This podcast is brought to you by the Albany Public Library main branch and the generosity of listeners like you. What is a podcast? God daddy, these people talk as much as you do! Razib Khan's Unsupervised Learning.
Hey, everybody this is Razib with the Unsupervised Learning podcast. And today I am going to be talking to Jacob Shapiro, Director of geopolitical analysis at Cognitive Investments. So, Jacob, I think most of the people in the audience, and listening will know what geopolitical means. And they will probably know why I am talking to you at this moment. The first question I want to ask is, you know, you're a person who looks at things through a geopolitical lens. Can you talk about that lens in detail in terms of the method, I just give a general sense what geopolitics is, like? Obviously, it's one of those things that people think they know about, because the word is pretty straightforward. But can you unpack that a little bit for the audience?
Sure, I think it's not, I don't think it's actually a straightforward as you're, as you're selling it, but credit to your readers if they know exactly what I'm about to hear. And this is more of a rehash than anything new for them. I have found that geopolitics has really become well, in some ways, it's in sort of a passive way. It's a synonym for international relations that, you know, the Wall Street Journal or other newspapers throw - throw in as sort of a fancy word to signal to the audience that they know what- what they're it's talking about. geopolitics, also over time has also been imbued with various ideological components, both good and bad, depending on your point of view. For me, geopolitics is really a descriptive, I hesitate to call it a social science, but it's a descriptive, aspirational social science. And it comes out of really 19th century European thought. And it's crucial to understand that background because geopolitics really emerges when nation states are emerging out of the Industrial Revolution, because for the first time, you're getting these large political communities that aren't multinational empires ruled by emperors or kings with divine right and smooshing together a bunch of different ethnic groups. Instead, what you're getting are these nation states that are starting to congeal along various principles like nationalism or liberalism, you have communism and fascism that come after that. And geopolitics is basically trying to describe so what happens when these states behave in the same globalized international system? And it it really tries to strip away all of the ideology and all of the -isms of the time and treat states like biological organisms. So you want to identify what are the things that states absolutely need in order to survive. also define really clearly what states can't do. Because if a state can't do something, it doesn't matter what they say they're going to do, and then try and figure out from there, what is possible and how states are going to go going forward. For me, also, I should, I should also just say, like, there are a lot of geopolitical forecasters who treat geopolitics like almost like a magic eight ball, like a determine - deterministic tool that sort of to crudely simplify, there's a river here, and there's a mountain here, and this demographic profile looks like crap. Therefore, this is the future. I'm very much not that I'm very much - geopolitics is just one of a number of different tools that you have to try and use to understand international relations. Sometimes, it helps, and it usually helps when you have more zero sum situations like this Russia Ukraine war that's happening right now, sometimes geopolitics is not how things go. The sort of period from 1990 91 until 2016, was really more of a unipolar world where economics was really driving things. And if you didn't understand things like globalization and trade, you were probably going to miss a lot of what was going on. So I'll stop there and ask you to pick at me and we can talk more about it.
So how does what you're talking about here relate to, you know, realism, liberal internationalism, you know, or something like, you know, Neo conservatism understood in the foreign policy context?
Yeah, that's a great question. And the simple answer is that geopolitics is descriptive. It is not trying to make an argument in favor of one thing or another. So realism, liberal internationalism, neoconservatism, those are all about what Foreign Policy a country - and those are all specifically about American foreign policy, but in the context of American foreign policy, those are all things about arguing what the United States should be doing. So if you're a realist, and realism maps on most closely to geopolitics. A realist, doesn't have time for ideology, and soft power and all these other things just thinks about naked national interest and then thinks the United States should behave in a way to further its national interest defined that way. Neoconservatives like to, or the neoconservative twist is to say that no ideology actually matters. So if Iraq was a democracy, democracies would align more with the United States. And that would be good for the United States, it was good for us to spread democracy throughout the world, because that's a good policy for the United States liberal internationalism, also a foreign policy, prescription. So geopolitics is descriptive. And those those approaches that you talked about, they might use some of the lessons of geopolitics, but at the end of the day, they are producing prescriptive ideas, things that governments are going to try to put into action. Whereas geopolitics wants to none of that just wants to describe what's going on.
So it's, it's like a tool for understanding. And those frameworks use the tool.
Exactly. And realism uses geopolitics as a tool more than probably any of the other typical or traditional American foreign policy approaches. But I will say this is one of the dangers of geopolitics, because as you can imagine, that line can get very blurred sometimes. So one of the reasons geopolitics went out of style, after World War Two was because the Germans really liked the idea of geopolitics. And they used it to justify a lot of what they were doing in Eastern Europe, they talked about, I mean, for instance, the Nazis talked about the German state as a biological organism that needed to expand so that the German people could expand and colonize parts of Eastern Europe. And they bastardize geopolitics and used it as a way to justify a lot of what they were doing. And you see that all the time where people take the descriptive aspect of geopolitics, and then map on whatever they're arguing for, and try and put them in relation together. And that's the hardest part of being geopolitically disciplined. And you really have to leave all of that at the door, I would never tell you that I'm a perfectly objective person. Nobody is. But when I put on the geopolitics hat, and I'm trying to understand what's going on in the world, my opinions are worthless, I try and check them at the door as much as possible, because they really only serve to confuse me or to stop me from understanding what's really going on in front of me.
So you mentioned the Germans - is geopolitics is it as a framework, a method, a school that is widely used abroad, or is it mostly American?
Well, it started as mostly European. And it sort of had a lot of acolytes in the early part of the 20th century, as I said, it kind of went out of style. But from Europe, it has spread around the world, one of the places where geopolitics ironically, is most robust or has one of the largest intellectual or academic communities around it is in South America, which you wouldn't know because a lot of those writers are actually only writing in Spanish or Portuguese. But there's actually a pretty well defined tradition of geopolitics. In South America, geopolitics in the United States is relatively fringe, to be honest with you. Like I said, the realist school uses geopolitics as a tool. But geopolitics has really only become fashionable in the United States. I would say in the last two decades. I always joke that when I first started at Stratfor, which was this geopolitical private intelligence firm, I started there back around the time of the Arab Spring, and I had just moved to Austin, Texas, and Austin, Texas was just beginning to blow up at the time, it was not the sort of crazy booming city that it is now. And you know, I'd go to a bar or something. And I'd try and impress somebody by saying, oh, yeah, I work at a geopolitical intelligence Think Tank. And most people would glaze over, because that word didn't even mean anything to them 10 years ago, that's starting to change. Now, suddenly, I'm a hot commodity. And suddenly, people want to talk to me because that word has entered the zeitgeist. But I would actually say that in a US context, it's only recent that it's become more of a mainstream thing. And then to your point, also one of the ... and this is one of the dangers of using geopolitics, and why I think it's so important to remember that it came out of a European context. Asian countries like China and India, they understand geopolitics, they think about it, but they have very different approaches, and start with very different assumptions about what it means to be in a political community and how different political community should behave. So one of the hardest things to do. For me when using geopolitics, is how do you take this tool that was really born of Europe at a very particular point in time and get rid of those things, but still use it to understand how a nation that is developed in a completely different process is going to behave? I think the lessons still work and a lot of the things that geopolitics does can communicate to you what different types of nations in different parts of the world do but just by definition, China's going to value certain things from a survival or national security perspective than Germany would then Argentina would. So understanding that none of these are apples to apples comparisons, even though you're using some of the same tools and frameworks, this is where this becomes almost a three dimensional type thing rather than a two dimensional. You know, there's geography and I'm gonna move some pushpins around on a map.
Yeah, I want to, I want to circle back to China, India and the global context. But first, let's - let's talk about Europe, specifically Eastern Europe. Like most Americans, I think, you know, I'm going to be... I think most of us did not take the idea of a full scale invasion into Russia. Very seriously, I have seen some surveys and polls that people apparently do know, where Ukraine is on a map probably helps that It's a big country. You know, and I think it's on Risk. So I would like to see that there must be a social science work that shows that, you know, knowledge of where Yakutia is based on the fact that, you know, it's on Risk. The the board game, for those of you who don't understand what I'm alluding to here, but in any case, so you know, we have this situation where I think most of us were not paying attention focused on the Olympics. And then Putin's belligerent bloviation get really real on February 24th. So we have a situation now, where a bunch of European nation states snap to attention and start looking east. And there seemed to be a massive pivot with the sanctions. And I don't know what Poland's doing here. But you know, the refugees are getting out of Ukraine, arms are going into Ukraine. Russia shows up all around the borders, you know, you know, it's coming into areas that you would expect it to the east, first south into Crimea and pushing along the north, you know, and we're all trying to understand what's going on here. And I'm sure people have asked you many questions over the last, you know, weeks or so. How do you understand what is going on with your descriptive toolset?
Well, I can tell you, first of all, that I didn't expect this to happen either. I was not surprised by it. It was one of the possible scenarios that I imagined. But I thought that a full scale invasion scenario like this, I put it at a 30% probability, I actually thought it was going to be more of a 70% probability that Russia was using military and security intimidation on order to get a political settlement. And I still, one of the things that is still confusing about this war to me is, Russia was getting everything it wanted by doing that. i It's hard for me to understand why the Russian government thought that it needed to do this in order to secure its national security goals, because I think even if in the short term, things look a little better from Moscow's perspective, in the long term. They've picked a fight, I don't think they can win. But to define Russia's interests here very simply. And this doesn't matter whether it's Vladimir Putin, whether it's Stalin, whether it's Catherine the Great, Russia's geopolitics and foreign policy, over the last centuries, is actually relatively consistent. And it all goes back to the fact that Russia looks like a really big country, if you look at it on a map, and it is there's a lot of territory there. But most people in Russia, either live around Moscow, or live around the agriculturally fertile areas around the Black Sea. And the unfortunate thing for centuries of Russian strategic decision makers is that that all happens to be on a wide open plane that's called the Northern European plane. And you can literally drive a tank or columns of tanks all the way from Moscow, straight to basically the beaches of Normandy and you're not going to hit many natural borders. So Russia's geopolitics over time. And I think for most of your listeners, you know, we all exist in a world where Russia was always the threat that Russia was going to project into Europe, and cause security problems in Europe. For most of Russia's history, the opposite was true. They always faced threats to Moscow coming from that direction in Europe. So whether it was Nazi Germany in the 20th century, whether it was Napoleon in the century before that, the Swedes at one point invaded Russia and got close to Moscow, the Polish Lithuanian Polish Lithuanian Commonwealth of the 17th century actually made it to Moscow and burned the city. In Moscow's historical memory, or all these episodes of countries invading across that plane, getting to Moscow laying siege, doing all sorts of horrible things. And so the only way that Russia knows to try and fix this situation is to push further into Europe to where you can get some defensible geographic boundaries. And the unfortunate thing for Ukraine is Ukraine's border, terminates at the Carpathian Mountains. And if you just look at a map, it basically shrinks the Northern European plane it doesn't eliminate it, but it shrinks the Northern European plane almost by half. I don't know what the exact percentage is, but suddenly you're dealing with a much smaller corridor to defend. So throw aside The propaganda about is NATO threatening Russia or not, that's all at the ideological political level. But whether and like I said, whether it's Putin all the way back to Catherine, the great, any Russian leader is going to try and push out to the Carpathians and make sure that Russia has, if not a military position there at least enough political influence, so that it doesn't feel like it's facing threats, or is facing threats that it can defend from from that direction. And that's really what this is all about. And whether I think Russia is doing the right thing or not, from, from the perspective of its of its national interest. What's happening here is that Putin and his government decided that they didn't like what they were seeing with the status quo, and that they had to use a military maneuver in order to increase Russia's strategic depth sufficiently in Europe to guarantee national security. And I think that is the fundamental thing that's happening. And that gets lost somewhat in. And I understand why it's getting lost. I'm not saying it's a bad, like, so much stuff is happening. We're seeing all these terrible videos, we're all having feelings about what's going on. But if you're just being very surgical about it, Russia's expanding out to get strategic depth in Eastern Europe, it's a movie we've seen many times.
Yeah. So, you know, just to reiterate what Jacob was saying, if you do look at a relief map of Europe, the border with Carpathians is pretty striking in that area. And, you know, many listeners will have read some of my pieces about the Eurasian steppe. And there's an extension of the step that goes past the Carpathians into the Hungarian plane. But you know, it is a pretty striking physical boundary climatological boundary ecological boundary, it is also has historically been a cultural boundary, because cultural boundaries tend to go along with physical boundaries. So, you know, this is where, you know, the nomads would pretty much like stop, and you know, you had settled populations, Neolithic societies in the area, and, you know, pushing into modern day Moldova. So there's always been action there. And now what Jacob was talking about is okay, now we have lines on a map, the borders, the borders around this region, and strategic depth. I think everyone can understand what that is, and why that's important. You know, there's a hypothesis that the Byzantine Empire survived against the Islamic - the rise of Islam and the Muslim invasions, partly because they had strategic depth that Constantinople, you know, beyond the straits, I think it's the Dardanelles there, but in any case, so, I mean, these are like, these are reasonable, you know, arguments to have and discussions. I think it's I think many people are surprised, confused and perplexed, because they would ask and let me just ask this. It is all fine, fine, and well to talk about the Polish Lithuanian, you know, sack of Moscow. But what are they scared of?
Well, I you have to put yourself in Putins... and it might not be that Putin is scared, it might be that the Russians think that now is an opportune time to press their advantage. They might not actually fear anything. It might be that the fear is just the public justification they're giving for their actions and but that the imperative stays the same. So whether the threat is real or not, we can talk about that. What what is absolutely real, is this Russian imperative to extend its political and security influence to that border. And I think one of the things that Russia saw was that it was not able to rein in Ukraine, Ukraine was moving further and further to the west, the Zelensky government was trying to get in with the EU trying to talk to NATO talking to the US and both administrations, both the Trump and Biden administration wanting to get closer and closer. And I think that Moscow just made the determination that this was no longer a situation that they could really deal with. This also goes back to the 2014 Ukrainian revolution, which at the time, people thought was a sign that Russia was so strong and had returned to, to history. All of this is really a sign of Russian weakness. The Ukrainian revolution was a massive intelligence failure. And Russia's invasion of Ukraine in the last couple of weeks looks like a massive intelligence failure already, it looks like the Russians assumed they were just gonna roll in and do exactly what they had just done in Belarus and Kazakhstan to Ukraine. So what are they scared of? Look, they're scared of Ukraine, turning to the west, and them not being able to do anything about that. I also think, and this I can credit, my buddy Marco Papic for this idea. He, he put up a chart of when oil prices have kind of gone up in the last 30 years. And every time oil prices reach a spike, or natural gas prices reach a spike, he saw that Russia basically did something aggressive and its near abroad, whether it was Georgia 2008. Or if you go back and look at the things that Russia has done, it always seems to coincide with high energy prices. And I think that might be the other component of this. I think that Putin and particular understands that from a demographic position Russia's not.... is kind of running out of time. I think he also understood that the long term trend was that Europe was going to try and delink itself from Russia at a commodity level, and it was going to take years to get, you know, pipelines built to China to actually replace Europe. So I think in some ways, I think Putin saw this is this was a moment of maximum political influence. And he kind of pushed forward. I can also tell you, that, you know, a couple of folks that I've talked to have also said, though, and have questioned Putin'a soundness of mind. And I really, I want to preface this by saying, I am very hesitant to say anything about a given leader state of mind, because I don't know, you don't know, nobody really knows. But I do know a couple people who were in meetings or who were, you know, staffing meetings around it. And they said that Putin was talking a lot about history. And it seemed like he'd spent a lot of time just thinking about maps and the glory of Russia, while being isolated in the context of COVID. So I'm not sure that I believe that he's lost his mind, but that is percolating out there. And some of the things that he's done are questionable enough that even Russian analysts that I would talk to, didn't think that this was going to happen. And we're surprised by what Putin is doing. So that's my best attempt at answering that question. But it's sort of unsatisfying. I'm not sure, we'll will actually know exactly what the mindset was. But I think it's probably a combination of all of them.
Well, I mean, so how much how much does history influence your geopolitical thinking? I'm assuming there some. So you have like a spatial dimension, just the physical geography of the landscape. And then you were talking earlier about the invasions from the west? You know, the the military incursions from the west? How do you balance the two because some people are very historically minded, and they keep thinking of history, whereas you obviously have to take a more multidisciplinary approach.
History is a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing. And I, I think from a historical perspective, and think history is profoundly important and consider myself a student of history, and almost went and got a PhD in history. That was like one of the things that could have happened in my life if I hadn't done what I'm doing now. And you absolutely need history to understand context, to understand what's happened before, to understand culture, to understand- to get to a real place where you can empathize with another country's point of view, you absolutely need history. History is a curse, though, because our brains like patterns, and they like stories. And that's all history really is history is about smooshing together a lot of data to tell yourself a story about what happened before, so you can understand where you are now. And just because something happened one way before, does not mean it's going to happen that way in the future. And if you put too many eggs in the history basket, you just start to think of the world as a never ending eternal return of the same. And you're just you're just saying, Oh, well, history is just going to repeat itself over and over again. And I just don't think that's true. One of the things about geopolitics is that you have to discipline yourself to say, okay, but what's going to happen in the future? How am I going to understand, I'll have to, I have to understand all this history to know what's going to happen next. But that doesn't mean that it's going to happen exactly the same way. Or that there's not going to be a scientific discovery that completely changes the balance of power in the world, and makes sort of history moot the way that nuclear weapons did, for example. So it's really, really important to have history, but it's also really important when you're approaching any subject from a geopolitical standpoint, the first thing you do when you sit down and you start doing that geopolitical analysis, forget about everything, forget everything you thought you knew, right? One of the things I do is I write down all my assumptions every time I start a new project. And if I have assumptions, the stronger I think I know something, the more wary I am of that assumption when I'm crafting my analysis. Now, in the end, that assumption might be right, it might be that you just know the subject really well. But the discipline there is you really have to question yourself at every single moment, do I really know this thing that I think I know because of history, or because I have a degree in economics or because I read this book one time, all that stuff, you have to have that on the table? And when you're thinking about the future, throw it all out the window, start from scratch and say okay, what what is going to happen? What do I absolutely know what can I confirm empirically with my own eyes or with my own sources, and then build your model from there.
Alright, so I mean, I guess you know, not to harp on it, but so on the 24th Russia starts rolling in. You know, you have this job where you have to think about things like this. Can I just ask you, what did your inbox look like?
Yeah, I didn't sleep very much that week. In my inbox was very full. It's funny also, I had just, I just started sort of an I had been working with Cognitive Investments for a long time. but it really just joined them in a more official capacity. And at the time, we even had a small position in Russian equities. Because, as I said, I thought there was a 70% probability that Russia was not going to invade Ukraine. And as a group, we thought that meant that the risk reward on Russian equities might be nice. So one of the first thing here before my inbox blew up, the first thing we had to do is take that off. And I think our risk controls actually kicked in at the right point there, and we were able to make a good transition. But after that, it was it was sort of funny, because I've spent a long time and this is one of the the other weird things about being involved with geopolitics is that it's the type of thing that people ignore for a really long time. And then when it's hot, everybody wants to talk to you. So you know, some of my corporate clients, they immediately wanted to understand what was going on, you get new clients, you get 1000s, of new Twitter followers, everything sort of changes, and you're trying to respond to everyone that's coming in. So that there was this groundswell of interest. The what I'm curious about is whether and we're already seeing this the war starting to become normalized. And I'm not saying that in a in any kind of judgmental way. I'm just saying, we're getting used to the idea that this war is happening, and life still goes on. So people are, you know, you go about your daily business. And you read that Russia, Ukraine is on the front pages, but it's not at the front of your mind, probably the way it was on February 24, or when things first started happening. But I wonder if folks will continue to think about geopolitics because the world has fundamentally changed, which, which I think it has, or if people will go back to doing whatever they were doing before and just think that the world is going to go back to being the way that it was. Because in sort of every single geopolitical moment of the past decade, that's happened, I've, I've noticed a very similar trend, where for a couple weeks, everybody wants to talk geopolitics, and then they go back to doing whatever they were doing before whether it was the US China trade war, whether it was the failed coup in Turkey, whether it was Brexit, going back to the Arab Spring, you have these punctuated moments where geopolitics seems to matter. And then it doesn't. But you know, I really do think that geopolitics is going to matter here in a very big way in the years and decade ahead and have really, you know, bet a lot of my mental energy on that and being somebody who can help folks understand what's going on around them.
Okay, so you made an allusion right there to the fact that things are going to change around here and the global order. I have been involved in you know, a couple of discussions with people about this issue. And I guess, like my own naive lay person inference is that, you know, the bill of goods that we were sold, and I was all on board with it, let me be clear, in the late 1990s, in the West, in the United States, by the Clinton administration, about this global world, and you know, Chi-merica, where they're producing all these things for us, there's gonna be so little friction, and everything's gonna be cheap, because of comparative advantage, etc, etc. That just seems to have blown up, in my opinion. But tell me where I'm wrong. Or maybe I'm right, I don't know.
Well, that's a complicated question. Let's, let's see if I can answer it succinctly. And then you can push on me where I don't answer it well. That's still a possible scenario for where we go from here. I don't think that scenario is off the table. It's just less likely. And I say it's still possible. Because as a species, we're still facing threats that go beyond national borders. COVID-19, we just went through a global pandemic, the most depressing part of the pandemic for me, was that country is actually used to geopolitically against each other in a competitive way, rather than the virus itself, which doesn't care whether we're Chinese or American or Indian, it literally couldn't care less, it just cares that it has a host to infect. And we couldn't all get on the same page, about COVID-19. Are we going to get on the same page about climate change, when it really starts to wreak havoc, especially on places like Indonesia, or Sub Saharan Africa that are going to be more exposed to how climates going to change here over the next two to three decades? I don't know. Probably not the way things are going. But I could still concoct, I think a realistic possibility, where the US and China look at each other from across a crowded room And realize, you know, what, we will both do better if we stop competing with each other and actually coordinate and cooperate. A really good example of this, by the way, and it's an example of how much the world has changed is that in the context of the 2008 financial crisis, Chinese and US leaders were talking and coordinating a lot around the 2008 financial crisis, because both sides understood that they needed to coordinate to save the global economy. I think a lot of Western observers make fun for the amount of debt and stimulus that China's just through it their economic system, post 2008. And yes, a lot of that they did for domestic political stability. They also did that because they understood they were one of the key things underpinning the global economy. And if they were going to go down everbody was gonna go down. So in some ways, in their minds if you're in Beijing's perspective, they felt like they were helping out that they were part of a global team that was trying to realize that more idealistic globalized future that that you described. And that didn't happen around COVID, we were in the middle of a US China trade war. And China did the exact opposite. It felt threatened by the United States. So it wasn't as revealing about information it had about the virus going forward. And then an epidemic became a pandemic. And here we are, you know, two - three years later. I think that the world looks a lot more like the world look before World War One, in the sense that you have rising and falling great powers, you have an international order that seems to be becoming obsolete, that you have countries that think or have assessed that their interests are going to be better, not in a globalized world. But if they assertively or aggressively go and pursue their interests. And you know, Russia has one perspective on how to do that. China has a perspective on how to do that. Even countries like India, South Africa, Brazil, Turkey, these are all countries that are operating within the global international order, but also subverting it or trying to find ways to achieve their national security because they want to move up, they want things to be better for them. So for me, I think the most likely scenario is the is what are the most likely scenario for what's going to happen here over the next decade or two is that period of the 1890s. And I like the 1890s. Also as a historical comparison, because it was actually a time of tremendous economic growth. When you rejigger all these types of global relationships, yes, there's a lot of dislocations but there's also a lot of growth and opportunity that happens alongside that. I also like that comparison, because that was also a moment where the the world was going through an industrial revolution, we're kind of going through, we're sort of at the initial stages of one of those types of industrial revolutions right now with the rise of artificial intelligence and automization, and 5g and enabling all these sorts of Internets of Things, applications that were from a Star Trek episode, literally 20 years ago, if you're thinking about the capabilities there. So that's what I think's happening. And the real question for all decision makers and countries is, can we avert what happened at the end of that period last time, at the end of that period, people were trading with each other more and more and more even as they were competing. And then you had the Archduke in... What was it Serbia or no, the Blackhand? assassinated the Austro-Hungarian Archduke. And then this, this whole sort of decision tree of things collapsed into a global conflict. Can we avoid that scenario? Can we figure out how to get through this kind of growing pains period as a world and deal with each other on a more equal basis? Or are we heading towards that kind of broader systemic conflict? If you asked me today? I mean, it seems to me like we're on the path, that systemic conflict even even if I would assert to you that there are plenty of opportunities and off ramps to avert getting there yet. It's not it's not written history. But if we continue, if you if we continue with the world the way it is right now and behaving with states behaving toward towards each other the way they are right now, a conflict like that waits for us at the end of it. And, you know, I hope I hope we've studied enough history to get back to that point, to know that this is not sustainable. Not good for everyone in the long run, but right now, that's not how nations are behaving.
Yeah, I mean, so you said earlier, people just kind of getting used to it, you know, kind of discounting as a background condition. I kind of wonder about that. But you know, you do have in China right now, there is all this talk about whether, you know, Russia is going to be China's little puppy or whatever, or whether China will align with the West and, you know, kind of turn on on Russia, which it hasn't so far. I mean, do you have any sense what the Chinese are thinking because, you know, they are a quote unquote "rising power" and their geopolitical reach is way greater than it was during the time of the financial crisis?
I think this is a difficult moment for China. I think I'm not sure that I'm sure that the Russians assured them that this was going to be an easy conquest of Ukraine. And by the way, most countries thought this was... Nope, I don't think anybody except the Ukrainians believe that the Ukrainians could hold out as long as they have. So in that sense, some of the credit here goes to something that no expert I think, really, I have not seen an expert. I've seen experts out there who thought that Russia was going to invade Ukraine and that this type of scenario was going to unfold. But I still I don't know that anyone was, was predicting that the Ukrainian defenses were going to last this long. So I think in some sense, that's actually part of what makes this difficult for China because a quick conflict that was wrapped up probably wouldn't have been that big of a deal. But the longer this conflict goes on, the more commodity prices rise, the more economic instability increases, the more the reputational risk of being associated with Russia increases and the more serious the sanction seems to seem to be, and all of those things hit China where its most vulnerable today right now, which is in their domestic economy. Even before this war, they were dealing with a real estate bubble that was popping. They're dealing with really a historically unprecedented moment for China in their history, which is really saying something considering how long Chinese civilization has been around, which is, they're becoming more and more dependent on imports of foreign goods, whether it's technology, whether it's food, they really are, whether it's energy, they have to import things in the same way that Japan had to import things in the early 1900s. And we saw what that did to Japanese Foreign Policy at that time. So they're trying to figure out how to do that. I think in the aggregate, though, the most important thing for China right now is economic stability. So I think they haven't, to my mind, they haven't supported Russia. And they also haven't really opposed Russia, either. They are trying to find some kind of middle position that gets them what they want. And the longer this straws on and the more the US starts to target China, for what it perceives as support of Russia, the more China is going to face really difficult decisions. And I don't think China can really go along with Russia, I think that would be a really destructive option for the Chinese Communist Party in the long term, but you know, we just saw with Putin that sometimes leaders don't think in terms of the long term or sometimes they miscalculate in terms of what they think is best for them. So it's an option for China to go go at it with Russia. But I don't think that's how Beijing is thinking, I think that what Beijing really wants is a world where the US isn't the top dog. And they'll support Russia, in helping sort of pull apart that liberal international order, right up until it starts to threaten Chinese core interests. And right now, I think China's economy is starting to fall under enough strain that Beijing is reconsidering where it is, in this broader conflict.
Yeah. So going back to all of this, we have volatility in the commodity markets. Right now. You know, as we're recording, it looks like it might have stabilized a little bit. You know, there are parts of the world, as you acknowledge, you know, indicates that have had conflicts and wars for many years, at various levels. I mean, you can read about Yemen right now, something is going on there. Americans might have forgotten. We know what happened in Syria, which was really not that far. From, you know, some natural resources. I think the issue with Russia in particular is it is I mean, most people call it a Petro state. And that's because a lot of its exports are, are based around oil. And some analysts are talking about, you know, let's like actually inject money into the fracking industry in the United States, because fracking is basically a finance driven extraction industry where it's expensive, in terms of the inputs, but If oil is high enough, then it works. And there's been a major collapse from what I have read and heard in fracking in the United States, just because oil prices were too low. So there's all these like confusions and complications relating to that. And, you know, regular people like me, and probably you and others are thinking about this. From what you're saying. It sounds like okay, like, Putin is a wealthy head of state, he's not thinking about stuff like this, like this is not like we are reactive, and we are talking about this, but this is not what's driving any of the decisions, right? Or I don't know, like, tell me where I'm wrong.
Well, that's a that's a, I don't know exactly what's driving in Putin's head in the same way that I don't know what he had for breakfast. What I can tell you having studied geopolitics, for as long as I have is that Russian leaders are going to try and push to achieve strategic depth and that Russia was in a fairly precarious situation and has been in Ukraine since 2014. It was really an unacceptable national security situation for Russia, and that Russia was going to try and fix it. And that I am sure that that, well, Putin definitely felt that the cost that Russia was going to have to bear for asserting itself in Ukraine was ultimately worth it. And I think that's probably the part that surprises companies or commodities, traders or investors, you know, they're all thinking about bottom lines. And I actually think in that sense, those types of that type of thinking, actually, I think, has much more in common with China, because as I say, I think the center of gravity for China right now is its economy. It's not exactly the center of gravity for Russia. And Russia was thinking much more in terms of more basic national security imperatives, and that's how it was acting. And one of the things I would say to you is that in a more multipolar world where you have different spheres of influence or different centers of power, rather than one overwhelming or even too overwhelming powers, as we had during this period of US dominance or in the cold war before it, you're going to have leaders making these types of decisions more and more. And if you look around the world and the last couple of years, and you already alluded to some of them, you can see these types of decisions in general, none have been as in our face as a full out conventional Russian war in Ukraine. It's obvious why that is getting people's attention. But if you look around the fringes of what's happening in the world, think about what China did in terms of eliminating Hong Kong separate political system. Think about what India did in Kashmir, think about how Australia has really tried to de... deconnect itself from dependence on the Chinese economy and find new markets to export to think about Brexit think when you start to actually piece together what's going on in the world, and how different countries are behaving, you can see that countries are being more opportunistic, being more assertive about when national security trumps some of these concerns about just the economy. And that's I think that's one of the big mental shifts we have to make. It's not we're in a globalization recession, it's not about what's the most efficient trade partner and what makes the most money and just in time supply chains. It's really more some of these countries, especially that can assert themselves that have these powers that they suddenly find themselves with. They're saying, Okay, I don't want to be subject to US sanctions one day that would cut me off for my foreign reserves. I don't want to have to import this particular commodity from a place halfway across the world that I can't guarantee. And those dynamics, I think we're gonna see more and more of
Yeah, I mean, so you... I alluded to this earlier when it comes to the dream of the 90s, this, you know, frictionless world with all of these interconnections. And in terms of trade and resources, I think many Americans are thinking in terms of, you know, I don't say, autarky. But you know, what resources do we have? How can we rely on ourselves and our maybe our closest allies, and kind of narrowing the windows and the horizons of engagement and interaction with the rest of the world? I think it's what a lot of us are thinking because it seems much more dangerous, much more capricious, much more unpredictable. And, you know, I mean, China itself is adding to it a little bit. But really, I think China also wants a more, you know, stable, predictable world. But, you know, that's not the world we live in, it seems, Putin showed that - showed that and, you know, and then we had, you know, starting with the Arab Spring, which you alluded to earlier, very early on in this podcast, I mean, that really was a surprise to many people. And you know, that that mattered. And, you know, the great powers just kind of have to watch it play out and kind of interfere on the margins. And so we have a situation that's multipolar, you said, we're in a multipolar world. And we have different blocks, and it feels I don't know, for a regular person like me, I am old enough to remember the Cold War. And so that was kind of a bipolar world, or, you know, maybe three worlds first world, second world Third World, and then you had the 90s. And it was just America, basically, just America. And then of the 2000s, you know, into the teens is still kind of America, as you're alluding to, like, you know, we, we went into Iraq, because we could, you know, burned a lot of money and a lot of lives. And then the teens and started changing a little bit. And China's very, very junior role is now not at parity, obviously, but not trivial. Okay. So I feel like, we haven't seen this in a long time. We haven't seen this sort of complexity a long time, it's probably good for you, you know, in terms of professionally gives you a lot of work. But we haven't seen this a long time as how I feel. What do you think about that assertion?
No, it's why like, I'm not just like, it's not just a use - a useful comparison that I'm trotting out around this conflict. When I say the world looks like it doesn't at 90. That's the only mental map that I have found that actually gives me any kind of insight into what's going on right now. I would take it a step further. I don't think there's anyone who's living right now who lived through a world quite like this one. In some ways. We're reverting to the international system before the United States rose as as a dominant power. And that is a fundamentally different world. And it's Yeah, I mean, I think you're I think you're exactly right.
Yeah, so I'm a statistic, you know, and all statistics are, they're not gospel, they're just ways to guide you. But a statistic I do like to tell people is, you know, when I looked it up, the last time the US was not the world's number one, GDP, gross domestic product in the aggregate was I think, 1870. And, you know, the numbers the data a little confusing back then, but the nation, but that was before the US was still actually China back then. So, you know, on a per capita basis, obviously, China was much poorer, but the point is, you know, in some ways, we're going back to the late 19th century. I think one of the issues that people are a little confused by, in this current situation is Europe demographically in geopolitically is not what it was, say, obviously, the late 19th century when a third of people in the world lived in Europe, very different scenario than today. But I feel like, you know, culturally, it's extremely influential and looms large. And I just wonder whether the demographic and economic rebalancing that's going to happen in the next couple of decades is going to be a little weird, just because it's going to have to drag the cultural perceptions, you know, forward.
Yeah. So that's a great question. And there's sort of two to three ways I want to answer it. The first is to think about and I think this gets to your point about the 90s. And the context in which most of us have gotten used to or even grew up in, and which is that I think the United States has become a little bit delusional, and has really started to believe its propaganda a little bit too much. Because the other thing about I mean, the 90s was great. We had great music, and there was free trade, and everybody was going to be happy, and everybody was going to be a democracy. And that was all fine. But some of that didn't happen. And it's almost like we started believing that story, even though it wasn't real. If you go back even to the 80s, in the 70s, you have US presidents presidents who were talking nakedly about US strategic interests, like Nixon himself, use the word multipolar world, and aligned, why shouldn't they align, but you know, did the opening up with China because he thought that that was what was best for US national interest. Whereas today, when you look at the rhetoric coming out of the United States, and it doesn't matter whether it's Republican or Democrat, it's all about everybody needs to be free. And everybody needs human rights, the way that the United States define them. And anybody who doesn't go along with the United States is evil, or is a thug, or this that the other thing, and there's a there's a hypocrisy, and there's an unbalanced seen sort of in US foreign policy, as an example, the United States continues to maintain really harsh sanctions against regimes and Cuba, and Venezuela, is going to be the last person who's going to defend those regimes. They do horrible things to their people. But are you really telling me they're that much worse than Saudi Arabia? Some of these other US allies that those relationships have been built up over time? No, not at all. You sort of get all of that as in the context of the Cold War and ideology and things like that. So one of the reasons we're in the situation right now with the Russia, Ukraine war is that both the Trump administration and the Biden administration said, you know, what, China and Russia are our enemies. They are peer rivals, they are thugs, they are threats to democracy, we don't like them. And because we're the United States, and we're the shining city on the hill, everybody needs to do what we want, or things aren't going to go well. And that worked fine in the 90s, where nobody could resist the United States. And where everybody was getting rich, it doesn't work so well, in the current geopolitical environment. And I think the United States and it's, it's going to happen rudely, I think because apparently, that's the only way the US foreign policy establishment can get this can learn these types of lessons is in hard ways, they're going to have to go back to thinking strategically like they did in the 80s, and 70s. Not everybody wants our version of human rights, no matter how much you, or I might like them, not everybody defines political community the way that the United States does. And let's not even - I won't even venture, whether that's morally okay or not, that's just the way it's gonna be. So we can either deal with that and figure out the best way to protect US interests and protect those ideas and countries that seem to like those ideas, or we continue, we can continue on in this, like, and you mentioned Iraq, in this delusion, that everybody's gonna like this. And everybody's gonna go along with it if they can just see how good it is. So that's one thing on the European question, and there's two parts to your question. The first is demographics. And I've actually just been reading more about demographics recently, and demographic started as a science really around the same time that geopolitics did, which actually makes sense, when you think about I think about geopolitics at a foreign policy level, how nations are behaving with each other. Demographics is about how governments control their own population. It starts when you start doing national censuses and trying to identify, Okay, this is, you know, these are the these are the people that I have in my population, this is what the government has to provide for them. All of that amassing of data about population is what enables demography to start and that really starts in the latter half of the 19th century and gets built up over time. Demographics is a really, really powerful tool, and a country's demographic profile, I think says really important things about its potential for economic growth, what's going to happen to it is not determinative. And I would say that's one of the things that actually separates me from most geopolitical thinkers. I don't think that demographics is quite as important in the way that others do. Like just because a society is aging does not mean it's on the verge of economic collapse, doesn't mean that it's not going to do aggressive things militarily. Look at a demographic profile of Germany in the early 1930s. You would never think they were about to conquer most of Europe. Just a couple years later. People have been talking about the demographic decline of China literally since the 70s in the 80s Ditto for the United States to have they collapsed? No. Do they have very serious problems become because of demographics? Absolutely. So when you get to European demographics, yes, there are big problems. And there are things that Europe is going to have to do in order to solve those problems. But I don't think they're insurmountable. And I don't think just because Europe is getting older that Europe's not going to be a player, especially when you look at how much wealth, how much technology, how much power Europe has built up over time, even if they aren't what they were back in the day, when all of the European countries pool their powers and resources together, they are still a top three global economy, a top three military force if they ever wanted to be they haven't wanted to be. But I think one of the parts of this shift that we're going to see in the Russia Ukraine war, is that's going to come alive. And this is actually something I've been writing and talking about for years. At CI for instance, we've we've been investing in European equities, and not just European equities, but on the fringe sort of the states that nobody cares about, like Italy and Spain, the ones that they have all the debt, and they have all the terrible demographic profiles, and they're the ones that are circling the drain. Actually, if I'm right about all this, if the if Europe is looking out at the world and realizing, man, for the last 30 years, we've been squabbling among ourselves over really stupid minor issues. And if we don't all get on the same page here, like Russia's there, and China's there and Turkeys there and man, we're going to get carved up if we don't actually pool our resources and defend ourselves a little bit. I think that's the mindset that's going to increasingly come out of Europe going forward. And that means that Europe, in Brussels in particular, they're going to start redistributing wealth, they're going to say, okay, Eastern Europe, we need to make sure your energy transition happens now, okay, Italy, we need to make sure that you're not selling all of your strategic ports and infrastructure to China. And we need to do that right now. Ditto, Spain, Portugal, all those other types of countries. So I think one of the things that happened in the, in the early 2000s, and in the 20 teens was that Germany was trying to have its cake and eat it too. It wanted to have this free trade bloc and just grow, while you know, enforcing debt austerity in Greece and telling and lecturing all the Southern Europeans about how irresponsible they were for borrowing. I think that's all about to shift. I think both Paris, Berlin, even sort of the frugal states like Denmark, the Netherlands, Austria, they're all realizing we can either spend some of this money and invest in our European sort of partner states that are around us, or we're just going to get carved up by some of these greater powers that are outside the world. So as you can tell, I think that Europe is actually going to grow much stronger going forward. And the demographic issue is actually yet another reason for Europe to do so for me, it's those types of threats that is going to make Europe become a more coherent geopolitical entity in the future.
Well, so, you know, we've been talking about the present, you know, exigencies of the present. That's a big deal. And, you know, we were talking about the past, you know, the future past maybe in a way of like, going back to the 1890s. You know, maybe we will get our own Belle Époque, that probably won't happen, but you know, maybe that's what tik tok is, maybe 100 years from now people will talk about the flowering of tik tok creatives, okay, I'm Gen X. I'm being very sarcastic here, just so everyone knows, I don't want to get any angry comments. But for the...
it's too late for that, man. Anytime I appear, and I'm not doing my job. If I don't get angry comments, I've had to embrace them.
Oh, that's a good thing, though, right? You don't want to make everybody happy. Because if you make everyone happy, you're not really pushing anyone and saying anything. Right. So let's talk about the future. As we're closing this out, I want to ask you, what do you see the next 20 to 30 years? Some people you know, I mean, to be candidly, to be candid, um, they're seeing some tough times for a lot of states and a lot of regions, as the current globalization system unwinds a bit, actually, the expectations of it, and we get something new, you know, the east China block the West Block, you know, maybe some block around India, probably not a block India itself is going to be the most populous nation in the world by 2030. So it is self is just a block, you know, and then the rise of Africa, demographically, all these things are going on. And, you know, we're having to deal with them. And I think you are correct, when you pointed out that, or you alluded to the fact that we're America in particular is a little bit of denial, in my opinion about the passing of the Unipolar Moment. We do engage in cultural imperialism in a very tone deaf way, in my opinion. And I know people hate what about ism. But every time Yes, I and a lot of people, I think, literally think of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, when America gets on his high horse about human rights to other nation states, because we have had a very special relationship, especially our elites, with the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia since the 1930s. So that shows you that, you know, this is a kingdom by the way that abolish slavery, I believe in 1961 because of protests, When diplomats or the monarch would show up the United States or the UN or whatever, right, so, you know, we're going into new territory. And as a geo politically informed person, as for person, generally obviously talking to you, what do you want to tell people the next couple of decades to prepare to think, to understand to analyze?
Well, you were joking about La Belle Époque, but I actually think that's what's gonna happen. And it's probably a sign of how far we fall into the civilization that things like tik tok will be the medium for it. But when you put one of the things that made La Belle Époque happen was, was some of the kind of dislocation that you had around that artistic creativity doesn't always happen. When everybody is comfortable, and everybody's happy. Like some of the greatest works of art have come because people are suffering or because they're trying to express a deeper feeling and you resonate with with art or things like that, that actually tugged at those heartstrings. And to your point, like, I think we're going to go through a massive period of reorganization. And that's going to be tough for some people. And it's also going to present tremendous opportunities, I guess the things that I would have in mind.
The first is, and this is the old F. Scott Fitzgerald, quote, you know, the true sign of intelligence is to keep two contradictory ideas in your head at the same time, you're going to have to do a lot of that. And the first place we'll start on our world tour is the United States, because the United States still has a lot of things going for it, the United States is an energy superpower, it's an agricultural super.... an agricultural superpower, it is isolated from most geopolitical threats, just due to the fact of where it is in the world, with the Atlantic and the Pacific on either sides, really insulating it from other geopolitical stressors that are that are happening around it. Just because the United States, power is less relative to the rising powers of other countries doesn't mean that the United States is about to collapse, I think the United States is going to go through a pretty intense period of coming out of its delusion here in the next five to 10 years, and then probably the United States will be will be one of those major actors going forward and will understand this new world that it's living in, it's going to be difficult. We've gone through periods like this before in the past, in the United States, just look at what happened in the 1980s with Reagan, or what happened in the 30s. With Franklin Delano Roosevelt, even the Progressive Era, like we go through these these major shifts. And I think that we're kind of at the we're at the beginning stages, I think of one of those shifts. So the United States like changing but like don't count it out, it's not on the decline, like the Chinese might think that's kind of one of the first points. The second point I would make is, again, don't assume that demographics is going to tell you everything that you need to know you're right that Sub Saharan Africa and some pockets of Southeast Asia are the only places where populations are predicted to grow over time. Those are also places that suffer from incredible food insecurity, in part because they're part of this globalized world where they just assume they could import cheap, you know, American or Russian grains. And I'm not sure that's going to be true for them that much either. anymore. But they're also population is growing, they're in places where climate change is going to hit first. So if you look at maps of where desertification is happening, or where agricultural yields are going to decrease, because of climate change, it unfortunately maps almost perfectly onto those areas where population is rising. I was writing a note, just this morning, for our research group at CI and thinking about, you know, food prices are rising right now, the last time we saw food prices like this, it was Arab Spring 2.0. Is Central Asia about to go through a very similar phenomenon. I mean, they depend on Russia, for the Russian economy, because a lot of their economy is remittances that are being sent by people from Central Asia who go to Russia and work and send them home. It's a very food insecure area, because of climate change. They're all suffering from levels of water scarcity, that are only going to get worse. They have to import. I mean, some of them have have energy. But overall, you're still talking about some of these countries that need to import things. They also have old Soviet style dictatorships for the most part, even in Uzbekistan, where they've liberalized a little bit like it's still, like, this is not like the nicest region in the world from a political perspective. And you've got, you know, because of that Soviet style dictatorship, you've had the local religion, which is Islam, really silenced for decades. So you put all those things together kind of looks like the Middle East in North Africa, in around the time the Arab Spring to me, so like their their regions and Sub Saharan Africa and Central Asia, where there there are tremendous opportunities, but how you get from the opportunity from where we are now, probably going to be a lot of dislocation probably, you know, huge refugee flows that make the 2015 refugee crisis in Europe or make what we're seeing out of Ukraine right now look small by comparison. I think that's probably one of the things that we have to look forward to if you'll forgive the sarcasm there. And then I think the other part of this is trying to understand which countries are rising in which countries are falling in the current macro environment just for the next two to three years. The countries where I'm most in or the countries that I think are best poised to capitalize are the ones that have the types of commodities that all the other countries want to import. So for instance, we are long Chilean equities at CI because Chile is a major fertilizer exporter. They're a major copper exporter, they have a bunch of lithium that they're going to try and export, you start to put the pieces together. They're far away from where geopolitical conflict is, they sell things that everybody needs. South Africa is another example of a country like that, that has lots of commodities that everybody needs, has some degree of agricultural self sufficiency, and is not located to any geopolitical hot zones. The closer you get to geopolitical hot zones, the kind of the, the more careful, you have to be about where you think things are going. Ironically, China is a country, I think, like the US is about to go through a pretty intense period of domestic reorganization, I think they have to get some things squared away with their economy before they can become the big geopolitical giant. Everybody thinks that they are right now. So for me, when I'm watching China, I'm watching boring things about like, what's the reserve requirement ratio out of the banks? And how much are civil servants salaries being cut, because local governments are exposed to real estate and can't pay as much anymore? That's really going to determine what's happening to China in the future. And then, I mean, we don't have to go all around the world, maybe you have a couple you want to look at but India, Brazil, Turkey, Indonesia, those are all very interesting countries that have challenges and also strengths and how they kind of move forward, it's going to be it's going to go beyond really geopolitics politics and go down to do those governments. Are those governments able to articulate policies to take advantage of this environment? And then can they execute, which are two very difficult questions. And those countries could go either way, depending on what your answers are to those two questions.
Yeah, well, I mean, let me let me, let me close out, like the last question, because like, this is a little off, off your core focus, I think, with geopolitics, which seems to be I don't know, you know, it's pretty cold and rational. Insofar as you're calculating power, you're looking at resources, looking at the geopolitical geographic landscape, you know, and past patterns. So, you know, we talked about the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, and our moralistic stance, and, you know, I've always been kind of uncomfortable by it, because I think, you know, I hate it... Okay. I will say that, I think on the whole the United States as a force for good, there are some listeners who are not American who will have different viewpoints. And I respect that, and I understand that. But I'm saying that partly in that kind of cautious way, because, I mean, there are things that this government, our government has done, that really rub a lot of people the wrong way. You know, like, let's talk about like Mosaddegh in Iran, like that's, that's just like, you know, patient zero of this sort of thing. But, you know, the consistent supportive Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, which is an extremely repressive country, when it comes to its social values, at least until Mohammed bin... until the current ruler started loosening things up. But he also has his own issues with the liberalism. And then we are extremely moralistic with many other countries. And so you mentioned India, I don't really know where this is coming from. But you know, during the farmers protest, everyone had an opinion. And that was really weird, because why do you have an opinion about some detailed, you know, geopolitical, or, you know, internal political thing related to India? And it turns out, there was some solidarity between left wing groups in India, I think, and left wing groups in the US. And those are culturally influential. And you had Greta Thunberg, giving a tweet, I mean, you know, it was a scandal, because people found out that there was a doc, Google Doc, and she was just going off that, and all of this stuff. And, you know, we've been, I think, kind of distracted, I think it's put a strain on the Indian-American, like, the relationship between India and America, because America is really hard on India, I think, partly because India is a democracy, and we expect better of it. And so, you know, people are like the Modi government is fascist. Now, this is an elected government that's actually has substantial majorities. I think that it's a little weird that, you know, a lot of the media is on such high volume about that. And I think it's, I think it's having an effect geopolitically in terms of many Indians who do support the government, which is the majority getting angry at this depiction. My own perspective is that these sorts of judgments are just being driven by American domestic political trends and coalition's and alliances. And it indicates a kind of an arrogance that what happens in America and Americans perspective and what what matters in America is going to shape everything everywhere and other people's perspectives and complexities and subtleties. You know, they need to get in line. And so I don't want to say it's cultural imperialism, but that is the easiest way for me to describe. And I feel that, you know, the American empire, the American uni polar entity of the late 20th century, that there's some cultural overhang in terms of our self obsession, our focus on our own concerns and our projection. And we live in a global world. And yet, I think that in some ways, we're incredibly myopic today. Maybe that's just because the disjunction between the two is to is much stronger, that we're actually much more myopic, and say, I don't know, the 80s, you know, but um, I know this, it's just a strange way to end in relation to all the kind of concrete and clear things that we've been talking about. But I feel that what you're saying is quite reasonable. And it's comprehensible, even though it's a little bloodless in some ways. But when it comes to like reading the New York Times, or the Washington Post, in particular, you know, I'm reading things about different countries that seem to be driven by emotion. So for example, you know, apparently, the Russian language and Russian people are very scary. And I am, like, quite shocked that the media is not writing a lot of op eds about how Putin might be bad in the Russian state might be bad, but Russian culture is great, and Russian people are okay. I don't know why that's not happening. You know, maybe I'm not in the right, like, you know, conferences or conclaves? I don't know. Anyway, I'm sorry that I just kind of rambled there. But
this sort of kind of like muck seems to be hanging over a lot of our interpretation of our relationships with other countries from an American perspective. That's, that's my take, and and what do you think about that?
It's such an important take. And I'll I mean, let's, hopefully we can do part two of this podcast, because I mean, I would, I would love a conversation for an hour with you just about India, it's worth it's worth that much. It's worth more than that, if you really wanted to get into it. We already alluded to this a bit with the flotsam and jetsam of US foreign policy. But when you look around at the world at the places where the US has sort of left unresolved conflicts, I think you're exactly right. You talked about Mosaddegh in Iran. Like the reason there's a thuggish theocratic government in Iran these days is because the US was fooling around with Iran and taking advantage of it in certain ways. It's not the only reason. But it's a big part of it. And if you don't understand, like, what the CIA did in Iran, what the US British interests were there, that's probably a chapter of history, you should look up. But ditto, I mean, just look at some of the countries that are really bad off today, Cuba, Democratic Republic of Congo, North Korea, you go down the list. And I guarantee if you're willing to read the history books, you will find sort of that those were countries that the United States had some goal in, that it didn't go very well with. And that's all, you know, that's actually pretty normal like, and I think, to your point like the United States, and this goes to how cynical a lot of geopolitics and foreign affairs is, the in some ways the United States, his problem is that it's too meek, or that it does things at a national interest or security level, that ideologically don't make sense within the American political framework and the ideas that we tell ourselves about our nation. So all those things happen kind of under the table. You know, no US government has - or the US Congress is supposed to have the ability to declare war. Hasn't done that since 1945. And but think about how many US military operations there have been since then, and continue to be around the world. So like I said, I think the United States is going to have to face this head on and understand what's going on. I think that's absolutely true, just from an objective level, and I think the level of discourse in our society has to increase so we can actually start having conversations about what is in our best interest. Is it worth it to be doing this in Yemen? What does it mean for us? What does it mean for the people there? What are the trade offs, we're not having any of those conversations, we're all just virtue signaling about, you know, how good we are, how bad we are based on our hot takes on conflicts that most people don't understand. So I agree 100% with you there. And part of what I'm doing in general with my life is to try and educate people about these things in ways they can have more sophisticated conversation. Just a brief thing about India, and maybe this can tease to a future conversation, if you'll have me back on and if I haven't scared you up off too much. Which is that first of all elected governments can be fascist. I do not think the Modi government is fascist. But just to say like Fascism is not does not start as dictatorship, it usually takes a democratic populace path to get there. So that just is a thing to sort of keep in mind. In general, I actually think the US has been pretty nice towards India. And especially in the context of India's foreign policy, since it became independent was to be non aligned. The US wants to be closer and closer with India and India says nice things but then doesn't always align. And there's a lot of good reasons for that. We don't have time to go into the whole US Pakistan relationship and the Cold War and how all of these things affected US India... how us how the US use food as a weapon against India in the 1960s. Like, these are all things that we could generally talk about. But I think in general, India is trying to be non aligned, and it's trying to thread a very difficult needle. And that's going to be difficult for the Modi government going forward. And my, I mean, it's not my problem with the Modi government, when I look at what the Modi government has done, the thing that worries me a little bit in terms of where India goes from here politically, is that he promised a bunch of reforms that India really needs he has, I think he has his finger on the pulse of what India needs to be a more powerful actor in the world and to have more economic growth and become a wealthier society. He has not been able to follow through on a lot of them. He's done some of them, but he has met a lot of opposition. And that's pretty distressing when you consider how popular he is, in general, to your point, like he should be able to do more of the things that India needs from an infrastructure perspective, or from a political regulation perspective. And he's really, really struggled hard to do that. And if somebody like him can't do it, I worry about where India is going to be going forward. Because to my point earlier, if India is going to take advantage of the situation, it needs to articulate some clear policies and it needs to execute. And if it doesn't execute, India has a lot of things that could go wrong, that wouldn't do well for it and kind of the years ahead, and then just kind of close the circle there. Or we can keep going if you want but I always go back to this Tony Judt, quote, If your listeners don't know who Tony Judt is, he's a person who you should go read his books or look up his work, he tragically got ALS and died way too young. But he was an incredibly prescient British American academic. And he gave a talk at NYU, I think it was in 2006 2007. It's on YouTube, if you want to watch it, and I go back to it all the time. Because he closes the talk. He's talking sort of about, I mean, we didn't even have the word woke yet. But he's talking about how our discourse was getting constrained by by people who thought on both sides about what what was okay to say and what was okay to say within the within the academy. And he closed with this idea that the real threat to democracies, like the United States, like India is not the will to power of any nefarious authoritarian dictator, but the will to ignorance among society. And if we continue to blindly go towards ignorance, if we only look at the top two Google searches, if we just go to Twitter, for our news, and accept what we read, based on a couple tweets, if we isolate ourselves, and don't look at what the opposite news channel is saying, and how to put it all together, then eventually we'll end up with, with the demagogue that at that point, we probably deserved because the only way I think, for democracy to really function is to have or the only way for democracy to protect kind of those rights that and here, I'll be less, I'll be not objective. Like, I think that the US political system is great. I believe in life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, like those are things that sound unambiguously good to me. And if the US is going to keep that system for itself, we can't keep sleepwalking into this partisan Apocalypse that we are currently on the path toward right now. So I agree with you 100%. there and that, we have to maintain the ability to talk to each other and learn about issues and not assume that we know everything. And that, you know, a person's entire personality isn't contained in a single sentence that they say that makes you feel bad or something like all of that, I think is a very bad thing for the United States going forward, if we can't figure out how to correct it. The only optimistic note I'll leave you with is we've been here before, like go back and look at political discourse in some of those previous moments of US political transition. It gets it got really heated before, I think it's gonna get heated again. But if you believe in the US political system, it's supposed to be able and has in the past, metabolize this sort of thing and come out stronger for it, rather than an authoritarian government like Russia that just arrests a bunch of people in hopes that the party is going to continue on. I think that is the the underlying strength of the United States and India and countries like that in the long term. But it's going to be messy and painful in the short term. And unfortunately, that's where we are.
Yeah, no, I think that's, that's a good place to end for this episode. Definitely. Would love to have you on later. Maybe. I mean, I, you know, I don't know, I'm hoping that it's not because of another war. So maybe in a somewhat more calm time, where we can explore some of the nuances of what we've been talking about, really in the last 15 minutes or so. But, you know, it's been it's been a great conversation, I think, I think people I hope, I hope they go into these sorts of issues, and current affairs and politics and geopolitics with your mindset in mind, because I think, you know, we have been too emotive and emotions fine, it is a good place to start. And, you know, that's why we do what we do, because we care and we're emotional. But you know, the process needs to be more rational. Otherwise, we're just going to flail about so I really appreciate, you know, your perspective there. That way that's what we need right now. We need to think clearly about what's going on because it's serious, it's going to affect us. And I want to talk to you and other people in your space right now, partly because I think Americans are not cognizant of how it's gonna affect. You know, we're not going to talk about economics today, but I think it's gonna have a huge knock on effect over the next year. I think Americans did not understand in February 15, what was going to go on with COVID the pandemic, but I'm hoping it's not as pervasive as that, obviously, but I think it will have some consequences. In any case. So yeah, Jacob Shapiro, Director of geopolitical analysis at Cognitive Investments. Thank you for joining me on this podcast. I really enjoyed the conversation. We talked about a lot of things and I think we could probably talk for many more hours so we will probably do that at some point in the future.
Sounds great man. Thanks so much. Cheers.
Is this podcast for kids? This is my favorite podcast!