Lost in Translation: World Order & Word Order

>> Stephen Kotkin: They gave me the coveted slot. Follow the secretary of state on the same subject. Everybody wanted that slot, but I got that slot. So that's really a privilege, and I'm grateful forever for that. Do we have time for questions? Yeah, exactly.

>> Stephen Kotkin: Yeah, you having a good session so far?

Pretty cool this Hoover institution. After waiting for 33 years at Princeton, I finally got here myself. Yes, no joke. All right, let's see what we're going to talk about with you today. I'm gonna try for five bullet points. Actually, we'll do four bullet points because I tend not to be as brief as necessary.

One will be the terms on which we debate the terms of debate. The second will be on reality over wishful thinking. I know it's hard to get to reality over wishful thinking, but we're gonna do our best. The third is going to be about choosing your history wisely, and the fourth is going to be called, do not become like them.

Okay, so let's start with the first one, the terms of debate. If you accept the terms of debate that are imposed on you, you have a hard time winning those debates. One of the most important things in any analytical exercise is to try yourself to define the terms of debate, not to accept what's imposed on you.

Let's take a couple of terms that are really widespread and let's see what kind of rubbish they are. Global South, Global South is a ubiquitous term. How many people live in the global south geographically? Go ahead, go ahead. How many people live in the global south geographically? That's right.

850 million people, 12% of the world population, live south of the equator. 12%. 88% live north of the equator. The global south is a fiction. One of the most important countries of the global south is. That's right, Australia, yes, South Africa, most of Brazil, Indonesia. But the global south is not in the global south.

That would seem to be a big problem. And then you say, okay, no problem. It's not really a geographical term. Okay, well, why are you using a geographical term if it's not a geographical term? It's really about solidarity in the Non aligned movement. I say, okay, that's cool.

I'm good with that. I know my history. What type of solidarity does Iran have, for example, with, let's say Australia? Not very much, right? So where's the solidarity issue? The solidarity is also a fiction. Remember the Bandung Conference in 1955? I know some of you were young. You weren't there.

Well, the Bandung Conference in 1955, the great opening conference of the so called Non-Aligned Movement, it failed. It failed. There was no non aligned movement because they had clashing state interests. They disagreed. The solidarity of the Global South is, I call something that doesn't exist the Global South, and I assign myself the right to speak on their behalf.

And then it's 4 billion or it's 6 billion or whatever it'll be. Yes, China's in the north. Yes, India's in the north. That's very inconvenient. Do you think that the African countries want South Africa to represent them? Go ask them. They have no desire to allow South Africa to represent them at global forums.

That's your Global South solidarity, all right? So just be careful about accepting terms that are invented for political purposes. And then people appoint themselves the spokesperson of those terms as if everyone in the term now thinks alike and I get to speak for them. We could do the entire day.

I could ruin the program of our leadership by going through every single category that we use. Let's take another one, multipolar world. That's so fabulous. Who could be against the multipolar world? No one country should be in charge. It should be a multipolar world, right? Isn't that better?

Okay, what do the Chinese and the Russians mean when they say multipolar world? Do they mean that everybody gets to choose and it's a free and open, non hierarchical sphere of influence where you can be sovereign? Or do they mean that small countries don't have sovereignty, especially if they're in their neighborhood and their pole is gonna be controlled by them and it's gonna be coercive?

And so when we talk about multipolar world, they have a different understanding of what a poll is from what we do. So when we say multipolar world in a positive sense and we align with that category, we're doing the bidding of Russian and Chinese propaganda unwittingly. As I say, we could keep going.

This is just my first point. Asian values, you know that one. Asian values, that's another beauty. You Westerners trying to impose yourselves on us. We have our own values, asian values. And get used to it. The west is not dominant anymore. I say, okay, asian values. I'm good with asian values.

You mean Japan? Because I align really well with the values and institutions in Japan. Do you mean South Korea? Do you mean Taiwan? No, that's not what they mean by Asian values. What they mean by Asian values is, once again, something that's invented, that's not shared across Asia.

You get the point, right? We don't do rubbish categories. We refuse those terms of the debate. For us, we're going to redefine the terms. They're gonna be empirical, and they're gonna align with reality. And we're gonna be able to win the debate as a result of that. You never say to a person when they tell you something, I disagree.

I have my own opinion. You hold to your opinion. I hold to my opinion, right? This is not the English department, okay? What you say is, what's the evidence for that? What's the evidence for that? You don't like what I'm saying? What's the evidence for that? That's your question.

The more you can talk about evidence, the more you can talk about evidence based analysis, the stronger you're going to be as analysts. So the terms of the debate and getting onto evidence, we won't do the Asian century, although, you know what? The Asian century it's real. That's the one that's real.

But the Asian century is happening in the United States. That's right. That's where the asian century is happening. Because the majority of immigrants now are south asian and east asian. And they're in our universities. They run our labs. They open established companies, they serve in government. And it's astonishing how the Asian century is working.

But it's working here because we have a free and open society. Okay, let's let that point number one go. Let's move on to point number two about the reality beating wishful thinking. You still with me? All right, so the world order is pretty simple. It's got two approaches.

One approach is one worldism. We're all in this together. We're all part of one world, and we have the United nations really important institution, right. That comes from President Roosevelt's and his administration's vision of how the post war order should be organized. They cheated a little bit, they hedged.

You would call it hedged. I would call it cheating. They used the UN Security Council to have permanent members with a veto. So we're all in this together. We're all sovereign, we're all part of the UN. But five of us are more equal than others, right? Okay. And one of those is China, because Roosevelt, the genius that he was, promoted China into the ranks of veto powers in 1945, beginning the tradition of America deciding that it was not gonna understand China, but was gonna promote it into a global role so that it could do what it wanted, okay?

Now, at the time, it was Taiwan, but then we fixed that. We did that. Okay. So the UN, the one worldism, we're all in this together with the little hedge of the Security Council. That's one version of organizing the world. The other version came out of the same time period, the same administration, the same people, and it's called the west.

What is the west? The West is not a geographical term. Here we go. They're using a geographical term when it's not geographical, right? They're cheating us again. The west is an institutional and values understanding. So, for example, Russia is European but not Western. Its institutions are not western.

Japan is not European, but it's western. It has western style institutions and western style values. So the west is a club, an open club that others can join, which is non geographical. But we use the term west, which is very confusing to people. We need a better term.

Our better terms were things like the free world, the first world. I'm good with those terms. I'm good with whatever terms we want, because it's the reality that I'm interested in. And so I have this fabulous thing, I have North America, I have Europe, and I have the first island chain in East Asia, which would include Japan, South Korea, Taiwan, all the way down to Australia.

That's my west. So those are the two organizing principles of the world. The club, based on certain types of institutions, and we're all in this together the one worldism. The western thing was really powerful because having friends who are rich and smart and open like you are have this very similar political and economic and social systems.

Having friends like that is a good thing. You got some good friends. Go get more good friends. And this system allows you to go get more good friends. Not everyone is a beneficiary. Some people are on the receiving end. The system is not always fair, but the system is open, flexible, and based on shared values and institutions and it's extremely powerful.

And it's led by a country that is powerful in every domain. But that country can't impose its will on its friends. It has to negotiate with them. Okay, so you got the one worldism and the west. And then 1991 happens. I forgot, OPEC. Thank you for reminding me, OPEC.

OPEC is the non aligned movement that actually works. OPEC is Mother nature, 300 million years ago, layering in to the earth certain geological facts which we know as oil. An OPEC forming a cartel that exercises power in a world where they are not part of the west, nor are they not aligned in that bondung sense, but they instead flex their muscles because of the power of oil.

Now it's OPEC plus because it includes Russia. The Soviet Union was its own energy system, as you know. Okay, thank you for the OPEC thing. So OPEC is a very important, interesting other piece of the two approaches to world order, right? One, the United nations, the other the west.

So after 1991, we decide in the United States that we're gonna do the United Nations version and give up the west version. We're gonna, as Anthony Lake gave a speech. You remember Anthony Lake. He was a national security advisor for Bill Clinton. You remember Bill Clinton, he was a sloppy guy from Arkansas that ate pizza late at night in the White House and did other things.

You guys don't remember that, maybe you're too young. Again, the blessings of youth. Sadly, we remember that. Okay, so here we are. It's 1993 and Tony Lake, who's the national security advisor, one of you will be that one day I'm sure. Tony Lake, national security advisor gives a speech at Johns Hopkins in DC called from containment to enlargement.

It's a 15 page speech. Everyone in this room who aspires to understanding international order, the global system wants to be secretary of state should read that speech many, many times. It's easily available. I read it again this morning. What did he say? From containment to enlargement, the whole world was now going to be enlarged in the sense that the US was going to spread its system across everything, not just bet on the west, but everybody was going to become part of a one world system, but a one world system based on western values.

It was a grandiose, grand idea and it's the organizing principle of our political establishment across republican and democratic administrations. Just like containment was during the Cold War. Enlargement, sometimes known as engagement. That's what you've been living. That's why we're in the situation we're in today. You got the speech from containment to enlargement.

Who wrote the speech? Tony Blinken wrote the speech. Tony Blinken, who gave a national security speech in this room not that long ago that you missed? Tony Blinken, the speechwriter, is now Secretary of State, which proves once again that anything is possible, right? I would have never believed that.

But whatever, this is America. America, the Indigenous American Berserk. Philip Roth, the Indigenous American Berserk. We didn't just get crazy recently. This is us. It's just we have social media now. Okay, so Blake Lake delivers a speech that Blinken wrote. I could have called him Blake, but that's another guy.

Anyway, and so the speech is all about how we're gonna redo the world and we end up in Iraq, we end up in Afghanistan, we end up in China, we end up everywhere. We're democratizing, we're transforming, we're enlarging, we're engaging. Okay, so betting on the west, what happens?

The Putin guy does the thing in Ukraine, and it turns out it's about the west. It turns out it's about the transatlanticism. It turns out it's about Germany and the European Union and Canada, and it turns out it's about Japan and South Korea and Taiwan and. Yeah, that's what's powerful.

Those are our friends. That's how the world works. That's what you bet on. Okay, you're gonna have the Africa story right after mine. And so I'm not gonna wade into that territory. You got an expert gonna talk about Africa. You'll notice, right, this is typical Hoover identity politics.

We got accomplished black woman gives the opening speech. We got an accomplished black woman gives the third speech. And so they gotta do identity politics and find some white guy to balance in between the two accomplished black women speakers. But whatever, that's just the Hoover institution on our identity politics.

Okay, so, yeah, so the west is a really good idea. And when it's open, when there's opportunity, when there's opportunity at home and opportunity abroad, the system works. That's how freedom was enlarged until we got onto the enlargement thing, which diminished freedom. Okay, point number three. So reality, wishful thinking.

That was point number two, in case you missed it. Now we're on to point number three. What did I say point number three was going to be? Choose your history wisely. There's two forms of power in the world, and they're very, very different. And one form of power is land based, Eurasian empire.

And that form of power looks like this, autocratic government, sometimes even tyranny, looks like extortion instead of trade. Looks like a big land army, looks like threatening its neighbors because it's on land and it's exposed. And that kind of power, that version of land power is the dominant version of power throughout history.

But then there's another kind of power which rises late in the game, early for you guys because it's before you're born, but late in the game in terms of historical tendencies. And that's maritime power, which is about limited government. It's about trade, it's about navies, it's about enlarging the pie.

It's about win win. It's about open access, open seas and open everything if possible, right? And that form of power, it actually starts with the Spanish, the Spanish empire. Remember, the sun never sets on the British Empire. That was Spain. They had that first. The British stole that.

The British stole a lot of things, but they stole that. So Spain, it didn't work because they had the autocratic, not the limited government. And along come the Dutch. And the Dutch do this better. And the Netherlands in the 17th century are an unbelievable story of maritime power, tiny little country underwater.

The country's underwater. It's below sea level in many places. And yet it invents modern commerce for the most part. The British come along and they're looking at the Dutch and they say, this is a good racket they have here. Let's get in on this. And the British do an even better version.

The British are a little bit better. Then the Dutch and the British end up forming the world in which we live, which is a world based upon maritime power, limited government, trade and the navy where openness and access is the story rather than close defensiveness. Land army, land borders.

British don't really have a land army. You need a land army. Go partner with one of those eurasian land empires. Go to war with them and use them as your land army. That's how you keep costs low, including human costs. So the United States begins, as you know, as a land power.

A land empire crossing this gigantic continent, right? If you've read the recent Hamalainen book on the survival of the native American empires, right, indigenous empires in America. It's rewrite the history of America for you. It's one of the great books that I've read. I read a lot of books, more than 120 books a year on average.

And that's the best book I've read in the last couple of years, maybe in the last decade. But anyway, there's a story of America, which we know poorly, moving across the land empire and creating a kind of land story, but it then discovers that it's in this cool place.

It discovers that it's got an ocean of the Atlantic on one side, the Pacific now on the other, because they reached all the way through and pushed the Russians out of that russian river so that we could have bohemian growth. And then it's got these nice people, Canada, which we invaded, but it didn't work, so we didn't do that again.

And then it's got Mexico, where we weren't as nice and we're still not as nice. But it's really important for us because our economies are fully integrated and they're no threat to us militarily. And so we got this springboard and we decide we're gonna do the British thing.

Not only are we going to do the british thing, but the British are going to get out of our way. Sure, the British voluntarily ceded power to the Americans, like always happens. Voluntary ceding of power, as you'll see, never happens, but anyway, occasionally happens. So the Americans decide they're gonna do the British thing and they're better than the British at doing it.

And they create this massive, successful version of modern power based upon limited government, trade and the navy, and a global navy, just like the British had, but undergirded by a bigger economy. And so if you're an old Eurasian land empire, you're a great civilization. You're Iran or you're Russia or you're China.

You're like, when did this happen? Here we are. We're a millennium old. We're two millennia old. We're five millennia old, if you believe Chinese propaganda. Who are these guys who just got started the other day in 1770 something, and now they're telling us how the world should work.

And they're organizing a lot of friends and alliances, they surround us. And they even borrow our army when they want to defeat one of the other armies. We'll borrow that Russian army when we want to defeat the German one. Yeah, so, when did that happen? And that's not fair, and that's not good.

And so you get the land empires resisting this, and they're afraid of this. It's not American policy that scares them. It's american existence that's an existential threat to them. We could enlarge or not enlarge. We could have smart policy, or we could have the policy we have. It doesn't matter.

It's our very existence that threatens their existence, because our form of power is more successful in the competition than their form of power. Okay, just like the Spain got pushed out of the way by the Dutch and the British, and then we pushed the British out of the way.

But then we incorporated everybody. All of our previous competitors are now our friends, and our allies, and our partners. That's a really great system if you can do that. Okay, is the system fair? No. Does the system make mistakes? Yeah. It makes nothing but mistakes. Does the system commit atrocities?

Yeah. I've been to Vietnam. I've been to lots of places around the world. Okay, so we're not talking about something which is ideal. We're talking about reality and just something that's stronger. So, if you're competing against this, you're gonna have a hard time. You got to have better trade.

You got to have better navy. You got to have better governance. Because if your governance isn't as good, your people might want the other side's governance. Boy, right? Listen, we'll trade with you, but keep those ideas out of here, right? We gotta censor the public sphere. We got to control.

We got to survive as an autocracy because we have history. We're a civilization. We're a millennia old, and you're an upstart. So, that's the world we live in. That's it. That's the modern world. And it should be better. It should be fairer. It should be more open than it is.

There should be more opportunity rather than less opportunity. The asian century is happening in the United States. What about the African century? That should also happen in the United States, but even more importantly, inside Europe. They're desperate for all the talent that's being born and coming on board in Africa.

Okay, point number four, and we'll close this out. Remember, point number four, do not become like them. Do not become like them. Do not become like them. You think you gotta compete against these autocracies. And they have censorship, they have control, they got industrial policy, they got all sorts of stuff.

These tools that you don't normally use. Do not become like them. That's George Kennan. Of all the stuff George Kennan wrote, the most important thing he wrote in that infamous article that no one reads anymore about that launch containment, about the way we should oppose the Soviet Union's power in the world.

Don't be like them. Do not become like them. Do not act like them. Was his most important. So people say, we're not in a cold war. We don't want to be in a cold war with China. That would be terrible. A cold war is not a misunderstanding. It's a fundamental clash of interests and values, that's the first thing.

They say, well, but China is so different from the Soviet Union, it's crazy to think we're gonna do a cold war with China when it's so different from the Soviet. I say, yeah, exactly. So the peloponnesian war, the seven years war, the 30 years war, World War one, World War two, the Congo war, the Korean War, the Vietnam War, they're all the same, right?

They're all identical. They got identical weapons, they got identical systems, identical countries. That's why we call them all regular wars, hot wars. But the cold war, because there are some differences between China. No, no, no, that's it. Can't use the cold war again. Sure, hot war, everything's a war, but cold war.

No, no, that'd be wrong. That'd be incorrect. I say, okay, that's an interesting proposition you put in front of me, and then I say, well, okay, you don't like cold war. What are your alternatives? What are you gonna do instead? What are the alternatives to Cold War? Because we live in the real world, it may seem we don't live in the real world here at Stanford.

It may feel like we don't live in the real world here at Stanford. What are the alternatives to cold war? Well, hot war. Hot war is the most important alternative to Cold War. You like hot war? I don't like hot war. 55 million people died in world War two, which was a multiple of world War one's deaths.

What's World War III gonna look like? A multiple of 55 million. I don't want to go anywhere near that. So if Cold War is an alternative to hot war, sign me up. What are the other alternatives, capitulation. Capitulation is always an alternative, right? Most of our political class, capitulation is their way of life.

Capitulation is no good for me. I got to live on the planet with China. I got to share the planet with China. But on what terms am I going to share the planet with China? What are the terms of sharing? Don't tell me you got to share the planet.

I know the ocean is wet. I know that already. But what are the terms of sharing the planet? So I don't want capitulation. I don't want hot war. What else do I have? Run through the list of things I got. Pygmalion, I got Pygmalion. You know what pygmalion is?

Do they still teach Ovid's metamorphosis in school when they got the statue, and it's stone, it's hard, it's a sculpture, and it comes to life, and the person marries the statue? And then George Bernard Shaw did a version of this in 1913, you may know that one where Eliza Doolittle, this Eliza Doolittle woman is kind of from the streets, and bad accent, is unrefined.

And so this guy says, we're gonna transform her into a lady. We're gonna engage China and transform Eliza Doolittle from a street person with a cockney accent into some refined. Yes, we're gonna do that again and again and again. So pygmalion, that's the other option. So those are your options.

Hot war, capitulation, Pygmalion. When you're in a competition of great powers, if they don't capitulate because you defeat them in war, let's call that Germany and Japan. If they don't knuckle under and capitulate and decide that it's okay, they're gonna be occupied by you and be transformed, then cold war looks like by far the best option on the table.

But in competing with them, competition is okay. We're not afraid of competition. We're not afraid of geopolitical rivalry. Rivalry between great powers, that's just life. That's just history. That's not earth shattering. We'll have a competition with China. Okay? We've done that many times before. Many other states have done that many times before.

All right, in conclusion, just don't become like them in competing with them. Because the more you become like them, the less free you are, the less open you are, the more you're closing things down and censoring things and forbidding things and stopping trade. And the more you're being like them, the weaker you're making yourself.

But they're afraid of you because of those strengths that you have, those attributes that you have. So when they have a Confucius institute at Stanford and they're using it for surveillance on Chinese students, and they're using it for maybe other things, and you say, we got to close this thing down.

You say, what? This is America. We don't close it down. You open a free Confucius Institute across the street, and you say, we love Confucius. We're pro China, and you want to come. Communist party members also welcome to our Confucius Institute across the street. That's how you win these things.

Do not become like them. Okay, thank you for your attention.