US Grand Strategy & the Revenge of Geopolitics | Edward Luce

22:22Edward Luce:There was McCarthyism, you know, there was a sort of whole debate and controversy around detente in the 70s. Of course, there was the massive falling out over the Vietnam War in the 60s. But broadly speaking, politics stopped at the water's edge when it came to defining what America's overriding challenge was, which was the Cold War rivalry with the Soviet Union. And this was a global rivalry. And we had never had that before in history. And so therefore, there was a lot more space and demand for strategic debate. It's hard to sort of imagine now, but in the 70s, Kissinger is a very controversial, deservedly controversial national security advisor and then Secretary of State as well to Richard Nixon.

23:10Edward Luce:That Brzezinski is seen as the Democratic Kissinger. And the aspiring hopefuls, White House hopefuls on the Democratic side, 1972, then 76, courted him. They wanted him to be on their team. And Carter eventually won. It was a very improbable choice, Brzezinski. He bet on a rank outsider, is the way I put it, who goes on to win the derby. And I really like people like, I don't know, Jake Sullivan. I have great respect for Jake's capabilities. But it's not like Democratic candidates go around sort of seeking their Jake Sullivan or their whoever it might be. And as I say, no disrespect to them. It was a different era.

23:52Edward Luce:and the rewards to being entrepreneurial, controversial, to thinking big, to risking being branded as not a team player, the rewards to that were quite high and the risks were much lower. Today, you've got to be a team player. And I think it's no accident that the term the blob, which I think Ben Rhodes coined, the blob does capture something, which is a sort of, I think, systemic risk aversion amongst so-called think tankers. They don't want to stick their heads up above the parapet too much. And it's a different climate. That's not a very satisfactory answer, but I think it's a description of how different Washington is today than it was during most of the Cold War.

24:37Yeah.

24:38Demetri Kofinas:It's interesting that you brought up Jake Sullivan, because I remember having a conversation with someone who worked in the Biden administration, and they essentially spoke about the obsession with process as being detrimental to foreign policymaking. And that, I think, is kind of what I was trying to get at, which is that the world after the fall of the Soviet Union, and this remained true to some extent in the Biden administration's own thinking, was one in which rules and processes had become so formalized that the bureaucracy was essentially impeding the changes needed to adapt US foreign policy to what was and what became a radically different world.

25:19Demetri Kofinas:How much of that change do you think coincided with Trump's election in 2016? And how much of it reflected a process that had already been underway and that Trump was largely therefore a symptom of a deeper set of underlying causalities? I mean, I think Trump's both a symptom and an accelerant.

25:40Edward Luce:But I mean, just to pick up on, I think, your very well-observed point about what is essentially the bureaucratization of foreign policy making and the interagency, the sort of strung out sort of quantity, particularly with democratic administrations of the interagency, the lawyered up nature of American foreign policymaking, to which Trump is a reaction and a cure worse than the disease. There is no interagency process. There isn't really a National Security Council. There aren't really sort of interdepartmental policy sort of options prepared by deputies. None of those sort of procedures are in place anymore.

26:23Edward Luce:And I think, you know, that is worse than having the excessively slow-moving, cautious, loyal policymaking that you get with, you know, you certainly had with the Biden administrations, for sure, to some degree, perhaps with the Clinton administration. But that has been getting worse. And partly this is a function of the growth of the imperial state. You know, I mean, it just sort of gets more and more sunk into precedent and into procedure and into, you know, it's like a barnacles gathering on the hull of a ship. It It just slows its passage through the water. And, you know, you get a lot of lawyers who are there to tell you what you can't do, not what you can do.

27:05Edward Luce:And so partly it's just the passage of time. But, I mean, I do think there are certain sort of quirks here. So let's look at Jake Sullivan and Joe Biden. Now, Joe Biden is 40 years older or not quite, maybe 30 something years older than Jake Sullivan. He's old enough to be a sort of fairly elderly father. Oh, he's a member of the silent generation, in fact. He's a member of the silent generation. Brzezinski was like three, four years younger than Carter. Kissinger was about a decade younger than Nixon, but they were broadly the same generation. And they both in very, very different ways, because they were radically different personalities, but they were both able to change their president's mind.

27:45Edward Luce:Or in Brzezinski's case, he had stand up arguments with Carter. there was a sense that they were intellectual equals and there was a sort of confidence about arguing with them very difficult for jake sullivan to do that with biden with that age gap and the fact that biden you know i mean biden with his various characteristics i genuinely think he's a likable decent human being joe biden don't get me wrong but he's also kind of thin skinned about the fact he didn't go to an ivy league school and you know the generals always sort of always spoke patronizingly to him when he was vice president. So he's kind of a bit chippy, as they say, and therefore not pretty stubborn when he makes a decision, even if it's a bad one, like let's pull out of Afghanistan overnight or, you know, let's just sort of give Netanyahu as much leeway as he wants.

28:36Edward Luce:I mean, pretty hard for Jake Sullivan to overcome a president who's stubborn and more than three decades older. So that's a sort of quirky thing that could have happened in the 70s. It just happens to describe the last administration. And I do wish to double underline that for all the foreign policy questions about what went wrong and what went right in the Biden administration, I think their China policy evolved into a pretty good one, to be fair. I think Jake Sullivan is a high caliber person. So this is no reflection on Jake.

29:11Demetri Kofinas:No, that's such an interesting insight, the age difference. Biden was also, and also, yeah, he was totally thin-skinned, although not all that uncommon. I can point to a number of presidents for whom this guy, including the current one, who really breaks all the records. But Biden was very good and it seemed that he took himself and his place in history too seriously, far too seriously. He was very conscious of it and his own stage presence. And he performed well in certain instances, like both before and after Putin invaded Ukraine in a number of notable speeches, as well as when he arrived in Tel Aviv or wherever it was, Jerusalem, I don't know where, presumably it was Tel Aviv after October 7th.

29:49Demetri Kofinas:He was very good in those moments. And you could see that those moments were very important to him, almost as though he was sort of cinematically processing them in his head. I want to go back to this point about process because I had been speaking with another person who worked at the National Security Council high up in the NSC. And he had said that when I was asking him about sort of the difference between the Trump administration and the Biden administration, he said, well, and I hope I'm not butchering what he said to me or misremembering, but I I could swear that he said that the Biden administration had a process, but they didn't have an outcome that they wanted or the clear outcome they wanted.

30:23Demetri Kofinas:Whereas the Trump administration has an outcome, but they don't have a process. I'm curious if you agree with that. And my second question is, what would you say the outcome is that this administration wants? Because quite frankly, I cannot tell.

30:37Edward Luce:So I can't name this person, but it's an ambassador of a prominent country, not Britain. An ambassador has been here a long time and has known successive administrations. And he said, what is it with democratic administrations? It's like, you think you've got a deal and an agreement, and three years later, it still hasn't been implemented. Whereas with Trump, though we disagree with a lot of things he does, it's like he says something

31:07Demetri Kofinas:happens and it happens. Actually, there's a famous anecdote I was literally told recently at our Washington DC dinner, where apparently this was during the recent takeover of Syria, and the Trump administration was debating taking sanctions off Syria. And then someone, whether it was Wyckoff, I don't know, met with MBS down in Saudi Arabia. And he was essentially like, or communicated to the president, I know what's going to happen. This is going to take X number of years. And basically Trump intervened and they just took them off. So to your point. And there are many examples of that, more than bad,

31:41Edward Luce:some of them disastrous and good. But I mean, here's one good one, and it's not directly foreign policy. I cannot imagine Operation Warp Speed happening in the Biden administration. I can't imagine blowing through all the restrictions, all the lawyers' objections, all the sort of government procedures happening under a democratic administration. And the fact is that Trump did blow through it. There was probably quite a bit of brifting on the side. and certainly a lot of cronyism with Jared Kushner's sort of pals being involved. But it got us to mRNA vaccines at a scale way quicker than it could have been.

32:20Edward Luce:And so, I mean, great irony that Trump's never able to boast about his single biggest accomplishment because so many anti-vaxxers support him. But the prime example to me of the Biden administration being too slow is Ukraine. I mean, he broadly speaking had the right response, which is to back up Zelensky's government, but just wasn't able to do obvious things quick enough because every single thing had to be debated as like, do we need this weapon? Would Russia respond by it? Where's its nuclear red line? It was essentially a process of a lot of second self-guessing going on, debating with imaginary Putins in their heads.

33:02Edward Luce:And that, of course, meant a lot of stuff that should have been, whether it's some high miles or whatever it might be, a lot of stuff that should have been getting to Ukraine either didn't come or came months and months after it could have been decisive or very, very much more helpful. And this is a frustrating element to democratic administrations. I mean, this is something that needs to be addressed. Now, Trump, you know, going into Iran, which is, I think, you know, unfolding into a potential catastrophe that in some ways rivals the Iraq war disaster. This could only happen with no interagency process, where the options are not given a chance to be properly vetted, debated, and then presented to a president who wants to read them.

33:51Edward Luce:None of this happened. I don't think a properly due diligence-oriented administration would have got into this situation.

33:59Demetri Kofinas:So I do want to end our interview or spend the rest of our time talking about Trump. I do want to revisit something you said. You used the term anti-vaxxer. I know that's going to trigger a lot of people in the audience. We have a 19-month-old at home. We didn't follow the CDC immunization schedule for childhood vaccinations. Doesn't mean we're anti-vax or against vaccinations in principle. But for example, my father's a perinatal doctor who deals with high-risk pregnancies. He's long had issues with the immunization schedule, the way in which many of these vaccines are administered and front-loaded at a time when a baby's immune system or a child's immune system is most vulnerable, or in some cases, view some of these as totally unnecessary from a risk reward standpoint, a good example being the rotavirus vaccine, which if you are a child living in a developed country, you're not at risk of dying from diarrhea.

34:52Demetri Kofinas:So I'm curious, when you use the term anti-vax, what is it exactly that you mean? Well, in the context of COVID,

34:58Edward Luce:I meant the people who believed that COVID, I mean, there were a lot of sort of RFK junior adjacent sort of elaborate theories about this being actually a bad faith vaccination rather than not necessarily one. And I fully understand your data and respect that position where there could be underappreciated or understudied side effects. This is one where, You know, you have people with large audiences spreading the view that, you know, these microchips are being injected into your bloodstream, you know, and Bill Gates is taking control. I mean, there was some pretty wild anti-COVID vaccine conspiracy theories that went around.

35:40Edward Luce:Listen to somebody like Candace Owens, you know, who's a big, what was then a big supporter of Trump. Trump found it quite difficult to advertise the degree to which this mRNA vaccines had come much quicker than otherwise. But I am not in any shape or form a medical expert. And I defer to people in that field to debate the pros and cons of the schedule. I'm trying -

36:07Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, no, I do too. And I just wanted to clarify that because I think the debate's gotten very muddled on this and people have good reason to be upset with how much of this was handled. And of course, people were gaslit about the side effects of, I mean, I got the COVID vaccine. I didn't get any of the boosters. And thankfully, I haven't had any lasting side effects that I know of, but I know people that have, and I did have side effects. And so I think that this debate has been so unscientific on both sides, on those who are basically institutionalists, whatever the authorities tell me I do, whatever the standard of care says I do, anything else is stupid and you're all idiots and conspiracy theorists.

36:44Demetri Kofinas:And then people on the other side, which is basically like, oh, now I don't believe anything. I'm just going to believe some random influencer on YouTube and I'm going to follow whatever that individual says. Yeah. Can I just sort of add a point here?

36:55Edward Luce:And I've written about this and annoyed people on what you describe as the institutionalist. I mean, I guess for want of a better shorthand liberal side of this debate, or not all liberals though, of course, it's a bit more variegated, but which is, I think, that the whole follow the science thing. I think the Dr. Fauci sort of turning up on TV every other day and sort of changing guidance. I think what the CDC guidelines, the arbitrary, at one point sort of recommending, and this isn't just about vaccines, that infants be masked. And then, of course, schooling. My daughter was then a teenager.

37:30Edward Luce:She was out of school way too long and arguably shouldn't have been out of school at all. So I believe that the democratic, sort of left liberal, whatever you describe it as well, still doesn't understand just how much harm this did to trust in them and in institutions. And this is a sort of underappreciated political event, how the epidemiological debate was conducted and the intolerance for dissent from it. But that is not a medical point I'm making. It's a communications point about how politics is conducted.

38:10Demetri Kofinas:Yeah, I agree. I think that what happened was essentially, it seems to me the democratic left or the liberal left or whatever you want to call it, saw themselves as the sort of institutionalists and as the establishment. And the cohort that I'm describing here basically just believed anything they were told. And anyone who disagreed with them, they viewed them as idiots or attacked them. Meanwhile, what's happened is the other side of the political spectrum. There's a large cohort that basically disbelieves anything. And the same time, what they end up doing is you can't remain in a state of disbelief around everything indefinitely.

38:44Demetri Kofinas:So they've ended up finding new people to believe in, and they'll believe in some random doctor, some random quack or whatever it is. And so that's kind of where I think things have fallen. But what I wanted to make sure that we talk about before we end is when it comes to the outcome that this administration wants. I mean, they released their national security strategy document some time ago now. In fact, it probably wasn't that long ago, but everything feels like it was forever ago. I mean, we're right around the same day as the Liberation Day tariff announcements, which is wild. And that's the pace.

39:14Demetri Kofinas:I mean, it's easy to forget what... I remember when Biden came into office, one of the things that many of us, myself included, felt was a sense of relief from the chaos of the four years of the Trump administration. And that's exactly what it feels like. Again, everything is chaotic with this president. And the document, I know that there were a lot of people that interpreted the document as being advocating for spheres of influence. I never felt that it was that way. I felt very much like it was saying, no, yes and. Yes to defending Taiwan. Yes to maintaining American preeminence in Asia, because we don't want any power to challenge us in the Pacific.

39:50Demetri Kofinas:But also we want to dominate the Western hemisphere. And it's hard to match the rhetoric and what comes out of the administration, because also there are so many different spokespeople, including the president himself, with what is being written or proposed as a kind of formal document. So it's still hard for me to interpret exactly what is the outcome here? What's driving policy here? I'm curious what you think it is. And I also mentioned this, that the tough thing about having these conversations is both, and this is especially true for you, Edward, because you're a journalist, you want to be objective, although you write a lot of op-eds.

40:24Demetri Kofinas:And you also don't want to be labeled as being TDS, which has become a derisive way of describing anyone that has negative things to say about Trump. And so oftentimes I'll find myself trying to make excuses for the president to try to find some kind of rational way to explain his behavior. But I wonder at the end of the day, if a big part of this is just that the president is just not, I don't know, is a bit cuckoo, to put it mildly. So I'm just curious, what would you interpret the outcome? How do you think about what this administration wants, what the president wants, and how that gets reflected in any kind of coherent policy?

40:57Edward Luce:So the TDS accusation or enable is one that I actually throw back on people who follow whatever Trump does, however capricious, unexpected, self-contradicting it might be. I think that is true derangement because that is cult-like behavior. So I have some respect for you know, the quotation marks, America firsts who are now falling out with him. And I never thought I'd say this, but you know, the Tucker Carlson's to some degree, Steve Bannon's, Megyn Kelly's, you know, at least sort of thought there was a sort of core principle there to the Trumpian worldview, which was not to get involved in wars of choice, particularly in the Middle East.

41:39Edward Luce:And so I have some respect for them, although maybe they're being performative, you know, I think they were naive if they genuinely believed there was a sort of core philosophy. The core philosophy is what Trump does. And what Trump does, you read the national security strategy and the related sort of sibling national defense strategy that came out a few weeks later, I think they came out like November and December, respectively, give you absolutely no guide whatsoever to what Trump is going to do. I mean, there are a couple of very brief pro-forma sentences on Iran in the national security strategy.

42:14Edward Luce:There isn't too much on Taiwan either. There's more in the national defense strategy. But again, I wouldn't really pay much attention to that at all because I don't think Trump did. I think this is a negotiation between underlings, Bridge Colby being very important with the national defense one, you know, various people had stated in the National Security Council for the national security strategy. But I don't think even in sort of normal administrations, they're brilliant guides to what's going to happen, but they at least provide a sort of blueprint of what the philosophical approach is. They don't very much with Trump.

42:52Edward Luce:The one area, well, to be fair, two areas where they do signal Trump's instincts and sort of build some scaffolding around it is Western Hemisphere. that this is our hemisphere and, you know, essentially Monroe Doctrine 2.0. That is, I think, consistent with Trump. And the other is this idea of civilizational erasure happening inside European liberal democracies, and that being a concern of the United, a civilizational concern of the United States, which wishes to defend and rebuild Western civilization in its own mind. And I think that's sort of something that I think Trump would use that language, but that's something that he thinks, broadly speaking, is to sort of give a heuristic to how he thinks about Europe.

43:42Edward Luce:It's essentially, it's all Berkeley. It's Berkeley campus. They're a bunch of liberals. You know, they're all vegetarians. They don't fight. They don't spend on weapons. They don't mind having, you know, Sharia law in their capital cities, et cetera. I think that's kind of how Trump thinks. So those are the two sort of core impulses that it brings. But the sort of quicker answer to your question, that was a longer one. The short answer to your question is that Trump's foreign policy is what Trump decides. And Trump's very capricious. I think he's more and more cornered of this Iran situation. He wants to end it quickly, but he can't find an off ramp.

44:22Edward Luce:And that's sort of putting psychological pressure on him. I don't buy into the school of he's suffering cognitive decline. I think he's always been like this. I think he was in the 80s arguing we should take Iran's oil. And in the early 2000s, we should take Iraq's oil. I'm one of the journalists that have got his cell number and I've had some calls with him. He was calling journalists in the late 1970s. He was doing, by his own count, 50 to 100 calls a day when he was Roy Cohn's so-called apprentice, talking to gossip columnists, page three people, calling him to talk shows as Don from Queens.

45:02Edward Luce:I mean, there are certain through lines to help Trump to his habits and ways of thinking. And of course, he always loved tariffs. And he always thought Japan was ripping us off and the USSR wasn't such a big problem. Japan was the big problem. There's a lot of through lines there into Trump's that make him more than just capricious. But for the most part, he's a guy who rolls the dice, goes with instinct, and has suspicion of experts. And so that makes him volatile and unpredictable.

45:33Demetri Kofinas:So Bob Woodward had published a three-part volume of the Bush administration, which I read, which was okay. But I loved James Mann's book, Rise of the Vulcans. I thought that was the best book I'd ever read on the history of the Bush administration. I cannot wait till someone writes the equivalent historical work of this administration. I'm going to read it voraciously. I'm just going to be... There's nothing that I look forward to more. I can tell you that right now, Edward, than a history of the Trump years. When they're over, if we're still alive, if we haven't been converted into some kind of AI liquid soup or something.

46:11Demetri Kofinas:Look, so we're recording this on Friday, April 17th. The markets are just... They've been yo-yoing now since this war began. And they're yoing. They're yoing way up today off the news that Iran is temporarily halting any attacks in the strait, this being interpreted as the strait is now open. But then the Trump administration also responds by saying, but we're still blockading the strait. I mean, I've never really indexed too tightly to headlines. That's an understatement today. I mean, I don't pay any attention to them at all, but I also don't even know what that means. I'm curious what you understand about this recent headline or this recent news, and more generally, how do you think this is going?

46:52Demetri Kofinas:Where is this going to end up? Is there going to be some kind of permanent resolution, or do you imagine this is just going to become a simmering conflict and that Iran will eventually look like post-war Iraq in 1991?

47:04Edward Luce:Well, the explanation for record highs recently, or surges, or day gain, whatever it might be with this S &P index, and then a lowering of the bond yields corresponding, that I get is unsatisfactory. I hear people talk about normalcy bias in the markets, that they're just sort of geared more to good news because half the people trading don't remember 08. There's no sort of memory of what real bears look like. And then others say, well, look, the AI gold rush is real and the valuations there are driving this. And that's kind of unrelated to the Iraq. unless the Iran war metastasizes into a global conflict, then it's containable relative to the upside of this AI investment.

47:52Edward Luce:So that's another explanation. Frankly, I don't find any of them fully satisfactory. I mean, the United States is more insulated from the blowback as a surplus oil and gas producing country. It's more insulated than say Europe or Asia for sure. And that might also explain some of it. Where Trump finds an off-ramp, though, it's a much more important question in a way, because can we psychologically have any confidence in saying, would Trump's pride stand doing a deal that is comparable to Obama's JCPOA? Weaker on some points, maybe stronger on others. Can Trump's pride withstand that? Because he did pull out of that deal.

48:37Edward Luce:It was described by him as a worst deal ever and Obama's a fool, etc. If he's now forced back to agreeing to something along those lines, maybe with longer time periods, say 15 years, as opposed to the 10 years that Obama had, or lower nuclear yields Obama had, you can enrich up to 3.67%. Does Trump get to 2.5? I don't know. I'm not a nuclear expert. Does he have to release a lot more billions of dollars that have been frozen of Iran offshore accounts in order to get Iran to agree to this? I don't know. But his sort of pain point, pride point, is going to be a real key to answering how this ends.

49:19Edward Luce:I cannot believe that there will be any deal possible in which Iran gives up its 420 kilograms of enriched uranium, because if it has learned anything from the last six weeks, it wants to, and I think we can take this almost as an article of dark faith, is that it wants to get from zero to 60 miles an hour from Tehran to Kim Jong-un, North Korea kind of nuclear defense as quickly as possible, because this is existential for them. It's a nasty regime. It's more hardline now than it was six weeks ago. It realizes there's no real middle way for them. It's not going to believe any Trump pledges that he's not going to resume bombing six months from now, regardless of, there's no court that will enforce the contract of a ceasefire deal, a longer term settlement.

50:12Edward Luce:So they're going to go for nuclear. And I don't know how and how long it will take. But I do know that only a revolution at home or a full scale sort of boots on the ground we'll stop it. And I don't think the latter is going to happen. A revolution is conceivable, but I don't think boots on the ground is going to happen because I don't think, I think the reason why, you know, 90%, what, 80 % of Republicans continue to back Trump's Iran, Operation Epic Fury, is because there's no body bags. And Trump knows that. Trump's not going to get into a big body bag situation, is my hunch. And so we're left with an Iran that wants to become a nuclear weapon state as its ultimate insurance policy.

50:51Edward Luce:And I don't see any easy way to stop that.

50:54Demetri Kofinas:What are the things that keep you up at night, realistic concerns, ways in which the world could become more destabilized in the course of the next three years?

51:02Edward Luce:We keep forgetting about, because the urgent drives out the merely important, as the phrase goes, we keep forgetting about the US-China relationship. And it is the most important one. It is sort of the most critical geopolitical relationship to the future of the world. Trump has surprised me on two fronts. One is much more warlike than, you know, he surprised J.D. Vance, too. He surprised Tucker Carlson. Much more warlike than he was in the first term. The ease with which he's departed from that sort of anti-forever war. And the second thing he surprised me on is China. Incredibly dovish, almost submissive toward Xi Jinping.

51:41Edward Luce:He wanted that summit from them, not even his inauguration, from his election. He kept saying, I want a summit. Now, Xi Jinping didn't concede that summit until Trump had climbed down from, you know, the tariff force with China. They agreed this off-ramp, what I call the spinal tap moment, where Trump said our relationship is a 12 out of 10. And then Xi says, OK, we can have a summit and we've got a truce here. I'm releasing my chokehold on, straggle hold on rare earths and you're bringing tariffs down to a sane level. Let's have a summit. That summit's really important. Will Trump remain fairly sort of dovish in his instincts towards China?

52:25Edward Luce:Does China in this Iran situation see an opportunity with a weakening America that has lost its allies, that has alienated its allies, that is really quite dreaded by the global South. I think something that Americans do not sufficiently appreciate is when Hegseth gives his briefings, is this is the ugly American. Somebody glorying in violence and misquoting the Bible as justifying violence. I don't think America realizes just how many people are rooting for Iran, which is an extraordinary thing to say because it's the nastiest regime, or one of the nastiest on the planet. And just how much this, for the generally patient, generally cautious Chinese leadership, how many temptations, geopolitical temptations, this is presenting China.

53:18Edward Luce:I worry about that. That ultimately is what would endanger our world. And I don't have any forecasts except to say we are, as the cliche goes, we're living in the revenge of geopolitics. It's not going to go away. It's the natural state of human affairs. And this is the most important geopolitical relationship in the world. And it makes me nervous.

53:40Demetri Kofinas:Last question. How do you think Kissinger and Brzezinski would advise not just this president, but the leaders today, the people in positions of influence to either influence foreign policy directly or this administration or future administrations? How do you think they would advise them today, do you think? differently to each other.

54:03Edward Luce:They had a fairly different approach to each other, to the Soviet Union during the Cold War. Now, Brzezinski, where Brzezinski differed from Kissinger was he believed the Soviet Union was a sort of Rube Goldberg contraption that was the last great European empire, albeit a Marxist one, but was resented by the peoples who were not Russian. And we should weaponize that to sort of hasten the unraveling of their system. Kissinger believed it was around for keeps, that it was a permanent feature of the landscape and that we should therefore find a way of living with them, detente. So they had very different views to the Soviet Union.

54:41Edward Luce:China, they had similar views. I mean, so Nixon opened to China and then Carter normalized. And they were both therefore fairly dovish towards China. But I think there is a big difference between China today and the Soviet Union then, and that is it's just going to be around. You know, there are on its peripheries, there are people who do not feel Chinese and who feel oppressed, like the Tibetans, like the Uyghurs of Xinjiang, but they make up a few percentage points of the Chinese population. And there is just no chance Tibet is going to be an independent entity. So there's no strategy here that involves regime change in China.

55:19Edward Luce:that does not involve World War III. And therefore, we have to, I imagine they would agree on this point. We have to find ways of, to use the rather blow-dried phrase that Jake Sullivan, I think coined, is to cooperate where possible, compete where necessary, confront where, I forget the exact formula, but we have to base our strategy on the assumption the Chinese are not going to go away. And the regime's character is not going to radically change. We have to work on that assumption and find ways whilst defending our allies of also jointly confronting things like AI that have species level implications.

56:00Demetri Kofinas:Hmm. Edward, it was great to speak with you. I've heard great things about the book. It's definitely on my reading list to read. So thank you so much for coming on the program. If people want to, I mean, obviously if people want to read your work, they can go to the Financial Times and they can read your column, but how do they follow you on Twitter and And is there any other way that people can stay up to date with your thoughts and opinions?

56:19Edward Luce:I mean, so I post all my stuff on Blue Sky and Twitter. I mean, I sometimes regret sort of putting unvarnished opinions on those sites. Social media isn't very good for the soul or the professional persona, but mostly I just post stuff I've written or stuff that by colleagues or other people that I think is worth writing. And it's at Edward G. Luce on Twitter. and it's something like it's Edward Lewis B. Sky. So that's where I post stuff by me and others. Wonderful. All right.

56:49Demetri Kofinas:Thank you so much, Ed. It was great speaking with you.

56:51Edward Luce:Thank you, Dimitri. It was a great pleasure. Thank you.

56:54Demetri Kofinas:If you want to listen in on the rest of today's conversation, head over to hiddenforces.io slash subscribe and join our premium feed. If you want to join in on the conversation and become a member of the Hidden Forces Genius community, You can also do that through our subscriber page. Today's episode was produced by me and edited by Stylianos Nicolaou. For more episodes, you can check out our website at hiddenforces.io. You can follow me on Twitter at Kofinas, and you can email me at info at hiddenforces.io. As always, thanks for listening. We'll see you next time.