 connections. And we have Carlos Juarez. He's spending most of his time in Mexico these days, but some of his time in Austin. Right now he's in Austin. Am I right? Am I got that right, Carlos? That's about right here in central Texas. Correct. Okay. Well, I think you can feel covered with all the stuff that's happening in the United States. And there's so much happening. And I know you're passionate about all of that. And of course, the central issue, of course, is COVID. And COVID is changing everything everywhere. And so we wanted to talk today about, you know, how those those sea changes, you know, are affecting our world, and how it's going to feel when we come out the other side, assuming that soon, but whether it's soon or not, we want to know from this show, from this discussion, where we're going to be. Have you got any rough ideas, broad thoughts about that? Well, I do, you know, and I guess more generally, you know, we can't help but see that this is a game changing moment. I mean, everything that we, you know, it's one of those watershed periods in history and the history of the world, where clearly everything before it is going to be different from everything after. And we still don't know exactly how it's going to play out. And here we are, still in the middle of it. But it is a pivotal moment. And what I want to maybe try to share some thoughts about is, you know, what is the impact that this pandemic may be having on really what we can say the liberal world order that we've had now for about 75 years. At the end of World War II, we could say there was the establishment of an international system, you know, largely led by the United States, you know, the allies, the Western, you know, victors after World War II, a system that has been in place. Obviously, it's undergoing a lot of changes as well. What does liberal mean, Carlos? Well, by that, what we refer to is, of course, you know, the end of World War II essentially ends with the result of the victors, the allied countries of Western Europe, the US, over those illiberal countries, or maybe authoritarian regimes, Germany, France, I'm not France, Germany, Japan, Italy. And by liberal, we also mean really the system that was set up very much anchored in a sort of sort of economic interdependence, sort of, you know, free trade of liberal international order in the classical sense. But I would say it rested on three core ideas. One was this notion of economic interdependence in the Marshall plan that helped we build Europe, the United States helping to create many of the sort of the framework of the system. Number two would be the institutions, many of them, what we call the Bretton Woods system, the IMF and World Bank, also the United Nations itself and many specialized agencies. And finally, perhaps a third pillar by liberal also, a democratic rule, democratic form of government. Because clearly, the alternative, we've had, and even after World War II, you had the socialist or communist, you know, led up alternative, the Soviet Union and its allies, eventually China with its model. So that's roughly what we mean now. We've seen, of course, a big transformation now almost 30 years ago with the end of the Cold War, right? 1989, 1991, the world faced another of these pivotal moments. But nevertheless, the liberal international system continued. But right now, I think one of the questions that we can ask is, I mean, what is this impact? What impact will this pandemic have on that order? And let me phrase it a different way. On one hand, pivotal moments like this can present an opportunity. And, you know, people are talking about that, hey, when we get out of this, will we somehow be better neighbors? Will we learn how to share more? Will we redefine the social order? Or it can be really a threat or a crisis that, in fact, I would argue, it's more likely we're going to see countries kind of looking more inward and focusing more on their own domestic. And this is a challenge because this pandemic requires it's a global crisis. It's a global issue. And it does require for the solution, global cooperation and coordination. We need a vaccine ultimately, and we can't do it where every country looks out to themselves. We have to have a coordinated effort for this to work. And that's going to be a challenge that I think, you know, especially given maybe the leadership in the US, and that's probably one of the biggest changes we've seen, the United States is basically losing some of its influence on global affairs. Under Trump, it has been accelerated and did not begin right now, but been going on since the end of the Cold War. But certainly we've seen it deeply accelerated under President Trump. And so it begs the question, how are we going to get, you know, beyond this? And will we face more uncertainty, more crisis? Because this pandemic is here today, and it'll eventually be managed, but we're likely to see these kind of global issues continue to confront us, you know, maybe a future different pandemic. Can I go back for context, a little context? Okay, so the liberal order, the global liberal order was based on a kind of altruism. The same altruism that made the United Nations, you know, the willingness to cooperate and with due regard for the fact that Europe was all bombed out. It was a terrible time for the Europeans, and we wanted to help them. And that was altruistic. We couldn't turn our backs just as easily. But the people of the United States went along with that. They went along with funding the Marshall Plan. They went along with the liberal international world order. They had certain high ideals. The country, my recollection of my understanding, the country came together. You know, we're victors, but we're kind victors. We believe in democracy and egalitarianism. And everybody wins. It was a very nice thought. The other thing I want to throw in on this context is that COVID has revealed a lot of flaws in our society. It isn't just Trump, although he's done a wonderful job at that. It's that COVID, and the experience has shown that maybe some of the things we thought were working well, were not working so well. And they were flawed. And maybe the liberal world order is something that was flawed. Not at the outset, but over time. So my question to you for context is, was it working? Was the liberal world order working? Or was it deteriorating as we get closer to COVID? Were there flaws there that we should have noticed? Maybe we didn't. Flaws that COVID would reveal. Well, you could almost change, you know, talking about world liberal order. You could almost say the same thing about globalization, you know, because in some ways the same issue can be present there. There are winners and losers. Now, on the macro level, economies, countries, individuals have benefited from this, from this liberal order on one hand. We have, you know, more democratic societies today than we did 75 years ago. We have more prosperity on one hand. And yet it's not everybody. And it's been uneven. And indeed, the rise of populism that we've now seen in the last few years, the election of Donald Trump, many other countries too, populist leaders, in many ways they are responding to this crisis of not everybody is benefiting. So you have today it's not just, you know, winners and losers, sometimes it's the globalists. Those that are more connected, more plugged in tend to be maybe more educated, but their work, what they do is more connected to the global economy versus those who are maybe more traditional, whose work, you know, maybe in previous times you worked at a factory. Well, today those factories are closing, automation is replacing workers. And so there are losers very clearly. And getting back to this general sense, we benefit as a whole and as a society, as a global community. But there are clearly losers and the challenge is if we're not helping those losers, if we're not integrating them, giving them options or alternatives, we're simply creating a divide. And, you know, you can even see it today in how people are responding to this pandemic, whether it's seen more as the public health crisis that it is, or if it's really more the focus on the economy, which clearly it's affecting many. So many people are, you know, taking sides and oh, let's open it and that's the priority for others. Wait, we have to be careful, it has to be managed carefully, we have to lead by science. But more generally, this big macro level, the international liberal order, it has been in crisis for a while. Again, we've seen democracy the last few years going backwards. In the United States included other even a crisis of the European Union in many ways, reflecting that while the European Union can be seen as a good example of liberalism or a liberal sort of interconnectedness, that same success story has also led to, again, losers criticism. You think it's fair to say that the COVID emergency, the COVID pandemic has accelerated these features of decline? Yes, absolutely. Because again, and even, you know, we talk maybe a lot about criticism about Trump and whether we're looking at his response to this crisis on one hand, or how he reflects a lot of these anxieties about globalism, globalization. These processes have all been going on. The pandemic has in many ways accelerated it, brought it out faster and quicker, starker. Now, again, some might see that as an opportunity for us to somehow rethink because things that have happened here in the last two, three months were unthinkable, you know, three, four, five months ago. Just, you know, China, which for decades has been growing at a very, you know, rapid pace. I think we're expecting this year it will grow zero. It will actually, you know, come to a very big shock. And you know, that's a separate puzzle. You know, what is that going to be meaning for China? How is that going to be reflected in, you know, either challenges for their regime or their government? Now, no doubt the pandemic has accelerated many things that have been going on already deepened them. One thing that strikes me is we talk about change. We talk about the pandemic kind of shaking things up and requiring China. It's the necessity that must breed invention. But, you know, one thing is I think people have it on their minds that you have the, you know, the COVID and everybody working on change because they have to. And then at the end of a certain point in time, we'll have a new normal. But actually this kind of tumultuousness, it's a positive word, I suppose, is painful. This kind of tumultuous doesn't necessarily go in a straight line. It goes here. It goes there. You make mistakes, you come out. And it could be that we come out of this this experience with a terrible result, which we ultimately have to correct yet again. So what about the process itself? The process of change between, say, now and the time when somebody can get up there and say, we have we have hit a new normal or a new abnormal, as the case may be. I think in the end, I think we're going to see a lot of variation. You know, on one hand, we can talk about countries. This country has done better and it's going to come up better. But our country, the US is a very large one. And we're going to see variation in regions and the response of maybe particular cities or states and similarly in different people. Some people, and again, we see the divide now. Those who have work that allows them to maybe function more like, you know, like what we're doing here through, you know, this new technology versus somebody who is a worker in a meat packing plant who has no option but to go to that place and work, that presents a challenge. So I don't know. I think we're going to see just a mixture of things. We're going to see some winners over time. And, you know, even again, this is shaking up the workplace in a way where more and more employers are going to realize, hey, maybe we can have more people working remotely from home or move towards more innovation and creativity, four day work weeks, you know, four, you know, four days a week at 10 hours instead of, you know, the five day work week. And many, many places will realize that. So this is, and that can be healthy on some hand, you know, and people can read, you know, redefine their whatever their social norms and their family, you know, traditions, whatever, but clearly others will not. And so it's going to be a mixed bag and the same among countries in the world. We're going to see some places that are going to be very interesting models and success stories. And we are likely to see others that are going to maybe languish and, you know, suffer very high costs. But there are certain trends that we have seen actually preceding COVID. Like the rise of dictatorship type governments and Trump preceded COVID. He is a dictator. We can see the fraying of democracy in countries that pretended or felt they were democracies. We can see that fraying all the more now. We can see people, you know, the eye, way, way film human flow with the takeaway there are 65 or 70 million people behind barbed wire right now that, you know, just dislocated people all over the world. That's a problem that I think is going to grow because of the economic effect of COVID. So I guess what I'm really asking you is there are negative things that are in play right now. Could it be that our new normal or abnormal is the prevailing of those things? I mean, it's a tension between the good things and maybe they're not so good things. I mean, we're going to wind up in a year or two with the vaccine or the subsidence of the disease. We're going to wind up with a lot of dictators. We are with a lot of divisiveness and, you know, the failure of national national community. I worry, for example, about the US. It seems so divisive about so many things even between the federal and the state and Trump is largely at fault for that, but it's a process that was happening before. So when we look around again, what are we going to see in terms of governments and people and all these issues that are now being raised? Well, again, it will depend on where you're sitting in the United States. Clearly, one could say that we've had a pretty abysmal failure at the national later level, you know, the leadership from Washington, from the president has been missing. Now, as a result of that, states, governors, mayors, you know, cities have had to sort of step in and fill that void. And so I would say you're going to see variation. You're going to see some places that are just picking up the pieces, figuring it out, and maybe at the very local community level, taking on that. But others that, you know, maybe are going to be resistant to that and real challenges, you know, what happens at that national level? We're coming up, you know, now less than six months, a national election that's going to determine whether Trump gets to be elected for years, or whether he gives, you know, he loses and does he go gracefully or allow power to transition. And that's going to have a lot of impact on, you know, different things. You know, if he loses, you know, some of his core core, you know, supporters are not going to be happy and may, you know, it's potential perhaps violence and more polarization if you can imagine it. Or I don't know. I mean, the other scenario where I suppose theoretically he could win the reelection, what does that mean? Do people go into different type of dismay or it's hard to imagine that that would result in like, you know, bringing together more people because up until now we've had a deepening divide. But that aside, you know, the US again, such a big country with variation, you know, the western left and east coast are, you know, on one hand, carrying out a different agenda from maybe the heartland. But at the international level, I think we're going to see that too. We're going to see some places that are going to more effectively manage their realities and others that are going to somehow language. So there's not going to be any clear path. I think it's going to be pretty messy and wide-ranging. Well, one thing it seems to be emerging and I don't know if it gives me comfort, but Xi Jinping takes advantage of every opportunity to advance China's brand in the world. He's joining international organizations that Trump has pulled out of. He's replacing the United States. He's replacing the United States as a world leader. He does this fitfully and sometimes he doesn't do it very well, but you can see that that's his pattern, that's his plan. And, you know, in a year or two or three, it may actually work. And so I'm asking really what about the possibility that China's supplants the United States as the leader of the world order, whether it's a liberal world order, or maybe not such a liberal world order, but it seems to me that's a real possibility. Yeah. Well, no, fair enough. And I think we're seeing some of that happen, as you suggest, with the relative abdication of global leadership from the U.S., that the U.S. is in decline, its influence no longer what it once was. And indeed, this pandemic is revealing that, you know, whereas normally in the past, the U.S. would be at the forefront helping to address this. Today, the Europeans, the Asians, the Latin Americans, they are not looking to the U.S. for a solution. They're sort of obviously realizing it's not coming. But back to your main point, I mean, are we going to see the rise of an alternative, maybe a Sino-centric world order? I think here are a couple of quick thoughts. On one hand, yes, China curiously and maybe ironically has taken advantage of the liberal international system, benefited from it, adapted many of the liberal institutions. However, China is not a liberal state. It is certainly not. And even Xi Jinping, who's been there since 2012, in many ways, he has even consolidated a more authoritarian state to control that. You know, China has a long history, even though it's a new country from 1949, but obviously the civilization and their world view is one that sees it as a long, long-term place. And in some ways, this rise of China or this new role is returning to a previous dominance that it once had, at least in that region of the world. It was never a global power in the true sense, but certainly maybe more of a system almost of a tributary state, you could say, where it was the core center and all those around it sort of paid homage, paid allegiance. It has tried to do that somewhat today, with Korea, with Southeast Asia, even reaching many tentacles out into Africa, the sort of ambitious one-built, one-road initiative they have. But I would just go back to this. On one hand, we can't say they're going to somehow just build the gap of the U.S. entirely because they don't see themselves in terms of sort of global power as a hegemon. It's more for their own interests, for what they need to keep their economy rolling. Yeah, it's not altruistic, not at the core. No, no, no, absolutely not. And it's not liberal in the sense of, you know, again, promoting democratic values. They're not interested in human rights or humanitarian intervention when there's a crisis in X or Y place. They don't have the values that, you know, they have been more prevalent in Europe and in the U.S., maybe not today as much, but certainly we've seen in the post-Cold War period, the last 20, 30 years, suddenly the international community, primarily the West have been focusing on humanitarian issues, humanitarian interventions, even dealing with pandemics, et cetera. China is not interested in that. They're interested in their own, you know, maintaining, obviously, their economy. The interesting puzzle will be how this crisis will affect their own order, because if anything, China is focused on order. That's what it's all about for them, maintaining some sort of semblance of order. And what happens if suddenly, you know, this rising new middle class or, you know, a new group of Chinese that have benefited from this globalization, suddenly the situation changes for them. Are they going to begin or the more open society that we have, you know, at the international level, more and more of these Chinese are aware of what's going on. They're traveling outside of the world. They're more connected with Taiwan, where, you know, suddenly they can see what a more open society is like. Is that going to lead to pressure on the Chinese political system? How long can the political leaders maintain an authoritarian rule but a liberal capitalist, state-led capitalist system? You know, I think that's such an excellent question, but I'd like to give you at least a partial answer. I would have warmed to that thought in the period between, what, the late 90s. Don't shout, hey, you can start with him. And see China as responding to the wishes for global engagement, for education, for westernization from its younger, more educated people. And throw aside violations of human rights and corruption. But that really hasn't gone in the way it was going. Under the tutelage of Xi Jinping, it's now reversed. First, it was an attempt to define corruption behind every rock in the name of advancing his political agenda. And then it was, let's build the, you know, built and wrote initiative right out to Spain and show those Europeans a thing or two. And all the countries in between. And then most, most irritating is, you know, the way they dump on people and violate human rights and send them to retraining camps and the way they're handling their relations with Hong Kong, which is really, really awful. So they changed. And I don't think they can be the leader of the liberal, a liberal world order anymore. It'll be, I think they're powerful and they'll continue to get more powerful and take opportunities the way he does. But I also think it's not going to be liberal. And maybe that's the future, Carlos. Maybe that's the way it works. I think in the end we're going to see, including China, countries around the world are more likely to focus inward, to take care of domestic resources, the economy, and maybe less consensus that somehow we all need to get around and hold hands. Now there will be some variation. And like the European Union, of course, now without the UK, despite challenges they face, they have in place now systems and institutions that allow them to maybe foster more cooperation. And they've been doing it for decades, if not centuries. That's the exception. I think in other parts of the world, including Asia, you know, with the China, you know, on the rise, China is not going to be in an ability or not going to have the capacity to, I don't know, force cooperation or take leadership of everything. They're going to be focused on their own economic, I guess, you know, machine. But they're less interested in the political order or the sort of hegemonic control, a geopolitical. It's more, you know, their own, and I think they're going to have a lot more pressure to have to handle their own internal political challenges. And so hard to imagine that they're going to be global powers in the US. Well, what it leaves you with is a sense of vacuum, because Trump is not engaging in Asia. He is not. He is not as engaging in Europe. He has left town in Europe. He has left town with the global community. He's not part of it. He's withdrawn from all of these valuable liberal order organizations that have emerged. And he's turned his back on the global consciousness, the global community. So I give you a new world with these changes. And I give you a world without moral leadership, because we're not providing it. And I don't think Xi Jinping can provide it either. So where does the leadership come from? And in the absence of global moral leadership, what happens? Do we have a lot of wars? Do we have a lot of competition for resources and water and land and so forth? I think we're going to face challenges because for years we've been, as you know, I'm a teacher of international relations, and the future problems are not going to be the massive wars of the past, the World War II, or even the Vietnam. They're going to be these global issues like pandemics, like natural resource management, climate change, and how we handle its impact. And these are very challenging issues. And in the absence of an effective leadership, or let's say a capacity to coordinate these things, we're going to see some floundering. We're going to see some mistakes made. And ultimately, I think maybe more and more individuals and countries are going to look to themselves to solving what is theirs. It's going to be a little bit more of this, you know, I guess what I'm calling like inward focus. But unfortunately, without seeing an international consensus or agreement as we had before, because the liberal world order, which is fraying and coming apart, is losing that consensus. It operated many, many decades with a consensus that this is what we want, liberal, you know, democratic societies, cooperation and coordination. And right now, we don't see as much of that. And yet, again, to solve this current pandemic, it requires cooperation, you know, a massive coordination for, you know, bringing about a vaccination program, not just for countries, but for the places that can't afford. It's going to require a lot of that. And it's going to be tough. You know, the UN is the canary in the coal mine. The UN, who Trump has defunded, knocked off funding to the World Health Organization and various other UN agencies. This is awful what he's done to the UN. But, you know, that's the last bastion, so to speak, of a sense of global cooperation. And I think it's in, I think it's in trouble. But one thing is emblematic. I wanted to ask you about the significance of this, because it's a mixed business and global kind of phenomenon. So some German researchers were working on a promising candidate for a vaccine in a German company, German researchers. And Trump sent his invoice to Germany to buy up the talent and hollow out that company and bring home these promising candidates for a vaccine. And Angela Merkel stopped him. And they, the researchers, the doctors, the research, they stopped him. They said, are you kidding? He was offering them billions of dollars to do this. He wanted to achieve a kind of coup, a win-lose kind of coup, where he got the product of the research and they didn't. He wanted to have intellectual property rights on it. He wanted to use it for, I want to say, his own purposes that doesn't necessarily mean the purposes of the United States. I can see that he, I believe he saw that as an opportunity in which he and his friends and family could make billions by, by cockroaching this intellectual property from Germany. So what does this mean? What does this mean in a larger sense? Because we saw that, but there's probably other things happening like that. My first thought was, look what happened at the end of World War II. We had all these prominent scientists of the Nazi government. They were quickly whisked away and brought to Los Alamos in New Mexico. Let's look the other way about those atrocities that maybe they didn't do it individually. They were part of that same system. But in the name of the new competition against the Soviet Union, we brought many of those up scientists to the U.S. And so that was my first thought. Beyond that, again, I think it speaks to how there's a certain, I mean, what would you call it? I guess it's a, you know, maybe in Trump it's reflected in a very extreme version of, I don't know, selfishness or looking out for your own interest. And, you know, he would argue it's, you know, he's looking out for the national interest as he defines it. More cynically, you could say, well, it's probably his, you know, his corporate friends or his own, you know, personal profits, etc. But I think we're going to see a lot of that. Countries, leaders, that is, kind of taking care of their own or whether it's themselves or their, you know, their people. And yet we saw this pushback. Obviously, when this came out a few weeks ago now, the German press was very quick to say, wait a minute, no, no, no, this, moreover, again, I just go back to this, this pandemic, the vaccine, it must be universal. And at the end of the day, Germany and the US are going to have to foot the bill to make sure it is in Central America and Africa and Asia, places that don't have the capacity. Because if we don't, this will continue. We won't be able to manage it. And so we have to understand this is a global issue that requires, obviously, leadership to address it that way. You can't just solve it for your own country. And unfortunately, so yeah, I mean, it's a cynicism on one hand, it's a selfishness, maybe it's also it's how leaders define their national interests. And I'm sure that Trump and his allies would argue it that way that they're looking out for the US. Well, you know, be that as it may, it's clearly rubbed a lot of other people the wrong way because it seems very well very selfish and not not thinking of others. Years ago, Carlos, fellow named Jack Balkan was on our think tech radio show has to be more than 10 years ago. And he's the dean of constitutional law at Yale. And it was a very nice show. And you know, Bush was Bush, W Bush was doing unproductive things to the country in those years. So I asked him, I said, Well, you know, what happens when Bush is out of office? Does it all spring back like like a yo-yo come right back like a rubber band being your back where you were? And can we can we set it up that way? I want to go back. And he said, No, Jay, you have to understand that history always moves forward. You can never ever go back. Everything that happens is built into the future. And I think that's what we're really talking about. We're talking about a world order that, you know, I think we agree that the old water world order is old, that new things are happening. Some of them are good. Some of them are bad. We don't know where it's going to go. But I think we can agree there is a new world order right now. Right now, it's already on us right now. Absolutely. Yeah. And while it's important for us to understand the past and know our history, we have to realize it's never going to be the same. We're not going to go back to that, you know, China is not going to be the US in the 1950s or 60s at all. And moreover, just the world today is so deeply interconnected and look at China again. Today, the US and China are at a deep, deep crisis. But they are so interdependent, both us of them and them of us that in the end, we have to cooperate like it or not. And so it'll be interesting to see that play out. But yeah, I think it's a good way to sum it up. The future is always going to be different and new. It will build on the past. And sometimes you want to learn those lessons, but it will never be the same. No. And all you can hope is that you have the same quality of life, both in materials and intellectually as you had before or better or worse. And look, if anything, I think this pandemic is going to force many of us to simplify, to make life, you know, take stock of what really matters and certainly this consumer world of, you know, more and more. In the end, look, we have to realize, you know, what's important, good health, obviously good, you know, civic, you know, duties, responsibilities, family, but especially we're going to have to make do with less because we're all going to be hit pretty hard by this financially. There will be some who will benefit, just as some companies, you know, the Amazons of the world are going to do well. Many others, however, are going to suffer. I mean, look at the restaurant and hospitality industry will never be the same at all. Yeah, lives are going to be different. But one thing is I appreciate very much candor and honesty. And I see emerging out of this perhaps a greater level of candor and honesty in human relations, even if divided by miles and by electronic zoom kinds of things. Anyway, Carlos, thank you very much for this discussion. We should buy in all particulars. Stay safe. And we'll talk again in a couple of weeks. I can hardly wait. Excellent. Thank you so much. And Aloha. Thank you so much. Take care.