 college-based global community, and we are delighted to have a number of those students here with us tonight. I'd also like to extend a special welcome to our young professionals here tonight. We hope all of the YPs in attendance will join us afterwards for an informal post-program discussion with our speaker over drinks and advertisers that may or might not grow downstairs. And now to introduce tonight's speaker, I'd like to invite Richard O'Han, council officer and president of the Invest Group to the podium. Thank you, Johnnie. I'm delighted to welcome back to the council's podium, Paragana. He's been with us several times and participated in a terrific panel discussion on superpowers of the 21st century in 2008 and in 2009, he was a keynote speaker for our inside Washington week and was rated one of our top speakers. My dad, he would have loved to have been able to open the inside Washington program this week. It's on, it's just you're taller than us. But unfortunately, he'll be in Singapore during that time. However, we are lucky to have the opportunity to hear him tonight and you can also join our Washington week program in April to hear many other great speakers. Now, let me tell you a little bit about it. Prague Connick is the director of the Global Govern... These are great titles. The Global Governance Initiative and Senior Research Fellow in the American Strategy Program at the New America Foundation, which I think is located in New York, Washington. He is also a partner in the advisory firm, Hybrid Realities and with his wife, Asia Connick, directs the Hybrid Reality Institute, which explores human technology, co-evolution and its implications for society, business, and politics. Dr. Connick served on the Foreign Policy Advisory Group to the Barack Obama for President campaign and during 2007 was a Senior Political Advisor to the United States Special Operations Forces in Iraq and Afghanistan. Earlier, he held positions at the Brookings Institute, the World Economic Forum in Geneva and the Council on Foreign Relations in New York. In 2008, he was named one of the Esquire's 75 most influential people of the 21st century and was one of 15 individuals featured in Wired Magazine's smart list. In 2009, he was honored as a young global leader in the World Economic Forum. Dr. Connick is widely published and quoted in media around the world. His articles and reviews have appeared in numerous publications including the International Herald Tribune, The Washington Post, Financial Times, Forbes, Time, and Newsweek. He has been featured on a number of TV and radio programs including CNN, BBC, PBS, Al Jazeera International, and National Public Radio among many others. He is the author of the international best-selling book, The Second World, Empires and Influence in the New Global Order, which has been translated into over a dozen languages. And his latest book, How to Run the World, charting a course for the new Renaissance, will be the focus of this evening's program and will be available following tonight's program for signing and sale. Dr. Connick holds a PhD from the London School of Economics and a bachelor's and master's degrees from the School of Foreign Service at Georgetown University. A truly international figure, Dr. Connick was born in India, grew up in the United Arab Emirates, New York, and Germany, and has traveled in more than 100 countries on all continents. And tonight, we are delighted to have him here in Philadelphia to speak with us. Dr. Connick. Thank you. Good evening. It's great to be back here. This is one of those moments in time where people like me, geopolitical junkies, this is what we live for, is the kind of moment where you rip up your speech and you just meditate and reflect on how amazing the world's dynamics can be, kind of moment that you wait for actually and have to keep on waiting for no matter how much you know, no matter what kind of expert you are about the world, you never really know when the tipping point is going to come. But I will say to back up about five years when I was traveling around the world two and a half years to write my first book, Second World, I spent a tremendous amount of time in the following countries, Morocco, Egypt, Libya, Egypt, Syria, Yemen, Jordan, Saudi Arabia, so on, so on, months and months and months and months and months and got okay at Arabic, but mostly was meeting everyone I could. Students, bloggers, activists, revolutionaries, politicians, members of parliament, ministers, taxi drivers, waiters, waitresses, you name it. And I sort of sized up my methodology is kind of different from other political scientists. I read the books, I take my notes, I integrate into a framework, then I pack it all in the drawer and I go and I travel. And so after when I was finally ready to leave Egypt, this is at some point in 2006, you know, in my notepad and my notes, I said Egypt is ripe for revolution. And there it is, there are those words stand somewhere in the middle of my last book. And so I've been waiting and waiting and waiting for that to actually happen to vindicate me. And you can see I'm kind of smiling about this. And obviously things have been, it's been a mixed picture the last few weeks. Obviously all has not been pretty, all has not been good in Bahrain. There's been a lot of trouble, a lot of unrest. Look at Libya, there's a lot of brutality. Syria as well. You know, revolution is not a dinner party, Mausadam famously said. And this won't be either. But let me say this, it could be so much worse. These regimes have been so much worse than what we have seen them do in the last few weeks. And all those times that they did, all those nasty things to their people, and maybe we were even supporting them. This time is actually different. You know, for decades and decades we have faced this paradox. We have either explicitly or quietly talked about democracy, promotion, economic reform, and progressive governance. But we never wanted to touch the leaders. And that was a paradox that we simply could not transcend. So we just waited and waited and waited. And then it happened, it happened for us. And now we don't face that paradox as much anymore because a lot of these regimes are gone. They're going or they're gone. Now, as familiar as anyone can be with the fact that even if you bring in next generation young leaders who talk about reform, they're still surrounded by their daddy's secret police and secret services who are going to maintain a grip on power. That's what's happening in Syria right now. Even Saif al-Qaddafi himself, who talked about reform for six or seven years, didn't get very far because of who his father is and who his father still is, in fact. But that said, one way or the other, they're all going to go. They're all going to go, or at least they're all going to modernize, they're all going to change. And therefore, very, very logically speaking, if this part of the world has had the worst governments that they could have had, it could only go up. It could only get better. And I think it will. And I think it has a lot to do with the combination of a certain set of factors. I want to mention those factors. I want to say that it's important to distinguish between what we're seeing right now and how deeper forces and deeper trends at play, which is what a lot of this book is about. A lot of people say failed states. That's a trend, right? You can pick up any magazine and say, what are the top trends of the 21st century? You can say, failed states this, or technology revolutions, things like this. Those are not trends. It's very important to be somewhat scientific about this. Those are just manifestations of much deeper trends. The deepest trend that's played here in the Middle East is what I wrote the middle chapters of this book to. It's what I call post-colonial entropy. That's a fancy way of saying the world is falling apart. Okay. Why do I say that? The world has 200 countries. 60 years ago, the United Nations was founded, there were less than 100 countries. We've doubled the number of countries in the world. Are they all really sovereign, equal, competent, coherent, even respectable nations and governments? Not really. Those are the words that come to mind when I think of Libya today. Probably isn't for you either. What these countries have experienced in the last 60 years since independence, decolonization, has been largely lack of investment infrastructure, very corrupt governance, tripling or quidrupling of their populations. No new national ideology that compels loyalty among the people and a general sort of pattern of suppression, externalizing the enemy, blaming Israel, blaming America, blaming anyone, but not taking responsibility for themselves. That is decay. It had to come to a point where that decay crosses over that tipping point into collapse. So when people say, what's the trend that played here? It's not, oh, there's a bunch of failed states, or oh, these regimes are falling. The deeper trend is this entropy. This entropy is ripping, not just the Arab world. It's actually kind of a worldwide phenomenon. A lot of people have been asking me lately, is this going to spread outside the region to a place like Pakistan? And I'm like, hold on a minute. Pakistan is already way beyond what the Arab countries are. What do you mean is this going to spread? It's already in such an advanced state of entropy that I don't think the country can even hold together at all. In the Arab world, we're talking about reforming governments, improving them, fighting the people, and building state capacity, nation-building, all these things, because we still believe these places can actually hold together. I don't actually think that a place like Pakistan, which can even do that, is much larger, almost 200 million people. So just bear in mind this concept of entropy. When you look at the map of the world today and you're starting to track and see and plot where these revolutions are happening, Jordan and Syria last week, now we are. A week before that, we weren't talking about other places, one by one by one by one by one. There are 200 countries in the world. More than half of them are post-colonial countries. Most of those are borderline failed states or already over the edge. And it's not something that started at the end of the Cold War, last 10 years, 15 years. It's not something that's just very, very recent because of Twitter and Facebook, even Al Jazeera, which I celebrate because of the way in which it shines a spotlight on a lot of these governments. This has been going on. These countries have been dying since the day they were born. And that's what I devote some chunk of this book to, saying, well, so what do you actually do about it? What you do about it is many things. And I want to kind of bring it straight to the headlines as well because Obama is giving a speech tonight defending his policy so far. And he has to defend about two levels. The first is why are we going to war isn't this illegal? I would say no. Because for one thing, there are regional organizations involved that have invited the United States to support humanitarian operations. The Arab League has sanctioned this. The European Union is involved in this. And the UN Security Council has approved this. We are not necessarily at war. As you probably know, we have an outright declared war in quite a while. It's something of a lost art. In fact, there is a book that came out recently titled The Lost Art of Declaring War. And so it wouldn't be such a thick book if we weren't finding very clever ways to not declare war while doing it. But I don't think that what's happening right now is the kind of thing where it requires a sort of congressional sanction. I would like for Congress to actually get its act together and do that, much as I would like the United Nations to much more quickly deliberate on whether or not Gaddafi has been conducting atrocities and therefore sanctioning more aggressive operations against him. But alas, these things take a lot of time and I don't think that Obama should be wasting time waiting for them. So that's one thing. The other more important question is does he have a strategy? And this is where I really like what we're doing. It's all too easy for people to attack him from the left and from the right. From the very beginning he said that this is an Arab situation. The Arab League is actually convening and doing something which is a real shock for anyone who follows the Arab politics. The Europeans have gotten together and decided to do something to recognize the National Council government of eastern Libya and to put together a military coalition. France has been lead. For anyone who follows European politics this is also a great shock. So for those of us who have been raised on a healthy diet of America as the world's policeman no one can do anything without us, whatever you know finally we're seeing some action and Obama is saying yes America has very unique military other kinds of capabilities that we are willing to use and support and sometimes we'll take leave we'll do strikes before others we'll strike targets others can't that's fine but we're doing it because the Arabs and this is the Arab world that's at stake here have invited us to do it we're doing it because the great powers that are proximate to the situation have to deal with the aftermath of this more than we do the Europeans they are on board in fact they have taken the lead they recognize this Libyan this would not have been the case in the last ten years right and yet that's exactly what's happening now so we have managed to combine caution with action that's really really remarkable so I actually applaud the way Obama has been handling this so far but don't expect him to provide the long term answer to what is going on a lot of people are going to say what's the strategy, what's the outcome what's the end state what's their own revolutions which they are doing right now which we have in many cases stopped them from doing remember based on our support for some of the dictatorships in the region is to let them decide where this is going to go and just to make sure as much as we can exercise as much leverage as we can to make sure that there isn't an unnecessary loss of life in the process and again we're actually doing a moderately good job of that maybe we shouldn't be dealing with any kind of what Saudi Arabia is doing there are trade-offs, there are double standards there is a bit of hypocrisy that's always the case but just because we're not stopping the Saudis from what they're doing it doesn't mean that we can't help the Libyans and we can't help people in other countries so we have limited capacity but we do what we can so how does this all this tie into to this book I've spent a lot of time in the Arab world and writing about these deeper forces of IC play, particularly this issue of post-colonial entropy what does state building really mean how important are regional organizations which is an entire level of international organizations that we just tend to ignore we tend to think of great powers, superpowers multilateral organizations and everyone else is just a little just a sort of icing on the cake in fact it began to be regional and organizations are very important and that's another big theme of this book a lot of people right now we're talking about global security issues are saying we will have a better global security system if we reform the UN Security Council let's expand it from 15 countries to 25 countries, let's have India have a permanency, Brazil should have a permanency Japan should have a permanency and so forth no one is asking is that actually going to lead to action is that going to lead to a more efficient model of global security and I challenge anyone to tell me expanding the UN Security Council as legitimate and noble the goal is that maybe to salvage the legitimacy of that core part of the UN tell me how that's going to save anyone's life and I'm not sure that it will and that brings us to the kind of core message of this book I'm not interested in global governance as we know it's it's a term that's on my business card global governance and there are a lot of people who work on it and 99% of the people who work on global governance basically sit around and play with order charts I know I've been doing this for years and those order charts are usually order charts in the United Nations World Bank, IMF World Trade Organization and so forth as if that map, that organogram really reflects the reality of the world but I attack those maps I attack those charts I'm telling what I just told you earlier about Postal and Entropy is my way of saying that that complete joke that the borders that are on it countries that are on it in half the cases don't reflect anything like a neat and tidy reality well the same thing goes in spades for the maps and charts of global governance we will not solve the world's problems by talking about silver bullets like reform the Unsecurity Council strengthen the IMF let the G20 handle all the world's problems right, financial stability Iran, climate change a new global environmental organization right and that will tackle climate change, let's have another summit Kyoto, Bali, Copenhagen Cancun, pick the next sunny resort of your choice where there will be a big summit and people will fly there and burn lots of emissions and get around to negotiating a treaty that will never ever be ratified this is the global governance system that people think of when they think of global governance and it gives global governance a bad name and it gives diplomacy a bad name and the very purpose of this book is to turn all of that completely on its head in one sentence the best global governance is local governance and in one sentence the diplomacy of talk is the worst kind of diplomacy the diplomacy of action is what we need a lot more of the reason these organizations are losing so much legitimacy the reason they are being bypassed by NGOs by companies that are in trouble and wants to go and do something the reason is because legitimacy doesn't just derive from where you sit on the org chart it doesn't derive from what international law what powers international law gives you the world is very impatient legitimacy derives from doing something that's why the Gates Foundation is not a democratically elected legitimate organization but I haven't been to a country in Africa or in Asia that doesn't give priority to a meeting with Bill Gates or his representatives over any diplomat from Italy or even from the United States because he does something so this is not rocket science those org charts are wrong in the way that they map out global governance and for me legitimacy now derives from action and the diplomatic map that I try to paint in this book is one in which it's not about against states it's not against international organizations it's about releasing resources and empowering local actors as much as possible let me give you some examples of that we've been in Afghanistan now for almost 10 years right 9-11 is coming up the 10th anniversary this year it took until or late last year for the Pentagon to say oh my god we're going to be occupying this country forever unless we actually bring in private actors investors, businesses, companies we need them to turn this country into what it has been or was for thousands of years which is the Silk Road it's a landlocked country, it has resources you can transit natural gas and oil through it you can extract minerals from it you can grow pomegranates and raisins there but yet this really wasn't the central focus of our policy we said well Afghanistan is a security problem right, therefore the military leads and the security problems and 10 years later we haven't solved the security problem, the stability problem or the terrorism problem because you can't let you can't treat issues in these silos the way we do and the way a lot of these international organizations do and the way our own government does instead the Pentagon created something called the Office of Business and Stability Operations last year where it said we need to start flying some CEOs in here so they did they've got American businesses we also opened up a factory in Kandahar we started building some roads around at Lazari Sharif please help get some of these businesses going so Afghanistan can export some goods so it can earn some revenue so it can not be dependent on us so that people have less motivation to join the Jihad or the insurgency again, it was so obvious and yet for almost 10 years we hadn't been doing it the reason is because we still think diplomacy, leadership and our foreign policy is only that which our government does and that's the biggest mistake we can make in the 21st century diplomacy is so much more than just what Hillary Clinton does it's so much more than just what the State Department does you all know how emasculated the State Department is we only have 5,000 foreign service officers is that the sum total of American diplomacy? it's not what our military does is diplomacy what our companies do is diplomacy we negotiate with other governments with other companies we form supply chains we gain access to markets we invest in foreign countries we develop their labor force we change their regulations all of that is diplomacy too our NGOs do diplomacy America is the most charitable society in the world hands down what Americans donate to causes has a big impact on the ground what our universities do 40 American universities operating across the Middle East at a time when we are such an unpopular government students are lining up to apply to study at American college campuses that are in the heart of the Middle East why because they actually want American education we have an enormous global footprint and that footprint goes well beyond what our government alone delivers and so we have this big misconception about diplomacy as being something that MNA is only from Washington but to me I want to hear that the World Affairs Council runs multiple trips to Iran how many American diplomats have been to Iran way more members of the World Affairs Council have been to Iran than there are American diplomats that have been to Iran at least post 1979 right and when I was in Europe last week in Germany and in the UK they have diplomatic relations with Iran and they are always saying that our Iran policy is so messed up frozen for 32 years now achieving absolutely nothing we have all this knowledge about the country all this time spent on the ground but your diplomats spend all their time row-eating us to not engaging with Iran that's an in and out shell American foreign policy for Iran now it hasn't strengthened its weaknesses diplomacy is obviously about coercion and persuasion about lots of different things a mix of characters and sticks obviously that's exactly the problem our policies have been so black and white and if it's broke you've got to fix it and we haven't been necessarily doing that it brings up the point really about engagement if you're not engaging then you're not exercising diplomacy at all you're abdicating your participation in diplomacy which is precisely why when World Affairs Council delegations go to me that's a form of diplomacy and there's a whole field built around what's called track to diplomacy citizen diplomacy citizen engagement diplomacy are actually extremely important and I think that they play a very complementary role toward governments too take the issue of Palestine us, time and check, we still don't have a two state solution or any solution but we've had rose garden ceremonies about the Israeli-Palestinian dispute we've handed out several Nobel Peace Prizes for that dispute for the last 30-35 years it hasn't really gotten us past the finish line I think one dimension that we have ignored to a large extent is people diplomacy which is absolutely essential if you want people to live in peace side by side we've ignored the economic dimension we've thought that oh no, no, you have to sort out the security issues or to negotiate the final status issues and then all of these things will just magically happen what if you just put that on its head what if you say, if you actually built a viable Palestinian economy then that entity could actually survive on its own in their case for its own independence it wouldn't be either a political and security dependent on others, it wouldn't be an economic client of various UN agencies and donor values like this but that's not the way people tend to think about these things, they think that you can regulate it all on paper have lots of cute ceremonies about it give out lots of prizes but they'll still bring us to where we are today so I'm for diplomacy on all of these different levels that involves citizens, involves companies involves NGOs, involves government agencies, the UN sort there is no either or, I'm not one of those people who says the market's going to solve all the problems or let Bill Gates and civil society solve all the world's problems and it'll all be okay it's about smarter partnerships between public and private actors it's about .gov, .com .org, .edu and also the .god religious groups and those actors they're all very very involved in this landscape of 21st century diplomacy I think there's enormous potential in that if the world of intergovernmental interstate policy has gotten us to where we are today and we still have so many problems so many unanswered questions, so many challenges climate change, human rights, democracy promotion, economic growth, public health you name it well, governments have done about as much we're not giving more money to foreign aid are we other governments aren't either the UN certainly doesn't have enough money or enough resources to solve these problems where is it going to come from where are the solutions going to come from but there's an enormous amount of resources that are out there in NGOs and civil society, in our corporations, in diaspora groups in universities and so forth harnessing that potential is really what the future of diplomacy is going to be about finding the resources from these different sectors that's what's going to generate the kinds of solutions that we need and you can see example after example I think this book could have been twice as long while my editors didn't want it to be just a laundry list of all the wonderful things that are actually going on out there when you see public and private resources combined but the examples are literally endless and so I do organize the book functionally is there an economic growth you could have a stimulus package, a stimulus package but you eventually sputter to the stop or you can attempt to stimulate innovation in the private sector and that ultimately is how you do in fact create jobs in public, private cooperation you can talk about terrorism you can say we need to drain the swamps we need to bond them to whatever but you also need to create jobs through foreign investment risk insurance guarantees things that banks do, things that UN agencies do things that governments also do things that local entrepreneurs do that's what it actually takes to drain the swamps it involves more than just governments more than just military you want to solve a climate change? well again you can have lots of big summits in world capitals but you also have to have innovation, clean technology coming from Europe, coming from Japan coming from the United States finding mechanisms to subsidize it to transfer those technologies to so that they will reduce their emissions you can't legislate that you have to innovate that governments don't innovate those things companies do probably you want to promote human rights well at the United Nations it's premised on respect for sovereignty so how are you criticizing what China does in Tibet? you can't actually do much of that at the United Nations but Amnesty International can do that and they do, Human Rights Watch can do that and they do as being an opposition to governments or simply being on the outside being on the margins let me tell you what the fastest growing NGO that I'm a Western NGO in China is it's called Business for Social Responsibility they used to have a staff of like 6 in Beijing now it's a staff of 36 that's the invitation of the Chinese government because they said we like you, you provide us with technical assistance and you help us actually improve and enforce labor rights and labor standards in our factories we actually train our factory managers so an NGO is doing more to improve human rights on the ground in China than sending over our bureaucrats to go and read out lectures to the Chinese government they're not listening they're not listening to that but they're actually welcoming the NGOs that are helping them reform so those are just a few examples of the amazing stuff that's actually going on the ground if you look at diplomacy not through the traditional framework of just what governments do but what I call mega diplomacy the combination of public, private, civic kinds of actors and the mega diplomacy framework is what I try to project in this book because really the genie is out of the bottle this is an irreversible sort of situation the empowerment of all of these actors companies, NGOs and so forth is not something that's ever going to be reversed because globalization is of course greater than all of us it distributes, dissipates it spreads power and authority in all kinds of directions and therefore we actually have to come to grips with it we have to stop the conversations about who gets to regulate who who has the upper hand and start thinking much more about who's partnering with whom who's deploying the resources how are we collaborating and I find far too much of the former conversation going on in Washington and a far more inspiring amount of the latter conversation going around outside of Washington and that's why maybe that's why I spend so little time in Washington but it's certainly I think the best way to get fresh ideas is to go and travel and to see this incredible display of creativity, diplomatic creativity innovation that's happening all over the world and what I've tried to do with this book is just to start conversation around that kind of basically rid us of any excuses that we might possibly have about why we don't each think of ourselves as diplomats because I officially think of all of you here in this room as diplomats thanks very much from the audience so Dr. Khanna I'm sort of I'm all in favor of democracy Middle East Arab, Libyan, Egypt and everywhere but is there a they never had an opposition party or leaders like we have in India two party system like in England and do you see any leadership that can take over like Mubarak and Karachi thank you so you're asking if the next set of leaders might be as bad as the ones that just left office that the current dynamics in these countries will allow that to happen already in Tunisia and Asia you have seen Prime Ministers and other cabinet ministers being sacked within one week of the job because people went back on the street and they said you appointed this rubber stamp guy and he's actually not delivering get him out and they're going to keep on doing it week after week after week until the Egyptian military and the Tunisian power brokers realize that they can't get away with it everyone is watching now everyone is holding government's feet to the fire and forcing them to reform a lot faster than they would like and so I think that's actually a very positive when you see when you wake up in the morning and you turn on the news or you open the newspaper and you read about how a government has been dismissed they've been sacked or something like that that's a very good thing it means that another attempt at a corrupt holding on to power by the old guard has been thwarted and rather than letting it ossify like a Mubarak for 30 years instead it lasted three days and I want those governments to keep falling I want government every week to keep falling because then those old regimes who think that they can cheat the people trick the people get away with it are going to finally give up and realize that they can't do it anymore day one it was okay fine I'll reveal the emergency laws day two it was okay fine I'll appoint a vice president day three it was okay fine we'll have early elections and then finally it was oh damn I really need to get out of here because they really aren't satisfied and yes it's a very imperfect and ad hoc form of accountability to take things out under the street but it's a lot better than waiting for what are sure to be flawed elections in fact what just happened today Egypt announced it's probably going to delay its next round of presidential elections I'm not at all surprised I'm not at all surprised that if we focus and you've heard this critique for many people standing right here at this podium when we talk about democracy we focus too much on elections and not enough on substance I mean at least 20 people are probably still here saying thank you here's what I have to say I don't believe I don't care who the next president of Egypt is I don't care if it is a flood thirsty Islamist and I'll tell you why what I care about is that the constitution prevents anyone whether his name is Mubarak or whatever the case may be from actually ever having the kind of power that Mubarak had and therefore my focus is not at all on the election my focus is on the constitution I want to see the constitution reformed and I want to see them fighting out every single letter and article and measure and amendment until it makes clear the president will never again be a powerful person that will be a figurehead and that's it the last thing you want these countries to have actually is a republican form of government they already have that this is what makes us ironically not very good at promoting democracy or at least not the kind of democracy we want these countries to have we want them to have multi-party parliamentary democracies we have two party presidential public we obviously have checks and balances and separation of powers we want them to have that but we don't actually have a lot of experience in training multi-party systems that's what Europe looks like Britain, Germany is like that Italy is like that and so forth they aim to actually be in the lead in doing this because we want those countries to look like western european states and you can only do that by changing the constitution we focus a lot on elections and that's always been the problem it's who comes next it should never matter who comes next a good government the symbol of good government is having the what in place such that it doesn't matter who is in power and that's what we need to be pushing for in this part of the world especially since we don't really know who the next person is going to be I'm curious what do you think curious what you think the reason the contradiction finally came true what changed my thoughts on this it's a loaded question is the spike in food prices ultimately is what drove them over the edge and created things to be untenable not just in Egypt but across the region and with that being the case then it really doesn't matter who is in power because those fundamental demands aren't going to be met by whatever groups in power well you know this was the third way of a food rise that the Arabians had in the last four or five years right so it isn't solely attributable to this spike in food prices though I completely agree with you it was a major contributor so was the food that nerve who set himself on fire so was the leaky meat stable and corruption whole set of sparks sort of came together obviously though the most systemic factor in the short term was the rise in food prices but again the longer term or the deeper instability in those societies has been planted for a long time again the corruption the overpopulation and all those kinds of things so I think this has been it was truly inevitable I think we'll debate for a long time if number two from now Saudi Arabia falls the house of Saud collapses are we going to say it began back then with the food riots did it begin in Tunisia or was it something else to me the fundamental conditions are common across all these countries that make their collapse inevitable so I wouldn't say it's any one thing but I do agree that the food issue was one of them and yes you're right that if they don't deal with fundamental economic questions providing basic goods and services in particular then whichever government it is that comes next is going to collapse the next time there's a food crisis they have been encouraged for a very long time to improve food stocks to improve local agricultural productivity all sorts of things and they haven't done it well and so yeah this is certainly something that needs to be fixed in each of these countries I would hope that one lesson that whatever regimes come next in any of these countries would get out of this and she have to address of course the food supply issue first and foremost back yes unlike the Middle East and North Africa if you're talking about change of government and so on what about places like Yemen and Southern Asia India, Pakistan, Bangladesh and so on where change is except for India where there is severe well there's a great deal of lack of literacy how does that affect how there may be changes or may not be changes I don't know if you can attribute future revolutions to I think a lot of these factors go hand in hand I mean societies that are poor that are agricultural and so forth have a little literacy where I thought you were going was other areas where we have strong man dictatorship types of systems which you mentioned we backed Mushara for almost a decade and we tolerated him we thought that he was we bought his rhetoric about being anti-corruption about improving economic growth and all these kinds of things he didn't really do any of that literacy decline agricultural productivity decline under Mushara he brought some semblance of political stability but that's actually literally a euphemism for authoritarianism so that's not the kind of stability you actually want case after case we learn that when they fall, these dictators fall and we lift up the hood we see just how corrupted corrosive the whole situation was underneath and we ignored it because we had one guy you know and we prefer the simplicity of that so Pakistan has literally collapsed in the last several years in a precipitous way if Mushara was doing half of the good he said he was doing there's no way it could have gotten so bad so fast he never did any of those things so yeah literacy overpopulation again the food supply issues all play a really big role and you know speaking of India there's even even liberal comfortable elites who I know in India today are writing articles in The Guardian saying we're next I'm like what do you mean India's democracy all these things they say but the elite is still very detached divorced from ground level realities much of India is still of course very poor there's a tremendous amount of dissatisfaction with government performance and those are the common factors that can spark or instigate revolutions I'm not saying that India is actually going to collapse I am saying that it's not just authoritarian governments it's any place where there's poor governments right any place where there's even in a democracy you can have a revolution and so I think that that's something that basically the entire world needs to be careful what would the possible or in my word probable financial economic collapse of the United States mean to the rest of the world well I don't think we're going to have you know precipitous economic collapse I mean we run all kinds of scenarios on issues like what if there's a run on the dollar obviously we have China's launches on credit rating agency and downgraded us we deserve it after all but I think that a lot hinges on what's happening right now in terms of our budget debate because you see I mean our debt is not really a number it's a number so large it's not really comprehensible 3, 4, 5 trillion dollars what does that actually mean that's not 15 right that's not a number that you actually ever pay is it that you can actually so it's not a number it's a concept right what foreign creditors are looking at right now the United States is not a country that has the capacity to pay this back right we don't what they're looking for is a country that what they're looking for is policies that could make us a country that could develop the kind of economy or modernize or shift to the kind of economy that will generate the kind of revenues that one day pay that number that concept back and turn it from some ethereal number that's too large to ever comprehend into something that's actually concrete and can be hacked away at bit by bit and so what's happening right now is that there are sort of deficit hawks particularly in the Republican side who say got a free spending the spending is getting out of control but if you free spending making it productive and actually increasing exports all these kinds of things you're actually sending the wrong signal the short term policy of freezing spending pretending that that's actually satisfying international creditors who don't want to see your deficits rise that's the exact opposite of what I hear foreigners saying foreign creditors are saying America needs to invest in infrastructure America needs to upgrade its infrastructure it needs to invest in new sectors of the economy it needs to create new jobs it needs to generate revenue and they'll be pleased to see us spending that money because they'll be pleased to see us spending it right instead of wrong and so I think that right now what is on the line in Congress is actually something where if we don't spend the money that we need on infrastructure and all these other things that actually risks bringing us ever closer to the scenario that you're painting where there is a run on the dollar and a huge obviously a spike in our our orchestrates and it's going to tremendously slow our economy but if you try to answer my question about if there is a collapse you don't believe there will be but if there is what will it be if there is a collapse meaning the dollar is not even a world currency anymore it becomes a an Ecuadorian again I don't think that's going to happen how bad will it be if America is not in the lead we're already competing for the lead America's share of global GDP is less than that of the European Union people play all kinds of funny games with statistics America is number one and Japan is number two and China is just surpassed Japan to be number two and all these things let's face it in every country they're going back to the drawing board and revisiting how they even measure GDP to begin with but the very notion of the economy is not linked to the national so it's kind of ridiculous to not appreciate the European Union as a larger kind of actually by some substantially larger economic weight than we are and that is actually the Eurozone plus so we're not really in the lead in that sense anymore do you need just the dollar as a reserve currency well even that is declining ever so slightly but at an accelerating rate but that doesn't mean that people want it to collapse because we owe people money in dollars so if it's worthless that's not going to do them a lot of good what they do want to do and this is where I actually see a lot of rational discourse going on which is why I don't think this scenario is going to happen because even China and other countries that might wish to sort of degrade our capabilities to use our financial assets to promote our influence they may wish to see that but at the same time they're also promoting these ideas like common international currency diversified basket global currency reserve SDR special drawing managed by the IMF all these kinds of conversations are taking place in which Chinese Americans and others are going about this in a very reasonable way trying to find a kind of a win-win situation because it really isn't in anyone's interest to just see us to see our economy collapse that's why I don't think it's going to happen especially when like post colonialism when colonialism kind of fell people equate self-determination with having their own government so I'm wondering in a world where NGOs are more important than governments how do people have to rethink self-determination right well you know I would never say that NGOs are more important than governments I mean it's not either or you have a lot of countries in the world where like I said the least developed countries the LDCs where NGOs and humanitarian agencies and UN bodies provide a substantial share majority of the public services in those countries they are part of the governance of those countries self-determination is somewhat different I mean when a new country is born like South Sudan last month obviously for a while exists on a certain lifeline from these international organizations and agencies that's why they're all flocking to Juba and setting up their operations and creating something of a very messy sort of mosh pit the same thing is already true in Palestine even though it's not yet the country even when it becomes one it's going to be dependent obviously to some extent on international support Haiti has been an aid of single really for many many years even though it's actually a sovereign country so there's no issue of self-determination there involved at all but I don't think that we should hold the idea of self-determination hostage to the economic weakness of certain countries Kosovo East Timor these are countries that have been born in the last decade even though they're very economically weak but in so many ways their political and economic evolution is held back by being a subservient part of a larger suppressive type of state and so therefore their liberation is painful but it's still something that they can maximize and I think that we should be supporting countries do that now most of my things I'm a big proponent of self-determination and I believe that it's only one the first step and a two-step process the first step is to become independent the second step then is to really melt down the borders that you've just created through infrastructure trade and so forth that's exactly what the European Union is down you have 27 independent countries but there are very few borders between them right they have more or less a single economy the Schengen agreement links a lot of the core countries together there are no borders to cross when you drive between them and so forth so I think that that is what needs to happen in a lot of these places you solve the territorial disputes by creating new countries the first thing those countries do is say thank you for recognizing what's mine is mine what's yours is yours now we can start to do business and that's what will happen between Kurdistan and Turkey that's what will happen between Palestine and Israel that's what will happen between now North and South Sudan that is what will happen the Balkan countries less than 20 years ago the horrific war of disillusion in Yugoslavia five new countries created one of which is a member of the EU already another one which is slated to become a member in the next year or two which is Croatia and all of which have stabilization association agreements with the EU several of which already use the euro as their main currency so these countries have fought horrific wars of independence and basically in a short amount of time they are going to become part of something much larger which is the EU the United States since the Second World War has been involved in many disastrous overseas conflicts what criteria can we use to determine whether we should or should not get involved in a particular area of the world where the Vietnam was a disaster what the president is going to talk tonight what would you advise him to say with respect to those kind of criteria when we should or should not get involved well I'm not going to give you the answer that I think you want the answer that a lot of people are talking about right now is it has to be a vital national security interest those are really soothing words who is going to define what vital is but you might love it we're only going to interview this is obviously not what Obama is going to say but if someone were to say Libya now doesn't seem like all that's for the EU only 1.6% of global oil we don't have a lot of people there and so therefore we're not going to do that one we will do this one we won't do that one it's completely ad hoc even when you use the most precise well actually it's not precise at all but vital national interest it's utterly subjective and you can get around it I would much rather see and I don't know if this is something that can be articulated in the speech but I'd much rather see us saying what are the regional dynamics in any given place what is the capacity of other people to solve their own problems how can we help them solve their own problems how can we help the Arab League police our problems how can we help the African Union and not have to necessarily do so much ourselves and that way you're kind of intervening without intervening you're helping to balance you're helping to promote stability you're helping with peacekeeping operations we're helping with money, with guidance with technical resources but you're not playing global cup in doing it yourself that is I think the correct answer to the question it's one I spend a lot of time in this book spelling out why you should think about the regional level are there people on the ground who can solve this problem themselves and can we provide some support to them so that we don't have to do it ourselves and where we can do that we should do that because you make that investment and you prevent future crises down the road where you do have to get involved thank you