 Globalization is sort of rebooting itself in all sorts of ways to try to take into account the geopolitics of today. I'm Robin Iblit. I was director of Chatham House for 15 years through to summer of 22. And now I'm a distinguished fellow with Chatham House, CSIS and Asia Society. And I do a bit of advisory work on the side. Well a lot has happened and I think probably the biggest thing to say, the biggest difference from that time is that 2007 when I first became the director of Chatham House was a time of promise, in particular promise around globalization. Very quickly, we tipped into not promise the global financial crisis in 2009, but countries came together. G20 was formed as a leaders level summit. It had great cooperation between China and the United States. China provided the stimulus when America and Europe couldn't provide it. And we kind of rebooted globalization through 2009-10. And Chatham House itself was able to focus more and more on the energy transition, on global economic, financial stability and resilience. But as I came to the tail end of my time, 2015-16, we suddenly realized that one of the big trends was that there had been real losers from globalization in the developed economies. That in a way we'd spent too much time looking at aggregate GDP. We'd grown in the West, but some had grown and some hadn't. And if you looked at the numbers, there were people for whom the last period had been a period of instability and lack of promise. And on the other side, geopolitically, there was a sort of loss of global hierarchy. People started to think, well maybe America first is not an America that will protect us. In Europe, people thought maybe this transatlantic alliance is not as strong as we thought it was. And Vladimir Putin, we now realize, was planning, look this is a moment of weakness in the West, after global financial crisis, a weakening of the transatlantic alliance. Maybe I can reset the boundaries of Russia. So I went from a period of promise and optimism to suddenly war on the European continent, a splitting of ideas of coexistence between China and Europe and America to more of decoupling. Adam Tooze, I thought, I should put it very well. It's a new cocktail. It was a mix that served the North, the Northern Hemisphere. It served America. It served Europe, or parts of Europe and America, who managed to keep themselves at the top end of globalization and were in a way sharing technology but maybe offshoring some of the lower value added jobs to other parts of the world, sharing some of the lower value maybe technology to integrate them into their globalization. What we have now is a different mix. If you are in China, you don't want to lose the benefits of globalization and maybe you can't trust being able to sell into the American market forever. And so you're trying to build up globalization more around Southeast Asia. So RCEP, the Regional Comprehensive Economic Partnership, has been able to integrate and lower barriers to trade in certain types of services trade as well as manufactured trade in that space between Japan, South Korea, Australia, ASEAN, China. Interesting. The EU is on a new push to try A itself to develop its own energy new drive of a more open energy market which is to be frank, something that never happened in the EU in a meaningful way but they're also thinking maybe we need to link up with Africa. If we don't look kind of north-south into a pillar of globalization we could end up with African migrants who are suffering under climate change and instability and so on coming north. So we have to build a sort of pillar of globalization that's more north-south. America has got a slightly different type of globalization. Maybe we need a new French shoring model. So it's not just about America because America apart from Canada or Mexico is pretty cut off physically. They want to connect through to their partners, their security partners in the Indo-Pacific, in Europe, and create a globalization trend for high technology across a sort of horizontal track. So you know globalization is sort of rebooting itself in all sorts of ways to try to take into account the geopolitics of today but also take into account some of the winners and losers or let me phrase it differently, those who are at the top of the globalization chain and those who previously were at the bottom. Saudi Arabia says to itself, hold on, we want to write our own rules of globalization and we'll pick our partners. We want to stay close to Russia. We want to keep doing oil. You know, there'll be a need for an oil producer. Why do we need to follow rules set in the northern hemisphere? We'll keep selling oil to whoever needs it. So I just think we haven't lost globalization. There's too much to gain from it, but it's no longer top down. It's a much more, it's a new cocktail, Adam's terminology. So I think it just, it becomes, there's a lot more friction, there's more sand in the gears of globalization. You've got to work out, oh I better not go in that area or if I've taken an investment from a country in this particular area, maybe I can't then export it to the other one. So globalization is not going to be as clean or I could say as wild west as it was before. But in the end, what this will create, I think is a sort of competition between America and China in particular to try to bring on to their side Africa, parts of Central Asia, parts of Latin America and net net, because you have to have a net net view, my net net is that actually this competition for the support of those countries, for their engagement to try to bring them onto your side of the competition will give those countries more agency and more opportunity to be frank. And in the end, then maybe in five years time or 15 years time to use my time frame, those countries hopefully will actually be more engaged in globalization than they were before. Because before they were passengers in many cases, they were having to take what they were given but now they can compete a bit more for their own packages of globalization and I tend to be a glass half full person. I think this could be a net plus. Well, we are going to have to work on this and live in two worlds the way the world is operating in two worlds, this competitive world, this geopolitical world of division but this world that is also looking for opportunities for agency, for diversification of globalization, for engagement, for dealing with the big problems, climate, the SDGs to put it in a very simple term. So, how do we do that? Think tanks are part of civil society. Civil society can only exist truthfully in a liberal democracy. A liberal democracy depends on a separation of powers, freedom of information, a media that leases competitive, that is autonomous, that is as independent as possible. That relies in turn on a rule of law. The rule of law, therefore must mean the rule of law and the legal system is not dominated by the executive branch. The executive branch needs to be challenged by the legislative branch. You know, it is an ecosystem. Liberal democracy is an ecosystem that competes with itself, that can be messy, that can sometimes be slow at making decisions but it keeps that resilience, that political resilience for change to happen in a way that is permissive. And my view is think tanks are part of that ecosystem. So we have to stand for it. We have to believe in it. We need to support it. Now, that is a very different role from promoting democracy. I'm not saying we can go out and promote democracy. That's not our job. To go out and tell countries around the world, our system, we might believe it's better. I believe it is more resilient. I believe that authoritarian systems of government are good until they're not good. Even those that work run the risk of then having a really seismic change that can be quite destructive and we've seen it historically. But what we need to be there is to be there as interlocutors, to be part of the conversation. It's something governments can't always do. Governments are caught in the geopolitical competition. But we need to be open. We need to be open. And we need to find a way to keep those dialogues open even when they're difficult. So that there are bridges with the non-liberal democracies. So we need to understand where we stand in the geopolitical contest. We stand on one side with liberal democracies. But we need to keep the doors open to everyone else. And one of the biggest challenges right out there is biodiversity, climate, sustainability. For that, you're going to need a lot of countries to work together. So we've got to keep the avenues on that one.