American Hegemony's Rupture: Weaponized Interdependence & Global Power

[00:00:00]At Davos last week, Mark Harney, the prime minister of Canada, gave a speech that sent shock waves through the international community.

[00:00:10]>> Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

[00:00:14]>> It was a remarkable speech by a Canadian prime minister.

[00:00:17]>> It's like a moment of clarity.

[00:00:18]>> It received a very rare standing ovation with praise not only in Davos, but around the world. To understand why this speech this has been such an international relations earthquake, I think you need to understand something about him. Carney is as establishment as you get. He is a technocrat's technocrat, former governor of the Bank of Canada, former governor of the Bank of England. for Carney, this kind of figure to come out at Davos in front of all those assembled government elites and business elites at this moment when Trump is threatening tariffs on Europe in order to take over Greenland. For him to come out and say that we are living in a rupture, that the old order in which you could have values-based relationships with the United States of America is over. for Carney, the leader of Canada, America's both geographically and in many ways spiritually closest ally to say this, that is a break point.

[00:01:16]I think that's a moment, a week that's going to be remembered for a long time.

[00:01:20]Beneath Carney's analysis of what is happening here is an idea I've been following for some time called weaponized interdependence. And this idea comes from the international relations theorists and professors Henry Ferrell and Abraham Newman. It's in their book, Underground Empire: How America Weaponized the World Economy.

[00:01:37]And the basic concept is that over time in this globalized woven together world, there are a lot of ways in which being on American technologies and in American financial markets gave us leverage. And that was fine for our allies, for the world, so long as we didn't use that leverage too much. But now we've begun to make that a way we can harm them, a way we can extort them, a way we can control them. And that has really changed the nature of the bargain. Henry Fail is an international relations professor at Johns Hopkins University.

[00:02:15]He is author, as I mentioned, of Underground Empire and of the Excellent Substack Programmable Mutter. I want to have him on to talk me through Carney speech, these ideas, and if the old order is ending, what that might mean for the one to come. As always, my email, Ezra Kleinshowny Times.com.

[00:02:40]>> Henry Frell, welcome to the show.

[00:02:42]>> I'm delighted to be here.

[00:02:43]>> So, I want to begin with this clip of Mark Carney, the prime minister of Canada, speaking at Davos.

[00:02:49]>> Let me be direct. We are in the midst of a rupture, not a transition.

[00:02:55]Over the past two decades, a series of crises in finance, health, energy, and geopolitics have laid bare the risks of extreme global integration. But more recently, great powers have begun using economic integration as weapons, tariffs as leverage, financial infrastructure as coercion, supply chains as vulnerabilities to be exploited.

[00:03:18]You cannot live within the lie of mutual benefit through integration. When integration becomes the source of your subordination >> when integration becomes the source of your subordination. What is he saying there?

[00:03:33]>> So in a weird way it feels to me like he is channeling things that Abe Newman and I, my co-author on this book Underground Empire started saying six or seven years ago. And here I'm not claiming that we are the people who discovered it. But this was not the consensus when we were writing and it has become a new kind of consensus now which is if we think about globalization. Globalization back in the '9s and the 2000s. It seemed like it was an incredible opportunity to build a new kind of economic world in which markets dominated rather than geopolitics. So you have all of these ideas floating around about we're past the world of the Cold War. We're past the world of the uh Berlin Wall and we're now in a new world where it is going to be possible to rebuild politics around market competition. You don't have to worry about your neighbors invading you. You don't have to worry about all of these political risks. Instead, you just focus on being the most competitive market that you absolutely can be. And this leads to enormous amounts of integration of the sorts that Carne is talking about. So, we see supply chains becoming global. We see these financial systems which are focused on the United States becoming uh means through which people can send money back and forth without really worrying or thinking about the politics behind it. And we see this entire plumbing for this new global economy becoming established. And all of this seems great and awesome and functional. But we're in a world now where as Carney says the plumbing has become political. All of these means that we use to integrate the world, all of these financial systems, all of these uh trade and production systems are suddenly being turned against countries.

[00:05:13]And the United States, which actually has been doing this in a much quieter and uh perhaps less threatening way to many countries at least for decades, is in fact the country that is pushing this the hardest. G >> give me some examples of this. Give me an example prior to Trump of the United States doing this in a quieter way and then give me an example of what Carney is talking about now when he says that great powers are using economic integration as weapons and he clearly means us.

[00:05:40]>> Okay. So this uh really began post September 11th, 2001 when the United States it looks at this attack that has happened and it tries to figure out what are the ways in which terrorists have been able to take advantage of this poorest international system of economics which allows them to send money back and forth uh and they begin to start thinking about what kinds of tools can they use to stop it. So this really begins I think it really begins to get going with a measure against a bank which is very closely associated with North Korea. Uh the United States begins to target that bank and uh so you see suddenly when that happens a massive flight of money away from the bank the bank nearly goes under.

[00:06:22]>> When you say they target that bank slow down a little bit.

[00:06:24]>> Yeah.

[00:06:25]>> What do they do?

[00:06:26]>> So here okay so there's this whole complicated system and let me just explain maybe the best place to start is with the dollar. So if you are an international bank, you need to have access to the US dollar because the US dollar is the lingua frana of the global economy. This is the uh currency that everybody exchanges in and out of. That means in practice that you have to have correspondent relations with a bank in the United States, you are effectively you become subject indirectly or directly to US regulation. Because if you don't have these banks which allow you to uh these banking relations which allow you to clear transactions through US dollars, you effectively stop becoming an international bank. And so this then means that you are in a world as the United States discovers where it is possible for the United States to effectively declare that a bank or another institution is a pariah. That nobody should have anything to do with it. And any bank which wants to maintain access to the US dollar which means most banks in the world is going to respect that demand from the United States. So suddenly the United States is able to turn the entire global banking system into a means of power projection and it uses this first against uh terrorists obviously then against rogue states such as North Korea. But we begin to see over the uh intervening years that we get more and more ambitious. And I think that the most important example of this came with respect to Iran. And so the Obama administration uh very carefully, very very slowly uh ratchets up pressure, withdrawing the ability of Iranian banks to use the international system and also ratcheting up pressure against any other uh any other bank in any other country which wants to touch the Iranian system in any way. And Iran suddenly discovers that it cannot get paid for its oil anymore. It is having to barter. It has it has to barter for say we will send you x amount of oil and in return we will get 500 tons of grain or we will get a uh crate load of zippers. All of these uh crazy things that Iran has to do in order to uh try and get paid and Iran wants to get out from under that. So this I think is a good example of how it is that the United States is effectively able to use this power to cut an entire country out of the global financial system. Iran does figure out ways around this over time. Uh it does especially under under the Trump administration begin to figure out alternative shadowy payment systems.

[00:09:00]So there are real limits to this. uh but uh these techniques are perfected uh from administration to administration and they're handed on a little bit like a baton in a relay race. This is not to say that this is uh the product of grand planning. At every moment I think these are officials who are desperately improvising to try to uh do whatever the policy need of the moment demands. But over time they create this entire ramshackle system for coercion which turns out to be pretty extraordinary and to have pretty extraordinary powers. One example of this that was striking to me was the Trump administration sanctioned you know some top judges and prosecutors of the international criminal court because of bringing suit against Benjamin Netanyahu. Tell me a bit about that moment and what happened. So really what's happening here is of course the Trump administration sees the International Criminal Court and all of these other international uh organizations as being uh in a sense illegitimate and this is uh not just about Trumpism itself. This has always been a tension between the United States and this global system. On the one hand the United States does want to take advantage of it. There are many people in the United States who see global human rights as being a very very important thing that we need to protect.

[00:10:22]But the United States like every other country does not want itself to be uh constrained by the system when the system acts against it. And so the United States has never actually signed on to the International Criminal Court and both Democrats and Republicans have been somewhat resistant to it. So then when uh the Trump administration sees what is happening with Netanyahu, it begins to go after these uh international criminal court officials.

[00:10:47]And what happens then is that these officials, they suddenly find they can't use credit cards because credit cards all rely upon these payment systems. Uh they can't use Google. And so you discover that there's this entire incredibly boring seeming infrastructure of uh institutions of communication systems of money that is really what underpins our ordinary life. It's possible to live without access to these systems uh as these uh judges uh who have and other officials who have been targeted have discovered. But it is a real pain. What Carney is describing here, what he describes as a rupture, not a transition, is not just the use of these tools, but the use of these tools for something. What to you is the rupture he's describing. So here I think it is worth going back to this whole idea of the uh liberal international order and uh the way in which this term comes into being. It's really two academics. It's uh Dudney and Iikenberg who come up with this idea and their argument is pretty straightforward that the United States is incredibly powerful and that that power is actually a problem for other countries. If you are uh a another country who wants to uh deal with the United States, you worry that it is too powerful for you uh that it might in fact you you you might make some concession and then the United States decides it wants a little bit more and it wants a little bit more and you find yourself in a a situation of complete uh vaselage of complete dependence. And so their argument is that the way that the US has worked over the uh decades after World War II is to create something which amounts to a kind of international quasi constitution.

[00:12:29]That is a set of relationships through which it binds itself through which it effectively makes it more difficult for itself to abuse at least its allies uh other countries uh which are dependent upon it. And so from this perspective, the more that the Trump administration takes that role, the more that the Trump administration decides to use that leverage, the less other countries want to trust it. And this is why I think many people uh like Dudney and Iikinbury, people who felt that the liberal international order was a wonderful thing. why they are uh extremely despondent about the world because they see from their perspective the United States has uh effectively having thrown away this massive advantage because if you are uh self-restrained in this way you actually are able to encourage much richer much deeper integration with other countries and everybody ends up better off as a result >> you've called what we're doing the initification of American power tell me about that idea >> okay so this is a term which we are taking very directly from Cory Doctoro who is a science fiction writer and general thinker who is uh also I guess a a shitster since we have used the sword already and so he uh uses this to talk about the way in which the platform economy works and so more or less his argument is that the platform economy typically platforms start out as being absolutely awesome uh you have these wonderful uses which you can make of Google search and whatever it is beautiful you have incredible access to information uh but Over time, the platform has these incentives to uh get shittier and shittier and shittier uh for the uh user. It basically uh it it begins to see uh the ways in which the users are not the customers. The customers are of course the advertisers and so you find for example if you're using Google these days uh you uh look up a restaurant, Google does not want you to go to that restaurant's homepage.

[00:14:24]It wants you to click on some affiliate link to Door Dash or somebody else. So you order via Google rather than uh via the uh restaurant. So our argument is that uh if you look at the ways in which United States power and United States hedge money works, it's kind of like a similar system. Uh that is that we are seeing the increased initification of all of these platforms that the United States provides that the world relies on. So the dollar clearing system we've already talked about the way in which the US is able to use the dollar in order to leverage its advantage against other countries. We can also think about weapon systems as being uh very similar.

[00:15:02]Once you buy uh for example a fifth generation fighter uh aircraft, you are not just buying the aircraft. You're buying into this extensive platform which you need to support the aircraft to provide the information that uh allows you to uh figure out where to uh target uh things. all of these other bits and pieces and the United States can possibly shut that off. So this is one of the big dilemmas that Canada faces I think is that Canada is very very deeply bought into these platforms.

[00:15:32]Uh Canada is more deeply integrated into the United States military structure I think than any other ally and suddenly it's in a world where it has to make some extremely difficult choices. Does it try to withdraw from these military platforms? What kinds of consequences does that have? You know, once a platform becomes inchitified, you're kind of like somebody trying to figure out, do you leave Google or do you stick with Google? Do you leave uh Facebook, do you stick with Facebook? Uh none of the choices that you have are great. I want to hold for a minute on the motivation of initification, which is as I understand um Cory's argument, the very simple way to put inification is that when these tech platforms want to attract people to the platform, they add a lot of value to the user. you are using early Google search, early Facebook, and it really does what you want it to do. You almost cannot believe how good it is for no cost to you at doing what you want it to do. And over the time when you're locked in, and it's very, very hard to get out. They then move from adding value to your life to extracting value from you. they, you know, cover you in ads and they manipulate you and they, you know, draw your attention in and and do all these things that that that that change the bargain. And that Trump and the people around him seem to have seen the the liberal world order under American leadership as something kind of similar.

[00:16:57]That now it is so hard for other countries to extricate themselves from it, from us, that you can begin to squeeze them. And to not squeeze them is to leave money, tribute, power on the table. You could maybe make Canada the 51st state. You could maybe have Greenland. You can certainly get all of these countries to give you better trade deals to put money in your pocket.

[00:17:22]But that's all built on this theory that they can't leave.

[00:17:28]So how good is that theory? It's somewhat good and it's somewhat not good. So I think that the United States did not set this up as a deliberate uh kind of honey trap. This is not a world in which the United States decided we are going to pull everybody in and then once we pull everybody in, we are going to figure out ways to uh screw the maximum amount of uh money and tribute out of them that we possibly can. So I I think I but I do think that this very much is the way in which Trump and the people around him view the world. they they do see this as a world in which the United States bluntly ought to uh be getting tribute. So I had this I remember uh 15 years ago I had this big fight with the late David David Greyber uh which was about whether or not the world economy was a tribute system and uh he was saying absolutely it is and I was saying nope it was not. And I kind of feel like the uh last year or so uh Donald Trump has been doing everything he can to possibly to prove that it is a tribute system and to try and figure that out. Now there are limits because the more that you do this, the more that uh other countries uh begin to try and figure out ways to use what the uh late political scientist uh James Scott uh calls the weapons of the week. So they begin to resist in different ways. I do think we're beginning to see some of that happening. Uh the more that you use it as well, the less other countries are going to be willing to buy into the stuff that you offer. And I think one of the really interesting test cases that is coming up is AI because we see uh if if you look at the political economy of AI, the Trump administration's approach to AI seems to be to uh offer it as freely and widely as possible in the expectation that everybody is going to be so impressed with the uh ways in which uh US AI companies have powered ahead that they will have no choice but to become dependent upon it. And then presumably after that at some point the US is able to use this as a new means of power. It is effectively in control of another of the great infrastructures of the world. And I'm going to be really interested to see whether countries actually I'm sort of shrug their shoulders and go for it or whether or not they decide that actually it makes better sense for them to build their own platforms even if these platforms are worse because at least these platforms are theirs and cannot be used against them. I want to pick up on the debate you had with Greyber for a minute because the idea that this liberal rules-based world order was something of a sham has been around for a long time and it's something Carney talks about in his speech. I want to play this clip for you. We knew the story of the international rulesbased order was partially false. That the strongest would exempt themselves when convenient that trade rules were enforced s asymmetrically.

[00:20:18]And we knew that international law applied with varying rigor depending on the identity of the accused or the victim.

[00:20:25]This fiction was useful and American hegemony in particular helped provide public goods, open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security and support for frameworks for resolving disputes.

[00:20:39]>> Tell me what you make of that story he's telling there. So I think that story is exactly right and uh in a certain sense this is the story that people I think have known suchce that they have known that this is in fact the true story. The United States has always had a opt out option uh to all of the arrangements it's made. It has uh always been uh willing to uh either implicitly or sometimes explicitly pull out when it feels that its national interests are being significantly hampered by some collective deal or arrangement. Equally at the same time as Carney says the services that the United States has provided are useful. So this is uh the ways in which you might think about a rational hgeimon actually working which is on the one hand you provide collective goods. some of these collective goods and sort of cost you significantly. You probably pay for more of them than the uh other countries that you're protecting but at the same time you get more out of the system as well because you are able to shape the system according to your particular needs, desires and wants. So I think that the interesting thing about what Carney says is uh not that this is something which is profoundly new. I and other academics uh my colleague Martha Fineore have talked about the incredibly important role of US hypocrisy in uh securing the order for a long while. This is not new but the fact that Carney is uh prepared to say this bluntly, plainly and openly.

[00:22:10]This is new and this suggests that uh whatever order Carney wants to build and I think that there are still some question uh marks open about how to build it. it is uh going to be different than the order that was before which is not to say that it would not have its own hypocrisies its own uh areas of self-interest because that is a fact of international politics but that it is a recognition that the United States has gone beyond the realm of hypocrisy into the realm of uh pretty naked we want you to do uh what we want you to do and if you don't do this we are going to punish you. But I guess if you're somebody in Trump's orbit and when I listen to Trump at at Davos in a very strange speech and I listen to him more broadly, what he always says is look how much we've done for you. Look at how much of the burden of collective security we've borne and and these things that that Carney mentions uh open sea lanes, a stable financial system, collective security, but the American political system is still guaranteeing those in that leaked signal chat uh where you saw, you know, JD Vance and Hexath and everybody debating whether or not to to to bomb to OpenC channels again. One thing Vance says uh in thinking about this you know fight against what would be the Houthis is that he can't stand that America is again doing something on behalf of Europe and they're not paying any of the cost. So you know from the MAGA perspective American hegemony is still providing these public goods we just want a fairer deal for it. So I'd think that the way that you would respond to that is that the United States does pay a disproportionate amount of the cost and this has always been a problem with the US and NATO in particular. I think that there was bipartisan agreement around this but also the United States has gotten a disproportionate amount of many of the benefits from it and also uh when it comes to things like NATO it has been the uh actor which has been able to set the agenda. Uh, you know, there's a a saying in uh Ireland, he who pays the piper calls the tune. And the United States has been capable of calling the tune. The Trump calculation seems to be that uh we can stop paying and we can use our awesome terror and wrath in order to uh provide a kind of substitute in order to keep on being able to be a uh a substantial power internationally.

[00:24:42]uh and I don't think that that actually works because its resources are limited.

[00:24:46]If it is fighting a war in this place, it is uh deploying the resources that cannot be used in other places instead of that. And we also have seen this uh with Venezuela. It's very clear that they had to pull in a lot of resources from other places that meant that there were other things that they weren't able to do in the world at the time. And there's also this weird kind of disconnect that I see uh for example the national security strategy which on the one hand does seem to suggest that the United States wants to withdraw from some of uh its uh role as global hegeimon. It wants to focus on really controlling the uh western hemisphere and sort of the uh notorious so-called donro doctrine. But at the same time I think the United States still wants to be recognized as the 800B gorilla in the jungle. It wants all of the awesomeness and wonderful things which come with that. And you can't do both at once. You can't both withdraw from the world and expect the world to continue to treat you as a hedgeimon at one and the same time. And this is the fundamental dilemma that I think a lot of the Trump administration uh thinking about these things uh tries to skirt around and doesn't do successfully. Something I noticed in Carney's speech is he uses the word American only once and the word hegeimon or hegemany four times and the only time he uses American is to specify American hegemony. Is that who we are to Canada now to to the world the hegeon? I think so. And uh so it and also it should be I should say Canada has always had a slightly weird relationship with the United States. I spent two years at the University of Toronto and it is a wonder you know I I had a wonderful experience there but it also felt to me a little bit like my native country of Ireland back in the 1970s and 1980s which was uh effectively joined into the uh economy of a much bigger neighbor the United Kingdom. and this feeling of on the one hand uh you sort of recognition that this was the way that things were but also a significant amount of resentment at this uh fact of basic dependency. So I think that uh that has always been there. What I think is different is the sense that the dependency is not on a uncaring giant to the south who uh is going to do things that are not in your interest because it simply doesn't know or care or recognize. I think that there is a worry and a fear that the United States genuinely has malign ambitions towards Canada. Even if those malign ambitions are not directly to be uh acted on in the uh near future, uh the United States is now actually a risk and a threat to Canada in a way that it wasn't. The >> one of the first things Donald Trump did when coming into office was slap huge tariffs on Canada and on Mexico.

[00:27:40]And in doing so, he elected Mark Carney.

[00:27:43]Carney and, you know, the party he's part of, Trudeau's party, were going to lose the next election. They were running far behind a sort of more Trumpist right-wing populist. And then Trump stopped these tariffs on Canada, created a nationalistic backlash in Canada. And I think very clearly like through the election to to Carney now creating this you know figure who is beginning to be one of the the leaders who opposes him on the world stage which is to say that there it's not just that we are economically integrated but but highly politically integrated and that the the way Trump is acting is causing backlashes and political turbulence in other places often in ways that help Trump's opponents by uniting the country against us.

[00:28:36]I'm curious how you think about that dynamic of all this. So, it's a very clear dynamic uh and it also is something that you saw over the last few days in uh Europe. So, when we began to see the uh Trump uh Greenland crisis really come to a head, that's something we uh actually haven't talked about yet, which is >> Oh, we're getting there. Don't you worry, Henry. Yeah. uh but but you saw a lot of uh very clear nervousness coming from uh people like Nigel Farage who uh clearly do not want to be in a world where Trump is making these moves because if you think about this from a nationalist perspective and all of these parties which are to some extent uh to some extent I'm sort of uh sympathetic to Trump they are all nationalists in one way shape or form all of them uh clearly because they're nationalists they are strongly attached to things like uh territorial sovereignty don't touch me and whatever. And the Trump administration's perspective seems to be uh not necessarily to want to grow these parties, you know, sort of in in a uh in a clear way. I think JD Vance absolutely would love to do that. But I think Trump's uh perspective very often is a much more shortterm are these people is doing a deal with them in my interest or is it not my interest? And you saw this, I think most uh prominently, of course, was Venezuela, you know, where the Venezuelan right clearly sees Trump as a savior who's going to come in and provide them with the backing that they need. And the Trump administration's attitude seems to be these people aren't powerful enough.

[00:30:05]Let's make a deal with some element of the uh existing regime and see where we go with that. I want to play you a bit of Trump's address at Davos, which which was, I thought, a very unusual, rambling, unfocused uh piece of rhetoric, but I want to play you the part where he focused on Europe, both America's relationship to it and his.

[00:30:27]>> The United States cares greatly about the people of Europe. We really do. I mean, look, I I am derived from Europe.

[00:30:35]Scotland and Germany, 100% Scotland, my mother, 100% German, my father, and we believe deeply in the bonds we share with Europe as a civilization. I want to see it do great.

[00:30:53]That's why issues like energy, trade, immigration, and economic growth must be central concerns to anyone who wants to see a strong and united West because Europe and those countries have to do their thing. They have to get out of the culture that they've created over the last 10 years. It's horrible what they're doing to themselves. They're destroying themselves. These beautiful, beautiful places. We want strong allies, not seriously weakened ones. We want Europe to be strong.

[00:31:23]>> How would you describe Trump's view of Europe?

[00:31:25]>> So Trump's view of Europe is and you know there it's sometimes hard to tell what is Trump's view. What are the views of other people in his administration?

[00:31:34]Because I think that there is a very very complicated relationship but I think that uh here we see the JD Vance version of the argument really coming to the four. So the idea is here that uh we are together in some kind of a civilization implicitly or semi-explicitly. This is a civilization of white Christian people and uh we need to make sure that this civilization is strong and this civilization is being weakened because Europe is weak because Europe is allowing all of these uh hordes of uh people who have different skin colors who are very often Muslim.

[00:32:09]It is allowing them to come in. And so we are going to see the Europe that we know is going to be a fun it's going to fundamentally disappear over the next generation to two generations.

[00:32:19]>> Civilizational eraser.

[00:32:21]>> Yes.

[00:32:21]>> The Trump administration uses in its national security strategy document is that Europe faces I think it's quote civilizational eraser.

[00:32:30]>> What do they mean by that? What they mean is that Europe is going to move from being a white Christian or maybe post-Christian because of course not very many Europeans go to church anymore. Uh but but a place which is recognizably similar at least if you look at at a photograph to uh the ideal of what the Trump administration would like the United States to uh look like.

[00:32:54]It's going to move away from that to being a uh a system in which there is a majority non-white Europe uh non-white non-European uh non-European observe back to 10 generations uh population and that this is going to be uh fundamentally something which is going to uh destroy uh their notion of what European civilization is. So the idea here is that the important alliance the affinity is not between you know two land masses but between two civilizations and the Trump administration doesn't recognize their view of what civilization should be of what America should be and what Europe should be in what they think Europe is becoming. So that's right and I think that this is fundamentally it is a uh push back against liberalism. It is a push back at least against a certain version of liberalism which is about a uh about allowing systems where you have a lot of people with plural identities that this is messy, this is difficult, this is uh but this is also an incredibly important source of growth and of life and of energy and that is something that has to some lesser or greater extent united uh the United States and Europe over the last few generations. You know, the United States has been a country which has had wave after wave of immigration. Many of these waves have been seen as problematic. Um, sort of I was uh, you know, my my uh my equivalent sort of three or four generations ago or five or six generations ago inspired the no nothings. Um, sort of Irish people coming in sort of were seen as being a fundamental civilizational threat.

[00:34:31]Jewish people were seen as being problematic in a variety of ways. We still see >> are by many members of the Trump coalition. Yeah. And uh we and we see this happening of course in Minneapolis at the moment where uh people who you know Somali people are being identified and sort of by the Trump administration as being uh evil, low IQ, a pirate culture.

[00:34:54]Exactly. So this so this so this is not this has never been easy but there has been at least some reasonable degree of consensus and a stronger consensus over the last couple of generations that uh this is a good thing. That is what I think the Trump administration is pushing back against. And it also is going handinhand with uh work by people like Orban in Hungary who uh not only share a similar perspective but also I think have been extremely influential on people such as for example Michael Anton who is one of the uh major ideologues of this uh way of thinking about the world.

[00:35:28]uh you know Hungary has been pushing something like this version of how we need to have a a Europe which is uh illiberal uh but uh uh you know democratic as long as you describe as long as you have uh the right description of who the majority who the people are who the system is actually supposed to respond to and these are the white native people these are not the people who are coming in >> so there's this dimension of the Trump administration's contempt for European government and leadership as it exists and then there's this side but increasingly central fixation on Greenland. Why does Trump or his administration but it seems at least partly him want Greenland so much? So there are a lot of different theories about that and I think it's really hard to know what goes into his head. I mean he you know this could be a specific fixation as some people have argued uh based on the fact that Greenland looks really big in the standard map projection of the world. This could also be other people have speculated that this is something that uh various Silicon Valley type people have been arguing for a while. people I think uh but I think that this is them trying to uh in a certain sense retrofit a story have said that there is a ton of critical minerals of one sort or another on Greenland that is going to become more accessible as global warming continues. I don't have a very strong sense of what is actually driving this uh this uh real obsession that Trump seems to have had. Uh it is it is also I think interesting however that he actually seems to have backed off on this obsession uh rather quickly uh once he got real opposition. One argument I've been hearing from more Trump aligned figures is that what we just saw play out was classic art of the deal.

[00:37:25]Trump went in with an aggressive negotiating position on Greenland. Maybe he would use force. He would certainly consider using tariffs. He scared the hell out of the Europeans and he came out with this framework of a deal that gave under, you know, America under the new telling of the Trump administration everything we wanted, you know, at a cost of of nothing. How do you think about that that justification of Trumpism that this is all just negotiating and it's just allowing him to get better deals than a more polite president would? So, this is just I think a complete uh delusional uh delusional argument. I don't think that there is any reasonable way in which you can actually say that Trump got substantial advantages from whatever is going to come out of this that he would not have gotten otherwise. So as best as we can tell uh this is a deal which is being negotiated via uh NATO and this is going to probably involve some kind of a deeper basing agreement which allows I'm sorry the uh administration more control over bases in the Arctic area. It also provides perhaps some protection of mineral rights against being bought uh by China or Russia or others. These are not things that uh would have been difficult to negotiate for. These are things that I think the Danish government and the Greenland and sort of autonomous uh government would have been willing to give probably no matter what right at the beginning of the situation.

[00:38:52]So we have here, you know, Trump prides himself on the art of the deal. One important part of the art of the deal is being willing to stick to deals so that people are willing to make them with you. And uh this is I think another example of you know in a sense some sort of how it is that Trump by keeping on pushing pushing pushing. He uh creates a world in which nobody is willing to trust that he is going to stick by a deal that he actually makes. And so uh you your uh strength then becomes whatever temporary concessions you can win and uh that uh you and and over the longer term people are less and less willing to actually do deals with you.

[00:39:32]>> I want to play you something again from from Carney which felt in a way like his version of a warning to America.

[00:39:41]>> And there's another truth. If great powers abandon even the pretense of rules and values for the unhindered pursuit of their power and interests, the gains from transactionalism will become harder to replicate.

[00:39:58]Hegeimons cannot continually monetize their relationships.

[00:40:04]Allies will diversify to hedge against uncertainty.

[00:40:08]They'll buy insurance, increase options in order to rebuild sovereignty.

[00:40:13]Sovereignty that was once grounded in rules but will increasingly be anchored in the ability to withstand pressure.

[00:40:21]>> This seems to me to connect to what just happened with Greenland, which is I think the Europeans began to realize that if they keep giving Trump what he wants, he's never going to stop taking.

[00:40:31]So they began to raise the the price. It became clear he would face real opposition.

[00:40:36]What what Carney I think is arguing here is that the more America acts like this the higher the cost of acting like this will become. Is he right? I think he is.

[00:40:48]I think he is. So I think we are going to see a world in which there are going to be a lot of people who want to hedge their bets who uh want to uh who are going to be much more skeptical about deep integration with the United States in ways that could allow the United States to take advantage of them. So this is something that Carney pretty clearly and explicitly acknowledges.

[00:41:10]This is going to be uh not just expensive for the United States, it's going to be expensive for the countries that are doing it as well. Canada, if it wants to do this, is going to be poorer.

[00:41:21]It's going to have to build its own platforms. It's going to have to try and figure out ways that it can uh insulate itself. And insulating itself is going to mean forgoing a lot of the advantages of a globally integrated uh economic system in favor of uh going it alone.

[00:41:38]And so here this is I think Carney talks about middle powers working together.

[00:41:43]His ambition is to create a world in which we have Europe, Canada, uh perhaps Japan and South Korea, although they are uh more dependent on the US in some ways uh for security, uh working together and trying to figure out some way to build a minimal system in which they can all have each other's backs. Uh you know, the question is of course, is that going to be adequate to the uh challenges that they face? And I don't think it is. Is it going it alone or is it balancing hegeons against each other? You know quite publicly right before Davos Carney made a deal with China lowering the tariff on Chinese electric vehicles.

[00:42:25]He made a deal with Qatar that in a very public way I think what he is saying and and and threatening and even advising other countries like Canada to do is to make clear to America that if they're an unreliable partner well over there is China. Well, it's very very clear that this does go together with uh making deals with China for example on uh things like electric cars where uh the United States has seen these connected electric vehicles as being both a security and an economic threat and carne is saying we are going to have more imports uh whether the United States likes it or not but I think that's one possible way in which uh other countries can respond which is hedging between the fact that there is a rising power which is China and the United States. A second is uh going it alone to a greater degree. That is building your own independent resources.

[00:43:17]And the third is uh building up the capacity for deterrence. So in a certain sense thinking about this as if we were back in the cold war when the United States deterred attacks against it by having uh you know the nuclear button.

[00:43:31]Uh the USSR similarly deterred attacks against itself um but by having its own nuclear and other forces. And we may be moving back into a world in which whatever kinds of uh commercial peace we have may depend upon the capacity of other countries than the United States to begin to uh leverage these counter threats so that uh people like Trump back off when uh they are pushing too far. One of the I don't know if it's an irony or a failure of the Trump administration's foreign policy is that to the extent Trump had in my view a distinctive foreign policy when he kind of came into power in 2016, it was that he so broke with the Washington consensus on China. He was so much more anti-China than you know the either the Republican or the Democratic party was at that time.

[00:44:25]and he, you know, began to move in the second term the trade war with the world into a trade war with China. He then backed down from that. But he also seems to be driving other countries into China's arms. That China becomes the only way to in a sense both punish the US but also balance against it. Now, that's dangerous because then you're dependent on China. But Trump seems to be ushering in a much more multi-olar world by making it much more dangerous for our traditional allies to be dependent on us on our technology companies. I think the uh experience of the European Union with Starlink and Elon Musk has become very sobering. Do you really want to be dependent on, you know, an an internet platform run by such a mercurial and highly politicized American, you know, billionaire?

[00:45:21]You know, I sometimes joke that it's hard to know what a like a Chinese secret agent who rose to high levels of American power would be doing aside from this, but it really does seem to me that he has strengthened China's geopolitical position almost immeasurably.

[00:45:36]>> I think so. So the uh carney bet I think seems to be that it is much better to have some reliance upon a predictable authoritarian who is several thousand miles away than an unpredictable uh person with authoritarian tendencies who is right across the border from you. And that is not an entirely stupid uh calculation by any means. Equally as you say it does involve its own risks. And the other interesting thing which I still don't have a good sense of what is driving it is the extent to which the uh within the administration the China hawks have uh pretty comprehensively lost. So you have seen various people being kicked out of the national security council. Uh there was news suggesting that people in the bureau of industry and uh and security which is a part of the department of commerce that deals with export controls. They had a special unit which was devoted to uh looking at the uh development of Chinese technology and the people from that unit have effectively being pushed out. And so I think we are seeing on the one hand this uh you know the the counterproductive policies that the United States has which makes it very very easy for Xi who is not under any uh anybody's understandings a particularly nice or benevolent individual. it is much easier for him to seem like the predictable somewhat safe alternative and on the other hand there does seem to be this pursuit of the deal or pursuit of something which is really reshaping the internal organization of the uh Trump administration and pushing people who are skeptical about China the people who might perhaps have been linked to Matt Potinger in the Trump one administration those people are losing and I I I really don't have a good understanding of what exactly is happening aside the administration to make that happen.

[00:47:25]>> One of the framing devices in Carney's speech comes from Vaklav Havl, the famed Czech dissident who later became president. And and let me play this part for you. In 1978, the Czech dissident Vaslav Havl, later president, wrote an essay called the power of the powerless. And in it, he asked a simple question. How did the communist system sustain itself?

[00:47:50]and his answer began with a green grosser. Every morning, this shopkeeper places a sign in his window. Workers of the world unite. He doesn't believe it.

[00:48:02]No one does. But he places a sign anyway to avoid trouble, to signal compliance, to get along. And because every shopkeeper on every street does the same, the system persists not through violence alone, but through the participation of ordinary people in rituals they privately know to be false.

[00:48:25]>> Tell me about what Hav meant by that story and and what Carney is saying or suggesting and invoking it.

[00:48:32]>> Okay, so the way in which I think about Havl's story is to uh introduce another academic. I'm a professor. So uh professors I guess have professional uh guild responsibilities. So it's a book by a guy uh called Timmer Kuran who's a uh somewhat conservative libertarian professor in Duke uh called uh private truths public lies. And so the argument more or less is that this is uh you can think about political society and authoritarian regimes as being like a collective action problem where if everybody knew how much uh the uh regime was hated, everybody could rise up against it. And uh so the regime has a lot of incentive to disrupt that kind of shared collective knowledge of how much the regime is loathed. And one way in which it does it is by introducing uncertainty. If you have everybody having those uh those pictures of the dear beloved leader in the shop window, then everybody is uh unsure about whether everybody else is actually as willing to uh act against the uh beloved leader as in fact they might be. So you're in a certain sense you're creating this uh corroded public understanding and by doing that you're preventing collective action from happening. So I think what Carney here is suggesting is that we have something similar with respect to the way that people talk about US hedgeimonyy right now. On the one hand we have uh people who really hark back to the good old days and who still are a little bit paralyzed. They don't know what to say.

[00:50:03]On the other hand we have people who are frankly calculating that their best uh approach is to be craven to put the uh sign out in the shop window. So we have here um the uh head of NATO calling uh Trump daddy and saying that you know more or less daddy has to come back in and to uh fix things and it's very clear I don't think that anybody thinks that uh the head of NATO actually believes this but he is I'm sort of putting out his uh picture and he is demonstrating his devotion by so doing. So and this means I think there's something interesting and weird that happened at Davos. So my sense of this and uh I wasn't there uh is there are a couple of things which have happened. One is that I think that a lot of Europeans in particular they have not been directly exposed to the way in which Trump talks and thinks about the world. So I think people here in the United States are pretty used to it. But from talking to Europeans a lot over the last year I think they just don't have any understanding of how incoherent how disconnected his way of thinking and talking about the world is. I think that speech actually was kind of shocking uh to a lot of people who simply hadn't realized how bad it had gotten. Also, we saw the uh backing down on Greenland.

[00:51:17]And I think this is creating a uh greater degree of public uh consensus uh to some extent among uh the uh among these people who are in some ways Trump's natural allies that there is something deeply wrong that we do actually need to start moving against us. And one should remember that when Havl was thinking about these things, it took a uh couple of decades from Havl being a uh a uh grumpy velvet underground underground fan who was trying to work with other dissident to actually getting to be uh the uh president of uh the Czech Republic. That was a you know that was a long and extremely painful period and it was also a period where there was obviously a lot of push back against Havl and other dissidents who were targeted who were punished who were humiliated. So I I you know my the way that I think about this is that uh the uh international you know I think that the willingness to completely capitulate is uh probably not as strong as it was. But we are perhaps moving into the uh one battle after another realization that uh if you actually want to do stuff about this you you ought to do it but it is going to be difficult. It is going to be hard and it is going to be uncertain. my sense of Davos and why it felt unusually important this year given that it's usually treated correctly with contempt and why Carney's speech was so significant and Trump's speech was so significant Trump coming in with the threat of at that point by the way also force yes >> to take Greenland I mean he then disavowed that in his speech but but initially that was something they were keeping on the table threatening the tariffs And then you had so much of the world's power elite, the European leaders, business elite, all gathered together, the people creating AI, the people, you know, in charge of of great industries to try to work out in this moment of, as Carney keeps calling it, rupture, what was really what is really going on.

[00:53:26]And then Carney comes in and says publicly in the voice of a very sober world leader and a very card carrying member of that global elite, right? A former central banker, right? Carney is not some wildeyed radical. He is as Davos as Davos can possibly get.

[00:53:44]It created a moment of collective admitting collectively admitting what was already in some ways known but inconvenient to to see right when a when a marriage or something goes bad often what has happened has already happened but then there's a moment where the participants see it and Davos seems to have been a moment both because of what Trump was doing and then in some ways Carney creating a point of coordination in which people who saw it but weren't admitting it admitted it. People who maybe weren't seeing it saw it. And it feels like we've moved through a sort of a portal of of understanding what that means in terms of action after it is not obvious to me at all. But I think it's hard to imagine going back to the pretenses that were operating before. And and by the way, that Trump has been trying so hard to destroy himself.

[00:54:43]>> Yeah.

[00:54:44]>> Right. This is not like something Carney did to Trump.

[00:54:47]>> In some ways, Carney and Trump are I think quite agreeing on the nature of what America now is and forcing everybody else to agree with it too.

[00:54:58]>> Yeah. And I think that the way that I would maybe reframe what you're saying very slightly and a little bit more abstractly as I say I am a professor is that uh what we are seeing here is you know there is an agreement about what America is but where there is disagreement is whether or not America can continue to be that and can continue to play the uh oversized uh role that it has played in the world. So uh and you know here you know so I think and I should also say because I don't think I said it it was a fantastic speech uh you know as speeches go speech >> yeah carney speech as speeches go this was uh not simply a uh emperor's new clothes moment it was an extremely well-crafted rhetorical way of uh both on the one hand pointing to the uh pointing to what was happening now but on the other hand explicitly admitting and I don't think that it would have had nearly as much force if it hadn't admitted this, explicitly admitting that a lot of what had preceded this during the so-called good old days had perhaps not been as good as they looked. So, I do think that you're right, you know, if if there is, you know, in a certain sense, Carney speech, it's about a rupture, but it's also clearly a very visible effort to try to create public recognition around that rupture from which other stuff can perhaps begin to happen. But whether or not that stuff is going to happen, you know, it really, you know, you you recognize that there is a that there is a fundamental difference in the world and you also create collective knowledge that everybody knows that everybody knows that uh there is something different in the world and that provides something to build from but it is an extremely uncertain uh foundation. Uh the other thing that I think is really interesting here is the uh this so-called board of peace that Trump is building up uh which uh does seem to me uh to be doomed to failure. And you can think about this very cynically. You could think about this as being and I I do think that this explains maybe 80% of it. It's a little bit like uh True Social uh which is his uh pet social media service in the United States which is a platform wrapped up in a special purpose vehicle which is intended to uh profit him and the people around him but it also is I think a kind of a bid for a different kind of legitimacy. So my co-author Abe Newman who I've mentioned uh together with Stacy Goddard has this piece which they wrote recently on what they call neo royalism which is effectively arguing that what Trump and people around him are trying to do is to create a different kind of international system which is based around clan loyalties and based around people recognizing that legitimacy does not come from the fact that they are states but comes from their relationship to Donald Trump. So I think in a certain sense you could see the Carney speech as pointing towards an uncertain future and you could see the Trump approach of the board of peace as pointing towards a project which I think is going to be extremely difficult for them to actually pull off in which uh the power of the world shifts to uh you know shifts to people like Trump shifts to other authoritarian regimes and shifts in a sense to recognition of who are the uh big powerful individuals and those connected to them and uh in a certain sense to a kind of the creation of a dark davos. In other words, you take, you know, the idea is you take this consensus, which is this consensus, which is really an elite consensus, and you try to push it towards a very different form of power, which is much more based around sort of the uh, you know, the the recognition of personal relationships, creations of family dynasties, all of these things that we haven't seen since the 15th or 16th century.

[00:58:51]The Havvel story reminds me of something that you've written about building on the late political scientist Russell Harden and you wrote there that power in modern societies depends on social coordination. That is just as true of aspiring authoritarians like Trump as of the people who want to mobilize against him. Tell me a bit about this idea of power as a coordination problem both for you know the authoritarian or the hegeimon and for those trying to create some kind of alternative.

[00:59:21]Okay. So here the idea and I I should say this is building upon other people's arguments is pretty straightforward. So if you think about a transition in political order and you can think about this in the US context, you can think about this in the global context. It is a it is really an effort to try and recreate collective knowledge, collective wisdom, collective consensus, everybody's understanding of the way things work around a different pattern, a different approach of one sort or another. And so this creates advantages and disadvantages for people like Trump uh who in a certain sense you know they want to recreate the system around themselves and around their own desires.

[01:00:01]Their advantage is uh if they are in charge as the United States uh is in a certain sense, it does have power in the global system. If you're in charge, I'm sure as Trump is domestically, if you're capable of getting goons to do your uh stuff for you, you are able to frighten and to terrorize people and you're also able to offer people incentives to get on board. Uh so what you want to do is to create a world in which everybody knows that the uh sensible strategic thing is to uh join the Trump coalition.

[01:00:32]You want to create a world in which this becomes just the general consensus.

[01:00:36]Everybody knows that this is what you want to what they what they ought to do if they actually want to prosper and succeed and have any chance. And so you um sort of you you try to organize the world around this. Equally, the problem that you face is that the uh more that you're capable of using this violence, uh the more that you're capable of using these uh tools, the more that people will be nervous that if they sign on to your side of the uh bargain, they are going to uh perhaps delay their punishment, but they're going to end up being uh comprehensively uh screwed over at some later stage in the process. So, that is the strategic dilemma that you're trying to solve. You're trying to on the one hand bring people in. On the other hand, you're trying to reassure them that if they are brought in uh that they are not themselves going to become victims some way down the line. Uh the other side of the thing that uh both the world and that uh that that the uh opposition in the United States have going for them is that uh Trump is not particularly good at this game of uh at this game of sort of persuading people on board and then sort of persuading them that they will sort of get what they want out of him. He is in a certain sense you know sort of his short-term transactionalism I think works very heavily against him. Uh and I think you see this for example sort of the best example I think I I see of this is the law firms. So you see this one firm Paul Weiss which signs on uh very early it crumples and sort of gives in uh in a way that uh encourages other law firms to give in as well. But once it gives in it discovers that the deal that it thought it was signing up to is not the deal that Trump thinks that he wants to have. And it's very clear that uh it then becomes uh it finds itself in a situation where it is going to get squeezed and squeezed and squeezed and squeezed >> and reputationally destroyed >> and reputationally destroyed. you know, sort of young associates presumably do not want to go with the firm who capitulated uh and you find yourself in an extremely difficult position. And this wins short-term benefits for the Trump administration, but it wins those benefits at the cost of uh undermining its long-term ability again to commit in a certain sense to restrain itself. And uh that is the one thing that is Trump's fundamental weakness is he is incapable of committing to restrain himself in the future. And I think that this is perhaps the single greatest flaw and weakness uh that uh other people can push back against. There's another weakness here too or I think it's a weakness. You you go back to the piece in which Havvel offers up this story and he describes the importance of the sign saying something that is principled. Right? The sign in his story is workers of the world unite and that sign is on the one hand an expression of obedience to the regime but it is also a inspiring or at least unobjectionable slogan. And Hava writes that the sign helps a green grosser to conceal from himself the low foundations of his obedience at the same time concealing the low foundations of power. It hides them behind the facade of something high.

[01:03:52]What always strikes me about Trumpism is the absence of the facade of something high, including in this Greenland idiocy where he starts this particular round by sending a letter to the leader of Norway saying that because you didn't give me the Nobel Peace Prize, which by the way is not given out by the government of Norway, I don't have to worry so much about peace anymore. I'm just going to do what America needs and and I want Greenland.

[01:04:23]The pure like brutish, narcissistic, gangsterish, it made him look terrible.

[01:04:29]And and much of Trump's transactionalism has that quality where it is claiming this honesty and its corruption and its venality, right? Everybody is like this. I'm just the one who's willing to admit it. But it also creates this vulnerability because actually people aren't all like that and people do cooperate and they do restrain themselves and they do try to exist in relationships with others and they are committed to ideals and values and the fact that it's pay me tribute not workers of the world unite. I mean that's some of where Carney is getting his power here too, right? He is doing something that is somewhat dangerous for him to do, right? He's clearly taking a risk by doing it. He's clearly committing to certain ideals by doing it. And I I do think a weakness of Trumpism is that I don't think people want to live in that world and he doesn't pretend it's a different world than it is. He just, you know, like the mafia boss tells you to to, you know, to pay your tribute and bend the knee or something bad's going to happen. I think that's right. And I think that also, and this is something, you know, so again, getting back into domestic rather than international politics. So one of the key moments in the uh in the fall of the Berlin wall are these protests that happen in Leipzig in a uh East German uh city. And so these protests get bigger and bigger and they begin to create a collective understanding that in fact the regime is wildly unpopular. And so Suzanne Lman who's a political scientist who wrote this classical article on this she argues that what happens one of the key things here is that the uh leipig protesters they seem like normal people they seem like good decent people you would like to have as neighbors you know so they don't seem you know so the East German propaganda is that these are uh evil weird freaks that these are um you know so these are sort of dissident you know they're scruffy they're whatever it's the fact that these look like normal ordinary people that actually make this powerful. So I think what we're seeing in Minnesota is we're seeing uh ordinary people, you know, so it's very very clear that the people who are organizing, the people who are pushing back, they are neighbors. They are people who seem like very straightforward, very ordinary Midwestern people, uh people who are, you know, sort of part of the community.

[01:06:47]And I think that the uh killing of uh of of good I think also I'm sorry you know she does not seem like somebody who is uh strange who is unusual >> domestic terrorist in her language.

[01:06:58]>> Yeah exactly. She is not a domestic terrorist under any reasonable definition of this. So I think so I do think that this becomes more and more of a weakness the more that you have uh people who are out in the streets and sort of dragging people off in cars.

[01:07:14]you're, you know, there people are getting beaten up, cracked ribs. Um, there's this poor, uh, guy who is dragged out in his underwear. I think that this does create >> this child used his bait to trap a family.

[01:07:27]>> This child used >> now in detention.

[01:07:29]>> Yeah. Yeah. and and you know so on the one hand um sort of we do live in a fractured media landscape where people get you know so people are embibing all sorts of uh content which uh supports and reinforces their priors so there are a lot of people who this does not get through to but there also does seem to be evidence from the uh polling uh that in fact I'm sort of these stories are actually connecting with people in a different way so I do think that you know the p a lot of the power of the powerless in a sense comes from the creation of a consensus and uh bluntly speaking a moral consensus a moral consensus that what is happening is wicked what is happening is wrong what is happening is is uh in some fundamental sense evil and I think that uh to the extent that the uh what the Trump administration is doing gets on the wrong side of that either internationally or domestically it does create a way for people to start pushing back There's another framing device Carney uses in his speech that that I thought was interesting where he references a a famous quote of lucidities. I want to play it for you.

[01:08:38]>> It seems that every day we're reminded that we live in an era of great power rivalry, that the rules-based order is fading, that the strong can do what they can and the weak must suffer what they must. And this apherimism of Thusidities is presented as inevitable as the natural logic of international relations reasserting itself.

[01:09:05]>> Tell me about that line from Thusidities. What he was describing and what the lesson of it was maybe then and now.

[01:09:12]>> Okay. So the lesson is very straightforward and it is a very different lesson than many many people take from it. People take this dialogue, this famous dialogue in in Susides as being evidence of a dog eat dog world, a world in which the millions who are desperately pleading that the Athenians not massacre them. Uh you know they they they make this plea and the Athenians tell them you know sort of you know you're tough luck. We're going to sort of massacre your menfolk and we're going to take your women and children away and turn them into slaves. So this is seen as being a kind of a expression of real politique. This is not how Tusides himself talks about it. It's very very clear that the dramatic tension that he is describing here is effectively a description of Athenian hubris. It is a description of Asen's willingness to more or less do whatever the hell it thinks it wants to do, whatever is in its temporary interest in the assumption that it is going to be able to keep on getting away with it. And uh Tusides also he has these uh passages where he describes how this hubris really infects the entire Athenian population. Uh this is in fact a symptom of all that is rotten in Athens. All that is rotten in this purportedly democratic power. how it is that they elect demagogues like Cleon and sort of who guides this uh notoriously unsuccessful expedition in which uh many Athenian uh citizens and so they end up themselves being enslaved and uh the result is the gradual collapse of Athenian hedgemony over the entire miniature empire that it has created. Athens finds itself being occupied by Sparta as it finds its own citizens and sort of being enslaved as I say and also as it becomes uh broken down and becomes effectively uh you know so this happens after uh his lifetime it becomes a secondary power at best even in the Greek citystate system let alone in the Mediterranean world as a whole >> I think that's a good place to end always our final question what are three books you recommend to the audience >> okay so I've got three books one of which is uh directly connected to these questions. It's uh by a woman a historian uh called Mary Bridges called dollars and Dominion. And so it is on the one hand it is not about what is happening right now. is about what what is happening what was happening in the beginning of the 1900s uh when the United States was trying to build up the kind of hedgeimonyy that we've talked about during the course of this show and uh it is really about how the people who are trying to build it up look like some of the people who are acting now I'm sort of in the twilight of this uh period they are uh very self-interested they're kind of venal they're building on their political connections and they also don't have much of a clue of what they are doing. So I think that what I I take from this is on the one hand that uh people you know sort of you know we are in a chaotic world that very often we tend to overestimate the Machavelian cunning of the people who uh we are up against. On the other hand even people who are trying to bumble through they can sometimes actually win they can sometimes actually achieve what they want to achieve. Second book is a book that's not available yet but will be out in the United States I think in maybe two months. It's by uh Francis Spuffford. Uh it's called Nonsuch. Uh so Spuffford wrote this incredible book called Red Plenty, which uh really I and Abe took as one of our models for how do you write a complicate a book about complicated structures uh using uh individuals in order to tell the stories of how that those structures work. This is a very different book in some ways.

[01:12:54]It's a fantasy set during the uh World War II blitz of London. Uh but it's also a book about what is happening right now. And it's a book that has in some really interesting ways uh economic systems and how economic systems uh work woven through the narrative in ways that you don't particularly notice but you actually end up uh learning quite a lot.

[01:13:16]And the final book is a book by Tinuan which has just come out called the score. And it's just a you know I don't even know how to begin to describe this book. It is about uh making pizza. It is about games. It is about the big structures that and sort of that shape our lives and how they don't recognize the knowledge and the wonder and the intimacy uh that we have together and it pulls together these desperate and many other disperate things into this incredibly compelling narrative. It is just a uh you know it is just a ridiculously beautiful book. We live in times when it's very easy to just feel unhappy and desparing and uh I think that this is a book that brings back joy. Henry Frell, thank you very much.

[01:13:57]>> Thank you.