Pushkin from Pushkin Industries. This is Deep Background, the show where we explore the stories behind the stories in the news. I'm Noah Feldman. Today on Deep Background, we continue our special mini series looking at global power, the institutions of power, the people who deploy it, and what it means for the United States in the world. To discuss these issues, I can hardly think of a person more extraordinary than for Read Zakaria. For Reid is known as one of the leading foreign policy intellectuals, not only in the United States but in the world. Not only that, he explains foreign policy to the world as the host of CNN's for Reid Zakaria GPS and the author of a regular column for The Washington Post. Before that, he was a Calmness for Newsweek, the editor of Newsweek International, and editor at large of Time, and the editor of Foreign Affairs. He's written several important and influential books on foreign policy and the US, and today he's agreed to talk about the major challenges that face US foreign policy in the time of the Biden administration, how the US government can and should think about its relationship with China, whether the world is becoming a bipolar place with the US and China on either side, and how power has been transformed over the last several decades. He's also agreed to look a little bit into the crystal ball of prediction and try to figure out how the post COVID era is going to affect foreign policy today. We will go deep and go behind the thinking that led to the arguments in that book. Farid, thank you so much for joining me. Farid. Want to start by asking you to do a job that you've been asked to do many times over the year, which is to imagine yourself as the foreign policies are of the United States. And in the old days we would have said Secretary of State or National security advisor, but today it's not entirely clear where the true power lies. And to think about what are the major foreign policy challenges that are facing the US right now that are facing the Biden administration, and then we'll work our way through that to the question of how American power is faring at this particular juncture. So let me start by asking it to you in the most open ended way possible. What strike you as the largest issues? Oh? Thanks, no, it's a huge pleasure to beyond with you. I'm a fan of the podcast. I think that one way to think about this is to say, what is the sort of central challenge that the United States faces beyond everything else? It was the organized principle, and I would argue it is. The United States has created over the last seventy years a rather remarkable international system, a system quite different from one that existed previously at any point in history, that is marked by a greater degree of international order, norms, rules, even liberal values. It's not perfect by any stretch. There's lots of violations. The US violates at a lot of times. But if you just think in big historical terms, the big shift that's taken place since nineteen forty five is this one. And you know, for example, the annexation of territory by using force is something that used to happen routinely for hundreds and hundreds of years before that. It barely ever happens anymore. The Russian occupation and invasion of Crimea is a rare example to the contrary. So if you say to yourself, sometimes people call this a kind of liberal national order, rules based international order, that is the central achievement of American foreign policy. It is the defining feature of the world we live in right a world in which France and Germany went to war three times between eighteen fifty and nineteen fifty. It's now unthinkable that France and Germany would go to war. So if that is the central achievement of American foreign policy, I would say it is also uniquely threatened these days. It had a good run during the Cold War, it was kind of a half system, then flourished after the fall of the Soviet Union, and now is really threatened. And it's threatened by a number of things. And I would say the central challenge for the United States is how do you stabilize, shore up this liberal world order and help to make it endure into the twenty first century. That's beautifully stated, and it leads us immediately to one of the most visible challenges to this order, and that's China. In part of the time that you describe the Cold War time, the US was in a bipolar world where the US powers on one side and the Soviet power largely on the other. Then in the Postcold War period, some people talked about the world being unipolar, dominated by the United States. Now, the rise of China makes bipolarity extremely probable, And in your fantastic book Ten Lessons for a Post Pandemic World, you have a whole section talking about bipolarity and how while war is not inevitable between the United States and China, some bipolarity is how should the US be thinking about China when it comes to incorporation into this international system of norms and orders, Because just to deepen the question, for about a decade and a half, foreign policy experts said, well, what the US should do is just give China the incentives to enter into this order, and then it will play alongside the United States and it will actually strengthen the order. And sometimes in some areas China appear to be doing at the World Trade Organization being a prominent example. But now it looks as though China is going to behave a little bit more like the US does. Embrace the order when it's useful and then step outside the order when that is useful. Yeah, you make a very important point that I think we often forget that the US often violates this order. I mean, if you look at, for example, even on something like trade, where the US has been the great promoter of free trade over the years over the decades, we violate free trade principles all the time. By the way, all the tariffs against China and the tariffs against Europe are essentially a violation of the spirit of free trade. Many of them invoke entirely bogus national security arguments. We face a national security threat from Germany and Canada and therefore have tariffs on there on their steel and aluminum product. But let me get to your central point, which is which is of course the most important one. So what I try to explain in the book is that most people are going to think, wait, we're not really in a bipolar world. The US is by far the most powerful country, which is true. But really, when you think about systems of international relations, the defining feature of polarity, of you know, whether you're in a multipolar or unipolar or bipolar system is mostly are the two powers in a bipolar system kind of in a league of their own. This is what Hans Morganhou came up with in the late forties. Were accurately figured out that we were entering a bipolar world, even though the Soviet Union, by the way, was at that point probably one third as large as the United States in terms of its global economic impact. The US was roughly forty percent of the world economy. The Soviets were maybe ten or twelve percent of the world economy. So if you look at it in those terms, morganhouse point was, Yeah, the Soviet Union might be only twelve percent, but it's way more than anybody else, you know. In other words, as the US, there's a Soviet Union, and then Britain, which had collapsed, was down to something like three and a half percent of world GDP. This time around, it's clear the US is number one, but China is number two and larger than numbers three, four, and five and six put together, larger than the next four countries put together in economic terms and in defense spending. So clearly these two countries have a kind of weight and heft and reach beyond almost anything. And China, unlike the Soviet Union, really is an advanced economy in many senses. Obviously not on its averages. But give you an example. There are five hundred of supercomputers in the world. The five hundred fastest computers in the world can be distributed thusly two about two hundred and twenty five are in China, about one hundred and twenty five are in the US, and then the rest are Europe, Taiwan and South Korea, Singapore, places like that. So you see that in some very cutting edge areas, China is actually ahead of the United States overall. No question, the US is number one by far, but China is a legitimate number two. So that's why I say bipolarity is inevitable. There is inevitably going to be a sense of rivalry competition between these two countries. There is a structural reality where each is going to think that its loss comes at the others gain and vice versa. But I don't think it's like the Cold War. For reasons you alluded to, the Soviet Union was an ideological and economic political challenge to not just the United States, but to the entire world order the United States had constructed. China is not quite that kind of player. It has readily embraced large parts of that order, not just the trading regime, but the knowledge regime, if you will, I mean the China sense. It's students to the United States. It abides by patent laws. You know, there's all kinds of areas where it is trying to mirror many of the rules regulations and norms that have been put in place. Then there are many areas where it violates, and Pattern is actually a good example where they violate and follow at the same time, similarly with trade. But if you think of the Soviets who actively argued that their goal was a communist world revolution and that funded parties around the world to do that, funded insurgent movements around the world to do that. Mouse China did that, it was funding at least a dozen insurgencies around the world. The Chinese Communist Party today is strikingly about not kind of world revolution and insurrections and things like that, but making China great. In doing that, they are violating a lot of the rules, norms, and values of a liberal international order. So the challenge with China is, I don't think that you face the same kind of Soviet like Cold War threat, but you face a country that is determined to rise and to really cheat in order to rise. And again, to be clear, it doesn't cheat all the time, but when it cheats, it is violating that that road. I would argue, that's why you have to have strong measures of deterrence where you really push back, but then also strong measures of integration, where you say to the Chinese, if you are playing by the rules, we will allow you, for example, to have a larger say in the World Bank or the IMF. Those examples are interesting because basically what happened over the last ten years is the Chinese tried to do that to say, we'd like to integrate. We'd like to be you know, we'd like to be more involved, we'd like to pay more of the bills, we'd like to bear more of the burdens on peacekeeping, on UN operations, but we'd like more of a say, and with something like the World Bank or you know, or the Asian Development Bank. The US largely said no, you can't have more, and so the Chinese went off and said, okay, fine, we'll start our own bank, the Asian Infrastructure Bank. And you know, that's the tension were One of the ways I think about this is to say, we all seem to in the in the United States, be sure we understand when China is overstepping its boundaries, it is exerting too much power and influence South China Sea or bullying Australia. But we haven't figured out what would be an okay level of power and influence for the second richest country in the world to have. It's not going to be what China's role in influence was when it was one percent of GDP, which was only twenty years ago. It's now fifteen percent of GDP. So that's a fifteen full rise in China's raw economic power. Surely there's going to be some increase in its influence, and we haven't figured out how do we allow for that. That's what I mean, that kind of force of integration, which will then give much more force it seems to me incredibility to the pushback, to the deterrence to say no, these are red lines when you're crossing them. But for there to be red lines, it seems to me they also have to be green lines. I love the paradigm that you're offering of deterrence and integration, and I think you couldn't be more correct that if your only stance is deterrence, then there's no positive incentive for integration. But I want to ask in practice what that means for good old fashioned hard power, you know, geopolitical power over other countries, because you know there have been voices, quiet voices for a long time, but louder in recent years, saying that when it comes to that kind of power, the US should squarely be in a model of containment towards China. That basically, every extra move that China gets more powerful in militarily comes at the expense of the US, because the US has been the dominant global superpower and China is rising. And often that view went alongside people saying, but when it comes to economic activity, that's where we can provide positive incentives sometimes because the positive incentives and economics are not thought to be zero sum. So if China gets rich, that doesn't mean that the US gets poorer. To an economist, at least, it's possible for everybody to get rich in a positive some way. But when it comes to geopolitical power, it's closer to a zero sum. It may not be exactly a zero sum, but it's closer to a zero sum. And so one of the schools of thought had been hard line on anything military, but give them green lines and encourage their participation and integrate them on anything broadly speaking economic. Does that seem to you like a plausible way of looking at it, or does that miss the point of how China's rise is actually operated, which is mostly through the economic vector. No. I think that misses the point for a different reason, Noah, which is that if you set yourself up to say that the geopolitical space is entirely zero sum, the problem becomes you condemned the United States to be essentially a world empire. Because what you're saying is if there are any gains not just for China, but for any other country anywhere in the world, that is de facto a loss of American power and influence. But does the United States want to be the dominant geopolitical player in every local conflict everywhere in the world. I mean, we're seeing the United States fatigue from having done that for forty years, I don't know, seventy sixty years in the Middle East, right, we're seeing a certain sense in which even in places like Latin America, the United States is taking a much less forward leaning position. If you think about you know, John Kennedy is a Latin American policy which was basically the United States was going to fund the foreign a in development throughout Latin America. We're not quite in that mode. Do we want to be in that mode? And if we don't want to be in the mode. It gets back to this sort of central architecture we've been talking about. Is there a way to conceive of a world order in which the United States is not maintaining the geopolitical balance in every local area so as to keep the world in some kind of equipoise, or are we willing to accept a certain amount of messiness regional balances things like that. Look what's happened as the United States has withdrawn from the Middle East. Basically you have a power struggle going on between the Saudiast, the Iranians, the Turks, the Israelis. But you know, it hasn't led the United States to say, oh my god, this is unacceptable. We need to be dominating. It's in fact, I think for many Americans, even American strategies, there's a sense of relief. You know, we were never even clear what we were doing, and we weren't clear what our interests world We were making huge expenditures and commitments without being sure we were getting much in return for it. So I think that's in some ways the central problem there is the reality that economics is more win win than security. But you know, one thing that Franklin Roosevelt who is my hero, understood about the you know, creating a world order, which Woodrow Wilson didn't. He admired Wilson greatly. Roosevelt did, but he understood you have to marry kind of power and idealism. You have to give the great powers a reason to be engaged in the international system. And so there has to be something in it for the other big powers in the world. They have to I hate to put it this way, but you know, they have to have some degree of influence. It's not spheres of control, really, But if you're saying nobody gets to have real power and influence other than the United States, then you know, it's very difficult to imagine a world order that that runs on any other principle than US as world hegemon. Here is where the rubber, I think, really meets the road. You're absolutely right that the public sentiment in the United States, if you ask people in polls, is not that the United States should be an empire that dominates decision making everywhere in the world. And Donald Trump's foreign policy, if you can call it a foreign policy, followed that call it intuition, public intuition, and you know, Trump regularly responded to problems in various regions by saying, I don't care, not my problem. We're going to back away from this situation. The Biden administration comes in full of young, smart people who don't see the world that way at all. Many of them are products of Hillary Clinton's time in the State Department, which in turn reflected to some degree Bill clinton foreign policy vision in which people talked about the United States is the indispensable Nation, which is a kind of egomaniacal formulation in a certain way, but which does capture this post Cold War idea that the United States would intervene wherever it was possible to do so to try to maintain something like the international order. Now. I don't think anyone disputes at this point that we overplayed our hand very badly with the wars in Afghanistan any rock, and with respect in the Middle East, I think you're right that there's a tendency to say, let's not get involved in that anymore. And yet when the Israelis and the Palestinians find themselves leaving aside the rights and the wrongs and who started it's killing each other, it's the United States that gets the call still. And that's partly because Israel as a US ally, but it's also partly because there's no other actor who can plausibly go in and sit the sides down and say, Okay, there's going to be a ceasefire now. And I'm wondering whether, as you look at the Biden administration's approach, they should just be saying something more trumpy. They should just be saying, no, we're not going to do that anymore. It sounded a bit like you were saying that that the US should sort of say to regional powers, you know, step up, you take some responsibility here. You want it anyway, so we'll just sort of give it to you. And I wonder if that's I mean, I don't have the sense that a lot of Biden's foreign policy advisors think that way, but perhaps they should think that way. You know, you're right about Trump. But what I think you are neglecting to say is Obama in many ways had very similar instincts on this limited issue as Trump did, particularly in the Middle East. The central drama of Barack Obama's presidency in the Middle East was his refusal to intervene in Syria, despite frankly a majority of his aids wanting him to do so. I happened to think Obama was dead right that if you had had a major US intervention in Syria, it is very difficult for me to see how it would either not Either it would be completely feckless and you would be just prolonging a civil war and actually increasing the casualties without doing having much impact, or you'd go in a big way and it would be a rock all over again. I mean, you had basically an almost identical situation, a minority government that was being pushed, you know, with lots of islam Is there, and the US was being told get rid of the minority government in this case, an Ola Whide government, in the Iraqi case, a Sydney government, and we would have seen a much bigger civil war and we would own it. And Obama is I think, very conscious of that danger, and you know, had this kind of hippocratic view, which is let's first not do any harm. But I think you're right many of his advisers are more in the Hillary Clinton mode, which is more of a kind of reflexive American imperial mode. What I would say to you is, look not so much at the Arab Israeli issue where the US has unique equities causes, you say, of the very close relationship with Israel, but also of the sense on the Palestinian side send me of a certain generation of Palestinians that the USA is trying to broker something and is actually trying in its own way to create a two state solution. Look at the rest of the Middle East. I don't think Biden is getting much involved as far as I can tell. I mean Syria. They you know, as I say, many of those Biden advisors criticized Obama for staying out of Syria. They're staying out of Syria. So I think everywhere you're seeing more of an approach that tries to recognize that the US does not have to be dominating and shaping every one of these balances. It's not just the American people. I think it's the reality that you know, I wrote a book about the post American world, and the central point was that these other countries have become quite strong and powerful. You know, you can't push them around. To my mind, Turkey is in some ways the best example of that. Twenty five years ago, Turkey was a basket case economy run by generals, and every time the United States would tell the Turks to jump, they would ask how high. Today, Turkeys, I think the GDP's has gone up fivefold since then. It is a mature political system. It is a democracy of sorts and imperfect democracy. Its leader is quite popular. He has a very different attitude, right, And I don't think it's just out one. I think any Turkish leader at this point that who was democratically elected, who had the weight of the Turkish economy behind him, is going to be much less willing to simply act as America's stalwart. Ally. Turkey has very complicated interests in that area, and so it pursues them correctly or incorrectly. And I think that's you know, that to me feels like the new world we're in. Look at India, look at Brazil, look at Indonesia. These places are not going to be pushed around in quite the same way. So the US has I think, real power, and that is a gender setting power, and it has real power when it wants to. What I would like to see is in America that played more of that agenda setting role which it uniquely has, and I think that's for all kinds of reasons, a combination of hard and soft power, but only the US that can push forward some big idea on the international stage, whether it's climate change, whether it's even something like this global tax regime. The janet Yellen has just managed to do. It is striking that the US has this power. It should be using it to do stuff like that, to shore up the international system, to make it work, make everybody feel like their equities are being taken into account, and not to go off in one more military intervention hero there, which often tears at this fabric rather than builds it. One of the fascinating sections of your Ten Lessons book was about the question of decline, and you quoted the late grade political scientists Samuel Huntington, always controversial but also always saying something that made everybody think on the idea of there being moments of declinism in US history, and his moments when he was writing were mostly moments of the late sixties through the middle seventies. And you note that we might be in another moment of declinism. Huntington, as you point out, use this phrase to say, we're not really declining. People just think we're declining. You're more measured in the book, and you say, look, this might be a moment of declinism where without actual decline, or it may actually be a moment of decline. I'm wondering how that plays into the picture that you were describing, because the one difference between now and those other times is that there really is another power, namely China, that is in a position to share a substantial part of the power that the US has had now. That existed during the Soviet period, of course, but over time it dwindled, and one of the reasons the US didn't decline is that the Soviet Union declined faster and then disappeared. This time around, China is not in a moment of the client's in a moment of rise. And so I'm wondering if you think that relative to China, we are inevitably somewhat declining, and that that's a reason to push this kind of legacy issue that you're describing, the international order, which after all, was created in part because it was good for the US, and which now maybe is still good for the US as well. Yeah, I mean, it's a fascinating question. So where I find myself coming out is when you look at America, you cannot help but notice it. It's a very complicated country, and the answer to a question is going to be necessarily complicated. There are areas where the United States is incredibly inventive and dominates the world like frankly no other country of our hats think about big tech. If you went back to the nineteen seventies and said what country dominates the world of technology? It would have been a complicated question because the Germans, you know, still we're doing very well. The Dutch in areas like the Phillips and consumer electronics, we're doing very well today. The big technology companies in the world or all American or Chinese, but the American ones, I think I still have a lead, and that reality is, you know, one that does not seem likely to go away anytime soon. On the other hand, in terms of you know, the quality of life for average Americans, median wages, social mobility, all kinds of metrics like child mortality, the United States does wigh worse than most European countries, certainly worse than all Northern European countries, and increasingly worse than places like Singapore, Taiwan, and South Korea. So you know, how to conjure up in America that conveys that full picture difficult. But that's why I rest my argument here or less on where America is in terms of how well it's doing, more in terms of how the rest of the world is doing. I think it's fair to say that whatever you may think of how America is doing, Singapore is doing ten times better than it was twenty five years ago. In South Korea and Indonesia, and India and Chile are all leaps and bounds further ahead than they were. And of course the number one country in that regard is China. As I say, one percent of global GDP twenty years ago, fifteen percent now almost inevitably rising to twenty percent in the next five to seven years. I would say, you know, seven years would be a reasonable number, and in that sense, in relative terms, it would be astonishing of the United States did not decline a little, not a lot. I mean, the truth is, the USS stayed roughly constant for the last twenty or thirty years. It's been sort of between twenty and twenty five percent of world economy. The Chinese have gone up, largely at Europe's expense. The country that has the countries that have declined in those terms, but the US has also declined a bit. I mean, it was closer to twenty five, it's now closer to twenty. It's likely I think they'll go down to eighteen something like that. So I do think that there is a reality here, and the larger reality is also one of political confidence, of cultural pride, of a sense you know. One of the things that I've always been struck by is the degree to which American culture, which used to dominate the world completely, just does not anymore. When you go to mean, if you go to China, there is essentially unknown. I mean, there are five American rock singers, rock stars who are known, and then everything else is Chinese. But even those, you know, Britney Spears or Beyonce or Jay Z, whoever you have, these are like number forty in China. But that's increasingly true everywhere. South Korean television shows dominate East Asia much more than American television shows too, So that maybe one kind of soft indication of what I'm describing. But I really do think that it's this rise of the rest that is the dominating force here, not so much the decline of America. But to put it in terms that you were asking, quite rightly, it does mean a certain kind of relative decline. Even if the raw numbers show a small decline, there's a similar moment in many of these countries. I think we'll be right back, Freed. I want to ask you a question that I hear frequently from what I would call the critical left that looks at international order, looks at liberal internationalism and says that when it works, it just benefits global elites, that it facilitates trade and facilitates great accumulations of wealth. And yes, if you push people, they will say, yes, it's very nice that so many Chinese people came out of poverty. But they say that happened at the expense of the loss of middle class jobs in the United States. And so one of the lines of criticism of the liberal international order is that it hasn't actually serve the interests of ordinary Americans, of middle class and working class Americans, and that therefore, in that approach, continued adherence to it with ideas that you and I tend to like, like free trade countries participating in an international order for intellectual property and so forth, is actually not in the long term interests of ordinary Americans that we need something different, perhaps a little bit more populist, less globalist, less focused on the idea of trade, and a little bit less worried about the fact that we can, through this model, enable poor people in other places in the world to get richer, more concerned about taking care of ourselves. So, first, I think it is worth noting the irony of a movement of people who central claim is that they are most concerned about human poverty, essentially being against a process that has taken the poorest of the poor, the you know, the people living on one dollar a day and move them up. You know, it's easy to regard this as an abstraction. I grew up in India. When you went into my father was a politician. Much of his constituency was rural. When you go into rural India even today, but twenty five years ago, I mean, there are people living there in medieval poverty. And so the idea that this is something to be scoffed at or to be taken lightly, you know, this is extraordinary. Five hundred million people moved from that kind of poverty into a more decent circumstance. You know, three four dollars a day. But I will say, the right wing populist seven don't have that worry about hypocrisy. I agree that part has to deal with that, but if you're a Trump supporter, you can skip over that part, right, you don't care. But but I think it's weird that Bernie Sanders, you know, the man of Workers of the World Unite, doesn't seem to notice this extraordinary benefit that trade and globalization has produced for hundreds and hundreds of millions of incredibly poor people all over the world. It is true, I will I will not pretend that there is no connection between globalization and what has happened to middle class wages in the Western world and in the United States in particular. It is not the whole story, as you well know, a large part of it when economists do the math. A large part of that story is manufacturing has become automated. If you look at America's manufacturing output, it has gone up and up and up over the last twenty years. It's just with fewer and fewer and fewer workers. So when people keep saying we're going to bring back manufacturing to the United says you can bring it back all you want. What you're bringing back is highly automated plans where very few workers work, and where the people who work are essentially advanced software engineers, you know, kind of running the plan. So there is that problem, but globalization plays some part in it, there's no question, and China plays a large part in that story. I have always felt about this the way I do about domestic economics. And again, I grew up in India socialist economy, and so maybe I'm colored by that experience of watching a dysfunctional, decaying, stagnant, corrupt system. There's no question that the market provides much greater efficiency, much greater vitality, allows for innovation, allows for the generation of growth. There's also no question that markets need to be regulated and some of their profits need to be taken and redistributed to provide greater opportunities for people. I think the biggest mistake we've made with regard to trade over the last fifty years is we keep saying that, oh, yes, you know, whether we know there are winners and losers in trade, and we need to make sure that we help the losers adjust, and then we never do it. There's never any money spent it seems to me this is obviously the right answer, which is you keep the motor that generates the dynamism and the wealth and the innovation, but you use the proceeds, the rewards to really try to bolster economic opportunity to really help people move up. Places like Denmark Sweden do this very well, even Germany, which is why they have not had as much of a decline of their manufacturing sectors or as much of a decline of their jobs. So it seems to me the answer is not to go in a Trumpian populist direction, but in a more social democratic European direction. Social democracy properly understood Northern Europe is very free market. In fact, in the Heritage Foundations Index of Economic free Denmark and Sweden rank higher than the United States because they're more free trade that they actually don't have that much regulation, but they take that money and they spend it on the poor, onequality economic opportunity. That seems to me the answer when a country is economically powerful that does have a tendency, not universally, but to create more economic opportunity and therefore more opportunity for well being for ordinary citizens, especially if they do the kind of Nordic redistribution that you're describing. What about geopolitical power? Is there any real reason to believe in this day and age that a country's capacity to exert its will globally necessarily serves the interests of ordinary citizens. You know. Trump seemed to think that it just didn't matter to ordinary Americans if the United States could exert its will globally, because it wouldn't translate into jobs, and it wouldn't translate into anything that would affect their pocketbook, and wouldn't translate into their daily well being. And in contrast, a lot of liberal internationalists, myself included, tend to assume that there are benefits to all Americans knowing that, let's say, our values can be expressed globally, that international institutions that we help design to serve our own interests are out there and are functioning in the world. But I'm not sure that we've necessarily done a very good job of translating that into concrete terms for ordinary people. Yeah, the Trump argument is sort of, I don't see cash coming into my pocket by doing this, so obviously the whole thing is a scam, and therefore what we should just do is you know, Drum would literally say this, even no matter how illogical it was, we should just charge the Chinese for this, or charge the Saudist to defend them, or you know, things like that. The truth is, I think is a much stronger case to be made that the kind of world that the United States has created is profoundly in the interests of an ordinary American. First of all, it produces peace, It produces stability, It produces more general prosperity, a more general adherence to rules and norms, all of which is great if you are a rich, powerful country that you know already has lots of things that you don't want war, you don't want revolution, you don't want massive chaos all over the world. And as you say, there is a certain benefit that we get from having regular open trade by having you know, democratic societies around the world observe the rule of law, observe human rights. Because we're the ones who are most more likely than not to interact, to travel, to trade. I think that the sort of central challenge we face that's more substantive, and this goes back to, you know, where we started is can we build a liberal international order in which we also adhere to the rules more. You know, there's a certain tension here where we tend to think we're the guys organizing the whole system, so we can we can be expected to live by these rules. So when we criticize China for excessive involvement in the South China Sea in violation of the Law of the Seas Treaty, nobody points out the US is not itself a signatory to the Law of the CIA's treaty. When we talk about war crimes again, you know, and we accuse dictators of war crimes, what we are implying is that they're going to be taken to the International Criminal Court in the Hague, and we don't point out we are not a signatory to the International Criminal Court. You know, when we talk about these tariffs or these unfair trade practices, the Chinese have a couple of good accounts have tallied up the number of protectionist measures enacted by any country. The US is off the charts. We're number one by far. So it seems to me our challenges can we find a way to also adhere to these rules and norms more, because that is going to be a more compelling argument as to why the Chinese need to do it as well. You put it very correctly. You know, the start of the show, you said, the Chinese really are not trying to be the Soviet Union in nineteen sixty. What they're trying to be is the United States in nineteen ninety five or two thousand and five, and say, we're big enough now that, yeah, mostly will follow the rules. But whenever we feel like we don't want to follow the rules, we're big enough that we don't need to. And Exhibit A is the United States of America. I want to close for Reid with a challenge that is enormous to everybody and also important to everybody, and that can't be solved without very sophisticated deployment of global power. And that's a climate. Pretty much every country in the world now is prepared to say that we need to reduce emissions in order to maintain the global temperature, but the collective action problem remains just so difficult to overcome. How do you think about the right approach to that? How should the Biden administration be thinking about what it can realistically do, because this is one of those cases where the ideals are shared. The problem is in the practical realities of getting people to overcome their own impulses to develop their economies. So it's the perfect example of why I think we should not go down a path of a cold war with China, because you know, you would have the two most powerful economies in the world that would be engaged in a ceaseless competition. And the central danger, the central cost, it seems to me, is that we will not be able to cooperate on issues where we need to cooperate. And the number one there's climate. You know, if you really do believe the climate is the existential challenge that we need to face up to, you can't do it without the United States and China in some measure of cooperation. This is a problem that actually heart power is very poorly designed to solve because the United States is not going to be able to force countries to do things that are not in its self interest. Right. If you look at a country like India that is essentially building a coal five power plant almost every couple of weeks, still, what is going to make India stop doing that is two things. One, there has to be some economic logic that makes sense for India, some kind of financing structure which allows it to buy slightly more expensive energy. And the second is a regime of global norms and values and rules which say this is really not okay, and you would pay a certain price, even if it's an intelligible price, even if it's a kind of normative price. So you'd need those two things to happen, And for both of those things to happen, you need the United States and China on the same side to generate those norms, to generate the financing, because otherwise what's going to happen is the Chinese will provide financing for dirty energy, which is what a lot of the Belton Road initiative is, we will provide financing for clean energy. Again, this will all get caught up in the more of competition. So it feels to me like there's no way to do this without some substantial degree of cooperation between the United States and China. Europe is already on board. So when you add that all up, you're talking about sixty five seventy percent of the world economy. But it seems to me that there's a larger issue, which is, you know, is there a way for us to find these kind of areas of common opportunity and to say to ourselves, look, there is a reality of common humanity. Are there ways we can try to solve these common you know, these common challenges. It has always been America's historical legacy that we have been able to do this. Maybe it's because I'm an immigrant. I do think one of the distinctive features about America is we think about our national interests like every other country in the world, but we also think about broader global interests, and we try to expense some power and some resources in doing that. So if you're going to say that's important, then it's you know, it's crucial that we not end up with a foreign policy that is solely defined around a kind of nationalist competition against another country, no matter what country, because that has never been the American way. The American way has been to try to create a better world, not simply to keep one country down, no matter how problematic that country is. Freed I want to thank you for your very, very coach intend sophisticated analysis that's tremendously valuable to all of us who try to think about these issues. Thank you so much. Now, this is a huge pleasure. Thank you Listening to Farid's fascinating analysis really brought home the depth to which a foreign policy thinker like Farid has to go in order to produce the analysis and the suggestions that go into much of his public commentary. Behind Fred's analysis lies a complex worldview that sees a combination of foreign policy realism and foreign policy idealism as components of how the United States approaches power and politics. In an important sense, Farid is a globalist. He cares a lot about how people all over the world are conducting their lives and are trying to improve them. He credits China with extraordinary efforts to raise people out of poverty, even as he is concerned about the lack of freedoms that China extends to its own citizens and the ways in which It's built and road initiative limit and constrain the freedom of countries with which it interacts. Freed does believe that we are headed for a greater degree of bipolar struggle between the US and China than we have seen until now. Yet simultaneously he argues that while struggle between the two may be inevitable, genuine conflict may be controlled and constrained. He sees the United States as playing a central role in the continuing international legal order, and he hopes that the United States can, at the level of its grandest strategy, still seek to constrain and limit China and bring it into that order, requiring it to the extent possible to follow the rules of the game in order to be a constructive partner for the United States. Overall, Freed's analysis remains optimistic about the capacities and possibilities of the United States to continue to lead in a range of different ways, even as it acknowledges the rise of China and seeks to recognize a shifting set of global power actors that go beyond just the handful of traditional ones in the United States and in Western Europe. The picture that emerged from our conversation is of a world getting more complex by the minute, a world in which no country can think that it has all of the answers to the core problems of the future, and in which, above all, on issues like climate, the world must work together or all countries are going to reap the whirlwind. I'm grateful that Farid agreed to go deep into his worldview, and I learned a tremendous amount from listening to him. Until the next time I speak to all of you, be well, think deep thoughts, and have a little fun. Deep Background is brought to you by Pushkin Industries. Our producer is Mola Board, our engineer is Ben Talliday, and our showrunner is Sophie Crane mckibbon. Editorial support from noahm Osband. Theme music by Luis Gera at Pushkin. Thanks to Mia Lobell, Julia Barton, Lydia Jeancott, Heather Fain, Carlie Migliori, Maggie Taylor, Eric Sandler, and Jacob Weissberg. You can find me on Twitter at Noah R. Feldman. I also write a column for Bloomberg Opinion, which you can find at Bloomberg dot com slash Feldman. To discover Bloomberg's original slate of podcasts, go to Bloomberg dot com slash Podcasts, and if you liked what you heard today, please write a review or tell a friend This is Deep Background.