 America's middle class has found itself under siege in recent years, from globalization, technological change, budget cuts, and now of course crushing economic damage from the COVID-19 pandemic. These pressures have had profound social, economic and political consequences in the United States and equally significant consequences for US foreign policy. They explain in part Donald Trump's rise to the presidency. And now Joe Biden, as President-elect, has pledged, and I'm quoting here, to equip our people to succeed in a global economy with a foreign policy for the middle class. So what will this actually mean? How can US foreign policy support the aspirations of the middle class in crisis? What will it mean for US global leadership? And finally, what does all this mean for Australia? Well, I'm really delighted today to be joined by Rosalind Engel and Darren Lim to help tease out the answers to these questions. Rosalind is the co-editor of a new Carnegie Endowment study on just this subject. In fact, the report is called Making US Foreign Policy Work Better for the Middle Class. If you have the time, I really encourage you to have a look at the report, both for its excellent analysis of how we got here, but also for its thoughtful reflections on policy responses. Rosalind is a non-resident scholar in the Geoeconomics and Strategy Program at the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace and also professor of practice in economics at the US Naval Academy. Rosalind served with distinction in a number of senior US government roles, including at the US Treasury and at the Office of the Director of National Intelligence. Darren is a senior lecturer in the College of Arts and Social Sciences at the Australian National University from where we are broadcasting today. He ranges broadly over some very big topics, including Geoeconomics, Grand Strategy in the International Order and Strategic Developments in the Indo-Pacific. Darren is also co-host of the Excellent Australia in the World podcast and a regular contributor to the public discussion on Australian foreign policy challenges. Rosalind and Darren, it's really a great pleasure to have you both here. Now, just before we start the conversation, just a quick administrative point, if you have a question that you'd like to pose to the panel, please post it in the Q&A box and then raise your hand and use the raise your hand icon in the toolbar. We'll try and get to questions as they come up. If you'd like to ask the question yourself, we will be able to make you live. That is promote you if you like to a panelist and you'll appear on screen and you'll be able to ask the question yourself. Alternatively, I can ask it on your behalf. If you prefer me just to ask your question, just type not live in front of the question and then I will do it. Now, just before we get going, I just wanted to check Rosalind and Darren that you're all okay and ready to go, both ready to go. All right, well, Rosalind, let's start with you. The study you co-edited says that America's middle class finds itself in a precarious state and you quote a very telling Pew Research Center poll of 2019 in which nearly 70% of American surveyed quite a staggering number, really. I said that they expected their children to be either worse off or no better financially from their parents. So how did it come to this? What set of circumstances has created this precarious state for the great American middle class? Sure. Well, first, thank you very much for having me today. It's really a pleasure to be here. And I also wanted to do one quick kind of scene setting if that's okay before I just jump into that question, just to make sure people knew a teeny bit about the report. Just kind of create some context. So first of all, the report was really developed and guided by a bipartisan task course. And we could talk a little bit about more a little later about who was on that task course. It's kind of interesting. We worked over three years to try to get a better understanding of how American middle class households viewed foreign policy. We actually started with and built off three detailed state level reports, Ohio, Colorado and Nebraska, which I might talk a little bit about here and there. And so it was a little bit different from your typical foreign policy study. We talked to lots and lots of people outside the Beltway, as we say, local business leaders, university experts, state local officials, economic development teams, and lots of middle class Americans. So I just wanted to put that out there because that's kind of the perspective that I'm going to bring, I think, to some of these comments today. So in terms of kind of how we got here and what's going on, we did hear a lot in these hundreds of conversations that we had about the state of the American middle class, and it largely mirrored that rather dismal statistic you just mentioned. I think the biggest issue for the American middle class has been the sluggish growth of employment earnings, particularly in the middle income entirely. Middle class households really depend for the vast bulk of their income on work. And work has just not been paying quite the way it used to in the United States. Just one quick statistic, and this is pretty typical of other places as well, they're advanced economies, but labor share of national income has been declining for years from roughly 64% of all national income before 2002, I think it's now down to 58%. And that has to do with things like structural shifts in the economy. We've lost a lot of jobs in goods producing industries based on manufacturing. So we've shifted, it used to be something like 27% of all jobs in 1980, we're in these manufacturing sector, and now it's down to about 14%. And so a lot of jobs have migrated into the service sector. And for those who do not have higher education, that's meant some declining wages or stagnating wages. So another quick statistic from the United States, GDP in the United States has tripled since 1980, but median earnings of the typical mail in the United States who worked full time in year round is essentially the same as it was in 1980. So it's been difficult for people who go to work every day and work full time year round to get ahead. And I think that's really what's mostly behind the statistic. But I just mentioned a couple of other stresses on American middle class households. One is just a general rise in income inequality, which I mentioned just a bit before. But another way to think of this is that if you look at the share of national income, that's going to the middle three quintiles in the United States, it's declined from something like 53% in 1970 to 45% today. And fiscal policies in the US, our tax spending and transfer programs are just not really doing a lot to help those middle income quintiles. It does a little bit to help the lowest quintiles, but it's not doing a lot for middle income quintiles. And then we had a financial crisis and we now have COVID. And so we also have a sense of diminished financial security. So even by 2016 in the United States, the median net worth of the middle quintile was really basically just where it was in the late 1990s. It just had not really recovered. It took a very long time. So we have all of that. And then we also have some rising costs of living, actually not for durable goods. So things like household appliances, clothing, other things, that's actually been fairly stable largely because of trade. But non-tradable services, education, childcare, medical care, all of those have been going up. And so you see this kind of squeeze on middle class households with stagnating or very slow growth in income, diminished financial security, so less of a financial cushion, rising costs for things like services. And I would add, we've had some really weak infrastructure investment in the United States, so we don't even have the infrastructure there to support some middle class households. So I think that's really behind a lot of what you're seeing when you see a statistic like the one that you just mentioned. Great, thanks Rosalind. So how much of that, those circumstances, do you think explains Donald Trump's rise to the presidency and the very deep social and political divides that we all see now in the United States? I think they're really critical. The election of 2016 was just a serious and pretty unequivocal repudiation of the Washington establishment and the policy status quo. It was the protest vote. In domestic policy, there's lots of problems. We've had kind of a policy almost paralysis since 2010, when you had a Republican Congress come in and really block a lot of what the Obama administration at that time was trying to do. And in foreign policy, since 2016, we had President Trump with his kind of make America great again campaign and the America first national security strategy really have this very marked departure in U.S. foreign policy away from free trade, away from sort of more generous immigration stance, away from closer cooperation or close cooperation with allies or multilateral institutions, away from a traditional emphasis in U.S. foreign policy on democracy and human rights. It's been a really significant shift in terms of the U.S. foreign policy stance. And I think this disgruntlement, this frustration, this sense that the system isn't working for a lot of people, that Washington isn't delivering. I think it's absolutely an important part of what happened. And I think it's kind of important to remember the economic and political geographies of the United States are pretty complex. It's a really big country. One of the reasons what we talked to and spent some time in three different states was trying to really get a feel for some of what in the United States is not so flatteringly called flyover country. But those geographies don't completely align, but they do sort of rhyme. So it's not that surprising that the Midwest has been a major swing area that's lost millions of manufacturing jobs. And it's still struggling to recover and diversify and move into sort of a more solid place in terms of 21st century economy. But on the coast, you have really well-educated workers in tech and finance, and they've done brilliantly. And in other parts of the country, including across the south, you have low-skilled populations that have kind of grown increasingly anti-immigrant. But also that was happening in this very slow economic recovery and a lot of wage stagnation. So I do think, you know, this overlapping of the geography, the politics, and kind of the economics is really important to keep in mind. Okay, terrific. Thanks, Ros and look, before I go to Darren, I just want to ask you one more question focusing on the domestic side of this, because most of our discussion, we're going to move on and look at the foreign policy dimensions of this issue. But occasionally when those of us in Australia who get, you know, worry a bit about the way in which reform, policy reform has become much harder in Australia in recent years, we look at America and we feel much better about ourselves. You know, whether it's healthcare or taxation or the structure of the budget or social security, as you say, nothing seems to be able to be done these days. It doesn't seem to be a middle ground. Do you see that changing at all? Because if it can't change, it caused the consequences for America are very significant. Yeah, I mean, I always say like the politics is a lot harder than the economics. So I don't know that I have a great answer. I think one thing to keep in mind is we have a federal system. So even while the federal government is been, you know, really drifting and really at odds with each other, there's a lot of things going on at the state level and there's still quite a lot of control. So infrastructure investment happens largely at the state level. There's a lot of different kinds of policies that can happen at the state level. So there is this sort of sense that even while Washington is kind of, you know, very preoccupied and very stuck, there still are other levels of government that have proved a bit more responsive. That said, you know, it's not great when, you know, your Congress, your executive branch cannot seem to find ways to compromise and move forward on things that people basically agree on, like, you know, infrastructure spending. So I don't know, you know, I mean, I'm hopeful President-elect Biden, you know, has some, you know, very significant deep experience on the hill. He's bringing in a very experienced team. I think there's a sense that we could be doing more to deliver for the American middle class and that these swerves back and forth across these two partisan divides is, you know, really not a particularly healthy place to be. That said, we live in a, you know, really tumultuous media environment with, you know, lots of, you know, crazy stuff that's happening and it doesn't, it's hard to know if the parties can come together in the public, you know, in the public, you know, realm to agree on things. It's almost like agreeing on things is bad. All right, Rosalind, thanks very much, Darren. I want to bring you in and just get a bit of an Australian lens on this issue. So I've got a couple of questions about the middle class in Australia, but Darren, before we get to those, you and I have talked before and you think a lot about this problem of American gridlock and polarization and whether we are actually seeing an America in decline. How much do you see the possibility of change in the American political system from your perch in Australia? Oh gosh, it is a very fragmented society and the fact that Donald Trump won even more votes in terms of raw, total in 2020, I think highlights that fact and so I don't, there is no easy solution and I think that's why conversations like this are so important because to win back that kind of shared sense of purpose, to win back a common identity is going to require making people feel more comfortable and giving them, you know, the report that Rosalind contributed or edited is very clear on this, you know, regaining their trust and that's a very slow, painful process with the political system that is very ill-equipped at the moment to provide that and so I think the pathway out is going to be about, you know, improving the lives of ordinary Americans, but it's a very long process if it can be even successful. Okay, well, let's look at Australia. Do you see parallels between the US experience and ours here in Australia? I mean, do you think our middle class is in crisis and its globalization having such an effect on the middle class in Australia that it's shaping our own domestic politics? I don't think so. I wouldn't describe it as being in crisis. I mean, I think there are echoes and some parallels. I think it's worth putting out a definition of what it means to be in the middle class, which is between 75 and 200% of the median income, which in Australia, if you're a single individual is a bit over $33,000, which is not a lot of money. In fact, it's about 5% more than the minimum wage. So you can be in the middle class and I think we can all agree not necessarily very comfortable. Middle class earnings like in the US are growing much slower than those of the wealthy, but they are still growing. I guess that's one contrast. But I think there are some major structural differences that distinguish the two countries. One, economic performance, the Australian economy has done very well over the past 30 years, and I think that has blunted some of the impacts of manufacturing decline that we have experienced. But also, as you said, Richard, earlier, we have a much stronger social safety net, better public services. I think also we have few of the maybe just less acute social and cultural challenges that we have in the United States. So we have, I think, a generally more cohesive society and partly because we're much smaller. So I think the main echo though, the main parallel is in some disaffection with mainstream politics and the mainstream political parties. You have seen a declining primary vote share for the two major parties. But one difference is that no one can actually agree on an alternative. You haven't seen an organised political force that represents some kind of middle class backlash, either take over a major political party like you saw with the GOP in the US or create a durable, successful political party of its own. There have certainly been attempts, but they haven't been able to durably succeed. So it's your second question in terms of, you know, how is globalization affecting our domestic politics and its impact on the middle class? I think we are one of the archetypal globalist countries, like all we have been. We have long recognised that openness to trade, to finance and yes, to some extent migration is a net positive for the country. And you see that reflected in polling data. And we've also recognised that the international system of rules and institutions that help facilitate and create the global economy have been to our benefit and to our national interest. So I don't think you've seen as much of an effect. And if you take the two biggest sort of single issues of globalization, you know, trade and migration, and you look at them through the lens of a middle class voter, you generally see healthy majorities of the Australian public saying that both have been on average on net good for Australia. So I do think our current Prime Minister Scott Morrison has shifted or adjusted the rhetoric of government around globalization to give it a slightly skeptical hue. But I'm not sure that's been driven from a bottom up political pressure from the middle class, but more trying to preempt that kind of pressure from building in the first place. And we can talk more about that later if you wish. Yeah, terrific. Thanks, Stan. And I really agree with that. I think, you know, when you look at the opinion polling, even in the current year, it's quite striking how strong the support for trade is, even where there are concerns about jobs. Well, Rosalind, we sort of looked inwards a bit, but I want to turn outwards now and just ask you how this sense of great challenge and a fading opportunity has influenced how the US middle class sees foreign policy and the role of America in the world. I mean, what does the middle class want from foreign policy? Yeah. I mean, I think it's worth, you know, Darren's point is kind of interesting, you know, the differences between the US and Australia. The US is just a huge place, it's a huge economy, very diversified, you know, has a huge internal market itself. And so, you know, it's never, you know, it's not one of the more open economies, right? I mean, we're open in the sense that we have low tariffs, but, you know, exports plus imports over, you know, as a share of GDP is not nearly as high in the United States as you might expect, but it has been growing. So it's a gradual increase in the way in which the US is becoming more integrated globally, but it's still fairly slow and it is a little bit more moderate than in other places. And I think that's sort of reflected in the way the US middle class tends to view US foreign policy. So, you know, the US middle class can usually just get by like living kind of its own lives, you know, not maybe as connected or as, you know, follow kind of foreign policy that closely. But what we really heard, I think most part was pretty heartening, you know, I think most American middle class families are pretty pragmatic. They see, you know, open free trade as basically a good thing. It's creating economic opportunities in a general sense. And they also have, you know, kind of this, I think this kind of support for this enlightened self-interest, you know, that goes with, you know, being a leader of an open and free trading system, you know, some of the benefits that have accrued to the United States from that global leadership. I think that's basically appreciated. And I think that there's some appreciation for the fact that the United States has served as a, you know, basically a positive and a constructive force in the world. So all of those things are present, and there's awareness and appreciation for them. But when you really kind of ask very specifically how is foreign policy affecting you, what you tend to get are conversations about trade, and actually to some extent national defense, the military, those seem to be the two that kind of come most immediately to mind for an American middle class household. So we can start with trade for a second. So, you know, middle class Americans, they hold pretty nuanced and diverse views on trade, which might surprise people, but it shouldn't because it really, very much depends on where you sit. So for example, when we were speaking with people in Nebraska, which is a very big agricultural state, you know, they were quite heavily dependent on exports and they follow world markets, especially commodity markets very closely. They're very concerned about maintaining access to those markets. They were actually quite worried about the Trump administration's trade war with China, although they were actually quite supportive of getting sort of tough on China. They wanted to see that trade war wrap up because that was really very risky from their standpoint the longer that went on. Nebraska farmers are actually pretty supportive of immigration as well, because they, you know, really rely on seasonal labor to support farming operations. So even though it's a, you know, deeply red state, you know, it was not 100% supportive of the trade war with China, and it's not particularly 100% supportive of anti-immigration programs that have also been put forward by the Trump administration. In Ohio, there's lots of areas that are very concerned about foreign competition and trade practices, ones that have been hit hard, particularly manufacturing, and they see, you know, some foreign competition and trade as a direct threat to U.S. jobs. It's very real and very concrete for them, but other parts of the same state, Ohio, like Cincinnati, very diverse economic base, lots of foreign students coming in to study local universities. There's lots of services, businesses that have good export opportunities, and so they're very supportive. And then you have a place like Colorado where, right, you have groups that are very strong on environmental stewardship and want to see us rejoin Paris, and then you have places like Colorado Springs, which is huge in defense spending and aerospace, and then you have fracking and mining areas that are all into U.S. energy production. So it's all over the place, depending on where you sit, depending on where you live. So I wouldn't say it's monolithic. There's a lot of nuance, depending on where you live, how you make your living, but generally there's a sense that trade presents some good economic opportunities. That said, there's still a lot of concern that the American government is not doing enough to protect American jobs, so that we've opened up to trade too freely, too quickly. We don't have good adjustment mechanisms. We don't have good safety nets. We're not doing enough to help communities adjust. We're not doing enough to help workers adjust. We're not doing enough to invest in the competitiveness of American communities, and we heard that pretty much loud and clear. So I would say that's kind of on the trade side. The other one I mentioned was national security. I think that's interesting because I don't think people maybe understand that there are a lot of really good middle-class jobs that are connected to U.S. military spending, and that's just a very pragmatic bottom-line thing. There's huge armaments production in a place like Lima, Ohio, which puts out tanks, and Lima, Ohio is quite aware that tank production is maybe not the industry of the future, but they don't necessarily want to see defense spending cut. They'd like to see reinvestment in Lima. They'd like to see this defense community, in which they take a lot of pride, continue, but they know it has to evolve. I think there's a lack of faith and trust, as you mentioned, in the government's ability to manage these transitions for American households and make trade work better for people. Okay, thanks a lot, Rosalind. Now just I just wanted to look at policy making because there's a great line in your report where you say that the foreign policy establishment sat in security and economic silos, which is a phrase that will resonate to some, at least in Australia, and frailed behind a changing world, lovely phrase that. So it's really a critique of orthodox farming and economic policy making, and so how do you think that disconnect happened and are there lessons for other countries here? I don't even know if it happened so much as it was kind of always there, and then just as the world got more complex and they need to integrate foreign and domestic policy became more important. We just haven't really been able to adjust, but just on a personal level maybe to make it more concrete for people. I worked in U.S. economic intelligence for a bunch of three, four years, and I spent time worrying about 170 other countries beside my own, everything besides the United States. I don't think we kind of as a rule really spent any time thinking about the domestic distributional effects of many of the events, risks, scenarios that we were concerned about, and then I went over to Treasury and I was in the U.S. macro side and we never once worried about anything to do with foreign events, global shocks, or anything else, and I literally, in my two worlds, I just crossed the street and they just didn't even speak to each other anymore. It just always felt like it was somebody else's job to make all these connections, and that's just, you know, we really need to fix some of that. On a more abstract level, I mean you could see it pretty easily if you read, which I have, you know, the past 40 years of U.S. national security strategies. I wouldn't recommend it, but it exposes the gap, you know, between kind of the foreign policy frame and the national security frame and kind of the economic policy. And so what you'll see a lot of is the U.S. national interest is almost always framed in terms of like economic strength, which of course is like, you know, who's not going to be for economic strength, right? But there's very little regard for kind of the shape and the character of the economy or how, what economic security of middle class households look like. It's almost always there's sort of these kind of phrases about economic strength, and then the whole document just moves into, you know, security, geopolitical competition, you know, technology, weapons systems, the whole thing. You know, obviously geopolitical competition matters a lot for U.S. national security, but so does, you know, the long-term economic security of a very large, you know, middle class for social stability, political stability and every other reason, right? So, you know, I think when we talk about these silos, I mean, I think everybody in government anywhere kind of nods, but we really do need to do better with this. We had one recommendation in the report, which I think a lot of members of the task force and even got picked up in a few other places liked, which was this idea of a national competitiveness strategy. So instead of just thinking about the national security strategy, really thinking a little bit harder about how do we actually knit together domestic and foreign policy priorities and tools to, you know, improve national competitiveness more holistically, not just national security, but national competitiveness, you know, as a source of national security. Okay. Actually, I think you asked me about lessons for other countries, but I don't think I know, you know, if we can get our own house in order, then we will be sure to go on the road with everything that we learn. We look forward to that day. Yeah, exactly. Don't hold your breath. Darren, I want to ask you the policymaking question in a minute, because I know that you are an astute observer of our own system. But before we get to that, can we talk a little bit about how you see Australia's middle class and foreign policy? Do you see the middle class as having a distinct set of foreign policy preferences? Does the middle class shape foreign policy? Or in your view, do you see it really as an elite preoccupation? I think both. The preferences that I described earlier, I think there has been an alignment of the middle class and the public more broadly with the basic tenets of Australian foreign policy. What's changed, at least in the last years, under this Prime Minister, as I foreshadowed earlier, is how foreign policy is framed. He has done, Scott Morrison, the Prime Minister, has been relentless in framing Australian foreign policy through the explicit lens of national interest. In our interest, what's in our national interest? He says it all the time in response to every question, we will do what's in our interest. I think my theory of this is that that reflects a recognition of the kinds of pressures that have been building in places like the United States or in Europe. And the PM getting out in front of that a little bit, which I think aligns also with his own beliefs about the world. And that Australia's actions on the international stage need to be connected back to that lived experience of ordinary Australians, Morrison's quiet Australians. Otherwise, those actions will lack the legitimacy of the public. But as I said earlier, I see this as more of a rhetorical shift rather than a concrete policy shift and one that's been driven by middle class pressures. There is one glaring exception, of course, which is climate change. I don't see strong evidence that the middle class explicitly supports or is pushing the government to be such an outlier on emissions reductions and on zero carbon neutrality policies. I think that's driven ideologically from inside the party itself. But perhaps with the voters not having it a sufficiently high enough priority overall to punish the government for its stance. Can I just ask you a subsidiary question on this? As you know, one of the big ideas in the foreign policy white paper and full disclosure here, because you know that I had a role in shaping it was this idea of openness that Australia gained considerably from being open to the world, not absolutely, but as much as possible, whether it was trade or investment or migration or even ideas and capital. And of course, openness is an idea that's really come under a lot of pressure in the past few years, sort of running against the tide, if you like, of the anti-globalisation sentiment that economic nationalism we've seen, not just in America, but in other parts of the world. But you know, in Australia it's survived, it's a little bit dented. But you know, do you think that there is still broad public support for that idea of openness? And the white paper, of course, says that Australia shouldn't remain open even if other countries begin to close their markets. I do. I think there are increasing qualifications on openness. For example, the way in which asylum seekers arrive in the country, Australians care very much about that process, which has been a very powerful political tool for successive governments. On foreign investment, I think the public largely accepts the national security exceptions that drive decision making, for example, on 5G telecommunications networks. So I think the public still supports openness in principle, but is very happy to carve out exceptions for Australia and the government has persuaded them that these are necessary. All right. Can we turn to the policy making part of the equation here? And I know that you and Alan Gingel have chewed this over quite a lot in your podcast. But do you see the same kind of critique of foreign policy making that Rosalind has in her report? Is the Australian system also trailing behind a changing world and clinging to orthodoxy when really it should be doing something else? I do think there is a disconnect, but I don't think it has been too consequential yet. I think that policy making elites, and I've said this to Alan, a 50-year veteran of Australian foreign policy, that I think elites have been less willing to face the political ramifications of the changing politics of the middle class. And the example I come back to is in the critical commentary around Prime Minister Morrison's infamous negative globalism speech that he gave in October of 2019, where he was sort of seemingly rhetorically critical of global elites and of international institutions to some extent. And you saw some pushback from the establishment, and I think less than the acknowledgement about the way it was trying to speak to some of these grievances of the middle class, the grievances that they have with the status quo model and recognition that things do need to change. But I wouldn't characterize this disconnect as so much of a failure because I don't think we have been tested yet. The pressures on Australia, unlike in the United States, had not strong enough. And it's not just the Prime Minister who's recognising that you're seeing key members on the opposition side in the Labor Party also recognising that they need to frame the challenges of foreign policy differently. I want to add one point, though, which is that this sort of the backlash against the status quo, whether that's domestically or internationally or against politicians or against elites, it's so broad and hard to pin down it. And I think it exists regardless of specific causes. And so I think, and we've discussed this before, Richard, that the international system and globalisation have been a bit of a scapegoat for what are genuine struggles and grievances of the middle class and of mass publics everywhere. But in many cases, they're not the cause and it's technology and secular changes in the labor market that are the main drivers of the struggles that are being experienced. But if that's true, if foreign policy is not as much of the cause, and we can debate that and the China shock and things like that, but if it's not much of the cause, it's also probably not much of the solution. And the goal, for me, one of the most interesting things about the Carnegie series of reports is that in some sense, I read them as almost seeking to insulate foreign policy from this critique to some extent, in the sense of rebuilding trust and rebuilding credibility, rather than necessarily that foreign policy is the solution to improving the lives of the middle class. And not sure if that's the thread you want to pull on. Well, that's a very good place, I think, to come back to you, Rosalind, because your report is not just about understanding the problem. There's a lovely American phrase that I used to hear a lot when I was posted in Washington, which is stop admiring the problem and actually give me some ideas to do something about it. So you do really try and grapple with foreign policy responses, although you do also talk about domestic policy. There's way too much in your report for us to sensibly cover here, but I wondered if you could just talk us briefly through a couple of the ideas around the model of U.S. global leadership on China, of course, which is really the biggest foreign policy issue now and forever, I suppose, for us all, and also on trade policy, which you talked a bit about before. Sure. So, I mean, I think, you know, if we think about kind of what the overarching kind of takeaway was, is that, you know, if we were to kind of recenter, reground U.S. foreign policy and middle class interest, sort of advance those interests, it would lead to a somewhat more tempered, more disciplined foreign policy that really issues, you know, major new conflicts and really tries to promote stability. So in the near term, what might that mean? So, you know, our view is that it would definitely mean reinvigorating relations with close allies, not in order to, you know, sort of express and project more power, but really to help protect the U.S. public from shocks that are coming in from abroad to help improve coordination on common challenges, which would include climate change and refugee flows, other border issues, and try to work with others to elevate middle class concerns that might include things like trying to work around closing regulatory or jurisdictional gaps, like in taxes, for example, like tax haven use, that maybe feed inequities and kind of advantage large corporations or wealthy individuals over others. I think it also suggests sort of the need to build back up the State Department, which has been, you know, as is now in Tatters, more or less. And maybe there's an opportunity there to do some reorganization around the State Department around sort of new priorities, new authorities, new capabilities. I also think there are some, you know, appetite to continue to push on things like burden sharing. So the ability of the U.S. to sort of begin to share the burden with allies on a number of issues goes a long way toward helping Americans, you know, see this global leadership role as something worth doing. When there's a perception, even if it's not true, but if it's a wide perception that, you know, there's a lot of free writing, that, you know, the system is unfair, that the U.S. is bearing all the costs, it becomes very difficult at home politically to get, you know, broad support for it. Obviously it's going to mean coordinating kind of a global economic recovery from the pandemic. I think it's going to mean, you know, looking toward the digital ecosystem. What do we need to do, you know, around the world to help kind of create a healthy, you know, digital economy going forward? How, what are we going to do with our very formidable defense budgets? You know, how are we going to actually work harder to make sure we're, you know, doing things around long-term readiness and security as we kind of, I think, pull back from, you know, active military intervention in any kind of large-scale way. So I think all of those things are kind of big picture ones. In terms of China, you know, I think that's really, it's a long, it's a long game, right? I don't think a simple reset back to maybe where we were four or eight years ago seems very possible. I mean, it feels like the train has left the station to some degree. And I think, you know, it's more an exercise in getting the train on a better track, right? So that we're not headed toward outright conflict, we're not in a, you know, an outright trade war, but we're working toward resolving some of the differences, working on some of the common problems that we have in managing some of the conflict in terms of things like unfair trade practices, IP theft, you know, some abuses around economic leverage or influence campaigns abroad. That whole set of issues. And then on trade, I mentioned before, you know, we tried to think a bit more is a broader competitiveness agenda rather than just a trade policy agenda. So this national competitiveness strategy would help to guide strategic investments in American workforce and infrastructure. We'd also want to be pursuing perhaps some limited targeted trade deals, but they would need to really be able to deliver some tangible gains to middle class households. There's some, you know, recommendations for promoting small, medium-sized businesses and in the export markets and some ways to think about doing trade enforcement better. And we have a lot of authorities, but they're all kind of in different places and we don't usually coordinate as well as we could. So there's some recommendations around that. Okay. Thanks, Rosalind. Darren, I wanted to come back to the point that you finished on, just to tease that out a bit more when we had you last on. But so how much do you think should foreign policy have to bear the burden of protecting the middle classes from some of these pressures? You know, is it enough for Australia, for example, just to focus on domestic policies that try and mitigate some of these impacts that reduce inequality, provide safety nets, transition plans for industry, improve competitiveness? Or is it unwise to try and separate foreign and domestic policy out here? I think you should do all those things. But at the end of the day, what happens internationally is going to have massive impacts on those policy domains, whether you like it or not. So you do need international cooperation to solve certain global problems that have those local effects that will change the things that you care about, and whether that's climate change or health or in trade. And so I sort of would characterize the failure of foreign policy over the past several decades as being one that enabled a lot of domestic policy failures. So, you know, the erosion of social protections and the safety nets that were constructed in the post-war period. This idea that national governments would have the freedom to pursue full employment policies and develop welfare states, even as they agreed on global rules and joined institutions, that idea, those ideas I think got lost. You know, it's called in political science the idea of embedded liberalism. But you saw in the 70s and 80s a rollback of the welfare state to the principle of sort of harmonizing policies across countries, you know, across borders, and that created a bit of a race to the bottom. So foreign policy has enabled domestic policy failure. But there's always going to be a core tension between sovereignty and cooperation. Like the more that you insist on a freedom to act, the harder it's going to be to coordinate policies across nations. And so states are still going to have to sacrifice some sovereignty and sometimes a lot of sovereignty to solve global problems. The challenge is then to translate that into a policy imperative that can persuade middle class voters across the west in particular to get behind it. Thanks, Darren. I'm conscious that we're beginning to run out of time and I do want to get to a new American president before we finish. But Rosalind, I just wanted to talk to you about one other aspect of your report that's very interesting. So much more than in Australia, American foreign policy, you know, is always animated by a very big idea. And your report looks at some of those foreign policy paradigms as a post-colon war, liberal internationalism, President Trump's America first, and a newer progressive agenda of economic and social justice and climate change and so on. And where you seem to land, need to combine internationalism with a more principled kind of nationalism than we got under Trump. It's more reform than revolution. And I suppose the question I wanted to ask you is that, does that look too centrist for the ages? Is it itself perhaps too unorthodox for those in the American middle class who are wanting to see a greater change? Or do you think that there is support domestically for a reformed policy framework? I really liked that phrase. I wish I'd come up with it, you know, the, you know, the internet. I think, what did you call it? Combined internationalism with more principled nationalism. I think it's really very close to where we came down. I just give you a sense. Like, there was a Gallup poll in February 2019, and it showed that 69% of Americans thought the United States should take a major or leading role in global affairs. And it might surprise people, but that number has been relatively stable for a decade. There just really isn't a lot of public support for Trump's revolution, you know, in foreign policy. And it's called to abandon US allies, abdicate leadership. So the American middle class, the broad American public is not particularly supportive of the actual Trump's actions. Whoops, too. To really, sorry, I lost my light here. I don't know. I'll have to be in the dark for a second. The, you know, the administrations. Yeah, I'll get up and turn it on in a second. But the administration's, you know, deep rejection of, you know, a global role for the United States. That's not really widely supported. I think what is supported is broadly what you just said, which is kind of a return to some kind of pragmatic focus on national interests and kind of basic interests, as in, you know, what is good for the US middle class? How do we actually, you know, engage in the global economy in ways that promote job security, job stability, the creation of good jobs that take some account of distributional concerns that, you know, is aware of the need for social safety nets or at least some kind of adjustment mechanisms that are a little bit more sort of honest about the fact that trade itself is highly redistributive process. And it just doesn't, things just don't redistribute, you open up to trade. It's not automatic that the winners are going to compensate the losers. So, you know, we have to have a little bit better conversation about that. So no, I actually don't think that a more centrist approach is out of sync with where the American people are. It's going to be a little difficult in Washington because we've now had, you know, basically a decade of a lot of intransigence and partisanship. But, you know, I think the election, and we can get into that shortly, you know, is a move a little bit back toward a more centrist stance. And, you know, I think you're going to see, I think you're going to see some willingness in Congress to make some progress in a few areas where I think the American public really wants to see some progress. All right. Thanks, Rosalind. Just before we go to President-Elect Biden, Darren, you know better than most that there's a vigorous debate in the US system about what the point of America should be now in this new world in terms of foreign policy. So do you see yourself that America can find a sense of shared purpose in its foreign policy that does find a path between the sort of narrow nationalism of Trump and the mistakes of imperial overreach that we've seen in the past? What I want to say first, I think, is just to recognize a particular electoral result that was quite remarkable to me on this question of centrism versus non-centrism. And that was in Florida where I think Trump won by four or five points. But a minimum wage bill or amendment passed, I think, with 60% of the vote. And so you had 10 or 15% of Trump voters who also wanted to see a minimum wage rise, which is traditionally a very left-leaning policy. And so I do wonder whether many of the things that we might be thinking of as a centrist coming out of the report actually have quite a lot of support among both the progressive left and much of the working class Trump right. And that there actually may be a way of synthesizing them. Maybe just don't call it centrism. In terms of the shared purpose, I mean, I think this is where the China comes into the frame, because the most likely pathway to that shared purpose, unfortunately, I think, is going to be some kind of uniting against an ideological adversary like China, which is what I think helped discipline U.S. policy and the West generally during the Cold War. Now, that obviously is very concerning from the point of your international stability, but history shows us that it's the most likely frame through which you can get a large majority of Americans on the same page. I don't see any other prudent, careful policymaking. I don't think it's going to shake things up in a way that gets the attention of the middle class, so that they suddenly come on board. I think the other option, if you're not going to sort of lead an ideological fight, is simply to sort of take foreign policy off center stage and to sort of try to build legitimacy for it quietly by framing it, as the report says, not so much as foreign policy, but as revitalizing local communities. So I think there are your two options, either China or taking it, not making it foreign policy anymore. Thanks, Darren. Yes, we should ban the word center, shouldn't we? It starts a fight automatically. All right. Well, Rosalind, just in time, we've come to, we have a new president or a new president elect, and he talks literally, as I said earlier, about foreign policy for the middle class. So he's got a huge job ahead of course. A smashed economy. There's the pandemic. There's the polarization before he even gets to thinking about foreign policy. So where do you see things going from here? What do you think we'll see from Joe Biden and his team? And I just want to recognize that John Preston had submitted a similar question, noting that Trump's probably reinforced middle class jaundice about international engagement by sort of attacking Trump's, America's partners and peak international bodies and so on. And so can Biden galvanize support for American middle class around his foreign policy? Yeah, so I think it's worth noting, right, so president elect Biden wrote an article in the Atlantic, I think it was last spring. I think I don't remember the title, but it was very much about this topic, which is how do we think about foreign policy for the middle class. And partly that's because a member of our task force, Jake Sullivan, is a very, very close advisor and now, you know, is the designated national security advisor for the president elect. So these ideas that the task force has been thinking about for the last three years have been actually making their way into, for sure, the Biden campaign. I think in some sense, they've animated, you know, much of the Trump campaign and Trump administration too. So I do think that they are more than lip service, right? It might sound like a nice little campaign slogan, right? We're for the middle class, but I actually think this is a little bit more long standing and more genuine and more central to the Biden administration and to several of the, you know, very key advisors. So, you know, in terms of what that might mean, you know, I think it does mean, I think we are seeing, you know, people being appointed who are pretty committed to the U.S. engaging with close allies. I think trying to reintegrate the U.S. back into the global community. But I do think you'll see that done in a way that is cautious and cognizant of distributional concerns. So I think, you know, the idea that we'll just slide right back into TPP, that does not seem to me, you know, super realistic. I think, you know, on climate, I'm not sure. I mean, it seems, I mean, the president elect has already said, you know, pretty clearly that he wants to go back into Paris, but those were fairly voluntary, you know, measures that we had signed up for. But I do think there'll be some green energy types of stuff that'll happen and maybe that will be linked back to community development and other things. So I do think you're going to see a little bit more of these concerns integrated into the foreign policy agenda of the Biden administration. Okay. Well, we've only got a couple of minutes to go. Darren, I just want to give you the last word. When you think about the way in which America so significantly shapes global debate on just about everything, and particularly foreign policy in Australia, you know, how much do you think a Biden administration will roll back the sense of a world in which globalisation was retreat, in which economic nationalism was legitimate, in which sovereign states were back and centre at the expense of multilateral cooperation. I mean, do you think yourself that that reflects deeper structural trends that will remain even if they're a bit gentler and kindler, or do you see Biden as really shifting the landscape? No, I think it's the former, a gentler kinder version, but still a real change. A return to normality, you know, engagement with allies, re-engagement institutions are certainly important. But I think you're going to see firstly much more of an emphasis on working with trusted security partners than the old international system on big questions. So, you'll be working outside maybe the United Nations or the large organisations on increasingly important measures, you know, and, you know, the return or the rise of the five-ice type security groupings as trusted networks. And you're also going to see, I think, Roslyn was saying, more policy that is not conducted through institutions as much, but that is carved out for each individual state to, you know, or at least the United States wishes to carve out for itself, regardless of what international rules and institutions are saying. So, that's not trashing the order the way Trump was doing it, but saying that there is, we need a larger space to operate within that order. So, I think, you know, but still, the optics of re-engaging the system are important. You know, China is certainly looking itself to engage with the order heavily. And so, it's important the United States also does so. But no, I think it's the change is permanent. All right. Well, look, we have run out of time. Apologies to Sean Innes. I was failed in my duties as moderator by not paying attention to the chat box. Rule number one. However, Sean, I look forward to discussing that issue over our next lunch, that question you asked. But we've kept Darren and Rosalind for a long time. We've worked them so hard. Poor old Rosalind is now sitting in the dark and the naval in Annapolis in a ruthlessly energy efficient building that is telling you time to go home. So, Rosalind, thanks so much for staying on a bit late to join us today. Darren, thank you for joining us. I really appreciated having you here with us. I really enjoyed that conversation. Now, we will, we have recorded this, so we will be posting this and promoting it because it was a fascinating discussion. And again, I encourage you for those who are interested, have a look at the report that Rosalind and her colleagues did. And if you're interested in these kinds of issues, Darren and Alan Gingel really go hard at them in the wonderful Australian in the world podcast. So, Darren and Rosalind, thanks so much for joining us today. It was a pleasure. Thank you, Richard. And we'll see you all again. Bye.