Invest Like the Best with Patrick O'Shaughnessy
00:08:43 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy, Walter Russell Mead
[00:08:43] S0: How do you think the world is or will be the most different because of his role in it? [00:08:49] S2: Well, I think he has vastly accelerated the disintegration of this post World War IIpost Cold War structures. They're not going to be the same. He's not the only one who's done this, but I think we're entering an era of much more personal and much less bureaucratic politics. That is, I think for a long time in the twentieth century people got into the habit of thinking one person rule or a central figure should be downgraded and we should be run by institutions and bureaucrats and committees. I think that one of the impacts of the internet is that people want to be ruled by people again. So that in India you see a Modi, we saw Abe in Japan, Bibi in Israel and Erdogan in Turkey and Trump in The United States. Trump is sort of the greatest of these, the most globally impactful of this new wave of Putin, Xi Jinping. We're back to an era of personal politics. [00:09:52] S0: If you think about the broader, longer arc of dominance or power leading up to this moment, I love the historical context. You're an amazing historian. Talk about why, whether it's maritime dominance or other major reasons that you think The UK and America up until, let's say, you know, the end of the Cold War or something had such an incredible run?
00:10:12 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:10:12] S2: Let's just start with The US China rivalry today. And what you see is the sort of two sides. One is a land based continental empire, China, which believes that it can match the technological and therefore military strength of the other power without all that political liberalism and messy democracy. Okay, great idea. The first, I think ruler in modern times to really embrace that was Louis the fourteenth, who thought that his technocratic government of the experts in France could beat those pesky English with all of that ridiculous, you know, every twenty years they kill the king or kick him out or who knows what they do. But it's utterly chaotic. The French idea was we can do that with a strong centralized system. From the time of Louis the fourteenth right up until now, you could sort of argue the dominant theme of global power politics has been this rise of this English speaking maritime commercial liberal order and then it's been contested successively by a series of great power continental states, France under Louis the fourteenth, again with Napoleon, Germany, Prussian World War I and then World War II, The Soviet Union, and that these contests have been incredibly difficult. There have been moments in every case where the technocratic centralized land power looked like it was just walking away and the ridiculous, confused, commercial English speaking maritime alliance was muddle lost, crazy, and yet somehow in the end, the hobbits keep winning. I should say that we stole our global strategy from the British, they stole it from the Dutch, who had been doing this earlier in the seventeenth century. And God and Gold, one of my books, I say that you could sum up the last three hundred years of modern history in 10 letters, UP, United Provinces, to UK, to US. Now obviously that raises the question to question mark question mark question mark. I don't think China has it in it
00:12:32 · Patrick O'Shaughnessy
[00:12:32] S0: to beat us. What is that strategy, the maritime strategy? What are these three entities done that's been so effective to let the hobbits win?
00:12:40 · Walter Russell Mead
[00:12:40] S2: I don't know if I can really reveal all this, the secret five point plan for global dominance, but okay. Why not? Right. I'm just going to ask everyone who hears this to kind of be careful with how they use this information. It'd be terrible if it fell into the wrong hands. Step one is have an open society at home. Think of the Dutch in the seventeenth century. Okay, everybody had these wars of religion. Well, the Dutch are pretty Calvinist, but they say, Well, you know what? These Lutherans, they're scum, they're going to hell, everybody knows that, but, you know, until they do, they could kind of pay taxes and contribute to the economy, and even the Catholics, I mean, of course they can't do their filthy idolatrous rights in the streets or anything, but yeah, live and let live. The Jews live and let live. If an intellectual scientist publishes some kind of scientific paper that the church doesn't like, well people will write nasty comments about it in other journals, but when Galileo doesn't go to the prison, there's no inquisition. And also, if you have an idea, you can try it. If you are the son of a peasant and you want to sort of try it as a merchant and you can find some people who'll let you do it, go right ahead. They come up with new ideas for government finance that we still use, the joint stock company, new seagoing technology, circulation of the blood, Locke comes to Holland and writes a lot of his best work there. That's step one, you have this open dynamic society and you've got the intellectuals are flocking there, your universities are flourishing. Step two is now with all of these products that you've developed and innovative technology, you take the show on the road, you trade globally. So you have, I think, were 10,000 seagoing ships coming from The Netherlands in the seventeenth century, and they're traveling all over the world, And what this does is it makes you stinking rich. I advise my students sometimes to go to the Met Museum here, or any number of places, to see the Dutch masters, not to look for, oh, like the brush strokes and the composition, it's so exquisite, all of which is true, but just look at like all the stuff that these people have in their painting.
00:15:05 · Walter Russell Mead
You know, here's the merchant with his like silk robe from China, and he's standing on a rug from Turkey, and he's got a stuffed parrot from Brazil on his mantelpiece. There's just this astounding amount of wealth, which then allows you to start thinking globally. Eighteenth century, the Prussians fight, Frederick the Great fights with Maria Theresa over Silesia. The Seven Years' War, this is a beautiful, I've been there, I've been to Silesia, I love Silesia. It's a sausage shaped province in modern Poland. And seven years, both countries go bankrupt, and in the end, Frederick gets it, which means he's Frederick the Great, and it's just Maria Theresa who lost. But during that seven years war, the British basically kicked the French out of India and Canada and North America and established the foundations of the world order that we still live today. So you're thinking globally. Once you have built this global system, you then do something extremely treacherous, which is you invite everyone else to participate in your system. So you don't do, say, what the Spanish did in Latin America where you say, this is ours, we conquered this, nobody else can trade here, you people stay out, which obviously condemns it to a certain stagnation. The British in the nineteenth century, they have free trade in the British Empire, everybody can trade, and the British Navy keeps piracy down for everybody, not just for the Brits. And what this does is it encourages other countries to participate in your system, as we did with Britain, we didn't fight with them after 1812, we came close a couple of times, but at the end of the day, we traded in the British system, we were among the greatest beneficiaries of what the British did. And the Germans did the same thing, Prussia, the German Empire became a great trading power, they had investments in Argentina and Chile, and in many places their commerce was driving out the British. Then the Germans discovered that we have another little trick up our sleeves, they go to war in World War I and they suddenly discover that while they were integrating into the world, that made them very rich, gave them great technology, a lot of military power, but now they're dependent on it. Suddenly they're at war with The UK and they can't get all that grain from Argentina and America that fed their people.
00:17:38 · Walter Russell Mead
They can't get that imported rubber from Malaya that provides the tires that they need for war. So they've grown dependent on that international system and you're able to cut it off and this is one of the big reasons the English won so many of these wars. So, system exists, I think a lot of Americans really aren't conscious of it, but we sort of revert to these patterns, things happen and we just behave in these ways. So after the end of the Cold War, what do we say to Russia and China, Come on in, and just as we said to Germany and Japan in 1945, benefit from the system. Actually, we waited about forty seven to do that, but in any case, come on in, benefit, and now both Germany and Japan are principal pillars of the world system. We sort of hoped that Russia and China would do that too, they've taken more of the Wilhelm the second path than the Conrad Adenauer path, We are now testing what happens there. It's one of the reasons I'm worried, but it's a pattern that has been recurring and so far, whenever it finally comes to the test, our side has been winning.