Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
01:06:37 · S3
[01:06:37] S3: Why have we been ineffective? Obviously, we have vastly superior military capability or whatever. This is a specific question about Iran in the Strait Of 4 Movies, but also people used to call Afghanistan the graveyard of empires. Why do world powers seem to have such a difficult time being effective at all in the Middle East?
01:06:53 · Walter Russell Mead
[01:06:53] S2: Well, think some of it is, which we've also seen with Russia, is the erosion of deterrence. What you don't want to do is help Ukraine win a war with Russia. What you want is for Russia to feel that if they attack Ukraine, the consequences would be so terrible that it's just not worth doing it. Anything other than deterrence involves long, difficult, expensive, divisive wars with uncertain outcomes and enormous costs. The decline of deterrence becomes a massive geopolitical problem overseas and a massive political problem at home. For example, right now, one of the real facts in the strait is it's not even as important that Iran can hit a tanker with a drone, as it is that Iran could put some drones on some desalinization plants and make the cities of The Gulf essentially uninhabitable. As long as that's the case, I'm not going to make big investments in The Gulf if I'm a foreign country. Really, really scary. And that means that these whole sort of economic development plans that those countries have for their future political stability go up in smoke because it doesn't work. The only way to preserve that is in some ways what we were doing in the Cold War in Europe, just saying to Russia, you cross that line, you invade West Berlin and holy hell breaks out. But I think as a country we're not at the point where a president of The United States can say it, and mean it, and have the public back him up. For that we need presidents who can explain to people, okay, this is how the world works. What Harry Truman did after World War II, for that matter what Franklin Roosevelt did in the fireside chats. Take the American people into your confidence, have a clear vision of what you're doing, why you're doing it, be enough of a communicator to be able to put it across. We haven't really had anybody do that in a very long time.
01:09:02 · S3
[01:09:02] S3: What do you hope we do? What do you hope America's role is in the next twenty years?
01:09:07 · Walter Russell Mead
[01:09:07] S2: I hope we, first of all, figure out how to keep our balance as we enter the information revolution. That we figure out how to use the wealth and the resources the information revolution creates to deal with the stresses and problems that it inevitably causes and also draw from it the abundance that will keep the American people feeling like America's working, it's working for them, the way things are going is basically a good thing. You have that going, then people will back an American president, American foreign policy in a serious way and I think if you don't have that, and if we don't do that, we lose ground in the information revolution to China in the deck race, we get challenged overseas and at home we're just rabid ferrets fighting with each other in a cage and that's just not pretty and not fun. And if we can get that going, then I think we act purposefully, we say, we don't want any great power dominating Europe, we don't want any great power dominating Asia, and we don't want any power able to interrupt the flow of oil in and out of The Middle East on commercial terms and we build the alliances and the relationships that do it. I don't think that is an unsustainable ask. Germany and Japan in particular have a lot of resources and a lot of ability, but also our problem in Asia is not that China is so big, know, which the rest of Asia has fallen behind. In 1980, India's GDP was something like 60%, 65% of China's, Today it's about 17% of China's. That gap in a sense is the imbalance of power that sort of tempts China into thinking hegemony in Asia is really possible And also ensures that without us putting a really heavy weight on the balance scale, it can't be stopped. If we can create a world that there's room for others to prosper, that not only India but Indonesia and Vietnam are growing, I think what we're going to see is China will kind of reach this point of understanding that Asia is too big for China to eat, nobody can eat it, and so we need to learn to live with folks, which Germany has done in Europe, it's possible. And in the same way, if Russia is stopped in Ukraine, and Ukraine goes like Poland and becomes a prosperous country and all of this, that door is closed without American soldiers fighting and dying to keep it closed.
01:11:52 · Walter Russell Mead, S3
So there is, I think, the potential for the kind of natural balance of power in these key theaters to emerge in a way that we can have the sort of world that is good for us economically and from a security point of view, but does not require an ever escalating defense budget and ever escalating series of American commitments. Is anything there especially unique, you call [01:12:19] S3: it the information revolution, I would think about it maybe as the intelligence revolution, like to make it very specific to AI. Is there anything that you're thinking about that excites you most or worries you most about this very unique brand of technology in global affairs? [01:12:33] S2: Well, is interesting how it seems at least for now to have simplified the international playing field so that people, as you were saying earlier, just they said there's America and there's China and there's no one else in the room. First of all, I wonder how long that will last because originally there were two nuclear powers, America and The Soviet Union, and nobody else was in the room, but then a bunch of other people started getting into the room. Is AI more replicable? Are we going to start seeing other countries come up with their equivalent of these technologies? The Chinese have obviously done it with less need for original skull sweat than we did. Can third parties look comparing The US and China do more? So I'd be definitely watching that one and there I think, you know, the Indians and the Europeans and the Israelis are all very interesting in that respect. [01:13:31] S3: The
01:13:31 · S3, Walter Russell Mead
[01:13:31] S3: The [01:13:31] S2: Israelis got their nuclear bomb just a couple of years, a few years after China, so look at that. I do think the whole question of AIs and national security decision making and deterrence is interesting because the whole goal of deterrence is you want to make the adversary believe that there's no question, if I do X, they will do Y. They will be able to do Y and they are willing to do Y. Automating your foreign policy decision making process increases deterrence and so we've turned that over to the AI and if the AI thinks you're doing this, wham. And anything less than that is, no, I'm leaving a human decision point because I might decide not to do it. That's interesting when you think about how that might play out in the world of deterrence and are we really willing to have the doomsday machine decide whether we're going to go to war or use nuclear weapons or something like that? Very interesting and somewhat perplexing. [01:14:38] S3: Maybe to end on a positive note, what are you most excited about in the future?