Transcription
And there's a lot to be there's a lot to dislike about Mr. Trump, you know, but that doesn't mean that you should not try to be a little balanced in assessing it. Uh if I can't remember the exact words, but both the New York Times and Washington Post, for example, basically said Trump was bamboozled, right?
And so if you have a concept of international order, it is a fundamental mistake, a theological mistake to think of it as something that necessarily must command universal consensus. Much more often than not in history uh the only order we knew is defined by competition and efforts to make it less dangerous. All right.
Now, this is often these these very simple points. In fact, you may you want to call them simplistic. I will not argue with you too much. But I always believe that a good starting point for analysis of everything anything is Okam's razor. You you have heard of this principle of Okam's razor. That means use the simplest explanation possible at least to start with and then you can add complexity. Don't start by being by looking for very complicated explanations and then you know try to pair them down. Okay.
Let me talk about with this framework. Let me talk a bit very briefly about about US China relations and the war against Iran. Right now USChina relations is a process. I was I looked at the the coverage of of most of the world media uh particularly in Europe and in the United States of that the last uh C Trump summit in uh in April in was it May in May in May this year right and it was all it was quite clear that that it was they looked at it in a binary way they looked at it as a win-lose situation and there was a clear inclination to and to put forward a narrative that Trump lost and I think that is as much uh reflection of distaste for him and there's a lot to be there's a lot to dislike about Mr. Trump, you know, but that doesn't mean that you should not try to be a little balanced in assessing it.
In any case, the choices for countries are very seldom only binary. Sometimes they are, but very seldom. And I'll I'll come back to that. Right? But I promise to give you an example of a confusion of theology and and uh practical diplomacy. Uh earlier this year on the 20th of January to be to be precise, Prime Minister Mark Khani of of Canada speaking at uh Davos uh made a speech that was highly acclaimed. He his point was that the international order had ruptured. That's his word. Sounds like they got a hernia. uh but it had ruptured and therefore middle powers who shared shared um similar values should get together to uphold international order that's the gist of his argument and it was I happened to be in Zurich I didn't go to Davos so I happened to be in Zurich and I was listening to your on live feed and it was certainly an extremely well-d delivered speech you know he spoke very passionately uh as if he was an old testament prophet you know revealing know conveying some relevation vouch safe to him by God. But I thought the content was rather banal.
In any case, his argument had a very fundamental internal contradiction. It was Banell because although he did not seem to have noticed, many countries particularly in Asia had been doing exactly what he um advocated uh for many years without the mellow drama of evoking a world crumbling around his ears. Right? And there was a fundamental internal contradiction because it was patently obvious to everybody I think except maybe to him that middle powers in any combination could not either deter Russia or balance China without at least the US minimally at its back. It's just not possible for them to do that. And so the internal contradiction was this. If they can't do this then whatever they could do uh it may not be may be useful but it could not replace the international order he he was lamenting had ruptured right if it was true that the US was no longer willing to uphold it but I think the fundamental mistake he made was to confuse theology with with practical diplomacy.
This very idea of international order is frankly uh borders on theological in my mind. It's it's not that it doesn't exist but it is an extremely subjective thing. His mistake was to assume that his idea of international order would necessarily be shared by everybody as if it was like the law of gravity. You know, you don't have a choice about whether you want to believe the law of gravity or not, but you do have a choice about whether you want to believe in international order and if so, what kind of international order you choose to believe in. And the the kind of American liberal international order that whose passing he was lamenting um was never accepted even at its height by every country in the world. In fact, I I would say a rough estimate, half of the world did not accept it or accepted it only in part, only in part. And in fact, even those who accepted it often had different interpretation of what it meant. Right?
Um when we talk about rules-based order, it's not that we are talking about something that doesn't exist, but we are talking about something that is primarily theological. And and theology is always subject to many interpretation when we may may use the same word rules based order but which selection of rules do we choose to emphasize what interpretation of those rules this is never uniform right my point is that this is one example of loss of perspective I can give you some more if you want but I don't want to take up too much time so with this broad framework that you need to see things as part of processor. If you're not going to overreact or underreact, you need to see things particularly in in a historical perspective, right? And and you need to understand why countries do things. Countries do things for a variety of reasons and their reasons are not necessarily your reasons even though you may think they they are aligned. Right?
Okay. Okay, with that broad and and one last point I think um the kind of instability you are you are experiencing now uh it's not new in the in the US right it's not new in the not new in the world right in fact competition and therefore conflict or at least the risk of conflict these are these are inherent characteristics of international relations and they are never absent right uh in some degree Um this kind of harsh truth was was masked for a very short period and short and exceptional period of world history maybe about 20 years or so at the end of the cold war when the Berlin war came down uh and maximum 20 years because it was a rather exceptional period because Russia posts Soviet Russia had not yet regained internal coherence and China was still hiding his light and biting his Right. And the US and its allies in Europe in particular was still riding high. Right.
I think that era is past. It cannot be recreated. the kind of generous American policies that we associated with American foreign policy for 40 years after the end of the cold war that those were artifacts of a particular period of world history that is not going to be recreated. I'll just give you one example terrorists. Uh I'm sure the previous speaker had talked about this and and so on. um free trade or trade whether it should be free or fair has always been a very controversial issue in the American body politic from the very beginning of the republic. But for those 40 years after the end of the World War II, America adopted relatively generous policies, trade policies, not out of altruism by the way, not even probably out of uh for for economic advantage. It adopted them as a weapon in his global competition with the Soviet Union in order to bind countries to itself. Right. Uh right now the US faces no existential threat anywhere in the world. Uh China is a formidable competitor in some fields. Uh not in every field because China has serious weaknesses too. But it's not an existential threat.