Transcription
If the United States and China can't find some kind of set of rules of the road on AI, the danger of around this crazily powerful technology worries me a lot. I think this may be the most misguided military intervention the United States has made since 1945. All that's being discussed is opening the Strait of Hormuz. We helped the Iranians discover a weapon that they had never used before and that they found more usable than the nuclear weapon.
Welcome to Make It Make Sense. I'm Carina Hajar and today I am thrilled to have on my colleague and Washington Post columnist Fareed Zakaria. The world feels a little out of whack these days and so we're lucky to have a foreign policy expert like Fareed on the show to break it down. He's an award-winning journalist, commentator, and best-selling author. He's the host of CNN's Fareed Zakaria GPS where he covers the most important issues shaping global affairs from geopolitics to technology to national security. So, let's get into it. Fareed, it's such a pleasure to have you on the show today. Thanks so much for joining us.
It's my pleasure to join you. I love this.
So, we'll just start off with an easy question given all the fires around the world that we're seeing right now. I I I want you to explain the world order to me. You focused so much and and you've spent so much time thoughtfully dissecting the post-Cold War order talking about where we are with if there is even a rules-based order. So, I'm curious what is the state of the rules-based international order and do we need one?
Yeah, it's a great question. So, if I can do a little bit of history, why do we have this this order in the first place? It came out of World War II. Particularly the Americans, Franklin Roosevelt probably most singularly, decided that he wanted to create an international order that did not plunge the world into just a series of wars of conquest and aggression, which is which is what had happened for the first half of the 20th century, and of course for longer than that. Um and so his idea was we're going to try something different. We're going to set up a world a rules-based order that has at its heart an open world economy. This was very important to him because he could see how tariffs and protectionism and nationalism all worked together to create a world in which countries felt like it was zero-sum, you know, and his point was no, let's have an open world economy where everyone can trade, everyone can get rich, you don't have to invade your neighbor to do that. The second piece of it was some some degree of international rules, and he was a realist about it, and that's why in the UN, you know, the great powers of the day have special status, and they have a veto, and they have permanent membership, uh because that is what the League of Nations of the the 1920s did not have. And the third part of it was a a recognition that at the end of the day you were going to have to have American power anchoring this whole system because again, the absence of vacuum of that kind of power is what led to the collapse of the international system. So that's what we tried to do. The The Soviets objected, um so there was a bit of a standoff, and we almost created half of a rules-based international world, you know, the the American half and and its allies. Then comes 1989, the Soviet Union collapses, and essentially joins in. So the whole world becomes part of this rules-based international order. And for many years people have wondered what would cause this to erode, and you know, the rise of China, the return of Russia, Islamic terrorism. And the fascinating thing is that what is now causing the rules-based international order to erode and to atrophy is none of those challenges. It is rather the resignation, the abdication of the creator of the rules-based international order, the United States, which has moved into a period of nationalism, protectionism, uh and transactionalism, if you will, that is essentially undermining it more than any any hostile state or hostile power could ever do. And and that is, you know, the the and and Trump is open about this. I don't think that I'm attributing things to him. He would say that this order is, you know, it's terrible, everybody free rides on it, we pay the bills, but it's but it's worth remembering we have created the longest period of of great power peace, 90 years, in human history. We have created the greatest level of prosperity in human history. And we have created the greatest advance in human rights, measured by the rise of democracy, the rise of liberal values, the rise of individual rights in human history. So, it's not a bad accomplishment, and I would think it's not worth tearing it apart, but the here we are.
Well, I couldn't agree more on that last point. And so, I have so many questions, but I guess the first one that comes to mind is why are we sort of bucking this position as the leader of the rules-based order that has brought so many people prosperity. And even deeper than that, I spent a lot of time um reporting on protests, spent a lot of time paying attention to higher education. And it's interesting because you also see sort of an aversion to both Western democracy, but also um this rules America being at the center of the rules-based order from within. Obviously, there have been a rise of anti-democratic regimes around the world, but there also seems to be an aversion from within. And so, I wonder what drives that.
Yeah, no, it's fundamentally I mean, the reason um um it's happening is because of what's happening within the United States. Uh and it's I think basically the two failed wars in the Middle East, uh the greater Middle East, Afghanistan and Iraq, and the global financial crisis are probably the the the the big uh causal explanation, because it left Americans thinking um first of all, we're not doing this very well. We don't understand how to do it. We're not succeeding at what we're doing. Uh whether it's, you know, the economic part of it or the military part of it. And secondly, it's costing us a huge amounts of money. We are bearing all these burdens. We are paying all these prices, and it's not clear what we're getting out of it. And Trump uh then weaponized this. And the reason I say Trump is this is the case one of those cases where, you know, human beings have enormous agency, and and you know, the sort of great man theory of history applies, because if you go back to 2016, there were whatever 12, 13 Republican candidates running for president. There was only one, Donald Trump, who was saying the kind of things he's saying, you know, NATO is a sham, everyone takes advantage of us, you know, free trade is a sham. The others were, you know, in some way part of that that larger consensus that felt that all these changes, globalization, immigration, capital flows, foreign wars were bad for them. And you know, there are there are legitimate reasons why they felt that way. For example, it was their sons and daughters who were mostly fighting in these wars. Um but because of that, I think this that the the kind of bipartisan support for this these policies, which had existed since like the late 1940s has been has been eroding and no one has quite been willing to or figured out how to in a compelling way sell it to the American people that no, we benefit from this. Joe Joe Biden basically said I'm going to restore things but didn't explain why he needed to restore things. You know, there was a there was a sense in which Trump is bad therefore I will do whatever Trump didn't do.
Just to focus on politics for a second domestically, it does feel like um America's role in the world has become binary at least among a populous faction in the country. Either you're the world's policeman or you're not. Is that the way to think about it? Is there some type of middle way that uh you know, cuts out some of the I guess the way that they would put it the police the costly policing that a lot of Americans don't seem to like while maintaining the benefits of leading a rules-based order?
Yeah, that's a that's a really good question because I I think that there is I tried to outline this in my book The Post-American World at the end because I think that what we have created we don't even realize how successful we've been. We've created a whole series set of like-minded allies uh that would be willing to share in the burden with us um but we would of course have to share some of the decision-making uh in the in return. But if you take Europe and then you take Japan and then you take Australia, Canada, um Singapore, you know, places like that. You're getting to 75% of global GDP if particularly if you add India into that mix um and that is a kind of coalition of liberally oriented states. And the reason I say that is let's be honest not all of them are great liberal democracies uh you know, but there are countries there that believe in a rules-based international order that believe in open, you know, an integrated world economics. So, there there's a large area of common ground here. And many of those countries, Europe in particular, Japan in particular, already paying. You know, what's famous is that Europe was not paying enough up for its defense, true. But Europe was the single largest provider of humanitarian aid around the world, which is also part of what we have been doing. We The United States invented the idea of foreign aid. Um, and so there is a path, but I think we were in the process of beginning to understand it. We were in the process of beginning to to kind of reshape it. Um, and then Trump came along and blew and sort of has largely blown it up. Um, it may not be the worst thing in the world in the long run if we can say to ourselves, okay, the old model was not working because American The American people did not feel they were getting enough value from it. But is there a new model that could work in which the US shares power, which, you know, shares the burden, things like that. So, I'm not despondent yet. I think that we are at a moment of fracture, and there's a question of whether this can be healed uh and reset, or whether the fracture then results in, you know, a kind of collapse.
How do you think technology plays into it? Um, I know that you've pointed out in your work that when there's a fast-moving cultural, technological change that creates a lot of heartburn can give rise to the sort of populist movements that we've seen in the post-industrial after the Industrial Revolution and we're seeing now. Um, so I'm curious to hear your thoughts on technology in general, the way how it would affect the rules-based order, and also just Western democracies. And AI in particular, what are you seeing AI do for our society?
So, we're we're probably in the middle of the the biggest technological revolution in history. I think that it's it's impossible to overstate the importance of the ability that we have now created to create or to manufacture and mass scale intelligence. It's not just It's not human intelligence. It is clearly superior to human intelligence because of the collective ability to do it. You know, by using so much data, by using so You know, you just think about it. You can You have in your pocket a supercomputer. The You know, any smartphone that can beat the world's chess champion, beat the world's go champion. You know, it's extraordinary, right? So, you think about the that ability to mass produce intelligence. We've never seen never seen anything like it. But, what we do know from history is when we have had technological revolutions that are not nearly as as dramatic, like electricity and railroads and uh and and cars. Um it it it has two or three effects. It produces a backlash, and that backlash tends to be a kind of cultural backlash, you know, because people just feel totally disoriented, and they want a sense of comfort, which is why the right often wins these debates over the left, because the left is providing a kind of three-point economic program, and the right is saying, "I'll take you back to when to before all this was happening. I'll make America great again." You know, the the slogan of Brexit was take back control. So, it's a kind of appeal to nostalgia, and it's appeal it's a it's an appeal to people to say, "Just don't worry. All this this era of turmoil, I'm going to take you back to when it was all stable." And the pre You know, that's why the promise we're going to bring manufacturing back. It's a kind of evocation of the of the some idyllic period in the past before all this turmoil. Obviously, that's not going to actually happen, but that is the backlash. That's the dynamic we're in right now. It also emphasizes nationalism because when you feel threatened by these kind of vast impersonal forces, you tend to say, "I want my country and my government to protect me." And that privileges, you know, national policy over international coordination. This is probably bad for the long run because these problems are international by nature, they're global by nature. Uh and in particular, what technology this technological revolution is doing, it is massively privileging the two really the only two players in AI, and that is the United States and China. And so, I don't think it's an exaggeration to say that probably in the long run, not in the short run, but in the 20-year run, if the United States and China in the next 20 years can't find some kind of set of rules of the road, um maybe not of entire system, but some rules of the road on AI, I think the danger of a competitive dynamic around this crazily powerful technology uh worries me a lot because, you know, you this technology can be used for everything. It can be used for cyber hacking on a scale people cannot imagine. Uh production of weapons of mass destruction on a scale that you can't imagine. The deployment of clever targeted uh uses of all these weapons on a scale that you can't do you know, you cannot imagine. So, for all of those reasons, the two countries that I think that are at the at the heart of this uh will have to find some way to get along.
Well, that's the perfect segue into I sort of wanted to touch on some of the US's biggest foreign policy challenges around the world. Uh China's obviously the big one. Um and I know that you've written about you know, the folly of trying to integrate China into the international community and hoping that would usher in some type of liberalization. Obviously, that didn't happen exactly as we hoped it would. So, I'm curious, how should the US be dealing with China? What should You know, you're talking about rules with AI, but what should the rules be generally between the US and China, especially as President Trump continues to you know, we have talks coming up with Xi. I'm curious how you're thinking about that.
Yeah, look, I think we all were naive in thinking that China would follow a kind of path of modernization, which is the term used in the academic literature, meaning that as it got richer, it became freer, it became more democratic. It's not entirely, you know, kind of baseless. If you look at the trajectory of the last 30-40 years, as countries have risen in per capita GDP, outside of oil-rich countries, where it's a kind of different dynamic, but as they've earned their way up the the income level, they've almost all become more liberal, more democratic. The most dramatic cases, of course, are places like Taiwan and South Korea, which were right-wing dictatorships. But, you know, broadly speaking, it's been true. You can look at the the right, you know, Spain and Portugal, which were dictatorships in the in the '70s and then flipped. Eastern Europe, of course, which which flipped. There there really are almost no countries that have managed to move up the income level and have not moved in some way politically. China is the big exception. So, it was not totally naive to think that, but China did not go down that path for interesting reasons, which we can go into, but what that means is you have to ask yourself, so what is the nature of our relationship with the other superpower in the world that is technologically, militarily, politically, you know, powerful. And I think what we have to try to do is to is to keep in mind that China is very different from a kind of rogue state like Russia or Iran. Russia basically is trying to tear down the international system. It benefits from instability. As an oil producer, every time there's instability, price of oil goes up. China is not like that. China is deeply integrated into the global economy. China wants to be a respected world power, wants to be part of the uh the the great powers that run the world, not the ones that tear it down. So, there is a great opportunity here, which is to to work with that reality and see if there are ways in which we can come up with some you know, probably lowest common denominator areas where the United States and China agree. Let's not Let's make it very hard for people to use AI for terrorism. Let's make it very hard for people to use AI to, you know, for rogue nuclear operations. You know, and you can build from that. When the world economy started to descend at a more rapid rate than it had during the Great Depression, which is what happened. Um China proved to be extremely helpful. Um it coordinated all monetary policy with the Federal Reserve and the European Central Bank. It did the largest fiscal stimulus. It spent the most money of any country as a percentage of GDP to essentially shore up the entire world economy. It continued that coordination on a regular basis. So, you know, it's a good example of how China is not Russia. So, there is hope for a kind of minimal set of rules that are largely related to stability and, you know, security and safety. Maybe we could layer more on on after that, but I think that that that should be the aspiration. And there is going to be a competitive dynamic to the US-China relationship without any question. Um, and that is that is how it is, but that shouldn't preclude the ability to cooperate on issues which are of mutual benefit. It doesn't help China to have rogue, you know, rogue actors going around, uh, you know, making it easy to use, uh, AI for terrorism or bio weapons or things like that. They're as vulnerable as anybody else.
So, I I hear you that there are there could be some areas of shared interest, certainly because we are both such major players in the global economy, but there is a difference between competition and outright aggression, and we've obviously seen outright aggression from China, maybe not in the traditional military sense, but of course, I mean, the Pacific is is a problem, obviously they're uh, they're inching closer and closer to Taiwan all the time and circling and that's that's on our radar. Uh, the Belt and Road Initiative, IP theft, buying up American farmland, all these different things that are raising alarm bells for a lot of American lawmakers, some of whom have been saying we're just not taking China seriously enough. So, I'm curious how you think about Chinese aggression and if we're doing enough to counteract it.
We're probably not doing enough to counteract it in some areas. Um, you know, we should have um, specifically China-related rules for some of these issues because they are the other superpower. It's also because they don't practice reciprocity. You know, you the US uh, US companies couldn't go into China and buy vast amounts of Chinese land. So, you know, there should be some recognition that we're not dealing with a, you know, with with with Britain or France here. We're dealing with a a country that does not have reciprocal uh, arrangements. I do think, however, that on Taiwan in particular and the South China Season, you know, in general. We have to recognize, look, China is the richest country and most powerful country in Asia. Um it's the second largest most powerful country in the world. It is going to have more influence uh in in its region uh and beyond. So, we can't draw the line so tightly that we say the second richest most powerful country in the world, uh, you know, is going to have to have the same foreign policy uh penumbra uh that it had when it was one of the poorest countries in the world 30 years ago. There is going to be a natural expansion. Um what it shouldn't bleed into is aggression. Uh it shouldn't bleed into domina- you know, uh bleed into domination. And that's why Taiwan becomes so important. My own view is that the single best way for us to deter China on Taiwan is to have a strong military and a strong commitment to Taiwan uh uh Taiwan security, but also to um to build a kind of coalition of countries that say to China, "If you were to do this, it will be the end of business as usual." Again, what I get back to is China depends massively on global markets for its growth rate, for its employment rate. What What I think keeps Xi Jinping up at night is the is the the worry that he will not be able to keep his country together with, you know, the the tens of millions of jobs he needs to create every year, with the hundreds of millions of people who might get disrupted by these latest technological technological changes, right? And so, China desperately needs its major markets to which it sells. The The Chinese economy bets heavily on exporting uh goods into the United States, Europe, Japan, uh South Korea, all those countries. If all those countries banded together and said, "We just want you to know, if you were to invade Taiwan, it would be the end of business as usual." I think that's a very powerful deterrent to Xi Jinping, maybe as powerful as the military. Now, the problem here is the the Trump administration, far from banding together with our allies, is busy fighting with them. We have We have, you know, put all these tariffs on our closest trading partners. We're constantly abusing them. So, far from creating that tight coalition that can present a united front to China, what we've done is we've divided that coalition. China is trying to pick some of these countries off, you know, establishing independent trade relations uh and deals with Canada, with Europe, uh with Southeast Asia. There's even the hints of a kind of rapprochement between China and India, all because the the United States uh is behaving in this predatory, transactional, uh mercantilist way with its closest allies. So, I feel like right now we are going in the opposite direction of a very very important way to keep a to create a kind of ecosystem of countries that can present a united front to China.
I am turning from what is still, you know, competition and and rivalry to an actual hot conflict. I want to finish out the episode getting your thoughts on Iran. Uh it just seems like our the conflict has become an utter quagmire for the Trump administration. They continue to move the goalposts on what their actual objectives are, and there was renewed conflict over the past week. Do you think that the Trump administration's ambitions here are worthwhile, and how do we get out of it? Can we get out of it?
Uh no, I don't think this was worthwhile. I think this may be the most misguided uh military intervention, major military intervention the United States has made since since 1945. It's difficult to think of one that was that was taken undertaken as lightly with as little sense of a strategic plan, with as little sense of clear identifiable goals, uh, and that has had more of a kind of international cost. Look, the Iraq war was a bad idea, um, but it was, you know, there was a clear objective, we could replace the Saddam Hussein Hussein with an inclusive democracy that would be more, uh, integrated with the world. It turned out to be very expensive to execute because Iraq the collapse of authority produced a civil war, but it didn't spill over that much, particularly not on the global scale. I mean, the US main costs were in blood and treasure. In the case of the Iran war, the whole premise of it was nonsensical. The idea that this 5,000-year-old country would, you know, after the entire regime would collapse, uh, and people would, you know, elect some Thomas Jefferson as the as the, uh, the leader. You can see how flawed the premise was in that right now with the Trump administration in its public, uh, um, admission says all it is trying to do is it has one agenda, the the ceasefire is about opening the Strait of Hormuz. In other words, the the the war which began with you know, as a goal, regime change in Iran, uh, the installation of a more liberal democratic, uh, regime, the end of Iran's nuclear program, and the end of all of its enriched stockpiles, the end of its missile, uh, arsenal, the end of its proxy support to Hezbollah and all those other militias. None of that is even being discussed. All that's being discussed is opening the Strait of Hormuz, which was open before the war began, and which closed as a consequence of the war. We We helped the Iranians discover a weapon that they had never used before, and that they found more usable than the nuclear weapon, because they can turn it on and off, they can monetize it, they can actually use it, they can threaten their neighbors in a in their indirect way very effectively. So, if And then, you add to it the international dimension, which is clearly China has been the big beneficiary. The whole world is now thinking of weaning itself off fossil fuels, and China dominates those green technologies. Bloomberg did an analysis that if you're going green, 70% of the supply chain in green in green tech is is Chinese. I mean, then it's 95% solar, it's 75% wind, it's 80% battery, but if you just do an average. So, I don't think we've ever seen an intervention that has been you know, has had so few benefits and so many costs. Um what Where do we go from here? Look, both sides are now overplaying their hand, honestly. Um the Iranians have essentially won de facto. They have the control of the Strait of Hormuz. They almost want a kind of de jure victory. They want a kind of recognition from the Trump administration. They're probably not going to get that. You know, if they had if they had just quietly accepted the reality, and if you think about why the last ceasefire uh broke down, that they were they were in control, uh nobody was going to end that. They They've They got you know, got upset because a few ships started to go through the Omani channel of the Strait of Hormuz. The Strait of Hormuz is sort of divided between an Iranian channel and an Omani channel. If they just let it go, they would have been they would have been de facto running the the Strait, but they wanted de jure control. The Trump administration wants some kind of victory that they can get you know they will they want to be able to say no we didn't lose and so they are they're overplaying their hand by destroying more and more you know hitting the same targets in Iran over and over again which I think you know what Vietnam showed is you can destroy a lot of the country that doesn't mean you can compel its leadership to surrender. That is the you know that's the the the crucial one the the bombing is in service of something and if that if it is hardening the resolve of the Iranians it's not working and and maybe one day it'll work but right now it doesn't seem to be working. The Iranians essentially have a kind of de facto control of the Strait of Hormuz which you know it to a certain extent they always had that latent power. The Americans have in fact destroyed a lot of the Iranian nuclear program um and both sides can walk away with something claiming some partial victory and live to fight another day live to negotiate those those other events but if you can get back to a normally functioning uh Strait of Hormuz and Middle Eastern you know commerce both sides can kind of claim that they've won but it's you know what's what's making this hard is both sides are kind of overplaying it and saying we want more than that. We want more than just a kind of practical workable situation where you know stuff is going through. The Iranians want this as a point of pride to say they own the Strait the Americans want this as a point of pride to be able to say they got something out of this.
Well I'm sure we'll be watching for how this plays out for a little longer than we'd like so but we're lucky to have your column to guide us through all these big questions and and lucky to have you on today to talk about all these complicated issues around the world. So thanks for taking the time for Reed.
It was a pleasure. Thank you.