 So good afternoon everybody. My name is Michael Collins and I'm the Director General of the IAEA, the Institute of International and European Affairs and I'm very pleased to welcome you to this IAEA webinar. And we're absolutely thrilled, delighted to be joined today by Professor Stephen Walt from the Harvard Kennedy School of Government who has been generous enough to take time out to speak to us this morning, American time this afternoon, Irish time. Professor Walt will speak to us on the topic of the world order after the pandemic. I think he'd be arguing that COVID-19 will have lasting implications for world politics even after the pandemic is finally over. And we certainly look forward to hearing his analysis and insights on all of this. Professor Walt will talk for about 20 minutes or so and then we will go to Q&A with you, our audience in the usual way and you'll be able to join the discussion using the Q&A function on Zoom, which you should see on your screen. Please also feel free to send your questions in throughout the session as they occur to you and we will come to them once Professor Walt has finished his presentation. A reminder that today's presentation and Q&A are both on the record. You've already seen the information on Professor Walt, but just to recap he is the Robert and Renee Belfer Professor of International Affairs at the Harvard Kennedy School of Government. He was elected a fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in May 2005 and received the International Studies Association's Distinguished Senior Scholar Award in 2014. He has many, many books, of course, to his name. His books include The Origins of Alliances, which received the 1988 Elgar S. Furnace National Security Book Award, Revolution and War and Taming American Power, the Global Response to U.S. Primacy, which was a finalist for the Lionel Gelber International Affairs Book Award and Arthur Ross Book Prize. His book, The Israel Lobby at U.S. Foreign Policy, co-authored with John Merchheimer, was, of course, a New York Times bestseller and has been translated into more than 20 foreign languages. I'll have to check with him to see whether Gaelic is one of those, but we'll see. In any event, his latest book is The Hell of Good Intentions, American Foreign Policy, Elite and the Decline of U.S. Primacy. So quite a rich harvest there of material from which I'm sure he will be drawing, but in any event, Stephen, you're very, very welcome to Dublin. We wish you were here in person at some time again in the future. I'm sure you will be, but in the meantime, the floor is all yours. Thank you very much. I certainly wish I was there in person myself. I have fond memories of my two visits to Ireland. As we talked yesterday, I can't claim Irish ancestry, but I did start my day with a large bowl of authentic Irish oatmeal, so I'm trying to at least be there in spirit if I can't be there in person. So my topic today is the world order after COVID, after the pandemic, and this is inherently a little speculative. There's lots we still don't know. We still don't know how long the current experience we're in is going to last. But I do think a number of things are clear, a number of trends we can forecast forward, and there's some things that about the future world order, I'll be somewhat surprised if they don't come true. And that's what I'm going to talk about today. So as usual with Zoom, I'm going to share my screen now and put up some some slides, which I hope are going to be visible in a second. And let's see here. All right, I hope that's all visible to all of you. So here's the basic outline of what I'll be going through. I'll summarize the main arguments, describe some of the things that were happening in the world before the pandemic. Discuss the immediate results, most of which you are all aware of, and then lay out some of my ideas on where we're headed. And we're going to see a less open world than would have existed otherwise, a world that is less free, less democratic than we might have expected that the United States in particular is going to be more adversely affected than a number of other countries, not in terms of the absolute damage or suffering, but in terms of our relative position in the world. And then I'll say some general remarks about the future global order that this will produce. So my main arguments are as follows. First of all, the COVID-19 is not going to alter the basic nature of world politics. It's not going to transform everything we're not going to see some kind of world government emerge out of all of this. The nation state will remain the basic building block of world politics and those states are going to continue to compete for power and influence, much as they have for centuries. The pandemic is accelerating several trends that were already underway before COVID struck us all and intensifying their impact. And in particular, I think it's going to reinforce the gradual shift in power and wealth we have seen toward Asia and lead to a world that is less open and less free than it would have been otherwise. So let me talk about some of the things that were happening before COVID occurred. First of all, we were seeing the end of what you might call the unipolar moment that era where the United States really stood alone atop the pinnacle of world power, roughly from the early 1990s until perhaps 2010 2012. This has been produced by a number of things, obviously the rise of China, the partial recovery of Russia, some of the mistakes that the United States made, the war in Iraq, for example. All of those have led to the reemergence of some familiar patterns of great power competition. And I think we're seeing that happen more and more already. This was taking place before the pandemic. We were also seeing a gradual shift in power and wealth from the West back to the East. And I don't want to overstate this. The United States, Europe and other countries still remain very wealthy, very powerful. It's not like suddenly Asia has gone into the lead, but the trend line was clearly one away from complete sort of Western domination of the world system to one where power was going to be more evenly distributed. Third, we've seen a global backlash against what I might call hyper globalization. You see this in the Brexit decision by the United Kingdom backing away from the European Union. Trade wars in various contexts, the decoupling of the US Chinese economy, populist opposition in various places to immigration and refugees. But already this was happening before COVID struck. And another trend, of course, that was going on was increased authoritarianism, according to the think tank Freedom House 2019 was the 13th consecutive year in which global freedom had declined. We've also seen movements away from democracy in places like Poland, Hungary, Russia, Brazil, Turkey and a number of other countries. And here is even before the pandemic began, the world was becoming less open, less free and less dominated by the West. What have been COVID's immediate impact. Well, first of all, as of yesterday, we've had over 33 million confirmed cases worldwide, approximately 35,000 in Ireland, by the way. And that number is probably an underestimate across the board and of course is still going up. We've now cleared over 1 million confirmed deaths due to COVID approximately 1800 in Ireland. And that number is almost certain, in fact, certainly will rise for some time to come. The International Monetary Fund has projected that the world economy is going to contract by about 5% in 2020. Ireland is going to be a little bit above the trend line there it's economy expected to shrink by about 6.5%. And the International Labor Organization forecast a couple of months ago that nearly half the global workforce is at risk of having its livelihood destroyed. So the economic impact of this pandemic is non trivial indeed to deal with this governments are doing a variety of emergency measures which of course requires taking on lots of debt. So you see debt levels soaring in many countries, which could have a long term effect on economic productivity. And the bottom line here is, although a few months ago people were hoping we might see a very rapid recovery if the pandemic proved short lived. We're increasingly likely now we're not going to see what some call a V shaped recovery a sharp decline and then a sharp recovery economically it's much likely much more likely to be a rather gradual one. So what's that going to produce well first of all, this is leading to a less open world one where borders are going to start mattering more. COVID-19 already revealed that there were some risks to integrated supply chains these tightly linked economic production lines that we've seen as a as one feature of globalization. It was clear before COVID that those supply chains were at risk when you started to get a trade war. So that was happening even before the pandemic. But of course the pandemic has simply driven this home more powerfully that suddenly when you have to shut things down because of disease that affects an entire economic production line. The result of this is that both countries and firms are looking to diversify their supplies, increase their stockpiles and try and bring more production at home as a matter of sort of financial or economic prudence. And you'll see I quote there, William Weider, he's the former chief economist at City Rook with a nice line that just in time economics will give way to just in case economics with multiple supply chains to ensure continuity in a crisis. This is going to be less economically efficient, so lower economic growth, but perhaps more robust to uncertainty, such as a future pandemic. COVID-19 also of course has shown us the risk of allowing people to move freely from country to country as we all used to enjoy doing. Foreign travel has been severely restricted. That's why I'm here on Zoom as opposed to present there in Dublin. I think that the fear of future infections is likely to reinforce xenophobia forms of racism as states are likely to maintain new barriers to travel and migration, even after the pandemic is over. It's not that we won't, we won't go back to the world just as it was in 2017 or 2018. You should be ready once we start traveling again to have various restrictions placed on you once you get to wherever it is you're going. I also think we're discovering a lot can be accomplished online so there's going to be less business travel, less movement of people in the future, because people have learned that maybe some of that's unnecessary. We'll just add one point here. It's a reminder that the coronavirus that causes this disease is the latest in a series of viruses. We've had AIDS, we've had SARS, we've had Middle East respiratory syndrome, and we've had Ebola. All of these have happened in the last 25 or 30 years. Once COVID-19 is over, it's not the last one of these we're going to see. And one big question will be whether or not the world is better prepared the next time this comes around. And I'll say a word or two about that at the end. It's also likely to be a less free world. In any kind of an emergency, governments start limiting personal freedoms, start imposing restrictions on civil liberties, government control goes up. In wartime we have censorship of the press, governments take control of the economy. They impose greater secrecy on others. And of course we've seen exactly this thing happen in response to the pandemic. Lockdowns, shutting down businesses, increased surveillance, mandatory testing in some countries, tracking and tracing in democracies and dictatorships alike. Again, it's why I can't be there in Ireland because it's illegal for me to go there now. And some countries leaders have requested and obtained emergency powers to deal with this. They may give them back when it's all over. They may not. And I would add here that the record so far between democracies and dictatorships is a mixed regime type doesn't seem to be determining success or failure. You have some democracies like New Zealand that have done very, very well in responding to this. You have other democracies like the United States or the United Kingdom that have handled this very badly. And the same is true for dictatorships. There are some authoritarian governments that have actually reacted very well. There's other dictatorships that have handled it badly as well. The bottom line here is many restrictions are likely to be lifted once this is over, but not all of them. And some of those restrictions may not have that much to do with public health. This is a great opportunity for some authoritarian governments to, you know, put an app to track you on your phone, keep track of all your contacts. It's all being done in the name of preventing the spread of a disease. But those, those tracking abilities may still be there long after this is over. Let me say a little bit about the United States. The United States still has enormous advantages. It will remain a very powerful country. But one impact that this has had on us is I think our reputation for competence has been badly damaged by how badly the United States has handled this. We were supposed to be a country that, you know, respected science had marvelous technical capabilities, had an enormous healthcare establishment, should have been able to do a much better job than we had. And I think the reputation of the United States for simply as a country that knows how to get things done has been badly harmed by this. We've also are seeing business bankruptcies in lots of countries, including the United States. And the more companies go out of business, the slower their recovery is likely to be, because a company can't rehire workers, if it's already gone bankrupt, but if it's already gone out of business. Moreover, the long term effects on education I think still remain to be seen but are not going to be good. Schools are closed or operating in a partial fashion all over the United States and in other countries that means less educational progress. That means a less well trained workforce attend or 20 years down the road which means less economic productivity. Another feature here is once you lock things down, once people aren't going to their businesses, you have problems at home, you have increased spousal abuse, increased child abuse, which means over time, you're going to have greater long term mental health issues as well. And finally, there's some very interesting scientific evidence suggesting that when women are pregnant, if they're undergoing high levels of stress, this actually has long term effects on the health educational prospects of their children. The fetus is actually affected by what the mother is going through in all sorts of ways that have quite distinct and measurable negative consequences. Now my point here is that all countries going through this pandemic are going to be experiencing these problems, but the relative impact will be greatest the longer the pandemic endures in a particular country. I think this is a problem for the United States, the United Kingdom and some others, because instead of having a problem here for one or two or three months and then getting a handle on it, this is going on for months and it's likely to continue for some time to come. So the relative impact for some countries of these long term trends is likely to be greater. All right, so where does this lead the world order? Well, nationalism, great power competition were increasing before the pandemic occurred. Nationalism never really went away, although I think some people hoped that it had, and we've seen a resurgence of great power rivalry even before the pandemic. Since the pandemic, despite lots of incentives to cooperate, most states have actually gone it alone in response. The United States, of course, has now announced it's going to cut off funding to the World Health Organization. Russia, China, the United States and India all declined to participate in the European Union's vaccine research fund. In general, states have sought to protect their own national vaccine research efforts so that they get access to a vaccine first. And of course, we've also seen some governments, most notably China and the United States, basically trying to blame each other for the problem. So in this sense, you haven't seen a sudden outpouring of global cooperation in response to a global problem. There are some exceptions to this. The European Union did put together an unprecedented rescue fund, but overall I think it's been sort of every state for itself more than anything else. And meanwhile, while all this is happening, conflicts are continuing in places like Syria, Afghanistan, Yemen, between India and China now, Sudan, Azerbaijan and Armenia, and lots of other places as well. So in that sense, international politics has not really changed at all. So where do I think this leads us? First, the post-pandemic world will be defined primarily by what was already emerging beforehand, and that's the growing rivalry between the United States and China, especially in Asia. I can say more about this in response to the questions. But I think the simple answer here is China would like to have at a minimum a dominant position in Asia. That doesn't mean expanding and conquering Asia, just a position where it is the principal power there and doesn't fear its neighbors any longer. And the United States is likely to try to prevent that, which means there's going to be a competition for influence in Asia between the United States and China, and that's going to lead to a pretty intense rivalry. The European Union, meanwhile, is going to be preoccupied with all sorts of internal and regional issues. About two weeks ago, the foreign minister, Borel, made a speech announcing that Europe must chart its own way to avoid being squeezed between the United States and China. I understand that sentiment, but Europe is not likely to be able to remain neutral between the two major powers and still expect American protection in the context of NATO. I think that's going to be an impossible bargain. We perhaps may want to say more about that in the future. And of course, Europe will be worried primarily about issues in its own neighborhood, whether it's what's happening in North Africa, in Ukraine, elsewhere in the Middle East, or the rivalry between Greece and Turkey. So the EU will still be a major player, but may be punching below its weight because it's so preoccupied with internal issues. Russia, in my view, will continue to decline relative to the other powers. I always like to remind people that the Russian economy is smaller than Italy's. And that puts real limits on Russian influence, but it will still have some, particularly in areas close to its own borders. And as I said before, overall, power and influence is going to be shifting in the direction of Asia, just as it was before the pandemic. And one more point to this slide is perhaps the biggest uncertainty in the short term, of course, is what course the United States is going to follow. And that's going to depend very heavily on what happens about a month from now in our election. So my last slide here. There are, despite what I've just suggested about a world of sort of growing rivalry between the United States and China, one where conflicts continue in a number of places, and where countries may be forced to line up, you know, and pick a side between the two major powers. There are some areas where the major powers must continue to cooperate or in an ideal world they would, and that includes the US and China. First and most obviously cooperation to end the current pandemic and prevent future ones is clearly necessary. The one silver lining here is there has been a considerable amount of information exchange and cooperation among the scientific community, trans-nationally or internationally. Scientists are sharing information pretty well. That's the one sort of bright spot I can point to here. There is no guarantee, however, that we will develop better global responses or better national responses. Historically, the tendency has been to sort of overreact to an emergency like this. Do a lot of smart things for a few years and then gradually become complacent and relax and then get surprised all over again. Let's hope that we are a little bit wiser going forward. Other issues, another obvious one is climate change cannot be solved if you don't get reasonable cooperation and agreements between the major greenhouse gas producers, China, India, the United States, most of industrial Europe as well. Progress had been made until relatively recently. The United States I think now has been the sticking point. That's again why November matters. I'm proving nuclear security. It's in the interest of all the major powers that nuclear weapons be kept under very reliable control, not used in any in anger as well. We have I think shared interest there. I think it's increasingly clear that the World Trade Organization is in need of radical reform. We're going to need some kind of rules and arrangements to govern the global economy. The WTO is showing its age. Some clear problems there, but creating a new set of rules for to handle global trade and investment is going to be essential and again requires agreement among the major powers. It's I think also increasingly clear that the digital world for all of the benefits we get from it has a dark side to it and developing some norms of conduct. What states and private actors can do how social media should be allowed to operate is another area where we would be much better off if we can reach agreements than if it's every country for itself. So my bottom line here and it's where I'll stop is that the biggest challenge we're likely to face is to preserve all of the places where we can benefit from cooperation in a post COVID world, but to do that in an era where there's going to be rising competition, probably greater suspicion and an emerging rivalry between the most powerful states. Let me stop there and I look forward to your question. Thank you. Thank you, Stephen. That was a wonderful presentation and full of rich content. Appreciate it very much. We invite questions obviously and they'll come in. But just to get the ball rolling, if I may, I think you made it clear that some of these trends that you're describing, they predate COVID, although COVID is clearly going to accelerate them. Can you maybe better pinpoint when it was that the tide began to go out on globalization? I mean, obviously we may all identify it perhaps with the coming up to power of President Trump, but in many ways I have a recollection that it predates that as well. There was already an indication of, prior to that, that the kind of trends that you're describing here were already in prospect. What happened and maybe you could pinpoint it a little bit more closely when the tide began to go out on globalization in particular? That's a great question. And there's no question it predates President Trump. He is a symptom of that, much as I would say the Brexit vote was also a symptom of that. I mean, I think it's important to remember what sort of hyper globalization was all about and think of the attitudes many people had in the 1990s, that democracy was going to spread, borders were going to become increasingly irrelevant. You could grow up anywhere, get an education and move anywhere in the world, get a job, become a sort of global citizen as well. And this was going to have wonderful benefits for everybody. We'd all live in more free and open countries. It would also foster economic growth because we would reduce trade barriers. We'd allow investment to flow wherever it could. Countries would be bound together by economic ties so they wouldn't bother to fight each other as well. And it was really an image of a very wonderful, harmonious, we'll all just get rich in this globalized world. I think several things then started to undermine this. First of all, the benefits of this were not evenly distributed. And to oversimplify a little bit, the poorest people in the world actually did pretty well from it. It fostered lots of economic growth in China, in India, in a number of other parts of Southeast Asia. It also was very good for Wall Street. It was very good for the wealthiest people in a number of advanced countries. The benefits were generally not realized by lower and middle classes in North America, in Europe, and elsewhere. So the benefits of globalization were not evenly distributed. And even though opening up trade was maybe good for economies as a whole, there were always going to be sectors within particular economies that were going to be damaged by it. This has been true forever, right? If you're an industry that gets wiped out by foreign competition, it may be good for everybody. They're getting cheaper goods, economic growth increases. But it's really bad if your factory is the one that closed. So that was one problem. You began to see a political backlash against it. Second, the financial crisis of 2008, if you ask for a specific moment where I think things really begin to come unglued, we have a financial crisis in the United States, which spreads around the world, the worst recession since the Great Depression. And that is to say, before we got to the COVID-related depression. And I think this had an inevitable effect, not only on generating a lot of lower and middle class anger, but also cast real doubt on the wisdom of all of the economic geniuses who had designed this system. Back in the 90s, people said, you know, all these masters of the universe on Wall Street, they really know what they're doing. In 2008, 2009, it became clear that they didn't. And in fact, they'd engaged in a varieties of fraud. And then finally, I think the opening up of borders, and this is perhaps most true in the European case, it neglected the importance of nationalism. As much as I might like to live in a very cosmopolitan rich multicultural type place, I think London, many other people saw this as threatening, saw this as threatening to their way of lives, rightly or wrongly. And so you started to see a nativist backlash in places like England in Hungary, in Poland, elsewhere against the sort of social and cultural side of this as well. And that again begins long before Donald Trump arrives. It's in fact part of the argument he used back in 2016 to win the presidency. Okay, Stephen. So I'll go to a few questions as they're coming in. I want to hear from Mark Mellot, who's of course Chief of Staff of the Irish Defense Forces. And he says, thank you for an excellent talk. Do you think the COVID-19 that COVID-19 will strengthen or weaken the multilateral institutions required to address the human security implications of climate breakdown and biodiversity loss. Maybe just to echo that, I mean, I know you've you've addressed this to some extent, but another member of the Institute Peter Midlone and the member of our board indeed wants to know what is Stephen's forecast on the effects of all of this on the climate change agenda. I know you've spoken about that to some extent, but maybe maybe we could elaborate on a little bit more. Sure. And so I, the short answer is I don't know. You would think this would be a absolutely vivid compelling demonstration about the most obvious one we've seen yet of the necessity of global cooperation to address any number of transnational problems. Ultimately, the problems of pandemics are inherently transnational. And there isn't, I think, a much more case that one, any single government is responsible. So we're all getting this very vivid demonstration that this sort of thing requires effective multinational responses. But by the way, this is happening also at a moment, as you undoubtedly well know, where we're getting abundant evidence of climate change being a very real phenomenon, not 10 years from now, not 30 years from now. But right now, my home state of California has been on fire for several months and that's very directly climate change related. We're not lacking now evidence of what needs to be done and that those responses have to be multinational in nature. What I find frustrating where my uncertainty comes from is the fact that a problem exists and is recognized doesn't necessarily mean that it gets solved. And one of the more disappointing features of the response to the pandemic has been the sense to which different states have tended to want to go their own way on this, my own country in particular, rather than working together with others to try and respond to it. You've seen that, I think, to some extent in Europe as well, you know, France's response is different than Belgium's is different than Spain's is different than Italy's. And there's been some cooperation within the European Union, but there's also been a certain amount of tension or rivalry or disagreement. So the fact that we're getting this demonstration of the importance of acting together to address these things I worry is not necessarily going to lead us to draw the right conclusion. And even if we did draw the right conclusion, this is my last point, reaching an agreement on and figuring out, you know, who will bear the set of costs and what the new set of rules or guidelines might be is not going to be easy because these are immensely complicated issues. Climate change being, I think, in some respects, even more difficult a problem to tackle than something like a pandemic. Yeah, Stephen, just maybe just to talk about a little bit the the the the pending election. Most people accept that, you know, if there's a President Biden, that everything will go back to the way it was five years ago or four years ago. That some things have changed, regardless of whether it's a Biden or a Trump presidency, obviously. In President Trump's case, obviously, we know his form over the last four years, but a President Biden presidency. What things would likely, you know, would likely would not reverse. I mean, in other words, some of these trends that you've been describing, they're almost, are they almost regardless of who becomes President of the United States after the third of the early next year. And would a President Biden just simply kind of be be be part of kind of this this new world that you're describing, obviously, maybe shaping it in a somewhat different way. But nonetheless, it would be that different world that he would be deciding over in other words that the trends that you're describing are indeed irreversible. That's another excellent question. So the most obvious thing where I think a Biden presidency would be similar to the Trump approach is vis-a-vis China. Biden's positions in the campaign have been more much more hawkish than he would have taken 10 years ago, for example. And I think there's now a broad consensus within the American foreign policy community that the United States has to take a tougher line against China on a whole variety of subjects, economically, militarily, and even I think with respect to human rights practices. I think the difference between a Biden administration and a Trump administration on China will not be in being more confrontational or taking a tougher stance, but Biden would want to do it much more in much more in partnership with others. I mean, one of the great mistakes the Trump administration made was that they decided to launch this economic rivalry with China at the same time that they were launching trade wars with South Korea with Japan with the European Union and with others. So the United States ended up in effect going up against China on its own. It would have been much more effective if we had stayed in the trans-Pacific partnership, worked with Europe, worked with Japan, worked with South Korea, and collectively gone and said to China, you need to alter some of your economic practices. I think that's likely to be a Biden approach, but it will not be sort of returning to the open embrace of China that you might have seen in the 1990s or before. On other issues, I think it's clear a Biden administration would take that set of transnational issues we were talking about before, climate change, pandemics, some other things, much more seriously. As the Obama administration in fact did, there my concern is that even if they want to do more on those issues, they're going to face lots of opposition from the Republicans party. And so you may have a situation where the administration wants to go in one direction and has trouble getting, the Congress has trouble getting the Senate to go along with them in ways that might be important. Some of that will depend obviously on how the election turns out and what the relative balance of power is on Capitol Hill. Okay Stephen, can I just take a question here from Alan Jukes, who's a former finance minister here in Ireland that he wants to know, and this question relates to Africa. He says, what effect does Professor Walt foresee for Africa in what you've been describing there? He says disruption of trade flows with hamper development processes and competition from the rest of the world for example precious metals could lead to further dangers of external manipulation and corruption in African states I suppose. So the effect on Africa, we talk about Asia obviously to some extent, to a considerable extent, but maybe just a little bit of focus on Africa. Yes, so with the caveat that I don't consider myself an expert on African politics and so I don't speak from a deep well of expertise on this one. But I'd say a couple of things and I agree with the thrust of the question. I mean, first of all, the pandemic is having a very powerful effect in parts of Africa, partly because public health facilities are not as well developed as they are in other parts of the world. With the small caveat that some African countries have responded actually pretty well in part because they've had experience with things like Ebola and others in the past. And so there was a certain certain degree of expertise or awareness of how seriously when one had to respond. But the rest of the question I think gets it exactly right there are two big issues one Africa had been doing relatively well when the rest of the world economy was doing well for all the obvious reasons. The rising tide was lifting all boats and was lifting Africa actually faster than other parts of the world. The whole world economy goes back the other direction this is, you know, harmful to Africa, and they don't have the reservoirs of wealth to buttress to get through it as easily. So if we have a very slow global economic recovery to COVID. That's not going to be good for Africa. Second, to the extent that the United States China and perhaps some others start playing hardball with each other and start worrying about relative levels of influence. On the one hand, some countries may be able to play both sides off against each other and benefit from that. But I think if you look at sort of the history of the Cold War, for example, the Soviet American competition in some parts of the world and including Africa ultimately wasn't beneficial for those societies. As the question implied, made it tempted us to, you know, cut deals with rulers who chose to support us, even if they weren't very good for their own countries. It made us put human rights on the back burner, even economic development on the back burner to strategic position and competition. And I would worry that we're going to see a replay of things like that in the future. If a Soviet or sorry, if a Sino American competition really heats up. So question here from Suzanne Keating, who's the CEO of one of our development agencies here, docus. She says Ireland is due to sit on the Security Council in January 2021, having of course been elected as a non permanent member for the two years 2021 2022. He says, she says, given your analysis, what would you advise that they being we I suppose prioritize if we are to have any influence at that table. Oh, um, you know, I obviously not knowing what the agenda is going to be it's sort of impossible to answer the question but I would say to almost any country as a non permanent members to say you should, you should think for yourself. That I think the Security Council works more effectively when the permanent members are not able to fully dictate the outcome of different of different initiatives or different resolutions and you know actually have to go do the real critical and diplomatic work of rounding up support. And so, you know, if the United States is able to put together positions that command real support through the Security Council, that's good. And when we find ourselves isolated because the position that we're taking can't even command support from Ireland. That should be a warning sign to the permanent members that maybe that they're they're off, you know, in a position that's not really defensible. In this case, I would encourage courage the Irish representative to think for himself or herself. In this case, it'll be a herself. So, Stephen just a question from Mary Cross who's a former Irish ambassador indeed and IEA board member. She says, Professor Walt said that power and influence is shifting towards Asia and that's been a very clear part of your presentation. She wants to follow their Asian powers besides China. Do you see as important in this shift. Well, almost all of them on the certainly you know if you look over a 30 or 40 year period the rise of South Korea from a country that was at one time had a lower per capita income in North Korea. I think that was true well into the 1960s and now South Korea is a top 10 economy. North Vietnam has had a remarkable run of economic growth increasingly important. This is the first year in 25 years or so in which the Australian economy didn't grow and that's directly related to COVID not to mistakes that the Australians made. Although I think it's disappointed a number of you know analysts with its economic performance has done far better in the last 10 to 15 years than it had done previously as well. So in a sense we're seeing not just the spectacular rise of China, but a number of other countries over a 30 or 40 year period you know you could throw in Singapore which has had a remarkable run for a long period of time as well. And all of this has begun to move the overall balance of economic power, you know from what was once very much a North America and Europe world plus Japan to a world where it's much more evenly distributed it is not it is not just China, although China is obviously a big part of it. Steve just you said either in your speech or elsewhere you you said that it was a combination of the deadly virus inadequate planning and incompetent leadership has placed humanity on a new and worrisome path. Just how worried are you I mean how how worrisome is this path I mean is this is this future a possible future that you're describing. Is it one that we should all be losing a great amount of sleep over. Well I'm more concerned than I have been you know in most of my life I guess I mean I think the pandemic itself we will in fact get get over. I think there will eventually be some combination of vaccines and medical treatments such that this issue is no longer a lot of restricting life in the way it is I don't anticipate you know sort of going back to the way things were anytime soon I think we will still be adjusting our behavior a year from now. And one thing to think about is you know what happens if a year from now we have a vaccine it's readily available and it's only 70% effective. But about as good as a good flu vaccine, which means there's still some considerable risk that if you're in certain circumstances you could catch a disease that's more viral and or potentially more dangerous than your average than your average flu. That's going to lead people to adjust their behavior in certain ways and that may be the world up we're headed into. I'm much more concerned by a set of political trends in a variety of places and and to be, you know, selfish American nationalist for a moment, especially in my own country where the the toxic nature of our political system now the fact that we're even talking about the possibility of an election where 30 to 40% of the country will think the election was fraudulent, regardless of what the outcome is. Right. That's a very worrisome situation for any democracy to be in, and particularly when it's a democracy that has been as powerful and influential and played such an enormous role in the world. In a sense, I've been more worried about the political trends inside the United States for the last few years, then I've ever been at in my life, and I'm hoping that the sort of darkest predictions here turn out not to be true, and that over the next year or we can see sort of the reemergence of a somewhat more unified and cohesive America. I think that would be good for the United States would also be good for the rest of the world. It is actually not healthy to have such a powerful country be so convulsed so distracted and so unpredictable, because our politics keeps shifting back and forth so rapidly. Well, just apropos of that I mean question here from Peter Gunning who's a former colleague of mine indeed a former ambassador and he wants to know he says even if we leave aside the US election outcome. Is the era of the US as the indispensable power in the world, whether militarily or in terms of values and standards is that over forever is it over for good. Well, I've never liked the thinking of ourselves as the indispensable power I think that was Madeline Albright's mistaken phrase it exaggerated America's ability to shape shape events. Certainly the position the United States found itself in in the 1990s, where not only were we essentially unchallenged by anyone on good terms with almost every major power. Enjoying a number of years of pretty robust economic growth. I think that that world is not going to come back in my lifetime that the United States is not going to be in that dominant position. Well, and that's because of the rise of China the partial recovery of Russia and some other other trends as well. But the United States is going to remain extremely influential, and its ability to shape events in particular realms in particular areas for good or bad is going to be quite profound. I think that requires the United States to be more selective to decide what issues it's going to care most about what parts of the world, it's going to care most about and to understand what it is good at doing and when it's not good at doing. Historically we've been pretty good at deterring major conflict in certain areas. We have not been particularly good at taking over other countries and then running them in a beneficial beneficial way. So if we do more of the former and less of the latter that'd be a good thing. Historically the United States has been pretty good at bringing groups of mostly like minded countries together for common purposes. And that was obviously especially true in the Cold War and not just in security terms also in in economic terms. I think we can still play that role pretty effectively if we choose to do so. But whether we, you know, have the wisdom to sort of focus on what our skill set really is and stop making some of the mistakes we've made over the last 20 or 30 years remains to be seen. Okay, you've touched extensively on Asia. We've touched on Africa as well as a question here from Jeremy Wilmhurst of the British Embassy here in Dublin. He wants to know what is your assessment of recent Gulf peace deals with Israel. What might happen next in the Middle East peace process. Well, the, I've taken a slightly contrarian position I don't regard these recent agreements, the establishment of diplomatic relations between the UAE and Israel, between Bahrain and Israel as particularly significant. They're not trivial they're not non events but they're not breakthrough in any significant way. First of all, these were countries that weren't at war with Israel had never fought Israel pose no military threat to Israel. So suddenly establishing diplomatic relations doesn't alter the strategic situation at all. Secondly, there was already a lot of tacit cooperation between these countries and Israel that's been going on for a long time. A lot of it is focused on their mutual antipathy toward Iran. So it wasn't exactly a revelation to discover that these countries were now willing to sort of go public with this as well. So I say it's not a non event, but it's not a real breakthrough. And of course it does absolutely nothing to deal with what is Israel's central problem which is namely still the Israeli Palestinian conflict and what they're going to do with the million plus Palestinians who are under their control but have no political right. It has no bearing on that decision if anything it just allows the situation to continue. Now, there is a statement or there's been a hint that to get this the Netanyahu government agreed that they would not go ahead with plans to annex the West Bank. I guess my view is that option is always there. It's certainly been something that the Israeli right has pushed for a long time and I don't imagine the UAE sort of breaking diplomatic relations three years from now, if that's what ultimately happens. So when I did write about this a few weeks ago and I said, basically the road to a one state solution just got a fresh code of asphalt. It made that more likely and that itself poses I think enormous long term problems for Israel, because it will be impossible to impose a one state solution. And, and also remain any kind of a democracy in in more than just name only. I think there it has, you know, enormous long term problems and those agreements really didn't do much to address that. Okay, Stephen, just one or two more questions here and we're coming up against the hour very shortly. And Neil Garvey, who's another leader in our among our development agencies here called Trocra. She says for a small country out there one with a good diplomatic profile she's talking about Ireland here. How can Ireland most meaningfully play in fostering global cooperation and promotion of values of rights and democracy I suppose as as the US withdrawals to some extent. You know, what is the scope of the prospect for how realistic is it that a country like Ireland can they can they can take up these challenges in the absence of of of the United States in ways that we've known in ways that they've been previously. I haven't thought about this I mean obviously smaller countries have have more limited influence, but they occasionally do punch, you know punch above their weight and a number of them have been quite influential on certain issues by the establishing credibility with the different parties by establishing a mutual acknowledgement of neutrality sort of not taking sides in any particular way. The most obvious place of course where Ireland can exercise disproportionate leverage or influence is due to be the United States because of the connection between the two countries. American politicians are more likely to pay attention to a diplomat from Ireland than a diplomat from some other parts of the world precisely because of the impact of the Irish diaspora in our politics, and the role that you know this those connections play. So in a sense, you know the Irish approach should be not all that different from what I think has been the British approach all along, which is you know you recognize that the United States is going to be doing a lot of things around the world and you want to perch on our shoulder and whisper in our ear, hopefully with some sage advice on how we ought to think about it. And if we're wise, you know occasionally will listen. Well, that's good to know. Just a question here from Daniel Bryan and just back to Asia. Daniel Bryan is the chief economist here in the IAEA, he says are asked how significant our recent developments in Hong Kong. And do you think the US would react differently. If it appeared that something similar was going to happen in Taiwan. That's a hugely important question. So, first of all, the United States in general has not reacted to internal developments in China. We protested, I mean, go back to Tiananmen Square. We protested, we downgraded diplomatic relations for for a time but ultimately I think we have recognized that when you are dealing with major powers, there are just real limits to how much you can shape what they do internally. But Hong Kong was slightly different because it was supposed to be under a different set of arrangements. Now, you know, sort of a foreign policy realist, I've always thought that the agreements on Hong Kong were not going to last forever that as China became more powerful, eventually they might renege on them. But they have real implications for Taiwan, because of course if the Chinese now try to say to Taiwan, look, please let's have reunification will let you have some special character. That's a much less credible promise to make. Now that they've of course altered the arrangements in Hong Kong. The Taiwanese are have every reason to be skeptical of any assurances they might get about special treatment or special status or you know one country two systems or anything like that. So, any kind of reunification and being much harder as a result of what's happened in Hong Kong. I also believe the United States for both political and strategic reasons would act very differently. In the event of any effort to impose coercively Beijing's control over Taiwan and the American position since the 1970s here has been, you know, quite clear. We were not opposed to voluntary reunification of both sides wanted to get back together that was fine with us, but we didn't want China to impose reunification and I think that position would. Any effort by China to do that would be strongly opposed by the United States. Okay, Steve, we've we've been speaking about state actors obviously and global institutions as well to some extent but here's a question now we're on which we might finish off it's from Alexander Alex Conway. He wants to know where do enormous companies like Facebook and Google feature in your vision, or in this vision of post pandemic global world order, and those professionals see them becoming more powerful or influential actors. I'll go out on a limb here and I again this is not my area of expertise but I actually think that we may be sort of at, you know, let's call it peak Google or peak Facebook that people have we've all benefited in various ways from these social media companies people have have enjoyed using them have gotten benefits benefits from them, etc. But I think there's also a growing recognition in many parts of the world that their political and social impact is not just positive. And that with anything any agency any corporation, any activity that can have this profound and effect on our politics and our society does require some degree of control. Whether it means breaking some of these companies up whether it means putting some restrictions on how they operate. Exactly how we go about doing this that's all up for grabs. But I think this idea that we could that we would just treat them as corporations that were providing a service and let them make as much money as possible and let them act pretty much as they wished and let them put any content they want up on their platforms regardless of its consequences. I think there's a growing sense that that's not the right answer. The right answer is what we're arguing about now, but I would guess that 10 years from now we will see most of those companies under greater restrictions greater degree of control altering their practices, I think they'll still be making tons of money. But I think they're going to be operating somewhat differently in many parts of the world. Precisely because net people now realize that the consequences of allowing them to sort of operate unchecked have not been uniformly positive. Yeah, just I mean talking about just go back to the nationalism issue. I mean obviously you say that nationalism is likely to emerge as a stronger force post COVID. But where does that then I mean as a country here obviously devoted and about to take up the responsibilities within the Security Council of the United Nations where does that leave. And I think you also spoke about the WTO leading reform. But where does it leave the multilateral world of the UN? I mean is America simply going to just do its own thing or is there still scope for a role by the multilateral organizations in the future as there has been in the past? Yeah, I think there definitely is. I don't see any contradiction between a world that where nationalism is a very powerful force where different groups see themselves as belonging to a nation with particular interests and traditions and cultures and a world in which multilateralism is a key element. And that's I think a recognition that although we have these separate nations around the world and separate states, they cannot achieve their own selfish interests as effectively on their own as they can in partnership with others. Figuring out what the rules should be figuring out how those arrangements or norms or institutions should be constructed is always a difficult diplomatic task. But the fact that we are existing in all these separate tribes doesn't mean we can't come up with ways of doing business together, ways of working together that are better than trying to operate solely on our own. So I don't see a tension or at least a contradiction between nationalism and multilateralism. And multilateralism is one of the strategies states can adopt to try and pursue their own aims in partnership with others. I like to think that's a view that will overall be, you know, characteristic of American diplomacy, even if it hasn't been featured very much in the last few years. People were right on two o'clock here, Irish time, nine o'clock Boston time. So I want to just say thank you to you for such a diverse, inspiring indeed presentation this afternoon. We do very much hope that some of these things that forecast, particularly when you speak about a less open, less free, less democratic world, post-COVID, that all of them don't come to pass or may not come to pass in ways that surpass our worst fears. But in any event, clearly, we're deeply indebted to you. We wish you the very best. We follow obviously the developments of the United States in particular, with a particular intensity over the next couple of weeks, but there after as well, of course. And we just look forward to being able to welcome you back, hopefully post-COVID, whether we'd have that post-COVID world at that stage remains to be seen. But we certainly wish to extend a very warm invitation to you to come to Dublin, to the Institute at some time in the future, where we can continue this discussion. I look forward to it. For many, many reasons, the world will be in better place when that's a possibility, and I always welcome an opportunity to come to Ireland. Thank you, Stephen. We appreciate it very much. Good afternoon.