Podcast: How crisis can help us fix broken systems: from Ukraine to COVID

TRANSCRIPT: How crisis can help us fix broken systems: from Ukraine to COVID

Steve Walt:

Responding to crises requires an accurate and sensible appraisal of actually what's going on, what the different options might be, what the expected costs would be. If those conditions aren't present, you're throwing a dart at a wall, whether or not you're going to get a decent response to it or not.

Ian Bremmer:

Hello and welcome to the GZERO World Podcast. This is where you'll find extended versions of my interviews on public television. I'm Ian Bremmer, and today it might feel like the world is one giant dumpster fire. We got a pandemic, a hot war in Europe, increasingly contentious US China relationship. And add to that ever worsening climate change. Don't even get me started on Washington.

But from crisis there's also opportunity. Opportunity to collaborate, to prepare, and to manage the problems we have today in order to diminish the risks we face tomorrow. Today I'm joined by two heavy hitters, Harvard Professor Steve Walt, New America, CEO, Anne-Marie Slaughter. Three of us will be talking about the Power of Crisis, happens to be the title of my new book. Let's do this.

Announcer 3:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company understands the value of service, safety and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Challenge yourself to change the world. On season three of Course Correction, a podcast from Doha Debates, in partnership with the UNHCR refugee agency, host Nelufar Hedayat takes listeners on the journey of a refugee from the moment of displacement to mental health risks, to integration and assimilation. Learn about the issues affecting displaced persons around the world and what you can do to solve them. Follow and listen to Course Correction wherever you get your podcasts.

Ian Bremmer:

Ann-Marie Slaughter. Steve Walt. Thanks so much for joining me on GZERO World.

Steve Walt:

Great to be here.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

It's always a pleasure.

Ian Bremmer:

So Anne-Marie, I want to start with you. We have this war ongoing over two months now, Russia invading Ukraine. For all of the tragedy on the ground and beyond, and there is certainly a lot of it, there has been a pretty unified response from the West, respond from NATO. Grade it for me so far. How do you think the United States and allies are doing?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Well, I think for the war itself, you definitely have to give them an A. Indeed when you and I last talked, we were at the Munich Security Security Conference at the end of February, and at that point the betting was will Putin invade or not? When he invaded, less than a week later, most people would've said two weeks, he's going to be in Kiev, if that's his intention. A month later, people couldn't believe it. Now, you know, it's really extraordinary. Not only has he not accomplished his aims, but the Ukrainians and basically NATO behind them are in fact pushing Russia back.

Ian Bremmer:

And is NATO stronger today, in your view? And if it is, is that a good thing?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

NATO's certainly stronger. In part, NATO has a mission. This was the mission that NATO was created for. So again, if we're thinking about NATO's ability to push back against Russia, to defend against Russia, it is stronger. The big hard questions are now. Finland and Sweden have said they want to join and NATO is delighted. My question there is, okay, so how are you now going to say no to Ukraine? You can't say it borders Russia. So does Finland. Obviously the Baltics do already. You could have said, well, it's weaker. It has a corrupt government. It isn't a stable rule of law society. How are you going to say that when you're spending tens of billions, an extraordinary amount of money, supporting that same Ukrainian government against Russia? And if you say yes to Ukraine, well surely you have to say yes to Moldova and to Belarus and to Georgia. And then where are you?

Ian Bremmer:

Now, I'm going to turn you in a second, Steve, but I do have to pile on here for a second because you wrote that in an op-ed that I read for the Financial Times about a week ago, if I remember correctly. And my God, you took incoming on the back of that, right? How could you possibly, Anne-Marie, question the idea that Finland and Sweden should not be brought in expeditiously to NATO if they wanted join? How'd you feel about that? Were you surprised by the intensity of the response?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

I was surprised about the intensity, and particularly from Finnish and Swedish friends, particularly Finnish friends. Alex Stubb actually stopped speaking to me.

Ian Bremmer:

Oh my goodness.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Although he and I have a good relationship, he's my boss at the School of Transnational Governance at EUI. So the intensity surprised me, but Steve knows this well, and Steve and I have been old friends and we disagree on a huge amount, but people who ask uncomfortable questions don't get answers. They get highly defensive responses. And that is what this was. Because I was not saying I don't want Finland and Sweden to be secure. I love Finland and Sweden. I would be perfectly happy if joining NATO were the only way to make their people secure. I would support it.

But my question was, hang on, Britain has already guaranteed their security, so it's not an immediate issue. What does this mean longer term? And the American people until now have been saying very clearly, we're not supporting having Ukraine join. Indeed, the entire expansion is at this point for this century, given what we face, really a question I think we need to consider in terms of our overall priorities, in terms of where Europe is. It's not being anti NATO, it's being forward looking.

Ian Bremmer:

So Steve, Anne-Marie's asking questions. I know you're not going to say she shouldn't be asking questions, but she's also expressing some skepticism, and I'm wondering where you come down on that issue.

Steve Walt:

So it's a measure of how significant this whole crisis is that it has actually brought Anne-Marie and I together in ways that aren't necessarily typical. So a couple of things. I mean, I think I agree with her that in terms of the overall response that the West has made to this, it's been quite impressive. And I give the Biden administration high marks for the coordination they've been able to do. What people have missed is sort of both looking backwards and looking forwards. First of all, it's been far too facile for people to say, well, this whole event proves that the problem in Europe is Vladimir Putin, him alone, and we had nothing to do with this. That NATO enlargement was totally unrelated to any of this. The deterioration of Russian relations with the West over a 20 year period had nothing to do with this. It's all Putin's fault, etcetera. That's a very convenient explanation to throw it, and I think it's simply historically inaccurate. So we're starting to forget how we got into this tragedy. That doesn't justify what Russia has done at all, but it's something we shouldn't lose sight of as we try to look forward.

The second thing that worries me, and I think Anne-Marie's put her finger on it, is people have not thought very much about the end game here. What does an appropriate political settlement look like? How far can you push a nuclear armed power who's not doing well, whose ambitions are clearly being thwarted? That's going to lose power over time. But if our objective is to drive Russia out of the ranks of the great powers, which is one way of interpreting some of the remarks that have been made by Western officials, then you have to wonder at what point do they start considering other options? How far do you push NATO forward? Recognizing that doesn't just involve sending Javelins to other countries, that might involve sending American troops to other countries.

So I think Anne-Marie was raising exactly the right question. Given how well Ukraine and others have done in responding to what was an unprovoked attack, you now have to start thinking about, well, what do you want to see as the end game here? How much can you ask for?

And one final point, at what point do we recognize that our interests and Ukraine's interests may not be identical in every particular. That's politically hard to say right now when stand with Ukraine is on everyone's lips, but the issues of two countries are never 100% aligned. And there may be points where we have to do some hard talking, not only with our adversary here, but also with our ally.

Ian Bremmer:

Well, it's funny, and you got in some of the most trouble of your historic career when you identified precisely that issue in terms of the US relationship with Israel, and you are just raising the analysis and the pushback was pretty significant. But I'm not going to push you there. I want to say when you said how far are you going to push the Russians, is it fair to say that at a minimum the West should want to push the Russians out of the territory of another country that they've invaded? Is that a reasonable outcome?

Steve Walt:

It's a reasonable outcome. The question is whether or not it's a realistic outcome, how much risk you're willing to run to do that, including the possible risk of the use of a nuclear weapon, which is an option Russia has, and one they've talked about, they've alluded to. And second, you have to ask, how much damage do you want to see Ukraine suffer? Right? Unless you anticipate a catastrophic collapse of the Russian army, which of course is exactly what brings the nuclear question into play, then you have to ask, well, if you get three or four years of stalemate in Ukraine, Ukraine will simply continue to suffer enormous damage no matter how much western assistance it gets. And that's what I mean about having to sort of think very coolly in a very hard-nosed and irrational fashion about not just what you want to get, but what you can realistically expect to get.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

This is also a question of then what do all Ukrainians want? I mean, yes, Zelensky is the president, he's leading, this is his Churchill moment, and he has really risen to it. But if you really asked Ukrainians and you said, okay, NATO's express goal now is to degrade Russian military capabilities so that it can't do this again, which is effectively we're going to drive them out of great power status.

Ian Bremmer:

That's what the defense secretary of the US actually said. That's right. No question. Yep.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

So Eastern and southern Ukraine are going to look like Chechnya, right? This is going to be Russia's approach. This is going to simply level everything that it can, and it certainly has the ability to do that, and it's going to do that over years. And maybe it's getting pushed back. It can even push back. It can still destabilize, fire missiles. I mean, it's been in the Donbas since 2014, and we did not think it was essential to push them out. So is that really a toll that the Ukrainian people as a whole are willing to pay for our desire less to save Ukraine than to degrade Russia's military capabilities?

Steve Walt:

Yeah, I had one other point here is people ought remember that this war, as long as it continues, always carries the risk of escalation and has consequences for other countries as well, right? This is disrupting grain shipments upon what many other countries around the world depend on. It's going to drive up food prices. And in some parts of the world, people are in fact going to starve as a result of this war happening. So it's not just that the damage and the suffering is confined to Ukraine itself, it's also has ripple effects elsewhere, which can magnify political instability, etcetera, which is why in fact, the West also, in addition to stopping what Russia has tried to do, has an interest in bringing this war to an end as quickly as is practically possible.

Ian Bremmer:

So what I'm hearing from both of you is that the initial response of the United States, of the Europeans, of allies around the world to the Russian invasion in February of Ukraine was very strong. You give high marks across the board. But your concern that as the war is going on, actually the potential to make this greater and much more damaging than is in the interest of any of these actors, including that of the Ukrainian people, is becoming more real for you. Is that a fair summary of your perspective?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

It is. And I would say that as it goes on, people start to use it for other goals. They were folks in Finland and Sweden who'd wanted to join NATO forever. And suddenly that there was the moment, the public opinion shifted, and that's the goal. And I respect the fact that lots of folks wanted that. But again, as then the US or NATO looks at it and they think, well, okay, well, Russia's finally crossed the line. We'll expand NATO further. We'll push Russia back. Steve's right, the best thing for the people of Ukraine and of the world and frankly of Russia, because Russia is being ruled by a murderous thug, is to at least get to a lasting ceasefire and start the negotiations and then think about what a lasting settlement can look like.

Steve Walt:

Yeah. I want to add something about the Finland and Sweden joining. I mean, at one level it's completely obvious why they have seized this moment to join. There was an act of aggression causing the biggest war in Europe since World War II. This seems like an obvious moment to want to enter NATO's embrace and get additional protection. But it's also puzzling in another, at least one other sense. First of all, neutrality has worked pretty well for both of these countries, especially Sweden, for a very long period of time. And in the Swedish case, they were participating and collaborating with NATO in lots of different ways. So it's not clear what more they're going to gain from this. But secondly, another lesson that you might draw from the Ukraine crisis is that Russia was not nearly the military threat people thought it was. Its ability to conquer to other territory in the face of opposition is actually quite limited, and Russia is going to get progressively weaker as a result of the war. The Western sanctions are going to have an effect. There's going to be a brain drain of talented young Russians who have the opportunity to leave.

So in fact, the threat that Finland and Sweden are going to face going forward is probably going to be lower as well. So it's at least mildly puzzling that this is the moment that they suddenly wanted to abandon decades of a neutrality tradition. I get it, why they're doing it. It's up to them to make up their own minds about this. But it, I think, does suggest that it's their sense of Russian intentions, the willingness to take risks, the willingness to use force and not, or an appraisal of Russia's actual capabilities that is driving this.

Ian Bremmer:

Now, I mean, I do think it's interesting that President Putin has come out recently and said, well, really, it's not about Finland and Sweden joining NATO. It's about NATO developing infrastructure in those countries. So I mean, perhaps backing down from what was an overly aggressive perspective now that his bluff has been called, certainly supporters of NATO, accession for those two countries will make that point.

Steve Walt:

Right. I think that's true.

Ian Bremmer:

So this show is not just about Russia, Ukraine today. It's also about crisis and response to crisis. And it's kind of interesting that the beginning of the pandemic Fauci was a national hero and everyone concerned and coming together in the United States, massive economic plan, and in relatively short order, things get really politicized. And not just in the US of course, but also around the world. The world more divided on the back of the pandemic, not less. The United States, more divided on the back of the pandemic, not less. What lessons didn't we learn as a consequence of COVID. How do we look at COVID and the pandemic differently through a lens of geopolitics and international relations than we are the Russia, Ukraine crisis that we see right now? Anne-Marie, you want to start?

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Yes, and I do have to say, Ian, folks who really want the answer to that question should read your fabulous new book about crises that we can use and crises that we can't. I think one of the lessons we learned, and perhaps it was predictable, but a pandemic that is relatively slow rolling. This was not Ebola. It is a virus that has killed millions of people, but that at the same time, people could say for quite a long time, and even now in the United States, it's like an intense case of the flu. That doesn't provide that kind of crisis moment where people have to pull together, like the crash of 2008, where Obama is able to get the world together in the G20. And by 2009 to say, we have to do something right now, like the war in Ukraine where there's an immediate issue and you have to respond in real time.

This was too complex, hitting different countries in different ways. Every country, of course, responding in its own way. There is certainly more that could have been done had Trump been willing to get together with the Chinese and others and the WHO at the outset. But at the outset, we didn't know enough about the virus.

So I think one of the big lessons here is if you're going to use a crisis effectively for change, you have to be able to have the right time horizon, the right group of countries, and a very specific set of goals. It is possible that we will be able to do that now with respect to kind of building a better global health infrastructure. But then the sense of urgency, although it should be there, is already draining away.

Ian Bremmer:

Except in the Chinese case where there's a lot more urgency, but a lot more anger and unwillingness to cooperate with the United States and the West.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Exactly. And honestly, the United States bears responsibility for that, or I should say bears some responsibility. We refused to work with the Chinese to vaccinate the world. The Chinese vaccine is not nearly as good as the Western vaccines, but it's better than no vaccine. And had the United States said the priority for the global economy, for the global health system, for humanity generally is to vaccinate the whole world, and we're going to bring India and China and the Europeans and us together to do it. We really would've had a far better shot. We didn't. We rebuffed all Xi's attempts. Maybe they were faints, maybe they weren't. And China is now much less willing to cooperate with us.

Ian Bremmer:

Steve, credible? I mean, of course the Chinese were lying for the first several weeks about whether or not there even was such a thing as COVID and lied to the WHO and their own people. Do you think there was really an opportunity for the West, for Americans, to work with the Chinese in terms of global COVID response?

Steve Walt:

Yeah, I think that one of the unfortunate things is you had essentially a lot of the wrong leaders in a lot of the wrong places at exactly the wrong time. So I can easily imagine a different set of people in China, in the United States and a number of other countries coordinating a much more effective global response to this. What I find really surprising about COVID is that it's run counter, at least in some countries, to our normal expectation. Our normal expectation is that when a crisis hits, the authority of the estate goes up. Think of what happens in a war, right? The economies get mobilized, prices get controlled, people get drafted, etcetera.

Ian Bremmer:

And popularity goes up.

Steve Walt:

And popularity goes up, and you've got some of that. You've got some of that response everywhere. Governments trying to do more, trying to impose rules, limiting travel, things like that. But remarkably quickly that began to dissipate. You began to see challenges to state authority, certainly in the United States, but also elsewhere in some other countries as well. And of course, that undermined the ability to respond to the pandemic as effectively as we could have.

And the second thing that I think is instructive about this is it is always difficult at the global level to get people to make sacrifices on behalf of others. People wanted to keep the vaccines at home for their own populations first before they shared them, even though the problem was simply going to continue. If the virus could continue to mutate someplace else, it was eventually going to go from South Africa to the west, and we'd be dealing with it again.

It's hard to get them to do things in the collective interest rather than self-interest, and it's hard to get people to make sacrifices in the short term to deal with a problem over the longer term. And I think the future problem we're going to face is yes, post COVID we'll say, well, let's have a better plan in place for the next one. And my concern is that interest and commitment to maintaining those preparations will dissipate if we get five or 10 years where nothing bad happens. And then suddenly the next virus, maybe a worse virus comes along and we'll be back in the same problem we've had this time around.

Ian Bremmer:

So my concern that on what I'm hearing from both of you on both the response to COVID and the response to Russia, Ukraine is that, of course, the developing world is getting hit the hardest in both of these cases. I mean, the food crisis is not primarily about the United States and Europe or China. It's about the countries that are importers that aren't going to have the ability to actually get food to their people. And the COVID crisis, it was about the fact that the West wasn't prepared to provide those vaccines, even when you were talking about boosters in the United States that a lot of people weren't willing to take. What are the implications of the fact that these massive global crisis that are hitting are actually hitting the hardest in some of the countries that in principle, they're democracies, ideologically they should be aligned with you, but increasingly they really feel like they're getting the short end of the stick.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

So there is a very strong intersection here, and Steve touched on it. With the countries that abstained on the US push to get Russia out of the Human Rights Council. And it's extraordinary. India, abstained, Brazil, South Africa, those are the bricks other than Russia and China and Russia and China of course voted against. But so did Mexico, so did Indonesia, so did Pakistan. These are all important countries. In fact, I was just looking at a list of great powers. They are all on that list, and they are important countries for the United States. Biden says he wants the democracies versus the autocracies. I mean, many of these are all imperfect democracies, and so are we, but they are not lining up with the United States, and their agenda of what they're most worried about is much more around health, around food, around jobs, and essentially growth, climate change.

So the United States, or probably better Europe, and we haven't talked about how Europe has stepped up and how Emmanuel Macron sees this is his Dugal moment, finally to get a Europe that can play a role independent of the United States, closely aligned, but independent. But there is an opportunity there to say, look, let's bring these countries together, not as the global south, but as the leaders who have to lead on this whole set of global problems, one of which is still absolutely interstate aggression. But that is only one of the things that imperils all of us in a sense of high security, that we actively worry about our wellbeing, our livelihoods, our lives.

Ian Bremmer:

Steve?

Steve Walt:

It should be at least somewhat worrisome that the two things you can get bipartisan consensus on in Washington right now is one, sending as many weapons as possible to the Ukrainians, nevermind what it costs, and everyone will vote for that. Or almost everyone will vote for that. And second, we should do more to compete with China.

Ian Bremmer:

Compete with China. Yup.

Steve Walt:

So those two things you can unite the parties. Everything else, all the things that Anne-Marie just mentioned, not to mention, addressing all sorts of problems here in this country, you can't get any agreement at all. What you get is a lot of rhetoric and a lot of accusations.

I think the other thing that's going on here is in a sense, a polluted information environment. You can't expect people to respond to a complicated problem if they're constantly being bombarded with false information about it. And one of the things that's happened, and one of the things you do talk about in your book is the fact that we now have an information space in a media environment, which is completely unregulated and frequently filled with falsehood, and responding to crises requires an accurate and sensible appraisal of actually what's going on, what the different options might be, what the expected costs would be so political systems can make reasonably intelligent judgements. If those conditions aren't present, you're throwing a dart at a wall whether or not you're going to get a decent response to it or not.

Ian Bremmer:

So last question before we close. I mean, we are in this environment where democracy, particularly in wealthy countries in the last 10 years, has taken a hit. We've seen a move towards more illiberal democracies and more hybrid political systems consistently over the course of the last couple decades. We also see that the US China relationship has no trust, the most powerful relationship in the world. It continues to erode. But we have all of these global crises. Given that, given the ones we've talked about today and also some of the ones we haven't, climate change, for example, others. To what extent is that making you, as people, as students of global politics and changing global systems? Are you becoming sort of more hopeful in this environment or are you becoming less? Steve, first.

Steve Walt:

I'm less hopeful for several reasons. First of all, the fact that we have several really monumental crises upon us now. If you had to pick one to solve, it would be hard. If you try to solve all of them simultaneously, it's especially difficult, and at some point you have to worry about people just throwing up their hands and saying, this is all too big of a challenge.

But the second thing, it actually goes back to something I said earlier. When you face a crisis, the temptation to go for stronger executive authority, to turn it over to a strong man, to let the government solve the problem, to abandon democracy, abandon liberty, goes way up. That's again, what happens in wartime, and I don't have too much trouble imagining that as these various crises escalate, as they get more serious and as they look intractable, many countries will start deciding that the only way to address it is by very strong central authority. So I think an additional challenge we're all going to face is preserving effective democracies in the face of multiplying and interacting crises.

Ian Bremmer:

Anne-Marie, the last word is to you.

Anne-Marie Slaughter:

Well, I am more of an optimist. I'll just have to say this is a historic occasion, that Steve Walt and I have agreed on pretty much everything, but here I recognize his concerns. I think they're completely right. I am more optimistic because there is so much crisis. The other way to look at this is there's all this intersecting crisis that the United Nations feels as well, right? Secretary Guterres knows that the UN is completely outdated. It's set up in 1945, the security council or the victors of World War II. He understands though, at this point, something really does have to give, and many, many other countries who have a stake in global governance are recognizing we need a new and better system. We are not going to get a San Francisco moment where we come together and revise the charter. That is absolutely not going to happen.

But there is a lot of room for different G groups, right? You could take each of these issues, health, refugees, climate, sort of just responding to this kind of crisis and create subgroups that are anchored in some of the more functional UN institutions in ways that will be incredibly messy. You won't be able to map it nicely. You won't be able to say, here's the headquarters and here are the people in charge. But we do, I think, have the ability to build stronger global capacity to address a number of these problems.

Involving global south, I would just say the most powerful countries all over the world in different areas, and I would conclude by saying a lot of the folks who are not around the table, that's the civic groups, the CEOs, but it's also the women, the people of color, the folks whose voices simply aren't being heard.

I'll end with this. It's a moral outrage that the United States is spending $40 billion to push Russia out of Ukraine and cannot pass Build Back Better to take care of our own children. That is a crisis that is being felt in the United States and in other countries who are looking at what we're spending money on and what we're not spending money on. That I think also will have political ripple effects that will bring us bigger change.

Ian Bremmer:

Anne-Marie Slaughter and Steve Walt, we can't fix global problems. We can at least get the two of you together. Thanks so much for joining today.

Announcer 5:

That's it for today's edition of the GZERO World Podcast. Like what you've heard? Come check us out at gzeromedia.com and sign up for our newsletter Signal.

Announcer 3:

The GZERO World Podcast is brought to you by our founding sponsor, First Republic. First Republic, a private bank and wealth management company, understands the value of service, safety, and stability in today's uncertain world. Visit firstrepublic.com to learn more. GZERO World would also like to share a message from our friends at Foreign Policy. Challenge yourself to change the world. On season three of Course Correction, a podcast from Doha Debates, in partnership with the UNHCR refugee Agency, host Nelufar Hedaya takes listeners on the journey of a refugee. From the moment of displacement to mental health risks, to integration and assimilation, learn about the issues affecting displaced persons around the world and what you can do to solve them. Follow and listen to Course Correction wherever you get your podcasts.

Subscribe to the GZERO World Podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Stitcher, or your preferred podcast platform, to receive new episodes as soon as they're published.