All-In Summit: In conversation with Graham Allison

00:00:00.000 | Please join me in welcoming Graham Allison to the stage.

00:00:03.000 | [APPLAUSE]

00:00:07.000 | Thank you.

00:00:07.500 | Thank you.

00:00:09.000 | Wow.

00:00:09.500 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:12.000 | Allegra winners ride.

00:00:15.000 | Rain Man David Sackett.

00:00:16.500 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:19.000 | And it said--

00:00:20.000 | We open sourced it to the fans, and they've just gone crazy.

00:00:23.000 | Love you guys.

00:00:24.000 | I see Queenie Kinloch.

00:00:25.000 | [MUSIC PLAYING]

00:00:29.000 | Really an honor.

00:00:30.000 | Graham, thanks for joining us, and thanks for agreeing

00:00:33.500 | to follow that routine.

00:00:34.500 | [LAUGHTER]

00:00:37.000 | Graham Allison was founding dean of Harvard's John F. Kennedy

00:00:39.500 | School of Government and remains a professor of government.

00:00:43.000 | He's a leading analyst of US national security and defense

00:00:45.500 | policy with a special interest in nuclear weapons

00:00:47.500 | and terrorism.

00:00:49.000 | He's most famous as the Assistant Secretary of Defense

00:00:52.500 | for Policy and Plans from 1993 to '94,

00:00:55.000 | where he coordinated strategy and policy towards the states

00:00:57.500 | of the former Soviet Union.

00:00:59.000 | Bill Clinton awarded him the Department of Defense Medal

00:01:02.000 | for Distinguished Public Service for reshaping relations

00:01:05.000 | with Russia, Ukraine, Belarus, Kazakhstan

00:01:07.500 | to reduce the former Soviet nuclear arsenal.

00:01:10.000 | And he's since become the longest serving member

00:01:12.500 | of the Secretary of Defense's Defense Policy Board,

00:01:16.000 | having served for eight secretaries of defense.

00:01:19.000 | And he's the only person to receive the Department

00:01:21.000 | of Defense's highest civilian award from both Reagan

00:01:24.000 | and Clinton administrations.

00:01:26.000 | Graham is one of the world's most cited experts

00:01:28.500 | on the bureaucratic analysis of decision making,

00:01:30.500 | especially during times of crisis.

00:01:33.000 | I read his book, Destined for War--

00:01:34.500 | Can America and China Escape Thucydides' Trap?,

00:01:38.000 | which was published in 2018 and I think was very prescient

00:01:42.000 | about the moment that we're in today.

00:01:44.500 | A couple of weeks ago, Elon Musk tweeted out several times

00:01:47.500 | that everyone should read this book.

00:01:49.000 | So congrats.

00:01:50.000 | We get a little promotion from Elon as well.

00:01:52.000 | Thank you.

00:01:52.500 | That must have helped sales.

00:01:53.500 | Congrats on that.

00:01:55.500 | The theory that when one great power threatens

00:01:59.000 | to displace another, war is almost always the result,

00:02:02.500 | is at the heart of his analysis on the U.S.-China relationship.

00:02:06.500 | During the Peloponnesian War, Thucydides wrote,

00:02:09.000 | "What made war inevitable was the growth of Athenian power

00:02:11.500 | and the fear which this caused in Sparta."

00:02:14.000 | And Graham says the trap triggered nearly every war,

00:02:16.500 | from the Peloponnesian War to World War I,

00:02:19.000 | to the War of the Spanish Succession,

00:02:20.500 | the Thirty Years' War, and now threatens

00:02:22.500 | to light the world on fire once again.

00:02:25.500 | Graham, thanks for joining us today.

00:02:28.500 | If you wouldn't mind, just frame for the audience

00:02:31.500 | and for us here on stage the point that you make in your book

00:02:34.500 | about Thucydides' trap and where we find the relationship

00:02:38.500 | between China and the U.S. taking us,

00:02:41.500 | and where it specifically sits in that evolution of,

00:02:46.500 | call it temperament, today.

00:02:49.500 | Thank you very much.

00:02:51.000 | And it's a pleasure and honor to be here.

00:02:53.000 | I'm a fan of your podcast,

00:02:54.500 | and I think how you've made this thing work,

00:02:57.000 | I don't quite understand, but I appreciate it.

00:03:02.500 | We have a friend in the deep state.

00:03:04.500 | He's sitting over there.

00:03:06.000 | We're not going to name names,

00:03:07.500 | but he made the introduction, and we appreciate it.

00:03:10.000 | In any case, it's a pleasure to be here.

00:03:12.500 | And the summary you gave, I think, is a very good place to start.

00:03:16.000 | Let me do four or five quick bottom lines.

00:03:18.500 | The first, as I wrote in this book,

00:03:22.000 | which was published just as Trump became president,

00:03:28.000 | in Relations Between the U.S. and China,

00:03:30.000 | expect things to get worse before they get worse.

00:03:34.000 | (laughter)

00:03:35.500 | That's exactly what I would say today.

00:03:37.000 | And why? What's driving that?

00:03:39.500 | This is a classic Thucydidean rivalry.

00:03:43.000 | As David said, Thucydides taught us 2,500 years ago

00:03:48.000 | that when a rapidly rising power seriously threatens

00:03:51.000 | to displace a ruling power, shit happens.

00:03:54.500 | That's normal.

00:03:56.000 | And in most cases, the outcome is war.

00:04:00.000 | So what we're seeing today

00:04:02.000 | and what we're going to see even more intensely tomorrow

00:04:05.500 | and a decade from now

00:04:07.500 | is the fiercest rivalry history has ever seen.

00:04:11.500 | China is not just another great power,

00:04:14.000 | but it's going to be the biggest power in the history of the world.

00:04:17.500 | The U.S. is a colossal ruling power,

00:04:20.000 | which has been the architect and guardian

00:04:23.000 | of the international order

00:04:25.000 | that allows us to live today in the 78th year

00:04:28.500 | without great power war--

00:04:30.500 | a pretty amazing accomplishment.

00:04:33.000 | And so the U.S. is not going to fade away comfortably.

00:04:37.000 | When that confrontation occurs,

00:04:40.000 | most often the outcome is war.

00:04:42.000 | In the book I look at that last 500 years,

00:04:44.000 | there's 16 times we've seen a rapidly rising power

00:04:48.000 | threaten a colossal ruling power.

00:04:50.500 | Think of Germany's rise beginning of the 20th century

00:04:54.000 | and the challenge to Great Britain.

00:04:56.000 | That became World War I.

00:04:58.000 | So most often, of the 16 cases, 12 ended in war.

00:05:02.500 | Four ended in no war.

00:05:05.000 | So if we were just doing statistics,

00:05:08.500 | war is not inevitable.

00:05:10.000 | It's just structurally likely.

00:05:12.500 | And the cases in which war didn't occur

00:05:15.000 | were cases in which somehow

00:05:18.000 | the parties managed a degree of strategic imagination

00:05:23.000 | that bent otherwise trends,

00:05:25.500 | or what you called earlier the physics of the situation.

00:05:30.000 | So, the Cold War. I'm an old Cold Warrior.

00:05:33.000 | In the rivalry between the U.S. and the Soviet Union

00:05:36.000 | that had dominated 40 years of American history,

00:05:41.000 | the U.S. and the Soviet Union came to the edge of war

00:05:44.000 | multiple times, Cuban Missile Crisis,

00:05:46.500 | about which I've written a book, The Most Dangerous.

00:05:48.500 | But there was ultimately no hot war.

00:05:51.500 | Well, that's a big deal.

00:05:53.500 | Had there been a hot war, we wouldn't be having this podcast.

00:05:56.500 | Los Angeles wouldn't be here. Boston wouldn't be here.

00:05:59.500 | So a real war, a real bloody war,

00:06:03.500 | is catastrophic.

00:06:05.500 | It could be, and today, absolutely catastrophic.

00:06:08.500 | So, what I said to David when he invited me to come was,

00:06:12.500 | "You folks are in the business of strategic imagination."

00:06:17.000 | That's what you do.

00:06:19.000 | That's how you've come to have a degree of confidence in what you do.

00:06:22.000 | You imagine something that seems slightly crazy,

00:06:25.000 | it seems almost unimaginable.

00:06:27.000 | Somehow you put pieces together.

00:06:29.000 | Some of the time it works, and lo and behold, yikes!

00:06:32.000 | Our life has got smartphones, or it has the net,

00:06:35.500 | or it has AI, or it has vaccines,

00:06:38.500 | or it has, it has, it has.

00:06:40.500 | Amazing.

00:06:41.500 | So I'm hoping that you'll devote some of those gray cells

00:06:45.500 | to the geopolitical challenge

00:06:49.500 | that China poses to the US today,

00:06:52.500 | which will be the dominant geopolitical challenge

00:06:55.500 | for the rest of our lives.

00:06:57.000 | I don't think there's anything inevitable about the outcome.

00:07:00.000 | I think, though, if we settle for diplomacy as usual,

00:07:03.500 | or statescraft as usual,

00:07:06.500 | or imagination as usual,

00:07:08.500 | then we should expect history as usual.

00:07:11.500 | But that's not, that's the trend.

00:07:14.500 | That's not inevitable.

00:07:15.500 | So if you ask me, bottom line, quickly,

00:07:17.500 | a war between the US and China in the year ahead,

00:07:20.500 | a no, I'd give you 99% on that one.

00:07:24.500 | War between the US and China in the next four years, no,

00:07:27.500 | I'd say 90%.

00:07:29.500 | No, okay?

00:07:31.500 | War between the US and China over the decades ahead,

00:07:34.500 | if both stay on the current paths?

00:07:37.500 | I don't like that thinking.

00:07:39.500 | We have, it seemed like, three decades

00:07:42.500 | of incredible collaboration with China

00:07:46.500 | and the West, and America specifically.

00:07:48.500 | And just look at what happened with the iPhone

00:07:50.500 | and the number of people who rose out of poverty in China.

00:07:55.500 | And it seemed to be going really well.

00:07:57.500 | And it seemed like the NBA was playing games there,

00:08:01.500 | and we were sending movies there.

00:08:02.500 | Everything seemed to be on the right track.

00:08:04.500 | And then something seems to have gone horribly wrong.

00:08:07.500 | And a two-part question, what has gone horribly wrong?

00:08:11.500 | Why has this happened so quickly?

00:08:13.500 | 'Cause it seems like it's changed since COVID

00:08:16.500 | in such a rapid fashion that's caught us all by surprise

00:08:21.500 | how this has come apart.

00:08:24.500 | And what does China want that we don't seem to understand?

00:08:29.500 | - Okay, two great questions, and I'll try to be brief.

00:08:33.500 | So maybe in your world, a better way to think of it

00:08:37.500 | is to have an established, entrenched company

00:08:42.500 | and a disruptive upstart.

00:08:44.500 | - Got it.

00:08:45.500 | - When the disruptive upstart is 1% of the business,

00:08:48.500 | welcome, 5% of the business, welcome.

00:08:52.500 | 10% of the business.

00:08:53.500 | Now it's moving faster and more rapidly.

00:08:57.500 | All of a sudden, one begins to think, wait a minute,

00:08:59.500 | where is this going?

00:09:02.500 | Could it actually imagine, it will displace me.

00:09:06.500 | So China was, at the beginning of the century,

00:09:08.500 | 10% of the US GDP.

00:09:11.500 | Today, it's 3/4 of the US GDP.

00:09:13.500 | So it's quite plausible that China will have a larger GDP

00:09:16.500 | even by market exchange rates than the US.

00:09:20.500 | Well, wait a minute, we're number one.

00:09:22.500 | That's part of who we are.

00:09:23.500 | So in a Thucydidesian dynamic,

00:09:25.500 | basically the seesaw of power begins to shift.

00:09:28.500 | Think of a seesaw on a kid's playground.

00:09:31.500 | The guy with the bulk is on one end,

00:09:33.500 | the little guy's on the other, and he begins bulking up.

00:09:36.500 | All of a sudden, the seesaw begin moving.

00:09:38.500 | The dynamics of that is Thucydides' trap.

00:09:41.500 | So the perception changes.

00:09:44.500 | I used to look down on you,

00:09:45.500 | now I'm having to look you in the eye, I'm looking up.

00:09:47.500 | The psychology changes.

00:09:49.500 | Who the hell do you think you are?

00:09:51.500 | I created the environment in which you grew up.

00:09:53.500 | You should be appreciative.

00:09:54.500 | -Yeah, we let you make our iPhones.

00:09:55.500 | -You should take your space.

00:09:57.500 | Seriously, our normal place is to be running the show,

00:10:00.500 | and your normal place is to take your seat at the table.

00:10:03.500 | So many, many people imagined that China

00:10:06.500 | would just follow the paths of Germany and Japan

00:10:08.500 | and take their place in the American-led international order.

00:10:11.500 | That was a pretty good idea,

00:10:13.500 | except they hadn't thought very carefully about history.

00:10:15.500 | Germany and Japan were defeated by the use of the war

00:10:18.500 | and occupied by the US,

00:10:19.500 | and then we wrote their constitution,

00:10:21.500 | and then we produced a kind of training school.

00:10:24.500 | So China wants to be--

00:10:26.500 | this is a leak one news slide--

00:10:28.500 | China wants to be respected as China,

00:10:30.500 | not as an honorary member of the West.

00:10:33.500 | -What happened in the late '90s--

00:10:35.500 | I guess it started with Clinton--

00:10:37.500 | where it seemed like a good idea to admit to the WTO,

00:10:41.500 | and then Bush kind of just put the nail in the coffin

00:10:44.500 | and did it and actually supported it.

00:10:47.500 | We could have not supported it.

00:10:50.500 | Some people say it was a trade-off

00:10:52.500 | for China's support for the Iraq war.

00:10:54.500 | Who knows?

00:10:55.500 | But the point is, it happened.

00:10:57.500 | But I'm sure you guys were sitting in the engine room

00:11:00.500 | scenario-planning what happens if this happens.

00:11:03.500 | And it's fair to say that from that context,

00:11:05.500 | we didn't necessarily get it right.

00:11:07.500 | So what did you get wrong?

00:11:09.500 | -Again, it's good to go back to 2000,

00:11:12.500 | and just to remember, in 2000,

00:11:14.500 | China was somewhere between 5% and 10% of US's GDP.

00:11:19.500 | The people in 2000--

00:11:21.500 | 80% of the people in China were trying to live on $2 a day.

00:11:26.500 | So the place is a miserable, struggling mess.

00:11:29.500 | The US has been in the business ever since World War II

00:11:32.500 | of trying to encourage economic development in countries.

00:11:35.500 | So Clinton and Bush together--

00:11:37.500 | Clinton said about the WTO,

00:11:39.500 | "It's a win-win-win situation.

00:11:41.500 | It's going to be a win for everybody.

00:11:43.500 | China's going to be lifted up.

00:11:44.500 | That's what we would like to do,

00:11:46.500 | because people's lives will be better."

00:11:48.500 | And actually, there's been an anti-poverty miracle in China

00:11:51.500 | that as human beings, we have to admire.

00:11:53.500 | People that used to get a few calories

00:11:55.500 | now get enough calories to eat.

00:11:57.500 | That's got to be a good thing.

00:12:00.500 | The idea that this might work so successfully

00:12:03.500 | that China could become--

00:12:06.500 | could have an economy as large as ours

00:12:09.500 | didn't occur to anybody at the time.

00:12:11.500 | A few, few people as outliers.

00:12:13.500 | But that was just kind of not in the imagination.

00:12:16.500 | And then secondly, this was in a period of great hubris in the US.

00:12:20.500 | We had won the Cold War.

00:12:22.500 | We were living in this bubble,

00:12:25.500 | which the most famous thesis of the period

00:12:29.500 | was Frank Fukuyama's "End of History."

00:12:31.500 | So everybody has become democracies and market economies.

00:12:34.500 | And if they have McDonald's, they can't have wars

00:12:37.500 | because people would prefer to get hamburgers than wars.

00:12:40.500 | You can hardly say that today without laughing.

00:12:43.500 | But that was sort of well-known--

00:12:45.500 | that was conventional wisdom at the time.

00:12:47.500 | So if you had come along and said, "Wait a minute.

00:12:49.500 | "If China's very successful,

00:12:51.500 | "it's going to come to have a GDP about the size of the US,

00:12:54.500 | "and then it's going to have-- back to your question--

00:12:56.500 | "it's going to have its own aspirations."

00:12:58.500 | The Chinese have a view, understandably,

00:13:01.500 | and Ray talked about this earlier today.

00:13:04.500 | Sorry, for 4,000 or 5,000 years,

00:13:06.500 | they were the predominant power in all the world they knew.

00:13:10.500 | So their story is the normal conditions of things

00:13:13.500 | is that we're at the-- they're Confucian,

00:13:16.500 | so hierarchy-- harmony and peace comes from hierarchy.

00:13:20.500 | They're at the top of the hierarchy.

00:13:22.500 | That's the normal place.

00:13:24.500 | They were displaced from this by Westerners

00:13:26.500 | with technology 150 years ago.

00:13:28.500 | They call that the "century of humiliation."

00:13:31.500 | And their aspiration is to go back to normal.

00:13:34.500 | And normal for them is China is the "center of the universe."

00:13:38.500 | China is the sun around which the others--

00:13:40.500 | there's, you know, as you remember their thing about,

00:13:44.500 | you know, you can't have two tigers in the valley.

00:13:46.500 | There's the big one and the other one.

00:13:48.500 | So I have two comments.

00:13:50.500 | The first is just a reaction to this.

00:13:52.500 | I'm sort of on the opposite side of you,

00:13:54.500 | which is that because of China's population woes

00:13:58.500 | and because of, I think, some of these technological things

00:14:02.500 | that are sort of on the horizon,

00:14:04.500 | I believe that we're sort of at the edge

00:14:07.500 | of an era of abundance that will create

00:14:09.500 | a massive peace dividend, because a lot of the justifications

00:14:12.500 | for war go away.

00:14:13.500 | That's my personal view.

00:14:14.500 | But I have taken the time to try to steelman

00:14:16.500 | your point of view, which is we go to war.

00:14:18.500 | And the best steelman that I can come up with

00:14:20.500 | is very practical, so I'd like you to try to dismantle it.

00:14:23.500 | Which is you have massive youth unemployment in China

00:14:26.500 | and waning growth, and so the simplest

00:14:29.500 | and most reductive way for China to basically grow

00:14:33.500 | and to appease 25% of young people,

00:14:36.500 | mostly men, from not uprising,

00:14:39.500 | is to essentially create demand.

00:14:41.500 | And the best way to create demand

00:14:43.500 | is to essentially create a war machine.

00:14:45.500 | And that is why they go to war.

00:14:47.500 | Is that--

00:14:48.500 | - I would say I appreciate that option.

00:14:52.500 | I've worked very hard on the 12 scenarios

00:14:55.500 | for getting to war.

00:14:56.500 | If there's a war between the US and China

00:14:59.500 | in the next year or four years or decade,

00:15:02.500 | how is it going to happen in my view?

00:15:04.500 | The most likely.

00:15:05.500 | Not this way.

00:15:06.500 | It's going to happen the same way the last war happened.

00:15:09.500 | Now if I were to take a quiz here,

00:15:10.500 | since I know we live in the United States of amnesia.

00:15:13.500 | (audience laughing)

00:15:17.500 | When was the last war between the US and China?

00:15:20.500 | I'm not going to give you a quiz,

00:15:21.500 | but I'll tell you the answer is 1950.

00:15:24.500 | What?

00:15:25.500 | Okay, and what happened?

00:15:27.500 | In 1950, North Korea attacked South Korea.

00:15:32.500 | Almost pushed them off the whole peninsula.

00:15:35.500 | The US had just won World War II.

00:15:37.500 | That's five years after the end of World War II.

00:15:39.500 | MacArthur and American troops were in Japan.

00:15:42.500 | They came to the rescue of South Korea.

00:15:44.500 | They pushed the North Koreans right back up the peninsula.

00:15:47.500 | And 38th parallel, which had been the starting point,

00:15:50.500 | they pushed right across without even thinking,

00:15:53.500 | and were pushing right towards the Chinese border, the Yalu.

00:15:56.500 | So you're now one year, this is 1950,

00:15:59.500 | one year after Mao has just won the Chinese Civil War.

00:16:03.500 | He hasn't even consolidated his position.

00:16:06.500 | The US is Superman.

00:16:08.500 | We've just dropped two bombs next door in Japan

00:16:10.500 | at the end of World War II.

00:16:11.500 | Monopoly of nuclear power.

00:16:13.500 | The possibility that China would attack the US,

00:16:17.500 | it was unimaginable, certainly to MacArthur.

00:16:20.500 | But Mao, seeing the US coming up to his border

00:16:23.500 | and not knowing where else he might stop,

00:16:26.500 | sent his peasant army to war with the US

00:16:30.500 | and beat the Americans right back down the peninsula

00:16:32.500 | to the 38th parallel.

00:16:34.500 | So wars happen often not because anybody wants a war.

00:16:38.500 | At the beginning of 1950, if you'd gone to Mao and said,

00:16:41.500 | "I got a good idea. Why don't you go to a war with Superman?"

00:16:44.500 | He would have said, "You're out of your mind."

00:16:46.500 | If you'd gone to Truman in 1950 and said,

00:16:48.500 | "How about we have a war with the US?"

00:16:50.500 | "Forget about it."

00:16:51.500 | So you don't have to have an intention of either of the parties.

00:16:54.500 | I think the most likely way a war will happen in the US and China,

00:16:58.500 | something happens in Taiwan,

00:17:00.500 | either we're unduly provocative or the Taiwanese provocative.

00:17:04.500 | - I'm going to hand it to Sax,

00:17:07.500 | but I want to just make one comment to get your reaction.

00:17:09.500 | If that's the framing, what about India?

00:17:12.500 | Because now India's ascendant, it's got a growing population,

00:17:15.500 | it's got huge economic growth,

00:17:17.500 | and unlike China, who's not necessarily ever been subjugated in a war,

00:17:21.500 | the Indians have this memory of basically having Judeo-Christians

00:17:27.500 | that dominated that region of which we all had to get liberty,

00:17:32.500 | which is almost even worse maybe.

00:17:34.500 | So just frame India in that context.

00:17:36.500 | - Another great question.

00:17:38.500 | Again, nobody knows, but the Indian story,

00:17:42.500 | either theory one,

00:17:44.500 | India is about to become a serious rival to China.

00:17:47.500 | That's the fashionable story today.

00:17:49.500 | Theory two is India is the country of the future and will always be so.

00:17:53.500 | We've been through already five of these cycles before

00:17:56.500 | where we declared India was about to rise rapidly,

00:17:59.500 | and lo and behold, India turns out to be India.

00:18:02.500 | So India has a lot of internal problems itself,

00:18:05.500 | as was mentioned earlier today.

00:18:07.500 | About 20% of the population are Muslims.

00:18:09.500 | Modi is basically undermining the multi-ethnic democracy

00:18:14.500 | that Nehru had built

00:18:16.500 | by getting support from the majority by oppressing the minority.

00:18:21.500 | So that's a complicated problem within,

00:18:23.500 | and a lot of other components.

00:18:25.500 | So if you look at the rivalry between the US and India

00:18:29.500 | in the 20th century and just graph it,

00:18:31.500 | you discover that lo and behold,

00:18:33.500 | in every year virtually and every decade for sure,

00:18:37.500 | the gap between them has grown in China's favor.

00:18:41.500 | Now, not this year.

00:18:43.500 | India is growing much faster than China this year and last year

00:18:46.500 | and maybe next year, so we can look at the trajectories.

00:18:49.500 | I think it's quite possible,

00:18:51.500 | and I think the American strategy, which I think is the right one,

00:18:55.500 | is that this is a long-run game, a long game.

00:18:59.500 | So there's going to be a long rivalry between the US and China.

00:19:02.500 | We believe that a more liberty-centered,

00:19:07.500 | open, democratic political system

00:19:10.500 | will perform better over the long run than a party-led autocracy.

00:19:15.500 | Xi has a different idea.

00:19:17.500 | He says things are too chaotic, information is too uncertain.

00:19:21.500 | You can't let people just--

00:19:23.500 | My God, let people vote and look and see what happens in the US.

00:19:26.500 | So we need to have order.

00:19:29.500 | And so our party-led autocracy, we believe,

00:19:32.500 | "Well, we play this out over time."

00:19:34.500 | If the US had to play this game, only US versus China, I think we lose.

00:19:38.500 | But if the US plays this game with a group of allied and aligned,

00:19:42.500 | of whom we now see in the quad India and Australia and Japan,

00:19:49.500 | and then in AUKUS we see Britain and Australia and the US,

00:19:55.500 | and then the trilateral that we just saw with Japan and South Korea.

00:20:00.500 | So you're seeing a configuration--

00:20:03.500 | I call it "more guys on our side of the seesaw."

00:20:06.500 | And that can go over a long period of time,

00:20:09.500 | and it may turn out that democracies fail internally.

00:20:14.500 | I think it's a big challenge.

00:20:16.500 | I think there's no certainty about that.

00:20:18.500 | It may turn out that autocracies fail

00:20:20.500 | in the way autocracies have historically failed.

00:20:23.500 | -It is an incredible framing because you have an autocracy in China

00:20:26.500 | and a democracy here, and then somewhat democratic

00:20:28.500 | is how we're, I think, describing India right now.

00:20:31.500 | Is India the most important relationship for America to get right

00:20:34.500 | at this moment in time?

00:20:36.500 | Is that the relationship we really need to be focusing on

00:20:38.500 | since that seems like it's the linchpin or the fulcrum?

00:20:42.500 | -Well, I would say that's a good question, and I'm not sure.

00:20:46.500 | I am probably unduly skeptical about India

00:20:52.500 | because my impressions are overly shaped by Lee Kuan Yew.

00:20:58.500 | Lee Kuan Yew was the founder and builder of Singapore,

00:21:01.500 | and his great hope was for India,

00:21:04.500 | but ultimately he became to be despairing of its internal complexities.

00:21:09.500 | Modi seems to be a different character.

00:21:11.500 | If you look at the way he ran the province that he ran before,

00:21:14.500 | the state, he was very effective.

00:21:16.500 | He's very ambitious for India, so I'm hopeful about India.

00:21:20.500 | If India emerges, it has the potential alongside,

00:21:25.500 | I don't think only India, Japan, South Korea, Australia,

00:21:30.500 | and even maybe the Europeans, again, depending on what happens here.

00:21:34.500 | So you could have a group of aligned and aligned,

00:21:38.500 | not all agreeing on everything, but agreeing on enough,

00:21:41.500 | that says we're trying the complex problem of governing a society,

00:21:48.500 | we believe has to start with the freedom and liberty of people.

00:21:52.500 | That's what we think is--

00:21:54.500 | and we think that's essential for the dynamism of innovation and invention,

00:21:58.500 | and lo and behold, there's a lot of evidence for that,

00:22:01.500 | and if we're the freest and most open society,

00:22:04.500 | lo and behold, a bunch of people come from other countries

00:22:07.500 | where they're not so free, and they do their thing here.

00:22:10.500 | I'd say thank God for that.

00:22:12.500 | So under those circumstances, played out over a long run,

00:22:18.500 | you can imagine a story that turns out pretty well.

00:22:22.500 | In the case of the US and Soviet Union, just to remember,

00:22:25.500 | it's hard to believe, but if you go back and read your economic textbook

00:22:29.500 | that was published in the 1960s,

00:22:33.500 | Samuelson was the--basically for economics,

00:22:36.500 | it says by the '70s, the Soviet Union will have overtaken the US economy.

00:22:41.500 | That was kind of a well-known fact.

00:22:43.500 | -Why didn't that happen? -Well, lo and behold, it didn't.

00:22:46.500 | The reason it didn't happen is because dictatorships have a hard time

00:22:50.500 | in the long term versus democracies?

00:22:53.500 | Well, there's about ten reasons why there's weaknesses in an autocracy,

00:22:57.500 | and you're now seeing a lot of evidence of it in the Chinese system,

00:23:02.500 | particularly after Xi became even more autocratic

00:23:05.500 | in guaranteeing his lease on life with the recent coronation,

00:23:09.500 | where he's got his third term unprecedented but without a term limit.

00:23:14.500 | So basically, if I'm the autocrat, and especially if I come to think,

00:23:20.500 | as he does, he's got the thought of Xi Jinping,

00:23:24.500 | they write this into the Constitution, so this contains all wisdom.

00:23:28.500 | One of the problems the guys are having with their AI machines

00:23:31.500 | is you can't ask a question that has an answer inconsistent

00:23:35.500 | with the thought of Xi Jinping that declares what's true about this and that.

00:23:40.500 | He doesn't talk much about mathematics or science,

00:23:43.500 | so you can ask those questions.

00:23:45.500 | Tencent's AI machine is a pretty good competitor for GPT-4

00:23:50.500 | in the science or math, but if you ask a question about

00:23:54.500 | how do freedom-centered societies perform,

00:23:59.500 | it can't answer that question because the thought of Xi Jinping says this.

00:24:03.500 | -He says this. -Does not compute.

00:24:05.500 | Another one, if you choose people for loyalty more than for competence,

00:24:11.500 | look at a company and see how that works.

00:24:14.500 | So seven reasons, yes.

00:24:16.500 | One of the points you make in your book is that--

00:24:21.500 | and I think your book came out around the time that China and the US

00:24:25.500 | had achieved rough parity in terms of purchasing power parity, their GDP.

00:24:30.500 | -Roughly, yeah. -Roughly.

00:24:32.500 | I remember one of the points you made is that China has four times

00:24:35.500 | the population of the US, so its per capita GDP was one quarter that of the US.

00:24:42.500 | If they merely got to the point of having half the per capita GDP of the US,

00:24:48.500 | then their economy would be twice as big as ours.

00:24:51.500 | China has a lot of really smart, hardworking people who are studying subjects

00:24:55.500 | that we aren't studying as much as we should in the US,

00:24:58.500 | like engineering, like science, and so forth.

00:25:01.500 | There are reasons, I think, to believe that their incredible rise could derail.

00:25:05.500 | The demographics are a problem, maybe if the economy becomes too centrally controlled.

00:25:11.500 | But let's just assume that it does continue its rise.

00:25:15.500 | I guess the question would be, will the US have to effectively recognize

00:25:23.500 | that they have a sphere of influence in Asia in order to avoid a war?

00:25:27.500 | I mean, is that what we're going to have to do?

00:25:30.500 | I think, so I appreciate you're starting with the basics.

00:25:35.500 | Structural realities are harder to deny.

00:25:38.500 | So again, Americans don't like this, but just do the arithmetic.

00:25:43.500 | If Chinese are only, if their economy is only half as productive as ours,

00:25:48.500 | and these are pretty talented people and they work pretty hard,

00:25:51.500 | they'll have a GDP twice ours.

00:25:54.500 | I'll do it again. Wait a minute, twice ours.

00:25:56.500 | I'll tell you in a rivalry between A and B, and B has twice the GDP.

00:26:00.500 | So we can have twice the size of the defense budget.

00:26:03.500 | We can have twice the intelligence budget.

00:26:05.500 | It can have twice, twice, twice.

00:26:10.500 | That's reality.

00:26:12.500 | Now, can I find enough allied and aligned on my side to make up for some of that?

00:26:18.500 | Yeah, that seems right.

00:26:21.500 | So that's one way.

00:26:23.500 | We need an alliance strategy more than they do.

00:26:25.500 | That's right. We need it.

00:26:27.500 | But if you said over time in relationships like that,

00:26:32.500 | if you're going to avoid war, will there – I mean, a sphere of influence –

00:26:38.500 | again, there's a great abstract debate about this,

00:26:40.500 | but in reality the sphere of influence is the shadow that power casts in some realm.

00:26:47.500 | So if you're more powerful, you have a sphere of influence.

00:26:51.500 | So in the South China Sea today, on the Chinese border, they have more ships,

00:26:57.500 | they have more missiles on the land.

00:27:00.500 | So lo and behold, we don't call that their sphere of influence,

00:27:04.500 | but if you look and see what happens in the area,

00:27:07.500 | we don't operate our ships the way we did when I was in the Pentagon in the Clinton administration.

00:27:12.500 | So if there were an event in Taiwan, which is 90 miles off their shore,

00:27:17.500 | like Cuba is on our shore, and halfway around the world for us,

00:27:22.500 | the likelihood we're going to have the ships and the planes and the other –

00:27:26.500 | excuse me, no, that just doesn't work that way.

00:27:29.500 | You can look at the geography and see the tyranny of it.

00:27:32.500 | So will there come to be some degree of difference and accommodation

00:27:38.500 | if a war is to be avoided?

00:27:40.500 | And the answer is yes.

00:27:42.500 | Now then it becomes ugly because you say, well, okay, well, in what respect?

00:27:46.500 | And I know you guys – I saw earlier did the question for Robert Kennedy about Taiwan.

00:27:53.500 | I think that's a good question not to answer, not to answer.

00:27:57.500 | [Applause]

00:27:59.500 | Yeah, I mean, this is where I worry about the competence of our foreign policy establishment

00:28:04.500 | because I think it only has one gear, which is forward and double down.

00:28:09.500 | In the United States, we have a doctrine, the Monroe Doctrine,

00:28:12.500 | which says that no distant great power can bring troops, weapons, or bases into our hemisphere

00:28:17.500 | because we do not tolerate other great powers having security threats amassed on our border.

00:28:22.500 | But our foreign policy establishment cannot comprehend that other great powers

00:28:26.500 | want a similar Monroe Doctrine.

00:28:28.500 | I think that was a huge contributor to the war we have in Ukraine right now.

00:28:32.500 | [Applause]

00:28:34.500 | So we have this theory.

00:28:37.500 | I mean, I'm part of this establishment that you're talking about.

00:28:41.500 | [Laughter]

00:28:44.500 | So why did you invade Ukraine?

00:28:47.500 | [Laughter]

00:28:49.500 | It's not as –

00:28:51.500 | That's such a gross implication.

00:28:52.500 | It's not as uniform as you say, and it's not always as unsuccessful as you say.

00:28:59.500 | But overall, I think you're more right than wrong.

00:29:02.500 | So basically, we say we're the exceptional nation.

00:29:08.500 | So what does that mean?

00:29:10.500 | We make the rules, and you're supposed to obey the rules.

00:29:14.500 | But we don't obey the rules.

00:29:16.500 | So we say we're for the rule-based order.

00:29:18.500 | Excuse me, the rule-based order was the basis on which we invaded Iraq?

00:29:24.500 | I don't think so.

00:29:26.500 | That we occupied Afghanistan?

00:29:28.500 | I don't think so.

00:29:30.500 | So the U.S. has made a lot of mistakes of unnecessary wars.

00:29:34.500 | [Applause]

00:29:41.500 | A lot of the unnecessary wars was because people with wrong ideas dominated people with right ideas.

00:29:48.500 | But there was a debate and a discussion.

00:29:50.500 | So we need more people with the right ideas getting into the conversation in an active way.

00:29:56.500 | But let me just do one other footnote here.

00:29:58.500 | [Applause]

00:30:00.500 | We have to remember, this is 9/11.

00:30:03.500 | So this is a big day for me.

00:30:06.500 | This is a day in which airplanes hijacked by terrorists killed 3,000 people at the World Trade Center and the Pentagon,

00:30:14.500 | including many people that I know extremely well.

00:30:18.500 | What would a world be like in which that happened every day or every week or every month?

00:30:23.500 | We'd be totally intolerable.

00:30:25.500 | We wouldn't be doing what we're doing.

00:30:27.500 | Why is that not happening?

00:30:29.500 | So people did some right things.

00:30:31.500 | So there's been a pretty active program by the U.S., some of it with mistakes, but overall,

00:30:37.500 | that's played a significant role in the fact that people who plan and train to conduct major terrorist attacks

00:30:46.500 | in the U.S. are taken off the chessboard.

00:30:49.500 | Every day people go out hunting.

00:30:51.500 | Every day people find people.

00:30:53.500 | And I would say thank goodness for this.

00:30:55.500 | [Applause]

00:30:56.500 | So I think that's an interesting point.

00:30:58.500 | Certainly al-Qaeda hasn't been able to hit us again in that way.

00:31:02.500 | I do wonder whether there were two tragedies on 9/11.

00:31:07.500 | One was the thousands of people who died.

00:31:09.500 | The other was the way that we reacted to it.

00:31:11.500 | Like you said, we went into Iraq, a total non sequitur.

00:31:14.500 | Stupid, yes.

00:31:15.500 | Stupid and a non sequitur, and then we stayed in Afghanistan for 20 years.

00:31:18.500 | And again, not in Assyria.

00:31:20.500 | Yeah, on sort of the nation-building grounds.

00:31:22.500 | We then went into Syria.

00:31:23.500 | That's still going on.

00:31:24.500 | There was Libya.

00:31:25.500 | And there was very little debate about all of these things at the time we made these decisions.

00:31:30.500 | It's almost like the U.S. foreign policy establishment, in reaction to 9/11, became almost deranged.

00:31:36.500 | And, you know, compared to say the 1990s where I think there were real foreign policy debates,

00:31:41.500 | there was a real foreign policy debate in the '90s on NATO expansion,

00:31:45.500 | it doesn't seem like we have that many debates.

00:31:48.500 | Not within the policy elite.

00:31:50.500 | Maybe we're having them.

00:31:51.500 | But it doesn't seem like the policy elite debates anything anymore.

00:31:54.500 | It's just this sort of bellicose, hawkish rhetoric at all times.

00:31:58.500 | Do you agree with that, Graham?

00:31:59.500 | From both sides.

00:32:00.500 | From the inside.

00:32:01.500 | Yeah, I mean, again, I live on the other side.

00:32:04.500 | I live on both sides of this curtain.

00:32:06.500 | And I would say inside, there's much more debate, and there was much more debate,

00:32:10.500 | than we take credit for.

00:32:12.500 | George Bush made a terrible, terrible, terrible mistake in invading Iraq in 2003.

00:32:19.500 | Who said that to him?

00:32:22.500 | His father's closest advisor, Brent Scowcroft, who was joined at the hip with the father,

00:32:30.500 | said to him, "This is a terrible, dumb mistake."

00:32:34.500 | He even went so far as to write an op-ed about it after he had--

00:32:38.500 | Now, he did not write an op-ed without talking to Bush's father.

00:32:42.500 | Would George H.W. Bush have done this?

00:32:44.500 | No.

00:32:46.500 | If Gore-- If the count had gone right in Florida and Gore had been president,

00:32:50.500 | would we have gone into Iraq?

00:32:51.500 | No.

00:32:52.500 | So, electing the right president and having the right--

00:32:56.500 | So, if it had been the Bush 41 team, rather than the Bush 43 team,

00:33:01.500 | we wouldn't have made that mistake.

00:33:02.500 | So, how would you--

00:33:03.500 | You mentioned this RFK clip.

00:33:05.500 | One of the things that he says is that we've gotten things backwards now,

00:33:10.500 | where there's a military-industrial complex that essentially wants to maximize revenue.

00:33:15.500 | That's like logical in the capitalist system.

00:33:17.500 | But then what it's done is it's perverted the intelligence-gathering institutions

00:33:22.500 | to essentially be writing the justifications for these wars before these wars happen.

00:33:28.500 | Is that conspiracy theory or is that--

00:33:33.500 | I'd say it's complicated, so--

00:33:36.500 | But it's not a no.

00:33:37.500 | I think it's true.

00:33:38.500 | It's not a no is what you're saying.

00:33:39.500 | No, it's--

00:33:40.500 | Why is it complicated?

00:33:44.500 | We live in an extremely dangerous world.

00:33:49.500 | But do we, though?

00:33:50.500 | This year--

00:33:51.500 | But, Grant, can I ask you, do we really, though?

00:33:53.500 | Absolutely.

00:33:54.500 | Really?

00:33:55.500 | Had thousands of people not been taken off the chessboard,

00:34:00.500 | you would have seen many repeats of 9/11.

00:34:04.500 | And if you were living in a place--

00:34:06.500 | and somebody I know was trying to make a last trade on the morning of 9/11,

00:34:12.500 | and a plane crashes in and the building is knocked down,

00:34:15.500 | all of a sudden the conversation changes.

00:34:17.500 | So there's that.

00:34:18.500 | I don't want to take the gravity away from it.

00:34:20.500 | That's the terrorist piece.

00:34:21.500 | Let's take war.

00:34:23.500 | This is the other big event most people don't realize.

00:34:26.500 | This month is the anniversary of the end of World War II

00:34:31.500 | and the beginning of 78 years in which there's not been another great power war.

00:34:35.500 | Excuse me.

00:34:36.500 | In history, that's almost unheard of.

00:34:38.500 | Why is that?

00:34:39.500 | Answer, a lot of good fortune, a lot of grace.

00:34:41.500 | But also lots of things that the U.S. did successfully.

00:34:44.500 | So I think that security dominates everything when you don't have security.

00:34:51.500 | And the geopolitics to provide security is very complicated.

00:34:55.500 | Now, the structures that do that often end up making big mistakes too.

00:34:59.500 | So I'm not trying to make excuses for the mistakes,

00:35:01.500 | but I think the overall of it is that the security order that's been built in the past

00:35:08.500 | and survived for the last 70 years has been a big deal.

00:35:12.500 | I agree with you.

00:35:13.500 | I want to ask, what you said there, which is through the framing Chamath has here,

00:35:18.500 | we have this military industrial complex,

00:35:20.500 | we have this complicated relationship with China, and then we have Taiwan.

00:35:23.500 | And we have this incredible policy of ambiguity,

00:35:27.500 | and it seemed to be working really well.

00:35:29.500 | And now are we having the proper debate on Taiwan?

00:35:33.500 | The debate we should be having on defending Taiwan, not defending Taiwan,

00:35:38.500 | providing them with arms?

00:35:40.500 | Because you seem to believe in the book that this is going to be what it's about.

00:35:44.500 | Let me add to that question, and this is going to be our last question

00:35:47.500 | because we do need to move on.

00:35:51.500 | In your role in defense planning,

00:35:53.500 | and you look at the Department of Defense today

00:35:55.500 | and the U.S. defense industrial complex, are we equipped for a hot conflict with China?

00:36:03.500 | And if we're not, does that change the positioning and the strategy that China then has

00:36:07.500 | and how they think about what they're going to do next with the U.S.?

00:36:10.500 | So the first one is no, we're not, and it certainly impacts China.

00:36:14.500 | In fact, I think if you were able to green field the Defense Department today for half the money,

00:36:20.500 | you could get twice the bang for the buck.

00:36:23.500 | So bureaucracies are complicated, difficult.

00:36:27.500 | The fact that we haven't had another great power war, I'm prepared to pay a little extra for,

00:36:31.500 | but if you said how efficient is it, not so much.

00:36:35.500 | And I think the big question we should ask ourselves is for rational actors in Washington

00:36:43.500 | or here today us and in Beijing, are there more reasons, more incentives,

00:36:49.500 | to compete between the U.S. and China or alternatively more incentives to cooperate?

00:36:56.500 | So we've been to all the ones to compete, but for cooperating,

00:37:00.500 | excuse me, if we have a war, we destroy ourselves.

00:37:03.500 | So we have a pretty powerful interest in survival in not having a war

00:37:06.500 | and not allowing something happen in Taiwan or this or that.

00:37:10.500 | If we live in an enclosed biosphere on a small planet,

00:37:13.500 | either party's greenhouse gas emission can make the place unlivable for both of us.

00:37:18.500 | If we don't find a way to cooperate in dealing with that.

00:37:21.500 | We have a financial system that's so entangled that a financial crisis in one place

00:37:25.500 | can become a depression everywhere.

00:37:27.500 | So if we don't find a way to do it.

00:37:29.500 | So I would say it's a good assignment for everybody.

00:37:32.500 | Make your list of the reasons, incentives to compete and turn the sheet over,

00:37:37.500 | incentives to cooperate.

00:37:39.500 | We need a lot more strategic imagination in that space,

00:37:42.500 | and I'm hoping some of you guys and other folks will put some of their gray cells onto that problem.

00:37:47.500 | Instead of this de facto posturing that everyone seems to hold today

00:37:50.500 | that we're going to go to war, this is our enemy,

00:37:52.500 | and just be a little more thoughtful about the long-term relationship.

00:37:55.500 | Graham Allison, thank you so much.

00:37:56.500 | Amazing.

00:37:58.500 | That was absolutely fantastic.

00:38:00.500 | Thank you.

00:38:01.500 | Wow.

00:38:03.500 | Another standing ovation.

00:38:05.500 | [Applause]

00:38:09.500 | [Music]

00:38:38.500 | [Laughter]

00:38:44.500 | We should all just get a room and just have one big huge orgy because they're all just using this,

00:38:47.500 | it's like sexual tension that they just need to release somehow.

00:38:51.500 | [Music]

00:39:09.500 | [BLANK_AUDIO]

All-In Summit: In conversation with Graham Allison

Chapters