- Hi, well welcome everyone to the John Sloan
Dickey Center for International Understanding.
You've braved the elements
and come to hear an incredible talk.
Today, I'm Melody Brown Burkins.
I'm an adjunct Professor in Environmental Studies
and I'm the Associate Director here of the Dickey Center.
I've had the privilege of working with
the entire team including Dan Benjamin
who couldn't be here today and he asked
if I would take the time but he of course
will be watching the video and has spent
quite a bit of time with our distinguished speaker today.
Today you'll be hearing from Philip Short who is our
Magro Family Distinguished Fellow in International Affairs.
I want us to take a quick moment to let folks
know that this is a new thing for the Dickey Center,
this is a new Distinguished Fellowship.
As of last spring, we had Ambassador
Johnnie Carson here as our first Magro Family
Distinguished Fellow in International Affairs.
That's now followed by Philip Short
and in the spring we will have Jake Sullivan
who is already here as a Montgomery Fellow
and he will take on that role as well in the spring.
So incredible work and scholarship done
by the Magro Family Distinguished or
supported by the Magro Family Distinguished Fellowship
in International Affairs and that's made possible
by the Magro family, Tony Magro serves on
our board and I just wanted to say thanks to that.
It lets the Dickey Center do even more
in these spaces and it will continue to grow.
Today we are here to hear from Philip Short.
A brief bio, I won't spend too much longer
because he will have a wonderful talk for you.
But he was born in Bristol in 1945
and educated at Sherburn and Queen's College in Cambridge.
He worked for the BBC for
30 years as a Foreign Correspondent,
initially in Central Africa and then in Moscow,
Beijing, Paris, Tokyo and Washington.
In 1997, he spent a year teaching Comparative
Politics at the University of Iowa and he now
lives with his wife and daughter in southern France.
I didn't ask exactly where.
- [Philip] Quite far in the south near the sea.
- His first book, A Life of Malawi Leader
Hastings Banda was published in 1974.
The Dragon and the Bear, a comparison between China after
Mao and the Soviet Union after Stalin followed in 1982.
His Biography of Mao Zedong was published
in the United States in 2000 and has been
widely regarded as the definitive account
of the life of the Chinese leader.
A revised edition incorporating new archival material,
Mao: The Man Who Made China was published in London in 2017.
He has also published a biography
of the Khmer Rouge leader Pol Pot
and a life of the French President Francois Mitterrand.
Quite a set of folks to study and we now
get to hear him speak about our President
of the United States, Donald Trump.
I'm looking forward to this talk,
thank you so much for being here.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you very much.
Thanks very much, Melody.
Dan is not here, as we just heard.
He initially, are we getting a?
I guess that one needs to go off.
- Well I turned this off here.
Let's see if I did incorrectly mute it.
We will turn it all the way off now.
- Because it's gonna go-- - It does.
- Howling around in circles. - Let's see what I can do.
- Sorry, technology.
- [Melody] Keep going and I think--
- Are you gonna mute me or are you gonna mute you?
- This is muted. - I can be muted too.
It's hard work but I can.
- It's not my expertise but I think--
- I think you've got it, great.
I was saying Dan originally suggested
I give this talk in the fall
and
I said no.
This is the kind of talk I would like
to give really at the last possible
moment just before I get on the plane because,
well I don't even need to tell you why.
It's such a terrible subject, such a difficult subject
and I'm certainly gonna say things which you
won't agree with and metaphorically or otherwise,
you will wish to throw brick bats
and rotten tomatoes and bad eggs.
So I thought the last possible minute
but I do notice that Dan is not here.
I'm here but he's not.
I wonder if he thinks something ugly is gonna happen?
Perhaps
the best answer is discretion.
It is sensitive and curiously enough,
the sensitivity came up even before I arrived in this room
because we discussed what to do in the poster
and we got a poster which shows Trump kind of
looking like Little Jack Horner sat in the corner,
what a good boy am I.
He's so pleased with himself.
But there were other ways of doing this
and we did kind of think, if this will work,
he said it would work.
Ah, there it is.
So should we do something more like this?
Because Trump as a caricature,
to most Europeans Trump is a caricature.
Is that fair?
I mean should we look on him as a caricature?
You could say well Trump isn't fair to
other people, why should we be fair to him?
But I don't think we have to descend to that level.
62 million Americans voted for him,
some of them probably holding their noses,
some of them because they hated Hillary.
All kinds of reasons but it's a big number.
He didn't come from nowhere.
He is an authentic reflection of a certain America,
an America which you may not like or you may like.
It's up to you to decide but there is a reality there
and the caricature to be fair always does reflect reality.
So
a caricature, yes.
I would argue in a minute, an aberration, no.
He is a reflection of a certain
reality whether we like it or not.
I guess I ought to say at
the beginning of this where I stand.
Many people regard Trump as a loathsome individual.
I'll hold up my hand, yes.
Personally I think he's the pits.
But just because he may be an unpleasant individual
in many people's views doesn't mean he's always wrong
and one of the things which has,
I won't say upset me but has disappointed me
is the kind of lynch mob mentality which has developed,
particularly in the mainstream American press
which holds very consistently
that Trump can never do anything right.
It's kind of a mirror image of Fox News and Breitbart.
One side demonizes him, the other side praises him.
Neither side is discriminating and actually
tries to figure out well, why is this guy there?
There must be a reason.
What does he represent and are some of
the things which he says actually sensible?
I said I'd annoy you all and I'm trying my best.
It's easier for me to say things like that than for you
and it's the old business of the trees in the forest.
You see the trees because you're living
among them much more clearly than I do.
I'm not in the middle of the trees,
I'm not surrounded, I don't see them as well.
But being outside, I at least should
be able to see the forest a little more clearly.
I confess that over the Atlantic there's often a lot of fog.
It's not always as easy as it might seem.
Another key point before we go on, we are the same family.
Europeans and Americans, you know,
we're basically on the same side.
We share the same values or at least
we pay lip service to the same values.
We share a Judeo-Christian culture and I think that's
true whether you're a Buddhist or an atheist or whatever.
The society in which we live upholds
or tries to uphold Judeo-Christian values.
We believe in the same kind of political system.
We believe in the same or similar freedoms.
Similar, not always the same
but basically we are on the same side.
So in what I'm going to say,
because I will inevitably be making certain criticisms,
this is as others see us, America in the age of Trump,
they are criticisms or observations which are made
from someone who is actually part of the same family as you.
Europeans and Americans are.
But being basically on the same side
doesn't mean we're completely on the same side
and there are disagreements.
We do see things in different ways
and I think in Europe now there's growing pessimism
about whether America is gonna get its act together,
whether you're going to confront your contradictions
and deal with these wrenching internal conflicts
that are so evident both to you
and to those who look from outside at America.
The other day I read a piece by George Will
who is one of my favorite conservative commentators.
I think he says a lot of good sense
and he quoted Mark Twain, it's a story
I should think most of you know.
Mark Twain and another writer were coming out
and it was pouring with rain and the other guy said
"Do you think it's gonna stop?"
And Mark Twain said "Well, it always has."
And the point of the story was that Trump also will pass.
The rain will stop but he doesn't answer the question
of how long it's gonna rain before it does stop
and how long in other words the age of Trump,
what I'm calling the age of America,
the America in the age of Trump is gonna continue.
European leaders really did think
to begin with that Trump was an aberration.
A kind of blip and he'd go away.
I think very, very few Europeans actually feel that now.
The prospect is rather that the problems that
America has will cross the Atlantic as they so often do.
My mother used to say
"When America sneezes, Europe gets a cold or gets flu."
We tend to pick up a lot that comes
from you and some of it goes the other way
and indeed I think
what you have been experiencing we are already experiencing.
It's already crossed over, technology's much quicker now.
It used to take four or five years for things
to cross the Atlantic, now they go much, much faster
and both of us are confronted by problems
which have been growing slowly over time.
They didn't come out of nowhere
and they're not going to go away soon.
I am actually less concerned about Europe
than I am about America for two reasons.
Because Europe
back in the 1930s experienced very directly fascism
and that memory is still with us.
You didn't, you were on the other side of the ocean.
You didn't have it kind of up in your faces so close up.
I think that is quite a powerful factor
and also Europe is a whole bunch of countries
and if one has a nervous breakdown,
there may be a little sanity in some of the others.
You are one country, so if you have a collective
mental breakdown, you don't have others to counterweight
and I'm talking about,
wait a minute.
I missed a page.
Sorry.
So I'm not so bothered about Europe
as with you and even with you, you know,
there'll be ups and downs.
You may have a really charismatic leader who comes next,
someone in the mold of Jack Kennedy perhaps.
It doesn't happen very often but who knows?
And if you have a leader who can inspire,
then there'll be an up but even then I would argue
these underlying problems are not gonna go away.
They're too deep and they're not
something which is here just temporarily.
We'll talk about that in a moment.
What are these underlying causes?
I think there are three.
The first is ever since the Second World War,
so for 70 years, America has been preeminent.
In fact since the end of the Cold War,
you've been the only world power.
But as Chrystia Freeland, the Canadian Foreign Minister
said recently, I'm sure you all read this and it's an
interesting comment, "preeminence does not go on forever."
There's the old Chinese classic which starts
empires wax and wane, states cleave asunder and coalesce.
There is a natural process there.
Some states become more powerful,
they reach a peak and they then become less powerful
and that has been the law all through human history
and it's going to apply to you too.
It applied to Britain.
I talk about Britain as a Brit.
In the parallel, I think it's very striking
between the United States over the last
few decades and late 19th century Britain.
We both espoused, and were proud to, a civilizing mission.
Britain had colonies, we had an empire.
Britain would bring the rule of law,
it would bring Westminster-style democracy, proper
administration and everything else to the colonized peoples.
You would bring democracy.
You wouldn't say they're colonies,
you had The Philippines but you didn't
have them on the kind of scale we did.
But after World War Two, you set out
to promote American values all around the world.
You
installed where you could or promoted
pro-American regimes to halt the spread of Communism
and then after the end of the Cold War,
that became regime change and inculcating democratic values.
Especially in the Middle East and the parishes
of the former Soviet Union and Eastern Europe
and I remember 20 years ago
at the University of Michigan giving a talk
where I tried to convince them that
actually there were big parallels between
19th century Britain and 20th century America.
It was in the 1990s and I must admit, I failed.
They were not at all convinced.
This was the late 1990s, it was the time when
America was absolutely at the peak of its power.
Difficult for Americans to imagine
that there could conceivably be a parallel
with little Britain that had kind of become
a second-rate power and not at all in the same league.
I wonder if it's different now and I'll be
interested to hear your comments, whether you think,
whether you can imagine that sort of process,
that sort of parallel actually applying.
I'm not suggesting the end result will be the same
but I'm suggesting there is a similar process at work.
The motor of that change is not just the rise of China.
It's also the growing economic weight
of other countries which were formerly
in the developing world which means
collectively that America will have a smaller,
relatively smaller slice of the global economic cake.
I don't think there's any way that's not gonna happen.
You can already see it and that creates
anxieties and fears, discontents which
Trump has very cunningly tapped into.
That slogan Make America Great Again,
well it implies America's no longer great
which implies that actually there has been
a process of decline and Trump is the guy
who promises he's gonna fix that and it's that
feeling of decline which drives Trump's support.
Now you may say and people have said to me, "Oh."
But the opinion polls show that Americans
are not actually concerned about these
huge geopolitical changes I'm talking about.
They are driven by nostalgia, by a feeling that
there are fewer opportunities than there used to be.
That the middle class or the lower
middle class or the working class are not
able to improve their situation in the way they were.
That America is no longer what it was in the 1950s.
In other words, it's the same thing as in Britain.
The nostalgia, Brexit which is a suicide mission.
Brexit is because fundamentally people are
looking for how they can get back a Britain
which no longer exists and which never can exist again.
But they want it and so voters do what they always do
in these circumstances, they look for a simple
reassuring answer to a complicated problem.
It's Brexit in Britain, it's Trump here in America.
So first underlying cause which is not
going to go away is geopolitical change
and geopolitical change for humanity as a whole,
it's a pretty good thing.
It's in the natural order of things.
Some countries get stronger, others become weaker
and just to get back to the British example again,
you've got to ask yourselves how long
did Britain take to get over the decline of its,
period of declining from its peak?
It's at least 100 years
if you look back.
The peak of Britain was around the time
of the First World War or just before and I think
Brexit actually represents
the last kind of destructive spasm of
Britain coming to terms with a decline
which it could do nothing about.
So if you're looking at how long a process it's going to be
even if things move quicker now for all kinds of
technological reasons, it's a very long, slow process
and I'm not suggesting America is
kinda finished or going downhill, not at all.
Going downhill maybe very slowly but
certainly not finished, certainly not dead.
In 40 years time, I suspect America
will still be the most powerful country in the world.
It's not happening overnight but there is,
there is a transition and it's begun.
The extent of your preeminence
is in relative terms declining
and until Americans start accepting that,
which I think is not for tomorrow,
it's going to be difficult to accept,
no one likes this kind of prospect,
then the kinds of anxieties and discontent
which Trump is homing in on are going to continue.
Second factor, globalization.
Globalization again is very positive
and not just for multinationals,
it's positive for people in the developing world,
for Senegalese, for Guatemalans, for you name it.
Bangladeshis.
They have much greater opportunities
than they would have had before
but if you're a Bangladeshi or a Senegalese
and you see because you can now see through the internet,
through improved means of communication,
you see how much better life is in Europe
or in America and if you're determined,
you're gonna up sticks and want to move.
So globalization is a fundamental cause of migration and
migration is a huge problem which nothing is going to stop.
I do believe
not just looking at the situation in America
but looking at the situation in Europe even more,
migration is not gonna be stopped by walls.
Across the Mediterranean, how many tens of thousands of
people have drowned trying to make the journey to Europe?
Because Europe offers things which
they don't have in their own countries
and build as many walls as you like, it's not gonna happen.
It's not gonna stop it.
It may make it more difficult.
You haven't even thought about maritime
migration to the United States.
You've got loads of coastlines.
Some of the countries that people are leaving from,
there are other ways of getting
to you and it's really not going to stop.
There is only one real solution to the problem
of migration and that is to improve life
in the countries from which people are leaving
and it's actually in our interest to
do so because those countries are our markets.
That's where we're gonna sell stuff.
So it's not just a matter of doing it
kind of as do-gooders, as a charitable cause
to make life better there and to stop them
migrating to us, it's also in our own interest.
But governments hate it because
it's very hard to explain to taxpayers.
Why are we helping these people
over there when we've got such problems here?
And I think it's probably not gonna happen.
I don't think we will have and as governments
suddenly have a kind of blinding vision
in Europe and here, I don't think we are
going to have the kind of effort that is required,
would be required to stop international migration.
So it's going to get worse.
A third factor is kind of piling in with those two,
climate change and I'm not going to get into
the argument of whether it's man made or not.
It doesn't really matter.
What I think we can all agree on
is that the climate is changing
and changing crop patterns, rising sea levels,
they are going to increase migration
because they're gonna make certain areas uninhabitable.
A rare note of optimism, I think America would
eventually climb on board the anti-climate change bandwagon.
It's aberrant and a lot of big American companies
are very well aware that this is a huge problem.
The American military is certainly very well aware that
climate change is real and it's a huge problem for them.
So you have these three factors,
geopolitical change which is coupled with globalization
indirectly induces anxiety in large parts of
the US population and then the infernal couple,
migration and climate change.
One of the key reasons for saying that
the age of Trump is not just a blip,
it's going to be with us because these
are factors which are not gonna go away
and absent a kind of black swan event,
a nuclear war or something of that nature
which we all hope is certainly never gonna happen,
absent something absolutely cataclysmic like that,
these are probably the two issues,
migration and climate change which are going
to affect not just our future but our children's
and grandchildren's future more than any others.
So those are the big issues.
But I would argue that America actually is
kind of missing the point over some of this,
what relatively are the smaller issues.
There's a kind of analogy from China back in the 1930s.
China in the 1930s was facing two things,
a civil war between the Communists and the Nationalists
and Japanese occupation
and Chiang Kai-shek, the Nationalist leader said
the Japanese are a disease of the skin,
the Communists are a disease of the heart.
By which he meant we
cannot worry about the Japanese occupation until
we've actually got rid of the Communists.
Of course he failed but it was
a distinction which was worth making
and I think it applies to America.
I think you are concentrating on diseases of the skin
and ignoring diseases of the heart.
Diseases of the skin, for example the threat from Russia.
Russia has the GDP of New York State.
It does, it's no exaggeration.
Economically it is way down the list.
Yet sure, it has nuclear weapons.
We talked about a black swan event.
I'm not diminishing, I'm not
passing over the threat of conceivable nuclear war.
But absent that, it's very difficult to see
how Russia is really a threat to your vital interests.
Is Ukraine a vital US interest?
Sure it is if you're a Ukrainian-American
but for the rest of America,
for America as an entire nation,
it isn't, it isn't for Europe even.
It's not a vital interest.
Another is the rise of China,
we've talked about it a little bit.
That's also in the natural order of things.
Sure we get exercised about being challenged,
especially when it comes from what
has been for so long a developing country.
But it's a relationship that needs
to be managed and managed intelligently
but it's not an existential threat.
Countries do wax and wane.
So the diseases of the skin are what take up
all our time and the diseases of the heart,
what do I mean by that?
Not just migration and climate change
but also the wounds in the American
social and political fabric.
Racism
clearly is one and when Europeans read about
unarmed black people being shot by policemen
and then acquitted by American juries, we kinda
scratch our heads and are completely unable to understand.
I'm not, don't think I'm being broad brush about this.
You've got a lot of decent policemen.
I'm not saying they're all racist killers
at all and racism is pernicious everywhere.
There's racism in Europe as well as here.
I'm not making that case
but those jury trials could not happen in Britain or France.
We can talk about the reasons they couldn't happen,
I'm happy to talk about them but they could not
and they are something which really
Europeans find very shocking about about your society.
In general, the racial divide in America
is much, much greater for historical reasons,
sure than it is in Europe.
I was struck by that when I came to
Washington for the first time 22 years ago
and I saw there were virtually no
biracial couples on the streets and in London,
there are probably as many black-white couples as
there are white-white couples or black-black couples.
The mixing is very much greater and I thought hey,
this country's supposed to be a melting pot.
Well,
it isn't and again these things have changed.
They've improved a little bit
but they haven't changed fundamentally.
Sorry.
I actually, when I first came to Washington,
I went to the Southeast and places like that,
you know what it reminded me of?
The only place I'd been that was like it was
South Africa, Johannesburg during the Apartheid period
because you would go from one street which
was completely inhabited by black folks and two
or three streets away, completely inhabited by white folks.
I know there are historical reasons for this
and every country has its history but I am simply,
as others see us, these are things which
Europeans are slightly shocked by
and then there's US democracy.
Now the US is a democracy and I'm not disputing that.
It's
a very important democracy but, there had to be a but,
when money plays quite such a big part in your system,
your political system,
that we find a bit difficult to take.
If you have to have a billion dollars to be
elected President, that's quite a lot of money.
I mean how is that democratic?
And then there's the Electoral College.
Okay,
you have an Electoral College system.
It does lead to people being elected
as in this case but not just this case,
people being elected with fewer votes than their opponents.
200 years ago I can quite see
that may have been a necessary safeguard.
But now?
But it's in the Constitution.
Another thing which surprises many outsiders,
you treat your Constitution as holy writ.
Other countries change their Constitutions.
The French are on their fifth
and they're always talking about the sixth.
Britain doesn't have one, so we don't have to change it.
But you do really hang onto that Constitution
that your Founding Fathers wrote and which was
wonderful 200 years ago but it's kind of
difficult to see that it's necessarily perfectly adapted
to the situation in which you're living in the 21st century.
I could go on, no democratic system is perfect.
But when Europeans
look at America, these are the things that stand out
and one other factor, white Americans,
and I put that in inverted commas
will no longer be the majority in
what is it, 20, 30, 40, 20, 30 year's time
and I wonder how you're gonna get over that.
That also will be a difficult
transition to make psychologically.
I've been kind of grumbling, I've been
the grumbling European so I want to counterbalance that
absolutely sincerely by saying that you also have
qualities which we have lost and we are aware of that.
These are qualities which
Europeans recognize, admire and envy.
The one which always strikes me most and I'm sure most of
you absolutely take it for granted is the can-do attitude.
It's Barack Obama's Yes We Can,
it's The Little Engine That Could, it's all this stuff
which you might say "Okay, that's for kids."
But it's actually there and for
a European, it's very striking.
If you have a new idea in Europe and you try to push it,
everybody will say to you "Oh, we haven't done that before.
"That's going to be difficult."
And they'll have a whole list of
reasons why it's really hard to do.
If you have a new idea here, people say "Let's try it."
It's a totally different mindset
and that's one of your greatest qualities.
New ideas do get traction in Europe,
I'm not being completely broad brush over this
but it's a lot easier here and the resistance
to change in Europe is really strong.
Brexit is one example.
The Yellow Jackets in France
are another absolutely classic example.
Macron wishes to bring about changes
which are so obviously necessary
and everyone's out on the street
burning cars saying "No you can't."
It's very different.
Americans are much more positive.
Maybe it comes from the pioneering spirit
when your people had to struggle against the odds.
But wherever it kinda comes from,
I think it's in a way an attribute of a young country,
a young, confident country.
Europe is kind of weighed down by its history.
You're not.
The European countries are mature,
I'm not saying you're immature
but you certainly have the hope.
I wouldn't dare, you would really all lynch me but
you have the energy and confidence of youth
and a question I ask myself is whether
that perhaps is now beginning to change.
I remember thinking years ago,
40 years ago when I was in Moscow that
if ever America lost its kind of certitude,
its sense of confidence in itself,
then that would be yes, a sign that it was
in inverted commas growing up, becoming more mature
but also the beginning of decline
and
you know, countries are like people.
We become wiser or at least we hope we do
as we get older, that's not always true.
But we also become less robust
and the core of your national sense of
confidence I think is this idea of exceptionalism,
American exceptionalism, America should lead,
America is a model that others should follow
and that America should promote its values.
You probably don't notice it so much
and in fact I didn't until I really
started listening and thinking about it
but this is a constant theme.
It's in every American newspaper,
it's in every politician's discourse.
My students when we talk in class,
they will come up with American leadership
just quite naturally in the course, you know,
it's something which is hardwired,
mixed metaphors, it's in your DNA and it's a given.
I don't think it's a given to Europe
and perhaps much of the outside world anymore.
It was during the Cold War.
During the Cold War, we were actually
very grateful to have American leadership.
It's something that was certainly accepted.
But since the Cold War ended and you had
the neocons, people like Dick Cheney who
talked about American exceptionalism as though
it was the ultimate good and Americans were
inherently virtuous, you were the chosen people
and what happened?
The fiasco in Iraq and this terrible war
in Afghanistan that's been going on and on and on.
That,
it's, I mean why did it happen?
I think it was partly triumphalism,
it was partly hubris, it was the end of history.
You remember that book by Francis Fukuyama.
The New World Order, America was a hyper-power.
It was also I think and I would argue,
I'm on my critical bent again now, short-termism
and I do find that an unfortunate characteristic
that you don't really look beyond the next move.
You don't look two or three moves down the road
and think what are the long term effects of this
in exactly the same way as Americans tend to live
or many Americans live paycheck to paycheck.
Europeans have savings and would be horrified if they had,
the idea that they had just to get to the next paycheck,
it's very rare in Europe.
Trump is more short term than most.
But he has called into question
some of the basic assumptions
on which this doctrine of exceptionalism rests
and I think some of those
assumptions need calling into question.
This is an outsider's view, you could look skeptically.
I think this is very much an outsider's view.
For instance, NATO, he's horrified
the foreign policy and defense
establishment by saying "Do we need NATO?
"No, let's get rid of it."
And I think you can make a very strong
case for saying in America's interests,
America ought to keep NATO.
It's been so useful to you over the years.
Is it in Europe's interests?
That I think is a very different question
because one of the problems has been that
every time the Europeans showed a little bit
of desire to create an independent defense force
like Germany and France did in the 1990s,
every time, they've been slapped down
and America said no no, no.
You do that and we'll pull out.
You'll be duplicating what we do,
we absolutely don't want it.
Basically you have wanted the European allies to be there
but you wanted to be the one calling the shots and
it's a little bit short term as well because
if you really want the Europeans to pony up
to their responsibilities, then you have
to do what parents do, what adults do.
You could say "Okay you're on your own, do it."
It's the old thing of the birds
with the baby birds in the nest.
They're not gonna learn to fly unless they're kicked out
and countries are not suicidal.
If the Europeans were forced to look after
their own defense, I have no doubt they would do so.
But you have to force them.
No one is going to spend loads of money
on making their armed forces stronger unless they have to
and the argument therefore that NATO
should never end but we should keep it forever
I think can be called into question.
Also the whole thing of NATO enlargement.
You enlarge up to Russia's borders,
how would you like it to have
Russian troops in Mexico or in Canada?
Try and look at it from the other side.
You, one can argue that actually much of
what has gone wrong in the relationship
between America and Russia, and it's a crucial relationship,
has been self-reinforcing.
The Russians have done one thing,
you've then done something else and it's
made it worse and it's been a vicious circle.
I mentioned the business of parents.
There was a fascinating piece,
Richard Cohen in the Washington Post
wrote a couple of weeks ago, he said
"Nations, like children, crave predictability.
"They need to know the rules.
"The United States is like a parent.
"Other countries look to it for
"guidance and to enforce those rules."
Well I wonder if that's how
you all see America's role in the world.
I mean it would make the hair of the Europeans
and of most other countries stand on end.
We don't want a parent, we don't even
need a leader of the free world anymore.
In the Cold War, that made some sense.
What is the free world, free from what, free from whom?
It makes sense if you regard Russia as
the great successor of the Soviet Union
trying to subjugate everybody else.
But that's a pretty hard line to try and make stick.
Now I suspect I've been over time, have I?
I'm going to be in a minute,
so let me wind up reasonably quickly.
There's just one other thing about exceptionalism
and it's from a guy called John Sipher,
it's another quote I saw recently.
John Sipher was a CIA official, he writes for lots of blogs.
He's retired, he's very well-respected,
a little bit right wing, okay?
Fine, there's no problem with that
and he wrote this piece saying
it was outrageous that we should even think
there was any kind of moral equivalency
between America and Russia over things
like Russian election interference
and what he said was what's important is moral intent.
In other words, if America tries to fix
other countries' electoral systems or election
results by underhand means, that's fine
because we're doing it in a good cause,
we are promoting democracy.
If the Russians do it, it's evil.
So you know, if one side does it, fine.
The other side does exactly the same thing, no.
You'd think that was a caricature but I'm
afraid it is an element that informs a lot of
the foreign policy establishment's thinking.
It seems to me crazy but it's something which
is quite widely believed.
I'll skip that.
The last point really I want to make is that,
and it's linked to exceptionalism and American leadership
and it's this,
it's
the way America punishes
other countries if they don't actually
follow what America would like them to do
and the Iran sanctions is the most recent case
where the Europeans have had to kind of,
European companies are very reluctant
to give up trading with Iran and the European
governments think the Iran Agreement was
actually a good agreement and it should be kept.
But the European companies have had
to jump through hoops to try and avoid
tertiary sanctions from the United States
because America would say well you can't
do business in our market because
you're trading with the Iranians.
That's kind of extraterritorial
and there are lots of other examples.
It happened under Reagan.
Reagan wanted the Europeans not to have
anything to do with a gas pipeline to Russia
and threatened sanctions of the same kind.
Nikki Haley said, you'll remember at
the United Nations, "If you don't vote
"for us, then there are gonna be consequences."
This is all, it's the schoolyard bully I'm afraid
and for your allies, it's really hard to accept.
It makes sense when enemies,
when adversaries try to stop us doing things
but when our greatest ally, the United States,
we're all on the same side, says
"You've got to follow our lead, otherwise we'll
"use economic sanctions against you."
And this is not new, in the 1980s,
Francois Mitterrand actually threatened
to take France out of the G7 because he
was so outraged by Reagan's insistence that
everyone follow what America wanted to do
and of course it didn't happen but
there was a huge row within the G7.
Read my book.
Then the other element of this punishing things,
it's also America's willingness to resort to war as
the recourse of, the policy of first resort.
You've fought a lot of wars,
they haven't all been terribly successful
over the last 70 years, put it that way.
Some of them, the little ones, Granada,
Panama, the first Gulf War where everyone supported you,
yeah that was very successful but a lot of
the others have actually produced huge expenditure
of blood and treasure for very, very little result.
I have talked to politicians, to businessmen,
to cultural figures, to people like you and me
in Europe, in many European countries and I'm
afraid one thing you hear rather often is that
they are more afraid of America starting a new war
than they are of any other country
including Russia starting a new war
and that is said by Europeans who
have seen what has happened in Ukraine.
They worry, John Bolton over Iran for example,
they do worry
about this
and that's, I mean it's not something
I would wish to say about America but it is,
it is an impression that you often give that force
comes first and diplomacy, you're not so good at.
It's a very broad thing to say.
You have been good at diplomacy in certain cases.
It was you who brought about the first
Middle East Peace Settlement between Israel and Egypt.
You've done a lot but you have tended perhaps
more even recently than before to use force.
I'm coming to the end of this.
The last thought I want to give you is Barack Obama,
you remember on American exceptionalism,
he suggested that most countries felt exceptional.
Do you remember?
And people said "How can you say that?"
And I think he was wrong.
Most countries don't feel themselves exceptional.
You do, the Russians, do, China does in a way.
Britain used to, it doesn't anymore.
France maybe culturally a little bit
but essentially it's you and the Russians
and that's what makes it always so difficult
for you to have a non-conflictual relationship with Russia.
What I noted about Obama though is
he started to think about exceptionalism,
he started to question it and
people say America's not very good at introspection.
But actually you hear that word introspection
more now than you used to and I think
maybe there is greater awareness
perhaps partly because of Trump
that you need to think about
the kind of country that you've become.
You need to think harder about it
because in order to become a normal country,
not a hyper-power or a superpower but normal
in inverted commas, in other words a great power
but not a hegemonic power but a power that can exist,
coexist with others, that recognizes that
there will be growing powers like China
and others in the world.
This doctrine of exceptionalism
you kind of have to overcome.
As long as you think you're completely exceptional,
it's very difficult to live as a normal country.
Powerful normal but still normal.
How long is it gonna take for that to sink in,
that change to happen?
Decades I'm sure.
How many?
Goodness knows but the British experience is it's very slow.
I don't think I'll be here to
see it, I think our children will.
But it's going to be a very long period
and that's another, that's the fundamental
reason I say Trump is not a blip.
He reflects things which are much,
much longer, durable, more deep-seated.
He's a bad moment I grant you but he's part of,
he's a symptom of these changes that we're going through
and I think all we can do is hope that his successors
have the wisdom, have the intelligence
and the convictions also to try
and manage the confused and dysfunctional,
deeply polarized country that he's left behind.
Not that he will leave behind but we would hope
he has left behind but it hasn't happened yet.
Thank you very much.
I'm sorry to end on a bleak note but let us now
in the time we have left go to questions.
(audience applause)
- We have a mic to record the questions, thank you.
And any questions for Philip Short?
I'm gonna hold mine, I'm gonna say it first I guess.
- Okay yeah, pull rank.
- Oh he's got that, I'll stand close to you.
My question was if you had geopolitics,
migration and climate as the heart,
is there anyone addressing that for the world
right now in a place, is it the UN, is it the G7?
Are there folks thinking about that part right now
that we should be paying attention to versus the skin?
- I think much too little.
Much too little.
I mean countries are thinking about it,
China for instance is thinking about climate change.
They've been taking some action on climate change,
but to fill the vacuum left by America.
It's for nationalistic reasons.
There is no global body, no group which is really, really
devoting energy to these things and migration, hopeless.
The Europeans are not getting their act together at all.
America, zilch.
No one is addressing these things and they
are the fundamental problems that face us all.
They're just not being dealt with, very depressing.
Yes?
- [Blond Woman] First of all I just want
to say it's delightful to see you in person.
For many years I've only heard you on the BBC.
It's quite nice.
One thing that you didn't mention which I found
very different, I lived in England for 20 years
and I'd be interested in your perspective on
the difference in religious fervor
in the United States versus Europe.
It to me is such a striking
in many ways negative to the way
we're approaching the world.
So I'd be interested in your thoughts about that.
- Well this would sort of reinforce my comparison
between America today and 19th century Britain.
In 19th century Britain,
people did have faith and the Church was very strong.
Now
in Britain, religion
is certainly not something you wear on your sleeve.
You don't at all and churchgoing,
if you believe it's kind of very personal.
It's not,
I have always been struck driving through
America by how many small churches there are.
You've got Lime and there's a lovely
church in Lime and you go around towards
the sea slopes and there's another church,
you have churches everywhere and people go to them.
Well in the same way that you have
your flags out, flagpoles outside your houses.
That would be pretty inconceivable in Europe.
Europe has, I said we've lost things and one of
the things we certainly have lost is faith, religious faith.
So many churches in Europe have been closed and transformed,
de-sacralized and transformed into private residences.
It's,
I mean I think people should have the right to choose.
You either believe or you don't.
Faith is a kind of gift.
It's not something you can work on,
it's not like learning arithmetic.
It's at a different level but it is absolutely true
that Europe is much more agnostic or atheist
than religious.
It's true everywhere.
So does that awake you?
Will that be one of the signs that
actually things are changing in America?
As I said, it's decades away but one may wonder
whether your grandchildren's generation
is going to be as religious, as
imbued with faith as your generation is.
Who knows?
- Early on in your talk you had
felt more concern about us,
the US
and all of the issues, Brexit and the right wing
rather than any, you felt less concerned about Europe.
Would you also extend that to Eastern Europe,
the concerns about
democracy and the like?
I can see Western Europe,
I'm wondering about Eastern Europe.
- Well, it's kind of a different issue
and when I'm talking about Europe,
you put your finger on something,
I was basically talking about Western Europe.
But you do put your finger on a very interesting issue.
There was discussion right at the beginning
whether the East European countries
should be admitted to the European Union.
Mitterrand for one suggested that
there should be a Confederation,
called for a Confederation of Europe
which would be a kind of halfway house
and of course the East Europeans said
we don't want anything remotely like that
and they ran to Washington and they said
"Hey, you hear what these Europeans are talking about?
"Put some pressure on them, we want to get in straightaway."
And America naturally for geopolitical
reasons wanted them to be part of Western Europe,
for very understandable reasons.
But there is a question, Eastern Europe
has had a very different experience,
a very different history from Western Europe
and how well was it going to fit?
I think we're now seeing that
actually there are quite big cleavages.
Particularly Hungary,
Hungary is probably the worst offender.
Orban is
running a very
dictatorial regime in Poland.
The Justice Party is
trying to get its hands on so many levers of power.
The Czech Republic, Slovakia,
the old Visegrad Group, these four
are kind of moving not exactly
together but they are proving
recalcitrant to many West European democratic ideals.
And Hungary in particular, the idea of
accepting any kind of immigration is absolutely out.
Well if you want to be part of a bigger thing,
you can't set your own rules and say
we like it because you're giving us lots of aid
but we're not actually gonna follow the same rules as you.
So I think this is a big problem.
Now, should, it's very difficult to,
I mean there are two ways of looking at this.
Will eventually
the East Europeans accept West European standards?
And so a period of pain for a larger Europe
is worth going through or are we going to
reach the point where we have to say well,
I'm sorry but you can't be members of this club anymore
because you're screwing it up?
That's not what this is about.
I think there is a, well it's very
difficult to say which way it's gonna go.
Gentleman.
- Because of your knowledge of China,
very impressive on multiple,
I wonder if you would care to make some comment on
how the rivalry between China and US is going to play out?
I know it's a loaded question but take it where you want to.
- [Man] Make it a short answer.
- You mean I've been talking enough, I can just...
Actually it's a question which is very
much related to everything we've been talking to.
How is America going to react
to the growth of powers like China?
How is it going to accept a multi-polar world?
Because a multi-polar world is,
you might even say it's here but it's certainly on the way.
You know,
crystal balls, I don't have them.
I find it very difficult to judge.
No, I just don't want to predict
because so much depends on America.
A certain amount depends on China, I agree.
But if America is only going to be satisfied
with a complete sort of Chinese surrender,
I don't think that's gonna happen
and so you're going to have continuing conflict.
My guess is you're going to have conflict for quite awhile.
Now the question is whether it will be
kept within manageable proportions because
if it isn't, it's gonna damage the American
economy as much as it damages everyone else.
This is the problem, it's fine to say okay,
we'll be tough and we'll show America first.
But who gets damaged?
You're going to get damaged
and that doesn't always seem to register.
So we just have to see how it plays out.
Anybody else, young lady?
Ah, this gentleman.
- I'd like to hear a little bit more
about the issue of migration as a problem
because you talked about one solution is spending money to
prevent it by building up the underdeveloped countries.
Why do you see migration
now as a problem?
Where
like in the early 1900s in this country,
we benefited greatly and even before that
we had immigration from Asia to help us build our railways
and we've seen migration throughout the world.
India to East Africa and China
to
Southern Asia.
Why is migration a problem?
Especially in this country now where we need
unskilled labor in healthcare, in agriculture
and given the demographics here and especially in Europe,
why is Italy that desperately needs younger people
because of its demographics
so anti-migration?
- There are two things about migration.
You've put your finger on one thing which I didn't mention.
I'm sorry, it was in my talk but it was
one of the bits that didn't get said.
All countries need migration.
I say all countries, all developed countries.
America needs a lot of immigrants.
Europe, we see it with Brexit,
the National Health Service is going to collapse.
No one's gonna be there to pick the strawberries
and the fruit in the orchards.
It's complete lunacy.
So you do need immigrants and America could take many,
many more immigrants than it does at the moment.
I forget what the figures are
but Australia I think has
28% of immigrants,
in other words, in the population it's something like one
in four Australians was not born in Australia, they came in.
In America, it's very much lower and in Europe as well.
It could be much higher
and economically it would make a lot of sense.
There are,
there is a limit though.
Uncontrolled migration
is not good for any economy.
There is
a threshold which you
pass at your danger
and there is a psychological limit in terms of
what the population already there is prepared to accept.
So there's an economic limit and a psychological limit.
So it needs to be managed but
beyond
what that threshold is,
you do need to improve conditions.
Most of the people who are trying,
poor people who are trying to cross the Mediterranean
are very much unskilled, they,
if they came by legitimate channels,
and that's one of the things some of
the European countries are trying to do,
it would be easier but certainly in psychological terms,
most European populations because it's uncontrolled,
because they're trying to get in in an uncontrolled manner,
do not wish to accept them and that may be regrettable
but it's a fact which governments have to reckon with.
So yes to immigration, yes to migration
but within
limits which countries can accept
and beyond that limit, you have to try to make
conditions better and of course the great problem
is you can spend money in developing countries
and it won't actually change anything.
How do you make sure that what you do
is actually going to be effective?
It's very, very difficult.
So that is a huge challenge but it's not being met
and the climate change aspect of this,
that we are going to have within the next half century
probably quite large areas which will be
more or less uninhabitable,
that's going to ratchet up the pressure
and again for completely uncontrolled migration.
So governments have to face this, that's all I'm saying
and I think it's going to be huge problem.
Sir?
Oh, the young lady behind you actually wanted to talk too.
And you next if you can wait.
Right. - Thank you for your talk.
I was curious your thought on the US system
of having different states and state governments.
You talk about cleavages within Europe
between countries that are in the EU.
A lot of the discourse I've heard in the US
is actually saying we need, people who don't
agree with the way that national politics
are going are trying to work at the state or
local levels and I think the increasing polarization
in our country is to some extent geographically distributed.
Do you see a future America that's less united with itself?
- As long as you remain a,
the powers of the states yes, you're right quite.
You look at California for example
with some of the initiatives they have passed.
But nonetheless an awful lot is decided in Washington D.C.
and you have a totally polarized and dysfunctional
Congress and have had for really quite some time now.
Bipartisanship seems out of the window
and I was talking about the American press
at the beginning of my talk, again,
to stand back and try to be dispassionate,
these are not qualities which you see very much of
either on Fox News or even in the New York Times.
This is what is regrettable
that you are seeing so little real
analysis and thoughtful writing.
So yes, there are glimmers of hope in what may
be done in the local level and in the states and you come
to somewhere like Hanover and it's absolutely wonderful.
You're all very privileged,
you live in a very nice part of America
and I've been talking about things which
have struck me as admirable about American society
and I guess one thing I should've mentioned is trust.
The second or third day we came,
we went out to Centauro and it was a holiday,
public holiday, I can't remember which one.
The florist there, all the flowers were outside.
They're closed for the holiday but
they had flowers and trees and stuff
which they'd left outside.
You would never in a million years
see that in Europe because it would be stolen.
Your newspapers you throw onto the sidewalk.
Again, they'd be gone.
You have boxes with Amazon and FedEx
and anyone could take those boxes.
It's amazing, it's very sad this is not the case in Europe.
I've seen in Paris fashionable stores
with flowerboxes and the flowers are wired
into the flowerboxes so no one will steal them.
I'm not joking.
You know, these are qualities which
actually make life a lot more enjoyable
and pleasant and you have them and we don't.
I mean Europe is a lovely place to live,
don't get me wrong but you do have tremendous strengths.
So don't knock it.
You were going to ask a question.
- It's a variation on the question.
A variation on the last question and I apologize
because I arrived late, so you may have covered this but
the question of how
others see America.
Do others recognize the difference between
the two parties when they see America?
Because it's important.
If you recognize that one party is
a minority party that stays in power by
generating fear, opposition, et cetera, et cetera.
Maybe I'm getting too political here.
- Any Republicans in the room?
- I'm quoting Norman Ornstein, how's that?
So I'll make it a source but there is a difference
between the two parties and there is an internal
dynamic which is creating an America that
now in power is displaying itself in a certain way.
As opposed to in the past when they said
"There's no difference between politic parties in America."
- I was gonna make that point.
If you go back 30 years, 40 years,
yes I did think and many Europeans would have said
"Well Democrats, Republics, you're both kind of center."
And then you would talk about left
wing parties in America and we'd say
"You don't even know what a left wing party is."
There was a feeling certainly that you were
all much of a muchness between the Democrats
and the Republicans and that probably,
did it begin to stop with Nixon?
It's hard to know exactly when but Nixon, then Reagan,
Jimmy Carter perhaps, that general period,
there was sort of beginning to be a division
and now yes, absolutely, your Democrats and your Republicans
are quite different except
on foreign policy and defense matters where
there is this national consensus which has not been shifted.
NATO is good, America is there to
promote its values,
to lead.
For 70 years, that has really not changed
and it's not changed now.
We used to think you know okay,
Americans are absolutely convinced of their own correctness.
Fine, that's probably a good thing.
Even if some of their policies are completely loopy,
at least they have the courage of their convictions.
That I think, that argument doesn't really hold anymore
after the last 20 years or so.
- [Man] Good afternoon, thank you for your comments
which I'd say I overwhelmingly agree with.
That said,
I'm married to the woman who lived in the UK for 20 years
and I spent my professional career
as a US lawyer in London, so explaining US law
to Europeans. - That's quite a task.
- [Man] Or I should say to British Europeans
or maybe I should say to English people,
Scottish people and Northern Ireland,
Irish people and Europeans.
A couple of points.
First,
I'd like to recharacterize a portion of what you said
as not calling into question American exceptionalism
but as calling into question American hubris
and I think in my own way of thinking
about these things that there is a difference.
That there are values that we as Americans stand for
that are absolute in their character,
that are virtuous,
that we all too often don't live up to
but still make us
as a society
exceptional in historical terms.
That's the simple way I would explain that to my children
and they're tired of me explaining it to them
but they're in their 30s, so they've gone off.
America is a country
where a person comes and says they're an American
and there are a few other places
like that but very, very few.
That's my first, I think there is virtue
in some of our beliefs of liberty and equality.
That's the first point I want to take a slight issue with.
The second, and this maybe brings me back into
the hubris point, I speak by virtue of my profession,
I spent a great deal of time
responding to the assertion of extraterritorialism
and why do you get to assert it?
And I think the answer there is quite simple,
because we can.
- Yes.
- [Man] And that carries with it a responsibility
but it also carries with it a matter of fact.
To put it in concrete terms, when I first
came to Europe in 1991, you could not raise
$100 million to finance whatever you wanted to finance,
a road, a building, a business without coming
to the United States, it could not be done.
Now $100 million is not a lot of money anymore
in the overall world of finance but at the time it was.
We asserted US law requirements on people
seeking to come to the United States and raise money.
The fallout of that was that
speaking purely in technical terms,
the financial
market systems in Europe became
substantially more robust and self-supporting.
- Right, let me take your two points.
- [Man] So those are just two different points--
- Right.
- [Man] Can I just finish on the extraterritorialism?
There is, as Kissinger said there is,
countries don't have friends, they have interests.
The notion that America asserts its interests
shouldn't be a surprise to anyone.
- It's a question of whether it's short
term interests or whether it's long term interests
and one can argue really quite forcefully
that very often it's short term interests.
Let me before I forget all your points,
absolutely on your second, you do it because you can.
Great powers use their power to advance their interests.
Completely agree.
Whether, there is the question of definition of interests.
Up to now, most of the time more or less I would agree that
you have used your clout in ways
that have advanced American interests.
I think this is going to become more difficult for you.
The second point or rather your first point
but the one I haven't addressed yet is about hubris and
exceptionalism and there I'm afraid I have to disagree.
I think they are two different things.
Hubris kind of compounds exceptionalism
but exceptionalism is a problem
and you can continue to, you talk about
immigration, you come to America, you become an American.
That has always been the case.
A bit hard to argue that in the age of Trump.
Actually when you close the border,
when you ban people coming in,
even this wretched mother who was
coming to look at her dying toddler,
I mean it's applied very hopelessly
but even if it were better applied,
the desire to keep others out, that's a big change.
Except the problem with exceptionalism
and it's in the words themselves,
if you go on thinking you're exceptional,
then you are gonna, it's like the kid
in the group of kids on the playground.
If you all play together, you're all mates
together and you all get on and someone is
on top and someone's underneath and then it
changes around and it's another person on top,
you're all in the same group.
If someone says "I'm exceptional,"
you're not in the same group and that,
you've been able to do this because of your power
and because other countries acquiesced.
They were happy with it, it was comfortable.
I believe that is ending
and that you, there is a psychological transition,
that's what I can call it which will accompany
the kind of real world economic transitions,
geopolitical transitions that Americans
are gonna have to go through and I think
that's going to be terribly, terribly difficult.
You know?
You don't give up something you're really
attached to and you are attached to exceptionalism
without a lot of pain and struggle and strife.
So that's all,
I'm afraid.
Anybody else?
- We maybe have a few more minutes but any other questions?
- We've exhausted you. - Well,
thank you very much for coming, it was absolutely wonderful.
(audience applauds)
- Thank you very much.
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