John Mearsheimer | The liberal international order

One of the most distinguished public intellectuals and journalists of the 20th century, Walter Lippmann once warned that we all think alike, no one thinks much, we all think alike, no one thinks very well, I believe that someone who thinks very well is our Guest today, ladies and gentlemen, please welcome. to Professor John Mearsheimer. The topic I want to talk about today is basically the rise and fall of the

liberal

international

order

and what I want to try to explain is exactly what the

liberal

international

order

is very important for. understand in some detail what it is and then lay out for them what I think went wrong and then talk briefly about where I think we're headed.

This is my main argument. My main argument is that the liberal international order was created in 1990. and that was when the cold war ended and as I will try to emphasize here the liberal international order was not created in 1945 with a different order from 45 to 89. the liberal international order was created in the '90s when the world became unipolar the united states what was the soul survey played a key role in creating that order that we matter most to and, despite considerable success in the 1990s and early 2000s, Do you know if I had come here in 1999 and told you that the liberal international order contained the seeds of your own order? destruction, you would have laughed at me because things were going pretty well back then, but then it started going south around 2004 2005. and uh, it failed and it is doomed to fail and I will argue that it is for two reasons, one of the which I just said.

It contains the seeds of its own destruction and also of the rise of China and the resurrection of Russian power under Vladimir Putin. Well, these are the questions I want to address first, what is the liberal international order? Make it very clear when you get the liberal international order. orders you don't get them all the time when you get them then why did it fail and then where are we headed those are the four big questions I'm going to address in that order okay, first question, what is the liberal international order? What I'm going to do here is define for you what an order is, what it means to be an international order, and then what it means to be a liberal international order.

Okay so an order to me is an organized group of international institutions that help govern interactions between member states you hear people talk all the time about the fact that we live in a rules based system those rules are built in in international institutions and an order is a group of institutions, just think of the cold The war order that we Americans in the West created, included NATO as an institution, included the EU as an institution, the WTO, right to institution , it was actually created back then, the IMF, the world bank, we had this group of institutions that formed the Western order during the cold war okay, so that's what an order is the great powers create and administer orders the great powers create and administer institutions they are the guerrillas in the system they are the ones who establish what the rules are and of course, those are the united states of america and to a lesser extent countries like china and russia in recent years okay, so that It is what an order is, this group of institutions, what is an international order, an international order must include all the great powers of the world, so if you are in the cold war to have an international order it has to include both the United States and the Soviet Union.

If you are talking about an international order in the world in which we are moving, which is a multipolar world, it has to include the United States, China and Russia. That is an international order and the opposite of an international order is a bounded order a bounded order is one that does not include all the great powers and is generally regional and broad in scope and just to get a little ahead of the order that Uncle Sam created during the cold war and the order that the soviet union during the cold war remember the warsaw pact comic-con common twist those orders were not international orders one was an american dominated order and the other was a soviet dominated order and those were bounded orders okay so a International order includes all the great powers of the world, as I say, ideally it would control every state now, very important, what is a liberal international order?

A liberal international order is one in which the dominant state is a liberal democracy and that liberal democracy has three objectives and if you think about the cold American politics during the post-Cold War period, those three objectives stand out very clearly to you. One of them is that you want to turn every country on the planet into a liberal democracy in some sense when you're creating a liberal international order that dominant state is trying to remake the world in its own image, that's what the United States was doing, so the first thing involves spreading democracy here, there and everywhere, the second thing you want to do is create an open international community. economy and what we want to do is integrate all the states on the planet into that open international economy, we want all the states in the system to be hooked on capitalism and we want to make sure especially that we do that with countries like Russia and China, and that Of course, It's exactly what we're trying to do.

This, of course, is an approach that virtually everyone loved, because people in the West love this whole enterprise. Of course, the third goal is to integrate states into more and more institutions they want. to go from gat to wto you want to create more institutions you want to have the chinese and the russians and all these institutions because the russians and the chinese will benefit from being in these institutions and of course the institutions are the building blocks of the orders , so those are the goals and in this world the dominant state pays little attention to balance of power politics the dominant state pays little attention to actual politics then people like me of this world are basically dinosaurs, as everyone knows, I'm a realist, I just don't It doesn't matter, this is a liberal international order where what really matters is ideology, economic interdependence and institutions, that is the liberal world order.

When do liberal international orders appear? My argument is that there are two key factors that shape an international order: one is the number of great powers in the system and two is the political ideology of the dominant state and the reason we got a liberal international order in 1990 was because we moved to a unipolar world where the dominant state was a liberal democracy; You have to understand how special the structure of the international system was in 1990, we had never seen a unipolar world before; had always been multipolar, as it was before 1945, or bipolar, as it was between 45 and 89 years in the cold war period we had for the first time in recorded history a unipolar world and, of course, the unipole was Uncle Sam and Uncle Sam is a liberal democracy, so it's no surprise that there's a country trying to create this liberal international order and remember I told you.

In a liberal international order, the soul survey pays no attention to real politics, the balance of power, and the reason is that there are no other great powers. You realize that during the post-Cold War period, from 1990 to about 2017, the United States barely paid attention to the balance of power because it was Godzilla, there was no other great power in the system, which means we were free to follow this liberal agenda, the correct history of the liberal international order. I want to talk about cold war orders. and the post-cold war order it is very important to understand what is happening here, as I told you before in my story, the liberal international order is the post-cold war order, it is not the cold war order and reason It should be obvious to you now.

The Cold War was a bipolar world, and in that bipolar world the United States was engaged in intense security competition with the Soviet Union. The Soviet Union was engaged in intense competition with the United States, and the United States was not free to create a liberal international order in its place. What you mainly get in the Cold War are these two limited realistic orders, the communist order led by the Soviets and the Western order led by the United States. Those limited orders were created to wage the Cold War. Think about NATO. Look at the origins of the european union the origins of the european union is based on a real policy most people today think that it was actually about economic prosperity economic prosperity mattered but the eu was mainly created in the beginning for the purpose of freeing the cold war, all those institutions were part of a limited order. in the west and the soviets had their own limited order warsaw pact comic-con right turn so you had these two limited orders and you also had a very weak realistic international order think about proliferation the npt the right npt the supplier group nuclear of the IAEA all those institutions, the Soviets and the Americans, the two great powers of the planet were involved in those institutions, so there was a realistic and thin international order and two realistic limited orders.

Well, that's the cold war, there is no liberal international order, but what happens in 1989, in 1989, the Soviet Union loses. the cold war and its bounded order collapse and the American-led Western order emerges triumphant, so what we decided to do is take that Western order, that Western bounded order and turn it into a liberal international order because we can do it, we are the unipole that we don't have another great power to worry about, so there is no security competition between great powers. We are a liberal state and we want to remake the world in our own image and we have this tremendously successful bounded order that we think we can expand.

Let's think about NATO and The expansion of the EU and the color revolutions in Eastern Europe NATO and the EU were created during the cold war, they were part of a limited realist order, but realism is gone, but the institutions remain there, so what you have to do is take those institutions and just move them. Towards the east more and more countries are joining this order, it is transforming from a limited order to an international order, that is what the expansion of NATO, the expansion of the EU, the color revolutions, what about the Bush doctrine? The Bush Doctrine was designed to deal with the problem of terrorism and the problem of nuclear proliferation in the greater Middle East by turning every country in that region into a liberal democracy.

Iraq was just the first stop on the train line we hoped to go to. the war in Syria Iran and turn the entire region into a sea of ​​democracies. promoting the liberal international order is about engagement with China. What were we doing with China? The idea was: let's get them hooked on capitalism, let's integrate them into these institutions, they will get rich and once they get rich they will demand democracy. China. will become a liberal democracy and, to use Robert Zelick's term, become a responsible stakeholder, how could it be otherwise if they are a liberal democracy?

This is how the world works in the minds of most people in the West. I'm sure most of you are Australian and think this way. They love commitment. We involve China. So instead of containing China, we engage with China now. As I told you, the golden years were from 1990 to 2004. I had been here before 2004. You would have thought it was very good, but then in 2005, order started to go south in Iraq, it became a disaster. Afghanistan, which at first seemed like a great success, turned into a disaster. The international economy almost collapsed in 2008, the euro crisis occurred shortly after.

I could go on. and well something went very wrong, this brings us to the question of what went wrong now, like Tom said, a lot of people think the problem is Donald Trump, right, oh my gosh, do you know how that guy got elected? And you'll know once we get rid of him. him in 2020 and we put someone like joe biden in there we'll be fine and just back to square one I want to be clear I'm not a Trump supporter I'm very clear I'm not. I'm a Trump supporter, but I don't think Donald Trump is responsible for the mess we're in.

In fact, it's very important to understand that Donald Trump was elected in part for running against the liberal international order and of course that's why most of you don't like it, right, Donald Trump said I'm getting out of the business. to spread democracy around the world and, as you know, he has never been an authoritarian leader or a dictator that you didn't want to get into bed with. Regarding an open international economy, the guy is protectionist and regarding institutions, he has never seen an institution he doesn't love. NATO's obsolete EU leaders say he is the biggest threat to the EU they have seen on the planet.

The guy charges the WTO. He has never seen an institution thatlike it, NAFTA was withdrawn from the TPP, which I think was a big mistake, but he didn't like the institutions he led against the liberal international order, he said it failed and they elected him, he is not the problem, he is a manifestation of the the problem what really went wrong the order contains the seeds of its own destruction and let me run through the argument as quickly as I can first of all we assume that to begin with this is frank fukiyama's thesis for those of you who have not read or does I read Frank's famous article for a long time.

He goes back and reads it. His basic argument is that there is no alternative to liberal democracy. We are moving inexorably toward a planet full of liberal democracies. Misguided liberal democracy doesn't seem so attractive to many people. Today they are alternative models I love liberal democracy I am glad I was born and raised in the United States but not everyone on the planet agrees with me there are alternatives go to Russia ask Russians about liberal democracy think about the 1990s when That country was a total disaster.they don't want to hear about liberal democracy they will accept soft authoritarianism with vladimir putin every time paul's crusading soul ends in endless wars do they realize that the united states of america has been at war for two out of three years since the cold war ended and we have bought seven different wars we are a highly militarized state to put it in slightly different terms we are addicted to war that is what happens when you become a crusader state and when you try to create a liberal international order and remake the world in your own image you are a crusader state number three the crusader soul survey ends up poisoning relations with the world's major powers this is nato expansion eu expansion and color revolutions believe that the Russians are happy for us to drive NATO to their border, I can tell you that they are not and they have been telling us that since the mid-1990s in 2000, after 2008, when we told them that we were going to make Ukraine and Georgia were part of NATO, we were told.

In some terms, that's not happening and it's not happening, right? The Chinese believe that the Chinese are happy for us to interfere in their politics and talk about turning them into a liberal democracy. They realize they think we are behind the protests. In Hong Kong this is surprising, it is not surprising at all because they understand what the United States was trying to do to turn China into a liberal democracy and they don't like it, so we have poisoned relations with the Russians and the Chinese in fact. , we have so thoroughly poisoned relations with the Russians that they have gotten into bed with the Chinese.

Order collides with nationalism by undermining sovereignty and national identity. I could go on and on about this in regards to undermining sovereignty every time you create something really powerful. institutions and you give them a lot of authority to make decisions they think the EU thinks how many people in Britain think about Brussels Brussels is a bad word in Britain for many Brits that's why Brexit came about. Many Britons feel that decisions about Britain's future should be made in London not Brussels and then with respect to national identity, just think about open borders, right? You know, the EU has this system that basically involves open borders to receive refugees in the era of nationalism, that is the recipe for really big problems, hyperglobalization, right?

We went to hyperglobalization. globalization we went from a globalized system to a hybrid globalized system uh we went from the gat to the wto trade became much more uh much more excessive uh it was much easier to move capital around the world uh and this created all kinds of problems donnie rodrick in his fantastic book on the paradoxes of globalization lays out this whole story as a result, you know, many people lost their jobs in the western world, the liberal international order was undermined within countries like the united states and britain due to the economic consequences of the hyperglobalization and those economic problems led to major political problems and finally integrating China into the liberal world order and making China increasingly rich undermines unipolarity, you understand what is happening here, we are moving from unitary polarity to multipolarity and One of my main themes here is that What you don't want to lose sight of is that you can only have a liberal international order in a unipolar world because the unipole doesn't have to worry about balance of power politics once you enter a multipolar world. . a multipolar world or you are in a bipolar world the balance of power politics is back on the table for the great powers and remember what John said it is the great powers that create orders so unipolarity is over because China and Russia are now great powers. and we are not in a unipolar world, so the question is what kind of orders will prevail in the future.

We are going to return to a situation that is somewhat similar to Cold War orders but different in some ways. I will not go. I'll go into detail about this now, but I'll just lay it out for you. Number two and number three are key. You will get a Chinese sled limited order and you will get a US led limited order and they will both focus on Asia and as you know here in Australia most Australians are deeply concerned about the fact that they feel that the Chinese They push in one direction and the Americans push them in another direction.

What they're going to want is that the Americans will want you to join their order and the Chinese will want you to join their order. You will have alliance structures here, you will have economic relationships that will all be linked. Continuing this security competition that is being established in the United States and China will lead to narrow orders that will wage a security competition and, hopefully, not a war between them, as occurred during the cold war. That's why so many people watching what's happening today say this. This is reminiscent in important ways of the Cold War, and of course, as was the case in the Cold War, there is also an international order.

I think again about proliferation. My sense is that the Chinese and the Russians and the Americans will work together internationally to create or maintain a proliferation regime and they will work together on other issues, hopefully on things like climate change, but there will be little international order. realistic, but the two orders that will matter most, as was the case in the Cold War, are two limited orders. Orders that will be in charge of the two largest guerrillas in the system, the United States and China, and for Australians what this means is that you will have to decide which of those two orders you will be in.

Thank you, thank you John. that was a lot to digest there and we'll answer some questions. I will do the first to put him on the spot because his thesis is that we are witnessing not only the increasingly assertive behavior of China strategically but also the reaffirmation of Russian power. But is there a danger that you are exaggerating their strengths because both states are subject to serious limitations and weaknesses? I think of Russia, which has serious demographic problems, who are addicted to petrodollars, and as for China, the saying is that they will grow old before they get rich, they have serious problems with air and water pollution, a lot of corruption at the top end of the political leadership and that's not to mention the ethnic tensions in China, so is there any danger? exaggerate the powers of russia and china, uh, regarding russia, russia is a great power in decline and even now it is not as powerful as china is from the american perspective, the real threat here is china, it is not russia and again Russia becomes weaker as time goes by for demographic reasons and also because its economy is basically a giant gas station and the Russians would like to rectify this situation but they cannot do so because they are in an arms race mainly with the United States.

So the Russians are not a problem. The issue is the Chinese right. I hope you are right. You understand from an American perspective. I want to see the Chinese economy in decline, if not in decline. I don't want the Chinese to become a potential. competitor that's why I opposed the compromise. I thought it was crazy to boost China's economy so that it could become a potential rival to the United States and I saw no way around it. Okay, so I hope that those problems that you describe in China manifest themselves and that China does not become a pure competitor and in fact the United States continues to grow and grow and grow and then, by the way, we would return to unitary polarity and again The interesting question would be whether we would pursue liberal hegemony. again, okay, next question, just a second, Professor Richard Beatty, the United Nations was an important international institution that you didn't mention in your talk.

I would be interested to know why yes, very quickly. Remember that during the cold war I said that there was a realistic international. order and that will be true in the future, that is where the UN would be because all the great powers are in the UN and practically all countries are in the UN, so the UN is the truest international institution on the planet and it is not I mentioned. because it's basically a pointless institution, you just know it, it just doesn't matter james phillips, thank you and thank you very much for your talk,

john

, the part of the thesis that liberal democracies could easily be exported, particularly to southern countries.

In Central Asia, which came from a very different political tradition, it seems to me that it is always very historical because the circumstances in which liberal democracies have developed are very, very specific and quite rare. Do you think there is a problem in Washington? Strategic thinking about being historical and being too ideological. I think the answer is, of course, yes, and I think that was especially true at the end of the Cold War. Fukiyama's thesis was tremendously attractive to most people in the West, not just Americans, especially Americans. actually, especially Western Europeans, because we had come to believe that we won the cold war because we were liberal democracies, that it was a superior system and that we had defeated fascism in the first part of the 20th century, communism in the second part of the century XX, those were the two viable alternatives, but they proved not to be viable alternatives and there really was no other alternative and, as Fukuyama argued, it would be easy to promote democracy around the world because it was the only meaningful option;

In other words, we had the wind at our backs. our backs and not only do we have the wind at our backs, we were extremely powerful charles krauthammer wrote this famous article called the unipolar moment in which he said and this article was written around the time that fukuyama published his article who uh um krauthammer said that the United States The United States has just emerged from the cold war. As a remarkably powerful country, we can do all kinds of things with all the power we have, so all we have to do is couple Krauthammer's argument with Fukuyama's argument, which says that we have the wind at our back. you come back and you go to the races and this is what you do well and it didn't work very well now you say that Americans are not very historical most people are not very historically oriented they don't pay attention to history and it's probably truer in the case of the Americans than in others and, as a result, we were hit in the face.

It's really amazing what a pathetic record we have, you know, between the period of 1990 and when Donald Trump moved into the White House and Trump said this in the debates that he held. it's very clear if you look at the record of democrats and republicans alike, remember he went after george w bush who actually looked like woodrow wilson on steroids, just when you read george w bush's second inaugural address it's like he smokes condoleezza rice, she also drank the kool-aid. She used to be a realist in the 1990s. If you read our famous foreign affairs article from January and February 2000, which when written as a sort of summary of what the Republican foreign policy platform would look like, is a very polytechnical document. real, not Wilsonian, but after she came to power, she and Bush, wow, they really accepted this and there were very few people who argued against it.

The next question awaits León, a former intern in the cis practice to return. León has blown everything up. the road from new zealand thank you for coming to australia professor mia sharma uh this will probably be related to my essay question for my university so I'm going to ask you this anyway so uh donald trump so I personally think it's more random type of politics foreign because in a way it supports the liberal hegemony in a way because it inflated the budget it is very hostile to Iran very hostile to China but you also said that it is quite isolationist, so is it realistic or not?

I just want to hear Well, I don't think Trump is aisolationist right and I don't think Trump is in favor of liberal hegemony either. He's not into the idea. He is not in the business of promoting liberal democracy. He likes tariffs and he's not a big one. a fan of an open international economy and does not like international institutions, these are all characteristics of the liberal international order, so he does not fit into that category. Some people ask me if he is realistic. Because there are several things. what I say sounds like Trump agrees or that there are some to our views.

I think it's hard to say that Trump is anything in particular because he kind of flies by the seat of his pants and it's hard to determine exactly what his views are. a macro level, uh, to put it in slightly different terms, if you want to distinguish between tactics and strategy, he's not a strategist, he's a tactician, right, he just believes that he can, you know, take a problem and he can solve it correctly, but how it all fits together. It's very difficult to say in the big picture, but, he is not an isolationist, that is a key point and the other thing is that he is not a fan of the liberal international order, thanks John, that is, Andy Canard, Andy, thanks to the teacher for so uh. exciting discussion um China seems to be looking at the big picture more than the United States if you're just talking about the bipolar situations and I take the lead on the Belt and Road, they seem to be gathering, if not friends, alliances over the Belton Road and going into debt to the countries that cannot pay and buy the alliances, that is correct and it is also a problem for the United States alliance.

Well, the big difference between the United States and China is that the United States is a global superpower and has interests all over the world and one of the problems that the United States has had in dealing with China is that when China was rising especially after 2000 and becoming most threatening to the united states the united states was busy fighting the forever wars in the middle east and we didn't pay much attention to what was happening in east asia you want to remember that when george bush ran for president in 2000. i just pointed out that he was not a Wilsonian, so he was a realist.

His main foreign policy argument was that what the United States needs to do is pay more attention to China if you go back and read the night. In Condoleezza Rice's January-February 2000 article you'll see it very clearly, so when Bush came to power it looked like we were going to focus on dealing with China, of course he comes to power in January 2001 and then you have 11 of September. and that is the beginning of the forever wars and the United States has remained stuck in the Middle East ever since and is only now beginning to pay serious attention to East Asia.

Hillary Clinton started with the pivot to Asia, which of course was in 2011. but even then we were still involved in the forever wars because 2011 is the beginning of the Arab Spring and that takes us to, you know, Syria, Libya, God knows. where else, so we haven't focused enough on East Asia and I think Pompeo's visit. Do you know an indicator that is starting to change significantly regarding China? China has been an Asian power. This is mainly focused on East Asia, but the Chinese want to be a global superpower. I hope you understand well, you are building a blue country. water navy they want to project power throughout the planet, you understand that the Chinese get 25% of their oil from the Persian Gulf and if you talk to the Chinese behind closed doors they will tell you that they are going to build a navy that can protect their maritime lines of communication between their east coast and between the persian gulf, that's why the indians think the indian ocean is so worried about the chinese right, which is why the chinese are starting to expand.

Belton Road is part of that and your navy blue is a part of that and the question is what are they going to be able to do here in east asia and I think almost everywhere else the united states is going to try to contain them we will do everything We can do everything we can to make sure they don't become a global superpower, and if they do become a global superpower, we will find them on every square inch of the planet in the same way we did with the Soviet Union, although the focus will be primarily here.

Now is as good a time as any to say that. on thursday night cis will host a debate at canberra's hyde hotel in front of 550 people, believe it or not, debate between

john

misheimer and hugh white, who some say is australia's leading strategic thinker hugh white will debate on thursday night john and his point of view reflects the views of many business people in this country that Australia has obviously become a much more prosperous place in the last 20 years thanks to China, you know, they, we, resist the finances Asians, we resisted the global financial crisis more than ten years ago, largely thanks to China, this is the argument that it is our largest trading partner, twice as powerful as a trading partner than Japan.

China is sure to become more powerful, so why should Australia support the United States in a containment strategy against China? Well, what you want to think about is. You could have this intense security competition between these two gorillas and it's going to be centered here in East Asia and you're stuck in the middle. You are not the only country that is stuck in the middle, but you are stuck in the middle. You have to choose which side you want to be on and you understand that if you go with the Chinese then you are our enemy and we point our weapons at you, you understand that you are right, or you are clever, this is, this is zero.

In short, you are either with us or against us, so what are you saying because of all this economic prosperity? I don't deny anything Tom said. I completely understand that China has been very good to you and that you would do it. I would love to perpetuate this endless situation. You would be crazy if I don't understand it but what I'm telling you is those days are over you have to choose and if you choose to ally with China against the United States there is a bitter security competition you are our enemy that is one point second point is that this It's really a choice between security and prosperity and the question you have to ask yourself is if China dominates East Asia, what will life be like for you and I would say for any of you who think it won't be that bad you should go to Latin America and talk with all those countries in Central and South America and ask them what it is like to live in the Western Hemisphere with the United States as the regional hegemon. and most of those people don't like America at all and would be very happy if America disappeared as a regional hegemon and I think that would be the case if China dominated Asia.

I think you don't want that. You would prefer that the United States protect you and prevent China from dominating Asia even though it will have economic costs. Well, the next question a few years ago it was popular to talk about a strange East Asian country called China and India, because if China and India was some kind of united disaster that was missing against the United States now these days India seems to be totally out of date where does india play any role in any future order? It's very simple India is with the Americans right in India it has two big problems with China the first problem is the border problem in the Himalayas, remember? two years ago they almost came to blows over that border dispute and fought a war in the early 1960s over this issue and secondly, as I mentioned a few minutes ago The Indian Ocean has been there for a long time, Indians live in fear for the Chinese to build a blue water navy and project power in the Indian Ocean.

One of the main reasons why relations between India and the United States are so good today is not because they are both democracies, it is because Indians fear the Chinese and Indians are interested in having some kind of alliance with the United States in order to contain China and I think here in Australia and Japan you see even closer relations with the Indians for the same reason, so the Indians will be with us, there is no doubt about it, I think the Australians they will be with us, there is no doubt about it, the interesting question in my opinion, the interesting cases are myanmar and pakistan, right, you can predict where they will all be and of course russia too but the united states will do everything possible to have myanmar on their side and the chinese are already working on that one on the other side pakistan pakistan looks like they will ally with china the united states will do everything they can to peel the pakistanis away from the chinese and then there are the russians where the americans have foolishly taken the Russians into the arms of the Chinese.

I mean, we need to improve our relations with Russia and get the Russians on our side and otherwise I won't do it. go into this in detail, it is Iran, it is crazy to pick a fight with Iran because we are simply driving the Iranians into the arms of the Chinese. I was in Iran in December 2017. You see virtually no American influence and of course we are. mortal enemies of the Iranians, but you see Chinese influence everywhere and the Chinese are going to want a foothold in the Persian Gulf, remember that 25 of their oil comes from the Gulf, so you have to think about countries like Iran, countries like Russia. pakistan and myanmar i think those are the key questions not so much india okay i have a couple more maybe three questions barbara thank you professor meanwhile i grew up in sydney and spent many years in canberra but my gulag at the moment is very stressed out a part of Queensland called Central Queensland and they broke our backs on climate change policy and I'm listening carefully to what you're saying, but I've done a study of UN policy.

I've looked at the agenda. 21 agenda 30 and the Paris agreement on climate change and my question is, when is the UN now largely on the left trying, in the name of climate change, to restructure Western economies and destroy capitalism and shift our wealth to the UN treasury, which is very very inspired by the communist socialist example why the UN is not someone to fear if you asked me to choose whether I fear China or the UN my immediate answer would be I fear the UN more than the UN china well, I think I'll make it easier for you to go to sleep at night by telling you that you don't have to fear the UN regarding climate change without telling you what my opinion is on it, did you see what Donald Trump did regarding the climate agreement?

Paris and see what their views are. about climate change and it's not it's not Trump it's not Trump the people who have told us what climate change is about is uh Cristiano Figueres uh who is promoting the Paris agreement Morris Strong who put his name in the introduction of the agenda 2030 and also dr. ottmar edenhofer, the father of climate change economics, have openly told the world that it is not about the climate, but about a redistribution of global wealth, that is what it is about, nothing to do with the environment, mouth of the horse, that's fine, but it's all like that.

What I say to your question was about the United Nations and you said that you feared the United Nations more than China because of the issue of climate control and the only thing I want to tell you is that the United Nations is not going to get anywhere in climate matter. control if you can't get countries like the United States and China on board, remember I said that these international institutions are created by great powers, the great powers created the UN because of the way great powers create international orders and that those orders work the great powers have to be synchronized and in climate control, the United States is not synchronized with those people that you described, okay, I think we have to thank you a lot, uh, john connor, uh, yes, professor, excuse me if not I am.

Totally polite but with an open Chicago spirit. Yes I love it. I'll say it more directly. Yes. Do you think that your view of the world in terms of realism is in fact anachronistic? You see the world as a one-two pattern. or three perhaps great powers that dictate the peers of the world. Do you think it is at least possible that we are now entering a period of many stars, not just two or three? And the other my other question would be why does Australia have to choose between China and the United States, what's wrong with being nuclear and neutral?

Just regarding the first question, the first question is: am I a dinosaur? And there's no doubt that in the United States and in Western Europe I often feel like a dinosaur, right, and I think especially during the unipolar moment when the liberal hegemony was on the rise, when people like me were treated like dinosaurs and it was very difficult to get an audience, I would just tell you that when I went to China, when I went to Russia and other countries in the world world I realize that I am at home, you know, when I go to China I start most of my You talk about how it's good to be back among my people.

I don't speak a word of Chinese and when I go to China it's one of the few times I'm aware of the fact that I'm American because the culture is very foreign to me and I don't mean that in a negative way, it's just that it's very different, right , but the Chinese are realists to the core. The Russians are realistic to the point.marrow. These people speak my language. That's why you take Vladimir Putin and pit him against Barack Obama. This is Bambi versus Godzilla. degree, which is another way of saying that it is realistic so that people in the West can continue to believe all these crazy liberal ideas about foreign policy with respect.

That's not what I said. What I asked him was the possibility of a multicultural, illiberal, polar world. democracy not liberal order but multipolar instead of one or two followers no, you asked me if I was a dinosaur, that was your first question and I and I loved the question, right, no, he said I was going to ask in the style chicago then your other question, which is a fascinating question, both are great questions, I hope you understand, I love questions. Your second question is, maybe the smartest strategy for Australia is to not pick sides, get a nuclear deterrent and as everyone knows you have a nuclear deterrent, no one will really play games with you for fear that you might use those things if Their survival is threatened. can make that argument correctly, can make that argument, the question to ask is what are the correct economic consequences.

It's pretty clear that neither China nor the US would attack you with military force if you had nuclear weapons, at least in my opinion, but the economic consequences are another matter and so it's complicated in that sense, but I haven't thought about it carefully. in any detail but it is it is an interesting night it could come up on Thursday night look I just want to know your opinion before closing george claude juncker prominent bureaucrat of the European Union said the other day quote that borders are the worst invention ever made by politicians and said on the eve of the European parliamentary elections that voters who support populists are, quote, stupid nationalists.

His answer, yes, which should have been somewhat clear in my presentation, although I did not emphasize it as I usually do due to time constraints. I think nationalism is the most powerful political ideology on the planet just as I was listening to the Australian Foreign Minister speak the other day. During Mike Pompeo's visit, she made it very clear that Australia will do what is best for Australia. interest, right, this is nationalism, you know, she is arguing that it is an Australia first policy, right, as it should be, This is what nationalism is all about and nation states also care a lot about their borders and that's why immigration is such a big problem in Countries like Australia and countries like the United States, I mean I think Trump has benefited greatly from the fact that we can't control our southern border and we have all this illegal immigration.

It's not that Americans are against immigration, they just want it to be legal. Immigration wants that feeling that they can control their borders sovereign states have hard shells around them this goes back to Brexit the British don't like the idea that this city called Brussels can control its destiny nor do they like the fact that all these Poles and romanians can come to britain thanks to the schengen agreement. If you look at the literature on why Brexit won, immigration was up to the task and it wasn't people from the developing world, it was Poles and Romanians from Eastern Europe wanted to control their borders.

This is what got Angela Merkel into big trouble. So in Europe this is part of the liberal agenda. You have these open borders. This is what Yonker represents. Juncker represents the liberal international order. Open borders. nationalism doesn't matter boom and the bottom line is that nationalism will win every time you see it in poland you see it in hungary yes, at the height of the asylum seekers standoff in tampa in 2001 in this country, then the prime minister John Howard famously said: It will determine who comes to this country and the circumstances under which they come. His critics denounced him as nativist and populist, but he actually resonated with many ordinary Australians who just wanted to control immigration, and over the next five years of his leadership, he more than doubled legal immigration, yes, but what Howard was saying It represents what Howard said and his critics said that it represents the clash between liberalism and nationalism, true, they are fundamentally opposed to this issue and open borders can be tolerated to a certain extent. is what they are discovering in Europe, it worked for a while but now that nationalism is coming to the surface and of course someone like Juncker hates this right and will therefore describe anyone who opposes open borders like an ugly nationalist. do that, but I think you lose in the end anyway, which is what's happening now.

I would like to call the president of the independent study center and my colleague Nicholas Moore to take the vote, thank you Nicholas, as you say, we sit at the intersection. of Chinese economic growth and American power, so I think everything you say actually directly influences how we think about the day and obviously what they're going to do. We just saw the market drop three percent, I think. Spending the night on Mall Street as a result of the standoff, I think you're talking about and of course with Mike Pompeo's visit here, very clearly it was about the practicalities of the security relationship between Australia and Australia in the United States and how we respond. with China, so I think on behalf of everyone here, we are absolutely delighted that you have come, Tom, you promised an independent view of the world and certainly you have been very independent and of course your story as Tom went through a independent thinking which, in fact, has been proven to be correct in In terms of this realist approach that is now at the center of independent studies, we obviously believe in independent thinking, so we welcome it.

We also believe in liberal values, as Tom will tell you, we believe in freedom. Actually, we expect probably a little more. We have to hope that the liberal order has really borne enormous fruits for this country and for the world in general and we hope that in some way this realistic point will be overcome that we are at this moment one of the topics that I think about in previous The presentations that you have always left out, I think it is right to assume that China's Chinese growth will continue and I think the big problem for the world today, of course, is not just how nations potentially collide, hopefully not, but in terms. of what will happen to the Chinese economic order and how the liberal order will continue to influence China economically and, of course, that characteristic will influence the international sphere and, in particular, Australia.