fine.

We have major problems in Europe, but we brought about those problems, Even Professor Meissheimer understands. I mean, it was Western policies that ultimately led to the crisis that we have in Europe. And different policies, if they're ever applied, they can sort those problems out. And, you know, we're not going to have conflicts between Russia and Brazil, or the United States doesn't need to have a conflict with Brazil. the conditions are there for a future concert of powers. There are always going to be conflicts and issues.

I mean, history doesn't stop, but it doesn't need to evolve into a great power war. It's different from what it was like in Europe in the 19th century, when the great powers were also concentrated and interconnected with each other, that it required much more difficult, it was much more difficult to maintain the balance and to maintain a kind of stability. And even then, for long periods of time in the 19th century, it worked. Today, it ought to be so much easier. That's my last observation.

I want to say amen. I really hope you're right. The only caution I would have is that wars can occur for no real reason at all. And this is the incredible, weird reality of the world. That's why it's taken more than a century to try to sort. how remind me why exactly did World War I occur. It wasn't a moment of crisis in the world. In 1914, it wasn't a moment of destitution. It wasn't a time of great progress, technological gain, scientific knowledge. Of course, we can do the TikTok in the old sense of the timing,

the chronology of why the war occurred. Why did Kaiser Wilhelm the second really want a Navy to compete with Britons? Bismarck told him, not a good idea. The Kaiser said, what'll happen if the British arrived with their Navy to our shores? And Bismarck famously said, I will have them arrested. You know, we don't need a big Navy. But so stupid. things are done by stupid people, that's my only caution because I think what you're saying is absolutely right. There are no fundamental reasons for conflict between the U.S. and China. I would say between Europe and Russia or between the U.S. and Russia. There's no deep reasons between China and India.

We're talking about psychological dynamics more than any. real conflicts of interest, and you're completely right about that. The only caution is Norman Angel said the same thing 110 years ago in the illusions of war. He said, there's no reason for war. It can't bring about anything good. There's no advantage to it. And then came World War I. So this is for me, the single biggest bottom line, stop the war mongering. end the war in Ukraine at the negotiating table. Now it was based on politics, just like Von Klauswitz always said. The war in Ukraine is politics with other means.

It is about the politics of NATO enlargement. The United States has to stop this, give some space to Russia. Russia has to stop this and give some space to Ukraine to exist as a sovereign nation. nobody can dispute that that's fundamentally possible and beneficial and the United States needs to back off over Taiwan and respect the one China policy and then we can get on to actually having a decent world. Professor Sachs, that's that's I just wanted to say thank you again for an amazing program. Glenn, any Glenn? No, thank you as well. Sorry for going a bit over time, but. No, pleasure to be with you guys. and look forward to the next time.

Great. Thanks a lot.