Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
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.
00:58:04 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:58:04] S2: Yeah, exactly. Often organized in unions. They had a very pragmatic political attitude and they were economically focused and political competition between the left and the right was who can figure out how to raise living standards for the workers better. And that kind of centered politics on a fairly rational basis. Then you had the business class and by the 1940s and 50s it was no longer the founders, you know, the John D. Rockefeller originally or the first JP Morgan, it was grandsons and it was publicly traded companies, professional managers. And so there was a kind of institutionalization of business. That was also the era of these very regulated monopolies and oligopolies, so there's one phone company, a limited number of airlines, the three networks, very structured business world. And then between them, this organized, rationally focused working class and organized, regulated, publicly managed business class, you had this expert class, the technocrats, the administrators and so on, who according to the dictates of the best social science, peer reviewed social science, were like making the decisions, regulate the businesses so they don't get too greedy, but also keep the workers from being so demanding that the whole system collapses, etc. And they were the balancing group. I would say in American society today, all three of those classes are in total disarray. And yet we are facing a whole series of very serious changes, perplexities, what do we do about AI, just being one of many, we're not organized to answer these in the old ways. So we are really out at sea. And because America has been for so long and still I think remains the only potential pillar of global stability in organization, the internal incoherence of America faced with all these changes can't help but undermine any chances of global stability. So I think what that means is for people like you and me and maybe our listeners on the show, tremendously heavy responsibility to try to figure out answers and see some path through this and try to build a new kind of American politics and social order that can allow us once again to be reasonably stable for ourselves and then project that globally.
01:00:50 · S3, Walter Russell Mead
[01:00:50] S3: What do you think against that backdrop it's going to mean or does mean to be an American? If all of that is changing, [01:00:57] S2: what does it mean? Americans think about being American in different ways and they have for a long time. You hear a lot of people talk these days about America as a country founded on ideas. Honestly, I think I was maybe in college before I met anybody who thought that way. I'm from the South and down there you sort of thought, well, I'm an American because everybody I know is American, my family, as long as I have any idea who the heck they were, they're Americans. I'm an American the same way a Frenchman is French or a Turkish Turk, because I believe in America, but because I'm here, I'm here and no one else would have me and I, know, it's like, this is it. But there really are other people who love America and contribute to America who experience, yes, it's a country of ideas and we are a pluralistic country in this way and I don't myself feel more American than somebody that was naturalized last week. I think for me in some ways the sort of meeting ground between identity and ideas, honestly, it's the pledge of allegiance. I pledge allegiance to the flag of The United States Of America and to the Republic for which it stands, one nation, indivisible under God, with liberty and justice for all. And I would say anybody who says that and means it is an American. Pretty remarkable, Well written. It's good. It's good.