How Not to Win the War, but the Peace - Stephen Kotkin | Endgame #174 (Luminaries)

Gorbachev happened, I chose to study Soviet things before Gorbachev. So there I was, Konstantin Chernenko, learning Russian in Leningrad, and then the Gorbachev thing happens. So, one thing after another, I was very lucky, very lucky, but it was not predictable. Looking back, it makes sense. I can tell a story that seems to make sense, but looking ahead I thought, "What was he doing? Where was he going?" And so is life; You have to be prepared to be lucky, you have to perceive these moments of good fortune and take advantage of them and take advantage of them.

So you believe in luck. I am a living embodiment of luck, without a doubt. Hard work; There is no substitute for hard work, but many people work hard, not everyone has good luck, some people have other types of luck. You had quite a few fortunate events before, but you are one of the few who has written so much not only about Stalin but also about Russia, the Soviet Union.Union. What has changed? And I want to put this in the context of how I see so many people not understanding each other. You've written a lot, but what do Americans need to better understand Russia?

This is a problem of large countries. Big countries are so big that they can become absorbed in their own history, and their own history is substantial, it is really big. American history is in line with global history right now. This is not how American history is written for the most part; It is not studied or written as global history, it is studied and written from a kind of internal nationalist and naval vision, even though the effect of the United States on the world is colossal. This is true of the way China works, and to some extent it's true of the way Russia works, although Russia is a little different because she had this giant Eurasian continent included in her story.

The United States had an assimilation approach, so many newcomers became Americans and wanted to be Americans as soon as possible. My generation; I am a fourth generation American. In other words, my ancestors arrived long ago before the First World War. My father is from Belarus, my mother from Poland, but when I found out no one spoke foreign languages. The second generation was already very eager to assimilate, to become as American as possible. And when it arrived to me, there was almost nothing left of the origin story. And so Russia is a little bit different because she adds to the Tatar Khanate and all kinds of other people;

Ukraine, Belarus, the Baltics, the Caucasus. Russia had a much bigger world than just Russia, within Russia, for a long time. It was much more of an Empire in its mentality and composition than the United States or China in terms of its Chineseification in the Chinese case and Americanization in the American case. That doesn't mean they are completely Chinafied or completely Americanized. There is the ability to retain one's own culture, one's own language, and one's own identity within a larger story, but that is much more prominent in the Russian case. But still, it is typical in places like the United States to think that the United States is the world.

And so the American version of English, American institutions, American food, the American way of life, they say that either the whole world is like this or has a desire to be like that. And that's just wrong. The entire world is not like that and has no desire to assimilate into a broader global Americanism. So it's something you have to fight against. You have to go out into the world, you have to live in foreign countries, you have to learn foreign languages, you have to live and learn to think like people who are not Americans, and this applies to any culture, anywhere. world, it's very valuable, and we don't do it enough because America is too big, too autonomous, and sometimes too self-satisfied, we don't encourage it enough.

We encouraged it after we were scared when the Soviet Union sent up the first artificial satellite in 1957, Sputnik, a couple of years before I was born. And then the United States panicked and invested massively in trying to understand the rest of the world. That was really beneficial for several generations, but now we need it again, we need that push again, where we all want to send our young people so that in the formative years they begin to understand how big the world is and how it is necessary to have empathy with the way how other people live, work and think and their points of view.

We lack empathy. Empathy is the hardest thing to achieve. - Yes, you've been talking about that. - But it is the most powerful. Is that feasible? The ability to send a group of citizens from one country to the rest of the world and vice versa? Sure, it's possible. It just doesn't happen. You're right, it doesn't happen naturally. It doesn't just happen automatically or organically, you have to be proactive, you have to encourage it. So both of my kids are in college now and I try to let them find their own path, not use them as guinea pigs for the disappointments in my life and force them to do some of the things I didn't or didn't do. make them do exactly what I did.

Therefore, encourage them, facilitate them, but do not impose them. But it turns out that one of my sons, who is double majoring in chemistry and economics, decided that he wanted to go to France. He learned French at university and went to France to study abroad. He now speaks French, loves French culture, and understands America much better as a result, and our daughter, who is two years younger than him, who is into visual arts, anime, poetry, creative writing, has a very different, but also She is very enthusiastic about Japanese culture and wants to study in Japan. Now, mind you, my wife has a South Korean passport.

My wife is Korean. So the kids grew up in Korean school and Korean culture on the weekends, they went to Korean school and were introduced to K-pop and other influences besides the language. - And K-dramas. - Yes. And my wife was chief curator of the Korean art section at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, so she did a series of really gigantic exhibitions related to Korea, and we invited Psy from Gangnam Style, and the kids met Psy and they recorded videos with him. . So they had some international influence, but they still took the initiative themselves, like my son to do the French things and my daughter to do the Japanese things, and we think that makes them much better Americans and a much deeper understanding of the United States.

We travel with them as much as we can. Tourist trips. I'm usually invited to give a talk or attend a conference, and my wife comes to work at the museum, and the kids come along just to see what that culture is like. So we've done some family trips that way, opening up perspectives but not telling them they should do this or that, but showing them what's possible. And that's why we think that it can be done. Of course, we have resources now. When I was growing up, we weren't rich and I was a working-class kid, and the first time I traveled abroad was a subsidized language study trip to Vienna when I was in grad school at Berkeley, where they paid my way into study. at the Goethe-Institut in Austria to study German.

But now that I worked very hard and was lucky and was rewarded, we have some resources to be able to travel, and my children started traveling abroad long before me, but now as part of their studies. It's really exciting and we can do more of that. it's important to bring it here and have it available within American culture, and we have a gigantic population of immigrants, green card holders, foreign students, and it's indispensable to our economy, and I would say, indispensable to our way of life. But we also need Americans on the scene, and especially those who will have decision-making capacity, officials and positions of authority.

It's not just about having passports, staying in a luxurious five-star hotel and spending a couple of days there talking to brilliant people who earned PhDs from Harvard, MIT or LSC. Not that kind of foreign trips. Let them go to the towns, to the trenches and all that. Yes. See how the transportation system works, see what the school system is like, see how ordinary people live with their families around the world, how they think and what their aspirations are. You alluded to a Sam Cooke song "Don't Know Much About History", I have the feeling that nowadays children tend to communicate through social networks among themselves, unlike their predecessors, the 107 thousand millions of people. who have died.

We call that history. Isn't it worrying that children today don't study history like you or most of your peers did? We have many complaints that our young people do not know history. And then I say, "Well, whose fault is it? Is it their fault or is it our fault as history teachers?" We have to do better. We have to teach a story; we have to write history and teach it in a way that attracts their attention. It's up to us, not them. You complain until you're blue in the face, walking around the Stanford campus, or they don't know anything about history.

Well, do something about it; Teach them some history, but in a way that sparks their curiosity, sparks their desire to learn more when you're no longer there. So I'm not complaining about people not knowing the history, I'm trying to be a doer about it. But that is true not only for our young people, but also for people in positions of authority. What I have discovered in my travels and in my consulting capacity with officials in the public or private sector is that the demand for history is really high. It's not a demand problem, it's really a supply problem.

When I go to Washington or other government institutions, our Five Eyes allies are all dying to hear the story from my mouth. That's all they ask me; history, how it happened last time or what the lessons are, what we can learn from previous episodes. So the demand for history in government sectors is huge, the same thing I discovered in the private sector. Well, sometimes history is financial history, economic history, tech people want to know how innovation works, they want to know the history of technology and the history of science, so the demand is off the charts, they just don't we are supplying the The big picture story, the tour of the horizon, the connecting of the dots, the story that is exciting and gives you an idea of ​​how the world works now and where it might be going, what the drivers of change are.

History never tells you what the future will be, no one can do that. But what history can say is that the present is not going to last, that things are going to change because that has happened many times. Anyone who lived in China in the 1960s or 1970s would think that China was going to be the second largest economy in the world, the GDP per capita was 200 dollars a year under Mao (Zedong). And if you had projected that forward, you would have looked like a fool because the China that developed was nothing like that period in which people lived.

So you have to do that with your own time period, with your own set of institutions, with the reality that seems permanent, because it's the reality that you live in and you have to say, "It's very likely to change." I don't know how it's going to change, but it's going to change and so let's be prepared for the changes, maybe even try to shape them in some way. And so what are the levers of power, the levers of agency writ large? How do you affect change? Not giving a lecture, giving a speech that something should happen, but how could it happen? and if you understand the drivers of change, then the story is truly empowering for the agency.

Yes, there are often perverse and unintended consequences, you think you are trying to invent one kind of world and you get the opposite result because you don't understand it. How non-linear causality works and these perverse and unintentional consequences are obtained, of course. but nevertheless history is enormously empowering if you take it seriously and study it well to understand power and therefore how to intervene, and not assume and project forward. So if we take the climate models or the economic growth models, all of those models have built in assumptions that are then projected forward 20 years, 30 years, 40 years, and we know that those projections are nonsense because if we look at the models Previous projections were generally wrong.

The United Kingdom's ambassador to Germany in the 1920s. So, Germany is a great power, the United Kingdom is the greatest power in the world in the 1920s, and this ambassador is not a stupid guy and writes this report that Adolf Hitler is finished as a politician. He has finished. He is finished. And a few years later, he is Chancellor of Germany, not because the Ambassador was a moron, but because the Ambassador was projecting himself forward from the circumstances in which he lived, without understanding broader dynamics at work that became visible retrospectively, and then how can you See any of that prospectively, right?

Once again there is contingency, there is accident, there isa lot of things you didn't think were going to happen and then they happen, right? I like how you've always compared yourself to the economist, who always used the assumption that everything else remains equal. Economics is a very powerful profession. I really like economics. I studied economics. I have many friends who are economists, their models are very impressive but they always have that line, just like you said, Gita. All other factors remained in a constant coma and then you are ready to compete with this economic model. In geopolitics nothing remains constant.

And so we have this political advice that goes like this: Economists are dominant. Economists have the ears of officials, economists have the ears of policymakers, and one day bad things happen and everyone discovers that people are not maximizing utility, they are murdering each other. And then geopolitics comes in again, right? And suddenly it's 24/7 geopolitics, geopolitical risk and all kinds of great power rivalry, this and that, and economists for a while get overshadowed because we're not maximizing utility, we're having a war or there is a pandemic. or whatever. But that is also wrong; that is another extreme.

So economics is really important; prosperity, commerce, opportunities. So it's

peace

and prosperity, it's geopolitics and economics, and we can't allow one to obscure the other just because it seems to be a happy time or just because it seems to be an unhappy time. So I try to keep a balanced perspective knowing that it is never as good as people say, it is never as bad as people say, economics is just as important as geopolitics even when that doesn't seem to be the case and vice versa. I want to take you to the present. And we talked about this a few months ago.

It is about the issue of Ukraine. You have stated several times the importance of winning

peace

instead of winning war. Talk about it. All wars aim to win peace. Wars are generally a miscalculation; They usually don't turn out the way people hope or expect, and they rarely offer the advantages that people who start them think they do. But it is not war itself, but peace that you should focus on. So, for example, the United States won the war in Afghanistan, but then we lost the peace. I think it's pretty clear that we drove out the Taliban very quickly, helped form another alternative political system in Afghanistan, but over time, the Taliban came back and we lost the peace.

Iraq is a little more ambiguous; We certainly won the war, it seems that we lost the peace, although in time we will see. In Vietnam, the United States lost the war and won the peace. Vietnam is a remarkably pro-American country, as you know, despite the atrocities that Americans committed there. Vietnam has this incredible museum of American atrocities. It's really moving to see that that museum made a big impression on me. And at the same time, people were incredibly warm to me as an American, the same to the South Koreans, and the South Koreans, as you know, were on the American side in that horrible war in Vietnam.

And that's really interesting. Not only can you win a war and lose the peace, but you can also lose a war and win the peace. So how is peace achieved in Ukraine? That was my question from the beginning. I understand that we need to talk about the war, and I have talked about the war, but what will happen after the war? Is there an after-war? How should it be? And so how should we define victory in war if our goal is to achieve peace? Thus, Ukraine defined a victory as the recovery of all of its internationally recognized territory, which is now under Russian occupation; war crimes tribunals for those who launched aggression against Ukraine; and reparations for all damage caused in Ukraine.

So, that's completely understandable on an emotional level. At the level of justice, what Russia has done is criminal aggression under international law. But to achieve those war goals, to achieve a victory defined in that way, you have to take Moscow to impose that kind of peace. So Ukraine is not going to take Moscow and therefore that version of victory is simply not achievable. As much as it is understandable on an emotional level, it is not possible to achieve it in reality. So what is a better definition of victory? A better definition of victory, at least for me, now remember that we are sitting here in an office at Stanford University, Palo Alto, California.

We are not under bombing, we have not killed our children, our husbands, our brothers, our sisters, aunts and uncles. Here we are not victims of rape and atrocities. So it's much easier for us to talk about the war in Ukraine than it is for Ukrainians who live it day to day, as we sit here and talk. But I think we can talk about peace or a victory when Ukraine enters the European Union and Ukraine gets some kind of security guarantee. Now, why does Ukraine need to enter the European Union? Well, because it needs that mechanism of accession to the European Union to transform its internal institutions; move from a poorly institutionalized, weakly institutionalized and extremely corrupt state to something more like a European state with rule of law, open society, free and open media and prosperity, because Ukraine is remarkably poor by European standards.

And then a security guarantee so that Ukraine, if it is rebuilt, will not be destroyed again. What would that accession process be like? What would the security guarantee be like? I think they are worthy of debate and they need to be debated and they are being debated, so that is very positive. But to get to that path an armistice is needed. You need the fighting to stop. That is, it is not necessary to recover all of its territory to begin the process of accession to the European Union, the transformation of the institutions, the reconstruction of the country in a new economy and with some security measures.

It would be better if they got their territory, but it would be much better if they started the process with an armistice to get the Ukraine that Ukrainians need. Ukraine needs Ukraine. Russia does not need Ukraine, it already has Russia. And so, taking all the territory of Ukraine that you can control and transforming it into a European country, joining the West is how we would put it. Ukraine wants to join Europe, that is why it opposed the internal tyrants in 2004-2005, that Orange Revolution; That is why they overthrew the internal dictator in 2013/2014, Yanukovych, who fled to Russia.

They risked their lives to join Europe before Russia took Crimea and then the full-scale invasion of February 2022. So I think that means how do you get an armistice, how do you get to that point where you can start that? process, that is a better definition of victory and that is how peace is won. So if we look at the Korean Peninsula, of course the result is very unsatisfactory; It's just an armistice, it's not a peace treaty. Technically they are still at war, but there is no large scale fighting. Yes, families were separated, some never saw each other again because the border was closed.

And yes, North Korea does a lot of things that South Koreans consider provocations, so it's unsatisfying. But still, on the other side of that demilitarized zone, with the umbrella of American Security, in the absence of a peace treaty, they obtained an umbrella of American Security. They built or rebuilt one of the most successful societies on the planet, as you know, South Korea. It's incredibly impressive what they did. Again, it is not perfect, it is not satisfactory; It would have been much better to get a peace treaty. But hey, look what they have achieved. And so an outcome like that for Ukraine would be a miracle and it would be a gift and it wouldn't necessarily involve Ukraine acknowledging the loss of territory.

South Korea does not recognize that the Korean Peninsula is divided forever, quite the opposite, but in the meantime they are rebuilding. . He has mentioned the EU but he has not mentioned NATO, and he has talked about the bilateral plus in the context of Ukraine. Yes. So right now what is on the table for a security guarantee for Ukraine is not a treaty in which someone else will come to Ukraine's aid if it is attacked, but a promise to arm Ukraine and allow it to defend itself. What is happening now during the war on an ad hoc basis could be institutionalized.

That's the guarantee they're talking about. The next level would be some kind of treaty, probably not with NATO because NATO works by consensus, and there is no consensus to extend the Article 5 security guarantee to Ukraine while it is still at war or even if the war ends. We are not sure there is such a consensus, so we have to live in the world we live in. Sure, Ukraine would love to be in NATO, and sure, many NATO officials have made promises to Ukraine, but is that so? feasible? And if it is not feasible, what do we do then?

And so some kind of security guarantee with the United States would have to be sold to the American people in the same way that South Korea's, Japan's, Australia's, would have to be supported by the American people. sold by them. That has not happened yet, but it could also be added to if it happened with others. That's why I call it plus bilateral. For example, Poland might want to join, for example the Baltic States, Estonia, Latvia, Lithuania, maybe one or two of them would like to join, maybe the Scandinavians would like to join. So it is a kind of proto-version of full NATO, more than what South Korea has, which is a lot, but less than full NATO.

So that would be a big step forward, we're not there yet, we would have to prepare the American public and the American Congress, especially the Senate, to ratify a treaty like that. We are a long way from that now, but let's at least discuss these terms publicly so that people understand how Ukraine could achieve peace. You think of Crimea. Crimea internationally recognized Ukrainian territory because in 1991, when the Soviet Union dissolved, it was part of Ukraine, it had been since 1954. Well, does it make sense for Crimea to return to Ukraine to win the peace? First of all, how would they get it back?

You would have to accept it because Russia has it. People say this is like Munich in 1938 if you give Crimea to Russia, and I say, "Well, Hitler was given the Sudetenland of Munich in 1938." I didn't have it yet; They gave it to them without any compensation. Putin has taken Crimea; Nobody gives it to him. He has it now, and if he can't retire it, it's his potential bargaining chip to get a bigger deal. What's more, if you try to get it back and you succeed, what does that do for you? It gives you a bad option about the need, perhaps for ethnic cleansing.

There are now 2.5 million ethnic Russians in Crimea. Are they going to eliminate them all through ethnic cleansing? Otherwise, there are 2.5 million Russians within their state who may not want to live inside Ukraine and could be available for Moscow-manipulated insurgency or sabotage by the Kremlin, so incorporating Crimea back into Ukraine could be detrimental to its EU accession process, for example. its security guarantee, for its overall stability, also incentivizes the regime in Moscow, whether it's Putin's or the next one or the next one or the next one, it incentivizes the Russian rulers to come back and do this again and get it done. back because Crimea was part of the Russian Empire since Catherine the Great since 1783, and for Russia it is mother's milk, and it is difficult to see how they would accept the loss of Crimea.

Therefore, it has all kinds of possible negative consequences for Ukraine. The final argument that Crimea makes is that, well, if they don't take back Crimea, Russia can use it to attack Ukraine, and that's true, that's what they're doing now. But Russia can use Russian territory bordering Ukraine to attack Ukraine even without Crimea, and it is also possible to demilitarize Crimea even if it was not taken back through some kind of deal. So you have to win the peace and you have to think of all the ways that you will not encourage this to happen again or you will not have an insurgency within your country that is more or less permanent, or you will not engage in ethnic cleansing because Ethnic cleansing is not a ticket to enter the European Union, minority rights are, but Russia can manipulate those rights in the opposite direction.

So this is complex; It's fraud. Understandably, there are a lot of emotions involved in this, and I'm not trying to downplay all those dimensions, I'm just trying to say how we can achieve peace so that we don't have an endless war, a permanent war. war, a renewal of war, but instead we have a stable Ukraine that can aspire to become something like the success of South Korea. I want to move on to China, but first I want to reference your earlier statement that a transatlantic alliance could be considered a pivot to Asia. - Yes. Explain it to some of us in Southeast Asia to understand it better.

So a lot of people in the United States were talking about a pivot to Asia, which is an absurd concept because the United States has been an Asian power for a long time, has huge financial investments inall of Asia, including Southeast Asia, where it is simply a colossal investor, technology transfer, exchange between people as we talked about before. The United States is already deeply immersed in Asia, but the shift toward Asia was intended to be a transfer of some of the Middle East's resources to the Indo-Pacific. So, that was the intention, and that also implied that maybe Europe should take care of itself and the United States should not expand the scale of resources, especially military, with NATO.

Why can't Europe defend its rich countries? And so the notion of pivoting to Asia became tied to a kind of Zero Sum, let's take it from here and put it there, because we have limited resources, the world is changing, we have deficits, we have internal demands, we can no longer be everywhere in the same scale. So, it's understandable, but it turned out that the war in Ukraine galvanized the United States and its allies, galvanized/resurrected NATO and the EU, and also brought Europe and the United States much closer together on China policy because China, as you know , initially rhetorically and now more than rhetorically has supported Russia's war effort.

And so the Europeans had been trying to distance themselves to some extent from the United States on China policy. China and the United States were going to be two great antagonistic powers; one was the status quo power, another the rising power, it was inevitable that there would be friction, but hey, we are Europe, we don't like conflict, we love trade, so let's distance ourselves from the US and have a closer relationship friendly. look towards China and have mutual enrichment, trade with China. And then they discovered that, well, geez, dependence on Russian energy blew up in their faces, maybe it's not so good to be so intertwined with an authoritarian regime that mistreats its people at home and therefore might behave in the exterior in a similar way as it does. behaves at home; exert influence, intimidate, coerce, deceive, undermine the rules-based order.

So the Europeans became much closer to the Americans in China policy as a result of the resurgence of transatlanticism brought about by Russia's aggression against Ukraine and Ukraine's ingenious and courageous resistance against Russia. So Ukraine gave a gift to Europe, it gave a gift to the United States, which was a resurgence of the institutional West that turns out to be really important for US-China policy. So the turn to Asia was the resurgence of transatlanticism because Germany, France, the United Kingdom and all the others are crucial to any policy towards China. Now, we must remember that the West is not a geographical term;

It is an institutional term. Russia is a European country culturally, but is not Western institutionally, while Japan is not culturally European, but is Western institutionally. Japan looks like a Western country institutionally. This applies to the former colonies of Japan, South Korea and Taiwan; goes through Australia; and one could argue that it is appropriate for Indonesia. It's a little more complicated there, but you know better than me. But there is a broader non-geographic West that is institutional, that is a like-minded rule of law club, open economies, open societies, democracies in the sense that they feel they have a lot in common, whether they are culturally European or not, and many of them are not.

And it's really valuable to have that. While Russia, China and Iran are not institutionally Western nor in terms of values ​​do they identify with the West. They are ancient Eurasian civilizations, land empires with a millennium or, in the Chinese case, claiming to have five millennia of history before today. And so there is a big difference in that non-geographic institutional West where if you are going to confront China it is good to have friends and allies, and it is good to have the most successful countries and the countries that share your values ​​and institutions, be your friends and allies.

I agree that we have to share the planet with China. China has been here for a long time and will continue to be here for a long time to come; It is simply an extraordinary civilization. Her achievements are impressive. My wife worked for 15 years in the Asian art department at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, and I used to take the kids to pick up Mom after work, I used to go alone to meet my wife at the Metropolitan Museum, and she's in the Asian art department, and I have to tell you that it is simply stunning to see it every day over and over again, there is more and more to discover even if you have seen it every day for 15 years.

So China just takes your breath away. We have to share the planet with China, that's not the point, right? The ocean is wet. We have to share the planet with China. The question is what the terms are for sharing the planet and how we negotiate those terms to preserve free and open societies, the rule of law and the institutional West that accounts for our peace and prosperity. Yes, we make a lot of mistakes. Yes, there are many policies and actions that could be criticized, from that Vietnam War to many others that could be named. There is much agony arising from mistakes, and more than mistakes on the western side.

It is very imperfect but we live in a world of reality where what is the best alternative. Is it better to hold the West to its promises, or is it better to undermine the Western order and get something else that is perhaps more coercive, more hierarchical, less free and open? That's why I'm all for sharing the planet, I just want to negotiate the terms and I want to have the influence to negotiate those terms so that we can defend our values ​​and institutions while sharing the planet. We can recognize China's greatness, we can recognize China's achievements, but we don't want to live under Xinjiang, we don't want to live through what happened in Hong Kong, we don't want that to happen in places outside of China because China has enormous influence and power as result of its commercial success.

We want to push back, not against commercial success, we want to share that commercial success because in many cases it is beneficial for everyone. We want to reject China's use of that commercial influence to impose a different world order that is suitable for an authoritarian regime and that is safe or safer for an authoritarian regime, but not for the kinds of values ​​and institutions that we hold dear. You have expressed this opinion that would have been slightly different from Kissinger's approach to China in the early 1970s. In retrospect, how do you think the United States could have done it differently so that the two largest countries or economies in the world world share the planet a little better?

I mean, you've given a description of some of the things that should have been instilled in the process. Hindsight is much easier than foresight, and being a critic from an office at Stanford is much easier than being Secretary of State or National Security Advisor, where you have imperfect information, an avalanche of unpredictable events, a lot of pressure from interest groups. interest and negotiations. it's hard. So we have to be careful not to be the kind of lab critics where we know better, we are smarter, when the time comes, things have happened. I would simply put it this way: America is much stronger than we think.

We are simply much more powerful than we think, and we also have many friends, and our friends are incredible, they are very capable, they have incredible achievements and they are willingly our friends; We don't force them to be our friends. This is how we have to approach China. We have to approach China with a sense of confidence in ourselves and our strengths, not with arrogance, not with arrogance, but with a sense of our own influence and confidence in ourselves why we are successful, what contributes to our success and encourage it, but also with our friends and allies along the way.

A bilateral agreement between the United States and China will not benefit us because we need the strength of our friends and partners to be taken into account in those negotiations, in those agreements and in that sharing of the planet. The whole point of the American World Order is that it provides opportunities to others, not just Americans. That's what we have to reinforce, that's the message, and therefore our friends and partners have to be in that room, and our actions can be unilateral; We have to understand what the effects are for our friends and partners, as well as for those who are not yet our friends and partners but who may want to be one day.

So, self-confidence plus humility, a bigger room rather than just a bilateral room, and making sure we don't undermine the interests of our friends and partners in the deals we might make as bilateral superpowers. And that is much more difficult; It requires more work, more patience, more knowledge, more conversations not only with the Chinese but with everyone, to understand what the effects could be, whether in Indonesia, Japan, Germany, Brazil, South Africa or anywhere else. can name. , United Arab Emirates, we could add in many many other places. We have to understand the secondary and tertiary effects, we have to understand the aspirations of those places and sometimes we have to make trade-offs.

Stephen, I know you have to go, but I have two questions. The first is regarding the unfortunate event that recently took place in Western Asia. You've talked about how the Middle East could be the battleground between China and the United States, right? And the second question is regarding this perception of this growing hegemony of China with respect to Southeast Asia, which is something inevitable. I'm just curious to know what you think regarding these two situations. Once again, we must be careful to understand places on their own terms; what their challenges are, what their aspirations are, we can't refract it all through the United States and China.

In other words, let's have a conversation with Saudi Arabia because it is important for China's policy. No, let's have a conversation with Saudi Arabia or have a conversation with Indonesia or have a conversation with ASEAN because it is important in itself, not solely or even predominantly because of its implications between China and the United States. I think that's a mentality that we sometimes fail at and that we have to overcome. The other thing I would say in response to your question is that we cannot be naïve about China's aspirations. They want a world that works for China, which means one that works for an authoritarian regime that does not threaten or undermine a regime that lacks a mandate with its own people, does not undergo regular elections, and imposes censorship.

For them, the world is dangerous right now because the United States and its friends have a different system that appeals not only to our populations but also to the Chinese people. And, of course, Taiwan has an alternative model of government under the Chinese language. They are not considered ethnic Chinese, nor mainland, they are considered predominantly Taiwanese, but it is still an important alternative model of how a Chinese-speaking entity could govern itself. That's why we must remember that the more influence the Chinese gain from trade relationships, the more interdependent we become with them; The greater influence they can have on our systems, our sovereignty, our institutions, our interest groups.

We are free and open societies and they can take advantage of that. And that's why we must be careful to protect our sovereignty, protect our institutions, our way of life, our well-being, while we benefit from trade relationships. So, once again, it is not understood that the Chinese are gaining influence over us through trade relationships that they can choose to use and in some cases they are already choosing. So, I am totally in favor, to conclude, of sharing the planet, I am totally in favor of establishing business links where everyone wins. But what are the terms? Are the terms reciprocity?

Are the terms free and open? Are the terms really a win-win? Or are the terms more coercive, more influence buying, more subversion, more turning the world in a direction that is safer for an authoritarian regime and corrosive to democratic rule of law regimes? Anyway, thank you very much for your time. - It's really a pleasure talking to you. - Thank you very much Esteban. I have many more questions, but maybe next time. We will visit it again for sure. It is a great pleasure to have you here at Stanford, Gita, and to increase interest and understanding of Southeast Asia here in the United States. - Thank you.

That was Stephen Kotkin of Stanford University. Thank you.