Principles & Pragmatism: Walking the Geopolitical Tightrope

>> Stephen Kotkin: I'm not gonna pick people because that would be favoritism. Yes, our good staff people, they got a nice picture of my office there in the pin.

>> Audience 1: Thank you, Mister Kodkin, my question is about what you said, your last point. So you said, when competing with them, don't become like them.

But in game theory, there's this prisoner's dilemma idea. Like, if China steals our intellectual property and we have a free trade system, how do we sort of keep being ourselves while also protecting our institutions? And I feel like it's very, very easy to become like your opponents. So How would you recommend to do that?

>> Stephen Kotkin: So I'm gonna put my intellectual property right here on the stage, and I'm just gonna walk away and leave it unprotected. And then someone might steal it. And I'm gonna say, my God, you stole my intellectual property, who's the idiot there, right? So you can actually have security, but your security doesn't have to be evicting Chinese from your laboratories.

Three quarters of the PhDs with Chinese passports in the United States stay here and become part of our economy, three quarters, that's a lot of intellectual capital. One quarter goes home, is that a good trade? That's a damn good trade. I want more of that. I want more people who know math.

We don't teach math in our schools. We got to import people who know math from other places, that's right, that's right. Math is racism.

>> Stephen Kotkin: And so, okay, so the Internet was built purposefully without security, that was intentional, not a flaw. It was built without security and without a payment system, because information wants to be free, because we don't have property rights in America.

You wanna steal my stuff? Okay, it's up on the Internet, go take it. So we set things up for ourselves to be stolen, and then it turns out people started stealing. Not just the Chinese, by the way, we steal from ourselves. I wouldn't have done that. I would have honored property rights.

Same thing with AI. They say, they scraped the Internet, and now they have all the images. The images are owned by Getty. They have copyright on the images. Do we have property rights in the United States or not? I think we do have property rights. Okay, sometimes the patents are too long, sometimes it inhibits innovation when we go overboard, but there are ways to have security and still be yourself.

And I don't think it takes a genius. Listen, let's be honest, we screwed this up. People my age, we screwed this whole thing up. And so now we're in front of you, telling you what we did, and you gotta rescue the situation. That's why you're sitting there, cuz you got to rescue what we did.

Some of the things we did are good, right? But lo and behold, some of the other things, we put ourselves in a hole on managing the Chinese situation. So China, they got this guy, Xi Jinping, they got this communist party afraid of its own people. There's no political reform, equilibrium.

You open up a communist political system, Gorbachev style, and it's actually committing suicide. So here they are, this is Xi Jinping's China. Okay, all right? This is Xi Jinping's China. And so what's our policy? Well, we got several policies. One is we wanna run up there and help him shoot himself with the gun, or we might wanna take our own gun and shoot him even while he's got a gun to his head, right?

Those are our hawks, they're lovely people. And then we got the same thing, but our doves, they wanna run up there and grab the gun and take it away, so the Communist Party doesn't shoot itself. China doesn't shoot itself because our GDP might be shaved 0.2%, Wall Street might have smaller bonuses, so let's get that gun out of the hands.

So that's our China debate, I wanna pull the trigger, I wanna pull the gun. Where's my position on that? My position on that is, you know what? They got a gun to their head. I'm gonna have a seat over here, I'm gonna watch what they're gonna do. I'm not gonna panic, I'm not gonna rush to pull the trigger, I'm not gonna rush to pull the gun, I'm gonna say, what am I doing here?

Where are my community colleges and where are my high schools and where are my kay through 5s and etc., etc. I'm gonna look around and say, I can strengthen myself while this guy's got a gun to his head. You don't always have to overreact. You can play to your strengths.

They do something in one realm where they're strong, you can counter them in another realm where you're strong. Never weaken yourself and never allow the other side to determine the field of engagement. Remember, don't accept the terms as imposed on you. All right, who's got the microphone? Yes?

>> Audience 2: Hi.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes, ma'am,

>> Audience 2: My name is Raina, sophomore here at rising, junior here at Stanford. And really appreciated your point about the Asian century here in the United States. And so my question is.

>> Stephen Kotkin: You are.

>> Audience 2: Yeah, so my question is kind of related to that.

I'm not sure if you're aware of Canada's recent H-1B program. Okay, so you asked, so my question is, how do the US and Europe and other western or other free countries try to maximize their ability to gain these talents that are willing to come in while also dealing with their own domestic politics and restraints on immigration?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yes, this is a leadership problem, right? If you think that immigration is predominantly people from South America, Latin America, coming across the border illegally and that that's damaging the country. If you think that that is the primary story on immigration, you're gonna have a tough time having a conversation.

You need to change the conversation. You need to interject some facts. You need to do a story about how immigration works, not just that way, because that is happening, but other ways, too. But the main thing you gotta do is you got to build housing, you gotta build housing.

The most incredible thing is when people come, they need to live somewhere. I know that's shocking, I know you can't anticipate that, but you need more housing. We can't build housing, why can't we build housing? Well because regulation this and regulation that, and rich people don't like more housing in their neighborhoods.

And the whole story, right? So Canada let everybody in and they forgot to build the housing. So they got the benefit of tremendous influx of talent, right? Immigrant stories, you can look at West Africa and the Caribbean in the United States. West african and caribbean immigrants in the United States make more than 20% above the median income.

They are incredibly successful immigrant groups, caribbean and west african immigrants. Okay, why? Because the people who do the immigration are already curious, ambitious, risk taking, talented, they're doing something that's not easy. And so you expect them to succeed unless you put obstacles in their way, you criminalize them or whatever.

So you can have tremendous boost to your productivity, to your economy, to your innovation, to your universities, to your communities, but you got to build housing. You don't build housing, you then end up in a zero sum opportunity cost trade-off problem, right? The immigrants come, housing prices go up because demand is higher and there's no more supply, and so the immigrants get blamed for rising housing prices.

Well, it's true the housing prices rose because the immigrants came, but you didn't build any new housing, had you done that, it would have been cool. And so you need to change the terms of the frame of debate, that's the leadership thing. Somebody's got to get up and talk about opportunity, America's a land of opportunity, America's an open society.

America succeeds when everyone has opportunity, when there's equality of opportunity on the front end, and then let's build some housing. And that's not as complicated, we've done that before. It looks like it's impossible, but a lot of things are possible when leadership breaks through. But if we could have more people like you, that Asian century that I half jokingly alluded to will become more and more a reality.

And we, of course, have done that many, many times over with immigrant populations from all over. And there are very few others Canada is one, there are very few other societies that can succeed that way, and of course, the Chinese can't do that based on all sorts of.

Who's got the mic?

>> Audience 3: I have a question.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah.

>> Audience 3: I'm actually interested in well, actually, first up, thank you for a very enterprising lecture. I really appreciated that passing comment that you made about Pekka Hamalainen and his involvement and basically revolutionizing historiography on American Indians in the US.

I guess my question to you is about your thoughts generally on the role that indigenous people play in the 21st century. You've already talked about a lot of these great powers in the world, but there's also something, I think that is emerging there, not only here in the US with the Supreme Court and grossian kind of jurisprudence.

But also, for example, Hoover just held an indigenous student seminar last week? They clearly recognize something else going on there, can you maybe talk to us about that?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, so indigenous continent by Pekka Hamalainen, he's a finnish guy, which is why he's got a wonderful, crazy name, Pekka Hamalainen, an indigenous continent.

Retells the story of America from the point of view of the agency of indigenous people. They have agency, they're not just on the receiving end of European settlers wiping them out, land piece by land piece, and driving them off their land, but they themselves have agency. The agency is not the dancing with Wolves agency, it's not where they're friendly with nature and everything's hunky dory.

And then the white settlers come in, it's an agency where they're good at empire, too. They're good at war, they're good at military stuff, and they give us a run for our money on the battlefield until very, very late in the game. And so it's the kind of agency that some, let's say, activists don't appreciate, but it's the real agency and it's real history.

So where does that leave us now? We can't be afraid of our history, nobody should be afraid of our history, nobody should be afraid of debating our history, right? Someone comes up and tells you something you don't like, once again, what's the evidence for that? Or tell me more, tell me more, I wanna hear more, maybe in the end, you don't accept it.

So we need to have an open, accessible dialogue about who we are, where we came from, and where we're going. The key to all of this is the civic revolution of the 18th century, the category citizen in the civic revolution of the 18th century was a civic, not an ethnic, understanding of citizenship.

As practiced it was exclusionary, it excluded black people. As you heard, the secretary of state, they weren't even people, let alone citizens, or they were three fifths of a people, which is not enough. It excluded women, women didn't have the right to vote until very late in the game for us, and they had to fight for it the same way that black people had to fight to become citizens as well.

Indigenous people, the same story. And it continues, the problem continues. The point being is that the category citizenship, which was exclusionary in practice, can be made more capacious in practice as well. So you can enlarge the category citizenship over time, and people who weren't born here can become citizens, and people who were born here but weren't recognized as citizens can become citizens.

So that's the piece, that's the most valuable piece. There's nothing more valuable than the 18th century civic revolution, because it makes everything else possible, including more accurate, more empirically grounded discussions of indigenous agency here on the continent in the past than today. So that doesn't mean we're all the same, that doesn't mean, right?

Once again, the terms people say, okay, the black community, and then they say, the black community thinks this. So they've invented something called the black community, and all people who are under that category, black think alike. And the person who says, the black community is now the self appointed spokesperson for that community.

So the black community, and here I go, I'm now appointed myself to speak for them or the LGBT community or the indigenous community. So those terms are empowering to people who wanna speak on behalf of others who, some believe in God, and some don't believe in God. Some are gay and some are straight, and some are this and some are, some are republican and some are liberal, and that's an open society, and so we need citizens.

We need the 18th century civic revolution, we need to be careful about inventing communities that we then speak on behalf of as if they have one voice, and then they vote for the wrong party. And then you got the Hispanics begin to vote republican, and people say, wait a minute, that shouldn't be happening.

The Hispanic community yeah, yeah, yeah. Okay, so enough of that. Let's know our history, let's not be afraid of it, Let's own up to the stuff that's happened here and that we've done everything. But let's understand it within the framework that allows us to do all of that, which is the 18th century civic revolution.

Citizenship defined not by ethnicity, not even by language, but citizenship defined because you can become American whether you were born American or not. But if you were born here, you are American automatically, that's so powerful, that's such a powerful instrument, including for people who. Self identify as indigenous to use for purposes they want to pursue within the free society.

And so I wanna know the history, I wanna know what happened. I wanna make sure that young people know it, too. And I wanna be able to act, intervene based upon commonalities and the citizenship, not based upon the divisions of the community. The biggest thing I can tell you today is what we got wrong is this, if you're geopolitics 101, you wanna unite yourself and recognize difference abroad.

The Chinese are not gonna become Americans. They're proudly Chinese and all power, too. So what we've done for the last long time now, 50 years, plus you could go back further, is we've divided ourselves while we've pursued one worldism abroad. Everybody's getting enlarged, everyone's getting engaged, everyone's becoming like us abroad.

But at home we're dividing into more and more, smaller and smaller groups, this community and that, community and this affinity group and that, this and this and that. No, you unite at home and you recognize difference when you go abroad. That's what is the success story. When you unite at home, you don't erase difference.

All right, one more or how many more we got here bosses. All right, so maybe two more. Who's got the microphone? I'm bad at answering questions, but you're good at asking them.

>> Audience 4: Well, thank you for your presentation. I have a question in regards to the don't become like them section in the framework that you laid out.

So you told us that we have wishful thinking in reality. And I would like to propose a third category, which is principle, which we've been talking about a lot, specifically with free speech and how we conduct ourselves in accordance with those principles. And something that you were just talking about is when our reality comes in conflict with those principles.

So within the United States, if we're working so hard not to become like our enemies, right, in reality, and we have these principles that lay out what we ought to look like, what happens when we muddy those lines? And what I mean by that is what happens when we kind of miss the imperatives that our principles laid out for us and we start contradicting them.

And a great example of this, I'm from Florida. A lot of censorship going on there. And overall, we can look to the executive branch as well, and executive aggrandizement there. How do we handle those circumstances when we come into conflict with principle?

>> Stephen Kotkin: Thank you for the reminder that we have principles.

I appreciate that a lot. It's very important. We do have principles. I was trying to enunciate some of them. For example, when I talked about open society, it's very hard to maintain an open society by closing things down. Sometimes it's necessary. There are criminal violations or whatever it might be.

People abuse the openness and cross a line in a way that it's necessary to make a trade off. But whenever you're making that trade off, you gotta be really careful. And so you use a threat, right? You use a threat to commit the sin of violating your own principles, and so therefore you have threat inflation is the way that we end up in trouble.

Let's be honest, it's not existential here in the United States. If you think it's existential, if you think the world is ending, if you think one side gets into power and that's it. It's the end of democracy, then you're empowering yourself to do anything necessary to keep them out.

Cheat, lie, steal, change the rules, violate the rules, right? If it's existential, if the democrats get in, it's the end of democracy. If the Republicans get in, it's the end of democracy. So as a citizen, I have to defend democracy. I got to do anything necessary to keep them out?

That's false existentialism for Chinese Communist Party, every day is existential. Changing the leader, Xi Jinping could lose the whole system. We have a system where 100 million, more than100 plus million people are eligible to be president from our population, 100 plus million people are eligible to be president.

And we got these two guys from that hundred plus million. And you say to yourself, how do we do that? How do we end up with two guys? I mean, you know who they are from the hundred-plus million. And the answer is, I don't know what it's, I don't like it.

And that's what it is. But we had one guy. I'd like it to be better. We had one guy and the world was ending. And then he's out. Now we got another guy, and the other side thinks the world is ending. Well, he'll be out at some point soon.

I've seen a lot of them come and go, and they haven't been that impressive. And some have been less impressive than others, and some have been more impressive. It's not existential if your political preferences don't get enacted. That doesn't mean democracy is under threat. That means your political principles or your political preferences have to wait till your next opportunity to intervene in the process and try to change your representation.

We got an independent judiciary, functions extremely well. We have a media ecosystem where falsehood, outrage, melodrama is the business model that's troublesome to a lot of people, right? So you got to be extreme to get into the media. And then the media magnifies your extremism once again that's just the cost of an open society.

We're gonna shut down the media because the business model is extremism. You got to live with what an open society is, right? First, it was radio. Radio was terrible. They broadcast right into the living room, and any demagogue could go on the radio and say anything, and it went right into people's living rooms.

And doctor Atlas and professor Rao couldn't stop them. They couldn't intervene as members of the August establishment so that people didn't get the wrong ideas. And then we had television, which was even worse, because it was images plus sound, and it came into people's homes, and you could say anything and you could show anything, and it was just so scary.

And now we got the social media, which is ruining our lives again. It's the third iteration of this. Radio brought Roosevelt. Whatever you think about that, that's up to you. Television brought Kennedy. You can have any views you want about that. And now social media, it brought Trump.

So this is just how an open society works. But now you're going to say, we got this Trump thing, therefore, social media, we got to regulate it. We got to shut it down. Misinformation is what I say it is. I'm on the board at Facebook, and what you think is misinformation, well, who appointed me, right?

This problem, okay, so the answer is, yes, we have principles. Yes, they're violated all the time. But it's not existential. And we've got to deal with it. We got to manage it. It's hard being an open society, but it's much harder being a closed society. You're very vulnerable.

You're existential there. And so I want people to come away from this understanding that I didn't answer the questions pithily. I didn't always answer them well. But this is on you, not on me.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Because you now have to enter the public sphere or the private sector. You now have to become the people who do things and make things and fix things and invent things and change things.

That's why you're here. You're here to discover why did things go wrong? Well, now you understand pretty well. Having seen all our speakers, up on the. But now it's on you guys to do better. And because our system is what it is, and because you're who you are, I'm very confident that you'll do a lot better than I did, thank you.