https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=D1-wOCCRo78
the United States and the Western world more generally on the foreign relations front in 2022. And maybe we can also talk about what you see happening in 2023 as we move forward. What’s currently besetting us in the West on the foreign policy front? Well, this is a really difficult time. It’s important that maybe to help people get what’s happening in the world is to realize sort of what the basic framework of world politics is. And that is that beginning about 300 years ago, the British began to build this sort of global commercial order where there’s trade, there’s commerce, and the British also were concerned for creating balance of power in Europe and developing their power globally so that this commercial maritime system would develop. The Americans more or less inherited, or some would say took over that system at the end of World War II. And this liberal international maritime commercial system of trade, of power, of political relationships is the dominant reality in world politics. And the world is more or less divided between countries that are fairly happy with this system and would like to see it continue, countries who have some grievances, would like the system adjusted, but are basically willing to work within that system, and then countries who want to bring the whole thing down. And today, the leading countries that are in that are China, Russia, and Iran, along with certain smaller hangers on like Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, and a few others. And we’ve seen since, you know, at the end of the Cold War, 1990, it looked as if this Anglo-American system would last forever. People talked about the end of history, but partly because countries like China have developed and become more powerful, but maybe more fundamentally because the Americans and our close allies have not done a very good job of understanding how to build and nurture and maintain the system, we’ve seen gradually a kind of a crisis of opposition approaching. And 2022, between the Russian invasion of Ukraine, China’s continued sort of menacing of Taiwan and Iran’s progress refusal to rejoin the JCPOA it’s deepening alliance with Russia. We’ve seen this alliance of revisionist powers assemble themselves for a real challenge to this international system. Well, so let’s maybe we could walk through each of those countries in turn. I mean, the first reaction I have to what you said is that, say what you might about the Anglo-American sphere of influence. It’s by no means self-evident that either China, Russia, or Iran stand out as shining moral lights to emulate as an alternative. I mean, China is a desperately terrible totalitarian communist state. Iran is basically a Islamo-fascist regime. And while Russia seems to be the outlier to some degree, but because at least nominally it could be allied with the West, but it certainly proved extremely problematic in new ways since the end of the Cold War. So, I mean, on what grounds can countries like China and Iran, for example, offer anything even remotely like an alternative to the sphere of Anglo-American domination? Let’s start with China. Right. Well, you know, China offers, what China offers countries or at least did offer because its offering has gotten less attractive with between the mounting totalitarianism, the economic trouble that they’re in and their reaction to COVID. They were saying, look, you don’t have to buy the Western package in order to become rich and powerful. And furthermore, they were saying to somebody like the ruler of a country like Zimbabwe or other countries, we’ll give you money, we’ll give you tech. We won’t ask you any questions about how much money your brother-in-law is making out of the deal. No pesky auditors. We will, you know, we’re not like the Anglo-Americans. We won’t try to make you behave. We’ll let you do as it will empower you to do exactly as you like. Now that is not a positive agenda for an alternative world order, but it is an offer that a lot of governments or a lot of powerful individuals might find attractive. Yeah, powerful and corrupt individuals. I mean, it’s for, okay, so let’s take that apart a little bit. So the first part of that is the proposition that you can actually be wealthy or let’s say have abundant resources and a reasonable standard of living for your citizens, not for you, without adopting something like the underlying metaphysics of the Western moral code. And that proposition strikes me as highly improbable given that the only reason that China’s rich at all is because it managed to integrate itself with the West and essentially adopt quasi-capitalist principles without actually adopting the underlying metaphysic. And I don’t think their system is stable. I don’t think they’re gonna be able to propagate that wellbeing into the future. I mean, you said yourself that China has tilted very heavily under Xi towards an increasing totalitarianism and that’s pretty much self-evident. And the fact that they can only peddle their wares with regards to, what would you say, their profitability on the dictator front to corrupt governments also indicates the moral bankruptcy of their offerings. So if what China has to offer is the ability to bring together the corrupt dictators of the world, that doesn’t seem like a very plausible or sustainable alternative to Anglo-American domination. So, and I mean, China seems to be facing a whole host of problems now too, including demographic problems that are deadly serious. Right, well, you know, Jordan, this Anglo-American order is 300 years old and a lot of people have tried to shake it over the centuries. You can go back to Louis XIV in France who said, I’m gonna have this centralized, powerful planned economy. We’re gonna have all the economic and military power of the British, but we’re not gonna have all that messy political liberalism. And it didn’t work, but he put up a good fight that convulsed the world for many years. Napoleon really exactly the same, challenging that Anglo-American, still at that time, British world order and saying, my dictatorship, my enlightened dictatorship can create a powerful economy that the stupid British cannot match and an army that they can’t defeat. And he rampaged for quite a while. He did ultimately fall apart and rightly so. I think Kaiser Wilhelm II, I think Hitler, Tojo and Stalin all in their different ways had the same idea that the sort of technocratic dictatorship, centralized power and planning could create an economy in a society that could challenge this Anglo-American hegemony, or call it the liberal world system. And they all failed, but they all thought, okay, I’ll learn from the past, now I’ll win. And I think China is thinking along those lines too. Yeah, well, I think there’s a fallacy at the bottom of that presumption that basically is biological in nature. I mean, one of the things I’ve observed as a consequence of watching the United States as an outsider, let’s say for 50 years, 50 conscious years, let’s say, is that diversity of approach beats efficiency of monolithic view. And so what I always see happening in the United States is while you guys are crazy about 80% of the time and going off the rails in five different directions, but there’s always someone in the United States doing something crazily innovative and sane, always. And so what seems to happen is that the US washes up against the shores of various forms of political idiocy, but there’s so much diversity of approach in the US, especially given its massive population and its federated system and its genuine freedoms, that someone somewhere is doing the next right thing. And then America is, what would you call it, open-minded enough and adaptive enough so that if someone is doing the right thing, then they spawn imitators extremely rapidly. And Americans just capitalize on that like mad. And you get this situation where you could imagine, and I think the Japanese managed this for a while, you could imagine that if you just happen to stumble on the right vision, if you were an efficient and benevolent totalitarian, you could be more effective over like a five-year period. But you’re gonna have a hell of a time with power transitions, that’s a deadly problem. And then if the world shifts on you that’s not in a way that isn’t commensurate with your ideological vision, then you have no alternative approaches to rely on. And by the way, I think the US is a great country my observation has been that just scuttles all these countries that try to compete with this distributed and creative, free Anglo-American ethos. And I do think there’s a biological reason for that is that one of the ways that biological systems compute adaptation is by producing a very large variety of mutations, of variant offspring. And most of those offspring perish, but the only solution to that problem of excess mortality, let’s say on the biological front is the provision of multiple variants. And the Anglo-American system, because it’s distributed and because it places a substantial amount of power in the hands of individuals and subsidiary organizations, it’s medium to long-term creativity simply can’t be beat. And it is inefficient in that it’s, a lot of the variants that the US produces, a lot of businesses and so forth fail, but those that succeed can succeed spectacularly. And that happens continually. And that seems like an unstoppable force. And you just outlined 300 years of history showing that these monolithic centralists who believe that central planning and efficiency will defeat distributed creativity, they’re just wrong one after the other. You’d think eventually we’d learn that that was just wrong. And maybe we have to some degree,