Well, thanks for that introduction. This is the time of year when I always feel that I made a really wise choice in coming to the University of Florida. And I'm going to continue to feel that way for, I guess, the next five or six months before those doubts start creeping back in.
Just, I know some of the students here are members of the Alexander Hamilton Society, and we've got a lot of people here associated with that group. Just want to say this is also my first appearance as a board member of the Alexander Hamilton Society. I was invited and just accepted this morning, and I hope to be continuing to work closely with that group, creating opportunities and internships for students, but also opportunities for faculty.
The AHS, its dream is to become in the field of international relations what the Federalist Society has been in law. That is to say, a pipeline that helps talented people find their way in a position in a field and ultimately emerge to have a tremendous impact. So we'll see if that works, but I think we can say reasonably that the Hamilton Center and the University of Florida are going to be a place where AHS will try to be active and useful.
So my talk today is going to have two parts. First, I'm going to try to describe the global crisis in the world that exists today, and then give you some idea of why I think the United States, despite our many problems and our enormous divisions, why the United States may in fact be the country best placed to move through this crisis successfully and to help build a stronger, more peaceful world in the future.
So that's what I'm going to do. For those of you who are thinking about CLA courses for next semester, some of this is going to be a taste of what I'll be trying to teach with the help of some of the Hamilton fellows next semester in our class, The Global Game of Thrones. It's an introduction to contemporary geopolitics. I can't remember the official name. It's something very boring, as these things have to be. But just look in the catalog for my name, or not, if the speech really turns you off.
Also, I think I should thank the teachers who have forced their students at gunpoint to attend this event. I hope you'll find it will be less painful than the other things they would have made you do in the absence of it. All right, let's start. Global crisis.
There are a lot of aspects to the world situation that lead me to describe it as being in a crisis. First, we are in one of the most revolutionary and destabilizing eras in the history of the world. And this is driven primarily by technology, the information revolution, which is dramatically accelerating even as I speak, as new forms of AI and other new forms of tech enter the marketplace and enter our lives.
Those of you who, as college students, are looking at these newspaper stories about rising unemployment among recently graduated college students are already very aware of one of the changes that this revolution is driving. It is going to transform the job market, and it will continue to do so. We may be in the middle of an AI bubble on the stock market, but that doesn't mean that this technology isn't going to go out there and change the way almost every company in the United States does business. And therefore, for almost all of us, it's going to change the way we do our work and earn our livings.
That kind of change is incredibly destabilizing in terms of politics. In terms of economics, as you know, classic great companies that look like they were here to stay wither and die, new startups emerge, fortunes are made, fortunes are lost, some regions of the country rise, some regions of the country go down.
People who studied computer science and thought, "Wow, I know how to code. I am really going to be on top of the world," are suddenly looking at it like, wait a minute, nobody wants me. And other people who studied things like the humanities may discover, oh, whoops, I'm actually going to have to make a living. It can be a little bit different.
My nephew once told me that, you know, he'd majored in philosophy as an undergrad, but he said it was just the most amazing thing. None of the big philosophy companies were hiring the year I graduated. Well, it may be that things like that are going to turn out to be an advantage when understanding thought and creativity and how to pose interesting questions becomes a massive skill in terms of prompting or interacting with AI.
But it's not just happening in the United States. It's not just tearing our politics apart and polarizing our politics. The information revolution is challenging governments and people everywhere. I've been spending a lot of time in India in the last few years, and one of the things you realize there is that Indian politicians and intellectuals are looking at the fact that 800 million Indians have gotten a hold of cell phones in the last 10 years.
And people who live in isolated rural villages can now look on their cell phone and see how things are different in other parts of the world and even other parts of India, and it's making them impatient with the status quo, and they want to know what their politicians are going to do to make their lives more like the lives they can look at on their little screens. All right. That's happening all over the world, and that's creating enormous pressure on governments and politicians everywhere at every level.
It's also completely destabilizing our strategic environment. And what do I mean by this? Well, some of us here, I look around the room, I'm not the only person here old enough to remember the Cold War. I may be the only person old enough to remember the Civil War, but that's a different story. During the Cold War, U.S.-Soviet relations were frequently at a critical point. You've probably heard of the Cuba missile crisis, where it looked as if we might have a nuclear war that week. On Tuesday, it looked like we might have a nuclear war by Thursday.
Well, and that seemed pretty awful and destabilizing. But today it's even harder because with nuclear weapons you can usually tell if somebody else is developing them, and if they are developing, you can usually tell how effective, how powerful they're likely to be. You can tell a lot about what kinds of missiles they've got to deliver them, how many they could deliver, and so on and so forth. And you could, through diplomacy and other methods, deal with this threat in various ways.
But with the information revolution, you're getting new kinds of strategic weaponry or ability to act. Suppose one morning we wake up and some hostile foreign government has simply taken down the financial system of the United States, and you don't know, neither you nor anybody else knows how much money you have in the bank. You can't process transactions. That would bring our economy and our society to a grinding halt, and we might not know who had done it until after it happened. How do you deter an attack that can take you by surprise?
And how do you respond to an event like that, where, you know, at least in nuclear war you had 15 or 20 minutes between when they launched and their missiles would hit? All right. Now you may have negative time. The thing hits before you know it's coming.
But you could develop, we did, we spent a lot of time and effort developing nuclear arms treaties, ways of, okay, we won't build these, you won't build these, you could check up on that. But with cyber or biological warfare, you can't really tell what some hacker is doing in some other country, what their computer experts are doing. You can't.
We'd have satellites that would fly around the world and could look and see what was going on at a Soviet nuclear site or something like that. You can take all the pictures you want from outer space. That's not going to tell you whether somebody is working on a biological WMD in essentially the equivalent of a high school biology lab.
So the world is getting more dangerous because of, just as politics everywhere are getting sort of more polarized and more difficult because of the extreme rapidity of change that we're getting with the information revolution, which then affects the ability of governments everywhere to compromise, to negotiate, and do all these things. At the same time you have that happening, you have the strategic environment becoming more dangerous and less predictable. Making sense? I'm not asking if it's good news. I'm just asking if the presentation makes sense. Okay. So, that's one of them.
Another one is that we're having a kind of a crisis of, really, this is a kind of political-cultural crisis. For the last 150 years, the core fact of politics in the industrial nations was the existence of what Marx used to call an industrial proletariat. Okay, that's not just a working class. We still have plenty of people who work for a living who, you know, if they didn't get their paycheck wouldn't be able to pay their rent or do other things, right? But an industrial proletariat is a very different kind of group of workers.
In Marx's idea, the idea of many non-Marxist social democrats and others, the industrial proletariat, they worked in big factories. So they worked together, they learned, they formed organizations, labor unions and syndicates of labor unions. The industries that they worked in, steel, rail, and so on, if the workers went on strike, they could bring the economy to a close. And so the unions and these workers had tremendous power.
Marx thought that this would lead to universal communism and the establishment of proletarian power. Didn't happen. What happened was that in countries like ours and in Western Europe and Japan, people figured out, well, wait a minute, actually what you need to do is share the wealth a bit. We can introduce reforms and the workers can have much better lives and higher living standards and no horrible communist revolutions like in Russia or China. All right. So we learned that.
But now something happened that Marx completely didn't anticipate, which is the virtual end of the industrial proletariat as a leading force in society. That is, today, the percentage of the population involved in manufacturing in America since the 1970s has gone down from the 30s to like, you know, 12% and is heading down further. That's as fast as the transformation from agriculture to industry back in the 19th century. And it's happening not just in the US, but everywhere.
And the countries where you still do have an industrial proletariat, like China, you have dictatorial governments that don't let the industrial proletariat have a voice. And so capitalism has survived the industrial proletariat. The one thing Marx would have thought was totally impossible has happened. But it's turned out in the absence of that, politics gets harder rather than easier.
The industrial proletariat as this force in society, what did it want? It wanted a better living standard. It thought in class terms. It wanted to help all of the workers, right? But when it's gone, what we see is the rise in its place of identity politics, cultural politics, culture wars rather than class conflicts. And these are much harder to compromise, much harder to work with.
And they tend to shift politics away from rational arguments about objective universal goals to things based on feeling and raising, heightening feelings and stressing identities and sub-identities and competition between them. And that is making politics more polarized, more tumultuous, and harder to find constructive common ground solutions. Again, not just in the United States, but in many countries around the world. Okay.
Then third element, institutional crisis of the institutions that we set up to prevent war and smooth international relations after World War. You know, you probably, if you've had the history, you'll know that after World War I, they set up the League of Nations. Oops, it didn't work. So after World War II, they tried the UN and a bunch of other institutions that never worked perfectly. But on the other hand, we haven't had a great power war since 1945. So that's something.
Okay. In between World War I and World War II, they only had 20 years. We've had like 80 years and still barely going since World War II without a great power war. Not too bad. But the institutions that help do that are working less and less well. The UN is getting more outdated every year. You know who are the permanent members of the Security Council? They're basically the five countries that sort of came out on top in World War II. That is to say, United States, United Kingdom, France, Russia, and China.
And of those, you know, Germany and Japan are not in the UN, in the Security Council. India isn't on the Security Council. So the UN less and less reflects the realities of world power and more and more becomes a kind of theater of illusions. And there's a lot more we could say about that, but that should...
Other world institutions like the World Trade Organization, that was set up with great hopes to promote free and fair trade around the world, kind of never worked, sort of was unable to block China's abuse of the international trading system to become kind of a hostile superpower. So the international institutions that we built up in the hope that they would prevent another war and allow other ways for big international problems to be solved without conflict are not working very well. That's another element of our crisis.
Then we see a changing balance of power. The European Union, Japan, and the United Kingdom are all in absolute or relative decline. That is, these countries used to be much more important, powerful, relatively rich than they are today. And at the best, like Japan, they're growing very slowly. Many of them are falling behind in the technologies that will shape the future. The Europeans are that way.
Beyond that, partly because they've relied too much on American security guarantees, they haven't made the investments in national defense that are really necessary to be independent and be a strong force in the world. And they've sort of lost the ability to think about strategy in a realistic way. So that a lot of the countries that ought to be promoting peace and believe in peace and want peace are weaker and less effective than they used to be.
And meanwhile, there are countries like China and India, which are, you know, India is not necessarily hostile to the existing world system, but looks very unenthusiastically on a largely Western world. And China actively thinks that the current system in some key ways is opposing its rise. And so the countries where the rapid growth technologically and economically is happening are countries that have much less reason to support the peaceful order that has existed since '45.
Not a perfect peace by any means, not total peace, but compared to, you know, world wars every 20 years, peace. All right, making sense? And out of that, what we see arising is a geopolitical crisis, which is to say, you've got what people call the CRINKs. I don't know if you've heard that expression: China, Russia, Iran, North Korea. C-R-I-N-K-s. The CRINKs.
They don't agree on how they'd like to replace the current world order. They don't know if America dropped dead or sank under the water tomorrow. They have no idea what they would do next. But what they share in common is a deep hostility to the way things are and a willingness to either go to war or come very close to war to try to push this system down.
And to use any means of information warfare, economic warfare, technological warfare that they can think of to weaken the existing international system and pave the way for its replacement by something new. And again, they've got different motives, different priorities. They're not necessarily going to stick together. There are opportunities in there for smart American diplomacy to change their calculations. Nixon went to China. It's not impossible that things like that could happen again now.
But at the moment, these countries are united on a program. Their work has been getting deeper, and with the single exception of Iran, which suffered some pretty catastrophic defeats in the last year, thanks largely to Israel, almost entirely to Israel. All right. These countries are continuing to get stronger. See, North Korea actually has troops fighting in Ukraine, and they're cooperating economically, they're cooperating on defense tech, and they are literally cooperating in Russia's war in Ukraine. All right.
Now, I could talk about all of these different crises, and there's a lot to say about them. You may feel I've already talked quite a bit about them, and maybe even too much, and when is he going to move on to something more entertaining, right? But I do want to talk a little bit about the severity of the crisis, and I'm going to focus on the geopolitical side of it, the international great power rivalry between the CRINKs and the others.
Because not that the other problems aren't real, but honestly, the thing that could hit us hardest, could kill us quickest, could hit our economy the quickest and have the biggest impact on your lives, it isn't climate change. It isn't a whole range of other problems that we see in the world. It is actually the geopolitical crisis that could come at us the fastest and have the biggest impact on our lives. So I want to talk just a little bit about that.
We can divide the world today into three rough groups of countries. You have what I'd consider the status quo countries. If you know the phrase in Latin, status quo means sort of things as they are. And countries that are basically okay with the way things are are known as status quo countries.
They don't necessarily want to change their boundaries. They don't want to rewrite the economic laws. They might want to compete a little bit and get richer and gain some advantages, but they don't want to break the system. All right? In fact, they don't want anybody else to break it either. So, who are some of these countries? Well, first and foremost is the United States. But with us somewhat, European Union, United Kingdom, Japan, Israel.
Argentina right now in South America to some degree, Mexico, Canada less today than perhaps a year and a half ago, and some of our NATO allies like Denmark. You know, when we talk about how we want to annex Greenland, the Danes who have it now get a little weirded out by that. Very sensitive, the Danes. So, but those are the kind of status quo powers.
And as I said earlier, a lot of them have been losing power. Combination of slow growth, technological backwardness, and strategic blindness. Then you've got the revisionists, the CRINKs. You can add a few others to those. I think Pakistan with its close alliance to China, Qatar in the Middle East, a few others, Venezuela, Cuba, Nicaragua, the usual three in our hemisphere.
These are revisionists who really don't like the way things work. Some of them don't like it because they're communists and would like to have a communist world. Some of them don't like it because they just want to get back to a world of great powers like Russia, and they want to be a great power. They don't like all these rules and all of this stuff. Some of them, like Iran, have a very different vision.
And then you've got non-state actors, the jihadis and so on, who again are willing to use force to try to change a world that offends them morally or blocks them politically or culturally, right? So you have these forces, you say, they don't all agree with each other, but they will cooperate in this common vision of wanting to end the status quo. From time to time they'll cooperate.
Then you have swing states, countries whose interests could lead them in either direction. A country like India, which is a member of the BRICS, which is a group that is really trying to replace Western institutions and so on with others. But on the other hand, there are a lot of ways in which India is more worried about China's revisionism than anything else. So India could go either way.
A country like Turkey, which used to be and is technically a NATO ally, but Turkey looks at the world and it thinks it has a lot of options. You could think about Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates are countries who will conditionally cooperate with anybody. So the UAE can have good economic and diplomatic relations with Israel even as it's working very closely with Russia in some rather unsavory ways. So you've got a range of countries in that global swing state group.
That's an overview of world politics, the quick and dirty version. Where do I see the biggest danger of things going badly wrong fast? The answer is Taiwan. Some of you guys may not have thought much about Taiwan. Many people have not thought very much about Taiwan, but it is an island off the coast of China that China considers to be a renegade province, which only American power is preventing China from doing what it otherwise can, would, and should do, which is to take Taiwan and bring it back to the motherland, as people in Beijing would think.
Taiwanese are divided. There are some who believe that there is one China and Taiwan is part of that China. But Beijing is the bad China and they're the good China, and they hope that someday all of China would be free, and in the meantime they would like Taiwan to keep its distance from China. There are others who say, no, no, no, Taiwan is a different society, has a different history from China.
We're like China in many ways, but you know, Singapore is like China in many ways, and Singapore is not a part of China. So you have these different tendencies. Now, why do we care? A lot of people will tell you we care about the semiconductors. Taiwan is the world's most important source of the most advanced semiconductors.
And if China were to take that, just as it used its domination of rare earths this summer and fall to try to impose its will on others, it would certainly use access to semiconductors as a major weapon. And when you realize that our most important military weapons, our core economic functions, and so on, all depend on these semiconductors, you do get a certain sense that that would really matter. But that's not all.
I was in Japan a couple of years ago, and I spoke to the national security advisor of Japan, who said, "Listen, if China were to unify with Taiwan, take control of Taiwan, Japan would have to reach a deal with China because China's control of the shipping routes, its ability to stop Japan from trading with the oil-rich Middle East... Japan has to import almost everything it needs to eat. It is dependent on food imports, on energy imports, and many other things. Plus, its export industries need to be able to import raw materials. So Japan totally depends on trade."
If China can cut off Japan's trade, it has its foot on Japan's throat and would use it. And Japan would have to move from the American side of the international power equation to the Chinese side. They wouldn't like it, but they wouldn't have the choice. And in the same way, South Korea. Now, if you take those two out of the pro-status quo column and you put them into the pro-revisionist column, you've got a very different balance of power in Asia and the world. Is that clear?
And so that's why the Japanese prime minister said the other day that a Chinese attack on Taiwan could actually draw in Japanese forces, which is the first time a Japanese prime minister has said anything of that kind in 80 years. And even though the Chinese have reacted very strongly, she's not backing down. So we're in a different position.
So if Taiwan loses the war for its independence, it's in trouble. But even if China just blockades Taiwan, what happens to you? What happens to us? It would mean that basically there could be no trade with Japan, with South Korea, with Taiwan, or China. In some ways, that might be President Trump's dream come true, no more imports from Asia, but not in a very good way.
The global economy and our economy would just suffer really the biggest shock since World War II or the Great Depression. Financial markets would collapse. Most of our key industries wouldn't be able to work. We wouldn't be able to have the drugs that we need, the key drugs that we need. It would be a massive total economic crisis, at least a 10% cut to...
GDP, and that could happen sort of at any moment, and increasingly China and Xi Jinping have this as a threat they can use to the rest of the world. All right. So, have I made you feel bad enough yet? Or do I need to add some more? I could, but let's move to the happy side of the equation. Why, in this messy situation, is the United States well positioned to survive the crisis and play a constructive role, a uniquely constructive role in the next stage of world history?
Well, several things. Some of them are, you know, obvious in a way. Our physical location, our geography. We're safer than other people, even when there are missiles and stuff. Russia is not going to invade California anytime soon. But also we have such natural resources. We're self-sufficient in food and energy. Most countries in the world aren't and would give anything to have that security. We have it. Our economy is really strong, from, you know, at the sort of quote low end of, you know, producing metals and agricultural commodities to the high end of tech and high-tech services. You know, we're like number one or in the top two or three at almost every level of this pyramid. So, we have a kind of balanced economic strength that other people don't.
We're also a big country and that really helps. If trade is going to be disrupted, we have a large internal market. And then as a sea power we have a lot of ability to make alliances around the world. Okay. So, like, take China and Asia right now. Okay. We're not trying to conquer Asia. We don't want to, like, you know, even President Trump hasn't talked about, like, you know, recolonizing the Philippines or, you know, making South Korea the 51st state. All right. That's not what we want. All right. All we want is that one country, China, not be so strong that it can control everybody else, which means that everybody else kind of likes having the United States around, right? That the other countries are more willing to kind of balance with a sea power that is thousands of miles away than with a great big old land power that's right next door. We're not a danger to their independence in the way that China is.
And in the same way, you know, countries like Poland and Lithuania and Germany don't see us as a threat to their independence. Russia sees us as an obstacle to their domination, right? But everybody who isn't Russia kind of hopes we stick around. So we have advantages in foreign policy that other countries don't have. But this is, you know, the American Enterprise Institute wants to celebrate — this is the 226th, will be the 250th anniversary of the Declaration of Independence — and American principles and institutions also have something to do with why I think we're in a relatively good position. It's not like everything's going to work out perfectly for us and all we have to do is kind of relax and let the forces of history carry us through to triumph. That's not how these things work. But it does mean that in a lot of ways we have a more favorable situation than some of our rivals.
Um, and I would say that, you know, for the last 400 years, the big thing that more than anything else determines who's going to be the strongest in world politics has been kind of simple. Capitalism is this amazing revolutionary force that, you know, spins off new technologies, creates new wealth, and basically the countries that are at the forefront of this technological capitalist revolution are the ones with the, you know, the most money, the fastest ships, the most accurate weapons and all of these things. So that, you know, success has largely been attributed to your ability to kind of go along with the whole capitalist thing. But more than that, because capitalism is so disruptive, it causes so many political and social problems. All right. A country has to be able to go with capitalism without blowing up internally because of all the social stresses that go with it.
And our culture as a people and our institutions and our ideas all promote that kind of ability, that double ability to embrace capitalism and not be destroyed by the consequences of capitalist instability, dynamism and change. Um, flexibility and unity are kind of the key elements of our founding philosophy and institutions. Um, faith in the future. It's very important for a successful society in the capitalist world for people to have hope and faith that the future will be better than the past and that change isn't, oh no, everything is falling apart, it will never be good again, but oh wow, change, an opportunity for things to get better. Okay. If a society has an anti-change mindset, then it will fight the new technologies that it actually needs to go forward.
You can see a lot of this in the European Union, I think. And people are so worried that, say, GMOs might turn into Frankenfoods that will kill us. Who knows, everything could happen, right? All of that stuff that they won't allow even some changes that would just raise farm productivity, reduce your need for fertilizers and chemicals and pesticides. They won't do those things. And as a result, countries that will do them tend to get further ahead. But in America there is this notion that — and it really comes deep in our past. I think in many ways this gets us back to Abrahamic religion and especially to sort of a central moment in the Jewish scriptures that is also a central concept in American Christianity, which is this moment when Abraham, as he's then known, is still living in an idolatrous city in northern Mesopotamia and he hears a call. Okay. God says to him,
"Get up and go. Leave your home. Leave your family. Leave your father's gods behind and go to a new place, and there you will find me." All right? That God does not live in this, you know, the ancient utopia, and every step, every change we make takes us farther from our roots, farther from God. No, God is calling us from an unimagined future to move toward him and meet him there. Maybe that's true, maybe that isn't true. That's a theological discussion. But as a cultural force, this looms very large in American history. Think of the pilgrims leaving England to come to a new world. Think of all the immigrants who have come over so many centuries. I'm going to leave my father and my father's ways and I'm going to go to a new world where I'll find my future.
So, we have that going for us. But then we have this mix of unity and individuality as a people. All right. And this gets right back to the Declaration of Independence, 1776, that human beings have inalienable God-given rights to life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness. Now, that does two things. There are two ideas in there. Number one, we are all in this together. We are all human. It's not that some human beings have inalienable rights, right? It's no, this is humanity as a whole. We are a special kind of beings with special rights and a special relationship with the creator. So there's a bond of solidarity. And yet one of these rights is the, you know, our rights are liberty, pursuit of happiness. They may take us in different directions, but as long as we continue to observe the inalienable rights of other people, all right, we can be individuals and maintain that solidarity. This is very much the kind of spirit that you need for capitalism, for you to embrace capitalism but not to be destroyed by capitalism.
And then finally, I would say our Madisonian constitutionalism, our system of checks and balances, our idea that we don't have undivided authority, but authority itself is divided in different ways, so that we have a constitution that is strong enough to keep our country together, but flexible enough to allow political changes, to allow political contestation. And in federalism, too, you know, if Vermont and Alabama don't necessarily want to live in this exact same way, fine, they can have different laws in Vermont than you have in Alabama, and that's okay. So we have this mix of unity of purpose, unity of government that allows for strong force and purposeful action, but also the ability to cut each other some slack. And the idea is, you know, to embrace the concept of diversity is not to reject our American unity, but in fact to embrace it.
So if I would kind of try to sum all of this up, I would say the line that always strikes me here — and I may be the only person in America who feels this way — but the motto of the state of Connecticut actually means a lot to me, and this is a Latin phrase, "Qui transtulit sustinet," the one who brought us over sustains us. The one who called us from many countries, from many traditions, from many histories, who called us into this place together. That's who we can look to to sustain us today. I think that confidence means that the crises of the 21st century, the difficulties of the 21st century are things — maybe we will fail as Americans to manage at all. But nobody has a better chance of success, I think, than we do. Well, thank you very much.
