 History is here to help. I'm Jay Fidel. The handsome young man is Peter Haffenberg, and we're here to help, especially Peter. And how have we strayed from the liberal world order? Because nothing is this constant change itself, and you cannot assume that things will not change. As a matter of fact, you have to look for all the things that are changing because they're all changing. And the other thing is that we have to learn history. We have to talk to Peter all the time. Why? Because he who disregards history is bound to repeat it. George Santiana, I'm right. I know I am. So we have here in these days the case of hybrid war, which we have discussed in a previous show today, and at the same time, which includes non-kinetic war. It includes all kinds of things beyond just firing bullets at each other. And it is, you know, and depending how you define your terms, it could be World War III right now, in terms of the non-kinetic aspect of the war. What happened to the liberal world order? How have we strayed? Why have we strayed? How far off the path are we? So Peter, I greatly appreciate you coming on to talk about this, because I think it's an important thing for all of us to understand where we are, to know where we've been. So can you talk about the liberal world order? What am I talking about here? And the 1945 liberal world order, much less, that seems like a long time ago. Guys, thank you. Thank you very much. So I think it's also appropriate, as we remember Madeline Albright, because she was really the second generation of trying to preserve the 1945 liberal order and her life while showing tremendous success and brilliance also is a hint at some of the landmines in that order. I mean, one of the things she had to address was ethnic nationalism. And ethnic nationalism since 1945 has been a challenge. And I mean, ethnic nationalism in two ways. And this gets back to your question. But what I'd like to do is sort of put the pieces together, because the crisis right now, most specifically between Ukraine and Russia, reveals that the world order was not just a political order, it was also an economic order, and it was a moral order. So I think all those pieces are in place in good part for all of us, because remembering Madeline Albright, a blessed memory, she confronted the problem of ethnic nationalism, which in 1945 was a problem. There was forced migration of German speakers out of territories. You just come out of the horrific Holocaust, extreme example of ethnic nationalism. And the world liberal order has never really been able to address the two sides of ethnic nationalism, right? One is that nationalism is tied to ethnicity, we call it ethno-nationalism. And the second side to that, as also Madeline recognized, that even if you were to recognize ethno-nationalism, no ethno-nationalism treats others within its own borders equally. Right? So the liberal order had difficulty, not just whether nationalism should be tied to ethnicity, which is antithetical to liberalism. Liberalism believes in what we call civic nationalism, right? Like the Constitution says, you live here, you are a citizen of the United States. The one thing you're bound to do is follow the Constitution. That's what you're bound to do, right? It shouldn't matter your race, your ethnicity, your orientation, etc. But since 1945, the world has had to wrestle with an increasing amount of ethno-nationalism, which also means with Madeline, another issue that the liberal order was supposed to create, was supposed to create a world of democracy and human rights. Democracy and human rights seem antithetical to ethnic nationalism as well. So one used Madeline as an entry for us, because her life shows that she recognized the power of the liberal order, and I'll get to exactly what that was in a second. And she recognized at least two of the problems within that. I think captured in the question, can ethnic nationalism be democratic and recognize human rights? Okay, now let's go back to 45. And I think all of your audience and all of your followers will remember that's the formal end of World War II. But I say formal end, right? Because we're still fighting it in many cases, right? Japan and China. You notice that Japan has not signed a peace treaty with Russia about World War II. And that's about to expire. So we'll see what happens. That may happen, just like in Korea, right? There's no formal peace. So when I say 45 in your audience, I'm sure is well aware of it. I'm just talking about the formal end, right? So in other words, the armies put down their weapons, there are peace treaties, and the United Nations is formed. So certainly that's part of the liberal order, which is to look at the world through the lens of the Cold War. And that wasn't antithetical necessary to a liberal order, right? There were agreements, NATO Warsaw Pact, etc. 1945, the United Nations said in the liberal world order, disagreements get resolved at the United Nations. You have agreements, you come to the United Nations, you don't just invade somebody. The second major note to that, when the United Nations was formed, I was a kid in New York. And they took us on school buses, little yellow buses to the United Nations. We walked around and we were, right, inculcated with the notion that this organization was the best thing that ever happened and would save the world and represented the highest stands of morality and international cooperation ever existed. And I remember that, but it seems like a long time ago. We discussed the UN previously, and I'm happy to talk about it again. But I would say it still does. It's just it's imperfect, but it still does represent the idea that the fundamental idea of liberalism, right, is that we will disagree. There will be differences. We have to find a way to resolve those differences without violence. And it's still the United Nations represents. OK, for our conversation, I think we have to go back one year. That one year is 1945 at the Bretton Woods Conference because the liberal world order, as all of your viewers understand, particularly today, right, it's not just a political battle. It's an economic system. It's what the time was called internationalism. Today we call globalization. I prefer internationalism just because it doesn't seem to have as much baggage with it. But in 1944, under particularly the guidance of the Americans and John Maynard Keynes at Bretton Woods, the IMF was laid out. The World Bank was laid out. So in other words, what the UN did politically and socially, Bretton Woods did economically. That's the world order. And it recognized there was a Soviet Union. Recognize that the idea was, though, the US and Soviet Union would not come to direct blows, right? There would not be another World War three. And to that degree, the UN has actually succeeded in helping us prevent another World War three. So what happened to that world order, I guess, is your central question. And what happened in my mind as a modern historian is, one, the inability to control what I said at the start, the inability to control ethnic nationalism so that it could at least be democratic and it could least uphold human rights. And to a certain degree, what's happening in Russian Ukraine is just the mother of all ethnic crises, right? The Russians claim that the Ukrainians are really part of mother Russia, right? The Ukrainians claim no, we have a different ethnicity and that's a different nation of it. Today, unlike in the 30s, the Ukrainians are relatively respectful. I don't know if your viewers saw last night, but there's, for example, an African refugee who's a member of the Ukrainian parliament. You're not going to find that in Russia, right? Russia is an ethno-national state. And in being an ethno-national state, it also suppresses its own. Ethnistics, I mean, that's where I think the problem of little order is. It's not just ensuring people are decent to people across the borders. But are you decent to people within your own borders? And the United Nations has had trouble with that because. But it would mean would be an international intervention. It's like the Soviets always told American presidents, you know, you complain about communism, but African Americans are starving in the United States. Do you want us to go intervene and resolve your civil rights? And that, I think, again, your viewers know, that's the Chinese issue, right? China says hands off, right? You know, we will do it in our own borders. And the liberal order has never quite resolved that because intellectually it's grounded in the Enlightenment. And the Enlightenment, you know, had a belief that at some point we would all be reasonable. And we'd all be rational. It doesn't mean we're all equal, but it means you treat people with a kind of humanity. Well, forgetting today for a minute, Peter, let's just talk about the late 40s. Had we, you know, in the shadow of the rubble of the war, the rebuilding effort in Europe especially, but everywhere in Japan as well. You know, had we achieved the kind of, what do you want to call it, cooperative nirvana there? Had we, were we all together on these notions you're describing, more than we are today? Was there a point of perfection in there somewhere? I would say there's a point of workability. So never perfection, because again, living in Hawaii, we well understand the Vietnam War, right? And the French persistence in this new world order. I'm talking about in the years that followed the creation of the UN. In the years that followed the end of the world. In the years that followed, I think there was, again, to answer your question, not a perfection, but more of a consensus. Now that did not again mean everybody was equal. Please, I'm not saying that by any means at all, but you could see, for example, newly independent countries seeking at least an economic relationship with the West. Right now it was building dams, the gruma builds dams as well. Now, of course, as scholars will point out, that could be a kind of neocolonial economic dependence. It could be. So I'm not white watching this, but there was a general consensus about the model. All right. Having said that, certainly there were tensions. And there were tensions in Europe. Please remember the 56 in Hungary, the Soviet intervention in Czechoslovakia. Right? So again, but having said that, Europe has not experienced this type of war I don't think. Well, the Balkans were similar. I mean, there are definitely parallels right between what's going on now and what was happening under the Serbs. But for the rest of Europe, this really does bring up the horrible memories of the Second World War. And you can't really look at the pictures coming out of the Ukraine without thinking most immediately of Syria and he looks like Syria. And for people in Eastern Europe, it looks like the campaigns of the Second World War where the Germans destroyed everything going into the Soviet Union and then the Soviets in return destroyed everything going into Berlin. So, you know, so the world has been through a lot in all these years since 1945. And here we are with a very different arrangement than 1945. That was the end of the war. This one feels like the beginning of a war or a long term world war. And I guess the question I've put to you as an historian is, what happened? What were the elements and the processes and the phenomena that have taken place over these years? How many years is it that have undermined the liberal or world order? How have we lost it? Okay. Excellent question. And a lot of scholars who know far more than me are discussing that. So let me just give you my background, but also for viewers, I recommend Brookings Institute, the Economist, et cetera. There's some very important discussions, the historian Tim Snyder. So let me contribute what I can, but with the recognition that there are far greater minds and far people of research further. So I think the answer is twofold in the old Tom Udick way, right? One is what I mentioned that the creation of the order after 1945 had within it already its worms. And we haven't really, and Madeline's life, as I said, is a good example of how, you know, whether they are, as Snyder would say, just so historical, you can't overcome them, right? The hatred in Eastern Europe is nothing new, right? It makes up how state-of-the-art Israelis look like brothers and sisters. So part of it is there are problems that in 1945 were there and were either covered up or put to the side. Sometimes they were covered up by massive amounts of money. This is, you know, this is the era of the Marshall Plan we're talking about where the U.S. was committed to investing in the rest of the world in ways to rebuild the rest of the world. So one example would be one issue, the inability to resolve problems with through there. Other historians would also say, as you were suggesting, that it did seem to work. So what's happened by now, which might be newer than in 1945? And I think historians would point to a couple things. One is our old friend, social media. The ability of social media, we talk about this every time, right? But I think we're still faced with that. And usually we talk about it in the case of the U.S. But please remember the ability of both the Ukrainians and the Russians, the Hungarian far right, the French far left, to use social media, Europe, the way we think about it, vis-a-vis partisanship in America. So that's certainly changed, right? When you say social media, though, over this period of time, you're really talking about telecommunications in general. You're talking about the ability to make an international telephone call, to send a message by telegram or email. All the ways that we have learned to communicate quickly to distant places that have all happened in this period of time. Social media, I agree, it's on steroids and all that. But I think the process that you're describing has actually been going on for a long time through a number of technologies. You're actually right with some differences now. For example, we all now understand the power of algorithms. So in other words, the ability to dig yourself into and participate in the silo of information and the constant flow of instant information. So what you say is absolutely correct. And any social media could potentially unite as well as divide. The technology is neutral, but how it's set up is not neutral. So I would say that that is one of the differences. And with that, I think very profoundly, we're back a little bit to the 1930s, where the power of social media, so quick and so pervasive, it does not allow a thoughtful political decision. So we're back a little to the 30s, and all of your viewers will remember the phrase, Mussolini made the trains run on time. Okay, that's a nice little quip. But what it really says is parliamentary politics, traditional politics, the European Union discussing something. That's in the past, it's not going to work anymore. So I think that's one of the analogy where in the 1930s, dictators and authoritarians were able to use radio to make demands. Today we see people using social media. Now what else has changed? I think certainly both the role of the US and the attitude towards the US has changed. So I'm not interested in pointing any fingers, but I think that 45 for much of Europe, US was a source of liberation. And we talked about before, right? Images of marching through Rome, images of marching through Paris. And that meant not just American military, but the French New Wave, jazz, early McDonald's. And the attitude towards the US is maybe not that much different than the historical attitude towards any great power, which is seen often as a liberator. Napoleon was first seen as a liberator. And then people begin to think that liberation might mean actually some kind of rule, even if it's awful. And there's a response. But I think we also have to take some responsibility. And in that case, again, I think we're all sort of tired of talking about the 45th president, but the 45th president said the US really needs to go it alone, because of Europe. And that didn't help, right? That Europeans think about their defenses and their role. So what is... Talk about Trump, and certainly he has had a negative effect in our relations with Europe and thus on Europe itself. But at the same time, you know, I keep wanting to ask you this question. Could the US have done a better job in these years since 1945 at holding a liberal order together? What did we do right? What did we do wrong? Okay, absolutely. And again, I would defer to American historians in particular. So let me give you a view as a European historian. Okay, certainly we could have done better in a couple of ways. One is we could have kept our own house better. You know, if you want to promote democracy and you want to promote a capitalism that's supposed to work, then you sort of better do it yourself as an example. And here is where I'm no fan of the Soviet Union, but here to certainly agree with Khrushchev was right, you know. We have housing and you have Jim Crow. Okay, and you don't allow African-Americans to vote. So part of the thing, and I think those who are historians, will always point to this, right? Rome was a problem not just because Rome conquered, but Rome left its republic and became an empire. So what kind of vision was that? Okay, so certainly we could have done that better. We could have kept our own house in order better in the profound ways that we claim not just for ourselves, but we claim for others. Secondly, I think we probably could have worked better with European Union economically in the sense that we see ourselves in the middle of two worlds. Like they say about Russia. Dostoevsky said, Russia has two faces, one towards Europe and one towards Asia. Well, we're kind of a schizophrenic society too, right? We have one towards Asia and we have one towards Europe. And I think living in Hawaii, we can very much appreciate this, that we've pivoted really towards Asia. I mean, if you talk about Washington's interests and even this discussion about Russia and Ukraine, we know it's in the back, if not the front of Biden's mind, right? We'll China do this to Taiwan. Okay, so part of the US issue is as a two ocean power, we haven't really been able to share equally the resources and our attention. Thirdly, I think for a variety of reasons, the US did not promote in much of Europe the kind of democracy that we actually believe in. We were very good at promoting anti-Stalinism, anti-communism. We were very good at that. And I'm not saying that that was necessarily incorrect. That's not historians' role to say, you know, good or bad. But part of that was letting the non-democratic right and the non-democratic nativists come to power. And the US bears some responsibility for that as well. I think also probably the US could have continued a more responsible market plan. But the parts of Europe which needed economic development and needed the assistance of the US, but in a way which said, look, here's the money, use it in a productive way, but we're not going to make demands about the particular uses. That's always attention and fornade, right? What kinds of strings does it come with? The most obscene example is the Hyde Amendment in which fornade must come with the provision that no money will be used for birth control and abortion. It's a Hyde Amendment. It's from Hyde, a very conservative Illinois congressman. And that's just an extreme example. We needed a new kind of Marshall plan which said, look, take the money. Use the money to develop your economy. We'd like you to develop it as much as a Democrat in an equitable way. But here's the money. So in this case, I don't want to focus too much on the 45th president because I think that what he did, like with much of what he did, is he gave voice to ideas that were already there and he legitimated ideas. I mean, you can't tell me that they were not isolationists since the liberal order was created. They certainly were. But they were in the back of the room. What 45 did was put them in the front and said, it's OK. But having said that, I think the current president has done, if you did not like him, has taken advantage of this crisis to rebuild some very important connections with Europe. That leads me to a question I want to ask you. So here we are in these extraordinary times. I mean, they're extraordinary because, you know, Trump had an insurrection. They're extraordinary because he brought these very negative elements in the country into the center channel. And he effectively wrecked, for the moment, our relations with Europe. And I don't think he did a good job anywhere else either. So the US lost some ground during those years, for sure. So here we are. And we have this invasion of Ukraine, which would be a violation on all points of the liberal world order, which to me, the core point is you don't invade your neighbor. You don't try to grab territory. You know, we do have a sort of civilized world. You don't grab territory. The Romans did that sort of thing, but we don't do that. And to me, that's the essential point of the liberal world order. So now we have a huge breach of the liberal world. And this is a very complicated and hard question. But let me ask you, can we ever restore it? Or is it out of the henhouse now? Can we ever go back to what the United Nations saw as a vision back in 1945? Can we ever find a liberal world order again, which says, you know, leave your neighbor alone? I'm going to give you an unsatisfying answer, and maybe it'll lead to a further show. I think the order that you've described, borders, international trade, some respect for international law, the promotion of capitalism with a human voice, human rights, those are all still on the table. All right, those have not been eliminated. And I think that the basic institutions will persist. I think the difficulty is, and historians always try to avoid this. It's not what's happening now. But is this a green light for other challenges? And I'm particularly thinking about China. And if we look at Russia, we probably recognize that if you want to think of a mistake, the mistake was not to hold Assad accountable and not to stop the carnage in Syria. Now, in a way, Assad got away with it because it was internal. And you can always make an argument, right, that my business is not your business. But the Russian intervention there, like the German and Italian intervention in the Spanish Civil War, internationalized the conflict. It was no longer a civil war, right? If Russian planes are doing Assad's business flown by Russian pilots, that's not a civil war, right? That is already internationalized. So I think that, yes, and that's one of the things Biden's trying to do even today, right, is shore up the European Union, shore up NATO. And in doing so, think about shoring up other regional diplomat diplomat alliances and other regional economic alliances. So what I'm going to look for the next couple of months is US, Vietnam, US, Japan relations in a way to try to control China. But China and Russia, and this is not ethnocentrism. Look, neither of them are democratic. They're autocratic authoritarian societies. So the costs of going to war, and again, this is nothing ethnocentrational, but the costs of going to war for an authoritarian society, right, it cannot be measured the same way as going to war for democracy. You got to factor that in. So back to the Madeline Albright problem, right? I mean, how do you promote democracy and human rights, even if they're imperfect? So I think, to answer your question, it will be restored, but it'll be restored with another threat right there on the threshold, which really is China. What will China do in the region? In particular, we know China's violation of human rights. The Uyghur situation is really like the Rohingya situation, just obscene. It's just an obscene example of genocide. Well, that challenges, you know, genocide challenges the liberal order as well, if nothing else. It's the most extreme example of all the problems we've talked about. Now, the other issue just quickly is the liberal order economically still has to have restrained tariffs. So, you know, if we get into an intense tariff war with China, that also doesn't do much for the liberal order. So the economies have to step back. And that's, that's painful, right? Because letting in Chinese goods, for example, might very well have an impact on domestic economy. So Biden, again, as an example is sort of, is treading both sides, right? The idea is to have very, if you're going to have a trade war, very specific, right? On a specific issue or a specific product, you don't make it this massive thing like 45 did, you know, which is nothing Chinese will be allowed. That's also antithetical. And Keynes, beloved John Maynard Keynes would spin in his grave because he would have argued that you can't have peace. And his mind, it was more of a British European democracy, not an American, but you can have democracy if you're going to have economic nationalism. I mean, that's the economic side, right? Of ethno-nationalism. You must have international trade. And then you must, of course, make measures where international trade leads to disparity, which it does. There's no doubt about it. But after, you know, 1919 Versailles, that was one of the things he realized that if you're going to severely punish Germany, severely and isolate it from the economic sphere, he didn't predict the Second World War, but he did predict you're asking for trouble, right? This is, I mean, yes, sorry. Going back to my thread about, you know, what can we do to restore the international liberal world order? And I totally agree that we have to be smart and also we have to be focused and collaborative. And this question, it follows on that to say, well, right now we have this travesty going on in Ukraine, and we should be worried about what China would do with Taiwan. And Europe should be coming together, not only because of the violence in Ukraine, but because of the threat to Europe and because of the refugee crisis happening in Europe. So the question is, what do you need to have? What do you need to do? Can Europe do what would be necessary, for example, to stop the bombing in Syria? I mean, if we could go back, what elements, what configuration would we want to have where Europe and the US would say, no, you can't bring, you know, Russian planes with Russian pilots and bomb civilians in Syria. We have to find a way to stop that because if we don't find a way to stop that, the liberal world order is in great dismay. And of course, I agree with you about being smart about economic policy and trade, but it seems to me that the higher moral level here is not bombing civilians because you want to. And the question is whether Europe can see its way, whether the US can see its way to becoming collaborative and taking collective action about things like that. The Rohingyas included, you know, the Uyghurs included all these travesties around the world. Is anybody going to step in and say no? I think there are a couple of quick answers and it's really an excellent topic for a future show, right? I mean, you've really opened up, you know, how do you create a more democratic humane world? So let me just quickly, because I know we have to end a couple of responses and we can continue later on. One is to move towards robust arms limitation. Every newscaster and every analyst has said that Putin has that nuclear option. And that's right, changed the dynamics of this. So we have to get back to the table. And the worst significant part of the world liberal order included significant arms negotiations. And it always has in the history of Europe. After a cataclysmic war, it always goes through in the 20s. Now, as politicians will say, that probably favors people who already have the weapons. That's true, right? If you already have a ship, it favors you. Okay, but the idea is also to have a balance where you won't do things like invade or you won't have a nuclear. So one is to get back to the table. It's difficult. I think anybody watching TV will realize this. The difficulty in that is everybody has an AK-47. Part of the dissolution of the Soviet Union was the explosion of probably the most lethal hand weapon as far as easy accessibility. So we have to have some kind of arms control. Okay. Secondly, there needs to be a regimen of punishment as Biden and the allies have done. You got to pay for your invasion. And that means an act of war, like embargoes, like freezing assets. Those do have an impact. Now, actually they're going to have an impact on the average Russian person who has no necessarily no love for Putin. But again, historically, the liberal order included. In a way, it's like the drone, right? The drone is death from afar without a human involved. So it's like, let's be honest, embargoes and sanctions kill people too. But that's right now that's going to have to be part of. They need to be used. They need to be synchronized. So both part of the same collective effort. And with sanctions, like with air bombardment, which tries to end a war. There is a curve at which point sanctions and air and air bombardments excite public antagonism. Right. So at some point right now, there are people in Russia who oppose Putin. But later on, right, when the sanctions start hitting really bad, I mean, we've noticed from World War Two, that aerial bombardment at some point didn't get people to oppose the war. It got them to oppose the people dropping the bomb. Right. Right. But that also happens. And the third and finally, and this again we've talked about is we do really need a much more robust United Nations as far as policy. It serves a very good purpose to vent a very good purpose. And I really had much rather have, you know, people having this debate in public and the world seeing the idiocy of propaganda, but we do need to rethink what the United Nations can do. And that might mean unlike the League of Nations, it might mean having a considerable armed force. And the UN has kept peace in various places in Cyprus. Cyprus has been essentially a successful partition. You know, again, it's not what you like. I mean, it's not necessarily equal, but it's a partition that's worked in a good part because UN peacekeepers are there. But that means you really, but you got to arm them. You have to arm them. They're going to stay with it and do the job. Yeah. Exactly. Well, Peter, we're out of time and I, I just want to tell you about a vision that I've had throughout this entire discussion. And my vision is it's 1945 or 46, you know, when the United Nations was getting, getting together and, and Ben Franklin is there and Ben Franklin walks out of the United Nations building right there on the East River. And there's a woman and the woman has been waiting to find what the United Nations is going to do. And she says, she says to Ben Franklin, Ben, I know you've been in there with all the boys and you've been deciding on how it's going to work from this point on, from after the war. So what kind of an order are we going to have in the world? And Ben Franklin says to her, yes, madam, we're going to have a liberal world order. If you can keep it. I think absolutely well put with all the things we talked about, both the problems that are there, right? Franklin walks out and slavery is still around. And the newer problems absolutely well put. And in a way, Franklin is perfect. With the one addition that PBS reminds us, he's probably the only founding parent who had a sense of humor, which made me think all of us were liberal. No, but I think absolutely appropriate. And again, like the constitutional convention, a recognition that there were problems. So can you design, can you design an order, right? Which can address the problems and resolve the problems that are destroying itself. And we're out of time, Peter. Okay, thank you very much as always. Professor extraordinaire. We'll see you in a couple weeks for much more. Take care. Take care. Aloha.