 the pandemic and geopolitics. I'm Joe Lauria, editor-in-chief of Consortium News. And I'm Elizabeth Voss. It's often been said, in fact, history shows, that before there can be radical change in society, there must first be a collapse of the old order. We are potentially at such a rare moment when the combination of an historic pandemic and a global economic unraveling has left us contemplating what transformations may be in store. Domestically in the United States, we can ask whether the US will emerge with a better health care system, a more equitable economy, with a totalitarian system and a police state, or whether it will all revert to the status quo ante. But change may not only be afoot at home for the US, but also abroad, and abroad dominated by the United States since the end of the Cold War. With us to discuss the geopolitical ramifications of the COVID-19 crisis are our guests, journalists Patrick Lawrence and Garrett Porter, as well as former Australian Ambassador Tony Kevin. Welcome all of you to CN Live. So let's start with Patrick. Of course, China-US relations are grabbing all the headlines right now. The Republicans are scapegoating China to deflect from the Trump administration's huge failings in managing this crisis, much like the Democrats scapegoated Russia, which 2016 lost to Trump. Even The New York Times is getting in on the act as they did in Russiagate by pumping out a story on Wednesday in the US in which it said that China had been sending false messages about a national lockdown and causing panic without giving any evidence and even saying that the intelligence agencies wouldn't give them evidence. So I want to ask you broadly, Patrick, how do you see the political and economic impact of the pandemic affecting America's standing in the world? And you wrote a piece of consortium news along those lines recently. Can the US emerge from this as still the permanent power in the world? All right. I think a somewhat complicated answer, Joe. There is power. We love complicated answers. We like complicated answers. OK. We're going to get one. All right. There is power to consider. And whatever standing the United States may have lost, and I think it's probably considerable in political capitals in Europe and Asia, our preeminence, I think it's probably wishful thinking to expect this to somehow go by the board. I don't see that. I think China is going to take a rather serious hit, mostly on the economic side. But the United States, I think we're long past the point where we have been able to project ourselves as any kind of model to be emulated. I think our extremely poor performance by way of COVID-19 seals the coffin on that. It's plain that we are willing to take every sorted advantage of this crisis to press our enemies. We have our perceived, our chosen adversaries, please. We have the Pentagon putting in for $20 billion of additional funding for Asia-Pacific operations. We have something approaching a full court press on Iran, Venezuela. This is what I mean by power. I don't see that there is a very great deal in the road ahead that is going to stop that. But I think that the nakedness of our insistence on, we need to say it now, imperial hegemony is plain to all. And I will make one other point. Our standing with the Europeans was never very good. Trump made a very good job of destroying that way back in 2015 with the Iran Accord and then the climate Accord and the NATO doings and all that. The Europeans are yet more furious with us and yet more disappointed. I will point to one thing in the matter of Europe. Macron, I have quite mixed feelings about the French president. But I do give him high marks for getting out there and saying Europe needs an independent voice on the foreign policy side. Let's watch for more of this. We'll speak more about Macron later, Elizabeth. Yeah, Patrick, I wanted to ask you how the corporate press's COVID-19 coverage differs from the Russiagate narrative. And whether you find it to be more or less dishonest, in what ways and in what fashion? I haven't actually made a connection. The Russiagate coverage is now behind us. We seem to have lost interest in the Russians. The ineffectiveness of that so-called narrative is exhausted. What I think we're looking at now and I fear this has not reached its high note yet, we're tipping into a yellow peril that parallels that matches the Hearst era. This is getting very, very worrisomely out of hand. And my remark here, Elizabeth, is that you're Australian. You may be clued into this perhaps a touch better than others. We can do this to China. We can demonize China. But we must not forget the Chinese consciousness with very, very high value to equality with the Westerner. If we push them too far into the corner, I wonder whether we're not looking at a sort of Versailles moment where I do not think the Chinese have anything like the aggressive designs that we assign to them. No, I don't see that at all. But if we continue to take full advantage of this virus fit and push them into a corner, we could see them in a sort of jacket-of-the-box fashion coming back in spades. We really don't want that. It is not the moment. One rather wishes that for once in one or another theater, the Middle East, Venezuela, China, somewhere, we could transcend our preoccupations with preeminence and recognize the common cause here. So far, not a go. Thank you, Patrick. Garrett, I want to turn to you now. If you can't hold off on responding to some of the things Patrick said until we run through our questions with you. Emmanuel Macron, who Patrick mentioned, told the Financial Times last week in a very interesting email, he sort of showed a very curious transformation. And we won't know whether he meant it or not until this crisis is over. But what he said is that the age of globalization was over. And the age of neoliberalism is over, according to a Financial Times editorial. So I want to ask you, are we looking at the end of these twin pillars that has proven to be what is so much wrong with the world in the past 40 years? I think that there is indeed a reason to believe that this crisis does spell a renewed phase of a long-term crisis of neoliberalism in world politics and finance. And of course, this is not the beginning, but rather the last or at least a very late stage of this process because over the past 40 years or so, we've had a process by which neoliberalism has prospered and gained a power for centrist governments throughout the Western world. And then we have, of course, the inevitable reaction against that beginning both in the United States and in Europe, but particularly emphasized perhaps by the Trump victory in 2016. And this has been, I think, rightly understood by most objective observers or analysts as a clear indication that the reign of neoliberalism, the reign in which the financial elites have had free reign to amass great fortunes through the, with the help of the states in Europe and the United States has started to weaken and is near a point of an inflection point if it hasn't already passed that. And now I think we are seeing in this pandemic the obvious worst case scenario for neoliberalism and the only sort of thing that the people who are, the people who've benefited from neoliberalism over the last few decades could feel good about is the fact that despite the pandemic, you have the US Congress nevertheless acting as though nothing has really changed very much in their response to the pandemic. And so we are in the situation where one would normally expect to have an explosion of protest and a movement rising very rapidly to push back. And yet nothing of the sort is now on the horizon. And one must ask whether there is a real possibility of anything like that developing over the coming year. I think this is really the question that must preoccupy anyone who has any conscience or who's thinking seriously about the crisis. Well, Gareth, you've actually preempted my question, which was basically what you've just said. I was going to ask you about what's going to be the reaction when the populace of multiple Western countries really realize in a visceral way the enormity of what's been done to them economically in response to COVID-19. And I was gonna ask, can we expect a surge that might even be violent and would dwarf the Brexit and Trump election scenarios that we saw in 2016 in all words. Well here, of course, I think you do have to distinguish among different countries in terms of both the potential for protest and the actuality of it. Of course, France, you have a situation where protest has already been very strong and even violent or perhaps I should say the reaction to it has been violent. But in any case, France represents one sort of extreme case and I think the United States represents thus far at least the opposite case where in fact, the people who have been mobilized have been those who have been manipulated by the Trump administration, not in favor of really radical change with regard to financial and economic policy, but rather to uphold a set of policies that Trump obviously hopes to continue without really any radical shift. Although you have to acknowledge as well that the crisis imposes certain minimum requirements just to keep the economy going and I think that's what we've seen so far. But nevertheless, I think in the United States the question remains whether there is potential here for any alternative to the Democratic Party or not and thus far the situation does not look very positive in that regard. And just today, Jeffrey Kay had a tweet which I thought was quite important in terms of its insight, which was just to note that the US public has been so atomized and so powerless over the last couple of decades, particularly the last 15 years, that this constitutes a crippling, my term, a crippling weakness in the face of this crisis. And that's the most worrisome thing that I see about it. Garret, thank you very much for that answer. We'll turn now to Tony Kevin in the Australian capital, Canberra. Tony is former ambassador to Cambodia and Poland. He was a diplomat in Russia as well. Tony, thanks for coming on. Let's start to China now as we're laying out all the pieces of this. It appears very much now to be the focal point and also between you as Australian and Chinese relations, Foreign Minister Murray's pain starts talking tough this week against Beijing as well, echoing the Republicans and some Democrats too. How do you see the West's relations changing with China in this situation? And then I wanna also ask you about Russia. Are they off the hook as Patrick suggested in this right now? Thank you. My first time on Zoom, for Australia. Your second time on Zoom, but that's, nobody's counting. Okay, for Australia, we are perched very uncomfortably on a knife edge between our political alliance with the United States, the strategic alliance with the United States and our overwhelming economic relationship with China, which is far and away our largest trading partner, investment partner, source of educational students that keep our universities alive. A large proportion of our population is now Chinese. We are very uncomfortably poised. Having said that, I'm struck by the incredible forces of inertia in our politics, that even though the world has been turned upside down by COVID-19, our foreign minister and even our shadow foreign minister, her opposition counterpart are still running along in the old furrows, still mechanically jumping to the orders from the United States, still being effectively a satellite. And this latest stupidity of Australia taking a leading role in calling for a so-called international inquiry into the conduct of China and the WHO. It's going to be another kangaroo court. It's going to be another MH-17. It's going to be another Syria war crimes chase. It's very distressing and disappointing that our political class doesn't seem able to recognize the enormity of the change that's happened in the world. And if I could say a little bit about that very briefly. What I'm struck by is the way COVID has brought home to us, firstly, as others have mentioned, the instability and the cruelty of the globalization model, how it effectively turns a large part of the world into very vulnerable serfs, if not slaves, and how those people, the underprivileged and the elderly, the demographic of the elderly, disproportionately copying the cruelty of the pandemic. Now, the encouraging thing I see is that countries are coming together most countries, with the rather notorious exception of Sweden at the moment, are coming together rejecting the cruelty of social Darwinist eugenics. The idea that we can put our elderly people out on the hillside to die has been vociferously rejected by people as dissimilar as some Scott Morrison, my rather pathetic prime minister, and Vladimir Putin, whom I rather admire. And that view that our society has built on families and families, whatever their composition, have a sense that elderly people, their grandparents, are to be loved and respected and taken care of. To me, that's the most encouraging thing. So I've thrown out a lot of stray leads here and I'll stop there. Tanya, I'd like to ask about whether you think that we can compare this crisis to 9-11 and the response of the US to 9-11 with the response to COVID-19. In other words, do you think that we should look for a worsening and an intensification of US warmongering, especially towards China as we've been discussing so far? Or do you think that it's finally gonna be this tipping point where the US is kind of forced to scale back it's foreign intervention? The answer to your very important question is that it all depends on whether the US can succeed in pinning the origins of COVID-19 on China, whether they blame the wet market or whether they blame the Chinese CBW laboratory in Wuhan. They will be trying very hard over the next few days to make China seem to the world like the culprit. But there is a very strong counter narrative that you know and it's not a conspiracy theory. There are facts that Fort Detrick chemical and biological weapons laboratory had to close down in July because of maladministration of protective quarantine, the very dangerous viruses and substances in there. It's a fact that the commanding officer of Fort Detrick was sacked. It's a fact that America sent a team of mediocre athletes, so-called to the international military games in Wuhan. And it's a fact that they all stayed in a hotel 300 meters from the Wuhan livestock markets. And it's a fact that that hotel subsequently became a major source of concentration of the virus. Now, here we get into more speculative territory. There are videos floating around of indeterminate people in civilian clothes, apparently smearing saliva with some sort of substance added to it onto guardrails in public transport in Wuhan. Now, there's probably a lot more of that sort of stuff around. If the Chinese government, at the moment, it's only been at the level of social media posts by senior people in their private capacity. But if the Chinese government goes to full hog on saying, well, actually, the Americans planted this virus here and it was a deliberate attempt to destabilize our society, possibly to destabilize our political system. And if that gathers legs, you won't have another opportunity like 9-11 because the thing about 9-11 was the world is swung behind the United States in a mood of moral outrage and sympathy. I don't see that happening yet on COVID-19. And I don't think the United States is anywhere near at the point of credibility that it quickly assumed on 9-11. You're watching CN Live. We're discussing the pandemic and geopolitics. We've laid a lot of issues now on the table and like to open this up for discussion. Let me stick with you for a second, Tony. Well, before I ask one question, my feeling and the three of you might disagree with me is that the time for investigation and blame and pointing fingers and recrimination should be after the world has come together to defeat this virus. I think that is what we should be focused on now and not the politics of that. We, of course, in the US by complete coincidence, there was a presidential election and I think even then the politics should be left aside until we get closer to November. But Tony, earlier Patrick said that he thought that China would take a hit economically on this. And I think in a phone call that we had, a private phone call we had a couple of weeks ago, you said that you thought China, and I could be wrong, may someone else may have told me this, that China would actually gain economically by that. We have America floored and the Chinese are back online again. They are starting to produce again. Wouldn't that give an economic advantage to them? I believe so, yes. I think that analysis is correct. China has shown incredible resilience in the face of what seemed like a huge disaster now and we've got a death toll of 45,000 in the US, approaching 20,000 in Britain, smaller but highly significant numbers across Europe. China now looks as though it got off relatively likely and in retrospect. And it's got the disease under control and it's got the social mechanisms to keep it under control. So yes, it's China's world now. I think for the asking. And China also has a model of globalization, the One Belt One Road Initiative, which is largely continental based. It's not maritime based primarily, although it has a maritime element certainly. But it's moving forward methodically through the Eurasian continent, attracting all sorts of interest as far away as in Europe. I sort of feel we're almost getting back to a Marco Polo world where China reached a center and Europe's a periphery and people like Macron know it and they're trying to sort of get on board. And America is a way over there in another continent, in another global system really. And I sort of think that America might be forced over the next few years to pull back on the North and South continental mass, North and South America. And basically China's going to be calling the shots with Russia in support in the Eurasian landmass. Patrick, yes, please jump in. And to exactly disagree with you, but let me put it in the form of a question. The talk now is all about supply chains and all that, right? The Americans, the English, the British, numerous on the continent, Macron was talking about this himself. We need to reduce our material dependence on well-established supply chains. You know, the obvious starting point is pharmaceuticals, but it hardly ends there. I think that's what the French president meant when he started discussing the end of globalization. So in this way, China's, what do we know? China's first quarter results were calamitous, right? And economic results, forgive me. And I think it was the first contraction since Deng Xiaoping's day. I'm not quite sure they're going to be the winner, and I meant on the economic side, okay? Strictly on the economic side. Maybe you could respond to that and let me put a big question mark at the end of it if I may. Well, obviously China's production slumped enormously because of a massive amount of social distancing measures that were put in place that shut down the economy very rapidly and broadly. I expect that to recover recently quickly now because people now in China know what they're dealing with and they know how to get production moving again while stopping the outbreak starting off again. I think Macron is right that globalization is coming to an end, but with one exception, and I come back to my Marco Polo metaphor again, I think that at the luxury end in goods and services, globalization will continue. Just as, you know, it was economical to bring spices to Europe from the East Indies and China region in the Middle Ages, it's going to be economical to keep a form of globalized political dialogue which is very expensive going, and it does need people getting together physically from time to time. It's going to be possible to have expensive high-end international travel, but I think when it comes to production, what COVID-19 has brought home to us is the cruelty and inequity of the model. We've just had it, I was listening on the radio just now in Singapore, the problem of the barracks of underpaid construction laborers from elsewhere in Asia, these are now the source of the pandemic revival in Singapore. The Singaporeans are belatedly realizing that you really have to look after the underclass, and this is happening all over the world now. People are realizing that we rich white people can't go on profiting from the slavery really of Bangladesh, shirt makers and so on. Something fundamental has to change. International trade will certainly shrink and there'll be a lot more focus on producing things at home that are strategically important like medicines and like medical equipment. We're not going to find ourselves in a world again where we're stuck at the end of a supply chain where the ventilators and the masks can only be made in low-wage countries. Garrett, do you want to jump in and comment on that? I was going to basically agree about the notion that China will recover relatively rapidly and probably will take advantage of the fact that they are going to be well ahead of the curve compared with the United States in that recovery yet. So I think that that's going to be one factor, but I must say that below the level of just the immediate economics, there's another factor here that interests me that we haven't talked about yet. And that is the potential impact of the coronavirus pandemic on the question of the national security policy of the United States and the national security state of the United States. And I've done a bit of writing about this already and intend to do more. My thinking here is that this situation could represent sort of a perfect storm for the national security state should represent a perfect storm for the national security state given any sort of normal set of politics, domestic politics in this country. And that's because on one hand, you have this very dramatic illustration of just how totally wrong the conception of national security that has been dominant in this country has been for so many decades. And on the other hand, you have the fact that you have a military that is still trying to sort of maintain the momentum as close as possible to the normal momentum that it has. And in the process, we have this drama that took place on the theater Roosevelt with Captain Crozier trying to save the sailors on board his ship, thousands of sailors who were in danger of being caught up in a pandemic on board the ship. And at the same time, back in Washington, the brass of the Navy and of the Pentagon, really not indicating that they cared one whit about the health of the sailors, really upset that he made public this problem. Now we have a situation where Crozier has emerged as something of a hero and the families of the sailors and the sailors themselves clearly are not only unhappy, but I would say there's a lot of anger toward the Navy and toward the Pentagon over this incident. And it's not just aboard the theater Roosevelt. There are other ships, naval ships in the Far East that have also had a problem of coronavirus outbreaks and similar problems have similar political situations have arisen between the crew and their families and the policy being pursued by the Pentagon. That raises the question of whether there could be a movement of families of sailors and soldiers who are unhappy with the fact that the Pentagon has so obviously expressed a disdain for the health and welfare of the people that are serving them as soldiers and sailors. Now there's also a brand new poll out of the families and veterans and the families of military personnel that shows that more than 70% of these people wanna get completely out of Afghanistan as soon as possible and believe it's time for the United States to start withdrawing from its conflicts around the world. So there are these signals that there's a potential here for more political activism among the veterans and families of soldiers and sailors. And that presents, from my point of view, an opportunity for people who've been pushing for fundamental change in the question of the national security state, including myself of course, to take advantage of this and try to see if there couldn't be a modest movement to push people in Congress to bring about some investigation of the fundamental question of whether we've been on the wrong track in terms of, quote, national security or not and what should be done about it. Eric, you wrote a piece for us about this very issue on the aircraft carrier and you cited a study that was done by two former military high-ranking people. What did that study say? I think that was very interesting. Well, they were suggesting that they do in fact believe that it's likely that there will be a lot of pressure on the military budget in the immediate future and that the Pentagon is not gonna get the kind of appropriations that they've been accustomed to and that they're going to have to really rethink the whole notion of where we're going in terms of military policy. That remains to be seen. I think that's a possibility. And I think these two things that they're talking about in terms of economic pressure on the military budget and the things that we've seen happening within the families and sailors aboard the ships in the Far East could be a second element of this reality as it unfolds. So, I mean, this presents just a new opportunity whether it's gonna pan out or not's another question but it's the closest we've been to a sort of inflection point similar if you will to what happened after the Vietnam War when the Pentagon was under a lot of pressure and had to agree to reduce budgets for several years. That's a great point and it's a great issue you've raised here fundamental to what we're discussing the future of the American empire and how it will be affected by this pandemic. Patrick. You have two constituencies now that are plainly identified as vulnerable in this quite apart from all that the ambassador said about the neoliberal model in general. You have the healthcare system and big pharma and you have the Pentagon, right? They are obvious targets for reconsideration here. As I wrote in a column for you Joe if we can't get a proper socialized medicine in the United States on the back of this crisis I don't know what it will take equally if we can't get some kind of minimum grip on the Pentagon budget. What will it take, right? But note, I'm all for Gareth's thought but both of these constituencies are right out there on the offensive. I honestly think we must be very careful with the word should. I concluded long ago that should is a very dangerous word in our dictionary, right? What should happen and what will happen are often very different things. And we're all in agreement here. I'm certain of that about the military budget. It's a sine qua non on getting anything else done and the healthcare system. But both of these constituencies are on a quite visible offensive if you watch them closely. I think we need to be very careful about what we expect. I must confess I'm very disappointed. I don't see any kind of a groundswell of somebody used the word earlier. We're atomized, we're an atomized people, right? One of the really admirable things about the French is they have a beautiful political tradition and they haven't let it go entirely, right? We don't share that. We're a very alienated people. And I don't think we have yet re-achieved the capacity we had in the 60s and 70s when Gareth and I met one another, right? To convene, to join together, right? We're all just looking out for ourselves, right? And the remedy for this bloody crisis could not be worse in this regard. Stay away from one another, right? So I just wish to add a cautionary to my entire vote of approval for what Gareth said. Patrick, I'd like to follow on from that comment and just ask you how easy it's going to be. And I hate to focus too much on the U.S. in the segment, but to ask how easy it is right now for Trump to outlaw the Democrats on issues economically and in terms of health care as well. And what do you think that will look like in the months to come? They're in a real duel for a street cred, aren't they? Right? Forgive me, I find it difficult to take either of them seriously. I don't have a great answer for you, Elizabeth, because I think they're just like kangaroos. They're all over the place, whatever needs to be said. I'm sure most of us have seen this egregious advertisement Biden campaign issued on China. Yikes, you know? Who's gonna out-synophobe the other, right? Right. But let us stay with substance, all right? Whatever Trump may say to out-left, as you say, I haven't heard that from you before. Whatever he may say, I caution, don't take it too seriously, it's an election year, right? Ditto, Biden. Yeah, perfect, thank you for that. Tony, you are in Australia, is he right to say that they're just kangarooing each other as he suggests enough? Seriously, there have been 5,734 soldiers infected in the U.S. military, sailors and soldiers, 25 deaths. You also wrote a piece for us about what impact this would have on the American Empire. Does that play a role? The fact, carrying on from what Garrett talked about on the aircraft carrier and other carriers, that these soldiers themselves are, for example, there was a lot of talk about attacking Shia militias in Iraq, Iranian-backed Shia militias in Iraq, and the brass pulled back, one of the reasons being they were afraid of the infections that could come to their soldiers. So what impact does the pandemic, except have directly on American military operations on the world and in the future, whether there will be a retraction of U.S., the military footprint of the U.S. around the world as a result of this pandemic? There are a number of strands to the potential answer to that. I suppose one for me would be the personal power dynamic between Trump and Pompeo, Pompeo representing that aggressive, mendacious CIA-influenced deep state, which basically has no rules except whatever it takes to win. And I don't see any change whatsoever in Pompeo's thinking or in the thinking of what I would call the deep state behind him. Now, Trump is a completely unguided missile. He could be influenced by foreign statesmen. He could be influenced by Macron. He could be influenced by Putin. He could go in any direction, really. We just don't know if he's an unguided missile. I think that the groundswell that the U.S. is overextended militarily and strategically, which comes through in people like Tulsi Gabbard. It comes through in people like Andrew Bakavich. It's real and it's going to have an impact. But against that, there's what I mentioned right at the beginning. There's this incredible inertia of the U.S. drive to power, the institutional weight of it, the difficulty of turning that aircraft carrier metaphorically speaking around. I just don't know. Garrett? Yeah, I'm just gonna say that with regard to the politics of U.S. empire and the present situation, what you have is a tension, obviously, between the desire of a lot of people in U.S. politics, including Pompeo in particular, who is a devotee of Zionism and loyal to the Netanyahu government to a great extent. On one hand, and people in the Pentagon are by no means interested in going to war for Israel against Iran. They don't wanna have anything to do with the idea of a war against Iran. This is a very firm position in which the Pentagon has been holding now for quite a few years, and it's become stronger, much stronger, not weaker over the last couple of years, as Iran has demonstrated much more convincingly that it has the wherewithal to cause a great deal of damage to the U.S. and its allies in case a war does break out. So I think that there is a very strong disposition on the part of the Pentagon against really taking a big risk of going to war with Iran. On one hand, and on the other hand, they have this very pronounced emphasis now on preparing for war with Russia and China. That's their meal ticket. That's what they get their money, that's what they plan to get their money for for the coming years. And at the same time, of course, practically speaking, there's no possibility that they can go to war with Russia or China. It's simply totally unrealistic, and they know it. So to me, there is a great deal of sort of pretending about the U.S. position militarily in the world at this point, perhaps more than ever before in its history. The reality is that we're not gonna be going to war with anybody of any consequence. Yeah, we'll pick on Venezuela, or we'll pick on somebody else in Latin America, but none of the big major players in the Middle East or in the Far East or Europe. Well, that's interesting, Garrett, because on Wednesday, Trump tweeted a warning to Iran that he would destroy any gunboat that comes near an American ship in the Gulf, which is what are the American ships doing in the Gulf anyway? But so you don't see a war at all with Iran, despite all the rhetoric, despite Pompeo chomping at the bit to do this, and before him bolting, or they use the cover of COVID to launch such a war, or against Venezuela, can we also see that? Garrett, please, go on. Yeah, I'm not going to issue a blanket statement that war with Iran is impossible, because we've already seen a couple of instances where Pompeo has managed to maneuver Trump into a position where with Iran being a little bit less cautious, we could have had a war breaking out. On the other hand, I am not convinced that Pompeo's position is really that stable or reliable in terms of remaining in Secretary of State position for the remainder, even of his term necessarily, and certainly not beyond that. I think there's a good chance he'll be gone by the beginning of next year. Pompeo's vulnerability, the most pleasant thing I've heard all evening, I have to say, but here's my question. That tweet about authorizing the Navy to destroy Iranian gunboats or whatever, was that an effort to prop up the oil price? Possibly, yeah, who knows? That it definitely could have that implication. It sure had that kind of reek, you know? Yeah, yeah, I don't take it very seriously. Otherwise, perhaps it could have had that intention, yes. So all of you, does that mean that the US military action in the midst of the pandemic is less likely or remains unlikely because of what Garrett said, that the US can't pick on any really major powers, maybe Venezuela. So in other words, the pandemic is not changing really the calculus of depending on terms of war. I would say it remains unlikely. I think we are going to see, as you said earlier, a massive China gate campaign, a massive disinformation campaign against China. I think it's going to turn very ugly. My pet subject, Russia, is virtually forgotten on the sidelines and I'm sure the Russian people will be very relieved by that. But it's going to be war by every means short of shooting and it's going to leave international institutions very vulnerable. And we're going to ask the question, can the international multilateral system emerge strengthened by this or weakened by this? And at the moment, I think the jury is completely out on this. I think what's interesting about the American military posture as we now have it is the Garrett's point, the hollowness of any notion that we will, you know, in fact, find ourselves at war with our chosen strategic adversaries. The entire point of the American military posture now seems to be purely self-perpetuation. And I wonder where this will lead us in time, right? In previous eras, we had our chosen adversaries and there was the realistic possibility of going to war, Iraq and so on and so forth. But as Garrett astutely said, it's out of the question we would have a war with China or Russia, we now have the Pacific fleets saying that it must be equipped to face the People's Liberation Army, what? Do we know how big the people's and where would that battlefield be, right? So it becomes somewhat nonsensical. And I watch in coming years where this will lead us when the nonsense of the American military posture becomes cleaner as one hopes it does. I really think that we have to talk not about geopolitics but about the domestic politics of the national security state in the US. I mean, that's really what this is all about. And that's what really interests me. And in my study of the national security state, what I've found is that you've hit the nail on the head. It's never been about anything else but the self-aggrandizement of the bureaucracies and the individual people who have been leading them, the senior figures in the CIA and the Pentagon and the services. They're the ones who've profited or who have gained power and prestige and all the rest of it, not the United States as a nation, obviously. And that's what this entire organization or set of organizations has really all been about since the beginning of the Cold War. And that really is the reality that has escaped the entire political process in the United States has simply never been discussed because we've always assumed that there was some there, there that's really been the substance of what the national security state has been about. And there really hasn't been ever. My point better said, yeah, thank you. The question of whether the United States could again become a sort of a moral instrument for the world. Interest me as an Australian, as an Australian who have a lot of American friends and connections in my family life, I would hate to see America shrink to a sort of a self-perpetuating military and no moral message for the world. I can't see though that the present political elite in America of either the Democrat Party or the Republican Party has the vision to see that. And I find that profoundly depressing that I can be talking to gentlemen like Gareth and Patrick and can see the wisdom and the breadth of vision there in you. Why doesn't that translate through the level of American politics? How is American politics going to break through to a higher moral level? Ambassador, what we have now, I urge you to consider is not the cause of anything, it is the consequence our moral hollowing out is not at all new, right? Let's pay attention here, it's generations back, right? It's Vietnam and pre-Vietnam, the disgrace of our political process and the manner in which Raytheon's quarterly results dictate geopolitical realities. This has been going on a very long time, right? It is, I think if something good can be said about our moment it's becoming crisis and Gareth used the phrase we may be reaching an inflection point and so we can look forward to some progress. But what we have now is not at all new, right? You know, I spent many years abroad, people used to tell me how terrific America was. I remember especially, oh, you Americans can change on a dime, right? And I used to say to myself, we're terrible at changing, we never change anything, right? But we had our change in 1776 that we don't want any more change after that, that's the history of the United States, right? Patrick is absolutely right about this. This is a key point that simply is not understood at all in American politics or in the commentariat, shall we say that the great weakness of this country is that for as long as anyone can look backward on our history, we have not had a movement that has been capable of changing the trajectory on which the country has been on. And that's why we are so bereft at this moment of having any hope of turning around this situation. I mean, this is a moment which is ready-made, tailor-made for the emergence of a new movement. However, whether it's a new party, whether it's an NGO, whether it's a set of social groups that coalesce or whatever, it's not happening. And I think this is deeply rooted in the nature of this society, and this is what is going to foil any of the solutions that we might offer at this point. I'm sorry to say, and I'm the last person really to give up on the idea that there must be a solution. This was my point earlier, Gareth. Remember the old expression, la luta continua, right? La luta doesn't continue on in America. We're just not on the page, we can't pull it together. It's a terrible recognition to arrive at. I think it's a shame that we're finishing up on such a downbeat note. I was hoping we'd all move forward, but I'm mindful of Patrick saying that I should be, avoid using the word should. Here I am, shoulding all over the place. You're not a journalist, your dictionary is different, Ambassador. So in Australia, which continues to be America's little satrap, obedient, subservient, nobleman over in the South Pacific, we hope you guys can get it together, we really do. Ambassador, I take it you're in agreement with Hugh White on these matters, huh? Very close to Hugh, except I don't believe Australia's solution is to become a military, a great military power. I think it would bankrupt us. Let's think for itself, huh? As it's bankrupting the US perhaps. We're not necessarily done, Tony, I wanted to, Patrick said that this is a generations long problem and position, and he's right, but I think it's getting worse. And I recently compared two similar incidents and the way it was reacted to in the US. And that was the revelation of the Milai massacre during the Vietnam War, and the revelation of the Baghdad massacre in the collateral murder video. In the Milai massacre story, you had actually had a whistleblower who wrote to Congress, Mr. Ridenauer, and Congress listened to him. He wasn't punished. And then they actually had an investigation. Yes, they tried to cover it up, and they did actually charge one out of many American soldiers to pardon that massacre, Lieutenant Cali, and he served only a few months, but nonetheless there was an investigation and a prosecution, where if you look at the collateral murder, the whistleblower was thrown in jail for 35 years and the journalist who published it, unlike Sy Hirsch who revealed the Milai massacre, we wanna pull surprise for that. The journalist who revealed the collateral murder is sitting in a jail in London right now. Haven't we gotten worse, America, the way 50 years later, and the way we deal with these? Dear colleagues, dear colleagues. You know, I would just say that I don't think there's really been any fundamental change. I think we're faced with the same dynamics in 2020 that we were in 1970s, 1969, 1970. In fact, just to add to what you said, Joe, we need to understand that the Milai massacre was not just Lieutenant Cali and a few other lower level soldiers. This was the result of high level policy that had been adopted by General Westmoreland. Westmoreland was the war criminal who should have been accused. And yet he was cleared by a process that, you know, was really a cover up all the way to the top of the US military. And so that's the reality. It's the politics of cover up that still exists and which always existed in the US military, abetted by politicians and by journalists, I'm sorry to say, who failed to uncover the story then as well as more recently. Yeah, but I argue it's worse because you just, you decided Westmoreland. Who was the general or the higher commanders who ordered those helicopter pilots to fire on those innocent civilians in Baghdad? Do we know? That's a good point. We don't. You're right. We don't. Joe, you mentioned without mentioning them by name, the French and the one who broke my lie. Well, I would mention there, Daniel Ellsberg. There's another name, of course, and that's Edward Snowden who hasn't come up in this discussion. But he's important, I think, because I read his autobiography with great admiration. He could see the power of the American national security state. He could see it was out of control. He was brought up within it. And he was very much a foot soldier of it. And yet somehow he found the wherewithal and the courage to do what he did. And he finished up successfully getting political asylum in Moscow where you'll probably remain for a very long time. I think he's important because if you see him, you see where the rebellion is coming from in Macron, for example. You can see where the rebellion is coming from in that wonderful lady, the chancellor of Germany, Angela Merkel. The Anglo-sphere and Britain and Australia and I suspect Canada will go on being America's last loyal puppets when I hope Europe, Europe will have started moving in a different direction. And that in itself, and this is all being very hopeful, that in itself will inspire the liberal younger cohorts in the United States. People like Tulsi Gabbard and AOC to really get up there in politics. And to add to your point about Snowden, I'd just like to add that one of the reasons, one of the biggest reasons that he was able to get asylum in Russia was thanks to the efforts of Julian Assange and Sarah Harrison. And essentially thanks to documents that were buoyed, I believe, by Stephanie and Maritzi, we know that as a result of Assange's help averaged towards Snowden, talks to basically stop, his prosecution were stopped in the tracks. So I just wanted to add that point, but yes, Snowden, Assange, Manning, all really luminary figures of our current era, for sure. Ambassador, as a diplomat, how realistic is it of us to expect the Europeans to turn this corner and find a voice of their own as Macron is encouraging? Many Germans are impatient. The German business community, for example. But, you know, we spent many years being disappointed on this point. Now is the moment. Now is the moment. And it's never the moment, right? That's been what's been... You're a good one to answer this question. What's the thought? I can just set up the possibilities. So I can't answer the question. There's been one good development, surprisingly, and it's Brexit. Britain has acted as a dead weight for decades. And now that's hopefully come to an end with Britain out of Europe and firmly in the Five Eyes Intelligence Strategic Network. There's a bit more room to move, I would hope, for countries like France and Germany and Spain and Italy to be a little bit more bold in their foreign policy. Now, the Eastern fringe, of course, is very unstable. Nobody knows what Hungary's going to do. Nobody knows what Poland's going to do. Nobody even knows what Sweden's going to do. Maybe the Baltics will stay out of this more adventurous Europe. But there are a lot of interesting possibilities in Europe now. Could I just ask another follow-up question, Mr. Ambassador? What about NATO? What is the future of NATO? Is it teetering towards something very different? Could it fall apart? Or is it one of the ways in which the United States can still maintain control? Look, I think NATO is very close to redundancy. It's not achieving anything very much. And the Russians can put a gas pipeline down the middle of the Baltic to northern Germany. And NATO can do absolutely nothing about it. When the NATO people parade their tanks up and down the Russian border in countries like Estonia and Latvia and Lithuania, and they see the Russians are not scared, they see they're having absolutely no impact on Russian foreign policy, rather than contrary. Yeah, I think NATO is becoming a bit of a redundancy. Well, it has been a redundancy for quite a while, but my question is, is it possible that it could really fall apart? I mean, could we see the Europeans essentially decide to be independent militarily of the United States? I think governments are reluctant to tear up institutions. I think it's more likely just to hang on there and become forgotten about. I mean, we had a thing in the Southeast Asia called CETO. Does anybody remember what CETO is now? CETO was never formally abandoned. It just stopped being talked about. Of course, NATO, after the Cold War ended, began out of theater operations. I think it goes against their charter and first of all in Kosovo and then Afghanistan. So to see a really independent Western Europe, independent from both Russia and the United States would require, I think, as Garrett said, a NATO to become CETO. And also to reestablish social democracy in Western Europe. And it's quite interesting, your take on Brexit, Tony, that the removal of Britain, it actually has a positive impact on perhaps on Western Europe without having a very neoliberal Britain way it down. Could this interstate interventionism that Macron is talking about against all the dogmas, he said? And he's thinking the unthinkable. But this crisis has made him think that they have to return to a social democratic model. My question is, on the military side, yes, abandoning US out of theater operations in the future, like Afghanistan or Kosovo, and whether they can revive a real social democratic system, refund their national health services, as we saw Italy has been eroded, hasn't just been the NHS and Britain. The Italian health system, the French health system has been under enormous privatization pressures as well. So can we see a model for the whole world, an truly independent Western Europe militarily and also in its social system? I think that's one way we can assign some optimism to Gareth's earlier point about what might come out of this. This being a big moment, it is a big moment. And I think what you just suggested is one way we can reasonably say yes, maybe that's one way to look for a move forward. That's my thought. I would say that maybe we might be in a 1815 moment here that if we can, after the horrors of the Napoleonic Wars, the exhaustion of Europe, we might see a concert of Europe coming together. We might see some rules of behavior among essentially quite conservative states. That was interesting, wasn't it? They were all conservative states. They all held back social liberalism for many decades, but they did keep the peace for about 40 or 50 years until the Crimean War. And clearly Russia is gonna be a part of that and clearly France and Germany are gonna be major parts of that. I can see good prospects for continental Europe, finding new protocols, finding new rules of the game, going back to the old diplomatic courtesies. I mean, this has been so horrible a period when you abuse the leaders of the states you're opposed to, when you plush to their faces as caricatures all over the cover of the economists with guided missiles in their eyes. We have become so habituated to demonizing our adversaries of the day, we really need to return to international courtesies. And I think that's coming. Brother, somebody has something positive to look forward to here. After all the things we've had to say. Indeed, as Tony wanted to end the program on an optimistic note, I think we will end it right now. So I wanted to thank Patrick Lawrence in Massachusetts for joining, sorry, Connecticut. Yeah, near the Massachusetts border, sorry about that, Tony Kevin in Canberra and Gareth Porter in Northern Virginia, Arlington for joining us to discuss, just scratch the surface of the geopolitical ramifications of this pandemic. And since I don't see this pandemic ending anytime soon, maybe we can reconvene this panel in a couple of months and see where we're at. So thank you all again. And thank you to our audience and to Elizabeth for joining us on CN Live. Get out your notebook, Mark.