 So hello wherever you are in the world and welcome to this discussion of how to shape post pandemic politics. I think he's pretty well the biggest question we are now confronted with collectively and in our individual countries. So, I would like to, first of all to introduce our three panelists who are, I think wonderfully balanced group, who will take us into this discussion. First, David Rubenstein, who is the co-founder and co-executive chairman of the Carlisle Group, one of the world's best known and most influential private equity groups. And second, Lisa John Berner, who's joining us from South Africa, who is the secretary general of Civicus, which is the world alliance for citizen participation, very appropriate. And finally, Nara Woods, who's the Dean of the Blavatnik School of Government at Oxford and renowned expert on multilateral institutions, both politically and economically. Let me just start off by introducing what I think of as the themes of this discussion. And the question is, so what has COVID-19 done to change our world? What is it pointed out to us about our world? And I would say, first of all, that this has been in very important ways a unique event. Of course, the world has experienced many pandemics, far worse in terms of the fatalities. But the way we've responded, the choice to close down our economies to protect lives, the speed with which science responded, and the scale of the economic decline, all these things are really as far as we can know unique to an extraordinary event. But what has it done to our societies and to our politics? And I think the most striking things to me very briefly are the following. It has had very unequal economic effects within our countries, with the biggest losses in terms of lives on the old, but in terms of the economy on falling on women, ethnic minorities, and the less skilled. So it tends tended very powerfully to exacerbate existing inequalities and to clarify them. Second, it has revealed very starkly where government works and where it doesn't, and where the public trust government and where it doesn't. And that's not necessarily, as it turns out, really correlated with the standard indicators of economic development, wealth, and so forth. And finally, I think very clearly showed a high level of global dysfunction in our ability to cooperate and manage the health and economic consequences of this crisis so it's an immensely challenging and also revealing event. Let's to launch our discussion of where we need to go after this crisis. Let me start with you, David. Could you talk a bit about the story and the challenges as you see them in the United States, which has had of course, an extraordinary story in the last year or so and particularly in the last few months now a new administration with a very different personnel. What are the challenges you see, and do you think they can handle it. The challenges in the United States, I'd say are several fold. One, you have to deal with the COVID-19 we have a large population relatively speaking, but we still have vaccinated relatively small percentage. The current president inherited was a system that should be applauded in one respect developing a vaccine in less than a year is never is unprecedented, but the system did not work so well in getting it distributed. So number one priority for the president is make sure we have a way of vaccinating most of our population so we have herd immunity as quickly as possible. Second is a propping up the economy. Because the economy is not working at full strength, we have to prop it up. We've done that already with about two trillion plus of extra dollars coming into the economic system from the federal government. We'll have to probably put in another one and a half trillion or so without that the economy would really be in trouble. So getting that through the Congress is another issue. And then the basically new president has to reassert himself around the world. I think he's inherited things that he thinks are real problems, and he has to make it clear to people that it's a different day in the United States and we're going to do things differently. That's what his perspective is. The most important lesson I think we've learned so far in the United States is that this is a life that is going to be changed forever. It's very common to say, oh, this is a big event and now the world's going to change, but it rarely does. But it has changed here in a rapid period of time. The industrial revolution took 100 years to change the world, make the world work. The internet changed the world in maybe 20 years or so. Smartphone in maybe seven years or so. In one year, we've changed the way we live and work and think and relate to each other. And I don't think it's going to go back so anytime soon. We've also learned in the United States and we've seen around the world that the difference as you suggested Martin between the haves and the haves not is getting greater. We had a big income inequality probably United States before it's been exacerbated people fall into what I call a COVID crater. If you're if you have worked blue collar worker you're unemployed you don't have enough food to feed your family you're living paycheck to paycheck. You're worse off than you were before, and it's going to take a long time to fix that problem. And that's a big challenge for the new president, and even the new stimulus bill is not going to solve that problem. That just to keep us at reasonably good economic level it's not going to solve the income inequality problem that's been exacerbated. So well let's get back to those questions later but I'd like to turn to you Lisa if I may. You have a very obviously very different perspective living in South Africa with your background in India and in civil society. So what does getting rebuilding after this really traumatic experience which we're not through of course crucially, certainly not in South Africa I believe. What does that mean to you what are the challenges and what do you want to see the world doing. I think it's very tempting to think of 2020 as a catalytic moment or a kind of a tipping point or a pivotal kind of moment in history where suddenly things are going to change but this actually follows on from an entire decade of content over the last 10 years we've seen the scale of protests of you know organized or unorganized movements across the world grow systematically and in a very, very sustained way so the organization I work with for instance we spent all of our time looking at how people recognize themselves and claim their rights right and it was very apparent even in 2019 that the world was actually on on a journey of a real head on clash of powers right between you know the institutions and and the people who hold formal power and the large vast kind of swads of population who have just been disenfranchised from the economic and political systems. So in a way the pandemic came at a time where it in a way stopped some of these really strong you know expressions of agitation and unhappiness in its track but then it just resumed again you know midway through the year you saw people you know kind of completely you know fed up with systems fed up with rules fed up with institutions and just having nothing to lose because there's just so much anger and and you know discontent just reading out of all all spaces across the globe I think what the pandemic did really well was it connected all of these different localized. You know, you know agitations or movements or on happiness with how things were being run in a very, very fast and fast way and kind of fuse those energies and efforts very much together so the next few years and definitely the coming decade really is going to be the decade of impatience and I think people have just had it with waiting for you know institutions to pick themselves up and figure out what needs what needs to be done but more so. I think we're at the state where a quarter of the world's population currently lives in context where they're simply not allowed to exercise the civic freedoms. And that's, that's just mind boggling because you would assume that if governments were facing angry mobs of people the most sensible thing to do would be actually to open forums for dialogue right and to actually find more sustainable ways to engage with that. So I think we're just going to see much worse in the coming years in terms of the friction unless of course governments and businesses learn to do things differently and are more transparent and open and how they engage communities. So let's come back to that too to the extent we can in the time available. So how does it look to you Nari from your perspective, how might the shock of the pandemic and its consequences, economic, social, political, change the world. And will it be actually for the better or as I rather fear for the worse. Well, my colleagues on this panel have talked about the, the downside of COVID the fear the, the nationalism that's being fueled the unrest that's being fueled, which can certainly there's a scenario in which that makes it more difficult to cooperate and makes it more difficult to control the pandemic which fuels more nationalism, which takes the world into a grim place just before we began Martin you said, Can we sustain any cooperation at all, I'm going to say yes, we can. And I want to recall from history that international cooperation has been possible, even among the bitterest of enemies. And it's that international cooperation, which can take us on a virtuous circle and make it more possible to deal with COVID COVID is like a war. It's like a war in the sense that huge debts are mounting up because countries have to use that money to fight COVID. And after the war, there's going to be a huge reconstruction job. And that makes it different to the financial crisis or to other global crises that many have faced in their lifetime. And for me, three areas of international cooperation will be vital. And I think there are reasons to be optimistic that they'll happen. The first is winning the war fighting the pandemic countries since 1851 have been painfully and carefully negotiating how to work together to fight pandemics. Is it perfect? No, our country is going to use it for their political purposes. Yes, but we have an infrastructure which we're seeing move, certainly not at perfect speed certainly not in perfect unison, but it's an infrastructure that is working the way that the World Health Organization did notify countries of this virus. It's organizing around COVAX. It's bringing together the research. That's the first area. The second area is money. The world is going to have to rebuild after COVID. And in this very low interest rate environment, there are a core of countries at the center of the world that can use their credit as status to make it possible for all countries to grow out of this crisis. And as my as Martin in particular knows extremely well, we have institutions that make that possible, like the IMF, the World Bank and regional development banks that can pull credit and guarantees. Do we need to work them much harder? Absolutely. Should they be moving faster already? Absolutely. Interestingly, though, the problem isn't that we don't have institutions. It's actually a mindset. We have all lived through decades of economic policymaking, which has the austerity mindset that says when you're in a crisis, tighten your belt and give confidence to the markets. We're entering an era I think the world hasn't seen since the end of the Second World War, which is to throw away the austerity playbook and to pull out an investment playbook. The problem is that there's almost nobody in any government or international institution that's ever done that. They've all been raised on the austerity playbook and they're going to have to shift their minds to take up this new challenge. And last, but I won't say anything more about it, is humanitarian relief after the Second World War, the careful building of United Nations institutions that definitely need reform, that definitely need made to work better. But both China and the United States are cooperating in those institutions. China cares so much about them that it has competed and won the leadership of four of them. We can stand back and say, well, this is just mechanicalism and a power play. Of course, international relations always is, but the fact remains that the institutions are there and cooperation can proceed. So I'm going to start with a resounding note of cautious optimism. Well, that's a very good place to start. So let's follow up in time we've got available. David, I think, actually Lisa and Mary have in their way though that very different perspectives, sort of clarified the challenge facing the US in the world, the US in the world, the longest accepted leader, because one of the things that we've seen in the last year in the US is first, I mean really very powerful, there are great protests from both wings of your politics. You saw it in the protests over the summer on round the Black Lives Matter movement. And of course you saw it after the election with culminating in the, I suppose the invasion of the capital, I don't know what term you use, coming from the right. It seemed to indicate a profoundly divided country with very strong popular anger, which is sort of what Lisa was talking about, and I would say from both wings. When they're emerged from this at the end of this, a new president who one think of as almost an archetypally centrist, a believer in the center, and a believer in bringing people together within the framework of a technocratic policy that has been oriented to recreate the sort of global functioning order that the US both created and operated and led for so long. So that seems to me where we are. What does the center hold? What does the center need to do to convince these extremes, which are obviously very, very powerful, that they have a political future which will work for them, and which will also allow the leadership to participate in the world? Well, since World War II, the United States has been pretty much the undisputed global leader in so many areas, the economy and intellectual kinds of things and technology, so many different areas, and also in, I would say, in certain types of governance. The last four years have changed the world's view of the United States in many respects. We weren't seen by some as as good an ally as we have once been. I think we lost some of our global leadership to China as a result of their being willing to fill a gap that we no longer were willing to fulfill. And the question now is, can the United States regain the image you once had? People around the world were horrified at the events of January 6th. That's the kind of things you would see in different kinds of countries. Nobody expected that kind of thing in the United States. So that image is in everybody's minds and they're going to remember that for quite some time. President Biden has to say this time is different in the sense that I am not my predecessor. I'm going to go back to what we did for many years after World War II, be a global leader and make certain that we and who care about democracy make certain those values continue. At the moment, the country is very, very divided, very, very divided. And I don't see anybody, including the president, able to fix this problem immediately. It's going to take some time. He's got to gain credibility. He's got to get a couple victories under his belt, and he's got to become a spokesman for democracy and democratic values and reconciliation in ways that may be very difficult to do. So we have some challenges in the United States for certain, but when all of this is said and done, I suspect the biggest winner out of the last of his events of the last year or so is probably going to be China because China really survived the COVID much better than other countries did. It's economy continues to grow. It's financial might continues to grow. And at some point there's a passing of the torch to China, perhaps from the United States if we're not able to get our act together and China will be the dominant country in the world for some time if we can't do the kind of things that I suggest President Biden needs to do. Hopefully he'll be able to do that. I'm going to turn turn. Obviously, there are points there, Nari, which are very relevant to you and your perspective. And I want to go to the US China question with you. But Lisa, I'd like to talk to you first, because I recognize fully both the range of popular protests and across the world. But it seems to me, if we're looking at the future, it's a it's quite a complicated and picture on several on at least two dimensions. I could go many, many more but one is, we are seeing in many countries, the, you know, popular rage coming from what I would broadly describe as the egalitarian left the desire for participation extension of human rights treatment of everybody equally. I think that's from my hearing what I heard from you what where you come from, but it's pretty obvious there's also a very powerful nativist. Sometimes let's be brutal racist, authoritarian, form of populism, and you can see lots of countries led by rulers like that, and, and still are. So, the question I have is, how do you. How do we bring about a politics in which these immense pressures that you describe from dissatisfied people can be can be married with reasonably stable governmental operations. And I think that's something of course is I want to follow on what David said, you know, sort of the great power of the world now the great rising power of the world is China, and it's interest in allowing popular participation the type you advocate is as far as I would say a very large and negative number. Doesn't that disturb you. So two things to that. I think one, it's, it's really fundamental for us to realize that, you know, the organizing we're seeing on the streets, these aren't flash points of, you know, mobilization they're not just short term mobilizations their issues that have been consistently, you know, enabling people to, to connect to kind of get activated to to call for so for much larger and much deeper transformative shifts in their countries or in in a larger context so when governments treat citizens protest or civic actions as something that can kind of just be quickly swept away or, or repressed or closed down or we just you know shut down the internet and it's just going to, I mean they're just going to wish these, these kind of struggles away that's not happening anymore. And what we're seeing is that the level at which people are organizing is not only now being a huge challenge for governments but also for big businesses and, and what we saw earlier this year for I mean earlier this month. You know with with some of the big tech kind of issues and questions. I mean people now aren't really in a position where you can, they can easily be swayed by one set of propaganda or the other because the access to information the access to, you know, what's happening across the world the access to strategies to organize and mobilize is much much higher than any generation before this point. And even if you are, you know that strongest economic power in the world you're still going to have to be very very careful about how you're actually treating issues of democracy how you're actually treating issues of rights. We know the Hong Kong protests have been on for for you for several years now and it's a continuing pain point and it's driven by the passion of a lot of young people and a lot of people who really believe in democracy as a value I mean what are they gaining from risking live and limb and health and so much else in terms of organizing for this and for civil society organizations this is kind of where beyond anything we could ever dream to because there isn't a central organization there isn't a central philosophy there isn't a central machinery. It's really people going with their gut on what economic and social justice actually means and and the call for a fairer world for more transparent systems of how resources and decision making and power is organized. And that's not something any one government or several governments can undo at any given point of time and that's why you know the conversation we're having on stronger multilateral institutions and stronger rules of how governments play fair and play the game of actually representing people across the spectrum is going to be so fundamental to how you know the discourse on politics and people are will evolve in the next few years. Mary can I just, I think they've these these two sets of remarks where David and Lisa sort of clarifying important ways this sort of global challenge. Because the first set of questions is domestic legitimacy for politics and policy, and it's pretty clear that in many countries of the world with very different systems. So the question of the legitimacy of the political order and of political power and economic power has become really potent, not everywhere but, and that of course limits what politicians can do globally and domestically and how do you reestablish legitimate order domestically and then that goes to the global side of what you're interested in because of course I'm very much in agreement with you on the importance of global cooperation. That's very difficult to do by governments that really don't have the confidence of their citizens and you can see that across the board on trade and economic policy and vaccine nationalism and all the rest of it. There's another dimension which has also come out of this which David's remarks really brought out, which is, we're in a new world. We have this huge rising power, very different ideologically from what Lisa was talking about. It has to be done non-western, in every possible way. And it has to cooperate fully in this system because we can't make it work otherwise and there's so much suspicion of it. Can we really manage these two, these two very interrelated challenges successfully. Yes, we can and I think we really do need to pay heed to history. Think of that moment in the 40s when having, you know, been so victorious in the Second World War Churchill comes back to present Britain with his vision for Britain. And the Brits say no, actually, we don't want you, we'll vote for Atlee. And why do they do that? Because just as coming out of COVID, after the Second World War people came out of that period, as David and Ilza and you have all said, with so little, with a desperate desire to have security in their own yard, security in their own front door before they saw security across the world. And so the Churchillian project, which was a project that many, that would seem more familiar to most people today, was quickly swept aside with a different project which was to rebuild schools, the infrastructure, the nation in ways that we might, you know, not want to repeat today, but that was the project. And I think that my point about international cooperation is that leaders and governments across the world are going to have to collaborate with their business partners first to build a new set of opportunities for their own people and to do that hand in hand with international cooperation. We did it in the 40s and 50s in an extraordinary way, building cooperation, even in a world completely split with nuclear weapons. And I think we can do it now today as well. I think I've got one more minute, so I'm supposed to close it, I'm afraid. We've had a taster. I know you all want to keep going, but I'm afraid it's only half an hour. We have a taster of the issues. And all I would say is, I think this is very clearly, it comes out from all these perspectives, one of the most challenging moments in world politics, we're going through a transformation domestically and globally. And I believe that we would all agree that we probably disagree on a lot else, but we'd all agree that the decisions that are going to be taken in the next few years by governments across the world and particularly major powers will determine the nature of our world in a very profound way. It's one of those moments when you make or remake, remake or unmake the world order and the domestic political order. And I think the discussion has illuminated that in very, very helpful ways. So thank you very much to the panelists. Thank you for participating. I've found it very enjoyable to listen to you. And let's hope it all ends well. Thank you very much. Thank you. Thank you.