Daily Archives: May 17, 2022

Ouk Touch, the man who threw a shoe at Prime Minister Hun Sen in Washington, DC. fb

Prime Minister Hun Sen on May 17 questioned whether a man who threw a shoe at him while he was in the US was exercising freedom of expression or if it was an act of hostility.

Hun Sen was referring to an incident last week when a Cambodian-American later identified as Ouk Touch threw a shoe at him while he was greeting a crowd of supporters and taking selfies with them during his visit for the ASEAN-US Special Summit in Washington, DC.

Touchs shoe missed the premier but hit the phone of a supporter who was taking a picture. He was then chased off by those present before any police intervention could take place.

Speaking to the volunteer healthcare workers from the Samdech Techo Voluntary Youth Doctor Association (TYDA) on May 17, Hun Sen said he had told his supporters to remain tolerant because if he had not done so, they might have done something more drastic to Touch for his actions.

Please dont forget that it was the US who was responsible for my security there, he said. Does the US regard this as freedom of speech or an act of violence? That is my question for them. I am not preaching to them, but the US must clear this up for me. I hope that the US ambassador in Phnom Penh will send the entirety of my message to the US administration.

During an interview with Radio Free Asia, Touch confessed that he had tried to accomplish the act several times previously but failed, including during the ASEAN- South Korea summit in Busan in October of last year.

Hun Sen said that if the US regards throwing shoes at him as freedom of expression, then the world would be left without any semblance of law and order.

He said this was not a small issue, suggesting that the US think carefully on the matter before replying. He stressed that he was not calling for the US government to take legal action against Touch, but simply to explain their views to him.

We know the group in Phnom Penh who is backing [Touch] and they should be careful about who they throw shoes at. Thats not a threat. Its just my own legal and political analysis, he said, adding that those who support Touch seemed to regard his act as heroic.

He renewed his call for supporters to remain calm and exercise tolerance in the face of provocations, while adding that he hoped their anger was not so great that it could no longer be controlled and warning that civil society organisations should avoid willfully misinterpreting his comments on this issue.

He also instructed Minister of Foreign Affairs and International Cooperation Prak Sokhonn and the Cambodian ambassador to the US not to file any formal diplomatic complaint with the US government over the incident.

Chad Roedemeier, spokesman for the US embassy in Phnom Penh, avoided addressing the issue directly when asked for a response to Hun Sens remarks.

The US-ASEAN Special Summit commemorated 45 years of US-ASEAN relations and demonstrates the US enduring commitment to ASEAN centrality in delivering sustainable solutions to the regions most pressing challenges.

The United States and ASEAN have committed to establishing an ASEAN-US Comprehensive Strategic Partnership that is meaningful, substantive, and mutually beneficial at the 10th ASEAN-US Summit in November 2022, he said.

Yong Pov, a professor of political science at the Royal Academy of Cambodia, said that throwing a shoe at the prime minister was immature and immoral and that Touch should know better given that he lives in a highly developed country and apparently comes from a Cambodian cultural background.

He shows his bad intentions with his actions that really are an embarrassment to civilised people and an affront to traditional Cambodian culture, he said.

Read the original post:
PM reflects on shoe throwing: Free speech or act of violence? - The Phnom Penh Post

This transcript was prepared by a transcription service. This version may not be in its final form and may be updated.

Speaker 1: From the opinion pages of The Wall Street Journal, this is Free Expression with Gerry Baker.

GERARD BAKER: Hello and welcome to Free Expression with me, Gerry Baker, from The Wall Street Journal Editorial Page. We're delighted you're listening to this podcast. If you enjoy it, please be sure to subscribe at Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and elsewhere, and please also be kind enough to leave us a favorable review.Now, at The Journal's Editorial Page, we believe strongly in free expression and each week on this podcast, we explore in depth and candor issues of topical and other interest. We speak in depth to people who are leading figures in their field, practitioners, experts, commentators, to give us a better understanding of the major issues of our times.I'm happy to say my guest this week is Ian Bremmer, geopolitical analyst, author, and commentator. He's the president and founder of Eurasia Group, the global research and consulting firm, and also of GZERO Media, which provides coverage and analysis of global affairs. That's named, by the way, for the concept that Ian developed of a GZERO World, one in which no major power has hegemony in an increasingly complex and competitive era. He is a prolific author, and he has a new book out this week called The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. Ian Bremmer joins me now.Ian, thank you.

Ian Bremmer: Gerry, always good to talk to you.

GERARD BAKER: I want to get onto your book, obviously, and the three crises that you talk about and how we respond to them. But it is, of course, one of the perils of book writing that we can be overtaken to some extent by events. I know you completed this book, I think literally days before the Russian invasion of Ukraine. In fact, you include an addendum in the book in which you address it and talked about that and how it fits in, so I do want to start with that, if we could, because I know you're a keen observer of these things and you talk to top politicians and policymakers around the world, and you've been observing the last couple of months just as the rest of us have with, I suppose, a degree of awe and shock.Let me ask you, start with this, if we could, with Russia and Ukraine. We are now, as I say, two months into this war. It clearly hasn't gone according to Vladimir Putin's plan. It's clearly resulted in an extraordinary response that in many ways probably is weakening Russia much more than Putin could possibly have anticipated, and the Ukrainians are showing extraordinary resilience and military capability. Where do you think this goes from here, Ian? How do you assess this and where does it leave Russia's ambitions?

Ian Bremmer: Well, Gerry, first of all, I wish that Putin had read my draft, because I feel that maybe he might have not pulled the trigger on this full on invasion into Ukraine. It's the whole point of the book.

GERARD BAKER: That's one of the most creative blurbs that anyone could possibly have come up with.

Ian Bremmer: Yeah, yeah. I'm not sure he'd want to give me a quote, frankly, but I mean, the fact is that this is a crisis that we are so obviously taking advantage of, and it was Putin who clearly thought that that wasn't possible and that's why he invaded. He believed, watching the lack of response from the West in Georgia in 2008, in Ukraine in 2014, watching the quagmire in Afghanistan and the United States pulling out of that war in disaster and largely unilaterally, watched the United States wanting to focus more on Asia, not wanting to deal with Russia particularly, watching a new German government, wasn't Merkel, social Democrats, more engaged with the Russians, watching Macron saying, "Let's go our own way," and thinking, "This is the absolute perfect time to go all in and remove Zelensky and create a new, greater Russian empire." Because of course, this is the humiliation that Putin has been dealing with for decades. The fact that what he calls the biggest geopolitical debacle of the 20th century, that the Soviet Union dissolved and the Russians were the losers of the Cold War.What Putin, of course, did not in any way appreciate was that that invasion was exactly what would bring the United States and Europe and other allies together, that it was precisely the motivation that would end the brain dead status, the obsolescence, as Macron and Trump put it, of NATO.Now to answer your question more directly, what's going to happen to Putin, he is going to be completely isolated, decoupled, cut off from the G7, from the advanced industrial democracies of the world, and I think that's permanent diplomatically, economically, culturally. I think that Putin in any scenario that we come up with is in materially worse position, as is his country, than they would've been if they had never decided to invade on February 24th.

GERARD BAKER: Cut off from the G7, true, but not cut off from China with whom he has a new alliance, not cut off from India, or some of the most important emerging markets in the world. I pose this in a rather sort of cynical provocative way, but does it really matter if he's cut from what we used to call the West, sort of north Atlantic, if you like, plus Japan and Australia and one or two other countries, has responded with remarkable unity to this, but does it matter in the end really? One of the central thesis of your analysis in the last dozen years or so is that we don't live in a unipolar world, we don't live (inaudible) by the US. Is his Alliance with China and there's continuing relations with other countries in the world, does that actually help him overcome the challenges that he's facing from the West?

Ian Bremmer: Well, first of all, Gerry, I don't think it's a provocative way of asking the question. I think it's an honest way of answering the question. You just put out a number of facts that are reality, right? There's no question that the developing world is continuing to do business as usual with Russia and they are not with the United States, decidedly not with the United States and NATO and Japan in the response to this crisis, even though arguably they should be because the impact, for example, on food prices and on fertilizer that is getting cut off makes this crisis vastly more important for poor countries than for example, the crises in Syria or Somalia or Sudan or Afghanistan.But be that as it may, a couple of things I would bring up to you. The first is that not only were there these massive sanctions from the West, but they literally froze half of Russia's assets, which has never been done to a G20 country before and which no one expected, even after the Russians invaded Ukraine. That's a significant hit to their economy and those assets are not going to be on frozen. Secondly, if you look at Russia, look at the map, very different from looking at China and increasingly the gravitational pull of the global economy being driven by Asia. Most of Russia's population is in the west, most of their infrastructure is to the west, most of their trade is towards the west, and so that means that for the near term future, the impact of Europe being cut off, the United States doesn't matter so much, there's very little trade there, but the impact of Europe being cut off actually matters a lot to Russian oligarchs, to Russian companies, to Russian oil and gas and coal flows, and that's not going to get changed anytime soon.The military, and of course the Russians, they're the second largest military producer in the world, but that's unlike oil and gas and coal, that requires supply chain and increasingly they don't have the spare parts. They're not going to be able to produce those advanced componentry, and so I worry, India's going to buy a lot of oil from Russia at cheap prices, but will India keep buying MIGS from Russia when they can no longer actually get the parts for them? Most of the people I talk to in the US military industrial complex believe this is a huge opportunity for them, not so much just because the United States is spending more in defense in the near term, but because all of those countries, the Russians were exporting to are now going to be markets that are up for grabs. So that's interesting.Then finally, I didn't mention China and China, of course, quite famously Xi Jinping on February 4th described his relationship with Putin as, "A friendship without limits." That's an extraordinary thing for Xian ping to do, but now a couple months into the war, we can increasingly describe the China relationship as also a friendship without many benefits because when the United States told the Chinese, "Don't you dare provide military support or break sanctions, or there's going to be held to pay," fact is that Chinese have a lot of lawyers in their companies and they like Russia. They have a much more aligned worldview with the Russians, and we can talk about that, Gerry, but they also understand that the Russian economy is 1/10th the size of China and their trade, China's trade, is vastly more important with Europe in the United States than it is with Russia. I think that informs the conversations that Xi Jinping has had both with Chancellor Schultz and with President Macron in the last week that are much more about not wanting to be tarred with the same brush in terms of international relations and economic engagement as they are with the Russians and the Chinese think privately, "No, no, no. We want to cease fire. We want to work with you guys."It's interesting that you're right, that it is the West that is leading the response to China and not the world, and there isn't an international community to speak of on this issue or on many frankly, but that this crisis has actually created real opportunities for the West to put itself in a better position, materially better, than it would have been in if no invasion had occurred and the Chinese and the developing world is ultimately going to do less with that than a lot of people would've expected.

GERARD BAKER: I just want to pry into that a little bit, but there's been obviously the kind of prevailing narrative in, again, what we generally call the West for the last decade or so has been declining faith in liberal democracy, rising populism, rising discontent with the system that we thought was actually had been so clearly demonstrated to be superior at the end of the Cold War, whether it's Brexit or Trump or rise of the populist rights in continental Europe, there's been this sort of general sense of, if you like, of kind of malaise and dissatisfaction. There's been a lot of talk since the invasion. That narrative is now changed by this. Do you, by that, do you think that this does renew the West's faith in itself? Does it diminish the self immolating process that the West has been going through in the last 20 years or do you think this is just a passing phase and we'll get back to thinking that we're doomed?

Ian Bremmer: First of all, it's a great question. It's the right question to be asking right now. I think the answer depends on where you're looking. I am much more optimistic about answering that question in Europe. I think that Macron won more decisively in France once he decided to start actually campaigning because people remembered Le Pen and said, "We cannot have someone aligned with the Russians. We can't have someone euroskeptic in this environment."

GERARD BAKER: If I may interrupt, she did get 42% of the vote.

Ian Bremmer: Yes, she did. But before she was within a couple of points before the invasion happened. Suddenly, remember, the election was pretty new. On the back most of that campaign was not with the Russians invading Ukraine. It was before. So you're asking me do I think that there was a response from the invasion and I'm saying yes. I'm saying I think this would've been a lot closer or maybe she could have even won if it wasn't for the invasion. I'm answering your question.I think Poland was heading in a much more euroskeptic direction until the invasion occurred and now, of course, they welcome 2 million Ukrainian refugees. They're asking for much stronger, much more integrated NATO. They're getting it from Germany, and I think the Polish government is seeing a much greater utility in a strong and united European Union.I, in general, I think that there is, and Hungary is the clear exception, and less of an exception if you look at their response to the pandemic, we can get into that later, but in general I would argue that the Russian invasion of Ukraine is seen as an existential crisis across Europe, not just for Ukraine, but for democracy as a whole and a stronger EU is becoming a higher priority for populations as a consequence. When even the social Democrats can take the lead on that in Germany, a little bit like Nixon is the only one that can go to China, I think that will be structural and long lasting. I would not make that argument in the United States.

GERARD BAKER: We're going to take a short break there, but when we come back, we'll have more with Ian Bremmer. Stay with us.Welcome back. We're talking with Ian Bremmer about his book Three Future Crises and How We Can Handle Them.In your book you talk about these three major crises. We can talk a little bit in more detail about them, but the three crises are pandemics, if you like, the global health risk that we've obviously seen for the last two years, climate change, which we are very familiar with, there are different views about how serious it is and what measures need to be taken but most people agree changing climate is a significant threat. Thirdly, you talk to us about the threat from technology. These are three big threats.What I find interesting about the book in, very interesting and perhaps unexpectedly so, even from you and you're an optimistic fellow, is you do express significant optimism about this. You talk about dealing with those challenges is going to require both international cooperation, particularly between the US and China and again, we'll talk a little bit more about that relationship, but you do also talk about the other big challenge is the US itself coming together rather more than it has over the last 20 years in a unified way to deal with that challenge. You do identify that as one of the central challenges. Tell us about that, and because as it stands, it doesn't look very promising, does it, in terms of us domestic harmony is not, even with the significant bipartisan support that there is, by the way, for the Biden administration's response to what Russia's done, there remains this underlying division, tension to the point where the two sides, it looks like they don't even want to be in the same country.

Ian Bremmer: No, I mean, look, even on Russia, I saw the tweet from Donald Trump Jr., not someone I usually like to quote yesterday talking about, "Hey, $40 billion to Ukraine and when are the Russians going to start sending nuclear subs off of our coast? And should we really be doing this?" Rand Paul's been very skeptical, JD Vance, of course, saying, "Why do we care about Ukraine?" I do think it is possible that Trump is testing that out and by the time we get to midterms, the United States might be much more divided even on that issue, even on that issue, in a way that the Europeans will not. But look, I start this book, the book is ultimately quite hopeful as you say, but I start this book from a position of realism, from recognition of where the world is today.I think there are two big realities that we have to accept. One is that the United States is the most politically divided and dysfunctional of the advanced industrial economies, period. It is just true, it is a reality, and it's not getting better. The second is that the most important geopolitical relationship in the world, the US-China relationship has no trust and is increasingly decoupling, it's not becoming more integrated. The trends of both of those things are not positive.If you told me that the optimism and hopefulness of my book relied upon the United States getting our political system functional and in order and the US and China coming to a level of partnership and agreement and collaboration on the global stage, I wouldn't have written the book because I don't think those things are going to happen in the next five to 10 years. I can tell you what would make them happen, but they're not realistic. They're not plausible in the near term. What's interesting and hopeful about this book, and you already see this argument in what we've just discussed on Russia, is that I firmly believe that we can respond effectively to these crises, even with the US being so dysfunctional and divided as an actor, even with the United States and China not getting along on the global stage.

GERARD BAKER: Let's go through these crisis just one by one. The pandemics, the global health threat, that has not been, and again, I do accept that a lot of this is the US and you think maybe even if the US is not involved in this corporation, then you can still deal with it. But the US is an important player and what we've seen from this pandemic, I think if anything, is far from a coming together in the face of a global threat, by the way, I like the way you start the book with a famous story of Ron Reagan and Gorbachev meeting in, what was it, '85 and '86. Reagan's first question being would Russia come to the US's defense if the US was attacked by an alien? And he says yes. You betray these threats on that level of threat to the globe as a whole and the need to come together.But surely what we've seen from the pandemic the last two years is actually, if anything, again, division, mistrust, division, don't trust the Chinese, they haven't been truthful about pretty well anything, the Americans have fallen apart themselves over pandemic responses, restrictions, mask wearing, vaccine mandates, all that kind of stuff. I agree with you. It's not been quite as extreme in Europe, but you have seen quite a lot of that, particularly in the UK and maybe some other countries. The experience the last two years doesn't lead us to much optimism, does it, that we would face another one, perhaps even greater one, that we'll be any more united or anywhere able to deal with it?

Ian Bremmer: Yeah, and of the crises in the book, the lessons from the pandemic on balance have not been great. Again, this is not a book in service of an ideology. This is a book in service of, it is a target rich environment for global crises. Clearly you can take advantage of crises when they occur. How are we doing and where is the hope? On balance, the pandemic is not the best argument here.Why not? Well, first of all, because the Chinese covered it up for the first month and as a consequence, led to enormous mistrust between the United States and China, led the United States to withdraw from the World Health Organization.

GERARD BAKER: Maybe not just for the first month. They've been covering up a lot. They've been covering up surely the extent of the spread up till now, and they may well, we still don't know, but there's still a very plausible argument that says this thing actually started leaked out of a lab by accident, and the Chinese absolutely adamantly resists that. It's not just that first (crosstalk).

Ian Bremmer: No, no, it wasn't just the first month. My point is that you started the crisis with this original sin from China and they lied to their own people and everyone else, and that made it much harder to create international trust and response to this. The only reason we found out about what this disease was and how to genetically map it was because of a Chinese doctor, against the admonitions of the Chinese government, got it out to an Australian website and then the rest of the world could start working on it. This was the opposite of international cooperation. This was the opposite of Gorbachev and Reagan coming together to fight the aliens. Once the Chinese finally started taking it seriously at home and they locked down and they tracked and they traced, and their economy got back open and running within months, well, they then had a lot of both arrogance and complacency in looking at the rest of the world that wasn't taking it as seriously, that didn't lockdown, that also cared about individual rights, and so much complacency that today you now have an environment where we have more mRNA vaccines in surplus than probably any other commodity in the world. The Chinese are desperately in need of them, but refuse to license them, refuse to let us help to be able to vaccinate their older populations with vaccines that would be effective. It's exactly the opposite of what's necessary.Now there are positive lessons from COVID, from the pandemic, that do show more cooperation, and I'm happy to talk about them, but if you asked me on balance in the last two years, did we learn from this crisis? Did we take away what we needed to? The answer for COVID has been no.

GERARD BAKER: Let's move on to see your second threat which is climate change. Again, isn't to some extent one of the lessons of the last two months we've seen since the invasion by Ukraine of Russia, that we as well, especially the Europeans, were put into this extraordinary position, partly as a result of pursuit of what many would argue were somewhat unreasonable ambitions for renewable energy, that they've been put in this strange position of essentially downgrading, in fact actually degrading their own domestic fossil fuel, traditional energy production. Also by the way, we can add into that nuclear powers, especially in the case of Germany, and upgrading their renewable capabilities, but not upgrading their renewable capabilities so anything like the level that was needed, and so increasing their dependence on fossil fuel energy from a country that was never going to be, and should never have been seen as a reliable partner.We could say the same to some extent in the US. The US has been energy sufficient as a result of climate change policies by this administration in particular, we've been moving away from that and Biden administration finds itself going out to Saudi Arabia and begging them to increase production. Again, the history of, talked about the history of the pandemic in the last two years, in terms of the context of your book and this idea of global cooperation, the history of energy and the environment in just the last two months doesn't inspire a lot of optimism either, does it?

Ian Bremmer: I hear, I just disagree. I actually think that you need to take the longer view when you look at climate and energy, just as when you look at most global crises. The reality is that we are in a radically different position today than we were five or 10 or 20 years ago. That trajectory is permanent and there's no question that the fact that the Russians are being boycotted in terms of their coal, increasingly in terms of their oil, and probably soon in terms of their gas by the Europeans and the Americans, and also in terms of their transit and their insurance, which again means that they will have a really hard time, even though those aren't secondary sanctions, with global export, precisely because the Europeans do so much of it, they have the supply chain. But that is going to lead in the near term, sure. That means that you have a major gap that needs to be filled and the Americans are filling it for the Europeans to a degree, the Qataris are filling it, these east areas are filling it, Saudi Arabia is doing a little bit though not because of the United States and on and on and on.But what that really means for the Europeans is we want to get as fast as possible, we want more efficiency and we absolutely want, we want more nuclear, and we want more transition faster to renewables. More broadly, not just looking at the last two months now but looking at the last five, 10 years, what we've seen is despite the fact that the United States and China are not coordinating globally, we've seen that people around the world increasingly see this as a major problem, that the amount of money that is being spent and invested in renewables and in supply chain for electric vehicles and in next generation nuclear, is exponentially greater than it was, making it cheaper at scale, so much so that within one generation, certainly by 2045, maybe by 2040, a majority of the world's energy will no longer be coming from fossil fuels. That is an extraordinary change that no one would have expected even 10 years ago.You have to ask yourself why. Well, how is it possible that we've moved the needle so fast? How is it possible that climate change feels a lot more like what I call a Goldilocks crisis. One that's not so big that you crawl up in a ball, but not so small that you just keep going on the way you were going on, as opposed to the crisis of COVID that we largely didn't coordinate, respond effectively to.I think there are a couple of answers to that. I think one is because in both cases you have most of the world that matters in terms of power in responding to this crisis, agreeing on facts. We talked about that already in terms of the response to Russia, that there was only a Ukraine narrative in all of the West, there was no one supporting Putin, there was no one justifying the other side of the story. There was no disinformation on it. The same thing didn't used to be true on climate, but is today. 195 countries have gotten together with the IPCC report and said, "Look, the Intergovernmental Panel for Climate Change, we have 1.2 degrees of climate change already. We know it's anthropogenic, it comes from humanity, it's not because of nature." Even 10 years ago, you didn't have that level of agreement. Now you do. Everyone agrees on what the problem is. They don't agree on necessarily how to respond to it, how much money to spend, but they agree on what the problem is.Furthermore, the farther the crisis evolves, the more we recognize it affects all of us. That was true with the Russia-Ukraine crisis in a short period of time, that is increasingly true in the climate crisis. It's no longer about just the Maldives and about Bangladesh. It's about California and Australia and Italy. That also really compels. It creates much more movement towards confirmation of your (inaudible), as opposed to the pandemic where if you were skeptical about it in the early days, you became more skeptical about what Fauci was telling you, about masks, and about the need to lockdown over time because of the tools that were available, but also because of the politicization of the crisis.

GERARD BAKER: Very quickly back on the energy and climate. This isn't the lesson of the last few months that governments have learned is that security of supply, the changed world that we live in after February 24th and the Russian invasion, security of supply is going to Trump, isn't it? Even the longer term ambitions for whatever your net zero date ambition may be, security of supply we've seen is so important in terms of the immediate threats, in terms of significantly higher prices or indeed, actually, of lack of availability of physical supply. Isn't that going to, at minimum, complicate the ambitious net zero agenda that you've outlined?

Ian Bremmer: I actually think that securities supply and a net zero agenda are very aligned. They weren't aligned when you couldn't develop these renewable energies at scale. But the reality is moving away from fossil fuels, one of the solutions is don't decommission your nuclear plants. Keep them. It's not fossil fuels anymore. That helps you with net zero, that's really important. A second one is move faster on renewables so that you have control. That's a decentralized energy source. You're not as reliant on the Saudis if you have more effective and larger renewables at scale. A third is don't rely on the Russians. Nord Stream 2, horrible idea. The United States has been pushing on that for a long time. Trump administration was very solid on that with Merkel. Merkel said, "No, talk to the hand." The Germans now understand that was completely stupid, it was a strategic mistake. But all three of those things work in concert in my view, very clearly. In the short term and in the long term.

GERARD BAKER: I think the third threat that you identify is a really particularly interesting one and one that I think hasn't been as much explored, which is technology. We're all familiar with cyber security concerns. You particularly talk about that, but you talk about artificial intelligence and also quantum computing and how much of a threat that can be. Just explain, first of all, what that is, and the threat that poses, and how you think we are positioned to resist that?

Ian Bremmer: This crisis is, you're right. It's the one that's getting the least attention right now. Everyone's been talking about COVID and climate and Russia for the last couple of years. Who's really talking about disruptive technologies and what are they talking about when they discuss it? Because everyone's problem is different, is that monopolies, the tech companies have too much power, or is it free speech and cancel culture or is it political polarization, disinformation? All this stuff.What I'm focusing on broadly is that we are developing technologies which are incredibly dangerous to the development of our kids, to the persistence of democracy as a political system, and even to the existence of the species. These disruptive technologies, we've had an experience with one in the 20th century. It was nuclear weapons, and we knew how dangerous it was and we did everything we could to contain the proliferation, and we were largely very successful at that, but we were successful precisely because it was a very complicated technology that required both very dangerous and fairly rare natural elements in order to put it together, and that meant that governments coming together had an easier time preventing them from proliferating.I am deeply concerned, cyber weapons, and you look at AI algorithms and disinformation, when you look at lethal autonomous drones. Even when you look at quantum computing, the ability to contain those disruptive technologies, to stop them from proliferating, is orders of magnitude greater and maybe undoable compared to nuclear weapons. Yet these technologies are potentially, and perhaps even very likely, as dangerous if not more dangerous than nuclear proliferation, so how can we not, as governments and as other actors with power over these technologies, how can we not start to address them as an existential crisis?

GERARD BAKER: But how do we? This, again, requires a remarkable degree of international cooperation. How do we achieve that kind of corporation, that sense of solidarity, which doesn't seem to be there at the moment that enables us instead, people view technology not as an existential threat to the globe, they see it as not a framework of your aliens coming from out of space and invading the earth. They see it as a great opportunity, a great advantage to secure their own benefit, to secure their own dominance in the world. How do you persuade them to back off that and somehow see it as a common threat?

Ian Bremmer: Well, they see it as both. When the colonial pipeline hit occurred, Biden met with Putin a year ago in Geneva, and didn't even bring up Ukraine. He said, "Look, if you guys don't cut that out, this is going to lead to direct conflict between our two countries." The Russians actually did tell some of these cyber gangs to knock off the attacks on critical infrastructure as a consequence of that conversation. I think people do understand in time some of the nature of these threats, but you're absolutely right, Gerry, that mostly when we talk about tech, we talk about convenience, we talk about click through, we talk about all the money that's made, and certainly the business models are not doing anything to try to prevent us, to try to display us.

GERARD BAKER: State actors and bads see it as a weaponized opportunity for them to secure advantage over somebody else. They're not incentivized to share what they know, they're incentivized actually to achieve more and more of an advantage, whether it's in cyber or AI or all of these things so they can actually inflict damage on their rivals. Isn't that right?

Ian Bremmer: Again, I think that they see it in both ways, but to the extent that there is no architecture, there are no guardrails, there is no nudging towards more responsible behavior, then you have a collective action problem. What these individual actors will do is say, "Well, if it's mostly offensive technology, I'm going to make sure I'm really good at it." It's what the Americans do, it's what Chinese do, it's what the Russians do, it's what the Israelis do.Part of the problem, so you say, "What do we do about it?" I think there are a couple of things that we do. One is you educate the public about it so that they get outraged and they start pushing for changes in behavior the way they have on climate change before it's too late and it's not too late on climate change. That's the extraordinary thing. Well, it's not too late on AI either. That's one thing you do.A second thing you do is you recognize that we have none of the institutions in architecture that would actually allow for us to identify which of these issues really would benefit from collaboration, would benefit from common rules of the road that otherwise we're going to destroy ourselves. We did that with nuclear weapons. We haven't done that yet with AI and disruptive technologies. We have a World Trade Organization and a lot of money has been made by the Americans on the back of that, the multinational corporations and a global middle class has emerged as a consequence of it. We don't have a world data organization. It seems fairly clear that we need one because it actually is responsible for driving so much of the global economy, but also for creating so many of these dangerous practices that undermine national security and personal security. The only reason we don't have it is because when we were in institution building mode, data wasn't a thing for the global economy or national security, now it is. It's pretty clear that the world, and we're going to need to start with countries that trust each other, but it needs to be suitably open, that chapters can be opened for anyone that's willing to behave in accordance to those values, will need to start creating that architecture.Another thing I will say is that unlike the WTO, which was an organization of governments, of states, a world data organization, and all of the regulatory framework and all of the rules of the road that need to be created to deal with at least some of these issues cannot just be about governments, because corporations are actually sovereign in their digital space. Big tech companies, they create the walled gardens, they build the algorithms, they determine the rules of the road. They know. Even cybersecurity, Ukraine's getting attacked, the Americans and NATO are defending them in terms of javelin weapons and stinger missiles but in terms of cyber, it's Microsoft, it's Google. It's not the United States government. The multilateral framework you're going to need to create to start to respond to these problems cannot just be through governments, will need to be multi-stakeholder from day one, and that's new. That's completely new in the way we think about global governance.

GERARD BAKER: Right. Finally, it's been a fascinating conversation, but final broad point, which again, you address in your book and I want you to address it here. It's become almost automatic among commentators and political figures in the West now to say that we are in a new kind of cold war. They were saying that before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, they were saying it, obviously, with respect to China, with what we saw when Trump came in 2017, radical change in US posture towards China. There was no more strategic engagement, there was actually strategic rivalry, and economic tariffs and all this stuff. But even when Biden succeeded Trump, there was a clear acknowledgement that we were in a changed relationship with China. Since early February, as you say, China and Russia have now established themselves in this alliance without limits. They talk about you've got other countries, obviously, who are in that sphere around China. This does all tend to reinforce the sense that we are revisiting the Cold War and only in potentially much more dangerous, much more frightening ways.It seems to me that if that is true, and if the world is devolving into these two camps, as it did in the Cold War, then your book and the hopeful, but realistic, but certainly aspirational objectives that you lay out in your book for this world of global corporation just seems to me that it's kind of like, it belongs to the pre-new Cold War era. That happy period we had maybe between 1991 and 2010 or whatever, when we did think that the world would move in global cooperation. Now we're in these two camps. What's the real prospect for achieving this global cooperation to address these big threats you talk about? What is the prospect for actually achieving them?

Ian Bremmer: Well, I mean, the fact that I'm as hopeful on climate as I am, and this is in an environment where the Americans and Chinese are competing with each other, but competing because both countries recognize that you don't want the other to just dominate the post-carbon energy environment. It's not just about polar bears, saving the whales, and hugging the trees. It's about if we're not going to be fossil fuels in 30 years, we better make sure that the Americans have influence there and the Chinese saying the same thing. It's actually a virtuous competition as opposed to a vicious competition. That also leads me to the response to the core piece of your question, which is in a new Cold War environment, can you get global responses?My response to you is there is a new Cold War between Russia and the G7 and Russia's going to be cut off economically, and I think that's essentially permanent, at least as long as Putin is there.I completely reject the idea that we are in a new Cold War with the Chinese. First of all, the Germans don't accept it, the French don't accept it, and they don't accept it anymore because of what's happened in the last couple of months. The Chinese don't accept it. The Chinese do believe the Americans are trying to contain China in Asia and they don't like that, but there's also massive interdependence between the two countries economically. If you ask me in the next 10 years, even though there is decoupling happening with some ensuring and with areas of the economy that are seen as dual use for national security, I would make a strong argument that there will still be more interdependence between the US and China overall in a decade than there is today. That is not a Cold War. It's mistrust, but what it really is a married couple who don't love each other anymore, but they have kids in the house, and they both love the kids, and as a consequence they're going to stay together.

GERARD BAKER: That's a particularly mutually hostile Cold War, even if I may say so, but I'm teasing you slightly, but you know what I mean.

Ian Bremmer: It does mean that you can work together and I do think that we're going to, and the same way that Democrats and Republicans will ultimately have to work together. I think that the US and China will ultimately have to work together. The question is, will it be enough? In a way that the Americans and the Soviets never had to work together.

GERARD BAKER: You're optimistic that despite China's ambitions, despite the challenge that it poses in east Asia, you think that those concerns can be buried in the face of these larger threats?

Ian Bremmer: No, I don't think they can be buried at all, but I think that those concerns coexist with greater interdependence and the crises that I talk about only add to the interdependence. They don't lead to more decoupling. Climate creates more interdependence, not less. The next pandemic will create more interdependence, not less. Our AI concerns will create more interdependence, not less. Will that be sufficient for us to continue to exist as a species? I have to hope so and I suspect you do too.

GERARD BAKER: Ian Bremmer, Eurasia Group, author of the new book, The Power of Crisis: How Three Threats and Our Response Will Change the World. Thank you very much indeed for joining us.

Ian Bremmer: Gerry, that was a real pleasure.

GERARD BAKER: That's it for this week's episode of Free Expression with me, Gerry Baker, from the Wall Street Journal Opinion Pages. Thank you very much for listening. Please do join us again for another deep exploration of the issues that are driving our world. Thank you very much and goodbye.

View original post here:
Will the World Overcome the Russia and Covid Crises? - Opinion: Free Expression - WSJ Podcasts - The Wall Street Journal