Host richard, congratulations on your book tickets not only the most thoughtful but its very timely and i think we do show that there on the screen. Very timely in discussing a world of disarray. Let me ask you right off the bat why did you write it . Guest i didnt know paula when i rode it who was going to be the president. I simply knew that this was going to be the inbox that would greet whoever was the president of United States but a lot of these trends have been long in the making. Some of the more recent but the bottom line was that whoever wins an election will choose just about everything, theyre running mate, their policies. The only thing they can choose is their inbox and what i wanted to do was talk about the next president and just as important how we got from the optimism of 25 years ago to something that shall we say its decidedly other than optimistic in the last part of the book i talk about what is it we should avoid about doing it. Whose though i noticed in the beginning of the book you also discuss the fact that you have the opportunity to teach at Pembroke College in cambridge and richard gere love of mi6 or even as a visiting professor of statecraft and diplomacy. A great title. Guest a great title. Host yes it is. What is it during those lectures that you are delivering . How did this again gel. You didnt know what it would become but were you impacted somewhat by your students, by the lectures you were giving . What about that connection . Guest anytime you give three formal public lectures it helps you organize your thoughts and i gave those and i got lots of feedback and it got me thinking and actually when i came back i thought what i will do as i will take these lectures and i will transcribe them and have them transcribed and do a quick book based on them so i did the transcription and for several months i tossed with the manuscript to make just couldnt get there. It turns out what they were a set of lectures did work as a book so i literally threw it out theres a great quote from the famously yiddish writer that a writers best friend is his waste paper basket. I got in touch with my best friend and dumped the manuscript and i started over and i started over from a question that had been bothering me while i was giving the lectures and afterwards which was why is it that things are better in the worlds . If boyd usually determines history is largely absent paid by that i mean if Great Power Competition and conflict for quite muted why was it still such a disorderly world in disarray and it was the solving of that puzzle. I had been Walking Around central park which is how i think when i write that essentially told me okay ive got a book here and i can explain why things are working better than they are and what explains what similar but also whats different about this history and again i can explain how was it we arrived there . What were the forces that were structural . What were the things we essentially do to ourselves and then i knew i had to be somewhat prescriptive. He cant write a depressing book or sober book images say thats it. I thought i needed to suggest what could be done about it. Host we are going to get to the substance of the book in a minute but i want to ask you a few more background questions. I know this is the beginning of the book that you dedicated to several of your former teachers. What influence did they have on this particular topic if any . Guest the teachers at oxford who i worked with and those were three of the teachers i mentioned here had tremendous impact. Headley wasnt australian and became a professor of International Relations when i was a student in the 70s and headley later wrote a book called the nra called anarchical society. It suggests in any moment in history the world could best be understood the balance between force of the of anarchy which is pretty selfexplanatory and force a society where we are nationstates essentially that agree to some rules and follow them and whats revealing is this balance. I find that the single most useful framing for any take i may have on our history or International Relations so had he had a tremendous impact on me that i mentioned Albert Veronica was a great historian of the middle east and wrote a fantastic essay once a about the crisis of 1956 about the suez in the middle east in hungary and europe. That essentially ended the european era and the middle east in the superpowers took over. He got me very interested in transitions from one historical era to another and i also worked with Michael Howard the great historian about war and the two other professors i mention. One was my first foreignpolicy professor and the other was in progress that taught me religion and thats what got neat into the middle east and in some ways the explanation of what really launched me and got me going on the career path that im in. Host thank you for sharing that. I thought it was interesting that you cited them and i wondered what the connection was and i think you have well articulated it. Let me ask one more. I was also struck by in the introduction you also talk about how you spent some time with the word disarray, that you thought that maybe the best password to be used might be chaos or anarchy and you come to the end he looked for the source. Talk about how you landed on the word disarray. You are right im oldfashioned and i think i still have the word from when i had my bar mitzvah. Im lucky enough to be the president of the council on foreign nations and organization you obviously know well and i thought i could use words like medicine he in the title. Chaos or anarchy seemed to me to strong and other than large parts of the middle east i felt it didnt apply. One day things make come to that i obviously think they dont that we are not there yet. Theres a degree of order. They are nothing like the way they were in most of the 20th century. What i was looking for was a word that is messiness or disorderly mess and what i wanted to do was give a sense of something that was dynamic and again i went through the thesaurus and i went through the dictionary and disarray came the closest so iran it by my editor and originally they wanted to call the book disarray and i said thats much too general. That is is a book about your sock drawer when things were a mess. I thought we needed a frame in terms of what was going on so i suggested a world in disarray and everybody said thats it, that sums it up. Just getting ahead of ourselves for a second its funny ive written any number of books. This is the first book ive ever written word on how to tell people what the subtitle is. People say oh youve got a new book, whats his called and i say a world in disarray and they look and they nod and they go yes, it is. It checks the box of having a selfexplanatory title. I guess toiling over your dictionary and the book, the source data resulted in a good outcome for you in that sense that people immediately embracing it and grasping it in understanding it and you dont have to go to the subtitle. Lets go to the first part. You do buy the book and into three parts in the first part traces as you call it the International Relations starting in the mid17th century in through two world wars and into the old of the cold war. The thesis that you primarily put forward is you say there was considerable continuity and how the world works during this. Back. Describe that. Why was there this continuity . Guest there are couple of features. Nationstates were the principle actors on the world stage to use a cliche and a lot of history was about powering competition is spilled over. Look at the 20th century and two extraordinarily costly world wars as well as the cold war and a lots of the structures of the world such as it was was based based on this idea of sovereignty, the idea that borders were significant, that they define nationstates, countries and that there was a deal out there that we wont try to change your borders by force if you dont try to change ours and we wont mess around inside your territory if you dont interfere inside of our so its a kind of live and let live society. This wasnt self banding. Then there was peace in the world it was largely because there was a balance of power and when there was an peace in the world that was because one way or another the balance of power broke down in one or another country saw advantage in trying to change the map. For me to answer questions as hinckley, the continuity with nationstates, Great Power Competition being the principle driver or the shaper of history and the centrality of sovereignty as the organizing principle. Host also what was the Lesson Learned . In this section of the book you do provide analysis, contrasting one period to another and share with us what were the Lessons Learned particularly from as you put a quote the unprecedented disorder of the 20th century in other words looking at the two world wars. To me the most fundamental lesson is its necessary but not sufficient to have a shared understanding of what others have called and i call legitimacy. Legitimacy is essentially the idea that we agree on what the rules are, International Relations and how they are to be set and change so on one hand you need legitimacy and then secondly you need a balance of power. Its inevitable that one day or another some country will get to a point where you wont like what the map looks like. You wont like what the chessboard looks like him if he cant get its way peacefully its going to be tempted to act coercively essentially with military force. That seems to me the basic lesson is that you need this set of rules and the process for setting and amending them but you also need a balance of power in order to lock them and because again its inevitable that you will always have what Henry Kissinger called a resolution very revolutionary space where if you see an opportunity to change things who will do just that. Host let me bring in the fact that in 2014 russian president Vladimir Putin held the valve guide cant conference and i believe that was the tenth anniversary in the title of the conference was world order, new rules on again without rule. How does that relate to the thesis that you are putting forward and looking back historically how do you set the stage in the book . I think its relevant in a couple of ways. Here we are now roughly a quarter of a century since the berlin wall came down, since the end of the cold war and i would argue that several things are happening. One is that there is less consensus than there was. There wasnt that much to begin with on what the rules ought to be pretty exactly what ought to be the principles that organize the world . What ought to be the behavior shall we say that arcs up to blend those behaviors. I think theres growing friction between particular russia, russia, china and the United States and others including europe. I think the balance of power. Nato in many ways demilitarized after the end of the cold war. Russia did many things but it clearly is not demilitarized. Thats the Russian Foreign policy. China has remilitarized or militarized in a significant way so it certain shifts in the balance of power in some ways commensurate with the changing balances of economic wealth. Youve have had the rise of all sorts of nonstate actors. The al qaedas in the isis who have taken significant power and you have the north koreas in the irans who could erupt after the region and above all there is globalization. Youve got these enormous flows of just about everything from viruses whether they are real, two guns to drugs to Greenhouse Gases, the components of missiles or bombs, the hacking and the things that hackers would send around the world, you name it. Essentially everyone and anything that goes across borders with tremendous speed and tremendous volume. So i think the old rules to one extent or another that helped us through four centuries have essentially been overwhelmed by this combination of globalization, this dissemination of power into all these actors state and nonstate alike in the rise of some new powers that are totally comfortable with the distribution of arrangements in the world and the rules such as they are. So when the russians Start Talking about not having rules for the end of the old order i think this is their way of saying we are not comfortable. We think what exists out there is a bias against us. Its there to help the United States and its allies and as as the guys in the movie we are not going to take it anymore and i think thats what we were getting to see. Host all right, let me stick with the historical backdrop of this. You have a section devoted to the postcold war period. Talk a little bit about that he could you do discuss the progression and also how the world order was defined at that time and you focus on the issue and the importance of isnt that still part of the discourse of today . Guest it is and after world war ii you had the two principle sources of order. One was various dimensions of the cold war, the Nuclear Dimension which introduced and straight. We also accepted one other spheres of influence. The United States was limited in what is right to do and say Eastern Europe to weaken the soviet holdover is warsaw pact neighbors so were mostly circumscribed though not always and what they have try to do in the western hemisphere. In some ways the greatest crisis of the cold war was in 1962 when the soviets went too far from the perspective of the United States and put missiles into cuba. That was obviously the crisis of october in and the end of the day the soviets, they back down so i think that tells us something about one source of order of the poorest world war ii period. There are a whole bunch of institutions, the u. N. , the International Monetary fund, the world bank. There was the alliances and the Marshall Plan that will strengthen and allies of the United States and europe that gave them the capacity to withstand local communist movements to what you had coming out a world war ii are these cold war related arrangements in these large institutional rights was so when the cold war ended in 1989, 1990 you had the breakup of the soviet union the breakup of the warsaw pact. You have for example the fun mom on a big foreign state like iraq something it would not have done without the cold war cu had a loosening of the bonds and the relations would you still had them play some of these institutions in some of these rules but what i argue in the book is that as welcome as things like the one of the world bank or the imf or other arrangements were they werent enough to contain the new sorts of pressures and dynamics that emerged in the world over the last 25 years. Host let me also go to the part in the book where you do discuss as you put it, the other order, the postworld war ii order, the liberal democratic order. Many would subscribe today to that order and say that the issue is that the value, the institution that has been put in place, that framework stands but what needs to be modified in many ways is things need to be updated not on values but in terms of the institutional arrangements that the world has changed and it has to be greater impact ability there. How do you move on to those who argue aggressively that the real issue is the maintenance of the liberal democratic order . Guest i think the liberal democratic order is despite as far as that goes. It just doesnt go nearly far enough. It was invented or designed in the world 70 years ago and a lot of the challenges that exist in the current world simply didnt exist then and the big concern of the liberal order in many ways was to promote peace, to get other countries to respect the sovereignty, not to use force to change order and that continues to be relevant and continues to be necessary but is not sufficient. The shortcomings of the liberal order had one position. No one on gods green green earth for example given a pencil and paper would design the current u. N. Security council. There is no way we would get these five countries the u. S. Russia china britain vetoes and not have significant roles for other countries like japan to india to germany so the institutions themselves are kept pace but theres also how do you regulate cyberspace . How do you deal with Nuclear States once the nonproliferation treaty prevents them from becoming Nuclear States . Would you do about global terrorism . What he do about global Infectious Disease and on and on and on. My argument simply what we need to do and i dont care if you call it up dating or complementing that we need to take the basic mechanisms of world order from four centuries ago and update them. The biggest single change we need to make is we need to introduce some idea but i called sovereign obligation or the heart of what i also call world order 2. 0. Its the idea that what goes on inside of other countries can no longer be their business alone, their promise alone if what goes on has the ability to affect other countries and other populations negatively. So again you cant have terrorists in your country if they are going to do terrorist acts along your borders. You cant allow computer hackers to operate freely. You have to make sure the Infectious Disease doesnt break out and if it does you got to be willing to take steps to bring it under control. You have to act responsibly about Climate Change. You cant just burn coal for electricity and so forth and so on. What im arguing is what we now need is an American Foreign policy that is increasingly informed by both the old basis of stability which was sovereignty but now something that adds a layer to it, call it sovereignty plus where countries have obligations as well as rights. In some cases we are going to have to set an example. In some cases where going to have to incentivize. In some cases we have to be prepared to penalize those who are not willing t