The Munk Debates Podcast - Fareed Zakaria on the future of geopolitics after COVID-19

Episode Date: April 21, 2020

On this episode of the Munk Debates Podcast, acclaimed journalist, author, and CNN host Fareed Zakaria joins us for a wide-reaching and in-depth conversation about the coronavirus pandemic and its long term impact on geopolitics and international affairs.Become a Munk Donor ($50 annually) to get 72-hour advanced access to the full length editions of Friday Focus and Munk Dialogues. Go to www.munkdebates.com to sign up. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

Welcome to the Monk Debates podcast. Every episode, we normally provide you with a civil and substantive debate on the big issues of the day. But our world as we know it has changed. And so has our format for the next few weeks. We're bringing you a special series called The Monk Dialogues. We invite the sharpest minds and brightest thinkers for one-on-one conversations live on Facebook to reflect on what our world will look like after the COVID-19. pandemic. These dialogues aim to provide you, the listener, with original insights into the pandemic's impact on everything from our shared values to the economy to international affairs. This week, we bring you journalist and past monk debater, Farid Zakaria, in conversation with Rudyard Griffiths. This is an edited version of the live event recorded Wednesday, April 15th. Hello and welcome to the monk dialogues. I'm Rudyard Griffiths. This on our second weekly dialogue, we have the opportunity to spend an hour with one of the world's brightest thinkers on geopolitics and international affairs. He's someone that I've had the privilege of moderating on four occasions at the Monk debates where he's really distinguished himself, I think, is one of the world's most versatile and capable debaters and public communicators.

He is also the host of a internationally acclaimed and renowned show on CNN called GPS. He's a Washington Post columnist. He's the author of numerous books, including the must-read book, The Post-American World. He's the former editor of Newsweek International. So I'd like to welcome to the monk dialogues for the next hour, our friend, Fried Zakaria. So, Fried, I want to jump in and talk to you about your thoughts on what is the single issue, event feature in geopolitics that you think will change as a result of COVID-19. Gosh, it's difficult to point to a single event because, you know, this is such a broad, capacious problem. It sort of pervades all kinds of different areas, you know, from health to

economics to, of course, nationalism. But I think when you look at a crisis like this, they tend to accelerate existing trends more than to completely upend them or transform them. If you think about World War I or World War II, you know, they accelerated trends that were already taking place, the rise of the United States, the decline of the British Empire, things like that. So I think if you had to pick one thing, I would probably say it is continue, it accelerates us into a post-American world. And what I mean by that is a world in which the United States no longer is the lodestar, the definer, the symbol of the entire international system as it has been since

1989, since the collapse of communism. You can look at it at several levels, right? First, one of the things that this crisis has laid bare is that the United States is not number one in a very crucial dimension of keeping it. its citizens safe and secure, right? This is an area where the United States has founded. Other countries have done better. We are not looking at the United States with all at its power, its purpose, its resolution. We're looking at South Korea. We're looking at Germany. You know, I mean, Canada has done pretty well. But certainly in that that soft power, the power of its example, the United States has not that. And the second area is, of course, in the raw geopolitics of it,

The United States doesn't want to be number one. The front administration has shown no interest in being the convener, in being the organizer, and being the agenda center. Look, after this crisis took place Rudyard, it was France that called for a G7 meeting to deal with the COVID crisis. It was Saudi Arabia of all places that called for a G20 meeting to deal with the COVID crisis. The United States actually acted as the spoiler in both those cases, refusing to. to sign a joint communique because the rest of the G7 wouldn't call it the Wuhan virus.

These are kind of acts of the spoiler, not the organizer. So if you think about it in those terms, what you are seeing is that we are entering into a world. You know, what I was trying to describe in 2007 was a world in which it's not that we're entering a Chinese world. It's not that we're entering, you know, nobody else is stepping in. And that's why I came up with this phrase, the post-American world, because it's not American dominance in the way that we have known it. But it's not anybody else's dominant. It's this vague, stunted chaotic, rudderless world in which everyone is sort of

jostling for advantage and no one is organizing us toward a common end or a common purpose. So, Fried, let's talk about the big geopolitical rivalry that we went into this crisis, the world facing. And Canada, like many countries, kind of in the middle of it, torn between these two superpowers. And that was China and the United States. Who comes out with the advantage from this crisis? Well, neither really in the sense that it accentuates that reality that there's no one in charge. China clearly comes out of it at some level looking bad. It clearly was deceptive and non-transparent and opaque about this crisis.

It could be signaled at one level, the weakness of the Chinese system, a repressive dictatorship in which bad news is covered up. in which information doesn't travel to the places it needs to. This is, after all, the kind of work, we know this phenomenon. This is what Amartya Sen, in some ways, won his Nobel Prize in economics for pointing out that dictatorships actually do very badly at handling things like famine because the information never comes up and there is this much tighter system. Once they handled, once they decided they were going to deal with it, they did deal with it aggressively and frankly impressively.

But that initial malfunction is not a bug. It's part of the feature of communist dictatorship that, you know, does run China. On the other hand, the United States has not covered itself with glory. It comes out a bit inept. It comes out with a bureaucracy that is not well-functioning and a country that doesn't want to strive for international function. We haven't still gotten to the kind of international competition yet. The Chinese are trying a little bit in terms of providing aid to some countries, but it strikes

to be as fairly feeble and some of the stuff they're sending a second tier. It's not, it doesn't seem like a concerted effort to win hearts and minds. So I think we're in limbo. Neither of them come out particularly well, but what has happened is you have had an acceleration of the existing trend. As you said, we went into it with the Chinese-American rivalry, and I would say it was a kind of soft rivalry. We're coming out of it with that rivalry having hardened on both sides. You now have senior officials of the United States government, blatantly blaming China. President wants to withdraw WHO funding because of China.

And you have in China, don't forget, the rise of officials, who are speaking in their official capacity, who are blaming this on America, who are coming this on America, who are coming. claiming this was concocted in an American military Labardre, obviously nonsense. But you see, therefore, in China also the rise of a kind of hardline attitude towards this rivalry. Freed, who could be the winners? You know, we've seen a very effective response to this crisis, for instance, in countries like Taiwan, South Korea. What does that suggest to you? One, that there are models that work. There are states that have the capacity to react and to react quickly. Are those benefits that these types of countries will carry with them after this crisis?

Yes. I think that one of the things this crisis has laid bare is that the old debates are over, are anachronisms. That is to say, it is no longer the quantity of government or the ideological orientation of government. It is the quality of government that matters. The debate about big government or small government or left versus right, more state and the economy, less state, is largely irrelevant. The question people are asking is, is the government competent? Does it have the ability to act with speed, with intelligence? Is the bureaucracy high functioning? Does the system have resilience? And if you look at the places that have done well, by the way, most of them are not dictatorships. South Korea comes out really probably at the top.

Germany probably comes out second. Singapore, Hong Kong do very well, which are unusual cases. Taiwan does very well. China does well, but not as well as some of those democracies. So what you notice is, what is happening is there is a race now for the degree to which you can have bureaucracies that are trusted, that are competent, that know how to act quickly. One of the things people have spent time talking about is the contact tracing that the South Koreans of the Singaporeans and the Hong Kong government have done, is the kind of intrusive government that America wouldn't stand for because they have technological surveillance and such.

Well, when you feel back and you study, they didn't do things that were somehow Orwellian. Mostly what they did was very good detective work. The kind of thing that, frankly, in anywhere, any democratic government could do. It just takes time and effort and intelligence and energy. They would sit and interview these people who had done, gotten coronavirus, who got in COVID-19 and asked them, who have you met?

Where do you know? They will go through and piece through exactly where these people were, but it's intensive work. So I think we're, you know, we're entering a new age, if you will, where that has become much more important. Think about it this way, Rudid. The United States spends $700 billion on its military. And yet, it is not able to secure the, you know, the safety and, you know, the safety and

and security of its citizens in a very fundamental sense from a very fundamental threat, because its healthcare system has no search capacity, as hospitals have no search capacity, lacks medical supplies, lacks pandemic preparation, all of which would cost, you know, 10, 5, 10, 15 billion dollars. The most the United States has ever spent

on this kind of preparedness in a single year, the $7 billion. Wow. 1% of the Defense Department's budget. I just wanna ask you about Canada, because you're someone who spends time in Canada, you follow Canada. Let's reflect a little bit on how Canada comes out of COVID-19. Because on one hand, you could say, we don't have the cultural wars that you're facing in the United States that have permeated this crisis now.

We don't have, you know, the problems of political leadership that you're facing with the current incumbent in the White House. But, you know, we do also have some challenges spread, some real ones. You know, we're not a reserve currency. We're a small country of 30 million people. We're not part of the European Union or some larger federation of states where we could ban together with them and, you know, seek strength through numbers. So what's your advice for Canada? And what's your thought in terms of Canada's place after this crisis? Is it diminished?

Is it enhanced? Is it a draw? Well, first of all, you're absolutely right. I come to Canada. Often I love Canada. I love Canadians. I think, look, on the dimension that I was talking about, Canada comes out very well, which is the quality of the United States. which is the quality of Canadian government

has shown itself to be very high. And the quality of your healthcare system has shown itself to be very high. But it's not just the healthcare system. Canadians started receiving their government checks for what is essentially disaster relief within two days or three days of parliament passing it.

The United States people still haven't gotten it. It's now held up because Trump wants his name on the checks. But even without that, it was going to take, you know, maybe a month before it could get there. That just shows you one of the ways in which your government is more responsive. The bureaucracy is working better. And part of it is these partisan divides. Look, the United States has gone through 30 or 40 years of the deep funding of its basic governmental operations because of a philosophy that said in Ronald Reagan's words, the nine most scary words in the English languages, I'm from the government and I'm here to help. So the idea was, again, in Reagan's words, government is not the solution.

government is the problem. So because of that, we have fallen behind, and in many ways, you have gone ahead. The problem you face is exactly what you described. And it's actually the same problem that South Korea faces, which is you may do well in the limited sense of being able to manage your affairs well. But there is a broader context in which you have to operate. And if that broader context is the return of nationalism, the return of a 19th century kind of real politics, where countries are pitted against each other, where there isn't a common international agenda, where there isn't common international institutions, where it isn't an age of multilateralism, but an age of bilateralism, rivalries, nationalism, protectionism. Canada doesn't, nobody does well,

but the big, large behemots like the United States and China can at least handle that. It's much charter for you. So I would argue that it still means that for Canada to achieve its potential in the world, you have to be a good influence on us. You have to press the United States to be more multilateral, more global, to take up the agenda, to at least think about the North American economy and the North American system and not just the United States, because that broadens the prism and it broadens our horizons. And to think even more broadly, look, the extraordinary thing about this crisis is it is almost biblical. It is truly a global challenge. And yet, the response almost everywhere has been to pull countries to a narrower perspective. This is almost,

by definition, a problem can only be dealt with at the global level because this thing is out and about it and it's going to spread no matter what you do unless everyone coordinates, unless everyone pools their resources and information so that we have common standards for travel and trade and things like that, but it's pulled us into a narrower perspective. I think Canada can help enormously because Americans trust Canadians, even people like Donald from at some level recognize that Canadians are friendly neighbors. And if you can use that leverage to help the United States understand the global dimensions and the opportunity here to really knit together a global response and knit together a global community in response to this, Canada does mean.

much better. United States does much better. Everybody does better. Look, we all end up in a suboptimal world if we're all being jealous, baroqueal, narrow, and competing when we could much more easily be broad-minded, cooperating, and solving this together. Wise words. Let's go to some questions, because that's what the monk dialogues is about. So Alex King here asking, are there any governments around the world that stand out to you as particularly vulnerable to political and social instability created by the pandemic. So, Fried, I've seen in some of other questions, you know, concerns about could there be another Arab Spring? Is there the potential in Africa for large-scale social unrest and collapse as this virus works its way through some of the world's most vulnerable countries and

economies? Well, it's a fascinating question because on the one hand, what you are seeing is the beginnings of a very devastating effect that this crisis is going to have in poorer countries. because remember, the United States and Germany and Canada and countries like this can borrow their way out of this. I mean, after what the United States is doing, what Canada is doing is telling people, stay at home, and we're going to compensate you. We are going to fill in at some level, not completely, for a lot of the income you lose over the next weeks, maybe months. Very few countries in the world can do that. There are probably 20 countries in the world, maybe 25, that can do that. They can borrow easily because they have responsible governments.

They have a track record. For whatever reason, the market trusts them. But that is not the case for the majority of the world, and certainly not the case for poor currencies. You already see massive capital flight out of the emerging markets of the world. So these countries face weak health care systems, governments that are not that competent and not that trusted, and they don't have much cash, and they can't raise much cash. And so I think we are in for a very tough time in many of these companies. And you ask where. I mean, it's really all the obvious places you can imagine.

It's the places that have the social and economic tensions to begin with, sub-Saharan Africa, places like Bangladesh, Pakistan, India. India is trying this extraordinary experiment in order to stave off that crisis by having essentially a five-week lockdown where they literally freeze everyone in place, which is going to be an extraordinarily costly process. I don't mean just economically. I mean, you're going to have people who are going to die of heat strokes and starvation, of preexisting conditions

because they can't, you know, they're most, 60% of India, I think our daily wage earners. Now, in terms of where it causes social and political problems, the irony here is because everyone is locked down. No one is protest. The Hong Kong protests have stopped. You know, there's a strange sense in which, the normal pathologies of a society in turmoil have been depressed.

I mean, one of the extraordinary things to notice, by the way, in the United States is you don't have any mass shootings in the last month. Very good point. Because you don't have schools open. You don't have, you know, so there is a kind of weird thing going on here. There's a lot of pain and a lot of misery that is unfolding in the developing world. But when you ask about the political crisis so far, because of the, because of social distancing, You are not seeing it, which doesn't mean it isn't there.

It is probably, you know, under the surface bubbling away. And the question is, where does it erupt? You're listening to the Monk Dialogues, a special edition of the Monk Debates podcast, where we invite past monk guests to reflect on what our world will look like after COVID-19. This week, CNN's Farid Zakaria on the future of global affairs. Here's one from Mark. As debt burdens from the lockdown weigh on our economies, can an already fractured European Union survive? And, Freed, I think that's an on-point question.

We've seen some real tensions here emerge between Italy, Germany, around, you know, how these bailouts are going to function. What different European countries, in fact, owe each other in this moment of crisis? And a return, a resurgence of internal borders in Europe. Do you think this is an existential threat, this pandemic, to the ideals of the European Union? It certainly raises the issue of Europe in a kind of existential way. Could they muddle along as the way they have often done, possibly, perhaps even probably? But I wonder, because the question asked the question exactly right, as you elaborated it exactly right. See, what's happened is Europe's bluff has been called.

Europe has so far tried to have it both ways. It wants to think of itself as a union. It wants to think of itself as a place that has pooled sovereignty, achieve this kind of completely historic thing, which is all these countries that were once jealous neighbors, you know, the past 400 years, they fought wars unendingly. They've come together.

They've abolished the idea of war among themselves. They've pooled sovereignty. They've gotten rid of borders and they speak as one. And it sounds great. But the reality is the European Union is actually very weak. It does not have a fiscal union. If the countries in the South are weak and in recession, the European Union doesn't have the cash to provide them with what would happen in Canada or the United States,

which is they get unemployment insurance, which was essentially federal transfers. The budget of the European Union has a percentage of the, European Union's GDP is tiny. The bureaucracy, even though people talk about it, is tiny. So in a way, they have wanted to talk big about the European Union, but not actually give up sovereignty. I mean, where do you really give up sovereignty? You give it up if you're talking about common taxation policy or a large common budget. You give it up in terms of the direction of your foreign policy. So there is a European foreign, high commissioner for foreign policy. But I'm sure most of your viewers and listeners haven't, don't know who it is,

because foreign policy is actually mostly made by Angela Merkel and Boris Johnson and Emmanuel Macron. They haven't ceded their power. So Europe, in a sense, has to figure this out. The way you can save the union is more Europe, is a deeper union, is actual fiscal transfers. because Italy is teetering on the edge. Italy is too large to bail out in the conventional way. You really have to do something dramatic and reform the whole system and make it a genuine union.

Or you recognize that it's not. And you come to grips with the fact that really what the European Union is, it's a kind of alliance of common-minded nations. It's sort of like a commonwealth that works rather than this grand dream of a united continent. have a feeling that in the next five to seven years, that decision is going to be made. And COVID, in a way, called the bluff. Because the crisis is now deep enough. The debts are large enough. The Europe either has to, you know, it has to either go for more Europe or less Europe. Right now, it's the proverbial bicycle where, you know, you can, if I can mix the metaphor

a little bit, the bicycle can move forward or backwards, but it can't just stay where it is. Good point. Okay, let's take another question from our online audience, who again, has been emailing us over the last while. Here's Chris Harris saying, do you think the U.S. will change its views on health care after this crisis? I mean, it's been one of the defining differences for Eid between our two countries. We have a universal single-payer system here in Canada. You know, it's had some challenges, certainly with this pandemic. But in some ways, I think compared to what seems to be a U.S. system, with all kinds of disparities that really affect the poor and disadvantaged in American society the most

as this pandemic rules across the U.S., could this cause the United States to finally wrap its head around the idea of some kind of public-funded system that was universally available? I hope so, because I think what it shows is this is no longer a matter of, again, as I say, left versus right and bigger government, smaller government, this is simply a matter of health security for everyone. What we have is a very bad system that provides very perverse incentives for people, simple ones. If you don't have health insurance, you are not going to go and get tested because you don't want to pay for the test. If you are an undocumented worker, you are not going to get tested because you're going to worry about it. So the lack of universality, the lack of viewing

this as a basic right is producing a circumstance that is in danger. injuring the health of everybody. And so that's one simple one. And then you think about the multiple layers of the kind of great inequalities of treatment and response that are going to take place because of your wealth. And it feels as though it isn't right. But it's also something else. It's wildly inefficient. Remember, we spend 18% of GDP on healthcare. We spend an additional trillion dollars for health care compared to any other advanced country. And we have lower life expectancy than any other advanced country. And at this point where, you know, there's a five-year gap between the best European countries, life expectancies, and the United States. So clearly

whatever we are doing is not working. I think the way to think about this is the key is exactly what you said, right, which is universality. How you achieve it, there's an open debate. The Canadians, you know, we have now the spectacle of Boris Johnson, a conservative British prime minister, singing the praises of the NHS, which is, of course, a government-owned operated healthcare system that is even more big government than Canada. Canada has what we would call Medicare for all, as does Taiwan. But there are other systems that Germans have a kind of a mesh-mash. The Swiss have what would essentially be Obamacare with a real mandate, where everyone has to buy insurance. So it's a system where you have insurers, you have private providers, but everyone is covered by

mandate. So there are many different alternatives. And I would say the key has to be to think about it this way. It should be universal. It should not be something tied to employment. And people should be assured a basic level of care. And those provide for a decent society, but also, as importantly now what we're realizing, this is a core issue of health security. If a prison population is infected, it affects all of us. It infects all of us. Yeah, good point. Let's go to some more questions, both from our Facebook audience and those of you who have been emailing in. This is from Kim. Teo, will the COVID-19 pandemic exacerbate the tendency of many countries to head towards autocracy, or do you believe that it will have the opposite effect?

So an interesting question there, Fried, because we're seeing, even in our liberal democratic societies, actions on the part of government restricting civil and individual liberties in ways that we never would have expected in our own lifetime. So does this encourage maybe both peripheral states? You think of Hungary that kind of is teetering on liberal democracy, drifting into autocracy. you look at countries like Turkey that are more firmly in that direction. What's your feeling? Does COVID-19 help the autocrats? Yes. There's a famous historian, Charles Tilley, who once had a great phrase.

He said, war makes the state, and the state then makes war. And this point being that any time you have a war, the powers of the state grow. Now, if you think about war in a more broader sense than a war, kind of great national emergency in which the government is given license. That allows the government to take on powers. It allows it to make the citizens do what it tells it. And in that sense, this war against this virus is exactly that kind of a war, where the government is given more leeway, the government has more power.

So you see it with Orban in Hungary, most clearly, is essentially dissolved parliament and said he's going to rule by decree. You're seeing it a little bit in India, where the government has taken on greater and greater powers. The central government, for example, has overruled state governments. India usually has a vigorous degree of federalism. You also see it with regard to the press. Modi has taken the opportunity to clamp down on some parts of the media,

the few parts of the media that have not been intimidated by him. So I think you are seeing disturbing tendencies. One thing one has to point out is you've not seen it in the Western world, including the United States. Trump may talk about having total powers, but the beauty of the American system was within 12 hours, 10 governors criticized him for it and pointed out that whatever he may say, they were not going to close or open their states based on his dictum, that they had independent constitutional authority. In fact, the head of the National Governors Association, who's a Republican, said that as well. So what you see is in these societies, the institutions are fighting back.

But I think this is the great tension and this is the great danger. I worry much less about the things that you all sometimes hear about, which is, are we going to have a surveillance system which gives up our privacy? Look, I give up my privacy when I'm shopping on Amazon. You know, Amazon knows what I'm buying. It knows what websites I'm going to, not just Amazon, Google, Facebook, all these people. If I'm willing to give that privacy up to Google or Facebook or Amazon, I'm perfectly happy giving up something. privacy in order to have a system of pandemic preparedness or epidemic preparedness where we have the ability to pool and analyze and assess information. As long as we live in a democratic society

in which there are controls where this data is maintained anonymously, where it cannot be used or misused. Maybe I'm too trusting, but I believe that that is the key. You cannot take an absolute disposition and say you will never be able to look at my data. I mean, that's absurd. You're letting Amazon look at your data and you don't want the federal government to look at it to prevent a pandemic or to prevent the acceleration of an epidemic? No, what you want is to have this democratically control with constitutional rights, liberty, checks and balances, courts and things like that. So I am willing to do that. What I'm wary of and what you're seeing as you pointed out in some of the countries you're seeing is the government using this to deprive us of

liberties. Some of that happened after 9-11 in the United States. The Patriot Act needs to be real scale back. Government has too many powers. Homeland security is a vague concept under which the FBI and the CIA have too many powers. All that is real. But so far, the greatest danger we're seeing is in countries like Hungary, to a certain extent, I mean, Philippines, Duterte said to his police. If anyone violates the curfew, you just shoot them. I worry about Turkey where Erdogan has always had a tendency to accumulate power. So again, it's one of these things where it accelerates trends that were already underway. Already Hungary was losing its democracy. Already Modi had become more and moreocratic. Already Erdogan had been depriving people of liberty. And that process is

accelerating. Great. Let's go on to our next question. Are we seeing a positive effect on the environment? Will there be changed to try to reduce these negative effects on our planet? I guess he's referring to climate environmental threats. It has been quite remarkable for a reed to see how in the face of this crisis, we have had definitive, urgent, sweeping action. But in the face of the challenge of climate, that type of action has been missing. Do you think that that remains the status quo? or in this response to COVID, will there be a new renewed energy around trying to tackle climate? Or does climate now get put off because economic growth is going to be just about every single focus for every single government out there? As always, you have all the issues parsed exactly right.

So first, at one level, you say to yourself, okay, you know, you remember Michael Gove, the British minister who during the Brexit, campaign said, I think Britain has had enough with experts. And the idea of this kind of, these populist movements are, we've had enough of these smarty-pants experts who tell us, you know, that they have special expertise, and they know what we should do, and they know how they should order the government and how we should learn our lives. Well, it turns out when you have a pandemic, it's very useful to have experts. And I hope that there is some recognition that in societies where you're going through this populist way, you really do want to have good government. You do want to have experts. But the deep state is actually the smart state. And that while you want to control, and of course,

nobody wants an independent bureaucracy that is not democratically accountable, you do need experts and you particularly need science. Now, if we're willing to listen to the scientists on infectious diseases now, which they've been warning about for a while, will we be willing to listen to the scientists about the other thing they've been warning about for a while, which is global warming. I think, unfortunately, the difference is that the scientists talk about pandemic are telling you how to save your life. Scientists are telling you about climate change. You're telling you how to save your grandchildren's lives. And fortunately, you know, the evidence suggests that we are willing to do things, change our behavior, pay a price to save our lives, but we're not willing to do very much

to save our grandchildren's life. I mean, it's sad, but that does seem to be where the evidence points. I hope it changes that. I mean, right now, actually, you're in a situation where there are very carbon emissions are down. Every country is probably going to meet its Paris goals, but you don't want to reach them this way through mass unemployment and, you know, having industry at a standstill. You'd much rather have it through industries that are sustainable.

Now, there's one final point I'd make. This is the Pope, you know, said maybe this is, nature's revenge the way we have been treating the climate and the earth. Of course, that's metaphoric and it's not meant literally, but there is a scientific reality here, which is the human development and the nature and base and rather brutal way has gone has been encroaching more and more on nature and on nature's preserves and on the places in the world where animals live freely. And one of these areas, one of these species have been bats.

We are in a sense coming to closer and closer contact humans with these kinds of animals, and that means that they, for example, start feeding on fruit farms, which is what bats have tended to do. And the closer and closer you get, the more possibility there is for transmission of diseases from bats to other animals to humans and so on.

So there is a non-metaphorical sense in a way, in a way that the nature of our development, the nature of human development so fast, so rapid, so industrial, and so unconcerned with these second and third order effects, is producing a kind of, you know, is having unintended consequences. I wouldn't call it a revenge or a backlash, except in a metaphorical sense.

But it should alert us to the fact that we just can't go on like this. And we certainly can't go on like this if the idea is that every country is going to grow the way the West grew, rightly or wrongly, it is just the earth will not be able to sustain it. Fred, your answer brings up a fundamental question I've been thinking about for the last couple of weeks, and it's about complexity that we have benefited as a global civilization from complexity. And we have become in how our economies function, how our society's functions,

infinitely more complex than a generation ago. What happens after COVID is, you know, will we be smart enough to understand that with that complexity, we have to have robustness, we have to have redundancy, we have to invest in the systems that allow this complexity to flourish, or do we just go back to doing what we did before, which is kind of roll the dice and hope that we can operate even at higher levels of complexity without assuming the structural costs to our economies, to maybe individual choice, to all kinds of different things that we don't want to accept those costs. Where do you come down on that on the future of complexity in a post-COVID world? You know, the message is clear.

I entirely agree with you. The best way to think about this is, you know, when people told us after 9-11, Here's what we need to do. We need to build the largest homeland security enterprise and have everybody take their shoes off and go through those x-ray barriers at airports and things like that. That's fighting the last war. After 2008, 2009, people have put in place

a whole bunch of checks and balances. The reality is you're never going to be able to anticipate the next crisis. What you can do is build a system that is resilient And you put it exactly right. What we need to do is to recognize the issue is not, you will never be able to predict the exact next crisis, precisely because of the complexity you describe. What we can say is because our world is so complex, what we need to do is to build in resilience,

surplus capacity, reservoirs, things like that. Now, the problem is that goes bang up against a kind of market fundamentalism that says, But one of the reasons the U.S. is in such bad shape in health care. Our hospitals operate very efficiently. They operate at 90% capacity because they run like hotels. And that is, you know, the boards and everybody tells them that is a good thing. The German hospitals don't run like that. I don't know enough about Canada in this particular area.

But in Germany, hospitals are, you know, the healthcare system is designed with surge capacity, with surplus capacity, because the market is not the only determinant of, how you build a good healthcare system. So similarly, it seems to me we need to think about what is it that we need to do precisely because we can't predict the next crisis. How do we build a system that has the resilience to deal with the complexity of the world we live in and the velocity with which change takes place? And those two vectors tell you that you need to, you know, overspend in some areas. You need to build greater capacity. You need to slow certain things down deliberately.

Do we need high-speed algorithmic trading where people have nanosecond differentials which allow them to make gazillions of dollars? What greater purpose is served by that? Are we better off putting in place circuit breakers so that something like that doesn't take down the whole world economy again? Those are the kind of questions I think we should be asked.

You're listening to the Monk Dialogues, series of the Monk Debates podcast. Each week, for the next few weeks, we'll bring you one-on-one conversations with the sharpest minds and the brightest thinkers, reflecting on how COVID-19 will change the world as we know it. If you're enjoying this podcast, write a review on iTunes. Check us out on Twitter or Facebook for the date of our next live monk dialogues. And send us your questions for our guests in advance at Dialogues at monkdebates.com. Now, back to the episode. Let's go to another question here from our audience members.

So from Matt, it seems that the future of global affairs after this pandemic hinges largely on the winner of this year's U.S. presidential election. To paraphrase, Matt, what do you think is likely to be the major geopolitical differences between an America in the future led by Donald Trump versus Joe Biden. Do you see a significant difference, a significant impact on how geopolitics generally plays out depending on who's in the White House once this pandemic hopefully begins to finally play itself out? At one level, of course, there's a big difference. Trump is Donald Trump is the first president we've had really since Franklin Roosevelt.

who has not believed in Roosevelt's vision for American foreign policy. Franklin Roosevelt really has defined American foreign policy since the mid-1940s. And for 75 years, every president, Republican or Democrat, in some way, was fulfilling that vision. And that vision was essentially that the United States came out of World War II saying, we don't want the problems we've had for the previous hundred years, 200 years, 300 years of this intimacy and rivalry war to drag. us down again. So we're going to try and build a system that is more open, that has some

rules of the road in which the great powers try to do some management of it. And implicitly, the United States would be the agenda setter and essentially the kind of guarantor of last resort, lender of last resort. Trump doesn't like this idea. He thinks that means that everyone rips America off, that America gets taken for granted. He wants to retreat in a sense to a kind of Jacksonian vision where America can bomb people and then retreat into its fortress and be unconcerned with providing the common good agenda setting and things like that. So it's actually a kind of a profound difference and a profound shift that Trump has represented. Now, Biden clearly comes out of the older tradition, but the world has changed. I mean, implicitly,

in the Rooseveltian vision was always the idea that the United States was the unquestioned leader of the world. We can't go back to that reality, you know, to that world. 25 years ago, China was one or two percent of global GDP. It's now 15, 16 percent of global GDP. It'll still keep going up. The one, the shift that has already been taking place in the world, the shift towards Asia has been accelerated by these changes, by this crisis. You know, the, the shift, things like the multilateral institutions of the World Bank, IMF, NATO, the whole Brettonwood system is creaking. And it has to figure out what does it do with countries like China? Does it let them in and give them equal status? In that case, you have the problems of the WHO, right? The Chinese do

have undue influence as a result. But what is the alternative? You want to then, you know, Trump's answer is withdraw, defund, let the institution collapse. Well, that's just going to mean the Chinese will build their institutions. We will presumably have ours. You lose any sense of global cooperation. You lose any sense of international structure. So there's going to have to be a real rethink, no matter who comes in. For Trump, maybe it's easier because what he wants to do is to destroy the old system. But even for a Biden, if you were to take it seriously, it can't just be saying, oh, we're just going to go back to the old days, and everyone's going to salute and say, America lead the way. That's not what's going to happen. It's a very different world.

The Chinese are real players, but it's not just the Chinese. One of the things I wrote about in the post-American world is, as countries like India and Brazil and Turkey grow in economic terms, they become politically more confident, they've become culturally more proud, and they've become less willing to jump what the United States tells them to. So it's a task of kind of managing a loose coalition of countries towards some common purpose, but that's very different from the old American world in which

the United States could define what the institutions were, the ideals were, the rules were, and everybody felt like, you know what, this sounds like a good deal and we will go along with. Makes a lot of sense. Okay, let's get some more questions in. So this is from Claudia. He said, besides the post-American world 2.0, I guess referencing the second edition of your book, what else should we be reading to prepare us for the post-COVID-19 world? So a great question there. For books maybe that come to mind from the past that could provide an analogy to understand the future, or what are you reading right now to try to figure this all out?

Gosh, some of the books that I think would be helpful, Harari's Sapiens is the most recent example, but some of those books that give you a broad sweep of history to recognize that what was going on today is truly historic, because we're really going through one of these kind of historical changes of phase where one era ends and a new era begins. And so I think some, you know, Harari's Sapiens really goes back to the beginning, recorded history and tries to tell in 600 or so pages, the story of humankind, guns, germs, and steel by Jared Diamond. I love those kind of big sweep books that give you, I think, a good sense of this. If you're particularly interested in the issue of epidemics, William McNeil, one of the great historians, this whole field is called Big History, and one of the great big historians,

wrote a book called Plagues and People, which is a wonderful. It's a little day. It's a little dense. It's not a beach reading, but it goes through, you know, things like the black plague and makes you understand, you know, exactly how, how they reshaped Europe, for example, killed about a third of Europe. And so then you ask yourself, what were the effects? It had the effect of forcing people to be more industrious. And in Britain, it actually laid the groundwork from the Industrial Revolution, because with so few people, each one had to figure out a way to be more productive. So there are these kind of bizarre things that happen to one. Another piece of Nathaniel's book that I love where he points out,

there's a kind of puzzle about the conquerors of the new world, Columbus, Cortez, Montezuma, people like that. They came in with very small armies, dans of soldiers. How did they convert all of Latin America to Christianity so quickly? Well, one piece of it, and just one piece of it, obviously, is that they came bringing these diseases, but they were immune from them. And so the natives, the locals, would look at this and say, why are these guys not getting sick when we get sick? Maybe their gods are better than our gods. Now it's speculation, but there is a kind of fascinating puzzle as to why with so few troops who, of course, pillaged and plundered and raped and such, but why would so few troops were able to get so much conversion? And one of his arguments is the differential effect of these infectious diseases, where the Europeans were immune to them, the natives were not.

of course, we didn't understand the science at the time, so people just looked at it and said, my God, this is some kind of magic, right? So those kind of books, I think, always excite me. One of the things I've been doing is just to drown myself in something else. I've been trying to also read great works of fiction. And the one that I read recently that I thoroughly recommend is John Steinbeck's East of Eden,

which is a great, it's many of us the great American story because it's a story of a family in Connecticut and the family in California and the Connecticut family moves to California in the late 19th, early 20th century. So it's the story of the rise of America and the westward movement of the American spirit, if you will. Let's go to our next question from Andrew. And is it safe to say that 2020 represents the start of the post-American world that you predicted over a decade ago? I think you kind of alluded to that, freed off the top of the show. But maybe you could go just a little bit. deeper and say, you know, what are one or two of the key kind of salient features of that world that we should understand as individuals right now that will have a big impact, let's say not on geopolitics, but on our day-to-day lives and how we live? Will we be more free or less

free? Will we be more prosperous or less prosperous in this post-American world that you see coming out of this crisis? Well, it's a good question, actually, kind of when did, when does it begin. I mean, obviously, when I went out using this metaphorically. But the way I think about it is, I wrote the book in 07. What happens then is a president is elected who is actually very attuned to these strengths. I mean, if I may say so, he read the book, he's photographed with the book. I know he read the book and was aware of the complexity of asserting American leadership in the context of a changing world. And if you remember, Obama had to restarted the Chinese, tried to get them to, you know, to try to agree to have a greater role in kind of the international system.

The Chinese at that point were not willing. They thought it would have to pay a lot of money and they would have to start funding all kinds of UN operations. So they retreated back and said, no, no, we're still a developing country. Meanwhile, you had the reality that whatever Obama was trying to do was being undercut at home all the time. He inherited these big wars.

So it wasn't clear exactly what was happening. And so he was trying very much to maintain American leadership in a very different world and trying to therefore use different skills, use persuasion. One of his aides once famously said in a New York article, we think it's better for us to lead from behind, meaning we don't want to be seen to be, you know, the America of old. We want to be seen to be gathering these coalitions, but letting other people take the lead. And all of that was working pretty well. The problem was that in America, I think you had lost the domestic consensus that the United States should play that leadership role. We wanted to get out of the Middle East. We want to get to do.

And what Trump recognized, where there was a much greater souring on that international leadership position. So Trump comes in and says, I hate trade, I hate immigrants, I hate international organizations. I hate multilateralism. I hate me. I'm obviously exaggerating, but not by much. And what Trump represents in a sense is in America that says, we don't want to take part in any of this. And for the rest of the world, it took somebody like Trump to recognize,

okay, we really are in a post-American war. So I think it's really the beginning of the Trump administration, where you see the actual beginnings, only because Obama was trying to paper them over and was very skillfully because of his personal commitment, and had been able to kind of fudge the issue. But with Trump, you see it, you know, plain as day, he withdrawals.

The rest of the world starts saying to themselves, okay, we have to freelance. I mean, this is the Europeans have said this explicitly. We are going to have to manage our affairs ourselves. Merkel has said this, Macron has said this. The Chinese view this as an open invitation for them to try to extend their influence into Asia and various ways. So I would argue that is pretty much the start of the Trump administration.

But like all great historical crises, this will accelerate those trends. Because rather than, if you think about the last crisis, oh, 809, Obama used it as a way to try to convene the world, the G20, coordinate with other countries, solve these problems together. This crisis, Trump is using it as a way to say, we're good, the Chinese are bad. I don't, you know, he didn't even want to have a G7 meeting. And then when the French forced him to, it's the Americans who essentially broke the meeting up. They couldn't come to a joint statement.

all the Americans cared about was, blame it on the Chinese, call it the Wuhan virus. You know, in some ways that is a metaphor for a post-American world, a world in which America not only doesn't lead, but doesn't want to lead. Okay, let's look for our last question of the evening now. So the question is, could you please give us a perspective on how the post-COVID-19 world will look like as opposed to the world in the aftermath of the Spanish flu and World War I? You just made the point free that the industrial revolution in the United Kingdom could in part have been the result of the pandemics of centuries ago. Do you think that there could be some kind of sweeping change?

I mean, after World War I in the United States, you had the roaring 20s. There was this incredible period of exuberance reacting to the horrors of that war. Do you see us coming out of this and opening up? Or are we instead maybe in a, I don't know, a holding pattern in some kind of hiatus as we work through the deep costs, economic and social and personal that this crisis has brought about? I hate to end the conversation by hedging, but a lot depends on the nature of the pandemic. And frankly, we don't really understand it. And let's be honest about that. We all need more information.

We all, you know, even the scientists, the best scientists will tell you they don't completely understand it. Swine flu, for example, which started out very menacingly, just disappeared after a while. Could that happen with this? In that case, the effects will be much more muted. Or are we living in a pandemic era where there are going to be waves of this and it's going to come back in the fall. It may come back next year. We will have to vaccinate 7 billion people around the world. If those things happen, then it's a very different outcome. But I think what we can say generally is the one thing that's different about the Spanish influenza compared to now is we have much more knowledge. We have much, you know, science is much better.

We have a much greater ability to ask ourselves who is infected, who is not, what are the mechanisms of infection? What do we do about it? We started this out handling this pandemic, you know, essentially in a kind of medieval fashion. What we are doing, social distancing is what the Venetians did during the plague. people in London did during the plague, you know, this idea of just stay away from everybody so that you don't transmit the plague. And that's fine and that's necessary. But we now have to bring in to bear the enormous knowledge we have about this disease and the ability to track that with testing, with contact tracing, with serology, you know, immunocerology where you can figure out whether somebody

has the antibodies or not. And, you know, we're getting there because this is all new. But I think we will be in a very different place than in previous pandemics, because we will have that knowledge, we will have that ability. And so you may see a kind of peculiar return of normals, you know, those wearing of mass, the taking of temperatures, the, you know, we may have to go back to using health documents. I grew up in India. I had to use these documents to travel when I was young anyway,

because, you know, coming from India, people wanted to know, have you had a typhoid shot, have you haven't had a cholera shot? So maybe we'll all have to have health papers. and maybe you will have to use them when you enter a sports stadium when you end, you know, so it's possible. We're very adaptable. And I think that we are ultimately social animals. Aristotle said that, I think it's the first line of the of the politics. And he's right. We want to live together. We want to eat, pray, love, mourn, celebrate together. We are not going to give that up.

We are going to find inventive ways to do it. So I don't think that we are, you know, life is going to go on and human life is social by its very nature. But we have intelligence now and we will know how to do it in a smart way. And we will be able to do it in a way that allows us to affirm that core element of humanity and that core element of civic life. But in a way that is smart and careful and sensible. So at the end of the day, an optimist about that.

I don't think that sometimes people believe everything will change. Well, the desire for human beings to gather in celebration, love, sadness, and camaraderie, that won't change. Frigg, did we learn our lesson? Do you really think that we've learned this lesson about the need for preparedness and the need for probably costly and extensive and difficult inventive? investments in societal capacity to deal with these unexpected threats in, as we discussed, a civilization of increasing complexity and therefore vulnerability? No, look, there's something about the human condition that you'd never say you've learned

the lesson. But I would say this, I think we are learning the lesson. I think we are understanding that we are in a different world. And I think that people are going to pay more attention to those who talk about preparedness to those who talk about science, to those who talk about resiliency. Unfortunately, it tends to always happen that you build that particular element of resiliency

into the system, but you neglect the others. So after 2008 or 9, we built a lot of financial resiliency in our system, and you notice our banks are in very good shape, but the problem is not a banking crisis, right? You ended up with another kind of crisis. After 9-11, you built up the security and safety of the travel architecture.

You know, you bolted the cockpit doors and you put the scanners at every airport and you have people take their shoes off, but you haven't dealt with, you know, the way we should be thinking about this is a more systemic way that everything should have some layer of resilience, some layer of a buffer placed within it. And our tendency is to fix the one that breaks. And as I said, the biggest one that we face, that is ultimately existential, is climate. And we do have to, you know, that is a, that is the perfect place for us to look when asking ourselves, what other kind of resilience do we need? What are, what other safety shock absorbers do we need to build in? Because, you know, if we have a real crisis on that one, it's not going to be

as easy, you know, as racing toward a vaccine and doing a little social distancing. That could be the big one. Well, thank you, that is a, I think, a super smart insight to end on that there will be other crises. There will be other existential threats we face. And climate certainly could be one of them. And we need to seriously think about how to build in redundancy, resiliency, all these things we've talked about. Fried, you've been very generous with your time. It's always an honor and a pleasure to have the opportunity to speak with you to benefit from your wisdom and insights. Thank you. That was Fried Zakaria. That's our second weekly dialogue. We're going to continue these dialogues for the next number of weeks to come. We're going to explore a whole range of issues from international

institutions to how we work, to the collective values that we share and how those will change through this pandemic and what will come out the other side. Again, this series is all about encouraging us to stretch our minds and think about how this pandemic is changing us as individuals, changing our societies, and changing the world. The Monk debates are produced by Antica Productions, supported by the Monk Foundation. Redyard Griffiths and Ricky Gurwitz are the producers. The president of Antica Productions is Stuart Cox. Be sure to download and subscribe wherever you get your podcast. And if you like us, feel free to give us a five-star rating. Thanks again for listening.