 I'll just give you a second because I can see now the act in these coming up online. Okay, let's give you the start, shall we? Perfect. Welcome everyone and greetings from London. Today I am delighted to host this Center for Grand Strategy webinar on what is perhaps first becoming one of the most topical questions in international security. Today we're going to debate a fundamental element of contention that exists in world politics. The matter related to the international order, does it exist? Is it the Kaimira or is the order that is going to talk today to us an imagined lost world as it were? I am particularly delighted because today this webinar gives me an opportunity to welcome back a long time friends with his latest publication Professor Patrick Porter and who needs no introduction and certainly it's way too much of a gentleman to go for a sales speech so I will do it. His latest book is now out and it takes the title from the webinar that we're having today and it is very easy, it's already on sales in the UK and in June in the US and I'm joined to give Patrick a little bit of a grilling I hope by Jennifer Lind another good old friend for studies from the Dartmouth College. Thank you very much Jennifer for joining us today and for all those who are coming online and joining us for this conversation let me just set up the ground rules and as you can see at the bottom of your screens we've got a Q&A space where you can type the questions that you wanted to address to the speaker and the commentator or you can also use the chat that is on the right side of your zoom screen. I will try depending on time to set them individually but if time comes to a bit of a push we'll try to group the questions together. The speakers have agreed to have a 20-20 minutes for Patrick to introduce the main themes of the book. Jennifer will then give us a bit of a response and reaction to the book and from there we'll open the floor and take more question. So without any further ado Patrick the floor is yours. Thank you very much and welcome. Well thank you so much Alessia, thank you Jenny, thank you Andrew, thank you Jessica, thank you to King's College London, thank you very much everyone for being here from around the world. I think the one thing that unites us all is this is an awful time and so why don't we start with a little holiday in our minds and our hearts. I want to take you to Renaissance Florence because it seems to me that the things we're debating today are really not new debates. They are old debates in new clothes. The question of whether of what the response should be to Donald Trump and to this new world we're going into and the question of whether we can have a so-called liberal international order sounds a lot like an argument that was raging in and around Italy in the 16th century, started very much by one of my favourite people Nicolo Macchiavelli and you'll recall that Macchiavelli very controversially said that in the world we actually live in, not the world we dread daydream about. To exercise power successfully you can't be a good Christian, right? You can't be a good person and exercise power and sustain power because people generally are not good and even the people that are good are insecure and he didn't mean that therefore you abandoned all morality but he did say that in order to wield power wisely you had to operate by a different morality, a reason of state. This was hugely enraging to another faction what we might call the Christian universalists who believed that actually you had to be a good Christian to rule well and in fact what they should do was reunite the world around a kind of Christian empire and so this question in a way is coming back up again today and that is can the United States rule as a benevolent hegemon as it supposedly once did? Can a hegemonic power domesticate the world to its values? And this there's an echo of this because the United States after all was founded as a republic to stand for something a little different with a concern for virtue and the security of its liberty and its free way of life but that now seems to be under threat and the question is what what should America try to be in a world of constraint in a world of plague and war and debt? Some people say that what it should do is to restore something to restore a lost thing a thing that was around allegedly until recently and that is a liberal rules based international order super intended by a great power that was not for the first time an empire but what we might call a hegemon and that that power should lead the democracies of the world in standing up to this terrible alternative which is what they call authoritarianism Russia China Putin's the North Korea Iran etc but I don't think we should do that and I want to start where Machiavelli started and what he made a very simple observation that quote many writers have dreamed up republics and kingdoms that there are no resemblance to experience and America it seems to me is in its own Machiavellian moment where it needs to think about the present and the future better by reimagining the past that in order to make smarter choices in order to him to understand its true choices better it needs a more blunt and honest confrontation with its very mixed history in writing this book I'm sort of trying to hold two thoughts together which are hard to hold together right that on the one hand the American dominated world the world since 1945 was clearly better than what came before it might be better than what's coming but the act of ordering the world of world order is intrinsically illiberal it is rough work it is coercive it is hypocritical sometimes it can be done prudently sometimes it can be done less prudently why does this matter because it seems to me that this question is coming up in 2020 and it's coming up quicker than we might have thought Joe Biden who is the presumptive Democrat nominee has said along with a whole lot of other smart people what we might call the foreign policy establishment that the point is to restore something that's been lost he said in his own words America is coming back back like we used to be ethical straight telling the truth supporting our allies all those good things in behind closed doors he said to Wall Street donors that under a Biden presidency there'll be nothing fundamentally new it'll be going back to something now we used to people in politics offering to take back control or make America great again but it seems to me that there's also a liberal version of this nostalgia if you like almost a lost Camelot and we hear versions of this at the big security summits at Munich and an Aspen and a Davos I think this is dangerous I think it disconnects the present from the past it in a way it's it's a way of complaining about what has happened while letting the past off the hook that the nightmare of of dangerous demagogues of dictators of economic protectionism is a departure from what we had before not a consequence of what we had before and then you blame the voters or blame wicked populists or blame even people becoming spoils as Madeleine Albright has done but that seems to me to be evasive to avoid the underlying problem that a set of arrangements about economics about the military power about foreign policy is fundamentally implicated causally in what's gone wrong so this nostalgia is not just a historical and curious it's actually pernicious because it works as a kind of theology and gives us a bad guide to what's coming I'll just give a quick idea of what the idea is and then I'll say what I think's wrong with it so the idea itself is that if we think of orders as hierarchies created by the strong whether they're Byzantine or Chinese or Roman or British the idea that the American order created in the wake of World War two was different it was a liberal order that is organized around the principle of liberalism the promise of emancipation from tyranny the promise of openness and freedom and rules and regularity that it was based on consent the allies had voice opportunities it was constrained and bound by law now those who are in favor of this vision don't think it was perfect and they agree that some and a lot of things went wrong but they don't particularly want to talk about those things that went wrong other than anomalies and they it's a particular group of people who straddle both the Academy and government people who have been in and out of government and the Academy so John I can bury Joseph Nye, Anne-Marie Slaughter, Samantha Power, Ivo Dalder, Gideon Rose, Mike Mazur they tend to talk about the world as a choice between leadership internationalism and isolation so the choice is the pursuit of primacy on this very moral basis because their intentions are very good or a return to the 1930s and isolationism and chaos and genocide so it's pretty dramatic stuff and in fact this vision draws coherence from what it is not from this sort of the dark opposite which is a world of aggression and imperialism and spheres of influence and empire in fact and it's interesting that this critique that they're making in fact that was was dressed rehearsed just over a decade ago in the long forgotten period of the Bush administration and the war on terror right where people who now talk about how there used to be 70 years of the rules-based liberal international order in fact after 50 years we're talking about how there been 50 years of it but it was being violated by George W. Bush so like a kind of medieval religious cult they're updating the date of the end of the world all the time but this is not just an American thing right it's also a nostalgia that's played back by anxious allies like the two countries where I have citizenship Britain and the United States in Britain in the National Security Strategy of 2015 it referred to the rules-based liberal international order 30 times in the Australian Defence White Paper 38 times almost like a kind of incantation and there's this anxiety there that they have a special relationship with a great and powerful friend who will come and rescue them I don't think I have to tell this audience how dangerous that assumption can be so the antithesis to liberal order is what we might call imperial order in fact John Ikenberry put it very clearly he said the contradiction in the Bush foreign policy is that it offered the world a system in which America rules the world but does not abide by rules this is in effect empire and actually I agree with him so it was but that also however is a good description I think of US foreign policies it's done in 45 so there's this attempt to exceptionalize things which actually are much more continuous through history now this is not primarily a complaint about the United States as an actor in the international system right it's an observation about the tragic nature of the international system itself and the bad choices that it throws up in other words we can't have liberal order easily if the world itself is an illiberal place so it begs a lot of questions first of all what do we do about the long record of illiberal behavior right whether it's coups or election meddling or alliance coercion or agricultural tariffs right so if you want to try and ask an Australian farmer or an African farmer about the era of free trade that Trump is dismantling see if that passes the laugh test there's also the whole region of Asia which is often talked about now as part of the rules-based liberal international order but it evolved that way as a lot of protection estates under martial law there's the sheer violence of ordering right what Paul Chamberlain calls the bloodlands of the Cold War from Indonesia the Indonesian anti-communist massacre to Vietnam to Korea etc what about the almost routine recourse to economic coercion what we call sanctions and what are the boundaries of this thing right was the order global was it confined to the Western Hemisphere or Australasia where does the Middle East fit and if the Middle East is not part of it then why do commentators in the Washington Post and the York Times insist that there must be military action brought to bear in the Middle East to protect the liberal rules based on so the boundaries seem to shift but this is also a question for countries like Britain so some in Britain say the Britain's role is to enforce a rules based order well how come who says who gets to decide that they are the enforcer what if enforcing order involves breaking rules for instance bombing unilaterally bombing Syria to punish the use of chemical weapons which may uphold one rule one taboo but also violates a rule a taboo about only waging war with UN Security Council resolutions if Britain is to obey the law obey the rules then when's it giving back Diego Garcia isn't it also a problem that in order to win some of its wars Britain has forged alliances with with dictators who are rule breakers for example General Pinochet of Chile who helped Britain win in the fault very close run Falklands war would he have done so had he known that Britain will be dragging up him up before the Hague in the International Criminal Court decades later so how do we get around these very necessary compromises that happen more importantly if there was a liberal order and if it was excellent how do we explain its demise how do we explain the change that seems to have happened here if it's about Trump and Trumpism then what do the Panama papers tell us what do the Afghanistan papers tell us this prehistory it would seem has a lot of darkness in it and is there not a danger in the very notion of an indispensable wise superpower that sees further and orders the world is there not a danger in saying that anything that's anomalous is a departure from its essential goodness that it couldn't that help actually produce further failures so I think in the abstract there are three principal problems which I've sort of got at one of which is that ordering and leading involves coercion it involves demanding that others follow some of that sometimes they want to but sometimes they don't and we can call that euphemistic things like primacy or leadership but it involves the smack of government and things like coercion all the way from sewers to economic warfare to routine drone strikes in fact if anything a lot of the history that we've lived through part of it is explained by resistance not just enforcement one of the reasons we haven't had a major war since 1945 I would argue is that there's been something has happened that Washington didn't want to happen which is nuclear proliferation right secondly there's this problem of rules of regularity that on the one hand Washington helps design institutions and rules that it sincerely wants other states mostly to follow but on the other hand it reserves the rights to step outside those rules to exempt itself to exercise a privilege not because it's bad but because it wants to remain the hegemon right and to remain the hegemon to remain the leading you route around or reinvent or stretch rules or just simply violate them and don't talk much about it it's rather ironic that when Barack Obama made his final phone call with Angela Merkel talking about the importance of the rules based order the world that was the phone that the CIA that that was the phone sorry that the US intelligence had actually hacked much to Germany's displeasure that this this is a problem because it's often not even talked about by advocates of rules based order so for example Richard Huss a grandee of the US foreign policy establishment chair of the council on foreign relations formed presidential advisor on Monday can tweet that the world should treat Russia as a rogue state for violating Westphalia norms of sovereignty in Crimea and Ukraine and on Tuesday say that America should unilaterally support a coup in Venezuela right it's not you don't have to have a PhD in international relations to see the problem here and thirdly there's a problem of security dilemma and that is that even if we did have a great power that wanted to be a benevolent ruler of a liberal rules based international order even if we it sincerely wanted to do that and to abide by it to adversaries and rivals with long histories of disaster and predation like Iran like Russia like China like North Korea it looks too much like the accumulation of dangerous capabilities right it looks to them like one power acquiring for itself an overwhelming arsenal of weapons and then it asks them to take that on trust and even if they do mean it even if you do have this pure intention what if you change your intentions tomorrow or 10 years down the line where does it leave your rivals it leaves them endangered so in the in this in the world that actually exists there's actually an interesting paradox here historically that some of america's greatest diplomatic achievements i would argue involved a very conscious accommodation of illiberal forces right so rebuilding germany in japan into proud social democracies after world war two which involved co-opting and collaborating with fascists right preventing emperor hirajito being put on trial even assisting and protecting from punishment not former nazi officials etc the opening to china in 1972 which helped realign the whole balance of the cold war and make the whole asia a more peaceful place but that involved keeping quiet about the genocide in bangladesh in order to have a third party intermediary in pakistan so for every shanghai communique there is a blood telegram the date and accords which ended the war in the Balkans in locks in and freezes ethnic divisions paradoxically at the same time some of the biggest disasters i would argue have happened when the u.s has tried to transform regions in its own image with liberal means the shock therapy in russia with economic overnight transformation along free market lines it helps to produce this very predatory oligarchy that we're dealing with now in mosca the war in iraq which is i would argue intended to transform a whole region in america's image in order to make america more secure the prizing open of poor countries along the lines of the washington consensus to promote free trade so the very moments when washington has become most entranced with an ideology of a crusader state as malta mcdougal calls it is when disaster most beckons um there's a lot of other things to say and and people are welcome to read those things but i wanted to actually bring in something uh to flatter and praise my interlocutor here jennifer lind who wrote i i think a an article which hasn't been talked about enough in this edition of foreign affairs um about how the u.s jennifer and darrell press how the u.s can pragmatically adjust to a world of constraints and one of the things they talk about is the need to actually need to actually uh recognize that you can't have it all you can't go up against every authoritarian regime there are greater constraints than before on america's wealth and power and influence and therefore it should have tried to accommodate these realities and one of the things they recommend which i really agree with is that the u.s should at least try to have some kind of rapprochement some entente with russia this reciprocal for instance western non expansion for russian non interference at least trying out the possibilities of a different kind of coexistence with one of its competitors and what i try and argue in the book is that in order to deal with and contain intelligently arising china the u.s should do what some advocates of liberal order go against which is actually disaggregate enemies and don't treat the world as an ideal ideologized conflict of democracy and dictatorship but in order to even debate those kinds of hard choices those realistic choices we have to move beyond the kind of potted histories and bedtime stories that these these panegyrics these songs of praise leave us with to think about the kinds of choices that have to be made and moving beyond if you like talking about the world in a series of manifestos uh because uh if the rest of us are to have restored one of the original visions of the united state which is a a great republic that's an example to the world then it has to think very clearly and very soberly as that article does about the actual choices in front of it rather than a kind of dream palace uh in other words we have to move beyond talking about history at high altitude because as someone once said the problem with high altitude from that vantage point is that everyone looks like ants uh so on that on that rather morbid note i'll shut up thank you very much and i look forward to the exchange wonderful Patrick thank you very much i think if i were to summarize what you you suggested so far in the book you think is if we really want to keep an international liberal order we need to accommodate with illiberal forces which sounds almost like the ultimate contradiction and the three points you were making the question of ordering uh there comes with coercion it's something that is imposing force on others um that rules if you want to have rules as part of this orderly sort of action you cannot set some sort of ability to step outside of them for yourself because you are the hegemon because that raises all sorts of questions which connects to the third point you were making the one about the security the security dilemma and in particular the accumulation of capabilities that are meant to ensure that the system works in a way it raises fears in the most sort of places whereby the very accumulation is supposed to prevent fears to come about and so these are very powerful factors if you want the powerful tensions that exist in international relations and then definitely something that i personally enjoyed very much and in reading the book because at the very least i remember as one of my mentors once said any good book should do first and foremost one thing and once you put it down your mind is more open up towards the new questions that you never imagined you'd have because that's the way how we move forward thinking and questioning the world that we take for granted Jennifer what do you think of it so first of all i want to thank you for inviting me to join this great conversation i want to thank patrick for for bringing me in on this amazing project of his and again for writing this book this is this is a real contribution as i'm going to testify and i really think that it's a tremendous book i i highly recommend if people haven't for some reason read it yet i guess on my side of the ocean it's not available yet so to to the americans joining us get your name on that list because it is it is well worth the read so again thank you so much um and i'm i just have a couple points to make and i really look forward to our conversation today i think what what patrick's done here is is a couple of things so first to to let us know that an international order that has quite recently actually stylized itself as liberal has actually been quite illiberal in many ways it's been illiberal in how the order was created requiring a lot in the way of the use of force the use of coercion internationally a lot of illiberalism domestically on the part of these dictators and some would say even within democracies so that all seems to be if you're creating this order it all seems to be contra the order's stated values and and strikes us as this kind of end justifies the the means sort of pernicious logic and then he's also saying it's illiberal in the the maintenance of that order and indeed in the substance of the order in many ways there's not as much free trade as we like to think of it he talks about a return to mercantilism in recent years there's again a lot of coercion to and this great quote that he found by brzezinski to keep the tributaries pliant and to subdue the barbarians right i mean this is quite the language to be using in this like glowy international order that that we talk about today so um so again the the the order is not as liberal as we've been thinking and then secondly pat has has pointed out that the advocates of this order have have created these very self-flattering narratives about it and this kind of mythology about it i study narratives so i'm very interested in this aspect every entity needs a narrative it be a person or a firm or a a country or indeed in this case we're talking about an order and it's fascinating to to see he's he's kind of just below the surface of this the scholars of narratives would would love to to work with us to talk about how the narrative was invented and reinvented over time and and the one he talks about is that uh you know it's it's it's a very self-flattering narrative about the motivations of the order and and also it white washes over the failures of the order in in pretty significant ways and to the extent that the failures are discussed the narrative seems to blame those failures on external forces so it's never something related to the the nature of the order that went wrong it was we didn't try hard enough or uh you know the the we we didn't believe enough or we didn't go as far as we needed to and so on so the again the iraq war is not seen as the logical product of the strategy of liberal hegemony but rather it's seen as oh well there was that weird iraq war thing that happened right and what a blip that was uh and then the u.s financial crisis and economic problems aren't blamed on that iraq war partly in the massive defense spending but it's it's it's mythologized that defense spending is being sustainable if you focus only on a small subset of its costs and then i think patrick does a great job pointing out the the rise of trump is not blamed on that iraq war on that financial crisis but but rather on oh it's it's racism we're all racist now and you know i'm sure there is a lot of racism but but again there was a lot of racism before so again the the fact that there might be something to this uh trump platform simply that a bunch of deplorable people like it right um that that is not interrogated enough by either the proponents of the order or or i would say even more broadly so the the order has profound illiberal means and in many ways some illiberal ends and we've told ourselves a very happy story about this uh this is a really big contribution that that patrick has made here uh it's an important counter voice to that narrative to that you know um mythology that that gauzy sunshine and rainbows mythology that that we invented and uh as an academic i think our first job is to to probe to push just to ask ourselves why do we think we know this and when our friends say things that that we think are dubious it's the best thing we could possibly do for them and for the debate to say hey wait a minute that sounds strange and what about x so so that's our job is academics and so so i love it when i actually see uh academics engaged in and there's my cat and daughter uh i love it when i actually see academics engaged in the the kind of policy relevant uh pugnacious kind of work that we're supposed to be doing rather than just sort of you know publishing yet another paper on you know 16 different lemmas associated with something so um so again the what i think is a big contribution here so i'll first say what i think pat sees his contributions as and i want to talk about that and then i want to just say a couple added contributions that i see um patrick's identified one of the big implications which is uh linking the rise of trump to this liberal order rather than seeing him as an aberration again saying what has been the u.s political economic policy and security policy that might have given rise to this um and again i think he makes a great point about the fact that you know oh you know oh it was just maybe it was hillary clinton's bad campaigning in wisconsin and minnesota or you know it was oh it was this freakish thing of there are these 80 000 voters in this one state the argument i always make is trump should never have been nominated by a major party that is the thing we have to explain how is it let alone the republican party where he seems to have so little in common with the republican party so so that's what we would need to explain not whether or not he won in that weird electoral landscape we have in american politics but the fact that he was even nominated is something we have to answer or as a as a republic so um so again one of these big contributions is linking the order and its policies and its failings to trumpism to the rise of trump and then i think patrick identified at the beginning of his remarks today the other key contribution uh that he speaks of in his book which is america at this moment is is thinking about what should our future be in this new world that we're in in this multi-polar world of greater constraints um i always laugh when i'm trying to figure out how to structure like a foreign affairs type essay because in this moment in 2020 i want to say something like america's at a crossroads and all the all the editors say you can never say anything like that it's such a cliche but we are actually maybe maybe for the first time since 1945 at a crossroads and maybe it was so cliche before but again i think there's some deeper link here to patrick's arguments but we really are at a crossroads and so uh so patrick is helping us as we're navigating this he's saying okay we need to think about where we've been before we can think about where we're going um so in the book patrick presents a pretty compelling uh litany of of criticisms about both the uh the illiberal motivations the illiberal means and then also the the substance so both how why we wanted to create this order how we did it and then also the actual substance of the order not being as as liberal and sunshine and rainbows as you know we frequently say in this narrative um and so the social scientist in me was thinking gosh i've i've read so many articles by really smart people um that just chose a different set of stylized facts right so they so if you read the the essays by ikenberry or kori shawky or you know the people that patrick cite my colleagues here uh steve brooks and bill wolforth um they will come up with their own list of stylized facts that are all the achievements and that the profound achievements of the international order um again the the prosperity the the lack of great power war and okay maybe that's due to nuclear weapons but is really that all it boiled down to um you know the democratization of these these great nations south korea and japan yes they they went through this illiberal period yes they were some of the biggest illiberal traders and so on but traders t r a d e r s i want to make sure in case the access getting in the way traders um so again somebody could write well they have written and that's why patrick wrote this book the book saying the homage to all the achievements of the the order um and so then i thought well maybe what we need is we need like a a more systematic way of kind of accounting so going through and saying what were the the means what were the goals um and and kind of coding them one way or another to to try and really sort this out and say okay on balance how do we judge this um and i started to think though at at the end of the day um what if we did all that and and we said okay well i think on balance it was 64 liberal um how would we feel about that and i don't think it would help us a whole lot analytically and it wouldn't help us as patrick was saying the whole point is to to figure out how to move forward so i i don't actually think that would be so helpful so um so again the just the fact that we're having this debate i think is is really profound um so i guess when i see is in terms of the most logical next step the the place to go the the kind of patrick has given us this launching pad where do we launch ourselves to what what should we be thinking about next um i i think what i think is is it should be a wake-up call to the political left and we have seen the political left wake up uh we've seen you know the the rise of bernie we're feeling the burn uh we've seen the the rise of elizabeth warren and we have seen the left push back against the failings of the international order the liberal international order and i i think that what's notable is that we're finally seeing them wake up because basically what we've seen is since the end of the cold war uh the u.s has had a very strange and and arguably quite destructive political alliance in the realm of foreign policy between the political left and between the right and i think that is what has enabled this this kind of um policies of liberal hegemony that we've seen um and again it dovetails well with with patrick's argument that this this creation of this order is really a post 1989 creation that we didn't talk like this in the 50s um that we didn't act the way we're saying we acted in the 50s so i think that in itself is a really important analytic contribution and this argument that i'm making coincides with that which is during the cold war we had the left hammering away at the right saying uh here are all the excesses of your policies too much defense spending too many human rights for violations too much support for dictators um and then you had the right hammering away the excesses of the left right pointing out all the hypocrisy and their support for communist dictators like castro and and these sorts of things so we had the left shouting at the streets at the right talking about all the casualties in vietnam and then vice versa right the the right castigating the left for his failings so um what happened at the end of the cold war however is we kind of lost this where we saw this this alliance between the the kind of neoliberal liberals and the the neocons on the right and this was new and this was different and and this is what allowed the policies of the the kind of liberal hegemony kinds of policies the emergence of american primacy rather than a return to a more multipolar world and so on so um so i guess i would say that the results of that were some of the the borders biggest failings right so the failure of the left to push back against the the big giant projects of the neocons led to some of its biggest failings to nato expansion right to to bringing china into the order despite its domestic politics despite its human rights problems despite its mercantilism and then of course the iraq war right the the left being complicit in that war when it should have been asking a lot tougher questions than it did um now you might say well you're being really hard on the left here right what i mean this these are the neocons projects this is what they wanted to do but that's just what neocons do right that's what they always do they want to build a huge military and they want to use it to dominate right that's what they always want to do this is not what liberals generally sign on to and it was this um again we can talk about why this happened and maybe it was the kind of quick easy victory over iraq that led people to think that the use of force was was a useful instrument and could be easily wielded and so on maybe it was problems in the electoral system where the the the the left who was suffering weren't being heard right so we can talk about why this happened but i really think that this was a a key this this was a key fact that i really didn't think about until reading patrick's book and i think this is a really useful place to go next i think it's an essential place to go next if you're the democratic party in an election year because if you're going to keep blaming the rise of trump on things unrelated to your policies for the past 40 years i think that's a big problem you're not going to fare well um so it's important for at least for that reason and and certainly for this this kind of broader thinking about where we've been before we embark on a new a new way of managing this multipolar order um and then the last thing i'll close with is i had a lot of of thoughts reading this book about the nature of foreign policy debates and how one nurtures a healthy foreign policy debate in an academic and policy community um these debates can be quite closed off sometimes you can see areas where they they are welcoming other times you can see areas where maybe we need to figure out events and as academics we can be part of this we can figure out ways of bringing together people who aren't talking to one another enough and and patrick and his great international security article i think made another really good contribution in and that respect which is talking about just the very way that these conversations are held and the impact that they have on in this case u.s. grant strategy so uh so again reading this this book makes one think okay well why was the debate allowed to evolve in this way and i i've recently written a piece on the u.s. engagement strategy toward china and trying to evaluate how that debate was conducted and of course how what do we think of the outcomes such that we can say there is a an outcome definitively um and i one thing i really noticed in those debates is people framed it as well it's engagement or containment right so so oh well of course we have to engage china because it would be folly to contain china and what patrick was just saying there and a minute ago and then also what he says in his book is the way that these choices like the iraq war like nato expansion all these different choices that were made during the um during the various decision points where we were growing or maintaining this order is they were frequently framed in these kind of mannequin ways so is it engagement or isolationism and i think that's one thing we can really do as academics and and it's just well informed citizens is point out maybe those aren't the choices and i understand you're trying to drive the narrative by your use of framing those choices um but that doesn't mean we have to accept them so again i want to say patrick congratulations on an amazing achievement which is not just you wrote a book and it was good but this is this is a contribution to the foreign policy of the u.s of britain and and to the countries that we we care about and to the future discussions that we'll be having so thank you thank you very much jennifer thank you very much for your comment indeed i think we've got now the ground set for a lovely conversation let me just sort of try to summarize uh uh uh jennifer's comments i think three main line of thoughts um first the fact that we often talk about being a crossroads in international relations but perhaps right now we are and whether trump is a product or indeed a driver behind it the key thing is what do we do uh from from here and so there is a link between this type of comment and the timely nature of patrick's book as someone is putting himself out there saying like look this is the situation it's very complicated situation but if we really want to engage on how to move forward it we really must understand what we mean by short hands that we use every day because otherwise we're going to get lost in the process and i think that is a very important thing i think i lost count of the numbers of conferences and seminars whereby there was always the creep about to the rule-based order or the international order at which point you turn right it's like okay what did they mean by that right so so there is an element of that we'll use certain sort of expressions but we don't spend enough time to clarify where they're coming from what they actually mean and what we want them to mean the second point i think was very very important that you highlighted and in a way it's very refreshing right it's the question of the convergence in the political debate domestically in the united states between the left and the right in my respects we tend very often to talk about the importance of domestic political debates when it comes we know we do about china right how chinese foreign policy is in a way ancillary imprisonment of domestic sort of requirements in in the country and at the party but guess what we could make an argument and i think that the point you were making about partix book is that it kind of makes us think about the fact that perhaps that's also what has happened in the united states after the fall of the berlin war and the sort of this new hegemonic periods were by perhaps the atheraphy right in terms of the ideas that we're playing with is the result of a convergence in a political debate where by sort of the lack of or more stronger positions prevented articulated policies to be sort of the natural result of it and then the third point that you raised about how we debate how did it get here right how that debates to land us where we are today and in the way it's about the mechanics it's not just about the convergence but also the mechanics it's incredible isn't it in the 2020 with all the means of the communications all the journals peer reviewed and non-peer reviewed that we have hanging about the amount of information that we process we seem to be capable to actually make a dent on having a contracting conversation right as if like too many voices prevented us from playing music and being an orchestra that's becoming basically overlayers of noise all around so i think both in terms of the book and the commentary we've got a fantastic sort of setup and i have to say i'm happy to report that we already have quite a few questions so bear with me and because we've got quite a quite a few interesting point race i want to start with a question asked by Curnedia Adriania Basiu at John Sockins and who asked three sort of quite compact intense questions that unfolded from one of the points that Patrick was making in the beginning last Thursday Donald Trump's arms control negotiator said that the US is prepared to overspend the China and Russia into oblivion right so questions for Patrick and of course Jennifer please do jump in if you have any thoughts about this as well from a domestic factors perspective can the US afford to pursue a nuclear arms race and this is a point that you both sort of mentioned in in the comments the second related question is great power competition prompting the US to adopt a one war grand strategy and if that's the case where does that leave the United States allies for example what European grand strategy should be about within this great power competition so i think that's that's a couple of excellent questions to start off with i've got a few others so if i could ask you sort of to keep the answers shot and sharp so that we can sneak punchy side of the life thank you so much and thank you Jennifer as well there's some there's some really stimulating things that i have to go away and sleep on and think about and that it's it's been really very fruitful so the question of arms control and nuclear testing i think first of all i felt when i saw that there'd been this dalliance with the idea of actually detonating doing a nuclear test to to impress china and the abrogation of arms control treaties we'd entered the third term of the bush administration because there was in a less dramatic way the bush to administration had begun the ballistic missile treaty for instance there'd been a tilt towards a kind of loosening of restraint and unilateralism then as well i think one of the problems with being a hegemon uh is that it's very easy for predominance and competition to become the end and not the means that we forget the purpose of american foreign policy is the purpose of american foreign policy for america to be predominant as an end in itself or is that a means to something else and there's this becomes very dangerous because if you start to believe that the purpose is to be dominant as an end in itself then everything is expendable for that outcome uh resources are expendable secured security expendable the constitution becomes expendable because you create an imperial presidency that shouldn't be tied down by congressional oversight etc i think it's also very dangerous because uh quite aside from anything else i think there is a real long-term problem here of inadvertently driving russia and china together uh in other words one of the purposes of american grand strategy is supposed to be to keep eurasia divided so that there isn't a a grand opponent uniting that sort of continent menacing the united states well one problem here is that for all their differences mosco and beijing are seeing a lot to unite against i mean it's a slow motion process but i think it is underway so it could have that effect as well i think it also will become very expensive uh and of course we shouldn't forget the whole problem of of debt and indebtedness so i'll stop my grim reaper act there i mean mr jennifer would you like to add anything more on this particularly on the on this question on the uh the nuclear angle i think that's a really important point that patrick just made in terms of um the we need a grand strategy like first of all we need to know where we're going and and then the nuclear policy should follow from that right so so patrick was saying uh in a strategy if your strategy is to divide russia and china then this doesn't seem to make a whole lot of sense so so again it's it's we need to figure out well what what is the us strategy and and strategy doesn't seem to be the strong suit of this administration um which which seems to again it's it's more power being an end in itself it's a lot of signaling it's a lot of posturing and so on so but but in terms of what the strategy is like why would that say we should have another nuclear test or be buying more nuclear weapons and the question is is what kind of nuclear weapons right i mean so you don't just buy a bunch more stuff right i mean well maybe maybe you do but i mean shouldn't shouldn't there be a mission that these are linked to and that mission is linked to a strategy so um on that uh i would agree that if if and i've patrick pointed out i've i've said that our strategy should should be thinking about ways to divide russia and china that this would definitely not be helpful toward that and and with respect to the the question about the allies um if if the us is is is in fact pursuing a one more strategy um again we need to figure out what is actually the case are they or aren't they um one thing that i can tell you americans get kind of frustrated about or at least i do is we are simultaneously being told we're withdrawing while we are simultaneously still on the hook to defend everyone and that doesn't feel right right it's like if you're gonna withdraw then take the criticism and and take the effects of that but at least you're safer um or uh be all in and and and you get the deterrence value of that and whatever so so again we're in this weird world where the the punditry keeps saying we're both and that's kind of frustrating because uh if you're trying to promote american security it's like we'll figure out what's your theory of that it's either by being engaged or or not engaged in some places and and carry that out but in terms of this i i mean the the allies need to have real conversations amongst themselves about what do you think threatens you um there's there's huge divisions in europe over this over whether russia is indeed a threat and you you see that division pretty profoundly in east asia there's big divisions over the extent to which china is seen as a threat and this is really evolving very quickly um australia is only fairly recently thinking about china in in the increasingly threatening terms um the philippines used to be one of the countries that i would talk about as being more inclined toward balancing against china and that's completely under duterte seen a reversal so so again there's the the allies need to figure out who do we think are what are our security threats and how should we best meet those threats and and some countries are doing a better job of this rather than others some countries are sort of putting their head in the sand and saying well we'll just hope the americans sort this out and and again you can do that and i wouldn't if i were you uh read the pat porter book and and uh it makes you a little worried about the state of the debate here and so i think the allies really do need to have a much tougher inward-looking conversation uh and uh spoiler alert you're going to have to spend more than one percent of gdp on defense so um i'll leave it at that wonderful i have seen we we were having now built up quite a quite a quite a bit of questions and um so i'll try to sort of in some cases to group them because some of them are quite similar but i want to start with one that was put on early i don't know about the both of you but one of the greatest sort of rewards of our job is when you're sitting in class and the least unexpected question which is also one of the most pointed ones you'll ever get comes from one of your students and so i'm happy to report that there's a former student of patry who's actually asked quite a pointed question um okay so halfway he's halfway through his book your book already good um and um there is a contradiction narrowed contradiction with the um liberal order and he bought that however he's asking a very a good question should countries drop the rhetoric and pursue their interest negatively or act in line act in line with the international rules accepting the constraints as well as the actions of the rule breakers what is the alternative if this liberal order is not that liberal after all so that's a splendid question and my answer is that actually it's not so much what you outwardly say it's what you think you're doing and my worry is that there is a lack of clarity in this thought process in this nostalgia in this kind of mytho history but i think that one of the one of the difficulties of the international system being a tragic place is there is a necessary element of hypocrisy because it's very difficult like in normal life it's very difficult to actually be consistent i mean the person who is hypocritical about their lifestyle might be unbearable but not nearly as unbearable as the person who is utterly consistent in everything they do and i think that there are there are there is deception there is uh double standards i do think we need to have a tighter relationship between words and deeds for instance if britain is if britain and america are going to talk very hard about liberal rules and order in asia then they need to think very carefully about the status of citizens in diego garcia and in many of the disenfranchised populations the people who are on the receiving end in the 1950s of nuclear tests there's going to have to be some given take there for instance for instance i would say don't just give away diego garcia which i seem to be obsessed with but try and strike some kind of settlement whereby people get most of the justice and most of the territory back whilst also somehow retaining a base there but don't just say say a and and and act x because people are noticing and it's going to hurt it's going to hurt one's interests might also say actually this raises a second point um and i did really want to rush to agree with something jenny said really important this is as much a approach to allies as it is to the united states in thinking about the past there are some very hard choices to make america australian politicians ran around for a decade saying very nervously we don't have to choose between beijing and washington we don't have to choose well guess what you may actually end up having to choose because beijing and washington also had a major say in that proposition now you can choose uh to carry on uh taking the risk of very low historically low defense spending and hoping for the best you can choose to bandwagon with china you can choose to stick with the american alliance and spend more on defense each of those has trade-offs each of those has costs but the choice itself cannot be ducked and it's this what i'm trying to get out here is this kind of false consciousness that if we tell america enough that we've been their friend or mate to use the unconscious term for 70 years they'll behave like they always have well actually one of the one of the points of international history is that sometimes even the best allies just don't turn up i think that's that's a very important point you're making perhaps you know southeast asia is a very good case a good example of this right the idea don't make us make a choice well it might actually have to happen at some point whether you like it or not and we have a few other questions that actually are related to this story and particularly in terms of something that that Jennifer was raising earlier on on the matter of domestic politics do you both believe that unipolarity in the lack of of of a rival in the hegemonic sense is has made sort of american foreign policy more open to be influenced and informed by domestic variables rather than than structural constraints and if that's the case is covid 19 more likely to reduce or increase and enhance the situation or indeed it did not have any impact at all and and related to this and a similar question about US foreign policy and if the project sort of the liberal project isn't it's not possible to be pursued what is the alternative what does the reasonable US foreign policy look like where we can uphold our values but also not lend a massive support to dictators and the liberal rulers so two sort of questions focusing on this relationship between domestic and foreign policy but also values and foreign policy how do we relate to them Jennifer do you want to start giving a bit of a stab at this and then we get back in with with Patrick sure um so on the question of under unipolarity did we see domestic forces kind of in the driver's seat of US foreign policy um it's possible but but when i think about the the big change in polarity and the changes that we've been talking about today in in US foreign policy the changes that the Patrick talks about in his book where he talks about um we went from a international capital market where capital would move about the world but then over time this this became this huge much more open unfettered system than we had seen before um also the the growth of the human rights regime which used to be bounded by sovereignty norms right where where you would say okay well of course every government has the right to connect itself within its own borders in the way that it feels necessary and chooses according to its values and needs that used to be how we would would look at human rights but then after the end of the Cold War we said wait a minute well maybe we could even help people within these borders that in your help so we see this massive growth in ambition in terms of what the the the advocates of the liberal order the the order saw saw themselves as as as wanting to do wanting to achieve and and what happened there what what changed well it was polarity right it was it was the this is what john miersheimer talks about when he says uh if you if you have a regional hegemon with the freedom to roam right the it's in this menacing phrase that he uses uh we had freedom to roam and so we roamed and the big change that happened that allowed that was the structure of the international system and it might be also that where we roamed and how we roamed was was influenced by domestic considerations but um i see the main thing there is being structural and the main change is now as being uh as being structural but also the the reality of domestic politics is you just can't deny um the the people who have lost out from free trade um not being compensated as the the economists tell you on the first day of class when you take free trade 101 which is that there are losses from free trade and you have to compensate to the people who lose out so we ignored that and and and so there are these huge losses born by some people in the country but but huge gains enjoyed by others and so obviously that's having very important domestic political effects um the the other question and i i think we should poke into this more and i'll just kind of say a couple words is on if not the liberal international order what's the alternative and and i think that patrick says this very well where he says you know i think he wants a liberal international order i'm not i don't think he says i want to you know create this authoritarian system he just he just says we should be cognizant of uh as we're saying what our goals are we should be cognizant that what are the methods we're using to achieve those goals uh and are those in fact our goals when we look around us today do we say this is this is the kind of liberal that we meant so absolutely we could point to and he does this a little bit in the book and i would love to see the book inspire more people to think about these things like he he talks about you know a a chinese-led international order would be very different um it would be fascinating to think about would it be more bloody or less bloody and i'm not sure because again you have the crusading liberalism on the liberal order side and then you have the the chinese side which is non-intervention which of course they mean in very different ways than just never intervening but um so theirs would be i'm guessing internally quite repressive um but it's it's a fascinating thought experiment to think like would they get into the same number of adventures so it's hard to say but um then patrick also talked about the greater east asia co-prosperity sphere to to speak again of propaganda and how people name their orders and and so we have a feeling that that would have been a pretty brutal one and so there's an interesting thought experiment to comparing the the order of today to these previous orders or two would be orders in the future and i think that's a really interesting direction for the conversation to go very two very quick points to build on that first of all the question of what is the alternative i actually would counsel a much more minimal response about actually dialing down the grandiose demand for a single world order of anything let's begin with the common thing which is the desire not to have a major war right because i think that's a value as well peace as well is or the absence of major war is a value right it's not just an interest and there are things the u.s can do to promote that and end to adventures in regime change to return to arms control a degree of acceptance and tolerance of some things that it doesn't necessarily like there will be some spheres operating where there's some behavior that offends us all but within that i think the u.s can do an important thing which is instead of talking all the time about doing think about being being a republic that's a powerful example right because that's also a strong tradition within the u.s a strong strand within the u.s tradition thinking about being a beacon and doing something at home doing something at home about that about limited government about building a kind of better civic model that others can look to to emulate the purpose of american foreign policy i would argue but at least the best version of that is how can it produce this sustained experiment in republican government in a very hostile world and it's going to be a world of multiplicity it's going to be a world in which there isn't a single hegemon setting the terms anywhere and one of the problems is the u.s is in the habit of thinking about a monochrome one-dimensional international system dominated by somebody the discipline is going to have to be accepting multiplicity accepting those contradictions and therefore something that actually goes for stability and coexistence more than transformation in the hope that others can converge on their own terms in the long run but and then this brings to the final point is what do we think will happen now that the structural pressures are getting worse i'm actually more pessimistic i think there's something about hegemon's where once their mythology takes hold it's very difficult for them to abandon that narcissism this is not peculiar to america the ottoman empire that a number of a number of powers have died hard with their belief about themselves that they have somehow cracked the code and a special and singular and appointed by history or in madeline albright's words we see further we are clairvoyant i think it's very hard to let that go and we thought the global financial crisis and the disasters of the war on terror would actually be a a lesson in the limits of power it turns out they weren't i thank you i mean this this the conversation is sort of continuously bringing up new very important threads and as you were both discussing i think east Asia is an interesting case jennifer's point about the core prosperity sphere of the past as a failed orderly project as much as a potentially imagined chinese order of course one of the things that we should probably start reengaging with is the problem of geography and international politics as in like that how we conceptualize space and how space affects what we can and cannot do of course east asia having one large continental state predominantly and then doctored by surrounding states all divided by the oceans makes the question of overseas projection a choice that needs to be matched up by investment sustainability questions that of course in different types of systems and let's not forget that United States in 1945 does not have to make that important choice because it is through overwhelming sea power that has managed to win the war so at that point the sort of how do i get to have that worldwide global projection is not a question that people are asking people are asking the question should we keep it or should we get rid of it and i think that's that's that's again a new element to this story and the point you are making so important to re-emphasize that perhaps the question is not that there is no international order but there are international orders depending on the particular aspect of international politics we'll talk about as a maritime expert i would say there is a question of power and legitimacy that comes in the maritime order because there are legal frameworks that constrain superpowers and in fact force superpowers to acquire a degree of legitimacy in their actions for their role as a hegemon not to be entirely rejected so again very important points that you're striking there i have a few questions left here and i want to get sort of quite quickly to them i'll start with a couple of questions that are related to the points you were just making because they kind of present some interesting counterpoints one christopher is asking pat patrick would you modify your thesis if the u.s and to a certain extent the uk had been more cautious in using military power and indeed um had the any recognizable strategy for their engagements related to this somewhat starting slightly more perhaps on a pessimistic tone is there new ends to u.s overseas commitments and engendered from the 9 11 effects um is this mythology going to keep the united states prisoners of everlasting engagements in middle east north africa in southeast asia and lastly jennifer i think this point goes back to something that you mentioned earlier on and about um how you know where the where are we coming from and that the rule of history and understanding with narratives has they as they historically develop in a way is an important way to understand where we're going and there's a question here from william about the point that if one looks at all sort of british official documents fco and cabinet office documents are from the cold war the closest you get to a common shorthand that is similar to rule-based international order is um the free world right and it's used over and over again and it kind of like made sense to an extent do you think that um an international liberal order uh requires an opponent in order for remaining sort of coherent not just as because we have an opponent we can sort of identify ourselves you know position to it but because that opposition creates a tension that allows for debates to produce better policy um patrick can i go back to you first and then and then well well jennifer is just sort of uh uh uh coming together with her own thoughts on this yeah so in a word yes if had there been more restraint for the past three or four decades i probably would have written a different book but that's a very big if it's a bit like saying switzerland without mountains well yes it wouldn't be a different country but it's it's a it's a miracle world counterfactual we're talking about here i think um what i probably should stress is that as a sort of attempting to be a Machiavellian type realist i'm not advocating for a kind of international order without coercion without military force in fact i do make a case for a modified balancing against china hopefully one that avoids a major war but i do think there is there are other things at play there that are at stake and there is there does need to be at times quite serious coercion and actually betrayals and terrible things that you wouldn't do in your private life that's the whole essence of Machiavellian realism that there is a different and dual morality for instance i mean i don't don't advocate everything but church will sink in the vishi fleet when the the uh crews refuse to come out of their ships for fear that that fleet could be handed over to Nazi Germany for instance right in what in private life would be murder in public life part of a supreme national emergency the point about morality which someone else raised before is it's it's identifying the point of necessity versus the point of excess right because in Machiavelli's tradition excessive misbehavior which is unnecessary for reason of state is where is also is just as much of a wrong as passive uh naivety but on the question of frequency of military action they're actually if you read the new york times in 2002 there was a there was a there was an advertisement taken out by a number of mostly u.s scholars mostly realists saying we live in a world of resistance we live in a world of nationalism we live in a world where people tend not to like military occupations and if you occupy Iraq there will be bloody resistance i wish that had been heated that's sorry that's that's the end of my answer in terms of i just wanted to comment on this the rules-based international order rhetoric which keeps coming up again and again uh and and this question that was raised in terms of do we need an opponent and is is that the the kind of rhetorical device that sustains the order um so the first thing i i think i mean that's a very interesting thought if we're talking about how narratives evolve and and which narratives are successful um the the time of the early 1990s is a really fascinating time to think about in terms of the the u.s casting about for trying to figure out okay what are we doing and and if we have chosen to still remain very powerful and not draw down to the extent that we might have to to keep lots of guns and not do quite as much butter as we we could why right like what what are the dragons that we feel we need to slay so that the early 1990s is a really fascinating time um that was right around the same time that the china threat narratives began and and a lot of people talk about the um that is being well this is you know this is the bureaucracy casting about for a villain um this is this is racism and and of course you can you can talk about elements of of both of those things um but if you start looking at the growth of chinese power that's really when it started taking off and uh as a result again of a lot of the decisions made within the the international order to bring china into various institutions to normalize relations and so on so um today i i guess i would say we shouldn't think about like oh we're we're trying to cast about for opponents i mean we have an opponent um i don't like to say it in these kind of stark uh you know wrestling match terms but if we're talking about is there an alternative to the international order that we've seen over the past 40 or so years um we debated for a while if in fact china was going to offer an alternative that was a big debate in international relations scholarship it was a very lively debate and one side has definitively lost and that's that's one thing that we actually need to have an accounting of china is here and china has no intention of accepting the status quo of many aspects of the international order and talk about the need for an accounting this was a lively debate in ir and we need to revisit that fact and we need to take stock of of okay 30 years later what have we learned so china is presenting an alternative and for for a lot of people who talk about oh well china doesn't have any soft power and who's going to follow china i would say quite a few countries that have been quite aggrieved by this quote liberal order that that patrick has has been writing about so um so a we have an alternative this is not a rhetorical construct and and b there are quite a few countries in the world that are going to find it a very appealing alternative and so again the the question is probably going to shift to one of domestic politics this time in china which is china clearly already has the power to mount a challenge to us leadership at least in asia and actually we're seeing beyond also in terms of diplomatically politically and economically militarily we're not sure if they're so interested but absolutely in those other realms so absolutely the the international order as we have seen it for the past 40 or so years is facing a challenge i think another important point that comes out of patrick's work that actually dovetails really well with my my essay with bill woolforth in foreign affairs um i guess last spring um which is to point out this difference between the 1945 to 1989 and then the post 1989 and bill and i made the point of the alternative to the order we have today is to return to a previous more restrained version of what we see today and so um so that's also an alternative it's not only the chinese or the alternative or the you know the the rise of whoever is an alternative we have a different way that we comported ourselves during the cold war and i'm not saying go back to supporting dictators or certain dictators we're still supporting them obviously but um but but are there things are there insights that we can we can glean from the way the the level of ambitions that we adopted during the cold war as opposed to after wonderful i'm on this particular point of uh and alternatives there was another question asked about whether the decline of liberal international order um whether it ever existed or not but this at the very least the perception that is being more fragmented and that under sort of with the u.s leadership being under strain um how do you see uh as an possible alternative the rise of fragmentation of the international system into small regional systems that are interconnected but in terms of policy and security are much more self-contained and therefore a much more fragmented fragmented international relations society Patrick for you yes this is a question oh sorry um i think that's already underway uh but i also think the u.s will not go quietly into the night and accept that fragmentation so on the on the one hand there is this system-wide development should we say uh where the world in a sense is getting larger harder to conquer harder to govern harder for any one power to dominate in fact if anything we've got to get out of the habit of thinking about the world as a place fit for one power to to order at all right but on the other hand the u.s is going to keep the u.s in china will will continue to try and intrude and i agree with you know there is there is a danger that some that some in china's orbit will be tempted to bandwagon which i think is one reason for the u.s to stay in asia at least if not to dominate at least to provide some equilibrium and that's all that's much easier said than done uh but one of the problems i think and this is where we get back to the issue of how you remember the past is that and we've mentioned this already the u.s rise to power was extraordinary and unusual and precipitate and relatively low cost not low cost for those who died in world war two but relative to every other power that's risen it was a sudden relatively relatively inexpensive rise and which almost artificial disparity in power to the point if you look if you compare the relative gdp of the world of the u.s held in 1960 and now and yet the u.s continues to judge itself by that and by that atypical standard of power in fact no power on earth can sustain that level of expectation so in other words the u.s in a strange sort of way is cursed by its good fortune that it rose to power in a way that made it feel like this should be the natural state of affairs so i think that's yet another reason for scholars to do what they can to kind of probe and pick away like sort of woodpeckers now i am conscious of the time and i'm afraid that we'll probably we'll have to droid to an end very soon um there are a couple of questions out there on on on specific issues whether you touch them or not on the book and for the moment what i'll do i'll just suggest that you actually buy the book and and you see if they're in there and and instead choose just one last question because it's a cruiser to home and in a way it makes us also it connects it to the timely nature of the debate that you want us to join and really has to do with the current integrated review in the UK what are the key issues you think this review should seek to tackle and in light of the conclusions that you draw in your book i think uh what kind of power britain wants to be in the world the question of identity is with loom's large and it's almost obsessional over here but i think as much as what i'd say to australia which is what are the actual hard choices in front of us does britain want to be a leading power in no term which is going to which case it's going to have to spend some pounds which is going to have to start debating something which we're not debating which is tax right i mean these capabilities are not cheap and uh there's a lot of the fact is that thanks thanks partly to the order that we've received there is an enormous amount of hoarded untaxed wealth that i think needs to be taxed needs to needs to be mobilized by the state right so that's the kind of egalitarian part of the argument here that the order has been inegalitarian in its effects and as a result the tax receipts aren't there to produce the kind of capabilities to defend nato's eastern flank etc so we're going to have to talk about money and we're going to have to talk about tax a series of things we actually don't like debating we like to debate in a kind of low tax deregulated framework actually i think we need to go the opposite of that and i think also just in terms of uh even closer to home uh actually thinking harder about reindustrializing bringing back nuclear scientific base to the country again it's a matter of money but doing that without actually without falling prey to the temptation of beijing seizing coercive control over british infrastructure so all of these questions about capacity and diplomatic relationships will come together but it's going to have to be an exercise where it goes beyond just signaling to other powers that we have a security strategy review actually reviewing the really difficult choices i'm not i'm i'm willing to be persuaded that that's what we're going to do but i think it's i think it's very difficult patrick i think this is a wonderful note to end our conversation um on that jennifer would you like to add anything else so perhaps from the perspective of the united states looking outwardly what do you see in the world and in a way based on what patrick is telling us about the international order what do you think the challenges i had are for the united states especially now there was about 20 sort of a lecture electoral electoral season as it were well i think that as we discussed before this this is really a momentous time we're talking about the rise of a peer competitor as the ir wonks like to say it the rise of a superpower in another region in which the us has traditionally exercised a great deal of dominance and so this is a a sea change this is a big moment and so thinking about um that's why i think patrick's book is so it's such an amazing resource at this time is because we can think about the last time we were trying to deal with a peer competitor across the world what did we do what did we say we were doing how did we do it this is such a great moment to interrogate all that as we as we turn our our focus toward this this toward asia and toward china and and i think also this is a this is a vexing time for the us and its european allies i mean we've talked a little bit about the asian allies as well but just how do we deal with the fact that the biggest security concern to the united states is china and from what we're seeing and from what i can tell when i'm visiting europe and talking to the the wonderful foreign policy community folks like yourselves there china is not the biggest concern asia is not the biggest concern and so that is a troubling reality that we're seeing such a divergence in our perceptions and we could talk about is that divergence narrowing are we seeing greater convergence on that point and and how is that going to evolve as we go forward but i think that is a a profound change that that we're we're thinking of it doesn't mean the us is no longer interested in europe it doesn't mean that i mean obviously russia is is is quite uh troublesome these days too from washington's standpoint so it's not that we're disinterested in europe which is the the issue of uh if the us fundamental security challenge is in asia and if europe is not particularly interested in that challenge i think that is uh that is both does not bode well from for the the health of the the future transatlantic relationship and so this is something we should be thinking about how are we going to manage well thank you very much for both for what has been an absolutely delightful conversation um it this this is incredible um and above all it reminds me uh that indeed we started with a slightly somber note about we ended with a very positive note uh because we now know that no matter what the problems of the world are a good starting point is always an excellent book in your hands and so it happens that this one is just one click away on amazon uh which are a lot for me using thank you both very much for this conversation thank you all those who contributed with questions so to keep the debate are lively and animated um and of course for those who weren't um able to get an answer uh some of the answer you find in the book themselves and patrick is always uh open to have conversations about international politics that i can tell you for sure one of the greatest companions at all repined which this time won't have an opportunity to share but nonetheless i look forward to hosting you both again very soon in the meantime stay safe thank you very much everyone for joining us thank you so much thank you thank you jenny thank you alessio thank you thank you guys bye bye bye bye thank you so much