 Can I make 40 here? Then you should never hear that President Xi is particularly smart or adept right Never hear about our brilliant years What a good strategist he is. He just seems like a thug So here's big time magazine cover story the world's future is in the hands of president g Personality doesn't actually matter that much No, the world's future is not in the hands of Xi Jinping Personality doesn't matter that much It doesn't matter that much Whether Donald Trump is president or Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez is president Maybe we're talking 15% difference It's not irrelevant Maybe it's a 20% difference Looking out here from Watson's Bay over to Manley So no Hitler, no Holocaust, for example That's some difference Six million Jews would have likely survived World War II Not right off Hitler But Germany would have still launched two World Wars In the first half of the 20th century No matter who was the leader of Germany It was in their strategic interest to make a go at seizing control of Europe and fight fast quick wars Germany had the potential to win fast quick wars But personality doesn't matter as much as structure China's president is on the cusp of a third term China's president is on the cusp of a third term Never before has the globe been so dependent on one man's whims No, we're not really dependent upon one man's whims He can affect China, he can affect the world So unless he launches a nuclear war which I don't believe he's going to do the world's not dependent on his whims So he can follow more or less effective policies He can be smarter or dumber about his trade or foreign or economic policy But the world is not run by the whims President Xi The world is run by structure I see the water pounding against the rocks Those are structural forces The world is run by the power of economies and militaries The structure of economies, the structure of militaries The geography of nation states The demographics of nation states That's what runs the world It's not Xi's or Putin's whims So even if Putin hadn't been in charge of the Soviet Union or even if he leaves office The Soviet Union is still going to have a strong incentive to do things like invade Ukraine Structural reasons created by NATO incentivised whoever leads Russia to send a warning and to build up protections for the country against invasion to try to secure their country No one task for any nation state is to survive The best way to survive is to be as strong as possible Time, narrated by Emily Wuzeller Back in March 2018 I found my mind wandering inside Beijing's great hall of the people as China's rubber stamp parliament voted to remove the two term presidential limit and scorned in the building's top tier with other journalists and dignitaries straining to hear the proceedings I stared up at the huge red star ceiling motif that loomed over Chinese Communist Party CCP delegates So journalism loves to focus on personalities because personalities are particularly compelling But journalism has no peer-reviewed academic literature, brah It can be compelling But it's not scholarly It's not even necessarily important It's attention grabbing Time magazine, Sydney Morning Herald and the New York Times have to grab your attention So on the course of grabbing your attention they often say stupid things Nearby, two board European diplomats gossiped noisily If we perhaps failed to grasp the magnitude of what was transpiring in that auditorium four and a half years ago It's only too clear today The world has since endured a pandemic that sprouted a metaphysical obfuscation in China's central city of Wuhan So if China had a different leader it's doubtful that its response to COVID would have been substantially different and China's autocratic dictatorial state Brezhnev, remember, he was the supreme leader of the Soviet Union when he backed down against John F. Kennedy in the Cuban Missile Crisis He was removed from power So even dictators don't necessarily have absolute power and spilled across every continent to claim an estimated 15 million lives Beijing has led a campaign of incarceration and indoctrination of its Uyghur Muslim minority that the UN on August 31st decreed Okay, that has nothing to do with how strong China is or how much it threatens the United States These internal factors the personality of leaders the structure of an internal political system doesn't really have that much of an effect on international power relations International power relations are driven by power, economic and military and why the geography and demographics behind nation states Okay, so if a regime employs crimes against humanity it's not going to make it more or less formidable Democracy is probably even more likely to be brutal than the way they wage war because they will tend to picture wars democracy's picture wars that they engage in is good versus evil Russia has backed Russia's February 24th invasion of Ukraine When you picture a war like the war over Ukraine is good versus evil because of the downside there's a lot of compromise and it's harder to compromise there's likely to be much more suffering So I've walked from Kuji to Watson's Bay here and yeah, I'm a little tuckered out Scuses regarding NATO expansion refusing to join international sanctions and amplifying Kremlin propaganda Oh no The architect of all this tunnel was the man in the blue tie sitting along me Afternoon was effectively anointed China's leader for life President Xi Jinping On October 16th Xi's coronation as emperor will be complete The 20th CCP Congress to be held at that same squat building will mark the start of his third leadership term ripping up a long-held convention that Chinese leaders serve only two It effectively ends the institutionalization of political power around the party Ah, so it's no longer institutional because he's taken an extra turn Not necessarily No man is invulnerable It still depends upon people to follow his orders You can't get much done in life if you can't get cooperation even when you're a dictator Read stories in the Bible Kings with supposedly absolute power It still depends upon their lieutenants their populations, their cooperation the mood of the country circumstances, the culture What are variables in life? So who's the boss? Is it President Xi? No, it's the situation's the boss China's economic miracle and instead centers it on a single individual swathed in a cult of personality not seen since Mao Zedong Okay, that's just packaging That doesn't make China more or less formidable Doesn't make China more or less dangerous as a rival Great power rival to the United States Age of 69 Xi becomes China's most powerful leader in modern history But it's an apotheosis that threatens unprecedented instability What threatens instability is the structure of international relations It's the tragedy of great power politics Instability is written into the nature of our life on this planet We are all stuck in an iron cage together And the stronger one party gets the more incentives the other parties have for ganging up against it which is happening now with China Japan India Korea recently ganging up against China You can see the Sydney Harbour Bridge out there on the horizon To the left of it will be the Sydney Opera House which you can't see from here That's the Central Business District of Sydney