Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:50:04 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:50:04] S0: which is Fat on steroids. [00:50:06] S2: Exactly. So I definitely see that. But then I look at things like, in some ways one of the biggest geopolitical problems of the last sixty years has been nuclear proliferation, continues to be obviously to this day. But when I think about weapons of mass destruction in the future, obviously biology, cyber, all kinds of things. While we have not been able to completely stop the proliferation of nuclear weapons, you can usually tell when somebody's trying to build them. Usually you have enough lead time to try to do something about it. How could you verify whether somebody was abiding by some sort of cyber arms control agreement or bioweapons arms control, when basically in a basement lab somewhere you can cook up a pathogen that could destroy half the planet. The idea that we're going to have accelerating arms races in a condition with an almost utter lack of strategic trust, where you can't appeal to verifiability as a way of ensuring compliance, I think it's a pretty serious problem. So I think the rapid and dynamic technological change across a whole range of disciplines and technologies is destabilizing the balance of power. And this, I think, does significantly increase the chance both of confrontation and ultimately even of war between great powers.
00:51:35 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:51:35] S0: Speaking of maybe Ukraine is the right flashpoint for this, but it does seem like there's been quite an evolution of non weapons of mass destruction, just regular old weapons. This is a highly contested topic now because of the conflict in Iran and some reports that we've run out of certain types of munitions, even as The United States Of America. What have you learned from the last several years of conflict about the nature of military technology, weapons, their relative importance in the AI world and Unfortunately, so
00:52:02 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:52:02] S2: I've learned a lot because there's been a lot of war. The first time I went to Ukraine after the war, I went to this drone factory and it really was remarkable because in real time they were starting to get results from the battlefield and then they were adapting But at that time it was very simplistic stuff. They were like getting kids toy trucks and re engineering them into ground drones that could put a landmine on a tank. I was back there a couple of months ago, the advances are just unbelievable. The intensity is the same, but the scope of change is amazing. I talked to people who said that they don't treat bullet wounds anymore. It's all drones. The Ukraine war is no longer a battalion over here shooting at a battalion over there. With these drones, you have this sort of gray kill zone, gray zone, where at most you'd have a couple of soldiers together. One of the hardest problems in warfare now, they tell me, is you'll get somebody wounded, how do you evacuate someone who's wounded? They're having to build a new kind of ground drone that can go retrieve a body or a person and then cover them with a kind of metal shield and wheel them out, but even to do this you need a whole team of drones working with this thing because they're looking for other drones that would try to attack this. They told me they had one soldier that it took them sixty three days to get them evacuated after a wound. This is so unlike what war was even six years ago. And I asked myself too, how fast is the Pentagon learning if the tank and the rifle are becoming as obsolete as the cavalry charge and the sword? What kind of forces do we have? What kind of forces do you need? And again, it changes every six months. Right now, the Ukrainians have kind of a battlefield advantage that could flip. And it's also for us as the power that has the most stuff, we're actually the most vulnerable to technological change because we've got so many tanks that the tank becomes useless, that's more of a problem for us than it is for somebody who's figured out the tank killer Or Navy, you know, the Russian Navy on the Black Sea. The Ukraine doesn't really have a Navy, they got a few little tiny boats, they don't have battleships and stuff. They have kept the Russian Navy out of the Black Sea with drones.
00:54:38 · Walter Russell Mead, Patrick O'Shaughnessy
Good news for Taiwan actually, but American power traditionally is about sea power to a very large extent. How does that change over time? We've gone from, you remember in the nineties, you look like you're just old enough to remember the nineties, they used to talk about the revolution in military affairs. We've shifted now, okay, there's this one thing happening and once we've mastered and gotten used to it, then we're good to go. Now it's continuing revolutions in military affairs. That's something that I've learned about war by watching. What do you think [00:55:16] S0: is the most likely thing to happen in Taiwan?
00:55:19 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:55:19] S2: Well, the Chinese, Xi Jinping, I think is committed to trying to get it. I don't think he actually has an alarm clock by his bed that will ring on the day that has to happen. The Chinese I think need a very high probability of success to commit themselves past a certain point because failure would be catastrophic for whoever launched it. But there are a lot of steps in between an invasion and doing nothing. And we see the Chinese, I think they're trying to get themselves into a position where they could have a soft blockade, they could give the orders that any ship that wants to go to Taiwan first has to stop at a Chinese port and go through a customs clearing process to assert sovereignty and so on, and make it difficult for ships that don't do that. They'll be looking for things that fly just under the radar, that don't actually cause us to really respond, but which alter the situation in their favor. So I see them moving in that kind of way. The big new factor is that the Japanese have woken up and the Japanese would see Chinese control of Taiwan as a direct threat to Japanese independence, I mean they really see this. And so they are much more engaged, they're only beginning, you know, they're raising their defense spending, they're rethinking their doctrine, they're beginning to kind of reshape their culture around the new strategic environment. Historically, the Japanese have actually been pretty good at changing direction when they genuinely feel threatened or feel the need to change in some way. How this works out, I don't see, but I think it's one of the things people really need to keep an eye on is how fast do the Japanese come up the learning curve, how serious does it turn out they really are about their own defense, and how does that affect China's calculations in Taiwan, if Japan is a new and complicating issue for them?
00:57:26 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:57:26] S0: If I combine all these things, the changing forces of power, technology, military technology, all the things we've talked about with your observation that politics in the future is gonna be more personal. Are there any other rates of change, things changing in the world that we haven't talked about yet that you think are especially important for what the future will look like? [00:57:47] S2: There were three basic classes in American society during the kind of post World War II era of stability and they spread a lot in the rest of the world. One was an industrial working class, which is kind of more or less in stable jobs [00:58:03] S0: with collar kind of work.