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well hello and welcome to this webinar on the decline of the west presented by professor mark beason my name is terry naramul and i'm the co-vice president of the tasmanian branch of the australian institute of international affairs which together with utas's information sorry island of ideas is sponsoring this event before i introduce mark there's a few important things we need to get through first firstly of course as a reflection of the university of tasmania's and indeed the aia's recognition of the deep history and culture of this island the university of tasmania which is to acknowledge the traditional owners the palawa people and custodians of the land upon which we meet and pay respect to elders past present and emerging this island of ideas program as well as the presentations co-sponsored by awia are part of a outreach if you like to the broader community in these difficult and ancient times uh that we're going through at the moment so both of us like to present as many presentations as we can forums and seminars to our students alumni and the broader community in general and certainly in these times we see these as an important service to provide to the community just a few housekeeping notes before we commence as well your microphones camera chat function raised hand function have all been disabled so our speakers are not interrupted but we do encourage you to ask questions and this can be done at any time by typing them into the q a function you'll see on your screens a selection of these will be answered at the end of today's presentation even though we may not be get able to get through all of those finally this lecture is being recorded for later access on our youtube and soundcloud channels at the university okay well it's my great pleasure to introduce tonight's speaker professor mark beason he's well known to people in the field of international relations and indeed he's one one of our most distinguished scholars in the field of international relations he's currently at the university of western australia but he's also taught at murdoch griffith queensland york and birmingham where he was also head of the department mark's a prolific writer and publisher in the field with over 150 published articles and book chapters and several books as well i'll just highlight the two of his most recent books environmental populism the politics of survival in the antipersin published by springer in 2019 rethinking global governance another recent book published last year published by macmillan red globe and i think anyone that knows mark's work values it very highly i know i do and i appreciate his contribution to the field i've used his work often and i've set many of his works in my courses at the university of tasmania so it's a great pleasure to have him with us tonight mark tonight is talking about the topic of the decline of the west what is it and why might it matter i think that's an admirably admirably brief and clear title to use but i'll just say this before we hand over to mark on what i particularly like about his topic is that it is truly an international relations topic rather than something like uh politics that occurs in countries that aren't australia so it encourages us and compels us to think about what being international may mean in this day and age where um people like trump are retreating from international institutions the people are perhaps becoming extremely skeptical of the globalism globalization and so on and indeed there's a concern as to what international order what international society may mean these days so it's a very important topic given the relative decline of the united states and the increasingly expanding and rising chinese influence in the international order so without further ado i'll hand over to mark who's coming to us tonight from perth thanks very much terry it's very generous and thoughtful and i hope i can live up to my pre-publicity so before i do anything else i'm going to attempt to share my screen with you because i hope uh all being well now can you see that okay how's that you should be seeing the opening slide of my little powerpoint so i've done a powerpoint partly so you all have something to look at apart from me and partly to help me remind myself of what i'm going to talk to you this evening so this particular talk is also available uh as a published paper with the global asia institute in hong kong and uh i don't know if terry's got a copy but i can certainly pass one on to him and you can contact me if you want to read the full version of what is a fairly lengthy sort of paper but but it's uh it's about a series of issues i've been interested in for some time and i try to pull together some of my ideas about this not i'll run the passage and i'll be most interested to hear what you all think about it so this is a little kind of overview of some of the issues that i'll talk about and uh try to give you some idea about and as terry mentioned in his introduction one of the big things that's happening in the world where there are two kind of big things i guess really uh one is about the possible uh decline of american power and uh this was happening even before mr trump came along but i think he's undoubtedly accelerated the process and undermined uh some of the aspects and elements of american power particularly what people refer to as quote unquote soft power so uh there's a there's a material uh aspect to that and there's a kind of ideational aspect to the decline of american influence and dominance and that's interesting and important the other thing of course that's happening is that china has rapidly emerged or possibly once you'd say more accurately re-emerged as the great power of the part of the world that we live in uh and uh as i'll explain as we go along i think china's the most uh the well the rise of china or the re-emergence of china i think is the most important thing that certainly happened in my lifetime uh and i include in that context the cold war and various other things that have happened uh that's in terms of geopolitics i think the the uh problems associated with climate change are likely to be even more consequential but i'll i'll get to that later on but this particular talk focuses primarily on this kind of rise of china and the decline of the united states but there's more at stake in all of this and simply great power politics because the united states and china in different ways represent different ways of thinking about and acting in uh the world and i think that has enormous consequences particularly for countries like australia which is very closely uh strategically aligned to the united states and of course like many other countries in the region china is our greatest trade partner and economic partner so there's a lot at stake not just for the united states and china but for the way the world operates uh and the impact it's likely to have on uh some of the lesser powers in the world like australia but everybody else around the world as well so that's that's the kind of uh broad context i'm going to talk about this evening and think about some of the kind of issues that flow from it so let me say something about the rise of the west and i should say at the outset that i'm a kind of product of the rise of the west i grew up in england uh which is in europe as we know and european civilization it's a very unfashionable thing to talk about but it has produced some interesting and important ways of thinking about the world which are in my view at least valuable and have helped to uh provide a universal understanding for the world at least in the sense of uh some of the kind of scientific principles and methodology uh that have helped us to think about our place in the world and what it means to live on this particular planet and the fact that we now know unambiguously i've not known for hundreds of years that the earth revolves around the sun rather than vice versa this is an unambiguously true fact about uh material reality that what you or i may think about it makes absolutely no difference and it doesn't matter that this was a reality that was discovered in the quote-unquote west rather than somewhere else it holds true for everybody everywhere and i think the fact that we know that there are scientific facts and there are some things that are unambiguously true and universal is an important uh reality for all of us to contemplate and think about and it has universal implications now clearly when we get into the issues of values norms judgments about the best ways to live and the best ways to order societies either at the national or the international level things get a bit more complicated but the idea that we can say something uh unambiguously true about material reality at all under any circumstances is i think pretty important and uh pretty encouraging in some ways and it does indicate that it's possible to make a degree of intellectual progress in the way that we think about uh things and the way that we order our own societies now this is important at any time but it's particularly important at the moment because as we all know uh there has been a systematic attempt to uh cast doubt on the validity of scientific evidence about the [Music] possible ways of thinking about the best ordering of society and politics and the fact that china and the united states subscribe to very different ideas about the best ways of organizing political life uh and economic life for that matter is striking and important and the fact that somebody like donald trump dismisses out of hand uh the idea that there are or there is factual evidence about particular sorts of issues because it suits its political agenda to do so is interesting and important important but it casts tax on otherwise fairly incontrovertible kinds of ideas for example uh like the existence of climate change and environmental uh degradation so that's the kind of context that we're uh having to deal with the fact that we have had some real intellectual uh development with universal implications which is being systematically undermined by one of the countries that's most associated with championing that uh in the past so that's a pretty interesting and paradoxical state of affairs now when we're thinking about the rise of the west uh and we're thinking about civilizations which is a pretty unfashionable way of thinking about the world has to be said there are some striking features of the development of the west and the fact that the the west and britain in particular played a surprisingly large role in the development of capitalism and industrialization and some of the technological innovations that underpinned the rise of first britain and then europe more generally and the fact that some of these institutions and innovations that were developed in the west were exported to the rest of the world often under fairly unpleasant circumstances through imperialism and colonialism uh but it's interesting that there isn't a part of the world at the moment uh that isn't uh at least notionally uh governed by a nation state now clearly some of these nation states aren't doing terribly well and are failing uh and causing problems for their own citizens citizens and the rest of the world at times but it's striking that that form of political institution and order has become the kind of default setting for everybody around the world and the other thing to recognize of course is that just because you have a nation state that doesn't mean you're going to have a democracy to go with it as well and some people have made francis fukuyama for example i've made some famous and as it turned out inaccurate claims about the inevitability of democratic transition and the the idea that everybody sooner or later would kind of sign up to being a democratic state like the united states like australia like britain that simply hasn't happened and the the big exemplar and the most important uh influence in this context is the rise of the people's republic of china because china is unambiguously not a democratic state it's an authoritarian regime and there is absolutely no guarantee that china is going to replicate the european experience despite the fact that china has clearly developed many of the same kinds of economic technological practices and innovations that have underpinned the rise of the west economically and militarily of course despite the fact that china has adopted many of those kinds of practices it hasn't become democratic and there's absolutely no guarantee that it will in the future in fact there's no guarantee that democracy will survive full stop uh and that's partly uh as a consequence of the kind of unforgiving environmental situation that's rapidly emerging around us but also because under the trump administration in particular the commitment to supporting democratic democratic principles and institutions in america never mind around the rest of the world is not as clear-cut as it once was despite some of the lofty rhetoric that occasionally accompanies american foreign policy declarations from time to time so that's an that's another kind of important uh paradox to keep in mind i think when thinking about the possible rise and indeed the decline of the west and the failure for other states and parts of the world to embrace some of the principles that we associate with the rise of the west at different times so let me just say a little bit about the world that america made and this is a plagiarized uh title from a very good book by robert kagan who's a very conservative commentator in america but he's one of the people on the right or the conservative side of american politics who realizes what's at stake uh with uh the trump administration in particular backing away from some of the kind of foundational principles that we've associated with american power and american influence since the second world war and it's worth remembering i think that america was always going to be a great power it's a country that is unending unambiguously blessed if only by uh geography because it has uh weak or friendly neighbors to the north and south and oceans uh to the east and west so it's geo geographically and indeed geopolitically very fortunately positioned in the world and uh the size the resources uh the number of people in america and the dynamism of the american people and economy meant that it was always going to be an important power it was less clear i think to everybody else perhaps was that american people might assume they'd kind of got a god-given role to play uh in the international scheme of things that became associated with this idea of american exceptionalism but that america was destined to play this particularly pivotal role in international affairs uh since it became an independent nation now clearly the fact that america is still the most powerful country in the world gives america a potential to play precisely that kind of role for better or worse in the international system and significantly uh in the aftermath of the second world war uh it was able to institutionalize some of those kinds of uh principles and norms that uh were initially associated with the united united states it was able to use particular sorts of international institutions which i'll say more about in a second to promote a particular view of how the world should be ordered and the bipolar struggle that emerged after the second world war between the united states and the soviet union gave the americans a chance to uh really consolidate those uh values and principles at least within the capitalist sphere of influence and one of the ways that they did this was by creating a set of institutions that helped to promote this liberal international order and this applied to east asia as well and one of the great paradoxes i think of american power and the world that they helped to create after the second world war is that it actually created highly successful competitors firstly in japan and a reconstructed europe as well for that matter but more recently in china china's been one of the principal beneficiaries of the world that america helped to create in this institutionalized order and so one question to kind of ask about this is who won the cold war at one level clearly it was the united states because its values and capitalism became the default economic order in the world uh but at the same time they created this formidable competitor in the form of china in particular which doesn't subscribe to all of the uh aspects of the liberal international order and that's kind of interesting and potentially very important now you've probably all heard of or familiar with uh bretton woods but it's worth saying something briefly about how significant this was uh in terms of american hegemony and why this particular aspect of american power and influence may be beginning to unravel before our eyes now you've probably all heard of the washington consensus as well that's also known sometimes as neoliberalism uh but it's a it's an idea that emerged from the disasters of the period between the first and second world war when we like today in many ways we had a uh an unprecedented economic crisis and the big idea after the second world war was we should never repeat that crisis again and we all hope that's not going to be the case uh but there were a series of institutions that were created with the specific objective of stopping that from happening again and these are the so-called bretton woods institutions the world trade organization the international monetary fund and the world bank being the most important uh economic institutions that were designed to keep the global economy functioning open liberal and integrated and you have to say they worked pretty well in many respects at the same time there were a series of strategic alliances that were created under the auspices of american hegemony or leadership depending on what you want to call it uh the north atlantic treaty organization uh in europe which ultimately helped to consolidate the european union and this integrated market and strategic arrangements in western europe but also in this part of the world as well the americans established a series of what are called hub and spokes bilateral relationships during the cold war with countries like the philippines south korea and us of course so interestingly in the aftermath of the second world war uh the united states used its what we now described very fashionably as its geoeconomic influence the fact that it was the biggest economy in the world by far after the sacramento war and it could use uh aid and trade to encourage uh allies to sign up and to be part of this american sphere of influence if you like and uh japan's renaissance from being a kind of a irradiated wasteland during the second world war to become the second biggest economy in the world uh by the 1970s was a quite extraordinary uh testament to the effectiveness of that geoeconomic leverage and influence and the ability of the americans to create a particular world order that included not just an economic aspect of it but a strategic one as well so this idea of geo-economic power as applying economic instruments to advanced geopolitical ends is an extremely important part of america's period of international dominance but also arguably it's becoming an increasingly important feature of china's expanding uh influence uh in the world as well and i'll say more about that in a moment so that was as the world was up until fairly recently and it's become dramatically obvious because we're seeing the re-emergence of trade wars we're seeing the so-called decoupling of key parts of the international economy we're seeing the rise of authoritarian powers who are challenging american dominance china not being the only one in this regard but i think although trump has undoubtedly added to these problems as far as america is concerned and undermined certainly the aspects of america's uh so-called soft power because he's managed to alienate uh many of america's key allies but he's also managed to undermine their strategic uh position as well because trump famously takes what's been described as a transactional approach to foreign policy in which he expects allies to pay for uh the security guarantee that allegedly america provides uh and which countries like australia uh live in hope that trump would actually uh fulfill if uh we found ourselves uh in syria's trouble there's a big question mark about whether trump would but i think it's important to recognize that many of these kinds of problems many of these kinds of uncertainties and the decline in america's material power and perhaps its willingness to play this kind of international role uh as an economic actor and particularly as a strategic actor many of these kinds of things were in question even before trump came along and it's remarkable that george w bush is now regarded as being something of a serious and sensible policy maker and yet here's the guy who uh authorized and dreamt up uh the disastrous invasion of iraq which i think just about everybody agrees now was perhaps the greatest unforced strategic era in the uh 20th century and we're still living with the consequences of a destabilized middle east and arguably the cost and the expense to america of trying to impose order in the middle east led in part at least to the global financial crisis the gfc which further undermined american power and influence in the world and indeed the attractiveness of the american economic model and i think that shouldn't be underestimated either because many people look at the united states at the moment and they see not only political chaos mayhem domestically but a seriously undermined economic presence in the world because america is far and away the greatest debtor economy in the world of course if it was any other country the imf would have been in there a long time ago telling them to sort themselves out and get their house in order but because it's the most powerful country in the world and the united states still has a good deal of influence over the imf that has not happened and isn't not likely to happen uh either it's also worth pointing out that barack obama who i think is has was uh and still is one of the more important uh and quite inspiring uh political figures particularly when judged against uh what's on offer at the moment but he's been one of the better american presidents in my view but he wasn't able to entirely repair the damage that george w bush uh had done and he wasn't able to really uh respond uh in the way that some people hoped he would to the challenges of restoring order in the middle east or to dealing with china because obama had the famous pivot to asia as it was called which was supposed to re-establish the united states as an asia pacific or indeed an indo-pacific power as we call it these days but that didn't entirely happen uh and that strategic confrontation between uh the united states and china is one of the kind of defining uh features of the international system today and i think it's partly as a consequence of it's not just china rising but arguably it's partly about uh america uh declining at least relative to uh the people's republic of china so china's rising but so are a lot of other would-be rising powers and authoritarian regimes and it's interesting that within this kind of context some of the most important uh regimes that were associated with uh the rise of the west or american many more particularly uh i've begun to lose authority and even legitimacy in the eyes of many people now i'm a big fan of the european union i won't bore you with my views unless you ask but actually asked me to which i'd be delighted to do so but i think the european union is arguably uh one of the greatest creations uh in history because it transcends some of those kind of national differences and boundaries and if the european union's done nothing else it's uh helped to pacify one of the most violent places on the planet and that's western europe and if you know anything about the history of where western europe you'll know what i'm talking about the european union is in real trouble at the moment uh trying to deal with a series of intersecting crises that defy easy solution and many people in europe have lost confidence in the european union to be able to deal with some of these problems and so there's a question about their legitimacy as a consequence donald trump has been doing his best to undermine the united nations and the world health authority in particular uh wealth world health organization uh in particular because it suits his particular domestic agenda to do so he's no fan of multilateral uh institutions uh and this would be unfortunate at any time that the leader of the free world and the leader of the united states and one of the creators of these uh multilateral institutions would be systematically undermining their uh position and their legitimacy it would be unfortunate any time but at a time when we really need global uh institutions or multilateral institutions to try to address some of the key problems that the world is facing both economically strategically and of course environmentally this is especially unfortunate it seems to me there are some new groupings on offer the brics is brazil russia india china sometimes south africa too uh it's interesting uh for a variety of reasons it hasn't gone that far so far the g20 was the great hope for australia because we're in it and we think it's a good thing of course because we get a seat at the big table seemed like a good idea the idea that there are more people involved is a good thing in principle but it's harder to get agreement uh and the g20 apart from addressing the former global financial crisis hasn't really done that much and maybe it's unfair to expect it to address uh problems it was never designed to to resolve in the first place interestingly china is uh seemingly attempting to build a parallel series of institutions in which it may be able to play a bigger role than it does in some of the institutions that were established by the united states so the awib is the asia infrastructure investment bank and this is the kind of uh funding part of the uh belton road initiative which is xi jinping's big master plan for the world and which makes the martial plan which the americans rolled out in the aftermath of the second world war look pretty small and unambitious uh by comparison so that's pretty interesting uh just as an ambition for china to trying to be trying to put into place whether it's going to actually be realized whether as china will prove to be immune to some of the problems uh that are affecting the other capitalist economies in the world and i think china is essentially a capitalist economy albeit a state directive one these days whether china will prove to be immune to some of these problems is an open and interesting question as is china's strategic ambitions and goals uh for the future as well and in the united states at the moment there are some very prominent scholars people like graham allison who have made a name for themselves by predicting that the world is uh in the grip of an unfolding process of hegemonic transition in which china is seeking to challenge the dominance and authority of the united states in a and we're seeing a kind of replication of uh what's called the thucydides trap which was the uh war between sparta and athens a couple of thousand years ago and the argument goes that this is the way the international system works rising powers will always seek to challenge the position of dominant powers there's something inevitable and uh and uh unescapable from this kind of uh great power dynamics between rising and falling uh powers now i personally don't think there's anything uh inevitable uh in life apart from death and taxes of course but it's interesting that many serious strategic analysts in both the united states and china do think that something in this kind of way of thinking about the world and there's a certain inevitability about the way people will respond and the kind of strategic policies that they'll put in place if they think this is the way the world works and this is the way their opposite numbers uh are thinking about the world as a consequence of that and that's a pretty dangerous state of affairs it seems to me let me briefly say i don't know how long i've got but i'll briefly just run through a couple of slides and make a couple of brief points this is about the attractiveness of the people's republic of china uh as an alternative to the united states and i think this shouldn't be under underestimated as i mentioned there are plenty of things that could go wrong in china and if they do it'll be catastrophic and it'll be unpleasant in my view that's my guess because one of the great things about democracies is they are a bit more resilient to internal and external shocks we hope am i getting a big test of that theory in the united states at the moment uh but i think authoritarian regimes are famously brittle and if things go wrong they can fall over fairly rapidly so we'll have to wait and see what happens but as far as china at the moment is concerned it's been hugely unbelievably successful it's part of a tradition of state-led development in east asia and the sheer size of the chinese economy means that it has a degree of economic leverage over all of its trade partners and everybody in east asia their biggest trade partner is china and china is increasingly willing to use that leverage to encourage its trade partners to behave in particular ways and that includes us of course and you can see what a problem that is for our government trying to strike a balance between the importance of china as a trade partner and the importance of america as a strategic partner i mentioned briefly the belton road initiative and this is uh the biggest kind of project of its uh type in the history of the world bar none if it works it will be incredibly consequential and a lot of people and countries will end up in a kind of chinese sphere of influence and it's interesting that we're even talking about spheres of influence again in a way that uh people did in the 19th century when european powers on the rise of the west were kind of demarcating uh geopolitical orders not only in europe but around the world and we're seeing a i think a return to something like that again and people are talking about a so-called new cold war and that's another way of describing this kind of re-emergence of particular spheres of influence and you know one of the big things that will that will shape the 21st century is whether america remains committed to being a major power in this part of the world whether you call it the asia pacific or the indo-pacific at some stage maybe the americans have to decide whether it's wars risking an outright conflict with china uh about their position in the region and about china's emerging sphere of influence in our part of the world in those circumstances uh is it possible for china to assume a leadership role now i've mentioned a few of these things already so i'll just try and keep this reasonably brief as well despite the fact that china is developing alternative institutions is a major part of the brics grouping it's worth asking who are china's friends yes there's north korea and yes there's pakistan but as the old joke has it with friends like that etc etc so it's striking that america despite trump being in charge and all of the damages inflicted on the united states and the international order there are still plenty of countries around who are uh enthusiastic supporters and allies of the united states and we are a classic example of that uh in australia so china is developing more influence there is a kind of model but it's not clear whether other countries could emulate it if they want to or whether they are increasingly concerned about being absorbed into a chinese sphere of influence and there's a degree of pushback against that at the moment which a smarter american administration might actually be able to get some mileage out of because not everybody's thrilled about china becoming bigger more powerful partly because it's an authoritarian regime so there's potential leverage for the united states as well but i don't think trump's the man to really take advantage of it so let me briefly wrap up so we've got a bit of time for q a because i'll be very interested to hear what you all think about this so the basic argument i've been trying to make in this uh very uh rapid fire presentation is that i think at least america's uh standing its reputation and its place and authority in the world uh was diminished uh even before donald trump came along but he's really added to it and i think the emergence of coronavirus and the absolutely appalling handling of the pandemic in the united states by the trump administration and the contrast between that and the way that china did it uh i think is striking and instructive that's not to say that china was without fault because clearly authoritarian regimes don't like the bright light of publicity being shined upon them and china undoubtedly tried to uh cover up their responsibility and the outbreak in the first instance but once they realized what the stakes were uh the authoritarian regime cracked down and you have to say pretty effectively uh responded to that particular crisis the contrast with american with america is really striking and i think a lot of people uh have drawn the kind of appropriate conclusions and it's not over yet in the united states no less a person than the uh nobel prize winning economist paul krugman suggested in the new york times a few weeks ago that america could be on the brink of a civil war and there's a pretty big call but when you look at some of the things that have been happening uh in the united states recently the black lives matter phenomenon there's a fracturing of uh the internal politics and even the society in the united states that is in itself i think a reflection of the lack of commitment to a set of principles and values that once were championed by the united states and i think were a really significant part of america's identity domestically and in the in the world and i think this kind of political crisis that's unfolding is opening up a political space in which is possible for authoritarians to be able to position themselves elise is being slightly more competent when it comes to domestic politics than the united states is under the trump leadership uh at the moment as i mentioned before authoritarian authoritarian regimes can collapse rapidly and we can't be certain what's going to happen in china uh i think they're going to have some formidable problems as are we all in the future and this uh problem of the so-called bad emperor syndrome uh is a real problem for china so what do you do if you finally decide well maybe xi jinping's not the man for this job after all and it would be nice to get somebody else in he is after all the president for life uh but let's not forget this may not be an exclusively chinese problem because what do we do if donald trump doesn't accept the result of the forthcoming election if he gets uh defeated by joe biden which i think many people hope he will but if he doesn't accept the result if he contests it uh it's not impossible that america could have a uh its own version of the bad emperor syndrome and the difficulty of getting rid of donald trump i mean the big point to make about all of this i think is that uh the world at the moment uh if there's one thing it needs it's international cooperation but it's simply not getting the leadership particularly from the united states but just about anywhere else at this particular point in time and that's most unfortunate to say the least so i'll leave it there and look forward to hearing your questions thanks very much mark uh very fluent presentation there and i think you've raised a number of significant points and i guess we're all sort of agreed we're transitioning to something else but um if we want to have a sensible discussion about where that might be we need to know those important signposts that you've covered there so thanks very much for that and i'll try and put some questions to you now we've got far more than we can get through so my apologies in advance if we don't quite get to your particular question that you may have posted so let's go over the first one here which is quite a common one here in australia i guess my can australia align itself satisfactorily with both the u.s and china would china's leaders have the political trade skill to understand what australia is doing in this new international climate so the the questions about the uh the difficulty of deciding uh how to negotiate this very very difficult challenge between america's strategic importance and china's economic reforms and this is not a problem that's unique to australia indeed this is something that the whole east asian region indo-pacific region whatever we want to call it is also trying to come to terms with including places like japan because japan's uh biggest trade partner is also china and i think that kind of relationship between japan and china illustrates that just having a good economic relationship or an important economic relationship is not enough to transform bilateral relations and improve uh diplomatic relations between different countries i think that's partly where australia is at as well because we want to have a good economic relationship with china but there's growing anxiety about china's influence domestically in this country about the strategic implications of its rise and about china's ability to be able to interfere in america in australia's domestic politics and i think these are all valid uh concerns and things that policymakers are right to fret about what you do about that is an open and interesting question now my suggestion for what it's worth and this is one that is studiously ignored by everybody in canberra but i think uh australia has an opportunity to actually make something of this much discussed uh but seldom seen middle power diplomacy and to actually form deeper uh more consequential relationships with some of our middle power neighbors and to try to do what we can to persuade not just china but also america to behave better and to act more responsibly in upholding a stable international economic and strategic order from which everybody benefits i don't think anybody thinks there's anything to be apart from possibly donald trump to be gained from having a trade war between china and the united states and much less an actual outright conflict so we're all in the business of trying to avoid those kinds of outcomes the question is what can moderate modestly credentialed countries like australia indonesia japan south korea what can they do to make this happen and i think if they can do anything at all it's by clubbing together and trying to make that kind of middle power diplomacy thing actually work in practice okay thanks smart we'll try another one from i think it's it's sick rabbanavids is it possible that democracy has failed and that civilization promise should be looking for another uh system oh that's that's a that's an excellent question it's impossible to answer uh am i obviously my hope because i grew up in and this is the thing about the decline of western civilization if you like and people are talking about this in a serious way and there are a truckload of books available at the moment which make very plausible arguments about the problems confronting democracy and the inability of democracies generally to wrestle with really difficult uh and global problems particularly things like uh the environmental challenge and i want to press uh the audience too much by i'm burdening myself about my views but but i have to say i'm not radiantly optimistic about the prospects for us dealing effectively with climate change in the time available to us and i think that's the biggest challenge facing democracies and capitalist systems generally because i don't think you need to be a marxist to recognize that there's potentially a fundamental contradiction between an ever-expanding capitalist economy uh and the finite limits to uh the planetary boundaries that are becoming increasingly evident evident to us so whether democracies are any more capable or less capable of uh responding to these kind of challenges and authoritarian regimes eyes and open and interesting question but i know i'm certainly not looking forward to the prospect of authoritarian regimes being the kind of endpoint uh to the challenge of dealing with environmental degradation and global warming because that doesn't uh make me feel any more uh optimistic about life but but clearly this is a really big and consequential problem that our policymakers i don't think have really kind of grasped and there is a big question to be asked about whether the current generation of policymakers around the world are really up to the job of actually recognizing some of the real and immediate and increasingly visible challenges that are in front of them and having the kind of requisite imagination to be able to do something about it and i think there's a big open question about policymakers of every stripe i mean you've only got a look at bolsonaro and people like that who's an authoritarian but a complete and utter bonehead i think might be the technical description and clearly not somebody's going to inspire a very useful response to that particular challenge okay thanks mark there's one here from asian dust has hasn't america's economy and social integrity been declining for quite some time eg pre george w bush has has america been in decline for quite some time well i think as a if you measure uh influenced by america's share of gdp immediately after the war it was getting on for 50 percent of global gdp that's the second world war uh these days i don't quote me on this i think it might be 18 20 something like that i'm not entirely sure off top of my head but the point to make is that it has been declining and uh economic power and material structural power in the international system is worth something quite how you operationalize that and make it uh important is often a tricky thing to do as china is discovering at the moment as it gets increasing amount of pushback but the fact that it's an asset that can be exploited i think is unambiguous and there are all kinds of interesting but slightly technical debates about america as the providing the world's reserve currency and the fact that it can pay its bills in its own currency those kind of privileges are only available to kind of one country at a time at the moment it's still the united states but if people lose confidence in the american economy uh or even more confidence than they have there's a question about what that will mean for the united states but there's also a big question about could anybody really replace them and what would the world look like if we didn't have confidence in one economy to provide the kind of collective goods of an international currency uh and a more or less uh stable international economic order so these are big and important questions at a time when countries all around the world are racking up unbelievable amounts of government debt to try and get us through this crisis as they should but uh what the consequences of this are how we get out of this how we eventually pay it back is an interesting and open question which i don't have the answer to i don't think anybody does at this stage interestingly enough okay was this i can give you one of lisa fuller's questions here uh what are your thoughts about china's 21st century colonisers china's 21st century colonizes as a kind of imperialist or colonising power so it's an interesting question i think this thing about china as an alternative developmental model you can see how some countries uh that aren't terribly democratic not interested in adopting all of the kind of principles of the so-called washington consensus might look to china as a fairly uh accommodating source of uh trade and investment and genuine uh infrastructural renewal of a sort that countries uh would actually welcome and uh value having said that it's interesting that uh that the people's republic of china which is allegedly a communist country as the label tells us he's actually being accused of neo-colonialism in parts of africa and elsewhere in the world and as i mentioned before there is some concern amongst countries that have signed up to the belt and road initiative for example about being caught in so-called debt diplomacy the idea that china may seek to use its geo-economic leverage to demand uh closer allegiance to demand favors for chinese corporations because it's striking that when china goes into places to provide much-needed infrastructure it's generally chinese corporations and labor force that does all of the literal heavy lifting in providing all of this kind of stuff so the benefits are tangible and real if you get a new railway put in it's a new railway and it's useful but uh some of the spin-off benefits uh in terms of actually transforming the local economies in a useful and productive way and integrating them more fully into the global economy that's there's a there's a debate about how fully that process has gone forward and what the implications of that are but i think it's interesting and striking that china does get uh described as having a kind of neo-colonial uh and proprietarial attitude towards some of the countries that it has seek to exert an influence oh okay and we might have to make this one the final one now mark um it's not surprisingly about covert 19. covert 19 is a bit like being invaded by another planet how has its advent affected your thinking how was the kovit 19 thing that affected my thinking well i as as without wanting to borrow my views about the environment but yeah i think the environment for what it's worth is the problem that we all face uh as a species i don't think it's too much of an exaggeration to say now the good news about this is if there is any is that it might encourage a sense of all being this together and finally a kind of recognition about the nature of the collective problems and dilemmas that we all face as members of a common humanity now that's the wildly optimistic take on this at the moment uh the response to environmental challenges has been woefully inadequate the degree of cooperation and collaboration we might hope to see has simply not been there but i think to get back to the kogit 19 thing there's a lot of evidence to suggest that this is a direct consequence of human beings expansion into the natural environment and having an impact on the natural environment uh that doesn't normally occur and the fact that we're being exposed to pathogens and viruses that we formerly weren't is a consequence of our actions in some ways and people who are far more knowledgeable about these kinds of things than i am think that this is going to be to use that dreadful cliche the new normal if we get rid of coronavirus it won't be too long until another one comes along because we're creating the preconditions within which these kinds of viruses can flourish and take hold and spread exponentially because of the uh the paradoxical impact of globalization that we can all fly around the world destroying the environment as we do of course but we can all fly around the world but we take these viruses with us and they can rapidly uh transmit themselves around the world as well so i think in in some ways the kobit 19 thing is kind of an interesting and paradoxical window into an alternative kind of future but it's a future that we might not want to embrace because it probably means that people like me don't fly endlessly around the world going to conferences that i could do in precisely the way i'm doing tonight i mean i could have flown over to tasmania and shaking hands with everybody and had a good time and gone back to the pub afterwards for a drink with all my colleagues in tasmania which would have been fantastic but i would have uh contributed in a small way to the very environmental problems and it seems to me uh that we actually need to do something about in the very short period of time that we have an opportunity to do so and it means people like me people like all of the people probably tuning into something like this need to take seriously and do something about and i'm not sure uh that we have kind of got that message not least because some of the people who are in a position to actually uh give us that message are either reluctant or incapable of doing so because they just either don't or won't get it in the way that they need to do so this is why i'm afraid given the opportunity to unburdened myself on this particular topic i feel compelled to do so because i just think it's the most kind of urgent problem that we collectively face and and the kind of good news such that it is about cobit 19 is it's yet another reminder of how intimately connected we are with the natural environment and how it can come back to bite us if we don't take the right kind of actions and recognize the consequences of the actions that we are having on the natural environment so i'm sorry there's a bit of a gloomy note to end on but not an important one all right thanks again mark and we'll leave it there and uh thank you very much for your generosity and we'll hope to take you up on that drink sometime and go out for a drink thank you very much again thanks bye-bye