 Ladies and gentlemen, I'm delighted to welcome you all to the 2020 Owen Harry's lecture. I'm Michael Fully Love, the Executive Director of the Lowy Institute and this year's lecture will be delivered by one of the world's most influential political scientists, Dr Francis Fukuyama. This event is part of the Long Distance Lowy Institute, which is how we have been communicating our content and analysis online while we're unable to do it in person. For today's event, we're experimenting with a new format. This is a hybrid event. Dr Fukuyama is joining us from Palo Alto in California. I'm here at the Institute's headquarters on Blyth Street in Sydney with a small COVID safe audience and of course most of our guests are joining us online via Zoom. So a warm welcome to everybody in the room and everyone dialing in from Australia and overseas, including several Lowy Institute board members. Ladies and gentlemen, our friend Owen Harry's passed away in June this year. Owen was a giant of the foreign policy world. In Australia he was an academic, a trusted Prime Ministeral Advisor and our Ambassador to UNESCO. He also spent nearly two decades on the great stage of Washington, DC as the founding editor of the National Interest. For those of us who are starting our careers at the newly established Lowy Institute in the early 2000s, it was our good fortune that Owen and his wife Dorothy decided to retire to Sydney. For many of us, Owen became a friend, a colleague and a mentor. This was during the Iraq War and I was impressed by the realism of Owen's views at a time of American hubris. The same principles that informed his foreign policy thinking, self-control, discrimination and understatement also marked his writing style and I learned from this too, less is more. Finally, I admired Owen's ambition. This Welsh-born Australian had the imagination and chutzpah to believe he could influence the international relations of the most important country in history. Owen always encouraged me to address big central issues in my writing rather than small, marginal ones. If you're going swimming, he often reminded me, swim in the deep water, not the shallows. And when I was appointed director of the Institute in 2012, I recommended to the board that we establish an annual Owen-Harry's lecture on the practice of geopolitics. The Harry's lecture has now been given by many important figures, including the American diplomat Kurt Campbell, one of the authors of the Pivot to Asia, Steve Hadley, National Security Advisor to President George W. Bush, Ambassador Shyam Saran, the former head of the Indian Foreign Ministry, and Jean-Divide Lavite, the French diplomat and former advisor to three presidents of France. And in the past two years, our Harry's lecturers have been American officials associated with President-Elect Joe Biden. In 2017, it was Jake Sullivan, who was Senior Policy Advisor to the President-Elect. And last year, it was Ambassador Nick Burns, who's been mentioned in dispatches as a possible Secretary of State. We're very pleased today to be able to add Francis Fukuyama's name to this list. Ladies and gentlemen, Dr. Fukuyama is one of the most important thinkers of his generation. He started his career at Rand Corporation, and he was an official at the State Department when he published his sensational 1989 essay, The End of History, which later became a best-selling book. Since then, Dr. Fukuyama has written widely on issues including development and politics and international relations. His most recent book, Identity, the Demand for Dignity and the Politics of Resentment, offers a provocative examination of modern identity politics. He's currently a senior fellow at Stanford University's Freeman Spogli Institute for International Studies. When Owen Harry's died, I appeared with Frank Fukuyama on the ABC program Between the Lines, hosted by Tom Switzer, who's with us today. And that gave me the idea to invite Frank to give the 2020 Harry's lecture. And I'm very grateful to him that he agreed. Let me explain how today's event will unfold. Firstly, Dr. Fukuyama will speak for about 20 or 25 minutes. Then I will have a conversation with him, during which I'll put to him my questions as well as some questions that have been pre-submitted online, and also some questions from our small but perfectly formed audience here at Bly Street. To my colleagues here in the building, if you would like me to pose a question to Dr. Fukuyama on your part, on your behalf, please write it down on the notepad we've provided you with in the next 20 minutes or so and hand it to one of my colleagues. And I'll put as many of your questions as I can to Dr. Fukuyama. And so now, to deliver the 2020 Owen Harry's lecture, let me call on Dr. Francis Fukuyama. Well, thank you very much for that generous introduction, Michael. When Michael suggested that I give the Owen Harry's lecture, I immediately jumped at the opportunity because Owen was a dear friend of mine. And I would say that I wouldn't be invited to give this lecture were it not for him because you would never have heard of me. I would be an obscure academic somewhere or a policy analyst, maybe back in Washington. I met Owen in the spring of 1988. He had been appointed the editor-in-chief of this new foreign policy magazine, The National Interest, and he met me at the Beverly Hills Hotel and asked whether I wanted to write anything for him. I was supposed to give a lecture at the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago. The lecture series was about the decline of the West. And I said, I would like to speak about the victory of the West. And that ultimately led to the article of the end of history with a question mark at the end in the book. And the rest is, so to speak, history. But Owen was a perfect editor, a great mentor, and somebody that encouraged, you know, I was younger at the time, younger writers like me back then, to take risks, intellectual risks. And I think that it's worked out well for all of us. So I miss him greatly and I'm very honored to speak in a lecture series named after him. Now, what I want to do is begin with a little bit of theory about liberalism. Owen and I had differences. Owen was, in a way, a classical realist, closer to Henry Kissinger than, let's say, to Woodrow Wilson in terms of his foreign policy preferences. And I have been a liberal, a classical liberal for most of my life. And we used to have, you know, regular arguments over the role of the United States in doing things like promoting democracy around the world. With all due respect to Owen's position, I do want to defend liberalism. I want to defend it in theory, and I want to talk about the ways that it is being threatened in the world today and what some of those consequences would be. So let me begin with a little bit of theory about why we have this doctrine called liberalism. I think that there are two justifications for it. One of them is very pragmatic, and the other one is moral. The pragmatic justification is that liberalism is essentially a political doctrine that seeks to enable societies to govern themselves over diversity. It arose in the minds of thinkers like Thomas Hobbes or John Locke or Samuel Pufendorf in the late 17th century as a result of the European Wars of Religion following the Protestant Reformation. In the Thirty Years' War, maybe a third of the population of Central Europe were killed in a bloody struggle between different Christian religious sects. And the pragmatic part of liberalism was to take final ends out of political discussion, the final ends defined by religion, and to lower the sights of politics to defend life itself and not the good life, not the good life as defined by a particular sect of a particular religion. And therefore, tolerance of diversity of people that don't believe the same thing that you do has always been at the core of this pragmatic project to enable diverse populations to live with one another. In the 19th and early 20th century, the issue had shifted from religion to nation. You had mixed ethnic populations throughout Europe. And as Europe began to reorganize itself on a national or a cultural or an ethnic basis, you had two bloody civil wars, I'm sorry, world wars that really undermined the magnificent European civilization of the 19th century. And so once again, liberalism was called upon in the aftermath of that war, of the Second World War, to enable Europeans to live together in ethnically diverse societies. That was the origin of the European Union, which was an effort to move beyond nationalism to a new form of coexistence. And I think that that liberal world that emerged after 1945 led to one of the most spectacularly successful periods in human history. There was material progress, there was stability, there was human freedom, there was the flourishing of many human activities that can only take place in a liberal and therefore free society. And it also was important because after World War II, liberal rights were not something that were only deserved by white Europeans. I think that there is a recognition that the black and brown peoples being held in colonial bondage could not consistently be held in that bondage because liberalism was a universal doctrine. Now, that's the other respect in which we can defend liberalism, a moral one. And this is a more continental European tradition. I believe that liberalism is fundamentally a protection of human autonomy. The idea of universal human dignity ultimately comes out of Christianity, out of the view that all human beings are equal in the sight of God because they have the capacity for moral choice. As Western thought developed in the 17th, 18th centuries, this took on a secular form under thinkers like Jean-Jacques Rousseau, or Emmanuel Kant, or Georg Hegel, who argued that human equality is indeed based on human autonomy. In Kant's words, human beings are uncaused causes and therefore have infinite value. And a liberal regime protects that autonomy by giving people rights, by giving them the right to speak, to organize, to associate, and ultimately to have a share of power by being able to vote. And this is really the moral status, the dignity that life in a liberal regime that does respect individual rights gives us. And it is one of the reasons why to this day, people do not want to live in authoritarian countries that do not recognize the fundamental dignity of their citizens. And so for both the pragmatic reasons and for these moral reasons, I think liberalism became the dominant doctrine of the 20th century and should continue to be defended as such. Now, let's turn to the present and the recent years that have brought a number of attacks against that liberal order. I think that in all honesty, a liberal like me, a classical liberal like me, would have to admit that there are defects and gaps in a liberal society that are constantly being filled by other longings and structures and that sometimes end up undermining that liberal project. And one of the problems, I think, both on the left and the right is that the autonomy, the individual autonomy protected by liberalism, tends to take more and more extreme versions and therefore in a certain sense become self undermining. And this is evident in a number of developments over the years. Let's begin on the more conservative side. Liberalism has been associated with one particular right, which is the right to own private property. That is one of the most fundamental individual rights that is protected in true liberal societies. And that right is really what made possible the modern economic world. As any economist would tell you, without secure property rights and contract enforcement, you don't get investment and therefore economic growth. But in the 1980s and 90s, there was an extension of the autonomy of individual property owners in what has now been called movement towards neoliberalism represented by Ronald Reagan, Margaret Thatcher, and at a high brown intellectual level by the Chicago School of Economics, that denigrated in a way the role of the state in the economy that said that private markets would be able to solve most social distribution problems and the like. This was true in many ways. The world did become much richer in this period. But it also became much more unequal because without adequate regulation and without some effort to protect people against the excesses of market capitalism, you had people that were being left behind even as their societies as a whole grew. And this obviously became one of the triggers for the kind of populism that we've seen arise in many rich countries. The second failing of liberalism comes directly out of the fact that it attempts to lower the horizons of politics. Liberal societies do not want to tell you how to live. They do not want to define the good life because that is the source of conflict. But as a result, liberal societies tend not to satisfy these very deep human cravings for community. Because in fact, there's something wrong with the basic liberal premise that we all start out as self-interested individuals. We're not self-interested individuals. Fundamentally, we are highly social creatures. We feel a big sense of anomy and discomfort when we are isolated from our fellow human beings. And we seek community in different ways. There's a right-wing version of this and there's a left-wing version of this. The right-wing version really sees community represented either by again religion or by nation. That these are units that in a sense get dissolved under a liberal world order through globalization, through the movement of people, goods, ideas, and trade between nations. National identity becomes diluted. And that sense of national community that held people together in democratic societies appears to be lost. I think that secularism as well is perceived as a loss by people that have religious faith. They believe that there's a kind of militant form of secularism that is not allowing them to practice their religion. And for that reason, a lot of religious conservatives in places like the United States have turned against that liberal order. And I think that both of these forces are driving illiberal political movements in many parts of the world. So India was a liberal society created by Nehru and Gandhi. But under the BJP and Prime Minister Modi, it's shifted its national identity to one based on Hindu nationalism. In Hungary with the rise of Viktor Orban and the Fidesz Party, Hungarian national identity has been redefined. Orban has said Hungarian national identity is based on Hungarian ethnicity, which I will remind you was really one of the reasons that World War II happened because the Germans wanted to define German identity on the basis of German ethnicity. And there were many Germans living in the surrounding parts of central Europe, not in Germany itself. And that was really the trigger that led to the outbreak of the Second World War. And so this has been going on in other countries as well, including in the United States, where there has been a deepening polarization between a red America and a blue America that is defined partly by these feelings of loss of community with regard to both religion and nation. There is a left wing version of this longing for community too, because in a liberal society we never move as quickly as we should towards full equality. And therefore there are many marginalized groups who feel that the liberal society is essentially hypocritical, that it's promising an equality of recognition and of rights, but it is not delivering on it. And therefore the very concept of liberal universalism is challenged in favor of a definition of rights that is tied to specific groups. And so the liberal world order that emerged, that I believe has these pragmatic and these moral dimensions, has been severely challenged in the last few years. The sources of this challenge are numerous. One is the rise of overtly authoritarian states like China and Russia. They have consolidated their rule. They seem to be stable internally, and they are increasingly seeking to project their power and influence, their model, if you will, across international borders. But there's also been the rise of populist movements within existing liberal democracies, and particularly within the United States and Britain, which were the leaders of the neoliberal revolution back in the 1980s. And then finally, and I think somewhat belatedly, there is the growing of a left that has taken a while to emerge, but has now been energized and is increasingly vocal, at least in certain quarters of the cultural community in the arts and universities in Hollywood, in the media, and places like that, where in some versions it also engages in a kind of illiberal politics. Now, let me turn to the election that just took place on November 3rd, because I think that it illustrates a lot of these clashing forces. Actually, quite frankly, as an American, it's been impossible to have a discussion about anything other than the election up until November 3rd. And because Donald Trump has not accepted the results, we're still in that discussion. And I'm afraid we're going to be probably until January 20th when the new President Biden is finally sworn in, which I assure you is going to happen. I think that that election was the most important political fight that has taken place in my lifetime. It's important not just for the United States, but it is important for the rest of the world, given the role that the United States has historically played in maintaining that broader liberal international order. The United States has been in a long term decline with its political institutions decaying. I think the single source of that decline is really the pervasive polarization that has occurred within American society that has made the United States unable to meet some of the basic governance challenges that it has faced. The most recent example of this has been the COVID pandemic, where something like wearing a mask instead of becoming a health measure that people take to protect themselves and their loved ones becomes a political statement. And you don't wear a mask if you're a Trump supporter and you do wear a mask if you're a Democrat. This is really not the way that nations, coherent nations, are supposed to meet systemic challenges like a global pandemic. The polarization has a number of different routes. The economic one I've referred to already, the fact that many working class voters had been left behind by the prosperity of globalization. But I think actually the more important division is a cultural one, and it really does have to do with the feeling on the part of many populist voters that they are not being respected by the elites that are running the country. And here all of the the identity issues that I referred to play themselves out. Identity politics in the United States started on the left after the civil rights era with specific groups like African Americans, women, gays and lesbians, indigenous peoples, the disabled, every one of these groups felt marginalized and disrespected by the dominant white male society that existed, you know, in the early 1960s. And each one of these groups began to demand recognition, not as part of a generic working class, but rather for their particular form of disrespect. And obviously the disrespect that a, you know, a gay woman feels is different from that of, you know, of a black man living in a northern city. And so there's obviously a lot to this belief that injustice takes these very specific forms tied to narrow identities. The problem with this is that I think that it began to alienate the traditional working class, which had been the base of the Democratic Party, as of every other left-wing party in the 20th century. And increasingly, working class whites began to abandon that party because they felt the Democrats were no longer catering to their interests. They are the ones that had lost their jobs to overseas competition. They're the ones who are falling behind in terms of status and income and social respect. And that generated a huge amount of resentment against the elites living in big cities that had jobs that were secure, that were comfortable in a multicultural, very diverse environment. If you look at the sociology of populism in the United States, it is tied most closely to population density, which I think is correlated in turn to these kinds of cultural differences. It's correlated to, you know, belief in traditional cultural values and family and religion and the like, and conversely to, you know, belief in immigration diversity as strengths. And this is the fundamental division that's taken hold of the United States. It has been augmented by technology because the Internet has succeeded in basically destroying every other source of authority that used to filter news and facts and information that really formed the basis of a Democratic ability to have political discourse. So today it turns out that red and blue voters rely on a completely different set of facts. There are polls that have come out just in the past week that suggest that a substantial minority of, I'm sorry, substantial majority of Republican voters believe that the Democrats basically stole the election and that Joe Biden is not the legitimate president. And when you don't have a common factual basis, you obviously simply reinforce the kinds of filter bubbles that people had started to move, started to move into. Now, if we step back a little bit and look at the election, Joe Biden actually won. And I think that's something that is very encouraging. I think that it shows that the American constitutional system of checks and balances ultimately still works. The most important check in our system is an electoral check, and the American people have pretty decisively rejected Donald Trump for a second term in office. Nonetheless, the Democrats did not get what they were hoping for, which was a landslide victory and a total repudiation of Trump with all the down ballot Republican candidates also losing. In fact, something of the opposite happened. The Republicans, the normal or the any Republican that wasn't Donald Trump actually did reasonably well. And they ran ahead of the president, which is a very unusual thing to happen. And what I think many people have been noting with some puzzlement is that Trump did well precisely among those non-white groups that every Democrat had assumed would be voting against him. So he improved his numbers among African Americans, especially among Hispanic voters. But even Muslim voters voted in greater proportion for Trump in 2020 than they had in 2016, despite all of the racist dog whistles that Trump had given out in the course of the last four years. And what that means really is that while Trump is not going to be president, Trumpism is going to survive. And I believe this is something we can talk about more in the Q&A, but I think that the Democrats need to look very, very carefully at those election results, because I think that once again, the Republicans did well not necessarily because people love what they represent, but because they don't like what the Democrats represent. And I think that unless they sort out what that is, they are going to continue to lose elections. Let me just conclude by saying something about foreign policy to get back to Owen's chief interest. Because the president has undisputed authority over foreign policy, President Biden, when he becomes president, president-elect Biden, will be able to reinsert the United States into the international system. He will rejoin the World Health Organization, the Paris Climate Accords. He will go to NATO and reaffirm support for NATO, for our Asian allies, for Australia, for every other country that has depended on American power. But I think that it's going to be extremely difficult to return to the kind of world that we assumed existed before 2016, because America does remain fundamentally divided. That bipartisan support for the liberal international order that we thought was extremely strong is no longer that way. I think that any American ally will welcome Biden as president, will be happy that he was elected, but will be a little bit distrustful because the Republicans could make a comeback in 2022. They could win the presidency again in 2024. Regardless of what happened on November 3rd, there's still a good third of the American public that remain very strong Trump voters. They're very angry and they are not going to go away. And therefore, the ability of the United States to resume its role as the chief defender of the liberal order, I think, is going to be contested both domestically and also by American friends. This leads to more self-reliance on their part. That may not be the worst thing in the world, but it is going to mean a very different kind of world order than the one that I grew up arguing with Owen Harry's about. So with that, I will stop, and thank you very much for your attention, and I look forward to the discussion. Frank, thank you very much for a wide-ranging, rich and substantive lecture. One with a bit of theory, which is something we sometimes neglect at the Lowy Institute, but also with some practical thoughts. I think the highest compliment I can pay your lecture is that Owen would have enjoyed it. So thank you very much. Let me ask you three or four questions about some of the big themes that you tackled and then put some questions from our guests and colleagues. First of all, let me press you on COVID. You mentioned COVID a little bit, but given that it's such a global phenomenon, I think it's worth pausing on it for a little bit, especially COVID as it relates to your country, because it does seem to me that COVID is like an x-ray on societies, and it shows up the extent to which they're healthy and the extent to which they're unhealthy, and the results so far have not been good for the United States, not only 11 million cases, a quarter of a million dead, but also the sort of maladies that COVID has revealed in your society. A lot of them are to do with President Trump's maladministration, but many are nothing to do with President Trump, or at least they existed before President Trump, the hyperpartisanship, the polarization, the lack of a universal health care, the poor federal state relations. So let me ask you, first of all, have you been surprised at how poorly the United States has dealt with COVID compared with other countries, both liberal and illiberal, that have done better? And secondly, could there be something positive that comes out of COVID for the United States? We have had, to some degree, a greater sense of social solidarity in the United States and many other countries with a new administration, a new approach based more on science. Could this be, could this strengthen the U.S. social compact? Well, I was surprised in the following respect. Oftentimes, when you are in a highly polarized society, the thing that creates greater national unity is an external threat or shock. We had one in the financial crisis in 2008, and then, well, we had one in September 11th, and then 2008, the financial crisis, and then COVID. And one might have thought that they would be sufficient to actually give Americans a sense, yes, we're all in this together, we need to pull together and cooperate and get over these partisan differences. But every single one of those external shocks actually deepened the polarization. And it's testimony to how deeply it runs. And I suppose I wasn't surprised, but I was very dismayed that that had happened and that the response had become such a partisan issue. And it also speaks to deeper, I think, sicknesses in the American society. For example, the spread of conspiracy theories, like QAnon, that have taken root just in the past year. There's always been a crazy fringe on the far right in the United States and on the far left as well. But there are some polls that indicate that a majority of Republican voters believe some version of this QAnon theory that the Democrats are drinking the blood of children in tunnels under Washington DC. I mean, just totally outrageous stuff that speaks to a level of fear and hatred that is really quite extraordinary. And this is something that certainly I would not have anticipated. I think that you're right that it could lay the basis for policies to fix some of our grave deficits. I think in domestic policy, the most inexcusable lack that we have is of a universal government-mandated health care system, where the only rich country in the world that doesn't have such a system. Obama tried to put it in place. And from that moment on, the Republicans spent every effort to try to dismantle it, which I thought was really quite disgraceful. And again, it's an indication of the polarization because a lot of the, let's say, the poor whites in the rural South that were the biggest beneficiaries of Obamacare continue to vote for Republican politicians that wanted to dismantle it. So they're acting completely contrary to their individual self-interest, which shows you the depths of the partisanship. But there is some possibility that if you have a president that doesn't actually want to widen these divisions, that you may go some distance to reducing them, Biden is certainly going to try. He's going to try to reach out to Mitch McConnell, who suddenly is really the second most important man in Washington. Whether that reaching out is going to do any good, I sort of doubt. But at least we're going to have a politician that's trying to do that rather than turning his back on half the country. And let me push you a little bit on that. You described the election on November 3rd as the most important political fight in your lifetime. What can, and I mean, if we think about Joe Biden, if anyone can bring down the level of craziness, it may be Mr. Biden, after all, his signature move for nearly half a century has been to reach across the aisle to his opponents. But it takes someone else to reach their arm back. So do you think the times will suit Joe Biden, this sort of approach he has, this desire he has to govern from the center, which is how he ran his primary campaign? Or are you concerned that he will fall short as well in trying to bridge the gap? Well, he may fall short. I think that the strategy that he has been following is the only conceivable one, first of all, that will allow a Democrat to be elected given our electoral college. I think that he realized early on that if he didn't appeal to these centrist voters that had been Democrats most of their life, but then switched to Trump and the Republicans in 2016, that he simply couldn't get elected president. And that was impressive. He managed to do that. In Pennsylvania, Michigan, Wisconsin, these swing states that had gone surprisingly for Trump four years ago, he managed to win by decent margins. And the only way you could do that is by not espousing the kinds of woke progressive agenda that the left wing of his party was in favor of. So that was sufficient to get him elected, whether it's sufficient to actually do anything, I unfortunately doubt. He's going to have a big agenda ahead of him. Some of the things that he needs to do are actually political reform measures because our Democratic institutions are way out of whack. They're not representative. It's a very minoritarian system because of the Senate and the electoral college that permanently favors a certain minority of the country. It's fundamentally unjust. Republicans have been trying to worsen that by essentially trying to deter Democratic voters from voting by putting up obstacles to their access to the vote. And all of those things really need to be corrected. But because they lead to a partisan Democratic advantage, I don't think that the Republicans are going to permit any of that, assuming that they hold the Senate. And even if they do hold the Senate, even if the Democrats do manage to get to a 50-50 Senate, I think that it's going to be very tricky to do any kind of deep political reform. Without that deeper political reform, I think that we're going to continue this hyperpolarized kind of politics into the indefinite future. One thing I would love to see adopted in Australia is your kind of ballot, rank choice voting or limited preferential ballot, because that would reduce I think the hegemony of the two political parties that have exacerbated that polarization. That may happen on a state level, but again, there's going to be very little consensus for moving in that direction on a national basis. You spoke about identity politics on both the left and the right. Can I ask you how you think those two politics will play out in the next four years? For example, on the left is the kind of woke progressive agenda that you mentioned. Is that baked in, even though there will now be a Democratic administration that will try to govern from the center? And on the right, you've seen the once-proud Republican Party in the last four years really become a sub-brand in many ways of the Trump organization. Is there any chance that the GOP will recover its sort of historical beliefs in fiscal conservatism and strong alliances and probity in personal behavior? Is there any chance, do you think, that the GOP will get its mojo back? Well, again, the signs of that are really not good. I think that if the Democrats had won the landslide that they were hoping for, you could have had the beginnings of a reform of the Republican Party to be a more open and forward-looking party rather than the party of insecure white working-class men. But that didn't happen. I think that's why I think that Trumpism is going to survive Trump, that kind of confrontational angry politics didn't hurt them nearly as much as some people feared. And therefore, the incentives of individual politicians to break from that Trumpist legacy are really not there. And so I'm afraid that it's going to hang around. And I think the left and the right, the forms of identity politics have been playing off each other. So the left has also been energized. There's a substantial part of the progressive left that is convinced that their opponents are just simply racists and xenophobes that are irremediable. And there's really no way of reaching out to them, that there's no point in trying to do that. And therefore, the only thing you can do is to try to mobilize people that think the way you do and win elections on that basis. We've already seen evidence of that in the wake of the election from some progressive politicians. So really the incentives that we're facing, both sides, have not fundamentally changed. And I think you're going to see this identitarian digging in in both parties that will continue for some time. Let me ask you, just while you're on that topic, let me ask you a question that was actually put by somebody in the room, Madeline Neist at the Lowy Institute. And Madeline asked, how will these identities that you're speaking of, how will these identities evolve as we spend more and more of our time online? Well, you know, I think that the thing about identity is that it's a very fluid concept. This is something that's trendy to say in academic circles, but it's socially constructed. You know, there are no fixed identities. Biology doesn't give us a fixed identity. And therefore, it's something that actually can be shaped through politics, through culture, through various instruments that we have available. And if you have a political leadership that is committed to restoring a unifying identity and not simply digging the two sides in deeper into their own different narratives, then I think you can do, you know, you can do something to move the country in that direction. And I think, you know, Biden is going to try to try to do that. But he's pushing against very strong headwinds because in fact, the country is unbelievably diverse. And I think the technology really is not conducive to, you know, control over a master narrative in the way that, you know, technologies like television and radio in the 20th century permitted, you know, for good and for ill, these master narratives to be constructed at a, you know, at a national level. In fact, the internet really encourages further fragmentation. So all of that, you know, again suggests that the unifying ideology or the unifying vision of national identity, you know, is yet to be uncovered. Or I'm going to go to the international stage to see if I can find some optimism there, Frank. Let me ask you about Biden's likely foreign policy. To date, I think he's got away with basically promising a non-Trump foreign policy. And he's spoken, as you mentioned, about returning to alliances and the principles of American leadership and so on. But we don't really know the organizing principle of a Biden foreign policy. Is it likely to be great power competition, for example, competing more fiercely with China and Russia? Is it a return to trying to support the liberal international order? Let me ask you what you think about that. And in particular, I saw a good line from Gideon Rackman in the Financial Times this week. And Gideon said, in a world in which power is more evenly distributed, a rules-based order and a US-led order, a US-led world are not the same thing. How do you think Biden will square this circle? Well, I think that there are different domains of foreign policy where he's going to behave differently. So he is a multilateralist, and he will provide American support and reentry into these organizations like the Paris Accords or the WHO that Trump rejected. And in that respect, he'll be very similar to Obama. On great power competition, actually, Russia is going to be a different story. Trump, in a very bizarre way, really seemed to like Putin and Russia, liked Russia better than Ukraine that was a democracy. That's something where he was kind of out by himself. I think most Republicans were really not willing to follow him down that route. They were willing to defend him during the impeachment, but they were not willing to, for example, support a lifting of sanctions against Russia. And Biden, there's no question that he's going to switch support to Ukraine. He'll be much more supportive of embattled American allies like that. And he will take a much tougher stance towards Russia. Now, China is a different story, because there's been an elite shift in the United States in attitudes towards China that actually precedes Trump. I think really the fault for this lies in the kind of China that Xi Jinping has created since 2013. If you're looking for a source of this problem, it's the fact that Xi's China has re-established the control of the Chinese Communist Party over as much of Chinese society as possible, has returned China to a much more assertive foreign policy. And therefore, I think it's inevitable that any American president is going to take a much more confrontational stand towards China, and I don't think Biden is going to be all that different. Where he's going to differ is what you do about that, because I think the foolish thing that Trump did was to simultaneously attack all of America's Democratic allies whose support you would need if you're trying to create a common front against China and go after everyone at the same time. And that obviously is not something that Biden would pursue. I think taking a little bit less hostile rhetorical stance towards China will remove this kind of hesitancy on the part of many Americans to follow Trump in this anti-Chinese crusade, because it was so xenophobic and so extreme that it was kind of embarrassing. And I think Biden will get us to a point where we can stand up to China, but not in a foolishly confrontational way. Michael, if I may say, I've been trying to preach this in every discussion of foreign policy. I think the single biggest challenge that an American president will face in Asia will be what to do about Taiwan. Xi Jinping gave a speech that almost two years ago in which he promised that Taiwan would be reincorporated into the PRC within a decade, and already almost two years of that time have passed. And he said that this would happen if necessary by force. And what's happened in the past year in Hong Kong, in the South China Sea, on the border with India indicates that China is moving in that direction. And I think that if there is a very serious coercive policy started by China against Taiwan, it's going to put the United States in a very, very difficult situation, because I do not think that there is a consensus on our supporting Taiwan in that kind of a struggle. And, you know, frankly, it doesn't matter whether Trump or Biden was president under those circumstances, I would find it very hard to predict what the United States would do. And that obviously is going to have very, you know, serious consequences for, you know, for all of Asia. Let me stay on China and put a question to you from Richard McGregor, the senior fellow here at the Institute on China. Richard asks, as follows, you've said you've been skeptical on the sustainability of China's hard turn under Xi Jinping. Could you expand on this, especially with China coming so strongly out of COVID? Well, I expressed skepticism in the very long term of these, you know, the sustainability of the China model in general. But I think that in the short run, they're in a very good position. And I think that unfortunately, COVID has really accelerated that. They're back to economic growth levels that they were experiencing before the epidemic hit. They looks like they pretty successfully mastered the disease within China, being able to return life to some version of normality. Whereas Europe and the United States are both heading into second or third waves, and that economic divergence is going to continue well into 2021. And so right now, I think that if there's any weakness in the China model, we're not going to see it for some time. That in the short to medium term, the Chinese are going to be doing well. They're going to get a lot of prestige for their having mastered the disease for still being the engines of global economic growth. And by contrast, the United States looks pretty pathetic in comparison. I have tried to make this point repeatedly that this does not mean that democracies are necessarily worse than autocracies in dealing with something like the pandemic, because the democratic countries in Asia, South Korea, Japan, Taiwan, have actually, in a couple of those cases, they've done better than China. So it really is not democracy or authoritarian government that's made the difference. It's state capacity, it's social trust, it's a lot of different things. But I do think that the way that people are interpreting the contrast between the US and China has not been good for the prestige of global democracy because they're seen as the exemplars of these respective forms of government. Frank, let me put a question to you that we've received from one of our audience members online, emeritus Professor Jeffrey Blaney, who's a well-known historian. I've read his books. All right. So Professor Blaney asks, is the world more dangerous now than during the Cold War? I think that probably not, just for the following reason, that during the Cold War, we were seriously contemplating a global war, the possibility of a global war between the world's two largest and most powerful superpowers. And I think that despite what I just said about the dangers posed by Taiwan, the risk of a global confrontation on that scale is really not in the cards, even with the deterioration of US-China relations. I think that's going to play out in other spheres in economic competition and technology and so forth. What you're seeing instead is a lot of other big problems of sub-state violence and political disorder. But in order to have a really disastrous war, you've got to have a big country that's well organized, has lots of resources, and can use those resources to pound the hell out of its rivals. And that's just not the situation that we're close to being in at the present moment. So in that respect, I think we're in a better shape than we were in the Cold War. Frank, I want to put a question to you from Tom Switzer, our mutual friend. And Tom says this, before he died, oh, and Harry's would argue there is more wrong with America than Donald Trump. And I know you agree with that. And Tom says his Harry's close friend and colleague, Irving Crystal, before he died a decade ago, lamented there are clear signs of rot and decadence in American culture. So Tom's question is, given all this, aren't there compelling reasons for America to put its own house in order and become once again a normal nation and give up pretensions of being a global superpower? What do you think? Well, I believe a certain version of that. You know, I have been on the board of the National Endowment for Democracy for almost two decades. This is a taxpayer funded organization that provides support to civil society groups all over the world, trade unions, women's rights groups, you know, human rights defenders and so forth. And I have really come to feel over the last few years that we've kind of lost our moral authority to do this kind of activity because, you know, for example, suppression of journalists that we as Americans criticize when it happens in other countries, you know, that's, we have a president that calls journalists enemies of the American people. And so we're not really at a higher moral plane to be able to project that kind of soft power. And until we fix our internal problems, we're, you know, we're at a severe disadvantage. However, there are still a lot of countries around the world that depend on American power and influence. And if we simply, as a principled matter, decide that we're not going to interfere anywhere, I think that's not going to be good for people. There's a lot of things below the surface where just Americans paying attention to a human rights violation, you know, going on in Serbia or in, you know, in Bolivia. And somebody saying something about it makes a difference because, you know, the United States still exerts a lot of sway, even if the president and it's the State Department really are not in a good position to, you know, to push these sorts of arguments. So I would hope that the United States does not walk away from its allies from countries that are expecting support when push comes to shove in the future. Frank, I want to ask, in the final question, I want to make a little change of pace if that's okay. And I want to ask you about your hobby of woodworking. And I recommend to everyone in the audience, if you haven't read it, there's a beautiful little article in 1843 Magazine, which is put out by The Economist about Frank's woodworking and his love of, I think I've got this right, late 18th century designs, Pembroke tables, Hepplewhite chests and Demi-Loone card tables. I can't visualise all those, but they sound very elegant. It reminded me of an essay that Winston Churchill wrote called Painting as a Pastime where Churchill recommended that people should have hobbies that are very different from their work. So he said, people who work with their hands should not be doing hard physical labour on the weekend. And equally, politicians should not have as a hobby reading political biographies. You should do something completely different, completely different from your day job. So just tell us a bit about woodworking. Tell us what you get out of woodworking that is a relief from your day job and that gives you, I guess, a different perspective on life. Well, I think that there are craft traditions that don't get adequate respect in the modern world. That's part of what drew me to this. There's a strong tradition of this in Japan. I have a lot of Japanese woodworking tools and they do very intricate kinds of joinery. I was trying to create this late 18th century federal style furniture because, you know, my life is completely intellectual. I produce intangible objects and it's extremely satisfying to be able to sit on something that I've made. You know, I built all of the beds that my children slept on as they were growing up and, you know, I figured, well, that demonstrates that I actually am doing something useful. All the articles and books are, I have no idea whether anyone, you know, for all I know, those are doing harm to people. But I can see that my kids have a bed to sleep on and that's something that they need and, you know, I can take satisfaction in that. So I guess that's the way I've approached this hobby right from the beginning. Well, can I finish by thanking you, Frank, for giving a very important lecture? I know it must give you satisfaction that you can make something you can sit on, but let me assure you that we think you're doing something very tangible and useful. I want to thank everybody for joining us online and in the room for the 2020 Owen Harry's lecture. And I want to finish with a little story that might interest you, Frank. A few years ago, Owen Harry's donated to the Institute two letters of congratulations that he'd received from foreign policy luminaries and we display them both upstairs. The first was from the father of containment, George Kennan. The second was a letter from 1997 from Henry Kissinger, the most famous realist of all whom you referred to in your remarks. And Kissinger wrote, I've read your article in the National Review and can't remember when I have read an article in which I've agreed with every word. And Kissinger continues, I'm only sorry I didn't write it myself, but I will plagiarise it liberally. Let me say, Francis Fukuyama, we promise not to plagiarise your lecture, but there is no doubt that all of us here have been influenced by it. So thank you very much, Francis Fukuyama. Thank you everybody here at 31 Blyth Street. Thank you everybody at home. Thank you for joining us and please stay safe and well. Thank you very much.