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Host
Foreign.
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Jeremy
Jeremy here from what really Matters. Walter and I are on the road this week and can't record a new episode till next week. So until then, please enjoy this recent talk that Walter gave. The lecture was from a few months ago so predates some recent news, but it's still very relevant and evergreen. Hope you enjoy it and see you next week.
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Jeffrey Collins
Thank you. Welcome everyone to this special event and it's great to see such turnout late in the semester, so many eager students. My name is Jeffrey Collins. I'm the interim Associate director of the Hamilton School for Classical and Civic Education here at the University of Florida and I will begin by thanking our co sponsor for this event, the American Enterprise Institute, which has supported it and has supported other events in collaboration with Hamilton in the past. So they're a great partner. It's my pleasure to introduce our speaker tonight who is Walter Russell Mead and doesn't need much introduction for most of us because he's a friend and colleague of many of us in this room. He is the Alexander Hamilton professor of Strategy and Statecraft at the Hamilton School and it would exhaust our time if I were to go through his accolades and offices. But I will just briefly mention that most of you will probably know him from his trenchant columns in the Wall Street Journal which enlighten us regularly on global affairs. He has also had positions at the Hudson Institute, the Council on Foreign Relations, the New America foundation which he co founded at Bard College, and as I say now at Hamilton. He's the author of many kind of books that are just fabulous reads on subjects as diverse as American Empire, Jacksonianism, Middle East, American Israel. I won't go through the titles but I will commend them all to you. He is that rare kind of expert on strategy, on statecraft, who is also an erudite humanist and today he's going to be speaking to us on the subject of the global crisis in the United States. So please join me in welcoming Walter Russell.
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Walter Russell Mead
Well, thanks for that introduction. This is, this is the time of year when I always feel that I made a really wise choice in coming to the University of Florida and I'm going to continue to feel that way for I guess the next five or six months before those doubts start creeping back in. Just I know some of the students here are members of the Alexander Hamilton Society and we've got a lot of people here associated with that group. So I want to say this is also my first appearance as a board member of the Alexander Hamilton Society. I was invited and just accepted this morning And I hope to be continuing to work closely with that group, creating opportunities and internships for students, but also opportunities for faculty. The ahs, its dream is to become in the field of international relations what the Federalist Society has been in law. That is to say, a pipeline that helps talented people find their way in a position in a field and ultimately emerge to have a tremendous impact. So we'll see if that works. But I think we can say reasonably that the Hamilton center and the University of Florida are going to be a place where AHS will try to be active and useful. So my talk today is going to have two parts. First, I'm going to try to describe the global crisis in the world that exists today and then give you some idea of why I think the United States, despite our many problems and our enormous divisions, why the United States may in fact be the country best place to move through this crisis successfully and to help build a stronger, more peaceful world in the future. So that's what I'm going to do. For those of you who are thinking about courses for next semester, some of this is going to be a taste of what I'll be trying to teach with the help of some of the Hamilton fellows next semester in our class, the Global Game of Thrones. It's an introduction to contemporary geopolitics. I can't remember the official name. It's something very boring. But just look as these things have to be. But just look in the catalog for my name or not if the speech really turns you off. Also, I think I should thank the teachers who have forced their students at gunpoint to attend this event. I hope you'll find it will be less painful than the other things they would have made you do in the absence of it. All right, let's start Global crisis. There are a lot of aspects to this, the world situation that lead me to describe it as being in a crisis. First, we are in one of the most revolutionary and destabilizing eras in the history of the world. And this is driven primarily by technology, the information revolution, which is dramatically accelerating even as I speak, as new forms of AI and other new forms of tech kind of enter the marketplace and enter our lives. Those of you who, as college students are looking at these newspaper stories about rising unemployment among recently graduated college students are already very aware of one of the changes that this revolution is driving. It is going to transform the job market and it will continue to do so. We may be in the middle of an AI bubble on the stock market, but that doesn't mean that this technology isn't going to go out there and change the way almost every company in the United States does business. And therefore for almost all of us, it's going to change the way we do our work and earn our livings. That kind of change is incredibly destabilizing in terms of politics, in terms of economics, as classic great companies that look like they were here to stay wither and die. New startups emerge, fortunes are made, fortunes are lost. Some regions of the country rise, some regions of the country go down. People who studied computer science and thought, wow, I know how to code. I am really going to be on top of the world are suddenly looking at like, wait a minute, nobody wants me. And other people who, like, studied things like the humanities may discover, oh, whoops, I'm actually going to make a living. It can be a little bit different. My nephew once told me that he'd majored in philosophy as an undergrad, but he said it was just the most amazing thing. None of the big philosophical philosophy companies were hiring the year I graduated. Well, it may be that things like that are going to turn out to be an advantage when understanding thought and creativity and how to pose interesting questions becomes a massive skill in terms of prompting or interacting with AI. But it's not just happening in the United States. It's not just tearing our politics apart and polarizing our politics. The information revolution is challenging governments and people everywhere. I've been spending a lot of time in India in the last few years, and one of the things you realize there is that Indian politicians and intellectuals are looking at the fact that 800 million Indians have gotten a hold of cell phones in the last 10 years. And people who live in isolated rural villages and can now look on their cell phone and see how things are different in other parts of the world and even other parts of India. And it's making them impatient with the status quo. And they want to know how their politicians, what their politicians are going to do to make their lives more like the lives they can look at on their little screens. All right, that is happening all over the world and, and that's creating enormous pressure on governments and politicians everywhere at every level. It's also completely destabilizing our strategic environment. And what do I mean by this? Well, some of us here, I look around the room. I'm not the only person here old enough to remember the Cold War. I may be the only person old enough to remember the Civil War, but that's a different story. During the Cold War, U.S. soviet relations were frequently at a critical point. You've probably heard of the Cuba missile crisis, where it looked as if we might have a nuclear war that week. On Tuesday, it looked like we might have a nuclear war by Thursday. And that seemed pretty awful and destabilizing. But today it's even harder because with nuclear weapons, you can usually tell a. If somebody else is developing them, and if they are developing, you can usually tell how effective, how powerful they're likely to be. You can tell a lot about what kinds of missiles they've got to deliver them, how many they could deliver, and so on and so forth. And you could, through diplomacy and other methods, you could deal with this threat in various ways. But with the information revolution, you're getting new kinds of strategic weaponry or ability to act. Suppose one morning we wake up and some hostile foreign government has simply taken down the financial system of the United States. And you don't know, neither you nor anybody else knows how much money you have in the bank you can't process. Transactions would bring our economy and our society to a grinding halt, and we might not know who had done it until after it happened. How do you deter an attack that can take you by surprise? And how do you respond to an event like that where, at least in nuclear war, you had 15 or 20 minutes between when they launched and their missiles would hit? All right, now, you may have negative time the thing hits before you know it's coming. But can you. You could develop. We did. We spent a lot of time and effort developing nuclear arms treaties, nuclear, you know, ways of, okay, we won't build these. You won't build these. You could check up on that. But with cyber or biological warfare, you can't really tell what some hacker is doing in some other country, what their computer experts are doing. We'd have satellites that would fly around the world and could look and see what was going on at a Soviet nuclear site or something like that. You can take all the pictures you want from outer space. That's not going to tell you whether somebody is working on a biological WMD and essentially the equivalent of a high school biology lab. The world is getting more dangerous because of. Just as politics everywhere are getting sort of more polarized and more difficult because of the extreme rapidity of change that we're getting with the information revolution, which then affects the ability of governments everywhere to compromise, to negotiate and do all these things at the same time. You have that happening. You have the strategic environment becoming more dangerous and less predictable, making sense. I'm not asking if it's good news. I'm just asking if the presentation makes sense. Okay, so that's one of them. Another one is that we're having a kind of a crisis of really this is a kind of political cultural crisis. For the last 150 years, the core fact of politics in the industrial nations was the existence of what Marx used to call an industrial proletariat. Okay, that's not just a working class. We still have plenty of people who work for a living, who, if they didn't get their paycheck, wouldn't be able to pay their rent or do other things. But an industrial proletariat is a very different kind of group of workers. In Marx's idea, the idea of many non Marxists, social democrats and others, the industrial proletariat, they worked in big factories, so they worked together. They learned, they formed organizations, labor unions and syndicates of labor unions. The industries that they worked in, steel, rail and so on. If the workers went on, on strike, they could bring the economy to a close. And so the unions and these workers had tremendous power. Marx thought that this would lead to universal communism and the establishment of proletarian power didn't happen. What happened was that in countries like ours and in Western Europe and Japan, people figured out, well, wait a minute, actually what you need to do is share the wealth a bit. We can introduce reforms and the workers can have much better lives and higher living standards and no horrible communist revolutions like in Russia or China. All right, so we learned that. But now something happened that Marx completely didn't anticipate, which is the virtual end of the industrial proletariat as a leading force in society. That is today. The percentage of the population involved in manufacturing in America since the 1970s has gone down from the 30s to like, you know, 12% and is heading down further. That's as fast as the transformation from agriculture to industry back in the 19th century. And it's happening not just in the US but everywhere. And the countries where you still do have an industrial proletariat, like China, you have dictatorial governments that don't let the industrial proletariat have a voice. And so capitalism has survived the industrial proletariat. The one thing Marx would have thought was totally impossible has happened. But it's turned out in the absence of that, politics gets harder rather than easier. The industrial proletariat as this force in society, what did it want? It wanted a better living standard. It's thought in class terms. It wanted to help all of the workers. But when it's gone, what we see is the rise in its place of identity politics, cultural politics, culture wars rather than class conflicts. And these are much harder to compromise, much harder to work with. And they tend to shift politics away from rational arguments about objective universal goals to things based on feeling and raising heightening feelings and stressing identities and sub identities and competition between them. And that is making politics more polarized, more tumultuous, and harder to find constructive common ground solutions. Again, not just in the United States, but in many countries around the world. Okay, then, third element, institutional crisis. Of the institutions that we set up to prevent war and smooth international relations. After World War, you know, you probably, if you've had the history, you'll know that after World War I, they set up the League of Nations. Oops, it didn't work. So after World War II, they tried the UN and a bunch of other institutions that never worked perfectly. But on the other hand, we haven't had a great power war since 1945. So that's something. Okay, in between World War I and World War II, they only had 20 years. We've had like 80 years and still barely going since World War II without a great power war. Not too bad. But the institutions that help do that are working less and less.
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Jeffrey Collins
Well.
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Walter Russell Mead
The UN is getting more outdated every year. You know, who are the permanent members of the Security Council? They're basically the five countries that sort of came out out on top in World War II, that is to say, United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia and China. And of those, you know, and Germany and Japan are not in the un, in the Security Council. India isn't on the Security Council. The UN works. You know, the UN less and less reflects the realities of world power and more and more becomes a kind of theater of illusions. And there's a lot more we could say about that, but that should. Other world institutions like the World Trade Organization that was set up with great hopes to promote free and fair trade around the world, kind of never worked. Sort of was unable to block China's abuse of the international trading system to become kind of hostile superpower. So the international institutions that we built up in the hope that they would prevent another war and allow other ways for big international problems to be solved without conflict are not working very well. That's another element of our crisis. Then we see a changing balance of power. The European Union, Japan and the United Kingdom are all in absolute or relative decline. That is, they are, you know, these countries used to be much more important, powerful, relatively rich than they are today. And at the best, like Japan, they're growing very slowly. Many of them are falling behind in the technologies that will shape the future. The Europeans are that way beyond that, partly because they've relied too much on American security guarantees. They haven't made the investments in national defense that are really necessary to be independent and be a strong force in the world. And they've sort of lost the ability to think about strategy in a realistic way. So that a lot of the countries that ought to be promoting peace and believe in peace and want peace are weaker and less effective than they used to be. And meanwhile, there are countries like China and India which are, you know, India is not necessarily hostile to the existing world system, but looks very unsentimentally on a. On a largely Western world. And China actively thinks that the current system in some, in some key ways is opposing its rise. And so the country's. The rapid growth technologically and economically is happening in countries that, that have much less reason to support the peaceful order that has existed since 45. Not a perfect peace by any means. Not total peace, but compared to, you know, World wars every 20 years, peace. All right, making sense. And out of that, what we see arising is a geopolitical crisis, which is to say you've got what people call the Crinks. I don't know if you've heard that expression. China, Russia, Iran, North Korea, C R I N K S the Crinks who. They don't agree on how they'd like to replace the current world order. They don't know if America dropped dead or sank under the water tomorrow. They have no idea what they would do next. But what they share in common is a deep hostility to the way things are and a willingness to either go to war or come very close to war to try to push this system down and to use any means of information warfare, economic warfare, technological warfare that they can think of to weaken the existing international system and pave the way for its replacement by something new. And again, they've got different motives, different priorities. They're not necessarily going to stick together. There are opportunities in there for smart American diplomacy to change their calculations. Nixon went to China. It's not impossible that things like that could happen again now. But at the moment, these countries are united on a program. Their work has been getting deeper. And with the single exception of Iran, which suffered some pretty catastrophic defeats in the last year, thanks largely to Israel, almost entirely to Israel, right. These countries are continuing to get stronger. See, North Korea actually has troops fighting in Ukraine and they're cooperating economically, they're cooperating on defense tech, and they are literally cooperating in Russia's war in Ukraine.
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Moderator
All right,
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Walter Russell Mead
now I could talk about all of these different crises and there's a lot to say about them. You may feel I've already talked quite a bit about them and maybe even too much. And when is he going to move on to something more entertaining, Right? But I do want to talk a little bit about the severity of the crisis and I'm going to focus on the geopolitic political side of it, the international great power rivalry between the Crinks and the others. Because not that the other problems aren't real, but honestly, the thing that could hit us hardest could kill us quickest, could hit our economy the most, the quickest and have the biggest impact on your lives. It isn't climate change. It isn't a whole range of other problems that we see in the world. It is actually the geopolitical crisis that that could come, that could come at us the fastest and have the biggest impact on our lives. So I want to talk just a little bit about that. We can divide the world today into three, you know, rough, rough groups of countries. You have what I'd consider the status quo countries, if you know the, the phrase in Latin status quo means sort of things as they are. And countries that don't want, that are basically okay with the way things are are known as status quo countries. They don't necessarily want to change their boundaries. They don't want to rewrite the economic laws. They might want to compete a little bit and get richer and gain some advantages, but they don't want to break the system.
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Host
All right.
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Walter Russell Mead
In fact, they don't want anybody else to break it either. So who are some of these countries? Well, first and foremost is the United States, but with us somewhat European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, Israel, Argentina, right now in South America, to some degree, Mexico, Canada, less today than perhaps a year and a half ago. And some of our NATO allies like Denmark, you know, when we talk about how we want to annex Greenland, the Danes who have it now get a little weirded out by that. Very sensitive to Danes, but those are the kind of status quo powers and as I said earlier, a lot of them have been losing power. Combination of slow growth, technological backwardness and strategic blindness. Then you've got the revisionists, the Crinks, you can add a few others to those, I think Pakistan with its close alliance to China, Qatar in the Middle East, a few others. Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, the usual Three in our hemisphere. These are revisionists who really don't like the way things work. Some of them don't like it because they're communists and would like to have a communist world. Some of them don't like it because they just want to be. They want to get back to a world of great powers like Russia, and they want to be a great power. They don't like all these rules and all of this stuff. Some of them, like Iran, have a very different vision. And then you've got non state actors, the jihadis and so on, who again are willing to use force to try to change a world that offends them morally or blocks them politically or culturally.
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Host
Right.
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Walter Russell Mead
So you have these forces, you say they don't all agree with each other, but they will cooperate in this common vision of wanting to do, to end the status quo. From time to time they'll cooperate. Then you have swing states, countries whose interests could lead them in either direction. A country like India, which is a member of the brics, which is a group that is really trying to replace Western institutions and so on with others. But on the other hand, there are a lot of ways in which India is more worried about China's revisionism than anything else. So India could go either way. Country like Turkey, which used to be and is technically a NATO ally, but Turkey looks at the world and it thinks it has a lot of options. It thinks you could think about Saudi Arabia. The United Arab Emirates are countries who will conditionally cooperate with anybody. So the UAE can have good economic and diplomatic relations with Israel, even as it's working very closely with Russia in some rather unsavory ways. So you've got a range of countries in that global swing state group. That's an overview of world politics, the quick and dirty version. Where do I see the biggest danger of things going badly wrong fast? The answer is Taiwan. Some of you guys may not have thought much about Taiwan. Many people have not thought very much about Taiwan. But it is an island off the coast of China that China considers to be a renegade province which only American power is preventing China from doing what it otherwise can, would and should do, which is to take Taiwan and bring it back to the motherland, as people in Beijing would think. Taiwanese are divided. There are some who believe that there is one China and. And Taiwan is part of that China. But Beijing is the bad China and they're the good China. And they hope that someday all of China would be free. And in the meantime, they would like Taiwan to keep its distance from China, there are others who say, no, no, no. Taiwan is a different society, has a different history from China. We're like China in many ways. But, you know, Singapore is like China in many ways, and Singapore is not a part of China. So you have these different tendencies. Now, why do we care? A lot of people will tell you we care about the semiconductors. That the key. Taiwan is the world's most important source of the most advanced semiconductors. And if China were to take that just as it used its domination of rare earths this summer and fall to try to impose its will on others, it would certainly use access to semiconductors as a major weapon. And when you realize that our most important military weapons, our core economic functions and so on, all depend on these semiconductors, you do get a certain sense of that that would really matter. But that's not all. I was in Japan a couple of years ago and I spoke to the national Security Advisor of Japan who said, listen, if China were to unify with Taiwan, take control of Taiwan, Japan would have to reach a deal with China. Because China's control of the shipping routes, its ability to stop Japan from trading with the oil rich Middle East. Japan has to import almost everything it needs to eat. It is dependent on food imports, on energy imports, and many other things. Plus its export industries need to be able to import raw materials. So Japan totally depends on trade. If China can cut off Japan's trade, it has its foot on Japan's throat and would use it. And Japan would have to move from the kind of American side of the international power equation to the Chinese side. They wouldn't like it, but they wouldn't have the choice. And in the same way, South Korea. Now, if you take those two out of the pro status quo column and you put them into the pro revisionist column, you've got a very different balance of power in Asia and the world. Is that clear? And so that's why the Japanese prime minister said the other day that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could actually draw in Japanese forces, which is the first time a Japanese prime minister has said anything of that kind in 80 years. And even though the Chinese have reacted very strongly, she's not backing down. So we're in a different position. So if Taiwan loses the war for its independence, it's in trouble. But even if China just blockades Taiwan, what happens to you? What happens to us? It would mean that basically nothing, there could be no trade with Japan, with South Korea, with Taiwan or China. In some ways, that might be President Trump's dream. Come True. No more imports from Asia, but not in a very good way in that the global economy and our economy would just suffer, really the biggest shock Since World War II or the Great Depression. Financial markets would collapse. We wouldn't. And most of our key industries wouldn't be able to work. We wouldn't be able to have the drugs that we need. The key drugs that we need be a massive total economic crisis. At least a 10% cut to GDP. And that could happen sort of at any moment. And increasingly, China and Xi Jinping have this as a threat they can use to the rest of the world. All right, so have I made you feel bad enough yet or do I need to add some more? I could, but let's move to the happy side of the equation. Why in this messy situation, is the United States well positioned to survive the crisis and play a constructive role, a uniquely constructive role in the next stage of world history? Well, several things. Some of them are obvious in a way. Our physical location, our geography. We're safer than other people even when they're missiles and stuff. We don't. Russia is not going to invade California anytime soon. But also we have such natural resources, we're self sufficient in food and energy. Most countries in the world aren't and would give anything to have that security.
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Audience Member 1
We have it.
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Walter Russell Mead
Our economy is really strong from at the sort of quote, low end of producing metals and agricultural commodities to the high end of tech and high tech services. We're like number one or in the top two or three at almost every level of this pyramid. So we have a kind of a balanced economic strength that other people don't. We're also a big country and that really helps if trade is going to be disrupted. We have a large internal market and then as a sea power, we have a lot of ability to make alliances around the world. Okay, so like take, take China and Asia right now. Okay? We're not trying to conquer Asia. We don't want to like, you know, even President Trump hasn't talked about like, you know, recolonizing the Philippines or you know, making south Korea the 51st state. All right, we're not, that's not what we want.
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Host
All right?
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Walter Russell Mead
All we want is that one country, China, not be so strong that it can control everybody else, which means that everybody else kind of likes having the United States around, that the other countries are more willing to kind of balance with a sea power than with a great, that is thousands of miles away than with a great big old land power that's right next door. We're not a danger to their independence in the way that China is. And in the same way, countries like Poland and Lithuania and Germany don't see us as a threat to their independence. Russia sees us as an obstacle to their domination. But everybody who isn't Russia kind of hopes we stick around. So we have advantages in foreign policy that other countries don't have. But this is, you know, American Enterprise Institute wants to celebrate. This is the 205th, 2026 will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence. And American principles and institutions also have something to do with why I think we're in relatively good position. It's not like everything's going to work out perfectly for us and all we have to do is kind of relax and let the forces of history carry us through to triumph. That's not how these things work. But it does mean that in a lot of ways, we have a more favorable situation than some of our rivals. And I would say for the last 400 years, the big thing that more than anything else determines who's going to be the strongest in world politics has been kind of simple. Capitalism is this amazing revolutionary force that, you know, spins off new technologies, creates new wealth. And basically, the countries that are at the forefront of this technological capitalist revolution are the ones with the, you know, the most money, the fastest ships, the most accurate weapons, and all of these things. So that success has largely been attributed to your ability to kind of go along with the whole capitalist thing. But more than that, because capitalism is so disruptive, it causes so many political and social problems, all right, A country has to be able to go with capitalism without blowing up internally because of all the social stresses that go with it. And our culture as a people and our institutions and our ideas all promote that kind of ability, that double ability to embrace capitalism and not be destroyed by the consequences of capitalist instability. Dynamism and change, flexibility and unity are kind of the key elements of our founding philosophy and institution. Faith. Faith in the future. It's very important for a capitalist, for successful society in the capitalist world, for people to have hope and faith that the future will be better than the past. And that change isn't. Oh no, everything is falling apart. It will never be good again. But, oh, wow, change. An opportunity for things to get better. Okay, If a society has an anti change mindset, then it will fight the new technologies that it actually needs to go forward. You can see a lot of this in the European Union. I think people are so worried that, say, GMOs might turn into Frankenfoods that will kill us all.
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Audience Member 2
Who knows?
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Walter Russell Mead
Everything isn't going to happen. All of that stuff that they won't allow. Even some changes that would just raise farm productivity, reduce your need for fertilizers and chemicals and pesticides, they won't do those things. And as a result, countries that will do them tend to get further ahead. But in America there is this notion that. And it really comes deep in our past. I think in many ways this gets us back to Abrahamic religion and especially to sort of a central moment in the Jewish scriptures that is also a central concept in American Christianity. This moment when Abraham, as he's then known, is still living in an idolatrous city in northern Mesopotamia and he hears a call one day God says to him, get up and go. Leave your home, leave your family, leave your father's gods behind and go to a new place. And there you will find me. All right. That God does not live in this, you know, the ancient utopia. And every step, every change we make takes us farther from our roots, farther from God. No, God is calling us from an unimagined future to move toward him and meet him there. Maybe that's true, maybe that isn't true. That's a theological discussion. But as a cultural force, this looms very large in American history. Think of the pilgrims leaving England to come to a new world. Think of all the immigrants who have come over so many centuries. I'm going to leave my father and my father's ways and I'm going to go to a new world where I'll find my future. So we have that going for us. But then we have this mix of unity and individuality that as a people, all right, and this gets right back to the Declaration of Independence, 1776, that human beings have inalienable God given rights to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. Now that does two things. There are two ideas in there. Number one, we are all in this together. We are all human. It's not that some human beings have inalienable rights, right? It's no, this is, this is humanity as a whole. We are a special kind of beings with special rights and a special relationship with the Creator. So there's a bond of solidarity. And yet one of these rights is, you know, our rights are liberty, pursuit of happiness. They may take us in different directions, but as long as we continue to observe the inalienable rights of other people, all right, we can be individuals and maintain that solidarity. This is very much the kind of spirit that you need for capitalism, for you to embrace capitalism, but not to be destroyed by capitalism. And then finally, I would say our Madisonian constitutionalism, our system of checks and balances, our idea, we don't have undivided authority, but authority itself is divided in different. So that there's. We have a constitution that is strong enough to keep our country together, but flexible enough to allow political changes, to allow political contestation, and in federalism, too. You know, Vermont and Alabama don't necessarily want to live in this exact same way.
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Moderator
Fine.
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Walter Russell Mead
They can have. You can have different laws in Vermont than you have in Alabama, and that's okay. So we have this mix of unity of purpose, unity of government that allows for strong force and purposeful action, but also the ability to cut each other some slack. And the idea is, you know, to embrace the concept of diversity is not to reject our American unity, but in fact, to embrace it. So if I would kind of try to sum all of this up, would say the line that always strikes me here, and I may be the only person in America who feels this way, but the motto of the state of Connecticut actually means a lot to me. And this is a Latin phrase, qui transtulate sustenance. The one who brought us over sustains us. The one who called us from many countries, from many traditions, from many histories, who called us into this place together. That's who we can look to, to sustain us today. I think that confidence means that the crises of the 21st century, the difficulties of the 21st century, are things maybe we will fail as Americans to manage it all, but nobody has a better chance of success, I think, than we do. Well, thank you very much. And in spite of my professorial loquacity, we still have some time for Q and A. So how do we handle this? We're going to grab two mics if
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Audience Member 1
you guys want to.
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Walter Russell Mead
Just give us 30 seconds.
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Moderator
Okay. All right.
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Walter Russell Mead
Are there any questions? Are they beating you into submission? Professor LYNN thank you.
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Audience Member 3
Begin with a social, global, geopolitical kind of diagnosis and ends with a. You ended with a theological kind of prescriptions. Can you elaborate a little bit on.
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Moderator
On this?
- [48:01]
Audience Member 3
Because I think there's a sense of optimism. But who is that coup that we're talking about? And in what ways can that actually coexist in our American kind of pluralistic context? And what would that look like in our world? So starting with the religious theological thing, then, what would that mean for America and beyond?
- [48:22]
Walter Russell Mead
Well, I think we want to distinguish a bit between theology and politics and that, you Know, I have a Christian faith and a faith in, as I understand it, the God of the Bible who speaks both in the Hebrew and the Greek scriptures. And that means a lot to me and helps me pull my life together. It does seem to me, however, that our culture over the centuries has been so profoundly shaped by, by the faith of others and by the power of these ideas in our general society that even people who don't share some form of that biblical faith do have a kind of a sort of a character that is directed toward this kind of hope in the future. Think of all the people we all know who may not have a religious bone in their bodies, but who think, I don't have to live the way my parents did. I can have my own future. My story is up to me to write, and my values, however I interpret or understand those. Now, I think, separated from its religious roots, I think that faith can go bad and go stale and get weaker. But that's a different, that's not a political observation about, you know, America's ability to manage the stresses of capitalism. So I would say that that biblical faith has enough cultural power to move even those who aren't personally moved by the faith. Does that make sense? Yes. We got a mic here.
- [50:20]
Moderator
One thing that you didn't mention in talking about crisis that I thought you might bring up and that relates to the question of hope in the future is birth rates. So we see that America has followed the trend of European countries and others developed countries in having low replacement birth rates. And it seems like it's trending down in some place, some places in the world, very much replacement growth rates. And I'd venture to guess that they're places that track with the status quo countries, as you said. So how should we think about that trend, both as it relates to people having hope in the future and as it relates to global security?
- [51:04]
Walter Russell Mead
All right. Well, you know, it's a big, complicated question. I think there are a lot of things at work in the whole birth rate phenomenon. One of them is that we see just about everywhere as populations go from being predominantly rural to being predominantly urban, there's a fall in the birth rate. It's also the case that with the improvements in public health and medicine, suppose you want to have three children. When all is said and done well, in 1850, you would have had to have six kids to have a reasonable shot at ending up with three. Now you can pretty much assume, although things can go wrong in life, three births equals three adult kids. So these things are not, I think, related to existential questions about the state of the world, but would have a significant impact on. On birth. I think beyond that, the fact that you can now just take a pill and dramatically reduce the chances that a given act of sex will produce a kid means that it's much more of an affirmative. For most people, it's become an affirmative decision. To have a child rather than having children is what comes with life. Not sure how healthy that is in the long run, but it's real. So all of these things would be bringing down birth rates, even if people still felt pretty optimistic about their future. I do think that the kind of loss of energy in human societies, there's an emptiness that comes with. Without children. I say this, by the way, I've never married and I have no kids. So I am, you know, I have no dog in this fight. Or maybe I am the dog in this fight, depending on the dirty dog in this fight. But I think that there is a. I'm going to just get in a whole lot of trouble here. And I think that there is something fundamentally misogynist in the way that our society codes all activities where women historically took the lead role as less than. So having children and raising children is seen as less than being a junior associate in a law firm. All right, that actually strikes me, you know, it's intended to be liberationist, and in some ways it is. I mean, you know, if someone. If a young woman wants to be a lawyer and she's got what it takes to be a great lawyer, go do it. You know, I don't believe in stopping people, but to have the kind of emotional ground label that says that everything my grandmother did is less than, and only the things that my grandfather did are good, that isn't healthy and it's not balanced. And I do think that the kind of. That this sort of weird, creeping misogyny has warped our culture in some dangerous ways. Yes.
- [54:42]
Host
I don't think I need a microphone.
- [54:45]
Walter Russell Mead
We all think that. Okay,
- [54:49]
Host
basically, in the beginning, we sort of talked about the polarization of our politics right now as a result largely of moving away from finding objective truths that hold together our institutions to a game of feelings that satisfy validation of different identities. But then at the end, you sort of brought in this feeling of, and I'm using the word feeling here as well, of our different identities, making us what is uniquely American and us as a people expressing that and having that diversity as being innate American value. So I'm wondering, at what point do you see this as being something that puts Together, our American society, what makes us so unique and makes us strong and at what point it crosses that boundary that you seem to allude to in the beginning of us falling too far into our feelings and creating a polarizing political game.
- [55:56]
Walter Russell Mead
That's a very good question for someone from the borough of Queens to be asking. The most maybe diverse ethnically and culturally county in the world and where I live very happily for many years.
- [56:13]
Jeffrey Collins
So
- [56:15]
Walter Russell Mead
I think, you know, the instinct to be part of a tribe is built into humanity. You know that to have a family and to have your family, you know, they're people like you, who you identify with and feel immediate solidarity with and share a lot of history and culture and in some cases religion with very human and not going to go away. You can't be educated out of it. Maybe a few people can, but most people can't and won't be. But at the same time, you know, that then brings you up with limits and you get inter tribal warfare being a pretty constant element of human history. I think one of the amazing and unique things about America is that we've managed to be a tribe of tribes. That is there's a big American tribe that we're all that we can all feel part of and then there are other sub tribes kind of within that. So you can be an Irish American or you can be a Southern American, a black American. There are lots of ways. There are lots of tribes under the tents that you can belong to. And I think as long as we have that sense that my tribe is one of many tribes in the big tribe, it all works. But if we start thinking that the big tribe is actually a conspiracy by the other tribes to keep my tribe from getting what it wants and deserves, right? We start seeing my loyalty to my sub tribe, whatever that might be, as utterly transcending any connection that I might have to the big tribe, then the whole thing begins to fall apart. And part of, part of why we have placed places like Hamilton Institute, you know, the Hamilton School, is because we think it's very important for the next generation not just to understand your sub tribe, which is terrific and have at it, but to understand why it's such a special thing that we have the tribe of tribes. Why we're able to be a big diverse country, but still a country. And then from that also why we can be one country in a big diverse world and not be filled with hate and rivalry toward all other countries all the time. And to hope for even if we do not always get peace, how we can have Universal solidarities as human beings, but still believe in our country. That makes sense. Yes.
- [59:18]
Audience Member 2
All right, thank you. So, like you mentioned about China, Japan and Taiwan, I'm just thinking, you know, do you think that Japan, by taking such a stance on Taiwan, has, despite all the, you know, intensifying hostility between the two countries, has no longer a minimized conflict over Taiwan, despite China now
- [59:35]
Moderator
has to think twice before plunging into it?
- [59:38]
Walter Russell Mead
Well, I think that if Japan continues to build up its defenses and if Japan begins to really move forward again in tech, then yes, I think that can change China's calculation. And that's again, why the US Japanese relationship is so important and why Japan is such a great ally for the United States. So I very much hope so. The problem would be in this sense, if both the United States and Japan keep saying to China, stay away from Taiwan. Don't do anything with Taiwan. But neither one of us is making the investments in defense. Neither one of us is taking the steps to keep our economies moving forward so that China each year fears the consequences of attacking Taiwan less and less. But we keep poking them. All right, that would not be good policy.
- [60:37]
Jeffrey Collins
Okay.
- [60:39]
Walter Russell Mead
Yes, in the back.
- [60:45]
Audience Member 1
So at least my understanding is that Taiwan is sort of politically moving away from China. Like, I think recently they elected a political that's more pro independence. And then also obviously Japan is now affirming Taiwan independence. You know, if we contextualize the political situation of Taiwan moving slowly moving away from China, does that encourage China to invade Taiwan?
- [61:05]
Walter Russell Mead
Is that imminent?
- [61:07]
Audience Member 1
And is China sort of losing this battle? Do you think they're going to invade imminently because of the situation where they're losing political influence over Taiwan?
- [61:16]
Walter Russell Mead
I think the political situation in Taiwan is a little bit more complicated. In that one party, the dpp, has moved both moved more toward separatism from China. And also in general, younger people feel, as time goes by, younger people feel more an independent sense of identity. But at the same time, the business community and the other main Taiwanese party has in some ways moved closer to China. Typically, Taiwan is a democracy, and the same party isn't always in power. And the DPP has had a longer run than usual. And so the kmt, the other party has a real shot next time. So I think China is playing the game now. If, if China really had wanted a kind of a soft conquest of Taiwan for Taiwan, the Taiwanese themselves to change, choose unification, the way to do that was to let Hong Kong alone. The Chinese had promised that if the British returned Hong Kong to China, they would allow one country two systems, at least until the 2000-40s, 50 years, so that the Hong Kong people could have had their own law, courts, legislative assembly, freedom of speech, all of those things. But they've, the Chinese have moved in and taken all that away. Which is the message to the people in Taiwan, that there is no easy middle path here. And that whatever China says to you, they will not necessarily observe if you can't force them, you know, force their compliance. So in that sense, China raised the stakes in Taiwan and made it, and this has made war much more likely. Now all of us, I think, need to under, need to look very seriously at that decision and think about its implications. Okay, well, let's take an undergrad here. I'm sorry, you also an undergrad? Yeah. All right, ask me afterwards. Come right up.
- [63:39]
Audience Member 4
Alright, great.
- [63:40]
Walter Russell Mead
Thank you sir.
- [63:41]
Audience Member 4
Thank you so much. Towards the start of your speech you were talking about technology and its role in the way that it's shaping the political structures of the world going forward. So in America we've seen kind of this tap into the global network by social media primarily. And what we've seen a lot is a rise of popularity on all sides of the political spectrum. So do you see this as a threat to America's position in the global order as the next generation cares seemingly less and less about the traditional constitutional values of American federalism and capitalism in exchange for sort of this popularity contest from the rise of social media? And how do you foresee America being able to retain its position of global superiority?
- [64:36]
Walter Russell Mead
Okay, again, good questions. And remember, I never said it was guaranteed. I just said our chances were better than other people's. I would say this, that the advent of social media is part of this wave of tech driven change that is affecting our economy, our society, our politics and everything else. And we can't make it go away. You can't, you know, you can't say, okay, let's go back to the golden age when there was no social media. What society has to do is learn to live with it, right? It's here. We got to get smart about it. My guess is that 25 years from now, your kids are not going to be addicted to the Internet in the same way a lot of your peers are. Partly, I imagine, because a lot of you guys are going to make sure your kids stay far away from screens much longer. Schools are likely to have much stricter policies and so on. But also we're going to get much better at sorting out frauds from reality. You know, we, because we'll have to Be. You guys are probably too young to remember something called sea monkeys. Anybody here ever heard of sea monkeys? A few. Right. This was. They're basically in comic books. On the back pages, they would have these ads for sea monkeys. And you know, send 25 cents or whatever. It would be away and you'll get. And they show you these pictures of like the king sea monkey and the queen and all of these wonderful things. And you'll be able to look at them through the magnifying glass into their container. They're brine shrimp. They're almost microscopic and they're just like run around and you've spent your money and you have these crappy little things. All right, okay, that's. But that's how you learn in this world that not everything is what it says it is. And you have to learn some skepticism and you have to kind of fraud proof yourself. All right. With the arrival of social media, we are going to have to do this as individuals and as a society. And there are good motives to it, because who wants to be fooled? Who wants to be fooled into supporting a demagogic politician who wrecks your life? There's a process. A democratic society is inevitably a society in a process of education and development. And this again is one of the reasons why so many of us have been willing to kind of come so far to try to help Hamilton grow. Is education is the key. But it can't simply be the education that Plato was giving aristotle in the 4th century BC because he didn't have to talk about social media, had to talk about error and sophism and how to tell good philosophers from bad philosophers and all of those things which maybe 50 years ago, they didn't really need so much 50 years before. So the needs of education do change. The methods, the techniques of education can change. But there are some basic tasks that as human beings in a human society, we have to master. So will we master them fast enough? I cannot tell you. Should we try? Absolutely. Should all of us here do everything we can to ensure that we as individuals in our society, as a group, rides these. Emerson once. Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote about the railroads during the first industrial revolution. We don't ride the rails. The railroads ride us. And right now, we don't surf the web. The web surfs us. We have to regain mastery over the technology that surrounds us. Everyone here needs to be part of that. Thank you.
- [69:03]
Audience Member 2
It.