 Good afternoon, everyone, and welcome to this webinar of the Institute for International and European Affairs in Dublin. My name is Peter Gunning, I'm a member of the Institute, and it's my pleasure to host today's presentation and discussion with Bruno Masayesh, who I'll introduce in a moment. Just on the arrangements for the talk and the questions today, Mr Masayesh will speak to us for about 15 to 20 minutes, and then we'll move to a question and answer session with the audience and both the presentation and the Q&A will be on the record. You'll be able as an audience to join the Q&A using the Q&A function on Zoom, which should appear on your screen. Feel free to send in your questions throughout the session, and we'll come to them in due course. Now, if with your question, you would identify yourself and any affiliation you may have. You can also join the discussion on Twitter using the handle at IIPA. So Bruno Masayesh was educated at the University of Lisbon, Lisbon from where he speaks to us today, and at Harvard from where he has a doctorate in international relations. He's currently at a senior advisor at Flint Global, where he advises some of the world's leading companies on geopolitics and technology. He's a senior fellow at the Wilfrid Martins Center for European Studies. Mr Masayesh is a thinker and the author of several books, including Belt and Road, The Chinese World Order, History Has Begun, The Birth of a New America, and The Dawn of Eurasia on the Trail of the New World Order. His latest book is entitled Geopolitics for the End Time from the pandemic to the climate crisis. And this is the theme of his address to the IEA today. I should add that Bruno also knows well the political side of the challenges facing us these days, having served as Portugal's Secretary of State for European Affairs for a number of years from 2013. And that capacity did that he addressed the IEA in person back in 2014. So Bruno, welcome back to Dublin, even if only virtually, and the floor is yours. Thank you Peter. I wish I could be in Dublin. And I have very fond memories of that event where I talked about a year crisis but all that seems very much in the past and we have new challenges now. That I wrote over the past four years and that you mentioned are all about, are all attempts to detect change as it is happening in our world. It could be in the global distribution of power with the rise of China or the rise of revisionist Russia. It could be the election of Donald Trump, to which in a way my book on America was inspired by, or it could be the pandemic or climate crisis. And I see the current moment as a moment of profound change in the structure of the global system. And interestingly, the theories we have are the exact opposite. The main ways we have of understanding the world are theories of the conclusion, the finitiveness of stasis, you know, when you think about Fukuyama in the end of history, it's the opposite of a theory of change. When you think about Huntington's clash of civilizations, it's the opposite of a theory of change. It's a theory of how we are stuck in this world of very old ancient civilizations and keep on on fighting each other. Actually, my next book will be a little slightly more academic than these four books, and I'll try to develop a competing paradigm, explaining how it can make sense of the change happening all around us. And today I'll just make some brief comments about a certain way to interpret and to bring together different dynamics of change today. I'll make some comments about, first, the technology wars. Second, the pandemic and third climate change. Some noise now in the background I hope it's not a problem. I would have to change inside, but hopefully it's not a problem. So, what is really happening I think if we if we look at these different stories and how they come together is that the dynamics of the stable elements in our world are coming and done. And our power to transform the global landscape is increasing every day along different dimensions. And so we're left in a world that in a way is being reconstructed as we speak. And that is I think the background for many of the crisis that we are discussing. If we think about the technology wars, the Huawei question let me put it that way. What was really behind it, it wasn't just economic competition it wasn't just industrial policy. If you look at the American reaction to the rise of Huawei and other successful Chinese companies. There was a lot of economic anxiety is America still leading. We have a lot of technological leaders. We have a threat from China, but there was a lot more than that. There was a sense that companies like Huawei and others would be able to rebuild the world to create a new network global landscape based on new communications technologies 5G the Internet of Things, and that this world would be built by China. Find lots of comments about we cannot live in a world that China will build. So there was an anxiety about China but there was also an anxiety about a new moment in history where technology is now so advanced that we are no longer fighting for territory we are building the territory. The virtual world of telecommunication and technology is being built from scratch. And the question is, who will build it and who will have to live in a world built by others. There's a particularly suggestive moment when suddenly our anxieties are even bigger and larger than before. And we see similar dynamics because what the pandemic that more and more come to the conclusion that the best way to interpret the pandemic is a great moment of artificial. Suddenly retreated from the natural world we migrated to the world of zoom to the world of telemedicine to the world of tele entertainment. We created behavior rules that were far removed from normal natural life as could be imagined. We developed new technologies for surveillance and digital contact tracing, which in many societies particularly in East Asia, really created almost a parallel digital system tracking individuals. One Chinese theorist even talks about the digitalization of people. People were now digital points in a global system of surveillance. So again, a great drive towards artificiality towards a technological world that is built separate from the natural world. Vaccines. It's not just that we relied on vaccines to put an end to the pandemic for the first time in history, every other pandemic vaccines appear that he ends. So sort of mopping up exercise but this time around vaccines were absolutely critical to actually put an end to the pandemic and we can barely imagine what the consequences would have been if vaccines had not been around. Not just vaccines, but new technologies that really point towards a new moment where we can manipulate human biology and make it to resistant to natural threats and the natural world in a way that never happened before. mRNA vaccines are really a form of genetic technology and this has created resistance in some quarries but obviously in my view it should be applauded and points towards incredible possibilities for example to develop universal vaccines against every coronavirus and really allow us to create new barriers between a dangerous natural world and the human world that we inhabit which is in the process becoming more and more delinked from the natural world. So again in the case of the pandemic we have this drive towards what those who are interested in literature and fantasy what in that context is called world building. Tolkien's idea of world building that you create a world from scratch. And in the pandemic we are all engaged in forms of world building China was building its own world, and America was building its own world, but in both cases separating from the natural world. The same dynamics that we had seen with the technology wars I believe. And in many respects this created during the pandemic, the same process of strategic competition that we saw before, because suddenly in this world of technological construction and artificiality. We are losing touch with sense of a natural world a natural economy of human needs that still brought different systems together. What was globalization over the past few decades, if not the idea that independently of what the regime and the ideology is in China and what the regime and ideology is in the West that we share something more or less fundamental. What Adam Smith would call a system of natural needs. There was production there's consumption. There's some universal factors about how one connects supply with demand and how production is organized. All this system of natural needs is coming and done. We no longer live in a world that can be called natural and each powerful actor in the global system is building its own system but it's no longer a system of natural needs. What we're seeing in the global supply chain is really the breaking apart of that, but fundamental I think philosophically at the bottom, we have this process of increasing artificiality. It's not Huntington's clash of civilizations, it's certainly not Fukuyama's end of history. What we have is actually a kind of a new beginning where we are becoming unnatural creatures in an unnatural world. The technology world show that the pandemic. In my view, this is the best way to think about the pandemic in a way that sort of makes sense of everything that happened over the past two years. And now if we turn briefly to climate change it's a sort of corollary combination of this with climate change. I don't think we have the consequences of artificiality of a technological world what we have is most likely in the large historical outlook. What we have is in fact the beginning of the Anthropocene, the beginning of a world that is built from scratch by human beings. Increasingly we're seeing that the response to climate change is moving towards ideas of geoengineering of increased control of the natural environment together with very powerful ways of that adaptation. And the process is going to be competitive. Every major block will be called upon to respond to climate change. And they won't respond through kind of disarmament, they won't respond by renouncing some elements of technological power that I believe is an illusion. People will respond by developing new forms of technological power. Ways of controlling the climate as China is developing ways of protecting your coastline against the ravages of climate change. I think many world cities to project their own city as better place to fight climate change. If during the pandemic we saw cities like Dubai and Singapore being able to tell the world we know how to do this, and why don't you consider moving here and many people did to Dubai, including myself. I was impressed by the way that city dealt with climate change with the pandemic. With climate change we'll see something similar. Many of these cities are actually not favored by geography or latitude, but they are already actively projecting an image of we have the resources and the ability to drive to respond to climate change through widespread use of air conditioning through landscaping through technology that releases is from the need for long commutes along painful commutes and in a transformed climate. And we'll see it in many other places. We already see this very strong competitive dynamics. Secretary of State Lincoln said about a year ago that the United States can only win the competition with China if it becomes a leader in climate change. And this was not correct. This is coming from China as well. China announced ambitious climate goals precisely because it believes this is in many respects where the competition for the 21st century will be decided. In some sense, who will be better able to resist the impact of climate change. This is sort of the negative side of the question who will show more resilience. Similar to the pandemic, who will be able to come out on top, knowing full well that the ravages will be profound and the disruption will be profound and who will be more resilient. But then there's a positive side to this. We all anticipate that at the end of this tunnel at the end of this process at the end of this climate transition. And we're talking about the rest of the century that it will be leaving in an entirely new world with a different technological paradigm with a different energy paradigm that we are going through another technological energy revolution and more profound than the previous ones. And curiously, when we look at the previous ones, we see that they were very closely aligned with changes in global power. There's some literature on this and I'd like to see more, but when I look at how the Britain came to dominate the world system in the late 18th century and then in the 19th century, was this because it won the seven year war against France? Or was it fundamentally because it knew how to master the new energy technologies of the first industrial revolution, steam in particular. It fully embraced those technologies and was able, you know, both to create a new world. So the world after the first industrial revolution of coal and steam was no longer recognizable, create a new world and as the creator of this new world having rights also to lead and manage it. And then when it's changed, it changed because America, the United States in a way replicated the process with the second industrial revolution with electricity oil. Again, fundamental transition to a new world and the United States is both the creator of this new world and its its manager. And in China today you see ideas that try to draw lessons from this history and that see a great opportunity in the climate transition that we are going through. That will emerge at the end with a world that will no longer be recognizable, that no longer depends on fossil fuel energy. When you, unimaginable in some cases, technologies will be universally deployed. And if China is able to lead and manage this transition then it will come out on top as Britain and the United States did. And there's actually some cause of optimism for Chinese strategists in these reflections because if you believe, like many IR academics do, that fundamental changes in global power are the result of great wars. So-called hegemonic wars. Then the prospects for a fundamental change in the global system that places China on top are very reduced because in the age of nuclear weapons this fundamental hegemonic wars look more or less impossible. It's a topic I developed at some length in my latest book. But if you believe that changes in the global hierarchy power are not the result of great wars, but the result of fundamental transformations in what I call in the book the technological order. And this technological order is deeply connected to new energy sources. Then China can look to the future with more optimism because it might be possible for a transition to a new global war to happen. Surreptitiously, let us say through the development of a new technological order rather than through a direct clash and war between the previous hegemon and the aspiring hegemon. Another reason why the decision is trapped might be entirely misguided as a way to understand what is happening. And interesting, I'll stop with this because there may even be questions about it. Russia clearly has taken the attack that Russia put in sees the last decade of his rule as a long dreamed about and long conceived and planned attempts to transform the global system. He's not trying to transform the global order but he's doing it in the in the sort of classical way of through a through a direct clash through a militarized diplomacy where the possibility of a new great war in Europe is used in order to force a new reality and therefore a redrawing of the designing of the global rules and and the global order. I believe he's stopping short of the idea that it is at the end of a destructive war that this new world can be built. He knows that we live in a world of nuclear weapons and and that is that's not a path that can be chosen. But I think he's stemmed it by the possibility that just a threat of a great war might be enough to bring the current hegemon and aspiring states to the table in a kind of new yalta to redesign the security order. China for all the comparisons between Russia China China is a very few of these things. This may be based on the slow growth of a new economic and technological order that China aspires to be. But that's the world we live in of great changes and not just of the appearance of a new world, but actually as I said at the beginning. This may be the first moment in history where human beings start to think of themselves as living in an entirely artificial world. In my view, it's this artificiality that helps us bring together this disparate strands of change in the contemporary world, which is what I've been trying to do in my book to try to bring them together. And finally, I've chosen this opportunity to try to present some of the ideas that I'm working on right now. Finally, I've come to the conclusion that it's the sense of artificiality of world building that provides, in my view, a much needed general paradigm under which this different changes and strands of transformation can be brought together. I'll stop here 20 minutes in and looking forward to the questions.